The girl laughed, tossed up her head defiantly. “If he should hear me sing—and say to himself: ‘That’s a good voice; it’s the girl next door; can I help her develop that voice?’ what harm’s that? Eric, how horrid you are to pin me! I dare say—when I said I’d bring some roses for McIvor—when he came to the Barrons from the hospital—why—I’m not ashamed if I did think of that, partly. That he might help about my voice. Why shouldn’t he? Musicians are glad to discover a new big voice. So I shall sing in the garden if I please. And if McIvor hears me and asks me to sing for him—who knows what might happen? Now I’m going to get the best roses we have. And I’ll sing too, if I choose. Too bad he’s not there yet; he can’t hear me.”
She ran across the grass with the confident ease of a boy, and suddenly, as she stood again at the rose-hedge her voice, full, strong, effortless, filled all the air with jubilant music.
She had made a mistake. McIvor was there. From the hospital in the city where his valuable throat had been under treatment for a week, the Barrons’ big car had brought him to the Barrons’ house an hour ago. Ten years back the great musician was spending his days shifting machinery in Henry Barron’s knitting-mill, unconscious of the Golconda mine waiting, unused, in his voice. He sang in the noon-hour, sometimes, for his mates, and on a day Barron heard him. Barron, music lover, philanthropist, and not ignorant, recognized the gift of his workman as remarkable, and for love of music and of mankind gave the beautiful voice a chance, and found that it was a great voice. Between the two men had grown a friendship. When McIvor’s throat got troublesome it was natural that Barron should arrange with the famous specialist who ruled over the hospital in his city, and natural that as soon as the operation was safely done McIvor should come to Barron’s house for his convalescence.
Carefully covered from even the June breezes, luxurious on a wide divan among pillows, he lay now on the gallery and revelled in the soft air and flowers and country stillness, and considered thoughtfully, as he often did, the contrast of his early life with this, for McIvor liked all things lovely, and never forgot who had opened the gates of such a world to him. His beauty-loving eyes lingered on the tall lattice all but hidden with extravagant masses of Dorothy Perkins roses. The lattice ran for two hundred yards, a wall of glory, and that it was broken here and there counted unto it for righteousness to McIvor. That gave atmosphere, history. Anybody could have a new lattice. As he regarded the large hole approvingly, through it suddenly floated the music of heaven. The singer, tingling in every temperamental nerve, regarded it so.
“My God!” whispered McIvor reverently.
It seemed nothing less than the touch of a divine hand that after his hideous week of suffering he should alight in this lovely place, cradled in peace, and music should come to him through a wall of roses. It was one of his own songs she was singing, one of the simple, hackneyed, undying Scotch melodies which his mother had taught him thirty years ago by the Firth of Tay, to which he went back gladly still from difficult operatic work of which he had come to be past master. He lifted himself on his elbow among the pillows, and his face was brilliant.
“Maxwelton’s braes are bonnie,
Where early fa’s the dew.”
The voice brooded among the low notes, clearly, happily. It went on:
“An’ ’twas there that Annie Laurie