That night a storm came up from the sea, and the house rattled and
shook in the clutch of a November gale. The trees that looked like
palms swayed and bent before the wind, and the many-colored leaves in
the garden fled like refugees before an attack, and covered the ground
with their quivering bodies.
We were gathered in the music-room, the cosy warmth from a fire of logs
making pleasant contrast to the snarling wind outside. The evening had
been a memorable one. The woman whose beauty was so delicate had
charmed us with her voice, her playing; charmed us without effort or
knowing how.
From a lounge, Norman's vivacity, which always had in it the quality of
sympathy, illuminated everything that happened. When she sang a little
extract of the eighteenth century, "_Bergère Légère_," it was he
who knew that it had been a favorite of Marie Antoinette's. When she
played the love theme which Puccini gives the strings in the first act
of _Madame Butterfly_, it was Norman who, by a dozen deftly chosen
words, created the atmosphere of Japan and brought before us the cruel
tenderness of Pinkerton's love for Cho Cho San. After Siegfried had
played MacDowell's conception of "Mid-ocean," Norman recalled in a
moment the genius of America's greatest composer, the genius that had
finally crossed the thin barrier to insanity. From that we talked of
the sea, while the wind howled outside, and I spoke of the many moods
of blue that colored it in a single day, and, without giving the effect
of quotation or of monologue, he brought his artistry into play with
three lines of Keats's sonnet "Blue."
Whenever any of us spoke, his sensitive rhythmic intellectuality seemed
to hover about us, acknowledging thought where it struggled to the
surface, adding some subtle touch of color when our efforts seemed too
drab. Under its influence we talked our best, we thought our best, we
were our best.
At nine o'clock Siegfried rose to go to bed, and advanced to shake
hands with me.
"Well," I said, "and do you still intend to be a conductor?"
He smiled a little self-consciously.
"There is much to learn," he said, "and--I do not want to leave my
home."
Norman lit a cigarette--his old mannerism when emotions were taut.
"Parents," he said, "and quasi-parents like us, march straight towards
loneliness. Our greatest concern is to have our children ready to leave
us as soon as they hear the call of the world, knowing that such a
moment will be the proudest and the saddest of our lives."
"Good-night," said Siegfried to me. "Goodnight, Uncle Bubbles." He
turned wistfully to Mrs. Norman, who smiled and linked her arm in his.
"Won't you come along?" she said to me. "Siegfried is very proud of his
room, and would like you to see it." It was her way of hiding her
knowledge that the little chap was frightened by the storm. So we saw
him safely in bed, and admired his books, and wished him pleasant
dreams. We had just left his room and were about to descend the stairs,
when we paused as the sound of rain beating against the house came to
our ears. We hurried about for a few moments seeing that all windows
were closed, and were going to rejoin Norman, when I stopped her.
"Mrs. Norman," I said haltingly, "it is never easy for an Englishman to
express the emotion he feels, but may I tell you how touched I am by
your devotion to your husband? Without you, his life would
be--unbearable."
She did not smile or protest, but her eyes looked straight into mine.
"To live day by day," she said slowly, her fingers playing with a
necklace that hung about her full white throat, "near a soul like
Basil's, to commune with a brain like his ... to feel the inspiration
of his nature that is so in tune with the beauty of the world, is a
happiness few women can experience. If it were not too cruel, I could
feel thankful for his wound that has given him so completely to me."
I stood by her on the creaking stairs as the rain swept in torrents
against the house, and her murmuring tones mingled with the sounds of
the storm.
"Perhaps you cannot understand," she said gently, "but loving Basil as
I do, and having him dependent on me, is a selfish happiness that only
a woman could really know."
And out of the night a truth came to me that, though it never, never
could be mine, the most precious thing in this world is a woman's
heart.