The limousine glided northward. A cold rain was falling. Behind the glistening windowpanes the scene was continually melting from one lackness into another. At each flash of radianceMadame Zanidov was revealed motionless in her corner, muffled in her cloak, with closed eyes.
"Is she reading my thoughts?" Lilla wondered.
No matter: by this time the whole world must know them, released as they had been, into that eager public air, like a deafening cry of confession. "What's to be the end of this?" she asked herself, appalled, as she felt her life being whirled along from one fatal impulse to another, just as she was being whisked by the limousine from darkness to darkness. To check that inexorable progress! to see some constant light!
Anna Zanidov turned her wedge-shaped face toward Lilla, with the words:
"I have thought of you many times."
"I can say the same."
"To be sure," the Russian declared, "I have stopped doing that, you know. I didn't want to end by being shunned."
"I suppose you still have the gift?"
"No doubt."
The limousine halted. Across its path rumbled a street car mistily bright behind the rain, crowded with people who represented a rational humanity aloof from the little compartment in which were shut up these two victims of remarkable beliefs. Then, the limousine moving on, the blurred phantasmagoria closed in again:—and the northern vista took on the ambiguity of Lilla's life, a compound of darknesses and deceptive gleams, stretching away toward what? She uttered:
"Nevertheless, to know the future!" And as the Russian remained mute and motionless, she faltered, "No matter what one learned, the suspense would be over."
"Would it, indeed?"
"I am desperate," Lilla responded in low tones.
After a while Madame Zanidov, with a compassionate austerity, responded:
"Remember, then, that it is you who wished this."
Their hands touched. In the rushing limousine, in this fluidity of lights and darkness, they were intent on the phenomenon that both believed to be a revelation of fate. At last the clairvoyant quietly began:
"I am out of doors, far away."
The glare of passing headlights displayed her closed, oblique eyes, her parted, flat lips, her idol-like aspect, which bestowed on her the impressiveness, the seeming infallibility, of those oracles that were anciently supposed to describe some future mood of the chaotic ebb and surge that human beings call life.
"Very old tree trunks. Great trailing vines. Huge flowers black in the moonlight. It is the very same place. Here is that clearing, and the squatting black men. Their hands are folded; their heads are bowed forward; they are filled with sadness. Near them, on the ground, lies the dead man whose body is covered with a cloth. It is the man who has loved you." She dropped Lilla's hand, protesting, "This is incredible!"
"Incredible?"
"Yes, because this scene appears to be still in the future. Do you understand me? Hasn't happened yet."
The limousine stopped before the Russian's door as Lilla, disgusted by this anticlimax, replied:
"You've repeated your old prophecy because it has haunted my mind ever since you made it that night at the Brassfields'. You've merely gotten back from me the impression that you stamped on my consciousness then."
"Then that is something new. These perceptions of mine have never referred to the past. Besides, I had just now—but how shall I explain it?—a powerful sense of the future. Ah, well, maybe this gift of mine is leaving me, since I've refused to use it. I sha'n't be sorry." As she got out of the car, she amended, "At least, I don't think I'm sorry to have disappointed you."
The door snapped shut on that hope: the world became fluid again: and Lilla was borne away toward another pity and another remorse.
Hamoud opened the front door, and told her:
"They are waiting for you."
"They? Who is here?"
"Mr. Brantome."
She stood for a moment staring balefully at the stone knight above the fireplace of the hall, who still raised his sightless face, and brandished his blunt sword, with that stupid appearance of defying everything. Then she tossed aside her cloak and hat, and went straight into the living room, peeling off her gloves, saying in a gracious voice:
"Hello! How nice! But how foolish to wait for me. You must both be starved."
"No, but David has been imagining all sorts of calamities," Brantome returned, with a loud, artificial laugh, and a look of anxiety in the depths of his old eyes. As for the invalid, silent in his wheel chair before the Flemish tapestry, he showed her a frozen smile, a travesty of approval.
