seeing—"you disgrace yourself! any one who can sing at all should be ashamed to sing no better than that!"
Then feeling that she ought not to be thus carried away, or quench with such a fierce lack of sympathy the smoking flax of any endowment, she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him. He received her embrace like the bear he was; the sole recognition he showed was a comically appealing look to Vavasor intended to say, "You see how the women use me! They trouble me, but I submit!"
"You naughty boy!" Hester went on, much excited, and speaking with great rapidity, "you never let me suspect you could sing any more than a frog—toad, I mean, for a frog does sing after his own rather monotonous fashion, and you don't sing much better! Listen to me, and I will show you how the song ought to have been sung. It's not worth a straw, and it's a shame to sing it, but if it be sung at all, it might as well be sung as well as it might!"
So saying she seated herself at the piano.
This convulsion was in Hester's being a phenomenon altogether new, for never before had she been beside herself in the presence of another.
She gazed for a moment at the song on the rest before her, then summoned as with a command the chords which Corney had seemed to pick up from among his feet, and began. The affect of her singing upon the song was as if the few poor shivering plants in the garden of March had every one blossomed at once. The words and music both were in truth as worthless as she had said; but they were words, and it was music, and words have always some meaning, and tones have always some sweetness; all the meaning and all the sweetness in the song Hester laid hold of, drew out, made the best of; while all the feeble element of the dramatic in it she forced, giving it an expression far beyond what could have been in the mind of the writer capable of such inadequate utterance—with the result that it was a different song altogether from that which Cornelius had sung. She gave the song such a second birth, indeed, that a tolerable judge might have taken it, so hearing it for the first time, for what it was not—a song with some existence of its own, some distinction from a thousand other wax flowers dipped in sugar-water for the humming-birds of society. The moment she ended, she rose ashamed, and going to the window looked out over the darkening sea.
Vavasor had not heard her sing before. He did not even know she cared for music; for Hester, who did not regard her faculty as an accomplishment but as a gift, treated it as a treasure to be hidden for the day of the Lord rather than a flag to be flaunted in a civic procession—was jealously shy over it, as a thing it would be profanation to show to any but loving eyes. To utter herself in song to any but the right persons, except indeed it was for some further and higher end justifying the sacrifice, appeared to her a kind of immodesty, a taking of her heart from its case, and holding it out at arm's length. He was astonished and yet more delighted. He was in the presence of a power! But all he knew of power was in society-relations. It was not a spirit of might he recognized, for the opening of minds and the strengthening of hearts, but an influence of pleasing for self-aggrandizement. Feeling it upon himself, he thought of it in its operation upon others, and was filled with a respect rising almost to the height of what reverence he was capable of. He followed her swiftly to the window, and through the gathering shadows of the evening she saw his eyes shine as he addressed her.
"I hardly know what I am about, Miss Raymount," he said, "except that I hear my own voice daring to address the finest non-professional singer I have ever yet heard."
Hester, to her own disgust and annoyance, felt her head give itself a toss she had never intended; but it was a true toss nevertheless, for she neither liked having attracted his admiration by such a song, nor the stress he laid on the word non-professional: did it not imply that she was not songstress enough for the profession of song?
"Excuse me, Mr. Vavasor, but how do you know I am not a professional singer?" she said with some haughtiness.
"Had you been," answered Vavasor with concealed caution, "I should have learned the fact from your brother."
"Have you learned from him that I could sing at all?"
"To confess the strange truth, he never told me you were musical."
"Very well?"
"I beg your pardon."
"I mean, how then do you know I am not a professional singer?"
"All London would have known it."
This second reply, better conceived, soothed Hester's vanity—of which she had more than was good for her, seeing the least speck of it in the noblest is a fly in the cream.
"What would you say," she rejoined, "if Corney were to tell to you that the reason of his silence was that, while I was in training, we judged it more prudent, with possible failure ahead, to be silent?"
"I should say you cherished a grand ambition, and one in which you could not fail of success," replied Vavasor, who began to think she was leading him gently to the truth.
But Hester was in a wayward mood, and inclined to prospect.
"Suppose such was not really Corney's reason," she resumed, "but that he thought it degraded him to be the brother of an intended professional—what would you say to that?"
"I should tell him he was a fool. He cannot know his Burke," he added laughingly, "to be ignorant of the not inconsiderable proportion of professional blood mixed with the blue in our country."
It was not in Vavasor's usual taste: he had forgotten his best manners. But in truth he never had any best manners: comparatively few have anything but second-best, as the court of the universe will one day reveal. Hester did not like the remark, and he fancied from her look she had misunderstood him.
"Many a singer and actress too has married a duke or a marquis," he supplemented in explanation.
"What sort of a duke or marquis?" asked Hester, in a studiedly wooden way. "It was the more shame to them," she added.
"Pardon me. I cannot allow that it would be any shame to the best of our nobility—"
"I beg your pardon—I meant to the professionals," interrupted Hester.
Vavasor was posed. To her other eccentricities it seemed Miss Raymount added radicalism—and that not of the palest pink! But happily for him, Cornelius, who had been all the time making noises on the piano, at this point appeared at the window.
"Come, Hetty," he said, "sing that again. I shall sing it ever so much better after! Come, I will play the accompaniment."
"It's not worth singing. It would choke me—poor, vapid, vulgar thing!"
"Hullo, sis!" cried Cornelius; "it's hardly civil to use such words about any song a fellow cares to sing!"
Hester's sole answer was a smile, in which, and I am afraid it was really there, Vavasor read contempt, and liked her none the worse for it. Cornelius turned in offense, went back to the piano, and sang the song again—not one hair better—in just the same nerveless, indifferent fashion as before; for how shall one who has no soul, put soul into a song?
Mrs. Raymount was sitting at the fireside with her embroidery. She had not spoken since tea, but now she called Hester, and said to her quietly—
"Don't provoke him, Hester. I am more than delighted to find he has begun to take an interest in music. It is a taste that will grow upon him. Coax him to let you teach him—and bear with him if he should sing out of tune.—It is nothing wicked!" she added with a mother-smile.
Hester was silent. Her conscience rebuked her more than her heart. She went up to him and said—
"Corney, dear, let me find you a song worth singing."
"A girl can't choose for a man. You're sure to fix on some sentimental stuff or other not fit to sing!"
"My goodness, Corney!" cried Hester, "what do you call the song you've just been singing?"
In the days when my heart was aching
Like the shell of an overtuned lyre.
"Ha!