He made one, two, one hundred, two hundred rough drafts; all in vain. His music was not like the music already written. Sleep fled from his eyelids, he lost his appetite, fever seized upon his brain, he went mad, and died, at last, without being able to finish the Miserere, which, as a curiosity, the monks treasured till his death, and even yet preserve in the archives of the abbey.
When the old man had made an end of telling me this story, I could not refrain from turning my eyes again to the dusty, ancient manuscript of the Miserere, which still lay upon one of the tables.
In peccatis concepit me mater mea.
These were the words on the page before me, seeming to mock me with their notes, their keys and their scrawls unintelligible to lay-brothers in music.
I would have given a world to be able to read them.
Who knows if they may not be mere nonsense?
STRANGE
I.
We were taking tea in the house of a lady who is a friend of mine, and the talk turned upon the social dramas which develop from act to act, unheeded of the world,—dramas with whose leading characters we have been acquainted, if indeed we have not ourselves played a part in one or another of their scenes.
Among numerous other persons whom I do not remember, there was a girl of the blonde type, fair and slender, who, if she had had a lapful of flowers in place of the blear-eyed little dog that growled half hidden in the wide folds of her skirt, might have been compared without exaggeration to Shakespeare’s Ophelia.