The fresh air and the swift motion soon completed the reaction from
Helen's morning unhappiness; and as generally happened when she was
much excited, her imagination carried her away in one of her wild
flights of joy, so that her companion was as much lost as ever in
admiration and delight. Helen told him countless stories, and made
countless half-comprehended witticisms, and darted a great many
mischievous glances which were comprehended much better; when they
had passed within the gates of Fairview, being on private land she
felt even less need of restraint, and sang “Dich, theure Halle,
gruss' ich wieder!” and laughed at her own cleverness quite as much
as if her companion had understood it all.
After that it was a new delight to discover that work was
progressing rapidly upon the trimming of the forest and the turning
of the grass-grown road into a broad avenue; likewise the “hay crop”
was in, and the lawn plowed and raked and ready for grass seed, and
the undesirable part of the old furniture carted away,--all of which
things Helen knew had been done according to her commands. And
scarcely had all this been appreciated properly before the architect
arrived; Helen was pleased with him because for one thing he was
evidently very much impressed by her beauty, and for another because
he entered so understandingly into all her ideas. He and the girl
spent a couple of the happiest hours in discussing the details of
the wonderful music room, a thing which seemed to her more full of
delightful possibilities than any other in all her radiant future;
it was a sort of a child's dream to her, with a fairy godmother to
make it real, and her imagination ran riot in a vision of banks of
flowers, and of paintings of all things that embody the joys of
music, the “shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses.” At night the
whole was to be illuminated in such a way as to give these
verisimilitude, and in the daytime it would be no less beautiful,
because it was to be almost all glass upon two sides. Helen was
rejoiced that the architect realized the importance of the fact that
“a music room ought to be out of doors;” and then as she made the
further welcome discovery that the moon would shine into it, she
vowed eagerly that there would be no lights at all in her music room
at those times. Afterwards she told a funny story of how Schumann
had been wont to improvise under such circumstances, until his
next-door neighbor was so struck by the romance of it that he
proceeded to imitate it, and to play somebody or other's technical
studies whenever the moon rose; at which narrative Helen and the
architect laughed very heartily, and Mr. Harrison with them, though
he would not have known the difference between a technical study and
the “Moonlight Sonata.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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