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Sacrifice

by Stephen French Whitman · English · Gutenberg #22928 · 395,777 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Sacrifice

Author: Stephen French Whitman


        
Release date: October 9, 2007 [eBook #22928]
                Most recently updated: January 3, 2021

Language: English

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SACRIFICE

by

STEPHEN FRENCH WHITMAN

Author of "Predestined," Etc.







[Frontispiece: "COME CLOSER, I WANT TO LOOK AT YOU."]



D. Appleton and Company
New York :: 1922 :: London

Copyright, 1922, by
D. Appleton and Company

Copyright, 1921-1922, by The Ridgway Company




SACRIFICE


PART ONE

CHAPTER I

Lilla Delliver's parents, killed in a railway accident, left their
child a legacy other than the fortune that the New York newspapers
mentioned in the obituaries.

The mother had been tall, blonde, rather wildly handsome, with the look
of one of those neurotic queens who suppress under a proud manner many
psychic disturbances.  Painfully fastidious in her tastes, she had
avoided every unnecessary contact with mediocrity.  Reclining on a
couch in her boudoir, she read French novels saturated with an
exquisite sophistication.  Then, letting the book slip from her
fingers, she gazed into space, as listless as a lady immured in a
seraglio on the Bosphorous.  At night, if the opera was _Tristan_, she
went down to her limousine with the furtive eagerness of a woman
escaping from monotony into a secret world.  She drove home with
feverish cheeks, and when her husband spoke to her she gave him the
blank stare of a somnambulist.

After a busy social season she was liable to melancholia.  She sat by
the window in a charming negligée, paler than a camellia, hardly
turning her head when, at twilight, her child was led in to kiss her.

Recovering, somehow, she traveled.

On those journeys every possible hardship was neutralized by wealth.
Yet even for her the sea could not always be calm, or the skies of the
Midi and the Riviera blue.  In Venice, at midnight, the soft, hoarse
cries of the gondoliers made her toss fretfully on her canopied bed.
In Switzerland, as dawn flushed the snow peaks, awakened by the virile
voices of the guides, she started up from her pillow in a daze of
resentment and perverse antipathy.

She calmed herself by listening to the sermons of swamis in yellow
robes, and by sitting in cathedrals with her eyes fixed upon the
splendor of the altar.

Wherever they traveled, her husband went about inquiring for new
physicians--"specialists in neurasthenia."  But then he usually felt
the need of a physician's services also.

He was taller than his wife, a brownish, meager, handsome man with dark
circles round his eyes.  A doctor had once told him that some persons
never had more than a limited amount of nervous energy; so he was
always trying to conserve his share, as if the prolongation of his idle
life were very important.  Yet he was not dull.  He had written several
essays, on classical subjects, that were privately circulated in
sumptuous bindings.  He played Brahms with unusual talent.  But certain
colors and perfumes set his nerves on edge, while the sight of blood,
if more than a drop or two, made him feel faint.

Disillusioned from travel, because they had viewed all those fair,
exotic scenes through the blurred auras of their emotional infirmities,
he and his wife returned to their home in New York.  There they were
protected against all contact with ugliness, all ignoble influences,
all sources of unhappiness except themselves.

It was a stately old house--for two hundred years the Dellivers and the
Balbians had been stately families--a house always rather dim, its
shadows aglimmer with richness, and here and there a beam of light
illuminating some flawless, precious object.  It was a house of silent
servants, of faces imprinted with a gracious weariness, of beautifully
modulated low voices, of noble reticence.  Yet all the while the place
quivered from secret transports of anguish.

In this atmosphere Lilla, the child, was like a delicate instrument on
which are recorded, to be ultimately reproduced, myriad vibrations too
subtle for appreciation by the five senses.  Or, one might say, the
small, apparent form that this man and this woman had created in their
likeness--as it were a fatal sublimation of their blended physical
selves--became the fragile vessel into which, drop by drop, the
essences of all their most unfortunate emotions were being distilled.

Sometimes, at a moment of perspicacity, the father's face was distorted
by a spasm of remorse.  Looking at his child, he was thinking:

"By what right have we done this?"

For that matter, he was always oppressed by miseries foreign to normal
men.  For instance, he fluctuated between the ardors of a pagan and an
anchorite, at one hour reëmbracing aestheticism, at another fleeing
back to a bleak sanctuary where he hoped to escape some vague, immense
reproach.  Too complex for an irrevocable decision, too weak to stand
firm against the pressure either of pantheism or an absolutely
spiritual idea, he was an insignificant creature worried and torn
between two vast antagonists.

Then, too, he was afflicted with a frequent symptom of neuroticism,
namely, superstition; and this superstition was sharpened by the usual
morbid forebodings--the characteristic expectations of calamity.

He accepted the idea that there were persons who could fathom the
destinies of others, that the palm of one's hand was cryptic with one's
future fortunes, and that the remotest planets had an influence on
one's life.  Furtively, then, as one might enter a place dedicated to
some shameful mystery, this erudite, handsome, wretched gentleman
slipped into the sanctums of the diviners, where, with a feeling of
degradation and imbecility, yet with a pounding heart, he listened to
prophecies uttered by the aid of playing cards, horoscopes, and crystal
balls.

All he asked was some assurance that he would presently find peace.
They all promised him that this desire of his would soon be realized.

Perhaps they would have called it realized by that crash of trains in
the night, which he and his wife hardly heard before their fine,
restless bodies were bereft of life.

So one day, when Lilla was six years old, the drawing-room suddenly
blossomed with white roses.  Next morning the orphan was taken away by
Aunt Althea Balbian to another house, on lower Fifth Avenue.




CHAPTER II

Miss Balbian's house provided an appropriate setting for its pale,
aristocratic, chastely fervent owner.  But its sedate, antiquated,
brick exterior--unaltered since the presidency of Andrew
Jackson--afforded hardly a hint of the conservative beauty that
pervaded it.

Here the glitter of old chandeliers fell upon the suave outlines of
colonial furniture upholstered with sage green and mulberry-colored
fabrics, chimney pieces of mellow marble carved into graceful
flourishes and bearing on their shelves quaint bric-a-brac, family
portraits in frames that it would have been a sacrilege to furbish
up--ladies dressed in the fashion of 1812, French and English gentlemen
in antique uniforms, a few of these likenesses doubly precious because
they were painted so naïvely.  But this "early-American" effect was
adulterated by objects that Miss Balbian had acquired on her travels,
such as medieval chalices, coffers covered with vellum and encrusted
with jewels, and a few authenticated paintings from that period when
the men of Italy, at a breath of inspiration from the Athenian tomb,
perceived, instead of the glamour of a celestial paradise, the
gorgeousness of this world.

In this gracefully puritanical atmosphere, these latter treasures,
imbued with a disturbing alien richness, were like thoughts that a
woman, hedged round by innumerable obscure oppressions, might gather
from afar and store away in her heart.

Lilla, in this environment, became a juvenile epicurean, precocious in
aesthetic judgment, intolerant of everything that was not exquisite.
Her opinions amused and touched her aunt, who, for a while, derived
from that imitation a nearly maternal pride.  Miss Althea Balbian
redoubled her efforts to form Lilla according to her most exalted
ideas; and, as a result, she implanted in that little charge still more
complexities of impulse--a greater sensitiveness to the lures of mortal
beauty, together with something of her own recoil from all the ultimate
consequences of that sensitiveness.

In fine, the devoted woman was preparing Lilla unwittingly for an
accentuation of the conflict that already had been prefigured in her
parents.

The child was so fragile-looking, there was about her so strange an air
of sensibility, that many persons who had known her father and mother
shook their heads in pity.  Some suggested that she ought to be reared
in the country, to play hard all day "close to nature."  But the play
of other children exhausted her, as if she, too, possessed "only a
limited amount of nervous energy."  She had nervous headaches and
feverish spells from no apparent cause.  When the weather was changing,
or when a thunder storm impended, the governess found it hard to manage
her.  Then, suddenly, certain odors and sounds filled her with
indistinct visions of felicity.  At night, when there was music in the
house, she crept from her bed to the staircase, and sat listening with
burning cheeks and icy hands.

Next day there came over her an immense, hazy discontent with
everything.  And her tragic little face--her eyes, skin, and fluffy
hair all harmonized in the most delicate shade of brown--resembled the
face of some European _grande amoureuse_ seen through the small end of
an opera glass.

"Yes," said Miss Balbian at last to the charming, quiet ladies who sat
in her library drinking tea from old china cups.  "Lilla is a strange,
I may say a startling, child."  And allowing herself one of her rare
public failures of expression--a look of uneasiness--she added, half
swallowing her words, "I sometimes ask myself----"




CHAPTER III

Nearly every spring, Aunt Althea, craving "her beloved Europe," took
Lilla abroad.

Escorted by an elderly courier who had the appearance of a gentleman in
waiting at the Vatican, they moved with royal deliberation, patronizing
luxurious hotels, celebrated landscapes, notable art collections.  The
governess was supplemented with the best local teachers of music and
languages; but it was Aunt Althea, with her proud fastidiousness, her
eclecticism at once virginal and ardent, who set the keynote for
Lilla's education.

All the young girl's inherited repugnances were enhanced.  All her
sensibilities were aggravated.  With the lapse of time and the
expansion of her world, her impassionable nature vibrated still more
extravagantly, at the most subtle stimuli, between the poles of
happiness and pain--which two sensations sometimes seemed to her
identical.

Now she was lovelier than her mother had ever been--a tall, fragile,
pale brown creature whose carefully composed lips, whose deliberately
slow grace, only half concealed that inner intensity of hers.

She had, indeed, the exceptional, agitating look--that softly fatal
aspect---which is seen in those who are destined to extraordinary
lives.  It was as though strange, unprecipitated events were clinging
round her slender body like an aura: the promises of unparalleled
adventures in love, perhaps also in tragedy.  Before her twentieth year
she had given this presentiment to many men, who, with a thrill that
may have been partly fear, longed to be the cause of those raptures,
and to accept the perils.

In an alley of Constantine, in fierce sunshine that oppressed and
stimulated her delicate tissues, she stood before an old Arab who,
seated on the ground, told her fortune by strewing sand on a board.

"You will be loved by men," he said, after contemplating apathetically
the curlicues of sand.  "And will be the death of men," he added,
closing his eyes as if bored; for out there, in the mountains beyond
Constantine, love and death, as partners in the fates of fair women,
were commonplace.

Before returning to America, Aunt Althea always managed a visit to
Rome.  On her first day there, the spinster drove out alone, returning
at twilight with her eyelids swollen and red.  She had been, she said,
to the English cemetery; but she declared that nobody whom she had
known was buried there.

They visited American ladies who had married into the Roman nobility.
In those historic palaces the great rooms were cool, dim, and resonant,
the women's voices died away in space between the tapestried walls and
the ceilings frescoed with pagan deities.  Through the tall doorway
entered young men with medieval faces, in quest of a cup of tea.

To Lilla these descendants of medieval despots seemed curiously dwarfed
by their surroundings.

But her eyes were apt to turn wistful when she passed the shabby cafés
where famous artists had sat brooding over the masterpieces that she
admired.  Then she thought of Bohemian studios at dusk, and of geniuses
aquiver, like dynamos, with the powers that had taken possession of
them.  She envied the women whose lives were united to theirs in an
atmosphere where beauty was always being recreated, who basked in that
radiance of art which love, perhaps, had inspired.

Of all the arts it was music that cast over Lilla the strongest spell.

During the winter season in New York, she haunted concert halls where
celebrated musicians played their works.  The new music, however,
strident with the echoes of industrialism, dissonant with the tumult of
great cities, repelled her.  She turned instinctively toward the
harmonious romanticism and idealism of a previous age.  She felt that
the compositions of Schumann and Schubert were the language that had
always been imprisoned in her heart, that could never reach her lips,
but that she now heard, by a miracle, freed and in its perfection.

When the concert was over, she could hardly prevent herself from
joining the women who surged toward the author of those sounds, as if
impelled by an inexorable force--or possibly by an idea that they must
mingle their lives with the life of the stranger who could so interpret
their souls, make clear to them their secrets, and give them, at least
momentarily, a coherent glimpse of their ideals.

One afternoon, in the exit of a concert hall, Lilla met Brantome, a
critic of music.

He was a robust-looking old Frenchman with white hair and the mustaches
of a Viking, displaying a leonine countenance out of which gazed a pair
of eyes that seemed to have been made tragical by some profound
chagrin.  In his youth, a student in Paris, he had written some scores
of songs, half a dozen sonatas, and a symphony.  These efforts, though
technically brilliant, had soon passed into oblivion.  After a long
while, during which nobody had heard a sound from him, Brantome had
popped up in the United States to begin his critical career.  Now he
was courted not only in artistic circles but also in the fashionable
world, where one might sometimes see his haggard old face relentlessly
revealed beneath fine chandeliers, ironical and weary, as if crushed
beneath the combined weight of disillusionment and renown.

At sight of Lilla he stopped in the concert hall doorway; and, when he
had peered at her closely, he rumbled in her ear:

"I see that this afternoon of bad music has not fooled you.  You don't
wear the look that I discovered on your face the other day, when they
had been playing Schumann."

"Oh, but Schumann!"  And with a nervous laugh she said, "If I had been
Clara Wieck----"

"You would have married him just as she did, eh?  Ah, well, maybe there
will be other Robert Schumanns.  In fact, two years ago I found a
certain young man--but now he is dying."

He lost the smile that had come to him at this contact.  With a shrug
he passed on, leaving with her the thought of beauty enmeshed by death.
She wondered who this young man was, who might have been another Robert
Schumann, but now was dying.




CHAPTER IV

Of all her suitors the most persistent was Cornelius Rysbroek.

In their childhood he had drawn for her amusement Spanish galleons, the
domes of Mogul palaces, and a fantastic damsel, that he called a
bayadere, languishing on a balcony.  His thin, sallow little face bent
close to the printed page, he had read _Ivanhoe_ to her.  At parties,
it was she to whom he had brought the choicest favors.

Departing to school, he had addressed her in melancholy
verses--doggerel decorated with references to flowers turned to dust,
setting suns that would never rise again, countless symbols of hopeless
passion and impending tragedy.

But, as an anti-climax, he always showed up alive in vacation time.

During his college years he had apparently forgotten her, had made
himself conspicuous by some highly pessimistic theories, and had tried
the Byronic gesture.  Then, after Commencement, meeting her
unexpectedly, he had turned a yellowish white.

Now Cornelius Rysbroek had become a lean, neat hypochondriac, highly
cultivated, with fine instincts and excruciating aversions, bored by
his leisure, yet incapable of action, and inconstant in every
aspiration except this love of his.  Whenever she refused him he sailed
away, after threatening to plunge into some wild, dramatic waste, but
always compromising on the easiest, beaten path.  He returned sadder
and sallower than ever, having contracted in his imagination some new,
obscure ailment, and with his old ailment, his longing for Lilla, still
gnawing at his heart.

But Lilla, so fragile and moody, dreamed of physical strength and a
triumphant will.

Where was he?

She was enervated by melancholy, scorched by impatience, then chilled
by an indefinable foreboding, just as her father had been.  Putting on
a figured veil to blur her blush of shame, she slipped away to visit
the soothsayers that fashionable women patronized.  In a shadowy room
hung with Oriental curtains, the shrewd crystal gazer informed her that
all would soon be well.  "A great love was in store for her."

She kept in her desk a magazine picture of Lawrence Teck, the explorer,
whom she had never met, but whose likeness, singular amid innumerable
presentments of the human face, had arrested her first glance and
fascinated her mind.

His aquiline countenance, darkened and corrugated by fierce suns,
expressed that virility which kept driving him back, for his
contentment, into remote and dangerous places.  But his salient
features suggested also the patience and wisdom of those who have
suffered hardship and derived extraordinary thoughts from solitude.  It
pleased her to note that his was the brow of a scholar--he had written
learned volumes about the jungle peoples, was the most picturesque
authority on the Islamic world since Burton, and his monographs on
African diseases had added to his romantic reputation the luster of
benevolence.  She liked to picture him as finding in his travels and
work the stimulation that less serious, aimless men might seek in love.

When she read his books, there unrolled before her the esoteric corners
of the desert, the strange charm and depravity of little-known Oriental
cities, the deadly richness of equatorial forests, peopled by human
beasts whose claws were hammered steel, whose fangs were poisoned
arrows, and who carried in their thick skulls the condensed miasma of
their hiding places.

She seemed to see him passing through those physical dangers and
corroding mental influences, a superior being of unalterable health and
sanity, perhaps protected because of a grand destiny still unrevealed
to him.  She longed to participate in that destiny, or, at any rate, to
be responsible somehow for it.

"Where are you?  What are your thoughts?" she would whisper, staring at
the likeness of this peculiarly congenial stranger.

Late at night, at that hour when bizarre fancies and actions may seem
natural, she would ask him:

"Don't you know that I exist?  Then I must make you know it."

So she tried to cast forth into space a flood of feeling strong enough
to reach him--a projection of her identity, her appearance, and her
infatuation.  All her secret ardors that had never been so strongly
focused upon a definite personality found their centering point in him,
whose imagined nature seemed to be so emphatically what she needed to
appease and complete her nature.  She was like one of those antique
sorceresses who would cast over distant hearts the spells that must
inevitably recoil upon their makers.

But when she had remained for a long while motionless and tense, she
rose wearily, with a low laugh of disillusionment and ridicule.

Little by little her thoughts of him were obscured by other thoughts,
by weakly apposite conjectures that had different men as their objects.
And when different men made love to her, once or twice, maybe at a
conjunction of exquisite scenery, music, and impatience, of confused
longings and eloquent persuasion, she was tempted to consent.  But just
in time she stilled that tremulous smile, and averted that dizzy look
in the depths of which lurked a fatal sweetness.

Then, when life seemed to her unbearably monotonous, she went to a
week-end party at the Brassfields' house in the country.




CHAPTER V

The Brassfields' country house was copied from an historic French
chateau.  In the drawing-room, the high walls, from which well-known
portraits stood forth, were paneled with amber-hued wood overlaid with
elaborate gilt traceries; they ended in a wide golden frieze that
curved inward to inclose a ceiling painted with roguish goddesses after
the manner of Watteau.  Here and there, between chairs and sofas the
arms of which seemed composed of half-melted ingots, appeared a baroque
cabinet filled with small, precious objects.  Or from a creamy pedestal
the marble features of some ancient sybarite regarded without surprise
this modern richness based upon the past.

Emerging from the dining room, the ladies crossed the large amber rug,
like moving images made of multicolored light.

Below their negligible bodices hung draperies of brocade interwoven
with metallic threads, of lace dyed the colors of exotic flowers, of
tulle embroidered with iridescent beads.  Parting into groups, they
dotted the drawing-room with the gorgeousness of peacock blue and jade
green, the joyousness of petunias and the melancholy of orchids, or the
pale, intermelting tints of rainbows seen through the spangle of a
shower.

Some, unfurling fans before their bosoms, sank down upon the chairs and
sofas.  Others stood beside the large chimney piece, talking to the
men, and smoking cigarettes that were thrust into jeweled holders.

A few emerged through the French windows upon the terrace to enjoy the
moonlit landscape, wherein Nature herself had been taught to show a
charming artificiality.

An esplanade overlooked an aquatic garden, with three pools full of
water flowers massed round statues.  Below, in broad stages that fell
away toward a wooded valley, lay other gardens, deriving a vague
stateliness from their successive balustrades and sculptured fountains.
The moonlight, while blanching the geometrical pattern of the paths,
and frosting the rectangular flowerbeds, imparted to the whole
surrounding, billowing panorama an appearance of unreality.

"Where's Lilla?" Fanny Brassfield inquired of a young man in the
doorway of the drawing-room, in her clear, grating voice that seemed
made to express an involuntary disdain of everything not comprised in
her luxurious little world.  She had just seen one of her most recent
lions, old Brantome, on his way toward the music room amid a group of
ladies; and this had recalled to her mind another celebrity, who, five
minutes before, had arrived from the city after she had given up
expecting him.

"Shall I find her?"

"Never mind, my surprise can wait."

Fanny Brassfield followed Brantome and his coterie into the music room,
her attractive, bony features revealing a quizzical expression.  In the
glitter of the big chandelier her coiffure appeared extraordinarily
blonde, her green eyes, especially frosty; and the eighteenth century
ladies in the gilded frames seemed suddenly, despite their histories,
insipid in comparison with this modern face, emancipated from a
thousand traditional reactions.

As for Lilla, she was sitting in the dim library with Cornelius
Rysbroek, who was harping on the old tune.




CHAPTER VI

She believed that she could discern in him already the first hints of
middle age.  His lifeless, brown hair was receding above his temples.
His small mustaches, which ought to have made him debonair, seemed on
his sallow face like the worthless disguise of a pessimist at the feast
of life.

Her look of compassion struck him silent.  He smiled in self-contempt,
then uttered a sharp sigh, pressed his palm to his forehead, and
produced a tiny silver box, from which he took a tablet.

"More antipyrene?" she demanded reproachfully.

