Lola

________________________________________________
Title:     Lola
Author: Perceval Gibbon [More Titles by Gibbon]

Rubies ripped from altar cloths Leered a-down her rich attire; Her mad shoes were scarlet moths In a rose of fire.

From the briskness of the street, with its lamps aglitter in the lingering May evening, O'Neill entered to the sober gloom and the restless echoes of the great studio. He had come to hate the place of late. The high poise of its walls, like the sides of a well, the pale shine of the north light in the roof, the lumber of naked marble and formal armor and the rest, peopling its shadows, were like a tainted atmosphere to him; they embarrassed the lungs of his mind. Only the name of friendship exacted these visits from him; Regnault, dying where he had worked, was secure against desertion.

Buscarlet opened the door to him, his eyes wide and bewildered behind his spectacles.

"How is he?" asked O'Neill curtly, entering the great room.

"Ill," answered the other. "Very ill, so that one cannot tell whether he sleeps or wakes. There should be a nun here to nurse him, only--"

O'Neill nodded. The sick man's bed was set in the centre of the great room, shielded from the draughts of the door by a tall screen of gilt leather. From behind this screen, a shaded lamp by the bedside made an island of soft radiance in the darkness.

They went together past the screen and stopped to look at Regnault. He was lying on his back, with closed eyes, and his keen aquiline face upturned to the pallor of the "light" in the roof. The white hair tumbled on the pillow, and the long, beautiful hands that lay on the coverlet were oddly pathetic in contrast to the potency of the unconscious face. Even in sleep it preserved its cast of high assurance, its note of ideals outworn and discounted. It was the face of a man who had found a bitter answer for most of life's questions. By the bed sat Truelove, his servant, ex-corporal of dragoons. He rose noiselessly as O'Neill approached.

"No change, sir," he reported. "Talked a bit, an hour ago. Mr. Buscarlet was then 'ere."

"Any attacks?" asked O'Neill.

"One, sir, but I 'ad the amyl under 'is nose at the first gasp, an' 'e came round all right."

"Good," said O'Neill. "You go and get some supper now, Truelove. I'll attend to everything till you get back."

The corporal bowed and went forthwith. O'Neill set the capsules out on the table to be easily accessible, and joined Buscarlet by the great fireplace at the end of the room, whence he could keep watch on the still profile that showed against the gold of the screen. From without there came the blurred noises of the Paris street, mingled and blended in a single hum, as though life were laying siege to that quiet chamber.

Buscarlet was eager to talk. He was a speciously amiable little man, blonde and plump, a creature of easy emotions, prone to panic and tears.

"Ah, he talked indeed!" he said, as soon as O'Neill was seated. "At first I thought: 'This is delirium. He is returning to the age of his innocence.' But his eyes, as he looked at me, were wise and serious. My friend, it gave me a shock."

"What did he talk about?" asked O'Neill.

Buscarlet coughed. "Of his wife," he answered. "Fancy it!"

"His wife? Why, is he married?" demanded O'Neill in astonishment.

Buscarlet nodded two or three times. "Yes," he replied; "that is one of the things that has happened to him. One might have guessed it, hein?--a life like that! Ah, my friend, there is one who has put out his hours at usury. What memories he must have!"

O'Neill grunted, with his eyes on the bed. "He's had a beastly life, if that's what you mean," he said, "Who was the woman?'

"One might almost have guessed that, too," said Buscarlet. He rose. "Come and see," he said.

There was a recess beside the great mantelpiece, and in it hung Regnault's famous picture, "The Dancer," all scarlet frock and white flesh against an amber background.

"That?" exclaimed O'Neill. "Lola?"

Buscarlet nodded; he had forced a good effect.

"That is she," he answered.

