_ "Peace! Sit you down,
And let me wring your heart; for so I shall,
If it be made of penetrable stuff."
Helen ran up to her room when she reached home, and shut herself in,
and after that she had nothing to do but suffer. All of her
excitement was gone from her then, and with it every spark of her
strength; the fiends that had been pursuing her rose up and seized
hold of her, and lashed her until she writhed and cried aloud in
agony. She was helpless to resist them, knowing not which way to
turn or what to do,--completely cowed and terrified. But there was
no more sinking into the dull despair that had mastered her before;
the face of Arthur, as she had seen it in that one glimpse, had been
burned into her memory with fire, and she could not shut it from her
sight; when the fact that he had come from the tavern, and what that
must mean rose before her, it was almost more than she could bear,
cry out as she might that she could not help it, that she never
could have helped it, that she had nothing to do with it. Moreover,
if there was any possibility of the girl's driving out that specter,
there was always another to take its place. It was not until she was
alone in her room, until all her resolution was gone, and all of her
delusions, that she realized the actual truth about what she had
done that afternoon; it was like a nightmare to her then. She seemed
always to feel the man's arms clasping her, and whenever she thought
of his kisses her forehead burned her like fire, so that she flung
herself down by the bedside, and buried it in the pillows.
It was thus that her aunt found her when she came in to call Helen
to dinner; and this time the latter's emotions were so real and so
keen that there was no prevailing over them, or persuading her to
anything. "I don't want to eat!" she cried again and again in answer
to her aunt's alarmed insistence. "No, I am not coming down! I want
to be alone! Alone, Aunt Polly--please leave me alone!"
"But, Helen," protested Mrs. Roberts, "won't you please tell me what
is the matter? What in the world can have happened to you?"
"I can't tell you," the girl cried hysterically. "I want you to go
and leave me alone!" And she shut the door and locked it, and then
began pacing wildly up and down the room, heedless of the fact that
her aunt was still standing out in the hallway; the girl was too
deeply shaken just then to have any thought about appearances.
She was thinking about Arthur again, and about his fearful plight;
there rushed back upon her all the memories of their childhood, and
of the happiness which they had known together. The thought of the
broken figure which she had seen by the roadside became more fearful
to her every moment. It was not that it troubled her conscience, for
Helen could still argue to herself that she had done nothing to
wrong her friend, that there had been nothing selfish in her
attitude towards him; she had wished him to be happy. It seemed to
her that it was simply a result of the cruel perversity of things
that she had been trampling upon her friend's happiness in order to
reach her own, and that all her struggling had only served to make
things worse. The fact that it was not her fault, however, did not
make the situation seem less tragic and fearful to her; it had come
to such a crisis now that it drove her almost mad to think about it,
yet she was completely helpless to know what to do, and as she
strode up and down the room, she clasped her hands to her aching
head and cried aloud in her perplexity.
Then too her surging thoughts hurried on to another unhappiness,--to
her father, and what he would say when he learned the dreadful news.
How could she explain it to him? And how could she tell him about
her marriage? At the mere thought of that the other horror seized
upon her again, and she sank down in a chair by the window and hid
her face in her hands.
"Oh, how can I have done it?" she gasped to herself. "Oh, it was so
dreadful! And what am I to do now?"
That last was the chief question, the one to which all others led;
yet it was one to which she could find no answer. She was completely
confused and helpless, and she exclaimed aloud again and again, "Oh,
if I could only find some one to tell me! I do not know how I can
keep Arthur from behaving in that dreadful way, and I know that I
cannot ever marry Mr. Harrison!"
The more she tortured herself with these problems, the more agitated
she became. She sat there at the window, clutching the sill in her
hands and staring out, seeing nothing, and knowing only that the
time was flying, and that her anxiety was building itself up and
becoming an agony which she could not bear.
"Oh, what am I to do?" she groaned again and again; and she passed
hours asking herself the fearful question; the twilight had closed
about her, and the moon had risen behind the distant hills.
So oblivious to all things about her was she, that she failed at
first to notice something else, something which would ordinarily
have attracted her attention at once,--a sound of music which came
to her from somewhere near. It was the melody of Grieg's "An den
Frubling" played upon a violin, and it had stolen into Helen's heart
and become part of her own stormy emotion before she had even
thought of what it was or whence it came. The little piece is the
very soul of the springtime passion, and to the girl it was the very
utterance of all her yearning, lifting her heart in a great
throbbing prayer. When it had died away her hands were clenched very
tightly, and her breath was coming fast.
