! first. It was evidently, from the slanting man entered. He too was young and powerfully built, with an intensely English face. Yet I could trace in his harder features a resemblance, such as a brother might bear, to the girl before me. As he entered, the lovers sprang to their feet; then, covering her face with her hands, the girl sank upon a chair, while her companion faced the new comer with an air as haughty as his own, and words of scorning, of contempt, of shaming, of defiance, were hurled from man to man. True, I heard them not all the a challenge which, he stated, his late anphantasmagoria came before me in dumb- tagonist dare not decline, as the writer was show; but the varied tones of the violin of even more noble family than the man who told me all that passed between the two had insulted him. Having written the letmen as truly as though their voices smote ter, he rose and paced the small room, deep upon my ear, and as the wild music culmi- in thought. As his steps went backward nated in a fierce crescendo of thrilling power and forward across the limited space-as his the two men grappled in their rage, and the thoughts grew black with hate as he rememgirl sprang to her feet and ran wildly to the bered the insult he had suffered, or grew door. bright with love as he pictured the fair girl who had pledged herself to him-so truthfully did the delicate gradations of the music harmonize with them that I could feel every emotion stirring his heart, at times almost identifying myself with him, making his joy, his sorrow, mine. After what seemed to be hours he took up the violin that lay on the table near him and commenced playing. As before, I say, whether Luigi's hands produced it or not, the sound came from him; and as he played, the music, at first fierce, stern and harsh, gradually toned down until it became dreamy and lulling, until at last he threw himself on his poor bed, and Luigi's violin resumed the strain-the soft, soothing measure I have before mentioned, telling of placid sleep. For a moment all grew misty, and the phantom actors of my vision were hidden from my sight. When they reappeared, I saw the young Frenchman quitting the room with blood trickling down his pale cheek; and as, with a look of undying hate on his face, he closed the door behind him, the room and all faded from my sight. But no pause in the music; still those weird notes weaving the mystic spell that chained me. Leaving me no time to reflect on what I had seen, but enforcing my attention to the drama acted before me, the fiery crescendo sank in a dull sullen theme almost colorless when compared with the foregoing numbers; then, as with dissolving-views, where one scene grows through another that fades, I began to realize that I looked into another room-one very different from the was be from a window-on a wide expanse of smooth green turf. turf. As before, the scene so real, so material, that I might have stepped out on to the sward. There was nothing in the locality which I could identify. A wall and some palings, I remember, were on the left hand; a belt of trees on the right. As I looked I saw figures at some little distance. Two men in their shirt-sleeves were engaged in a deadly duel. They were not so far away but I could plainly distinguish their features, and I knew they were those of the two men whom I had seen grapple in the room. As their slender flashing blades twined in and out like serpents-as they thrust and parried, advanced and retreated -the mysterious music entered fully into the fray, accompanying every stroke, until, as the arm of one of the combatants sank by his side helpless, pierced by his antagonist's blade, it swelled to a strain of exultation. It was the Englishman who was wounded, and as the sword dropped from his grasp his opponent with difficulty checked the impulse urging him to drive his weapon through his unguarded breast; then, seeing his foe was quite unable to renew the combat, he bowed with cold politeness, sheathed his sword and turned away, leaving the wounded man to the care of his second. As the Frenchman vanished from my sight among the trees at the right hand the scene grew blurred and faded: only the spell of the music continued ever. The dismal measure and the dismal garret once more. As I look at the poverty-stricken room, the music, eloquent as before, in some hidden manner makes me aware that months have passed since I last looked at it. The young Frenchman is present. Indeed, I begin now to understand that no scene can come beneath my eyes unless he be an actor in it; it is his life, his love, the violin in its own marvellous tongue relates. I wait with interest now; I have no time to wonder at or speculate upon what I have seen-no time to endeavor to explain the phantom scenes and actions which the song of the Stradivarius has brought before me. I feel no fear— curiosity and excitement only. Luigi's presence I have forgotten, so intent am I upon the drama played before me. The young man, I notice, is handsome as ever, but paler, thinner and careworn. What is the music saying now in that strange speech which I interpret so readily? Poverty and hopelessness, loss of love, and with that loss the wish to rise to fame. He is writing, but the paper before him this time