“Miss Waring, you can play the violin too?”
“A little,” she said, leaning down her soft cheek against it, as if she loved it, and drawing a charmingly sympathetic harmony from the ill-used strings.
“I will never play again,” cried the young man. “Yes, I will—to touch it where you have touched it. Oh, I think you can do everything, and make everything perfect you look at.”
“No,” said Constance, shaking her head as she ran the bow softly, so softly over the strings; “for you are not perfect at all, though I have looked at you a great deal. Look! this is the way to do it. I am not going to accompany you any more. I am going to give you lessons. Take it now, and let me see you play that passage. Louder, softer—louder. Come, that was better. I think I shall make something of you after all.”
“You can make anything of me,” said the poor young soldier, with his lips on the place her cheek had touched—“whatever you please.”
“A first-rate violin-player, then,” said Constance. “But I don’t think my power goes so high as that. Poor General, what does he say when you grind, as you call it, all the morning?”
“Oh, mother smooths him down—that is the use of a mother.”
“Is it?” said Constance, with an air of impartial inquiry. “I didn’t know. Come, Captain Gaunt, we are losing our time.”
And then tant bien que mal, the sonata was got through.
“I am glad Beethoven is dead,” said Constance, as she closed the piano. “He is safe from that at least: he can never hear us play. When you go home, Captain Gaunt, I advise you to take lodgings in some quite out-of-the-way place, about Russell Square, or Islington, or somewhere, and grind, as you call it, till you are had up as a nuisance; or else——”