Chapter XIX The Melody in the Violets
“What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart,
Of thee what word remains ere speech be still?
A wayfarer by barren ways and chill
Steep ways and weary, without her thou art....”
ROSSETTI.
Geiger-Hans laid the flowers on his knee and, still staring at them with the eyes of mingled horror and grief, gathered his instrument to his embrace and drew from it a strain the like of which Steven had never heard. Low and simple it was, with even a delicate lilt, as of the shadow-dance of bygone joys, yet so heart-rending that, after a moment or two, the listener felt tears rising to his eyes and a catch at his throat, and cried on his companion to stop.
The musician laid down his fiddle and turned his drawn countenance upon his companion.
“That is the melody in the violets, the melody that is never silent in my soul, night or day. You cannot hear it? Why, then, you must listen to the story.—I was once as youthful as you and had also a very noble pride—I had nearly as much reason,” said Geiger-Hans, his pale lips writhing in a smile of scorn; “but, as men differ, their same passions vary in motive. It was of little moment to me that I came of an ancient house. (Ah! it pleases you to know so much! You have always guessed it, else had you not frequented me. Let it pass, friend, lest I should blush for you.) No, my pride was the pride of intellect. I knew a vast amount! I learned to lisp English that I might study Bacon and Locke, and to chew German that I might wrangle over Kant. I was the friend of Helvetius and Diderot, the rival of Holbach. We worshipped Voltaire. Reason was our God! In short, I was one of those they called the Encyclopædists; we dreamed of doing away with old Abuses and replacing all established things by brand-new Perfections. ‘Humanity and Freedom!’ was our war-cry. With sweet-oil and rose-water our revolution was to be accomplished. You know what we did for France and the world? We set the first stone rolling, a half-century ago, and”—with a tragic gesture he pointed to the valley—“you can hear the echo of it still reverberating down yonder! Freedom we preached: and the whole world is enslaved as never it was before! Reason was our lodestar: and the State was handed over to the lowest intellects to guide it according to their brute passions! Humanity was our watchword: and France was drenched in blood from end to end, and her sons have brought blood and fire to every land in Europe! The blood of that wretched son of the steppes blackening yonder on the road, the blood shed in yonder bullet-riddled village by that very volley that shakes us as we sit, is all offered to the honour of that same trinity of our invention: Freedom, Humanity... and Reason! Oh, glorious was the path we opened! Had we not just cause for pride?”
He fell silent a second; and Steven dared not speak, so corrosive was the bitterness of his every word, so poignant the emotion written on every furrow of his countenance.
“Oh, it was a golden time!” he resumed. “We philosophized up to the steps of Versailles. Louis made beautiful locks; Marie Antoinette tended snowy sheep; the roses bloomed at Trianon... and not the wisest of us ever saw the precipice yawn! As for me—even the greatest minds are subject to the everyday passions of humanity—” his lips parted upon an ironic smile—“I fell in love, neither more nor less than the most elementary youngster of the land. She——” He hesitated; then, steadying his voice, proceeded in tones which betrayed the effort of speech: “she was of an old-fashioned Breton stock, and her ideas and mine were as the poles asunder. But upon one common ground, and a fair pasture it was to me, we met and were equal: we loved.”
He paused, his breath came quick. “Heaven!” he said, and it seemed as if he knew not that he spoke, “how I loved her!”
He picked up a violet from the heap on his knees, and passed his fingers over it caressingly; his countenance softened. When he began again, it was in gentler accents than Steven had ever heard him use:
“When two people love each other, young man, and when each believes the other to be mistaken in some cardinal point of judgment, the dearest thought they cherish is to bring the Beloved to the truth. I had no doubt but that I could open her mind; she, but that she would redeem my perverted soul. I have told you what a fine pride I had. So noble it was that I was proud of my pride. And being an apostle of Liberty, the idea that a woman should resist her husband, that the weaker vessel should not give way to the stronger, never dawned on my emancipated mind! Well, well—we quarrelled! The fault was mine. Could I not have been content to worship her in her sweet faith! She had a high spirit. I wounded her in a thousand ways. Women have susceptibilities that we, thick-hided, thick-witted, dream not of. Even when we touch them to caress, we bruise. And then, when their pain is intolerable and they turn and strike at us, our wound is that of the most innocent, the most injured! Oh, when my measure was full against her, she insulted me, if you like—much as your little bride this morning insulted your Highmindedness. She said words that my exquisite pride could not endure. Of course, you will well understand (being even such a self-respecting youth as I was then) that I had no choice but to leave her. That was right, was it not?”
