Page:The Good Soldier (1915).pdf/262

 Rh for the Princess Badrulbadour; she remembered to have heard that love was a flame, a thirst, a withering up of the vitals—though she did not know what the vitals were. She had a vague recollection that love was said to render a hopeless lover's eyes hopeless; she remembered a character in a book who was said to have taken to drink through love; she remembered that lovers' existences were said to be punctuated with heavy sighs. Once she went to the little cottage piano that was in a corner of the hall and began to play. It was a tinkly, reedy instrument, for none of that household had any turn for music. Nancy herself could play a few simple songs, and she found herself playing. She had been sitting on the window seat, looking out on the fading day. Leonora had gone to pay some calls; Edward was looking after some planting up in the new spinney. Thus she found herself playing on the old piano. She did not know how she came to be doing it. A silly, lilting, wavering tune came from before her in the dusk—a tune in which major notes with their cheerful insistence wavered and melted into minor sounds, as, beneath a bridge the high lights on dark waters melt and waver and disappear into black depths. Well, it was a silly old tune. . ..

It goes with the words—they are about a willow tree, I think:

Thou art to all lost loves the best,

The only true plant found

—That sort of thing. It is Herrick, I believe, and the music was the reedy, irregular, lilting sound that goes