Chapter 22

A pallid, black-haired woman with pendent earrings--a woman who rather resembled Anna Zanidov--was playing a sea-piece by MacDowell in the light of a tall lamp. The hall door swung open; the unsympathetic face and square shoulders of David Verne's attendant appeared above the back of the wheel chair. The invalid, looking up at Brantome, murmured:

"Let him put me in the alcove, where it's dark enough for your friends to forget that I'm here. And don't bother about me."

"What!" Brantome protested. "I'm not even to bring a beautiful lady to talk to you?"

"It's rather late for talks with beautiful ladies," David Verne replied in his weak, dull voice. "Besides, it's music that I've chosen to torment myself with this afternoon. Where is she?" And when Brantome had nodded toward Lilla. "Ah, she was here once before."

Lilla wore a brown coat frock heavily trimmed with fur; her brown velvet hat, very wide across the forehead, was brightened by a rosette of silver ribbon. The black pearls in the lobes of her ears, just visible below her fluffy brown hair, completed the harmony of her costume with her person, while bestowing upon her face a maturity in contrast with the invalid's youthfulness--which all his sufferings and despairs had not eclipsed.

When she had sat down beside him, he regarded her with a sort of suppressed aversion.

The attendant, a bullet-headed fellow with Scandinavian cheek-bones, leaned down, looking flagrantly solicitous, and inquired in unctuous tones if there was "anything else at present." At this question David Verne appeared to be overwhelmed with a dreary contempt. He did not trouble himself to reply; and the attendant went away, walking cautiously on the sides of his feet, the back of his head somehow suggesting that he was gritting his teeth.

Lilla surprised herself by saying:

"Why do you have that man?"

"I don't know. He is appallingly stupid." He paused, with an effect of still more profound exhaustion, then breathed, "He hates me, no doubt because I resent his stupidity. I resent stupidity," he repeated, giving her a glance of weak alarm, as if wondering, "Are you stupid, too?" He seemed reassured by his scrutiny of her. A coldness began to melt out of his eyes.

Then he looked astonished, rather like a child that is unexpectedly led up before a Christmas tree.

Now she had analyzed the most touching impression that David Verne produced--an impression as of a child who has come into the world with a heart full of blitheness and trust, only to be mistreated. A child, but an extremely precocious one, with a child's round chin, but with a brow of genius; with eyes accustomed to visions, but with lips almost too delicate to belong to a man. Another incongruity was presented in his complexion--bronzed as though by the sun, mockingly bestowing on him one of the aspects of health.

When he listened to music suddenly he became adult. There appeared in his face a glimpse of a masculine, severely critical soul, a nature to be satisfied with little less than perfection. And no doubt it was this habit of stern analysis, involuntarily carried over from art into life, that had helped to make him "impatient of stupidity."

The black-haired woman at the piano was attempting Beethoven.

"Talk to me," said David Verne. "I don't wish to hear this."

He added that Beethoven was intolerable on the piano--a composer who had never had a thought that was not orchestral.

"Like myself," he vouchsafed, with that smile of a mistreated child. "I, too, thought orchestrally. There was no group of instruments rich enough to suit my ambitions, just as the scale was too poor for what I wished to express. A tone speech inadequate to describe what I had to describe--do you know what I'm talking about?"

"Yes."

"Never mind. It is all over."

He sat in the wheel chair in so collapsed a pose that he seemed subjected to some exceptional pull of gravitation. His bronzed hands, on the chair arms, appeared to be welded to the brown wood; his head, resting against the chair back, never turned. But his troubled eyes, stealing round in their sockets, surprised on Lilla's countenance a look as if all her compassions had been united to find the fading young genius as their congenial object.

It was hard to talk to him, since every topic must lead to some interest that he was relinquishing. His doom, hanging over them like a black cloud, stifled all those gleams of enthusiasm which normally would have illumined such a conversation. But presently he forgot himself in watching her moving lips, in gazing at her hair, her throat, her hands, in letting his eyes embrace, with reluctance, all her singularity which was made doubly exquisite by the fastidiousness of her costume. While he was inhaling her perfume, he listened with a blank look to the silvery cadence of her voice.

At last he asked her:

"Do you come here often?"

"Oh, no."

"Why not?" He stared at the abandoned piano. "Why not every week?" And, in a soft, impulsive rush of words, blurred by haste, and maybe by intention, "I have so few weeks left."