"Yes. They always cast a sort of spell over me. But what made you think of them just now, Amaldi?"
"Because they cast a spell over me, too. In fact they haunted me till I put the story of that 'lovely, ill woman' into music. I'll play that for you."
Sophy could not restrain an impulse of curiosity.
"Tell me first ... will you—what you thought her story was?"
Amaldi kept his eyes on the keyboard and spoke rather low and rapidly.
"I fancied," he said, "that love had made her a prisoner in that castle. Then love had died. But love's ghost haunted the empty halls. I dreamed that her sickness was a sickness of the heart and soul ... the regret for love ... the fear of the ghost of love."
He began the opening movement as he finished speaking, a wild, monotonous, plangent cadence, like the rhythmic beat of surf on a rocky coast.
There is in the life of every artist, of every sensitive and lover, a supreme inspirational hour, wherein expression seems simple as breathing, and inevitable as birth and death. Amaldi, who was really great in music, played that night as never until then, as it was never given him to play again. Grief and love, these are the mighty angels that urge genius to its fullest utterance.
As the music poured over Sophy its splendid and tumultuous mystery, she felt like one chained upon a rock that the high tide overwhelms ... drowning, suffocating in that passionate welter of sound. The composition was in itself a masterpiece, but her knowledge of what it was intended to express lent it a terrible lucidity. That woman in her prison-castle, alone with the ghost of love—was she herself. It was her secret malady—her soul's mortal sickness that he was revealing in that dæmonic candour of superb harmony.
She put up one hand over her eyes, as she sat gathered in upon herself. She felt as if some barrier were too completely down between them, as if, in some well-nigh insufferable way he touched the open wound in her heart.