Kitabı oku: «A Woman's Will», sayfa 9
“It will be wet,” he said, in reply to the resistance in her arm; “but we must be alone until I have finished all that I will to say. The trees about us are best; we do not want cabs and streets just now.”
She felt blindly, miserably wretched.
“I don’t want to be married again,” she declared in a voice that was thick with more tears; and then she gathered her skirt well into her hand and they plunged together into the darkness beyond.
The park was dusk with night’s downfall and heavily misted by the day’s rain. Its paths, usually like hard gray cement, were a slippery mosaic of clay and brown leaves, and on either hand arose a stockade-like effect of tree-trunks knowing no light beyond. Wind there was none to rustle the leaves, nor sound of bird or beast. An utter and complete silence echoed the footfalls of these two who had come into the solitude, to the end that they might search there for a solution of themselves.
At the first forking of their way, Rosina said timidly:
“We must not go too far; it is so lonely, I am afraid.”
Von Ibn stopped short, drew one of her arms behind his back, caught her firmly to his bosom, and approached his face so close to hers that his breath came and went against her lips.
“Are you frightened?” he asked.
“No,” she said, wrapt in a sort of awe at the wonder of her own sensations, “I have the utmost faith in you.”
He loosed her instantly, and walked a little way off for a moment.
“I felt that you wished not,” he said, bitterly, “and so I held myself back. Mon Dieu, how good I am to you, – how cruel to myself, – and no thanks.”
Her heart was wrung.
“Oh, let us go back and go home,” she cried; “all this is of no use. It makes me glad to go away, because I see now that for me to go will be better for you.”
“And for you?” he asked, returning to her side.
“I said ‘for you,’” she answered gently.
“Then not at all for you too?” – he laid his hand insistently upon her arm, – “not at all for you too?” he repeated.
She was silent.
“It was there in Lucerne,” he went on presently; “I knew it at first – the first time I see you; and when I found that it was you who had sent for me – I – I dared to hope that you too felt something, even then, even so at the very first. Have you never known that feeling?” – he exclaimed, his breath rising passionately, “has such storm never swept within you? – and you have no other life for a while but its longing, – no sleep but the stupid fatigue when one cannot think more? What has my existence been since that day on the Quai by the Vierwaldstattersee? —Je ne peux rien faire!– To the world I am dead. – There is perhaps no future for me because I have learned to love and have not learned to be loved.”
His voice broke utterly; he loosed her arm, walked apart once more, and was once more silent.
Then her agitation suddenly found voice and to her own intense horror she heard herself laughing – laughing a loud hysterical laughter, that resounded hideously and was beyond her own control.
“You are amused,” he exclaimed, and his mood took on a justifiable tone of outraged anger; “you laugh. You have made me like this and now you laugh. If you were suffering and I had made you so, I should be ashamed and sorry; but a woman laughs. You are as that other,” he continued, impetuously, “and it will be the same some time after. When she had made me wild, then she laughed. When I heard her laugh, I grew quite cold, I cared no more, never more. Then, when I cared no more, she learned to care, she grew to love, she wrote me many letters, she became most miserable; but for me nothing mattered. Because I could not care more.”
Her laughter continued spasmodically in spite of her struggles to check it. But between the paroxysms she gasped:
“I never tried – to make you love me. I never wanted you to come where I did – ”
“But now that I am all yours,” he interrupted, “now that nothing is left for me, but you – ” He paused. “What will I do now?” he added, asking the question with a simplicity at once boyish and heartrending.
She was silent; her laughter had ceased. He came close to her and took her hand again within his own. And then in the darkness beside him he suddenly heard the bursting misery of her sobs.
“You weep,” he cried.
“No,” she whispered faintly, “no.”
“You weep,” he repeated slowly, and gathered her warmly and closely within his arms.