The picture was familiar to O'Neill; to him, as to many another young painter of that time, it was an upstanding landmark on the road of art. He looked at it now, in the sparse light from the bedside lamp, with a fresh interest in its significance. He saw with new understanding the conventionalism of the pose--hip thrust out, arm akimbo, shoulder cocked--contrasted against the dark vivacity of the face and all the pulsing opulence of the flesh. It was an epic, an epic of the savage triumphant against civilization, of the spirit victorious against the forms of art.

He stared at it, Buscarlet smiling mildly at his elbow; then he turned away and went back to his seat. The face on the bed was unchanged.

"So Regnault married Lola!" he said slowly. "When?"

"Ah, who knows?" Buscarlet shrugged graphically. "Many years ago, of course. It is twenty years since she danced."

"And what was he saying about her?" asked O'Neill.

"Nothing to any purpose," replied Buscarlet. "I think he had been dreaming of her. You know the manner he has of waking up--coming back to consciousness with eyes wide open and his mind alert, with no interval of drowsiness and reluctance? Yes? Well, he woke like that before I knew he had ceased to sleep. 'I should like to see her now,' he said. 'Whom?' I asked, and he smiled. 'Lola,' he answered, and he went on to say that she was the one woman he had never understood. 'That was her advantage,' he said, smiling still; 'for she understood me; yes, she knew me as if she had made me.' After a while, he smiled again, and said, 'Yes, I should like to see her now.'"

O'Neill frowned thoughtfully. "Well, she ought to be here if she's his wife," he said. "Is she in Paris, d'you know? We might send for her."

"I do not know," replied Buscarlet. "Nobody knows, but I have heard she retired upon religion."

Their talk dwindled a little then. O'Neill found himself dwelling in thought upon that long-ago marriage of the great artist with Lola, the dancer. To him she was but a name; her sun had set in his boyhood, and there remained only the spoken fame of her wonderful dancing and a tale here and there of the fervor with which she had lived. It was an old chronicle of passion and undiscipline, of a vehement personality naming through the capitals of Europe, its trail marked by scandals and violences, ending in the quick oblivion which comes to compensate for such lives. On the whole, he thought, such a marriage was what one would have looked for in Regnault; as Buscarlet said, one might almost have guessed. He, with his genius and his restlessness, his great fame and his infamy, the high achievement of his art and the baseness of his relaxations, he was just such another as Lola.

Friendship, or even the mere forms of friendship, are the touchstone of a man. O'Neill was credited in his world with the friendship of Regnault. It had even been to him a matter of some social profit; there were many who deferred willingly to the great man's intimate. O'Neill saw no reason to set them right, but he knew himself that he had come by a loss in his close acquaintance with the Master. To know him at a distance, to be sure of just enough to interpret his work by the clue of his personality, was a thing to be glad of. But if one went further, incurred a part of his confidence, and ascertained his real flavor, then, as O'Neill once said, it was like visiting one's kitchen; it killed one's appetite.

While he pondered, he was none the less watchful; he saw the change on the still face as soon as it showed. With a quick exclamation he crossed to the bed. Regnault's jaw had set; his eyes were wide and rigid. On the instant his forehead shone with sweat. Deftly and swiftly O'Neill laid his hands on a capsule, crushed it in his palm, and held it to the sick man's face. The volatile drug performed its due miracle.

The face that had been a livid shell slackened again; the fixed glare sank down; and Regnault shuddered and sighed. Buscarlet, trembling but officious, wiped his brow and babbled commiserations.

"Ah!" said Regnault, putting up a thin hand to stop him. "It takes one by the throat, this affair."

Though he spoke quietly, his voice had yet the conscious fullness, the deliberate inflection, of a man accustomed to speak to an audience.

"Yes," said O'Neill. "Were you sleeping?"

The sick man smiled. "A peu pres," he answered.

"I was remembering certain matters--dreaming, in effect."

He shifted his head on his pillow, and his eyes traveled to and fro about the great room.

"If this goes on," he said, "I shall have to ask a favor of somebody." His quick look, with its suggestion of mockery, rested on O'Neill. "And that would be dreadful," he concluded.

