II
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.