Читать книгу The Erratic Flame - Ysabel De Teresa - Страница 4

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After a sleepless night, Anne dozed late. So when Regina brought in her coffee about nine o’clock as usual, she awakened gropingly to fog. Fog, which filtered in at the windows in layers of pale moonlight, and wreathed about the house an ectoplasmic shroud until for a long moment Anne had the illusion of floating through clouds in a dreamship.

Then Regina spoke.

“Dio mio, it’s as chill as the finger of death in here!” She closed the windows violently. “When will you learn to take care of yourself, carina?”

Anne smiled. She was accustomed to these wild admonitions. She sat up in bed and slipped into the green silk kimono which Regina was holding out to her. The contrast between her own slim white arms and the woman’s knotted brown hands pleased her impersonally. She allowed her fingers to rest upon Regina’s sleeve. Relaxed and peaceful, the enshrouding fog rose like a protecting wall between her and an irksome world. She sighed luxuriantly at the thought of having left it all behind her.

Then the memory of last night swooped down upon her with the clamorous beat of wings and sleep departed. She clasped Regina’s wrist with tense fingers.

“Regina, how is he? Where is he this morning?” she exclaimed wide awake and anxious. “I had forgotten all about him, poor boy!”

The woman smiled benevolently. She placed the tray upon a table beside the bed.

“He sleeps, cara, he sleeps. I but this moment popped my head in at the door and he was lying there as still and quiet as a child, poverino. So don’t worry your little head about him, but eat your breakfast before it freezes to a jelly.”

But Anne did not hesitate. With a lithe movement she was out of bed. Twisting the brazen rope of hair about her small head, she fastened it with a massive gold hairpin. Then, a mediæval princess, in trailing green draperies, she swept from the room.

Left alone, Regina thrust hands and eyes to heaven and called out upon her picturesque God. Then she shrugged with Italian fatalism and despair. What else could she have expected? It had been so from the very first. Anne had always had her own way, ever since she herself had gone to her as nurse when as a little girl they had lived in the palazzo in Florence and her father had been the American consul. Married and a widow, she still remained the same wilful child in the eyes of the faithful, long-suffering, old woman.

With a shake of the white head, she followed her mistress out into the narrow hallway and watched disapprovingly, as she disappeared into the opposite room.

It was cold in there and Anne shivered a little as she entered. The fog shimmered in from the open window, writhing itself between her and the recumbent figure on the bed. Like Regina, she closed the window, although less violently, smiling the while to herself at the similarity of their action. Approaching the bed, she looked down upon the sleeper. He was flushed and breathing irregularly, and Anne was glad she had not trusted to Regina’s optimistic inspection. For his hand and forehead were burning and her touch did not arouse him. Rather alarmed, she took him by the shoulders and shook him gently. He muttered, and opening his eyes, gazed up at her, at first vacantly, then with dawning dread.

Although her heart beat a little faster, she smiled serenely down upon him. “Well?”

He turned his head away quickly, and for a moment the unnatural flush was replaced by the glistening pallor of the day before.

“I must get up. I must go back,” he said self-consciously. “I have trespassed upon you most shamefully. What can you think of me?” Still avoiding her eye, he sat up in bed and ran an unsteady hand through his tumbled hair.

The serene smile upon her lips, she shook her head.

“Do you really want to know what I think? I think you are going to stay right here, young man, for unless I am much mistaken, you have fever, and if that is the case, I shall not permit you to get up at all!”

He tossed his blonde mane impatiently.

“Fever? Nonsense! I’m perfectly all right. There’s nothing the matter with me at all, and I am going to get up!” Flushed and unsteady, he stared at her defiantly, prepared to throw off the clothes and jump out of bed. Then remembered with horror that he was attired in one of Regina’s ample and unpoetic nightrobes, and inhibited the impulse with a groan.

Repressing her amusement, Anne approached and took his wrist in cool, silken fingers. “I’m going to take your temperature, and if you have any fever, I shall send for a doctor at once,” she announced composedly.

