"Awfully bad, is it?" Mr. Merriman inquired.

"Awfully," said Gwendolen.

"Well, it's all one to me," said Mr. Merriman jocosely.

"I paint the soul of man, as influenced by the forces of nature," still delivering explanatory comments, Lady Henge had seated herself at the piano. "My symphonic poem--'Thala.s.sa,' shall I give you that?" and from a careful adjustment of the piano-stool, she looked up at Camelia, who had followed her.

Sir Arthur, on his solitary sofa, showed some dismay at the imminence of his mother's performance. Perior, who had heard Lady Henge play, fixed enduring eyes on the cornice. Camelia dropped into the vacant seat beside him.

"Hold your breath, Alceste," she murmured, her smiling eyes still gently observant of Lady Henge, who, after a majestic turn up and down the key-board, had paused in a menacing att.i.tude, one hand lifted in a heavily pouncing position.

"She'll have our heads under water in a minute. Ah! here comes the splash!" The very walls quivered as that fierce hand fell. A volcanic, incoherent volume of sound hurtled forth upon the stillness. From thenceforward they might have been sitting amidst the clamorous concussions of a thunder-storm, Lady Henge, high priestess of terrified humanity, making valiant warfare with the angry G.o.ds. The wind, or rather the effect of the wind upon the shrinking mind of man, shrieked in long sweeps down the key-board--Lady Henge's execution with the flat of her hand being boldly impressionistic; the waves beat out their stormy rhythm in crashing chords of very feeble construction, but in noisiness immensely effective, leaping, bounding, shouldering, swallowing one another with a splendid inconsequence as to time or key.

A chaos of stammering phrases cried out fitfully above the steady bellowing of the ba.s.s.

Physically the composition was most certainly exhausting. Lady Henge's fine, flushed profile, bent with brooding intensity above the key-board, evinced a panting effort to cope with the mighty requirements of her creation.

"It sounds as if she were being tossed in her cabin, doesn't it?"

Camelia's soft voice murmured under the safe cover of the tumult, her face keeping the expression of grave attention, "and horribly seasick.

One hears the bottles breaking, and the basins clashing, and the boots being hurled from side to side. Anything but abstract. Intimately descriptive rather--don't you think?" A side glint of her eye evidently twinkled for sympathy; but Perior solemnly stared at the ceiling.

"The construction too," Camelia said more soberly, "she plunged us into the free fantasia--and perhaps at the end she may fish us out with the dominant phrase--but I haven't caught it yet; ah, this thudding finale announces the journey's end." And she jumped up as Lady Henge, with a fine, tense look of soul-experience, rose from the piano. The dazed and wilted listeners chimed out the polite chorus usual on such occasions.

Camelia led Lady Henge to her chair. "Thank you--so much," she said.

Lady Henge smiled dimly, her eyes fixed on vacancy.

"It was like a glorious wind blowing about one. It made me think of Wordsworth's sonnets--of the soul in nature," said Camelia. Perior still looked stolidly at the ceiling, and she felt his silence to be ominous.

"Such music," she added, "gives one courage for life." She was angry with Perior. Lady Henge pressed her hand.

"Thanks, my dear. Yes--you _felt_. One must hear, of course, a composition many times before entering into the sanctuary of the artist's meaning." Camelia's mouth retained its sympathetic gravity.

Perior said nothing; and faint, relieved little groups of talk twittered like birds after a storm.

"And you, Mr. Perior," Lady Henge, fanning herself largely turned to this silent critic. "You, too, are a musician as I know, a musician at least in appreciation. What do you think of my 'Thala.s.sa'? Frankly now--as one artist to another." Perior moved his eyes slowly from the ceiling, and dropped them to Camelia's face. He grew very red.

"Frankly now," Lady Henge reiterated with genial urgency.

"I think it is very bad," said Perior. The sentence fell with a thud, like a stone.

Lady Henge flushed, and her fan fluttered to stillness; Camelia, her eyebrows lightly lifted, met Perior's square look.

"Bad," Lady Henge repeated, with a pathetic mingling of deprecating pride and pain, "really bad, Mr. Perior?"

"Very bad," said Perior.

The unmitigated sentence reduced her to feeble plaintiveness.

"But why? This is really savage, you know."

"Excuse me, I know I seem rude," he looked at her now with something of an effort. "You see I tell you the uncompromising truth. Your piece is weak, and crude, and incoherent!"

Now that she met his eyes, Lady Henge saw that it gave him pain to speak so. Camelia standing over them smiled unruffled.

"It is a case of Berlioz and the Conservatoire, Schumann and the Philistines, Lady Henge. Mr. Perior is an old cla.s.sicist--understands nothing outside strictest adherence to form. Your more modern march of the _Davidsbundler_ could say nothing to him." Perior did not look at her.

"If you will allow me, Lady Henge, I will come some day and go over a lot of Schumann with you. I think you will recognize the difference. His power and genuineness are apparent. And Schumann has a great deal to say."

He smiled at her as he spoke, a very sweet smile--asking tolerance for the friend in spite of the critic's unwilling arrogance. Lady Henge was soothed, though decidedly shaken.

"You are severe, you know."

"But you prefer severity to silly fibs."

"I may be silly," Camelia here put in with a touch of coldness, "if so, I stand convicted with you, Lady Henge, for I found your 'Thala.s.sa'

neither crude, nor weak, nor incoherent; but I can't be accused of fibbing. You will play your symphonic poem to me again, won't you? and we will leave Mr. Perior to the pleasures of iconoclastic conservatism."

After so speaking, Camelia went back to her seat beside Sir Arthur.

He had a book in his hand, and was turning the leaves vaguely, he put it down as he looked up at her. For a man well over thirty, Sir Arthur had certain boyish traits, as a frank nervousness of glance now revealed.

"Well?" Camelia smiled, feeling a something in the silence.

"It was bad, wasn't it?" said Sir Arthur.

"Bad?"

"Yes, poor mother."

"I don't think it bad."

Sir Arthur surveyed her with pained hesitation.

"Why do you say that?" he demanded, with an abruptness of wounded tenderness that put Camelia alertly on her guard.

"Why do you say _that_?" she asked, rounding innocent eyes at him.

"I saw you laughing at it, with Perior--not that he laughed. I heard what he said too, I prefer that, you know."

Camelia herself was feeling wounded, was smarting under a sense of angry humiliation. This added and unexpected blow brought the blood vividly to her face, and the sincerity of her discomfort seemed even to herself to warrant the sincerity of her quick question.

"You suspect me of lying?"

Camelia hardly thought that she had lied; neither the flush nor the tone of voice was acted.

Sir Arthur looked away. "I saw you laughing," he repeated.

"I _was_ laughing," Camelia declared. "Not at Lady Henge," she added.

Sir Arthur kept a silence in which doubt and a longing to believe evidently struggled.

"I said to Mr. Perior that the rocking pa.s.sage with the chord accompaniment made me feel seasick--from its realism; that touch of levity doesn't imply insincerity in my admiration--I always smile at the birds in the 'Pastoral.' Why should I be insincere? If I had not liked it, I would have said so."