"My sinus is pretty bad to-night.  This salt air blowing in from the
Sound----"

He declared that he was going away again.  "His health made it
necessary."  He had hung round New York long enough, enduring an
impossible climate because of an idiotic hope.  He uttered the word
"Arizona."  He spoke of hot deserts, solitudes under the stars, mirages
less mocking than his aspirations.  As he contemplated her delicately
fervent face, her tapering, graceful body, wrapped like something very
precious in pale gold, his eyes glittered with tears.

"Dear Cornie----"

And once more she began the familiar rigmarole.  Her lips shaped the
immemorial complaint, "Why isn't our friendship enough--why must we
always be clouding our old congeniality----"  And so on.  These
inexorable words, combined with her look of pity and reproach--a look
that seemed almost amorous on her fair face--gave him an impression of
immense perfidiousness.

He turned bitter.  He asked her where the ideal suitor could be
loitering--the strange knight for whom she used to watch as a little
girl, the fairytale prince from another kingdom, who was to sweep her
off her feet by the force of his perfections, and carry her away.

As he spoke, there stole through the doorway the first notes of _Vienna
Carnival_.  In the music room old Brantome had been persuaded to play
Schumann.

"I know, at least," said Cornelius, "that you haven't found him yet!"

In his voice there was a gloating that made her again turn toward him
that unique face of hers, whose brownish pallor, in harmony with her
large eyes and fluffy hair, appeared to reflect amid the shadows the
radiance disseminated from her dress.  In his unhappy eyes she now
perceived something that had not been there before--a desperation, as
though his heart had suffered too long from a sense of inferiority to
the unknown and unrevealed antagonist, who was to win this treasure.
For an instant, in fact, there was something weakly ferocious, not
quite sane, in this visage that had been familiar to her since
childhood.  Then his habitual, well-bred, wooden look, as a door might
shut on a glimpse of an inferno.

He muttered, in his throaty, queerly didactic voice:

"Well, one must be philosophical in this life.  You'll teach me that,
won't you?"  He got up, patting the pocket of his waistcoat, where he
kept the little vial of oil of peppermint, which he always touched to
his tongue when he threw aside his cigarette on his way to a dancing
partner.  "Are they at it?" he asked, cocking his ear toward the music
of Schumann.  "Or is it only that old chap hammering the piano?"

"Don't ask me to dance to-night," she returned, closing her eyes.

"I wasn't."  With the parody of a merry smile, he explained, "You know
I can't dance with you any more.  You know you make my legs tremble
like the devil."

With an exclamation intended for a laugh, looking unusually bored and
vacuous, he went out of the room like a man in an earthquake sedately
strolling away between reeling and crumbling walls.




CHAPTER VII

Lilla was approaching the music room doorway--round which some men were
standing with the respectful looks of persons at the funeral of a
stranger--when a laughing young woman intercepted her.

"Do come over here.  Madame Zanidov is telling our fortunes."

Anna Petrovna Zanidov, one of the Russian aristocrats that the
revolution had scattered through the world, was a thin, black-haired
woman with a faintly Tartar cast of countenance, a dead-white
complexion that made her seem denser than ordinary flesh, and somewhat
the look of an idol before whose blank yet sophisticated eyes had been
performed many extraordinary rites.  Tonight her strangeness was made
doubly emphatic by a gown of oxidized silver tissue painted over in
dull colors with a barbaric design.

She was said to be a clairvoyant.  Rumor had it that she had foreseen
her husband's murder by Lenin's Mongolians, and that, since her arrival
in America, she had predicted accurately some sensational events,
including a nearly fatal accident in the polo field.

Now, turning her sharp, dead-white profile to right and left,
encountering everywhere a frivolous eagerness, Madame Zanidov protested:

"Really, I ask you if this is the proper atmosphere!"

She explained that she regarded very seriously "this gift" of hers,
which had astonished people even in her childhood.  She agreed that it
was inexplicable, unless by the theory that the future, if it did not
already exist, was at least somehow prefigured.  Yet she believed that
this prearrangement of events was not so rigid as to exclude a certain
amount of free will.  In other words, one who had been forewarned of a
special result, if a special course were pursued, might escape the
result by pursuing another course.  "For as you know," she added,
looking round her at the women who were losing their smiles, "the
impression that I receive is often far from amusing.  How can one tell
beforehand?  So I consent to do this only because, if what I see is
unpleasant, my warning may possibly help one to evade it."

A lady objected that prophecy frequently had just the opposite effect.
She referred to the attractive power of anticipation.  Then she cited
instances where persons had made every effort to realize even the most
unfortunate predictions, as if hypnotized by their dread into a feeling
that the tragic outcome was inevitable.  Of course, on the other hand,
she admitted, a happy prediction might have a tonic effect, heartening
one to pluck victory from apparent failure.  Or else, just by setting
in action the magnetic power of expectancy, it might even draw
mysteriously into one's life a wealth or a fame that had seemed
unattainable, a love that had appeared to be impossible.

When she had voiced this last opinion, the other ladies' faces were
softened by a gentle acquiescence.  Their necklaces flashed with the
rising of their bosoms; their heads leaned forward in thought; and the
mingled odors of their perfumes were like exhalations from the
innermost recesses of their hearts.

By this time, apparently, the proper atmosphere had been established.
Madame Zanidov consented to display her powers.

All the women drew their chairs closer.

She took the hand of a young girl whose features were alive with an
invincible gay selfishness.  Madame Zanidov hardly glanced at the
other's palm.  Closing her almond-shaped eyes, contracting her brows,
she let an unnatural fixed smile settle upon her lips.  And now,
indeed, it seemed to them that some of the mystery of Asia had informed
her rigid person, or was escaping, together with a thick, sweet scent,
from the folds of her metallic and barbarically painted gown.

"Do not be afraid," she said, without opening her eyes.

Even the girl whose hand she held had ceased to smile.

There was a long silence, pervaded by the faint harmonies of _Vienna
Carnival_.

"For you have nothing to fear," the Russian quietly announced at last.
"All that you must pass through--how much confusion and twitter I am
conscious of!--will hardly touch you.  Few heartaches, few tears.  Some
day you will find yourself in a tawny land of harsh outlines: it is
probably southern Spain.  There you will meet a man as lithe as a
panther, his shoulders covered with gold, driving his sword through the
neck of a bull.  You are speaking to him at night.  He kisses your
hands.  But that, too, will soon end in laughter.  You will marry three
times, but never be a widow."

She opened her eyes, to gaze thoughtfully at Lilla.

They asked Madame Zanidov if she really saw those things.  She replied
that her perceptions were at times exactly like pictures.  For example,
she had seen the matador's lunge, as a splendid plasticity of violet
silk and tinsel, and then the bright blood gushing from the neck of the
bull.

In subdued voices they began to discuss "the possession of human beings
by occult forces."  One spoke of astounding passages set down through
automatic writing.  Another mentioned psychometry.  "But psychometrists
got impressions only from the past!"  Whereupon they stared at the
Russian.  Their eyes, which had been lightly touched with a black
pencil, were no longer sophisticated.  Their rouged lips were relaxed
by that superstitious awe which, even in cultivated societies, is ever
waiting to invade the feminine mind.

Madame Zanidov was still looking at Lilla.

"Yes," some one proposed.  "Try her."

"She doesn't wish it," Madame Zanidov remarked.

But after a moment of hesitation Lilla held out her hand.  Once more
everybody became silent and intent.  The music of Schumann softly
intruded into this stillness.

"Ah," the Russian murmured, "here is something different."

With her eyelids pressed together, she began:

"You are sitting alone.  You are writing letters, which will pass
through many hands of different colors.  One would think that those
hands would grow warm from touching your letters.  Now you are not
writing any more letters.  You are wearing a black dress."  Madame
Zanidov leaned forward as if striving with her closed eyes to pierce a
sudden opacity.  "This is very odd," she declared.  "I can see no more
pictures.  For there is a darkness which grows larger and larger, which
obscures everything.  So now I must discover what this darkness means.
Please be patient for a few moments."

Some one whispered:

"It's getting quite uncanny,"

Lilla's senses reached out to clench themselves upon the normality of
her surroundings.  But beneath that normality, that familiar solidity,
her innate mysticism, her instinctive habit of foreboding, seemed to
perceive a basis invisible yet similar--a solution, so to speak, from
which material things and events were continually being evolved, the
fluid containing all the elements of the crystalization.  And this
foreigner, with her idol-like face and meager, rigid body, her aspect
of long acquaintance with the very essence of materiality, became the
ageless oracle, the rewarder of humanity's incorrigible credulity.  So,
like the bejeweled princesses in the Mesopotamian temples, the Latin
ladies who had crept trembling into the Aventine caves, the Renaissance
beauties who, in the huts of witches, had turned whiter than their
ruffs, Lilla remained motionless, her gaze fixed apprehensively on the
clairvoyant.

The latter said:

"It will soon be plainer, for the moon is rising.  No, what a nuisance!
It is still very dark, because the moonlight is shut out by great
masses of foliage, great tangles of vines.  Such a place!  Gigantic
thickets, through which wild beasts are prowling, and above them the
trunks of huge trees.  Wait, I have found a path.  It leads to a
clearing in the midst of this forest.  Here I can see much better.
There are human beings here, and a feeling of sadness."

At a general stir, one of the ladies suggested nervously:

"Perhaps you'd better----"

But Madame Zanidov was saying:

"The people in the clearing are black savages.  They sit round a body
that is stretched on the ground and covered with a cloth.  Is it the
savages who are so sad?  I think not.  I cannot describe the one who
lies in the midst of them.  The cloth is drawn up to cover even his
face.  But I feel that it is some one who has loved you.  He is dead.
That is to say, he will be dead when the scene that I am describing is
realized; but now he is alive----"

Lilla, raising her eyes, saw in the doorway, with Fanny Brassfield, a
tall man, a stranger, whose countenance was aquiline and swarthy.  It
was Lawrence Teck, the explorer.




CHAPTER VIII

In the music room some musicians were playing a waltz; but Lilla and
Lawrence Teck were walking on the terrace.

She said to herself, "This is a dream"; for she had come to believe
that only in dreams did one realize, even in faint counterpart, one's
deepest desires.  She stood still.  The world--this new world drenched
in an unprecedented quality of moonlight--gradually became distinct.
She gave him, through that veil of silvery beams, a long look of
verification.

As in his picture he seemed at once rugged and fine, resolute and
gentle.  He was very quiet, like one who has willed to be so; but a
certain shyness remained in him, and presently announced itself to her.
Whereupon, remembering that she was beautiful, and that her beauty had
a way of troubling men, Lilla felt her own timidity transmuted into joy.

"Are your jungles better than this?" she asked.

"The charm of my jungles overlies a welter of stupid cruelty and deadly
waste.  Would it surprise you to know that I should like to see all the
world as nobly ordered as this landscape?"

She did not grasp the meaning of the words, being too deeply occupied
with seizing upon those syllables, those living tones, and dropping
them one by one into the treasury of her heart.

Glancing down at the aquatic garden, he remarked:

"These three basins would please my Mohammedan friends, who like to see
their flowers inverted in still water, like a mirage come true."

"Yes, no doubt they have their ideals."

"And often dream of them in very pleasant places."

He described certain gardens of the East.  He made her see nests of
color unexpectedly blooming in the midst of deserts, behind walls of
sundried mud overgrown with Persian roses, and with airy pavilions
mirrored in pools that were seldom darkened by a cloud.  Under date
palms the white-robed Arabs sat smoking.  From time to time black
slaves brought them coffee flavored with ambergris.  After sundown, at
the hour called "maghrib," when the sky was turning green, having
performed their ceremonial ablutions, they prayed.

"For what?"

"Behind the formal words?  Who knows?  For whatever they desired most.
Probably for something that nobody would suspect."

"And the women?" she ventured, looking at him sidewise.

In those remote walled towns they still remained invisible.  Their
minds, restricted to puerilities, had never grown up.  Their bodies
were so lax that their short weekly promenade to the cemetery exhausted
them.  Seated on cushions, they spent their time listening to cuckoo
clocks and music boxes, smelling perfumes, putting their jewelry away
in caskets, then bedizening themselves all over again.  Their servants,
who had known in childhood the hurly burly of caravanserais and slave
markets, told them of a world where everybody was possessed by a
thousand devils of ingenuity and wit.  And those scented ladies with
feeble flesh, hollow eyes, and the brains of parrots, after listening
for a while in vague regret, all at once became bored.  Whereupon they
fell to playing parchesi and eating sweetmeats.

In such sheltered and languid lives Lilla seemed to perceive a
similarity to her own life.  Or, at least, she felt that her life, if
he knew it in detail, would seem to him almost as trivial.

"Poor souls," she said.  "But one surely finds others out there," she
persisted, unfurling her large fan of yellow plumes, and looking at it
intently.  "White women, for example, the women of the empire builders?
At such meetings, in those far-off places, romance must be almost
inevitable.  Each finds in the other an overwhelming congeniality?  The
loneliness round about exerts a tremendous persuasion?"

"Oh, yes," he assented, with a smile.  "Especially if the lady smokes a
pipe."

He told her of an Englishwoman whom he had met in the Masai veldt,
hunting for maneless lions--an amazon in breeches and boots, at the
head of her own safari.  Week after week she had led her dark-skinned
retainers through the wilds, cheerily doctoring them in their
sicknesses, herself never ailing or weary.  At the charge of a lion she
had withheld her fire till the last possible moment.  By night, the
safari encamped, she had sat before her tent in a folding chair, one
knee cocked over the other, a pipe between her teeth, listening to the
gossip of ragged wanderers who had been attracted by the firelight and
the smell of burning fat.

"I find such women incomprehensible," Lilla declared, with a profound
animosity to that huntress whose body was so strong, whose nerves were
so sound, whose courage had been proved in the face of charging lions,
who took life without a twinge and doubtless gloated over the blood
that she had shed.

Lawrence Teck, after a moment's struggle with himself, blurted out:

"I assure you that when we fellows dream of women it's of a different
sort."

"Oh, of course.  Of the one that you've left behind, I suppose."

Sometimes, he assented presently; in which case the one at home would
be immensely enriched by that wide separation.  But it often happened
that such an exile, when no specially congenial woman had given him her
heart, constructed from his imagination an ideal, a vision capable of
brightening the wilderness with the most exquisite charms.  Or else he
might find an unattainable ideal ready-made.  Thus it was that uncouth
sailors, on long voyages, treasured the photographs of unknown
actresses in fancy costume, as a religious devotee might treasure an
ikon.  Or thus a soldier in some Congo fort, while gradually succumbing
to the malefic spell of the encircling forests, yearned toward the
portrait of a princess that he had clipped from an old illustrated
magazine--toward a divinity whom he could never know, but whom he
adored because her nature and life were so different from his.

"How romantic men are!" she exclaimed, turning away her head.

He seemed abashed; but he returned:

"And are women never tempted to renounce that famous practicality of
theirs?"

She walked on along the terrace.  The moonlight intensified her
ethereal aspect; and nothing could have been more emphatic than the
contrast between her seeming fragility and his apparent strength.

At a recollection she walked more and more slowly, her pace according
with the faltering of her heart beats.  But it was in an almost
indifferent tone that she inquired:

"You are really going back to Africa day after to-morrow?"

"Yes, everything's settled."

She paused, staring across the gardens, watching the slow withdrawal
from that scene of its peculiar charm.

"Why are you returning?"

He hesitated.  Well, he had reason to believe, he said, that not far
north of the Zambesi there was an unmapped, ruined city similar to the
stone city called Zimbabwe, which adventurers from Phoenicia were
supposed to have built four thousand years ago, as a mining town of the
fabled Land of Ophir.  Who knew what ancient idols, what Himyarite
inscriptions, what trinkets of gold, might not be found there?

"How can such a matter be important enough to make you risk your life
amid deadly fevers and insects, venomous reptiles, wild beasts and
wilder men?"

In that respect the expedition would be tame.  The journey into the
interior would consist of undramatic drudgeries and discomforts, of
association with a primitive folk whom he had never failed to make his
friends, of precautions that would confound the reptiles, the fevers,
and the disease-bearing insects.  As for the wild beasts, they asked
nothing better than to be left alone.

"Oh, yes," she assented, trailing her fan along the balustrade, "a hero
must be modest on such points.  Yet it seems to me an abnormal vanity
that drives one into those places, just in order that one may say,
'It's I who have found a new pile of ruins, a few scraps of gold, in a
jungle.'"

After a moment's reflection, he confessed:

"I gave you my secondary reason, because I thought you might find it
more interesting than my chief one."

It was true, he said, that he hoped to find a new Zimbabwe there; but
his principal task would be to make a geological survey of some
territory believed to be very rich in certain minerals.  He was going
for a group of capitalists who, if he brought back an encouraging
report, would obtain large concessions for exploiting the land.  It was
a gamble; the territory in question was virtually unexplored.  That
region, moreover, was peopled by a tribe opposed to exploitation, and,
for that matter, even to visits from their white-skinned nominal
rulers.  But he had always been successful in dealing with savages; so,
since this was to be as much a diplomatic mission as a geological
survey, he had seemed the one for the task.

From this explanation she derived the idea that he was not a rich man,
that perhaps until recently he had never thought of money as important,
but that now, for some reason, he had determined that his fortune must
be increased.

The waltz had ended.  The dancers were appearing on the terrace.  Some,
descending the staircases between the pools, wandered away through the
gardens.  Here and there a match flared up against unnaturally tinted
foliage.  Farther on, a spangled dress shimmered beside a fountain,
then, accompanied by a dark shadow, disappeared into a charmille.  A
clock in the valley struck eleven, its last vibrations mingling with a
laugh that rose, through the moonbeams, from a marble kiosk enveloped
in flowers.  And as the breeze, heavy with the fragrance of many
blossoms, caressed her face, Lilla felt that the gardens must be full
of hidden persons each of whom had at last found the amorous complement.

At the end of the esplanade, in the light of the French windows,
Cornelius Rysbroek's face appeared, then drifted away.

"What is that fellow's name?" asked Lawrence Teck.  "Just now he wanted
me to take him along to Africa.  He seemed quite unhappy, especially
when I had to tell him no.  Indeed, he gave me a rather curious
impression of misery and recklessness.  What is it?  An unfortunate
love affair?"

"So it's that," she vouchsafed, staring at him intently, "which starts
men off to the wilds?"

"Sometimes it's that which brings them back from the wilds.  I could
give you an instance----"

They, too, were now descending the steps between the pools.

The leafy alleys, silvered by the moon, and redolent of flowers that
had been made magical by the alchemy of night, surrounded them.  They
came to a spot where a circular wall of foliage, rising behind stone
benches, hemmed in a fountain, above which a marble antique warrior was
lifting in his arms a marble girl, who struggled against that seizure
with a convulsive energy, while her upturned face wore a look of
happiness.  Lawrence Teck made the comment:

"It appears that a rather primitive Greek gentleman has found a nymph
bathing in a pool.  If I remember, mortals who tried to capture nymphs
were liable to die."

"Yes," she assented, staring at the upturned face of the captive.  "He
should not have tried."

"But no doubt it's hard for them to be reasonable at such times,
especially when the person that they try to catch seems so strange, yet
so overwhelmingly congenial--the embodied dream."

"Then she should have prevented him."

"Perhaps she tried to, with the usual success when it's a question of
love in opposition to fear."

Lilla turned aside, drawing a cloud of golden tulle around her slender
shoulders.  "Does that acuteness also come to one in the jungle?"  She
seated herself upon the nearest stone bench.  "What is that story of
yours?"

"A story of one of those sentimental exiles and the picture of his
ideal."

The man, he said, had found the picture in a tattered magazine in the
Afrika Hotel at Zanzibar.  Of all the thousands of fair faces that he
had seen depicted or in the flesh, it was this face whose peculiar
beauty clutched suddenly at his pulse.  But it was not so much the
physical beauty that exerted the spell; nor was it, in this instance,
the attractiveness of the incomprehensible.  For the man divined from
his contemplation of those features the nature of the woman, all her
complexities, and even her emotional fragilities.  There came to him
the well-known conviction, "It's she that I've always been seeking."
At dawn, smothering under his mosquito net, with the din of Arab and
Hindu, Masai and Swahili voices drifting in through his shutters, his
first waking thought was of her.

He cut out the picture and kept it in his notebook.

It was there, against his breast, for many months.  It traveled into
still stranger places.  It passed, through Gallaland and Abyssinia,
into the country of the Blue Nile spearmen, across Darfur and Wadai,
where the Emir's men rode out in the helmets and chain mail that their
ancestors had copied from the Crusaders.  It crossed the Sahara,
skirting the strongholds of the Senussia Brotherhood, penetrating the
wastes patrolled by the Tuaregs, ferocious camel riders whose mouths
were always muffled in black bandages.  It went north to the steppes of
the Ziban, from which the tribe of the Ouled Nail scattered their
feather-crowned dancing girls from Ceuta to Suez.  And in the Atlas it
entered the hill castles of Kabyles, whose unveiled, fierce-eyed,
red-haired women, drenched with half a dozen perfumes, and clattering
with silver, coral, turquoise and gold, were swifter than snakes with
their knives.