Horror stalked across the young face.

“No, no, you mustn’t do that!” he exclaimed. “Nobody must see me, nobody must know where I am! I’ll do anything you want, if only you won’t send for a doctor, or let anyone know I am here!”

His feverish clasp about her hands, Anne encountered his imploring look with gravity.

“Very well, I have your promise. I don’t know just how much it is worth, of course, it is up to you to show me. Now lie down again, and be a good patient while I get the thermometer and change my dress.”

Head obediently on the pillow, his eyes rested upon her wistfully as she moved toward the door.

“Must you change, you look so beautiful like that,” he said simply. “Your lines are so flowing, so fluid, like music. A Débussy prelude.”

Her hand on the knob, she laughed a little tremulously.

“Your temperature must be even higher than I feared,” she said lightly; looking at him rather shyly over her shoulder, she left the room.

The next two days she and Regina were in constant attendance. His fever had risen rapidly at first and Anne had feared that after all she might have to break her word and call in a doctor. She could even have done so without his knowledge, for most of the time he had lain in a heavy slumber, from which she and Regina had difficulty in arousing him for his medicine. But she resisted the temptation. And when the fever finally commenced to drop, experienced a triumph disproportionately disturbing, which she explained to herself as relief from the intolerable responsibility of her position.

The afternoon of the second day, as she sat beside the window the sense of relief filtering through her, Regina came into the room, and with a great show of excitement and mystery, handed her the New York paper.

She pointed to a picture on the second page, with excitement.

“Ecco lo, there he is!” she exclaimed in a whisper. “And I guessed it the moment I set eyes on him. For haven’t I sat a dozen times in the gallery and listened to him while he played, poor angel!” She approached and looked down at the boy with a mixture of compassion and adoration. “Poverino, how he has suffered,” she added, as she smoothed the bedclothes beneath the unshaven young chin.

Anne took the paper and looked at the photograph. It was indeed he, violin under one arm, who looked at her with cryptic eyes, eyes laden with all the tragedy of genius.

She sighed. A little shiver passed through her, as she glanced toward the bed. Why was genius inevitably companioned by suffering? Why did those who possess it harbor such strange magnetism, even when their personalities were often repellent and ugly? And as she looked upon the sleeping boy, an emotion to which she was not accustomed stole upon Anne and kindled a flame, which scorched as well as warmed. An embryonic temperament, drugged with artificial activities, somnolent from ennui, stirred within her. With a flutter of self-ridicule she focussed her attention upon the newspaper in her hand, and read through the headlines mechanically.

Famous Young Musician Still Missing

In Spite of Frantic Search by

Anxious Relatives

Alexis Petrovskey, who escaped ten days ago from the sanitarium where he had gone to recuperate from nervous shock following upon his unfortunate breakdown in Carnegie Hall last April, is still missing, and a lake near the sanitarium is being dragged for his body, as it is feared that in his state of acute melancholia he may have made away with himself. Etc., etc.

There followed encomiums upon his art and the great loss his death would be to the musical world in general.

So he had relatives, mused Anne, and for some cryptic reason was unpleasantly stirred by the fact. That ought to have occurred to her in the beginning and they were—how had the newspaper put it?—frantic? Yes, that was it. They would be, of course. And she was aiding and abetting this unnatural young man to make them so. Put in that way, the fact sounded very disagreeable, and yet—? She finished the article with an impatient sigh, and turning her head, saw that the mysterious object of her speculation was awake and looking at her. There was an odd little smile upon his lips and his eyes were very lucid. Conscious of a flaming and obnoxiously juvenile blush, she folded the paper quickly and threw it aside.

“Too late!” he exclaimed in a rather weak voice. “I have caught a glimpse of my beauteous self and know the worst. So they haven’t been able to keep it out of the papers, after all? Please show it to me.”

He held out a long thin hand and she gave him the paper without further parley. He sat up in bed and read the article from start to finish.

