“Oh, I am so glad! I knew you would, and it will be grand, I am sure, for to-morrow is Christmas!”
Her face was radiant with pleasure; but so extreme had been her excitement that nearly an hour later, when Margery came to take her upstairs, she still trembled.
Franz, left alone, paced the floor of his room up and down, sometimes stopping to look moodily into the fire. He had had this thing long upon his mind. Feeling the divine power of genius within him, he was not willing to play over again what generations had played over a hundred times before him. Yet he tried unavailingly to improvise. Once or twice, when playing, with the little Alice beside him, he had suddenly entranced even himself; but as soon as he undertook to reproduce the notes, either upon paper or upon the organ, he discovered them gone from his memory, and himself utterly powerless. It had only been latterly that he felt hampered in this way; yet he was conscious, notwithstanding, that his music at the same time had undergone a vast improvement. But he struggled against this one fault vainly. He had been determined to work out a new composition for this great occasion; and now, upon the very verge of Christmas-day, after all his unceasing anxiety, he found himself without a single idea—wholly unprepared. In his disappointment, he had almost been ready to absent himself altogether from the church; but the sudden appeal of the little girl had compelled him to give up this cowardly refuge, of which in a better mood he would have been ashamed.
The child had not prophesied incorrectly. Under cover of night, the clouds marshaled themselves into gray battalions, which fled precipitately before the lances of the morning, that in resplendent array, column upon column, mounted the eastern sky; and Christmas—this day forever sacred to the world in its grand memories—dawned with the blaze of victorious colors.
Bathed in sunlight, the crystal valley wreathed itself with brilliant jewels; the sparkling trees held up their embossed arches of frosted silver; and from the glittering hill-sides cold flakes of fire burned in diamond hues almost blinding to the eye—for a slight fall of snow during the night had spread itself over the land, and covered it as with a mantle of transfiguration.
The bell in the tower had long been ringing out its invitation to worship, before Franz, carrying the little Alice on his arm, left the house. A singular eagerness rested on the face of the child, whose usually pale cheeks were now colored with a crimson flush that deepened almost to scarlet in the center. She held quietly to Franz, sometimes looking at him for a moment, then turning her eyes again toward the village.
Though she said no word, it seemed as if she could hardly wait until they reached the church, but that her impatient spirit would break its bounds and fly. But Franz walked with a slow, unwilling step. A fierce despair appeared to be consuming him. His disappointment was made keener when he saw the wild expectation with which the little Alice looked forward to his music, and her confident belief that it would be far grander than any thing he had ever done before.
The villagers, by groups, in twos, in threes, with happy faces, coming from far and near, poured into the church. Paying no heed to any one as he passed, Franz entered by the side door, and went immediately up into the organ-gallery. With glad eyes, the little Alice saw the church in its festival decorations. Beautiful wreaths of cedar coiled themselves around the great pillars, and crept in waving lines over altar, arch, and casement, their unfading green sometimes flecked with amber, sometimes dyed in violet light, as the rays of the sun caught the tints from the windows of stained glass. Resting against the center of the chancel rail, a magnificent cross of hot house flowers loaded the air with the perfumes of summer—an incense more pure and holy than the incense of myrrh; and on either side sprays of English ivy, in long and twining branches, displayed their wax-like leaves.
The last vibrations of the bell died away. The congregation chanted its anthem; the minister read the Christmas service; and the first strains of the organ-voluntary, after the close of the litany, sounded through the church. The little Alice, with a throbbing pulse, crept close to Franz as he played; but it was only the familiar music, that the world already knew by heart, and had heard a thousand times before. Poor Franz, warring against himself, had been driven back to the composition of others, though he knew he possessed within him a power that should have created, that should have raised him above all written measure. But now even his execution was a dead, mechanical labor.
A swift expression of keen disappointment fell upon the child’s face. She looked up at him, with a gesture, slight but strangely appealing, and with eyes filled by a sorrowful reproach—such a look as one might wear in the last moment, whose most cherished friend had suddenly turned and dealt him a death-blow.