The girl felt a sudden sickness at his honeyed cruelty, but immediately pulled herself together. For whatever fiendish intention might be in his mind she meant to frustrate it.
“I hear you are of a musical turn, Mr. Bannister. Won’t you play for us?”
She had by chance found his weak spot. Instantly his eyes lit up. He stepped across to the piano and began to look over the music, though not so intently that he forgot to keep under his eye the man on the lounge.
“H’m! Mozart, Grieg, Chopin, Raff, Beethoven. Y’u ce’tainly have the music here; I wonder if y’u have the musician.” He looked her over with a bold, unscrupulous gaze. “It’s an old trick to have classical music on the rack and ragtime in your soul. Can y’u play these?”
“You will have to be the judge of that,” she said.
He selected two of Grieg’s songs and invited her to the piano. He knew instantly that the Norwegian’s delicate fancy and lyrical feeling had found in her no inadequate medium of expression. The peculiar emotional quality of the song “I Love Thee” seemed to fill the room as she played. When she swung round on the stool at its conclusion it was to meet a shining-eyed, musical enthusiast instead of the villain she had left five minutes earlier.
“Y’u can play,” was all he said, but the manner of it spoke volumes.
For nearly an hour he kept her at the piano, and when at last he let her stop playing he seemed a man transformed.
“You have given me a great pleasure, a very great pleasure, Miss Messiter,” he thanked her warmly, his Western idiom sloughed with his villainy for the moment. “It has been a good many months since I have heard any decent music. With your permission I shall come again.”
Her hesitation was imperceptible. “Surely, if you wish.” She felt it would be worse than idle to deny the permission she might not be able to refuse.