Her voice had not faltered for a moment; she had spoken with an increasing rapidity of utterance. But suddenly she broke off short, looked helplessly at Ordham, her face, which had looked flushed and full as she spoke, becoming white and pinched once more, the defiant glare dying out of her eyes. He had stood motionless during the horrid sordid story, looking straight at her, his face almost vacant, as if his brain had emptied itself of every thought, that it might receive to the brim all she chose to pour into it. So she had seen him many times at a new or absorbing play. He merely looked paler, his eyes darker. She stopped, held her breath, then:

“Well?” she stammered. “Well?”—

The colour came back to his face, and with it an intense deepening of expression. He drew out his watch, then took the six telegrams from his pocket and laid them on the table between them.

“I am sorry you chose to-night to tell me that story,” he said, in his ordinary tones, “for, as you will see by reading these telegrams, I must take the eleven o’clock express, and it is now quarter past ten. Hines is no doubt at the door—”

But she interrupted him with a cry that was almost a scream. “Good God! Do you mean to say that it makes no difference? What are you made of?”

“It might have made a difference a year ago. Now it makes none whatever—or—yes—it is odd you should not have guessed that the more you made me pity you the more I should love you. And then—I had imagined very much all you have told me, taken it for granted, at least. Perhaps it is just as well, after all, that you selected to-night for the tale, if I had to hear it, for although determined to come to an understanding with you, I was in no humour for love-making. We have now wiped the thing off the slate, and, if you don’t mind, when I return we will not refer to it.”

She glanced at the telegrams, dropped into a chair, and covered her face with her shaking hands. “Your wife will die,” she moaned, “your wife will die!”

“I have not the least idea she will die. She is as strong as you are. I dare not assume that these telegrams were sent merely to frighten me and bring me back; no doubt excitement has made her ill, and in that case there may be danger. Besides, she has lost her child. I shall go, of course. But I shall return at the earliest possible moment. We will then make our plans as deliberately as more fortunate people do when about to marry. I am capable of being faithful to one woman for a lifetime, and I shall be faithful to you. We can be unimaginably happy. But I must not miss the train.”

He went round the table, and she stood up, shaking. “Not to-night!” she said. “I cannot kiss you so soon after that story. It has brought the past too close.”

“Very well.” He took both her hands, however, and bending his face looked close into her eyes.

“Swear to me that you will be here when I return,” he said.

“Yes, I shall be here.”

His eyes contracted at some hint of irony in her voice, and his grip on her hands intensified.

“If I thought that you would make way with yourself, I should not leave you. Unless you swear that you will do nothing so foolish and so cruel, I shall not return to England, and in that case I may have my wife’s death on my head.”

She returned his intense gaze for a moment, then, wrenching her hands away, pushed him from her violently. “Do not worry!” she cried harshly. “If I kill myself, I’ll take you with me. I am not Isolde for nothing. But now, for God’s sake, go! I want to be alone.”

If Ordham could be very hard, he could also be very soft. When he received a telegram at Flushing stating that Mabel was still alive, but that her condition was hopeless, he was moved deeply, the more so, perhaps, because his sympathies had been so profoundly stirred a few hours before. At the same time he wished to heaven he were on the other side of the world. When he reached London, he went hastily to the sick room, fearing that if he stopped to think his courage might desert him, for it was his first personal encounter with death. There was a strange moaning sound from the bed, such as he had heard animals utter in their last extremity, and he stumbled over a pail of ice. The darkened room seemed to him full of people and in an indescribable confusion, but he had barely caught a glimpse of Mrs. Cutting, dishevelled, haggard, when everybody seemed to disappear simultaneously, leaving him and the dying creature in the bed alone.

He made his way across the big room and saw Mabel, who looked like waxwork with enormous glass eyes. He shuddered, but bent over and would have kissed her had she not pushed him feebly away. He sat down, and his nervousness, even his horror, fled. He looked at the shrunken pallid remnant of the beautiful girl he had married and was filled with an immense pity, which induced one of those rare moments in life, like tiny islands, that have no space for self. He was also awed, as one must ever be in the presence of death, but those little green isles in the ocean of egoism have their atmosphere of unreality; and he felt throughout this interview, which he has never tried to forget, like a man who dreams yet believes himself to be awake.

