Chapter XXV

One light, not strong, illuminated the legless man's face. Barbara and her friends sat in half-darkness. Kid Shannon went out of the room on tiptoe, closing the door softly behind him. Of Rose, crouched under the key-board of the grand piano, her hands on the pedals, nothing could be seen, owing to a grouping of small palms and flowers in pots. The stump of Blizzard's right leg touched her shoulder. She was trembling. So was Blizzard. He was trembling with stage fright; she with Blizzard fright. His hands, thick with agile muscles and heavy as hams, though he had just been soaking them in hot water, seemed powerless to him, and stiff.

He struck a chord, and it sounded to him not like the voices of a musical instrument, but like a clattering together of tin dishes. This enraged him. His self-consciousness vanished. Those ivory keys and well-tempered wires had fooled him. He hated his piano. And he began to punish it. The heavy hands, rising and falling with the speed and strength of lightning strokes, produced a volume of tone which perhaps no other player in the world could have equalled.

Blythe, a great amateur of music, had come in a sceptical mood. He now sat more erect, his face, eyebrows raised, turned to Blizzard, his ears recalling to him certain moments of Rubinstein's playing.

But Blizzard no longer hated his piano. It had stood up nobly to his assault. It was a brave instrument, well-bred, a friend full of rare qualities--for a friend to show off. And, the swollen veins in his forehead flattening, he began to make his peace with his piano. It could do more than shout and rage. It could sing like an angel in all languages; it could be witty, humorous, heart-rending, heart-healing, chaste, passionate, helpful, mischievous. And it could be wise and eloquent. It could stand up for a friend, and explain his sins away, and get him forgiven in high places.

And even as Blizzard thought, so he played. He was no longer conscious of himself or his guests, not even of Barbara. As for Rose, she was merely a set of pedals in perfect mechanical adjustment. He was not even conscious of his thoughts. They came and went without deliberation, and were expressed as they came and dismissed as they went in the terms of his extraordinary improvisation.

But it came to this at last, that he thought only of beautiful things, so that even his face was stripped of wickedness, and his fingers loosed one by one the voices of angels, until it seemed as if the whole room was full of them--all singing. And the singing died away to silence.

The legless man looked straight ahead of him into the dim room. Then, smiling, his head a little on one side, he caressed his piano so that it gave out Chopin's 7th Prelude, which, as all the world knows, is a little girl who smiles because she is happy; and she is happy because so many of the flowers in the garden are blue. It is not known why this makes her happy, only that it does.

And forthwith he played Chopin and only Chopin: brooks and pools of sound to which you did not listen, but in which you bathed. And in his soul the legless man was playing only for Barbara, and only to Barbara. And so powerful was this obsession that it stole out of him like some hypnotic influence, affected the others, and gave him away. First Blythe looked toward Barbara, not realizing why, then Haddon looked, then Mrs. Bruce.

Barbara felt the warm blood in her cheeks. She was troubled, unhappy, touched. A man, his face full of unhappy yearning, his soul quick with genius, was making love to her; asking her to forget his shortcomings, to forgive his sins, to give him a hand upward out of the dark places into the light. He followed her, always pleading, by brooks, into valleys, through flowery meadows in the early morning, into solemn churches, into groves of cypress flooded with moonlight.

Blythe could have sworn that a woman sobbed, but his eyes, used by now to the obscurity, told him that it was neither Mrs. Bruce nor Barbara. The piano burst into a storm of sound, under cover of which Rose, still at her post, torn with jealousy, continued to pedal at the direction of her lord and master, and sobbed as if her heart would break. Devils filled the room, whirling in mad dances; they screamed and yelled; the souls of the damned screeched in torment; and the face of him who invoked the inferno, swollen, streaming with sweat, the eyes glazed, protruding, was the face of a madman.

Rose, for whom her master's playing had the eloquence and precision of speech, forgot her jealousy in fear of those consequences which her ill-timed sobbing must bring upon her. Her tears dried as in a desert wind; her sobs ceased, and in a moment or two the madness was going out of Blizzard's music and out of his face. He rested, preluded, and then began to play Beethoven, quietly, with a pure singing tone, music of a heavenly sanity.

