Sacrifice | Page 2

distilled.
Sometimes, at a moment of perspicacity, the father's face was distorted
by a spasm of remorse. Looking at his child, he was thinking:
"By what right have we done this?"
For that matter, he was always oppressed by miseries foreign to normal
men. For instance, he fluctuated between the ardors of a pagan and an
anchorite, at one hour reëmbracing aestheticism, at another fleeing back
to a bleak sanctuary where he hoped to escape some vague, immense
reproach. Too complex for an irrevocable decision, too weak to stand
firm against the pressure either of pantheism or an absolutely spiritual
idea, he was an insignificant creature worried and torn between two
vast antagonists.

Then, too, he was afflicted with a frequent symptom of neuroticism,
namely, superstition; and this superstition was sharpened by the usual
morbid forebodings--the characteristic expectations of calamity.
He accepted the idea that there were persons who could fathom the
destinies of others, that the palm of one's hand was cryptic with one's
future fortunes, and that the remotest planets had an influence on one's
life. Furtively, then, as one might enter a place dedicated to some
shameful mystery, this erudite, handsome, wretched gentleman slipped
into the sanctums of the diviners, where, with a feeling of degradation
and imbecility, yet with a pounding heart, he listened to prophecies
uttered by the aid of playing cards, horoscopes, and crystal balls.
All he asked was some assurance that he would presently find peace.
They all promised him that this desire of his would soon be realized.
Perhaps they would have called it realized by that crash of trains in the
night, which he and his wife hardly heard before their fine, restless
bodies were bereft of life.
So one day, when Lilla was six years old, the drawing-room suddenly
blossomed with white roses. Next morning the orphan was taken away
by Aunt Althea Balbian to another house, on lower Fifth Avenue.
CHAPTER II
Miss Balbian's house provided an appropriate setting for its pale,
aristocratic, chastely fervent owner. But its sedate, antiquated, brick
exterior--unaltered since the presidency of Andrew Jackson--afforded
hardly a hint of the conservative beauty that pervaded it.
Here the glitter of old chandeliers fell upon the suave outlines of
colonial furniture upholstered with sage green and mulberry-colored
fabrics, chimney pieces of mellow marble carved into graceful
flourishes and bearing on their shelves quaint bric-a-brac, family
portraits in frames that it would have been a sacrilege to furbish
up--ladies dressed in the fashion of 1812, French and English
gentlemen in antique uniforms, a few of these likenesses doubly

precious because they were painted so naïvely. But this
"early-American" effect was adulterated by objects that Miss Balbian
had acquired on her travels, such as medieval chalices, coffers covered
with vellum and encrusted with jewels, and a few authenticated
paintings from that period when the men of Italy, at a breath of
inspiration from the Athenian tomb, perceived, instead of the glamour
of a celestial paradise, the gorgeousness of this world.
In this gracefully puritanical atmosphere, these latter treasures, imbued
with a disturbing alien richness, were like thoughts that a woman,
hedged round by innumerable obscure oppressions, might gather from
afar and store away in her heart.
Lilla, in this environment, became a juvenile epicurean, precocious in
aesthetic judgment, intolerant of everything that was not exquisite. Her
opinions amused and touched her aunt, who, for a while, derived from
that imitation a nearly maternal pride. Miss Althea Balbian redoubled
her efforts to form Lilla according to her most exalted ideas; and, as a
result, she implanted in that little charge still more complexities of
impulse--a greater sensitiveness to the lures of mortal beauty, together
with something of her own recoil from all the ultimate consequences of
that sensitiveness.
In fine, the devoted woman was preparing Lilla unwittingly for an
accentuation of the conflict that already had been prefigured in her
parents.
The child was so fragile-looking, there was about her so strange an air
of sensibility, that many persons who had known her father and mother
shook their heads in pity. Some suggested that she ought to be reared in
the country, to play hard all day "close to nature." But the play of other
children exhausted her, as if she, too, possessed "only a limited amount
of nervous energy." She had nervous headaches and feverish spells
from no apparent cause. When the weather was changing, or when a
thunder storm impended, the governess found it hard to manage her.
Then, suddenly, certain odors and sounds filled her with indistinct
visions of felicity. At night, when there was music in the house, she
crept from her bed to the staircase, and sat listening with burning

cheeks and icy hands.
Next day there came over her an immense, hazy discontent with
everything. And her tragic