At last it was yellow and crinkled, that picture of the fair unknown,
which had become for him, in consequence of so many vivid reveries,
like a living companion.

There were days when he forgot her.  Then suddenly, under those desert
constellations, he remembered her with a thrill.  Or else, before the
tent of some nomad sheikh, all at once she fluttered from the notebook
to the silken carpet, on which girls with little brown feet had just
been making their cuirasses of gold coins leap to the music of
flageolets and drums.

And sometimes, though he had never before been superstitious, he felt
that this picture was a sort of amulet.  For twice when he was in
danger, and there seemed to be small hope of his survival, there had
come to him the fortifying thought, "Not yet, because I haven't found
her in reality."

"Just a picture!" Lilla uttered, thinking of another picture that had
been hardly less potent.

Yes, but when he returned home, after a dozen efforts and
discouragements one day, merely by chance, he saw her alive, breathing.
She whirled past in a limousine.  She disappeared into the haze of a
city street in summer.  Whereupon he thought, "I was not mistaken; it's
inevitable."  He accepted the fatalism of his Arab friends, who believe
that every man's destiny is fixed.

"He found her again?"

"Finally.  There were difficulties."

"And they were happy ever after?"

He did not reply.

She looked over this magical garden toward the future, which now
appeared like one of those deserts, but bereft of all enchantment, and
covered with clouds that were not positive enough to rain.  Then,
gazing at the marble warrior that had seized the marble nymph, she said:

"I suppose it was you?"

"Yes," he assented, and pressed her hand to his lips.




CHAPTER IX

When she had reached her room she stood dazzled by the rays of the
declining moon, and stifled by the sweetness of the night.  The clock
in the valley struck one, as if marking the end of a time that had been
interminable in its tediousness and bleakness.  In the mirror she saw
her pale brown eyes, skin and tresses invested with a new allurement, a
new ardor.

His face sprang out before her--against the moonlit wall, in the
glazing of the pictures, on the dial of the clock.  She saw his gray
eyes surrounded by the fine wrinkles of those who have peered across
glaring sands, and his black eyebrows united above his aquiline nose.
The qualities that made him her antithesis redoubled his worth; and the
prestige of romance clung round his head like a nimbus.

As she moved to and fro, the moonbeams followed her and embraced her;
they glorified her slender figure whose reflections she saw with a new
pride.  The pale rays passed through her bosom, like a current from the
fabled regions of felicity.  They renewed in her breast that agitation
as if all her fibers were emerging from inertia into the fullness of
life.

She lay on her bed wide eyed, as if floating in a tepid sea, buoyed up
by happiness and wonder.

Then she sat upright, stricken with terror.  She had seen a clearing in
a jungle, and black savages seated round a body covered over with a
cloth.  For a moment she thought that she had seen Madame Zanidov also,
trailing her barbaric gown away through a shaft of moonlight.




CHAPTER X

It was mid-afternoon when Lilla emerged from her room.

A servant informed her that "everybody" was motoring or playing golf.
She entered the library, lustrous with its rows of books and its
deep-toned paintings hung against wooden panels.  Between half-drawn
window curtains passed rays of sunshine that came to rest upon vases of
flowers arranged in porcelain bowls; but the corners of the room were
steeped in shadows.  A man who had been sitting on a couch amid these
shadows rose to his feet.

She sought the gloom beyond the fireplace, in order that her changed
face might not betray her.  But even here her paleness was emphasized,
and her eyes, with faint purple streaks below them, took on a look of
deeper anxiety.  Her features began to quiver as if her soul were
revealing itself beneath a transparent mask.

"What has happened?"

She managed to reply:

"A great mistake.  Because that picture seemed congenial to you in
those lonely places you thought that the original must be the same?
You were wrong.  Physically and temperamentally we belong to different
worlds.  You couldn't rest in mine, and I couldn't enter yours.  If you
knew me," she added, in a hushed voice, "you'd find me contemptible, in
all my weaknesses."  She lowered her head, then, raising her eyes,
which were full of fear, besought him, "Tear it out of your heart!
Destroy it!"

"There, it's done.  How easy it was to obey you!"

And they stood face to face in a pallor that was like a scintillation
of white-hot metal, both knowing that their lips, though they uttered
first a thousand similar phrases, would presently be united.

Then he came close, catching in his strong grasp her writhing hands.
But she stopped him with a look like a flashing sword--a look as
poignant as though they had been lovers for years and now must love no
longer.  And so, in fact, they had been, heart drawn to heart by a
strange likeness of accidental or of fatal events, one longing groping
through space toward another longing.  Apart, just by aid of their
imaginations, they had progressed already from indefinite to precise
emotions, from vague to fixed visions, each attaining in thought a
consummation that mocked this present struggle.  And this profound
mutual intimacy, an accomplished fact in the realm of mind, was
suddenly projected into the physical atmosphere, so that the glances of
these two, who had just now met each other, clashed in an almost
terrible intimacy, as though the question were not "Never," but "Never
again."

Wrenching her hands away, she made a despairing gesture.

"Tear it out," she repeated.  "It's only by doing so that you can
please me."

"Will you help me to kill it?  Will you lend a hand by making your
beauty hideous, your nature repulsive?  Come and take a drive with me.
Just an hour or two.  How long do you need to destroy it?"

"Ah," she breathed, closing her eyes in pain.

In a broad-brimmed hat that matched her muslin gown she went down the
steps to his car.  The high, gray walls of the house disappeared behind
a rush of trees; the conical turret roofs of slate sank quickly away.

From the terrace Cornelius Rysbroek stared at the distant gateway
through which they had vanished.

The car rushed through the countryside.  The orderly fields stretched
away toward gentle slopes on which cows were grazing.  Here and there a
village abruptly spread out its roofs, which rotated on the axis of a
spire.  All the windows gave back the light of late afternoon; and far
off, against a hollow between two hills, like wine in a cup, there was
a ruddy flash of water.  It was the Sound; and beyond the Sound lay the
sea.

A cloud covered the setting sun.

"So you pretend to begrudge me this perfected feeling, this
verification, that I'll carry back with me!"

He told her that over there he would build a perfect similacrum of her
out of his thoughts, as an enchanter might form at will in the
twinkling of an eye the likeness of some one who was far away.  "You
shall even move and speak," he predicted, "and I'll make your glances
and your words whatever I want them to be.  Look out for yourself!
That is sorcery.  I shall have taken a part of you away from yourself,
across the ocean, to Africa where the forests are full of magicians.
Over here you'll no longer be complete.  You'll turn your eyes
southeast with a sense of missing something from your heart."

He gazed ahead at the road that the car was devouring with an endless
purr of triumph.  He pursued his fancy, while the car pursued the
glimmer of the Sound, which was escaping amid the first thin veils of
the twilight.

He promised that she, to whom everything uncouth and primitive was
repugnant, would smile beside him in those equatorial tangles, or, at
any rate, that she would do so in his dream of her.  In the camp
surrounded by a hedge of thorns, in the firelight flickering on the
shoulder blades and teeth of the negroes, the wraith of her living self
would sit at his side, radiant in the dress that she had worn last
night.  "Real as you'll seem to me," he said, "I sha'n't have to worry
about the striped mosquitoes stinging you on the shoulders; and when we
others go plodding along, no helmet or terai need hide that hair of
yours.  Since you'll be made of my thoughts, you'll be invulnerable.
You'll catch up your little train to run across a field of ferns in
pursuit of some small, inquisitive wild beast.  When the tribes make
dances for us, they won't know that a beautiful white lady, in a golden
decolleté gown, is seated before them, as happy as if that hullabaloo
were a ballet by Stravinsky."

In the twilight, by a road hemmed in with sumac, they came to a small,
rustic restaurant, which perched on a cliff above the waters of the
Sound.  An old waiter led them between empty tables to a veranda
overlooking the waves.  He seated them by the railing, along which
trailed a honeysuckle vine.

They had come for tea or for dinner?

"Dinner!" exclaimed Lawrence.  "Here, take this, and carry your sane
and practical face away.  Wait, you might bring us some tea."  He
reached across the table to feel her hand, which was as cold as ice.
"I've frozen you!"

"No," she returned, almost inaudibly.

The odor of the honeysuckle was mingled with the smell of the sea.  The
old waiter came and departed like a shade.  They were alone on the
veranda, above the waves over which the rising moon had just thrown a
silver net.

But it was a beam of light from the doorway that illuminated the angles
of his face, at which she looked with a sensation of faintness.  She
bent her neck; her hat brim concealed her eyes.

By this time to-morrow!

"Let me hear your voice," he pleaded.  "At least I'll fill my mind with
those tones; and when I'm alone I can put them together into the words,
'I love you.'"

As if conjured up by this utterance, a breeze swept over them, full of
the fragrance of honeysuckle and the acridity of the sea, like the
immense, soft breath with which nature blows upon the kindled human
heart, fanning it into a sudden conflagration.  And the rustling
of the vines, together with the murmur of the water, expanded into
a sigh which seemed to issue from the multitude of lovers who
somewhere--everywhere--at that moment, were swaying toward the
irresistible embrace; and from the innumerable flowers of the earth, in
the act of relinquishing the sweetness beloved by bees; and, indeed,
from that whole spread of mortal consciousness which nature, moved by a
supreme necessity, has subjected to this world-wide tyranny.

She lifted her head as if striving to rise above that smothering flood,
and in the moonlight her face was revealed to him--her eyes humid, her
lips twisted into an unprecedented shape, her whole aspect, in its
startling maturity, like that of the immortal goddess whose genius and
nature had suddenly possessed this flesh and blood.

Rising, she turned away in a movement of denial that came too late.  He
followed her to the end of the veranda; and there at last--or, as it
seemed to them, again--he took her in his arms.  For an instant her
averted face imitated the marble nymph's face, her slender and flexible
body the nymph's struggling body, before she became limp at his kiss.

In the doorway of the dining room she paused to look back at the
veranda.  She wanted to remember every arabesque that the vines were
tracing in silhouette against the moonlit sea; but she could not see
anything distinctly.  As she left the restaurant some one presented her
with a little bunch of flowers.

It was her wedding bouquet.

They were married in a village rectory.  The minister, peering over his
horn-rimmed spectacles, stood before a mantelpiece on which a black
marble clock was flanked by clusters of wax fruit under glass.

Lilla borrowed a cloak from the minister's wife, and Lawrence drove
straight to New York.




CHAPTER XI

She appeared in the doorway of the living room wearing a white
burnoose, her pale brown hair caught up in a loose knot, her feet
thrust into yellow Moorish slippers much too large for her.  In the
thin morning sunlight Lawrence, dressed for his journey, was locking a
metal trunk.  Lilla sat down and fixed her eyes on the clock.

The furniture of the living room, gathered from various parts of the
Mohammedan world, was carved and inlaid.  In the corners long-barreled
muskets, with stocks of mother of pearl, flanked cabinets full of
brittle copies of the Koran, witch doctors' switches, and outlandish
fetishes.  Above these objects there dangled from the molding the
cagelike silver head armor of the Wadai cavalry horses, the tassels of
Algerian marriage palanquins, oval shields of bullock-hide and bucklers
of hammered brass, crude drums and harps from Uganda.  On the four
walls, against pieces of reddish bark cloth, gleamed savage weapons
arranged in circular trophies--the war spears of the Wanandi, the
swords of the Masai, the bows and poisoned arrows of the Wakamba,
besides jeweled yataghans, scimitars with gilded hilts, and damascened
pistols.  Over the bookcases--which were crammed full of heavy volumes,
portfolios, and maps--appeared framed photographs; among the likenesses
of Europeans in duck tunics one saw the visages of Egyptians, Persians,
and Arabs, or some ghastly black apparition daubed with white paint and
crowned with a shako of squirrel fur and plumes.

In the air there was a faint odor of skins, dried herbs, sandalwood,
and camphor.  But on the center table, in a large African gourd that
had been polished till it looked like porcelain, stood the little
bouquet that some one had presented to her at the restaurant.

These flowers, because neither he nor she had thought to give them
water, were already faded.

"Have you telephoned to the Brassfields?"

"Yes," she said, with a wan smile, "and caused quite a sensation."

A small, wiry, middle-aged man, with an honest, lantern-jawed face,
entered the living room bearing a breakfast tray.  After one glance,
keeping his eyes cast down, he bowed respectfully.

He was Parr, Lawrence Teck's valet in America and right-hand man in
Africa.

With her head bent forward, she stared at some petals that had fallen
from the gourd.  Her neck rose from the white burnoose in a curve of
the palest amber; her delicate lips were parted; her loosened tresses
were filled with the feeble sunshine.  She seemed to symbolize quiet.
But when the telephone bell rang she started violently.

It was a call from Long Island, where Aunt Althea Balbian was
summering.  The servants had learned of Lilla's whereabouts from the
Brassfields.  Aunt Althea had fallen seriously ill in the night.

Parr showed his downcast eyelids and lantern jaws in the doorway.

"A maid is here from madam's house downtown with a steamer trunk and
three suitcases."

"Tell her to take them back," Lilla said in a muffled voice.

She had planned to go as far as London with Lawrence.

She went to a bookcase, knelt down, and scanned the titles of the books.

"I shall read these," she murmured.  "I shall take them home with me,
stack by stack, and read them all.  At night I'll read the ones that
are worn from your hands, the dog-eared ones full of pencil marks.
Show me those that you care for most.  Have you any little book that's
gone with you everywhere, that's shabby from your constant use?  I want
to keep it in my handbag in the daytime and under my pillow at night."

He turned away to the window.  She sat on her heels before the
bookcase, the white folds of the burnoose flowing out round her, her
fragile hands in her lap, her soft palms upturned, her fluffy hair
trailing down to frame her sad face.

She continued:

"Don't forget to leave me the key.  There will always be flowers here;
but the moment they fade fresh ones will take their place.  What chair
do you like to sit in?  On winter nights I'll come here, and draw your
favorite chair toward the fire, and sit opposite.  I won't let these
cruel weapons, these hideous painted faces, frighten me.  I'll tell
myself that nothing can prevent us from being together again.  Yes,"
she declared, in a deadened voice, "my thoughts are going to form armor
round you.  Just wait!  When you're alone out there, and everything's
silent, you'll wonder what it is that makes the air round you electric.
It will be my thoughts of you."

The clock struck the hour.  She rose; but at the doorway she paused,
drooping and tremulous, so that he could take her in his arms again.
Her head sank back; her curling lashes veiled her eyes, and a sob,
swelling her throat, escaped through her quivering lips.  Her knees
bent, and with a look of anguish she cried distractedly:

"Good-by!  Good-by!"

She believed that her heart had stopped beating.

She was in the bedroom, lying on the couch spread over with a leopard
skin.  He was sitting beside her.  His face expressed alarm; for she
shivered convulsively, turning her head from side to side, and biting
her lips.  He urged her to have courage.

"Courage!  When I shall never see you again?"

"What an idea!"

She touched his dark cheek with her fingers on which the nails were
like gems.  Her eyes, extraordinarily enlarged, and swimming in a
mournful tenderness, regarded his face, as if striving to impress it
forever upon her mind.

"Give it up," she pleaded once more.  "Don't scorn my intuition."

"It's necessary," he said.  "More so now than ever."

"Money!  As if there were no other way!  And even if there weren't----"

Parr knocked on the door.

"Shall I call the taxi, sir?"

"Yes."

Lying motionless, staring at the ceiling, she faltered:

"All right.  I'll dress."

But she could hardly drag herself to her feet.

As she pinned on her hat she longed for a veil, such a heavily figured
veil as she had put on when setting out to the fortune teller's, who
had said, "A great love is in store for you."  "How dreadfully I look!
This is the picture of me that he must take away with him."  She
entered the living room as Parr and the taxi driver were carrying out
the valises.  She took a flower from the gourd.  A petal fell off; and
the taxi driver, brushing past her, ground it into the rug.

In the outer corridor, which she did not remember having passed through
last night, she held out her hand.  Lawrence gave her the key; she
slipped it down the neck of her muslin frock, and it struck a chill
through her bosom.

When the ship had carried him away she returned uptown and took a train
for Long Island.




CHAPTER XII

Aunt Althea lay in a four-post bed near a window through which she
might see the sunshine resting on the small Italian garden.  Her
colorless face was stamped with a look of almost infantile
acquiescence, though it was only three days since she had sat out there
in the garden, thinking:

"When Lilla comes back I'll ask her whether she wouldn't like a little
run over to Rome, before the season sets in."

The sick woman tell asleep.  Her hair appeared grayer, her skin more
nearly transparent, than ordinarily.  All her various ardors had not
slipped away from her without leaving on her countenance the marks of
their transmutation, a peculiar nobility that owed half its fineness to
unacknowledged suffering.

In the night the nurse decided to wake the physician, who was dozing in
one of the guest rooms.  Aunt Althea had conquered time, had regained
her "beloved Europe."  Somewhere in the New York house there was a
photograph of her, taken in her twenty-fifth year.  She, too, it
seemed, had once been charming, full of young grace and eager
expectancy.  And now she was in her twenty-fifth year again, and
driving through Rome to the English cemetery.  She reached it.  She met
some one there, to whom she spoke in Italian.  It was a rendezvous of
lovers.  And Lilla heard the sigh:

"Don't go.  Don't smile at my intuition----"

Later, after seeming to listen intently, Aunt Althea cried:

"What are they calling?  All massacred at Adowa!"  She uttered a moan,
"I knew it!"

To the doctor's surprise she lived through the following day.  By
evening everybody had become hopeful of her recovery.  Aunt Althea,
turning her faded, aristocratic head on the pillow, said:

"You must go and rest, Lilla.  I shall be all right now.  How badly you
look!  How I must have worried you!  They shouldn't have spoiled your
party.  You see it wasn't worth while."

She passed away at dawn.

It was a morning of unusual brightness.  A high wind caught up and
scattered broadcast the petals from the Italian garden, as though that
spot had served its only purpose.  Now and then a swift cloud cast a
shadow over the landscape, then passed on, leaving everything as
brilliant as before.  The boughs of the trees tapped urgently against
the windowpanes, calling attention to the sparkling clarity of space.
And Lilla, sitting alone in her room, wondered, "Will she meet him out
there?  Does fate finally relent?  Or are those moments that she had
with him--so few, while others are allowed so many!--supposed to be
enough happiness for her?"




CHAPTER XIII

For a while Lilla remained in the house on Long Island.

She sat in the pergola holding on her lap a closed book, between the
pages of which she kept Lawrence's cablegrams and letters from London.
Toward sunset she rose and went down across the meadow to the brook,
where some willows leaned over the water.  As the twilight gathered, a
smell of wood smoke made her think of camp fires; and casting a look
around her at the suave landscape she tried to picture the jungle.

Then, when she recalled their brief hours together, a filmy curtain
appeared to ascend before her eyes; and that relationship, which
because of her profound, psychic agitation had been almost dreamlike
while in progress, assumed a perfect clarity, a new value.  And now,
with the dissipation of that haze cast over all her senses by his
nearness, she perceived him, himself, far more distinctly than when he
had been with her.  "Ah, what was I thinking of to let him go!"  She
felt that another woman, not cursed with her ineptitude in that crisis,
would have held him back.

"But you were cruel enough not to give up going of your own accord,"
she sighed in the twilight.  And, turning wearily back toward the
house, she reflected that if she had been fatally weak he had been
fatally strong, and that, after all, those two antithetical defects
were strangely similar.

When she was most gloomy, Fanny Brassfield came to visit her for a few
days.

That vigorous blonde woman, ruddy from golf and thin from horseback
riding, with calm nerves and an endless fund of gossip, brought a vital
thrill into the Long Island house.  Yet to Lilla this very vigor was
oppressive instead of tonic; and resentment came over her as she
scrutinized her friend's satirical face, which seemed to typify all the
women who progressed successfully through life, as if their natures,
victoriously adamantine, had bestowed upon them this brilliant hardness
of complexion, this sophisticated, frosty, conquering glance.  Lucky
women, who were so emphatically of the same essence as the phenomena
round them, who accepted life with the simplicity of natural creatures,
who never saw, beneath the pageantry of these appearances, a peeping
horror that cast one down from joy to despair!  Even death seemed
natural to them, apparently, so long as they themselves escaped its
touch.

"One must resign oneself to all these things," said Fanny, in her
clear, loud voice.  "One must learn to rise above them.  These periods
of mourning are really a mistake.  All this sitting still, dressed in
black!  One takes medicine when one's ill.  A dose of pleasure ought to
be the prescription when one's sad."

She added that physical exercise was also very important.

In a striped woolen sports suit, a felt hat turned over one ear and a
walking stick in her hand, Fanny Brassfield presented herself at
Lilla's bedside while the garden was still full of mist.  She
prescribed, on this occasion, a walk before breakfast.

They trudged through bypaths where the bushes were gemmed with dew.
From a wooded hilltop they saw, gliding along the highway, the cars of
men who were bound for their safe occupations in the city.

Lilla regained the house exhausted, pale from fatigue, while Fanny
Brassfield seemed bursting with energy.

