It was near sundown when we reached the sea-side hotel. By the time we
were settled in our apartment, and I had my invalid undressed and in
bed, the soft, long summer twilight was nearly over. The maid, having
cleared away the litter of unpacking, was sitting in the anteroom, near
enough to be within call. The poor suffering body that held so lightly
the half-escaped spirit lay on the bed, exhausted with the journey, but
feeling already soothed by the pleasant sea-breeze which sighed gently
in at the open window.
Our rooms were on the ground-floor of a one-story cottage. A little
distance off was the large hotel, to which the cottage was attached by a
long arcade or covered gallery. We could hear fragments of the music
which the band was playing to the gay idlers who were wandering about
the balconies or through the hotel grounds; while laughs and little
shrieks, uttered by the children as their pursuing nurses caught them up
for bed, mingled not unpleasantly with the silvery hum arising from the
fashionable crowd and the festal clang of the instruments.
Sleep half hovered over, half winged off from the pillow. I fanned the
peacock plumes slowly to and fro in the delicious air, gazed with a
suppressed sigh on the darkening West, and repeated with a rhythmical
beat the beautiful Hebrew poem in Ecclesiasticus, which I had so often
recited through many long years by the side of that sick-bed, to soothe
the ear of the sufferer. I had just reached these lines,--
"A present remedy of all
Is the speeding coming of a cloud,
And a dew that meeteth it,
By the heat that cometh,
Shall overpower it.
"At His word the wind is still;
And with His thought
He appeaseth the deep;
And the Lord hath plumed islands therein,"--
when I noticed that sleep had settled firmly on the dark eyelids, and
the panting breath came through the poor clay in little soughs and
sighs, as if body and soul, tired with combat, had each sunk down for a
momentary rest on the weary battle-field of life.
The music of the band had ceased; the gay crowd had withdrawn into the
hotel to prepare for the entertainments of the evening, and there was a
lull of human sounds. Then arose the grand roar of the ocean, which with
the regular break of the billows on the beach beneath the cliff made the
theme where before it had played the bass.
I crept stealthily out of the bed-room, and, after exchanging my
travelling-gown for a cool white robe, stretched my tired body on the
lounge in the anteroom.
There I lay with cold finger-tips pressed against burning eyelids, and
icy palms holding with a firm grasp throbbing temples, under which
flowed the hot, seething tide of mortal anguish, anxiety, and aching
love. Some one touched me on the shoulder. I looked up. It was Max who
was standing beside me.
"There is a great musical treat for you," he said in a low voice. "The
A---- Society is here, and also part of B----'s Opera Troupe, with
Madame C----, and D----, the great tenor. The troupe and society united
are to give such a concert as rarely falls to the lot of mortals to
hear. I never saw a better programme. Look!"
I read over the concert-bill. First there was an overture; then several
scenes from "Lucia di Lammermoor,"--that great Shakspearian drama, whose
dread catastrophe of Death and Doom leaves in the memory of the hearer a
heavenly sorrow unmixed with earthly taint. It was the master-work of
two poets, Scott and Donizetti, who had conceived it at the best period
of their lives, when they were in all the vigor of manhood, and when
mind and fancy had become ripened by experience. It was formed in one
of those supreme instants, which come like "angels' visits" to artists,
when they were enabled, through a power more like inspiration than art,
to throw aside all outward influences, and fashion as deftly as Nature
could the sad life of the Master of Ravenswood and his "sweet spirit's
mate."
The Lucia scenes were grouped together and occupied the main part of the
programme. They were those that told the story of the brief passion,
from the sweet birth of love up to the solemn hour when both lovers
passed away to that resting-place "where nothing could touch them
further."
My eyes lingered over the titles of the scenes, while my memory swiftly
recalled their characteristics:--the First Duet between Lucia and
Edgardo, a passionate burst of youthful love, as delicious as the tender
dialogues between Romeo and his Juliet;--the Sextette, that masterly
pyramidal piece of vocal harmony, in which the voices group around those
of the two lovers, and all mount up glowingly like a flame on a
sacrificial altar;--the heart-rending passage where Lucia's spirit,
frantic through woe, rises supreme over native timidity and
irresolution, and, with one fierce burst of love and grief, which
startles alike tyrant and friend, soars aloft in the terrible, but grand
realm of madness;--and the Finale, where the dying Edgardo sighs out
that delicious air which has been well styled, "a melody of Plato sung
by a Christian soul."
The programme closed fitly with Schumann's Quintette in E flat Major.
This Quintette is one of remarkable power and beauty. It is for 'rano,
viola, first and second violin, and 'cello. It is divided into four
movements: _Allegro brillante_; _In moda d'una Marcia_; _Scherzo_; and
_Allegro ma non troppo_.
As I handed the bill back to Max, he whispered to my maid, who left the
room an instant, and returned with a mantle on her arm.
