"I can't hear it to-night!" he said. "I would give worlds to hear it, but I daren't. I should lose all hold over myself in the state I am in now. I am not equal to raking up the horror and the mystery of the past; I have not courage enough to open the grave of the martyred dead. Did you hear me when you came here? I have an immense imagination. It runs riot at times. It makes an actor of me. I play the parts of all the heroes that ever lived. I feel their characters. I merge myself in their individualities. For the time I _am_ the man I fancy myself to be. I can't help it. Iam obliged to do it. If I restrained my imagination when the fit is on me, I should go mad. I let myself loose. It lasts for hours. It leaves me with my energies worn out, with my sensibilities frightfully acute. Rouse any melancholy or terrible associations in me at such times, and I am capable of hysterics, I am capable of screaming. You heard me scream. You shall _not_see me in hysterics. No, Mrs. Valeria--no, you innocent reflection of the dead and gone--I would not frighten you for the world. Will you come here to-morrow in the daytime? I have got a chaise and a pony. Ariel, my delicate Ariel, can drive. She shall call at Mamma Macallan's and fetch you. We will talk to-morrow, when I am fit for it. I am dying to hear you. I will be fit for you in the morning. I will be civil, intelligent, communicative, in the morning. No more of it now. Away with the subject--the too exciting, the too interesting subject! I must compose myself or my brains will explode in my head. Music is the true narcotic for excitable brains. My harp! my harp!"He rushed away in his chair to the far end of the room, passing Mrs. Macallan as she returned to me, bent on hastening our departure.
"Come!" said the old lady, irritably. "You have seen him, and he has made a good show of himself. More of him might be tiresome.
Come away."
The chair returned to us more slowly. Miserrimus Dexter was working it with one hand only. In the other he held a harp of a pattern which I had hitherto only seen in pictures. The strings were few in number, and the instrument was so small that I could have held it easily on my lap. It was the ancient harp of the pictured Muses and the legendary Welsh bards.
"Good-night, Dexter," said Mrs. Macallan.
He held up one hand imperatively.
"Wait!" he said. "Let her hear me sing." He turned to me. "Idecline to be indebted to other people for my poetry and my music," he went on. "I compose my own poetry and my own music. Iimprovise. Give me a moment to think. I will improvise for You."He closed his eyes and rested his head on the frame of the harp.
His fingers gently touched the strings while he was thinking. In a few minutes he lifted his head, looked at me, and struck the first notes--the prelude to the song. It was wild, barbaric, monotonous music, utterly unlike any modern composition.
Sometimes it suggested a slow and undulating Oriental dance.
Sometimes it modulated into tones which reminded me of the severer harmonies of the old Gregorian chants. The words, when they followed the prelude, were as wild, as recklessly free from all restraint of critical rules, as the music. They were assuredly inspired by the occasion; I was the theme of the strange song. And thus--in one of the finest tenor voices I ever heard--my poet sang of me:
"Why does she come? She reminds me of the lost; She reminds me of the dead: In her form like the other, In her walk like the other: Why does she come?
"Does Destiny bring her? Shall we range together The mazes of the past? Shall we search together The secrets of the past? Shall we interchange thoughts, surmises, suspicions? Does Destiny bring her?
"The Future will show. Let the night pass; Let the day come. Ishall see into Her mind: She will look into Mine. The Future will show."His voice sank, his fingers touched the strings more and more feebly as he approached the last lines. The overwrought brain needed and took its reanimating repose. At the final words his eyes slowly closed. His head lay back on the chair. He slept with his arms around his harp, as a child sleeps hugging its last new toy.
We stole out of the room on tiptoe, and left Miserrimus Dexter--poet, composer, and madman--in his peaceful sleep.
