And the hideous eccentricity of the
music, its wanton desolation, deepened until both Levillier and Julian
were pale under its spell, shrank from its ardent, its merciless and
lambent sarcasm against all things refined or beautiful. The prelude was
as fire and sword, as plague and famine, as plunder and war, as all
instruments that lay waste and that wound, a destroying angel before
whose breath the first-born withered and the very sun shrivelled into a
heap of grey ashes.
As Doctor Levillier leaned forward, moved by an irresistible impulse, and
stretched out his hand to enforce silence from this blare of deplorable
melody, Valentine looked up at him, into his eyes, and began to sing. The
doctor's movement was arrested, his hand dropped to his side, he remained
tense, frigid, his eyes fastened on Valentine's like a man mesmerised. At
first he knew that he was wondering whether his brain was playing him a
trick, whether his sense of hearing had, by some means, become impaired,
so that he heard a voice, not dimly, as is the case with the partially
deaf, but wrongly, as may be the case with the mad, or with those who
have suffered under a blow or through an injury to the brain. For this
voice was not Valentine's at all, but the voice of a stranger, powerful,
harsh, and malignant.
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