For a moment, while she played, her face was so
determined and pitiless that Mr. Bry, unaware that she was still thinking
about Miss Filberte, murmured to Lady Cardington:
"Evidently we are in for a song about Jael with the butter in the lordly
dish omitted."
Then an expression of sorrowful youth stole into Lady Holme's eyes,
changed her mouth to softness and her cheeks to curving innocence. She
leaned a little way from the piano towards her audience and sang, looking
up into vacancy as if her world were hidden there. The song had the clear
melancholy and the passion of a Northern night. It brought the stars out
within that room and set purple distances before the eyes. Water swayed
in it, but languidly, as water sways at night in calm weather, when the
black spars of ships at anchor in sheltered harbours are motionless as
fingers of skeletons pointing towards the moon. Mysterious lights lay
round a silent shore. And in the wide air, on the wide waters, one woman
was singing to herself of a sorrow that was deep as the grave, and that
no one upon the earth knew of save she who sang. The song was very short.
It had only two little verses. When it was over, Sir Donald, who had been
watching the singer, returned to the sofa, where Robin Pierce was sitting
with his eyes shut and, again striking his fingers against the palms of
his hands, said: "I have heard that song at night on the Neva, and yet I
never heard it before.
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