When they had all duly admired the roses and the goodly promise of peaches on the south wall, someone brought a guitar out of the house and Mary sat down to sing.
Her dress, some soft transparent blackness over white, faded into the shadows among which she sat. Somehow it reminded Andrew of the silver birch trees in the copse beyond. She bent her head as she tuned the guitar, and the throb of the strings seemed an appropriate background to the sweetness of her profile. Vision and sound became indissolubly mixed. Andrew could never afterward separate Mary’s face from her voice, and both were irresistibly a part of the beech copse seen dimly in the evening light. The whole making a picture, subtle, detached, vivid; an experience in which all the senses bore an equal part and were indistinguishable.
Mary’s voice was a big, soft contralto, as unlike the usual “drawing-room voice” as it is possible to be, and she sang seriously. She gave her message to the four winds to be carried where they listed. She sang to the scented night, to the distant sea, to the flowers and the moonlight: not to the little handful of human beings, whose chairs creaked as they sat, and who, saving one, only realized that she was a beautiful woman who had a fine voice.
They thanked her when she had finished, all but Andrew, who, white-faced and dumb, gazed into the deepening shadows as he stood by Mary’s chair.
“It’s really most extraordinary to be able to sit out at night in June in Scotland, is it not?” said the colonel’s wife in his ear. He started, looking at her stupidly. “A very absent young man!” she said to herself.
Truly he was absent, for he had been in heaven.
Mary, too, was silent, softly beating out a faint melody on her guitar as it lay across her knees.
Suddenly she looked up at Andrew, saying under her breath: “The rest may reason and welcome, ’tis we musicians know!”
“The rest” did not hear, or hearing did not understand; but Andrew said: “Thank God!”
The colonel’s voice was heard declaring that it was “deucedly chilly,” and everybody made a move to go indoors, except Andrew, who, pleading work, fled down the drive, only to walk for miles aimlessly in a direction leading further and further from the Manse.