She remained thus for a minute, forgetful of everything; then at
last she found herself thinking "it must be Mr. Howard," and waiting
to see if he would play again. But he did not do so, and Helen sat
in silence for a long time, her thoughts turned to him. She found
herself whispering "so he is a wonderful musician after all," and
noticing that the memory of his wan face frightened her no longer;
it seemed just then that there could be no one in the world more
wretched than herself. She was only wishing that he would begin
again, for that utterance of her grief had seemed like a victory,
and now in the silence she was sinking back into her despair. The
more she waited, the more impatient she grew, until suddenly she
rose from her seat.
"He might play again if I asked him," she said to herself. "He would
if he knew I was unhappy; I wonder where he can be?"
Helen's window was in the front of the house, opening upon a broad
lawn whose walks were marked in the moonlight by the high shrubbery
that lined them. Some distance beyond, down one of the paths, were
two summer-houses, and it seemed to her that the music had come from
one of them, probably the far one, for it had sounded very soft. No
sooner had the thought come to her than she turned and went quietly
to the door. She ran quickly down the steps, and seeing her aunt and
Mr. Roberts upon the piazza, she turned and passed out by one of the
side doors.
Helen had yielded to a sudden impulse in doing thus, drawn by her
yearning for the music. When she thought about it as she walked on
it seemed to her a foolish idea, for the man could not possibly know
of her trouble, and moreover was probably with his friend the
lieutenant. But she did not stop even then, for her heart's hunger
still drove her on, and she thought, "I'll see, and perhaps he will
play again without my asking; I can sit in the near summer-house and
wait."
She went swiftly on with that purpose in mind, not going upon the
path, because she would have been in the full moonlight, and in
sight of the two upon the piazza. She passed silently along by the
high hedge, concealed in its shadows, and her footsteps deadened by
the grass. She was as quiet as possible, wishing to be in the
summer-house without anyone's knowing it.
And she had come very close to it indeed, within a few yards, when
suddenly she stopped short with an inward exclamation; the silence
of the twilight had been broken by a voice--one that seemed almost
beside her, and that startled her with a realization of the mistake
she had made. The two men were themselves in the house to which she
had been going.
It was Mr. Howard's voice which she heard; he was speaking very low,
almost in a whisper, yet Helen was near enough to hear every word
that he uttered.
"Most people would think it simply a happy and beautiful piece of
music," he said. "Most people think that of the springtime; but when
a man has lived as I, he may find that the springtime too is a great
labor and a great suffering,--he does not forget that for the
thousands of creatures that win the great fight and come forth
rejoicing, there are thousands and tens of thousands that go down,
and have their mite of life crushed out, and find the law very stern
indeed. Even those that win do it by a fearful effort, and cannot
keep their beauty long; so that the springtime passion takes on a
kind of desperate intensity when one thinks of it."
The voice ceased again for a moment, and Helen stood gazing about
her; the words were not without a dimly-felt meaning to her just
then, and the tone of the man's voice seemed like the music she had
heard him play. She would have liked to stay and listen, tho she
knew that she had no right to. She was certain that she had not been
seen, because the little house was thickly wrapped about with
eglantine; and she stood, uncertain as to whether she ought to steal
back or go out and join the two men. In the meantime the voice began
again:
"It gives a man a new feeling of the preciousness of life to know
keenly what it means to fail, to be like a tiny spark, struggling to
maintain itself in the darkness, and finding that all it can do is
not sufficient, and that it is sinking back into nothingness
forever. I think that is the meaning of the wild and startled look
that the creatures of the forest wear; and it is a very tragic thing
indeed to realize, and makes one full of mercy. If he knows his own
heart he can read the same thing in the faces of men, and he no
longer even laughs at their pride and their greediness, but sees
them quite infinitely wretched and pitiable. I do not speak merely
of the poor and hopeless people, the hunted creatures of society;
for this terror is not merely physical. It is the same imperative of
life that makes conscience, and so every man knows it who has made
himself a slave to his body, and sees the soul within him helpless
and sinking; and every man who has sinned and sees his evil stamped
upon the face of things outside him, in shapes of terror that must
be forever. Strange as it may seem, I think the man who lives most
rightly, the man of genius, knows the feeling most of all, because
his conscience is the quickest. It is his task to live from his own
heart, to take the power that is within him and wrestle with it, and
build new universes from it,--to be a pioneer of the soul, so to
speak, and to go where no man has ever been before; and yet all his
victory is nothing to him, because he knows so well what he might
have done. Every time that he shrinks, as he must shrink, from what
is so hard and so high in his own vision, he knows that yet another
glory is lost forever, and so it comes that he stands very near
indeed to the'tears of things.'"