"Come," he said, in a decided tone, "you must go, and quickly, too, for
they are already playing the overture. You can surely trust Ernestine
with the watching, as you will be such a short distance off; my
serving-man shall wait in the arcade, and come for you, if you are
needed."
Then, raising me with kind force from the lounge, he wrapped the mantle
around me. As we passed out, we stood for an instant at the
bed-room-door, looking at the invalid. The breath still came in short
pants, but the truce was being kept: sleep had come in between as a
transient mediator.
I noticed in the dim light the attenuated frame, the shrunken features,
the pinched nostrils, the very shadowy outlining of death. With choking
throat and swelling breast I looked at Max, my eyes saying what my voice
could not,--
"I cannot go."
Without a word of reply, he lifted me out of the apartment, and in a few
moments we were sitting in a dim corner of the concert-room, listening
to the charming First Duet.
The scenes followed one another rapidly, and displayed even more
powerfully than I had ever noticed before the one pervading theme. Sense
and imagination became possessed with it; at each succeeding passage the
interest increased continuously, until at the end the passion mounted up
as on mighty wings and carried my sad heart aloft and beyond "the
ordinary conditions of humanity."
The prima donna, Madame C----, and Signor D----, the tenor, had a sad
story of scandal floating about them; it was on every one's lips. Madame
C---- was no longer in her first youth, but she was still very
beautiful, more attractive than she had been in her younger days,--so
those said who had seen and heard her years before.
Her young womanhood had been devoted to patient, honest study, which was
rewarded with success, and calm, passionless prosperity. She had married
brilliantly, and left the stage, but after an absence of many years had
returned to it to aid her husband in some reverse of fortune. Her
married life had been tranquilly happy, for she had loved with all the
sweet serenity of a cold, unexacting nature.
But now it was whispered that this beautiful, pure woman, who had
resisted--indeed, like another Una, had never felt--the temptations
which had environed her on the stage, and in the courtly circle to which
she had been raised by her husband's rank, was being strangely
influenced by a gifted, handsome tenor singer, with whom she had been
associated since her return to her professional life.
This person was about her husband's age, a year or two her senior, and
unmarried. The infatuation, it was said, existed on both sides, and the
two lovers were so blinded by their strange passion as to seem
unconscious of any other sight or presence. The husband, report added,
behaved with remarkable prudence and good breeding; indeed, some doubted
if he noticed the affair,--for he treated not only his wife, but the
reputed lover, with familiar and kind friendliness.
The recollection of this scandal flitted over my memory as I listened to
the First Duet. Madame C---- was a blonde; she had rich, deep violet
eyes, and a lovely skin: her hair, too, was a waving mass of the poet's
and painter's golden hue. She was about middle height, and had a full,
well-developed person.
"When I saw her in Paris and Vienna, twenty years ago," whispered Max,
"she was too pale and slender, and the expression of those brilliant
eyes was as cold and still as glacier depths."
Not so now, I thought,--for they fairly blazed with a passionate fire,
as the music welled up on her beautiful quivering lips; indeed, the
melody appeared to come from them, as much as from her mouth, and I
seemed to be listening with my looks as well as my hearing. She was not
well, evidently,--for there was a bright red, feverish spot on either
cheek, and her movements were feeble and trembling; but her voice was
full of the deepest pathos.
"In her best days she never sang so well," said Max, as the room rang
with applause at the termination of the duo, "Time may have taken away a
little fulness from her lower notes; but the touching tenderness which
envelops them, as a purple mist hanging over a forest in autumn, fully
compensates for the loss of youthful vigor."
Her voice was, indeed, wonderful,--not simply clear and flexible, but
dazzling and glancing, like the lightning that plays around the horizon
on a hot midsummer's night; and her execution was as if the Cherub
All-Knowledge and the Seraph All-Love had united their divine powers in
one human form.
In the Sextette, which followed, the tenor showed to great advantage.
His voice, though no longer young, was beautifully managed; it had an
exquisite _timbre_, and on this night there was added to it a rare
expression and character.
When he asked the poor trembling Lucia if the signature to the marriage
contract was hers, there was a concentrated rage in his singing that was
fearful; and Madame C---- almost cowered to the floor, as he held her
firmly by the wrist,--for the scenes were sung in costume and with
action,--and demanded,--
"A me rispondi. Son tue cifre? Rispondi!"
Her affirmative was like the silvery wail of a fallen angel. Then
followed the terrible imprecation passage. He darted out the
"Maledetto sia l'istante!"
with such startling fury that the notes and words seemed to be forked,
stinging, serpent tongues.
The _Stretta_ ensued, and the music-tide flowed so high and full that
the fashionable audience forgot all artificial conventionalities, and
yielded themselves freely to the ennobling emotions of human sympathy.
