"It is true that great powers require time to ripen," observed Prince L----, "wonderful children seldom come to anything. You may perhaps remember such a case, ladies--the little gypsy whom de Sterny brought to us one evening."
"Hm--a little hunch back in a braided jacket?" asked a lady.
"No--no--that was another--this was a handsome youth from the Rue Ravestein."
None of the ladies remembered. "What of him?" they asked.
"Nothing remarkable. I only cited him apropos of wonder children. Never have I heard finer improvisation than his and what has come of it?" At this moment there was a slight stir, de Sterny stepped upon the platform. They clapped applause, they bowed before him, they pressed his hands.
He stood at the conductor's desk and let his eye run over his musical forces--they were all there. Suddenly he turned pale, the baton sank at his side, he longed to flee, the eyes of his aristocratic friends were shining all around him; he rapped on the desk, and the bombastic introduction to "Satan" sounded through the hall.
There was disappointed shrugging of shoulders in the audience. Gesa von Zuylen's mouth showed deep mocking corners. Slowly, painfully, but with increasing confidence he raised his eyes to the director's face, the face that had once been to him as the countenance of a god. He smiled bitterly.
And now the Alto is singing her first song. The audience rouses up as if from an electric shock--and listens amazed, but none listens with such intentness as Gesa von Zuylen.
A strange, strange feeling trembles through him, the feeling of warm young delight, of joyful intoxication with which he wrote that song. Indignation had no chance to be heard, so mighty is the bliss of hearing his own work. It is as if some one had given him back his lost soul. The applause grows louder and louder. As if in a dream he plays on, sometimes he shrinks when some blatant interlude of de Sterny's disfigures his own composition.
"Now comes the most beautiful of all," they whisper in the audience, "the duet of the Outcasts."