She sat in a golden mist until the lights began to change upon the still water of the creek, and the rooks wheeled noisily out from the treetops to sort themselves for the night, and warned her of evening.
She brought to the dinner-table that night a buoyancy of spirit which surprised her companions. Mrs. Adair had to admit that seldom had her eyes shone so starrily, or the colour so freshly graced her cheeks. She was more than ever certain that Captain Willoughby had brought stirring news; she was more than ever tortured by her vain efforts to guess its nature. But Mrs. Adair, in spite of her perplexities, took her share in the talk, and that dinner passed with a freedom from embarrassment unknown since Durrance had come home to Guessens. For he, too, threw off a burden of restraint; his spirits rose to match Ethne’s; he answered laugh with laugh, and from his face that habitual look of tension, the look of a man listening with all his might that his ears might make good the loss of his eyes, passed altogether away.
“You will play on your violin tonight, I think,” he said with a smile, as they rose from the table.
“Yes,” she answered, “I will—with all my heart.”
Durrance laughed and held open the door. The violin had remained locked in its case during these last two months. Durrance had come to look upon that violin as a gauge and test if the world was going well with Ethne. The case was unlocked, the instrument was allowed to speak; if the world went ill, it was kept silent lest it should say too much, and open old wounds and lay them bare to other eyes. Ethne herself knew it for an indiscreet friend. But it was to be brought out tonight.
Mrs. Adair lingered until Ethne was out of earshot.
“You have noticed the change in her tonight?” she said.
“Yes. Have I not?” answered Durrance. “One has waited for it, hoped for it, despaired of it.”
“Are you so glad of the change?”
Durrance threw back his head. “Do you wonder that I am glad? Kind, friendly, unselfish—these things she has always been. But there is more than friendliness evident tonight, and for the first time it’s evident.”
There came a look of pity upon Mrs. Adair’s face, and she passed out of the room without another word. Durrance took all of that great change in Ethne to himself. Mrs. Adair drew up the blinds of the drawing-room, opened the window, and let the moonlight in; and then, as she saw Ethne unlocking the case of her violin, she went out on to the terrace. She felt that she could not sit patiently in her company. So that when Durrance entered the drawing-room he found Ethne alone there. She was seated in the window, and already tightening the strings of her violin. Durrance took a chair behind her in the shadows.
“What shall I play to you?” she asked.
“The ‘Melusine Overture,’ ” he answered. “You played it on the first evening when I came to Ramelton. I remember so well how you played it then. Play it again tonight. I want to compare.”
“I have played it since.”
“Never to me.”
They were alone in the room; the windows stood open; it was a night of moonlight. Ethne suddenly crossed to the lamp and put it out. She resumed her seat, while Durrance remained in the shadow, leaning forward, with his hands upon his knees, listening—but with an intentness of which he had given no sign that evening. He was applying, as he thought, a final test upon which his life and hers should be decided. Ethne’s violin would tell him assuredly whether he was right or no. Would friendship speak from it or the something more than friendship?
Ethne played the overture, and as she played she forgot that Durrance was in the room behind her. In the garden the air was still and summer-warm and fragrant; on the creek the moonlight lay like a solid floor of silver; the trees stood dreaming to the stars; and as the music floated loud out across the silent lawn, Ethne had a sudden fancy that it might perhaps travel down the creek and over Salcombe Bar and across the moonlit seas, and strike small yet wonderfully clear like fairy music upon the ears of a man sleeping somewhere far away beneath the brightness of the southern stars with the cool night wind of the desert blowing upon his face.
“If he could only hear!” she thought. “If he could only wake and know that what he heard was a message of friendship!”
And with this fancy in her mind she played with such skill as she had never used before; she made of her violin a voice of sympathy. The fancy grew and changed as she played. The music became a bridge swung in midair across the world, upon which just for these few minutes she and Harry Feversham might meet and shake hands. They would separate, of course, forthwith,
