“You do—I think that you do; and you will join your voice to mine in imploring our father to spare me the agony of appearing before an audience? Oh, surely there is something to live for besides singing to divert the people here! Surely Heaven has not given me a voice to make me wretched! Has Heaven given me a voice instead of happiness?”
“Do you indeed fancy that you could find any happiness apart from music?” said he. “If you do, you are not my sister. There is nothing in the world that is worth a thought save only music.”
“What, have you never loved?” she cried.
“Love—love! Ah, yes; ’tis a sentiment, a beautiful sentiment. I do not say that it was created solely to give a musician a sentiment to illustrate—I do not talk so wildly; but I do say that it lends itself admirably to illustration at the hands of a competent musician; so that if Heaven had decreed that it should exist for this purpose, I would not hesitate to say that the object of its existence was a worthy one.”
She put him away from her.
“I have talked to you to no purpose: you do not understand,” she said. “It is left to me to work out my own freedom, and I mean to do it by marrying Mr. Long.”
“I do not think that your feeling for Mr. Long would lend itself to interpretation through the medium of music,” said he, smiling, as he picked up his violin.
She threw herself wearily into the chair that it vacated, and listlessly, hopelessly, watched him screwing up another of the strings.
“Listen to me, Betsy,” said he, after a pause filled up by his twanging of the catgut: “I remember how good Bishop O’Beirne called you a link between an angel and a woman. Pray do not let the link be snapped, for in that case you would be all angel; let me talk to you as if there was still something of the woman in your nature. Handel was a genius. Mr. Garrick is a genius, too; each of them is the greatest in his own art that the world has ever known. And yet you do not hear that either of them thought as you do; you do not hear that Handel ever said that he was degrading himself because he overheard some fool saying that his suggestion of the hailstones in his treatment of the Plagues was only worthy of the ingenuity of the carpenter of a theatre; we have never heard that Mr. Garrick resolved to retire from Drury Lane stage because some fools preferred Spranger Barry’s Romeo to his.”