Mabel spoke in a small distant voice. “I am dying and you have killed me.”

“I am afraid I have.”

“That is all I have left—that you should know that. Had I been happy I might have pulled through, although I had a horrible time, a horrible time! But my brain, all my blood, was on fire. I don’t know—the doctor will explain—but I do know that my only chance was mental peace, and I was like a mad creature from the moment I learned you had gone to that woman. O God! I am only nineteen. What was I born for?”

She paused a moment and he stared at her with blanched face and mouth slightly open. His expression was almost vacant, his remarkably receptive faculty exercising itself unconsciously. To Mabel he looked as young as when she had first known him, and her expression softened, but only for a moment. Her face set again, and she went on:

“I don’t mind dying so much, for I am so tired I don’t care, and there is nothing left to live for. Even the baby deserted me. But I have lost—lost! And I was so sure I should win! Why should I not have been confident? I had had everything—always—it is so strange that I should be ground to powder! I feel as if the huge wheels of one of those old Roman chariots—conquerors’ chariots!—had crushed me. I was a real little queen, and now I am nothing! nothing! And only nineteen! Why was I born?”

She raised herself on her hands; her immense hollow eyes, which had wandered during her last words, focussed, were piercing for the first time, probably, since they had met the light. “I think I should not mind even that—anything—” she was whispering, her voice almost dead—“if I could only have understood you. But to have been your wife, to have loved you so, and to die knowing that not for one minute, not for one second—and even death gives me no insight—”

He fled from the room as she fell back. The doctor, a nurse, and Mrs. Cutting, were waiting on the threshold. He went hastily to his own room, and as he closed the door he felt something at his heels. It was LaLa, and he took him in his arms and sat without moving, almost without thought, for an hour. At the end of that time there was a tap and he admitted Mrs. Cutting. As he saw her face he braced himself and all sense of unreality left him. Her cherished but never harnessed youth had deserted her. Her face was pinched and yellow and old. Her hair was streaked with white. Her lips were gray and shaking. But even in her deep maternal grief, in the one violent blow that life had dealt her, even in her new hatred of this royal child of fortune, she was unable to undam her soul and overwhelm him with a fury of scorn and hatred, as she had dimly imagined she should do when she left Mabel’s room for his. She could suffer, but not for her were the great tragic emotions, the splendours, the lightning blasts of expression. As she disciplined her relaxed mouth and pressed her hand hard against her bosom, Ordham’s mind vagrantly recalled an observation of Styr’s regarding the best of the American actors: that they managed to convey the impression of deep intense emotion, artistically repressed; when as a matter of fact they had nothing to repress. But that the poor woman suffered to the full capacity of her meagre nature he could not doubt, and he tried to take her hand and lead her to a chair. But she, like her daughter, thrust him away.

“Mabel is dead,” she said.

As his brain whirled it almost cast out the collocations: “Of course!” “I am so sorry!” and the bathos of it twisted his features into a grin that was as like a smile as a mask is like the human face; but Mrs. Cutting fell back in horror.

“You—you—was it not enough to kill her, without laughing—”

“Good God, how can you say such a thing? I feel as hysterical as a woman. How else could I feel? I am distracted, half out of my mind with horror and remorse. Give me credit for that much at least.”

“You are still young enough to feel excited at being in the midst of a tragedy!” Mrs. Cutting spoke almost dryly. “But I doubt if you will long convince yourself that it is anything more. I hope this may be the last time I shall ever be obliged to speak to you, and therefore I will say at once that I wish to take my child and her child to New York for interment. I don’t think it necessary to give my reasons.”

“You will do everything you wish, of course. I should not think of opposing you.”

She stared at him in unwilling admiration in spite of her suffering, her indignation. He had mastered his excitement, and were he a kindly relative he could not be more courteous, more full of solicitude. She turned her back on him, thinking of nothing to say but “Thank you,” and she left the room feeling like an honoured guest reluctantly dismissed.

