If there was anything that she really could play on the piano, her forte lay in those very Scottish airs, which she certainly rendered with exquisite feeling and with skill enough for the moderate demands of that class of music. And on this occasion she felt bound to exert herself, to repay the obligation of Crawford's coming out to hear her, though her brain was all in a whirl for fear something might occur to drive the patient back into his room, and her fingers, as they touched the white keys, itched to be busying themselves about the cushions of the invalid's sofa. For a few moments, while "Within a Mile of Edinboro' Town," "Roy's Wife," "Charlie is My Darling," "Bonnie Doon" and half a dozen others of the Scottish wreath were dripping from her fingers, and while Richard Crawford was enjoying his favorite music better than he had before enjoyed anything for many a week,—for this few moments Joe Harris was nonplussed. How should she get out of the room? Oh! Suddenly she remembered that there was some music on one of the tables up-stairs, and she acted upon that excuse for absence.
"Oh, Dick, please lie still a moment. There is a piece up-stairs that I must bring down and play for you. I know you will like it. One of Gottschalk's—'Las Ojos Criollos.'" She had caught sight of that composition lying at the top of the heap of music near her, and without being observed by Crawford she caught the sheet, rolled it up in her hand, and was out of the room in a moment.
"Tut! tut! what a pity that that girl never can be still a moment and do exactly what any one asks her to do!" was the mental comment of that gentleman as her flying skirts disappeared through the door.
Of course Josephine Harris did not go up stairs. She had no real errand whatever in that direction. There was a door opening from Richard's little bed-room, adjoining his study, into the hall; and her hope was to find that door unlocked. If not, some other excuse must be made to get into his room, to invent which she must play a few more tunes, and run a little more risk of being interrupted. She stepped very lightly to the door, with a repetition of that cat-step which seemed that day suddenly to have come to her. She turned the knob—it was unlocked—it opened. One dart through the other door and to the sofa. The cushion was a moveable one, as she knew, and very likely to be made a temporary hiding-place for any small article, by one lying upon it. She lifted the edge of the cushion, her heart beating at trip-hammers again, and her whole being almost as much excited as it had been half an hour before. Human life is full of blunders, but happily there are some movements that are not blunders; and this was one of them. A small, round roll of linen, three or four inches wide, was stuck a little distance under the edge. She drew it out, hastily unrolled it until she saw that a dark plaster lay in the middle, then, with a "Whew!" of triumph, quite as hastily rolled it up again and thrust it into her pocket. Half a minute more, and she had softly ascended a dozen steps of the stairs, and descended again with plenty of noise, springing down with a decided bump on the landing. Then she burst into the parlor with her piece of music, and sat down once more to the piano.
"Excuse my running away, Dick. Haven't been long—have I?"
"No, not very long," answered Crawford, whose impressions of Joe's steadiness were not enthusiastic. "You know I should not have been surprised if you had not come back in a week."
"Fie! fie! Dick Crawford! I have half a mind not to play for you at all, after that insult." But she did attempt to play, and to play "Las Ojos Criollos." If she ever could have played that most brilliant and difficult of all Gottschalk's pieces, which was very doubtful, she certainly was not capable of doing it when her fingers were in such a tremor, and with the mysterious package in her pocket; and though it may be an ungallant and improper thing to say of a lady's performance, she "made a mess of it."
"Pshaw!" she said, as naturally as if really vexed. "That piece is very difficult. I thought that I had mastered it, a dozen times, yet here it is bothering me again. Never mind!—I know what I can play—something that you like, or if you do not, you should!" And very much to Crawford's delight, for she did not often sing, though she frequently hummed,—she broke out with voice and instrument into that finest, though worst-hackneyed, of modern love-ballads—"Ever of Thee." There are unaccountable fancies, in music as well as in personal regard, and one piece will sometimes make itself the very key-note of a human heart, without being in itself so pre-eminently beautiful as to command that distinction. Crawford had before many times heard Josephine Harris humming that air, or touching it lightly on the keys of the piano, but he had never before heard her sing it. Before half of the first stanza was finished, he knew that it supplied to her a need in music that all the compositions of all the great masters would fail to fill; and before she had finished the last, he believed that some painful secret of her young life must be bound up in it. He was the more painfully confirmed in that belief, when he saw her rise from the piano the moment after she had concluded the song, and dash her hand to her eyes with the unmistakeable gesture of wiping away a tear.
"Joe—dear Joe," he said, "come here a moment."
She crossed the room at once and stood beside him. He held out his hand to her, and she took it as a sister might have taken that of a dearly beloved brother. There was nothing of heat or tremor in the touch, though there was everything of kindness. Absorbed in something else, both had for the moment forgotten the feeling before predominant—Crawford his sickness and crippled condition, and Joe Harris her anxieties and her plans with reference to him.