III
Fergus Appleton thought he saw the singing girl of his voyage from New York one May day in Wells, where he went to study the cathedral. He noticed a hansom with a pink-clad figure in the opening, looking like a rosebud of a new and odd sort on wheels. At least, it looked like a rosebud at the moment the doors rolled back like the leaves of a calyx, and the flower issued, triumphant and beautiful. She was greeted by a tall, stout young lady, who climbed into the hansom, and the two settled themselves quickly and drove off.
Appletons hansom followed on its own course, which chanced to be in the same direction, and he saw the slim and the stout disappear up a hilly street, at the top of which was a famous old house. He walked that way in the afternoon, having nothing better to do, but could observe no dwelling at which the two ladies might be staying. There was a pretty cottage with a long, graveled pathway leading to it, and a little sign on the locked gate reading: Spring Cleaning. Please do not knock or ring. Farther along was a more pretentious house, so attractive that he was sorry he had never noticed it before, for the sign Apartments to Let was in one of the front windows. He heard a piano in the rear somewhere, but on reaching the front door another sign confronted him: The parlor maid is slightly deaf. If doorbell is not answered at once, please step inside and ring the dinner bell on the hall table.
This somehow required more courage than Appleton possessed, though he determined to look at the rooms on his next visit, so he stole down the path and went about his business, wondering why in the world he had done such a besotted thing as to take a walk among the furnished lodgings of the cathedral town of Wells.
The summer waxed. He had nearly finished his book, and feeling the need of some peaceful retreat where he could do the last chapters and work up his sketches, he took the advice of an English friend and went down to Devonshire, intending to go from place to place until he found a hotel and surroundings to his mind.
The very first one pleased his exacting taste, and he felt that the Bexley Sands Inn would be the very spot in which to write; comfortable within, a trifle too large, perhaps, and at week-ends too full of people, but clean, well-kept, and sunny.
It was a Friday evening, and the number of guests who arrived on the last train from Torquay was rather disturbing. The dining-room service was not interfered with, but Appleton made up his mind to smoke his pipe in his own sitting-room and go down to the lounge later to read the papers, when the crowd might have dispersed. At nine oclock, accordingly, he descended, and was preparing to settle himself with the last Spectator when the young lady in the office observed: Theres a very good concert going on in the drawing-room, sir, if you enjoy music. No admittance, you know; just a plate at the door as you leavequite optional.
Appleton bowed his thanks, filled his pipe, and taking up his newspaper with a sensation of comfortable idleness, was beginning an article on the situation in the Balkans, when a voice floated out from the distant drawing-room, down the long corridor, through the writing-room into the lounge. It was not a little voice nor a big voice, it seemed to have no extraordinarily high notes and no low ones, it did not arrest attention by the agility of its use; but it was as fresh and young as a birds and sweeter than honey in the comb. It began by caroling My Loves an Arbutus, went on to The Little Red Lark and The Low-Backed Car, so that Appleton, his head thrown back in the easy-chair, the smoke wreaths from his pipe circling in the air, the Balkans forgotten, decided that the singer was Irish.
A pretty voice, sir, remarked the goddess of the hotel office. Im sorry so many of our guests are playing bowls this evening, and theres a bridge party of three tables in our first-floor private sitting-room, or the young lady would have had an audience. She seems a nice little thing, quite a stranger, with no experience.
If the singer had even a small group of hearers, they were apparently delighted with The Low-Backed Car, for with only a seconds pause she gave The Minstrel Boy. A certain individual quality of tone and spirit managed to bridge the distance between the drawing-room and lounge; or perhaps it was the piano accompaniment, so beautifully played that one could almost imagine it a harp; or was it that the words were so familiar to Appleton that every syllable was understood, so that the passion and fire of the old song suffered no loss?
The minstrel fell, but the foemans chain
Could not bring that proud soul under!
The harp he loved neer spoke again,
For he tore its chords asunder.
Its a pity her programme is so old-fashioned, said the young lady of the office, passing his chair to give an order to the page. Its true only the elderly people went in, but our week-enders are very up-to-date in everything. Theres a lot of Londoners here, and those from Torquay are frightfully musical. If they dont get Debewssy, it seems they think nothing of the programme.
Well, I confess that Debussy seems a trifle alien to this time and place, said Appleton, and these old ballads suit my taste much better. I think Ill take a nearer view.
He shoved his pipe into its case and strolled down the corridor, pausing behind the heavy velvet portières that shut off the drawing-room. There was no buzz of conversation going on, because there was not a sufficient number of persons to buzz. A very quiet, stodgy audience it was, with no friendly grouping; just a few old gentlemen here and a few old ladies there, sometimes with their prematurely aged and chastened paid companions by their sides. There were some girls of fifteen or sixteen, too, scattered about, a few of them accompanied by prim governesses.
Appleton heard the entrance of some one from the anteroom beyond the grand piano, then a few chords, struck by hands that loved the ivory keys and evoked a reciprocal tenderness every time they touched them; then:
Near Woodstock Town in Oxfordshire
As I walked forth to take the air,
To view the fields and meadows round,
Methought I heard a mournful sound.
So the chronicle ran on until the crisis came:
The lady round the meadow ran,
And gathered flowers as they sprang.
Of every sort she there did pull
Until she got her apron full.
The history of the distracted ladys unhappy passion persevered:
The green ground served her as a bed,
The flowers a pillow for her head.
She laid her down and nothing spoke.
Alas! for love her heart was broke.
Appleton was at first too enchanted with the mischievous yet sympathetic rendition of this tragedy to do anything but listen. The voice, the speech, were so full of color and personality he forgot for the moment that there would be a face behind them; but there was an irresistible something in the line, Until she got her apron full, that forced him to peep behind the curtain just in time to catch the singers smile.
As this is not a story of plot, suspense, or mystery, there is no earthly use in denying that the lady in question was Miss Thomasina Tucker, nor any sense in affirming that her appearance in Fergus Appletons hotel was in the nature of a dramatic coincidence, since Americans crossing the Atlantic on the same steamer are continually meeting in the British Isles and on the Continent.