“Damn it!” he exclaimed, but rather placidly she thought. Somehow he had the air of a naughty and triumphant small boy. “This is an awful bore. What can I do to stop this parrots’ talk?”

“Let them know of your whereabouts, I suppose,” she replied laconically. She walked to the window and looked out through the vista of trees. “It is quite natural they should be worried,” she added non-committally.

“I suppose you think I’m a brute.” His eyes lingered upon the pearly nape of neck, where the copper tendrils coiled so densely. “But if you knew all the circumstances, I believe you would understand.”

The effort at self-command, the something piteous in his voice thawed her superficial coldness. A gentle rush of emotion coursed through her. She turned toward him impulsively.

“Of course I don’t think you’re a brute! What right would I have to do that, when I am ignorant of the facts? Only I do think you ought to let them know——”

He sat up in bed interrupting her savagely.

“I can’t go back—I won’t go back!” he cried in a desperate voice. “You don’t know what you are asking of me!”

A pang of curiosity shot through Anne against her will. Why and of what was he so full of hatred and fear? But her manner was calm and impersonal as she approached him.

“Perhaps you might let them know that you are safe and with friends, and let it go at that?” she suggested soothingly.

He shot her a strange look.

“Much she cares about my safety!” he muttered under his breath. Anne heard with an unacknowledged but irritating pang. So there was a wife, after all, in spite of his almost adolescent appearance!

“Shall I send your wife a telegram?” she inquired in a matter-of-fact tone.

“My wife!” he stared at her in surprise. “My mother, you mean!”

Relief welled up in Anne’s heart, but she chose to ignore its humiliating presence. “Your mother, then?” she pursued evenly.

“Yes I suppose we had better,” he acknowledged grudgingly. “But she is absolutely not to know where I am, or to try to communicate with me until I myself make the first move. That is to be understood.”

“Very well,” said Anne with composure. “I’m sure we can manage that. It might be a good idea to write a letter and have my chauffeur take it down to New York and mail it from there? Or perhaps it would be even better if he took it to your house and left it there. Then there would be no postmark.”

“You’re wonderful,” he cried enthusiastically. “I never would have thought of that!”

She met his look of admiration demurely.

“Oh no, it is really a very simple idea. I’ll go and get some notepaper and you had better write it yourself, so that your mother can be sure that the letter is absolutely genuine.”

Acting as curb to his impetuosity and anger, she helped him to concoct one of the strangest letters that a mother ever received. Such a glacial letter, in spite of her own compassionate tempering, that at the end Anne was loath to send it at all.

“It will break her heart,” she said sorrowfully.

But he laughed at her with bitter emphasis.

“Heart? She doesn’t possess one! All she cares about is what she can get out of me, not only in money, but in vicarious fame, as the fond mother of a musical prodigy!”

Shocked and pitiful, Anne regarded him. His flushed cheeks and gleaming eyes warned of the ever-present danger of recurring fever. She spoke kindly as if to a sick child.

“I’m sure you’re exciting yourself unnecessarily. This will never do. You’re not at all well, and things appear exaggeratedly awful. I’m sure your mother loves you, how could she help it?”

“Loves me? That is good! Why, she has bled me since I was seven years old. She has sometimes kept me at my violin until I have fainted from exhaustion. She has purposely isolated me from all friends and interests so that I might have no outside influences to distract me. Because of her, my life has been as narrow and as bleak as that of a Trappist Monk. We have never had any home, any ties. We have traveled from city to city, like a couple of strolling players, and lived almost as poorly, although ever since my twelfth year I have brought in thousands. But she wanted to hoard. It is her passion. She’s very greedy. In fact, she’s insatiable. She has always insisted upon being my business manager, and it wasn’t until a couple of years ago when I was twenty-one that I was allowed the use of some of my own money. And then it was only because the doctors frightened her!”

Anne met the triumph in his eyes with an inward shiver.

“Were you so ill?” she inquired, curiosity struggling with repugnance.