Steven, under that terrible gaze, ironic even in its haunting agony, was at a loss how to reply. He muttered something of a woman’s duty and wifely submission. The fiddler caught up the words fiercely.
“Ay,” cried he. “A woman’s duty—wifely submission. Oh, strange how men prate of chivalry, in the exercise of their bodily strength, because of a woman’s weakness, and yet never see that, because also of a woman’s sensitiveness of soul, a man should take shame to parade the superior strength of his will—that he should spare the delicate spirit as well as the delicate frame. Listen:—my strength of mind was such that it left me no choice but to desert the woman whom I had vowed to protect, to make parade of my manhood by leaving her to live her own life alone, to cast the frail and lovely thing I had held in my arms away from my love and guardianship. No doubt, no doubt, I made some very generous dispositions as regards my fortune—even as you now propose towards Madame Sidonia, and she had her people to go to, even as your wife has: those whom she had given up to come to me. But when the day dawned that I had to look into my heart and read the truth, what did I see? Look into your heart now, and learn the baseness of your own motives. Why do you leave your bride? Why did I leave mine? For what reason, but that she might weep and mourn for me; that she might learn how precious was the jewel she had not appreciated!... To be revenged... revenged on the Beloved!”
He flung himself back against the bole of the fir that rose behind him and closed his eyes.
“I left her,” he went on, “left France, left Europe. I went to America, the new home of Freedom, the only country on the face of the earth where the goddess was worshipped as she should be. I had vowed not to return till recalled: I was summoned by a voice terribly different from hers. It took three months before the noise of the storm reached me on that far-off shore, and I knew that it must take me at least a month more ere I could reach her. And she was in danger!... I think it was then I began to go mad—for it is understood that I am mad, is it not?”
He opened his bright eyes and fixed them on Steven, who became so extremely embarrassed that the fiddler broke into unmirthful laughter.
“Mad!” he repeated. His gaze flickered; and, if truth be told, he looked none too sane. Then he sank his head between his hands with a groan. “If only I were a little madder!” he cried. “The story is nearly finished,” he went on presently, in a new, toneless voice. “When I landed in France, all the powers of the Hell my superior intellect denied were let loose in the land—Danton, Marat and Robespierre represented the trilogy of Liberty, Reason and Humanity! The prisons were full, the guillotine everywhere restless.... Our Golden Age!... A fortnight I looked for her. Have you ever sought in vain one you had loved, even for an hour? Dante never devised a more exquisite torture for his deepest circle. My house in Paris had been confiscated for the nation’s soldiers; her father’s castle in Lorraine had been burnt to the ground. At my old home at Nancy at last I found a trace. She had refused, it seemed, to join in the flight of her people across the Rhine; but, when trouble became threatening, had taken up her post on my estate. That was like her. She had been arrested—so dangerous an enemy of the people! She was in the infamous prison at Nancy. She——” He flung his battered old hat from his head, dashed back his hair, loosened the wide collar at his throat. Breath seemed to fail him. A dark wave of blood rushed to his forehead. “All, all had abandoned her, save one poor girl—a peasant from our farm, whose people were of the local patriots.... This girl was allowed access to the cells. I met her at the prison gates, whither my frenzied search brought me at length. She knew me, though I was a tramp already. At sight of my face, she clapped her hands and broke into wild sobs. I was too late! That morning.... Why do you look at me like that? Do you wonder that I am still alive? That is where the God I denied has His vengeance of me, you see. I cannot die. Oh, I could kill myself, of course! But, mark how deep has the Encyclopædist fallen.... I dare not, dare not, lest I lose my chance of meeting her again!... Ah! there is great pity in your eyes.... Her little delicate head—she held it like a queen’s. Under the powder, her hair was gold. (I have not even one lock of her hair.) I used to clasp her slender throat between both my hands.... The peasant girl had kept by her to the end. She had stood at the foot of the scaffold, that a last friendly glance might speed that lovely soul. ‘She smiled to me,’ said the poor creature, sobbing. My eyes were dry.... Then she drew from her bosom a bunch of violets, and said, ‘Madame, les avail à son corsage.’...”
