Ardath - Page 393/417

Beethoven! ... Musical fullness of divine light! how the glorious nightingale notes of his unworded poesy came dropping through the air like pearls, rolling off the magic wand of the Violin Wizard, whose delicate dark face, now slightly flushed with the glow of inspiration, seemed to reflect by its very expression the various phases of the mighty composer's thought! Alwyn half closed his eyes and listened entranced, allowing his soul to drift like an oarless boat on the sweeping waves of the music's will. He was under the supreme sway of two Emperors of Art,--Beethoven and Sarasate,--and he was content to follow such leaders through whatever sweet tangles and tall growths of melody they might devise for his wandering. At one mad passage of dancing semitones he started,--it was as though a sudden wind, dreaming an enraged dream, had leaped up to shake tall trees to and fro,--and the Pass of Dariel, with its frozen mountain-peaks, its tottering pines, and howling hurricanes, loomed back upon his imagination as he had seen it first on the night he had arrived at the Monastery--but soon these wild notes sank and slept again in the dulcet harmony of an Adagio softer than a lover's song at midnight. Many strange suggestions began to glimmer ghost-like through this same Adagio, --the fair, dead face of Niphrata flitted past him, as a wandering moonbeam flits athwart a cloud,--then came flashing reflections of light and color,--the bewildering dazzlement of Lysia's beauty shone before the eyes of his memory with a blinding lustre as of flame, . . the phantasmagoria of the city of Al-Kyris seemed to float in the air like a faintly discovered mirage ascending from the sea,--again he saw its picturesque streets, its domes and bell-towers, its courts and gardens.. again he heard the dreamy melody of the dance that had followed the death of Nir-jalis, and saw the cruel Lysia's wondrous garden lying white in the radiance of the moon; anon he beheld the great Square, with its fallen Obelisk and the prostrate, lifeless form of the Prophet Khosrul.. and.. Oh, most sad and dear remembrance of all! ... the cherished Shadow of Himself, the brilliant, the joyous Sah-luma appeared to beckon him from the other side of some vast gulf of mist and darkness, with a smile that was sorrowful, yet persuasive; a smile that seemed to say--"O friend, why hast thou left me as though I were a dead thing and unworthy of regard?--Lo, I have never died, --I am here, an abandoned part of THEE, ready to become thine inseparable comrade once more if thou make but the slightest sign!"--Then it seemed as though voices whispered in his ear--"Sah-luma! beloved Sah-luma!"--and "Theos! Theos, my beloved!"--till, moved by a vague tremor of anxiety, he lifted his drooping eyelids and gazed full in a sort of half-incredulous, half-reproachful amaze at the musical necromancer who had conjured up all these apparitions,--what did this wonderful Sarasate know of his Past?