Othmar

by Ouida

In the farthest room of all, where the pianoforte stood, Paul of Lemberg had begun to play; melodies of Tristan and Isolde thrilled through the silence to her ear and awakened her in her hiding-place. She who had never heard any such music in her life listened with a surprised sense of delight so intense that it was also pain. The delicate rain of harmonious notes falling one on another, the strange mystery with which the chords of the instrument repeat and concentrate all the sighs of passion and the woes of feeling, all the inexplicable and marvellous humanity and sympathy with which all perfect music is filled, were heard by her for the first time in their most exquisite forms. She listened entranced, awed, and penetrated with an ecstasy which was as sharp as suffering. She forgot where she was. When silence followed she was weeping bitterly; all the wounds of her heart at once deepened a thousandfold, yet healed by a touch divine.

All the longing, all the dreams, all the vague desires and unsatisfied fancies which had been in her mind and heart untold to anyone, and misunderstood even by herself, burned to obtain utterance in this the first music she had ever heard. She crouched in her corner unseen; a servant, who had placed a lamp behind the screen, had been too discreet in his office, and too contemptuous of herself, to disturb her. She sat still on her low stool, and listened as the harmonies succeeded each other from the distance.

Paul of Lemberg was in the mood to recall a thousand memories and invent a thousand fancies in music, and his companions were capable of giving him that comprehension and appreciation which the finest scientific knowledge of the tonic art alone can render.

In the pauses which at times ensued, the conversation was animated and absorbing; they spoke of music, always of music, and Othmar, whose greatest interest had always been found in music, forgot as well as others the guest whom his house sheltered.

When at length Lemberg rose and drank a cup of coffee, and lit a cigarette, and proceeded to faire la cour to the Princesse de Laon, and four violins in a quatuor of well-known artists were tuning to fill up the blank of silence he had left, Othmar, with a pang of compunction, recalled the hours during which the child had been neither seen nor sought by any one of them. It had been half-past eight when they had gone into dinner; it was now past eleven o'clock.

He went through his drawing-rooms hastily, looking for her in every place, and failing to find her. At length, when he was about to inquire for her of his household, he saw a shadow behind the embroidered screen, and moving the screen aside, discovered her in her solitude.

'My dear child!' he exclaimed, ashamed at his own neglect of her, 'where have you been? I have not seen you for hours. What a dull evening you have passed!'

The tears were dry on her cheeks, but they had left her eyes humid and heavy; her face had grown very pale.

'I have heard all that,' she said with a little gesture towards the distant music-room. 'I did not think there was anything as beautiful in the world.'

'Une sensitive!' thought Othmar, recalling his wife's half-unkind and half-compassionate expression as he answered. His knowledge of such sensitive natures induced him now to observe with an instinct of pity the trouble visible on the young girl's face. She had an isolated, pathetic, bewildered look which touched him, and with it there was an expression of anger and hurt pride. No child lost at dark in a wood where it had strayed through disobedience, was ever more bewildered, lonely, or punished for its sin, than she was in those radiant drawing-rooms, surrounded with the light laughter and the, to her, unintelligible chatter in which she had no share; oppressed by this overheated, over-perfumed air in which she felt stifled and sick, abashed, and yet angered by the neglect and obscurity to which they had abandoned her.