“My papeh dotes on music. Positively, I have known my papeh to say he would rather go without his port at dinner than his music after dinner. My papeh has heard all the most famous singers. In his opinion, no one could compare with Malibran.” Thus Miss Timms-Kelly; and at his cue the chubby, white-haired old Judge, surreptitiously snatching forty winks in a dark corner of the drawing-room, would start, open his eyes, and, like a well-trained parrot, echo his daughter’s words.
“Malibran? . . . ah, now there was a voice for you! — Pasta could not hold a candle to her. As a young man I never missed an opera when she sang. Great nights, great nights! The King’s Theatre packed to suffocation. All of us young music-lovers burning with enthusiasm . . . our palms tingling from applause.” Here however, at some private sign, the speaker abruptly switched off his reminiscences, which threatened to carry him away, and got to the matter in hand. —“My dear, give us, if you please, CASTA DIVA. Though I say so myself, there is something in my daughter’s rendering of that divine air that recalls Malibran in her prime.”
A musical party at the Timms-Kellys’ tempted even Mahony forth. On such evenings, in company with other devotees, he would wander up Richmond Hill and through the wooden gates of Vaucluse, where a knot of houses stood sequestered in a grove. The French windows of the Timms-Kellys’ drawing-room were invariably set wide open; and guests climbing the hill could hear, while still some way off, the great voice peal out — like a siren-song that urged and cajoled.
Miss Timms-Kelly herself bore the brunt of the entertainment; occasionally mingling in a duo with some manly second, or with the strains of Mahony’s flute; but chiefly in solo. For the thin little tones of the other ladies, their tinkly performances of “Maiden’s Prayers” and “Warblings at Eve,” or the rollicking strains of a sea ballad (which was mostly what the gentlemen were good for) stood none of them an earthly chance against a voice like hers. It was a contralto, with, in its middle and lower registers, tones of a strange, dark intensity which made of it a real VOIX SOMBRE; yet of such exceptional compass that it was also equal to OR SAI CHI L’ONORE and NON MI DIR, BELL’ IDOL MIO. Mahony used to say there was something in its lower notes that got at you, “like fingers feeling round your heart.” Ladies, while admitting its volume and beauty, were apt to be rendered rather uncomfortable by it; and under its influence would fall to fidgeting in their seats.
In person Miss Timms-Kelly matched her voice: though not over tall she was generously proportioned, with a superb bust and exquisitely sloping shoulders. Along with this handsome figure went piquantly small hands and feet — she boasted a number three shoe — white teeth, full lips, a fresh complexion. But her chief charm lay in her animation of manner: she was alive with verve and gesture; her every second word seemed spoken in italics. Amazing, thought and said all, that one so fascinating should have reached the brink of the thirties without marrying; society had known her now for twelve years, and during this time the marvellous voice had rung out night for night, her old father faithfully drawing attention to its merits, the while he grew ever whiter and sleepier in his corner of the drawing-room.
But the little court that surrounded Miss Timms-Kelly consisted chiefly of married men and bachelors well past marrying age: greybeards who, in listening to the strains of NORMA or SEMIRAMIDE, re-lived their youth. Eligible men fought a little shy of the lady and after a couple of visits to the house were apt to return no more. Happily, Miss Timms-Kelly did not take this greatly to heart. Indeed she even confessed to a relief at their truancy. “All my life, love, I have preferred the company of ELDERLY gentlemen. They make one feel so SAFE.”
In process of dressing for such an evening, Mary remarked: “Of course, it’s very nice of Lizzie to say that . . . and most sensible. But all the same it IS odd — I mean the fact of her never having married. Not only because of her voice — one doesn’t just marry a voice. But she really is a dear, warm-hearted creature. And so generous.” At which Mahony stopped shaving his chin to throw in: “That’s precisely it. Your marriageable man instinctively fears not being able to live up to the fair singer’s generosity.”
“REALLY, Richard! . . . it takes you to say queer things. Now I believe it comes of Lizzie never having had a mother to go about with. She’s been obliged to put herself too much forward.”
