Читать книгу Sacrifice - Stephen French Whitman - Страница 10

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Nearly every spring, Aunt Althea, craving "her beloved Europe," took Lilla abroad.

Escorted by an elderly courier who had the appearance of a gentleman in waiting at the Vatican, they moved with royal deliberation, patronizing luxurious hotels, celebrated landscapes, notable art collections. The governess was supplemented with the best local teachers of music and languages; but it was Aunt Althea, with her proud fastidiousness, her eclecticism at once virginal and ardent, who set the keynote for Lilla's education.

All the young girl's inherited repugnances were enhanced. All her sensibilities were aggravated. With the lapse of time and the expansion of her world, her impassionable nature vibrated still more extravagantly, at the most subtle stimuli, between the poles of happiness and pain—which two sensations sometimes seemed to her identical.

Now she was lovelier than her mother had ever been—a tall, fragile, pale brown creature whose carefully composed lips, whose deliberately slow grace, only half concealed that inner intensity of hers.

She had, indeed, the exceptional, agitating look—that softly fatal aspect—which is seen in those who are destined to extraordinary lives. It was as though strange, unprecipitated events were clinging round her slender body like an aura: the promises of unparalleled adventures in love, perhaps also in tragedy. Before her twentieth year she had given this presentiment to many men, who, with a thrill that may have been partly fear, longed to be the cause of those raptures, and to accept the perils.

In an alley of Constantine, in fierce sunshine that oppressed and stimulated her delicate tissues, she stood before an old Arab who, seated on the ground, told her fortune by strewing sand on a board.

"You will be loved by men," he said, after contemplating apathetically the curlicues of sand. "And will be the death of men," he added, closing his eyes as if bored; for out there, in the mountains beyond Constantine, love and death, as partners in the fates of fair women, were commonplace.

Before returning to America, Aunt Althea always managed a visit to Rome. On her first day there, the spinster drove out alone, returning at twilight with her eyelids swollen and red. She had been, she said, to the English cemetery; but she declared that nobody whom she had known was buried there.

They visited American ladies who had married into the Roman nobility. In those historic palaces the great rooms were cool, dim, and resonant, the women's voices died away in space between the tapestried walls and the ceilings frescoed with pagan deities. Through the tall doorway entered young men with medieval faces, in quest of a cup of tea.

To Lilla these descendants of medieval despots seemed curiously dwarfed by their surroundings.

But her eyes were apt to turn wistful when she passed the shabby cafés where famous artists had sat brooding over the masterpieces that she admired. Then she thought of Bohemian studios at dusk, and of geniuses aquiver, like dynamos, with the powers that had taken possession of them. She envied the women whose lives were united to theirs in an atmosphere where beauty was always being recreated, who basked in that radiance of art which love, perhaps, had inspired.

Of all the arts it was music that cast over Lilla the strongest spell.

During the winter season in New York, she haunted concert halls where celebrated musicians played their works. The new music, however, strident with the echoes of industrialism, dissonant with the tumult of great cities, repelled her. She turned instinctively toward the harmonious romanticism and idealism of a previous age. She felt that the compositions of Schumann and Schubert were the language that had always been imprisoned in her heart, that could never reach her lips, but that she now heard, by a miracle, freed and in its perfection.

When the concert was over, she could hardly prevent herself from joining the women who surged toward the author of those sounds, as if impelled by an inexorable force—or possibly by an idea that they must mingle their lives with the life of the stranger who could so interpret their souls, make clear to them their secrets, and give them, at least momentarily, a coherent glimpse of their ideals.

One afternoon, in the exit of a concert hall, Lilla met Brantome, 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.