Part 38

To-night, as she entered the hall, she was so still, so majestic, that she no longer looked a woman at all, save in so far as her slain womanhood may have risen to feed the purpose of the daughter of Wotan—calm, inexorable, the personification of Will. As she stood by the bier and ordered the funeral pyre built and began that great dirge which expresses the end of all things mortal, her face was expressionless, as fixed as that of the beautiful Medusa in the Glyptothek of Munich. Her head, her body, might have been an organ out of which rolled such notes as no other audience had ever heard. Ordham almost stood up, the voice was so sublime, so unearthly; he wondered if his brain, his senses, had been so unmercifully beaten upon during the long hours of the opera that he was suffering from delusion. He had not known that even Styr could sing like that. So must the heroines of the old Sagas have sung when Europe was still the battleground of gods and men, so may Brynhildr’s voice have gone up in its mighty swan song before Valhalla flamed and fell to ashes.

Never on any stage has there been such a picture as Styr always made, when, standing before the funeral pyre on whose summit lay the body of Siegfried, with her flaming torch held high in her right hand and her hair streaming behind her, looking even taller than her own majestic height, she sang:

“_Flieght heim, ihr Raben_ _raun’t es euren Herrn_ _was hier am Rhein irh gehört!_”

and to-night, as she sang that magnificent pæan to death, she fairly filled the stage, as if some power of the soul literally permitted her body to grow to the heroic proportions of that old daughter of the gods.

But all the time the immobility of her face never broke; it was fate itself. She thrust her torch into the pyre, greeted and unbridled her horse still with the same awful calm. It was only when the fire was roaring from floor to ceiling and she was about to mount Grane that her voice abruptly lost its solemnity and pealed out in the wildest ecstasy:

“_Fühl’ meine Brust auch,_ _wie sie entbrennt;_ _helles Feuer_ _das Hertz mir erfasst,_ _ihn zu umschlingen,_ _umschlossen von ihm,_ _in mächtigster Minne_ _vermählt ihm zu sein!_ _Heiaho! Grane!_ _grüsse deinem Herrn!_ _Siegfried! Siegfried! Sieh!_ _Selig grüsst dich dein Weib!_”

The last line was flung straight into Ordham’s ear, but he did not pause to reflect upon its significance, holding his breath for this final moment of Styr’s stupendous acting, Brynhildr’s immolation. She leaped on her horse, and with head erect and arms uplifted to the smouldering body on the pyre, dashed straight into the flames. It was over in a second, but its realism was so intense and affrighting, that, as ever, Ordham gasped and nearly sprang from his seat, while the King gave a loud shout of rapture.

Ordham sank back with a deep sigh of amused relief. He knew that those flames produced by spirits did not really meet, and that Styr’s horse was too well trained to make a misstep or linger. Still no one else save Vogel had ever essayed this feat, which could be simulated on the darkened stage, and overlooked in the simultaneous conflagration of the castle, the rise of the waters of the Rhine, the vision in the sky of Valhalla in flames.

The walls began to fall, Hagen and the Rhine maidens to search furiously for the ring, retainers to fly about in distraction. Ordham had never seen the confusion as well represented as to-night. The shrieks sounded genuine, the faces of the survivors were distraught. No doubt these born artists and loyal Bavarians were always afire when performing for their King alone. The curtain went down amidst the crash of orchestration. Ordham, seeing that the King’s box was empty, slipped out, meditating upon those last words of Brünhilde. “Thy wife!” She had made her final decision, then, bade her farewell to the stage in that long dirge. It was indeed her swan song! For the first time he wholly realized the enormity of the sacrifice, the egoism of love. But he did not care. He exulted, as inexorably the male as Siegfried or Gunther.

He had half made up his mind to ignore Styr’s injunctions and go to her dressing-room; but when he reached the open air, he suddenly realized that he was very tired. The long unbroken strain of an opera which, even with pauses, makes a severer drain on the nervous system than any opera ever written, following a sleepless night of travel and many hours of mental excitement, left him suddenly exhausted, devitalized; he was glad to fall into the cab which his friend the doorkeeper had had the forethought to order, and drive to his hotel. The dawn was cold and grey, a bleak and disheartening contrast to the scene of mysterious splendour from which he seemed to have been shot straight into the chilliest stratum of a dismal inhospitable Earth. He shivered, wondered had it all been a dream, longed for sleep. He did not even glance down Maximilianstrasse, to the stage door, out of which the performers were streaming, gesticulating, weeping.

LXI THEIR MARRIAGE

When Ordham reached his hotel he found old Kurt awaiting him with the promised letter. He dismissed him sleepily and when in his room laid it on the table beside his bed, intending to read it in the morning when he was in a more appreciative condition. But the preparations for bed roused him somewhat, and he suddenly opened the letter with the purpose of glancing at the first page, believing this message was designed to console him for the taciturn note she had sent to the station. But when he had read three lines he read on; and when he had finished the letter he read it again; and then once more.

“After all, I find that I love you more than I love myself.

“Even could I exercise that power of will which has transformed me from one sort of woman into another during these last nine years of my life, and forced you to consent to see me no more, and even were I able to convince you for the moment that I acted in your interest alone, the time would come when you would resent the strength that enabled me to annihilate my happiness as well as your own; furthermore, the suspicion would be irresistible that art was the stronger passion after all. In time you would hate me, then grow indifferent, then forget. Now, you will love me always.

“In one’s last hour one must be entirely truthful; it is possible that, if I renounced my beloved art, my great career, the time would come when I should regret; when I might, indeed, raven for that lost world of illusions of which those that never have entered it have no conception whatever. And this might come to pass even did the world inconceivably ignore my life as Margaret Hill and I found myself a prop in your career—instead of assuring that career to you by eradicating myself. In that case could we continue to be happy? If Love is the Cæsar among the passions, Art is an imperious atom of God himself. It sits on the mind’s throne, and although the golden mists of passion may, for a time, hang like a curtain before it, Art never abdicates. It bides its time, and that time inevitably comes.

