But no pause in the music; still those weird notes weaving the mystic spell that chained me. Leaving me no time to reflect on what I had seen, but enforcing my attention to the drama acted before me, the fiery crescendo sank in a dull sullen theme, almost colourless when compared with the foregoing numbers; then, as with dissolving views where one scene grows through another that fades, I began to realize that I looked into another room—one very different from the first. It was evidently, from the slanting roof and small window, an attic, and its contents spoke of poverty. A bed-stead with threadbare hangings occupied one corner, and in the centre, at a square table littered with sheets of music, sat the young Frenchman. His brow was contracted, and the wound yet fresh on his cheek. He was writing, and through the medium of the music I knew the purport of his epistle as well as if I had looked over his shoulder. It was a challenge—a challenge, he stated, his late antagonist dare not decline, as the writer was of even more noble family than the man who had insulted him. Having written the letter, he rose and paced the small room, deep in thought. As his steps went backwards and forwards across the limited space—as his thoughts grew black with hate as he remembered the insult he had suffered, or grew bright with love as he pictured the fair girl who pledged herself to him—so truthfully did the delicate gradations of the music harmonize with them, that I could feel every emotion stirring his heart, at times almost identifying myself with him—making his joy, his sorrow, mine. After what seemed to be hours, he took up the violin that lay on the table near him, and commenced playing. As before, I say, the sound came from him, whether Luigi’s hands produced it or not; and as he played, the music, at first, fierce, stern, and harsh gradually toned down until it became dreamy and lulling—until at last he threw himself on his poor bed, and Luigi’s violin resumed the strain—the soft, soothing measure I have before mentioned, telling of placid sleep.
Another change—hard, sharp, staccato passages. I was now looking—it might be from a window—on a wide expanse of smooth green turf. As before, the scene was so real, so material, that I might have stepped out on the sward. There was nothing in the locality I could identify. A wall and some palings, I remember, were on the left hand; a belt of trees on the right. As I looked, I saw figures at some little distance. Two men in their shirt-sleeves were engaged in a deadly duel. They were not so far away but I could distinguish their features plainly; and I knew they were the two men I had seen grapple in the room. As their flashing blades, slender as serpents, twined in and out; as they thrust and parried, advanced and retreated—the mysterious music entered fully into the fray, accompanying every stroke, till, as the arm of one of the combatants sank to his side, helpless—pierced by his antagonist’s blade—it swelled to a strain of exultation. It was the Englishman who was wounded; and as the sword dropped from his grasp, his opponent with difficulty checked the impulse urging him to drive his weapon through his unguarded breast; then, seeing he was quite unable to renew the combat, bowed with cold politeness, sheathed his sword, and turned away, leaving the wounded man to the care of his second. As the Frenchman vanished from my sight among the trees at the right hand, the scene grew blurred and faded—only the spell of the music continued ever.
The dismal measure and the dismal garret once more. As I look at the poverty-stricken room, the music, eloquent as before, in some hidden manner makes me aware that months have passed since I last looked at it. The young Frenchman is present. Indeed, I begin now to understand that no scene can come beneath my eyes unless he be an actor in it. It is his life, his love, the violin in its own marvellous tongue relates. I wait with interest now. I have no time to wonder at or speculate on what I have seen: no time to endeavour to explain the phantom scenes and actors the song of the Stradivarius has brought before me. I feel no fear—curiosity and excitement only. Luigi’s presence I have forgotten, so intent am I upon the drama played before me.
The young man, I notice, is handsome as ever, but paler, thinner, and careworn. What is the music saying now in that strange speech I can interpret so readily? Poverty and hopelessness, loss of love, and with that loss the wish to rise to fame.
