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The Pursuit Of The Piano
by
“No, no! I won’t! I can’t! I’m not going to!” one voice answered to all, but apparently without a single reference to the event; for in the end the speaker gave her hand to the man in the wagon, and with many small laughs and squeaks was pulled up over the hub and tire of a front wheel, and then stood staying herself against the piano-case, with a final lamentation of “Oh, it’s a shame! I’ll never speak to any of you again! How perfectly mean! Oh!” The last exclamation signalized the start of the horses at a brisk mountain trot, which the driver presently sobered to a walk. The three remaining girls followed, mocking and cheering, and after them lounged the three remaining men, at a respectful distance, marking the social interval between them, which was to be bridged only in some such moment of supreme excitement as the present.
It was no question with Gaites whether he should bring up the end of the procession; he could not think of any consideration that would have stayed him. He scarcely troubled himself to keep at a fit remove from the rest; and as he followed in the deepening twilight he felt a sweet, unselfish gladness of heart that the poor girl whom he had seen so wan and sad in Boston should be the gay soul of this pretty triumph.
The wagon drove into the grounds of the Desmond cottage, and backed up to the edge of the veranda. Lights appeared, and voices came from within. One of the men, despatched to the barn for a hatchet, came flickering back with a lantern also; lamps brought out of the house were extinguished by the evening breeze (in spite of luminous hands held near the chimney to shelter them), amidst the joyful applause of all the girls and the laughter of the men. A sound of hammering rose, and then a sound of boards rending from the clutch of nails, and then a sound of pieces thrown loosely into a pile. There was a continual flutter of women’s dresses and emotions, and this did not end even when the piano, disclosed from its casing and all its wraps, was pushed indoors, and placed against the parlor wall, where a flash of lamp-light revealed it to Gaites in final position.
He lingered still, in the shelter of some barberry-bushes at the cottage gate, and not till the last cry of gratitude had been answered by the unanimous disclaimer of the men rattling away in the wagon did he feel that his pursuit of the piano had ended.
VII.
“Can you tell me, madam,” asked Gaites of an obviously approachable tabby next the chimney-corner, “which of the musicians is Miss Desmond?”
He had hurried back to the Inn, and got himself early into a dress suit that proved wholly inessential, and was down among the first at the hop. This function, it seemed, was going on in the parlor, which summed in itself the character of ball-room as well as drawing-room. The hop had now begun, and two young girl couples were doing what they could to rebuke the sparse youth of Lower Merritt Inn for their lack of eagerness in the evening’s pleasure by dancing alone. Gaites did not even notice them, he was so intent upon the ladies of the orchestra, concerning whom he was beginning to have a troubled mind, not to say a dark misgiving.
“Oh,” the approachable tabby answered, “it’s the one at the piano. The violinist is Miss Axewright, of South Newton. They were at the Conservatory together in Boston, and they are such friends! Miss Desmond would never have played here–intends to take pupils in Portland in the winter–if Miss Axewright hadn’t come,” and the pleasant old tabby purred on, with a velvety pat here, and a delicate scratch there. But Gaites heard with one ear only; the other was more devotedly given to the orchestra, which also claimed both his eyes. While he learned, as with the mind of some one else, that the Desmonds had been very much opposed to Phyllis’s playing at the Inn, but had consented partly with their poverty, because they needed everything they could rake and scrape together, and partly with their will, because Miss Axewright was such a nice girl, he was painfully adjusting his consciousness to the fact that the girl at the piano was not the girl whom he had seen at Boston and whom he had so rashly and romantically decided to be Miss Phyllis Desmond. The pianist was indeed Miss Desmond, but to no purpose, if the violinist was some one else; it availed as little that the violinist was the illusion that had lured him to Lower Merritt in pursuit of Miss Desmond’s piano, if she were really Miss Axewright of South Newton.