One night when she was expecting David to dinner, she turned round,
from arranging some flowers in a vase in the drawing-room, to see
Cornelius Rysbroek in the doorway. He had come, he declared, to "take
her out somewhere, give her a breath of fresh air, and make her listen
to reason."
"But I'm dining here, Cornie."
"Alone?"
"No."
Nevertheless, he sat down with a dogged look.
"What's to be the end of this?" he demanded. "I suppose you know what
a lot of chatter this nonsense of yours has stirred up? They're even
saying that you're engaged to him. It's perfectly monstrous."
It was his old tone of voice, throaty, quaintly didactic, precise from
spite and yet muffled by rage; but it was not the same face. It was,
instead, the face of a desperate, possibly dangerous man, who had
brooded over this monomania in the gorges of the great Chinese river,
in the filthy yamens of barbarous mountain towns, in the forts of
hill-robbers who practiced extraordinary cruelties. He had fought his
way through rapids whose very names were ominous--"The King of Hell's
Slide," the "Last Look at Home," the "Place Where the Soul Itself Is
Lost." He had sat with the free people of Nosuland, the enemies of the
Chinese, eating from bowls of camphorwood raw sheep's heart minced with
pepper, sometimes expecting permission to go free, sometimes sure of
being tortured with the split bamboo. At last they had sent him back
with gifts. Then, rushing home to her, he had been led by her greeting
to believe that his miseries were ended.
What a mockery of hope! On those journeys of his, roused from his
acquiescence in ill-health and failure, moved by a savage
determination, he had accomplished the impossible, in body and
character had exceeded his limitations. He had taken as his pattern
the rival whom she had preferred. He had built up in himself the
counterfeits of those qualities by which Lawrence Teck had won her.
Yet now he must see her devoting herself to a man who was the
antithesis of all that she had previously preferred.
It was unendurable! But how was he to escape it? By hating her? Yes,
surely she was worthy of his hatred, heartless, cruel, the cause of all
these innumerable torments from which he sometimes got a moment of
madness.
"What do I see in you?" he said between his teeth.
She had on a copper-colored gown hung over her slender shoulders by two
straps. Maybe because its hue was a deeper shade of the same color as
her hair, her eyes, and even her pale-brown skin, the costume seemed
part of her. He could see nothing about her that was not exquisite--no
detail from which to build up a remedial distaste. So he ground out at
her:
"Your nature? What rot!--as if that ever attracted me, with its false
pretenses of heart, its instabilities and downright treacheries. What
else do you offer? This that I see? What we human fools call beauty?
What is beauty?"
She sat down in despair, observing that even his jaws, under his heavy
mustache, looked more salient. It was almost laughable, she thought;
but she was far from laughing. Every moment she expected to hear the
doorbell.
He continued ferociously:
"In the beginning these arms and legs of yours were nothing but
appliances for hanging from trees and running away from wild beasts.
Your body was merely a convenient case for a machine that kept your
life ticking along. How does one get the idea that all this is
good-looking? Ages ago men decided to think so for reasons that have
nothing to do with esthetics; they passed the hoax on, and in time
these physical features got themselves surrounded with a perfect fog of
sentimental and romantic balderdash. Take your face. Your nose is
bridged in that so-called ravishing way in order to let a stream of air
into your lungs. Your eyebrows--how many sonnets have been written on
eyebrows!--are there, in the first place, to keep the perspiration from
running into your eyes. Your lips are merely a binding against the
friction of food. How grotesque to find such expedients beautiful! No
doubt in other planets there are creatures that you'd call monsters;
and they'd call you hideous. In fact, there can't be any such thing as
beauty."
"No doubt you're right, Cornie dear," she responded, looking down at
her beautiful hands.
"And what's it all for?" he ejaculated, in a stupefied kind of horror.
"All this sordid consolidation of flesh and blood, this disgusting
hallucination of attractiveness? All for----"
"I know," she assented. "More Lillas, ad infinitum. Isn't it
tiresome?"
He jumped up, with a groan:
"I could kill you!"
"Too late. You ought to have done it when we were children together."
"Yes, too late, too late."
He wandered round the room, slapping one fist into the other, glaring
at the walls, from which old-time ladies simpered vapidly at him. His
brain seemed to be whirling round in his skull; his vision became
blurred; and he had a dreadful apprehension of losing contact with
normality. But normality, too--what was it? Normality was being
natural! He came toward her; she rose and recoiled; but he caught hold
of her arms above the elbows, and held her fast when she swayed back
from him with a long shimmer of her copper-colored gown.
"You're hurting me, Cornie. And there's the bell," she muttered, her
heart going dead.
He released her with the gesture of a man who hurls an enemy over a
precipice. He gasped:
"One of these days!"
And with a livid smile he left the room as David Verne appeared in the
doorway, in his wheel chair, propelled by Hamoud.
But David, too, was nearly unrecognizable.
"What is it?" she ejaculated, and turned to catch her reflection in a
mirror. She saw herself in a curious aspect also, white and a little
wild. One of her shoulder straps had slipped down across her arm.
"What a dress!" she said.
David carefully pronounced the words:
"That was Rysbroek, wasn't it?"
"Yes; I've known him since we were kiddies."
"I remember your saying so."
"He brought me bad news," she added, to imply, "That's it."
"Ah, I'm sorry."
There was no life in his voice.
