A Romance of Two Worlds by Marie Corelli (the little red hen ebook .txt) 📕

“Well!” said Mrs. Challoner; “I must say she doesn’t look as if anything were the matter with her. In fact, I never saw two more happy, healthy-looking girls than you both. What secret do you possess to make yourselves look so bright?”

“No secret at all,” replied Zara, laughing; “we simply follow the exact laws of health, and they suffice.”

Colonel Everard, who had been examining me critically and asking me a few questions, here turned to Zara and said:

“Do you really mean to say, Madame Casimir, that your brother cured this girl by electricity?”

“Purely so!” she answered earnestly.

“Then it’s the most wonderful recovery I ever saw. Why, at Cannes, she was hollow-eyed, pale, and thin as a willow-wand; now she looks- -well, she knows how she is herself—but if she feels as spry as she looks, she’s in first-rate training!”

I laughed.

“I DO feel spry, Colonel,” I said. “Life seems to me like summer sunshine.”

“Brava!” exclaimed Mr. Challoner. He was a staid, rather slow Kentuckian who seldom spoke; and when he did, seemed to find it rather an exertion. “If there’s one class of folk I detest more than another, it is those all-possessed people who find life unsuited to their fancies. Nobody asked them to come into it—nobody would miss them if they went out of it. Being in it, it’s barely civil to grumble at the Deity who sent them along here. I never do it myself if I can help it.”

We laughed, and Mrs. Challoner’s eyes twinkled.

“In England, dear, for instance,” she said, with a mischievous glance at her spouse—“in England you never grumbled, did you?”

Mr. Challoner looked volumes—his visage reddened, and he clenched his broad fist with ominous vigour.

“Why, by the Lord!” he said, with even more than his usual deliberate utterance, “in England the liveliest flea that ever gave a triumphal jump in air would find his spirits inclined to droop! I tell you, ma’am,” he continued, addressing himself to Zara, whose merry laugh rang out like a peal of little golden bells at this last remark—“I tell you that when I walked in the streets of London I used to feel as if I were one of a band of criminals. Every person I met looked at me as if the universe were about to be destroyed next minute, and they had to build another up right away without God to help ‘em!”

“Well, I believe I agree with you,” said Colonel Everard. “The English take life too seriously. In their craze for business they manage to do away with pleasure altogether. They seem afraid to laugh, and they even approach the semblance of a smile with due caution.”

“I’m free to confess,” added his wife, “that I’m not easily chilled through. But an English ‘at home’ acts upon me like a patent refrigerator—I get regularly frozen to the bone!”

“Dear me!” laughed Zara; “you give very bad accounts of Shakespeare’s land! It must be very sad!”

“I believe it wasn’t always so,” pursued Colonel Everard; “there are legends which speak of it as Merrie England. I dare say it might have been merry once, before it was governed by shopkeepers; but now, you must get away from it if you want to enjoy life. At least such is my opinion. But have you never been in England, Madame Casimir? You speak English perfectly.”

“Oh, I am a fairly good linguist,” replied Zara, “thanks to my brother. But I have never crossed the Channel.”

The Misses Challoner looked politely surprised; their father’s shrewd face wore an expression of grim contentment.

“Don’t cross it, ma’am,” he said emphatically, “unless you have a special desire to be miserable. If you want to know how Christians love one another and how to be made limply and uselessly wretched, spend a Sunday in London.”

“I think I will not try the experiment, Mr. Challoner,” returned Zara gaily. “Life is short, and I prefer to enjoy it.”

“Say,” interrupted Mrs. Challoner, turning to me at this juncture, “now you are feeling so well, would it be asking you too much to play us a piece of your own improvising?”

I glanced at the grand piano, which occupied a corner of the salon where we sat, and hesitated. But at a slight nod from Zara, I rose, drew off my gloves, and seated myself at the instrument. Passing my hands lightly over the keys, I wandered through a few running passages; and as I did so, murmured a brief petition to my aerial friend Aeon. Scarcely had I done this, when a flood of music seemed to rush to my brain and thence to my fingers, and I played, hardly knowing what I played, but merely absorbed in trying to give utterance to the sounds which were falling softly upon my inner sense of hearing like drops of summer rain on a thirsty soil. I was just aware that I was threading the labyrinth of a minor key, and that the result was a network of delicate and tender melody reminding me of Heinrich Heine’s words:

“Lady, did you not hear the nightingale sing? A beautiful silken voice—a web of happy notes—and my soul was taken in its meshes, and strangled and tortured thereby.”

A few minutes, and the inner voice that conversed with me so sweetly, died away into silence, and at the same time my fingers found their way to the closing chord. As one awaking from a dream, I looked up. The little group of friendly listeners were rapt in the deepest attention; and when I ceased, a murmur of admiration broke from them all, while Zara’s eyes glistened with sympathetic tears.