In the evening time began to hang rather heavily for Fanny.  She
persuaded Lilla to play the piano for her.  Then she glanced over the
books in which the paragraphs were shortest, ran through a few
magazines, kicked off her slippers, put her feet on a stool, lighted a
cigarette, and fell back upon gossip.  Madame Zanidov was now visiting
in Maine.  Cornelius Rysbroek had gone to Mexico.

"Mexico!  Aren't things rather unsettled there?"

"Perhaps he's gone where things are unsettled because everything is too
much settled here," replied Fanny, with her satirical smile.

"But Cornie!"

"Oh," said Fanny, luxuriously stretching herself like a cat that needs
exercise, "if one of these timid souls is hit hard enough, there's no
telling what he'll do."




CHAPTER XIV

Before the end of summer Lilla returned to the house on lower Fifth
Avenue.

In the hall paved with black and white tiles, the chasteness of the
ivory-colored wainscot set off two stately consoles, on which lamps
with cylindrical shades of painted parchment were reflected in antique
mirrors.  The drawing-room furniture, from the eighteenth century,
displayed its discreet elegance against the sage green walls and the
formal folds of the mulberry-colored curtains; while over the chimney
piece, which was ornamented with three vases of the Renaissance in
silver gilt, a painting by Bronzino focused the gaze upon a triumph of
romance over formality.  This painting, in this room, was like a
gesture of Aunt Althea's real self.

"How well she kept her secret," Lilla thought "She was rather heroic,
it seems."

And she felt as surprised a sadness as though she were the first who
had not quite appreciated the departed.

"The departed!"

The prophecy of Madame Zanidov--"that incredible balderdash!"--even
woke her in the night.

She discovered the date of Lawrence's birth, then went to a woman with
birdlike eyes, who was seated behind a table on which stood some little
Hindu idols and a vase of gilded lotus buds.  The astrologer, when she
had made some marks on a sheet of paper, and had added up some figures,
confessed that "these next few months were going to be a critical time
for him."  "You see, here are Saturn and Uranus----"

Emerging from the sanctum, Lilla felt the pavement move beneath her
feet.

Presently she sought out the teachers of New Thought, whose faces were
as serene as though they had found a talisman by which death itself
might be vanquished.  They calmed her with benignant smiles, then
informed her that fear was as potent in bringing about disaster as
optimism was in preventing it.  In those consultation rooms, where the
walls were dotted--rather unnecessarily, it seemed to Lilla--with
mottoes exhorting her to love, they gave her the recipe in gentle
voices that were nearly lyrical.  But gradually she got the idea that
they were speaking to her in a foreign language.  Drowsiness assailed
her, as though a malignant power, determined that she should not gain
this peace, had cast over her a spell of mental lethargy.

Nevertheless, she persisted.  In the bookshops the customers turned to
regard this tall beauty clad in black, who, with a mournful eagerness,
leaned over the counters devoted to "inspirational literature."

One rainy afternoon she threw those books aside and went to church.

Here was an awesomeness appropriate to a mortal conception of God--a
distant glitter of candles beyond colossal pillars, a fragrance of
stale incense, a silence in which the shadowy crimson of banners,
suspended high in the nave, was like a soft blaring of celestial
trumpets.  Exaltation took hold of her as she recalled the miracles of
orthodox faith and the eternal promise of compassion.

She prayed for a long while, lost in the sweetness of the incense, her
heart quivering from the memory of her few hours of love.

Whenever she received a letter from him she tore open the envelope with
one movement, and pressed against her face those crackling sheets of
paper that seemed to exhale the odor of a far-off land.  He had written
it in the wilds, before his tent, while a naked black messenger stood
waiting.  The letter sealed, the messenger had stuck it into a split
wand, and straightway had set off at a trot toward the coast.

Now she wanted to know precisely what his surroundings looked like.
When she had pored over the map she collected all the books about that
region.

She was surprised to find it impregnated with romance.

It was the "Eldorado" of remote antiquity.  Thither, in the dawn of
recorded history, had gone the Phoenician galleys, full of hook-nosed
men in purple and brass, their beards scented with spikenard.  From the
mining towns that they built in the jungle, surrounded by cyclopean
walls and adorned with grotesque stone images, came the stores of gold
with which the Sidonians enriched King Solomon.  To-day all those
workings were apparently exhausted.  The Zimbabwe--the cities of
stone--had crumbled; the jungle had closed in; and in that wilderness
only a heap of rubble, or the choked mouth of a pit, remained here and
there to mark the source of the metal that had gilded the temple at
Jerusalem, and the Semitic shrines to Baal and Astoreth.

But a new letter told her that he had crossed the Zambesi.

He had gone into a land almost wholly unexplored by its present
claimants, full of fever-breeding marshes, barren mountain gorges, and
great forests.  The inhabitants were an unconquered race of warriors
called the Mambava, fiercer than the lions and leopards about them,
hostile to strangers, and given to uncanny customs.  They worshipped
among other things--perhaps in consequence of the old Phoenician
occupation--the moon.  At certain periods of the year their forests
thundered with the music of drums; their towns were deserted except for
the women and children.  Then the stranger who had ventured into their
country might see, from his hiding place, hordes of black men moving to
a secret rendezvous, their painted faces framed in monkey hair, their
limbs covered with amulets, their shields rising in time to an
interminable chanting in a minor key.

Sometimes, in the corridor outside the door of Lawrence's rooms, she
encountered a small, dapper young man with an inquisitive face, who
lived on the floor above.  He usually carried under his arm a leather
portfolio.  Nothing could have been more interested than his look when
he passed this sad-eyed woman in mourning, whose identity and story he
had learned from the janitor.

When she had shut the living-room door behind her, for a moment she
closed her eyes in order that she might not see the weapons on the
walls.  Then she kindled the fire.  The blazing logs sent over her a
wave of heat; but she shivered while listening to the sound of sleet on
the glass.

"He might be here with me.  We might have felt together the security
and peace of this warm room, and laughed at the storm outside."

One evening she ripped from their frames the photographs of savages
smeared with white paint and crowned with fur and feathers.  She threw
them into the fire.  As the flames consumed them, she leaned, forward
like those who try to annihilate their enemies by destroying their
likenesses.

For a long while she sat beside the empty chair, shading her eyes from
the blaze with a translucent hand.  But suddenly she stood up, tense
and quaking.  Her dilated eyes were fixed upon a point in space, from
which an overwhelming impression had rushed in upon her--a flood of
distant emotion, a sort of voiceless cry, in a flash traversing half
the earth and unerringly reaching her.

Little by little her nerves and muscles relaxed.  Moving as though her
limbs were weighted with lead, after carefully drawing the fire screen
in front of the glowing embers, she put on her black toque, her long
coat of black fur and her black gloves.

As she crossed the sidewalk to her car, an eddy of wind raised up
before her, head high, a whirl of snowflakes that resembled a wraith
for one moment, before it was whipped away into the darkness.




PART TWO


CHAPTER XV

A month after that stormy night when Lilla had felt the impact of some
far-off gush of feeling, the newspapers published a despatch reporting
the death of Lawrence Teck at the hands of savages.  Four months
passed, however, before Lilla received a letter from Parr, the valet.

It had happened in the country of the Mambava.  That tribe, despite
their well-known animosity to strangers, had not been hostile to
Lawrence.  Indeed, he had won the friendship of their king.  Yet it was
in the king's stronghold that the tragedy had happened.

There had been a beer dance, a disorderly festival ending in a clash
between the Mambava warriors and Lawrence's camp police.  Almost
without warning the rifles had cracked, the spears had begun to fly.
Lawrence, throwing himself between the parties, had been among the
first to fall.  Then a frenzy had seized the savages; a panic, the
intruders.  It had been a massacre--a headlong flight amid the Mambava
forests, through which Parr, himself badly wounded, and half the time
unconscious, had been dragged by five Mohammedan survivors.  They had
gained an outpost fort where, ever since, Parr had lain hovering
between life and death, not only crippled by his wounds, but also
stricken with the black-water fever.  Then, at last, he had gathered
strength enough to scrawl these lines.




CHAPTER XVI

Her friends were surprised that she "took it as well as she did."
Considering her emotional legacy, they had expected a collapse.  On the
contrary she remained, as it seemed, almost passionless.  She did not
show even that desire for sympathy which is characteristic of
hysterical natures.

Fanny Brassfield noticed presently, however, that Lilla could no longer
look at negroes without turning pale, that her antipathy to certain
colors, sounds, and perfumes had increased, and that sometimes she
appeared to be listening to a voice inaudible to others.

It was the voice of her thoughts, which she heard, now and then, just
as if some one were whispering in her ear.

She became subject to reveries in which there were frequent lapses from
all mental function.  Then, of a sudden, she was filled with a longing
for movement.

She went abroad alone, and settled herself in a villa on the French
Riviera.

Every morning there appeared on the terrace of a neighboring villa a
young Frenchwoman in a white straw hat and a white dress, carrying an
ebony cane, and followed by a brown spaniel.  In the evening the
stranger might be seen pacing behind the marble urns in a gown of gold
and silver lace, or perhaps in a black dress spotted with large
medallions of pearl and turquoise.  A tall man walked by her side; and
when their silhouettes stood out against the luminous sea there came to
Lilla, with the interminable odor of roses, a soft laugh of happiness.

The sound floated across a gulf as wide as that which separates one
world from another.

As for Lilla, her world lay in the past; and all this semitropical
luxuriance of nature, enriched and complicated by an insatiable
mankind, was lost in such mistiness as had risen round her in
childhood--when her world had seemed to lie in the future.  Sometimes
those past events, from her continual rehearsal of them, attained
recreation; the precious scenes surrounded her visibly and almost
tangibly; and the dark garden of the villa became the other garden, the
threshold of love.  Then she realized that this was one more delusion
due to her abnormal state of mind.  In her terror she reached out
through the shadows to grasp at something that might help her to regain
contact with reality.  She clutched a rose, and as she crushed its
sweetness to her face its thorn pierced her lip.  She burst into a fit
of crying and laughing at this reassurance--this proof that there
existed, after all, a material world, of beauty inextricably mingled
with despair.

But loneliness remained.

She expected no abatement of this loneliness; for he was gone after
showing her that it was he, of a worldful of men, for whom she had been
waiting.  And now, more and more, her objective mind was filled with
hitherto unsuspected memories of him, a thousand fragmentary
recollections that she fitted together into an image more vivid than
the man himself had been.  This image, gilded by layer after layer of
pathetic thoughts, enlarged by the continuous enhancement of his value,
gradually assumed an heroic magnitude, and became more splendid than a
statue in a temple.  So now it was no longer a man that she
contemplated in her reveries, but a sort of god whose stubbornness had
destroyed her.

In those nightmares of hers, however, he was still a man, subject to
mortal tragedy.  Waking with a cry, she discerned, in the act of fading
away against the curtains, the dead-white, wedge-shaped face of Anna
Zanidov.

One day she closed the villa and went swiftly to Lausanne.

She entered a bright consulting room where there rose to meet her, from
behind a desk, a calm-looking man with a bushy red and white beard.
His gaze took in, in a flash, her widow's weeds, her tall, slim person,
her delicate, pale brown face, her features composed and yet a trifle
wild, her whole effect of elegance and singularity.

"I feel as if I am going mad," she blurted out, by way of greeting.

The famous physician smoothed his beard reflectively.

"There is a story, perhaps?"

And when she had told him everything, he remarked, "I will make out for
you a series of appointments."

"The cause will remain," she returned.

"But I shall change your thoughts about the cause," he said paternally.

"No!" she exclaimed, in a voice vibrant with apprehension.  For she
would have gone on risking this madness that she feared, rather than
let him efface from her conscious thoughts, or even dim, one
recollection of Lawrence.

He understood.  Casting down his eyes, he reflected:

"Apparently this charming person has never been told how extreme an
example she is of our poor civilisées.  For the sake of a dead man she
is willing, after all, to commit slow suicide.  If she continues to
nurse this grief which is indissoluble from her love, with her
predispositions she will go the usual way, probably ending in a psychic
collapse.  Ah, yes, if she had not come to me she would just have
drifted on and on into the devil knows what.  As it is, I don't fancy
that I could make her quite unemotional; but that grief--there's no
reason why she should go through life under that additional burden!
She is exquisite, young, sure of many happy years with some one else,
if she is cured of this preoccupation with that fellow who is gone.
Shall I ask permission to try to do her that favor?"

The celebrated specialist, raising his eyes, said benevolently to Lilla:

"At least, madam, you have no objection to my stopping those nightmares
of yours?"

Every day, for three weeks, she returned to the consultation room, sat
down in a deep leather chair, fixed her eyes on a bright metal ball,
and fell asleep.  The famous physician found her, as he had expected,
extremely impressionable.  On waking, she had no objective recollection
of what had been said to her.

But the dreams ceased to torment her.

With a strange, almost unprecedented feeling of peace she traveled down
to Lake Como.  Here she dwelt in a house smothered in flowers, on a
promontory that was almost an island.

In the morning she walked in the garden, drenched in sunshine,
enveloped in the silence of the lake, beyond which she saw, far away,
other villas nestling at the bases of the mountains.  A sensation of
humility came to her.  Amid that great panorama of blue and gold she
seemed to perceive subtle traces of a beneficent divinity.  The
sunshine veiled the hawks that were soaring through the sky in quest of
weaker birds; the waters of the lake concealed the fishes that were
devouring one another; and when, with a timid and pleading naïveté, she
paused before a rosebush, she did not see, behind those petals, the
spiders spinning their traps.

As she returned toward the house, there stole over her a pleasant
weakness, a childlike and tremulous trust; and she felt the soft air
more keenly, smelled more delicate fragrances, heard a multitude of
infinitesimal sounds that had not reached her ears a moment ago.

She sat in a high-ceiled, white-walled room with French windows opening
on a terrace where _olea fragans_ blossoms expanded round the base of a
statue by Canova.  At last a feeling of incompleteness penetrated her
languor.  She rose to pace the mosaic floor on which appeared a design
of mermaids and tritons.

"What shall I do now?  I must fill my life with something.  I must find
some way to occupy my mind."

She thought of mastering another language; for like many persons of
similar temperament she found the learning of foreign tongues a simple
matter.  But what language?  Already she knew French, Italian, and
German.  Russian, then?

She recoiled from that thought, associated as it was with Anna Zanidov.

Sitting down at the piano, she played Chopin.

Her interpretation of the piece was good, but not eloquent.  The spirit
that she had heard certain musicians put into it was lacking.  She
remembered how differently even old Brantome, the expatriated French
critic, had expressed these phrases.  She wondered why, with her
immense passion for music, she had never been able to translate its
profoundest spirit.

And she recalled an old longing of hers to compose some musical
masterpiece.  For that purpose she had faithfully studied harmony,
counterpoint, fugue, and musical form, had steeped herself in the works
of the masters from Palestrina to Stravinsky.  Yet her own creative
efforts had ended in platitudes.  Was it true that women, supposed to
be more emotional than men, were incapable of employing successfully
the most intense medium for the revealment of emotion?

"What am I good for?  Ah, what shall I do with my life?"

Late in the afternoon a boatman rowed her out on the lake.  At twilight
the mauve shadows on the cliffs combined with the pallor of the Alps to
form round her a setting full of poetry and pathos.  She thought how
perfectly these things might once have enclosed her in the scenery of
love--yet now, for some reason, they were incapable of composing with a
proper vividness the scenery of grief.

She returned to the villa to find visitors, women whom she had known in
girlhood, who had married members of the Italian nobility, and now were
sojourning in the neighborhood.  They brought men with them, and
sometimes stayed to dinner.

One night, as she leaned against the balustrade of the terrace,
watching the strings of lights across the lake, a young Roman, tall,
dark and aquiline, handsome and strong, laid his hand upon hers.

"It is a world made for happiness," he breathed.

The others, in the white-walled room now mellow from lamplight, were
clustered round the piano, and one of them was singing a song by Tosti.
Without drawing away her hand, Lilla returned:

"Happiness.  Yes, tell me what it consists in."

"In the glory of life and love.  In the splendors of this world and our
acceptance of them--we who are this world's strange, sensitive
culmination.  Not to question, but to feel, with these feelings of ours
that a thousand generations have made so fine, so complex.  To be
natural in the heart of nature."

She smiled mournfully:

"You realists!  And are these things that you celebrate reality?  They
fade and die----"

"But while they live they live," he cried low, with an accent of
austere passion, and seized her in his arms.

For a moment she did not move.  She let herself feel that contact, that
strength and fervor, with a nearly analytical attentiveness, with, a
melancholy curiosity.  But of a sudden she pushed him from her with a
surprising strength, her heart beating wildly.  She stared at him in
amazement, then entered the house.

A fortnight later she returned to New York.

Winter was imminent; but few of her friends had yet appeared in town.
One day on Fifth Avenue, however, she met old Brantome, the critic, who
invited her to an afternoon of music at his apartment.




CHAPTER XVII

In Brantome's living room the book shelves rose to the ceiling; between
them the spaces on the walls were covered with the mementoes of a long
life.  On the tables stood bowls of flowers, stacks of musical scores,
trays of wineglasses, cigarette boxes that had once been jewel cases,
half-empty teacups, and the gold purses or jet handbags of women who
reclined in the deep chairs with their faces turned toward the piano.

Men leaned smoking in the heavily curtained embrasures of the windows,
their foreheads lowered, their eyebrows casting over their eyes the
shadows as if of a profound fatigue.  Beside the hall door loomed the
white mane of Brantome, who turned, at an inflow of artificial light,
to greet the small Italian woman that had recently become a prima donna.

And presently this song bird warbled for her comrades of the arts, as
she would have done in no other company.  The air shook from her agile
cadenzas.  A last, long trill, high and pure, died away vibrating in
the vases of iridescent glass.

Then some one persuaded Brantome to play a piece of Schumann's.  And
once more Lilla heard _Vienna Carnival_.

When he had finished playing, Brantome sat down beside her.

"So it is as magical as ever, a bit of music?" he inquired, in his
rumbling, hoarse voice.

"You were playing that at the moment when I first saw my husband," she
said.

He contemplated her with his haggard old eyes.  Patting her hand, he
declared:

"All these emotions that you, a beautiful young woman, have felt, I
believe that I, an ugly, worn-out old man, have felt, also.  I, too,
have felt in my time that the world was at an end.  I have suffered
from the same inability to return into life.  Well, will you think me
cruel--shall I appear to you as the thief of an inestimable
treasure--if I tell you something?  In time, sooner or later, one
recovers.  I don't mean that one forgets.  It is always there; and a
chance sound or perfume brings it back to one.  But at last it returns
so gently!  One feels then, instead of pain, almost a gentle,
melancholy pleasure.  Then you will learn that there may be certain
subtle joys in grief."

She lowered her gaze, flinching inwardly, as one sometimes does when
credited with a feeling that one no longer fully deserves.  A dismal
perplexity came to her, a little pang of treason, as she asked him:

"How can I hasten that day?"

He suggested:

"You might perhaps find some engrossing interest?"

Near the piano a group were discussing women's failures in music.  One
heard the names of Chaminade, Augusta Holmes, Ethel Smyth.  Why had
there been no female Beethovens, Liszts, or even Chopins?  The reason,
asserted a middle-aged man, was that women's emotions were too
thoroughly instinctive to be projected in the form of first-class
music, which was, in fine, emotion analyzed, compressed within the
limits of fixed rules, expressed by series of arbitrary signs.  In the
midst of his conclusion, however, he lost his self-satisfied smile: he
had caught sight of Lilla, who was looking at him blankly as though he
had slammed a transparent door in her face.

She heard Brantome benevolently murmuring the platitude:

"It is often in making others forget their sorrows that one diminishes
one's own, and in doing good to others that one finds good for oneself."

She showed him a bitter smile.

"Yes, charity.  The usual prescription.  I have already tried it."  She
added, "Of course those poor people in their poverty and illnesses
merely appeared to me as a means for my own relief.  In helping them I
didn't think of their troubles, but of forgetting my own.  Sometimes
when I've written a check I almost expect it to buy me a less gloomy
day.  At such moments I should be absurd if I weren't contemptible."

"Bah! you are unjust to yourself."

It was true.  Lilla, who had suffered so much from her exceptional
temperament, could not bear to see others suffer; and in the grip of
her own weaknesses she had always felt compassion for the weak.

"But I ought not to come here," she said.

She explained that in this place she "felt her worthlessness."  It
would be better, she thought, to remain in the Brassfield state of
mind: thus one might find an anodyne for this sense of insignificance.
For, to those others, of course, wealth and social position were the
important things in life, magnificently making up for the lack of other
qualities.  If they had artistic enthusiasms, it was because they
regarded the arts as did the Roman conquerors--as elements created for
no other reason than to enhance their triumphs.  Debussy, she
suggested, had been born to give them a cause for displaying their
jewels at the opera, just as Titian had existed in order that their
acquisition of a painting by his hand might be cabled round the world.
In that region of inverted values one took on the egotism of the fabled
frog in the well, who laughed to scorn the frog that came to tell him
of the ocean.

"But the well is so prettily gilded," Lilla remarked.  "And it's lined
with so many nice little mirrors in Louis XVI frames, that you can
hardly blame the frog if he imagines that his importance, like his
reflections, extends to the ends of the earth, in that multiplied
glitter of gilt."