"If it's anything I can do, I'll do it, of course," said O'Neill awkwardly.

He aided Buscarlet to set the bed to rights and change the pillow- cover, conscious that Regnault was watching him all the time with a smile.

"One should have a nun here," remarked Buscarlet. "They come for so much a day, and do everything."

"Yes," said Regnault;--"everything. Who could stand that!"

He shifted in his bed cautiously, for he knew that any movement might provoke another spasm.

"Now, tell me, O'Neill," he said, in the tone of commonplace conversation. "That doctor--the one that walked like a duck--he was impressive, eh?"

O'Neill sat down on the foot of the bed.

"He's the best man in Paris," he answered. "He did his best to be impressive. He thought we weren't taking your illness seriously enough."

"Well," said Regnault, his fingers fidgeting on the coverlet, "I can be serious when I like. I'm serious now, foi de gentilhomme. Did he say when I should die!"

"Yes," replied O'Neill. "He said you'd break like the stem of a pipe at the first strain."

Regnault's eyes were half closed. "Metaphor, eh?" he suggested dreamily.

"He said," continued O'Neill, "that you were not to move sharply, not to laugh or cry, not to be much amused or surprised--in fact, you were to keep absolutely quiet. He suggested, too, that you'd had your share of emotions, and would be better without them now."

Regnault smiled again. "Wonderful," he said softly. "They teach them all that in the hospitals. Then, in effect, I hold this appointment during good Conduct?"

"That's the idea," said O'Neill gravely.

There was a long pause; Regnault seemed to be thinking deeply. The amyl had brought color back to his face; except for the disorder of his long white hair he seemed to be his normal self.

"It will not be amusing," he said at length. "For you, I mean."

"Oh, I shall be all right," answered O'Neill, but the same thought had occurred to him.

"No, it will not be amusing to you," repeated Regnault. "For this good Buscarlet it is another thing. I shall keep him busy. You like that, don'it you, Emile?"

Poor Buscarlet choked and gurgled. Regnault laughed softly.

"Take the lamp, Emile," he said, "and carry it to 'The Dancer.' I want to see it."

Buscarlet was eager to do his bidding. O'Neill frowned as he picked up the lamp.

"Careful," he said, in a low voice to Regnault.

"Oh," said Regnault, "this is not an emotion." He laughed again.

Across the room Buscarlet lifted the shade from the lamp and held it up. Again there came into view the white and scarlet of the picture, the high light on the bare shoulder, the warm tint of the naked arm, the cheap diablerie of the posture, the splendid rebellion of the face. Regnault turned and stared at it under drawn brows.

"Thank you, Emile," he said at last, and lay back on his pillow. For an instant of forgetfulness his delicate face was ingenuous and expressive; he caught himself back to control as he met O'Neill's eyes.

"Il est un age dans la vie Ou chaque reve doit finir, Un age ou l'ame recueillie A besoin de se souvenir,"

he quoted softly. Buscarlet was fitting the shade on the lamp again.

"I think," Regnault went on, "that I have come to that, after all. He told you, eh? Buscarlet told you that she--Lola--is my wife?"

"Yes," answered O'Neill. "Would you like me to send for her?"

"She would not come for that," said Regnault. He was studying the young man's face with bright eyes. "Ah," he sighed; "you don't know these things. We parted--of course; but not in weariness, not in the grey staleness of fatigue and boredom. No; but in a splendid wreck of wrath and jealousy and hatred. We did not run aground tamely; we split in vehemence on the very rock of discord. She would not come for a letter."

"Is she in Paris?" asked O'Neill.

"No, in Spain," answered Regnault. "At Ronda, in a great house on the edge of the hill, a house of small windows and strong doors. She is religious, Lola is; she fears hell. Let me see; she must be near to fifty now. It is twenty years and more since I saw her."

"But if I wrote," began O'Neill again.

"She would not come for a letter," persisted Regnault. "What would you write? 'He is dying,' you would say, 'Poof!' she would answer, 'he has been dead this twenty years to me.'"

