“If you are not in a hurry to leave us, I know my niece would much like to hear you play,” she said, feeling that the talk about Riverdale had been dull work for Pamela.
Miss Ransome murmured assent.
“If you will play something of Beethoven’s,” she entreated.
“Do you object to Mozart?” he asked, forgetting his depreciation of the valet-musician’s son a few days before, “I feel more in the humour for that prince of dramatists. I will give you the supper in Don Giovanni. You shall see Leporello trembling. You shall hear the tramp of ghostly feet.”
And then, improvising upon a familiar theme, he gave his own version of that wonderful scene, and that music so played conjured up a picture as vivid as ever opera-house furnished to an enthralled audience.
Pamela listened in silent rapture. What a God-gifted creature this was, who had so deeply moved her by his pen, who moved her even more intensely by that magical touch upon the piano!
When he had played those last crashing chords which consigned the profligate to his doom, he waited for a minute or so, and then, softly, as if almost unawares, in mere absent-minded idleness, his hands wandered into the staccato accompaniment of the serenade, and, with the finest tenor Mildred had heard since she heard Sim Reeves, he sang those delicate and dainty phrases with which the seducer woos his last divinity.
He rose from the piano at the close of that lovely air, smiling at his hearers.
“I had no idea that you were a singer as well as a pianist,” said Mildred.
“You forget that music is my native tongue. My father taught me to play before he taught me to read, and I knew harmony before I knew my alphabet. I was brought up in the house of a man who lived only for music—to whom all stringed instruments were as his mother tongue. It was by a caprice that he made me play the piano—which he rarely touched himself.”