They went in to dinner. As soon as they had sat down she began, with an unnatural vivacity, to tell them where she had been. That horse show! It had never seemed so silly to her. The same old stable slang interspersed with the same old scandal. And to-night Fanny Brassfield, instead of falling upon her bed in a stupor of futility, was going to give a big dinner for the very same people. "I'm surprised," she exclaimed, turning her flushed face toward Brantome, "that you weren't dragged into it. They usually sacrifice a captive from the land of art."
David remained quite still, his frail shoulders bowed forward, his head advanced, his eyes intently watching her moving lips. She could not abate that frozen smile of his. Brantome, his portly body thrown back, his white mane and long mustaches shimmering like spun glass in the candle light, seemed still to wear on his tragical old face a look of uneasiness. She had the feeling of sitting before two judges who were weighing not only her words, but her tone of voice and appearance. She wondered what appearance she presented.
"Why don't you eat your dinner?" she asked David.
"I am interested," he replied rather hoarsely.
"At what? I was wondering what right I had to inflict all this on you. I suppose when I came in you were talking of something worth while." She turned again to Brantome. "AndMarco Polo?"
"The best tone poem sinceDon Quixote," he said, rising and making her a bow. "As far as it has gone. It is not finished yet."
"It soon will be. Won't it, David?"
"Oh, another month with luck," he returned lightly, trying to lift a wineglass, and spilling on the cloth the champagne that had been prescribed by Dr. Fallows.
She caught his wrist. A pang passed through her heart. She showed them a new expression, or else an old one for which they had been hoping, as she exclaimed in alarm:
"You're not so well to-night!"
And, as Hamoud was wheeling David into the living room, she protested to Brantome:
"I can't leave him for a day without something happening."
"Then for God's sake don't, at least till this piece is done." The old Frenchman pulled her back, and whispered, "Why, this afternoon he was nearly beside himself. How can he work——"
"About what?" she ejaculated, glancing down at his hand on her arm.
"How should I know, if you don't?"
In the living room Brantome did not sit down. Flushed from the wine that he had drunk, striding to and fro, he began a rigmarole about "David's future." His voice was nearly ferocious when he prophesied the subjugation of the public, which might be aroused, by precisely the right persuasion, to a tumult of applause. Yes, they must all be conquered, until, as in the case of Beethoven for instance, the name of the genius appeared as though written like a portent in the sky, above the heads even of throngs that knew nothing of music, that would never hear these harmonies, but that would be filled all the same with reverential awe.
He had never before revealed this thirst for undiscriminating homage. They hardly recognized him. The old leonine fellow was transfigured, as though by megalomania. He seemed larger, and slowly made the gestures of an emperor.
He darted into the study, as Lilla said to David:
"The piece will stand up for itself, I think. He's becoming almost too ridiculous."
But in the other room Brantome began beating out fragments ofMarco Polo. The familiar sounds took on a startling majesty in the atmosphere heavily charged with the player's exultation. One had an illusion that this music was irradiating from the house all over the earth. Then, in the silence, the rustle of the rain seemed a long murmur of enthusiastic comment.
Abruptly Brantome reappeared in the doorway with his mane disheveled, like a lion let out of a cage; but Lilla was too wretched to laugh at him. Now he was bursting with memories of those, since great, with whom he had chummed in his youth, when he, too, had expected to be great. He swept his listeners away to foreign studios, where they saw young men poising for flights amid the stars.
"And here," he affirmed, whirling round to Lilla, "is something better, in humor, in tragedy, in dignity, in richness of invention, in everything."
"I know it," she responded, reaching out to lay her hand upon David's hand.
"Something better," he repeated, in a changed voice, with an effect of shrinking to his usual proportions. His arm fell to his side, and he turned away to hide his altered look. "I'll fight for this boy," he said. "I'll fight the whole world for him."
"You looked," suggested Lilla gently, "as if you were going to fight me, too."
"You? No, you are my ally. Or, if you please, I am yours; for neither of us can do anything without you."
At midnight, when Lilla returned to the doorway of his bedroom, David was not asleep.
She sat down on the edge of the bed. A beam of light from the corridor touched her slender figure wrapped in yellow silk, and her braided hair outlined, round her head, by a narrow golden halo. The rain had ceased, and the breeze from the window was laden with the odor of the saturated earth. Falteringly he asked her if she was chilly.
