“Meaning what?” She was trying hard to feign indifference.
“That I must entertain you as you have insisted.”
She watched him stride across the room. She thought at first he was going to the piano; instead he leant over the back of the instrument and brought up a black case from which he extracted a violin and bow.
“Now, what shall it be?” he asked with the bow poised.
“Oh, something light and lively—a popular air.”
The shade of a frown flickered at his brows. “What I know is rather ancient; but it shall be as you command, Milady Caprice.”
He struck up a bit from an old comic opera. Josephine Stone sank to a seat. There she lost sense of the bizarre nature of this scene. This man was no mean amateur airing a mechanical talent. He executed no flourishes; his form scarcely swayed as the bow rode the responding strings like a thing possessed of life.
The girl sat enraptured till he had concluded two rollicking melodies.
“Oh, you wonderful man!” It came from her spontaneously as she clapped her little hands in sheer delight. “Where did you learn to play so exquisitely?”
“An old man who once lived here taught me the rudiments. The rest I picked up.”
“But it must have taken years of practice.”
“It has been my one genuine diversion. I often come here when the mood seizes me and play for a solid evening—but never before to a living audience.”
He was replacing bow and instrument in the case. “Oh, don’t do that,” she entreated. “Just one more selection anyway, please.”
Without show of diffidence he prepared to comply. “More light stuff?” he asked.
“No. Something serious—your own choice this time.”
It was “Unrequited Love,” from the opera Rigoletto, that he played, a rendition Josephine Stone was destined never to quite forget.
From the first tragic note the man before her seemed metamorphosed—seemed one with his exquisite violin; and, as the wailing, beseeching soul-cry of the rejected lover rose and fell, cried out in the volume of those notes the depths of its anguish, and tremulously swooned its everlasting despair, the player ceased for her to be Acey Smith, the piratical, sinister timber boss. He swayed before her fascinated gaze a beautiful disembodied spirit of melancholy calling to the subtlest deeps of her being. Once again, as on that memorable morning at the beach, the soul that looked out at her from those great, dark eyes was the soul of an untarnished boy—a soul brilliant and aspiring, no longer shackled to the clay of iniquity.