“Ah, Mariamne,” he blared gently.
“Oh, Bennett, you angel, how did you get here so early?” responded Miriam, playing with zealous emphasis.
“Got old Barrowgate to finish off the outpatients,” he said with a choke of amusement.
“I say, Mirry, don’t you play. Let me take it on. You go and ply the light fantastic.” He laid his hands upon her shoulders and burred the tune she was playing like a muted euphonium over the top of her head. “No. It’s all right. Go and get them dancing. Get over the awfulness—you know.”
“Get over the awfulness, eh? Oh, I’ll get over the awfulness.”
“Ssh—are there many there?”
They both looked round into the drawing-room.
Nan Babington was backing slowly up and down the room supported by the outstretched arms of Bevan Seymour, her black head thrown back level with his, the little scarlet knot in her hair hardly registering the smooth movements of her invisible feet.
“They seem to have begun,” shouted Bennett in a whisper as Harriett and her fiancé swung easily circling into the room and were followed by two more couples.
“Go and dance with Meg. She only knows Tommy Babington.”
“Like the lid up?”
Miriam’s rhythmic clangour doubled its resonance in the tiled conservatory as the great lid of the piano went up.
“Magnifique, Mirry, parfaitement magnifique,” intoned Tommy Babington, appearing in the doorway with Meg on his arm.
“Bonsoir, Tomasso.”
“You are like an expressive metronome.”
“Oh—nom d’un pipe.”
“You would make a rhinoceros dance.”
Adjusting his pince-nez he dexterously seized tall Meg and swung her rapidly in amongst the dancers.
“Sarah’ll say he’s had a Turkish bath,” thought Miriam, recalling the unusual clear pallor of his rather overfed face. “Pleated shirt. That’s to impress Meg.”
She felt all at once that the air seemed cold. It was not like a summer night. How badly the ferns were arranged. Nearly all of them together on the staging behind the end of the piano; not enough visible from the drawing-room. Her muscles were somehow stiffening into the wrong mood. Presently she would be playing badly. She watched the forms circling past the gap in the curtains and slowed a little. The room seemed fairly full.
“That’s it—perfect, Mim,” signalled Harriett’s partner, swinging her by. She held to the fresh rhythm and passing into a tender old waltz tune that she knew by heart gave herself to her playing. She need not watch the feet any longer. She could go on forever. She knew she was not playing altogether for the dancers. She was playing to two hearers. But she could not play that tune if they came. They would be late. But they must be here now. Where were they? Were they having coffee? Dancing? She flung a terrified glance at the room and met the cold eye of Bevan Seymour. She would not look again. The right feeling for the dreamy old tune came and went uncontrollably. Why did they not come? Presently she would be cold and sick and done for, for the evening. She played on, harking back to the memory of the kindly challenge in the eyes of her brother-in-law to be, dancing gravely with a grave Harriett—fearing her … writing in her album:
“She was his life,
The ocean to the river of his thoughts—
Which terminated all.”
… cold, calm little Harriett. Her waltz had swung soft and low and the dancers were hushed. Only Tommy Babington’s voice still threaded the little throng.
Someone held back the near curtain. A voice said quietly, “Here she is.”
Ted’s low, faintly-mocking voice filled the conservatory.
He was standing very near her, looking down at her with his back to the gay room. Yesterday’s dream had come more than true, at once, at the beginning of the evening. He had come straight to her with his friend, not dancing, not looking for a partner. They were in the little green enclosure with her. The separating curtains had fallen back into place.
Behind the friend who stood leaning against the far end of the piano, the massed fernery gleamed now with the glow of concealed fairy lamps. She had not noticed it before. The fragrance of fronds and moist warm clumps of maidenhair and scented geraniums inundated her as she glanced across at the light falling on hard sculptured waves of hair above a white handsome face.
Her music held them all, protecting the wordless meeting. Her last night’s extremity of content was reality, being lived by all three of them. It centred in herself. Ted stood within it, happy in it. The friend watched, witnessing Ted’s confession. Ted had said nothing to him about her, about any of them, in his usual way. But he was disguising nothing now that he had come.
At the end of her playing she stood up faintly dizzy, and held out towards Max Sonnenheim’s familiar strangeness hands heavy with happiness and quickened with the sense of Ted’s touch upon her arm. The swift crushing of the strange hands upon her own, steadied her as the curtains swung wide and a group of dancers crowded in.
“Don’t tell N. B. we’ve scrubbed the coffin, Miriorama—she’ll sit there all the evening.”
“That was my sister and my future brother-in-law,” said Miriam to Max Sonnenheim as Harriett and Gerald ran down the steps and out
