—a wild sound. To read all the human pathos into nightingales' singing is nonsense. A wild, savage, non-human lurch and squandor of sound, beautiful, but entirely unæsthetic.
What Aaron was playing was not of his own invention. It was a bit of mediæval phrasing written for the pipe and the viol. It made the piano seem a ponderous, nerve-wracking steam-roller of noise, and the violin, as we know it, a hateful wire-drawn nerve-torturer.
After a little while, when he entered the smaller room again, the Marchesa looked full into his face.
"Good!" she said. "Good!"
And a gleam almost of happiness seemed to light her up. She seemed like one who had been kept in a horrible enchanted castle—for years and years. Oh, a horrible enchanted castle, with wet walls of emotions and ponderous chains of feelings and a ghastly atmosphere of must-be. She felt she had seen through the opening door a crack of sunshine, and thin, pure, light outside air, outside, beyond this dank and beastly dungeon of feelings and moral necessity. Ugh!—she shuddered convulsively at what had been. She looked at her little husband. Chains of necessity all round him: a little jailor. Yet she was fond of him. If only he would throw away the castle keys. He was a little gnome. What did he clutch the castle-keys so tight for?
Aaron looked at her. He knew that they understood one another, he and she. Without any moral necessity or any other necessity. Outside—they had got outside the castle of so-called human life. Outside the horrible, stinking human castle of life. A bit of true, limpid freedom. Just a glimpse.
"Charming!" said the Marchese. "Truly charming! But what was it you played?"
Aaron told him.
"But truly delightful. I say, won't you play for us one of these Saturdays? And won't you let me take the accompaniment? I should be charmed, charmed if you would."
"All right," said Aaron.
"Do drink another cocktail," said his hostess.
He did so. And then he rose to leave.
