“Not more beautiful than this,” he murmured. “Perhaps you will give me the pleasure. I am here to paint—partly, that is.”
“Perhaps in town; not here. I want to be out and about. Olive, we must give them something before they go back through the cold night.”
Olive rang the bell and ordered refreshment. They adjourned to the drawing-room, a spacious apartment, with strange heavy antique furniture and curious bronzes and vases, the ensemble made more quaint by the irrelevant presence of a grandfather’s chair, with its high, stiff canvas back.
“I fished that up from the kitchen,” said Olive. “It’s jolly to sit there and imagine one’s self an old crone nodding to one’s last sleep.”
She seated herself upon it forthwith, nid-nodding, and against the white canvas her dark face shone, lovely and young and more provoking by the suggestive contrast.
Herbert stood over her, fidgeting, his fingers drumming nervously on the canvas awning.
She sprang up and threw back the lid of a mahogany instrument, and began to play a joyous melody.
Matthew had seated himself in an arm-chair near the window. Eleanor, her superb arms and neck bare, was opposite him, a wonderful white vision in the soft-toned light. He caught her eyes and they smiled at him, the friendly smile that means nothing and everything.
As Olive touched the keys, his breast grew tenderer; where had he heard those tinkling harmonies before? His dead childhood came back to him for a moment—it was a harpsichord, and the last person he had heard playing it was Ruth Hailey. A vision of her girlish figure flitted before him, then passed into the picture of the young woman with the sweet earnest eyes that Billy had conjured up, then faded into the sweeter vision of reality, as, through eyes still misty, he saw Eleanor’s bosom softly rising and falling with the melody, the joyous soul of which sparkled in her eager eyes. The tune grew merrier, madder. Herbert was at the player’s side now; he was talking to her as her long, white fingers darted among the keys. Suddenly the music jarred and stopped; Olive leaped up and ran to the window and threw it open, and a cold wind swept in, and the solemn sobbing of the waves.
“There it is,” she cried, “the great lonely blackness, roaring outside like a wild beast in its lonely agony. We shut it out with our walls, and hang them with pictures and plaques, but there it is all the same, and all our tapestries cannot quite deaden its wail. Don’t you hear it in the darkness, don’t you hear it crying out there—the pain of the world?”