She was surprised, having been aware for a long while only of this pity and this remorse.
"You have suffered to-day," she said.
He responded:
"The penalty one pays for having acquired great riches is the fear of losing them."
She was silent for a time, then murmured:
"When this piece is finished, or to-morrow if you like, we might go abroad? Over there we could find any number of nice, secluded places. Some Greek island might please you? The climate is very invigorating."
"Would you like it?"
"If it would make you happier."
He uttered a groan:
"How I torment you! It must be some devil in me that prompts me to this ingratitude. All that you've done for me, and I'm not satisfied. You are perfection."
She laughed dismally, raising her face in the gloom of the bed canopy that enshrouded them like the shadows of a catafalque. Perfection! A pitiable heroine, an unstable creature tossed about from one compassion to another, from a contemptible dissatisfaction here to a half-hypocritical idea of reparation there, and now to self-abasement! She was sick from disgust at her ingratitude to this poor invalid, through whom she had become majestic, holding fate back so that beauty, and even life, might miraculously survive. She seemed to have emerged from an ignoble dream; she longed to merit again, at least in her devotion to this supine figure, that word, perfection. Suddenly her bosom swelled not only with compunction, but with love also—since it was she, indeed, who had recreated him, and since without the nourishment of her daily reassurances he must die.
"Help me to deserve those words," she besought him, bending down through the shadows. Her tears moistened his lips, and upon that revelation he stammered:
"At this moment I feel that you're mine."
"Not only this moment. Always."
In the morning, when Brantome had departed for the city, Lilla said to Hamoud:
"Please tell the servants that if any one should ask for me I'm not at home."
Soon afterward, while David was at work shut up in the study, and Lilla was trying to read a book in the living room, the doorbell rang. When she heard Hamoud, in the hall, speaking quickly in Arabic, her body relaxed. She thought:
"He has found one of his own people. I am glad. He must have been so lonely all this while!"
She heard another voice, deeper and more vibrant. "Yes, Arabic," she said, smiling contentedly. Of a sudden, for some inexplicable reason, she felt as if she were going to faint.
She raised her eyes from the book, and saw a tall man with a black beard, standing in the hall doorway, watching her.
She was seized with the paralyzing chill that comes to those who seem to be confronted by apparitions of the dead. Her conviction that she saw no living man was strengthened by his physical alteration. His black beard, which covered even his cheekbones, masked a shriveled countenance. His eyes had receded into their sockets; his lips were stretched over his teeth; and the swarthiness of his skin had become sulphurous. The stillness of his attitude, and his blank, attentive look, completed the effect of unreality.
Then she thought, "Perhaps it's I who am dead." Her surroundings melted away. All her obligations related to these surroundings melted also. She began to float toward him, over the floor that she no longer felt beneath her feet, so that her disembodied spirit might be merged with this other spirit. Her half-raised hands prepared to cling to him—as though one phantom could cling fast to another! But abruptly an invisible force seemed to check her progress mid-way; and she stood before him with her arms, that had meant to embrace him, lifted in what appeared to be a gesture of horrified denial.
There was no change in his face disfigured by unhappiness and illness.
The air round them began to tremble with strains of music—harmonies mounting up toward a climax of intolerable beauty. It came, this perfect epitome of love, from behind the closed doors of the study, where David Verne was playing as never before.
"Lilla!"
A profound silence followed the call that neither of these two had uttered. And from behind the closed doors, David, transported by his exultation, cried out again to the Muse:
"Lilla! Lilla!"
Swaying aside, she sank down into a chair. "Oh," she breathed, looking at the rug as though some very precious object had slipped from her hands and broken at her feet. As she sat there, a huddle of coffee-colored fabric and pallid flesh, the sunlight burst through the clouds to smite her all over with its glory, igniting her hair, turning her face into incandescent gold.
Lawrence Teck watched this transformation.
He became natural—ready to fight for this woman, though still believing that he despised everything about her except her loveliness. All at once he was like a man who stands on the edge of a chasm, who has an idea that he may be able to leap across, from a bitterness endured alone to a bitterness shared with another. He took the leap. He put her to the test.