Brantome began to laugh, then turned serious.

"You must be desperate," he commented.

"That is your fault.  I've always had a longing for what I find in
these rooms; but that longing isn't backed up by any capacity.  When
one of these friends of yours has suffered a loss, his art still
remains.  And maybe it becomes a richer art because of his loss."

She sighed, her pale brown cheek resting against her black-gloved hand,
her black fur collar framing her neck on which the strand of pearls was
less lustrous than the teeth between her parted lips.

His leonine old visage grew soft as he looked at her, and under his
white mustaches of a Viking there appeared a sad smile, as if he were
thinking that things might have been different with him, had she, with
this beauty and these predilections, been young when he had been young.

"Oh, no, you must not stop coming here," he protested gently.  "It's
only right that these poor fellows should have their glimpses of a
composite of all the beautiful muses--who, as you'll remember, were not
themselves practitioners in the arts, but the inspirers of artists.
Isn't there, for women, besides the joys of personal accomplishment,
another satisfaction, which one might call vicarious?"

She gave him again her bitter, listless smile.

"You believe that stuff about women's inspiration?"

"But why not, good heavens!  When it is a fact of life----"

He bade her consider the great music written by men.  Almost invariably
one found in its depths a longing for synthesis with some ideal beauty,
produced by thoughts of some idealized woman.  Or else, by woman in the
abstract--that obsession which, ever since the days of Dante and the
troubadours, had attained a nearly religious quality, against whose
pressure even the modern materialist struggled in vain.  Yes, ever
since that fatal twelfth century it was woman, the goddess, the
Beatrice-form beckoning on the staircase of Paradise, who attracted
upward the dazzled gaze of man, and who seemed, by an unearthly
smile--with which man himself had possibly endowed her--to promise a
mystical salvation and a sort of celestial bliss.

"But at times, as I say," he concluded, with a shrug, "some lucky
artist is suddenly confronted by all that in bodily form--by a Beatrice
in a sable coat from Fifth Avenue and a little black hat from Paris."

But in her silvery voice there was a cadence of irony, when she
demanded:

"Whom shall I inspire?  Show me the one by whose aid I can pretend that
the woman is responsible for the masterpieces, as no doubt Vittoria
Colonna sometimes pretended to herself in the case of Michael Angelo.
But remember that it must be an affair like that one, romantically
platonic--_à la manière de Provence_."

Brantome nodded benignantly.  But old pangs had revived in his heart.

How well he understood this restlessness of hers, this sense of
impotency, this secret rancor at contemplation of congenial forms of
success!  He, by some minute fault, some tiny slip of fate, had long
ago been doomed to these same sensations.  In the morning of youth,
when gazing toward the future, he had seen the world at his feet,
unaware of that little flaw in the foundations of his Castle in Spain,
unwarned of the trick that destiny was going to play on him.  All these
years it had been here in the bottom of his heart, the sensation of
inferiority, the gnawing chagrin.  He had masked it well: one discerned
it only in some rare look when he was off his guard.  And now and then,
for a while, he even vanquished it, when some fresh voice rose in the
world of music, and he championed the cause of that new genius so
generously, hotly, and triumphantly that the consequent renown seemed
nearly to be his own, since he had helped by his enthusiasm to
establish it.

"Yes, certainly, _à la manière de Provence_--since music is so very
impersonal an art," he muttered, with an absentminded, haggard smile.

But Lilla was watching a man and woman who sat in a shadowy alcove, and
who, as some one began to play a nocturne, let their fingers twine
together.




CHAPTER XVIII

One night, at the end of the winter, she astonished everybody by
appearing with Fanny Brassfield in a box at the opera, wearing a black
velvet dress that made her, in that great horseshoe blooming with
flowerlike gowns, the objective of all eyes.

"There is hope!" said one young man waggishly to another.  "Cornie
Rysbroek ought to see this."

But Cornelius Rysbroek was traveling far away.

As for Lawrence, he was slipping farther and farther into the past.
There were times when without the aid of his picture Lilla could no
longer visualize his face.  Their moment of love became blurred in her
memory.  At times, remorsefully, as if struggling against a lethargy
mysteriously imposed upon her natural instincts, she strove to revive
her grief in its full strength; and then, for an instant, her
recollections became as poignant as though he had been with her only
yesterday.  But that perception could not always be evoked at will; and
ordinarily Lilla was aware only of a faint echo from a distant region
of pathos and delight--an echo that reached her, through a host of
other sounds, like the intrinsic spirit of an ultra-modern symphony, so
wrapped up in dissonances as to be nearly unintelligible.

"Where is he?" she wondered.  "Are those right who would say that he
has ceased to exist except in memory?"

At this thought she wept, not for him so much as for the blurring of
her remembrance of him.  And sometimes, when she had not thought of him
all day, she was awakened in the night by her own cry:

"Give me back my love!  Give me back my grief!"

Rising from her bed, she pored over the books on spiritualism that
still formed a long row on the shelf of her writing desk.  She envied
the women who were reported to have received, through automatic
writing, messages from the dead.  She sat down, in the silence of the
night, to hold over the clean sheet of paper the perpendicular pencil.
With her head bowed forward, her pose an epitome of patience, she fixed
her eyes upon the pencil point, which slowly made meaningless curlicues.

But suddenly, when she was expecting nothing, there passed through her
a tingling warmth such as that which must pervade the earth at
spring-time.  She stared round the room with the thought, "His spirit
is here!"

And she uttered, very distinctly, in the hope that the words might
penetrate his world from hers:

"I love you as much as ever!"

Those moments became rare.  At last they ceased to occur.

"He has passed so far into the beyond that he can no longer return to
me."

As if it had been awaiting this acknowledgment, a thicker curtain
descended between Lilla and the past.

And now she was like some medieval chatelaine who, emerging from a dark
and lonely castle, views all the gewgaws that a far-wandering peddlar
has spread out for her in the sun.

There were the art galleries filled with statues in inchoate or
tortured forms, or with paintings that seemed to Lilla to have been
conceived by madmen, yet in which certain persons declared that they
could discern a sanity beyond the understanding of the age.  And there
were the concert halls given over to the very newest music, from which
Lilla emerged with her nerves exacerbated.

Then the prosceniums of the theaters framed pageants of Oriental
sensuousness--scenes of hallucinatory seductiveness and splendor,
through which, to a blare of startling music, bounded swarms of
half-naked bodies jingling with jewels.

Or, abruptly, the softness of oboes and cellos, the flagrancy of musk,
the gleam of purple light on torsoes moist from exertion, a presentment
of love as understood by ancient Eastern despots--a perverse and
gorgeous ideal resuscitated to challenge modern thought.  Or perhaps,
with a sudden rush of darkness and return of light, before scenery that
tore at the nerves like a discord of trumpets, a dancer--a heathen
god--leaped high into the air, with muscles gilded as if to add an
overwhelming value to mere human flesh.

Later, the chandeliers of ballrooms, multiplied by those Louis XVI
mirrors that Lilla had derided, cast their glitter upon the bright
dresses of a new design, the coiffures that had been invented
yesterday, the jewels, maybe souvenirs of old fervors, that had been
ruthlessly reset.  In glass galleries banked with azaleas, where the
waltz music was like an echo from a still more desirable world, looks
melted into embraces, or, at least, a whisper promised the kiss that
caution there denied.  On all sides love was going forward: men and
women were dancing toward the pain of happiness or the strange
pleasures of tragedy.  And even in the brief silence the air seemed to
ring from a concerted laugh of triumph over life.

Yet all these activities were informed with a feverish haste, a sort of
delirious greediness and apprehension, as though one must feel very
quickly everything that humanity's experiments had made the senses
capable of feeling.

Lilla stood watching this whirlpool.

Sometimes she thought of opening the Long Island house and shutting
herself up there, of collecting Chinese porcelains, of studying a new
language or religion.

"Ah, if I had some real object!"

One day she put on her hat intending to drive uptown and spend an hour
in Lawrence's old rooms; for nothing was changed there, except that
nowadays the curtains were always drawn, and the hearth was always
cold.  But this time she purposed to light the fire, and pretend----

Instead, she returned to Brantome's.  Some one had just stopped
playing.  On the dim divans, men and women sat pensively holding
teacups on their knees.  The firelight appeared to give life to the
many rows of books, as though all the fine emotions stored between
those covers were consuming the leather that was intricately tooled
with gold.  Together with the wood smoke, and the scents of tobacco and
tea, there stole through the quiet room a redolence not of flowers or
of women's perfumes, but, as it were, the essence of the mementoes on
the walls and cabinets--those souvenirs of old friendships and past
attachments, or maybe of unconfessed infatuations and thwarted longings.

"I knew you'd come back," said Brantome, looking at Lilla out of his
massive, ruined face.

He made her sit down beside him on a divan apart from the rest.  She
looked like a lady of cavalier days, he told her, in her tricorn hat of
maroon velvet, with a brown plume trailing down to the shoulder from
which was slipping her maroon-colored cloak edged with fur.  He assured
her that she had never looked so lovely.

At these words she felt despondency instead of pleasure.

Across the room, half in shadow, with a ray of lamplight falling on his
hands, a young man sat sunken in a wheel chair.  He was frail,
obviously an invalid; yet in the gloom of the alcove where he was
sitting his complexion seemed bronzed, as if from a life in the sun.
His sensitive face, disfigured by his sufferings and his thoughts,
leaned forward; his eyes were fixed on the keyboard of the piano.

"What!" Brantome exclaimed, "you don't know David Verne?"

She thought that she had heard some of his music, but could not recall
the impression it had made on her.

"The impression produced by Verne's work isn't usually vague."

"Has he so much talent?"

"I was confident," said Brantome, "that he would be the great composer
of this age."

"And now?"

"It's a question whether he'll live through the spring."

He told her David Verne's story.

At the height of his promise, in consequence, it was said by some, of a
certain mental shock, the young composer had fallen victim to a rare,
insidious disease, arising apparently from an organic derangement,
small in itself but deadly in its secondary effects.  The chief
characteristics of this malady were a general muscular prostration
growing ever more profound, and a slowly increasing feebleness of vital
action.  It was an illness for which medical science had provided no
cure; the physicians could prescribe only such drugs as arsenic and
strychnia, to postpone as long as possible the climax of that fatal
debility.  The patient was already afflicted with an immense
exhaustion, incapacitated from any but the slightest of muscular
efforts, unable to carry on the simplest occupation.  Yet despite his
almost continuous attacks of headache he could think--of the collapse
of his hopes, of the approaching end.

In the beginning David Verne had rebelled against this fate with all
the force of one who feels that he is in the world for an unparalleled
purpose--who refuses to believe that any physical affliction is meant
to thwart the unfoldment of his genius.  All the splendid raptures
pressing toward expression, the conviction of unique capacity and great
prolificness, reinforced his determination to be well again.  Brantome
declared that in those early days it had been like the combat of a hero
against malefic gods--a "sort of Greek tragedy."

"Well," said Brantome, in a tone of stifled fury, glaring at Lilla with
his eyes of an old conquered Viking, "have you seen these pigmies
brandishing their fists at thunderbolts?"

Disqualified long ago from walking, to-day David Verne could hardly
raise his hands to lay them limply upon the keyboard of a piano.

His mind had suffered as sad a deterioration as his body.  Formerly
fine, as befitted the source of fine achievements, it was now deformed
by bitterness.  The last of those bright qualities, which in other days
had endeared him to his friends, were dying now, or perhaps were
already dead, In fact, Brantome confessed, it was doubly painful to
receive him here; one had to see the wreck not only of a young
physique, but also of an invaluable spirit.

Lilla sat frozen.  At last she uttered:

"Ah! this world of ours!"

And she had a vision of a universal monster evolving exquisite forms of
beauty only to destroy them fiendishly.

"Yes," Brantome assented.  He, too, for all his experience with life,
looking crushed anew.  Indeed, in his old countenance there was a look
of defeat as dismal as though the ruin of that young man's hopes had
involved one more precious aspiration of his own.  After a pause he
exclaimed, "I haven't suggested that you, who have enough unhappy
recollections, meet the poor fellow----"

"What was the shock that caused it?"

The old Frenchman made a hopeless gesture, and returned:

"I don't say it was that.  It's only certain persons who say the thing
may sometime be produced that way.  Who knows?  Too sensitive!--but if
he hadn't been we shouldn't have had the music.  These poor chaps,
always balanced between joy and sorrow by a hair!"  And he ground out
between his teeth, "One of those Beatrices of ours.  As if she had come
to a harp, and had made all its strings vibrate just for the pleasure
of hearing their quality, and then had gone on content----"

Lilla rose, drew her cloak around her, and departed with an appalling
sensation of pity and resentment.




CHAPTER XIX

One afternoon, returning to her house on lower Fifth Avenue, as she
entered the hall paved with black and white tiles she saw a shabby
little man trying to rise from a settee between two consoles, by aid of
a pair of crutches.  For an instant she had a hazy idea that he ought
to be holding a breakfast tray in his hands.  Then, with a sickening
leap of her heart, she realized that this was Parr, who had been
Lawrence Teck's valet.

He had thought she would want to receive from him, promptly on his
return, a first-hand report on that African tragedy.

"But where have you been all this time?"

He had been a long while recovering from the wound that had crippled
him, and from the black-water fever.  Then he had found himself
penniless, dependent on the charity of traders and petty government
officials in the port town lying just above the equator.  He had
"drifted about," a reproach, perhaps, to a certain human callousness
engendered by the tropics, till finally an old friend of Lawrence
Teck's had appeared from Mozambique, found him sitting in tatters on
the steps of a grogshop, and paid his passage home.

"You should have let me know," she said remorsefully.

He hung his head.

She led him into the drawing-room, and seated him in one of the
mulberry chairs.  He had become an old man.  His honest, lantern-jawed
face was gray and drawn.

And then there had always been the idea in his head that he ought to
have fallen with his master.

"I couldn't help myself, ma'am," he said in a broken voice.  "Before I
hardly knew what was up he was done for, and I had this spear wound in
me, and our gun boys was dragging me off amongst them, shooting to
right and left.  I didn't rightly know what was going on any more than
if I'd got mauled by a pack of lions.  Once when I kind of come to
myself I tried to make them go back; but they told me they'd seen the
Mambava finishing Mr. Teck as he lay on the ground----"

She gave a start and a moan.  He recoiled in contrition.

At last, when she had bade him continue:

"Besides, they was after us all the way.  Sometimes they even showed up
in our path instead of behind us, waving their shields and shouting for
a parley.  But we'd had enough of their treachery; and our boys let
them have it.  Night and day it was dodge and run.  Then we got out of
the Mambava forests, and they carried me the rest of the way in a
hammock made of vines and poles.  Even then they never dared to light a
fire, because we could always hear the Mambava behind us, telephoning
from one village to another with their drums.  But I couldn't hope to
make you feel it, ma'am, even what I took in myself when I wasn't out
of my head.  It was just bad.  Of course, the worst of it was that Mr.
Teck was gone."

He began to cry weakly, exclaiming:

"I'd been with him everywheres!"

He was living with relatives.  He hoped to get a job as a watchman.
This idea was repugnant to her.  The shattered, tremulous, little man
was dignified by his grief, the intensity of which, after all this
time, filled her with self-contempt.  Then she thought, "But now, by
his aid, I shall regain that dear grief!"  She said:

"You must let me arrange to have your pay go on.  That's what Mr. Teck
would have wished."

She took his address, told a servant to call a taxicab, and went down
the front steps with Parr, holding him by his bony arm as he lowered
his crutches.  Overwhelmed by this condescension, he stammered:

"I was afraid to come here, ma'am."

She replied:

"We need each other."

Next day she sought him out.

She found him near Stuyvesant Square, in a shabby room overlooking a
back yard in which an ailanthus tree spread its limbs above some
clothes lines.  She leaned forward in a raveled chair, with her veil
tucked up so that she could see him better, her gloved hands clasped
tightly in her lap, her eyes intent.  When he had recovered from her
simplicity, Parr prepared to tell her what she had come to hear.

But there were so many tales about the hero to choose from!

"Anything," she exclaimed.  "Make me hear what he used to say, know
what he used to think.  Make me see him there.  Make him live!"

She meant, "Make him vivid again in my heart, where, against all my
efforts, his face has faded away."

Parr held his crutches against his shoulder as if they were the harp of
a minstrel who has come from afar to chant the epic of some already
mythical character.  His faded coat was wrinkled round the neck; his
collar was split at the folds; and a faint smell of iodoform mingled
with Lilla's perfume, which a Viennese artist in odors had concocted
especially to "match her temperament."

"One time in Nyasaland----"

"Not the jungles!" she protested, flinching back.

"The desert, then?" he ventured.

He showed Lawrence to her in the desert that is called Erg, the waste
of shifting sand; and in the desert called Chebka, a wilderness of
boulders; and in the desert called Hamedan, the bleak plateaux where
there are no springs of water; and in the desert called Gaci, the
oases, rich with date palms, pomegranates, and oleanders.  The caravan
routes unrolled before her, at sunset.  The hills turned to ashes of
rose; the sand dunes to heliotrope; and against the sky appeared a
caravan of many thousands of camels, bearing on their humps,
impoverished from hard travel, the traffic that passes between the
great oases--the rugs and the oil, the sacks of dates and boiled
locusts, and, in the closed palanquins, the women destined to new
slaveries.  A great calm descended at dusk; the tents of dingy brown
hair surrounded the sheik's pavilion, which was topped with a plume.
The air was filled with odors of camels, of cous-cous, of sagebrush.
The camp fires of desert grass flared in the night wind.

He was always well received by the caravan chiefs, the sheiks of the
oases, the heads of the desert monasteries--drowsy towns with arcaded
streets and tunnels of mud, into whose holy precincts came no echoes of
war.  He had the knack of endearing himself to fierce men, by something
in his character at the same time inflexible and kindly, by a sympathy
that embraced that other religion, or at least its intrinsic spirit, so
that he could repeat the Fatihah with good grace before the tombs of
saints.  Even the Tuaregs, the untamed bandits whose faces were always
muffled in black, received him into their tents of red dyed leather,
where he joked with their wives and daughters, the "little queens," who
were accustomed to ride alone, fifty miles on their trotting camels, to
visit a sweetheart.

"But my picture was with him," thought Lilla.  "I was with him there,
just as he, through his picture, though I had never seen him, was with
me.  In our longings, that crossed in space, we were already united.
Even then our actual meeting was predestined--like our parting."

Once he had encountered a band of Shaambah Arabs, out, like
knights-errant, in quest of any adventure.  They had fought him all
afternoon in a desert spotted with gold and purple lilies, the
burnooses flitting in a wide ring as the horses raced through the heat.
Then suddenly they had vanished.  The lukewarm water flavored with
goatskin and tar, the draughts of sour camel's milk, had tasted good
after that scrimmage, like a combat in chivalry.

What was it that had driven him into such places, when there had been a
great, rich world of safety?  Some fatal desire for regions where
beauty sported more obviously than here the signs of its origins, or
death the mask of beauty?

"Yes, there is a fatality in all our preferences.  Is that what the
Arabs mean when they say that our destinies are written on our
foreheads?"

"What is their word for fate?" she inquired of Parr.

"Mektoub."

"Mektoub!"  And presently, "Do you speak Arabic?"

"Oh, no, ma'am; but Mr. Teck did, as well as any of 'em."

"Tell me more," she said.

So he took her to the oases.  As one drew near, there floated from the
minaret a thin cry, "Allah is great!  Allah is great!  Allah is great!"
In the house of the sheik, sitting among the hawk-nosed horsemen, they
dipped their right hands into couscous flavored with cinnamon, ate
honey cakes and nougat.  In the doorways, beyond the range of the lamp,
there was a soft clashing of bangles, a craning of veiled heads.  Then
in the cool of the night they walked to the café, where cobwebs hung
from the palmwood rafters, and the raised hearth glowed.  Here were the
men drinking coffee infused with rose water, pepper, or mint, smoking
tobacco and hasheesh.  And here were the dancing women--"The Pearl,"
"Lips of Pomegranate," "The Star"--their foreheads bearing the tattoo
marks of their tribes, their cheeks and chins smeared with saffron,
their fingernails tinted with henna, their bodies moving convulsively
under rose-colored satin dresses.

But Lilla was no longer listening.

Dusk had covered the windowpanes; the shabby furniture had turned
nebulous.  In these shadows Parr heard the words, meditatively
pronounced:

"I think I should like to learn Arabic."

"You, ma'am!"

He gaped at her vague, pearly face, as if she had suggested some
enormity.  It was an ugly language, all bubbling and snorting.  And a
very hard one to learn!

"A hard one?  Good.  Can you find me a teacher somewhere?"

The door opened to frame a careworn woman in a gingham dress, who said
shyly to Lilla:

"Oh, excuse me, ma'am.  I thought----"  And to Parr, "I'll keep your
supper warm."

With her sleek bandeaux of lusterless brown hair, and her thick,
straight eyebrows meeting above her nose, she looked like some model
for a fifteenth century Italian painter, who had suddenly faded and now
was exiled from the studio to the region of pots and pans.  She was
Parr's niece.

