Alixe could not refuse, for the moment he finished speaking she heard a too familiar motive, the ponderous phrase in the brass choir which Van Kuyp intended as the thematic label for his hero, "Sordello."
"Ah, there's your Browning in tone for you," whispered the critic. She wished him miles away. The draperies were now slightly parted and into the room filtered the grave, languorous accents of the new tone-poem. Her eyes were fixed by Rentgen's. His expression changed; with nostrils dilated like a hunter scenting prey, his rather inert, cold features became transfigured; he was the man who listened, the cruel judge who sentenced. And she hoped, also the kind friend who would consider the youth and inexperience of the culprit. To the morbidly acute hearing of the woman, the music had a ring of hollow sonority after the denser packed phrases of Weber.
She had read Sordello with her husband until she thought its meaning was as clear as high noon. By the critic's advice the subject had been selected for musical treatment. Sordello's overweening spiritual pride—"gate-vein of this heart's blood of Lombardy"—appealed to Van Kuyp. The stress of souls, the welter of cross-purposes which begirt the youthful dreamer, his love for Palma, and his swift death when all the world thrust upon him its joys—here were motives, indeed, for any musician of lofty aim and sympathetic imagination.
Alixe recalled the interminable arguments, the snatches of poetry, the hasty rushes to the keyboard; a composer was in travail. At the end of a year, Rentgen professed his satisfaction; Van Kuyp stood on the highroad to fame. Of that there could be no doubt; Elvard Rentgen would say so in print. Alixe had been reassured—
Yet sitting now within the loop of her husband's music it suddenly became insipid, futile, and lacking in those enchantments for which she yearned. Her eyes dropped to the shapely hands meekly folded in her lap, dropped because the bold, interrogative expression on Rentgen's face disturbed her. She knew, as any woman would have known, that he admired her—but was he not Richard's friend? His glance enveloped her with piteous mockery.
The din was tremendous. After passages of dark music, in which the formless ugly reigned, occurred the poetic duel between Sordello and Eglamor at Palma's Court of Love. But why all this stress and fury? On the pianoforte the delicate episode sounded gratefully; with the thick riotous orchestration came a disillusioning transformation. There was noise without power, there was sensuality that strove to imitate the tenderness of passion; and she had fancied it a cloudy garden of love. Alixe raised an involuntary hand to her ear.
"Yes," whispered the critic, "I warned him not to use his colours with a trowel. His theme is not big enough to stand it." He lifted thin eyebrows and to her overheated brain was an unexpected Mephisto. Then the music whirled her away to Italy; the love scene of Palma and Sordello. It should have been the apex of the work.
"Sounds too much like Tschaïkowsky's Francesca da Rimini," interrupted Rentgen. She was annoyed.
"Why didn't you tell Van Kuyp before he scored the work?" she demanded, her long gray eyes beginning to blacken.
"I did, my dear lady, I did. But you know what musicians are—" He shrugged a conclusion with his narrow shoulders. Alixe coldly regarded him. There was something new and dangerous in his attitude to her husband's music this evening.