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When was the last time you saw the locket in the bag and where?" "Oh!" Betty cried suddenly. "I remember it was in the bag when I was shopping yesterday." "Shopping where? Let's hear about the last place you remember seeing it." Betty remembered very clearly seeing the twist of paper with the locket in it while she was at Purcell's where she had bought some veiling.
To penetrate to Purcell's intention, to understand with what skill and force the intention is carried out, a knowledge of the music alone hardly suffices.
One day she wants to lose sight of everyone who knew her as Purcell's daughter, or me as Purcell's assistant; the next she is fretting to be reconciled to her father.
Edward lived till 1740, leaving a son; Frances married one Welsted, or Welstead, and died in 1724. Her daughter died two years later. Before the end of the eighteenth century the line of Purcell's descendants seems to have terminated. In 1682 Purcell became an organist of the Chapel Royal, whilst remaining organist of Westminster Abbey.
He died at twenty-seven, having been Purcell's master; and though Purcell's imagination was richer, deeper, more strenuous in the ebb and flow of its tides, one might fancy that the two men had but one spirit, which went on growing and fetching forth the fruits of the spirit, while young Humphries' body decayed by the side of his younger wife's in the Thames-sodden vaults of Westminster Abbey.
In many cases half a dozen items are all that are attached to one play, and many of the pieces are brief. Therefore that formidable-looking list of what used to be called Purcell's "operas" does not represent anything like the quantity of music we might suppose. Purcell wrote only one opera Dido. The word "opera" had not in his day acquired a special meaning.
But the light had gone, and it was not Handel who extinguished it. Handel did not come to England for fifteen years, and during that fifteen years not a single composition worthy of being placed within measurable distance of Purcell's average work fell from an English pen. Purcell was by no means forgotten all at once.
But his taste, though secular, was not corrupt the music-hall Church music and Salvation Army tunes of to-day would probably have outraged his feelings. His taste coincided with Purcell's own.
Emilia had caught blindly at Sir Purcell's hand, by which she raised herself, and then uncovering her face, looked furtively at the malign furnace-white face of Mr. Pericles. "It cannot have gone," she spoke, as if mentally balancing the possibility. "It has gone, I say; and you know why, Mademoiselle ze Fool!" Mr. Pericles retorted. "No, no; it can't be gone. Gone? voices never go!"
No prayer, no striving now, would bring back that negative peace; the battle of her life, it seemed, was not to be decided in that short and easy way, by perfect renunciation at the very threshold of her youth. The music was vibrating in her still, Purcell's music, with its wild passion and fancy, and she could not stay in the recollection of that bare, lonely past.
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