As Lilla departed down the black staircase redolent of boiled cabbage,
she reflected that these surroundings were going to contaminate the sad
pleasure that she planned to obtain through Parr.  Her instinctive
epicureanism demanded that the scene of these evocations should not be
sordid.

Besides, it was intolerable that Parr, of whom Lawrence had been fond,
should not be better housed.

So Lilla moved Parr and his astounded relatives to a pretty little
dwelling in Greenwich Village, with waxed floors, chintz hangings at
the windows, and Delia Robbia plaques in the sitting room.  After
seeing them installed, she said to herself:

"Poor things!  How abominable I am!"

At any rate, there was nothing abominable in her having sent Parr to a
surgeon who, though he doubted that the patient would ever be quite
well again, guaranteed to abolish the crutches.

On the day that Parr was to go to the hospital, Lilla entered the
Greenwich Village house to find a stranger sitting under the Delia
Robbia plaques, He rose with a graceful dignity, bowed, and stood
gazing down at her out of dark, lustrous eyes.

Parr explained that this stranger was prepared to give lessons in
Arabic.

He was in his early twenties, though one did not immediately appreciate
his youth because of a very delicate black beard that softened, without
concealing, the lines of his chin.  His features appeared to have been
chiseled with great precision out of some pale, tan-colored marble; his
nose was long and straight; his full eyelids gave him a slightly
languorous look; but his lips, as sharply defined as a gem of
carnelian, seemed somehow to be ascetic as well as sensual--virile as
well as effete.  Tall and spare, with small hands, he wore an
outrageously inappropriate, ill-fitting sack suit.  To Lilla it was as
if some romantic young character from the tales of Scheherazade had
been degraded for his gallantries in this hideous attire.

His name was Hamoud-bin-Said.  He was an Omân Arab from Zanzibar.

Parr had found him in a Turkish café in Washington Street, oppressed by
the weight of successive misfortunes, and by that sense of fatality
which benumbs the Arab of vitiated stock.  For little by little the
soft, moist airs of Zanzibar had corroded the spirit of the Omân Arabs,
who had sailed thither, in the old days, from their own rugged land, in
great fierceness and ruthlessness, unconquered by men, and incapable of
foreseeing that some day they would be vanquished by perfumed breezes.
As for Hamoud-bin-Said, he was typical of his kind to-day in that humid
paradise, where want of energy, and lack of discipline or any
well-defined purpose, affected even the young.

"As you see him, ma'am, he's down on his luck.  But I think he has
seen----"

The young Arab remained impassive, erect, as handsome as a faintly
tinted statue of Pride, yet pathetic in his salt-and-pepper suit.  And
Lilla, despite his costume and his errand, divined in him a certain
subtle relationship to herself, received an impression of
"aristocratic" feeling perhaps derived from a consciousness of superior
birth and fortune.  Parr need not have told her--especially in so
audible a stage whisper--that the stranger had "seen better days."

"You speak English?" she inquired.

The Arab's limpid eyes were slowly infused with light.  His clear-cut
carnelian lips started apart; but he did not answer until the last
vibrations of her voice had died away, like the echo of a silver bell
in a landscape that one had believed to be empty of human life.  In a
low, grave, muffled tone, he said:

"A little.  Enough, perhaps, madam, I hope."

And after a moment, though his face did not change, he gave a sharp
sigh, somehow the last thing that one had expected from him.

All at once as she stared at him she had a feeling of unreality.  Why
were they three standing here?  A whim, transformed into a command by a
vision of a Saharan coffee house, had materialized this abjectly
clothed young human exotic in the midst of the blue-and-white Delia
Robbias!  But she had a feeling that she had stood here before with
him, or else had dreamed of this, perhaps, in one of those
psychopathological moments that have a prophetic quality.  This
sensation of recurrence--or else, this impression of the
unavoidable--gave her a twinge of awe.  Was everything, even a baggy
young teacher of Arabic, foreordained?  "Am I," she thought, with a
sort of comic despair, "doomed by fate, as well as by my own
foolishness, to learn a language like the snarling of camels?  Or is it
that his old Allah has picked me out to tide him along for a while?"
She wanted to laugh aloud, at the restlessness, superstition, weakness,
and folly that had composed her life, and had now produced this
egregious interview.  And in the midst of this emotion she was touched
by his statuesque face, with its glimmering suggestion of gentility
cast down, of pride lost in a dread that she might not find him worth
her charity.

"I shall expect you on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at eleven
o'clock."

He bowed in silence.  She felt his relief that was mingled with a sense
of abasement; and she wondered what he had been, that he should suffer
from the prospect of turning an honest penny.




CHAPTER XX

She received a note from Brantome, informing her that if she went to a
certain orchestral concert she would hear a piece that David Verne had
written at the height of his promise.

To Lilla it was a new voice in the world of music, ultra-modern, yet
incorrigibly melodic, giving utterance to immemorial emotions with
great nobility.  Those passages of almost intolerable aspiration were
underlaid with dissonant harmonies, as if hell itself had poured all
its allurements into tone, to engulf the theme that was struggling to
soar upward.  It became a terrific combat, in which beauty was to be
recognized in sublimated form, striving to end its likeness to another
beauty, seductive in a different, monstrous way, yet all too similar.
It was a battle translated into sound, so enlarged and enriched by the
imagination of the composer that a universe, instead of one soul,
seemed to be involved in it.

Suddenly in the midst of a piercing blare of brass there was a moment
of chaos; then the theme, as if soaring free, lost itself in
extraordinary altitudes, borne up by a whirl of violin notes.  A crash
of cymbals ended everything.

When she roused herself at last, Lilla perceived that the concert hall
was empty except for the ushers who were turning up the seats.




CHAPTER XXI

Hamoud-bin-Said suggested that she master first the most difficult
consonants--"ha," to be pronounced with the force at the back of the
palate, "dâd" and "tâ," emphasized by pressing the tongue far back, and
the strong guttural "en."  These were sounds that had no association
with any in English, French, German, or Italian.  Lilla was filled with
dismay.

"But this poor young man lost from the _Arabian Nights_ must live," she
reflected, eyeing the salt-and-pepper suit with secret horror.

He was extremely neat, however; and his small right hand, with which he
turned the pages of the textbook, was as well cared for as hers.  He
brought with him into the library an almost imperceptible scent of
burnt aloes.  His grave composure sometimes made her forget his youth.

Now and then, the lesson finished, she detained him in talk, out of
curiosity.

From his father he had inherited a house in Zanzibar, a mansion,
indeed, of coraline limestone fitted with doors of palmwood elegantly
carved.  At the same time he had fallen heir to a grove of clove trees;
in short, he had been wealthy.  There had been no end of hospitality in
his home.  In the large, white rooms strewn with Persian carpets, where
there were no pictures, but a variety of clocks, the slaves were always
bringing in to visitors an excess of refreshment--stews of mutton, fine
soups, cakes, sherbets, Turkish delight.  The world had been a good
place, full of friends.

And there was no spot as fair as Zanzibar!  The hills, crowned with
palms, embraced a sea as deeply blue as lapis-lazuli.  The clove trees
were covered with pink blossoms whose fragrance entered the city.  It
was a place of brilliant sunshine and purple shadows, of gray walls
over which peacocks hung their tails, of mysterious stairways, and
latticed windows behind which ladies sat peering through their
embroidered face screens resembling semicircular candle shades; and
there was always a marvelous clamor in the streets, and silence in the
patios full of flowers.  At dusk, one still saw, sometimes, the
daughters of the rich hurrying through the alleys, muffled up, escorted
by slaves with lanterns, going to call on their women friends, leaving
behind them a trail of perfumes.

"It was in Zanzibar," thought Lilla, "that Lawrence found my picture."

And gazing as if indifferently at a vaseful of roses, she asked, with a
feeling of suffocation:

"Why did you leave there?"

He did not reply.  When she turned her eyes toward him he appeared to
be listening almost drowsily to something that she could not hear, or
else, since his sensitive-looking nostrils were dilated, to be
relishing some sweet odor--perhaps the smell of the roses.  She
received an impression of deliberate, yet somnolent, sensuous
enjoyment; and she recalled having seen long ago, in a doorway in
Tunis, this same expression on the face of a beggar who had just been
smoking hasheesh.

He gave a start, and looked like a man who in his sleep has fallen off
a roof.  But immediately, lowering his full eyelids, he became the
handsome statue, or perhaps the delicately bearded effigy, in
tan-colored wax, of a young caliph who had incurred the hatred of the
jinn.

It was simple.  He had squandered his fortune.  It had sifted through
his fingers like sand, the price of one clove tree after another, till
the whole grove was gone.  Then the Hindu money lenders had got the
ancestral house.  The friends had departed to make merry elsewhere; the
gazelle-eyed girls with short, silk dresses and frilled pantalettes had
turned cold; and, in the market, little boys had sung songs about the
ruined young man.  Burning with resentment and shame, he had sailed
away in a dhow--it had landed him at Beira--believing that he would
hate Zanzibar forever.

When he began to starve, he joined the safari of a Muscat trader,
traveled up-country, returned to the coast sick with fever.  Late one
night, while walking below the sea wall, yearning for Zanzibar, he saw
a man running, from time to time throwing something into the sea, and
another man running silently in pursuit with a knife in his hand.  He
waded along the shore, and presently found in the surf a bag of
gold-dust.  Next morning he slipped aboard a north-bound coaster.
Instead of calling at Zanzibar, this time it went clear to Suez!

In Suez a fortune-telling dervish, perhaps because he had just seen an
American pass by, told Hamoud-bin-Said that his wanderings would take
him to America.  Hamoud accepted the words of the holy man as a
second-hand pronouncement of God.  At that time there was even a ship
at Suez bound for New York.

"It was my destiny," he averred, sitting motionless in his atrocious
suit, so young yet so full of bizarre recollections, impassive at the
inevitable thought that this "destiny" of his might be preparing events
stranger still than those which he had endured.




CHAPTER XXII

A pallid, black-haired woman with pendent earrings--a woman who rather
resembled Anna Zanidov--was playing a sea-piece by MacDowell in the
light of a tall lamp.  The hall door swung open; the unsympathetic face
and square shoulders of David Verne's attendant appeared above the back
of the wheel chair.  The invalid, looking up at Brantome, murmured:

"Let him put me in the alcove, where it's dark enough for your friends
to forget that I'm here.  And don't bother about me."

"What!" Brantome protested.  "I'm not even to bring a beautiful lady to
talk to you?"

"It's rather late for talks with beautiful ladies," David Verne replied
in his weak, dull voice.  "Besides, it's music that I've chosen to
torment myself with this afternoon.  Where is she?"  And when Brantome
had nodded toward Lilla.  "Ah, she was here once before."

Lilla wore a brown coat frock heavily trimmed with fur; her brown
velvet hat, very wide across the forehead, was brightened by a rosette
of silver ribbon.  The black pearls in the lobes of her ears, just
visible below her fluffy brown hair, completed the harmony of her
costume with her person, while bestowing upon her face a maturity in
contrast with the invalid's youthfulness--which all his sufferings and
despairs had not eclipsed.

When she had sat down beside him, he regarded her with a sort of
suppressed aversion.

The attendant, a bullet-headed fellow with Scandinavian cheek-bones,
leaned down, looking flagrantly solicitous, and inquired in unctuous
tones if there was "anything else at present."  At this question David
Verne appeared to be overwhelmed with a dreary contempt.  He did not
trouble himself to reply; and the attendant went away, walking
cautiously on the sides of his feet, the back of his head somehow
suggesting that he was gritting his teeth.

Lilla surprised herself by saying:

"Why do you have that man?"

"I don't know.  He is appallingly stupid."  He paused, with an effect
of still more profound exhaustion, then breathed, "He hates me, no
doubt because I resent his stupidity.  I resent stupidity," he
repeated, giving her a glance of weak alarm, as if wondering, "Are you
stupid, too?"  He seemed reassured by his scrutiny of her.  A coldness
began to melt out of his eyes.

Then he looked astonished, rather like a child that is unexpectedly led
up before a Christmas tree.

Now she had analyzed the most touching impression that David Verne
produced--an impression as of a child who has come into the world with
a heart full of blitheness and trust, only to be mistreated.  A child,
but an extremely precocious one, with a child's round chin, but with a
brow of genius; with eyes accustomed to visions, but with lips almost
too delicate to belong to a man.  Another incongruity was presented in
his complexion--bronzed as though by the sun, mockingly bestowing on
him one of the aspects of health.

When he listened to music suddenly he became adult.  There appeared in
his face a glimpse of a masculine, severely critical soul, a nature to
be satisfied with little less than perfection.  And no doubt it was
this habit of stern analysis, involuntarily carried over from art into
life, that had helped to make him "impatient of stupidity."

The black-haired woman at the piano was attempting Beethoven.

"Talk to me," said David Verne.  "I don't wish to hear this."

He added that Beethoven was intolerable on the piano--a composer who
had never had a thought that was not orchestral.

"Like myself," he vouchsafed, with that smile of a mistreated child.
"I, too, thought orchestrally.  There was no group of instruments rich
enough to suit my ambitions, just as the scale was too poor for what I
wished to express.  A tone speech inadequate to describe what I had to
describe--do you know what I'm talking about?"

"Yes."

"Never mind.  It is all over."

He sat in the wheel chair in so collapsed a pose that he seemed
subjected to some exceptional pull of gravitation.  His bronzed hands,
on the chair arms, appeared to be welded to the brown wood; his head,
resting against the chair back, never turned.  But his troubled eyes,
stealing round in their sockets, surprised on Lilla's countenance a
look as if all her compassions had been united to find the fading young
genius as their congenial object.

It was hard to talk to him, since every topic must lead to some
interest that he was relinquishing.  His doom, hanging over them like a
black cloud, stifled all those gleams of enthusiasm which normally
would have illumined such a conversation.  But presently he forgot
himself in watching her moving lips, in gazing at her hair, her throat,
her hands, in letting his eyes embrace, with reluctance, all her
singularity which was made doubly exquisite by the fastidiousness of
her costume.  While he was inhaling her perfume, he listened with a
blank look to the silvery cadence of her voice.

At last he asked her:

"Do you come here often?"

"Oh, no."

"Why not?"  He stared at the abandoned piano.  "Why not every week?"
And, in a soft, impulsive rush of words, blurred by haste, and maybe by
intention, "I have so few weeks left."




CHAPTER XXIII

As week followed week, it was evident that David Verne watched her and
listened to her as he watched and listened to no other person, with an
attention as though there were something unique in her most trivial
utterance, and with a sadness as though she symbolized all the
allurements of life, from which he must presently depart.  And at last
it became evident that he had found in this relationship a charm more
piercing than if their association could have had a different outcome.
For him, no doubt, their hours together were at last suffused with the
mournful glory that concludes a sunset--more valuable, to the
romantically imaginative soul, than the flaming vigor of mid-day.  To
have found her, to realize that she must remain as an angel hovering
high over an inferno, to perceive that he must pass from this radiance
into the shades, filled him with a gloomy ecstasy and a pathetic
gratitude.

A time came when his armor of misanthropy crumbled away; and in the
shadowy alcove of Brantome's living room he confessed to her.

He told her that she had covered the page on which Finis was already
written with a glow of gold, as though, at the last moment, a shutter
opening on a paradise had swung ajar.

He declared that she could not imagine the blackness that had
surrounded him at her first appearance.  His heart had been cased in
ice; he had hated every one.  Then she had come holding beauty in one
hand and tenderness in the other.  Although he believed in nothing but
a mechanistic universe, he had thought of those figures, half woman and
half goddess, that descend from another plane, in the old mystical
tales, to lure one back to faith with a celestial smile.  He protested
that he was not far from regaining that deep-rooted belief of his race,
of which Brantome had spoken--the idea that woman might be angelic.

He even said:

"Suppose your kindness were the reflection of something still more
lovely, which we cannot see with these eyes?"

He went on to other, similar rhapsodies, such phrases as bubble from
the lips of those who, in the extremity of despair, exhausted by their
sufferings, become, with a sigh of relief, like little children.  Amid
the shadows of the alcove his eyes shone; and even his body, helpless
in the wheel chair, quivered as if with new life.

"If you had appeared sooner!  The music I might have written!  But
then, everything would be different.  There would have been no reason
for your pity."

On the hearth the log that was nearly consumed fell with a shower of
sparks, shot forth one last flame, which brightened the room that had
become for a moment a whole world.  The light flashed over the many
rows of books, which made Lilla imagine a vast human audience, all
aglow from a final blaze of genius.

She leaned toward him, staring into his eyes as one who would summon
from a sepulchre something more precious than love.

He understood her, and assented:

"Yes, what a victory, eh?  Even on the threshold of death!  And even
though the inspiration was the embodiment of pity only!  But men before
me--though not so far gone, perhaps--have transmitted to the world the
songs that rose in their hearts as a result of unconsummated, even
unrequited, love.  Who knows?  That, too, may come just in time.  I may
write one more song."

Before her mind's eye there sprang out the full picture of her part in
such a triumph.

Was it not she who would virtually be the creative force?  Had he not
become, in these last days of his, a shattered instrument that she,
alone, could make musical again?  And her long-thwarted aspirations
coalesced into this desire, in which, it may be, her compassion was
disorganized by egotism, her compunctions swallowed up in ruthlessness.

"You will do it!" she cried softly, leaning closer still, holding his
hand more tightly, blinding him by the glorification of her smile.

Hardly knowing what she was saying, finding at the tip of her tongue
all the arguments that had failed to help her in her griefs, she spoke
of the prodigies accomplished by will, the triumphs of faith over fate,
the miracles of love.

"Of love?" he repeated.

The log on the hearth was ashes.  But that morning there had drifted
through the city a message from the country--of a new spring, which
would not be like nature's previous unfoldments, yet could not, for all
its subtle differences, be denied.  Was it something like that in
Lilla, or only a tender duplicity born of this new ruthlessness of
hers, that made her press his limp hand against her kindling cheek?




CHAPTER XXIV

It was a romance as nearly incorporeal as mortal romance may be, almost
as though one of the participants had already passed beyond the
sensuous world.

If Brantome was not at home they had the place to themselves.  The fire
no longer burned on the hearth; but the sunshine of the lengthening
days conquered the shadows that had lingered here all winter.  And now
the wheel chair was rolled to the open window, so that David might see,
beyond the trees of the square and above the cornices of the tall
houses, the inexhaustible improvisations of nature in the western sky.

"You have changed everything," he affirmed, drinking in her beauty, her
elegance that was always presented to him in some new guise, her
invariable manifestation of tenderness.  "How did it happen?  You, so
intensely in the midst of life, so lovely, who might so easily find
elsewhere----"

She did not tell him that it was the almost phantasmal quality of their
communion that made it possible.

Yet now and then, for a moment, she forgot his infirmity.  He became
the young hero of an idyllic scene such as those that seem attractive
enough in adolescence.  But unlike those heroes he spoke only of the
moment, since it was only the moment of which he could be sure.  "You
are here!" his eyes said to her, as she entered the room.  "I have this
hour at least.  Nothing else matters."  Then, by aid of the sunset, the
warm breeze in his face, the flowers on the table, the fragrance of her
perfume and the smoothness of her hand, he tried to drown himself in a
sea of sensation, like one who listens, in a glamour of stained glass
and a cloud of incense, to the protracted sweetness of an organ playing
the _Nunc Dimittis_.

Sometimes he would say:

"When I am gone you will be as fair as ever.  That is good.  The
ancients who entered their temples to worship the goddess must have
redoubled their love with the thought that the beauty of her marble
person would survive them."

Or perhaps:

"Yes, you will still be young.  And presently--no, I shall pretend that
you will never turn to another."

He thought her ensuing look of sadness was a reproach to him; but she
was reproaching herself.

But here was a miracle.  The invalid had ceased to decline in health.
And that declension, which formerly had been uninterrupted, seemed
stopped just by the hand that she had held out to him on that first
full day of spring--by the slender hand that had owed its beauty to its
apparent uselessness.

Then he told her that he had begun to jot down, in feeble signs, some
scraps of music.

That evening, as she drove home, the city seemed hung with banners.
"Ah, fate!" she cried, clenching her fists, and uttering a savage laugh
of defiance.  She entered her house radiant, erect, shining with
triumph.  In the black-and-white hall, at the entrance to the
drawing-room, a man stood before her, tanned, lean from physical
hardships, strange-looking and yet familiar.  Instead of a small
mustache intended to be debonaire, he had a heavy one; his shoulders
were wider and straighter than formerly; he advanced with a quick,
swinging step.

"Cornie Rysbroek!"

She laid her palms, on the new shoulders of this friend of her
childhood, and flooded him with her victorious smile.

"What have you done to yourself?" she laughed, rather wildly.  "Where
do you come from?  India?"

"I went on to China."