“No, but I was so damned neurotic and unsociable and had acquired so many complexes that they were afraid I would develop dementia praecox if my chains weren’t slackened up a bit.”

“Poor boy, what happened then?” Anne seated herself on the foot of his bed and prepared to listen to the end. Very possibly, mental catharsis might succeed where the rest-cure had failed.

He continued vehemently.

“What happened? I took a three months’ vacation from my music, which I had begun to detest in a furtive, unacknowledged, sort of way, and for a time ran completely wild. I was like an animal let out of a cage. I ran around with a pack of fools who took me into every sort of imaginable den and got me into every kind of imaginable scrape. In fact, it was only the force of money and my mother’s constant watchfulness which kept me out of the newspapers at least a dozen times.”

“But—but didn’t she try to interfere? To reason with you?” Anne was remotely angry at herself for being offended by this recital.

His laugh was sinister. The expression on his young face mephistophelian.

“Interfere? Why no, of course not. This fling was part of her own plans, and according to the psycho-analyst for whom she was going in heavily at the time, I would come out a better money-making proposition. In other words, she expected to reap from my wild oats a bounteous harvest for the future!”

Amused at Anne’s horrified expression, he chuckled sardonically.

“Motherly of her, don’t you think? But unfortunately, for her tender intentions, the experiment was an awful fluke. I came out of it as suddenly as I went in, only more melancholy, more morose than before, utterly disgusted and sickened with the whole scheme of creation. I wouldn’t touch my violin for days, and for similar periods they couldn’t get me away from it long enough to eat or sleep. I gave a few recitals, brilliant but uneven, and the critics were less kind than usual. My mother was in a perfect funk, but I was utterly indifferent. Nothing interested me at all. It was too much trouble even to live, and if I had condescended to anything so positive as a wish, it would have been for death.”

He paused, and threw himself back wearily upon the pillow. “In fact, that is the way I am now, only the longing is intense instead of indifferent.” He closed his eyes. An expression of fatigue and disdain brooded over his drawn features.

Anne leaned forward impulsively and took his long, hot hand in both of hers. “Don’t,” she begged, “I cannot bear to hear you speak so. It wrings something in my soul. Surely, you will not remain so unhappy always. Your music, your beautiful music will console you. It cannot fail!”

His fingers twined about hers almost painfully.

“My music, my beautiful music,” he murmured. He turned his head on the pillow restlessly. “I shall not make it any more. I’m not fit, I have dishonored it, and it will not come to me any more. That night—” he faltered and turned his head away from her pitying eyes. “When I failed, you know?” His voice demanded her help.

“Yes, yes, I know,” she whispered. “I was not there, but I read about it in the paper. I felt so sorry, so heartbroken for you. I had heard you so often, and with such joy.”

Tears in his eyes, he looked up at her gratefully and continued, “That night I was playing as usual, in fact a little better than usual, when all of a sudden every note went out of my head completely, and left nothing but a blank. It was as if music had ceased to exist. I wasn’t frightened or ill, I simply couldn’t play the violin any more. That was all. Since then I haven’t touched it.”

Drawing his hand abruptly out of hers, he turned on his side and hid his face in the pillow. She rose, and standing by the head of the bed, put her fingers on his tumbled, blonde head.

“Poor boy, how horribly you have suffered! But I know you are going to come out of it better and stronger than ever. You are so young! The saying ought to be, ‘Where there is youth there is hope.’” She sighed inaudibly, remembering her thirty-three years with a pang. “Besides, you are really lucky to have gone through your hell so early, while you can still reap the benefits from it. For most of us it comes too late and we retire defeated into middle age and spiritual death. But,” she patted his head lightly, “I don’t want to preach. It isn’t my métier at all! I’m supposed to be frivolous! However, tell me, I simply must know before I leave you, why did you run away from the sanitarium like that without letting anyone know, and how did you ever find the hut?”

Beneath his laughter there lay an undercurrent of almost fierce despair.