"Well, then, what do you suggest?"

Regnault opened his eyes and looked up sharply. He stretched out one long slender hand in a sudden gesture of urgency. His face, upon the moment, recovered its wonted vivacity.

"Go to her," he said. "Go to her, O'Neill; you are young and long- legged; you have the face of one to whom adventures are due. She will receive you. Speak to her; tell her--tell her of this gloomy room and its booming echoes and the little white bed in the middle of it. Make your voice warm, O'Neill, and tell her of all of it. Then, perhaps, she will come."

There was no mistaking his earnestness. O'Neill stared at him in astonishment. Regnault moistened his lips, breathing hard.

"Really," said O'Neill, "I don't quite know how to answer you, Regnault."

Regnault put the empty phrase from him with a movement of impatience.

"Go to her," he said again, and his brows creased in effort. "Is it because she is religious that you hesitate! You think I am an offence to her religion? O'Neill, I will offer it no offence. I have myself an instinct that way now. It is true. I have."

"Wait," said O'Neill. He was thinking confusedly. "You know you're like a spoiled child, Regnault. You'd die for a thing so long as some one denied it you. Now, what strikes me is this. Your wife ought to be with you, as a matter of decent usage and--and all that. But if you want her here just so that you can flog up the thrill of one of your old beastly adventures, I'll not lift a finger to help you. D'you see!"

Regnault nodded. Buscarlet, standing behind the bed, was trembling like a man in an ague.

"I'll go to Ronda, and do what I can," said O'Neill, "so long as you're playing fair. But I've got to be sure of that, Regnault."

Regnault nodded again. "I see," he answered. "What shall I say to you? Will you not trust me, O'Neill, in a question of taste? Morals-- I don't say. But taste--come now!"

"You mean, you want to see your wife in ordinary affection and--well, and because she is your wife?" demanded O'Neill.

"You put it very well," replied Regnault placidly. "Give me some paper and I will write you her name and address. And, O'Neill, I have an idea! I will give you, for your own, 'The Dancer.' It shall be my last joke. After this, I am earnest."

He wrote painfully on the paper which they gave him.

"There," he said, when he had done. "And now I will compose myself."

Buscarlet saw O'Neill forth of the door, for he was to leave for Spain in the morning. On the threshold he tapped O'Neill on the arm.

"It is worth a hundred thousand francs," he whispered, with startled eyes. "And besides, what a souvenir!"

The little room in which they bade O'Neill wait for the Senora opened upon the patio of the house, where a sword of vivid sunlight sliced across the shadows on the warm brick flooring, and a little industrious fountain dribbled through a veil of ferns. There was a shrine in the room; its elaboration of gilt and rosy wax faced the open door, and from a window beside it one could see, below the abrupt hill of Ronda, the panorama of the sun-steeped countryside.

The cool of the room was grateful to O'Neill after the heat of the road. He set his hat on the small table and took a seat, marking the utter stillness that reigned in that great Moorish house. Save for the purr of the fountain no sounds reached him in all that nest of cool chambers. The thought of it awoke in him new speculation as to the woman he had come to see, who had buried the ashes of her fiery youth in this serene retreat. He had thought about her with growing curiosity throughout the journey from Paris, endeavoring to reduce to terms of his own understanding the spirit that had flamed and faded and guttered out in such a manner. The shrine at his elbow recalled to him that she was "religious." It explained nothing.

He was staring at it in perplexity, when the doorway darkened, and he was conscious that he was not alone. He started to his feet and bowed confusedly to the woman on the threshold.

"Mr. O'Neill?" she inquired. Her pronunciation had the faultless precision of the English-speaking Spaniard. He bowed again, and drew out a chair for her.

