“I am making frightful hash of it, I know,” Stella confessed, unabashed, as her fingers stumbled. “I think Miss Allison had better play it.” Mark glanced quickly at the older woman.
“Then it was you I heard a moment ago.”
“I tried it,” she admitted, with a smile. “The title had a melancholy attraction for me. I had no idea the composer was overhearing, or I should have had stage-fright dreadfully.”
“Play something else,” Mark suggested. “It would give me so much pleasure. Something not Mark Faraday.”
Miss Allison rose decisively.
“No, I will play ‘Crabbed Age,’” she decided, “and youth shall sing it.” And then they ran through it together, the older woman playing it with a musician’s sense of its qualities, and Stella singing it through passably in her firm young voice.
In answer to Mark’s sincere, “Play more,” as she started to rise from the piano stool, Miss Allison let her fingers wander through passages of “Meistersinger” in a way that showed a musician’s knowledge of the score.
“How wonderful that you can play like that still!” exclaimed Stella. The gaucherie of that “still” struck upon Mark’s artistic sensibilities, trained in Italian habits of speech. “What a resource it must be!”
“For crabbed age,” Miss Allison finished. Her smile held a faint amusement. Stella, momentarily silenced, if not abashed, by this explicit voicing of her thought, did not contradict, and Miss Allison continued, “The technic of a Paderewski would be small compensation for lost youth, I fear.” She said it without sentimentality, but, as she spoke, lightly touched the delicate theme of the “Golden Apples” that brought eternal youth to the gods, passing into the sublimity of the Valhalla motive. Looking up, she met Mark’s comprehension and smiled, then, bringing her chord to a resolution, rose from the piano stool. Mark watched her as she paused to turn over the pages of his “Sun-dial,” noting the titles—Sunrise, Morning, High Noon, Afternoon, Evening, Night. “‘Youth and Crabbed Age’ is Evening, I see,” she commented. “Then what is this?” She held up a separate sheet loosely set in the book, reading the title, “Too Late for Love and Loving.”
“That was an attempt with words of my own before I resigned in favor of Shakespeare,” Mark explained. “I am not a poet. They are just words for music.”