THE Maestro’s romantic opera was a success. He was at least so far a genius that he knew where he was strong and where he was weak.

He reproduced with great exactness the play in the palace gardens, but he kept the person and character of Mark enshrouded in mystery, allowing him to appear very seldom, and trusting entirely to the singing of the principal performers, and especially of the Signorina, to impress the audience with the idea of his purity and innocence. He surpassed himself in the intense wistful music of the score; never had he produced such pathetic airs, such pleading sustained harmonies, such quivering lingering chords and cadences. At the supreme moment the boy appears, and, after singing with exquisite melody his hapless yet heroic fate, offers his bosom to the sacrificial knife. But a god intervenes. Veiled in cloud and recognised in thunders, a divine and merciful hand is laid upon the child. Death comes to him as a sleep, and over his dead and lovely form the anger of heaven is appeased. Incapable as the Maestro was of feeling much of the pathos and beauty of his own work, still, with that wonderful instinct, or art, or genius, which supplies the place of feeling, he produced, amid much that was grotesque and incongruous, a work of delicate touch and thrilling and entrancing sound. The little theatre near the Kohl market, where the piece was first produced, was crowded nightly, and the narrow thoroughfares through private houses and courtyards, called Durch-haeuser, with which the extraordinary and otherwise impenetrable maze of building which formed old Vienna was pierced through and through, were filled with fine and delicate ladies and gay courtiers seeking admission. So great, indeed, was the success that an arrangement was made with the conductors of the Imperial Theatre for the opera to be performed there. The Empress-Queen and her husband were present, the frigid silence of etiquette was broken more than once by applause, and the Abate Metastasio wrote some lines for the Signorina; indeed, the success of the piece was caused by the girl’s singing.

“Mark is better than the canary,” the Maestro was continually repeating.

In his hour of triumph the old gentleman presented a quaint and attractive study to the observer of the by-ways of art. Amid the rococo surroundings among which he moved, he was himself a singular example of the power of art to extract from bizarre and unpromising material somewhat at least of pure and lasting fruit. He had attired his withered and lean figure in brilliant hues and the finest lace, and in this attire he trained the girl, also fantastically dressed, to warble the most touching and delicious plaints. The instinctive pathos of inanimate things, of forms and colours, was perceived in sound, and much that hitherto seemed paltry and frivolous was refined and ennobled. Mark’s death, and even that of the poor canary, was beginning to bear fruit. Nature and love were feeling out the enigma of existence by the aid of art.

The reference to the canary was not, indeed, made in the presence of Tina, for the Maestro found that it was not acceptable. Nevertheless, a strange fellowship and affection was springing up between these two. The critics complained that the Signorina varied her notes; but, in fact, the score of the opera never remained the same at least as regarded her parts. As she sang, with the Maestro beside her at the harpsichord, imagination and recollection, instructed by the magic of sound, touched her notes with an unconscious pathos and revealed to her master, with his ready pencil in one hand and the other on the keys, fresh heights and depths of cultured harmony, new combinations of fluttering, melodious notes.

This copartnership, this action and reaction, had something wonderful and charming about it; the power of nature in the girl’s voice suggesting possibilities of more melodious, more artistic pathos to the composer, the girl’s passionate instinct recognising the touch, and confessing the help, of the master’s skill. It seems a strange duet, yet I do not know that we should think it strange.

The girl’s nature, pure and loving, was supremely moved by the discovery of this power of realisation and expression which it had obtained; but at times it frightened her.

“I hate all this,” she would cry sometimes, starting away from the harpsichord; “they are dead and cold, and I sing!”

“Sing! mia cara!” the old man would say, with, for him, a soft and kindly tone; “you cannot help but sing: and when did love and sorrow feel so near and real to you as when, just now, you sang that phrase in F minor?”

“It is wicked!” said the girl; but she sang over again, to the perfect satisfaction of her master, the phrase in F minor.

“It is true,” she said, after a pause. “I knew not how to love I knew not what love was till I learned to sing from you. Every day I learn more what love is; I feel every hour more able to love I love you more and more for teaching me the art of love.”

“Ah, mia cara,” said the Maestro, “that was not difficult! You were born with that gift. But it is strange to me, I confess it, how pathetically you sing. It is not in the music at any rate, not in my music. It is beyond my art and even strange to it, but it touches even me.”

And the old man shrugged his shoulders with an odd gesture, in which something like self-contempt struggled with an unaccustomed emotion.

The girl had turned half round, and was looking at him with her bright, yet wistful eyes.

“Never mind, Maestro,” she said; “I shall love you always for your music, in spite of your contempt of love, and your miserable, cold ”

And she gave a little shudder. She was forming, indeed, a passionate regard for the old man, solely for the sake of his art.

It was not by any means the first time that such an event had occurred, for unselfish love is much more common than cynical mankind believes.