Three Cousins Performed at the Pianoforte for the Duke — He Asked for the Girl Turning the Pages
Chapter 14
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"Play the slow one, Cecily. I want to hear it how it goes."Cecily sat down at the Broadwood. She sat for a moment with her hands in her lap, the way you do when you have not done a thing in public in your life and are about to.Then she played the slow movement of the Clementi. She played it without the music, because she had copied it eleven days running, and it was in her hands.There is a thing that happens to a person who has not been listened to for ten years in the first four bars of being listened to, and it is not triumph: it is fear. She felt the room behind her the way you feel a drop behind you, and her hands were not quite hers for the first phrase, and she knew with complete clarity that she could lose it, here, in front of everybody, and that if she did, she would never sit down at an instrument in company again as long as she lived.So she did the only thing she knew. She slowed down—not for effect, because slow is where the ground is, and because she had written the instruction herself at eleven at night in a back parlor with two dead notes in the bass, and she had believed it when she wrote it.She played it slower than felt safe.There is no describing what a room does when it hears something it was not expecting to hear in a house where it thought it knew everything. Mrs. Pelham cried, which she denied for years. Mr. Sowerby, who had bought that instrument in a rash year and had never much liked it, sat forward with his elbows on his knees and did not move. Arabella watched with an expression that was not, to her credit, entirely unkind.Honoria Sowerby sat in the second row and understood, over the course of about four minutes, the precise size of the thing she had had in her house for ten years and had used to write invitations.When it finished, nobody applauded for a moment, which is the compliment. Then everybody did.The Duke of Carrow stayed until one. He talked to her for perhaps forty minutes in total in a room in front of people, which was in that county a public act.He asked her what she thought of the Clementi as a whole, and she told him, which was that the first movement was manufacture and the slow movement was not, and that a man who could write the second could have written a better first if anybody had been paying him properly. He laughed; it was a startling sound in that room, and several people turned.He asked what else she had corrected, and she said, "Everything in the house."