It seemed that she hesitated a moment ere she came forward and accepted it. When she stood in the door, with the slanting sun at her back, O'Neill could see little of her save the trim outline of her figure, wrought to plain severity by the relentless black dress she wore. Now, when she was seated, he regarded her with all an artist's quick curiosity. As Regnault had said, she was not much less than fifty years old, but they were years that had trodden lightly. There was nothing of age in the strong brows and the tempestuous eyes that were dark under them; the mouth was yet full and impetuous. Some discipline seemed to have laid a constraint on her; there was a somber seriousness in her regard; but O'Neill recognized without difficulty the proud, hardy, unquelled countenance that stared from the canvas in Regnault's studio.

She had his visiting-card in her fingers. Lest he should be denied admittance he had penciled on it, below his name, "with a message from M. Regnault, who is very ill."

She was looking at him steadily, aware of his scrutiny.

"I will hear your message," she said. "Please sit down."

O'Neill took a chair where he could continue to see her face.

"Senora," he said, "I must tell you, first of all, that M. Regnault is ill beyond anything you can picture to yourself. He sends this message, in truth, from his last bed, the bed he is to die on. And that may be at any moment. His is a disease that touches the heart; any emotion or quick movement--anything at all, Senora, may cut off the very source of his life. I ask you to have this in mind while you hear me."

Her dark face was intent upon him while he spoke.

"What do you call this disease?" she asked.

"The doctors call it angina pectoris," he answered. She nodded slowly. Her interest encouraged him to speak with more liberty.

"I could tell you a great deal about it," he went on; "but it might be aside from the point. Still--" he pondered a moment, studying her. "Still, imagine to yourself how such a malady sits upon a man like Regnault. It is a fetter upon the most sluggish; for him, with all his vivacity of temperament, his ardor, his quickness, it is a rack upon which he is stretched. You do not know the studio he has now, Senora! It is a great room, with walls of black panels and a wide window in the slope of the roof. Here and there are statues in marble, suits of armor--the wreck and debris of dead ages. And in one corner hangs a picture which the world values, Senora. It is called 'The Dancer.'"

A spark, a quick gleam in her eyes, rewarded him. Her hands, crossed in her lap, trembled a little.

"It is all of a dark and somber splendor," O'Neill continued. "A great, splendid room, Senora, uncanny with echoes. And in the middle of it, like a little white island, there is a narrow bed where he lies through the days and nights, camping on the borders of the grave. There are some of us that share the watches by his bedside, to be ready with the drug that holds him to life; and I can tell you that it is sad there, in the hush and the shadows, with the noises of Paris rising about one from without."

He ceased. She was frowning as she listened to him, with her resemblance to the pictured face in Paris strangely accentuated by the emotions that warred within her. For a minute neither of them spoke.

"I can see what you would have me see," she said at last, raising her head. "It belongs to that world in which I have now no part, Senior. No part at all. And it brings us no nearer to the message with which you are charged."

"Your pardon," said O'Neill. "It is a part of my message. And the rest is quickly told. It is Regnault's request, his prayer to you, that you will come to him, to your husband."

"Ah!" The constraint upon her features broke like ice under a quick sun. "I guessed it. I--to come to him! You should be his friend indeed, to be the bearer of such a message to me."

Her dark eyes, suddenly splendid, flashed at him with strong anger. The whole woman was transformed; she sat up in her chair, and her breast swelled. O'Neill saw before him the Lola of twenty years before.

He held up one hand to stay her.

"I should be his friend, as you say," he told her. "But he knows that it is not so. I came for two reasons: because now is not the time to be discriminating in my service to him, and also because I am glad to help him to do right. I will take back what answer you please, Senora, for I came here with no great hopes; but still I am glad I came, for the second reason."

"Help him to do right!" She repeated the words in a manner of perplexity. "What is it you mean to do right?"

O'Neill had a moment's clear insight into the aspects of his task which made him unfit for it. "Eight" was a term that puzzled his auditor.

"Senora," he answered gravely, "his passions are burned out. He is too sick a man to do evil. It is late, no doubt, and very late; but his mood is not to die as he has lived. He asks, not for those who would come at a word, but for his wife. And I am glad to be the bearer of that message even if I carry back a curse for an answer."

