The big drawing-room at Yorkshire House was full to overflowing, and for the avoidance of asphyxiation the six long windows that looked on to the Green Park were all open. Louis Seize candlesticks, converted to the more modern use of electric light, were brilliant on the crimson satin of the walls, and a couple of dozen rows of chairs, all occupied, were directed towards the end of the room where the Steinway grand stood. Behind the chairs there was a throng of standing folk, but, except for the voice of the piano, no sound broke the stillness. A quarter of an hour ago the smaller drawing-room opening out of this had been full of chattering groups, but now it was completely empty, except for some half-dozen people who had been unable to find a standing-place in the larger room, and crowded as near as they could to the doorway. But the last human voice had been that of Martin.

“I’ll play it if you like,” he said, “but it will take nearly half an hour.”

Then he sat down and, since he had played before, a hush most abnormal during the ordinary piano solo fell on the “party” which had been invited in after dinner. Many, no doubt, were unmusical, but more, since it was Frank’s house and it was he who had invited the guests, had some instinct for perfection, that bond that joins together all artists. Lady Sunningdale, of course, was there, and had early established herself in a front row, and Helen, who was under her chaperonage, sat next her. At the end of the fourth Étude of Chopin’s, she had said to Martin:

“Martin, play the Brahms Variations,” and the demand had led to his word of warning. But warning was not needed. If the piece was going to take an hour, no one would have complained.

Frank, knowing the acoustic properties of the room better than Lady Sunningdale, had placed himself in the seat of the second window, with Karl Rusoff beside him. He had himself not felt the slightest hesitation in asking the great pianist to listen to the recital of this wonderful dÉbutant, and Karl’s absolute silence at the end of the Variations convinced him that he had been right. And as the last glorious fantasy vibrated and died on the air, while the crowd burst gloves in applause, he turned to him.

“Well?” he said.

Karl Rusoff nodded his great grey head up and down once or twice.

“Ah, my dear friend,” he said, “I usually think it very clever to unearth a genius. But with your genius it needed no cleverness. Shall I tell you what will happen? We,—the pianists, I mean,—with our nimble professional fingers will in a year’s time be fighting each other for seats at his concerts, if he is kind enough to give any. Let him give one, however, just to show us, to—yes, I mean it—to let us weep over our own deficiencies. Fire, my God, what fire! But I hope he won’t give many. He ought—I only say he ought—to be too busy with his own work. As regards his piano-playing, of course you were right. Who has taught him? Nobody, I tell you. How can you teach that? Will I teach him? Certainly I will, as MoliÈre’s housemaid taught her master. He does a hundred things quite wrong. But—ah, a big but!”

Martin had risen and bowed his thanks to the storm of applause, but his eye sought the corner where Karl Rusoff sat, with his great grey, leonine head and his grey eyes gleaming through his spectacles. The latter rose and came up the gangway between the chairs and the wall towards him and shook hands with him.

“Mr. Challoner,” he said, “that was a great treat to me. Thank you. You can play what is really difficult, magnificently. Now, my dear young man, I want to ask you a great favour. Attempt something much more difficult,—that is to say, something where the notes are quite easy, but where the rest, which is everything, must be a poem. Play, if you happen to know it—really know it, I mean—Chopin’s fifteenth prelude, the rain on the roof.”

Martin looked round the room, but nobody had moved from his seat, except Frank, who had followed Monsieur Rusoff.

“Yes, I know it,” he said. “But are you sure you really want me to play again?” he asked, with the charming horror that a nice boy has of being a bore. “Are you sure they aren’t sick of me?”

“No, do play again, Martin, if you will,” said Frank, who had followed Karl. “We can really stand a little more.”

“I have asked him to play the fifteenth prelude,” said Rusoff.

“Ah, yes, do,” said Frank.

So the rain beat, the gutter choked, the chariots of God thundered overhead, one ray of sunlight gleamed, and again the rain, pitiless and slow, spoke of an alien land. And at the end, in the moment’s silence, more appreciative than any applause, which followed, Martin’s glance again sought the great pianist, and with a sudden spasm of joy, so keen that for a moment he thought he must shout or laugh, he saw that Karl Rusoff had taken off his spectacles and was wiping his eyes.

