第73章

He breathed hard through the robust portions of stern, vigorous noise, and rocked himself to and fro when, as rosy morn breaks upon a storm-swept night, the drums are silenced for the sweet, comforting strain of solitary melody.

The clanging minor harmonies into which the march relapses came to their abrupt end.Theron rose once more, and moved with a hesitating step to the piano.

"I want to rest a little," he said, with his hand on her shoulder.

"Whew! so do I," exclaimed Celia, letting her hands fall with an exaggerated gesture of weariness."The sonatas take it out of one! They are hideously difficult, you know.

They are rarely played."

"I didn't know," remarked Theron.She seemed not to mind his hand upon her shoulder, and he kept it there.

"I didn't know anything about music at all.What I do know now is that--that this evening is an event in my life."She looked up at him and smiled.He read unsuspected tendernesses and tolerances of friendship in the depths of her eyes, which emboldened him to stir the fingers of that audacious hand in a lingering, caressing trill upon her shoulder.The movement was of the faintest, but having ventured it, he drew his hand abruptly away.

"You are getting on," she said to him.There was an enigmatic twinkle in the smile with which she continued to regard him."We are Hellenizing you at a great rate."A sudden thought seemed to strike her.She shifted her eyes toward vacancy with a swift, abstracted glance, reflected for a moment, then let a sparkling half-wink and the dimpling beginnings of an almost roguish smile mark her assent to the conceit, whatever it might be.

"I will be with you in a moment," he heard her say;and while the words were still in his ears she had risen and passed out of sight through the broad, open doorway to the right.The looped curtains fell together behind her.

Presently a mellow light spread over their delicately translucent surface--a creamy, undulating radiance which gave the effect of moving about among the myriad folds of the silk.

Theron gazed at these curtains for a little, then straightened his shoulders with a gesture of decision, and, turning on his heel, went over and examined the statues in the further corners minutely.

"If you would like some more, I will play you the Berceuse now."Her voice came to him with a delicious shock.

He wheeled round and beheld her standing at the piano, with one hand resting, palm upward, on the keys.She was facing him.Her tall form was robed now in some shapeless, clinging drapery, lustrous and creamy and exquisitely soft, like the curtains.The wonderful hair hung free and luxuriant about her neck and shoulders, and glowed with an intensity of fiery color which made all the other hues of the room pale and vague.A fillet of faint, sky-like blue drew a gracious span through the flame of red above her temples, and from this there rose the gleam of jewels.Her head inclined gently, gravely, toward him--with the posture of that armless woman in marble he had been studying--and her brown eyes, regarding him from the shadows, emitted light.

"It is a lullaby--the only one he wrote," she said, as Theron, pale-faced and with tightened lips, approached her.

"No--you mustn't stand there," she added, sinking into the seat before the instrument; "go back and sit where you were."The most perfect of lullabies, with its swaying abandonment to cooing rhythm, ever and again rising in ripples to the point of insisting on something, one knows not what, and then rocking, melting away once more, passed, so to speak, over Theron's head.

He leaned back upon the cushions, and watched the white, rounded forearm which the falling folds of this strange, statue-like drapery made bare.

There was more that appealed to his mood in the Third Ballade.

It seemed to him that there were words going along with it--incoherent and impulsive yet very earnest words, appealing to him in strenuous argument and persuasion.

Each time he almost knew what they said, and strained after their meaning with a passionate desire, and then there would come a kind of cuckoo call, and everything would swing dancing off again into a mockery of inconsequence.

Upon the silence there fell the pure, liquid, mellifluous melody of a soft-throated woman singing to her lover.

"It is like Heine--simply a love-poem," said the girl, over her shoulder.

Theron followed now with all his senses, as she carried the Ninth Nocturne onward.The stormy passage, which she banged finely forth, was in truth a lover's quarrel;and then the mild, placid flow of sweet harmonies into which the furore sank, dying languorously away upon a silence all alive with tender memories of sound--was that not also a part of love?

They sat motionless through a minute--the man on the divan, the girl at the piano--and Theron listened for what he felt must be the audible thumping of his heart.

Then, throwing back her head, with upturned face, Celia began what she had withheld for the last--the Sixteenth Mazurka.

This strange foreign thing she played with her eyes closed, her head tilted obliquely so that Theron could see the rose-tinted, beautiful countenance, framed as if asleep in the billowing luxuriance of unloosed auburn hair.

He fancied her beholding visions as she wrought the music--visions full of barbaric color and romantic forms.

As his mind swam along with the gliding, tricksy phantom of a tune, it seemed as if he too could see these visions--as if he gazed at them through her eyes.

It could not be helped.He lifted himself noiselessly to his feet, and stole with caution toward her.He would hear the rest of this weird, voluptuous fantasy standing thus, so close behind her that he could look down upon her full, uplifted lace--so close that, if she moved, that glowing nimbus of hair would touch him.

There had been some curious and awkward pauses in this last piece, which Theron, by some side cerebration, had put down to her not watching what her fingers did.