In the morning, when Brantome had departed for the city, Lilla said to
Hamoud:
"Please tell the servants that if any one should ask for me I'm not at
home."
Soon afterward, while David was at work shut up in the study, and Lilla
was trying to read a book in the living room, the doorbell rang. When
she heard Hamoud, in the hall, speaking quickly in Arabic, her body
relaxed. She thought:
"He has found one of his own people. I am glad. He must have been so
lonely all this while!"
She heard another voice, deeper and more vibrant. "Yes, Arabic," she
said, smiling contentedly. Of a sudden, for some inexplicable reason,
she felt as if she were going to faint.
She raised her eyes from the book, and saw a tall man with a black
beard, standing in the hall doorway, watching her.
She was seized with the paralyzing chill that comes to those who seem
to be confronted by apparitions of the dead. Her conviction that she
saw no living man was strengthened by his physical alteration. His
black beard, which covered even his cheekbones, masked a shriveled
countenance. His eyes had receded into their sockets; his lips were
stretched over his teeth; and the swarthiness of his skin had become
sulphurous. The stillness of his attitude, and his blank, attentive
look, completed the effect of unreality.
Then she thought, "Perhaps it's I who am dead." Her surroundings
melted away. All her obligations related to these surroundings melted
also. She began to float toward him, over the floor that she no longer
felt beneath her feet, so that her disembodied spirit might be merged
with this other spirit. Her half-raised hands prepared to cling to
him--as though one phantom could cling fast to another! But abruptly
an invisible force seemed to check her progress mid-way; and she stood
before him with her arms, that had meant to embrace him, lifted in what
appeared to be a gesture of horrified denial.
There was no change in his face disfigured by unhappiness and illness.
The air round them began to tremble with strains of music--harmonies
mounting up toward a climax of intolerable beauty. It came, this
perfect epitome of love, from behind the closed doors of the study,
where David Verne was playing as never before.
"Lilla!"
A profound silence followed the call that neither of these two had
uttered. And from behind the closed doors, David, transported by his
exultation, cried out again to the Muse:
"Lilla! Lilla!"
Swaying aside, she sank down into a chair. "Oh," she breathed, looking
at the rug as though some very precious object had slipped from her
hands and broken at her feet. As she sat there, a huddle of
coffee-colored fabric and pallid flesh, the sunlight burst through the
clouds to smite her all over with its glory, igniting her hair, turning
her face into incandescent gold.
Lawrence Teck watched this transformation.
He became natural--ready to fight for this woman, though still
believing that he despised everything about her except her loveliness.
All at once he was like a man who stands on the edge of a chasm, who
has an idea that he may be able to leap across, from a bitterness
endured alone to a bitterness shared with another. He took the leap.
He put her to the test.
She saw him walking across the living room toward the closed doors of
the study.
Noiselessly, as swift as her dreadful thought, she rose, traversed the
room, passed him, and whirled round against the door. She flung out
her arms in a movement that nailed her against the panels as to a
cross. She could not speak; but he read on her lips, as if she had
cried it in his face:
"No!"
The music began again, at first soft and simply melodious, soon complex
and thunderous. The door at her back vibrated from the sound, and the
quivering penetrated her body and her brain. She was filled with a new
horror, at the new, miraculous strength evinced in that playing.
And again that voice exulting in the study:
"Lilla? Oh, where are you?"
"Come away from here," she muttered, giving Lawrence an awful stare,
snatching at his sleeve, dragging him after her across the room, her
feet as heavy as if fleeing through a nightmare. Now, straining at his
arm, she was in the wainscotted hall before the stone mantelpiece that
bore up the defiant knight. Now she reached the fernery. The palms
leaped back into place behind them as she collapsed upon the red
cushions of the settee.
He stood watching her as before, erect, breathing, alive, even though
he lay smashed in the depths of that chasm which she had prevented him
from clearing.