Dividing Waters. I. A. R. Wylie
she will do well. It is already a delight to listen to her."
A tide of warm colour darkened Wolff's face as he glanced quickly at Frau von Arnim's profile.
"I wonder what little pleasure—or perhaps necessity—you have denied yourself to perform that act of kindness?" he said.
"Neither the one nor the other, lieber Junge. If I deny myself one pleasure to give myself another, it can hardly be counted as a denial, can it? Besides, I believe her people are very badly off, and it is a shame that her talent should suffer for it. There! I am sure you want to go upstairs. Run along, and let me write my letters."
Wolff laughed at the old command, which dated back to the time when he had worried her with his boy's escapades.
"I'll just glance in and tell Hildegarde my good luck," he said, a little awkwardly. "I promised her I would let her know as soon as the news came."
"Do, dear Wolff."
She turned back to her letters, and Arnim, taking advantage of her permission, hurried out of the room and upstairs.
Hildegarde's little boudoir was an inner room, divided off from the neighbouring apartment by a heavy Liberty curtain. Governed by he knew not what instinct or desire, he stepped softly across and, drawing the hangings a little on one side, remained a quiet, unobserved spectator of the peaceful scene.
Nora had left the Walküre and had plunged into the first act of Tristan und Isolde. She played it with inexperience and after her own ideas, which were perhaps not the most correct, but the face alone, with its youth, its eagerness, its enthusiasm, must have disarmed the most captious critic. And Wolff von Arnim was by no means captious at that moment. Though he was listening, he hardly realised what she was playing, too absorbed in the pure pleasure which the whole picture gave him to think of details. He knew, for instance, that her dress was simple and pretty, but he could not tell afterwards whether it was blue or green or pink, or of no colour at all; he knew that he had never before found so much charm in a woman's face, but he would have been hard put to to describe exactly wherein that charm lay, or whether her features were regular or otherwise. He simply received an impression—one that he found difficult to forget.
A lamp had been placed on the top of the piano, and by its light the bright, wide-open eyes and eager fingers were finding their way through the difficult score. The rest of the room had been left in shadow. Arnim knew where his cousin was lying, but he did not look in her direction—perhaps he did not even think of her, so far did she lie outside the picture on which his whole interest was centred; and when the music died into silence, her voice startled him by its very unexpectedness.
"Wolff, won't you come in now?" she said.
Was there pain or annoyance in her tone? Arnim could not be certain. The knowledge that she had seen him standing there was sufficiently disconcerting. When we are unobserved, we unconsciously drop the masks which the instinct of self-preservation forces us to assume in the presence even of our dearest, and our faces betray emotions or thoughts which we have, perhaps, not even acknowledged to ourselves. As he advanced into the room, Arnim wondered uncomfortably how much the invalid's quick eyes had seen and if there was, indeed, anything in his looks or action which could have wounded her.
"You must think my manners very bad," he said in English as he greeted Nora, "but I knew if I came in you would stop playing, and that would have disappointed me and annoyed Hildegarde. You see, I know my cousin's little foibles, and one is that she does not like being interrupted in anything. Is that not so, Hildegarde?"
"You are a privileged person," she answered with a gentle smile on her pale face. "Still, I am glad you let Nora—Miss Ingestre—finish. She plays well, don't you think?"
"Splendidly—considering," was the answer.
Nora looked up.
"Considering? That sounds a doubtful compliment."
"I mean, English people as a rule have not much understanding for dramatic music."
"Yes, they have!" Nora blazed out impulsively.
"Have they?"
Still seething with injured patriotism, she met the laughter in his eyes with defiance. Then her sense of humour got the better of her.
"No, they haven't," she admitted frankly.
"There, now you are honest! Have you tried Tristan for the first time?"
Nora nodded. She had gone back to the piano and was turning over the leaves of the score with nervous fingers. For some reason which she never attempted to fathom, Wolff von Arnim's entries into her life, seldom and fleeting as they had been hitherto, had always brought with them a subtle, indescribable change in herself and in her surroundings. There were times when she was almost afraid of him and welcomed his departure. Then, again, when he was gone she was sorry that she had been so foolish, and looked forward to their next meeting.
"I have tried to read the first act before," she said, "but it is so hard. I can make so little out of it. I am sure it all sounds poor and confused compared to the real thing."
"Your piano score is inadequate," he said, coming to her side. "The duet arrangement is much better. Hildegarde and I used to play it together for hours."
Nora looked at him with wide-open eyes of wonder.
"Can you play?" she asked, very much as though he had boasted of his flying abilities, so that he laughed with boyish amusement.
"I play like a great many of us do," he said, "sufficiently well to amuse myself. I have a piano in my quarters which I ill-treat at regular intervals. Do you remember how angry you used to get because I thumped so?"
He had turned to the girl lying on the sofa, but she avoided his frank gaze.
"Yes," she said. "It is not so long ago, Wolff." And then, almost as though she were afraid of having betrayed some deeper feeling, she added quickly, "Couldn't you two try over the old duets together? I should so like to hear them, and I am too tired to talk."
"Would you like to, Miss Ingestre?"
"Very much—only you will find me dreadfully slow and stupid."
He hunted amongst an old bundle of music, and having found the required piece, he arranged it on the piano and prepared himself for the task with great gravity.
"You must let me have the bass," he said; "then I can thump without being so much noticed. I have a decided military touch. Hildegarde says I treat the notes as though they were recruits."
Nora played her part without nervousness, at first because she was convinced of her own superiority and afterwards because he inspired her. His guidance was sure and firm, and when he corrected, it was not as a master but as a comrade seeking to give advice as to a common task. Her shyness and uneasiness with him passed away. Every bar seemed to make him less of a stranger, and once in a long rest she found herself watching the powerful, carefully kept hands on the keyboard with a curious pleasure, as though they typified the man himself—strong, clean, and honest.
Thus they played through the whole of the first act, and when the last chord had been struck there was a long silence. It was as though both were listening to the echo of all that had gone before, and it was with an effort that Nora roused herself to speak.
"How well you play!" she said under her breath. "And how grand—how wonderful it is!"
He turned and looked at her.
"Did you understand it?"
"Not all. I feel that there are many more wonders to fathom which are yet too deep for me. But I understand enough to know that they are there—and to be glad."
"It is the noblest—most perfect expression of love and of the human heart that was ever written or composed," he said.
She looked up at him, and their eyes met gravely and steadily for a moment, in which the world was forgotten.
"Thank you very much," a quiet voice said from the background.