The party that Frank had brought together that evening was very typical of his tastes and of the position which he held in the world. Though only thirty, thanks partly to the great wealth which was always completely at the service of any artistic cause, but chiefly to his own exquisite and unerring artistic sense, he had now for some years been a sort of accredited godfather to any new talent, and for any one to “come out” at his house was a guarantee that the aspirant was to be taken seriously. During the three months of London season he gave a succession of evening parties, which all had some definite raison d’Être, chiefly musical. And to-night he had taken special pains to get all the right people, with the result that there were not perhaps a dozen people in London whose opinion was worth having who were not there. And the opinion, for once, was practically unanimous; for, though Claud Petman, plump and short-fingered, had something to say to Henry Runton about the lack of finality in the determination of his key-colour, and Henry Runton, over ortolans, agreed with the additional criticism that his phrasing of the fourth variation was a little pulpy, yet the fact that they were critics rendered it obligatory on them to criticise. But they had but small opportunity to express these fine differences of opinion to Martin himself, for Lady Sunningdale, on the conclusion of the prelude, beckoned imperatively to her “monster,” and made a brilliant group round him. She had taken it into her head that she had “discovered” Martin, and told every one so.

“My dear, I assure you I gasped,” she said to Karl Rusoff. “There he was in a poky little room, furnished entirely with prayer-books, in a dreadful parsonage, playing on a cracked tin-kettle of a piano, and playing as he played to-night. Then in the middle his father came in and said, ‘Go and do your Hebrew-Greek, instead of wasting your time at the Jew’s-harp.’ Such a strange man, Flints’s brother, you know, and lives, I believe, entirely on locusts and wild-honey and wears broadcloth, or is it sack-cloth? Something very thick and imperishable, anyhow. Such a beautiful life, but ascetic, not artistic,—Mendelssohn and pitch-pine, you know. Of course, I saw at once how priceless Martin was; but we had the greatest difficulty in persuading his father to let him come up to London. He thinks all artists will go to hell, if they have not already gone there. Yes. I didn’t bring my darlings to-night, because they always bark when anyone plays the piano, and Suez Canal is so shrill. But, is not my monster too wonderful? And now I must go. I never get to bed till it is time to get up, and I shan’t sleep one wink after the music. I never do. Where is Helen? Yes, she is Martin’s twin. Why aren’t we all twins like that? Supper? How nice! I am famishing. Music always takes so much out of one. Yes, pray take me into supper, Monsieur Rusoff, and let us put it back. Martin, don’t dare to leave my side for a single moment.”

Frank, in the mean time, had found a chair next Helen. The girl looked divinely happy. Her pride in Martin, her intense pleasure in the wonderful reception he had been given, flushed her cheek with excitement and sparkled in her eyes. Frank had not had an opportunity of speaking to her the whole evening, and now, as he was making his way towards her through the crowd, delayed every other moment by some acquaintance or friend, he met her eye long before he was within speaking distance, and as he smiled in response to her, something suddenly thumped softly and largely on his heart, as if demanding admittance. At last he reached her, and she looked at him with her direct, child-like gaze.

“Thank you,” she said, “thank you most awfully.”

He laughed, not pretending not to know what she meant.

“Ah, we are all thanking Martin,” he said, “and those who know best, I think, thank him most. Karl Rusoff, for instance.”

“Then, you were right?” she asked. “There is no mistake? He is really of the best?”

“Yes, that is Monsieur Rusoff’s opinion.”

“I should like to kiss him,” said Helen.

“Shall I fetch him?” asked Frank.

“Not this moment. Go on, Lord Yorkshire.”

“That is a good deal already. And he will take him as a pupil, he says. He has not consented to take a pupil for years. Now we have to consult—— How is that to be managed?”

Helen’s face fell for a moment.

“It must be managed,” she said. “I will write to father to-morrow, telling him all that has happened. You must write, too; Lady Sunningdale must write. Poor father! We must give him no peace till he lets Martin study. What are we to do?”

“You must think it over, and tell me if I can be of any use,” said he. “I am entirely at your disposition. Anyhow, there is a fortnight for him in London. And you? You came up to-day, did you not? Ah, before I forget. Lady Sunningdale is coming to my box at the opera to-morrow night. Please come, too. She, Martin, you, I. Just we four.”

Those last three words gave him extraordinary pleasure.

“But are you sure you have room for me?” asked Helen. “Lady Sunningdale is so kind: she is dumping me at all her friends’ houses, upsetting their dinner-tables right and left, and there is no earthly reason to suppose they want me.”

“I want you,” said Frank, simply, and again the words pleased him.

“Thank you, very much. Where is she, by the way? Will you take me to her? She probably wants to go home. I see people are leaving.”

“It is conceivable she is having supper,” said Frank, gravely. “Let us go and see.”

