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SACRIFICE
by
STEPHEN FRENCH WHITMAN
Author of "Predestined," Etc.
[Frontispiece: "COME CLOSER, I WANT TO LOOK AT YOU."]
D. Appleton and Company
New York :: 1922 :: London
Copyright, 1922, by
D. Appleton and Company
Copyright, 1921-1922, by The Ridgway Company
SACRIFICE
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
Lilla Delliver's parents, killed in a railway accident, left their
child a legacy other than the fortune that the New York newspapers
mentioned in the obituaries.
The mother had been tall, blonde, rather wildly handsome, with the look
of one of those neurotic queens who suppress under a proud manner many
psychic disturbances. Painfully fastidious in her tastes, she had
avoided every unnecessary contact with mediocrity. Reclining on a
couch in her boudoir, she read French novels saturated with an
exquisite sophistication. Then, letting the book slip from her
fingers, she gazed into space, as listless as a lady immured in a
seraglio on the Bosphorous. At night, if the opera was _Tristan_, she
went down to her limousine with the furtive eagerness of a woman
escaping from monotony into a secret world. She drove home with
feverish cheeks, and when her husband spoke to her she gave him the
blank stare of a somnambulist.
After a busy social season she was liable to melancholia. She sat by
the window in a charming negligée, paler than a camellia, hardly
turning her head when, at twilight, her child was led in to kiss her.
Recovering, somehow, she traveled.
On those journeys every possible hardship was neutralized by wealth.
Yet even for her the sea could not always be calm, or the skies of the
Midi and the Riviera blue. In Venice, at midnight, the soft, hoarse
cries of the gondoliers made her toss fretfully on her canopied bed.
In Switzerland, as dawn flushed the snow peaks, awakened by the virile
voices of the guides, she started up from her pillow in a daze of
resentment and perverse antipathy.
She calmed herself by listening to the sermons of swamis in yellow
robes, and by sitting in cathedrals with her eyes fixed upon the
splendor of the altar.
Wherever they traveled, her husband went about inquiring for new
physicians--"specialists in neurasthenia." But then he usually felt
the need of a physician's services also.
He was taller than his wife, a brownish, meager, handsome man with dark
circles round his eyes. A doctor had once told him that some persons
never had more than a limited amount of nervous energy; so he was
always trying to conserve his share, as if the prolongation of his idle
life were very important. Yet he was not dull. He had written several
essays, on classical subjects, that were privately circulated in
sumptuous bindings. He played Brahms with unusual talent. But certain
colors and perfumes set his nerves on edge, while the sight of blood,
if more than a drop or two, made him feel faint.
Disillusioned from travel, because they had viewed all those fair,
exotic scenes through the blurred auras of their emotional infirmities,
he and his wife returned to their home in New York. There they were
protected against all contact with ugliness, all ignoble influences,
all sources of unhappiness except themselves.
It was a stately old house--for two hundred years the Dellivers and the
Balbians had been stately families--a house always rather dim, its
shadows aglimmer with richness, and here and there a beam of light
illuminating some flawless, precious object. It was a house of silent
servants, of faces imprinted with a gracious weariness, of beautifully
modulated low voices, of noble reticence. Yet all the while the place
quivered from secret transports of anguish.
In this atmosphere Lilla, the child, was like a delicate instrument on
which are recorded, to be ultimately reproduced, myriad vibrations too
subtle for appreciation by the five senses. Or, one might say, the
small, apparent form that this man and this woman had created in their
likeness--as it were a fatal sublimation of their blended physical
selves--became the fragile vessel into which, drop by drop, the
essences of all their most unfortunate emotions were being distilled.
Sometimes, at a moment of perspicacity, the father's face was distorted
by a spasm of remorse. Looking at his child, he was thinking:
"By what right have we done this?"
For that matter, he was always oppressed by miseries foreign to normal
men. For instance, he fluctuated between the ardors of a pagan and an
anchorite, at one hour reëmbracing aestheticism, at another fleeing
back to a bleak sanctuary where he hoped to escape some vague, immense
reproach. Too complex for an irrevocable decision, too weak to stand
firm against the pressure either of pantheism or an absolutely
spiritual idea, he was an insignificant creature worried and torn
between two vast antagonists.
Then, too, he was afflicted with a frequent symptom of neuroticism,
namely, superstition; and this superstition was sharpened by the usual
morbid forebodings--the characteristic expectations of calamity.
He accepted the idea that there were persons who could fathom the
destinies of others, that the palm of one's hand was cryptic with one's
future fortunes, and that the remotest planets had an influence on
one's life. Furtively, then, as one might enter a place dedicated to
some shameful mystery, this erudite, handsome, wretched gentleman
slipped into the sanctums of the diviners, where, with a feeling of
degradation and imbecility, yet with a pounding heart, he listened to
prophecies uttered by the aid of playing cards, horoscopes, and crystal
balls.
All he asked was some assurance that he would presently find peace.
They all promised him that this desire of his would soon be realized.
Perhaps they would have called it realized by that crash of trains in
the night, which he and his wife hardly heard before their fine,
restless bodies were bereft of life.
So one day, when Lilla was six years old, the drawing-room suddenly
blossomed with white roses. Next morning the orphan was taken away by
Aunt Althea Balbian to another house, on lower Fifth Avenue.