“Can you play like that, and never feel it?”
“It’s the only time I ever feel, the only time I ever live.”
“Better than emptiness. Now I have lost the only thing I love. All week it lies quite mute, a thing of idleness, bursting with life. And when I take it up it utters so long a wail, so sad a sigh, that my heart returns to it, and we weep together till pain becomes an ecstasy and sadness joy.”
“No different from the rest. A life of grey to-morrows that come and go in endless twilight.”
“No. To-morrow brings a calm existence. To-night I fill my heart with tears.”
“Oh! I loved not wisely, but too well, this little fiddle.”
For her the dimness of the room had vanished, its fantasies and ghostly shadows thrown off with one great effort. She grasped the other’s arms in both her hands, and stared at her, taller by her sudden force and fierceness. The other looked at her, and then recoiled.
“Give it up! The only joy of life—the only life beyond a dull existence! Why, I should die—the very thought would kill me.”
But Mariana only looked at her, and shook her head.
“Rosalie, can I play? Can you make anything out of it?”
“I never heard such music; but it is wrong—it’s the wrong sort.”
Then Mariana came close up to her, just as before she had drawn back, and, with a sudden weakness, drooped her head upon the other’s shoulder, clasping her hands about her waist.
“Don’t say that!” she cried, her voice little above a whisper. “I cannot bear it. I can do nothing more. There is no time. Once or twice I asked the Master would he listen, and he did. But he said there was no tune in what I played, no harmony of any sort—that all was a delusion, a fancy of my brain.”
“But that was not the truth.” And Rosalie held her very tight, that woman who in the morning had seemed so strong to her. “And he only said it because he knew you would be fool enough to take it all to heart.”
“Hush! hush! It’s treason to talk like that.”
“Nothing’s treason but failure. You follow my advice, and give up the fiddle. Then after a while you’ll get it back again in such a way that even Mr. Barringcourt will not be able to say there’s no tune in it.”
Mariana looked at her, with surprise and misunderstanding on every feature.