But the next three days were a nightmare to Ordham. He was determined to pay all respect to Mabel dead, which, to do him justice, he had, with brief lapses, managed to pay her living. He even sat beside the bed for a few moments after they had dressed her and folded her hands, and filled her arms with lilies. She was less pinched, less shrunken, in death. A little of her beauty had returned to her, and she looked no more than sixteen. Again pity possessed him, and he left the room abruptly and wandered about the darkened house. For three days he barely went out, and as he could not settle himself to read, and as every blind, according to that depressing old provincial custom, was down, as the house seemed to grow more and more silent, darker and darker, until he thought he should go mad, he took refuge in the attic, where in an unused room he opened a back window, and, companioned by LaLa, who clung to him, sat gazing by the hour over the roofs, trying not to think of the future, but making no bones about wishing the present were over.

Then came the ordeal at which he had to appear as chief mourner; but he girded up his loins, and, as a matter of fact, very nearly wept as he followed the long narrow casket out of the house. It was to remain in the mortuary chapel in Brompton Cemetery until Mrs. Cutting could close her house and start for New York. There was another short service out there, and as he was as white as death, and his shoulders sagged, the distinguished gathering, among whom were many Americans, pitied him intensely.

Bridgminster was also dead; and on the day following Mabel’s funeral, Ordham, in company with his mother and two of his brothers, started for Scotland to escort the body of the late head of their house to Ordham Castle and bury him in the vault beneath the village church with his fathers.

Ordham had endeavoured to forget Margarethe Styr until the last rites had been paid to his wife, but he sent her a telegram as he was leaving London, several from Scotland, and another as soon as he arrived at the castle. When his brother’s funeral was over, his relatives departed, and he was quite alone—certain matters necessary of adjustment detained him at Ordham for a few days—he sat down to write a long impassioned letter to her. But his pen fell from his hand. For the first time in his life he could have written a great love-letter, abandoned himself recklessly in words; but he knew that if he made no mention of marriage, Styr, even if she received the letter in a state of mind absolutely responsive—by no means certain!—would notice the omission. She loved him as profoundly as a woman is capable of loving; the terrible confession by which she purposed to save him was proof enough of that; but she was also clear-sighted and practical. No subtlety of omission would ever deceive her, and all arguments against the public relation should come from her; that was her right. It was not that he had the least doubt she would continue to make these protests that held his pen, but the doubt of his own sincerity did he protest in black and white that he intended to marry her. Not only did this woman still magnetize all the truth that was in him, but he knew that he could not make that particular protest as strong as the rest of his letter; she would detect the difference, and, with feminine inconsistency, be wounded to the quick.

And although he loved her the more for the pity that melted him every time he thought of that past she was forced to crowd out of her memory would she live at all, and admired her increasingly that she had risen to such triumphant heights of character and fortune above that Paphian ruin, he was appalled at the thought of introducing her into the line of mothers of the house of Ordham. If Mabel’s boy had only lived! Or if he could be sure that Styr would have no children. But to have his possible sons and daughters cower from their fellows under the knowledge that their mother had been a woman of the streets—he was no longer young and indolent enough, careless and arrogant enough, to quaff his goblet to the dregs with no thought of the morrow.

If Styr had been one of the world’s great singers for twenty years, that would be quite another matter. Ugly facts disappear into the alembic of Fame to emerge picturesque fiction. In course of time history would relate that one of the Countesses of Bridgminster had been a famous prima donna, her descendants would point with pride to her pictures by Lenbach and Sargent in the gallery of Ordham. But Munich was not the world, and although Styr had triumphed briefly in London, it was as a “discovery,” not as a prima donna of established fame. Nor had she more than a year left in which to make a world-wide reputation, for she must leave the stage if she married him. He knew that he should win on this point, if he was able to overcome her scruples and marry her at all; but the result would be, as she well knew, an immediate—and fatally easy—disinterring of her past, a past which her brief and narrow career would by no means annul. And neither wealth nor abilities nor the great name he now bore would enable him to force his wife upon those circles which, representing their countries abroad, are compelled to exercise, or simulate, a rigidity of convention which London and other great capitals can afford to disdain.

He tortured his mind for a restless day, roaming over the castle and the moors, but could think of no way out of the difficulty save to leave the problem to time. In any case, they could not marry for a year; two years would be more decent still. They might mutually agree to leave the question unopened for that length of time. During that period many things might happen; she might become so famous in the Anglo-Saxon world that, as is often the case, mere time would be annihilated by the dazzle of her reputation,—people would talk of her as if “they had known her always”; an experience which has its annoyances for those that resent having ten or twenty years added to their age, but not without its compensations. He, also, should be on his way toward establishment; for although it was not likely that any influence he could bring to bear would lessen the prescribed term of probation, those two years would give him opportunities to show his mettle, and he could rise rapidly enough thereafter. Yes, by degrees, the marriage might be accomplished, or it was possible they both might fear to disturb a relation in which they had found happiness; although it was his disposition to do all honour to the woman he loved, compensate her to the fullest degree for all she had been made to endure by malignant circumstances; and at the base of his nature was a love of order, of regularity. Like many another man, he might enter lightly enough into a liaison; but deliberately to contemplate one that should last the lifetime of himself and the woman for whom he felt all the refinements as well as the passions of love which a man generally reserves for his wife—it seemed to him an ugly and a grotesque jumble of contradictions. Better renounce diplomacy at once and seek usefulness in other ways. Moreover, he wanted her constant companionship.

But all this could not be written. It would look cold-blooded and calculating in black and white, a ridiculous postscript to a love-letter. When they were together once more the subject would naturally be forgotten for a while; he could assume, without discussion, the future legalizing of their union, or profess that it was not worth talking about until the end of his period of public deference to the memory of his wife. He certainly would marry her if he discovered that she really wished it—but he trusted to time. Therefore he did not write, but telegraphed daily, intimating that the attempt to talk to her on paper made him sick and that he was bending all his energies toward hastening his departure. He did leave for London in less than a week, and there he found a long letter from Styr. She made no reference to her confession, nor to the death of his wife; but it was probably as passionate a love-letter as man ever received from woman, and it caused Ordham (as we may as well continue to call him during these remaining pages devoted to his youth) to ignore both the Foreign Office and his solicitors, and take the next train for the Continent.

Ordham sat alone in the vast black auditorium of the Hof. Old Kurt had met him at the station with a note from Countess Tann which informed him briefly that the King had commanded a midnight performance of Götterdämmerung, and that she had without difficulty bribed the doorkeeper to smuggle in the Englishman so favourably remembered; in these days there was little awe of the King’s displeasure, but he must be careful to make no sound. “I shall sing to you, not to the King,” the note concluded. “Do not forget that, but make no attempt to see me until to-morrow afternoon at one. It will be dawn before the performance finishes, and I shall be nothing but a worn-out prima donna with not a wish on earth but for supper and sleep. I shall hide in one of the hotels this evening and console myself by writing you a letter, which you will find at your hotel upon your return. Mind you tell Kurt where you are stopping.”

Ordham raged at the further delay. But when he had worn his temper down with a long walk and a German supper, he began to feel agreeably alive to the adventure. At a quarter before midnight he presented himself at the side entrance of the Hof. The door was slightly ajar and opened upon his approach. Reënforcing the hand held out to him in the darkness, he tiptoed through the vestibule and foyer, then, left inside a door near the middle of the parkett, he fumbled unaided to a seat.

The orchestra was tuning and covered what sound he made. The jets of light above the scores of its musicians, and the solitary globe in the box of the King were all that relieved the black vacuum in which he found himself. He could not make out a feature of the familiar tiers which always formed a part of the mental picture of this graceful opera house when he fell to dreaming of it. Dowdy as many of the women might be, they made a brilliant scene in totality, and there were always familiar faces, particularly in the balkon. And all were music lovers, come to hear, not to be seen, hardly daring to breathe audibly until the curtain went down. To-night, Ordham could have sworn the galleries were full of ghosts, so difficult was it to believe that he was to hear a performance of Götterdämmerung in an empty house. He turned his head, whimsically expectant of seeing the space behind the parkettsitz crowded with shadowy forms: the students, men and women, who felt themselves fortunate in being able to pay for standing room, and to stand for five hours!

And since he was forced to put an extinguisher on the lover in him until the morrow and had finished cursing the King, he gave his fancy rein and found it no effort to imagine himself in some vast underground cavern watching restless spirits bearing each a tiny torch at the entrance, and a throne cut in the rock behind him high up toward the dome. In truth the air in which he sat was damp and cold, although the month was August; the opera house had been closed since the first of July.