Geiger-Hans gathered up the flowers scattered on his knees, and crushed them against his face.
“She always loved violets,” he murmured. “These have no scent,” he went on dreamily; “but hers, hers—oh, they were sweet!”
“Ah! friend!” cried Steven, and had no further word. Infinite pity indeed was in the look he turned upon the musician. It seemed as if the latter wandered as he spoke again.
“There was blood on the violets,” said he, dropping his hands, “her blood and mine—for the man that was I died too, then, murdered in his youth, even as she.” His face had grown ashen again, his eyes were restless in their orbits. “The something that lived on, the miserable carcass, the old man—call it myself, if you will—this self that is before you now—it took the violets and began to walk away.... And it has walked ever since!” He gave a laugh, and the sound of it was mad. “No place could be home to me again—no land could be country, France least of all. But the skies and the trees are kind; they understand my sorrow, they take it into themselves. And sometimes they give me back peace. And then there’s the music.... I was always a musician. One, a village priest, found out by accident that the crazy tramp he had sheltered played better on his old Strad than he did himself. The fiddle was to him as his child, but he gave it to me, for he had compassion on me.... And so was born Geiger-Hans. And Fiddler Hans and his fiddle will walk until one day he can walk no more. And then he will lie down on the kind, brown earth, and turn his face to the skies... perhaps!”
He thrust the flowers into his breast. Then he leaned forward, his elbow on his knees, sheltering his eyes in his hands: and there was silence. The valley below had sunk into stillness.
While Steven had listened to the story of one man’s defeat in life, a combat where the fate of hundreds had been decided had been fought and won. And now they were picking up the dead yonder, in the evening calm of the plain. The wind had fallen with the fall of the day, and only the topmost branches of the pines swayed and whispered in scarcely perceptible airs. The light was growing golden mellow, the shadows were lengthening. Steven remembered his wound.
The fiddler turned and spoke. It was with composure.
“Well,” said he, “which way shall it be; back or forward?”
“I do not know,” said Steven, in a low voice, and dropped his eyelids as if ashamed.
The fiddler stretched out his hand and helped the other to rise, with a vigorous grasp. As they stood side by side, he suddenly cast his arm round the young man’s shoulders.
“The child,” said he, “Sidonia!... Oh, I want her to be happy. The first day I ever saw her, I thought that if we had had a child, the woman I loved and I, it would have been like her. And, to my madness, she has gradually become even as my own. I have haunted her ways. However imperiously the roaming fit may come upon me, there is always something that draws me back to watch, to guard, to care. I gave her to you. Aye, Count Steven, it was I gave her to you. And if again I have failed with the happiness of what is dearest to me on earth... then indeed it is that I am cursed!” His voice failed, broken; his eyes implored. After a while he went on: “When her soul looks out of her clear eyes, when she moves her head with its golden burden... she has a trick of speech, a laugh... Oh, it is like a refrain of old music to me, a sighing strain from a lost life! Her little, slender throat—I could hold it in both my hands.... Go back to her.... If I knew her happy, my restless spirit would, I believe, find some kind of peace. Ah! you think it will be hard? I tell you it will not. You do not know a woman’s heart. Forget that your pride is hurt. Remember that you are young. Oh, if you but knew! Life has one unsurpassable flower for youth—take it now, lest a breath from heaven scatter its bloom. Its scent is for you! The love of your youth, go, gather it! Go back to little Sidonia!”
“I will go back,” said Steven, and his lips trembled.
Silently Geiger-Hans loosened the grey horse, helped the wounded man to mount, and led the way down the hill.