She saw him walking across the living room toward the closed doors of the study.
Noiselessly, as swift as her dreadful thought, she rose, traversed the room, passed him, and whirled round against the door. She flung out her arms in a movement that nailed her against the panels as to a cross. She could not speak; but he read on her lips, as if she had cried it in his face:
"No!"
The music began again, at first soft and simply melodious, soon complex and thunderous. The door at her back vibrated from the sound, and the quivering penetrated her body and her brain. She was filled with a new horror, at the new, miraculous strength evinced in that playing.
And again that voice exulting in the study:
"Lilla? Oh, where are you?"
"Come away from here," she muttered, giving Lawrence an awful stare, snatching at his sleeve, dragging him after her across the room, her feet as heavy as if fleeing through a nightmare. Now, straining at his arm, she was in the wainscotted hall before the stone mantelpiece that bore up the defiant knight. Now she reached the fernery. The palms leaped back into place behind them as she collapsed upon the red cushions of the settee.
He stood watching her as before, erect, breathing, alive, even though he lay smashed in the depths of that chasm which she had prevented him from clearing.
"And your idea is," Lawrence inquired calmly, "that he mustn't know at all?" She continued to weep in silence, the tears running quickly down her cheeks and falling like brilliants upon the fur edging of her house gown. He added, "I merely mean, is it practicable?"
Incoherently she started to tell the whole story over again.
"But how can I make you understand? My wits are gone. He was utterly helpless, done for, you might as well say dead. All the life blazing and throbbing round him—and round me, too; for I was as good as dead also. Two dead people meeting and trying to find their way back, through each other, to some sort of life. But he didn't know that he was helping me; that is my secret. Yet it wasn't all selfishness with me. In the end I was persuaded just by pity. Have you seen a sick animal looking at you pleadingly? Pity is a monster! First one tentacle, then another, and finally one is pulled under and devoured. One should never feel pity. But you were gone."
She pressed her fingers to her temples, and closed her eyes.
"Don't you know this will kill him?" she asked. "But how could you know that? It's so, all the same. It's just I who have kept him alive. It's just by holding on to me that he's held on to life."
She gave a cry:
"Ah! This is too much! What am I to do?"
She writhed amid the red cushions of the settee till he commanded sternly:
"Calm yourself. It's time we began to talk sensibly."
She sat still, looking at him in terror.
"Yes," she whispered.
His erect immobility, his emotional self-containment, recalled to her, by contrast, the feebleness and helplessness that had lured her into this trap. Once more she perceived in this man the refuge that her frailty of nerves and tissues had always yearned for; and the miracle that she had accomplished in his absence became the work of a stranger. Ah, to let go of heroism now, to be once more her true self—the fragile complement of this strength! But in the very moment when she visualized the consummation of that wish, she saw with her mind's eye the other sitting at the piano in his wheel chair, his music strewn round him, the air still vibrant with triumph and gratitude, his face turned eagerly toward the door as toward the source of an infallible reassurance, of beautiful accomplishment, of life itself.
The palms, forming an arch above him, cast a greenish shadow over Lawrence's bearded visage, which was shrunken and yellow from the last attack of fever, in the coast town. This head of his, hovering before her in a frame of ragged greenery, seemed about to melt away amid one of her old illusions of the jungle. Gradually she understood that this was not he whom she had married on that night of romance.
All those thoughts of his were what had changed his face into this new appearance, hard and misunderstanding, incredulous and ironical, and crushed with an utter weariness of spirit. And Lilla did not know how to summon back into being the man that he had been; for all her inspiration was dragged down by guilt. She remembered the dusty rooms where even her last tribute of flowers had now turned to dust. She recalled the victorious seductiveness of genius, of egotism, the lure of a world in which a myriad women had seemed to be dancing away from her toward happiness; and then, her moment of complex treason at the horse show. She quailed as she heard again her vow to Lawrence on their wedding night, "Forever!" and that word was blended with the "Forever!" which, a few hours ago, she had uttered in the gloom of David's bedroom.