His mind indulged in fantasies but for a few moments however, presently returning to Styr’s note. He had read it twice and wished he might strike a match and read it again. Something in it had induced a vague sensation of uneasiness, of doubt. In spite of her assurance that she should sing to him alone, it had been abrupt, almost cold. She might be wise in refusing to see him before the performance; but at least she could have written something of the regret she might reasonably be expected to feel; but this omission, no doubt, was due to the ill temper generally induced by these commands to sing at midnight. Then fear assailed him. Did she mean to convey some message of renunciation to-night? Prepare him for her decision in favour of art? He had never questioned that for this great artist to renounce the stage at the height of her powers and in the dawn of a world-wide fame would be no light matter. In his breast pocket were the fiery vows he had received a few hours before his departure from London. There were no half measures about Styr; this letter had enveloped him in an electric mist. But her last note might have been written the summer before. Had she faltered when she received his last telegram from Cologne?—sternly admonished, perhaps, by that twin sister of hers in Valhalla, Brynhildr, whose temporary reincarnations, mayhap, it was that made Ludwig despise the women of Earth? . . .

Ordham felt his long jaw grow prognathic. Munich was not England. He forgot the death of his brother. He was in a romantic city, in a romantic adventure, he was youth on fire, man balked once more in his desire for the woman he loved with the strength of both youth and maturity. He vowed to own her in the uninterrupted possession of marriage if he had to blast the voice in her throat. He felt as primitive as the characters in the drama about to be presented, as he sat there, frowning, dogged, almost growling, in the cavernous darkness of that opera house which he has never set foot in since, nor ever will again.

The musicians stood up and faced about, standing in an attitude of extreme respect. Ordham turned his head. The King had entered his box. He still wore a light overcoat, as if he had but just now stepped from the carriage that brought him from one of his castles. He also did not think it worth while to remove his hat, a large soft hat, tipped over his heavy white face. Altogether he bore little resemblance to the romantic and brilliant youth, probably the handsomest figure that ever ornamented a throne, who had witnessed his first exclusive performance from that box in 1865. He sat down heavily. The musicians took their places. The overture began.

Ordham felt as if he had dropped gently from a fire-swept plain, haunted by furies, into a vast warm rhythmic sea whose tides swept sense to thought and rushed it back again to the senses, until that complete union was effected of which all mortals dream but only the Ordhams and Styrs can attain.

Ordham never made any attempt to follow the motives in an overture; that was not his idea of enjoying music, which he estimated as a gift bestowed on brains like Wagner’s that the intellect of the hearer might be awakened and excited only so far as was necessary to liberate the senses. Nevertheless, to-night he was aware as never before of that deep undertone of fate below the solemn joy and halleluja of the music of Götterdämmerung. And fate was personified in the first dark scene, where the three grey Norns sat weaving their ropes and gloomily foretelling the death of gods too confident and ambitious. But when the hideous trio disappeared and Brünhilde and Siegfried came forth from the cave where they had passed their long honeymoon, it needed only Styr’s first love notes, piercingly sweet, while her eyes deliberately sought the spot where she knew Ordham must be, to shake him from head to foot with the reassurance that whatever she might resolve in her cooler moments, love meant all to her that it had meant to this fallen goddess.

Styr may or may not have read the volumes of criticism devoted to the heroine of the Niebelungenlied, but it is probable that in any case she would have penetrated the mists of antiquity and seen the Brynhildr who reigned there, with her own eyes. In Die Walküre she made her alternately the jubilant sexless favourite of Wotan, shadowed subtly with her impending womanhood, and the goddess of aloof and immutable calm, Will personified, even when moved to pity. In Götterdämmerung, particularly of late, she had portrayed her as woman epitomized, arguing that all great women had the ichor of the goddess in their veins, and that primal woman was but the mother of a sex modified (sometimes) but not remade. In the last act of Siegfried her voice was wholly dramatic and expressed her delight at coming into her woman’s inheritance in ecstatic cries, almost shouts, which were never to be forgotten by any that heard them, and stirred the primal inheritance in the veriest butterfly of the court. In this beautiful love scene of Götterdämmerung, the last of the tetralogy, her voice was lyric, rich and round and full, as her voice must always be, but stripped of its darker quality; and while by no means angelic, a character with which she could invest it when portraying the virgin Elizabeth, was as sweet and clear and triumphant as if bent upon giving the final expression to the first love of woman alloyed with knowledge.

