“Let me pass,” said the Duke, rather breathlessly. “Thank you. Make way please. Thanks.” And with quick-pulsing heart he made his way down the aisle4 to the front row. There awaited him a surprise that was like a douche of cold water full in his face. Zuleika was not there! It had never occurred to him that she herself might not be punctual.
The Warden5 was there, reading his programme with an air of great solemnity. “Where,” asked the Duke, “is your grand-daughter?” His tone was as of a man saying “If she is dead, don’t break it gently to me.”
“My grand-daughter?” said the Warden. “Ah, Duke, good evening.”
“She’s not ill?”
“Oh no, I think not. She said something about changing the dress she wore at dinner. She will come.” And the Warden thanked his young friend for the great kindness he had shown to Zuleika. He hoped the Duke had not let her worry him with her artless prattle6. “She seems to be a good, amiable7 girl,” he added, in his detached way.
Sitting beside him, the Duke looked curiously8 at the venerable profile, as at a mummy’s. To think that this had once been a man! To think that his blood flowed in the veins9 of Zuleika! Hitherto the Duke had seen nothing grotesque10 in him—had regarded him always as a dignified11 specimen12 of priest and scholar. Such a life as the Warden’s, year following year in ornamental13 seclusion14 from the follies15 and fusses of the world, had to the Duke seemed rather admirable and enviable. Often he himself had (for a minute or so) meditated16 taking a fellowship at All Souls and spending here in Oxford17 the greater part of his life. He had never been young, and it never had occurred to him that the Warden had been young once. To-night he saw the old man in a new light—saw that he was mad. Here was a man who—for had he not married and begotten18 a child?—must have known, in some degree, the emotion of love. How, after that, could he have gone on thus, year by year, rusting19 among his books, asking no favour of life, waiting for death without a sign of impatience20? Why had he not killed himself long ago? Why cumbered he the earth?
On the dais an undergraduate was singing a song entitled “She Loves Not Me.” Such plaints are apt to leave us unharrowed. Across the footlights of an opera-house, the despair of some Italian tenor21 in red tights and a yellow wig22 may be convincing enough. Not so, at a concert, the despair of a shy British amateur in evening dress. The undergraduate on the dais, fumbling23 with his sheet of music while he predicted that only when he were “laid within the church-yard cold and grey” would his lady begin to pity him, seemed to the Duke rather ridiculous; but not half so ridiculous as the Warden. This fictitious24 love-affair was less nugatory25 than the actual humdrum26 for which Dr. Dobson had sold his soul to the devil. Also, little as one might suspect it, the warbler was perhaps expressing a genuine sentiment. Zuleika herself, belike, was in his thoughts.
As he began the second stanza27, predicting that when his lady died too the angels of heaven would bear her straight to him, the audience heard a loud murmur28, or subdued29 roar, outside the Hall. And after a few bars the warbler suddenly ceased, staring straight in front of him as though he saw a vision. Automatically, all heads veered30 in the direction of his gaze. From the entrance, slowly along the aisle, came Zuleika, brilliant in black.
To the Duke, who had rapturously risen, she nodded and smiled as she swerved31 down on the chair beside him. She looked to him somehow different. He had quite forgiven her for being late: her mere32 presence was a perfect excuse. And the very change in her, though he could not define it, was somehow pleasing to him. He was about to question her, but she shook her head and held up to her lips a black-gloved forefinger34, enjoining35 silence for the singer, who, with dogged British pluck, had harked back to the beginning of the second stanza. When his task was done and he shuffled36 down from the dais, he received a great ovation37. Zuleika, in the way peculiar38 to persons who are in the habit of appearing before the public, held her hands well above the level of her brow, and clapped them with a vigour39 demonstrative not less of her presence than of her delight.
“And now,” she asked, turning to the Duke, “do you see? do you see?”
“Something, yes. But what?”
“Isn’t it plain?” Lightly she touched the lobe40 of her left ear. “Aren’t you flattered?”
He knew now what made the difference. It was that her little face was flanked by two black pearls.
“Think,” said she, “how deeply I must have been brooding over you since we parted!”
“Is this really,” he asked, pointing to the left ear-ring, “the pearl you wore to-day?”
“Yes. Isn’t it strange? A man ought to be pleased when a woman goes quite unconsciously into mourning for him—goes just because she really does mourn him.”
“I am more than pleased. I am touched. When did the change come?”
“I don’t know. I only noticed it after dinner, when I saw myself in the mirror. All through dinner I had been thinking of you and of—well, of to-morrow. And this dear sensitive pink pearl had again expressed my soul. And there was I, in a yellow gown with green embroideries41, gay as a jacamar, jarring hideously42 on myself. I covered my eyes and rushed upstairs, rang the bell and tore my things off. My maid was very cross.”
