"If I thought you were not angry, sir," she said, "and would not take offence, I should like to ask you a question, and if you answer it according to my expectation, one other in connection with it."
"I shall not take offence," I said, "and I promise to exercise less reserve than you have done."
"I thank you, sir," she said, gazing steadily at me, so steadily, indeed, as to cause me to doubt whether, in a combat of will-power between us I should be the victor. "My questions are very simple. Do you ever hear the sounds of music, without being able to account for them?"
The question, simple as it was, startled, and for a moment almost unnerved me. What she suggested had occurred to me, at intervals perhaps of two or three months, and always when I was alone, and had worked myself into a state of exaltation. I do not exactly know at what period of my life this strange experience commenced, but my impression is that it came to me first in the night when I awoke from sleep, and was lying in the dark. It had occurred at those times within the last two or three years, and had it not been that it had already become somewhat familiar to me in hours of sunshine as well as in hours of darkness, I should probably have decided that it was but the refrain of a dream by which I was haunted. In daylight I frequently searched for the cause, but never with success. Lately I had given up the search, and had argued myself into a half belief that it was a delusion, produced by my dwelling upon the subject, and magnifying it into undue importance. For the most part the mysterious strains were faint, but very sweet and melodious; they seemed to come from afar off, and as I listened to them they gradually died away into a musical whisper, and grew fainter and more faint till they were lost altogether. But it had happened on two or three occasions, instead of their dying softly away and leaving me in a state of calm happiness, that the sweet strains were abruptly broken by what sounded now like a wail, now like a suppressed shriek. This violent and, to my senses, cruel termination of the otherwise melodious sounds set my blood boiling dangerously, and unreasonably infuriated me--so much so that the power I held over myself was ingulfed in a torrent of wild passion which I could not control. The melodious strains were always the same, and the air was strange to me. I had never heard it from a visible musician.
Not to a living soul had I ever spoken of the delusion, and that the subject should now be introduced into our conversation, and not introduced by me, could not but strike me as of singular portent. As Mrs. Fortress asked the question I heard once more the soft spiritual strains, and I involuntarily raised my right hand in the act of listening; I hear them at the present moment as I write, and I lay aside my pen a while, until they shall pass away. So! They are gone--but they will come again.
I answered Mrs. Fortress briefly, but not without agitation.
"Yes, I have heard such sounds as those you mention."
"You hear them now?"
"Yes, I hear them now. Do you?"
"My powers of imagination, sir, are less powerful than yours," she said evasively, and passed on to her second question. "It is not an English air, sir?"