Mr. Howard stopped again, and Helen found herself leaning forward
and wondering.
"I know more about those tears than most people," the man went on
slowly, after a long pause, "for I have had to build my own life in
that way; I know best of all the failure, for that has been my lot.
When you and I knew each other, I was very strong in my own heart,
and I could always find what joy and power I needed for the living
of my life; but there have come to me since, in the years that I
have dwelt all alone with my great trial, times when I think that I
have stood face to face with this thing that we speak of, this naked
tragedy and terror of existence. There have been times when all the
yearning and all the prayer that I had could not save me, when I
have known that I had not an ounce of resource left, and have sat
and watched the impulse of my soul die within me, and all my
strength go from me, and seen myself with fearful plainness as a
spark of yearning, a living thing in all its pitifulness and hunger,
helpless and walled up in darkness. To feel that is to be very near
indeed to the losing creatures and their sorrow, and the memory of
one such time is enough to keep a man merciful forever. For it is
really the deepest fact about life that a man can know;--how it is
so hazardous and so precious, how it keeps its head above the great
ocean of the infinite only by all the force it can exert; it happens
sometimes that a man does not discover that truth until it is too
late, and then he finds life very cruel and savage indeed, I can
tell you."
Mr. Howard stopped, and Helen drew a deep breath; she had been
trembling slightly as she stood listening; then as he spoke again,
her heart gave a violent throb. "Some day," he said, "this girl that
we were talking about will have to come to that part of her life's
journey; it is a very sad thing to know."
"She will understand her sonata better," said the officer.
"No," was the reply; "I wish I could think even that; I know how
sorrow affects a person whose heart is true, how it draws him close
to the great heart of life, and teaches him its sacredness, and
sends him forth merciful and humble. But selfish misery and selfish
fear are no less ugly than selfish happiness; a person who suffers
ignobly becomes only disgusted and disagreeable, and more selfish
than ever. * * * But let us not talk any more about Miss Davis, for
it is not a pleasant subject; to a man who seeks as I do to keep his
heart full of worship the very air of this place is stifling, with
its idleness and pride. It gives the lie to all my faith about life,
and I have only to go back into my solitude and forget it as soon as
I can."
"That ought not to be a difficult thing to do," said the officer.
"It is for me," the other answered; "it haunts my thoughts all the
time." He paused for a while, and then he added, "I happened to
think of something I came across this morning, in a collection of
French verse I was reading; William, did you ever read anything of
Auguste Brizeux?"
The other answered in the negative.
"He has some qualities that are very rare in French poetry," went on
Mr. Howard. "He makes one think of Wordsworth. I happened to read a
homely little ballad of his,--a story of some of that tragedy of
things that we spoke of; one could name hundreds of such poems quite
as good, I suppose, but this happened to be the one I came across,
and I could not help thinking of Miss Davis and wondering if she
were really so cold and so hard that she could have heard this story
without shuddering. For it really shook me very much."
"What is it?" the other asked.
"I can tell you the story in a few words," said Mr. Howard. "To me
it was one of those flashes of beauty that frighten one and haunt
him long afterwards; and I do not quite like to think about it
again."
The speaker's voice dropped, and the girl involuntarily crept a
little nearer to hear him; there was a tree in front of her, and she
leaned against it, breathing very hard, tho making no sound.
"The ballad is called 'Jacques the Mason,'" said Mr. Howard, "There
are three little pictures in it; in the first of them you see two
men setting off to their work together, one of them bidding his wife
and children good-by, and promising to return with his friend for an
evening's feast, because the great building is to be finished. Then
you see them at work, swarming upon the structure and rejoicing in
their success; and then you hear the shouts of the crowd as the
scaffolding breaks, and see those two men hanging over the abyss,
clinging to a little plank. It is not strong enough to hold them
both, and it is cracking, and that means a fearful death; they try
to cling to the stones of the building and cannot, and so there
comes one of those fearful moments that makes a man's heart break to
think of. Then in the fearful silence you hear one of the men
whisper that he has three children and a wife; and you see the other
gaze at him an instant with terror in his eyes, and then let go his
hold and shoot down to the street below. And that is all of the
story."
