A Woman's Will - Anne Warner (english novels for students txt) 📗

almost well, thank you; but why are you not gone to the concert?”

He pointed to his violin with a smile.

“It is a concert that I bring to you who may not go out,” he said.

“But you are making a tremendous sacrifice for me, monsieur.”

He stood before her, twisting his moustache.

“It is that I am regretful for the other night,” he said briefly, “for that I am glad to give the concert up and make you some pleasure. The other night--”

“Don’t,” she pleaded uncomfortably; “never mind all that. Let it all go.”

“But I would ask your pardon. _J’étais tout-à-fait fou!_”

“If I have anything to forgive it shall be forgiven you when you play. Do so now, please. Oh, you have no idea how impatient I am to hear you.”

He stared through her and beyond her for several seconds, and then came back to himself with a start.

“Then I do play,” he exclaimed, and went to where he had placed the case of rosewood, and lifting it from the small table, set it on the floor and knelt before it, as a priest at some holy shrine. She leaned her head against the chair back and watched him, her eyes searching each detail of his appearance without her spirit being cognizant of the hunger which led to the seeking, of the soul-cry which strove to fortify itself against the inevitable that each hour was bringing nearer.

He felt in his pocket for his key-ring, chose from the many one particular key, inserted it, turned it, left it sticking in the hole, and then, with a curious breathless tightening of the lips, he raised the lid, put aside the knit wool shield of white and violet, and with the tender care which a mother bestows upon a very tiny baby lifted the violin from its resting-place. As he did so his eye travelled with a sudden keen anxiety over its every detail, as if the possibility of harm was ever present, and as he held it to his ear and snapped the strings one after another, she beheld with something akin to awe the dawning of another nature upon his face, of another light within his eyes, the strange light of that abnormal, unworldly gift which God gave man and which we have elected to call by the name of genius. As he rested there before her, tightening one cord, trying another, listening to a third, she realized--with a sorrowful sense of her own remoteness at the minute--that this man was some one who, in spite of all their hours of intercourse, she had never met before.

He loosened the bow from its buttons and rose slowly to his feet. His eyes sought hers, and he said dreamily:

“What shall I play?” even while his fingers were forming dumb notes, and the uplifted bow quivered in the air as if impatient.

“Oh,” she said, acutely conscious of her inferiority,--of the ten thousand leagues of difference between his grandeur and her commonplace,--“play what you will.”

He hardly seemed to hear, his eyes roved over the little salon as if its walls were gone, and he beheld a horizon illimitless. He just slightly knit his brows and then he bowed his head above the instrument and said briefly:

“Listen!”

And she listened.

And the unvoiceable wonder of his magic!

It was an intangible echo of the Tonhalle at Zurich, with the music that they had heard there sounding as the waves lapped up against the embankment and the crowd laughed and chatted after; those strains to which she had then been deaf on account of her agitation came back now, and the thrill of her pain was there still, rising and falling amidst the music and the water breaking up against the stones. While she waited on the verge of tears, the whole shifted to Constance, and through the slow sweep of the steamers coming into the harbor sounded the “Souvenir” of Vieuxtemps, drifting across the rose-laden air and carrying her back to the minutes when--Ah, when! She put her hand before her eyes and it was not the cords of his violin, but the sinews of her soul which responded to his bow. That which man may not voice he played, and that which our ears may not hear she absorbed into the depths of her being. Something within them each burst bonds and met at last, but neither knew it then, and the wonder carried her out upon the bosom of the Bodensee, showed her the charm of its gracious peace, and then drifted as the breezes drift, to the concert in the open air that is given each day by the Feldherrnhalle, a concert that knows no discord, because the murmur of life, the calls of the birds, the splashing of the fountains, and the light-hearted joy of the crowd around, all meet and mingle in its chorus. He echoed them all with the sublimity of the power which he controlled, and all--bird-calls, fountain-drip, desultory laughter, and careless joy, all flowed from him, and took from him as they flowed that subtle and precious subconsciousness which lines our every cloud with the infinite hope that is better than all else in this world.

She leaned forward breathlessly, her fingers interlaced around her knees; her eyes had grown as dark as his own, her heart stood still, and between its throbs she asked herself if _this_ was the secret of their sympathy,--if _this_ was the basis of his mastery.

Then there was silence in the room and he stood motionless, his eyes on the floor, the violin still resting against his shoulder in its rightful position, above his heart, quite touching his head.

