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Carlos also saw them, and frantically waved his panama by way of reply, shouting, as he did so: "Hurrah, Padre; hurrah, Jack! Look! there are the Madre and Isolda out on the gallery, waving to us! I'll bet that they have been watching the bend of the road through their opera-glasses for the last hour or more!"
"You remember your mother's art," says Brangaena: "do you think she would have sent me over-seas with you without a means of helping you?" Isolda knows it is the love-potion she means. She has only to drink the contents of a small flask, and old King Mark will become at least tolerable to her. The flask is in a casket, and another is there, as Isolda knows, full of a deadly poison.
Presently follow a few pages of perhaps the divinest music to be found in Wagner's scores, Tristan's dream of Isolda crossing the summer sea.
It is useless to describe the scene in any detail: the words are simple and seemingly direct; the marvellous music alone reveals their fateful, fearful significance. Isolda asks Tristan to sink the ancient quarrel between them caused by the slaying of Morold and drink a cup together; he knows perfectly well a large part of her meaning that she means to poison him.
"Never," answered Dona Isolda. "I was born here, and, less lucky than Carlos, was also educated here; so that I know nothing whatever about the great outside world, save what I have read of it in books. Havana is my conception of a great and handsome city, so you may guess how ignorant I am, and how intensely I should enjoy seeing other places.
She has confessed to the mistake she made in giving the wrong potion, and he has come to make all well. Isolda pays no attention, but, after a beautiful phrase from Brangaena, rises and sings the wonderful Death song. The drama is now ended; the lovers' passion has led them whither they knew it was leading them from the beginning.
Though Tristan loves her he does not ask for her, but with many protestations of gratitude and friendship sails away to Cornwall. Next occurs one of those things at which most of us are apt to boggle: Tristan goes home, it would appear, only to suggest that his aged uncle should marry Isolda the peerless beauty; Mark consents, and sends Tristan to ask for her.
Howells, moving from the Casa Falier across the way, wrote his Venetian Life. In the next Wagner wrote part of Tristan and Isolda. Needing solitude for this task, the composer came to Venice in the autumn of 1858, and put up first at Danieli's. Needing a more private abode he came here. From his Autobiography I take the story.
Isolda does not listen; presently she rises to sing the matchless death-song; she sees Tristan before her, smiling, transfigured, his love envelopes her as in billows; she is his now, at last, for aye; and, exhausted, she again sinks down beside Tristan, and dies.
But the nurse Isolda, terrified by the shouting of her beloved son and lord, leapt from her bed and went to the window, filling the house with dreadful cries.
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