Karl Rusoff attended to Lady Sunningdale’s wants, which were rather extensive, but lingered after she had left, and when the rooms were growing empty he came up to Martin.

“My dear Mr. Challoner,” he said, “I am sure you have had enough compliments paid you by this time. So allow a very rude old Russian, who has no manners at all, to take you into a corner and talk to you for a little.”

Martin turned a brilliant glance, vivid, and full of huge, youthful enjoyment on him. He knew, he could not help knowing, how complete had been his success, and coming straight from the country and from that home where he was officially an idler, almost a black sheep, into this cultured, critical world, the knowledge had somewhat intoxicated him. It was like coming out of some dark, dripping tunnel into the light of a noonday and flying along through a kingdom that was his. For he, he had been the central figure; round him had crowds collected, for him ears had been alert and applause had burst. Artist as he was by nature, and caring, therefore, infinitely more for his art then for any adventitious success that he might achieve by it, he would not have been human, and certainly not young, if this evening had not been honey and wine to his boyish heart. For, except to the sour, success is sweet, and it is only the cynic and the unsuccessful who affect to find applause hollow. And Martin was emphatically neither cynic nor sour: the world seemed to him the most excellent habitation. But he detached himself at once from the group which was round him; he was still sufficiently master of himself to know that it was probably better worth his while to listen to Karl Rusoff talking sense than to any one else who might have pleasant things to say, and they passed out of the supper-room into the now deserted room where he had played.

“Now, my dear Mr. Challoner, listen to me,” said Karl. “Probably a hundred people this evening have told you that you are a very wonderful young man. That cannot help being a pleasant hearing, but——“

He looked at Martin’s radiant face and paused.

“Ah, my dear boy,” he said, “I will talk another time, I think. Go and listen to what everybody else has to say to you. Drink it all in; enjoy yourself. I am too serious. I can wait.”

“But I would sooner listen to you,” said Martin.

“Are you sure? Are you really sure?”

“Quite. Absolutely.”

“Well, then, in the sacred name of Art, forget all the pleasant things that have been said to you. So many of these delightful people do not know. Our charming Lady Sunningdale even, she does not know. She appreciates, I grant you, but that is all.”

Martin’s face had grown quite serious; the brightness in it seemed to have ceased to be on the surface only; it glowed beneath like the core of a prospering fire.

“Tell me what to do, then,” he said.

“Work, and live also. Do not forget that any experience in life, so long only as it is not sensual,—for whatever is sensual blurs and deadens the fineness of any gift,—gives richness and breath to your power in music. Live, then; live to your utmost and your best. Do not be afraid of anything. Neither the bitterest sorrow that the world holds nor its most poignant joy can bring you anything but good, so long as you embrace it willingly, passionately. But shun a sorrow or a joy, and you are clipped, maimed, blinded.”

The old man spoke with extraordinary fire and emphasis, and the intense eager gravity of Martin’s face deepened. Here was a coherent code which summed up, strung together, his own musings by the river-brink.

“Am I then to—am I to take all that comes,” he asked, “and trust that it will somehow make grist for my own little mill?”

“Ah, you understand,” said Karl. “I see you have thought of it before. But never call your mill little. If it is little, you may be sure that others will label it for you. And if it is not little—then down on your knees and thank God. Ah, my dear boy, you are all that you are. Make the most of you. Assume there is something.”

He paused a moment.

“And I will endorse it,” he said.

Again Martin looked at him with that lucid glance as transparent as running water.

“Yes, I will endorse it,” he repeated. “And if any one dishonours your cheque, I will pay it.”

Martin gave a long sigh.

“You believe in me?” he asked, almost in a whisper. The rest of the triumph of the evening, the silence, the applause, were pale and dim to him as compared with this. The sun was rising on a dream that he had scarcely dreamed, and it was not a dream, but a reality.

“I believe in your possibilities,” said Karl. “I believe you can be,—well, a musician. Now, as regards another point. I have been asked whether I will take you as a pupil. On my part I ask you to come to me. I have not taught for some years, but I rather suspect that one’s power of teaching increases not by teaching, but by learning. So I may be perhaps of some use. There are certain things I can tell you. Come and learn them. On the whole, it is worth your while. Even for a poet the alphabet is necessary.”

Martin could not speak for a moment.

“Some day I will try to thank you,” he said at length. “But not by words. I don’t think you want that, and also it would be idle for me to do it.”

He paused again.

