Sacrifice | Page 2

foreign to normal men. For instance, he fluctuated between the ardors of a pagan and an anchorite, at one hour re?mbracing 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 na?vely. 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 little face--her eyes, skin, and fluffy hair all harmonized in the most delicate shade of brown--resembled the face of some European grande amoureuse seen through the small end of an opera glass.
"Yes," said Miss Balbian at last to the charming, quiet ladies who sat in her library drinking tea from