It was not in O'Neill to know how well and deftly Regnault had chosen his messenger. His lean, brown face and his earnestness were having their effect.

The Senora bent her keen gaze on him again.

"Ah," she cried, with a sort of bitterness, "he regrets, eh? He repents?" She laughed shortly.

"I do not think so," answered O'Neill.

"No?" She considered him anew. "Tell me,"--she leaned forward in a sudden eagerness--"why does he ask for me? If he is sober and composed for death, why--why does he ask for me?"

O'Neill made a gesture of helplessness. "Senora," he said, "you should know; you have the key to him."

Gone was all the discipline to which her nature had deferred. Twenty years of quiet and atonement were stripped from her like a flimsy garment. The fire was alight in all her vivid face again as she brooded upon his answer.

"Ah!" she cried of a sudden. "Everything is stale for a stale soul. Does he count on that? Senor, you speak well; you have made me a picture of him. He has heard that I have made religion the pillow of my conscience, eh? He folds his hands, eh?--thin, waxen hands, clasping in piety upon his counterpane, eh? He will wear the air of a thin saint and bless me in a beautiful voice? Am I right? Am I right?"

She forced her questions into his face, leaning forward in a quick violence.

"Goodness knows!" said O'Neill. "I shouldn't wonder."

She nodded at him with tight lips. "I know," she said. "I know. I have him by heart." She rose from her seat and stood thinking. Suddenly she laughed, and strode to the middle of the room. Her gait had the impatience and lightness of a dancer's. Quickly she wheeled and faced O'Neill, laughing again.

"Now, by his salvation and mine," she cried, "I will do what he asks. I will go to him. He thinks his heart is dry to me. I will show him! I will show him!" She opened her arms with a sweep. "Tell me," she cried, "am I old? Am I the nun you looked for?" Her voice pealed scornfully. "Scarlet," she said; "I will go to him in scarlet, as he pictured me when I posed for 'The Dancer!' His pulses shall welcome me; his soul was in its grave when I was in my cradle."

O'Neill had risen too. "Senora," he protested, "you must consider-- he is a dying man!"

He spoke to her back. Laughing again, she had turned from him to the gilt shrine and plucked a flower from it. She was fixing it in her hair when she faced him.

"To-night," she said, "we travel north. You are"--she paused, smiling--"you are my impresario, and Lola--Lola makes her curtsy again!"

She caught her black skirt in her hand and curtsied to him with an extravagant grace.

That was a strange journey to Paris that O'Neill made with the Senora. He had seen her humor change swiftly in response to his appeal; what was surprising was that that new humor should maintain its nervous height. It was soon enough apparent that the Lola of twenty years before lived yet, her flamboyant energy, her unstable caprice, her full-blooded force conserved and undiminished. It was like the bursting of one of those squalls that come up with a breathless loom of cloud, hang still and brooding, and then flash without warning into tempest. She faced him at the station with an electric vivacity; her voice was harsh and imperious to her servants who put her into the train and disposed of her luggage. It occurred to O'Neill that she traveled well equipped; there were boxes and baskets in full ampleness. When at last the train tooted its little horn and started, she flung herself down in the seat facing him and broke into shrill laughter.

"It is the second advent of Lola," she cried. "There should be a special train for me."

Her dress was still of black, but it had suffered some change O'Neill did not trouble to define. He saw that it no longer had the formal plainness of the gown she had worn earlier. It achieved an effect. But the main change was in the woman herself. It was impossible to think of her and her years in the same breath. She had cast the long restraint from her completely; all her sad days of quiet were obliterated. She was once again the stormy, uneasy thing that had dominated her loose world, a vital and indomitable personality untempered by reason or any conscience. Even when she sat still and seemingly deep in thought, one felt and deferred to the magnetism and power that were expressed in every feature of that dark and alert face.

