I knew that he had been growing thin of late, but this was the first time I had realised how sunk were the hollows of his eyes and how haggard his features had become. It may have been some effect of moonlight which I do not well understand, but his fine-cut face, once so handsome, looked on this night worn and thin like that of an old man. He never for a moment ceased playing. It was always one same dreadful melody, the gagliarda of the “Areopagita,” and he repeated it time after time with the perseverance and apparent aimlessness of an automaton.
He did not see us, and we made no sign, standing afar off in silent horror at that nocturnal sight. Constance clutched me by the arm: she was so pale that I perceived it even in the moonlight. “Sophy,” she said, “he is sitting in the same place as on the first night when he told me how he loved me.” I could answer nothing, my voice was frozen in me. I could only stare at my brother’s poor withered face, realising then for the first time that he must be mad, and that it was the haunting of the gagliarda that had made him so.
We stood there I believe for half an hour without speech or motion, and all the time that sad figure at the end of the gallery continued its performance. Suddenly he stopped, and an expression of frantic despair came over his face as he laid down the violin and buried his head in his hands. I could bear it no longer. “Constance,” I said, “come back to bed. We can do nothing,” So we turned and crept away silently as we had come. Only as we crossed the landing Constance stopped, and looked back for a minute with a heartbroken yearning at the man she loved. He had taken his hands from his head, and she saw the profile of his face clear cut and hard in the white moonlight.
It was the last time her eyes ever looked upon it.
She made for a moment as if she would turn back and go to him, but her courage failed her, and we went on. Before we reached her room we heard in the distance, faintly but distinctly, the burden of the gagliarda.
XII
The next morning, my maid brought me a hurried note written in pencil by my brother. It contained only a few lines, saying that he found that his continued sojourn at Royston was not beneficial to his health, and had determined to return to Italy. If we wished to write, letters would reach him at the Villa de Angelis: his valet Parnham was to follow him thither with his baggage as soon as it could be got together. This was all; there was no word of adieu even to his wife.
We found that he had never gone to bed that night. But in the early morning he had himself saddled his horse Sentinel and ridden in to Derby, taking the early mail thence to London. His resolve to leave Royston had apparently been arrived at very suddenly, for so far as we could discover, he had carried no luggage of any kind. I could not help looking somewhat carefully round his room to see if he had taken the Stradivarius violin. No trace of it or even of its case was to be seen, though it was difficult to imagine how he could have carried it with him on horseback. There was, indeed, a locked travelling-trunk which Parnham was to bring with him later, and the instrument might, of course, have been in that; but I felt convinced that he had actually taken it with him in some way or other, and this proved afterwards to have been the case.
I shall draw a veil, my dear Edward, over the events which immediately followed your father’s departure. Even at this distance of time the memory is too inexpressibly bitter to allow me to do more than briefly allude to them.
A fortnight after John’s departure, we left Royston and removed to Worth, wishing to get some sea-air, and to enjoy the late summer of the south coast. Your mother seemed entirely to have recovered from her confinement, and to be enjoying as good health as could be reasonably expected under the circumstances of her husband’s indisposition. But suddenly one of those insidious maladies which are incidental to women in
