Page:Marsh--The seen and the unseen.djvu/264

240 spell. Then, drawing a long, gasping sort of breath, she shut her mouth. She looked about her as if she were struggling with a dream. I was conscious that Nora, on my left, was actually trembling. Bensberg I suspected of something very like a covert grin. I saw that the cheeks of the usually cool and self-possessed Mrs. Groome were a fiery red. Unless I was mistaken, tears were in her eyes. I was conscious that the position was distinctly an uncomfortable one, the discomfort of which was not lessened by the nature of the performance to which we were listening. Again, Mr. Goad favoured us with an extraordinary olla-podrida of sounds. That he was, in one sense, a master of his instrument there could be no doubt whatever. The piece he played struck me as being an actual improvisation. Transcribed in black and white, I should not have been surprised to find it something very much like nonsense; but, played as he played it then, it had an effect upon my already agitated nervous system, which, so far as I was personally concerned, I found peculiarly disconcerting. I almost began to feel, as Mrs. Groome seemed to be feeling, that these things were chancing in a dream. The effect was heightened, if I can make myself plain, by the fact that while the performance suggested frenzied excitement, the performer himself seemed to be in a state of imperturbable calm. I found it quite a relief when he finished. Mrs, Groome seemed to find it an even greater relief than I did. As the applause subsided she turned and addressed me in a manner which took away the larger portion of the little breath which Mr. Goad had left me master of.