Styr locked herself in her gallery and wondered if she were alive or a walking automaton. Her passion had expended itself, the blood had left her brain, but she was filled to the brim with a sullen, silent, deadly rage—curiously mixed with disappointment and regret. For nearly nine years, in a life ordered to please herself, with not an outer disturbing force, save only an occasional tilt with the opera house cabal, or a fit of temper after a performance, quickly forgotten, with not a disturbance from within, for she had buried the past, trained her powerful will to banish all such futilities as regret, she had aimed not only to lead an ideal life but to perfect and ennoble her character. Although she had been almost a recluse, she had helped many young people with promising voices, and her purse was always open to the unfortunates in the chorus. Perhaps she had deliberately kept her humanity alive by these acts of kindness and sympathy, knowing that there was danger to art in the drying up of the springs of human nature. Perhaps; she could not tell; did not care. But at least she had led not only a blameless, a kindly, an inspiring, a finely mental and nobly artistic life, but she had achieved what she knew to be happiness, and this by the sealing up of her inner kingdom.
It is easy to ignore the inner kingdom so long as no man enters it. It is easy to be impersonal, mental, a consummate devotee of art so long as the heart and soul and passions encounter no powerful disturbing force. Nothing so astonished and shocked her in these comparatively calm moments as the discovery that art was not all, that common primitive instincts were stronger in the final test than the elevated choice of the brain supported by genius and will. So profound had been her contempt for human weakness, her loathing for men, so exalted, so triumphant her progress in that great sphere to which her voice had given her the golden key, that she had believed herself to be elevated permanently to a plane high above the common. She had never closed her eyes to the very second-rate clay of which most musicians were composed, both mental and moral, but she had been as serenely aware of her superior intellectual gifts, of a will stronger than any she had ever encountered, as she had been of her voice, her dramatic genius; and she had never even speculated upon a possible descent from that glorious plane where she dwelt alone with her art. She was a woman, after all, and she so abhorred herself that, had she possessed the sorceries of Isolde’s ancestors, she would have obliterated Earth from the cosmic scheme.
She had received Ordham’s letter a few moments before departing for the opera house, and the same post brought a note from Princess Nachmeister, announcing that “our jüngling, Gott sei dank, was really engaged to the American heiress of forty million marks, and was the more riveted to his bargain—that charming uncertain youth!—by being madly, nay absurdly, in love with the ravishing beauty.” Then the blood had gone to Styr’s head.
Even now she wondered if she really loved Ordham, for she was sensible of none of that organic craving which once alone would have distinguished one man from another in her imperial regard. At this moment, indeed, she did not love him at all; she hated him with a passion which, if stilled by exhaustion, was none the less volcanic, eloquent of the tremendous upheaval in her nature. But she was too wise not to suspect that it was the hatred which is merely love reversed. It would pass, her very mental balance would see to that; and what then? Hers had not been the experience of love in its infinite variety, and she stared out at the dark future with the first real fear of her life. During her long intimacy with Ordham she had been fully conscious that she had never liked any one half as well, never drawn as close to any mortal spirit. When he had gone, she had had time for but a brief reaction from her perverse feminine exultation in renewed freedom, in the luxury of missing him, for she had left almost immediately for Switzerland, then on her second Gastspiel. Even so she had missed him, and had thought of him tenderly, hoped that he would keep his word and return to Munich. But she had been very busy, very uncomfortable, very much diverted, and the ovations she received had put all other wants in her soul to sleep. It was not until she was again in Munich, in the house which he still pervaded, where she saw him in his characteristic attitudes, heard his mellow English voice with its languid drawl and impatient breaks, that her vague sense of loss had grown poignant. But even that had been tempered before long by a gentle melancholy, a new sensation and not unpleasant, for the ego likes to run the gamut; and the certainty that he would return to Munich from time to time had further mitigated that deep sense of loss. She even hoped, or thought she did, that he would marry well, be delivered of the belittling embittering want of money; nothing could interfere with their friendship, or whatever it was. She, too, was possessed by the uneasy sense that it was something more, but even as the days passed and she finally became restless, more and more disturbed, coming out of her sleep sometimes with a sense of actual terror, she would not permit her thought to enter the analytical zone, the word love to rise before the judgment seat.