is a score— the score of a work he once thought would hand his name down to future times. Well know, as I watch him, that music will never be given to the world. I know it is night, and to kill his bitter thoughts he is sitting down and working without interest at his uncompleted score. As I watch him grieving at his grief, weird and dreamy and unearthly sounds Luigi's violin, bar after bar of the music monotonous and sad. Then of a sudden it wakes to fresh life with a sort of expression of keen surprise, and the young man raises his head from the work that interests him no more, and the door of his poor dwelling opens. I A few bars of that haunting melody that has caused me to whisper "This is love" merge into a strain of plaintive hopelessness, and the fair girl enters. She is closely veiled and enveloped in a long dark cloak, and as she raises the veil from her face and looks at | playing ever, gives me his thoughts. As I read them I shudder, knowing how every fresh departure tends ever and only to the same end: what has he to do with life any longer-he, the last descendant of a noble French family, his sovereign an exile, his lands and possessions confiscated or squandered, and now he lies starving, or soon to be starving, in a London attic? Even the fame that he once hoped to win as a musician is far off; and if ever to be won, is it worth struggling for? The past, to him, is full of agonizing recollections of relatives and friends whose blood has slaked the guillotine's thirst. The present is misery; the future, now that the dream of love he had dared for a while to dream is dispelled, hopeless. What, indeed, has he to do with life any longer? If he knows not how to live, at least he knows how to die. Ever with the same dreary thoughts in his mind, I see him take the bulky score-the result of months, it may be years, of labor-and deliberately tear sheet after sheet to pieces, until the floor is littered with the fragments. And as his action tells me he renounces hope, love and fame I know I am fated to see an awful sight, but am powerless to move my eyes from the scene. For still the melancholy notes sound, and I know that until Luigi's hands are at rest I am fettered by the spell the music weaves. I watch the man, or the phantom, with concentrated interest. The last page of the score falls in tatters to the ground, and, still seated in the chair which he had placed for the girl, he stretches out his hand, seeking for something among the papers on the table. Well I know the object he seeks a small knife with an elaborately chased silver handle, a relic, doubtless, of former riches. To him with silent, wistful eyes the man's heart responds to the impassioned strings and vibrates with love, hopeless though it be. For I know that ere two days are past she will wed another; and the man knows it, and, crushing down his love, curses her in his heart for her faithlessness. He stands for a moment after her entry helpless in his surprise at seeing her, and then, with a grand air of calm politeness, handing her to one of the crazy chairs that furnish his poor room, waits with a cold face to learn the object of her visit. Then the woman, or the music, pleads in pathetic strains for pardon and forgiveness-pleads the pressure put upon her by friends, pleads her utter helplessness in their hands-yet tells him, even with the wedding-ring waiting to encircle her finger, that he alone, the exiled, poverty-stricken Frenchman, owns the love her heart can give. And as the tears fall from her eyes the man waves his arm round the squalid room, and, showing by that gesture his utter poverty and hopelessness, commends, with a bitter sneer, the course she has taken, or been compelled to take, and asks how he could expect the daughter of a noble English family to share such a home and such a lot as his. I see the girl hesitate, falter and tremble, and, as she rises, the man, with a calm air and forced composure, opens the door. Weeping bitterly, she leaves him; and as she closes the rickety door upon her a wail of music more mournful than words can describe lingers in the air and brings the tears to my eyes, while the man kneels down and kisses the very boards on which her feet have rested. With the mirthless smile upon his face, he sits down and begins thinking; and the music, morrow even that would have been sold to provide the bare necessaries of the life he ceases to care for. He opens it, passes his fingers across the keen edge, and, removing his coat, turns up his shirt-sleeve to the shoulder and deliberately severs a large vein or artery in his arm. Oh, that maddening music!