Ordham had heard her in the rôle many times, and he soon appreciated that she had never made as much of this scene as she did to-night, realized she meant to convey that Brynhildr, with some echo in her brain of her old gift of prophecy, took advantage of this last hour of happiness to gratify her woman’s nature to the core. She was tender, ineffably so, doubtful, charming, full of fears, superbly passionate. Her great tones were like golden apples filled with the sharp delicious juices of her bridal memories; and she was the epitome of the helpmate, the apotheosis of exalted womanhood when she bade her man go forth and conquer new worlds, exercise his supreme gifts of strength and courage as a man should, instead of dallying too long in these flowery meadows of love. Ordham, watching her through his glass, wondered that even she could be so beautiful, for her face was illuminated as he had never seen it before. He had not the least doubt that she kept her word and sang to him, and when she cried: “Oh, heavenly powers, holy protectors, view with delight our devotion and love. Apart, who can divide us? Divided, still we are one!” she bent her head from Siegfried’s neck and looked once more full at the spot where, it may be, Ordham’s face made a white blur on the dark.

He paid slight attention to the next scene, although the picturesque hall of the Gibichungs on the Rhine, with the sinister plot hatched there, had always delighted him; but his uneasiness recurred, for in retrospect Styr’s voice and acting were charged with a significance he felt but could not define. His confidence returned, however, during her scene with Waltraute, when he could not doubt that her incredulity at the demand of the gods to give up her bridal ring, and the magnificent scorn with which she announced herself woman, not that pitiful half-remembered thing, a demigoddess, were addressed, not to Valhalla, but to the harrowing demands of an art that still fought for its rights.

“Siegfried loves me! . . . The ring bides with me. . . . get hence to the gods. . . . Sooner to ruins Valhalla’s splendour may crash,” sang Brünhilde, much as Styr, if too hard pressed, might have cried: “To the devil with Art and the world!”

Ordham smiled, then sank the man in the spectator once more as the hapless Brünhilde repulsed and struggled with the disguised and unmemoried Siegfried, for here there could be no message; no mortal would ever come between himself and her; and perhaps that profound knowledge and faith, at the same time devoid of the subtle sting of regret for the loss of a suspense always piquant, was the final proof that, whatever his faults and lacks, as a man he was at least able to love greatly.

As Brünhilde was driven by the fraudulent Gunther into the cave, she looked as if the very bones had gone out of her, primitive woman beaten and captured by the victorious male, bewildered, helpless, sick with disgust and horror, but too broken, too conscious of the futility of revolt even to appeal to the relentless brute force behind her. Ordham recalled Styr’s initiation, and reflected that, although methods had changed since the primordial era, man had not. And while there was no resemblance whatever between himself and that prosaic seducer of an ignorant and beautiful child, bred in a filthy mining town, save in their common sex, still would he, impelled by that imperious call in his blood of man for his mate, have resorted to kidnapping, strategy, bribery, violence, any device old or new, to force this woman into an indissoluble bond with himself.

By the King’s command, there was a pause of but three minutes between the first act—close upon an hour and a half in length—and the second. Ordham’s mind wandered to the morrow until the boat came down the Rhine with Gunther and his prey. Then, once more he was ready to sink Styr in Brünhilde, for he had never been able to decide which was the greatest piece of acting on the world’s stage, Styr’s Isolde in the first act of Tristan, or her Brünhilde in this tremendous scene, where she invoked the supernormal birthright of the goddess to intensify the fury and indignation of the outraged woman.

As she stepped from the boat, hanging her head before the throng awaiting the bride Gunther had ravished from the fire-girt rock, she looked so forlorn, so beaten, so wholly womanly that Ordham felt tears in his eyes. Oddly enough his thoughts flew to the lonely coffin in Brompton Cemetery. Mabel, dead in her youth, was mercifully spared the maturer suffering of woman. Not that she ever could have reached the heights and depths so fatally accessible to this woman, but she symbolized youth, whose unhappiness is but a phase of its egotistical pleasures, and was gone before she had lived long enough to suffer with a mind stripped of illusions.

