The piano stood in the inner drawing-room, and thither the Count and Mrs. Harrington repaired when the gentlemen had joined the ladies. In the larger drawing-room Luke was fortunate enough to secure a seat near to Agatha--quite near, and a long way from Mrs. Ingham-Baker, digestively asleep in an armchair.
He did not exactly know how this arrangement was accomplished--it seemed to come. Possibly Agatha knew.
Mrs. Harrington struck a keynote and began playing the prelude of a piece well known to them both.
“Why did you not tell me that you were going to Spain?” she asked somewhat tersely, under cover of her own chords.
“Had I known that it would interest you--” murmured De Lloseta, tightening his bow. There was a singular gleam in his eye. The gleam that one sees in the eye of a dog which has been thrashed, telling the wise that one day the dog will turn.
“I am always interested,” said the grey lady slowly, “in Spain--and even in Mallorca.”
She used the Spanish name of the island with the soft roll in the throat that English people rarely acquire. He was prepared for it, standing with raised bow, looking past her iron-grey head to the music. She glanced back over her shoulder into his face with the cruel cat-like love of torture that some people possess. Far away in the distant wisdom of Providence it had been decreed that this woman should have no child less clever than herself to tease into hopelessness.
The Spaniard laid his magic bow to the strings, leaving her to follow. He tucked the violin against his collar with a little caressing motion of his chin, and in a few moments he seemed to forget all else than the voice of the instrument. There are a few musicians who can give to a violin the power of speech. They can make the instrument tell some story--not a cheery tale, but rather like the story that dogs tell us sometimes--a story which seems to have a sequence of its own, and to be quite intelligible to its teller; but to us it is only comprehensible in part, like a tale that is told dramatically in a tongue unknown.
The Count stood up and played with no fine frenzy, no rolling eyes, no swaying form; for such are the signs of a hopeless effort, hung out by the man who has heard the story and tries in vain to tell it himself.
Even Agatha was outdone, for Luke drifted off into absent-mindedness, and after a little effort she left him to return at his own time. She listened to the music herself, but it did not seem to touch her. For sound ascends, and this was already above Agatha Ingham-Baker’s head. The piece over, Mrs. Harrington selected another.