“What is it necessary that we suffer?” he asked her softly. “Let us cease struggling, let us be only happy,” and then he bent his head so that his cheek touched hers, and waited for the words of her answer. “Your heart is very near mine,” he whispered to her silence, “let it stay near mine, let it rest mine.” Still she was silent. “N’est-ce pas?” he asked, pressing her closer yet.
To her, at that instant, the darkness was flashing with strange lights, the silence was roaring in thunder, the trees charging and whirling in giant combat. Her head was suddenly light and then suddenly heavy; her breath strangled her and then failed altogether. She swayed from side to side, her head fell backward, and Von Ibn had it borne upon him, that instead of being in love she had fainted.
“Qu’est-ce que vous avez?” he cried, as he felt her reeling, and then he knew; and knowing, recognized the fact that he was alone in the depths of the rain-soaked forest, with a helpless woman on his hands, and that the situation was infinitely more novel than amusing.
He was obliged to let his umbrella fall in order that he might raise her in his arms; and when she was so raised he felt a poignant wonder as to what to do with her next. He had no idea which direction to take, for the night was now night in good earnest, and the Englischergarten is so large that one may walk for two hours and a half without passing its limits. He felt uncertain as to just where they had entered it, the common ingress not being from Schwabing, and also uncertain as to just how far towards the centre they had penetrated. A pale, young moon peeped up above the tree-tops; he looked at the moon and then at Rosina, and they both appeared unnecessarily weak and inadequate to the urgent necessities of the moment.
“She should be laid on her back and have water thrown upon her face,” he murmured to himself in French, and then he felt his boots sinking deeply into the mud, and recognized the impracticability of that means of resuscitation at this particular moment.
“Why did I ever pray that I might hold her in my arms?” he thought in German. “Mein Gott, what shall I do?”
Failing all other remedies, he shook her hard, and her eyes flew open on some wax-doll-like principle. She gave him a look of complete unrecognition, and closed them with a sigh.
“You must not faint once more,” he cried, anxiously; “you cannot, you know.”
Something like physical despair swept over him as he felt her tremble and sway again.
“What can I do?” he cried, shaking her very hard indeed, “we are far from all. I cannot leave you to get a carriage, I cannot take you – ”
“I don’t care what you do,” she murmured, with the usual complete resignation of the swooning, always so exasperating to those who care for them. He felt desperately that she was telling the truth.
There was a sound in the wilderness beyond, a sound that thrilled him with hope and fear at the same instant. The developments of a sound may under some circumstances prove one’s salvation or destruction. He riveted his eyes anxiously in the direction from whence the echo of a horse’s feet splashing through the mud was now drawing nearer each second.
“If it prove the Prinz Regent himself,” he said decidedly, “he must take us in.”
It proved to be, not a royal coach, but a mere ordinary cab, than which nothing more welcome had ever crossed his vision in all his life before. He hailed the cabman, and the cabman stopped in the greatest possible astonishment, and was good enough to descend in the mud and open the door. He asked no questions – cabmen never do – but took the address, mounted to his seat, and put his horse to a rounder trot in the direction of the city.
Rosina leaned back in her corner and shook as if she had the ague. Her hands and feet were icy cold; Von Ibn took her hands in his and feared that she was ill, or going to be so.
“What did make you like that?” he asked, as the wheels dashed the mud-spatters up against the windows; “was it that I distress you, yes?”
“Yes,” she sighed.
Then he kissed her hands.
“Forgive me,” he said, contritely, “I have not meant it so. There in the trees, when you were unconscious, I did not kiss you, I did not touch even your hair, – not thirty men in all Germany had been so good as that. You see what I try to be for you.”
He was leaning over her, the blood seemed to be boiling up into her ears. She put up her hand:
“If you speak so,” she said, “I shall faint again; I get dizzy when you talk to me in that way.”
“But if I kiss you only once,” he whispered.
“No – no – no,” she reiterated, and raised her hand and pushed his lips away with it.