He felt her sense of guilt, and misinterpreted it. When her protestations became more intimate, a smile, half contemptuous and half commiserating, appeared on his shrunken lips. It struck her silent.
"As I understand it," said Lawrence Teck, "this is your plan, which; seems to me, in the light of common sense, perfectly hopeless. In short, he's not to know. You've refused to let me face him——"
"Ah, yes," she sighed, and quoted, "'Infirm of purpose, give me the daggers.' You'd kill him for me, wouldn't you?"
"You exaggerate. If he were as delicately poised as that, I shouldn't want his death on my hands. These people who kill one another, and even themselves, for love, exist of course; but to me they're ridiculous. The game isn't worth it. There are too many other things in life. As for me, my work, that part of it out there unfinished, dropped so that I could run back here and clear this matter up——"
"No, I'm the one that you're killing," she returned, bowing her head that was glorified in the sunshine pouring round her, as if with a crown of celestial happiness.
He went on in a deliberate, grave tone, feeling logical and dizzy, replete with self-justification, magnanimity, and horror:
"I managed to arrive in this country secretly. There are only three persons in New York who know that I'm here, or, for that matter, alive. It may help a little if I succeed in slipping away as quietly as I came. You can get your divorce on grounds of desertion. I'm sorry enough to have let you in for this. It's my fault from beginning to end. I shouldn't have appeared then, and worst of all I shouldn't have reappeared now." He hesitated; then, glancing toward the door of the fernery, "No doubt you'll discover how to smooth it out with him. After all, if he were the most sensitive creature on earth, he ought to be satisfied when he understands that though I've popped up alive he is the one you've chosen."
"You are mad," she gasped, giving a convulsive bound amid the red cushions.
He wondered if it were so.
Here she was before his eyes, more beautiful than in any of his dreams, a diffuse vision compressed once more into a tangible form, fragrant and warm, full of coursing blood and tremors, no doubt still capable of those same ecstatic appearances and vocal rhapsodies. All his swarming, jealous thoughts were consuming him, as warrior ants might consume some wretched victim of King Muene-Motapa. He felt that this deliberate farce must end, that he must spring through the door, find the other, kill him with one blow, and then rush away from this woman who, like a fallen deity, lay weeping again, her face between her arms, somehow pathetic under this retribution for the inconstancy that she pretended was pity.
She raised her face, and pronounced:
"There must be some way. But I can't think any more."
"There are two ways. One is for me to go. The other is to tell him."
She sat up and clutched the cushions on each side of her.
"You ask me to go into that room, and you might as well say shoot him through the heart?"
He said to himself, "How she sticks to it! This pretense is all she has to cling to, poor thing, in lieu of saying straight out, 'I can't return to that old adventure now. Too much time has intervened; I'm no longer the same woman. I must stick to this new romance.'" He said to himself, "I shall get away from here this moment." He turned toward the doorway.
"Remember," he told her wearily, "I'm depending on your silence."
Struck by the folly of that caution, he hurried into the hall, as though to escape an outburst of laughter.
He was close to the front door when she appeared in his path, materialized from thin air.
"Wait outside. I'll go with you."
She stood tearing her handkerchief to pieces, looking at him strangely out of her swollen eyes, her cheeks flushed. She went on:
"Why, we must talk. We can surely find the way out. But not here. At the rooms." A film passed over her eyes. She caught him fast round the neck, raised her lips toward his, and whispered, with a distracted appearance that seemed guilty as well as passionate, "You still love me? As much as ever?"
He felt that he and she had reached the depths. This temptation capping the climax of her rejection—this monstrous inversion of the classic triangle! "What is she, then?" he asked himself, "and what am I?" For he caught hold of her as if he were going to crush her doubly perfidious, inexplicable heart, and fastened his lips to hers in a kiss that burned her up, before he thrust her from him with a gesture meant to express all his loathing of her, of himself, of the whole of life.
"Oh, wait!" she cried, as he fumbled with the door.
To hold her off with the first words that came into his head, he cast at her:
"To-morrow!"
She remained facing the closed door, softly repeating:
"To-morrow."
