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."
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.
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'sRosen 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.
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.
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.
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."
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!"
"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.
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.
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 predicted came to pass. Including three deaths; that is, two besides——"
"One must believe that she sees it," Lilla assented, and, frozen by her thoughts, shuddered violently. "Yes, too uncanny! She did well to give it up."
"Especially as people were getting to be afraid of her," said Fanny Brassfield, while passing through the front doorway.