Chapter 39

Hamoud, wearing the blue robe edged with gold embroidery, and carrying in his right hand the Venetian goblet, was half-way out of the living-room when David Verne resumed:

"No, you must really go about more, or you will begin to hate me."

The young Arab paused beyond the living-room door, his handsome head inclined to one side, waiting for the response--not for the words, but for the mere tone of her voice. He heard:

"While you are holding your own, and working so well, I am happy."

Hamoud closed his eyes, in order to let those silvery vibrations occupy his whole consciousness. Then, staring before him, he went swiftly across the wainscotted hall with his lithe, noiseless step, escaping before that other voice could break the spell.

David Verne, in his wheel chair that stood beside a tall lamp, gave her a furtive look, before continuing:

"Is it always happiness that I discover on your face? Is that what you show me when you raise your eyes blankly from some book, or return from the garden after those lonely walks of yours in the twilight? Or is it pity, not only for me, but also for yourself? Is it then that you see clearly what you've let yourself in for--what that divine impulse of yours has brought you to?"

"David!" she protested, her nerves contracting at this threat of a scene that must lacerate both their hearts.

But he persisted:

"I don't disbelieve what you told me about Rysbroek. It's not he that I'm jealous of. I can even believe that there's no other living man in your thoughts. The powers that I can never hope to conquer don't have to exist in the present, in order to frighten me. They have only to exist in the past and in the future. Of course the man who is dead will always triumph over me by comparison. And some day, since mortals are bound to strive for a duplication of their happiest moments, another will appear to promise you that duplication."

How young he seemed in the light of the tall lamp, despite all his former physical sufferings and his present anxieties! Again there was a look of childish pain on his lips, and in his large eyes humid beneath the brow that harbored thoughts of a magnificent precocity. Again compassion filled her at sight of this weakness, this helplessness. She returned:

"How can you say such things? When I refuse to go anywhere, because you couldn't go with me without being bored----"

"You mean, without feeling my inferiority."

"Is it inferiority to be the great artist that you are? What wickedness! You, with your genius, aren't satisfied, but envy those commonplace men because their bodies move easily from place to place. Can their minds soar up like yours?"

"Perhaps not--nor sink into such depths."

She rose, to approach the long window against which the night had plastered its blackness. He watched her inevitably graceful passage from the light into the shadows, and her nervous attitude, as she stood with averted face, staring out through the lustrous glass. She was glamorous with the material elegance that always ended by deriding him. She was agitated by who knew what secret thoughts in accordance with that involuntary withdrawal--the movement of a prisoner toward the window of a cell.

"Let's not deny the facts of life," he began again. "Or pretend with each other. Pity doesn't make one incorporeal. All your angelic compassion can't transform you from a woman into an angel, especially when you see, at every glance in your mirror, the charms that a moment of generosity has made futile."

She came to him quickly, knelt down beside the wheel chair, and put round him her bare, slender arms.

"Don't you know that I love you, David?"

"There are so many kinds of love," he sighed, gazing at her dark eyes that once had flamed with passion, at her fragile lips that had uttered such words as he was never to hear, at her whole pale-brown countenance that would never express for him what it had expressed for the other.

"I want nothing else," she affirmed, in a voice wherein no one could have found any insincerity.

"Perhaps you believe even that. But when it comes to you, then you'll realize what a trap I've caught you in." He gave her a look of horror. "Why did you go there that afternoon to Brantome's? When you saw me there, sitting alone in the shadows, dying with no weight on my conscience, why didn't you leave me alone? But maybe you had no idea of the effect you were going to produce on me--that your look, and voice, and mind, were what I'd always been waiting for. Or since you had come there why couldn't my conscience die at the moment when you made me live again? But instead of dying, my conscience is becoming more and more alive."

He bit his lips to keep back a groan. She declared:

"You're harming yourself again. You won't be able to work to-morrow."

"What is my work worth, if it dooms you to this?" Presently he said in a quiet tone, "It would be easy to free you."

"Ah, you are horrible!"

"Don't be afraid. If there is anywhere beyond this life, anything in the nature of a heaven, it would seem inferior to this house, where I can see you without possessing the love that you're capable of, and hear your voice utter these incredible reassurances. Yes, my conscience torments me, but not enough for that. While I may, I'll hold on to you and to life, even when I feel sure that your thoughts are turning elsewhere, and even if it comes to pass that your bodily self must follow those thoughts. For as your pity returns, so must you return to me. What a weapon I've found in pity! What a victory it will bring me! Some other man may end by winning yourself; but I, as long as I can keep my grip on life, will cling to this ghost of you!"

"Do you do this just in order to drive me mad?" she cried.

"No, you would understand if you could see into my soul. All its surgings and clashings, its vortexes of pain and joy, the anguish that somehow produces an audible beauty, and the ecstasies that are struck mute by these fears! If I could explain all that, you would forgive me for these moments that are beyond my control. But I can't explain it. Not even in my music. One is always alone with one's heart."

Taking his twitching face between her hands, she showed him her eyes filled with tears.

"But I do understand," she protested.

If she did, it was because she also was alone.

That night, as she was going to her own room, she saw Hamoud in the upper corridor. Something forlorn and lost in his exotic aspect struck through her sadness: she remembered how far from home this exile was, how far removed also from the rank to which he had been born. She hesitated, then asked remorsefully:

"Do you hate me, Hamoud?"

He turned pale, standing before her with the wall light shining upon his face of a young caliph.

"I, madam?"

"Well, for what I've got you into: this service, which must distress you every day. But what was there to do? It offered itself when I--you, too, I suppose--could think of nothing else."

Hamoud-bin-Said, paler than ever, replied in Arabic:

"You are sorry for me because I have lost my heshma, my prestige? It is part of the divine wisdom, the foreordained plan of my life. All things happen for the best. The house is warm, so that one does not feel the winter. There is food, so that one does not starve. Therefore, my body is at peace----" He paused to compress his carnelian lips, before concluding serenely, "And as for my soul, it rests as always in the palm of God, like a bird waiting to be taught its ways."