Above the whole sublime assemblage of sounds wailed out that fearful
note of the fallen cherub; and the fainting of Lucia, at the close of
the Sextette, I felt sure was not a feigned one.
As the curtain fell over the temporary stage, several gentlemen hurried
out to make inquiries about Madame C----, for there seemed to be an
opinion similar to mine pervading the room. The curtain rose, and it was
announced that she was too ill to sing again; but the murmur of regret
was silenced almost immediately by the appearance of the chorus with
Signor D----, the tenor.
They began the Finale. Signor D----looked haggard and wan, but very
stern, and there was more of wrath than repentance in his singing. Was
it fancy or reality? The heart-rending
"O bell' alma innamorata!"
seemed to be accompanied by distant, half-veiled sobs. No one else
appeared to notice them, and I half doubted their reality.
The Finale ended; and for a few moments the gay crowd buzzed, and some
stood up and looked about at their neighbors. The interval was short,
however,--for the Quintette performers came upon the stage, and took
their places.
I leaned back and covered my face with my hand. My memory was still
ringing with echoes of the forlorn cry of wrecked love, mingled with the
imaginary sobs I had just heard; therefore I hardly listened to the
majestic opening of full, harmonious chords, which lead grandly into a
sort of cantabile movement.
The curious modulations which followed aroused me, and I soon busied
myself in tracing the changes from major to minor, and from one minor
key to another, as sorrows chase each other in life. Just at this part
of the composition occurs the passage which sounds like a weird, ghostly
call or summons: when I heard it, my fancy began working, and, like
Heine, I saw spectres in the music sounds.
The air seemed to have grown suddenly "nipping and eager." I
unconsciously drew my mantle around my shoulders, as a shiver ran over
me, such as nurses tell us in childhood is caused by some one walking
over our graves. I fancied I saw before me the ghost scene in "Hamlet."
There was the castle platform,--the gloomy battlements,--the sound of
distant wassail; and dimly defined by the vague light of my fancy, stood
the sad young Danish prince, shivering in the "shrewd, biting"
night-air, tortured with those apprehensions and sickening doubts
"That cloud the mind and fire the brain,"
but talking with a feigned and courtly indifference to his dear friend,
"the profound scholar and perfect gentleman," Horatio; and in the gloom
around them seemed to be arising the questionable shape which was
"So horridly to shake his disposition."
Strangely the music displayed its fine forms, mingling most curiously
with, while it created, my fancied pictures,--and though my senses
followed the changing visions, which flitted like a phantasmagoria
before my eyes, my mind traced clearly the music train; but when the
diminished seventh resolved gracefully into the melody which is taken
alternately by 'cello and viola,--the close of the first movement,--my
vision faded gradually away.
There was a short pause, but the fine artists who were executing the
Quintette did not by any undignified movement break the illusion which
the music had created; although a violin-string needed raising, it was
done with quiet and skilful dexterity, and they proceeded to the second
movement.
Smoothly and mournfully the Funeral March opened. The solemn melody
which glides softly through it is totally unlike the restless trampings
of Fate heard in other great compositions of the kind; yet Fate is
unmistakably there, quiet, but relentless, like
"the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on."
The _Scherzo_, with its beautiful octave run for the piano and delicious
change of harmony in the next measure,--the weird melody sketched out by
the first violin, and then yielded up to the piano,--and the strange,
but truly inspired, modulations which follow,--lapped my spirit in a
sweet bewilderment. I forgot all the before and after of that "sad and
incapable story" of human life and love which my fancy had been weaving
from the coarse, vulgar threads of common rumor; and even the pictures
vanished which had been evoked of the young prince,
"In his blown youth blasted with ecstasy."
I ceased following the modulations, interesting as they were; for often
music fills the thoughts so full that the ear forgets to listen to the
sweet harmonies.
But I was again aroused by the fine suspension and sequence which open
the last movement of the Quintette,--the _Allegro ma non troppo_. The
fugued passage, the reiteration of the opening theme, and the sad close
were all as tragic as the last scene in "Hamlet," the
"quarry that cries on, Havoc!"--
but it was also as graceful and touching as the words of the dying
prince to his friend,--
"Horatio, I am dead:
Thou liv'st. Report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied."
A thousand rumors flitted about the room as the concert broke up. Madame
C---- was so ill, they feared she was dying; and, strange to say, the
tenor, on leaving the platform after the Lucia finale, had been seized
with violent cramps and vomitings, which could not be checked, and he
also was lying in a very critical state. There were dark hints and many
improbable imaginings.
"All was not well, they deemed;
Some knew perchance,
And some besides were too discreetly wise
To more than hint their knowledge in surmise."
