7. CHAPTER VII.
A MARRIAGE.
All through the day, John Gillies sat almost motionless in the embayed window,
his dreamy eyes gazing far across the shining waters, his thoughts roaming
beyond the limits of sea, or earth, or life itself.
Nancy Brume in vain invited him to eat of her choicest viands, in vain importuned
him with questions as to the sudden death of Lazarus Graves, and the
disposition to be made of his body. He answered everything with a briefly-expressed
desire to be left alone, and the housekeeper, who had gradually acquired
a profound respect for the wishes of her taciturn master, at last complied,
and from the middle of that day to the morning of the next, did not venture in
his presence.
The long summer day ended, and with the sunset came rolling up out of the
the south great clouds which presently wrapped heaven and earth in a black
and stifling mantle, through whose folds peered no light of moon or stars, although
each sullen wave, as it rolled shoreward, was crested with the lurid light
of its own phosphorescence, and, breaking upon the beach, tossed its fiery sparkles
far up the level sands.
Dark and heavy as fell the night upon the beach, it fell darker and heavier
yet in that close-mouthed and ghastly chamber, darkest and heaviest of all in
the heart of the man sitting so rigidly in the old arm-chair, gazing, forever gazing
over the phosphorescent sea, into the black void beyond, holding for him, not
alone the secret he had so wearied to discover, but all secrets, the last great
secret, the secret in whose utterance the lips of the Sphynx petrified forever,
leaving the unspoken word to be guessed from her melancholy eyes.
Hour by hour the night stole on, until the rising tide lapped with its fiery
tongues the foundations of the old house, and all the monsters that be beneath
the sea rose, each in his place, to look in at the man who still sat waiting, always
waiting until the hour should come. It came at last. A spirit moved upon the
vast waters, entered at the open window and laid its shadowy pall upon that
weary head and breathed upon those pallid lips; and before those wistful eyes
opened a vision, a foreseeing, a promise such as no man who has seen has ever
found tongue to tell.
Over the white and weary face came a smile such as had never rested there
before, and the musician, softly rising, went through the gloomy room to place
himself at the organ. His fingers fell upon the keys, and that sweet, strange smile
passed through them, and embodied itself in sound. Such sounds! Such “long
disquiet merged in rest!” Such full content and peace; such grand and solemn
joy! And, ah! the glorious rending of the bonds and cerements that had
cramped in earth's heavy atmosphere the spirit whose home was in the clouds!
It was the song of the lark who sees the door of his cage thrown wide, and
after weary months of pining, in one instant finds the prison far below, nothing
but the subtle ether around, nothing but the sunbright heavens above, and who,
thrilling upward to the sky, sends a joyful heralding of song before him, whose
tones dropping back to earth, steal into men's hearts like the memories of their
youth, like the faith of their childhood.
Such music it was that floated out upon the mirky air of the summer's night,
until the listening monsters, catching its joyful meaning, lashed the waters into
pools of fire with their ponderous glee, and sported together till the sliding
waves broke in great shouts of laughter on the beach. Only the mermaids, the
Undines, would not sport or laugh, but hiding their faces in their long hair, clung
to each other trembling and sobbing, for they, whose merry lives are forever
shadowed by the thought of the immortality denied them, knew that the joy of
the musician's heart was a joy in which they had no share; they knew that from
their golden harps no such notes should ever ring—through their soulless lives
never thrill such ecstasy.
And as the dark night waned, and aged, and came to the dawning of another
day, the musician gathered his life in his hands and inspired with it the tones
that grew beneath his touch. It was no longer music, it was the soul of a man
who had lived and died for music, and to whom the divine art had at the last
granted its love and grace, and had entered into his form, and made itself one
with his spirit, until soul and art together sang such a nuptial hymn, chanted
their epithalamium in such a glory of triumphant harmony as never before has
earth heard, never the heavens let fall to man.
And in that grand triumph of his life, in that glorious consummation of an
eternal union, the soul of John Gillies emancipated itself from the broken body
that had confined it, and soared upward until its broad vans were gilded by the
rays of the rising sun.
