For Natalie had blushed to the roots of her hair. Tears stood in her eyes.
Boris guessed that she feared he would look upon the explanation of her mother as a bid.
"I remember the violins very well," he hastened to a.s.sure her; "especially one of them excited my envy. It would please me very much to try them again."
The servant brought the violins and at the same time a pile of hastily s.n.a.t.c.hed-up violin music, smelling of dust, dampness, and camphor. The wonderfully beautiful instruments were in a pitiable condition--half of the strings were gone, those that remained were brittle and dry. But still there was a small stock of them. After Boris, with the loving patience and surgical skill with which only a true violinist handles an Amati, had put it in a suitable condition and then tuned it, he drew the bow softly across it. A strangely sweet, tender, sad sound vibrated through the great empty room. It seemed as if the violin awoke with a sigh from an enchanted sleep. A pleasant shudder pa.s.sed over Natalie.
Lensky bent his cheek to the splendid instrument like a lover. "Shall we try something?" said he, and took from the pile of notes a nocturne of Chopin, transposed for the violin, opened the piano, the only good and costly piece of furniture in the room, and laid the notes on the music-rack. "Now, Natalie Alexandrovna, may I beg you?"
Quite frightened by his artistic greatness--yes, trembling from charming embarra.s.sment--she sat down at the piano.
His violin began to sing; how full and soft, so delightfully languishing, and also somewhat veiled, as is usually the case with an instrument unused for years.
"How beautiful!" murmured Natalie, with eyes sparkling with animation.
"Yes, it is a splendid instrument," replied Lensky. "You cannot imagine what it is to play on an instrument which understands one. It is still only a little bit sleepy, but we will awaken it."
He placed a sonata of Beethoven before Natalie. They were alone. After the first bar of the nocturne the princess had fallen asleep, at the last she had waked, and had retired, with the remark that she could hear much better in the adjoining room.
"Will you really tolerate my accompaniment?" murmured the young girl.
"And do you wish to hear again, vain little princess, what I already told you in St. Petersburg, that I have seldom found a more sympathetic accompaniment than yours?" he replied.
She was an uncommonly good pianist, and with an unusually fine divination followed all the shades of his art. One piece followed the other. After awhile a certain relaxation was perceptible in her.
"You are tired," said he, breaking off in the middle of the first phrase of Mendelssohn"s G-minor concerto. "I should not have given you so much to do. Pardon me."
"Oh, what does that matter," said she, while she let her hands slide from the keys. "It was splendid, only, do you see, I feel as if I am a dragging-shoe for you. I would like to have a wish, a great immoderate wish. I would like to hear you once alone, without accompaniment, from your heart. Give me one glance into your soul, make your musical confession to me!"
He felt a peculiar twitching and burning in his finger-tips. He would rather have killed himself than let her glance into his inmost soul, as the condition of that soul had been until then.
"Do not ask that of me," said he, hoa.r.s.ely.
"It was very immodest in me, excuse me," said she hastily and confused.
"Oh, that is nothing," he a.s.sured her. "Do you think that I will spare the little bit of pleasure that I can perhaps give you, only--but if you really wish it--as far as I am concerned----"
He took up the violin.
It was a different affair now. Dragging-shoe or not in any case her accompaniment had had a calming and perhaps purifying effect on his musical instincts. With her he had played as a wonderfully deeply sensitive and technically cultivated virtuoso; in spite of all the heartfelt fulness of tone and vibrating pa.s.sion, he had scarcely pa.s.sed the boundary of musical conventionality. It had been the highest possibility of a quiet, artistic performance; but what Natalie now heard was no longer art, but something at once splendid and fearful. It was also no longer a violin on which he played, but a strange, enchanted instrument that she had never known formerly and that he himself had invented; an instrument from which everything that sounds the sweetest and saddest on earth vibrated, from the low voice of a woman to the soft, complaining sigh of the waves dying on the sh.o.r.e. A depth of genial musical eloquence burst forth under his bow.
Inconsolable pain--dry, hard, cutting; tender teasing, winning grace, mad rejoicing, a wild confusion of pa.s.sion and music, the height and depth of neck-breaking technical extravagance.
But what was most peculiar about his playing, and had the most magical effect, was neither the mad bravura nor the flattering grace, but something oppressive, mysterious, that crept maliciously into the heart and veins, ensnaring and paralyzing--a thing of itself, a strange horror. Again and again, like a mysterious call, appeared in his improvisation the same bewitching, exciting succession of tones, taken from the Arabian folk-songs, the devil"s music.
Suddenly he seemed to be beside himself; he drew the bow across the violin as if beset by an untamable, pa.s.sionate excitement. It was no longer one violin which one heard; it was twenty violins, or, rather, twenty demons, who howled and cried together.