He is writing; but the paper before him this time is a score—the score of a work he once thought would hand his name down to future times. Well I know, as I watch him, that music will never be given to the world. I know it is night; and to kill his bitter thoughts he is sitting down and working without interest at his uncompleted score. As I watch him, grieving at his grief, weird and dreamy and unearthly sounds Luigi’s violin—bar after bar of the music monotonous and sad. Then of a sudden it wakes to fresh life with a sort of expression of keen surprise; and the young man raises his head from the work that interests him no more, and the door of his poor dwelling opens. A few bars of that haunting melody, that had caused me to whisper “this is love,” merge into a strain of plaintive hopelessness, and the fair girl enters. She is closely veiled, and enveloped in a long dark cloak, and as she raises the veil from her face and looks at him with sad and wistful eyes, the man’s heart responds to the impassioned strings and vibrates with love, hopeless though it be. For I know that ere two days are past she will wed another, and the man knows it, and, crushing down his love, curses her in his heart for her faithlessness. He stands helpless in his surprise at seeing her for a moment after her entry, and then, with a grand air of calm politeness, handing her to one of the crazy chairs that furnished his poor room, waits, with a cold face, to learn the object of her visit. Then the woman—or the music—pleads in pathetic strains for the pardon and forgiveness—pleads the pressure put upon her by friends—pleads her utter helplessness in their hands—yet tells him, even with the wedding-ring waiting to encircle her finger, that he alone, the exiled, poverty-stricken Frenchman, owns the love her heart can give. And as the tears fall from her eyes, the man waves his arm round the squalid room, and showing with that gesture his utter poverty and hopelessness, commends, with a bitter sneer, the course she has taken, or been compelled to take, and asks how he could expect the daughter of a noble English family to share such a home and such a lot as his. I see the girl hesitate, falter, and tremble, and as she rises, the man with a calm air and forced composure opens the door. Weeping bitterly she leaves him; and as he closes the rickety door upon her, a wail of music, more mournful than words can describe, lingers in the air, bringing the tears to my eyes, and the man kneels down and kisses the very boards on which her feet had rested.
With the mirthless smile upon his face he sits down thinking, thinking; and the music, playing ever, gives me his thoughts. As I read them I shudder, knowing how every fresh departure tends ever and only to the same end—what has he to do with life any longer?—he the last descendant of a noble French family, his sovereign an exile, his lands and possessions confiscated or squandered, and now he lies starving, or soon to be starving, in a London attic. Even the fame he once hoped to win as a musician is far off; and if ever to be won, is it worth struggling for? The past, to him, is full of agonizing recollections of relatives and friends whose blood has slaked the guillotine’s thirst. The present is misery. The future, now that the dream of love he had dared for a while to dream, is dispelled, hopeless—what, indeed, has he to do with life any longer? If he knows now how to live, at least he knows how to die.
Ever with the same dreary thoughts in his mind, I see him take the bulky score, the result of months, it may be years, of labour, and deliberately tear sheet after sheet to pieces, until the floor is littered with the fragments. And as his action tells me he renounces hope, love, and fame, I know I am fated to see an awful sight, but am powerless to move my eyes from the scene. For yet the melancholy notes sound; and I know until Luigi’s hands are still, I am fettered by the spell the music weaves. I am watching the man, or the phantom, with concentrated interest. The last page of the score falls in tatters to the ground, and seated still in the chair he had placed for the girl, he stretches out his hand, seeking for something amongst the papers on the table. Well I k
