Appleton bowed his thanks, filled his pipe, and taking up his newspaper with a sensation of comfortable idleness, was beginning an article on the situation in the Balkans, when a voice floated out from the distant drawing-room, down the long corridor, through the writing-room into the lounge. It was not a little voice nor a big voice, it seemed to have no extraordinarily high notes and no low ones, it did not arrest attention by the agility of its use; but it was as fresh and young as a bird’s and sweeter than honey in the comb. It began by caroling “My Love’s an Arbutus,” went on to “The Little Red Lark” and “The Low-Backed Car,” so that Appleton, his head thrown back in the easy-chair, the smoke wreaths from his pipe circling in the air, the Balkans forgotten, decided that the singer was Irish.
“A pretty voice, sir,” remarked the goddess of the hotel office. “I’m sorry so many of our guests are playing bowls this evening, and there’s a bridge party of three tables in our first-floor private sitting-room, or the young lady would have had an audience. She seems a nice little thing, quite a stranger, with no experience.”
If the singer had even a small group of hearers, they were apparently delighted with “The Low-Backed Car,” for with only a second’s pause she gave “The Minstrel Boy.” A certain individual quality of tone and spirit managed to bridge the distance between the drawing-room and lounge; or perhaps it was the piano accompaniment, so beautifully played that one could almost imagine it a harp; or was it that the words were so familiar to Appleton that every syllable was understood, so that the passion and fire of the old song suffered no loss?
“The minstrel fell, but the foeman’s chain
Could not bring that proud soul under!
The harp he loved ne’er spoke again,
For he tore its chords asunder.”
“It’s a pity her programme is so old-fashioned,” said the young lady of the office, passing his chair to give an order to the page. “It’s true only the elderly people went in, but our week-enders are very up-to-date in everything. There’s a lot of Londoners here, and those from Torquay are frightfully musical. If they don’t get Debewssy, it seems they think nothing of the programme.”
“Well, I confess that Debussy seems a trifle alien to this time and place,” said Appleton, “and these old ballads suit my taste much better. I think I’ll take a nearer view.”
He shoved his pipe into its case and strolled down the corridor, pausing behind the heavy velvet portières that shut off the drawing-room. There was no buzz of conversation going on, because there was not a sufficient number of persons to buzz. A very quiet, stodgy audience it was, with no friendly grouping; just a few old gentlemen here and a few old ladies there, sometimes with their prematurely aged and chastened paid companions by their sides. There were some girls of fifteen or sixteen, too, scattered about, a few of them accompanied by prim governesses.
Appleton heard the entrance of some one from the anteroom beyond the grand piano, then a few chords, struck by hands that loved the ivory keys and evoked a reciprocal tenderness every time they touched them; then:
“Near Woodstock Town in Oxfordshire
As I walked forth to take the air,
To view the fields and meadows round,
Methought I heard a mournful sound.”
So the chronicle ran on until the crisis came:
“The lady round the meadow ran,
And gathered flowers as they sprang.
Of every sort she there did pull
Until she got her apron full.”
The history of the distracted lady’s unhappy passion persevered:
“The green ground served her as a bed,
The flowers a pillow for her head.
She laid her down and nothing spoke.
Alas! for love her heart was broke.”
Appleton was at first too enchanted with the mischievous yet sympathetic rendition of this tragedy to do anything but listen. The voice, the speech, were so full of color and personality he forgot for the moment that there would be a face behind them; but there was an irresistible something in the line, “Until she got her apron full,” that forced him to peep behind the curtain just in time to catch the singer’s smile.
As this is not a story of plot, suspense, or mystery, there is no earthly use in denying that the lady in question was Miss Thomasina Tucker, nor any sense in affirming that her appearance in Fergus Appleton’s hotel was in the nature of a dramatic coincidence, since Americans crossing the Atlantic on the same steamer are continually meeting in the British Isles and on the Continent.
Appleton was pleased to see the girl again because he had always liked her face, and he was delighted to find that her voice not only harmonized with it, but increased its charm a hundredfold. Miss Tommy had several rather uncommon qualities in her equipment. One was that when she sang a high note she did it without exposing any of the avenues which led to her singing apparatus. She achieved her effects without pain to herself or to the observer, just flinging them off as gayly and irresponsibly as a bird on a bough, without showing any modus operandi. She had tenderness also, and fire, and a sense of humor which, while she never essayed a “comic” song, served her in good stead in certain old ballads with an irresistibly quaint twist in them. She made it perfectly clear that she was sorry for the poor lady who was running around the meadow preparing her flowery bier, but the conviction crept over you that she was secretly amused at the same time. Appleton heard the smile in her voice before he pulled aside the curtain and saw its counterpart on her face; heard and responded, for when Tommy tossed a smile at you, you caught it gratefully and tossed it back in the hope of getting a second and a third.
Another arrow in Tommy’s modest quiver was the establishment of an instantaneous intimacy between herself and her audience. The singing of her songs was precisely like the narration of so many stories, told so simply and directly that the most hardened critic would have his sting removed without being aware of it. He would know that Tommy hadn’t a remarkable voice, but he would forget to mention it because space was limited. Sometimes he would say that she was an interpreter rather than a singer, and Tommy, for her part, was glad to be called anything, and grateful when she wasn’t brutally arraigned for the microscopic size of her talent.
It was Tommy’s captivating friendliness and the quality of her smile that “did” for the shyest and stiffest of men, for by the time she had finished her programme the thunderbolt, the classic, the eternal thunderbolt, had fallen, and Fergus Appleton was in love. Tommy began her unconscious depredations with “Near Woodstock Town” and “Phillida Flouts Me,” added fuel to the flames with “My Heart’s in the Highlands” and “Charlie Is My Darling,” and reduced his heart to ashes with “Allan Water” and “Has Sorrow Thy Young Days Shaded?” The smile began it, but it was tears that worked the final miracle, though moisture very rarely has this effect on fires of any sort.
Tommy was tired and a bit disheartened; Appleton, the only responsive person in the audience, was seated in a far corner of the room, completely hidden behind a lady of formidable width and thickness, so the singer could not be expected to feel the tidal waves of appreciation he was sending toward her, although they ran so high at one moment that he could have risen to his feet and begged her to elope with him. The rest of her hearers sat heavily, stodgily in their seats without moving a muscle, mental, emotional, or physical. They had no private sitting-rooms, and they might as well be where they were as anywhere else; that was the idea they conveyed in every feature of their expressionless faces. An old gentleman in the front row left the