Had she, perhaps, chosen to play his music this evening because she wished to be at her best? Or was she merely being impelled by an overwhelming force within her? Perhaps it was something of both.
Was she wishing to humiliate these people who had received her so coldly? This little girl was only human: perhaps there was something of that feeling too. Who can tell? But she played as she had never played in London, or Paris, or Berlin, or New York, or Philadelphia.
At last she arrived at the Carneval, and those who heard her declared afterward that they had never listened to a more magnificent rendering; the tenderness was so restrained, the vigor was so refined. When the last notes of that spirited Marche des Davidsbundler contre les Philistins had died away, she glanced at Oswald Everard, who was standing near her, almost dazed.
"And now my favorite piece of all," she said; and she at once began the Second Novellette, the finest of the eight, but seldom played in public.
What can one say of the wild rush of the leading theme, and the pathetic longing of the Intermezzo?
"... The murmuring dying notes,
That fall as soft as snow on the sea;"
and
"The passionate strain that deeply going,
Refines the bosom it trembles through."
What can one say of those vague aspirations and finest thoughts which possess the very dullest among us when such music as that which the little girl had chosen catches us and keeps us, if only for a passing moment, but that moment of the rarest worth and loveliness in our unlovely lives?
What can one say of the highest music, except that, like death, it is the great leveler: it gathers us all to its tender keeping--and we rest.