The bassines, at least, James Femms admitted, were good. Sound
bronze—he stiffened as memory quickened in him. Gently his finger-nail
tapped their margins and a hushed whispering resonance seemed to bring
an audible perfume into the chamber. James Femms nodded. It had been
Sonoff’s whimsy to have these bassines cast and toned in bell-metal—one
to sound the low A flat and the other the D that Sonoff had loved best
of all his bells.
The bassines, at least, were possible under James Femms’s roof. But the
_porte-chapeaux_ itself, with a fraudulent becket? James Femms negated
the suggestion with a resolute, peremptory movement of his head. He set
his shoulder to the task of thrusting the piece before him to the open
porch. He closed the door upon it. Except for the bassines, it would
have been better, after all, to let Kitchler have it; perhaps, even
now, he could let Kitchler persuade him to part with it—not too easily,
of course; it would be simple to pick up another pair of bassines, in
place of these. There were two in Reading, Femms remembered, and, he
thought, another pair in a junk-shop on the edge of Camden.
Yes, he would let Kitchler have it, at a price. He lifted the two
bassines and brought their edges softly together, inclining his head to
catch the moonlit fragrance of their conjoined note. He carried them to
his bedroom; he would keep them here, on either side of the Benjamin
Harrison bureau. He set them on the twin plackets that jutted out from
the mirror-frame.