Sacrifice | Page 4

a critic
of music.
He was a robust-looking old Frenchman with white hair and the
mustaches of a Viking, displaying a leonine countenance out of which
gazed a pair of eyes that seemed to have been made tragical by some
profound chagrin. In his youth, a student in Paris, he had written some
scores of songs, half a dozen sonatas, and a symphony. These efforts,
though technically brilliant, had soon passed into oblivion. After a long
while, during which nobody had heard a sound from him, Brantome
had popped up in the United States to begin his critical career. Now he
was courted not only in artistic circles but also in the fashionable world,
where one might sometimes see his haggard old face relentlessly
revealed beneath fine chandeliers, ironical and weary, as if crushed
beneath the combined weight of disillusionment and renown.
At sight of Lilla he stopped in the concert hall doorway; and, when he

had peered at her closely, he rumbled in her ear:
"I see that this afternoon of bad music has not fooled you. You don't
wear the look that I discovered on your face the other day, when they
had been playing Schumann."
"Oh, but Schumann!" And with a nervous laugh she said, "If I had been
Clara Wieck----"
"You would have married him just as she did, eh? Ah, well, maybe
there will be other Robert Schumanns. In fact, two years ago I found a
certain young man--but now he is dying."
He lost the smile that had come to him at this contact. With a shrug he
passed on, leaving with her the thought of beauty enmeshed by death.
She wondered who this young man was, who might have been another
Robert Schumann, but now was dying.
CHAPTER IV
Of all her suitors the most persistent was Cornelius Rysbroek.
In their childhood he had drawn for her amusement Spanish galleons,
the domes of Mogul palaces, and a fantastic damsel, that he called a
bayadere, languishing on a balcony. His thin, sallow little face bent
close to the printed page, he had read Ivanhoe to her. At parties, it was
she to whom he had brought the choicest favors.
Departing to school, he had addressed her in melancholy
verses--doggerel decorated with references to flowers turned to dust,
setting suns that would never rise again, countless symbols of hopeless
passion and impending tragedy.
But, as an anti-climax, he always showed up alive in vacation time.
During his college years he had apparently forgotten her, had made
himself conspicuous by some highly pessimistic theories, and had tried
the Byronic gesture. Then, after Commencement, meeting her

unexpectedly, he had turned a yellowish white.
Now Cornelius Rysbroek had become a lean, neat hypochondriac,
highly cultivated, with fine instincts and excruciating aversions, bored
by his leisure, yet incapable of action, and inconstant in every
aspiration except this love of his. Whenever she refused him he sailed
away, after threatening to plunge into some wild, dramatic waste, but
always compromising on the easiest, beaten path. He returned sadder
and sallower than ever, having contracted in his imagination some new,
obscure ailment, and with his old ailment, his longing for Lilla, still
gnawing at his heart.
But Lilla, so fragile and moody, dreamed of physical strength and a
triumphant will.
Where was he?
She was enervated by melancholy, scorched by impatience, then chilled
by an indefinable foreboding, just as her father had been. Putting on a
figured veil to blur her blush of shame, she slipped away to visit the
soothsayers that fashionable women patronized. In a shadowy room
hung with Oriental curtains, the shrewd crystal gazer informed her that
all would soon be well. "A great love was in store for her."
She kept in her desk a magazine picture of Lawrence Teck, the explorer,
whom she had never met, but whose likeness, singular amid
innumerable presentments of the human face, had arrested her first
glance and fascinated her mind.
His aquiline countenance, darkened and corrugated by fierce suns,
expressed that virility which kept driving him back, for his contentment,
into remote and dangerous places. But his salient features suggested
also the patience and wisdom of those who have suffered hardship and
derived extraordinary thoughts from solitude. It pleased her to note that
his was the brow of a scholar--he had written learned volumes about
the jungle peoples, was the most picturesque authority on the Islamic
world since Burton, and his monographs on African diseases had added
to his romantic reputation the luster of benevolence. She liked to

picture him as finding in his travels and work the stimulation that less
serious, aimless men might seek in love.
When she read his books, there unrolled before her the esoteric corners
of the desert, the strange charm and depravity of little-known Oriental
cities, the