-encouraging, tempting, even applauding his crime of self-destruction. I see, and sicken at the sight, the first red rush of blood from his white arm; and then-drip, drip, drip-follow the large, quick-falling drops. So real, so horrible, is the vision that I can even note the crimson pool forming amid the tattered paper covering the floor. Will the fatal music never end? Minutes are hours as I watch the face grow whiter and yet whiter as the man sits bleeding to death. Now, while I long to faint and lose the dreadful sight, he rises and with tottering steps walks across the floor and takes up the violin. With the life-blood streaming from his left arm, once more, and for the last time, he makes the instrument speak; and again, I say, the music comes from him, and not from Luigi. As he plays, even while I wait for what must follow, I know that such rare music was never heard on earth as the strain to which I listen, fancying, the while, I see the eager wings of Death hovering around the player. To what can I compare it? A poet would term it the deathsong of the swan. It is the death-song of a genius-one whom the world never knewwhose own rash act has extinguished the sacred flame. Strong and wild and wonderful rises the music for a while. Now it sinks lower-lower and lower. Now it is so soft I can scarcely hear it; it is ebbing to silence, even as the heart's blood is ebbing to death. The face grows ghastly; the head sinks upon the breast; the eyes flicker like the dying flame of a candle; the violin drops from the reddened hand, and the man falls sideways from his chair to the ground even as Luigi's violin completes the bar his fall had broken off in the score; and as it sums up the tragedy in one long-sustained passage of hopeless grief I see the bloodless white face of the man, now dead, or soon to be dead, lying on the ruddy floor, while the left arm, motionless now, rests as it had fallen across the violin, which those nerveless fingers had at last been fain to drop. The music stopped; the spell was ended. So powerfully was I wrought upon by the last vision I had seen that the moment my limbs resumed their freedom I rushed forward and fell fainting on the very spot on which it seemed to me the man had fallen. When I recovered consciousness, I found Luigi bending over me and sponging my face with cold water. He was pale and agitated, and seemed, from physical exhaustion, scarcely able to stand. I rose and with a shudder looked toward that part of the room where the phantasmagoria had appeared. Nothing was there now to move me: the familiar wall-paper, the pictures I had so often scanned, alone met my eye. As I gazed round, Luigi, in a whisper, asked, You saw it all, then, as I did?" "I saw it all. Could it have been a dream?" He shook his head : "If so, three times have I dreamed it. and each time alike in every detail. The first time I said, 'It must be a dream;' the second time, 'It may be fancy.' But what | small fire and consumed every atom of the can I say now, when another sees it also?" when another sees it also?" violin which held in some mysterious, inexplicable way the story of a man's love and death. I could give him no answer; I could offer no explanation; only I asked, 'Why did you not cease playing and spare me that last sight?" "I could not. It was your impulse to play on that violin, when first you saw it, that led me to think its strange power would act on another besides myself and induced me to go through it all once more. But it will tell its story to no one else." I turned inquiringly, and, seeing on the carpet a mass of small splinters of wood mixed with tangled strings and pegs, knew what he meant. This, then, was the end of the masterpiece of Stradivarius! We parted at last. Luigi left England, as arranged, and has not yet revisited it. Is there any sequel to my incredible story? None that will throw any light upon it or enable me―as, indeed, I have little hope of doing to win the reader's belief; only some time afterward I saw in the house of a man known-by name, at least to all who are familiar with the titles of the great ones of the land, the portrait of a lady. It was that of his mother, who had died a few years after her marriage; and if the painter's skill had not erred, it was also the portrait of the phantom woman whom I had seen twice that night in the visions brought before me by the weird music. Every feature was so stamped upon my memory that I could not be mistaken. And yet I did not trouble to inquire into her private history. Even if I could have learned it, it could have "And you mean to say you had no power to cease when once you began-were compelled to play through the whole tragedy?" "I had no power to stop; some force irresistible compelled me. I was but an instrument, and, absurd as it seems, I believe that you, with no knowledge of the art, would have played just as I did." "But the music," I asked-" the wonder- told me no more than I knew already. The ful music?" That, to me," replied Luigi, "is the strangest thing of all. Neither you nor I can recall a single bar of it. Even those two or three melodies which as we heard them we thought would haunt us have vanished." And it was so. Try how I would, I could fashion no tune at all like them. "It bears out what I told you," said Luigi, in conclusion: "I was simply an instrument. Indeed, it seemed the whole time not I, but another, was playing. But here is an end of it." story of her love and its tragic endingdoubtless a sealed page in her life-had been fully revealed to me as I lay in Luigi's room listening to the varying strains of the haunted Stradivarius. Ο BIRTH. HUGH CONWAY. Fall vanities and fopperies, the vanity of high birth is the greatest. True nobility is derived from virtue, not from birth. Titles, indeed, may be purchased, but virtue is the only coin that makes the Then, late as the hour was, we kindled a bargain valid. Burton. |