In bad company

X

The ice had been broken. The next day the boy ventured, timid, but curious, into the drawing-room, which he had not entered since the day the strange new-comer, so noisy and bad-tempered, as it seemed to him, had been established there. The new-comer's songs, last evening, had conquered his delicate ear and overcome his prejudice. With only a faint trace of his earlier fear, he came towards the piano. A step or two away he paused, and stood listening. There was no one there. The mother, sewing in an adjoining room, watched him breathlessly, admiring his every movement, every change of expression in his nervous features.
From where he stood, he stretched out a hand and touched the polished surface of the piano—and at once drew timidly away. He tried again, and once again—then came up closer and began to examine the instrument carefully, moving all around it, bending to the floor to follow the lines of its legs. And finally his fingers touched the keys.
A faint, hesitant note trembled in the air. The boy stood listening long after all sound had vanished to the mother's ear. Then, absorbed, expectant, he pressed another key. After that, his hand swept across the keyboard, and he struck a new note, in the highest register. He let each tone sound, and tremble, and die away before he touched another; and, as he listened, his face expressed not only intense interest, but enjoyment. He seemed to take pleasure in each individual note, with an artist's sensitive receptiveness to the elements of music, to the separate components of potential melody.
But in each note, besides its sound, the blind boy seemed to feel other distinctive features. When his fingers pressed a clear, joyful note of the upper register, his face, bright with pleasure, would turn upwards, as though following the airy sound in its skyward flight. When he struck a bass note, he would tilt his head downwards to catch the deep vibration, as though feeling that this heavy note must roll low, low, over the very floor, to vanish in the farthest corners of the house.