The jarred feelings of his audience were soothed. Into his own face there stole a high-priest look. And when he had finished playing, this look remained for a few moments. Then he laughed quietly and, speaking for the first time, expressed the hope that he had not made them listen too long.

He reached for the wall behind him, and turned a switch so that the room became brightly lighted. Then, reluctantly, he came out from behind the piano, swinging between his crutches, and leaving Rose to escape at the first favorable opportunity. His descent from colossus to cripple had an unpleasant effect. And the question, "How the deuce do you work the pedals?" was jerked from Blythe, usually a most tactful person.

"Why," said Blizzard simply, "I have an assistant." He caught Barbara's eye and reddened a little. "A young man who is musical and intelligent. We have a system of signals, and--but I think there is a sort of thought communication that comes of much rehearsing together. And in our best moments we do pretty well. But sometimes when our minds are not tuned together we make a dreadful hash of things."

He might have added: "At such times I drag her about by the hair and beat her." But he didn't. He looked instead the picture of a very patient man who makes the best of things.

"Whatever you do at times," said Barbara gently, "you have done wonders to-night. But you know better than we do how good your playing is. So what is the use of praising it--to you?"

She felt that he was her own private discovery--almost her property. And knowing that her friends were still profoundly affected by his playing, she was filled with honest pride. Her eyes flashed, her cheeks glowed.

"What did I tell you?" she exclaimed. "Was I right? Didn't I promise that he would make good? Did he?"

She was delighted with Blizzard, delighted with herself, delighted with the whole party. She had forgotten the madman face that he had showed. She forgot that he was a cripple, a thing soured and wicked. She thought of him only as a great genius, which she herself had discovered.

The childlike pleasure which she felt communicated itself to the others, and Blizzard, escaping an ovation of honest praise, led them into the next room, where, among palms and roses, such a supper was spread as gamblers, the big men of the profession, spread for their victims.

The mere sight of the champagne-glasses loosened the men's tongues. Talk flowed. Mrs. Bruce and Barbara, seated right and left of their host, made much of his music and his hospitality. For once in his life he was genuinely happy. He looked very handsome, very high-minded, very modest, a man's man. Sitting, he was much taller than the others. You forgot that, standing, he was but a dwarf. He towered at the head of his table, his mind working in swift, good-natured, hospitable flashes. It was obvious that he had been born a gentleman, and that he had never "forgotten how." It was obvious, too, that he was a man of power and position, who when he wished could spend money like a great lord, and who was accustomed to give orders.

In his manner to Barbara there was (perhaps noticeable only to herself) an air of long-proved friendship and a kind of guardianly tenderness, and he managed somehow to convey to her that she had an immense influence over him; that he looked to her for help--for inspiration.

The desire to make a great man of him invaded her mind. Her heart warmed toward him.

"I wonder," said Bruce suddenly, "where our wandering Wilmot is to-night?"

"I drink to him," said the beggar quickly, "wherever he is, and wish him luck."

But the poison had been spilled on Barbara's evening. For three hours she had not once thought of the man whom twelve hours ago she had really wanted to marry. And her heart meanwhile had warmed and expanded toward one who at best was a prodigiously successful crook and rascal, and she was ashamed. But for all that neither the warmth nor the triumphant sense of influence and conquest went out of her heart. And later, when Mrs. Bruce said: "I really think we ought to go," Barbara, outwardly all sweetness and agreement, was inwardly annoyed. She wanted very much to stay, for she knew that the moment she was alone her conscience would give her no peace, and that she would make resolutions which she would not, judging from past experiences, be able to keep. She would resolve to abandon her bust of Blizzard, resolve never to see the creature again, since it seemed that he had in him power upon her emotions--dangerous power.

"Do we work to-morrow, Miss Ferris?"

The words, "No, I'm afraid not to-morrow," rose to her lips. The words, "_Please,_ at the usual time," came out.

And she felt as if his will, not her own, had caused her to say those words. Her heart gave a sudden leap of fear.