“All this is not good, you know,” he said, as if communing with himself alone; “here is no room for the music to spread. All these,” he pointed to another ornament, “are so very, very bad. But some day, perhaps,” he added, with another smile, “you will hear me in a good place.”
Then he raised the violin to position once more.
“Choose what you will have,” he told her.
“Oh, forget that I am here,” she pleaded, speaking with a startled hushedness, as if no claim of conventional politeness might dare intrude itself upon that bewildering hour, “do not remember that I am here,—play as you would if you were quite alone.”
“That is very well,” he said, with a recurrence to his unseeing stare and dreamy tone, “because for me you really are not here. Nothing is here;—the violin is not here;—I am myself not here;—only the music exists. And if I talk,” he added slowly, “the inspiration may leave me.”
He went beside the piano and turned his back towards her, and then his prayer made itself real and his love found words....
She wept, and when he ceased to play he remained standing in silence as the very reverent rest for a short interval after the termination of holy service....
After a while he moved to where the case lay open on the floor and knelt again, laying his instrument carefully in its place and covering it with its little knit wool quilt. Then he locked the lid down, replaced the keys in his pocket, and, rising, seemed to return to earth.
“Can you understand now,” he asked, taking a chair by her side,—“can you understand now how it would be for me if I lost my power to create music?”
“Yes,” she said, very humbly.