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 civilisees. 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 naivete, 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—a la maniere 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, a la maniere 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 cafe, 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 Oman Arab from Zanzibar.

Parr had found him in a Turkish cafe 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 Oman 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, "dad" and "ta," 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 Oman, 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 Sueden, 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?