O'Neill deemed himself fortunate that she did not speak of Regnault till Paris lay but a few hours away. The whirlwind of her mood was a thing that did not touch him, but it would have been mere torment to battle on with that one topic. When she did speak of him it was with the suddenness with which she approached everything. She had been silent for nearly an hour, gazing through the window at the scurrying landscape.

"Then," she said, as though resuming some conversation--"then he is, in truth, sick to death?"

"You mean--Regnault!" asked O'Neill, caught unawares. "Yes, Senora. He is sick to death."

Her steady gaze from under the level brows embarrassed him like an assault.

"And he is frightened?" she demanded.

"I don't think he is in the least frightened," replied O'Neill.

She nodded to him, with the shape of a smile on her full lips.

"I tell you, then, that he is frightened," she said. "I know. There is nothing in all that man I do not know. He is frightened."

She paused, still staring at him.

"People like us are always frightened in the end," she went on. She lifted her forefinger like one who teaches a little child. "You see, with us, we guess. We guess at what comes after. We are sure--certain and very sure--that we, at least, deserve to suffer. And that is why I have lived under my confessor for ten lifetimes. You gee!"

O'Neill nodded. It was not hard to understand that the splendid animal in the Senora could never conceive the idea, of its utter extinction. Death--to Lola and her kind--is not the end, it is the beginning of bondage.

There was another interval of silence while she twisted her fingers in her lap.

"Ah," she said. "I know. He will be beautiful in his bed, dying like an abbot. He is frightened--yes. But he thinks himself safe from me. He imagines me sour, decorous, with a skinny neck. Because he thinks me all but a nun, he will be all but a priest. We shall see, Senor O'Neill. We shall see!"

Soon after that she left him to retire to the compartment in which her maid traveled alone.

"We arrive at eight, do we not?" she asked him. "Then I must make my toilet." She smiled down on him as she spoke, and gave him a little significant nod.

The train was already running into the station when she returned. O'Neill, nervous and apprehensive, gave her a quick glance. She was covered in a long cloak of black silk that hid her figure entirely; the hood of it rose over her hair and made a frame to her face. Under the hood he could distinguish the soft brightness of a red rose stuck ever one ear.

"Senora," he said, "I take the liberty to remind you that we are going to the bedside of a dying man."

She turned on him with slow scorn. "Yes," she replied. "It is, as you say, a liberty."

The long robe rose and fell over her breast with her breathing; her eyes traveled over him from head to feet and back again deliberately.

O'Neill took his temper into custody. "Still," he urged, "if you have it in mind to compass any surprising effect, remember--it may be his death."

She laughed slowly. "What is a death?" she answered. And then, with a hissing vehemence: "He sent for me, and I am here. Should I wear a veil, then--Lola?"

He put further remonstrances by, with a feeling of sickness in the throat. Again realization surged upon him that he had no words with which to speak to people like this. They lived on another plane, and saw by other lights. He was like a child wandering on a field of battle.

He found a carriage, and got into it beside her, and sat in silence while they drove through the throng of the streets. He saw, through the window, the brisk tides of the pavement, the lights and the cafes; they seemed remote from him, inaccessible. Inside the carriage, he could hear the steady, full breathing of the woman at his side.

"You will at least allow me to go first," he said, as they drew up at last. He was prepared to carry this point if he had to lock her out of the house. But she made no demur.

"As you will," she murmured.

He found her a place to wait, an alcove on the stairs. As he guided her to it, a touch on the arm showed him she was trembling.

"I will be a very little while," he promised, and ran up the stairs.

It was Buscarlet who opened the door to him, with Truelove standing behind his shoulder.

"Welcome, welcome!" babbled Buscarlet. "Oh, but we have been eager for you! Tell me, will she--will she come?"

"She is waiting on the stairs, in the alcove," answered O'Neill.

Buscarlet's mild eyes opened in amaze. "You have brought her with you?" he cried.

O'Neill nodded.

