“Come, Babette,” he said, “and we will hunt for the sou. Let us hope it has not slipped through the hole in my pocket. I had been playing, child—playing with the shadows of some little dolls, long, long dead everyone of them, and my company, after all, turns out to be one lonely old man, with a tattered coat and a single pair of trousers, which Madame Fichet has to patch while their owner lies abed.”
Paganini
It was in Florence that Baronte at last ran to earth that terrific secret which for ten long months had eluded and maddened him. Here, in the summer of 1819, was present once again that fiend incarnate of melody, that monster Paganini—and more astounding, more inexplicable than ever. He had taken the city captive as utterly as any Marmaldo; he drew its people, extravagantly laughing and sobbing, in the wake of his devil’s music. And Florence was Baronte’s native town, and it was here, he had felt, that his quest must end, though even at the gates of Death. And, behold! Fate, even in the shadow of his reason’s overthrow, had vouchsafed him at length and at least an approximate solution of the mystery.
What mystery, then, and what secret? Why those that touched upon the source of the Maestro’s superhuman powers—nothing more nor less. But, for whatever was their ethical value, they had haunted Baronte’s soul for full ten months—ever since that night, in fact, when he had first heard Paganini play in the Scala Theatre at Milan. And from that night onwards he had followed his evil genius, as he regarded the man, from town to town, feeding yet hungering, drinking yet thirsting, loathing and lusting at once.
Baronte was himself, though an amateur, a rare violinist. He knew as well as most the extreme capacities of the instrument, and the sympathies possible to be created between its sensitive mechanism and the interpretative soul of its player. But here was something which as much surpassed the conceivable limits of human execution as it surpassed mortal understanding in its expression of superhuman passions and emotions. It was not instrumentation to which one listened, but temptation—melodious frenzy, an ecstatic lure to things forbid, rendered not by, but through a human medium. The great Master, it was very certain, was in league with the devil to betray mankind through the most voluptuous of its senses, and in no other way could the miracle be explained. Baronte felt it in every nerve of his responsible being, and sought nothing but a confirmation of his suspicions to dare a martyr’s fate. Young, emotional, fanatic, with haggard face and brilliant eyes, he retained all of that religious fervour which had once kept him hesitating on the threshold of the Church, and which still yielded to nothing but his passion for music.
And at last he stood on the brink, as he believed, of the great discovery. The dread secret lay to be exhumed, he had convinced himself, from the recesses of the little black morocco handbag which the dark Master perpetually carried about with him.
It might contain some demoniac philtre; it might conceal some vessel, like the Fisherman’s flask, loaded with the concentrated essence of all wickedness. It was certain that the bag never left its possessor’s custody day or night; that he bore it with him on his rare excursions abroad; that he hugged it to his pillow throughout the hours of darkness. Baronte knew all this from his confidant and sympathiser young Varano, who had hired, at his instance, a room adjoining the Maestro’s, in the hotel occupied by the latter, and who had been able to keep a pretty incessant watch, through an unsuspected crack in the party panelling, on his tremendous neighbour. It was this friend who had described to him the sympathy apparent between Paganini and his hidden fetish, who had whispered to him awfully of day-long prostrations on a couch, broken only by spasmodic writhings, by fiendish ejaculations and brief explosions of laughter, or by wild apostrophisings of the thing, held up in worshipping hands before two gloating eyes. It contained, without doubt, the key to the mystery—only how to find an opportunity to examine it? That was as yet as stultifying a problem as itself. And in the meantime the Maestro’s engagement was drawing to a close.
One night before the end Baronte sat in the theatre. It was packed from floor to ceiling, and his restless vision hunted, as always, among the massed audience for some confirmation of a shadowy legend. It related, this legend, of a beautiful weeping girl, and of a man, her companion, bleak, sardonic, with whom the player would be seen to exchange a smile of ghastly import, and of the sudden inexplicable disappearance of the two. He believed the story—and he did not believe it; as he believed and disbelieved that other tale of the shape dimly adumbrated behind the Master’s figure and directing its bowing. The whispers of libertinism and nameless cruelties which pursued the great performer’s footsteps affected him no more, either way, than these others. It was sufficient, in his conception of evil, to credit the fiend with a capacity for achieving without betraying himself, of directing the touch on the instrument, of being the instrument itself, the imagined Guanerius, if he chose.
And then instant silence, a shock, a thrill, and Paganini stood before the expectant house.
Music! He appeared the antithesis of every grace, of every emotion associated with its production—an impossible grotesque, like a clown got up as a fiddle and proposing to play upon himself. There he stood in the glare of the footlights, as ungainly an anomaly as the mind could conceive. He was tall, he was supernaturally gaunt and angular; his long kit-shaped face, pallid as Death’s own, seemed pierced with two blackened sockets for eyes; his hair, lank and raven, straggled upon his shoulders. He was dressed in a tight-buttoned black swallow-tail and black trousers, loose for the period and awkwardly short at the ankles. As the storm of greeting subsided and the orchestra crashed out its symphony, he settled himself upon his right hip, like a badly articulated skeleton, and, raising bow and fiddle, dived his long chin into the latter, and, with a grinning snarl upon his face, poised the former, like a veritable fiend of extravaganza.