If so, the impossible was being performed in a masterly manner. Would-be sarcastic lieutenants, tittering young ladies, were bewitched into silence and admiration. Rubinstein’s weird and melodious legend of the youth whose race ‘die if they love,’ was sung to the end, as few of the audience had ever before heard it sung. The last notes, Die sterben wenn sie lieben, were followed at first by silence; and then some murmurs, not loud, but deep, of applause, greeted the singer.
The song that followed was, Es blinkt der Thau, and it made Sara’s heart beat. That finished, as if to give his audience a complete change, he struck a couple of deep chords, and began to sing that oft-quoted, hackneyed, but ever-beautiful Ich grolle nicht.
Sara felt a slight shiver run through her. Why did he choose that one weird song of Heine’s, set to Schumann’s equally weird music? She had heard it once at a concert, sung in a style which hardly rose above mediocrity, and yet even then it had impressed her; and she had pondered involuntarily over the gruesome, hinted mystery of the last lines. Jerome sang the strange song with a depth and a meaning all his own: her artist-nature thrilled to the strains, which are in very truth a song of death; it was ghostly—it was as if her spirit was enfeebled and chilled, and had to trail its drooping wings through a land full of vague and awful shadows.
‘Ich sah die Nacht
In deines Herzensraume;
Ich sah die Schlang’
Die dir am Herzen frisst—
Ich sah, mein’ Lieb’,
Wie sehr du elend bist!
Ich grolle nicht.’