“But at present, you know, I am not even certain that I shall be allowed to study. I—I am very stupid, you know. I can’t pass examinations, and my father is most awfully keen about them. In any case I expect I shall have to finish my time at Cambridge.”

Rusoff rose. Absurd and almost criminal as this seemed to him, he had no right whatever to express that to Martin.

“Ah, then, go back to Cambridge, like a good boy, and do whatever has to be done. Forget also almost everything that has occurred to-night. You have won a great deal of applause. Well, that is very easy to win, and in itself it is worth absolutely nothing. In so far as it encourages you to good work, whether it is now in the immediate future at Cambridge or eventually in music, there is no harm in it; but the moment it breeds in you any slackness, or the feeling ‘this will do for them,’ it is a poison, an insidious narcotic poison.”

He laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“It is not by applause,” he said, “it is not by any help really that I or any one else can give you that you may become great. It is in yourself alone that the power lies, and it is by your life, by your industry, and by the fulness and completeness of your experience and your sympathy that you will be able to get hold of that power. For your warning, I tell you that it is no easy task—that, mining in yourself, you will have to think and struggle and despair before you can bring your own gold to the surface. You will also have to find your choice by patient, unremitting work. You cannot make others feel unless you feel yourself, and you have to learn how to feel. It is not so easy. Again, having learned that, you cannot convey what you feel until you have learned speech. And, for your encouragement, I believe—or else I would not accept you, much less ask you to be my pupil—I believe that you will be able to do so. You have perception. You can interpret others, as I have heard to-night. So that some day you may write that which will give tears or laughter to those not yet born. Good-night.”

The summer and the season were at their mid-most, but though the former had been fine, the latter at present had been rather objectless. Balls, concerts, parties, all the various devices by which the crowd believes it amuses itself, and without which it would certainly be bored, had occurred with their usual frequency, but up till now no bright particular star had arisen to draw the eyes and the thoughts of all to itself. There had, in fact, been no “rage,” and neither book, play, violinist, or traveller, nor even a cowboy from the remote West, had appeared to fill the invitation-cards and usurp the thoughts of emigrant London. Why nobody had invented something by this time was not clear, for absolutely anything in the world can become the rage of one season to be dropped either like a hot potato or a soiled glove the next. The year before there had been a cowboy,—this year he was a hot potato, for he had become odiously familiar; a female palmist was also still in existence, but she was a soiled glove, since the pleasant frisson of having a bewildering future told in all the horror of detail before your friends is an experience not to be repeated if subsequent events have shewn the prophecy to have been altogether erratic.

But from the night of Lord Yorkshire’s concert hope began to wake in the season’s middle-aged breast, that it, too, like most of its predecessors, would be known by an engrossing topic to mark it out from others before it was numbered with the colourless dead. For the picturesque—of a picturesqueness unequalled even by last season’s cowboy—had at length arisen in the shape of twins from Hampshire, Challoner twins, Flints’s nephew and niece. They sprang from a country parsonage, where Flints’s brother, whom nobody had hitherto even heard of, lived like a sort of mediÆval ascetic prophet in a lugubrious atmosphere of fasting and prayer and scourging and sack-cloth. He preached the most curdling sermons on Sunday, quite like Savonarola, on the comfortable doctrine of eternal damnation. About the twins, however, there was nothing in the least ascetic or mediÆval: they were both quite young, hardly out of their teens, and were simply Diana and Apollo come to earth again. The girl (Helen, too) had Titian hair, in golden, glorious profusion, a face like the morning, and the inches of a goddess. And her charm, her bubbling spirits, her extraordinary enjoyment and vitality! She made everybody else look like a kitchen-maid, which was so delightful. But Martin—Phoebus Apollo, drunk with nectar! He played, too; Karl Rusoff said he had never heard anything like it, and the dear old angel simply wept the other night at Frank Yorkshire’s, when Phoebus Apollo first dawned, but wept floods. And what could have been more romantic than the manner of their appearance? People were asked—we were all asked—to Lord Yorkshire’s for “Music” in the bottom left-hand corner, expecting, perhaps, a couple of songs from Maltina and a nocturne of Rusoff’s. Instead, this divine boy walks up to the piano and plays the “Pied Piper” to us all. Yorkshire brought him up from the country, without a word to anybody, and just shot him at London. He hit. Helen was with Lady Sunningdale,—she always scores somehow,—who gives out openly that she is madly in love with Martin, and makes him imitate her, which he does with such awful fidelity that it is impossible not to believe, if one shuts one’s eyes, that it is not she who is talking. The only question is whether she will poison Sunningdale and insist on marrying Phoebus Apollo, or whether he will say “Retro Sathanas.” It may be taken for granted that Yorkshire will marry the girl. Then, the next night they were all four at the opera in Yorkshire’s box, next the Royal box, and nobody looked at anything else. The girl was dressed in grey, very simple, but quite good. There was just a touch of blue somewhere; no jewels, but that radiant face and that glorious hair! Poor Lady Sunningdale beside her looked like a lobster salad in the highest spirits. But really the boy is the handsomer; and when the opera was over people simply stood on the stairs to see them go out. But the twins were completely unconscious that it was they whom every one was looking at, and came downstairs together, chatting, laughing, and chaffing Lady Sunningdale because she had gone to sleep in the second act of “Siegfried.” My dear, they are simply divine, and we must secure them at once for dinner or something, otherwise it will be too late.

