"What—music? I should think so."
"Oh! I forgot—you're all musical in these northern parts, aren't you?"
He made no answer, but sat down to the piano and opened it. She leant over the back of a chair, watching him, half incredulous, half amused.
"I say—did you ever hear this? I believe it was some Cambridge fellow made it—Castle said so. He played it to me. And I can't get further than just a bit of it."
He raised his great hands and brought them down in a burst of chords that shook the little room and the raftered ceiling. Laura stared. He played on—played like a musician, though with occasional stumbling—played with a mingled energy and delicacy, an understanding and abandonment that amazed her—then grew crimson with the effort to remember—wavered—and stopped.
"Goodness!"—cried Laura. "Why, that's Stanford's music to the Eumenides!
How on earth did you hear that? Go away. I can play it."
She pushed him away and sat down. He hung over her, his face smiling and transformed, while her little hands struggled with the chords, found the after melody, pursued it,—with pauses now and then, in which he would strike in, prompting her, putting his hand down with hers—and finally, after modulations which she made her way through, with laughter and head-shakings, she fell into a weird dance, to which he beat time with hands and limbs, urging her with a rain of comments.
"Oh! my goody—isn't that rousing? Play that again—just that change—just once! Oh! Lord—isn't that good, that chord—and that bit afterwards, what a bass!—I say, isn't it a bass? Don't you like it—don't you like it awfully?"
Suddenly she wheeled round from the piano, and sat fronting him, her hands on her knees. He fell back into a chair.
"I say"—he said slowly—"you are a grand 'un! If I'd only known you could play like that!"