Chapter 25

As for David Verne, despite the extraordinary prostration in which Lilla had found him, it seemed that he had not passed beyond the vivifying powers of love, which sometimes appear to change the body, as well as the mind, into a new organism for a while. Week after week, to the bewilderment--one might almost say the consternation--of the physician, he refused to imitate the customary progress of that disease which had been diagnosed as his. And while he acknowledged that this phenomenon must presently end, David knew that for the moment, at any rate, love had proved stronger than death.

To prolong these hours in the transfigured world of sense! To steal from oblivion one more summer of which she would be the warmth, the fragrance, the unprecedented beauty!

In appearing to him she had embodied all that seductiveness which he had formerly perceived at random, fragmentarily and vaguely, in a change of light on the sea, in a spread of landscape, in the grace of animals or the refinements of art, or in those streams of consciousness that flow as the senses are touched by some reminiscent odor, apparition, or sound. She was the whole, dear, fading world compressed into one shape, as the goddesses of ancient times personified blindingly a host of precious elements that had previously been diffuse. And since she was so, he determined, with all this new mental energy evoked by love, to cling to her another day, another week or season, like a drowning man who, as he sinks, clutches at a flower hanging over the water, with the thought, "In this flower, whose petals hold as much wonder as the whole universe, there is surely strength enough to sustain me till I have filled my throat with one more draught of life?"

Inevitably all this fervor and pathos, gratitude and adoration, were transmuted into a consciousness of music. He felt ever more strongly the artist's need of expression. Since he had never previously known such exaltation--or, indeed, such dejection--the music that he finally produced, his physical weakness notwithstanding, was music such as he had never written before.

At Brantome's, when that piece was to be played for the first time, he sat in his wheel chair suffocated by sudden doubts, as if on trial for his life. Lilla sat beside him, her hand on his. No one else was there except Brantome, who bent over the manuscript his haggard old face, revealing nearly as much agitation as did David.

At last, raising his head, the critic murmured:

"You think this is going to be easy for me? Reflect on what I must do. To satisfy you I must take the rigidity out of all these ink marks, restore to this score the emotions that you felt in writing it."

David responded:

"The emotions that I felt in writing it are not there; for the idea always loses its original form the moment it is seized by the pen. That is the first loss. The second comes now. You cannot help it. It is the old misfortune, the inability to transmit what one feels, the isolation of the human soul. But nobody could play as well as you what's left of those thoughts of mine."

The bullet-headed attendant appeared beside the wheel chair, a bottle of medicine and a glass of water in his hands. With that pretentious solicitude of his, he uttered:

"It is time----"

David Verne gave a shudder.

"Ah! At this moment! Will you get out of the room?" And when the attendant had gone, "Is he, can he be, so stupid? I really think he does these things on purpose."

Brantome poised his hands above the keyboard, leaned forward to peer at a legend scrawled faintly in the corner of the page, then, turning round on the piano bench, cast at Lilla:

"Rose-covered Cypresses."

"What?" she exclaimed, with a start.

"He has called it that."

The old Frenchman began to play.

Not a song after all, but a piano concerto, it described in tone that goal of all human longings, the conquest of tragedy.

But this music, although gradually made replete with victory, was not to end in major chords of triumph. The sadness that seemed, at the beginning, unassuageable, continued to the end, but--and herein lay the victory--became ever more exquisite. For this was the utterance of a man who having had his life transformed by love must soon leave that love behind him; this glory that had descended upon his sadness was such a glory as fills the sky for a little while before the inrush of dusk. At the conclusion, it was as if in the gorgeousness of a sunset the roses covering the cypresses had become a mist of rare hues, behind which those trees emblematic of mourning almost lost their significance. At last, however, one felt that the light was fading, that the somber silhouettes of the cypresses were more visible than their poetic embellishment. And finally, with the darkness, a breeze seemed to bring a long sigh from those elegiac branches, together with a perfume of the roses that had become unapparent, wet with dew as if with innumerable tears.

After a long silence, Brantome lifted his burly, old body from the piano bench, came to stand before David, then abruptly turned away.

"It is all your promises fulfilled," he said, as he went out of the room without looking back. But it was Lilla whose arm he touched in passing.

David Verne sat gazing before him, his sunken eyes shining in his face of a sick, young Apollo in bronze. But soon, turning his eyes toward Lilla:

"All you!"

She gathered his hands against her bosom with a movement that imparted to him the life so violently pounding in her heart--the pride and the hope, perhaps even a little of the defiance and belief. She gave him a look that pierced the caverns of his brain, where his faith in death resided blackly, with a white-hot faith in life.

"Have you forgotten," she breathed, "that a little while ago you, and every one else, would have called this impossible?"

"Too much!" he whispered, peering at her with a dreadful longing across the chasm that lay between her will and his terror of extinction.

"No! You shall see!"

She felt that this must be the object of her life-long wishes and antipathies--that her sense of the preciousness of mortal life and beauty, and her hunger for participation in the development of both, were instincts intended to make her indomitable now. Suddenly she had one of those rare moments when the wall is so strengthened by a feeling of worthy purpose that it becomes tremendous, and everything opposed to it seems as good as vanquished. It was with an accent of accomplished victory that she repeated:

"You shall see!"

And now, indeed, the drowning man clutched at the flower that epitomized the dear world.

"Lilla! Never let go of my hands! Yes, it's true; while I hold them I hold fast to life; but if you let go of them, in that moment I'll go tumbling down into the pit. Do you realize that by this time I should probably be already gone, if you hadn't appeared? I am a dead man who lives, who even does this work, because of the hold of these slender hands of yours."

In that clutch of his, all at once so strong despite his feebleness, Lilla found no sinister portent. She was thinking:

"Death conquered me once; but now I shall conquer death."