Of all her suitors the most persistent was Cornelius Rysbroek.
In their childhood he had drawn for her amusement Spanish galleons, the
domes of Mogul palaces, and a fantastic damsel, that he called a
bayadere, languishing on a balcony. His thin, sallow little face bent
close to the printed page, he had read _Ivanhoe_ to her. At parties,
it was she to whom he had brought the choicest favors.
Departing to school, he had addressed her in melancholy
verses--doggerel decorated with references to flowers turned to dust,
setting suns that would never rise again, countless symbols of hopeless
passion and impending tragedy.
But, as an anti-climax, he always showed up alive in vacation time.
During his college years he had apparently forgotten her, had made
himself conspicuous by some highly pessimistic theories, and had tried
the Byronic gesture. Then, after Commencement, meeting her
unexpectedly, he had turned a yellowish white.
Now Cornelius Rysbroek had become a lean, neat hypochondriac, highly
cultivated, with fine instincts and excruciating aversions, bored by
his leisure, yet incapable of action, and inconstant in every
aspiration except this love of his. Whenever she refused him he sailed
away, after threatening to plunge into some wild, dramatic waste, but
always compromising on the easiest, beaten path. He returned sadder
and sallower than ever, having contracted in his imagination some new,
obscure ailment, and with his old ailment, his longing for Lilla, still
gnawing at his heart.
But Lilla, so fragile and moody, dreamed of physical strength and a
triumphant will.
Where was he?
She was enervated by melancholy, scorched by impatience, then chilled
by an indefinable foreboding, just as her father had been. Putting on
a figured veil to blur her blush of shame, she slipped away to visit
the soothsayers that fashionable women patronized. In a shadowy room
hung with Oriental curtains, the shrewd crystal gazer informed her that
all would soon be well. "A great love was in store for her."
She kept in her desk a magazine picture of Lawrence Teck, the explorer,
whom she had never met, but whose likeness, singular amid innumerable
presentments of the human face, had arrested her first glance and
fascinated her mind.
His aquiline countenance, darkened and corrugated by fierce suns,
expressed that virility which kept driving him back, for his
contentment, into remote and dangerous places. But his salient
features suggested also the patience and wisdom of those who have
suffered hardship and derived extraordinary thoughts from solitude. It
pleased her to note that his was the brow of a scholar--he had written
learned volumes about the jungle peoples, was the most picturesque
authority on the Islamic world since Burton, and his monographs on
African diseases had added to his romantic reputation the luster of
benevolence. She liked to picture him as finding in his travels and
work the stimulation that less serious, aimless men might seek in love.
When she read his books, there unrolled before her the esoteric corners
of the desert, the strange charm and depravity of little-known Oriental
cities, the deadly richness of equatorial forests, peopled by human
beasts whose claws were hammered steel, whose fangs were poisoned
arrows, and who carried in their thick skulls the condensed miasma of
their hiding places.
She seemed to see him passing through those physical dangers and
corroding mental influences, a superior being of unalterable health and
sanity, perhaps protected because of a grand destiny still unrevealed
to him. She longed to participate in that destiny, or, at any rate, to
be responsible somehow for it.
"Where are you? What are your thoughts?" she would whisper, staring at
the likeness of this peculiarly congenial stranger.
Late at night, at that hour when bizarre fancies and actions may seem
natural, she would ask him:
"Don't you know that I exist? Then I must make you know it."
So she tried to cast forth into space a flood of feeling strong enough
to reach him--a projection of her identity, her appearance, and her
infatuation. All her secret ardors that had never been so strongly
focused upon a definite personality found their centering point in him,
whose imagined nature seemed to be so emphatically what she needed to
appease and complete her nature. She was like one of those antique
sorceresses who would cast over distant hearts the spells that must
inevitably recoil upon their makers.
But when she had remained for a long while motionless and tense, she
rose wearily, with a low laugh of disillusionment and ridicule.
Little by little her thoughts of him were obscured by other thoughts,
by weakly apposite conjectures that had different men as their objects.
And when different men made love to her, once or twice, maybe at a
conjunction of exquisite scenery, music, and impatience, of confused
longings and eloquent persuasion, she was tempted to consent. But just
in time she stilled that tremulous smile, and averted that dizzy look
in the depths of which lurked a fatal sweetness.
Then, when life seemed to her unbearably monotonous, she went to a
week-end party at the Brassfields' house in the country.