At four o’clock the hum of conversation ceased at the sound of singing voices in the distance. A sort of processional effect had been Tommy’s suggestion, and the quartette formed in the dressing-room and sang its way to the audience.
“Hark, hark, the lark at Heaven’s gate sings,
And Phœbus ’gins to rise.”
The voices rang high and clear, coming nearer and nearer. All the words could be heard and understood. The hall portières divided, and the girls entered, all in soft gray crêpe, gardenias at the belt, little brimmed hats of black velvet with a single gardenia on the side, the flowers being the offering of the dramatic soprano, who loved Tommy. They were young, they were pretty, they sang delightfully in tune, and with quite bewitching effect. Several ladies fell in love with them at first sight, and hoped that they would sing for nothing a few times, “just to get themselves known.” They had done nothing else for two years, so that Tommy said they must be acquainted with the entire State of New York, though nothing ever came of it. It was a joyous surprise, then, when an old gentleman in the company (who was seen to wipe tears away when the girls sang “Darby and Joan”) engaged them to sing at his golden wedding the next night. That was the beginning of a season of modest prosperity. Tommy’s baritone had married his new accompanist (he seemed determined to have a piano-playing wife), and wishing to show Miss Tucker that his heart was not broken by her rejection, he gave a handsome party and engaged the quartette, paying for their services in real coin of the realm. Other appearances followed in and out of town, and Tommy paid for her gray dress, spent a goodly sum for an attack of tonsillitis, the result of overwork, and still saved two hundred dollars. The season was over. She was fagged, but not disheartened. Who is at twenty-two? But it was late April, and drawing-room entertainments were no more. The two hundred dollars when augmented by the church salary would barely take her through till October.
“It is very annoying,” thought Tommy, “when you have to eat, drink, sleep, and dress twelve months in the year, that the income by which you do these things should cease abruptly for four months. Still, furriers can’t sell furs in hot weather, and summer boarders can’t board in winter, so I suppose other people have to make enough money in eight months to spend in twelve.”
“‘Hark, hark, the lark at Heaven’s gate sings,
And Phœbus ’gins to rise!’”
she caroled, splashing about in her morning tub as she finished making these reflections, the tub being an excellent place for trills and scales.
Proceeding from tub to her sitting-room to make things ready for toilet and breakfast, her mind ran on her little problems.
“I want to learn more, see more, hear more,” she thought. “I have one of those nasty, unserviceable, betwixt-and-between talents: voice not high enough for ‘Robert, toi que j’aime,’ nor low enough for ‘Ständchen’; not flexible enough for ‘Caro Nome,’ nor big enough for ‘Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster’; poor French accent, worse German; awfully good English, but that doesn’t count. Can sing old ballads, folk-songs, and nice, forgotten things that make dear old gentlemen and ladies cry—but not pay. If I were billed at all, it ought to be
This appellation so tickled her fancy that she nearly upset the coffee-pot, and she continued to laugh at her own wit until a fat letter was pushed under her door from the hall outside. She picked it up. It had an English postmark.
“Helena Markham!” she cried, joyously.
Dear Tommy: [the letter read]
Don’t you want to come over to London for the season? You never make any money at home from June to October, and if by chance you have a penny in the bank (I don’t know why I say “if” when none of us ever had such a thing!) I think I can put enough in your way to pay part of your expenses. I am really beginning to get on!—three engagements in the provincial towns all arranged. My accompanist plays lots better than you do, but I don’t sing half so well with him as I used to with you. You somehow infuse the spirit into me that I lack. I incline to be lumpy and heavy. They may not notice it in the provinces, for I dare say they are lumpy and heavy there, too. However, though I shall have to have somebody well known over here for concerts of any great pretensions, I could work you into smaller ones, and coach with you, too, since I must have somebody. And you are so good-looking, Tommy dear, and have such a winning profile! I am plainer than ever, but no plainer than Madame Titiens, so the papers say. I never saw or heard her, of course, but the critics say I have the same large, “massive” style of voice and person. My present accompanist would take first prize for ugliness in any competition; he is more like a syndicate of plainness than one single exemplification of it! I must have a noble nature to think more of my audiences than of myself, but I should like to give them something to please their eyes—I flatter myself I can take care of their ears!
Oh, do come, Tommy! Say you will!
Tommy pirouetted about the room like an intoxicated bird, waving the letter, and trilling and running joyful chromatic scales, for the most part badly done.
“Will I go to London?” she warbled in a sort of improvised recitative. “Will I take two or two and a half lessons of Georg Henschel? Will I grace platforms in the English provinces? Will I take my two hundred dollars out of the bank and risk it royally? Perhaps the bystanders will glance in at my windows and observe me giving the landlady notice, and packing my trunk, both of which delightful tasks I shall be engaged in before the hour strikes.”
III
Fergus Appleton thought he saw “the singing girl” of his voyage from New York one May day in Wells, where he went to study the cathedral. He noticed a hansom with a pink-clad figure in the opening, looking like a rosebud of a new and odd sort on wheels. At least, it looked like a rosebud at the moment the doors rolled back like the leaves of a calyx, and the flower issued, triumphant and beautiful. She was greeted by a tall, stout young lady, who climbed into the hansom, and the two settled themselves quickly and drove off.
Appleton’s hansom followed on its own course, which chanced to be in the same direction, and he saw the slim and the stout disappear up a hilly street, at the top of which was a famous old house. He walked that way in the afternoon, having nothing better to do, but could observe no dwelling at which the two ladies might be staying. There was a pretty cottage with a long, graveled pathway leading to it, and a little sign on the locked gate reading: “Spring Cleaning. Please do not knock or ring.” Farther along was a more pretentious house, so attractive that he was sorry he had never noticed it before, for the sign “Apartments to Let” was in one of the front windows. He heard a piano in the rear somewhere, but on reaching the front door another sign confronted him: “The parlor maid is slightly deaf. If doorbell is not answered at once, please step inside and ring the dinner bell on the hall table.”
This somehow required more courage than Appleton possessed, though he determined to look at the rooms on his next visit, so he stole down the path and went about his business, wondering why in the world he had done such a besotted thing as to take a walk among the furnished lodgings of the cathedral town of Wells.
The summer waxed. He had nearly finished his book, and feeling the need of some peaceful retreat where he could do the last chapters and work up his sketches, he took the advice of an English friend and went down to Devonshire, intending to go from place to place until he found a hotel and surroundings to his mind.
The very first one pleased his exacting taste, and he felt that the Bexley Sands Inn would be the very spot in which to write; comfortable within, a trifle too large, perhaps, and at week-ends too full of people, but clean, well-kept, and sunny.
It was a Friday evening, and the number of guests who arrived on the last train from Torquay was rather disturbing. The