Mr. Howard stopped, and there followed a long silence; afterwards he
went on, his voice trembling: "That is all," he said, "except of
course that the man was killed. And I can think of nothing but that
body hurled down through the air, and the crushed figure and the
writhing limbs. I fancy the epic grandeur of soul of that poor
ignorant laborer, and the glory that must have flamed up in his
heart at that great instant; so I find it a dreadful poem, and
wonder if it would not frighten that careless girl to read it."
Mr. Howard stopped again, and the officer asked if the story were
true.
"I do not know that," answered the other, "nor do I care; it is
enough to know that every day men are called upon to face the
shuddering reality of existence in some such form as that. And the
question which it brought to my heart is, if it came to me, as
terrible as that, and as sudden and implacable, would I show myself
the man or the dastard? And that filled me with a fearful awe and
humility, and a guilty wonder whether somewhere in the world there
might not be a wall from which I should be throwing myself, instead
of nursing my illness as I do, and being content to read about
greatness. And oh, I tell you, when I think of such things as that,
and see the pride and worthlessness of this thing that men call
'high life,' it seemed to me no longer heedless folly, but dastardly
and fiendish crime, so that one can only bury his face in his hands
and sob to know of it. And William, the more I realized it, the more
unbearable it seemed to me that this glorious girl with all her
God-given beauty, should be plunging herself into a stream so foul.
I felt as if it were cowardice of mine that I did not take her by
the hand and try to make her see what madness she was doing."
"Why do you not?" asked the lieutenant.
"I think I should have, in my more Quixotic days," replied the
other, sadly; "and perhaps some day I may find myself in a kind of
high life where royal sincerity is understood. But in this world
even an idealist has to keep a sense of humor, unless he happens to
be dowered with an Isaiah's rage."
Mr. Howard paused for a moment and laughed slightly; then, however,
he went on more earnestly: "Yet, as I think of it, I know that I
could frighten her; I think that if I should tell her of some of the
days and nights that I have spent in tossing upon a bed of fire, she
might find the cup of her selfishness a trifle less pleasant to
drink. It is something that I have noticed with people, that they
may be coarse or shallow enough to laugh at virtue and earnestness,
but there are very few who do not bow their heads before suffering.
For that is something physical; and they may harden their conscience
if they please, but from the possibility of bodily pain they know
that they can never be safe; and they seem to know that a man who
has walked with that demon has laid his hand upon the grim reality
of things, before which their shams and vanities shrink into
nothingness. The sight of it is always a kind of warning of the
seriousness of life, and so even when people feel no sympathy, they
cannot but feel fear; I saw for instance, that the first time this
girl saw me she turned pale, and she would not come anywhere near
me."
As the speaker paused again, Lieutenant Maynard said, very quietly:
"I should think that would be a hard cross to bear, David."
"No," said Mr. Howard, with a slight smile, "I had not that thought
in my mind. I have seen too much of the reality of life to trouble
myself or the the world with vanity of that very crude kind; I can
sometimes imagine myself being proud of my serenity, but that is one
step beyond at any rate. A man who lives in his soul very seldom
thinks of himself in an external way; when I look in the glass it is
generally to think how strange it is that this form of mine should
be that which represents me to men, and I cannot find anything they
might really learn about me, except the one physical fact of
suffering."
"They can certainly not fail to learn that," said the other.
"Yes," replied Mr. Howard sadly, "I know, if any man does, what it
is to earn one's life by suffering and labor. That is why I have so
mastering a sense of life's preciousness, and why I cannot reconcile
myself to this dreadful fact of wealth. It is the same thing, too,
that makes me feel so keenly about this girl and her beauty, and
keeps her in my thoughts. I don't think I could tell you how the
sight of her affected me, unless you knew how I have lived all these
lonely years. For I have had no friends and no strength for any of
the world's work, and all my battle has been with my own soul, to be
brave and to keep my self-command through all my trials; I think my
illness has acted as a kind of nervous stimulus upon me, as if it
were only by laboring to dwell upon the heights of my being night
and day that I could have strength to stand against despair. The
result is that I have lived for days in a kind of frenzy of effort,
with all my faculties at white heat; and it has always been the
artist's life, it has always been beauty that brought me the joy
that I needed, and given me the strength to go on. Beauty is the
sign of victory, and the prize of it, in this heart's battle; the
more I have suffered and labored, the more keenly I have come to
feel that, until the commonest flower has a song for me. And
William, the time I saw this girl she wore a rose in her hair, but
she was so perfect that I scarcely saw the flower; there is that in
a man's heart which makes it that to him the fairest and most sacred
of God's creatures must always be the maiden. When I was young, I
walked about the earth half drunk with a dream of love; and even
now, when I am twice as old as my years, and burnt out and dying, I
could not but start when I saw this girl. For I fancied that she
must carry about in that maiden's heart of hers some high notion of
what she meant in the world, and what was due to her. When a man
gazes upon beauty such as hers, there is a feeling that comes to him
that is quite unutterable, a feeling born of all the weakness and
failure and sin of his lifetime. For every true man's life is a
failure; and this is the vision that he sought with so much pain,
the thing that might have been, had he kept the faith with his own
genius. It is so that beauty is the conscience of the artist; and
that there must always be something painful and terrible about high
perfection. It was that way that I felt when I saw this girl's face,
and I dreamt my old dream of the sweetness and glory of a maiden's
heart. I thought of its spotlessness and of its royal scorn of
baseness; and I tell you, William, if I had found it thus I could
have been content to worship and not even ask that the girl look at
me. For a man, when he has lived as I have lived, can feel towards
anything more perfect than himself a quite wonderful kind of
humility; I know that all the trouble with my helpless struggling is
that I must be everything to myself, and cannot find anything to
love, and so be at peace. That was the way I felt when I saw this
Miss Davis, all that agitation and all that yearning; and was it not
enough to make a man mock at himself, to learn the real truth? I was
glad that it did not happen to me when I was young and dependent
upon things about me; is it not easy to imagine how a young man
might make such a woman the dream of his life, how he might lay all
his prayer at her feet, and how, when he learned of her fearful
baseness, it might make of him a mocking libertine for the rest of
his days?"
"You think it baseness?" asked Lieutenant Maynard.
"I tried to persuade myself at first that it must be only blindness;
I wondered to myself, 'Can she not see the difference between the
life of these people about her and the music and poetry her aunt
tells me she loves?' I never waste any of my worry upon the old and
hardened of these vulgar and worldly people; it is enough for me to
know why the women are dull and full of gossip, and to know how much
depth there is in the pride and in the wisdom of the men. But it was
very hard for me to give up my dream of the girl's purity; I
rememher I thought of Heine's 'Thou art as a flower,' and my heart
was full of prayer. I wondered if it might not be possible to tell
her that one cannot combine music and a social career, and that one
cannot really buy happiness with sin; I thought that perhaps she
might be grateful for the warning that in cutting herself off from
the great deepening experience of woman she was consigning herself
to stagnation and wretchedness from which no money could ever
purchase her ransom; I thought that possibly she did not see that
this man knew nothing of her preciousness and had no high thoughts
about her beauty. That was the way I argued with myself about her
innocence, and you may fancy the kind of laughter that came over me
at the truth. It is a ghastly thing, William, the utter hardness,
the grim and determined worldliness, of this girl. For she knew very
well what she was doing, and all the ignorance was on my part. She
had no care about anything in the world until that man came in, and
the short half hour that I watched them was enough to tell her that
her life's happiness was won. But only think of her, William, with
all her God-given beauty, allowing herself to be kissed by him! Try
to fancy what new kind of fiendishness must lie in her heart! I
remember that she is to marry him because he pays her millions, and
the word prostitution keeps haunting my memory; when I try to define
it, I find that the millions do not alter it in the least. That is a
very cruel thought,--a thought that drives away everything but the
prayer--and I sit and wonder what fearful punishment the hand of
Fate will deal out for such a thing as that, what hatefulness it
will stamp upon her for a sign to men. And then because the perfect
face still haunts my memory, I have a very Christ-like feeling
indeed,--that I could truly die to save that girl from such a
horror."
There was another long silence, and then suddenly, Mr. Howard rose
from his seat. "William," he said in a different voice, "it is all
useless, so why should we talk so? The girl has to live her own life
and learn these things for herself. And in the meantime, perhaps I
am letting myself be too much moved by her beauty, for there are
many people in the world who are not beautiful, but who suffer
things they do not deserve to suffer, and who really deserve our
sympathy and help."
"I fancy you'd not be much thanked for it in this case," said the
other, with a dry laugh.
Mr. Howard stood for some moments in silence, and then turned away
to end the conversation. "I fear," he said, "that I have kept you
more than I have any right to. Let us go back to the house; it is
not very polite to our hostess to stay so long."
"It must be nearly time for my train, anyhow," said the officer, and
a moment later the two had passed out of the summer-house and up the
path, Lieutenant Maynard carrying Mr. Howard's violin-case in his
hand.
The two did not see Helen as they passed her; the reason was that
Helen was stretched out upon the ground by the side of the hedge. It
was not that she was hiding,--she had no thought of that; it was
because she had been struck there by the scathing words that she had
heard. Some of them were so bitter that they could only have filled
her with rage had she not known that they were true, and had she not
been awed by what she had learned of this man's heart. She could
feel only terror and fiery shame, and the cruel words had beaten her
down, first upon her knees, and then upon her face, and they lashed
her like whips of flame and tore into her flesh and made her writhe.
She dared not cry out, or even sob; she could only dig into the
ground with her quivering fingers, and lie there, shuddering in a
fearful way. Long after the two men were gone her cruel punishment
still continued, for she still seemed to hear his words, seared into
her memory with fire as they had been. What Mr. Howard had said had
come like a flash of lightning in the darkness to show her actions
as they really were; the last fearful sentences which she had heard
had set all her being aflame, and the thought of Mr. Harrison's
embraces filled her now with a perfect spasm of shame and loathing.
"I sold myself to him for money!" she panted. "Oh, God, for money!"
But then suddenly she raised herself up and stared about her, crying
out, half-hysterically, "No, no, it is not true! It is not true! I
could never have done it--I should have gone mad!" And a moment
later Helen had staggered to her feet. "I must tell him," she
gasped. "He must not think so of me!"
Mr. Howard had come to her as a vision from a higher world, making
all that she had known and admired seem hideous and base; and her
one thought just then was of him. "He will still scorn me," she
thought, "but I must tell him I really did suffer." And heedless of
the fact that her hair was loose about her shoulders and her dress
wet with the dew of the grass, the girl ran swiftly up the lawn
towards the house, whispering again and again, "I must tell him!"
It was only a minute more before she was near the piazza, and could
see the people upon it as they stood in the lighted doorway. Mr.
Howard was one of them, and Helen would have rushed blindly up to
speak to him, had it not been that another thought came to her to
stop her.
"Suppose he should know of Arthur!" she muttered, clenching her
hands until the nails cut her flesh. "Oh, what would he think then?
And what could I tell him?" And she shrank back into the darkness,
like a black and guilty thing. She crept around the side of the
house and entered by another door, stealing into one of the darkened
parlors, where she flung herself down upon a sofa and lay trembling
before that new terror. When a few minutes had passed and she heard
a carriage outside, she sprang up wildly, with the thought that he
might be going. She had run half way to the door before she
recollected that the carriage must be for the lieutenant, and then
she stopped and stood still in the darkness, twisting her hands
together nervously and asking herself what she could do.
It occurred to her that she could look down the piazza from the
window of the room, and so she went swiftly to it. The officer was
just descending to the carriage, Mr. Roberts with him, and her aunt
and Mr. Howard standing at the top of the steps, the latter's figure
clearly outlined in the moonlight. Helen's heart was so full of
despair and yearning just then that she could have rushed out and
flung herself at his feet, had he been alone; but she felt a new
kind of shrinking from her aunt. She stood hesitating, therefore,
muttering to herself, "I must let him know about it somehow, and he
will tell me what to do. Oh, I MUST! And I must tell him now, before
it is too late!"
She stood by the window, panting and almost choking with her
emotion, kneading her hands one upon the other in frenzied
agitation; and then she heard Mr. Howard say to her aunt, "I shall
have to ask you to excuse me now, for I must not forget that I am an
invalid." And Helen clutched her burning temples, seeing him turn to
enter the house, and seeing that her chance was going. She glanced
around her, almost desperate, and then suddenly her heart gave a
great leap, for just beside her was something that had brought one
resource to her mind. She had seen the piano in the dim light, and
had thought suddenly of the song that Mr. Howard had mentioned.
"He will remember!" she thought swiftly, as she ran to the
instrument and sat down before it. With a strength born of her
desperation she mastered the quivering of her hands, and catching
her breath, began in a weak and trembling voice the melody of
Rubenstein:
"Thou art as a flower,
So pure and fair thou art;
I gaze on thee, and sorrow
Doth steal into my heart.
"I would lay my hands upon thee,
Upon thy snowy brow,
And pray that God might keep thee
So pure and fair as now."
Helen did not know how she was singing, she thought only of telling
her yearning and her pain; she was so choked with emotion that she
could scarcely utter a sound at all, and the song must have startled
those who heard it. It was laden with all the tears that had been
gathering in Helen's heart for days.
She did not finish the song; she was thinking, "Will he understand?"
She stopped suddenly as she saw a shadow upon the porch outside,
telling her that Mr Howard had come nearer. There was a minute or so
of breathless suspense and then, as the shadow began to draw slowly
backwards, Helen clenched her hands convulsively, whispering to
herself, "He will think it was only an accident! Oh, what can I do?"
There are some people all of whose emotions take the form of music;
there came into Helen's mind at that instant a melody that was the
very soul of her agitation and her longing--MacDowell's "To a Water
Lily;" the girl thought of what Mr. Howard had said about the
feeling that comes to suffering mortals at the sight of something
perfect and serene, and she began playing the little piece, very
softly, and with trembling hands.
It is quite wonderful music; to Helen with her heart full of grief
and despair, the chords that floated so cold and white and high were
almost too much to be borne. She played desperately on, however,
because she saw that Mr. Howard had stopped again, and she did not
believe that he could fail to understand that music.
So she continued until she came to the pleading song of the swan.
The music is written to a poem of Geibel's which tells of the
snow-white lily, and of the bird which wonders at its beauty;
afterwards, because there is nothing in all nature more cold and
unapproachable than a water-lily, and because one might sing to it
all day and never fancy that it heard him, the first melody rises
again, as keen and as high as ever, and one knows that his yearning
is in vain, and that there is nothing for him but his old despair.
When Helen came to that she could go no farther, for her
wretchedness had been heaping itself up, and her heart was bursting.
Her fingers gave way as she struck the keys, and she sank down and
hid her face in her arms, and broke into wild and passionate
sobbing. She was almost choking with her pent-up emotions, so shaken
that she was no longer conscious of what went on about her. She did
not hear Mr. Howard's voice, as he entered, and she did not even
hear the frightened exclamations of her aunt, until the latter had
flung her arms about her. Then she sprang up and tore herself loose
by main force, rushing upstairs and locking herself in her own room,
where she flung herself down upon the bed and wept until she could
weep no more, in the meantime not even hearing her aunt's voice from
the hallway, and altogether unconscious of the flight of time.
When she sat up and brushed away her tangled hair and gazed about
her, everything in the house was silent. She herself was exhausted,
but she rose, and after pacing up and down the room a few minutes,
seated herself at the writing desk, and in spite of her trembling
fingers, wrote a short note to Mr. Gerald Harrison; then with a deep
breath of relief, she rose, and going to the window knelt down in
front of it and gazed out.
The moon was high in the sky by that time, and the landscape about
her was flooded with its light. Everything was so calm and still
that the girl held her breath as she watched it; but suddenly she
gave a start, for she heard the sound of a violin again, so very
faint that she at first thought she was deluding herself. As she
listened, however, she heard it more plainly, and then she realized
in a flash that Mr. Howard must have heard her long-continued
sobbing, and that he was playing something for her. It was
Schumann's "Traumerei;" and as the girl knelt there her soul was
borne away upon the wings of that heavenly melody, and there welled
up in her heart a new and very different emotion from any that she
had ever known before; it was born, half of the music, and half of
the calm and the stillness of the night,--that wonderful peace which
may come to mortals either in victory or defeat, when they give up
their weakness and their fear, and become aware of the Infinite
Presence. When the melody had died away, and Helen rose, there was a
new light in her eyes, and a new beauty upon her countenance, and
she knew that her soul was right at last. _