But it was a false alarm. The visitor proved to be a young gentleman named Theed, aged about twenty-one, who was devoted to music and sometimes sang duets with her. She would have none of his duets to-night. She scarcely smiled when receiving him, and would scarcely condescend to talk to him. She was in no mood for talking with this immature young man—this boy, who came with his prattle when she wished to be alone. It was very uncomfortable for him.
“I hope you are not feeling unwell, Miss Starbrow,” he ventured to remark.
“Feeling sick, the Americans say,” she corrected scornfully. “Do I look it?”
“You look rather pale, I think,” he returned, a little frightened.
“Do I?” glancing at the mirror. “Ah, yes, that is because I am out of rouge. I only use one kind; it is sent to me from Paris, and I let it get too low before ordering a fresh supply.”
He laughed incredulously.
Miss Starbrow looked offended. “Are you so shortsighted and so innocent as to imagine that the colour you generally see on my face is natural, Mr. Theed? What a vulgar blowzy person you must have thought me! If I had such a colour naturally, I should of course use blanc de perle or something to hide it. There is a considerable difference—even a very young man might see it, I should think—between rouge and the crude blazing red that nature daubs on a milkmaid's cheeks.”
He did not quite know how to take it, and changed the conversation, only to get snubbed and mystified in the same way about other things, until he was made thoroughly miserable; and in watching his misery she experienced a secret savage kind of pleasure.
No sooner had he gone than she sat down to the piano, and began singing, song after song, as she had never sung before—English, German, French, Italian—songs of passion and of pain—Beethoven's Kennst du das Land, and Spohr's Rose softly blooming, and Blumenthal's Old, Old Story, and then Il Segreto and O mio Fernando and Stride la vampa, and rising to heights she seldom attempted, Modi ab modi and Ab fors' è lui che l'anima; pouring forth without restraint all the long-pent yearing of her heart, all the madness and misery of a desire which might be expressed in no other way; until outside in the street the passers-by slackened their steps and lingered before the windows, wondering at that strange storm of melody. And at last, as an appropriate ending to such a storm, Domencio Thorner's Se solitaria preghi la sera—that perfect echo of the heart's most importunate feeling, and its fluctuatons, when plangent passion sinks its voice like the sea, rocking itself to rest, and nearly finds forgetful calm; until suddenly the old pain revives—the pain that cannot keep silence, the hunger of the heart, the everlasting sorrow—and swells again in great and greater waves of melody.
There could be no other song after that. She shut the piano with a bang, which caused the servants standing close to the door outside to jump and steal hurriedly away on tiptoe to the kitchen.