'You are an advocate worth having, Miss Leyburn,' he said at last, an enigmatical smile he could not restrain playing about his mouth. 'I could not argue with you; I had better not try.'
Rose looked at him, at his dark regular face, at the black eyes which were much vivider than usual, perhaps because they could not help reflecting some of the irrepressible memories of Madame Desforêts and her causes célèbres which were coursing through the brain behind them, and with a momentary impression of rawness, defeat, and yet involuntary attraction, which galled her intolerably, she turned away and left him.
In the afternoon Robert was still unavailable, to his own great chagrin, and Langham summoned up all his resignation and walked with the ladies. The general impression left upon his mind by the performance was, first, that the dust of an English August is intolerable, and, secondly, that women's society ought only to be ventured on by the men who are made for it. The views of Catherine and Rose may be deduced from his with tolerable certainty.
But in the late afternoon, when they thought they had done their duty by him, and he was again alone in the garden reading, he suddenly heard the sounds of music.
Who was playing, and in that way? He got up and strolled past the drawing-room window to find out.
Rose had got hold of an accompanist, the timid dowdy daughter of a local solicitor, with some capacity for reading, and was now, in her lavish impetuous fashion, rushing through a quantity of new music, the accumulations of her visit to London. She stood up beside the piano, her hair gleaming in the shadow of the drawing-room, her white brow hanging forward over her violin as she peered her way through the music, her whole soul absorbed in what she was doing. Langham passed unnoticed.
What astonishing playing! Why had no one warned him of the presence of such a gift in this dazzling, prickly, unripe creature? He sat down against the wall of the house, as close as possible, but out of sight, and listened. All the romance of his spoilt and solitary life had come to him so far through music, and through such music as this! For she was playing Wagner, Brahms, and Rubinstein, interpreting all those passionate voices of the subtlest moderns, through which the heart of our own day has expressed itself even more freely and exactly than through the voice of literature. Hans Sachs' immortal song, echoes from the love duets in 'Tristan und Isolde,' fragments from a wild and alien dance-music, they rippled over him in a warm intoxicating stream of sound, stirring association after association, and rousing from sleep a hundred bygone moods of feeling.
What magic and mastery in the girl's touch! What power of divination, and of rendering! Ah! she too was floating in passion and romance, but of a different sort altogether from the conscious reflected product of the man's nature. She was not thinking of the past, but of the future; she was weaving her story that was to be into the flying notes, playing to the unknown of her Whindale dreams, the strong ardent unknown,—'insufferable, if he pleases, to all the world besides, but to me heaven!' She had caught no breath yet of his coming, but her heart was ready for him.
Suddenly, as she put down her violin, the French window opened, and Langham stood before her. She looked at him with a quick stiffening of the face which a minute before had been all quivering and relaxed, and his instant perception of it chilled the impulse which had brought him there.