Sacrifice | Page 8

those hands

would grow warm from touching your letters. Now you are not writing
any more letters. You are wearing a black dress." Madame Zanidov
leaned forward as if striving with her closed eyes to pierce a sudden
opacity. "This is very odd," she declared. "I can see no more pictures.
For there is a darkness which grows larger and larger, which obscures
everything. So now I must discover what this darkness means. Please
be patient for a few moments."
Some one whispered:
"It's getting quite uncanny,"
Lilla's senses reached out to clench themselves upon the normality of
her surroundings. But beneath that normality, that familiar solidity, her
innate mysticism, her instinctive habit of foreboding, seemed to
perceive a basis invisible yet similar--a solution, so to speak, from
which material things and events were continually being evolved, the
fluid containing all 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