She let her knitting drop on the table, and asked him to play her a certain passage of the “Africaine.” She listened, with her head resting in her hand; the music penetrated her soul with the sweetness of mystic voices calling to her; it seemed to her as if, borne along by them, she was leaving behind her everything terrestrial, every agitation, and as if she were transported to a distant shore, before her the melancholy sea, when, a spirit freed from the miseries of the flesh, she floated on the air, bathed in light, passing over the waves like a breeze.
Her melancholy attitude irritated Jorge.
“Sebastião, will you do me the favor to play a fandango,—‘Blue-Beard,’ ‘Pirolite,’ or the devil. Else, if you insist on having sadness, I will give you the thing in earnest.” And he began to sing the Dies Irœ.
Luiza laughed.
“What folly! Cannot one be sad?” she said.
“One can,” returned Jorge; “but if one is sad, one should be so consistently.” And he sang in lugubrious accents the Bemdito.
“The neighbors will say we are crazy, Jorge,” she said.
“And so we are,” he answered, going into his study and shutting the door behind him.
Sebastião played a few bars, and turning to Luiza, said in a low voice,—
“But what notions are these? Why this sadness?”