Sacrifice | Page 4

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 deadly richness of equatorial forests, peopled by human beasts whose claws were hammered steel, whose fangs were poisoned arrows, and who carried in their thick skulls the condensed miasma of their hiding places.
She seemed to see him passing through those physical dangers and corroding mental influences, a superior being of unalterable health and sanity, perhaps protected because of a grand destiny still unrevealed to him. She longed to participate in that destiny, or, at any rate, to be responsible somehow for