“No,” she answered, “he is not my Master.—I suppose you mean Beethoven by that?” she added, looking up at him. He assented.
“And yet,” she said, “I cannot somehow call even him Master. I do not love music as I ought to do—especially Beethoven and Wagner. They are great, these men, very great, but I cannot lose myself in their spirit as I should do. I often feel this.”
“It was one of Heine’s few fantastic sayings,” said Gildea, “that Chopin was the Raphael of the piano, and indeed a piece like this, or the stately opening of the Thirteenth Nocturne—You remember it?” (She assented)—“or the Marche Funèbre, help to see what he meant; but to call him a Raphael seems to me inapt. No Raphael, for instance, would have dreamed of so entirely giving himself up to the influence of his passion as Chopin does. Surely it is not in his spirit that you can lose yourself?”
“No,” she said, “less than in Beethoven’s. But perhaps Heine only meant his expression about Chopin comparatively. Chopin, you remember, is the only great composer who devoted himself to the piano. Certainly he is a master of it, but his style of art is not like Raphael’s—at least so far as I know of Raphael.”
They came back talking into the other room, where Gildea, from a glance at Mrs. Medwin’s face, perceived that she now wished them to go down to the yacht. In a few minutes he brought the conversation round to the subject and, having asked and she having expressed her wish, the party was presently crossing the lawn on its way down to the small landing-stage, close to which the “Petrel” had now been brought in. Mrs. Medwin, between Maddock and Alcock, was some yards ahead of Gildea and Miss Medwin who were following them.
“You did not know,” Gildea was saying to her, “that Mr. Hawkesbury was a friend of mine? He has been having lunch with us, and only just went away before you arrived. He, and another friend of mine whom you perhaps have met in Melbourne, Mr. Fitzgerald—No?—were unable to stay.”
“So I supposed,” said Miss Medwin, “or something like that.—You do not perhaps know,” she added, “that my aunt has a dislike for him that really almost amounts to antipathy?”
“Yes,” said Gildea, “I was aware of it: his social opinions are too much for her, and Sydney Medwin annoys her by constantly mentioning both them and him. A meeting would have been awkward indeed, but I made my calculations carefully, and I should have regretted not giving my friend Fitzgerald the opportunity of making Hawkesbury’s acquaintance. In a few days one will be going due north and the other due south, but I hope they will meet again later on. Two more charming examples of the two species of enthusiast it would be hard to find.”
“What do you call the two species?”
“The enthusiast of heat and the enthusiast of light: both are to me equally beautiful, equally charming!”