Corthell turned about.
“Oh, the grand, noble organ,” he murmured. “I envy you this of all your treasures. May I play for you? Something to compensate for the dreadful, despairing little tarn of the picture.”
“I should love to have you,” she told him.
He asked permission to lower the lights, and stepping outside the door an instant, pressed the buttons that extinguished all but a very few of them. After he had done this he came back to the organ and detached the self-playing “arrangement” without comment, and seated himself at the console.
Laura lay back in a long chair close at hand. The moment was propitious. The artist’s profile silhouetted itself against the shade of a light that burned at the side of the organ, and that gave light to the keyboard. And on this keyboard, full in the reflection, lay his long, slim hands. They were the only things that moved in the room, and the chords and bars of Mendelssohn’s “Consolation” seemed, as he played, to flow, not from the instrument, but, like some invisible ether, from his fingertips themselves.
“You hear,” he said to Laura, “the effect of questions and answer in this. The questions are passionate and tumultuous and varied, but the answer is always the same, always calm and soothing and dignified.”
She answered with a long breath, speaking just above a whisper:
“Oh, yes, yes, I understand.”
He finished and turned towards her a moment. “Possibly not a very high order of art,” he said; “a little too ‘easy,’ perhaps, like the Bougereau, but ‘Consolation’ should appeal very simply and directly, after all. Do you care for Beethoven?”
“I—I am afraid—” began Laura, but he had continued without waiting for her reply.
“You remember this? The ‘Appassionata,’ the F minor sonata—just the second movement.”
But when he had finished Laura begged him to continue.
“Please go on,” she said. “Play anything. You can’t tell how I love it.”
“Here is something I’ve always liked,” he answered, turning back to the keyboard. “It is the ‘Mephisto Walzer’ of Liszt. He has adapted it himself from his own orchestral score, very ingeniously. It is difficult to render on the organ, but I think you can get the idea of it.” As he spoke he began playing, his head very slightly moving to the rhythm of the piece. At the beginning of each new theme, and without interrupting his playing, he offered a word, of explanation:
“Very vivid and arabesque this, don’t you think? … And now this movement; isn’t it reckless and capricious, like a woman who hesitates and then takes the leap? Yet there’s a certain nobility there, a feeling for ideals. You see it, of course. … And all the while this undercurrent of the sensual, and that feline, eager sentiment … and here, I think, is the best part of it, the very essence of passion, the voluptuousness that is a veritable anguish. … These long, slow rhythms, tortured, languishing, really dying. It reminds one of Phèdre—‘Vénus tout entière,’ and the rest of it; and Wagner has the same. You find it again in Isolde’s motif continually.”
Laura was transfixed, all but transported. Here was something better than Gounod and Verdi, something above and beyond the obvious one, two, three, one, two, three of the opera scores as she knew them and played them. Music she understood with an intuitive quickness; and those prolonged chords of Liszt’s, heavy and clogged and cloyed with passion, reached some hitherto untouched string within her heart, and with resistless power twanged it so that the vibration of it shook her entire being, and left her quivering and breathless, the tears in her eyes, her hands clasped till the knuckles whitened.
She felt all at once as though a whole new world were opened to her. She stood on Pisgah. And she was ashamed and confused at her ignorance of those things which Corthell tactfully assumed that she knew as a matter of course. What wonderful pleasures she had ignored! How infinitely removed from her had been the real world of art and artists of which Corthell was a part! Ah, but she would make amends now. No more Verdi and Bougereau. She would get rid of the “Bathing Nymphs.” Never, never again would she play the “Anvil Chorus.” Corthell should select her pictures, and should play to her from Liszt and Beethoven that music which evoked all the turbulent emotion, all the impetuosity and fire and exaltation that she felt was hers.
She wondered at herself. Surely, surely there were two Laura Jadwins. One calm and even and steady, loving the quiet life, loving her home, finding a pleasure in the duties of the housewife. This was the Laura who liked plain, homely, matter-of-fact Mrs. Cressler, who adored her husband, who delighted in Mr. Howells’s novels, who abjured society and the formal conventions, who went to church every Sunday, and who was afraid of her own elevator.
But at moments such as this she knew that there was another Laura Jadwin—the Laura Jadwin who might have been a great actress, who had a “temperament,” who was impulsive. This was the Laura of the “grand manner,” who played the role of the great lady from room to room of her vast house, who read Meredith, who revelled in swift gallops through the park on jet-black, long-tailed horses, who affected black velvet, black jet, and black lace in her gowns, who was conscious and proud of her pale, stately beauty—the Laura Jadwin, in fine, who delighted to recline in a long chair in the dim, beautiful picture gallery and listen with half-shut eyes to the great golden organ thrilling to the passion of Beethoven and Liszt.
The last notes of the organ sank and faded into silence—a silence that left a sense of darkness like that which follows upon the flight of a falling star, and after a long moment Laura sat upright, adjusting the heavy masses of her black
