Charley dashed into a dancing tune, and played a few bars.
“Magnificent!” exclaimed Mr. Whacker, flushing with intense delight. “Did you ever hear such resonance!”
“Magnificent!” we echoed; and Charley resumed his playing.
“Do you know?” began he, pausing and raising his head from the fiddle,—but on he dashed again. “Do you know, Uncle Tom?” he resumed, biting his under-lip, as he gave a slight twist to a peg,—“Do you know, it occurs to me that this room—” the scamp winked at me with his off eye. “Listen!” And, placing the violin under his chin, he began to play a movement out of one of Mozart’s quartets. “How does that sound?” he asked, looking up into my grandfather’s face with an expression of innocence utterly brazen.
This simple question, and the simplicity with which it was put, covered our unsuspecting ancestor with confusion, though he himself could hardly have told why. Before he could recover himself sufficiently to reply, Charley went on,—
“Do you know, Uncle Tom, that it occurs to me that this room is the very place for our quartets? How strange that it should never have occurred to us before!” And turning to me, he bended upon me that stare of serene stolidity under which he was wont to mask his intense sense of the humorous. I had no such power of looking solemn and burying a smile deep down in my heart, as the pious Æneas used to do his grief, while he was fooling Sidonian Dido, poor thing; and so, as Charley and I had had many a quiet joke over my grandfather’s transparent secret, I burst out laughing.
“Why, don’t you agree with me?” demanded Charley with austere composure. “What do you think, Uncle Tom?”
“Our quartets? Well, now that you suggest it—H’m!” And he glanced around the room with a critical look. “We’ll ask Mr. Waldteufel next Friday. What on earth is that idiot giggling about?”
