there was no escape; at others, the ethereal purity of the strain
stirred her heart with a strange, sweet vision of mysterious joy; joy
that she had never possessed, would never possess; joy whose bare
existence she never before realised. When the low notes sank lower
and lower with their soft wail of delicious woe, she bent forward
into the dark, dreading that something would be lost in the very
struggle of listening; then, after a pause, a pure human tone would
break the stillness, and soaring, birdlike, higher and higher, seem
to mount to heaven itself, and, "piercing its starry floors," lift
poor scarred Lydia's soul to the very gates of infinite bliss. In
the gentle moods that stole upon her in those summer twilights she
became a different woman, softer in her prosperity than she had ever
been in her adversity; for some plants only blossom in sunshine.
What wonder if to her the music and the musician became one? It is
sometimes a dangerous thing to fuse the man and his talents in this
way; but it did no harm here, for Anthony Croft was his music, and
the music was Anthony Croft. When he played on his violin, it was as
if the miracle of its fashioning were again enacted; as if the bird
on the quivering bough, the mellow sunshine streaming through the
lattice of green leaves, the tinkle of the woodland stream, spoke in
every tone; and more than this, the hearth-glow in whose light the
patient hands had worked, the breath of the soul bending itself in
passionate prayer for perfection, these, too, seemed to have wrought
their blessed influence on the willing strings until the tone was
laden with spiritual harmony. One might indeed have sung of this
little red violin--that looked to Lyddy, in the sunset glow, as if it
were veneered with rubies--all that Shelley sang of another perfect
instrument: