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Updated: May 1, 2025
"I was irritated because we were two to one, you see, and Carroll backed me up. 'A double door, with a grille in front of it, he repeated for the fiftieth time.... Rangon merely replied that it wasn't our good faith he doubted. He didn't actually use the word 'drunk.... "'Mais tiens, he said suddenly, trying to conceal his mirth.
"I would gladly do so, but the door of the grille is locked." "Ah, that accounts for the fact that everybody else in Egypt isn't in this office on your heels! Britt, let him out!" The president obeyed, unlocking the door, and the Prophet joined the crowd in the corridor. Starr went to the door and addressed the folks.
Charlie was vice-president of his father's bank his name was so printed on the stationery, at least and was familiar with his parent's affairs, though he was averse to anything like industry. He much preferred the pursuit of pleasure to work, and his automobile to the grille of the bank.
And he beat on his knees with his fists, railing, raging, talking incoherently, laughing sometimes, sometimes listening, as though, suddenly, near him, a voice was mocking him. He had a pocket full of bills, crushed up; some he gave to the cabman, some he dropped as he stuffed the others into his pockets, stumbled toward a bronze-and-glass grille, and rang.
Lavinia crossed the room and stood at the grille. The lights strung along the river, curving away like uniform pale bubbles, cast a thin illumination over the Lungarno, through which a solitary vehicle moved. Lavinia idly watched it approach, but her interest increased as it halted directly opposite where she stood.
In the centre of the chapel is the tomb of the founder, Henry VII., and his wife, Elizabeth of York, and on the grille and the gates are the family badges. The tomb of Henry's mother, Margaret, Countess of Richmond, is in the south aisle; and the effigies of herself, her son and his wife, are fine specimens of the skill of the famous Italian sculptor Torrigiano.
Beneath, covered by two huge blocks of stone, lay Mohamed Achmed's remains. Early that day violent hands were laid on the brass rails in the outer windows and grille. The catafalque was stripped of its black and red cloth covering, and the wood-work was totally destroyed.
The young Englishmen, still in the custody of the guard, were marched up to within about ten feet of the table, where they were halted; whereupon the central and apparently oldest figure of the seven said, in a deep, grave voice which both at once recognised as that which had spoken from behind the grille: "Draw near, strangers, and take the oath which shall free you from the ban of the law, and make you citizens of Izreel for the remainder of your lives.
I stooped and peered through the grille into the lighted interior; and then I uttered an exclamation. The box was empty. Thorndyke regarded me with a grim smile. "We have been caught on the hop, Jervis, I suspect," said he. "It is queer," I replied. "I didn't hear any sound of the opening or closing of the door; did you?" "No; I didn't hear any sound; which makes me suspect that she did.
The temptation was irresistible. Robert accepted the invitation, and as he watched the play, it seemed to him that he had never known Brigit till that evening. He had seen her in dreams yes; and talked to her in dreams, yes; but now at last she lived a real creature. Lost in the part, she was able to throw aside the self-restraint which had given her always a cold, almost sexless quality. Her face betrayed a hundred changing emotions: the youth, strength, and passion so severely repressed in her own life came out, though still controlled, with full and perfect harmony in her art. It was one of those consummate revelations of temperament which, in silent or inactive lives, never come till the last hours before death when in one look or one utterance all the time lost and all the long-concealed feelings take their reparation from existence. But with those who may express their true characters through the medium of some creative faculty, the illuminated moment comes at a psychic crisis not to enforce the irony of death but to demonstrate and intensify the richness of humanity. The knowledge which depends upon suffering, and, in a way, springs from it, is good, yet it must always be incomplete. Happiness has its light also, and in order to get the right explanation of any soul, or to understand the eternal meaning of any situation, one must have had at least a few glad hours, felt the ecstasy of thoughtless joy, drifted a little while with the rushing, unhindered tide. As Robert, behind the grille, watched the animated, beautiful girl who seemed to typify the very springtime of the world, he felt he had peered too long at love and life through bars. He would have to break them, get on the other side, and join in the dazzling action. How unreal and far-away seemed all grief, remorse, or anxiety from that brilliant scene! Brigit was laughing, singing, dancing fulfilling, surely enough, her real vocation. What! at seventeen, was she to sit pale, silent, tearful, and alone? At his age, was he to look on with a dead heart and unseeing eyes, murmuring words of tame submission to a contemptuous Fate? His whole nature rose up in revolt, and the self he had once abdicated rushed back to him, howling out taunts which were not the less bitter because they were false. Not pausing to wonder whether the present were a profanation of the past, or the past an insipid forecast of the present, he was conscious only that a change perhaps a terrible change had taken place in his mind a change so sudden and so violent that it had paralysed every power of analysis and reflection. Imaginative love made up of renunciation and spirituality, gave way to the fierce desire to live, to silence the intolerable wisdom of the conscience, and learn folly for a space. He was madly jealous of Castrillon, who gazed into Brigit's eyes and uttered his lines with the most touching air of passionate devotion. She seemed to respond, and, in fact, their joint performance had that delicate, irresistible abandon apparently unconscious and unpremeditated which is only possible between two players who are not in love with each other. Where there is actual feeling, there is always a certain awkwardness and want of conviction (partly caused by the inadequacy of the diagram in comparison with the reality), and the charm, so far as art is concerned, is wholly lost. An acted love was the only love possible between Brigit and Castrillon; hence its sincerity on the stage, where, as a merely assumed thing, it harmonised perfectly with its artificial surroundings the canvas landscape, the painted trees, the mechanical birds, and the sunlight produced by tricks of gauze and gas. But Orange did not stop to consider this. It was enough and too much to see his "sad spirit of the elfin race" completely transformed. Was this the child-like, immature being of their strange visit to Miraflores? That whole episode seemed a kind of phantasy a Midsummer Night's music nothing more, perhaps something less. The very title of the play The Second Surprise of Love carried a mocking significance. Sometimes the soul speaks first, sometimes the senses first influence a life, but the turn, soon or late, must inevitably come for each, and the man or woman, sick of materialism, who begins to suspect that the unseen world and its beauty is an inheritance more lasting and more to be desired than all the vindictive joys of this prison-house, has no such bitterness as the idealist who finds himself brought into thrilling touch with the physical loveliness, the actual enchantment, the undeniable delight of certain things in life. The questions, "What have I missed? What have I lost? What birthright have I renounced?" are bound to make themselves heard. They beat upon the heart like hail upon the sand and fall buried in the scars they cause. Things of the flesh may and do become dead sea fruit; but things of the spirit often become stale and meaningless also. What is more weary than a tired mind? What joys and labours are more exhausting than those of the intellect, and the intellect only? Does an idle week in summer ever beget more lassitude or such disgust of life as a month alone with books in a library? Dissatisfaction and satiety, melancholy and fatigue show as plainly in the pages of
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