Renewed Agonies

In that same moment my pangs were all renewed; my repose of mind
departed; once more my heart was on fire, my spirit filled with
vague doubts, grief, and commotion. The soft, sweet, preluding note
of the player had touched a chord in my soul as utterly different
from that which it expressed, as could by any possibility be
conceived. Heart and hope were instantly paralyzed. Fear and its
train, its haunting spectres of suspicion, took possession of the
undefended citadel, and established guard upon its deserted outposts.
I tottered to the window which I had left--I shrouded myself in the
folds of the curtain, and as the strains rose, renewed and regular,
I struggled to keep in my breath, listening eagerly, as if the
complaining instrument could actually give utterance to the cruel
mystery which I equally dreaded and desired to hear.

The air which was played was such as I had never heard before.
Indeed, it could scarcely be called an air. It was the most
capricious burden of mournfulness that had ever had its utterance
from wo. Fancy a mute--one bereft of the divine faculty of speech,
by human, not divine ministration. Fancy such a being endowed with
the loftiest desires, moved by the acutest sensibilities, having
already felt the pleasures of life, yet doomed to a denial of
utterance, denied the language of complaint, and striving, struggling
through the imperfect organs of his voice to give a name to the
agony which works within him. That flute seemed to me to moan, and
sob, and shiver, with some such painful mode of expression as would
be permitted to the "half made-up" mortal of whom I have spoken. Its
broken tones, striving and struggling, almost rising at times into
a shriek, seemed of all things to complain of its own voicelessness.