now the object he seeks—a small knife, with an elaborately chased silver handle—a relic, doubtless, of former riches. Tomorrow even that would have been sold to provide the bare necessities of the life he ceases to care for. He opens it, passes his fingers across the keen edge, and removing his coat, turns up his shirt-sleeve to the shoulder, and deliberately severs a large vein or artery in his arm. Oh, that maddening music!—encouraging, tempting, even applauding his crime of self destruction! I see, and sicken at the sight, the first red rush of blood from his white arm; and then, drip, drip, drip, follow the large quick-falling drops. So real, so horrible is the vision, that I can even note the crimson pool forming amid the tattered paper covering the floor. Will the fatal music never end? Minutes are hours as I watch the face grow whiter and whiter as the man sits bleeding to death. Now, whilst I long to faint and lose the dreadful sight, he rises, and with tottering steps walks across the room and takes up the violin. With the life-blood streaming from his left arm, once more, and for the last time, he makes the instrument speak; and again, I say, the music comes from him and not from Luigi. As he plays, even whilst I wait for what must follow, I know that such rare music was never heard on earth as the strain I listen to—fancying the while I can see the eager wings of Death hovering around the player. What can I compare it to? A poet would term it the death-song of the swan. It is the death-song of a genius—one whom the world never knew: whose own rash act has extinguished the sacred flame. Strong and wild and wonderful rises the music, for a while. Now it sinks lower, lower, and lower. Now it is so soft I can scarcely hear it; it is ebbing to silence, even as the heart’s-blood is ebbing to death. The face grows ghastly; the head sinks upon the breast; the eyes flicker like the dying flame of a candle; the violin drops from the reddened hand, and the man falls sideways from his chair to the ground, even as Luigi’s violin completes the bar his fall had broken off in the middle; and as its sums up the tragedy in one long-sustained passage of hopeless grief, I see the bloodless, white face of the man, now dead, or soon to be dead, lying on the ruddy floor; whilst the left arm, motionless now, rests as it had fallen, across the violin those nerveless fingers had at last been fain to drop.
The music stopped—the spell was ended. So powerfully was I wrought upon by the last vision I had seen, that the moment my limbs resumed their freedom, I rushed forward and fell fainting on the very spot it seemed to me the man had died. When I recovered consciousness, I found Luigi bending over me, and sponging my face with cold water. He was pale and agitated, and seemed scarcely able to stand from physical exhaustion. I rose, and with a shudder looked towards that part of the room where the phantasmagoria had appeared. Nothing was there to move me now. The familiar wallpaper, the pictures I had so often scanned, alone met my eye. As I gazed round, Luigi, in a whisper, asked—
“You saw it all, then, as I did?”
“I saw it all: could it have been a dream?”
He shook his head. “If so, three times have I dreamed it, and each time alike in every detail. The first time, I said, ‘It must be a dream’; the second time, ‘It may be fancy.’ But what can I say now, when another sees it also?”
I could give him no answer—I could offer no explanation—only, I asked—
“Why did you not cease playing, and spare me that last sight?”
“I could not. It was your impulse to play on that violin, when first you saw it, led me to think its strange power would act on another besides myself, and induced me to go through it all once more. But it will tell its story to no one else.”
I turned inquiringly, and seeing on the carpet a mass of small splinters of wood, mixed with tangled strings and pegs, knew what he meant. This, then, was the end of the masterpiece of Stradivarius.
“And you mean to say you had no power to cease when once you began?—were compelled to play through the whole tragedy?”
“I had no power to stop. Some force irresistible compelled me. I was but an instrument; and absurd as it seems, I believe that you, with no knowledge of the art, would have played just as I did.”
“But the music?” I asked. “The wonderful music?”
“That to me,” replied Luigi, “is the strangest thing of all. Neither you nor I can recall a single bar of it. Even those two or three melodies, which, as we heard them, we thought would haunt us, have vanished.”
And it was so. Try how I would, I could fashion no tune at all like them.
“It bears out what I told you,” said Luigi, in conclusion. “I was simply an instrument. Indeed it seemed the whole time not I, but another was playing. But here is an end of it.”
Then, late as the hour was, we kindled a small fire, and consumed every atom of the violin, which held, in some mysterious, inexplicable way, the story of man’s love and death.
We parted at last. Luigi left England as arranged, and has not yet revisited it.