“Because I should have gone completely mad if I had stayed another minute. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I was scarcely capable of thought, and yet they tried to cheer me up as if I were an automaton, and all they had to do was to turn a crank. I was supposed to sit on the lawn and drink iced postum and be sociable with my fellow pariahs. Then the radio was turned on every night and those who could still hobble were expected to dance. So wholesome, you know. Half crazed already, the canned music and canned joviality finished me. The jazz sounded in my ears all night. I felt as if my soul were being pounded into a jelly. I couldn’t sleep a wink. So I packed my things and stole away without saying a word. I think I had some delirious idea of losing myself and my identity forever. I hiked for the first few days, keeping to the woods for fear of being found. I got my meals at stray farmhouses and slept once or twice in a barn. When I came to the hut I was pretty well exhausted and decided to rest up for a day or two. That’s all,” he sighed wearily.

Anne’s eyes were full of compassionate horror.

“Poor boy, it must have been ghastly. I scarcely wonder you wanted to end it all. And it was I who awakened you from your first good sleep. Will you ever forgive me for bringing you back to this sordid old world?”

He looked up at her with worshipping eyes.

“Not sordid with you in it,” he caught at her hand and retained it. “You are the fairy princess, you know, who broke the evil spell. To-day I feel—almost healed.”

The mournful young voice went to her heart. With an assumption of gayety she ran to the window and pulled down the shade.

“Very pretty indeed from a sick child. But now I am really going. You must sleep. Later on I will bring you a little supper, your first real meal under my roof, and we will discuss the future. Meanwhile I will give your letter to my chauffeur, who is going into New York anyway, to bring back some necessary things for the house. And now, sweet dreams.”

She turned to leave the room, but before she could stop him he drew her hand to his lips and kissed the palm passionately and with reverence.

The next day he was so much better that he was allowed to sit up in bed and dictate to Regina as to the proper disposal of the contents of his suitcase which Anne’s chauffeur had packed and brought down from the hut before leaving for New York. Attired in a pair of his own pajamas, hair brushed, face and hands washed by the delighted and flustered old woman, Alexis was seriously contemplating a shave, when at the bottom of the suitcase beneath some silk socks he came upon Claire’s picture.

He drew it out slowly, an expression of shrinking upon his face. Where had it come from? He certainly would never consciously have packed it among his things. And neither would his mother have done so. The girl herself, pitiful, sentimental little fool must have secreted it among his things hoping that he would come upon it, and perhaps cast her a random thought, as one throws a bone to a dog. For Claire was like a dog, with the same beseeching, tragic gaze that looked up at him now from the photograph so reproachfully. A tremor of rage swept over him as he met those wistful eyes. Damn it, what right had she to reproach him and to look so woebegone! As if he, Alexis, were to blame for everything. Hadn’t she fallen in with his mother’s plans with alacrity, with indecency even? Yes, they had tricked him nicely between them. Claire’s visit to his room in the dead of night and his mother’s neatly-timed discovery, and accusations. What else had there been to do after that, but to marry the girl though they were both innocent even in thought? No, Claire had no right to reproach him, for she had deceived him, too. His mother, for her own cryptic purposes and Claire in self-deluded passion. He had done the only thing possible under the circumstances. Was it his fault that he had never been able to love her? He had told her so from the beginning, hadn’t he? She had nothing to complain of. If he had neglected her, he at least had been faithful in a technical sense. What mattered it if the faithfulness had proceeded from indifference, rather than from a sense of strict virtue? The fact remained, he had been faithful. And to what? A tool of his insatiable mother; a toy thrown to serve as outlet for hitherto-repressed physical desires; a stuffed doll to appease nascent passion.

He threw the picture from him with a savage gesture and laughed aloud, much to Regina’s alarm. She hastened to his side.

“The signorino is feeling gay?” she said hopefully, but with a tinge of suspicion. The young man’s expression was anything but gay! “Shall I call my signora?”

He looked at the woman oddly.

“Please do,” he mocked. “I want her to laugh with me!”

His wild look frightened the woman, she ran out of the room, and presently Anne came in.