He had traveled up the Yangtze River, had crossed Tse-Chouan, had
reached the borders of Thibet.  Her happy look continued to embrace
him; but she hardly heard what he said.  She did not perceive that he
had undertaken that journey in imitation of the other--perhaps in the
hope of finding in those distant, hard places the secret of Lawrence
Teck's attractiveness.  And, in fact, he looked stronger in spirit as
well as in body.  The hypochondriac, the timid dilettante, seemed to
have slunk away; in his place stood a man who had forced himself,
against all his natural instincts, to endure extremes of cold and heat,
dirt and famine, hardship and danger.  Even now his face was calm; but
he could not keep his eyes from shining at her.

"You'll stay to dinner, Cornie.  Just us."

From the doorway she came rushing back to throw her arms round him, and
cry like a delighted child:

"Dear old Cornie!  I'm so happy!"




CHAPTER XXV

As for David Verne, despite the extraordinary prostration in which
Lilla had found him, it seemed that he had not passed beyond the
vivifying powers of love, which sometimes appear to change the body, as
well as the mind, into a new organism for a while.  Week after week, to
the bewilderment--one might almost say the consternation--of the
physician, he refused to imitate the customary progress of that disease
which had been diagnosed as his.  And while he acknowledged that this
phenomenon must presently end, David knew that for the moment, at any
rate, love had proved stronger than death.

To prolong these hours in the transfigured world of sense!  To steal
from oblivion one more summer of which she would be the warmth, the
fragrance, the unprecedented beauty!

In appearing to him she had embodied all that seductiveness which he
had formerly perceived at random, fragmentarily and vaguely, in a
change of light on the sea, in a spread of landscape, in the grace of
animals or the refinements of art, or in those streams of consciousness
that flow as the senses are touched by some reminiscent odor,
apparition, or sound.  She was the whole, dear, fading world compressed
into one shape, as the goddesses of ancient times personified
blindingly a host of precious elements that had previously been
diffuse.  And since she was so, he determined, with all this new mental
energy evoked by love, to cling to her another day, another week or
season, like a drowning man who, as he sinks, clutches at a flower
hanging over the water, with the thought, "In this flower, whose petals
hold as much wonder as the whole universe, there is surely strength
enough to sustain me till I have filled my throat with one more draught
of life?"

Inevitably all this fervor and pathos, gratitude and adoration, were
transmuted into a consciousness of music.  He felt ever more strongly
the artist's need of expression.  Since he had never previously known
such exaltation--or, indeed, such dejection--the music that he finally
produced, his physical weakness notwithstanding, was music such as he
had never written before.

At Brantome's, when that piece was to be played for the first time, he
sat in his wheel chair suffocated by sudden doubts, as if on trial for
his life.  Lilla sat beside him, her hand on his.  No one else was
there except Brantome, who bent over the manuscript his haggard old
face, revealing nearly as much agitation as did David.

At last, raising his head, the critic murmured:

"You think this is going to be easy for me?  Reflect on what I must do.
To satisfy you I must take the rigidity out of all these ink marks,
restore to this score the emotions that you felt in writing it."

David responded:

"The emotions that I felt in writing it are not there; for the idea
always loses its original form the moment it is seized by the pen.
That is the first loss.  The second comes now.  You cannot help it.  It
is the old misfortune, the inability to transmit what one feels, the
isolation of the human soul.  But nobody could play as well as you
what's left of those thoughts of mine."

The bullet-headed attendant appeared beside the wheel chair, a bottle
of medicine and a glass of water in his hands.  With that pretentious
solicitude of his, he uttered:

"It is time----"

David Verne gave a shudder.

"Ah!  At this moment!  Will you get out of the room?"  And when the
attendant had gone, "Is he, can he be, so stupid?  I really think he
does these things on purpose."

Brantome poised his hands above the keyboard, leaned forward to peer at
a legend scrawled faintly in the corner of the page, then, turning
round on the piano bench, cast at Lilla:

"Rose-covered Cypresses."

"What?" she exclaimed, with a start.

"He has called it that."

The old Frenchman began to play.

Not a song after all, but a piano concerto, it described in tone that
goal of all human longings, the conquest of tragedy.

But this music, although gradually made replete with victory, was not
to end in major chords of triumph.  The sadness that seemed, at the
beginning, unassuageable, continued to the end, but--and herein lay the
victory--became ever more exquisite.  For this was the utterance of a
man who having had his life transformed by love must soon leave that
love behind him; this glory that had descended upon his sadness was
such a glory as fills the sky for a little while before the inrush of
dusk.  At the conclusion, it was as if in the gorgeousness of a sunset
the roses covering the cypresses had become a mist of rare hues, behind
which those trees emblematic of mourning almost lost their
significance.  At last, however, one felt that the light was fading,
that the somber silhouettes of the cypresses were more visible than
their poetic embellishment.  And finally, with the darkness, a breeze
seemed to bring a long sigh from those elegiac branches, together with
a perfume of the roses that had become unapparent, wet with dew as if
with innumerable tears.

After a long silence, Brantome lifted his burly, old body from the
piano bench, came to stand before David, then abruptly turned away.

"It is all your promises fulfilled," he said, as he went out of the
room without looking back.  But it was Lilla whose arm he touched in
passing.

David Verne sat gazing before him, his sunken eyes shining in his face
of a sick, young Apollo in bronze.  But soon, turning his eyes toward
Lilla:

"All you!"

She gathered his hands against her bosom with a movement that imparted
to him the life so violently pounding in her heart--the pride and the
hope, perhaps even a little of the defiance and belief.  She gave him a
look that pierced the caverns of his brain, where his faith in death
resided blackly, with a white-hot faith in life.

"Have you forgotten," she breathed, "that a little while ago you, and
every one else, would have called this impossible?"

"Too much!" he whispered, peering at her with a dreadful longing across
the chasm that lay between her will and his terror of extinction.

"No!  You shall see!"

She felt that this must be the object of her life-long wishes and
antipathies--that her sense of the preciousness of mortal life and
beauty, and her hunger for participation in the development of both,
were instincts intended to make her indomitable now.  Suddenly she had
one of those rare moments when the wall is so strengthened by a feeling
of worthy purpose that it becomes tremendous, and everything opposed to
it seems as good as vanquished.  It was with an accent of accomplished
victory that she repeated:

"You shall see!"

And now, indeed, the drowning man clutched at the flower that
epitomized the dear world.

"Lilla!  Never let go of my hands!  Yes, it's true; while I hold them I
hold fast to life; but if you let go of them, in that moment I'll go
tumbling down into the pit.  Do you realize that by this time I should
probably be already gone, if you hadn't appeared?  I am a dead man who
lives, who even does this work, because of the hold of these slender
hands of yours."

In that clutch of his, all at once so strong despite his feebleness,
Lilla found no sinister portent.  She was thinking:

"Death conquered me once; but now I shall conquer death."




CHAPTER XXVI

Next day, when a maid announced that Hamoud-bin-Said was waiting in the
library, Lilla felt that the time had come to "stop that nonsense."
Her desire to learn Arabic now seemed to her an absurd caprice; and
once more she had reason to wonder at her swift passage from one
enthusiasm to another, her intense preoccupation with things that
suddenly became insufferable.  She entered the library dressed and
hatted for the street, pulling on her gloves; and while occupied with
her glove buttons said calmly, in her enchanting voice:

"I'm going to be very busy for a while.  I suppose I ought to have
given you a little notice; so I'm writing you a check for two-weeks'
lessons."

Hamoud stood before her, tall and spare, in a new, black alpaca suit as
incongruous-looking as the old one.  He made no response at once; and
there was no change in his perfectly chiseled, tan features; but for
all his impassiveness he managed remarkably to convey the impression
that an immense calamity had befallen him.  His full eyelids remained
lowered, as if he were considering his whole unfortunate destiny; and a
sort of loneliness, produced no doubt by his strangeness in this room,
hovered round his shapely head that was covered with straight, black
locks.

Lilla felt a twinge of compunction, as she reflected:

"Who in this town except myself would ever take Arabic lessons!  Poor
young caliph!  Now he must work or starve."

She added, aloud:

"In fact, you've been such a good teacher that I ought--well, haven't I
made great progress?"

He raised his eyes, and a bitter smile appeared on his gemlike lips.
He replied in Arabic:

"It is a difficult language, madam.  Perhaps you understand what I am
saying now because I am speaking very simply and slowly.  But you
yourself can speak only the most ordinary phrases; and I doubt if any
one but I could understand you.  However, why should you trouble to
learn this language of mine?  It always seemed folly to me.  It is just
a part of this life, which has little meaning except to thoughtless
persons, and in which, to the wise, all events are like the shadows of
passing birds."

Her pride was affronted; and yet it was not as if an inferior had
rebuked her.  He picked up his hat, a frightful confection of tan and
yellow straw, and the textbook out of which she had learned--in
heaven's name, why?--the facts that "el" and "al" are assimilated
before dentals, and that "elli" is omitted after general substantives.
Hamoud-bin-Said inclined his handsome head, while concluding:

"You will soon forget all you have learned from me, and I shall have
received your money for nothing."  His impassiveness was deranged by a
look of chagrin, as he blurted out harshly: "I regret that the money
also has flown away, or I should insist----"

He held his head high, as if trying to rise above his feeling of
degradation.

Lilla stood looking at him thoughtfully from under the edge of a
verdigris-colored turban that matched the high collar of her walking
suit.  She was reluctant to let him drift away to some obscure,
wretched fate, to which his native apathy would surely direct him.  She
perceived in him again a certain relationship to herself, a
relationship due not only to his past good fortune, but also to
something in his character--perhaps some likeness of enthusiasm, or
even some identical kind of ardor, or else some weakness that had
ruined him but had not yet ruined her.  So it was with a blush that she
suggested:

"See here, an invalid friend of mine is dissatisfied with the man who
takes care of him----"

When she had made herself clear, his face turned brick-red, and for an
instant his eyes were terrible.  One would have said that some ancestor
uncontaminated by Zanzibar, some true Arab of Omân, stood there in his
place, flaming with outraged dignity.  He cast back at her one more
burning look before he stalked from the house.

The following week, when she had forgotten him, she found him, at
twilight, in the black-and-white hall.

He looked exhausted, as if he had tramped innumerable miles; and his
face was as pale as death.  He bowed humbly, muttering:

"Madam, if you will forgive, I am now ready to be the servant of that
sick man."




CHAPTER XXVII

Sometimes she tried to stand off as a spectator of her emotionalism, to
examine these new feelings.  Were they more egotistical than
compassionate, more defiant than gentle?  Among them, at any rate,
there was gratitude.  She had found an object in life, had splendidly
emerged from her old sensations of incompleteness and inferiority.  No
longer that morbid humility struggling in vain to transform itself into
a violent self-assertion.  Not since she had become the virtual
creatrix of beauty, even the giver of life!

And David, because she owed so much to him, became every day more
precious.  All this new dignity and worth that now enveloped her, these
self-satisfactions of a Euterpe and a Beatrice, depended on his
survival, would increase, even if he maintained just that strange
equilibrium between life and death, but would die the instant he died.
So for Lilla he took on such importance that everything else in life
turned insignificant: old ardors were all consumed in this new ardor at
once conquering and maternal, vainglorious and passionately grateful.

Even that wound in her heart from which a corporeal love had been torn
out by the roots, was healed at last, as it seemed, by these new forms
of pride and tenderness that could culminate in no material union.

She returned less and less often to the little house in Greenwich
Village, where Parr, escaped from his crutches, sat in a chintz-covered
chair, a cane between his knees, his white head lowered, still dreaming
of "those good days."

"You're better, aren't you?  What does the doctor say now?  Is there
anything you need here?"

Her eyes, avoiding his look of humble devotion, roamed over the walls,
as if she were considering the advisability of more Delia Robbia
plaques.  The niece, with her sleek brown bandeaux and fifteenth
century profile, passed noiselessly through the hall; and presently a
smell of cooking entered the sitting room.

"As late as that?"

Lilla drove uptown, heaped her arms with flowers, entered the rooms to
which Lawrence Teck had led her on the night of their marriage.

The characteristic odor of the place--the odor of skins and sandalwood,
camphor and dried grasses--nearly stifled her.  In the gloom she saw
the savage weapons gleaming.  Then the shadow of clustered tomtoms
against the bedroom door made her heart stand still.  As if to exorcise
a ghost that she no longer dared to meet, still clutching the mass of
tributary blossoms to her breast, she tore the window curtains apart.
The sunset struck in like a sword blade relentlessly cleaving through
the veils of time.  Dust lay over everything.  On the center table, in
the polished gourd, a bouquet of winter roses stood rigid, brown, like
the lips of mummies, dry enough to crumble at a touch.

Standing there in her modish suit so cunningly devised to emphasize her
charms, with the flowers slipping from her arms to the dusty rug, she
wept at the vagueness of her recollections, the fading away of grief,
to which she had once dedicated herself "for life."

"Why do I keep this place up?  It's dreadful that everything should be
just the same here----"

She meant, "While I am so changed."

She went downstairs intending to tell the janitor to give the rooms a
cleaning; but she found him--a fat, undersized old fellow in a
skullcap--talking to a young man who had a leather portfolio stuck
under his arm.  As her eyes were red, and her voice no doubt still
unsteady, she averted her head, and passed quickly out to her car.




CHAPTER XXVIII

Though a genius--at any rate according to Brantome--it was now David
Verne, instead of Lilla, who suffered from the feeling of inferiority.
To hold her, he had only his music, and perhaps his bodily feebleness
that excited her compassion.  Yet this feebleness, profound,
insurmountable, was what caused his torments of jealousy.

The question was, how long would she be content with this wan sort of
love?

And what did he know of her life during all the hours when she was
invisible to him?  What homage, what persuasions, must she, with her
peculiar loveliness, not be object of, out there in the world full of
gaiety and vitality, where strength was always offering itself to
beauty?  It would be only natural, he thought, if one of those men
should win her heart away, and she, out of pity, should pretend that
nothing had happened.

For that matter, perhaps even now----

At last she understood why, when she entered the room, he sometimes
transfixed her with that poignant, questioning look.  Then his
appearance was the same as on the day of their first meeting, as
though, at that dread, he had lost all the ground that she had helped
him to gain.

"Oh, what folly!" she cried, aghast more at the change in him than at
this injustice.  "If you knew how seldom I see any one these days,
except you!"

He remained lost in the fatal contemplation of the idea, his body sunk
even deeper in the wheel chair.

"And what's more there never has been anybody else, except one----"

A gleam issued from the eyes of the poor wretch who, while hovering so
nicely between life and death, was still, just because he could see
her, hear her voice, and touch her hand, superior to the dead.

"I am not jealous of him," he affirmed, though not quite convincingly;
since a man may be nearly as jealous of a departed rival as of a
present one.  "But every fellow that you know, who walks toward you in
his wholeness and vigor, is my superior.  Ah, my music; don't speak of
it!  What does all that amount to against those natural qualities,
which I can never regain?"

His frail, handsome, bronzed, young face expressed a puerile
helplessness.  And it was with a maternal pity that she reassured him,
using words such as mothers find for children frightened by the dark.

"Forgive me, Lilla.  But what do you expect?  You are my life."

She reflected that beneath his weakness there was a strength perhaps
greater than the strength of the strong; and now, at last, she thought
of the clutch of the drowning.

Then, instead of meeting her always at Brantome's, he had himself
wheeled to her house.  Two or three times a week, as the summer
advanced, he dined there, in the cream-colored room where Balbians and
Dellivers of Andrew Jackson's day--and even a dandy by Benjamin West in
a sky-blue satin coat--looked down from above the mahogany sideboards
that were laden with Colonial glassware and old Lowenstoft.  The
windows were open to the mews; the candle flames flickered in a tepid
breeze.  They could hear the faint crash of a band that was playing a
Strauss waltz in Washington Square.

She had not opened the Long Island house.  As for David, he had a house
of his own in a corner of Westchester County, inherited from his
parents, who had been well-to-do.  He told her about his family and his
childhood--his feeling of strangeness amid persons who had thought him
very queer, and had tried by every means to make him conform to their
ideals of thought.  "I was a sort of black sheep," he declared,
"because some necessity compelled me to be myself.  I could never get
over my skepticism about a thousand things that seemed plain to those
good folks----"

The candles flickered before his hypersensitive face.  The band in the
Square continued to play Strauss's _Rosen aus dem Süden_, with its old
suggestions of agile grace, united movement, young men and maidens
joyously dancing away toward kisses and laughter.  The servants brought
in the fresh course.  Lilla cut up David's food, then held the fork to
his lips; for the man who had scrawled that concerto could not lift his
hands high enough to feed himself.  He faltered:

"Your dinner will get cold."

"All the better, on such a hot night."

"Yes," he sighed, "you ought not to be here in this oven of a city."

"Oh, I!" she retorted, with moisture in her eyes.

In the drawing-room Hamoud-bin-Said paced to and fro, sometimes
standing before the picture by Bronzino, and seeming to stare clear
through it.  He was serene, as water is serene that has been lashed by
tempests, and that holds in the depths of its placidity secrets that
none can discern.  He was always near nowadays, on the fringe of their
lives, just beyond the radius of their preoccupations, the silent
witness of this strange love affair, in the humble station that Allah,
for some inscrutable reason, had decreed for him.




CHAPTER XXIX

One night when she was expecting David to dinner, she turned round,
from arranging some flowers in a vase in the drawing-room, to see
Cornelius Rysbroek in the doorway.  He had come, he declared, to "take
her out somewhere, give her a breath of fresh air, and make her listen
to reason."

"But I'm dining here, Cornie."

"Alone?"

"No."

Nevertheless, he sat down with a dogged look.

"What's to be the end of this?" he demanded.  "I suppose you know what
a lot of chatter this nonsense of yours has stirred up?  They're even
saying that you're engaged to him.  It's perfectly monstrous."

It was his old tone of voice, throaty, quaintly didactic, precise from
spite and yet muffled by rage; but it was not the same face.  It was,
instead, the face of a desperate, possibly dangerous man, who had
brooded over this monomania in the gorges of the great Chinese river,
in the filthy yamens of barbarous mountain towns, in the forts of
hill-robbers who practiced extraordinary cruelties.  He had fought his
way through rapids whose very names were ominous--"The King of Hell's
Slide," the "Last Look at Home," the "Place Where the Soul Itself Is
Lost."  He had sat with the free people of Nosuland, the enemies of the
Chinese, eating from bowls of camphorwood raw sheep's heart minced with
pepper, sometimes expecting permission to go free, sometimes sure of
being tortured with the split bamboo.  At last they had sent him back
with gifts.  Then, rushing home to her, he had been led by her greeting
to believe that his miseries were ended.

What a mockery of hope!  On those journeys of his, roused from his
acquiescence in ill-health and failure, moved by a savage
determination, he had accomplished the impossible, in body and
character had exceeded his limitations.  He had taken as his pattern
the rival whom she had preferred.  He had built up in himself the
counterfeits of those qualities by which Lawrence Teck had won her.
Yet now he must see her devoting herself to a man who was the
antithesis of all that she had previously preferred.

It was unendurable!  But how was he to escape it?  By hating her?  Yes,
surely she was worthy of his hatred, heartless, cruel, the cause of all
these innumerable torments from which he sometimes got a moment of
madness.

"What do I see in you?" he said between his teeth.

She had on a copper-colored gown hung over her slender shoulders by two
straps.  Maybe because its hue was a deeper shade of the same color as
her hair, her eyes, and even her pale-brown skin, the costume seemed
part of her.  He could see nothing about her that was not exquisite--no
detail from which to build up a remedial distaste.  So he ground out at
her:

"Your nature?  What rot!--as if that ever attracted me, with its false
pretenses of heart, its instabilities and downright treacheries.  What
else do you offer?  This that I see?  What we human fools call beauty?
What is beauty?"

She sat down in despair, observing that even his jaws, under his heavy
mustache, looked more salient.  It was almost laughable, she thought;
but she was far from laughing.  Every moment she expected to hear the
doorbell.

He continued ferociously:

"In the beginning these arms and legs of yours were nothing but
appliances for hanging from trees and running away from wild beasts.
Your body was merely a convenient case for a machine that kept your
life ticking along.  How does one get the idea that all this is
good-looking?  Ages ago men decided to think so for reasons that have
nothing to do with esthetics; they passed the hoax on, and in time
these physical features got themselves surrounded with a perfect fog of
sentimental and romantic balderdash.  Take your face.  Your nose is
bridged in that so-called ravishing way in order to let a stream of air
into your lungs.  Your eyebrows--how many sonnets have been written on
eyebrows!--are there, in the first place, to keep the perspiration from
running into your eyes.  Your lips are merely a binding against the
friction of food.  How grotesque to find such expedients beautiful!  No
doubt in other planets there are creatures that you'd call monsters;
and they'd call you hideous.  In fact, there can't be any such thing as
beauty."

"No doubt you're right, Cornie dear," she responded, looking down at
her beautiful hands.

"And what's it all for?" he ejaculated, in a stupefied kind of horror.
"All this sordid consolidation of flesh and blood, this disgusting
hallucination of attractiveness?  All for----"

"I know," she assented.  "More Lillas, ad infinitum.  Isn't it
tiresome?"

He jumped up, with a groan:

"I could kill you!"

"Too late.  You ought to have done it when we were children together."

