One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
the Radnor Concerts. She had a special consideration for
Mademoiselle de Seilles, owing to her exquisite French, as
she said; and she may have liked it, but it was the young
Frenchwoman’s air of high breeding that won her esteem.
Girls were spring frosts to her. Fronting Nesta, she put on
her noted smile, or wood-cut of a smile, with its label of
indulgence; except when the girl sang. Music she loved. She
said it was the saving of poor Dudley. It distinguished him
in the group of the noble Evangelical Cantor Family; and it
gave him a subject of assured discourse in company; and
oddly, it contributed to his comelier air. Flute [This would
be the German Blockeflute or our Recorder. D.W.] in hand,
his mouth at the blow-stop was relieved of its pained updraw
by the form for puffing; he preserved a gentlemanly high
figure in his exercises on the instrument, out of ken of all
likeness to the urgent insistency of Victor Radnor’s punctuating
trunk of the puffing frame at almost every bar—an
Apollo brilliancy in energetic pursuit of the nymph of sweet
sound. Too methodical one, too fiery the other.
In duets of Hauptmann’s, with Nesta at the piano, the contrast
of dull smoothness and overstressed significance was
very noticeable beside the fervent accuracy of her balanced
fingering; and as she could also flute, she could criticize;
though latterly, the flute was boxed away from lips that had
devoted themselves wholly to song: song being one of the
damsel’s present pressing ambitions. She found nothing to
correct in Mr. Sowerby, and her father was open to all the
censures; but her father could plead vitality, passion. He held
his performances cheap after the vehement display; he was a
happy listener, whether to the babble of his ‘dear old Corelli,’
or to the majesty of the rattling heavens and swaying forests
of Beethoven.
His air of listening was a thing to see; it had a look of
disembodiment; the sparkle conjured up from deeps, and
the life in the sparkle, as of a soul at holiday. Eyes had been
given this man to spy the pleasures and reveal the joy of his
pasture on them: gateways to the sunny within, issues to all
the outer Edens. Few of us possess that double significance
of the pure sparkle. It captivated Lady Grace. She said a word
of it to Fenellan: ‘There is a man who can feel rapture!’ He
had not to follow the line of her sight: she said so on a previous
evening, in a similar tone; and for a woman to repeat
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