“Do you want me?” she asked quietly, with a quick glance at his excited face.

He nodded grimly.

“I want to show you something. Do you see this picture?” He held out the photograph. Anne approached the bed.

“Is it your sister?” she noted the trembling fingers with apprehension. A sudden knife-like foreboding pierced her.

“My sister!” he laughed. “No, unfortunately, no. This,” he pointed a trembling, contemptuous finger at the small tragic face, “this is a photograph of my wife.”

Anne’s smile was a triumph of indifference.

“Indeed?” she said coolly. “She looks like quite a child, doesn’t she?”

She sat down calmly upon the chair beside the bed.

Angered by her serenity, he flung her a look of mingled hatred and remorse.

“I suppose you are wondering why I didn’t tell you about her yesterday?” he grumbled.

She lifted her brows in astonishment, her green eyes met his coolly beneath unfathomable lashes.

“Not at all, it is your own affair, isn’t it?” her voice was icy.

“Ah, you are angry!” he exclaimed with satisfaction. “I can see you are. I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you that I completely forgot all about her?”

“Hardly!” Anne’s lips tightened unconsciously.

“Well, believe it or not, that is the truth! My so-called wife counts for so little in my life, I seldom even think of her, and when you asked to whom we should write yesterday, she never entered my head. That is the only explanation I have to offer.”

Anne returned his pleading glance with perfect composure. She took the photograph out of his hand and gazed at it. As she met the girl’s eyes, a tremor of sympathy quivered through her.

“She seems a pitiful little creature,” she murmured almost against her will. “Why are you so hard on her?” She avoided his eyes.

“Because I don’t love her, I suppose!” he exclaimed harshly. “And when one doesn’t love a woman, one hates her. It is her own fault. She thrust herself into my life of her own accord when my will was crushed and almost dead, and I never shall forgive her for it. That is all.”

Once more Anne interposed in the other woman’s behalf.

“How pitiless you are! I don’t believe you understand her at all. Perhaps she loves you? Indeed I am sure she must love you.”

“Loves me,” he jeered, “she thinks she does, she is a born satellite. Her docility fills me with hatred, lowers me. When I am with her I feel that I am having intercourse with a slave, a chattel.” He flung his hands out before him, in excess of emotion, then added more quietly, “but that is all over now. For weeks I have barely spoken to her, and it is my intention never to see her again if possible.”

Anne shook her head gently.

“Unfortunately, one cannot end things like that.”

He looked at her angrily.

“Why not? If she is such a fool as to refuse to divorce me, at least I can refuse to see her!”

“Have you spoken to her of divorce?”

“Of course. But she will not listen. You see she is a Roman Catholic and something of a mystic to boot. But why do we bother about her so much?” He shrugged cynically. “She is negligible. I have often forgotten her existence for weeks at a time. That is why I don’t understand why the very thought of her can upset me so.”

There was something uncanny in the comprehending look which Anne cast at him.

“That is because you cannot forgive her the injury you have done her. It is her pain and not her love which bores you. It is the memory of your own suffering and debased self which you hate in her. She is so associated with your weakness that the very mention of her name fills you with hatred and humiliation. It is not her fault at all.”

The calm voice ceased. Alexis faced the compassionate eyes with horror in his own.

“No, you are wrong, you are wrong. You do not understand.” Then, as she continued to look at him as from a great distance, “Don’t make me loathe myself more than I do already!” he pleaded.

With an odd little smile she turned to leave the room.

“Perhaps I am mistaken,” she said softly, her hand on the knob. “But somehow I don’t believe I am. Think it over.”

The odd smile lingering about her lips, she pulled the door slowly between them and was gone.

A sense of void surged over him, in a sickening sweep. He fell back upon the pillow with a suppressed groan. She had gone, misunderstanding in her heart. To explain fully and in detail would be the act of a cad, an act of which even he was incapable. For a moment his very center of gravity seemed to disintegrate. Then came the familiar blankness of despair.