Her playing was to Angela as great a revelation as Isabey’s singing. It was so finished, so full of art, so unlike the noisy transcriptions of operas and descriptive pieces to which Angela was accustomed. She listened, thrilled, but with a sinking heart. Each of her accomplishments seemed to disappear, one by one, in the light of Adrienne’s superiority.
When Adrienne had finished playing, Madame Isabey cried: “Oh, you should hear Adrienne and Philip sing together the most charming duets imaginable! My child, sing for our friends.”
Adrienne acquiesced readily and gracefully. She was in no wise averse to showing her gifts before this young girl already a wife, whom Philip Isabey had admired so openly.
Adrienne’s voice was not remarkable, but her method, her feeling, her deep musical intelligence made her songs charming.
Then to complete Angela’s mortification, as it were, Mrs. Tremaine asked her to play. Angela, with the courage which would lead a forlorn hope, went to the piano and very wisely chose to do what she could best do. She played a waltz with perfect rhythm, but she had nothing of the phrasing, the tone color, the power of expression which marked the finished musician.
The waltz was, however, inspiring enough, or rather too much so, for Madame Isabey crying, “The music gets into my feet, it makes me waltz, I can’t help it,” sprang up, and catching Archie by the arm, cried out: “Oh, you dear little red-headed boy, come and waltz with me!” Archie, nothing loath, seized her about her capacious waist, and the two floated round the big drawing-room to their own delight and to the discomfiture of all present except Lyddon and the servants, whose black faces peering in at the door were expanded into smiles which showed all their ivories.
Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine were aghast; Mrs. Tremaine had never really considered the waltz respectable.
Neither age nor size could impair Madame Isabey’s grace, and Archie, enveloped in her flounces, his round, red head peering over her shoulder, found less difficulty in steering her than many a sylph-like girl. Lyddon, smiling grimly, leaned with folded arms against the mantelpiece. He forebore to take a chair, meaning to make his escape at the first moment. Suddenly Madame Isabey darted up to him and crying, “Here is an opportunity to teach you the divine waltz,” proceeded to drag him around the room, keeping time meanwhile with a refrain of “one, two, three, waltz around.”
Angela turned round, and for the first time in a month burst out laughing. So did Colonel Tremaine, while a subdued guffaw from the window showed that Lyddon’s predicament had not been wholly lost on Tasso, Jim Henry, Mirandy, and their colleagues. Lyddon, when he recovered his senses, found he had waltzed half round the room with Madame Isabey, but then tore himself loose, and rushed away, considering whether or not he should be obliged to give up the comfortable berth at Harrowby, which he had held for twelve years, rather than live under the roof with this extraordinary old lady.
Madame Isabey sat down panting. The laugh which went round relieved for a moment the tension which had prevailed at Harrowby ever since that fateful night of Neville’s departure.