David Verne gave a shudder.
"Ah! At this moment! Will you get out of the room?" And when the attendant had gone, "Is he, can he be, so stupid? I really think he does these things on purpose."
Brantome poised his hands above the keyboard, leaned forward to peer at a legend scrawled faintly in the corner of the page, then, turning round on the piano bench, cast at Lilla:
"Rose-covered Cypresses."
"What?" she exclaimed, with a start.
"He has called it that."
The old Frenchman began to play.
Not a song after all, but a piano concerto, it described in tone that goal of all human longings, the conquest of tragedy.
But this music, although gradually made replete with victory, was not to end in major chords of triumph. The sadness that seemed, at the beginning, unassuageable, continued to the end, but—and herein lay the victory—became ever more exquisite. For this was the utterance of a man who having had his life transformed by love must soon leave that love behind him; this glory that had descended upon his sadness was such a glory as fills the sky for a little while before the inrush of dusk. At the conclusion, it was as if in the gorgeousness of a sunset the roses covering the cypresses had become a mist of rare hues, behind which those trees emblematic of mourning almost lost their significance. At last, however, one felt that the light was fading, that the somber silhouettes of the cypresses were more visible than their poetic embellishment. And finally, with the darkness, a breeze seemed to bring a long sigh from those elegiac branches, together with a perfume of the roses that had become unapparent, wet with dew as if with innumerable tears.
After a long silence, Brantome lifted his burly, old body from the piano bench, came to stand before David, then abruptly turned away.