“So much the better,” said Ordham.
“If you kiss me, this will be the last time we shall ever be alone.”
“Again, so much the better. I am going to kiss you, and I am willing to take the consequences. If you run from me, you will stumble.”
He caught her in his arms and kissed her a great many times. And she knew that she should be eternally grateful to him for these few moments of terrified happiness he forced her to admit. But she was grateful also for the gypsies.
She disengaged herself and stood back a pace. “They are coming this way,” she said. “You have not given me that other promise.”
He stood before her, whipping one hand with the gloves he held in the other. His face was so white that it would have looked dead but for the eyes, which were black and blazing. He answered steadily enough, however:
“I swear, since you will have it, that, as much to erect a monument to this love of ours, as to gratify my own ambition and compensate myself for the bleakness of my personal life, I will do what I can to make a great and useful man of myself.”
LIV
THE CONQUEST OF LONDON
If the next twenty-five days passed quickly, it was not because they were barren of events. It was Ordham’s idea that in the second performance of Die Walküre Styr should sing, not the vocally interesting but dramatically unappealing rôle of Brünhilde, but that of Sieglinde. Knowing that his race was the most remarkable compound on the globe of respectability and sensuality, he believed that the character of Sieglinde, portrayed with all the abandon of which Styr, alone of living singers, was capable, and yet easefully vapourized in the alembic of music, would give the Wagner season a fresh impetus; and the event proved him right. Styr, with a new need to give her imprisoned passions relief, acted the part of the faithless young wife, the incestuous demigoddess, with an emotionalism so deep and wild that the audience held their breath, and yet with a poignant sweetness that brought tears to their eyes, filled them with an immense pity for the captive of the hideous Hunding who found her mate capriciously caught in the body of a son of Wotan. After all, demigods were not mortals, they remarked, few besides the Germans understanding Fricka’s emphatic opinion on the subject.
In the second act Styr portrayed tragedy, delirium, remorse, and the mere physical weakness of woman, in a fashion that caused even herself to wonder why she had never essayed this rôle before. When she lay unconscious between the knees of Siegmund during the long duet between her lover and Brünhilde, she looked so beautiful that she continued to hold the attention of all, and Ordham stared at her until his gaze seemed to burn her eyelids and she stirred uneasily. When Sieglinde was finally swept off the stage by Brünhilde, the audience, almost to a man, arose and left the house.