Cornelius Rysbroek had just driven up before the house in a blue runabout. Now, sunk down behind the steering wheel, he gaped at the black-bearded man who stood like a rock at the foot of a low flight of steps.
Lawrence Teck put on his hat, gave Cornelius Rysbroek a blind stare, climbed into a hired car. In doing so he showed his aquiline profile; and Cornelius recalled the moonlit terrace of the Brassfields' country house.
"It's he!"
The hired car set out for New York; and behind it, all the way, went the blue runabout.
She entered her sitting room, locked the door, threw herself upon the couch. Round lunch time there came a creaking in the corridor, a knock. It was David in his wheel chair, propelled by Hamoud.
"No lunch. And perhaps no dinner. It's only a headache, dear. I shall be all right."
"Your voice sounds——"
"Why not, since I'm suffering a little?"
The creaking sound died away.
At the first glimmer of dawn she was up. An hour later she entered David's bedroom, dressed, hatted, and gloved. Her skin appeared translucent. Her hands, drawing her cloak round her shivering body, seemed almost too weak for that task.
"Why, where are you going?"
"To town. It seems that Parr has fallen ill."
She leaned over him quickly, thinking of all the kisses of betrayal that had ever been bestowed upon the unaware. She went out leaving him dumfounded by her appearance of feverish eagerness, energy, and illness.
On the ride to New York she lay back in the corner of the limousine, her face burning, her lips pressed together. "He thinks I don't love him, it seems!" That was the tender menace she hurled ahead of her, as the car carried her swiftly—yet how slowly!—toward his rooms.
She remembered Anna Zanidov.
"The infallible clairvoyant! All that solemn nonsense! Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!"
She found herself at the door of his rooms, ringing, knocking, calling his name through the panels. She recollected that she had the key in her purse. The door swung back with a bang, and she ran through the shaded apartment that was filled with the dull gleaming of weapons. She stopped before the bed that had not been slept in. She returned to the living room, and gazed at the withered petals lying round the gourd.
The doorway framed an undersized, obese old man who wore a skullcap of black silesia. He was the janitor.
"Where is Mr. Teck?"
"Mr. Teck!" the janitor exclaimed in a shocked voice.
The words tumbled out of her mouth:
"He was here yesterday, surely. Didn't he leave any word?"
"Mr. Lawrence Teck?" the old fellow repeated, in consternation.
Behind him hesitated, in passing by, a young man with an inquisitive face, who had under his arm a leather portfolio. She slammed the door on them. In the shadowy room the very walls seemed to be crumbling.
She searched everywhere for a note, for some sign that he had been here; but there was no object in the place not covered with dust.
Then, sunk in a stupor, she drove to the little house in Greenwich Village. Her ring was answered by Parr's niece, the woman with the sleek bandeaux. Mr. Teck had been here twice, the second time late last night. On that occasion he had taken Parr away with him.
"Where to?"
"Ah, ma'am, if only I knew!"
Those faded, medieval eyes gazed at the benefactress in a sudden understanding and intimacy; and Lilla thought, "You, too, perhaps in some region far removed from your pots and pans, have had such a moment as this!" And she would have liked to let her face fall forward upon the bosom of that threadbare working dress, feel those toil-worn arms close round her, and utter the plea, "Tell me how to bear such things, to survive, to emerge into that strange serenity of yours."
She drove to Brantome's. The whole world was now tumbling down about her ears.
Brantome rose from his desk, where perhaps he had been sketching out some brilliant appreciation ofMarco Polo. After one glance at Lilla:
"What's happened?"
She showed him a look of hatred that embraced the whole room; for it was not only he, but also this abode of his, that had entrapped her. In accents that lashed him like whips she told him everything.
The old Frenchman sat down with a thump, and let his ruined face droop forward. She heard the hoarse rumble:
"What shall I do now?"
"Find him!"
She returned to the house in the country.
In the middle of the third night, the telephone beside her pillow gave a buzz, more terrifying than a shout of fire, an earthquake, a knife at the throat. Brantome was speaking. Parr had returned to the house in Greenwich Village. Lawrence Teck had sailed secretly, that day, for Africa.