There was no controversy of doubt over Styr’s interpretation of Brünhilde in this act. She let loose every passion of which her sex when scorned has yet conceived. After her vain appeal to Siegfried, standing fatuously beside the Gedrun whose magic potion has bewitched him (more than ever Ordham wondered that Brünhilde could have given her affections to this great child), when those long moments of staring incredulity were over, she burst into such a madness of rage that her voice seemed to darken visibly, to take on strange tones, as deep and crude as colour may have been in that morning of the world when goddesses went to sleep on rocks surrounded by fire and Siegfrieds fought dragons and walked through flames protected by tarnhelm and ring. When she screamed, her voice pierced to the marrow, affrighting as that of a wild beast in a jungle at night. The whole scene was almost unbearable in its intensity; but never did those beautiful arms make an ungraceful movement, the hand that clutched the heart as if to tear it out never rose an inch too high or low. Her audience might be racked and unbreathed, but Styr was always the absolute artist, vivified but never distracted by the furnace within.

Nevertheless, those that knew nothing of acting would have vowed that Styr’s brain was suffocated by Brynhildr’s. To-night when Siegfried and Gedrun had gone, and, alone with Gunther and Hagen, she stood staring before her, an immense horror in her eyes, her lips slightly parted, her arms limp, as if on the edge of the world watching it sink into the black void of space, Ordham involuntarily glanced behind him at the King. He had hitched his chair forward, his arms were pressing the rail, his hat was on the back of his head, his eyes flamed with light. He looked like a lost immortal, long straying from star to star, who at last sees the distant gates of Valhalla open, and awaiting him. Ordham wondered why this poor idealist had never sought out Styr, hoping to find in her the embodiment of his unearthly dreams; wondered again if it were because of the knowledge that his mortal career had made it impossible for him to find the goddess in any woman. His eyes were filmed with more than common weakness, his senses drugged, dead; he could but dream of some tier of heaven reserved for great souls like his, which came to their own only when free of the flesh. But there was no doubt that Styr in such scenes as this gave him immortal moments.

Brünhilde came out of her stupor, and after a fruitless lament for the lost arts of her godhood, with which, woman-like, she fancied she might have held Siegfried against the wiles of a younger woman, deliberately sentenced him to death. As she described the only vulnerable part of the mighty Siegfried, that fearless back which he would never show to any foe, her calm was far more awful than her wrath had been. During her long meditation, she had divined the trick which had been played upon the warrior, but that light by no means mitigated the evil; if she could not possess him neither should Gedrun. It was the primitive woman’s method of revenge that modern woman has not disdained to follow, but so grand was her portrayal of a woman conscious that she had once been the mighty daughter of Wotan, that never for a second did she descend to the level of Earthians. She was Brünhilde acting according to her lights, and the lights of her day must have been as blinding as an electric storm caught in an underground cavern.

The scene shifted. Siegfried drank from the horn into which the ever malignant Hagen had squeezed the restorative herb, and sang of Brünhilde, forgetting Gedrun and all that had happened since he left the rock. With the enchanting strains of the love music of the last act of the third opera of the tetralogy embracing him—tender and ecstatic—followed by the slowly unwinding Brünhilde motif, coming as it did after so much misery, wickedness, and violence, and preceding crime and the final disaster, Ordham dropped his face into his hands and gave up his thoughts to the bliss he anticipated. He was recalled by the deepest sigh he had ever heard. It came down upon him like a gust of death, dulling the almost excruciating sweetness of the music. He raised his head and thanked God that he was not Ludwig, King of Bavaria. For him there was a future on Earth.

The Trauermarsch, in which all the dead of not only Earth, but of the Universe, seem to rise and tramp across the bridge of oblivion, was finished. Brünhilde entered the hall of the Gibichungs to find Gedrun wailing over Siegfried’s body, Gunther slain by Hagen. Of late Styr had played the character consistently through to the end as a woman. But to-night she appeared to defer once more to Wagner—possibly to the King—and to be about to symbolize the “negation of the will to live,” the eternal sacrifice of woman, the immolation of self; although she had contended, and for that reason sang no more at Bayreuth, that such an interpretation was absurd as a finale for Brünhilde, no matter what its beauty and truth in the abstract. The gods were doomed, her renouncement of life did not save them, and as for the sacrifice of woman to man, that she had accomplished twice over. Brünhilde died as other women had died since, and doubtless before, in the hope of uniting with the spirit of her man, and because life was become abhorrent.

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:

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:

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.

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!”