About an hour after midnight I was lying on the lounge in the anteroom
of the cottage. The faithful maid had taken my place by the
sick-bed,--for my invalid was still sleeping. It was a long, quiet
sleep; and so low and peaceful had grown those suffering, panting
breaths, that they almost startled me into a hope of happier days. Could
health, long absent, be returning? A state of continuous illness, if
free from acute pain, would be a relief.
These half-formed hopes made me restless, and, instead of taking the
physical repose I needed, I rose from the lounge, and walked out on the
deserted lawn in front of the cottage. The moon was at the full, and
shone brighter than day's twilight. The night was warm, but not
oppressive,--for there was a gentle air blowing, filled with the
invigorating briny odor of the ocean; yet I felt choked and stifled.
"Just for a breath from the beach," I said to myself, as I descended the
steps leading down from the cliff.
On reaching the sands, instead of being alone, as I had hoped, I found
two persons already there. I drew back quickly, intending to return; but
they were passing too swiftly to notice me. As they went by, the bright
full moon gleamed over their pale, wan faces, and I recognized in them
Madame C----and the tenor!
They were talking earnestly, in low, rapid Italian. She leaned on his
arm,--indeed, they seemed to be sustaining each other, for both appeared
feeble and faint; but, tottering as they were, they sped rapidly by, and
so near to me that the corner of Madame C----'s mantle flapped in my
face, and left a strange subtile perfume behind it.
But what struck me most was the expression of their faces,--such wild,
sad, longing, entreating love! As they disappeared around a corner of
the cliff which jutted out, a dreadful suspicion seized me. Could they
be seeking self-destruction? Were they going to bury their unhallowed
love, with its shame and sorrow, in one wildering embrace beneath those
surging ocean-waves?
As one in a dream, I moved along the beach, hardly knowing whither I
went. Mechanically I ascended the flight of steps which led to the part
of the cliff directly opposite the hotel entrance. As I walked up the
lawn, I noticed a great commotion in the house. There were lights
flitting about, people running up and down stairs, and many persons
talking confusedly on the gallery and in the hall.
"What is the matter?" I asked of a waiter who was passing near me,
looking frightened and bewildered.
He stopped, and answered with all the keen eagerness of an untrained
person, to whom the communicating of a startling story to an uninformed
superior is a perfect godsend.
"Very strange doings, Ma'am,--very strange!"
"Aha!" I thought; "they have discovered the absence or flight of those
unhappy creatures."
"Very strange doings!" he repeated. "The foreign lady who sang to-night,
and the gentleman too, is both dead."
"Dead!" I exclaimed. "Why, you are mistaken. I saw them just this
instant on the sands below the cliff."
The man looked at me as if he thought me crazy.
"I mean the singers, Ma'am,--them as sang at the concert to-night. They
was both taken nigh about the same time, was handled just alike, and
died here a little while ago, a'most at once, as you might say. Folks is
talking hard about the husband of the Madame."
Then he added, in a lower tone, confidentially, "They do say he poisoned
'em; for, you see, he it was that dressed the lobster salad at dinner,
and made 'em both eat hearty of it, though they were unwilling; and now
they have him over in the office there, in custody."
"But, my good man," I said, as soon as I could get my breath, "I assure
you they are not dead."
"Well, Ma'am, if you don't believe my words, you can see 'em with your
own eyes, if you choose"; and he led the way into the hall of the hotel.
I followed him. We entered a side room,--a sort of reception
_salon_,--where the two poor creatures were, indeed lying extended on
sofas. Several startled persons were gazing at them, but the larger
portion of the crowd were drawn off to the other side of the hotel,
where the unhappy, stunned husband was listening to the fearful charges
of murder,--murder of his wife and his friend!
I stepped up to the dead bodies,--one after the other. Their dresses had
not even been changed. The stage finery looked very pitiful. A muslin
mantle had been thrown over Madame C----'s bare shoulders and beautiful
bosom; from it arose the same curious perfume I had noticed on the
beach. It was as if that delicate, rare smell had been kept in a box of
some kind of odoriferous resinous wood.
I touched their cold brows, their icy fingers,--noticed the poor
features, drawn by acute suffering,--and strange as it was, I could see
on both faces, as if behind a gauzy film, the same sad, wild, longing
look of love I had observed on the countenances of those two shadowy
beings I had met on the sands.
I left the hotel, and walked to the cottage, with my mind in a sad,
bewildered state. I entered the open door, and went to the sick-room.
There stood Max and Ernestine, and she was weeping.
"It is all over!" he said; "and I am glad she was not here."
I advanced hurriedly forward, pushed them aside, and stood by the bed.
Yes, that long, quiet sleep had, indeed, been a forerunner of life,--the
true life! All was truly over,--the long years of suffering, the blessed
years of loving care, the combat and the struggle; and on the
battle-field rested the dread shadows of Night and Death!
And I? I sank on the poor body-shell with one low, long wail, and Nature
kindly extended over me her blessed veil of forgetfulness.