"Don't give yourself away. The others will be glad enough to come if Calvert and Farquharson do. Once capture the coming man and others will follow. You must help me, Evelyn; it means everything to me to have it known Calvert visits us."
"Of course I'll do my best. Oh, hush!" said Evelyn. The orchestra had begun playing the first notes of that exquisite prelude to Tristan and Isolde which, motif by motif, leads from the first confession of love by way of desire and magic and mystery to the deliverance of death.
Wagner opera was to Farquharson a new experience. He had come that night in a cynical enough mood. The darkness that enfolded the great assembly in its mantle, the hush and tension under which it laboured, listening without movement, rather as one corporate body than as a crowd of separate entities, struck him at first as a mere pose. But presently the power and strength and pathos of the music carried him away as it carried others. This was real flesh and blood; impatience, ardour, glory, the very song of the sea, transport and passion, blending with underlying chords of human sorrow—each in turn rang true.
And as he listened old memories came thronging back, memories at once exquisite and painful. For now the sufferings of his childhood spread before him like an allegory whose language his mature eyes could read; they had been encrusted for years with the ice of bitterness. But here, under Evelyn's influence, the ice had melted. He detached himself, the man, from the sturdy boyish figure which had flinched and wavered, but yet never given way, and saw how the fire of manhood had been kindled by those hours of stress. Wind and rain, storm and torrent, had formed his character, and mountain fastnesses had been his playground. The whole story of his childhood was a preparation for the battle he was fighting now. His ceaseless combats with men and things, even the mimic raids and sorties he had made as a child upon invisible foes, had stood him in good stead later when struggle was as infallibly his portion as it is the portion of certain men to sleep beside the hearth.
But if life for him was a battle-field, it was no less a battle-field for the woman at his side. His foes were worthy opponents, men of strength who brought their artillery to bear upon his little stronghold; hers were mere thieves of the night, but both came armed with weapons that drew blood.
Apart in body, separated from each other by every natural barrier, the wheel of the potter, whose toil is endless, had shaped the rough clay of these two human beings from very similar moulds. The voice of the great religion to which Evelyn belonged has its unworthy exponents; it is not always in a convent that the purest souls are reared. "Factus obediens usque ad mortem crucis," is sometimes chanted solemnly by those who betray unconsciously the souls of others; who impose little straws of restrictions upon backs already bent to breaking by God's unswerving laws. Should a Catholic sin, the fault is shrieked from the housetops, so high a standard is demanded of man or woman who subscribes to that high faith.
Yet the limits of Catholicism and the limits of Calvinism—apart as they seem—can touch. The bigot of the one may be as the bigot of the other. The gospel of detachment had been preached to Evelyn until, for a short time, she let herself drift upon the waters of submission, and since habitual and unquestioning obedience must crush in time the strongest spirit, yielded in the matter of marriage to the direction of her stepmother and father as she would have yielded to that of a spiritual adviser. Now, too late, she knew that for this retribution would be exacted hourly, for God strikes—not as men do, at the mere twigs and blossoms of human frailty, but at the very roots of being.
Unconsciously the thoughts of the man and woman in the box moved on converging lines and met, as the music below swayed onward and upward in Tristan and Isolde's exquisite duet.
"Isolde. So stürben wir,
Um ungetrennt—
Tristan. Ewig einig—
Isolde. Ohne End'—
Tristan. Ohn' Erwachen—
Isolde. Ohne Bangen—
Tristan. Namenlos
In Leib' umfangen—
Isolde. Ganz uns selbst gegeben,
Der Liebe nur zu leben?"
The spell of the music, rising to that passionate climax of the love song in the second act where Night the Revealer points the way of human transport to culminate in the superb Song of Death, broke the earthly barriers of speculation, and two souls in the audience called to each other as before the judgment seat and became temporarily one. Such things have been since the world came out of chaos, and will be until it returns again to the void. There is but one mate for each man and woman in the world, and until they recognize the fact and learn with patience to await that note of absolute conviction which is the one infallible guide to happiness, marriages will fail as they fail now, and the Church will give its empty blessing to those ill-assorted pairs whom God for ever leaves unblessed.