The last sentence, whatever in this brief rÉsumÉ of what London said was false or exaggerated, was certainly borne out by subsequent facts. For London, tired with its spinster ragelessness, rose at them as trout rise in the days of May-fly, and besought their presence, finding them, as is not always the case with its rages, improve on acquaintance. They enjoyed themselves so enormously, and enjoyment is a most infectious disease, of which every hostess prays that her guests may sicken. They danced divinely, with the same childish pleasure, all night. Whatever the entertainment was, they were delighted, and their delight diffused itself through the crowds of which they were the centre. And it was always interesting to have at one’s house the girl from nowhere, who was going to make the match of the season, and the boy from nowhere, who was going to send the world mad with music. The twins, in fact, blazed in the blue; they were the latest discovery, the point at which all telescopes were aimed. And they presumably, like the latest-discovered star, were too busy to be either pleased or embarrassed that everybody was looking at them; they just sang and shone together with all the other lesser stars.

Ten days passed thus, Lady Sunningdale plying the bellows assiduously and from time to time throwing on fresh faggots of interesting and picturesque information to feed the blaze. Nobody, not even the twins themselves, had been more astonished than she when they shot up into the zenith of success, for she had not anticipated anything of the kind; but that having happened, she was quick to assume the rÔle of godmother. Nothing again, a week or two before, had been further from her thoughts than the idea that Frank Yorkshire should marry Helen; but that having been suggested to her, it was, of course, incumbent on her to say that she had brought them together with that express purpose, and by dint of repetition soon got to believe it.

The allied forces mean time had concerted their attack on that very well-garrisoned fortress known as Martin’s father. Sheets of desultory letters were rained upon him by Lady Sunningdale, which he answered with punctilious politeness; while Frank, in far soberer strain, told Lord Flintshire the opinion of those like Karl Rusoff, who were thoroughly competent to judge, begging him use it in Martin’s behalf. In consequence he wrote soon afterwards to his brother with some earnestness:

“You hardly ever come to town, I know, my dear Sidney,” his letter ran, “but I really wish you would come now. It would make you prouder than you have ever been of both your children, if you saw them here. London, I am speaking quite seriously, has gone off its head about them. And, indeed, I’m sure I don’t wonder. They are absolutely entrancing; their enjoyment of it all is the most infectious thing I ever saw, and we play ridiculous round games after dinner instead of grumbling at each other over Bridge. And their looks! Helen has taken the shine out of all the dÉbutantes, and yet not one of them seems to hate her for it.

“This, however, is frivolous; but I want to tell you very seriously what an extraordinary impression Martin’s musical abilities have made. He played the other night at Yorkshire’s house, and I assure you all the musical lights of London simply hung on his hands. I know nothing about it myself; but when you find a great pianist and a great musician like Karl Rusoff listening, absorbed, to a young man of twenty-three, whom nobody has hitherto ever heard of, one cannot help attaching some weight to it. Others, too, so Frank tells me, have been no less enthusiastic about him, but they are only names to you and me.

“Well, this is not entirely unasked advice, for I remember at Chartries a fortnight ago you consulted me about Martin and his future. And now it seems to me there is really no choice. He must be a musician; you cannot take the responsibility of trying to render unfruitful a gift like his. Nor would it be any good; he is bound to be one.

“Now, my dear Sidney, if there is any difficulty about expense, for I gather he must study exclusively for some time, pray do not give a thought to it. I will most gladly defray all expenses connected with him. Pray let me hear from you as soon as possible on the subject; and if you can run up to town for a day or two, you will see for yourself, and be a most welcome guest at the house of

“Your affectionate brother,
“Flintshire.”