And had it been love? This was the question which now shook her puzzled and tortured brain, and banished all hope of sleep. Was it but an imperious pride outraged, a secure sense of possession shattered, that had lashed her into a berserk rage? Vanity, perhaps, that had been fed and watered into an abnormal growth for twenty-four years, first by the power she wielded over men, then by the far more heady incense of the public,—could that be it, mere vanity screaming with rage at this defeat by a silly little American girl? She knew the type, had seen hundreds of them in her many trips to Paris; moreover, she had seen this Mabel Cutting several times during the conspicuous beauty’s sojourn in Munich, she had sat almost beside her at a performance of Fidelio one night. The girl was beautiful and patrician, no doubt accomplished as girls ran; she was the sort that the American youth was falling in love with every hour, but she was not the girl to bewitch John Ordham, for the type was shallow, vain, soulless, hopelessly unintellectual. If he had fallen a victim to the race, he must have been engineered by very clever women. She knew him well enough to be sure that, left to himself, although he might have thought it best to marry the girl, he never would have fallen in love with her—the real Mabel Cutting—unless something besides gold dust had been thrown into his eyes. There had been extraordinarily clever scheming somewhere. She could but guess its nature, but she knew Ordham. His mind had artfully been lulled, and his mere youth and sex manipulated with the modern sorceries of tact and diplomacy.
And the real Ordham belonged to her. The blood rose to her head once more as she was forced to admit that the fine flower of his awakening would not be hers, was irretrievably given to a little fool whom he would hate, not merely tire of, before a year was out.
And this she could have had. She knew it now as she recalled certain moments when she had caught him looking at her with heavy eyes, or a strange stare as of something stirring and quivering in the depths of his being. But she had slurred over these dangerous moments, and without so much as a flush of self-consciousness. Not only had she finished with the masculinities, but she was not the woman to want the love she must rouse, engineer, reveal to itself. With all her tyrannous strength of will she was woman personified, and she must be wooed and won imperiously, or she should prefer to love alone.
She ground her teeth and beat the floor with her foot, and reverted to the vernacular of her youth, as she anathematized her inconsistency, her dog-in-the-manger attitude. Had Ordham appeared before her at that moment, she would not even have considered marriage with him, would have hesitated long before committing herself to the less binding relation. Not only had she no desire to wreck his career, but she was not sure even now that she should greatly care if she went to her grave without having touched his lips. But he was hers. Inside that charming flesh was a John Ordham that no other woman would ever glimpse, that never would attain full growth save in contact with the woman so jealously hidden within her own noncommittal shell.
It was her first definite experience of the sovereign demands of the soul, of the recognition of the ego, that invisible entity which makes itself so uncomfortable in its earthly home until released by disease or decay. Were the needs of this God-in-little more lasting and determined than those of the affections, the body? Infinite, perhaps? In that case what should she do? what should she do?
She paced up and down the room as a new thought tormented her. This girl? What were most girls at that age but little fools, particularly if pretty and rich? Had not all women once been silly girls? Suppose this lovely creature, under the tutelage of John Ordham and the brilliant society in which she was to spend her most plastic years, should develop into a clever, intellectual, subtle woman? Then, what of her, Margarethe Styr, a fixture in Munich, an outcast from the circles of which this girl would become a component part? She stretched out her arms and opened and shut her long flexible hands. If Mabel Cutting had chanced to sing the part of Brang?ne to-night she would have been strangled in view of all Munich. Oh, no doubt of that! It was as well indeed that the young lady was in London.
All these years of proud mental development, of devotion to her art, the abrupt but uninterrupted sequence to those terrible forty hours in the bony clutch of death,—all, then, were as naught? The evil, th............