“En effet vous n’êtes pas du tout gentille,” he cried, in violent anger, for his moods knew no shading in their transposition from one to another; “you are cold and without heart. How long do you think that I stood there in the wet and hold you back from the mud, and now you will do nothing for me; and you were quite heavy too, and – oh, mon Dieu!” he exclaimed sharply, interrupting himself, “my umbrella!”
“Have you lost it?”
“Have I lost it? Naturally I have let it fall to upraise you, and now I have leave it there.”
“I will give you another,” she said pacifically.
“Another,” he commented scornfully; “do you think that I have no other?” Then his weathercock cast of mind whirled again: “I do not want an umbrella,” he said more forcefully, “I want a kiss.”
“I thought that you were distressed over losing it.”
“Not at all; I have already very many others. But a kiss from you I have never yet.”
He seized her hand again, and tearing off the glove with a haste that demolished two buttonholes, pressed the bare cold fingers to his lips and eyes and forehead.
“Oh, I do love you!” he cried in a fresh storm of feeling. “You must love me, because my much must make of you a little.”
Then he kissed her hand many times more, stopping his rapid caresses to gaze upon her with that curious, burning glow firing the sombreness of his eyes the while he held her wrist against the fever of his face.
“If I obeyed myself,” he said hoarsely, “how I would hold you and kiss you. Je vous embrasserais tellement!”
She wondered why she was not distressed and alarmed. Instead the awe at her own emotion that had come upon her spirit in the wood was with her again. Something like strength seemed rising within her, and what it rose against was – strangely enough – not him, but herself. She was conscious of a sympathy for him in place of any fear for herself.
She looked from the window and saw that they were now rolling rapidly through the brightly lighted streets, and a glimpse of the Hof told her that the end was but five minutes further on.
“You answer not,” he said, insistently; “you must say me some word.”
“Oh, what can I say?” she cried helplessly.
“Say that you love me.”
“But I do not.”
Then he loosed her hand and ground his teeth.
“Decidedly you are queer,” he said bitterly; “it is there in your eyes and you will to deny it. You are senseless, —vous n’avez pas de cœur! I am always a fool to go on as I go.”
She turned her eyes upon him.
“Je ne suis pas pour vous,” she said gently and very, very sadly; “mais je ne suis pour personne non plus,” she added, and there was a tone in her voice that he had never heard before. His temper faded instantly.
“You think of me with kindness, always, —n’est-ce pas?” he said, returning her look.
Their eyes rested steadily upon each other for a little space. Then he exclaimed:
“You do love me,” and started to seize her in his arms forgetful of lights, streets, passers-by, and all other good reasons for self-restraint.
But just then the cab stopped before the door of No. 6, the cabman descended.
There was no further question as to les convenances.
Chapter Twelve
“Buda-Pesth.
“DEAR ROSINA, – If you’re laid up I might just as well take a week more in this direction. Plenty to see, I find, and lots of jolly company lying around loose. I’ll get back about the twelfth and we’ll plan to skip then as fast as we can. Keep on writing Poste Restante, Buda, and I’ll have them forward. Don’t try to fool me any by being too sick to sail. I’ve got to go the nineteenth and you must too.
“Lovingly,
“Jack.”
She sat in the little salon the night of October fifth and read the above affectionate epistle which the postman had brought to keep her company, because every one else in the house was gone to the famous concert of the famous pianist.
She could not go; that little episode in the Englischergarten and all the attendant agitation had put her in bed for three days and rendered her quite unable to go out for two or three more. She had been obliged to write Jack that she was ill, with the above results, and she read his answer with the sensation that life was long, the future empty, and none of its vistas worth contemplating. Her heart ached dully – it was forever aching dully these days, and she —
There was a tap at the door. Europe has no open-door policy, be it known; all doors are always shut. Even those of pension salons.
She looked up, and saw him coming in, his violin case in his hand. Then life and its vistas underwent a great transformation, because he smiled upon her and, putting the case down carefully, came eagerly to kiss her hand.
“Vous allez bien ce soir?” he asked pleasantly, standing before her chair and looking down into her face.
“Oh, I am 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.
