Chapter 33

"Lilla! Lilla!"

She appeared in the doorway of the study like a muse that David had summoned by an infallible conjuration.

His day's work was over. He showed her what he had done. She leaned down beside the wheel chair to scan the pages; her fluffy, brown hair filled with the afternoon sunshine. And David, in the exhaustion following his labor, dreamily immersed his senses in the sight of her pale-brown cheek so close to his, in the persistent strangeness of her perfume, in the singular cadences of her voice that were always inspiring new harmonies, and in the caress of her cool, fragile hands that had drawn him back from death.

"Is it good?"

What he meant was, "Is it good enough to keep you from regrets?"

She understood, pitied him the more, redoubled her tenderness. And this wan idyll of theirs, as nearly incorporeal as though she were indeed an ethereal visitor, took on a new pathos which was accentuated by the withering of the flowers in the garden, the first hints of the rigor of winter.

He marveled at her self-immolation in this lonely house. He wondered how long such a state of things could last. Then, summoning back his new courage, he continued his combat against the unknown rivals, who, perhaps, had not yet revealed themselves to her, or else had thus far sent to her only ambiguous and subtle heralds of their coming--a breeze flavored with the past and promising an imitation of old transports, a cry of departing birds like a reassurance of the inevitable return, not only of the spring, but also of natural love.

"What are you reading now?" he would ask her apprehensively; for so many books were replete with accounts of a different sort of union.

Or, when she had gone to walk through the grounds at sunset, he, chained to his wheel chair, watched her departing figure with a sensation of dread, asking himself what thoughts would come to her out there, under the immense compulsion of the scarlet clouds.

His fears, for lack of any other definite object, often veered toward her memories.

She rejoined him at dusk, languid from that brief promenade, like those Eastern women whom Lawrence Teck had once described to her, or like one who is enervated by a fever stealthily creeping round one at the moment of tropical twilight. He saw her eyes misty with shadows which disappeared as she came forward into the lamplight.

"Yes, she had been thinking of him."

He suspected that she thought of "him" also in the night.

"Don't go yet," he would plead, when she came to his bed, into which Hamoud-bin-Said had tucked him like a child. So she sat down; and the ray of the night lamp fell across her sensitive lips that had felt the kisses of "the other." David's thin, romantic, bronzed face, with its queer comminglement of adolescence and genius, was fortunately in the shadows cast by the curtains of the bed canopy.

"Ah, how dull it must be for you! If we had some visitors? Brantome----"

"No," she said.

"And yet it was through him----"

"What! haven't you seen through him yet?" she returned in a jealous tone. And presently, with an accent of fear, as if her intuition had discerned some serious, unrevealed event of which Brantome was going to be the cause, "I wish we could have met some other place."

"You dislike him now?"

She responded:

"It was he, you know, who told me of that other woman, the one before me, who had you when you were well."

She rose, laid a kiss upon his forehead, and went away to her rooms across the corridor, leaving with him her perfume.