With hands lightly folded in her lap and head leaned
back against her chair, Natalie has listened. In the beginning she had
been carried out of herself by a feeling of painfully sweet happiness,
but now she felt strangely oppressed. p. 36.
With hands lightly folded in her lap, and head leaned back against her chair, Natalie had listened. In the beginning she had been carried out of herself by a feeling of painfully sweet happiness. But now she felt strangely oppressed. It seemed to her as if something pulled at every fibre, every nerve, as if her heart was bursting. She would have liked to cry out and hold her ears, and still did not move, but listened eagerly to that piercing, wild, passionate tone. Never had she felt within her such hot, beating, intense life as in this hour. Her whole past existence now seemed to her like a long, stupid lethargy, from which she had at last been awakened. Tears flowed from her eyes. Then his look met hers. A kind of shame at his brutality overcame him, and his playing died away in sad, sweet, anguished tenderness. With contracted brows and trembling hands, he laid down the violin. "You wished it!" said he. "You should not have asked it of me. I can refuse you nothing. God! how pale you are! I have made you ill!"
She smiled at his anxious exaggeration, then murmured softly, as if in a dream: "It was wonderfully beautiful, and I shall never forget it--never forget it, only----"
"What have you to object?"
"Shall I really tell you?"
"Certainly; I beg you to."
"Well," she began, hesitatingly, with a somewhat uneasy smile, as if she was afraid of wounding his irritable artistic sensibility, "I ask myself how one can abuse an instrument from which one can charm such bewitching harmonies, and which one loves as you love your violin, as you have just now abused it?"
He was silent for a moment, surprised, looked at the violin with a loving, compassionate glance, as if it were a living being. Then he passed his hand across his forehead.
"I do not know how it is," said he, confusedly. "Sometimes something comes over me. Ah! if you knew what it is to have, all one's life, such a sultry, sneaking thunderstorm in one's veins as I have. Sometimes it bursts forth; it must have vent. I cannot rule myself. Teach me how!"
He said that, so naïvely ashamed, quite pleadingly, like a great child; he had strangely warm, touching tones in his deep, rough voice.