Cross! The Duke was shot through with envy of one who was in a position to be unkind to Zuleika. “Happy maid!” he murmured. Zuleika replied that he was stealing her thunder: hadn’t she envied the girl at his lodgings43? “But I,” she said, “wanted only to serve you in meekness44. The idea of ever being pert to you didn’t enter into my head. You show a side of your character as unpleasing as it was unforeseen.”
“Perhaps then,” said the Duke, “it is as well that I am going to die.” She acknowledged his rebuke45 with a pretty gesture of penitence46. “You may have been faultless in love,” he added; “but you would not have laid down your life for me.”
“Oh,” she answered, “wouldn’t I though? You don’t know me. That is just the sort of thing I should have loved to do. I am much more romantic than you are, really. I wonder,” she said, glancing at his breast, “if YOUR pink pearl would have turned black? And I wonder if YOU would have taken the trouble to change that extraordinary coat you are wearing?”
In sooth, no costume could have been more beautifully Cimmerian than Zuleika’s. And yet, thought the Duke, watching her as the concert proceeded, the effect of her was not lugubrious47. Her darkness shone. The black satin gown she wore was a stream of shifting high-lights. Big black diamonds were around her throat and wrists, and tiny black diamonds starred the fan she wielded48. In her hair gleamed a great raven’s wing. And brighter, brighter than all these were her eyes. Assuredly no, there was nothing morbid49 about her. Would one even (wondered the Duke, for a disloyal instant) go so far as to say she was heartless? Ah no, she was merely strong. She was one who could tread the tragic50 plane without stumbling, and be resilient in the valley of the shadow. What she had just said was no more than the truth: she would have loved to die for him, had he not forfeited51 her heart. She would have asked no tears. That she had none to shed for him now, that she did but share his exhilaration, was the measure of her worthiness52 to have the homage53 of his self-slaughter.
“By the way,” she whispered, “I want to ask one little favour of you. Will you, please, at the last moment to-morrow, call out my name in a loud voice, so that every one around can hear?”
“Of course I will.”
“So that no one shall ever be able to say it wasn’t for me that you died, you know.”
“May I use simply your Christian55 name?”
“Yes, I really don’t see why you shouldn’t—at such a moment.”
“Thank you.” His face glowed.
Thus did they commune, these two, radiant without and within. And behind them, throughout the Hall, the undergraduates craned their necks for a glimpse. The Duke’s piano solo, which was the last item in the first half of the programme, was eagerly awaited. Already, whispered first from the lips of Oover and the others who had come on from the Junta56, the news of his resolve had gone from ear to ear among the men. He, for his part, had forgotten the scene at the Junta, the baleful effect of his example. For him the Hall was a cave of solitude—no one there but Zuleika and himself. Yet almost, like the late Mr. John Bright, he heard in the air the beating of the wings of the Angel of Death. Not awful wings; little wings that sprouted57 from the shoulders of a rosy58 and blindfold59 child. Love and Death—for him they were exquisitely60 one. And it seemed to him, when his turn came to play, that he floated, rather than walked, to the dais.
He had not considered what he would play tonight. Nor, maybe, was he conscious now of choosing. His fingers caressed61 the keyboard vaguely62; and anon this ivory had voice and language; and for its master, and for some of his hearers, arose a vision. And it was as though in delicate procession, very slowly, listless with weeping, certain figures passed by, hooded63, and drooping65 forasmuch as by the loss of him whom they were following to his grave their own hold on life had been loosened. He had been so beautiful and young. Lo, he was but a burden to be carried hence, dust to be hidden out of sight. Very slowly, very wretchedly they went by. But, as they went, another feeling, faint at first, an all but imperceptible current, seemed to flow through the procession; and now one, now another of the mourners would look wanly66 up, with cast-back hood64, as though listening; and anon all were listening on their way, first in wonder, then in rapture67; for the soul of their friend was singing to them: they heard his voice, but clearer and more blithe68 than they had ever known it—a voice etherealised by a triumph of joy that was not yet for them to share. But presently the voice receded69, its echoes dying away into the sphere whence it came. It ceased; and the mourners were left alone again with their sorrow, and passed on all unsolaced, and drooping, weeping.
Soon after the Duke had begun to play, an invisible figure came and stood by and listened; a frail70 man, dressed in the fashion of 1840; the shade of none other than Frederic Chopin. Behind whom, a moment later, came a woman of somewhat masculine aspect and dominant71 demeanour, mounting guard over him, and, as it were, ready to catch him if he fell. He bowed his head lower and lower, he looked up with an ecstasy72 more and more intense, according to the procedure of his Marche Funebre. And among the audience, too, there was a bowing and uplifting of heads, just as among the figures of the mourners evoked73. Yet the head of the player himself was all the while erect74, and his face glad and serene75. Nobly sensitive as was his playing of the mournful passages, he smiled brilliantly through them.
And Zuleika returned his gaze with a smile not less gay. She was not sure what he was playing. But she assumed that it was for her, and that the music had some reference to his
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