"Thank God!" ejaculated Truelove.

"How is he?" asked O'Neill. "Still--er--living, eh?"

It was Truelove that replied. "Still keeping on, sir," he answered. "But changed, as you might say. Softened would be the word, sir."

"What d'ye mean?" demanded O'Neill.

"Well, sir," said the ex-corporal of dragoons, with a touch of hesitation, "it isn't for me to judge, but I should say he's--he's got religion. Or a taste of it, anyway."

O'Neill stared at the pair of them in open dismay. "Let me see him," he said shortly, and they followed him through the little anteroom to the great studio.

Behind the screen, the narrow bed was white, and on it Regnault lay in stillness, looking up.

He started slightly as O'Neill appeared at the foot of his bed, and the faint flush rose in his face. "Hush!" he said, with a forefinger uplifted, and poised for a few seconds on the brink of a spasm.

"Ah!" he said when he was safe. "That was a near thing, O'Neill. I am glad to see you back, my friend."

He was tranquil; even that undertone of mockery, so familiar in his voice, was gone. A rosary sprawled on his breast; O'Neill recognized it for a splendid piece of Renaissance work that had lain about the room for months.

"I have found my happiness in meditation," Regnault was saying, in a still, silken voice. "But tell me, O'Neill--will she come?"

"Yes," said O'Neill, wearily, "she will come." Regnault made a gentle gesture of thanks and closed his eyes. His long fingers slid on the ivory beads and his lips moved. O'Neill gazed down on him with a weakness of bewilderment; his landmarks were shifting.

He was standing thus, looking in mere absence of mind, when a footfall beyond the screen reached his ear.

"Oh Lord!" he cried.

It was she. As his eyes fell upon her she was letting fall her long cloak. It lay on the floor about her feet, and she towered over it, in superb scarlet. Against her background of shadow her neck and arms and the abundance of her breast shone like silver. Ere he could go to her she waved him away with a sweep of a naked arm. A hand was on her hip, and she moved towards the bed with the sliding gait of the Spanish dancer.

It was an affair of an instant. Buscarlet and Truelove hastened upon his exclamation, and Buscarlet, stumbling, brushed against the screen. He caught at it to save it from falling, and the bed was bare to the room. Regnault and his wife looked into each other's face. She, undisturbed by the suddenness of it all, held yet her posture of the stage, glowing in her silk with something dangerous and ominous about her, something blatant and yet potent, like a knife in a stocking. It was as though she wrought in violence for the admiration of the man on the bed. He, on his elbow, turned to her a thin face with lips parted and trembling; for an intolerable instant they hung, mute and motionless. Then, slowly, she turned with one foot sliding, and the light of the lamp was full on her face.

It seemed to break the tense spell; Regnault's face was writhing; of a sudden he burst into shrill, hideous laughter, and his right hand flung out and pointed at her. None moved; none could. His laugh rang and broke, and rang again, outrageous and uncontrollable, merry and hearty and hateful. The woman, at the first peal of it, started and stood as though stricken to stone; they could see her shrivel under the blast of it, shrivel and shrink and age.

Then, as though it had been overdue and long awaited, the laugh checked and choked. It freed them from the thrall that held them. Regnault's head fell back.

"The amyl!" cried O'Neill, and they were all about him. "The amyl-- where is it?"

Regnault's face was a mask of paralyzed pain; but the silver patch- box that held the capsules was not on the table. It took a minute to find it on the floor. O'Neill smashed a couple, and thrust his hand into the waxen face--and waited. Buscarlet was breathing like a man in a nightmare. Truelove stood to attention. But Regnault did not return to the shape of life.

O'Neill let his hand drop, and turned to Truelove. "He's got it," he said; "But fetch a doctor."

His eyes fell on the dancer in her shimmering scarlet, where she knelt at the bedside, with her head bowed to the counterpane and her hands clasped over it.

He sighed. He did not understand.

[The end]
Perceval Gibbon's short story: Lola

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN