Part 64

"Give me at least your reasons, Martia; tell me, for God's sake, who you are and what! Are you me? are you the spirit of my mother? Why do you love me, as you say you do, with a love passing the love of woman? What am I to you? Why are you so bent on worldly things?"

This monologue lasted more than an hour, and he threw himself on to his bed quite worn out, and slept at once, in spite of the nightingales, who filled the starlit, breezy, balmy night with their shrill, sweet clamor.

Next morning, as he expected, he found a letter:

"Barty, you are ruining me and breaking my life, and wrecking the plans of many years--plans made before you were, born or thought of.

"Who am I, indeed? Who is this demure young black-eyed witch that has come between us, this friend of Ida Maurice's?

"She's the cause of all my misery, I feel sure; with Ida's eyes I saw you look at her; you never yet looked at Julia like that!--never at any woman before!

"Who is she? No mate for a man like you, I feel sure. In the first place, she is not rich; I could tell that by the querulous complaints of her middle-class mother. She's just fit to be some pious Quaker's wife, or a Sister of Charity, or a governess, or a hospital nurse, or a nun--no companion for a man destined to move the world!

"Barty, you don't know what you are; you have never thought; you have never yet looked within!

"Barty, with Julia by your side and me at your back, you will be a leader of men, and sway the destinies of your country, and raise it above all other nations, and make it the arbiter of Europe--of the whole world--and your seed will ever be first among the foremost of the earth.

"Will you give up all this for a pair of bright black eyes and a pretty white skin? Isn't Julia white enough for you?

"A painter? What a trade for a man built like you! Take the greatest of them; what have they ever really mattered? What do they matter now, except to those who want to imitate them and can't, or to those who live by buying cheap the fruits of their long labors, and selling them dear as so much wall furniture for the vulgar rich? Besides, you will never be a great painter; you've begun too late!

"Think of yourself ten years hence--a king among men, with the world at your feet, and at those of the glorious woman who will have smoothed your path to greatness and fame and power! Mistress and wife--goddess and queen in one!

"Think of the poor struggling painter, painting his poor little pictures in his obscure corner to feed half a dozen hungry children and the anxious, careworn wife, whose beauty has long faded away in the petty, sordid, hopeless domestic struggle, just as her husband's little talent has long been wasted and used up in wretched pot-boilers for mere bread; think of poverty, debt, and degradation, and all the miserable ugliness of life--the truest, tritest, and oldest story in the world! Love soon flies out of the window when these wolves snarl at the door.

"Think of all this, Barty, and think of the despair you are bringing on one lost lonely soul who loves you as a mother loves her first-born, and has founded such hopes on you; dismiss this pretty little middle-class puritan from your thoughts and go back to Julia.

"I will not hurry your decision; I will come back in exactly a week from to-night. I am at your mercy.

"Martia."

This letter made Barty very unhappy. It was a strange dilemma.

What is it that now and again makes a woman in a single moment take such a powerful grip of a man's fancy that he can never shake himself free again, and never wants to?

Tunes can be like that, sometimes. Not the pretty little tinkling tunes that please everybody at once; the pleasure of them can fade in a year, a month--even a week, a day! But those from a great mint, and whose charm will last a man his lifetime!

Many years ago a great pianist, to amuse some friends (of whom I was one), played a series of waltzes by Schubert which I had never heard before--the "Soirées de Vienne," I think they were called. They were lovely from beginning to end; but one short measure in particular was full of such extraordinary enchantment for me that it has really haunted me through life. It is as if it were made on purpose for me alone, a little intimate aside à mon intention--the gainliest, happiest thought I had ever heard expressed in music. For nobody else seemed to think those particular bars were more beautiful than all the rest; but, oh! the difference to me!

And said I to myself: "That's Leah; and all the rest is some heavenly garden of roses she's walking in!"

Tempo di valsa:

Rum--tiddle-iddle um tum tum, Tiddle-tiddle-iddle-iddle um tum, tum Tum tiddle iddle-iddle um tum, tum Tiddle-iddle, iddle-hay! ... etc., etc.

That's how the little measure begins, and it goes on just for a couple of pages. I can't write music, unfortunately, and I've nobody by me at just this moment who can; but if the reader is musical and knows the "Soirées de Vienne," he will guess the particular waltz I mean.

Well, the Düsseldorf railway station is not a garden of roses; but when Leah stepped out of that second-class carriage and looked straight at Barty, dans le blanc des yeux, he fitted her to the tune he loved best just then (not knowing the "Soirées de Vienne"), and it's one of the tunes that last forever:

"Du bist die Ruh', der Friede mild!"

Barty's senses were not as other men's senses. With his one eye he saw much that most of us can't see with two; I feel sure of this. And he suddenly saw in Leah's face, now she was quite grown up, that which bound him to her for life--some veiled promise, I suppose; we can't explain these things.

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