grüsse deinem Herrn!
Siegfried! Siegfried! Sieh!
Selig grüsst dich dein Weib!”
The last line was flung straight into Ordham’s ear, but he did not pause to reflect upon its significance, holding his breath for this final moment of Styr’s stupendous acting, Brynhildr’s immolation. She leaped on her horse, and with head erect and arms uplifted to the smouldering body on the pyre, dashed straight into the flames. It was over in a second, but its realism was so intense and affrighting, that, as ever, Ordham gasped and nearly sprang from his seat, while the King gave a loud shout of rapture.
Ordham sank back with a deep sigh of amused relief. He knew that those flames produced by spirits did not really meet, and that Styr’s horse was too well trained to make a misstep or linger. Still no one else save Vogel had ever essayed this feat, which could be simulated on the darkened stage, and overlooked in the simultaneous conflagration of the castle, the rise of the waters of the Rhine, the vision in the sky of Valhalla in flames.
The walls began to fall, Hagen and the Rhine maidens to search furiously for the ring, retainers to fly about in distraction. Ordham had never seen the confusion as well represented as to-night. The shrieks sounded genuine, the faces of the survivors were distraught. No doubt these born artists and loyal Bavarians were always afire when performing for their King alone. The curtain went down amidst the crash of orchestration. Ordham, seeing that the King’s box was empty, slipped out, meditating upon those last words of Brünhilde. “Thy wife!” She had made her final decision, then, bade her farewell to the stage in that long dirge. It was indeed her swan song! For the first time he wholly realized the enormity of the sacrifice, the egoism of love. But he did not care. He exulted, as inexorably the male as Siegfried or Gunther.
He had half made up his mind to ignore Styr’s injunctions and go to her dressing-room; but when he reached the open air, he suddenly realized that he was very tired. The long unbroken strain of an opera which, even with pauses, makes a severer drain on the nervous system than any opera ever written, following a sleepless night of travel and many hours of mental excitement, left him suddenly exhausted, devitalized; he was glad to fall into the cab which his friend the doorkeeper had had the forethought to order, and drive to his hotel. The dawn was cold and grey, a bleak and disheartening contrast to the scene of mysterious splendour from which he seemed to have been shot straight into the chilliest stratum of a dismal inhospitable Earth. He shivered, wondered had it all been a dream, longed for sleep. He did not even glance down Maximilianstrasse, to the stage door, out of which the performers were streaming, gesticulating, weeping.
LXI
THEIR MARRIAGE
When Ordham reached his hotel he found old Kurt awaiting him with the promised letter. He dismissed him sleepily and when in his room laid it on the table beside his bed, intending to read it in the morning when he was in a more appreciative condition. But the preparations for bed roused him somewhat, and he suddenly opened the letter with the purpose of glancing at the first page, believing this message was designed to console him for the taciturn note she had sent to the station. But when he had read three lines he read on; and when he had finished the letter he read it again; and then once more.
“After all, I find that I love you more than I love myself.