"Yes, too late, too late."

He wandered round the room, slapping one fist into the other, glaring
at the walls, from which old-time ladies simpered vapidly at him.  His
brain seemed to be whirling round in his skull; his vision became
blurred; and he had a dreadful apprehension of losing contact with
normality.  But normality, too--what was it?  Normality was being
natural!  He came toward her; she rose and recoiled; but he caught hold
of her arms above the elbows, and held her fast when she swayed back
from him with a long shimmer of her copper-colored gown.

"You're hurting me, Cornie.  And there's the bell," she muttered, her
heart going dead.

He released her with the gesture of a man who hurls an enemy over a
precipice.  He gasped:

"One of these days!"

And with a livid smile he left the room as David Verne appeared in the
doorway, in his wheel chair, propelled by Hamoud.

But David, too, was nearly unrecognizable.

"What is it?" she ejaculated, and turned to catch her reflection in a
mirror.  She saw herself in a curious aspect also, white and a little
wild.  One of her shoulder straps had slipped down across her arm.

"What a dress!" she said.

David carefully pronounced the words:

"That was Rysbroek, wasn't it?"

"Yes; I've known him since we were kiddies."

"I remember your saying so."

"He brought me bad news," she added, to imply, "That's it."

"Ah, I'm sorry."

There was no life in his voice.

In the dining room the servants moved noiselessly, as though fearful of
disturbing the long silences.  A sickly breeze stirred the curtains of
apricot velvet.  The brass band in Washington Square was playing
selections from Verdi; the long-drawn wails of the horns crept in
through the windows like snatches of a dirge.  She was reduced to
speaking of the sultry air.  A thunderstorm was brewing?

"The air will be clearer," he assented.

He ate nothing.  When Hamoud had wheeled him back to the drawing-room,
he asked:

"Do you mind if I go?  A splitting headache.  This weather."

"You shouldn't have stayed in town, you see," she returned
automatically.

"Maybe I'll go up to Westchester for a week or so."  His dull eyes
rested upon the picture that she made as she stood uneasily before him,
with an appearance of guilt, her figure like a shaft of flame springing
upward from the hearth, her brown head aureoled by the tempestuous
canvas of Bronzino.  "Besides," he concluded, "keeping you here all
this while a prisoner----"

"How can you be so unkind?"

"At least I'm not ungrateful."

He made a sign to Hamoud, who stole forward to take his post behind the
wheel chair; and the two faces regarded her with the same brave, secret
look, the same queer impassiveness that was like a deafening cry.  Her
nerves began to fail her.  With an unaccountable feeling of perfidy she
straightened his cravat, while murmuring:

"I'll see you first, of course, dear?"

"Of course."

But he neither saw her nor telephoned before his departure; nor did he
write to her from the house in Westchester County.  On the third day
she went to Brantome, who said:

"I was coming to see you."

Fixing her with his tragical old eyes, he informed her that he had
received a long-distance call from David Verne's physician, who had
telephoned from the house in Westchester County.  In three days David
seemed to have lost all that he had gained in these months.  For some
reason he was letting go of life.

"Why is that?  Is it because he is letting go of you?"

The Frenchman's leonine countenance took on a hostile expression.  He
persisted:

"Eh?  Is it you who have done this?"

And Lilla understood that to this old devotee of the arts she had
ceased to be anything except a means to an end.

He seemed contemptible to her with his red-rimmed, fiery eyes, his
Viking mustaches that had turned truculent, his whole aspect of
animosity at this last collapse of hope.  And of a sudden she divined
the true basis of those hopes of his--the longing for at least some
vicarious creation, the desire to escape, in part, his own sense of
defeat by aiding, and, therefore, sharing, the triumphs of another.  He
put himself in her path: he would not let her go.  He was preparing to
hurl at her, who knew what reproaches.

"Oh, get out of my way!" she cried at last, in a breaking voice.  She
pushed him aside so sharply that he tottered back on his heels.  She
rushed out of the room, downstairs, into her car.

The limousine sped northward into the country.

She watched the placid fields, the wooded hill-tops, the lanes that
wound away between walls of sumac.  She thought of another unexpected
ride toward another crisis of life.  Her heart was beating wildly; her
breathing was labored; her hands twitched open and shut.  She took the
mirror from its rack, and saw her pupils extraordinarily dilated, so
that her eyes appeared black.

The car left the highway, to enter a park of well-grown trees.  She
caught sight of the low, simple mass of the house; its walls of gray
plaster rising between two clumps of evergreens, beyond a garden laid
out in grassy stages, where flagstone paths wound away between beds of
heliotrope.  On the terrace, under an awning of striped canvas, stood a
man in a dark-blue robe that opened down the front to reveal a white
under robe confined with a scarlet sash.  He had a close-fitting
skullcap on his head, of white, embroidered linen.  He was
Hamoud-bin-Said.

She passed him without a second glance, and found herself face to face
with the physician, who was just starting back to town.

Dr. Fallows began to talk to her judicially and suavely, with a tone of
regret, but possibly with an undertone of contentment: for this case,
after having immensely bewildered him for a time, was now, at last,
imitating all the proper symptoms again.  The patient's recent
improvement had been due, no doubt, to one of those rallies that may
interrupt the progress of many diseases--though in a case of this sort,
whether due to a functional or a pathological cause, Dr. Fallows had
never seen nor heard of an arrest--much less a diminution--of the
general weakness.

But now the relapse was complete.

She was aware of a lot of fluted wainscotting around her, and, beyond
Dr. Fallows' head, a Tudor staircase in silhouette against a large bay
window of many leaded panes.  Some of these panes, of stained glass in
heraldic patterns, gleamed against a passing cloud like rubies,
emeralds, and sapphires that had lost their fire.  Dr. Fallows still
blocked her way--almost another Brantome!--engrossed in his pessimistic
peroration, his visage of an urbane, successful man full of complicated
satisfactions and regrets.  Behind him the staircase was suddenly
bathed in sunshine; all the panes of stained glass became sparkling and
rich; and a sheaf of prismatic rays stretched down, through the gloom
of the hall, toward Lilla's upturned face.

She sped up the staircase.

All that she saw was the four-post bedstead canopied with cretonne, the
face on the pillow.  At her approach, a thrill passed through the air
pervaded by the stagnation of his spirit.  He opened his eyes.

"You!  I thought I had unchained you."

She knelt down beside him, and asked:

"What have I done to deserve this?"

He managed to respond:

"You deserve more, perhaps--a worldful of blessings.  But this release
is all that I have to give you."

"Do you think I care for that man?  I even hate him now, if it's he who
has brought you to this."

He looked like a soul that sees an angel hovering on the threshold of
hell, promising salvation.

"Oh, if I could believe you!"

And all the propulsions that had brought this moment to pass now forced
from her lips:

"I am here to prove it in a way that you can never doubt."

That day, at twilight, she standing beside his bed, they were married.




CHAPTER XXX

Beyond seas, deserts, and snow-capped mountain peaks, in the equatorial
forests where the Mambava spearmen dwelt unconquered, the black king,
Muene-Motapa, sat in the royal house listening to a story teller.

The king sat on an ebony stool, in a haze of wood smoke, muffled in a
cape of monkey skin embroidered with steel beads; for while it was
summer in America it was winter in his land.  Behind him, in a wide
semicircle against the wattled walls, sat his black councilors, war
captains, and wives, their eyeballs and teeth agleam in the light cast
up by the embers.  On the other side of the fire, the story teller
discoursed from between two warriors who leaned their heads pensively
against the upright shafts of their stabbing spears.

At the story teller's gestures--since gestures were needed to explain
these wonders--chains clanked on his wrists.  The chains had been
fastened upon his arms and legs long ago, when he had begun to struggle
back to health, surviving wounds that even his hardy captors had
expected to prove fatal.  When he fell silent, the councilors,
captains, and women patted their mouths to express their astonishment,
and the king declared:

"A good tale, Bangana.  Do you know still another?"

So Lawrence Teck resumed his entertainment.




CHAPTER XXXI

The house in Westchester County was a pleasant surprise to Lilla.  When
she had gotten rid of some furniture and bric-a-brac whose style or
color irritated her, she found herself in a sympathetic atmosphere,
surrounded, as always, by a harmonious and sophisticated richness.

In the wainscotted hall, which the stained glass of the bay-window on
the staircase landing dappled every day with a prismatic light, a
marble Renaissance mantelpiece supported a mounted knight of the
fifteenth century in stone, a champion who brandished his sword, and
raised his sightless eyes, in an invariable gesture of defiance.
Across the hall from him, a wide doorway opened on the living room,
illuminated from tall windows set with quaint faces in color, and
having at its far end a fine old Flemish tapestry of faded greens and
browns, behind a long table on which stood a bust of a Florentine
noblewoman in polychrome.  High sprays of flowers sprang up, here and
there, above sofas and chairs upholstered in antiquated damask, and
seemed to bring into this spacious room walled with fluted wood the
gayety of the garden, which appeared, behind the leaded windowpanes, a
riot of golden marguerites, Chilean lilies, Chinese larkspur, phlox,
asters, and poppy mallows.

Next, beyond folding doors, stood David's study, a pianoforte between
the mullioned windows, a large carved center table covered with
portfolios and books, the paneled walls hung with framed sheets of
music written and autographed by famous composers.

Upstairs, however, in her own apartment, Lilla had produced an
eighteenth century air.  The walls of her sitting room and bedroom were
remolded in chaste panels of French gray; the new rugs and the canopied
window curtains were the palest orange.  Her desk, the most vivid
object in her sitting room, pleased her especially--a high Venetian
desk of green and gold lacquer with pigeon holes and writing shelf of
gold and red.  She thought of the letters that must have been written
there by women with dark eyes and powdered coiffures.

Then she sighed.  A look of wonder and depression was reflected by a
mirror framed in gilt; and she turned to stare at a vase in which stood
a bouquet of Louis XVI flowers, a soft blending of mauve, faint yellow,
rose, and pale blue, all fashioned out of tin.

"Tin flowers!  Great heavens, what was I thinking of?"

She had only now realized the mockery of them.  She rang for a maid,
and said:

"Throw this thing out."




CHAPTER XXXII

In September David began to write his tone poem, _Marco Polo_.

It was not Marco Polo alone, but every man of extraordinary
aspirations, who took that long journey, through semimythical deserts,
into the realm of the Great Khan, and there for many years lived a life
unrelated to the lives of his boyhood companions.

In far-off Cambulac the Venetian adventurer steeped himself in sights,
odors, and sounds that were the antithesis of those which he had known,
till at last he took on the strangeness of his surroundings.  Yet in
the course of time, though covered with wealth and honors, and
habituated to bizarre delights, he began, with the perversity of human
nature, to long for the land of his birth.  With a sense of necessity
and foreboding he tore himself loose from the paradise of Cambulac,
traversed the deserts again, regained his own house.  None knew him,
for he was old, savory with antipodal spices, outlandishly garbed; and
even his countenance had become like those Oriental faces amid which he
had found unheard-of griefs and joys.  In Venice, his birthplace,
instead of a greeting that might ease his nostalgia, he encountered
disbelief in his identity, and ridicule of his tales.  He could not
make them credulous of that delicious Cambulac where he had dwelt like
a god: his tidings of unearthly felicities--free to all who would make
that journey--fell upon brutish ears.  The very children came to laugh
him to scorn.  So finally, stunned by this ingratitude, cut to the
heart by the gibes of these Venetian wretches to whom he had brought
such fine news, he sank into a stupor, and wondered, as he sat alone in
his shame, whether indeed he had been a great and dazzled man in
Cambulac--which, perhaps, after all, had no existence in reality!

The idea mapped out, there began for David Verne the period of complex
mental tension, of intense concentration, during which an interruption
might scatter forever a sequence of valuable thought.  Lilla, knowing
how great this mental and emotional strain must be, wondered that he
was strong enough to bear it.

But the desire to be to Lilla, despite his infirmity, something that no
other man could be, made him prodigious.  As the tone poem expanded
from this inspiration, he gained still greater impetus from the mere
tonic of success.  Toward the end of October, his asthenia had
diminished enough to allow him to play the piano weakly in three
octaves.

Dr. Fallows, on one of his visits a witness of this achievement, went
out thunderstruck to his car, muttering to himself:

"It is impossible!"

He looked sternly across the sunny garden, where the last of the summer
flowers--giant daisies above beds of tufted pansies--were triumphantly
flaunting themselves.  He had never heard, and he doubted if any one
else had ever heard, of a similar case--the checking and diminishing of
such a prostration.  But, knitting his brows, he pondered on the still
chaotic state of the whole data concerning the "endocrine chain," and
on the fallibility of previous unequivocal pronouncements in the
science of medicine.  He had a slight feeling of deflation, followed by
a glow of curiosity; and he returned into the house to change his
orders about the medicine.

He had been prescribing a solution of arsenic, the dose increasing
little by little toward the point of tolerance.  Now, for the purpose
of experiment, he ordered that the dose was to remain the same.  And in
order to impress his instructions upon the mind of Hamoud-bin-Said, he
said to the Arab severely:

"Remember, not one drop more!"




CHAPTER XXXIII

"Lilla!  Lilla!"

She appeared in the doorway of the study like a muse that David had
summoned by an infallible conjuration.

His day's work was over.  He showed her what he had done.  She leaned
down beside the wheel chair to scan the pages; her fluffy, brown hair
filled with the afternoon sunshine.  And David, in the exhaustion
following his labor, dreamily immersed his senses in the sight of her
pale-brown cheek so close to his, in the persistent strangeness of her
perfume, in the singular cadences of her voice that were always
inspiring new harmonies, and in the caress of her cool, fragile hands
that had drawn him back from death.

"Is it good?"

What he meant was, "Is it good enough to keep you from regrets?"

She understood, pitied him the more, redoubled her tenderness.  And
this wan idyll of theirs, as nearly incorporeal as though she were
indeed an ethereal visitor, took on a new pathos which was accentuated
by the withering of the flowers in the garden, the first hints of the
rigor of winter.

He marveled at her self-immolation in this lonely house.  He wondered
how long such a state of things could last.  Then, summoning back his
new courage, he continued his combat against the unknown rivals, who,
perhaps, had not yet revealed themselves to her, or else had thus far
sent to her only ambiguous and subtle heralds of their coming--a breeze
flavored with the past and promising an imitation of old transports, a
cry of departing birds like a reassurance of the inevitable return, not
only of the spring, but also of natural love.

"What are you reading now?" he would ask her apprehensively; for so
many books were replete with accounts of a different sort of union.

Or, when she had gone to walk through the grounds at sunset, he,
chained to his wheel chair, watched her departing figure with a
sensation of dread, asking himself what thoughts would come to her out
there, under the immense compulsion of the scarlet clouds.

His fears, for lack of any other definite object, often veered toward
her memories.

She rejoined him at dusk, languid from that brief promenade, like those
Eastern women whom Lawrence Teck had once described to her, or like one
who is enervated by a fever stealthily creeping round one at the moment
of tropical twilight.  He saw her eyes misty with shadows which
disappeared as she came forward into the lamplight.

"Yes, she had been thinking of him."

He suspected that she thought of "him" also in the night.

"Don't go yet," he would plead, when she came to his bed, into which
Hamoud-bin-Said had tucked him like a child.  So she sat down; and the
ray of the night lamp fell across her sensitive lips that had felt the
kisses of "the other."  David's thin, romantic, bronzed face, with its
queer comminglement of adolescence and genius, was fortunately in the
shadows cast by the curtains of the bed canopy.

"Ah, how dull it must be for you!  If we had some visitors?
Brantome----"

"No," she said.

"And yet it was through him----"

"What! haven't you seen through him yet?" she returned in a jealous
tone.  And presently, with an accent of fear, as if her intuition had
discerned some serious, unrevealed event of which Brantome was going to
be the cause, "I wish we could have met some other place."

"You dislike him now?"

She responded:

"It was he, you know, who told me of that other woman, the one before
me, who had you when you were well."

She rose, laid a kiss upon his forehead, and went away to her rooms
across the corridor, leaving with him her perfume.




CHAPTER XXXIV

In New York there were two opinions concerning the change in Cornelius
Rysbroek.

From his travels, it seemed, he had acquired a certain temperamental as
well as physical hardness.  He wore habitually a calm, ironical look,
as though, having found life out, he considered it a phenomenon worthy
only of scorn.  He was seen everywhere, fastidiously attired,
self-possessed, taciturn, listening to the chatter of his friends with
sardonic attention, now and then throwing in a blighting comment.  It
was curious that these infrequent remarks of his, even though they had
not remotely referred to her, always ended by bringing the conversation
round to Lilla.  Thereupon he fell silent, smoked one cigarette after
another, and wore a look of indifference and boredom.  At last he would
rise, apparently fatigued by all that trivial gossip, and wander away.

In solitude he became another man.  He would pace the floor for hours,
sometimes all night; and then one might have heard some very peculiar
rigmaroles declaimed aloud, or even shouted out--phrases so jumbled
that they were hardly rational, cries interrupted by groans or
smothered by the grinding of his teeth.  Now and then his valet, on
pushing back the window curtains in the morning, discovered a mirror
smashed, or a book torn to tatters.  There was something shocking in
the calm set of Cornelius Rysbroek's jaws, the languid contempt of his
eyes, as he remarked to the valet, that "there had been a little
accident last night."

Once he burned his right hand severely.  He had hurled a picture of
Lilla into the fire, then, to rescue it, had plunged his arm to the
elbow into the flames.

He often drove his car into Westchester County, round and round a wide
network of roads in the center of which lay the house of David Verne.
Suddenly he entered the highway that passed the tall gateposts of the
detestable place.  He drove faster and faster.  The gateposts were near
at hand.  He bent over the wheel, and, without raising his eyes, sent
the car roaring by, as if escaping through a forest in conflagration.
His visage was covered with sweat; his pupils were full of red lights.
He no longer saw the road, or was conscious of driving.  Miles beyond,
he became aware that he was calling out maledictions: and strangers,
passing at a decent speed, had a vision of a dapper, ghastly wretch who
appeared to be fleeing on the wings of the wind from the clutch of
insanity.




CHAPTER XXXV

Fanny Brassfield, whose country house was not far away, sometimes
dropped in to see Lilla.

"Hello, David," she said, sitting down beside the tea table, and
crossing her knees.  "How's old Marco Polo to-day?"

Her bony cheeks were rosy from the cold wind; her green eyes glittered
with health; and her whole countenance, under a tilted, putty-colored
toque, expressed her full satisfaction with what she had found in life.
She had no nerves, no remorse nor thwarted ambitions.  Because of her
wealth, unscrupulousness, and small imagination, her one constant
craving--for novel experiences--was easily satisfied.  A long cigarette
holder between her thin lips, one putty-colored lisle stocking showing
to the knee, she exhaled, together with an odor of Florentine
orris-root, a ruthless vigor and appetency for pleasure.  Lilla thought
with envy of all this woman had never imagined nor felt, all that she
had been able to enjoy without self-questioning.

How simple life was for some people!

"I'm giving a little party.  No doubt it's useless to ask you----"

Fanny Brassfield interrupted herself to stare at Hamoud-bin-Said, who
had entered the room without a sound.

He had on a long, dark-blue joho, or robe, embellished down its open
front with a tracery of gold.  Underneath he wore the kanzu, the under
robe of fine white cotton, embroidered round the neck with a bit of red
needlework, and reaching to his boots of soft, black leather.  Bound
his waist was a blue-and-gold sash, from which protruded the silver
hilt of his J-shaped Zanzibar dagger.  His head was covered, as always
in the house, with a white embroidered skullcap.  In one small hand he
held a Venetian goblet, in the other a bottle of medicine.

It was the hour for Dr. Fallows' prescription.

"Really," Fanny Brassfield exclaimed, in her high-pitched, insolent
voice, "I must get myself one of these--what is he again?  Zanzibari?"

Hamoud, towering there in the attire of an Omân gentleman--which she
took for a specially effective livery--contemplated the great Mrs.
Brassfield.  His full eyelids were dreamily lowered over his lustrous
eyes.  His long, straight nose seemed narrower than usual, perhaps from
disdain.  But his clear-cut carnelian mouth, vivid between his faint
mustache and his delicate beard, did not change expression, although he
was calling the great Mrs. Brassfield a female beneath the contempt of
a Muscat slaver, the progeny of camels and alley dogs, and other names
besides.  As if regretfully he turned away to David Verne, measured out
the solution of arsenic, and presented the goblet, a tapering treasure
covered with gilt and crimson protuberances, an antique that had stood
before men in the wave-lapped palaces of Venice, brimming with Greek
wine, or maybe with Renaissance poison.

David Verne himself raised the goblet.

"Dr. Fallows has really done wonders, hasn't he?"

"Wonders," Lilla echoed with a smile.

In the hall, as she was leaving, Fanny Brassfield said to Lilla:

"By the way, Anna Zanidov is in town.  She was asking after you."

Without moving, Lilla murmured slowly:

"Ah, she wants to tell my fortune again, perhaps?"

"She stopped doing that.  It got too uncanny.  You know yourself that
everything she ever pre

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