But for all his two-edged comments, let Miss Timms-Kelly but open her mouth to sing, and Mahony was hopelessly her slave. His natural instinct for music had outlived even the long years of starvation in this country, where neither taste nor performance was worth a straw. Under the present stimulus, his dormant feelings awoke to new life: when the great voice rang forth he would sit rapt . . . absorbed. And where others, but faintly responsive to the influence, listened with only half an ear, the while they followed their own trains of thought, musing, gently titillated: “How fine the moon to-night!” or “I shall certainly succeed, if I carry through that deal,” or “Perhaps after all Julia will hear my suit,” he surrendered thought for emotion, and climbed the ladder of sound to a world built wholly of sound, where he moved light-footedly and at ease.
“Upon my soul, I would walk ten miles to hear her rendering of an aria by Mozart or Verdi!”
This was all very well in its way — its musical way. But now something happened which brought him with a bump to earth. And, ever after, he twitted and blamed himself with having been the innocent cause of a most unnecessary complication.
Towards the close of her stay in Ballarat, Mary had a second meeting — a chance one, this time — with Mr. Henry Ocock. And Ocock, in his new role of friend and adviser, let fall a hint with regard to a certain mining company in which he believed Mahony held shares. This was not the case; but Mary rather thought John did, begged Richard to find out, and if so, to let him know what was being said. As Mr. Henry’s information had been SUB ROSA, Mahony thought it wise to pass it on by word of mouth, and wrote John saying he would drop in for a moment the following evening, on his way to Richmond: he was bound with his flute for Vaucluse. In the morning, however, John’s groom brought a note asking him to take pot-luck with the family at six o’clock. Such things were possible in John’s house nowadays, under the fairy rule of Miss Julia. And so he found himself that night at John’s dinner-table.
As usual at this stage, when he had not seen his brother-in-law for a time, Mahony’s chief sensation on meeting John was one of discomfort. Without doubt, some great change was at work in John. Lean as a herring, yellow as a Chinaman, he had been for months past. But the change in his manner was even more striking. Gone was much of the high-handedness, the pompous arrogance it had once been so hard to stomach; gone the opulent wordiness of his pronunciamentos. He was now in point of becoming a morose and taciturn sort of fellow; prone, too, to fits of blankness in which, staring straight before him, he seemed to forget your very presence. So much at least was plain: John was not taking the universe by any means so much for granted, as of old.
Money troubles? . . . such was the first thought that leapt to Mahony’s mind. Then he laughed at himself. John’s business flourished like the green baytree: you never heard of it but it was putting forth a fresh shoot in a fresh direction. No lack of money there! — the notion was just a telling example of how one instinctively tried to read into another, what had been one’s own chief bogey. Besides, the warning passed on by Mary left John cold: he waved it aside with a gesture that said: a few thousands more or less signified nothing to him. Could the wife’s idea that he was fretting over the loss of his boy be the right one? Again, no: that was just a woman’s interpretation: HE jumped to money, she to the emotional, the personal. Then after all it must be John’s health that was causing him anxiety. But a tactful question on this score called forth so curt a negative that he could not press it.
Not till the nuts and port were on the table did John shake off his abstraction. Then his trio of little girls ran into the room — with the playful antics of so many tame white mice — ran in and rubbed their sleek little comb-ringed heads against their father’s, and climbed over him with their thin little white-stockinged legs. And John became solely the fond parent, gathering his children to him, taking the youngest on his knee and holding her to his watered-silk waistcoat, letting them play with the long gold chain from which depended his PINCE-NEZ, count his studs with their little fingers, disarrange the ends of his tie. At the lower end of the table Emmy, who had presided over the meal a radiant vision in white muslin and blue ribbons, flushed, drooped her head, and looked as though she were going to cry. For though the lovely girl had throughout dinner hung distractingly on her father’s lips, he had never so much as glanced in her direction.
In watching her, Mahony fell into a reverie, so vividly did she remind him of her dead mother, and the one — the only — time he had seen John’s first wife. It was here, in this very room, that the gracious Emma, the picture of all that was comely, had dandled her babes. One of the two, like herself, had vanished from mortal eyes. The other, a full-grown woman in her turn, was now ripe for her fate.
When Emmy shepherded the little girls to their nursery, he turned to John. “Upon my soul, it makes a man realise his age, to see the young ones come on as they do.”
Something in this reflection seemed to flick John. His response was more in his old style. “You say so? For my part I cannot admit to feeling a day older than I did ten years back. I am not aware of any decrease of vigour. I still rise at six, take a cold shower-bath, and attend to business for a couple of hours before breakfast. I have needed neither to diet myself for a gouty constitution, nor to coddle myself in flannel. Age? Bah! At forty-six a man............