Drip, drip, drip!--it was the sad, graceful prelude in which the fall of rain is supposed to be suggested, the hot steady rain of the Mediterranean which had fallen at Majorca ever so many years ago and was falling now in sound, though he that caught its beauty was long since dust. Drip, drip!--and then the soft repet.i.tion which announced that the delicate and lovely vision had reached its close, that the august grey harmonies were over.

For a moment, there was silence in the drawing room.

Muriel's white fingers rested on the keys of the piano, the candles threw their light upwards upon the enigmatic maiden face. Her father sighed quietly--happily also as he looked at her--and the low buzz of Mrs. Amberley's and Mrs. Toftrees' talk became much more distinct.

Suddenly Gilbert Lothian jumped up from the settee. He hurried to the piano, his face flushed, his eyes liquid and bright.

It was consciously and theatrically done, an exaggeration of his bow in the dining room--not the right thing in the very least!

"Oh, thank you! _Thank you!_" he said in a high, fervent voice. "How wonderful that is! And you played it as Crouchmann plays it--the _only_ interpretation! I know him quite well. We had supper together the other night after his concert, and he told me--no, that won't interest you.

I'll tell you another time, remind me! Now, _do_ play something else!"

He fumbled with the music upon the piano with tremulous and unsteady hands.

"Ah! here we are!" he cried, and there was an insistent note of familiarity in his voice. "The book of Valses! You know the twelfth of course? Tempo giusto! It goes like this ..."

He began to hum, quite musically, and to wave his hands.

Muriel Amberley glanced quickly at her father and there was distress in her eyes.

Amberley was standing by the piano in a moment. He seemed very much master of himself, serene and dominant, by the side of Gilbert Lothian.

His face was coldly civil and there was disgust in his eyes.

"I don't think my daughter will play any more, Mr. Lothian," he said.

An ugly look flashed out upon the poet's face, suspicion and realisation showed there for a second and pa.s.sed.

He became nervous, embarra.s.sed, almost pitiably apologetic. The savoir-faire which would have helped some men to take the rebuke entirely deserted him. There was something a.s.siduous, almost vulgar, a frightened acceptance of the lash indeed, which immensely accentuated the sudden _defaillance_ and break-down.

In the big drawing room no one spoke at all.

Then there was a sudden movement and stir. Gilbert Lothian was saying good-night.

He had remembered that he really had some work to do before going to bed, some letters to write, as a matter of fact. He was shaking hands with every one.

"I do hope that I shall have the pleasure of hearing you play some more Chopin before long, Miss Amberley! Thank you so much Mrs. Amberley--I'm going to write a poem about your beautiful Dining Room. I suppose we shall meet at the Authors' Club dinner on Sat.u.r.day, Mr. Toftrees?--so interested to have met you at last."

... The people in the drawing room heard him chattering vivaciously to Mr. Amberley, who had accompanied his departing guest into the hall.

No one said a single word. They heard the front door close, and the steps of the master of the house as he returned to them. They were all waiting.

When Amberley came in he made a courtly attempt at ignoring what had just occurred. The calm surface of the evening had been rudely disturbed--yes! For once even an Amberley party had gone wrong--there was to be no fun from this meeting of young folk to-night.

But it was Mrs. Amberley who spoke. She really could not help it. Mrs.

Toftrees had been telling her of various rumours concerning Gilbert Lothian some time before the episode at the piano, and with all her tolerance Mrs. Amberley was thoroughly angry.

That such a thing should have happened in her house, before Muriel and her girl friend--oh! it was unthinkable!

"So Mr. Gilbert Lothian has gone," she said with considerable emphasis.

"Yes, dear," Mr. Amberley answered as he sat down again, willing enough that nothing more should be said.

But it was not to be so.

"We can never have him here again," said the angry lady.

Amberley shook his head. "Very unfortunate, extremely unfortunate," he murmured.

"I cannot understand it. Such a thing has never happened here before.

Now I understand why Mr. Lothian hides himself in the country and never goes about. _Il y avait raison!_"

"I don't say that genius is any _excuse_ for this sort of thing,"

Amberley replied uneasily, "and Lothian has genius--but one must take more than one thing into consideration ..."

He paused, not quite knowing how to continue the sentence, and genuinely sorry and upset. His glance fell upon Herbert Toftrees, and he had a sort of feeling that the novelist might help him out.

"Don't you think so, Toftrees?" he asked.

The novelist surveyed the room with his steady grey eyes, marshalling his hearers as it were.

"But let us put his talent aside," he said. "Think of him as an ordinary person in our own rank of life--Mrs. Amberley's guest.

Certainly he could not have taken anything here to have made him in the strange state he is in. Surely he must have known that he was not fit to come to a decent house."

"I shall give his poems away," Muriel Amberley said with a little shudder. "I can never read them again. And I did love them so! I wish you hadn't asked Mr. Lothian to come here, Father."

"There is one consolation," said Mrs. Toftrees in a hard voice; "the man must be realising what he has done. He was not too far gone for that!"

A new voice broke into the talk. It came from young d.i.c.kson Ingworth who had slid into the seat by Rita Wallace when Lothian went to the piano.

He blushed and stammered as he spoke, but there was a fine loyalty in his voice.

"It seems rather dreadful, Mrs. Amberley," he said, quite thinking that he was committing literary suicide as he did so. "It is dreadful of course. But Gilbert _is_ such a fine chap when he's--when he's, all right! You can't think! And then, 'Surgit Amari'! Don't let's forget he wrote 'The Loom'--'Delicate Threads! O fairest in life's tissue,'" he quoted from the celebrated verse.

Then Rita Wallace spoke. "He is great," she said. "He is manifesting himself in his own way. That is all. To me, at any rate, the meeting with Mr. Lothian has been wonderful."

Mrs. Toftrees stared with undisguised dislike of such a.s.sertions on the part of a young girl.

But Mrs. Amberley, always kind and generous-hearted, had been pleased and touched by d.i.c.kson Ingworth's defence of his friend and master. She quite realised what the lad stood to lose by doing it, and what courage on his part it showed. And when Rita Wallace chimed in, Mrs. Amberley dismissed the whole occurrence from her mind as she beamed benevolently at the two young people on the sofa.

"Let's forget all about it," she said. "Mrs. Toftrees, help me to make my husband sing. He can only sing one song but he sings it excellently--'In cellar cool'--just the thing for a hot night. Joseph!

do as I tell you!"

The little group of people rearranged themselves, as Muriel sat down at the piano to accompany her father.

"Le metier de poete laisse a desirer," Toftrees murmured to his wife with a sneer which almost disguised the atrocious accent of his French.