Read Ebook: The Bryd by Loomis Noel M Vestal Herman B Illustrator

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Ebook has 95 lines and 7465 words, and 2 pages

But, as an anti-climax, he always showed up alive in vacation time.

During his college years he had apparently forgotten her, had made himself conspicuous by some highly pessimistic theories, and had tried the Byronic gesture. Then, after Commencement, meeting her unexpectedly, he had turned a yellowish white.

Now Cornelius Rysbroek had become a lean, neat hypochondriac, highly cultivated, with fine instincts and excruciating aversions, bored by his leisure, yet incapable of action, and inconstant in every aspiration except this love of his. Whenever she refused him he sailed away, after threatening to plunge into some wild, dramatic waste, but always compromising on the easiest, beaten path. He returned sadder and sallower than ever, having contracted in his imagination some new, obscure ailment, and with his old ailment, his longing for Lilla, still gnawing at his heart.

But Lilla, so fragile and moody, dreamed of physical strength and a triumphant will.

Where was he?

She was enervated by melancholy, scorched by impatience, then chilled by an indefinable foreboding, just as her father had been. Putting on a figured veil to blur her blush of shame, she slipped away to visit the soothsayers that fashionable women patronized. In a shadowy room hung with Oriental curtains, the shrewd crystal gazer informed her that all would soon be well. "A great love was in store for her."

She kept in her desk a magazine picture of Lawrence Teck, the explorer, whom she had never met, but whose likeness, singular amid innumerable presentments of the human face, had arrested her first glance and fascinated her mind.

His aquiline countenance, darkened and corrugated by fierce suns, expressed that virility which kept driving him back, for his contentment, into remote and dangerous places. But his salient features suggested also the patience and wisdom of those who have suffered hardship and derived extraordinary thoughts from solitude. It pleased her to note that his was the brow of a scholar--he had written learned volumes about the jungle peoples, was the most picturesque authority on the Islamic world since Burton, and his monographs on African diseases had added to his romantic reputation the luster of benevolence. She liked to picture him as finding in his travels and work the stimulation that less serious, aimless men might seek in love.

When she read his books, there unrolled before her the esoteric corners of the desert, the strange charm and depravity of little-known Oriental cities, the deadly richness of equatorial forests, peopled by human beasts whose claws were hammered steel, whose fangs were poisoned arrows, and who carried in their thick skulls the condensed miasma of their hiding places.

She seemed to see him passing through those physical dangers and corroding mental influences, a superior being of unalterable health and sanity, perhaps protected because of a grand destiny still unrevealed to him. She longed to participate in that destiny, or, at any rate, to be responsible somehow for it.

"Where are you? What are your thoughts?" she would whisper, staring at the likeness of this peculiarly congenial stranger.

Late at night, at that hour when bizarre fancies and actions may seem natural, she would ask him:

"Don't you know that I exist? Then I must make you know it."

So she tried to cast forth into space a flood of feeling strong enough to reach him--a projection of her identity, her appearance, and her infatuation. All her secret ardors that had never been so strongly focused upon a definite personality found their centering point in him, whose imagined nature seemed to be so emphatically what she needed to appease and complete her nature. She was like one of those antique sorceresses who would cast over distant hearts the spells that must inevitably recoil upon their makers.

But when she had remained for a long while motionless and tense, she rose wearily, with a low laugh of disillusionment and ridicule.

Little by little her thoughts of him were obscured by other thoughts, by weakly apposite conjectures that had different men as their objects. And when different men made love to her, once or twice, maybe at a conjunction of exquisite scenery, music, and impatience, of confused longings and eloquent persuasion, she was tempted to consent. But just in time she stilled that tremulous smile, and averted that dizzy look in the depths of which lurked a fatal sweetness.

Then, when life seemed to her unbearably monotonous, she went to a week-end party at the Brassfields' house in the country.

The Brassfields' country house was copied from an historic French chateau. In the drawing-room, the high walls, from which well-known portraits stood forth, were paneled with amber-hued wood overlaid with elaborate gilt traceries; they ended in a wide golden frieze that curved inward to inclose a ceiling painted with roguish goddesses after the manner of Watteau. Here and there, between chairs and sofas the arms of which seemed composed of half-melted ingots, appeared a baroque cabinet filled with small, precious objects. Or from a creamy pedestal the marble features of some ancient sybarite regarded without surprise this modern richness based upon the past.

Emerging from the dining room, the ladies crossed the large amber rug, like moving images made of multicolored light.

Below their negligible bodices hung draperies of brocade interwoven with metallic threads, of lace dyed the colors of exotic flowers, of tulle embroidered with iridescent beads. Parting into groups, they dotted the drawing-room with the gorgeousness of peacock blue and jade green, the joyousness of petunias and the melancholy of orchids, or the pale, intermelting tints of rainbows seen through the spangle of a shower.

Some, unfurling fans before their bosoms, sank down upon the chairs and sofas. Others stood beside the large chimney piece, talking to the men, and smoking cigarettes that were thrust into jeweled holders.

A few emerged through the French windows upon the terrace to enjoy the moonlit landscape, wherein Nature herself had been taught to show a charming artificiality.

An esplanade overlooked an aquatic garden, with three pools full of water flowers massed round statues. Below, in broad stages that fell away toward a wooded valley, lay other gardens, deriving a vague stateliness from their successive balustrades and sculptured fountains. The moonlight, while blanching the geometrical pattern of the paths, and frosting the rectangular flowerbeds, imparted to the whole surrounding, billowing panorama an appearance of unreality.

"Where's Lilla?" Fanny Brassfield inquired of a young man in the doorway of the drawing-room, in her clear, grating voice that seemed made to express an involuntary disdain of everything not comprised in her luxurious little world. She had just seen one of her most recent lions, old Brantome, on his way toward the music room amid a group of ladies; and this had recalled to her mind another celebrity, who, five minutes before, had arrived from the city after she had given up expecting him.

"Shall I find her?"

"Never mind, my surprise can wait."

Fanny Brassfield followed Brantome and his coterie into the music room, her attractive, bony features revealing a quizzical expression. In the glitter of the big chandelier her coiffure appeared extraordinarily blonde, her green eyes, especially frosty; and the eighteenth century ladies in the gilded frames seemed suddenly, despite their histories, insipid in comparison with this modern face, emancipated from a thousand traditional reactions.

As for Lilla, she was sitting in the dim library with Cornelius Rysbroek, who was harping on the old tune.

She believed that she could discern in him already the first hints of middle age. His lifeless, brown hair was receding above his temples. His small mustaches, which ought to have made him debonair, seemed on his sallow face like the worthless disguise of a pessimist at the feast of life.

Her look of compassion struck him silent. He smiled in self-contempt, then uttered a sharp sigh, pressed his palm to his forehead, and produced a tiny silver box, from which he took a tablet.

"More antipyrene?" she demanded reproachfully.

He declared that he was going away again. "His health made it necessary." He had hung round New York long enough, enduring an impossible climate because of an idiotic hope. He uttered the word "Arizona." He spoke of hot deserts, solitudes under the stars, mirages less mocking than his aspirations. As he contemplated her delicately fervent face, her tapering, graceful body, wrapped like something very precious in pale gold, his eyes glittered with tears.

He turned bitter. He asked her where the ideal suitor could be loitering--the strange knight for whom she used to watch as a little girl, the fairytale prince from another kingdom, who was to sweep her off her feet by the force of his perfections, and carry her away.

"I know, at least," said Cornelius, "that you haven't found him yet!"

In his voice there was a gloating that made her again turn toward him that unique face of hers, whose brownish pallor, in harmony with her large eyes and fluffy hair, appeared to reflect amid the shadows the radiance disseminated from her dress. In his unhappy eyes she now perceived something that had not been there before--a desperation, as though his heart had suffered too long from a sense of inferiority to the unknown and unrevealed antagonist, who was to win this treasure. For an instant, in fact, there was something weakly ferocious, not quite sane, in this visage that had been familiar to her since childhood. Then his habitual, well-bred, wooden look, as a door might shut on a glimpse of an inferno.

He muttered, in his throaty, queerly didactic voice:

"Well, one must be philosophical in this life. You'll teach me that, won't you?" He got up, patting the pocket of his waistcoat, where he kept the little vial of oil of peppermint, which he always touched to his tongue when he threw aside his cigarette on his way to a dancing partner. "Are they at it?" he asked, cocking his ear toward the music of Schumann. "Or is it only that old chap hammering the piano?"

"Don't ask me to dance to-night," she returned, closing her eyes.

"I wasn't." With the parody of a merry smile, he explained, "You know I can't dance with you any more. You know you make my legs tremble like the devil."

With an exclamation intended for a laugh, looking unusually bored and vacuous, he went out of the room like a man in an earthquake sedately strolling away between reeling and crumbling walls.

Lilla was approaching the music room doorway--round which some men were standing with the respectful looks of persons at the funeral of a stranger--when a laughing young woman intercepted her.

"Do come over here. Madame Zanidov is telling our fortunes."

Anna Petrovna Zanidov, one of the Russian aristocrats that the revolution had scattered through the world, was a thin, black-haired woman with a faintly Tartar cast of countenance, a dead-white complexion that made her seem denser than ordinary flesh, and somewhat the look of an idol before whose blank yet sophisticated eyes had been performed many extraordinary rites. Tonight her strangeness was made doubly emphatic by a gown of oxidized silver tissue painted over in dull colors with a barbaric design.

She was said to be a clairvoyant. Rumor had it that she had foreseen her husband's murder by Lenin's Mongolians, and that, since her arrival in America, she had predicted accurately some sensational events, including a nearly fatal accident in the polo field.

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