Hildegarde was right. Bell played on and on, one lovely thing after another; and forgot her friend up-stairs, and her walk, and everything else in the world, save herself and die edle Musica.
Now, it happened about this time,—or it may have been half an hour after,—that some one else stood and listened to the music that filled the early December twilight with warmth and beauty and sweetness. A young man had come running lightly up the steps of the veranda, with a tread that spoke familiarity, and eagerness, too; had hastened towards the door, but paused there, at the sound of the piano. A young man, not more than twenty at the most, very tall, with a loose-jointed spring to his gait, that might have been awkwardness a year or two ago, but sat not ungracefully on him now. He had curly brown hair, and bright blue eyes, set rather far apart under a broad, white forehead; not a handsome face, but one so honest and so kindly that people liked to look at it, and felt more cheerful for doing so.
The blue eyes wore a look of surprise just now; surprise which rapidly deepened into amazement.
"Oh, I say!" he murmured. "That can't be,—and yet it must, of course. How on earth has she learned to play like this?" He listened again. The notes of Schumann's "Faschingsschwank" sounded full and clear. The bright scene of the Vienna carnival rose as in a magic vision; the flower-hung balconies, the gardens and fountains, the bands of dancers, like long garlands, swinging hand in hand through the white streets. The young man saw it all, almost as clearly as his bodily eyes had seen it a year before. And the playing! so sure and clear and brilliant, so full of fire and tenderness—
"But she cannot have learned all this in two years!" said Jack Ferrers. "It's incredible! She must have worked at nothing else; and she has never said a word— Ah! but, my dear girl, you must have the violin for that!"
The player had struck the opening chords of the great Mendelssohn Concerto for piano and violin.
The youth lifted something that he had laid down on the veranda seat,—an oblong black box; lifted it as tenderly as a mother lifts her sleeping child. Then he stepped quietly into the twilight hall.
So it came to pass that Bell, who was very near the gate of heaven already, heard suddenly, as it seemed to her, the music of angels; a tone mingling with her own, pure, thrilling, ecstatic; lifting her on wings of lofty harmony, up, up,—far from earth and its uncertain voices, nearer and ever nearer to where love and light and music were blended in one calm blessedness. It never occurred to her to stop; hardly even to wonder what it meant, or who was doing her this service of heavenly comradeship. She played on and on, as she had never played before; only dreading the end, when the spirit would leave her, and she must sink to earth again, alone.
When the end did come, there was silence in the room. It was nearly dark. Any form that she should see on turning round would needs be vague and shadowy, yet she dreaded to turn; and she found herself saying aloud, unconsciously:
"Oh! I thought I was in heaven!"