Nearly every spring, Aunt Althea, craving "her beloved Europe," took
Lilla abroad.
Escorted by an elderly courier who had the appearance of a gentleman in
waiting at the Vatican, they moved with royal deliberation, patronizing
luxurious hotels, celebrated landscapes, notable art collections. The
governess was supplemented with the best local teachers of music and
languages; but it was Aunt Althea, with her proud fastidiousness, her
eclecticism at once virginal and ardent, who set the keynote for
Lilla's education.
All the young girl's inherited repugnances were enhanced. All her
sensibilities were aggravated. With the lapse of time and the
expansion of her world, her impassionable nature vibrated still more
extravagantly, at the most subtle stimuli, between the poles of
happiness and pain--which two sensations sometimes seemed to her
identical.
Now she was lovelier than her mother had ever been--a tall, fragile,
pale brown creature whose carefully composed lips, whose deliberately
slow grace, only half concealed that inner intensity of hers.
She had, indeed, the exceptional, agitating look--that softly fatal
aspect---which is seen in those who are destined to extraordinary
lives. It was as though strange, unprecipitated events were clinging
round her slender body like an aura: the promises of unparalleled
adventures in love, perhaps also in tragedy. Before her twentieth year
she had given this presentiment to many men, who, with a thrill that
may have been partly fear, longed to be the cause of those raptures,
and to accept the perils.
In an alley of Constantine, in fierce sunshine that oppressed and
stimulated her delicate tissues, she stood before an old Arab who,
seated on the ground, told her fortune by strewing sand on a board.
"You will be loved by men," he said, after contemplating apathetically
the curlicues of sand. "And will be the death of men," he added,
closing his eyes as if bored; for out there, in the mountains beyond
Constantine, love and death, as partners in the fates of fair women,
were commonplace.
Before returning to America, Aunt Althea always managed a visit to
Rome. On her first day there, the spinster drove out alone, returning
at twilight with her eyelids swollen and red. She had been, she said,
to the English cemetery; but she declared that nobody whom she had
known was buried there.
They visited American ladies who had married into the Roman nobility.
In those historic palaces the great rooms were cool, dim, and resonant,
the women's voices died away in space between the tapestried walls and
the ceilings frescoed with pagan deities. Through the tall doorway
entered young men with medieval faces, in quest of a cup of tea.
To Lilla these descendants of medieval despots seemed curiously dwarfed
by their surroundings.
But her eyes were apt to turn wistful when she passed the shabby cafés
where famous artists had sat brooding over the masterpieces that she
admired. Then she thought of Bohemian studios at dusk, and of geniuses
aquiver, like dynamos, with the powers that had taken possession of
them. She envied the women whose lives were united to theirs in an
atmosphere where beauty was always being recreated, who basked in that
radiance of art which love, perhaps, had inspired.
Of all the arts it was music that cast over Lilla the strongest spell.
During the winter season in New York, she haunted concert halls where
celebrated musicians played their works. The new music, however,
strident with the echoes of industrialism, dissonant with the tumult of
great cities, repelled her. She turned instinctively toward the
harmonious romanticism and idealism of a previous age. She felt that
the compositions of Schumann and Schubert were the language that had
always been imprisoned in her heart, that could never reach her lips,
but that she now heard, by a miracle, freed and in its perfection.
When the concert was over, she could hardly prevent herself from
joining the women who surged toward the author of those sounds, as if
impelled by an inexorable force--or possibly by an idea that they must
mingle their lives with the life of the stranger who could so interpret
their souls, make clear to them their secrets, and give them, at least
momentarily, a coherent glimpse of their ideals.
One afternoon, in the exit of a concert hall, Lilla met Brantome, a
critic of music.
He was a robust-looking old Frenchman with white hair and the mustaches
of a Viking, displaying a leonine countenance out of which gazed a pair
of eyes that seemed to have been made tragical by some profound
chagrin. In his youth, a student in Paris, he had written some scores
of songs, half a dozen sonatas, and a symphony. These efforts, though
technically brilliant, had soon passed into oblivion. After a long
while, during which nobody had heard a sound from him, Brantome had
popped up in the United States to begin his critical career. Now he
was courted not only in artistic circles but also in the fashionable
world, where one might sometimes see his haggard old face relentlessly
revealed beneath fine chandeliers, ironical and weary, as if crushed
beneath the combined weight of disillusionment and renown.
At sight of Lilla he stopped in the concert hall doorway; and, when he
had peered at her closely, he rumbled in her ear:
"I see that this afternoon of bad music has not fooled you. You don't
wear the look that I discovered on your face the other day, when they
had been playing Schumann."
"Oh, but Schumann!" And with a nervous laugh she said, "If I had been
Clara Wieck----"
"You would have married him just as she did, eh? Ah, well, maybe there
will be other Robert Schumanns. In fact, two years ago I found a
certain young man--but now he is dying."
He lost the smile that had come to him at this contact. With a shrug
he passed on, leaving with her the thought of beauty enmeshed by death.
She wondered who this young man was, who might have been another Robert
Schumann, but now was dying.