Sacrifice | Page 8

the elements of the crystalization. And this foreigner, with her idol-like face and meager, rigid body, her aspect of long acquaintance with the very essence of materiality, became the ageless oracle, the rewarder of humanity's incorrigible credulity. So, like the bejeweled princesses in the Mesopotamian temples, the Latin ladies who had crept trembling into the Aventine caves, the Renaissance beauties who, in the huts of witches, had turned whiter than their ruffs, Lilla remained motionless, her gaze fixed apprehensively on the clairvoyant.
The latter said:
"It will soon be plainer, for the moon is rising. No, what a nuisance! It is still very dark, because the moonlight is shut out by great masses of foliage, great tangles of vines. Such a place! Gigantic thickets, through which wild beasts are prowling, and above them the trunks of huge trees. Wait, I have found a path. It leads to a clearing in the midst of this forest. Here I can see much better. There are human beings here, and a feeling of sadness."
At a general stir, one of the ladies suggested nervously:
"Perhaps you'd better----"
But Madame Zanidov was saying:
"The people in the clearing are black savages. They sit round a body that is stretched on the ground and covered with a cloth. Is it the savages who are so sad? I think not. I cannot describe the one who lies in the midst of them. The cloth is drawn up to cover even his face. But I feel that it is some one who has loved you. He is dead. That is to say, he will be dead when the scene that I am describing is realized; but now he is alive----"
Lilla, raising her eyes, saw in the doorway, with Fanny Brassfield, a tall man, a stranger, whose countenance was aquiline and swarthy. It was Lawrence Teck, the explorer.
CHAPTER VIII
In the music room some musicians were playing a waltz; but Lilla and Lawrence Teck were walking on the terrace.
She said to herself, "This is a dream"; for she had come to believe that only in dreams did one realize, even in faint counterpart, one's deepest desires. She stood still. The world--this new world drenched in an unprecedented quality of moonlight--gradually became distinct. She gave him, through that veil of silvery beams, a long look of verification.
As in his picture he seemed at once rugged and fine, resolute and gentle. He was very quiet, like one who has willed to be so; but a certain shyness remained in him, and presently announced itself to her. Whereupon, remembering that she was beautiful, and that her beauty had a way of troubling men, Lilla felt her own timidity transmuted into joy.
"Are your jungles better than this?" she asked.
"The charm of my jungles overlies a welter of stupid cruelty and deadly waste. Would it surprise you to know that I should like to see all the world as nobly ordered as this landscape?"
She did not grasp the meaning of the words, being too deeply occupied with seizing upon those syllables, those living tones, and dropping them one by one into the treasury of her heart.
Glancing down at the aquatic garden, he remarked:
"These three basins would please my Mohammedan friends, who like to see their flowers inverted in still water, like a mirage come true."
"Yes, no doubt they have their ideals."
"And often dream of them in very pleasant places."
He described certain gardens of the East. He made her see nests of color unexpectedly blooming in the midst of deserts, behind walls of sundried mud overgrown with Persian roses, and with airy pavilions mirrored in pools that were seldom darkened by a cloud. Under date palms the white-robed Arabs sat smoking. From time to time black slaves brought them coffee flavored with ambergris. After sundown, at the hour called "maghrib," when the sky was turning green, having performed their ceremonial ablutions, they prayed.
"For what?"
"Behind the formal words? Who knows? For whatever they desired most. Probably for something that nobody would suspect."
"And the women?" she ventured, looking at him sidewise.
In those remote walled towns they still remained invisible. Their minds, restricted to puerilities, had never grown up. Their bodies were so lax that their short weekly promenade to the cemetery exhausted them. Seated on cushions, they spent their time listening to cuckoo clocks and music boxes, smelling perfumes, putting their jewelry away in caskets, then bedizening themselves all over again. Their servants, who had known in childhood the hurly burly of caravanserais and slave markets, told them of a world where everybody was possessed by a thousand devils of ingenuity and wit. And those scented ladies with feeble flesh, hollow eyes, and the brains of parrots, after listening for a while in vague regret, all at once became bored. Whereupon they fell to playing parchesi and eating sweetmeats.
In such sheltered and languid