AS IT WAS WRITTEN.
I.
VERONIKA PATHZUOL was my betrothed. I must give some account of the circumstances under which she and I first met each other, so that my tale may be clear and complete from the beginning.
For a long while, without knowing why, I had been restless—hungry, without knowing for what I hungered. Teaching music to support myself, I employed all of the day that was not thus occupied in practicing on my own behalf. My life consequently was a solitary one, numbering but few acquaintances and not any friends. In my short intervals of leisure I was generally too tired to seek out society; I was too obscure and unimportant to be sought out in turn. Yet, young and of an ardent temperament, doubtless it was natural that I should have been dimly conscious of something wanting; and, not prone to selfanalysis, doubtless it was also natural that I should have had no distinct conception of what the wanting something was. Besides, it would soon be summer. The soft air and bright sunshine of spring awoke a myriad vague desires in my heart. I strove in vain to understand them. They were all the more poignant because they had no definite object. Twenty times a day I would catch myself heaving a mighty sigh; but asking, “What are you sighing for?” I had to answer, “Who can tell?” My thoughts got into the habit of wandering away would fly off to cloud-land at the most inopportune moments. While my pupils were blundering through their exercises their master would fall to thinking of other things—afterward impossible to remember what. From morning to night I went about with a feeling of expectancy—an event was impending—presently a change would come over the tenor of my life. I waited anxiously, on the alert for its first premonitory symptom.
I had taken to strolling through the streets at evening. One delicious night in May, I found myself leaning over the terrace at the eastern extremity of Fifty-first street. The moon had just risen, a huge red disk, out of the mist and smoke across the river, and was turning the waves to burnished copper. Through the open windows of the neighborhood escaped the sounds of quiet talk, of laughter, of piano playing. Now and then a low dark shape, with a single bright light gleaming like a jewel at its side, and spars and masts sharply outlined against the sky, slipped silently past upon the water. The atmosphere was quick with the warmth and the scent of spring. I stood there motionless, penetrated by the unspeakable beauty of the scene. The moon climbed higher and higher, and gradually exchanged its ruddy tint for its ordinary metallic blue. By and by somebody with a sweet soprano voice, in one of the nearest houses, began to sing the Ave Maria of Gounod. The impassioned music seemed made for the time and place. It caught the soul of the moment and gave it voice. I could feel my heart swelling with the crescendo: and then how it leaped and thrilled when the singer reached that glorious climax of the song, “Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae!” At that instant, as if released from a spell, I drew a long breath and looked around. Then for the first time I saw Veronika Pathzuol. Her eyes and mine met for the first time.
“A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange, and sad”—and pale. Her face was pale, like an angel’s. The wealth of black hair above it and the dark eyes that gazed sadly out of it rendered the pallor more intense. But it was not the pallor of ill-health; it was the pallor of a luminous white soul. As I beheld her standing there in the moonlight scarcely a yard away from me, I knew all at once what it was my heart had craved for so long a while. I knew at once, by the sudden pain that pierced it, that my heart had been waiting for this lady all its life. I did not stop to reflect and determine. Had I done so, most likely—nay, most certain-ly—I should never have had to tell this story. The words flew to my tongue and were spoken as soon as thought.—“Oh, how beautiful, how beautiful!” I exclaimed, meaning her.
“Very beautiful,” I heard her voice, clear and soft, respond. “It is almost a pain, the feeling such intense beauty gives,”—meaning the scene before us.
“And yet this is every-day, hum-drum, commercial New York,” added another voice, one that jarred upon my hearing like the scraping of a contre-bass after a cadenza by the flute. She was leaning on the arm of a man. I was at the verge of being straightway jealous, when I observed that his hair and beard were snowy and that his face was wrinkled.