Part 47 (2/2)

To the end of her life Rita Wallace never heard the melody without a stab of pain and a dreadful catch of horror at her heart.

Perhaps the thing had not been played lately, perhaps the hour was ripe for it in the great restaurant. But as the violins and 'cello sobbed out the first movement, a hush fell over the place.

It was the after-dinner hour. The smoke from a hundred cigarettes curled upwards in delicate spirals like a drawing of Flaxman's. Bright eyes were languorous and spoke, voices sank to silence. The very waiters were congregated in little groups round the walls and service tables.

Salut d'Amour!

The melody wailed out into the great room with all the exquisite appeal of its rose-leaf sadness, its strange autumnal charm. It was perfectly rendered. And many brazen-beautiful faces softened for a moment, many pleasure-sodden hearts had a diastole of unaccustomed tenderness as the music pulsed to its close.

Gilbert's acquaintance, the well-known actor, who was personified animal pa.s.sion clothed in flesh if ever a man was, felt the jews-harp which he called his heart vibrate within him.

He was a luxurious pariah-dog in his emotions as in everything else.

The last sob of the violins trembled into silence. There was a loud spontaneous burst of applause, and a slim foreign man, grasping his fiddle by the neck, came from behind the gilded screen and looked down into the hall below with patient eyes.

Lothian rose from his chair and bowed to the distant gallery. The musician's face lighted up and he bowed twice to Lothian. Monsieur Toche had recognised the name upon the card. And the request, written in perfect, idiomatic French, had commenced, ”_Cher Maitre et Confrere_.” The lasting hunger of the obscure artist for recognition by another and greater one was satisfied. Poor Toche went to his bed that night in Soho feeling as if he had been decorated with the Order of Merit. And though, during the supper hours from eleven to half past twelve he had to play ”selections” from the Musical Comedy of the moment, he never lost the sense of _bien etre_ conferred upon him by Gilbert Lothian at dinner.

Gilbert was trembling a little as the music ended. Rita sat back in her chair with downcast eyes and lips slightly parted. Neither of them spoke.

Gilbert suddenly experienced a sense of immense sorrow, of infinite regret too deep for speech or tears. ”This is the moment of realisation,” he thought, ”the first real moment in my life, perhaps.

_I know what I have missed._ Of all women this was the one for me, as I for her. We were made for each other. Too late! too late!”

He struggled for mastery over his emotion. ”How well they play,” he said.

She made a slight motion with her hand. ”Don't let's talk for a minute,” she answered.

He was thrilled through and through. Did she also, then, feel and know ... ? Surely that could not be. His youth was so nearly over, the keen aesthetic vision of the poet showed him so remorselessly how changed he was physically from what he had been in years gone by, for ever.

Mechanically, without thinking, obeying the order given by the new half-self, that sp.a.w.n of poison which was his master and which he mistook for himself, he filled his gla.s.s once more and drank.

In forty seconds after, triumph and pride flared up within him like a sheet of thin paper lit suddenly with a match. Yes! She was his, part of him--it was true! He, the great poet, had woven his winged words around her. He had bent the power of his Mind upon her--utterly desirable, unsoiled and perfect--and she was his.

The blaze pa.s.sed through him and upwards, a thing from below. Then it ended and only a curl of grey ash floated in the air.

The most poignant and almost physical sorrow returned to him. His heart seemed to ache like a tooth. Yet it wasn't dull, hopeless depression.

It was, he thought, a high tragic sorrow enn.o.bling in its strength; a sorrow such as only the supreme soul-wounded artists of the world could know--had known.

”She was for me!” his heart cried out. ”Ah, if only I had met her first!” Yes! he was fain of all the tragic sorrows of the Great Ones to whom he was brother, of whose blood he was.

In a single flash of time--as the drowning man is said to experience all the events of his life at the penultimate moment of dissolution--he felt that he knew the secrets of all sorrow, the pangs of all tragedy.

The inevitable thought of his wife pa.s.sed like a blur across the fire-lit heights of his false agony.

”I cannot love her,” he said in his mind. ”I have never loved her. I have been blind until this moment.” A tear of sentiment welled into his eye at the thought of poor Mary, bereft of his love. ”How sad life was!”

Nearly every man, at some time or other, has found a faint reflection of this black thought a.s.sail him and has put it from him with a prayer and the ”vade retro Sathanas.”

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