A Woman's Will by Anne Warner (best 7 inch ereader txt) 📕

with Von Ibn this afternoon,” he said to Rosina as they chanced together during the coffee-and-cigarette period.

“Where?” she asked. “I don’t remember seeing you anywhere.”

“No; he appeared to engross you pretty thoroughly. I feel that I ought to warn you.”

“What about?”

“He isn’t a bit popular.”

“Poor man!”

“None of the men ever have anything to do with him; you never see him with any one, and it’s odd, because he talks English awfully well.”

“What do you suppose they have against him?”

“Oh, nothing in particular, I guess, only they don’t like him. He isn’t interesting to any one.”

“Oh, there I beg to differ with you,” she said quickly; “I saw him speak to some one to-day who I am sure found him very interesting indeed.”

“Who was it?”

“Myself.”


Chapter Four

“Have you ever thought what is love and what is passion?”

It was the man who spoke as they leaned against the rail of that afternoon steamer which is scheduled to make port at the Quai by seven o’clock, at the Gare by seven-ten.

Rosina simply shook her head.

“I am going to tell you that,” he said, turning his dark gaze down upon the shadows in the wake behind them; “we part perhaps this night, and I have a fancy to talk of just that. Perhaps it will come that we never meet again, but when you love you will think of what I have say.”

“I never shall love,” she said thoughtfully.

He did not appear to hear her at all.

“It is as this,” he said, his eyes glowing into the tossing foam below: “many may love, and there may be very many loves; very few can know a passion, and they can know but one. You may love, and have it for one that is quite of another rank or all of another world, but one has a passion only for what one may hope for one’s own. Love, that is a feeling, a something of the heart,”--he touched his bosom as he spoke but never raised his eyes,--“what I may have known,--or you. But passion, that is only half a feeling, and the other half must be in some other, or if it be not there it must be of a force put there, because with passion there _must_ be two, and one _must_ find the other and possess the other; that other heart must be, and must be won, and be your own, and be your own all alone.” He paused a moment and took out his cigarette case, and contemplated it and put it back. She leaned on the rail and listened, undisturbed by the strength of his speech. In the few short hours of their acquaintance the breadth of mutual comprehension between them seemed to be widening at a ratio similar to the circles spread by a stone striking still water.

“I am going to speak to you in my tongue,” he went on presently, “I am going to explain what I say with my music. Will you think to understand?”

“I will try,” she told him simply.

“It is so easy there,” he said; “I think if I had but my violin I could tell you all things. Because in music is all things. You must have feel that yourself. Only I fear you must smile at my language--it is not so easy to place your soul on a strange tongue.”

“I shall not smile,” she reassured him, “I am deeply interested.”

“That is good of you,” he replied, raising his head to cast a briefly grateful glance at her, “if you may only really understand! For, just as there are all colors for the painter to use, so are there all of the same within music. There is from darkness far below the under bass to the dazzle of sun in the high over the treble, and in between there are gray, and rose, and rain, and twilight, so that with my bow I may make you all a sad picture between the clefs or a gay one of flowers blooming from G to upper C. And there is heat and cold there too,--one gasps in the F flat down low and one shivers at the needle frost above high C. And there are all feelings too. I may sing you to sleep, I may thunder you awake, I may even steal your heart forever while you think to only listen in pleasure.”

“Not my heart,” said Rosina decidedly.

“Ah, now it reminds me what I have begin to tell you,” he exclaimed,--“of love and of passion. I must get some music and teach you that. Do you know the ‘Souvenir’ of Vieuxtemps?” he asked her abruptly.

“The ‘Souvenir d’Amérique’?”

“No, no,” he said impatiently, “not one of those. ‘Le Souvenir’ it is. Not of anything. Just alone. If we were only to be of some together I would teach it to you; I have never teach any one, but I would trouble me to teach you that.”

Then he paused and, producing his _étui_ for the second time, lit a cigarette.

“It is like this,” he went on, staring again upon the now rapidly darkening waters, “you may learn all that I have begin to tell you there in that one piece of music. There is love singing up and up in the treble, and one listens and finds that nothing may be sweeter or of more beauty, and then, most sudden and terrible there sounds there, below, a cry, ‘E,--F,--F sharp,--G;’ and it is not a cry, rather a scream, strength, force,--a Must made of the music,--and one perceives of a lightning flash that all the love was but the background of the passion of that cry of those four notes; and one listens, one trembles, one feels that they were to come before they are there, and when they have come, one can but shake and know their force.” He stopped and took his cigarette from between his lips. “_Mon Dieu_,” he cried violently, “of what was the composer thinking when he beat out those bars? When you shall play them you shall take only your forefinger and draw all your strength within it, and when the notes shriek in pain you shall have one secret of passion there beneath your hand.”

