Ingolby's quick perception saw, however, what his words had done, and he
hastened to add: "I believe you can get more out of that fiddle than
Sarasate ever could, in your own sort of music anyhow. I've never heard
any one play half so well the kind of piece you played this afternoon.
I'm glad I didn't make a fool of myself buying the fiddle. I didn't, did
I? I gave five thousand dollars for it."
"It's worth anything to the man that loves it," was the Romany's
response. He was mollified by the praise he had received.
He raised the fiddle slowly to his chin, his eyes wandering round the
room, then projecting themselves into space, from which they only
returned to fix themselves on Ingolby with the veiled look which sees but
does not see--such a look as an oracle, or a death-god, or a soulless
monster of some between-world, half-Pagan god would wear. Just such a
look as Watts's "Minotaur" wears in the Tate Gallery in London.
In an instant he was away in a world which was as far off from this world
as Jupiter is from Mars. It was the world of his soul's origin--a place
of beautiful and yet of noisome creations also; of white mountains and
green hills, and yet of tarns in which crawled evil things; a place of
vagrant, hurricanes and tidal-waves and cloud-bursts, of forests alive
with quarrelling! and affrighted beasts.
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