But there was another atmosphere in the cathedral, and Oscar floated on it as on a flood--the silent sanctuary, the rows of empty pews going up to the chancel, the empty pulpit with its sounding-board, the empty altar with the Eastern subject painted above it, the marble font for the baptism of future generations, the marble monuments to the memory of past ones, and then the listening air, awakened by a whisper or a footfall, and full of the breath of dead prayer and vanished praise.
In this atmosphere of art and religion Oscar sat down at the organ, with Helga by his side, to try his anthem for the first time. The organ throbbed under his fingers, the empty cathedral shook like a sea-cave under the boom of his waves of sound, and when he came to the end of his first reading he was quivering with excitement and Helga was in a fever.
"What did I tell you?" she said. "Was I not right? Oh, if this could be heard in Denmark!"
"Or in England!" said Oscar.
They played the piece again and again, and at every fresh playing their excitement increased until it reached the point of hysteria, and their voices in that silent place became as shrill as the wind on the mountain top. At last they tried the words, and then their emotion knew no limit.
The organ trembled and throbbed again, and then on the top of all other sounds came the sound of Helga's voice, like a human cry above the thundering waves of nature, sometimes weeping, sometimes raging, sometimes crouching, sometimes springing out of the surge, and finally sinking down to the soft whisper of "Let there be peace!"
When the anthem was over and all was still, Oscar sat quiet for some moments while the unheard echo of the music seemed to roll through the silent air; and then the lightning-flash of joy or madness which comes to every man of genius once in his life came to him also, and his heart cried out, in its delirious happiness, "I, too, am a great composer!"
In the intoxication of that moment, Oscar's hand swung down and took Helga's hand and held it, and their fingers trembled together and they seemed to hear the beating of each other's heart. They looked at each other, and his eyes were bloodshot and hers were wet.
"Helga!" he cried.
"Oscar!" she answered, but at the next moment a window blew open on the staircase to the organ loft and Oscar heard again the dreary noises of the work-a-day world without--the rumble of the iron trolleys, the thin clank of the mason's trowel, and the quick beat of the riveter's hammer. It was like the wakening of a prisoner in his cell when the warder beats at the door and the dream of glory is gone and the prison walls close round him again.