"If your doctrines regarding future punishments are true," he once said to F. Chevreuse, "then the physical part of a musician's purgatory will be to listen to discords striving after, but never attaining to, harmony, and his hell to hear sublime harmonies rent and distorted by discords. I never come so near believing in an embodied spirit of evil as when I hear a masterpiece of one of the great composers mangled by a tyro. I haven't a doubt that Chopin or Schumann might be played so as to throw me into convulsions."
And F. Chevreuse had answered after his kind: "And your spiritual purgatory, sir, will be the recollection of those long years during which you have persisted in playing with one thumb, as a bleak monody, that divine trio of which all the harmonies of the universe are but faint echoes."
Nothing of this artistic irritability appeared to-night, as we have said. In its stead was a gentleness quite new in the musician's demeanor, and so slight as to be like that first film of coming verdure on the oak, when, some spring morning, one looks out and doubts whether it is a dimness of the eyes or the atmosphere, or a budding foliage which has set swimming those sharp outlines of branch and twig.
"He is really human," Annette whispered to Miss Pembroke; and Honora smiled acquiescence, though she would scarcely have employed such an expression for her thought. She had already discovered in Mr. Schöninger a very gentle humanity.
Low as the whisper was, his ears caught it, and two sharp eyes, watching him, saw an almost imperceptible tremor of the eyelids, which was the only sign he gave. The owner of these eyes did not by any means approve of the manner in which their leader had given Miss Pembroke her music that evening, leaving the other ladies to be served as they might; still less did she approve of the coldness with which her own coquettish demands on his attention had been met. It was scarcely worth while to submit to the drudgery of rehearsing, in a chorus too, if that was to be all the return. Rising carelessly, therefore, and allowing the sheet of music on her lap to fall unheeded to the floor, Miss Carthusen sauntered off toward where Miss Ferrier's two critics sat apart, talking busily, having, apparently, as she had anticipated, written their reports of the rehearsal before coming to it.
These critics were a formidable pair, for they criticised everybody and everything. One of them added to a man's sarcasm a woman's finer malice, which pricks with the needlepoint. Dr. Porson was a tall, aquiline-faced, choleric man, with sharp eyes that, looking through a pair of clear and remarkably lustrous glasses, saw the chink in everybody's armor. Those who knew him would rather see lightning than meet the flash of his glasses turned on them, and feel the probing glances that shot through, and thunder would have been music to their ears compared to the short laugh that greeted a sinister discovery.
The other was Mr. Sales, the new editor of The Aurora, a little wasp of a man. He had twinkling black eyes that needed no lens to assist their vision, and a thin-lipped mouth with a slim black moustache hanging at either corner, like a strong pen-dash made with black ink. Dr. Porson called them quotation-marks, and had a way of smoothing imaginary moustaches on his own clean-shaven face whenever the younger man said any very good thing without giving credit for it.
"A clever little eclectic," the doctor said of him. "He pilfers with the best taste in the world, and, with the innocence of a babe, believes everybody else to be original. He never writes anything worth reading but I want to congratulate him on his 'able scissors.' 'Able scissors' is not mine," the doctor added, "but it is good. I found it in Blackwood's."
These two gentlemen had arrived early, and, seated apart, in a side-window of the long drawing-room, crunched the people between their teeth as they entered. Between the morsels, the doctor enlightened his companion, a new-comer in the city, regarding Crichton and the Crichtonians.
"There's little Jones, the most irritating person I know," the doctor said. "By what chance he should have that robust voice I cannot imagine. Sometimes I think it doesn't come out of his own throat, but that he has a large ventriloquist whom he carries about with him. I shouldn't wonder if the fellow were now just outside that open sash. Did you see the way he marched past us, all dickey and boot-heels? A man who is but five feet high has no right to assume six-foot manners; he has scarcely the right to exist at all among well-grown people. Besides, they always wear large hats. Not but I respect a small stature in a clever person," he admitted, with a side glance at Mr. Sales' slight figure. "We don't wish to have our diamonds by the hundredweight. But common, pudding-stone men must be in imposing masses, or we want them cleared away as débris."