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A Window Of Music
by
The count looked at him shrewdly. He patted the child’s trembling hand.
“Now,” he said soothingly, “something to clear away the mists! ‘Der Erlkoenig,’ We have never had it; bring it out.”
Schubert hesitated an instant. He glanced at the child.
“That music–I have it not, Herr Count–I left it in Vienna.”
The count moved impatiently.
“Play it from memory,” he said.
The musician turned slowly to the piano.
The child’s eyes followed him. She shivered a little.
He swung back with a swift gesture, feeling absently in his pockets.
“A piece of tissue-paper,” he murmured. He had extracted a small comb from one of his pockets. He regarded it thoughtfully. “If I had one little piece of paper–” He looked about him helplessly.
“There is some in the music-rack, Marie. Find it for him,” said the count.
The girl found it and laid it in his hand.
He turned back to the piano, adjusting and smoothing it. His broad back was an effective screen. The group waited, a look of interest on their faces.
Suddenly he wheeled about, his hands raised to his mouth, the comb, thinly covered with tissue-paper, at his lips, and his fat cheeks distended. His eyes behind the big spectacles glowed portentously.
They gazed at him in astonishment.
He drew a full breath and drove it forth, a lugubrious note. With scowling brows and set face he darted the instrument back and forth across his puckered lips. It wailed and shrieked, and out of the noise and discord emerged, at a galloping trot, “Der Erlkoenig!”
The child, who had been regarding him intently, threw back her head, and a little laugh broke from her lips. Her face danced. She came and stood by the player, her hand resting on his knee.
Herr Schubert puffed and blew, and “The Erlking” pranced and thumped. Now and then he stumbled and fell, and the fugitives flew fast ahead.
The player’s face was grave beyond belief, filled with a kind of fat melancholy, and tinged with tragic intent.
The faces watching it passed from question to amusement, and from amusement to protest.
“Nein, nein, mein Herr!” said the countess, as she wiped her mild blue eyes and shook her blond curls. “Nicht mehr! nicht mehr!”
With a deep, snorting sob the sound ceased. The comb dropped from his lips, and the player sat regarding them solemnly. A smile curved his big lips.
“Ja,” he said simply, “that was great music. I have made it myself, that music.”
With laughter and light words the party broke up. At a touch from the count the musician lingered. The others had left the room.
The count walked to the open window and stood for a moment staring into the darkness. Then he wheeled about.
“What was it you played?” he said swiftly.
“A Hungarian air,” replied Schubert briefly.
The count looked incredulous.
“It was your own,” he said.
“Partly,” admitted the musician.
The count nodded.
“I thought so.” He glanced toward the piano. “It is not too late—-“
Schubert shrugged his shoulders.
“I told the child–you heard–I cannot play it again, that music.”
The count laughed lightly.
“As you like.” He held out a hand. “Good night, my friend,” he said cordially. “You are a strange man.”
The grotesque, sensitive face opposite him quivered. The big lips trembled a little as they opened.
“I am not a strange man,” said Schubert vehemently. “That music–it was–the devil!”
The count laughed again lightly. He held out his hand.
“Good night,” he said.
IV
A soft haze hung over Zelitz. The moonlight, filtering through it, touched the paths and shrubs with shifting radiance and lifted them out of shadow. Under the big trees the darkness lay black, but in the open spaces it had given way to a gray, elusive whiteness that came and went like a still breathing of the quiet night.
A young girl, coming down one of the winding paths, paused a moment in the open space to listen. The hand that held her trailing, shimmering skirts away from the gravel was strong and supple, and the face thrown back to the moonlight wore a tense, earnest look; but the dark eyes in their curving lids were like a child’s eyes. They seemed to laugh subtly. It may have been that the moonlight shifted across them.