She replaced the receiver on the hook, rested her head on her hands, and remained thus for a long while. In the end she formed the words:
"That woman."
She was thinking of "the infallible clairvoyant."
In the early morning, while the trees round the house were still full of mist, Lilla, in her sitting room, at the tall Venetian desk of green and gold lacquer, redrafted for the twentieth time the message that she wanted to send after Lawrence Teck by wireless. The rich scintillations from the polished surfaces before her enveloped her distracted countenance in a new, greenish pallor, as she traced, now heavily, now very faintly, the words:
"If you knew what you've done——"
She paused; for the confusion of her brain made her think of a squirrel frantically racing in a revolving cage. Then, seeing nothing except the pen point, she wrote slowly, "What have you done? What have you done?" And suddenly, in a convulsive hand that sprawled over half the page, "Betrayed!" She stared at these words in amazement.
Hamoud-bin-Said entered the sitting room. He had on the dark blue joho edged with a red pattern. His snowy under robe was bound with a blue and red sash from which protruded the silver hilt of his dagger. His tan-colored, clear-cut, delicately bearded face was expressionless, as he said softly:
"The morning paper."
And she realized that the whole story had been discovered, scattered broadcast.
For a time Hamoud regarded the prostration of her spirit from the heights of fatalism. But presently, as he contemplated that limp pose, which added one more novelty to her innumerable beautiful appearances, the stoicism that had made him look mature gave way to the fervor of youth—his limpid eyes turned to fire; his full, precisely chiseled lips were distorted by a pang. He appeared as before, however, when she raised her head and uttered:
"Burn it."
His reverie had a flavor of commiseration now, as though he were saying to himself, "Who can catch all the leaves before they fall to the ground? Who can sweep back the waves of the sea?" He responded:
"The men who make these things have been telephoning half the night. And now they are here themselves."
"Here!"
"They are sitting on the steps," he affirmed, lost in a gloomy, relishing consideration of the wonders of life. "They wish to talk to you and to Mr. Verne."
He pronounced these words as if he had no idea of their enormity.
Her spirit stirred at this threat. All seemed lost except the phenomenon of David living, by which, in her distraction, she hoped somehow to justify herself. To the amazement of the world one might oppose the fact of genius miraculously unfolding through her sacrifice. But she thought, "The world! What is that?" And thereupon, "All the same it shall not strike down this helpless creature." And the world became a monster, unfeeling, indeed immeasurably malign, lying far off with the teeming cells of its brain all plotting to rob her of her wretched victory, and with the claws of one outstretched paw already touching the threshold of this house.
"You are to drive them away."
She went on groping for phrases as one gropes for objects in the dark, telling Hamoud that henceforth nobody from outside the house was to see David till she had been informed, that all newspapers and letters must come first to her, that the servants must not show by so much as a look—— She became aware that among these phrases she was uttering, with an air of calm consideration, others that had no intelligible meaning, no relation to her objective thoughts. She heard herself say, "Perhaps I had better see the servants myself. It would be a queer thing if there were a draft from the pantry. There is a red pillow in the fernery; it must be hidden—the spears, too——" She gazed in perplexity at Hamoud, who appeared to be floating before her at the end of a dark tunnel.
"For how long?" he sighed.
"For how long?" she repeated plaintively.
He seemed to grow taller. His face, which had taken on a blank aspect, resembled the faces of those who, in Oriental tales, stand waiting to fulfil a wish too sinister to have become an audible command. In that instant she saw all problems rushing to their solution, except one; all treasures recaptured, except the peace of conscience. She struggled as one might to awake from some hypnotic spell in which one has been assailed with frightful suggestions. She sprang up and transfixed him with a look.
"Go! Do as I say!"
He bowed and departed.
At once she became so weary that she could hardly reach her couch.
"What am I to do?" she asked herself in a lost voice.
Somewhere, no doubt, there was another Lilla, sane, able to act as well as to think, capable of solving even this dilemma. But that other Lilla remained far away, perhaps in the realm of those who, with an Alexandrian gesture, ruthlessly cut the knot of interwoven scruples, and for a brief season triumphed over the accidents of life! Raising her eyes in despair, she saw trembling on the ceiling a ray of light that resembled the blade of a spear.
