When they came in, the precious violin which Rose never trusted to any other hands but her own without trepidation had just arrived, and its owner, more erect than usual, because more nervous, was trying to prop up a dilapidated music-stand which Mrs. Darcy had unearthed for her. As Langham came in, she looked up and beckoned to him.
'Do you see?' she said to him impatiently, 'they have made me play. Will you accompany me? I am very sorry, but there is no one else.'
If there was one thing Langham loathed on his own account, it was any sort of performance in public. But the half-plaintive look which accompanied her last words showed that she knew it, and he did his best to be amiable.
'I am altogether at your service,' he said, sitting down with resignation.
'It is all that tiresome woman, Lady Charlotte Wynnstay,' she whispered to him behind the music-stand. 'I never saw such a person in my life.'
'Macaulay's Lady Holland without the brains,' suggested Langham with languid vindictiveness as he gave her the note.
Meanwhile Mr. Wynnstay and the squire sauntered in together.
'A village Norman-Néruda?' whispered the guest to the host. The squire shrugged his shoulders.
'Hush!' said Lady Charlotte, looking severely at her husband. Mr. Wynnstay's smile instantly disappeared; he leant against the doorway and stared sulkily at the ceiling. Then the musicians began, on some Hungarian melodies put together by a younger rival of Brahms. They had not played twenty bars before the attention of every one in the room was more or less seized—unless we except Mr. Bickerton, whose children, good soul, were all down with some infantile ailment or other, and who was employed in furtively watching the clock all the time to see when it would be decent to order round the pony-carriage which would take him back to his pale overweighted spouse.
First came wild snatches of march music, primitive, savage, non-European; then a waltz of the lightest, maddest rhythm, broken here and there by strange barbaric clashes; then a song, plaintive and clinging, rich in the subtlest shades and melancholies of modern feeling.