"Certainly," said Mercer and with the grace of a city dandy he called upon the lady to gratify all present with a little music, prefacing his request with the remark that if she was fatigued "his friend Cash would give the machine a turn."
Miss Patience smiled, and looked at Cash.
Miss Patience said she was gratified to hear that Mr. Cash was a musician; she admired people who had a musical taste. Whereupon Cash fell into a chair, as he afterward observed, "chawed up."
Oh that Beau Brummel or any of his admirers could have seen Mo Mercer all this while! Calm as a summer morning, complacent as a newly-painted sign, he smiled and patronized, and was the only unexcited person in the room.
Miss Patience rose. A sigh escaped from all present: the piano was evidently to be brought in. She approached the thick-leafed table and removed the covering, throwing it carelessly and gracefully aside, opened the instrument, and presented the beautiful arrangement of dark and white keys.
Mo Mercer at this, for the first time in his life, looked confused: he was Cash's authority in his descriptions of the appearance of the piano; while Cash himself began to recover the moment that he ceased to be an object of attention. Many a whisper now ran through the room as to the "tones," and more particularly the "crank"; none could see them.
Miss Patience took her seat, ran her fingers over a few octaves, and if "Moses in Egypt" was not perfectly _executed_, Moses in Hardscrabble _was_. The dulcet sound ceased. "Miss," said Cash, the moment that he could express himself, so entranced was he by the music,--"Miss Doolittle, what was the instrument Mo Mercer showed me in your gallery once, it went by a crank and had rollers in it?"
It was now the time for Miss Patience to blush: so away went the blood from confusion to her cheeks. She hesitated, stammered, and said, if Mr. Cash must know, it was a-a-a-_Yankee washing-machine_.
The name grated on Mo Mercer's ears as if rusty nails had been thrust into them; the heretofore invulnerable Mercer's knees trembled, the sweat started to his brow, as he heard the taunting whispers of "visiting the Capitol twice" and seeing pianos as plenty as woodchucks.
The fashionable vices of envy and maliciousness were that moment sown in the village of Hardscrabble; and Mo Mercer, the great, the confident, the happy and self-possessed, surprising as it may seem, was the first victim sacrificed to their influence.