Who could see that in her heart she was crying—crying bitterly—for the poetry and the beauty that were lost out of her life!
There was an interval of silence, during which she sat quite still, looking at the great organ-pipes, and seeing nothing; and then there grew out of the hush the delicious rhythm of the "Faust" waltz, beating like a soft pulse through the summer air.
What spell is there in the "Faust" waltz, or in any waltz, for one whose heart is capable of receiving and responding to the inspired message of Mozart?
How can we tell? But this we know, that those whose hearts are warm and young—who understand how to love and how to dance, and have done the two things at the self-same moment—have seldom any more power than they have honest inclination to resist the subtle wiles of this simple measure.
There is a vox humana stop out in whatever organ plays it, magnetic to the human passions that memory and imagination keep. Rachel did not ask why it was, but she felt, as soon as the air began to unwind itself from a confusion of sweet sounds, and she heard the slow time throbbing softly in her ears, that she did not know how to bear it.
It filled her soul with a great wave of suffocating emotion—it ran like an electric current over all her sensitive nerves—it contracted her white throat with a choking pain that was like incipient hysteria—it set abnormal pulses bounding in her brain. She did not think of Adelonga, and the hour when she and her true love had their first and last waltz together.
No definite picture of the past arose at the magician's bidding, or if it did, she shut her eyes to it. But she could not help the forlorn rapture of longing for that nameless something that was the most precious of her woman's rights, which fate and fraud had taken from her, when the notes of this dreamy waltz measure, so charged with passionate and poetic associations, pulsed from the heart of the organ into her warm young blood.
"Oh, my love! my love!"—that was the burden of the music which was not set to words.
And she turned her face a little, and saw Roden Dalrymple standing in the doorway. He had come in quietly, and was waiting, with his hat in his hand, apparently for a pause in the performance, which he did not wish to interrupt, but really until he could find where some one whom he was looking for was sitting.
It was the first time she had seen him since that October night when they had parted in the moonlight under the walls of the house that was now her home; but she had been, unknown to herself, expecting him, and there was no shock in her surprise.