It was a relief to breathe the thinner mountain air, and the young artist inhaled it with satisfaction, his big hat in hand, his long curly black hair flowing in the gentle breeze.  He found himself in tunnels of verdure, the sunlight shut off by the heavy leafage; then the path debouched into the open and, skirting closely the rocky wall, it widened into an island of green where a shady pagoda invited.  He sat down for a few minutes and congratulated himself that he had escaped the intimate discomforts of the omnibus he discerned on the opposite bank, packed with stout people.  This was the third week of his vacation, one enforced by a nerve specialist in the Austrian capital, and for the first time Davos felt almost cheerful.  Perhaps the absolute hush of the country and the purity of the atmosphere, with its suggestion of recent rain,—­the skies weep at least once a day in the Salzkammergut region,—­proved a welcome foil to fashionable Ischl, with its crowds, its stiffness, its court ceremonial—­for the emperor enjoys his villegiatura there.  And Davos was sick and irritable after a prolonged musical season.  He had studied the pianoforte with Rosenthal, and his success, from his debut, had been so unequivocal that he played too much in public.  There was a fiery particle in his interpretations of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt that proclaimed the temperament, if not the actual possession, of genius.  Still in his early manhood—­he was only twenty—­the maturity of his musical intelligence and the poetry of his style created havoc in impressionable hearts.  With his mixed blood, Hungarian and Italian, Marco Davos’ performance of romantic composers was irresistible; in it there was something of Pachmann’s wayward grace and Paderewski’s plangency, but with an added infusion of gypsy wildness which evoked for old concert-goers memories of Liszt the brilliant rhapsodist.

But he soon overpaid the score presented by the goddess Fortune—­his nerves were sadly jangled.  A horror of the human face obsessed his waking and sleeping hours; he dreamed of colossal countenances with threatening eyes, a vast composite of the audiences he nightly faced.  As his popularity increased the waning of his self-respect told him that he must go into retreat, anywhere out of the musical world—­else would his art suffer.  It did suffer.  The nervous diffidence, called stage-fright, which had never assailed his supreme self-balance, intruded its unwelcome presence.  Marco, several months after he had discovered all these mischievous symptoms, the maladies of artistic adolescence, was not assured when the critics hinted of them—­the public would surely follow suit in a few weeks.  Then came the visit to the learned Viennese doctor and the trip to Ischl.  A few more months of this appalling absorption in his own personality, this morbid marriage of man to his own image, and he suspected that his brain would be irretrievably injured.