"Oh! he has no voice at all. It is his soul," she would reply. "He speaks through the violin. But he taught me all that I know. He said my voice was God's gift. He had a strange theory that the language of heaven and of the angels was music, and that he who loved it best on earth made his life and his thoughts most heavenly."
"Very," said Beatrice, with the utmost simplicity. "Oh, I loved him so dearly!"
But in this confession, so artlessly made, Brandon saw only a love that was filial or sisterly. "He was the first one," said Beatrice, "who showed me the true meaning of life. He exalted his art above all other arts, and always maintained that it was the purest and best thing which the world possessed. This consoled him for exile, poverty, and sorrow of many kinds."
Beatrice looked at Brandon with a singular smile. "Married! Langhetti married! Pardon me; but the idea of Langhetti in domestic life is so ridiculous."
"Why? The greatest musicians have married."
Beatrice looked up to the sky with a strange, serene smile. "Langhetti has no passion out of art," she said. "As an artist he is all fire, and vehemence, and enthusiasm. He is aware of all human passions, but only as an artist. He has only one love, and that is music. This is his idol. He seems to me himself like a song. But all the raptures which poets and novelists apply to lovers are felt by him in his music. He wants nothing while he has this. He thinks the musician's life the highest life. He says those to whom the revelations of God were committed were musicians. As David and Isaiah received inspiration to the strains of the harp, so, he says, have Bach and Mozart, Handel and Haydn, Beethoven and Mendelssohn. And where, indeed," she continued, in a musing tone, half soliloquizing, "where, indeed, can man rise so near heaven as when he listens to the inspired strains of these lofty souls?"
"Langhetti," said Brandon, in a low voice, "does not understand love, or he would not put music in its place."
"Yes," said Beatrice. "We spoke once about that. He has his own ideas, which he expressed to me."
"I will have to say them as he said them," said she. "For on this theme he had to express himself in music."
Brandon waited in rapt expectation. Beatrice began to sing:
