Miss Medwin smiled assent, and, after a few moments’ pause to consider what piece she would play and to collect her thoughts, began. The piece was the one which she considered would most please her audience, and which of course she knew. It was Chopin’s Eleventh Nocturne. It suited her humour at many times, but particularly at the present. The Nocturne is divided into two parts: passionate and half-weary wandering, and rest in which passion is merged in peace. To her it conjured up the vision of a twilight road winding up between woody rolling fields and a plantation. The dark figure of the man, whose passionate and half-weary wandering is here expressing itself, is coming slowly up the road. Low down and far away behind the close straight stems of the plantation lie a few pallid veins of sunset light. The shadows are stealing swiftly around him. He is near to hopelessness, near to the wish to
lie down like a tired child, and weep away the life of care which he has borne and yet must bear:
but passion and yearning are still too strong in him for self-abandonment. Then he hears sounds—a strain of music and voices—the nuns or monks perhaps, singing an evening hymn to the blessèd Mary, mother of passion and of peace! He moves on slowly and softly, listening. His hopelessness, his weariness are soothed into rest: trust enters into him, trust in the aims of life, that general life in which his own is now merged, even as the yearning of passion is lost in the sweetness of peace....
When she had finished, there was a long pause, and then Gildea thanked her for the pleasure she had given him. Mrs. Medwin and Maddock began to speak of the piece, Maddock expressing his pleasure at it and his admiration for Miss Medwin’s playing.
“You are, then, a lover of this Chopin?” said Gildea to Miss Medwin. “But he is not your Master, as you would say?”
“No,” she answered, “he is not my Master.—I suppose you mean Beethoven by that?” she added, looking up at him. He assented.
“And yet,” she said, “I cannot somehow call even him Master. I do not love music as I ought to do—especially Beethoven and Wagner. They are great, these men, very great, but I cannot lose myself in their spirit as I should do. I often feel this.”