With hands lightly folded in her lap, and head leaned back against her chair, Natalie had listened. In the beginning she had been carried out of herself by a feeling of painfully sweet happiness. But now she felt strangely oppressed. It seemed to her as if something pulled at every fibre, every nerve, as if her heart was bursting. She would have liked to cry out and hold her ears, and still did not move, but listened eagerly to that piercing, wild, pa.s.sionate tone. Never had she felt within her such hot, beating, intense life as in this hour. Her whole past existence now seemed to her like a long, stupid lethargy, from which she had at last been awakened. Tears flowed from her eyes. Then his look met hers. A kind of shame at his brutality overcame him, and his playing died away in sad, sweet, anguished tenderness. With contracted brows and trembling hands, he laid down the violin. "You wished it!" said he. "You should not have asked it of me. I can refuse you nothing. G.o.d! how pale you are! I have made you ill!"
She smiled at his anxious exaggeration, then murmured softly, as if in a dream: "It was wonderfully beautiful, and I shall never forget it--never forget it, only----"
"What have you to object?"
"Shall I really tell you?"
"Certainly; I beg you to."
"Well," she began, hesitatingly, with a somewhat uneasy smile, as if she was afraid of wounding his irritable artistic sensibility, "I ask myself how one can abuse an instrument from which one can charm such bewitching harmonies, and which one loves as you love your violin, as you have just now abused it?"
He was silent for a moment, surprised, looked at the violin with a loving, compa.s.sionate glance, as if it were a living being. Then he pa.s.sed his hand across his forehead.
"I do not know how it is," said he, confusedly. "Sometimes something comes over me. Ah! if you knew what it is to have, all one"s life, such a sultry, sneaking thunderstorm in one"s veins as I have. Sometimes it bursts forth; it must have vent. I cannot rule myself. Teach me how!"
He said that, so naively ashamed, quite pleadingly, like a great child; he had strangely warm, touching tones in his deep, rough voice.
When Lensky presented himself again, the next day, in the Palazzo Morsini, and, indeed, this time to arrange the purchase of the wonderful violin, the princess called out gayly to him:
"The violins are no longer to be had. I have bought all three. I gave all my savings for them. If you wish to play on them, you must come here. But you may come as often as you wish!"
"For how long?" asked he, with a peculiar tremble in his voice.
She turned away her head. After awhile she said, apparently irrelevantly, with her gay, ingenuous smile, that still never quite banished the sadness from her pale face: "Do you know that we are really as poor as church mice? It is comical. Mamma consoles herself with the thought that I will make a good match. If she should be mistaken, what a tragedy!"
She laughed merrily. What did she mean by that?
He came oftener and oftener to the old palace in the Via Giulia; came every day, indeed.
Formerly intercourse with women of rank had always formed only a short parenthesis in his otherwise dissolute life. Now the couple of hours, or sometimes they were only minutes, which he daily pa.s.sed with the a.s.sanows were the key-note of all the rest of his existence. How happy he felt with them!
If elsewhere the great society ladies had raved over the artist Lensky to an immoderate extent, they had quite ignored the man. But with the a.s.sanows it was different, or at least it seemed so. His fame was not put forward from morning to night. There were days in which his violin-playing was not even mentioned. The artist stopped in the background, and in a.s.sociation with Natalie and her mother he was no star, no lion, only a very wise, peculiar, sympathetic man, who pleased quite aside from his artistic gifts. Besides, with them he appeared differently than with any one else in the world.
His petulant defiance disappeared, as well as the helplessness for which it was a shield.
He was completely uncultivated from the foundation. Grown up among ignorant men who profited by his early unfolding talent, and misused it in order to earn money thereby; sentenced consequently as a child to just as many hours of hard musical practice as his poor still undeveloped body could endure, he had, at fourteen years of age, when he could barely read and write, not even the consciousness of his lack of knowledge. That came later, came when great people began to be interested in him. But then it was painful and humiliating beyond measure.
Whatever one can acquire in later years he acquired. Another would have made a show of the astonishing amount of reading which he had accomplished in the course of years, but he never learned to display his lately won intellectual riches with grace. He had not the frivolity of superficial men. Much too clever not to be conscious that his little bit of supplementary cultivation was still only patchwork, even if made of very n.o.ble, large patches, he confined his remarks in society, if the conversation was upon anything but music, to a few heavy commonplaces.
With Natalie and her mother it was quite different. He never, indeed, spoke very much, but everything that he said was characteristic, stimulating, interesting, and as, in spite of his sad lack of education, he was free from narrow provincialisms and affectations, and with the capability of a.s.similation of all barbarians, understood exactly Natalie"s pure and poetic being, he never wounded her by a coa.r.s.e lack of tact, but attracted her doubly by the austere unconventionality of his manner.
Every day he became more sympathetic to her; she had long been indispensable to him.
He was suddenly struck with horror of his past. It seemed to him as if everything that was beautiful in his life had just begun when her pure bright apparition had entered it. She had brought a cooling, healing element to his sultry existence. It was as if one had opened a window in a room full of oppressive vapor--a great breath of sweet, spicy air had purified the atmosphere.
A large part of his intellectual self which had formerly lain fallow, now grew and blossomed. Often, in the morning, he accompanied the ladies to some art collection. Very frequently he occupied a place in the carriage which the princess had hired for their drives.