CHAPTER VII.
GOOD-BYE.
ON that same day, at a little after four o'clock in the afternoon, Mrs. Kingston might have been seen—she was seen, in fact—going into the Town Hall by herself, having left her carriage in the street below. She mounted the stone steps lightly, with the train of her dress held up in her hand, looking exquisitely fresh and dainty in the dusty sultriness that everywhere prevailed; and she glided through the vestibule as if time were precious, paid her sixpence, and entered the hall, where she took a solitary seat under the shadow of the gallery at the lower end.
The organist was interpreting Mozart to some hundreds of receptive citizens, making the great organ sing like a choir of angels in the "Gloria" of the Twelfth Mass, "et in terra pax, pax, pax hominibus; bonæ, bonæ voluntatis." All the spacious place was flooded with the impassioned harmonies of that inspired theme.
Rachel was not what is popularly called musical, but in the dulness of her empty life her soul slacked its thirst in this way, as a soul of a lower order, which had been denied its natural nourishment, might have found comfort in the emotional stimulus of champagne or brandy.
She could not play well herself, but she was like a fine instrument to be played upon; not one sweet phrase of melody passed from her listening ear to her sensitive heart without wakening an echo that had the very divine afflatus in it in response. And in this resonance of enthusiasms and aspirations, dumb and suffocated in the bondage of her artificial life—in the sense of breathing spiritual air, and freedom, though with a passion of enjoyment that filled her with far more pain than peace—she found the one true luxury of her much-envied lot.
Long ago—oh, so long ago!—the music of a violin had led her into enchantment, as the Pied Piper of Hamelin led away the children. To-day the music of the Town Hall organ, speaking now in Mozart's dramatic choruses, and again in Baptiste's Andante in G, was a similar but a sadder incantation.
She sat solitary in her far-away chair, with her feet on the rung of the one in front of her, her hands, gloved to perfection, folded in her lap, her delicate, neat dress daintily adjusted, much as she might have sat in the pew at church, a model of matronly grace and propriety.
But who could tell, from the expression of her quiet pose and her dreamy eyes, what ineffable raptures and fancies, what infinite longings and yearnings—nameless, even to her own consciousness, but all reminiscent of the blessed past—soared out of captivity on the wings of those alluring harmonies!