“How can you do it?” asked Mrs. Challoner in good-natured amazement. “It seems to me impossible to compose like that while seated at the piano, and without taking previous thought!”

“It is not MY doing,” I began; “it seems to come to me from—”

But I was checked by a look from Zara, that gently warned me not to hastily betray the secret of my spiritual communion with the unseen sources of harmony. So I smiled and said no more. Inwardly I was full of a great rejoicing, for I knew that however well I had played in past days, it was nothing compared to the vigour and ease which were now given to me—a sort of unlocking of the storehouse of music, with freedom to take my choice of all its vast treasures.

“Well, it’s what WE call inspiration,” said Mr. Challoner, giving my hand a friendly grasp; “and wherever it comes from, it must be a great happiness to yourself as well as to others.”

“It is,” I answered earnestly. “I believe few are so perfectly happy in music as I am.”

Mrs. Everard looked thoughtful.

“No amount of practice could make ME play like that,” she said; “yet I have had two or three masters who were supposed to be first-rate. One of them was a German, who used to clutch his hair like a walking tragedian whenever I played a wrong note. I believe he got up his reputation entirely by that clutch, for he often played wrong notes himself without minding it. But just because he worked himself into a sort of frenzy when others went wrong, everybody praised him, and said he had such an ear and was so sensitive that he must be a great musician. He worried me nearly to death over Bach’s ‘Well-tempered Klavier’—all to no purpose, for I can’t play a note of it now, and shouldn’t care to if I could. I consider Bach a dreadful old bore, though I know it is heresy to say so. Even Beethoven is occasionally prosy, only no one will be courageous enough to admit it. People would rather go to sleep over classical music than confess they don’t like it.”

“Schubert would have been a grander master than Beethoven, if he had only lived long enough,” said Zara; “but I dare say very few will agree with me in such an assertion. Unfortunately most of my opinions differ from those of everyone else.”

“You should say FORTUNATELY, madame,” said Colonel Everard, bowing gallantly; “as the circumstance has the happy result of making you perfectly original as well as perfectly charming.”

Zara received this compliment with her usual sweet equanimity, and we rose to take our leave. As we were passing out, Amy Everard drew me back and crammed into the pocket of my cloak a newspaper.

“Read it when you are alone,” she whispered; “and you will see what Raffaello Cellini has done with the sketch he made of you.”

We parted from these pleasant Americans with cordial expressions of goodwill, Zara reminding them of their engagement to visit her at her own home next day, and fixing the dinner-hour for half-past seven.

On our return to the Hotel Mars, we found Heliobas in the drawing-room, deep in converse with a Catholic priest—a fine-looking man of venerable and noble features. Zara addressed him as “Father Paul,” and bent humbly before him to receive his blessing, which he gave her with almost parental tenderness. He seemed, from his familiar manner with them, to be a very old friend of the family.

On my being introduced to him, he greeted me with gentle courtesy, and gave me also his simple unaffected benediction. We all partook of a light luncheon together, after which repast Heliobas and Father Paul withdrew together. Zara looked after their retreating figures with a sort of meditative pathos in her large eyes; and then she told me she had something to finish in her studio—would I excuse her for about an hour? I readily consented, for I myself was desirous of passing a little time in solitude, in order to read the manuscripts Heliobas had given me. “For,” thought I, “if there is anything in them not quite clear to me, he will explain it, and I had better take advantage of his instruction while I can.”

As Zara and I went upstairs together, we were followed by Leo—a most unusual circumstance, as that faithful animal was generally in attendance on his master. Now, however, he seemed to have something oppressive on his mind, for he kept close to Zara, and his big brown eyes, whenever he raised them to her face, were full of intense melancholy. His tail drooped in a forlorn way, and all the vivacity of his nature seemed to have gone out of him.

“Leo does not seem well,” I said, patting the dog’s beautiful silky coat, an attention to which he responded by a heavy sigh and a wistful gaze approaching to tears. Zara looked at him.

“Poor Leo!” she murmured caressingly. “Perhaps he feels lonely. Do you want to come with your mistress to-day, old boy? So you shall. Come along—cheer up, Leo!”

And, nodding to me, she passed into her studio, the dog following her. I turned into my own apartment, and then bethought myself of the newspaper Mrs. Everard had thrust into my pocket. It was a Roman journal, and the passage marked for my perusal ran as follows:

“The picture of the Improvisatrice, painted by our countryman Signor Raffaello Cellini, has been purchased by Prince N–-for the sum of forty thousand francs. The Prince generously permits it to remain on view for a few days longer, so that those who have not yet enjoyed its attraction, have still time to behold one of the most wonderful pictures of the age. The colouring yet remains a marvel to both students and connoisseurs, and the life-like appearance of the girl’s figure, robed in its clinging white draperies ornamented with lilies of the valley, is so strong, that one imagines she will step out of the canvas and confront the bystanders. Signor Cellini must now be