Then, raising me with kind force from the lounge, he wrapped the mantle around me. As we passed out, we stood for an instant at the bed-room-door, looking at the invalid. The breath still came in short pants, but the truce was being kept: sleep had come in between as a transient mediator.
I noticed in the dim light the attenuated frame, the shrunken features, the pinched nostrils, the very shadowy outlining of death. With choking throat and swelling breast I looked at Max, my eyes saying what my voice could not,—
"I cannot go."
Without a word of reply, he lifted me out of the apartment, and in a few moments we were sitting in a dim corner of the concert-room, listening to the charming First Duet.
The scenes followed one another rapidly, and displayed even more powerfully than I had ever noticed before the one pervading theme. Sense and imagination became possessed with it; at each succeeding passage the interest increased continuously, until at the end the passion mounted up as on mighty wings and carried my sad heart aloft and beyond "the ordinary conditions of humanity."
The prima donna, Madame C——, and Signor D——, the tenor, had a sad story of scandal floating about them; it was on every one's lips. Madame C—— was no longer in her first youth, but she was still very beautiful, more attractive than she had been in her younger days,—so those said who had seen and heard her years before.
Her young womanhood had been devoted to patient, honest study, which was rewarded with success, and calm, passionless prosperity. She had married brilliantly, and left the stage, but after an absence of many years had returned to it to aid her husband in some reverse of fortune. Her married life had been tranquilly happy, for she had loved with all the sweet serenity of a cold, unexacting nature.
But now it was whispered that this beautiful, pure woman, who had resisted—indeed, like another Una, had never felt—the temptations which had environed her on the stage, and in the courtly circle to which she had been raised by her husband's rank, was being strangely influenced by a gifted, handsome tenor singer, with whom she had been associated since her return to her professional life.
This person was about her husband's age, a year or two her senior, and unmarried. The infatuation, it was said, existed on both sides, and the two lovers were so blinded by their strange passion as to seem unconscious of any other sight or presence. The husband, report added, behaved with remarkable prudence and good breeding; indeed, some doubted if he noticed the affair,—for he treated not only his wife, but the reputed lover, with familiar and kind friendliness.
The recollection of this scandal flitted over my memory as I listened to the First Duet. Madame C—— was a blonde; she had rich, deep violet eyes, and a lovely skin: her hair, too, was a waving mass of the poet's and painter's golden hue. She was about middle height, and had a full, well-developed person.