“Don’t,” she pleaded uncomfortably; “never mind all that. Let it all go.”
“But I would ask your pardon. J’étais tout-à-fait fou!”
“If I have anything to forgive it shall be forgiven you when you play. Do so now, please. Oh, you have no idea how impatient I am to hear you.”
He stared through her and beyond her for several seconds, and then came back to himself with a start.
“Then I do play,” he exclaimed, and went to where he had placed the case of rosewood, and lifting it from the small table, set it on the floor and knelt before it, as a priest at some holy shrine. She leaned her head against the chair back and watched him, her eyes searching each detail of his appearance without her spirit being cognizant of the hunger which led to the seeking, of the soul-cry which strove to fortify itself against the inevitable that each hour was bringing nearer.
He felt in his pocket for his key-ring, chose from the many one particular key, inserted it, turned it, left it sticking in the hole, and then, with a curious breathless tightening of the lips, he raised the lid, put aside the knit wool shield of white and violet, and with the tender care which a mother bestows upon a very tiny baby lifted the violin from its resting-place. As he did so his eye travelled with a sudden keen anxiety over its every detail, as if the possibility of harm was ever present, and as he held it to his ear and snapped the strings one after another, she beheld with something akin to awe the dawning of another nature upon his face, of another light within his eyes, the strange light of that abnormal, unworldly gift which God gave man and which we have elected to call by the name of genius. As he rested there before her, tightening one cord, trying another, listening to a third, she realized—with a sorrowful sense of her own remoteness at the minute—that this man was some one who, in spite of all their hours of intercourse, she had never met before.
He loosened the bow from its buttons and rose slowly to his feet. His eyes sought hers, and he said dreamily:
“What shall I play?” even while his fingers were forming dumb notes, and the uplifted bow quivered in the air as if impatient.
“Oh,” she said, acutely conscious of her inferiority,—of the ten thousand leagues of difference between his grandeur and her commonplace,—“play what you will.”
He hardly seemed to hear, his eyes roved over the little salon as if its walls were gone, and he beheld a horizon illimitless. He just slightly knit his brows and then he bowed his head above the instrument and said briefly: