Chapter 43

Hamoud opened the front door, and told her:

"They are waiting for you."

"They? Who is here?"

"Mr. Brantome."

She stood for a moment staring balefully at the stone knight above the fireplace of the hall, who still raised his sightless face, and brandished his blunt sword, with that stupid appearance of defying everything. Then she tossed aside her cloak and hat, and went straight into the living room, peeling off her gloves, saying in a gracious voice:

"Hello! How nice! But how foolish to wait for me. You must both be starved."

"No, but David has been imagining all sorts of calamities," Brantome returned, with a loud, artificial laugh, and a look of anxiety in the depths of his old eyes. As for the invalid, silent in his wheel chair before the Flemish tapestry, he showed her a frozen smile, a travesty of approval.

They went in to dinner. As soon as they had sat down she began, with an unnatural vivacity, to tell them where she had been. That horse show! It had never seemed so silly to her. The same old stable slang interspersed with the same old scandal. And to-night Fanny Brassfield, instead of falling upon her bed in a stupor of futility, was going to give a big dinner for the very same people. "I'm surprised," she exclaimed, turning her flushed face toward Brantome, "that you weren't dragged into it. They usually sacrifice a captive from the land of art."

David remained quite still, his frail shoulders bowed forward, his head advanced, his eyes intently watching her moving lips. She could not abate that frozen smile of his. Brantome, his portly body thrown back, his white mane and long mustaches shimmering like spun glass in the candle light, seemed still to wear on his tragical old face a look of uneasiness. She had the feeling of sitting before two judges who were weighing not only her words, but her tone of voice and appearance. She wondered what appearance she presented.

"Why don't you eat your dinner?" she asked David.

"I am interested," he replied rather hoarsely.

"At what? I was wondering what right I had to inflict all this on you. I suppose when I came in you were talking of something worth while." She turned again to Brantome. "And _Marco Polo_?"

"The best tone poem since _Don Quixote_," he said, rising and making her a bow. "As far as it has gone. It is not finished yet."

"It soon will be. Won't it, David?"

"Oh, another month with luck," he returned lightly, trying to lift a wineglass, and spilling on the cloth the champagne that had been prescribed by Dr. Fallows.

She caught his wrist. A pang passed through her heart. She showed them a new expression, or else an old one for which they had been hoping, as she exclaimed in alarm:

"You're not so well to-night!"

And, as Hamoud was wheeling David into the living room, she protested to Brantome:

"I can't leave him for a day without something happening."

"Then for God's sake don't, at least till this piece is done." The old Frenchman pulled her back, and whispered, "Why, this afternoon he was nearly beside himself. How can he work----"

"About what?" she ejaculated, glancing down at his hand on her arm.

"How should I know, if you don't?"

In the living room Brantome did not sit down. Flushed from the wine that he had drunk, striding to and fro, he began a rigmarole about "David's future." His voice was nearly ferocious when he prophesied the subjugation of the public, which might be aroused, by precisely the right persuasion, to a tumult of applause. Yes, they must all be conquered, until, as in the case of Beethoven for instance, the name of the genius appeared as though written like a portent in the sky, above the heads even of throngs that knew nothing of music, that would never hear these harmonies, but that would be filled all the same with reverential awe.

He had never before revealed this thirst for undiscriminating homage. They hardly recognized him. The old leonine fellow was transfigured, as though by megalomania. He seemed larger, and slowly made the gestures of an emperor.

He darted into the study, as Lilla said to David:

"The piece will stand up for itself, I think. He's becoming almost too ridiculous."

But in the other room Brantome began beating out fragments of _Marco Polo_. The familiar sounds took on a startling majesty in the atmosphere heavily charged with the player's exultation. One had an illusion that this music was irradiating from the house all over the earth. Then, in the silence, the rustle of the rain seemed a long murmur of enthusiastic comment.

Abruptly Brantome reappeared in the doorway with his mane disheveled, like a lion let out of a cage; but Lilla was too wretched to laugh at him. Now he was bursting with memories of those, since great, with whom he had chummed in his youth, when he, too, had expected to be great. He swept his listeners away to foreign studios, where they saw young men poising for flights amid the stars.

"And here," he affirmed, whirling round to Lilla, "is something better, in humor, in tragedy, in dignity, in richness of invention, in everything."

"I know it," she responded, reaching out to lay her hand upon David's hand.

"Something better," he repeated, in a changed voice, with an effect of shrinking to his usual proportions. His arm fell to his side, and he turned away to hide his altered look. "I'll fight for this boy," he said. "I'll fight the whole world for him."

"You looked," suggested Lilla gently, "as if you were going to fight me, too."

"You? No, you are my ally. Or, if you please, I am yours; for neither of us can do anything without you."

At midnight, when Lilla returned to the doorway of his bedroom, David was not asleep.

She sat down on the edge of the bed. A beam of light from the corridor touched her slender figure wrapped in yellow silk, and her braided hair outlined, round her head, by a narrow golden halo. The rain had ceased, and the breeze from the window was laden with the odor of the saturated earth. Falteringly he asked her if she was chilly.

She was surprised, having been aware for a long while only of this pity and this remorse.

"You have suffered to-day," she said.

He responded:

"The penalty one pays for having acquired great riches is the fear of losing them."

She was silent for a time, then murmured:

"When this piece is finished, or to-morrow if you like, we might go abroad? Over there we could find any number of nice, secluded places. Some Greek island might please you? The climate is very invigorating."

"Would you like it?"

"If it would make you happier."

He uttered a groan:

"How I torment you! It must be some devil in me that prompts me to this ingratitude. All that you've done for me, and I'm not satisfied. You are perfection."

She laughed dismally, raising her face in the gloom of the bed canopy that enshrouded them like the shadows of a catafalque. Perfection! A pitiable heroine, an unstable creature tossed about from one compassion to another, from a contemptible dissatisfaction here to a half-hypocritical idea of reparation there, and now to self-abasement! She was sick from disgust at her ingratitude to this poor invalid, through whom she had become majestic, holding fate back so that beauty, and even life, might miraculously survive. She seemed to have emerged from an ignoble dream; she longed to merit again, at least in her devotion to this supine figure, that word, perfection. Suddenly her bosom swelled not only with compunction, but with love also--since it was she, indeed, who had recreated him, and since without the nourishment of her daily reassurances he must die.

"Help me to deserve those words," she besought him, bending down through the shadows. Her tears moistened his lips, and upon that revelation he stammered:

"At this moment I feel that you're mine."

"Not only this moment. Always."