In the dining room the servants moved noiselessly, as though fearful of
disturbing the long silences. A sickly breeze stirred the curtains of
apricot velvet. The brass band in Washington Square was playing
selections from Verdi; the long-drawn wails of the horns crept in
through the windows like snatches of a dirge. She was reduced to
speaking of the sultry air. A thunderstorm was brewing?
"The air will be clearer," he assented.
He ate nothing. When Hamoud had wheeled him back to the drawing-room,
he asked:
"Do you mind if I go? A splitting headache. This weather."
"You shouldn't have stayed in town, you see," she returned
automatically.
"Maybe I'll go up to Westchester for a week or so." His dull eyes
rested upon the picture that she made as she stood uneasily before him,
with an appearance of guilt, her figure like a shaft of flame springing
upward from the hearth, her brown head aureoled by the tempestuous
canvas of Bronzino. "Besides," he concluded, "keeping you here all
this while a prisoner----"
"How can you be so unkind?"
"At least I'm not ungrateful."
He made a sign to Hamoud, who stole forward to take his post behind the
wheel chair; and the two faces regarded her with the same brave, secret
look, the same queer impassiveness that was like a deafening cry. Her
nerves began to fail her. With an unaccountable feeling of perfidy she
straightened his cravat, while murmuring:
"I'll see you first, of course, dear?"
"Of course."
But he neither saw her nor telephoned before his departure; nor did he
write to her from the house in Westchester County. On the third day
she went to Brantome, who said:
"I was coming to see you."
Fixing her with his tragical old eyes, he informed her that he had
received a long-distance call from David Verne's physician, who had
telephoned from the house in Westchester County. In three days David
seemed to have lost all that he had gained in these months. For some
reason he was letting go of life.
"Why is that? Is it because he is letting go of you?"
The Frenchman's leonine countenance took on a hostile expression. He
persisted:
"Eh? Is it you who have done this?"
And Lilla understood that to this old devotee of the arts she had
ceased to be anything except a means to an end.
He seemed contemptible to her with his red-rimmed, fiery eyes, his
Viking mustaches that had turned truculent, his whole aspect of
animosity at this last collapse of hope. And of a sudden she divined
the true basis of those hopes of his--the longing for at least some
vicarious creation, the desire to escape, in part, his own sense of
defeat by aiding, and, therefore, sharing, the triumphs of another. He
put himself in her path: he would not let her go. He was preparing to
hurl at her, who knew what reproaches.
"Oh, get out of my way!" she cried at last, in a breaking voice. She
pushed him aside so sharply that he tottered back on his heels. She
rushed out of the room, downstairs, into her car.
The limousine sped northward into the country.
She watched the placid fields, the wooded hill-tops, the lanes that
wound away between walls of sumac. She thought of another unexpected
ride toward another crisis of life. Her heart was beating wildly; her
breathing was labored; her hands twitched open and shut. She took the
mirror from its rack, and saw her pupils extraordinarily dilated, so
that her eyes appeared black.
The car left the highway, to enter a park of well-grown trees. She
caught sight of the low, simple mass of the house; its walls of gray
plaster rising between two clumps of evergreens, beyond a garden laid
out in grassy stages, where flagstone paths wound away between beds of
heliotrope. On the terrace, under an awning of striped canvas, stood a
man in a dark-blue robe that opened down the front to reveal a white
under robe confined with a scarlet sash. He had a close-fitting
skullcap on his head, of white, embroidered linen. He was
Hamoud-bin-Said.
She passed him without a second glance, and found herself face to face
with the physician, who was just starting back to town.
Dr. Fallows began to talk to her judicially and suavely, with a tone of
regret, but possibly with an undertone of contentment: for this case,
after having immensely bewildered him for a time, was now, at last,
imitating all the proper symptoms again. The patient's recent
improvement had been due, no doubt, to one of those rallies that may
interrupt the progress of many diseases--though in a case of this sort,
whether due to a functional or a pathological cause, Dr. Fallows had
never seen nor heard of an arrest--much less a diminution--of the
general weakness.
But now the relapse was complete.
She was aware of a lot of fluted wainscotting around her, and, beyond
Dr. Fallows' head, a Tudor staircase in silhouette against a large bay
window of many leaded panes. Some of these panes, of stained glass in
heraldic patterns, gleamed against a passing cloud like rubies,
emeralds, and sapphires that had lost their fire. Dr. Fallows still
blocked her way--almost another Brantome!--engrossed in his pessimistic
peroration, his visage of an urbane, successful man full of complicated
satisfactions and regrets. Behind him the staircase was suddenly
bathed in sunshine; all the panes of stained glass became sparkling and
rich; and a sheaf of prismatic rays stretched down, through the gloom
of the hall, toward Lilla's upturned face.
She sped up the staircase.
All that she saw was the four-post bedstead canopied with cretonne, the
face on the pillow. At her approach, a thrill passed through the air
pervaded by the stagnation of his spirit. He opened his eyes.
"You! I thought I had unchained you."
She knelt down beside him, and asked:
"What have I done to deserve this?"
He managed to respond:
"You deserve more, perhaps--a worldful of blessings. But this release
is all that I have to give you."
"Do you think I care for that man? I even hate him now, if it's he who
has brought you to this."
He looked like a soul that sees an angel hovering on the threshold of
hell, promising salvation.
"Oh, if I could believe you!"
And all the propulsions that had brought this moment to pass now forced
from her lips:
"I am here to prove it in a way that you can never doubt."
That day, at twilight, she standing beside his bed, they were married.