Is there any sequel to my incredible story? None that will throw any light upon it, or enable me—as, indeed, I have little hope—to win the reader’s belief. Only, some time afterwards, I saw in the house of a man—known by name at least to all who are familiar with the titles of the great ones of the land—the portrait of a lady. It was that of his mother, who had died a few years after her marriage; and if the painters skill had not erred, it was also the portrait of the phantom-woman I had seen twice that night in the visions the weird music brought before me. Every feature was so stamped upon my memory, I could not be mistaken. And yet I did not trouble to inquire into her private history. Even if I could have learnt it, it could tell me no more than I knew already. The history of her love and its tragic ending—doubtless a sealed page in her life—had been fully displayed to me as I lay in Luigi’s room listening to the varying strains of the haunted Stradivarius.
MR. LINDSAY’S MANUSCRIPT, by T. H. E.
“And who was Mr. Lindsay?”
“I don’t know what he was before he came hither, but he was a singular creature whilst he was with us.”
“And where did you find these papers, sir?”
“They were left in his chamber.”
“Very well—read on then.”
Dr. Milman read on, and thus ran:
MR. LINDSAY’S MANUSCRIPT
There are mysteries in the world in which we live, to whose development but few among the beings that people it have dared to devote their energies, and to which yet fewer have ventured to yield belief, in the face of vulgar ridicule. Rare has been the search into the secrets of existence, and when attempted, its result has generally been fatal. But Oh! ye sons of men, much which ye regard as falsehood is indeed truth—truth which sheds a tremulous reflection upon your own hearts, when, in the dead midnight which is solitude, or in the intense silence of lonely wilds, ye become suddenly conscious of dim terrors and indefinite influences, from which ye hasten to escape into the world. At such moments ye flee from yourselves, and from that knowledge upon which even then ye verge, with chance-directed steps.
Hear the history of one whose life has been a wild pursuit of that from which ye turn aside! Learn the fate of one who has looked into these mysteries as into a charmed mirror, and upon whose fortunes both the joy and the grief of their magic have been alternately exhausted.
I was gifted with a rich imagination and acute perceptions. To catch the influences of beauty, physical or abstract—to yield my nerves to its power, as strings to the fingers of a mighty master—to shun the cold and coarse realities of life and throw my being into the haunts, the dreams, the joys of that separate and glorious world, which is known to such natures only as my own—these were the first impulses of which my soul was conscious, and to these it was delivered up with the enthusiasm of a worshipper before the shrine of Nature. Beautiful, but mysterious Nature! When we bend before thee, in deep and earnest adoration, how sublime are the revelations which open their endless vistas to our spirits, and yet how dark, how difficult and perplexed, are the mazes to which they allure our steps!
My childhood ha
d little sympathy with other childhood. Lone and dreamy of heart, I shunned the sports and abhorred the mirth of my associates. I sat apart devouring the writings of other days, at an age when children are usually intent upon the sense of life alone, and diffusing its exuberance of gladness through a thousand forms of frolic. I inhabited the moonlight glades with Shakespeare’s fairies, and recoiled with childish terror from the “weird sisters,” whom he alone could have created. Ghost and fiend, water-witch and indefinite phantom, were objects familiar with my fancy; and the long-indulged revel of my mind in the province of imagination, at length gave to the impressions it there received the force of reality. Pictures of the world and of life too had my authors, and on these I dwelt until it seemed as if I myself became part and parcel of the illusion—so ardently did I enter into the spirit of their creations; and at a later period, when I stumbled upon a translated romance, the work of a German and a metaphysician, a new region opened before me, and, for a time, I was lost in contemplations which could not fail to leave their trace upon my heart and mind. I read in silence and unchecked, and in silence and without communication with other hearts, I wove into visionary association the results of my studies, or from my own rich and teeming imagination created scene and subject, population and interest, for many a dark and fearful history. Thus, as I wandered in the outward world, touched by the unutterable beauty of still life, imbued with the lore of Nature, penetrated by the light and glory of creation, my soul united with all it thus acquired, the deep and earnest romance which teaches us ourselves, and the exercise of that peculiar faculty whereby men, in their turn, become creators, and rise in the scale of intellect and fame. So grew my spirit with my years, and I became a man—my passions, mind, and energies, all blent and bound up in a poet’s faith and worship.
The Second Macabre Megapack Page 31