Chapter 23

As week followed week, it was evident that David Verne watched her and listened to her as he watched and listened to no other person, with an attention as though there were something unique in her most trivial utterance, and with a sadness as though she symbolized all the allurements of life, from which he must presently depart. And at last it became evident that he had found in this relationship a charm more piercing than if their association could have had a different outcome. For him, no doubt, their hours together were at last suffused with the mournful glory that concludes a sunset--more valuable, to the romantically imaginative soul, than the flaming vigor of mid-day. To have found her, to realize that she must remain as an angel hovering high over an inferno, to perceive that he must pass from this radiance into the shades, filled him with a gloomy ecstasy and a pathetic gratitude.

A time came when his armor of misanthropy crumbled away; and in the shadowy alcove of Brantome's living room he confessed to her.

He told her that she had covered the page on which Finis was already written with a glow of gold, as though, at the last moment, a shutter opening on a paradise had swung ajar.

He declared that she could not imagine the blackness that had surrounded him at her first appearance. His heart had been cased in ice; he had hated every one. Then she had come holding beauty in one hand and tenderness in the other. Although he believed in nothing but a mechanistic universe, he had thought of those figures, half woman and half goddess, that descend from another plane, in the old mystical tales, to lure one back to faith with a celestial smile. He protested that he was not far from regaining that deep-rooted belief of his race, of which Brantome had spoken--the idea that woman might be angelic.

He even said:

"Suppose your kindness were the reflection of something still more lovely, which we cannot see with these eyes?"

He went on to other, similar rhapsodies, such phrases as bubble from the lips of those who, in the extremity of despair, exhausted by their sufferings, become, with a sigh of relief, like little children. Amid the shadows of the alcove his eyes shone; and even his body, helpless in the wheel chair, quivered as if with new life.

"If you had appeared sooner! The music I might have written! But then, everything would be different. There would have been no reason for your pity."

On the hearth the log that was nearly consumed fell with a shower of sparks, shot forth one last flame, which brightened the room that had become for a moment a whole world. The light flashed over the many rows of books, which made Lilla imagine a vast human audience, all aglow from a final blaze of genius.

She leaned toward him, staring into his eyes as one who would summon from a sepulchre something more precious than love.

He understood her, and assented:

"Yes, what a victory, eh? Even on the threshold of death! And even though the inspiration was the embodiment of pity only! But men before me--though not so far gone, perhaps--have transmitted to the world the songs that rose in their hearts as a result of unconsummated, even unrequited, love. Who knows? That, too, may come just in time. I may write one more song."

Before her mind's eye there sprang out the full picture of her part in such a triumph.

Was it not she who would virtually be the creative force? Had he not become, in these last days of his, a shattered instrument that she, alone, could make musical again? And her long-thwarted aspirations coalesced into this desire, in which, it may be, her compassion was disorganized by egotism, her compunctions swallowed up in ruthlessness.

"You will do it!" she cried softly, leaning closer still, holding his hand more tightly, blinding him by the glorification of her smile.

Hardly knowing what she was saying, finding at the tip of her tongue all the arguments that had failed to help her in her griefs, she spoke of the prodigies accomplished by will, the triumphs of faith over fate, the miracles of love.

"Of love?" he repeated.

The log on the hearth was ashes. But that morning there had drifted through the city a message from the country--of a new spring, which would not be like nature's previous unfoldments, yet could not, for all its subtle differences, be denied. Was it something like that in Lilla, or only a tender duplicity born of this new ruthlessness of hers, that made her press his limp hand against her kindling cheek?