She did not speak and he did not speak,--neither knew for how long that period of silence endured. But after a while he lowered the instrument and looked at her.

“You like, yes?” he said with a faint smile.

“Can you ask?”

He laid his hand upon a vase that sat upon the table and shook his head.

“All this is not good, you know,” he said, as if communing with himself alone; “here is no room for the music to spread. All these,” he pointed to another ornament, “are so very, very bad. But some day, perhaps,” he added, with another smile, “you will hear me in a good place.”

Then he raised the violin to position once more.

“Choose what you will have,” he told her.

“Oh, forget that I am here,” she pleaded, speaking with a startled hushedness, as if no claim of conventional politeness might dare intrude itself upon that bewildering hour, “do not remember that I am here,--play as you would if you were quite alone.”

“That is very well,” he said, with a recurrence to his unseeing stare and dreamy tone, “because for me you really are not here. Nothing is here;--the violin is not here;--I am myself not here;--only the music exists. And if I talk,” he added slowly, “the inspiration may leave me.”

He went beside the piano and turned his back towards her, and then his prayer made itself real and his love found words....

She wept, and when he ceased to play he remained standing in silence as the very reverent rest for a short interval after the termination of holy service....

After a while he moved to where the case lay open on the floor and knelt again, laying his instrument carefully in its place and covering it with its little knit wool quilt. Then he locked the lid down, replaced the keys in his pocket, and, rising, seemed to return to earth.

“Can you understand now,” he asked, taking a chair by her side,--“can you understand now how it would be for me if I lost my power to create music?”

“Yes,” she said, very humbly.

“I think that nothing so bad could arrive,” he went on, pulling his moustache and looking at her as he spoke, “because I am very much more strong than anything that may arrive at me, and the music is still much more strong than I. But if that _could_ arrive, that a trouble might kill my power, you can know how bad it would be for me.”

She sat there, gazing always at her new conception of him. The tears which she had shed during his music filled her face with a sort of tender charm. It did not occur to her that any words of hers could be other than a desecration of those minutes.

“I am going now,” he said presently, rising. “I have done no work since in June, but I feel it within me to write what I have played to-night.” He went over and took up the violin case and then he laid it down again and came back to her side.

“I shall kiss you,” he said, not in any tone of either doubt or entreaty, rather with an imperativeness that was final. “In the music that I go to write to-night I want to put your eyes and also your kiss.”

He put his arms about her and raised her to his bosom.

“_Regardez-moi!_” he commanded, and she lifted her eyes into his.

Their lips met, and the kiss endured.

Then he replaced her gently upon the sofa, took up the violin and went out.

Later that night she reproached herself bitterly.

“I ought to have a chaperone,” she told her pillow in strict confidence.

But the kiss had a place now in her life, and the place, like the kiss itself, endured.

Von Ibn, in his room at the hotel, paused over his manuscript score, laid down his pen and closed his eyes.

“_Elle sera à moi!_” he murmured, and smiled.

For him also the kiss was enduring.


Chapter Thirteen

Jack was expected on the morrow, and on the day after the start for Genoa was to be made.

Under these cheerful circumstances Von Ibn came to call at the pension, and Amelia tapped at Rosina’s door to announce to the “_gnädige Frau_” that “_der Herr von Ibn ist im Salon_.”

Rosina was dressed for dinner and when her visitor saw her gown with its long trailing skirt his face fell.

“We go to walk, yes?” he said, in a doubtful tone. She looked from the window out upon the rainy view.

“It’s too wet,” she said hopelessly; but the hopelessness was hypocritical, because she had resolved to never walk alone with him again.

He threw himself down upon the divan and entered into a species of gloomy trance. She took a chair by the window and unfolded her embroidery. Since the night of the music their mutual feelings had become more complicated than ever, and sometimes she wanted to get away with a desperation that was tainted with cowardice, while at other times she almost wondered if she should ever have the strength to go at all. What he was meditating in these last days she could not at all divine. He continued to have fits of jealousy and periods of long and absorbing thought. The new knowledge of the spirit which he revealed in his art was always with her and always held her a little in awe. Also the recollection of the Englischergarten and of her own overwhelming sensations there stayed by her with a persistence which knew no diminution.

“I wouldn’t be off like that with him again for anything,” she thought, as she drew a thread of red chenille from the skein upon her knee, and stole a glance