He spoke with such force,--such a tremendous force of feeling, that her face betrayed her wonder.

“I frighten you,--yes?” he asked with a smile of reassurance; “oh, that must not be. I only speak so because I will that you know too. It is good to know. Many go to the end and never know but love and are very well content, but I think you will know more. I did love myself once. She was never mine, and the time is gone, and I have thought to suffer much forever, and then I have stop to suffer, and now I am all forget. But,” he flung his cigarette to the waves, and for the first time during his monologue turned squarely towards her, “but if I have a passion come to me _now_, _that_ woman shall be mine! If I die for it she shall be mine. Because what I feel shall be so strong that she shall of force feel it too. Every day, every night, every hour, the need of me will go to her strongly and make her weaker, and weaker, and weaker, until she have no choice but of the being all mine. And so you are quite decided to go to Zurich to-morrow?”

He brought forth the question in such sudden change of subject that she started involuntarily. But then relief at the descent into the commonplace came on her and she replied:

“Yes, I want to go there to-morrow.”

“But why do you not want to on Tuesday--or next week?”

“My friend is there,” she reminded him.

His brow clouded, and she knew the reason why.

“You are so typically European,” she laughed; “I do believe that humanity over here has only two bases of action, and they are governed by ‘_Cherchez la femme_’ and ‘_Cherchez l’homme_.’”

“_Mais c’est vrai, ça!_” he said doggedly.

“Not always,” she replied; “or perhaps not always in the usual sense. It is true that I am going to Zurich to meet some one, but it is so very innocent when a woman goes ‘_cherchant la femme_,’ and, as I told you before, it is a woman that I go to meet, or, rather, it is a girl.”

“Are you sure?” he asked suspiciously.

“You don’t believe my word yet, do you?”

“I did not say that.”

“No, but really you do not.”

He gave a slight shrug.

“My friend is an Irish girl,” Rosina went on placidly. “I do love her so. We shall have such a good time being together next week.”

“You are sure that she is not English?” the man asked, with a little touch of sarcasm in his inflection.

“If you could hear her speak you could tell that from her accent.”

Von Ibn took out his case and lit another cigarette.

“What hotel do you go at in Zurich?” he asked presently.

“I shall go wherever my friend is.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know; I write her _Poste Restante_. She has been travelling for a long time with a Russian friend,--a lady,” she added, with a jerk.

“I hope you will go to the Victoria,” Von Ibn said slowly; “that is where I always have stay in Zurich.”

“So that we may have our dining-room souvenir in common, I suppose?”

“It is a very nice place,” he cried hotly; “it is not at all common! It is one of the best hotels in Zurich.”

She hastily interposed an explanation of the error in his comprehension of her meaning, and by the time that he understood, the lights of Lucerne were hazing the darkness, while the Rigi and Pilate had each hung out their rope ladder of stars.

“What time do you travel in the morning?” he asked then, turning his eyes downward upon her face.

“By the first express; it goes, I believe, about eight o’clock.”

“I shall not be awake,” he said gloomily.

“I shall not be, either; but Ottillie will get me aboard somehow.”

“If it was noon that you go, I should certainly come to the Gare,” he said thoughtfully; then he reflected for a short space, and added eagerly, “why do you not go later, and make an excursion by Zug; it is just on your way, and a so interesting journey.”

“I know Zug, and the lake too; I’ve coached all through there.”

“Then it would not again interest you?”

“No; I want to go straight to Molly as fast as I can.”

“To Molli! Where is that? You said to Zurich you went.”

She laughed and explained.

“Molly is the name of my girl friend.”

“Ah, truly.”

Then he was silent, and she was silent, and the lights of Lucerne continued to draw nearer and nearer.

“I wonder if I shall really never see you again,” he said, after a long interval.

“I wonder.”

“It is very unlikely that we shall ever meet again.”

“Very.”

In spite of herself her voice sounded dry.

“Where is your bank address?”

“Deutsches-Filiale, Munich, while I am in this part of the world. But why? Were you thinking of writing me weekly?”

“Oh, no,” he said