Sacrifice

Sacrifice, by Stephen French
Whitman

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Title: Sacrifice
Author: Stephen French Whitman

Release Date: October 9, 2007 [eBook #22928]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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SACRIFICE***
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SACRIFICE
by
STEPHEN FRENCH WHITMAN
Author of "Predestined," Etc.

[Frontispiece: "COME CLOSER, I WANT TO LOOK AT YOU."]

D. Appleton and Company New York :: 1922 :: London
Copyright, 1922, by D. Appleton and Company
Copyright, 1921-1922, by The Ridgway Company

SACRIFICE
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
Lilla Delliver's parents, killed in a railway accident, left their child a
legacy other than the fortune that the New York newspapers mentioned
in the obituaries.
The mother had been tall, blonde, rather wildly handsome, with the
look of one of those neurotic queens who suppress under a proud
manner many psychic disturbances. Painfully fastidious in her tastes,
she had avoided every unnecessary contact with mediocrity. Reclining

on a couch in her boudoir, she read French novels saturated with an
exquisite sophistication. Then, letting the book slip from her fingers,
she gazed into space, as listless as a lady immured in a seraglio on the
Bosphorous. At night, if the opera was Tristan, she went down to her
limousine with the furtive eagerness of a woman escaping from
monotony into a secret world. She drove home with feverish cheeks,
and when her husband spoke to her she gave him the blank stare of a
somnambulist.
After a busy social season she was liable to melancholia. She sat by the
window in a charming negligée, paler than a camellia, hardly turning
her head when, at twilight, her child was led in to kiss her.
Recovering, somehow, she traveled.
On those journeys every possible hardship was neutralized by wealth.
Yet even for her the sea could not always be calm, or the skies of the
Midi and the Riviera blue. In Venice, at midnight, the soft, hoarse cries
of the gondoliers made her toss fretfully on her canopied bed. In
Switzerland, as dawn flushed the snow peaks, awakened by the virile
voices of the guides, she started up from her pillow in a daze of
resentment and perverse antipathy.
She calmed herself by listening to the sermons of swamis in yellow
robes, and by sitting in cathedrals with her eyes fixed upon the splendor
of the altar.
Wherever they traveled, her husband went about inquiring for new
physicians--"specialists in neurasthenia." But then he usually felt the
need of a physician's services also.
He was taller than his wife, a brownish, meager, handsome man with
dark circles round his eyes. A doctor had once told him that some
persons never had more than a limited amount of nervous energy; so he
was always trying to conserve his share, as if the prolongation of his
idle life were very important. Yet he was not dull. He had written
several essays, on classical subjects, that were privately circulated in
sumptuous bindings. He played Brahms with unusual talent. But certain

colors and perfumes set his nerves on edge, while the sight of blood, if
more than a drop or two, made him feel faint.
Disillusioned from travel, because they had viewed all those fair, exotic
scenes through the blurred auras of their emotional infirmities, he and
his wife returned to their home in New York. There they were protected
against all contact with ugliness, all ignoble influences, all sources of
unhappiness except themselves.
It was a stately old house--for two hundred years the Dellivers and the
Balbians had been stately families--a house always rather dim, its
shadows aglimmer with richness, and here and there a beam of light
illuminating some flawless, precious object. It was a house of silent
servants, of faces imprinted with a gracious weariness, of beautifully
modulated low voices, of noble reticence. Yet all the while the place
quivered from secret transports of anguish.
In this atmosphere Lilla, the child, was like a delicate instrument on
which are recorded, to be ultimately reproduced, myriad vibrations too
subtle for appreciation by the five senses. Or, one might say, the small,
apparent form that this man and this woman had created in their
likeness--as it were a fatal sublimation of their blended physical
selves--became the fragile vessel into which, drop by drop, the essences
of all their most unfortunate emotions were being