Her eyes closed indolently, and opened again as though digesting the subtlety: then, disdainfully accepting the assumption: “Oh, Vanya,” she called out carelessly, “play a little for us.”
The handsome youth bowed in his absent, courteous 109 way. There was about him a simplicity entirely winning as he seated himself at the piano.
But his playing revealed a maturity and nobility of mind scarcely expected of such gentleness and youth.
Never had Palla heard Beethoven until that moment.
He did not drift. There was no caprice to offend when he turned with courtly logic from one great master to another.
Only when Estridge asked for something “typically Russian” did the charming dignity of the sequence break. Vanya laughed and looked at Marya Lanois:
“That means you must sing,” he said.
She sang, resting where she was among the silken cushions;––the song, one of those epics of ancient Moscow, lauded Ivan IV. and the taking of Kazan.
The music was bizarre; the girl’s voice bewitching; and though the song was of the Beliny, it had been made into brief couplets, and it ended very quickly.
Laughing at the applause, she sang a song of the Skomorokhi; then a cradle song, infinitely tender and strange, built upon the Chinese scale; and another––a Cossack song––built, also, upon the pentatonic scale.