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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.
She wondered who this young man was, who might have been another Robert Schumann, but now was dying. Of all her suitors the most persistent was Cornelius Rysbroek. In their childhood he had drawn for her amusement Spanish galleons, the domes of Mogul palaces, and a fantastic damsel, that he called a bayadere, languishing on a balcony.
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. In New York there were two opinions concerning the change in Cornelius Rysbroek.
To hold her off with the first words that came into his head, he cast at her: "To-morrow!" She remained facing the closed door, softly repeating: "To-morrow." Cornelius Rysbroek had just driven up before the house in a blue runabout. Now, sunk down behind the steering wheel, he gaped at the black-bearded man who stood like a rock at the foot of a low flight of steps.
Lawrence Teck put on his hat, gave Cornelius Rysbroek a blind stare, climbed into a hired car. In doing so he showed his aquiline profile; and Cornelius recalled the moonlit terrace of the Brassfields' country house. "It's he!" The hired car set out for New York; and behind it, all the way, went the blue runabout. She entered her sitting room, locked the door, threw herself upon the couch.
One night when she was expecting David to dinner, she turned round, from arranging some flowers in a vase in the drawing-room, to see Cornelius Rysbroek in the doorway. He had come, he declared, to "take her out somewhere, give her a breath of fresh air, and make her listen to reason." "But I'm dining here, Cornie." "Alone?" "No." Nevertheless, he sat down with a dogged look.
There was no strength in him even to move his hand, after that gesture with which he had put from him, though half lost in fever, the ultimate temptation. Cornelius Rysbroek, believing that he saw here defeat instead of victory, smiled.
The brilliant pages of Froissart fascinate us with their pictures of the artificial courtesies of chivalry; the mystic reveries of Rysbroek and of Tauler show us that spiritual life survived in some rare souls, but the mass of the population was plunged into the depths of sensuality and the most brutal oblivion of the moral law.
But in the midst of a broad pool of moonlight was spread a tent cloth through which appeared the outline of a body. She sank down upon her knees, turned back the tent cloth from the inscrutable face. It was the face of Cornelius Rysbroek, who, in the dead of night, beside his sleeping rival, while drawing the pistol from the holster, had been shot in the back.
"You do not often come to town, they tell me," the Russian murmured. "No, why should I?" Lilla returned, as if violently aroused from sleep. She saw beyond Anna Zanidov, on the steps of the box, a man whose visage was lined across the forehead and under the cheekbones, and who showed, under his heavy, mouse-colored mustache, a stony, courteous smile. It was the new face of Cornelius Rysbroek.
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