“On the other hand, I find myself forced to believe that I am not the born artist, deep and inexorable as is the grasp of art on my mind and soul. The phenomenon of my temperament—its emotional part—can be explained, no doubt, by the fact that the natural passions of an uncommonly lusty and highly organized woman were turned back upon themselves by the accumulated disgust and horrors of those thirteen years, with all their vitalities unimpaired; rather were they recuperated, and rushed into the channels of art the moment the sluices were opened. I profoundly believe that no born artist would sacrifice her career—which is merely the insatiable activities of the gift resident in her brain—for any man, give him anything more than the temporary effervescence of her woman’s nature. To some accident of organism I owe the purely mechanical gift of a voice; my brain, my will, the peculiar circumstances of my life, have made me a great actress, a great artist. That I do not hate you for shattering the dearest delusion that can possess the human mind, is the final proof of my all-embracing love for you. For, alas! I am Brynhildr, not that Margarethe Styr deliberately manufactured upon the ruins of Margaret Hill.

“But if Brynhildr—who, however victimized by the fates, would at any moment have given her life for Siegfried—is in my soul, a more irresistible tyrant than the dazzling counterfeit of art in my brain, still does the fact remain that in this world I have played, and on its public stage, the horrid and unpardonable rôle of Margaret Hill. For every infringement of law (on this planet at least), we sooner or later pay the price. The bill has been presented to me later than I deserve—possibly because I had something to give the world—but at the precise moment when my all could be exacted in payment. Still, who shall say that I am not more fortunate than most?—I have my choice of retributions: to live and be your ruin, or to die while I can still live on in your heart, your unappalled imagination, forever. If I am not the absolute and inalienable artist I so fondly believed, at least I have not cultivated my soul and my brain to no purpose, and I do not believe that I really have hesitated a moment.

“Putting all other considerations aside, could I, after the life I led for thirteen long vile years, continue to exalt you above your sex? Those numberless ghosts would rise, sit at the banquet, claim you as their brother. And, alas that it should be so, it is only in dreams that men are not fatally alike!

“If when you read this you should conceive the mad thought of following me, please stop and reflect that by that act of cruelty you would make this sacrifice of mine—for I shall not pretend that I wish to leave this world—both foolish and useless. Therefore do you owe it to me to practise as your religion that promise you made me on Stanmore Heath, to live for the single purpose of developing to the utmost those great gifts for which I extinguish my own. And believe me when I assure you that in the constant exercise of great abilities, particularly when their performances are accompanied by the world’s orchestra, there is much to console. It is, indeed, the next best thing to the heart’s happiness; perhaps it should be given the first place, for as long as we are willing to exercise our gifts and our usefulness, so long are we masters of our fate. It is only the immortal happiness of mortal love that Life fears to give us lest we grow stronger than she.

“If I elect to die on the stage, it is not merely because I believe the stage to be the proper place for the final exit of those artists that have truly loved her, but because the stage of the Hof has been my best friend; on it I have known the most triumphant, the most exalted, moments of my life. Bayreuth was my school, the London experience was an anti-climax, a tour de force; on this stage alone have I been really alive, profoundly happy. Therefore do I give her my last breath.

“I shall be, when I pass finally through the gate of that fool’s paradise in which I have dwelt for the past eight years, a nameless woman, a waif of the coal pits, of the streets of New York. But I will not submit to have Margaret Hill engraved on my tombstone, for, however alloyed, in my veins there is a drop of golden blood. ‘Countess Tann,’ would make the gods on their thrones rock with mirth, and in time the world would hear and laugh too, and this beloved Bavaria, which has shown me surpassing kindness, would be put to shame. Therefore have I ordered my body purified by fire and the ashes cast on the Isar. Then will it dwell with music forever.

“I bequeath you my Will.

“I dare not see you again.

“_Siegfried! Siegfried! Selig grüsst dich dein Weib!_”

LXII THE IVORY TOWER OF ORDHAM

Bridgminster’s manners are almost as famous as his diplomatic gifts and achievements. They are, indeed, so perfect, that many—notably the women that have tried to marry him—aver that he is composed wholly of charm and brain; that his heart, if ever he had one, is buried in the American grave of his young wife, whom he had the terrible misfortune to lose so soon after his romantic marriage. That dramatic finale of his youthful happiness occurred not so long since but that people still gossip about it, recall his desperate flight to the Continent immediately after the funeral of the divine Mabel, where he affected the company to tears by his manifest woe. No one was surprised to hear of his illness—brain fever?—in one of the British Legations—Munich? Rome? Constantinople? He has such a vast connection, and details will slip from the best of memories.

When quite well again, however, he threw himself into work with an ardour! In the course of three or four years, between those gifts the good Lord had showered upon him, an industry at which his family has not ceased to marvel, and the influence he was able to command, his advancement in the diplomatic service was uncommonly rapid. He has gone on rising ever since, not alone in the service, but in the estimation of Europe, whose attention he has challenged more than once, and in a manner which assures him a place in history.

Princess Nachmeister died quite satisfied with him.

No man in Europe is more gay, more brilliant, more constantly in society. He looks, say those so fond of discussing him, like a man whose heart is just twenty-five, and theorize that its normal action was arrested at that age by the loss of his sweet young wife—a marvel of beauty, and elegance, and cleverness, and grace!—and when the heart never grows old—well, we all know what happens.

So is Mabel avenged.

But the room in The Temple is Ordham’s still.

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TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.

[The end of _The Tower of Ivory_ by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton]