She took a sheet of music, a modern arrangement of an old song. The first notes startled him. Did her pliant voice take color from the music, or had it found a tenderness of its own? It came at first uncertainly. The deep tones drew out tremulous, the high notes quivering with too keen intensity: but it lived; it interpreted; it was significant.
“Beautiful, beautiful!” some chord within him seemed repeating. The sweetness, the pure passion of that voice, singing up from him, away from him, in sublime ignorance of the birth of its being and the danger of its flight! He would not look at her; but in this new voice of hers for the first time he seemed to see the soul, more beautiful than her beauty—as desirable as life; and he had no right to think of her!
The chords went to pieces. His hands fell jangling upon the keys. He saw her, the half-sung note dying away between her parted lips—still parted in amazement. It made him desperate, that look of innocence that couldn’t help him!
“It’s such rot!” he said grimly at the music-sheet, and ran his hands in a thunder of discords down the keys. “You sang it well enough. If you understood it, I dare say you’d do it badly.”
Her mouth grieved. Her eyes flashed, resentful; she was bewildered by his rapid changes.
“First you say I sing without feeling, and then you tell me I should feel more and sing badly! I think you are hard to please.”
“No; art is acting. I am complimenting you on yours.” He denied to her what was too plain to himself; but the tone of his voice, that intimate coldness, seemed to draw them forcibly nearer. “Now we’ll have something better,” he said.
This thing must stop here, he determined. It should never happen again. But he must hear her voice just once again, her voice in his music. It would make her his for a moment.
“I don’t know it,” she protested sullenly.
“All the better,” he said brusquely, and began the prelude.
He ran over the melody with phrases his fingers seemed to linger in and love—unexpected intervals, elusive rhythms—and gave her a look that said, “Come.” She had to stoop to see the words. These, too, were strange to her:
“Never seek to tell thy love— Love that never told can be! For the gentle wind doth move Silently, invisibly.”