There descended upon her the full weight of her forebodings—the superstitious dread that was typical of her emotional defectiveness, and that had its origin, perhaps, in those two unhappy persons who had been her parents. Yet when she moaned, "Ah, Anna Zanidov!" it was with an accent of reproach as keen as though the prophetess of a tragedy must be the cause of it.
The sunshine was dissolving the luxurious room. There came to her, like a dullness from a drug, the fancy that this world had no existence except that with which her credulity had endowed it. "All my life I have been dreaming this dream in which Lawrence and David, Hamoud and Anna Zanidov, America and Africa, are figments. Presently I shall wake and wonder why all these figments gave me so much pain."
She floated deliciously in this thought. She reflected, with a vague smile:
"I must go and restore the appearance of happiness to that poor phantom downstairs."
Lilla descended the staircase in the transplendency of the many colored windowpanes. The red of rubies, the blue of sapphires, the green of emeralds, enwrapped her slim body that was still phenomenally moving in its habitual harmoniousness. The serene progress of her person through prismatic light, the smile that passed unchanged through rays of varying resplendence, added another stanza to the poetry of flesh, a stanza differing from all the rest, however, in its ominous quality of strangeness. For now, bathed in the fortuitous magnificence of the stained glass, she shone in herself with an unearthly bloom, as if an abnormality that had always permeated her seductiveness were now at its apogee—as if, with no one to witness, she had reached the utter expression of her loveliness, which blazed forth for an instant completely, before dissolving in this strange element that mingled with it.
The multicolored lights released her. A pale, cold atmosphere closed round her as she traversed the sunless hall and living room. Beyond the doorway of the study this cold pallor rested on the figure in the wheel chair—the phantom because of which that other phantom was traveling toward an exotic semblance of death. He had not heard her footsteps. He remained with his head bowed forward, a prey, no doubt, to such anxiety as ghosts experience. He expressed perfectly that helplessness with which, when she had believed him to be real, he had laid hold of her pity.
The outlines of all objects round her were clear and hard: everything had assumed a look of preternatural density. She stood paralyzed by the thought, "It is not illusion. It is reality."
He was looking at her.
What did he read in her face? Had he, too, heard the command that seemed to have been shouted in her ears, "Tell him! Strike and be free!"
"What is it?" he whispered.
Her lips parted, writhed, and uttered no sound. She was struck dumb, no doubt by the feeling that if she spoke she would blurt out everything, in obedience to that atrocious command.
All at once she seemed to have flames in her eyes. Everything had turned the color of gold. She stood with her head thrown back, her face changed by anguish; then she fled through that golden dazzle. On the staircase the many-colored rays reached out to hold her, to restore her to that exquisite transfiguration; she passed through them in a flash; and indeed they could now have enhanced, instead of beauty, only the triumph of that element which had made her beauty strange. She stretched herself upon her couch, on her back, in the attitude of the dead. She pronounced with an extreme rapidity, in muffled tones:
"I am on the ship——Faster! Faster!"
She uttered a cry that was heard all over the house.
When Hamoud and the servants came running, they found her rigid; but while they were telephoning for the nearest physician the convulsions began. Tossing about, she showed intense fear of all who tried to approach her. The women ran from the room. Hamoud remained, rigid at the foot of the bed, his face a dingy white, staring before him as one who meditates on some immense, intolerable injury. When her cries burst forth, he laid his hand upon his dagger, as if against these invisible forces, these jinn from the Pit, that had taken possession of her.
The physician arrived to find the convulsions ended. Hamoud, now gripping his dagger as if he would presently escape this scene by plunging the blade into his breast, uttered:
"Dying?"
"It will pass," the physician answered, with a movement of reproof.
Hamoud, afflicted by disbelief, by a despair that swept away his fatalism, by a fury that called for revenge, bared his teeth and demanded:
"I shall bring him? We show her to him?"
"Who?"
Hamoud glanced malignantly toward the floor.
"Hardly!"
The physician resumed his contemplation of the patient, who had descended into a stupor that was to last for days.