It was like tearing up a half-rooted flower, already drooping from
one transplanting. She said to herself that she could never survive
another change. She read the letter over which lay in her hand, and
tears began to slowly well from her eyes. Joy seldom wept; but now
it seemed to her she was some other person, who stood apart and wept
tears of sympathy for this poor girl, Joy Irving, whose life was so
hemmed about with troubles, none of which were of her own making; and
then, like a dam which suddenly gives way and allows a river to
overflow, a great storm of sobs shook her frame, and she wept as she
had never wept before; and with her tears there came rushing back to
her heart all the old love and sorrow for the dead mother which had
so long been hidden under her burden of shame; and all the old
passion and longing for the man whose insane wife she knew to be a
more hopeless obstacle between them than this mother's history had
proven.
"Mother, Arthur, pity me, pity me!" she cried. "I am all alone, and
the strife is so terrible. I have never meant to harm any living
thing! Mother Arthur, GOD, how can you all desert me so?"
At last, exhausted, she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
She awoke the following morning with an aching head, and a heart
wherein all emotions seemed dead save a dull despair. She was
conscious of only one wish, one desire--a longing to sit again in the
organ loft, and pour forth her soul in one last farewell to that
instrument which had grown to seem her friend, confidant and lover.
She battled with her impulse as unreasonable and unwise, till the day
was well advanced. But it grew stronger with each hour; and at last
she set forth under a leaden sky and through a dreary November rain
to the church.
Her head throbbed with pain, and her hands were hot and feverish, as
she seated herself before the organ and began to play. But with the
first sounds responding to her touch, she ceased to think of bodily
discomfort.
The music was the voice of her own soul, uttering to God all its
desolation, its anguish and its despair. Then suddenly, with no
seeming volition of her own, it changed to a passion of human love,
human desire; the sorrow of separation, the strife with the emotions,
the agony of renunciation were all there; and the November rain,
beating in wild gusts against the window-panes behind the musician,
lent a fitting accompaniment to the strains.