Chapter 24

It was a romance as nearly incorporeal as mortal romance may be, almost as though one of the participants had already passed beyond the sensuous world.

If Brantome was not at home they had the place to themselves. The fire no longer burned on the hearth; but the sunshine of the lengthening days conquered the shadows that had lingered here all winter. And now the wheel chair was rolled to the open window, so that David might see, beyond the trees of the square and above the cornices of the tall houses, the inexhaustible improvisations of nature in the western sky.

"You have changed everything," he affirmed, drinking in her beauty, her elegance that was always presented to him in some new guise, her invariable manifestation of tenderness. "How did it happen? You, so intensely in the midst of life, so lovely, who might so easily find elsewhere----"

She did not tell him that it was the almost phantasmal quality of their communion that made it possible.

Yet now and then, for a moment, she forgot his infirmity. He became the young hero of an idyllic scene such as those that seem attractive enough in adolescence. But unlike those heroes he spoke only of the moment, since it was only the moment of which he could be sure. "You are here!" his eyes said to her, as she entered the room. "I have this hour at least. Nothing else matters." Then, by aid of the sunset, the warm breeze in his face, the flowers on the table, the fragrance of her perfume and the smoothness of her hand, he tried to drown himself in a sea of sensation, like one who listens, in a glamour of stained glass and a cloud of incense, to the protracted sweetness of an organ playing the _Nunc Dimittis_.

Sometimes he would say:

"When I am gone you will be as fair as ever. That is good. The ancients who entered their temples to worship the goddess must have redoubled their love with the thought that the beauty of her marble person would survive them."

Or perhaps:

"Yes, you will still be young. And presently--no, I shall pretend that you will never turn to another."

He thought her ensuing look of sadness was a reproach to him; but she was reproaching herself.

But here was a miracle. The invalid had ceased to decline in health. And that declension, which formerly had been uninterrupted, seemed stopped just by the hand that she had held out to him on that first full day of spring--by the slender hand that had owed its beauty to its apparent uselessness.

Then he told her that he had begun to jot down, in feeble signs, some scraps of music.

That evening, as she drove home, the city seemed hung with banners. "Ah, fate!" she cried, clenching her fists, and uttering a savage laugh of defiance. She entered her house radiant, erect, shining with triumph. In the black-and-white hall, at the entrance to the drawing-room, a man stood before her, tanned, lean from physical hardships, strange-looking and yet familiar. Instead of a small mustache intended to be debonaire, he had a heavy one; his shoulders were wider and straighter than formerly; he advanced with a quick, swinging step.

"Cornie Rysbroek!"

She laid her palms, on the new shoulders of this friend of her childhood, and flooded him with her victorious smile.

"What have you done to yourself?" she laughed, rather wildly. "Where do you come from? India?"

"I went on to China."

He had traveled up the Yangtze River, had crossed Tse-Chouan, had reached the borders of Thibet. Her happy look continued to embrace him; but she hardly heard what he said. She did not perceive that he had undertaken that journey in imitation of the other--perhaps in the hope of finding in those distant, hard places the secret of Lawrence Teck's attractiveness. And, in fact, he looked stronger in spirit as well as in body. The hypochondriac, the timid dilettante, seemed to have slunk away; in his place stood a man who had forced himself, against all his natural instincts, to endure extremes of cold and heat, dirt and famine, hardship and danger. Even now his face was calm; but he could not keep his eyes from shining at her.

"You'll stay to dinner, Cornie. Just us."

From the doorway she came rushing back to throw her arms round him, and cry like a delighted child:

"Dear old Cornie! I'm so happy!"