VIII
Christian did not know the gentlemen who were with her. Their features and garments showed them to be foreigners. Accustomed to surprising events in Eva’s daily life, they regarded Christian with cool curiosity.
Eva’s whole form was wrapped in a grey mole-skin coat. Her fur cap was trimmed with an aigrette of herons’ feathers, held by a marvellous ruby clasp. From under the cap her honey-coloured hair struggled forth. The wintry air had given her skin an exquisite delicate tinge of pink.
With a few steps she came stormily to Christian, and her white gloved hands sought both of his. Her great and flaming looks drove his conscious joy and his perceptions of her presence back upon his soul, and fear appeared upon his features. He found himself as defenceless as a ball flung by another’s hand. He awaited his goal.
“Did you buy Ignifer?” That was her first question. Since he was silent, she turned with raised brows to David Markuse.
The merchant bowed and said: “I thought that I could no longer count on you, Madame. I am sorry with all my heart.”
“You are right. I hesitated too long.” Eva spoke her melodious German, with its slightly foreign intonation. Turning to Christian she went on: “Perhaps it makes no difference, Eidolon, whether you have it or I. It is like a heart that ambition has turned to crystal. But you are not ambitious. If you were, we should have met here like two birds swept by a storm into the same cave. The preciousness of the stone almost makes it ghostly to me, and I would permit no one to give it to me who was not conscious of its significance. And who is there? What do they give one? Wares from a shop, that is all.”
David Markuse looked at her in admiration, and nodded.
“It is said to bring misfortune to its possessors,” Christian almost whispered.
“Do you intend to test yourself, Eidolon, and put it to the proof? Will you challenge the demon to prevail against you? Ah, that is what allured me, too. Its name made me envious. As I held it, it seemed like the navel of Buddha, from which one cannot divert one’s thought, if one has once seen it.”
She noticed that the people about them seemed to make Christian hesitate, so she took his arm, and drew him behind the curtains of a window-niche.
“That it brings misfortune to people is certain,” Christian repeated mechanically. “How can I keep it, Eva, since you desired it?”
“Keep it and break the evil spell,” Eva answered, and laughed. But his seriousness remained unchanged; and she apologized for her laughter by a gesture, as though she were throwing aside the undue lightness of her mood. She watched him silently. In the sharp light reflected from the snow, her eyes were green as malachite. “What are you doing with yourself?” she asked. “Your eyes look lonesome.”
“I have been living rather alone for some time,” answered Christian. His utterances were dry and precise. “Crammon too has left me.”
“Ivan Becker wrote me about you,” Eva said in muffled tones. “I kissed the letter. I carried it in my bosom, and said the words of it over to myself. Is there such a thing as an awakening? Can the soul emerge from the darkness, as a flower does from the bulb? But there you stand in your pride, and do not move. Speak! Our time is short.”
“Why speak at all?”
Although his eyes seemed so unseeing, it did not escape him that Eva’s face had changed. A new severity was on it, and a heightened will controlled its nerves, even to the raising and lowering of her long lashes. Experience of men and things had lent it an austere radiance, and her unbounded mastery over them a breath of grandeur.
“I had not forgotten that this is the city where you dwell,” she said, “but in these driven hours there was no place for you. They count my steps, and lie in wait for the end of my sleeping. What I should have is either a prison or a friend unselfish enough to force me to be more frugal of myself. In Lisbon the queen gave me a beautiful big dog, who was so devoted to me that I felt it in my very body. A week later he was found poisoned at the gate of the garden. I could have put on mourning for him. How silent and watchful he was, and how he could love!” She raised her shoulders with a little shiver, dropped them again, and continued with hurry in her voice. “I shall summon you some day. Will you come? Will you be ready?”
“I shall come,” Christian answered very simply, but his heart throbbed.
“Is your feeling for me the same—changeless and unchangeable?” In her look there was an indescribably lyrical lift, and her body, moved by its spirit, seemed to emerge from veils.
He only bowed his head.
“And how is it in the matter of cortesia?” She came nearer to him, so that he felt her breath on his lips. “He smiles,” she exclaimed, and her lips opened, showing her teeth, “instead of just once throwing himself on his knees in rage or jubilation—he smiles. Take care, you with your smile, that I am not tempted to extinguish your smiling some day.” She stripped the glove from her right hand, and gave the naked hand to Christian, who touched it with his lips. “It is a compact, Eidolon,” she said serenely now, and with an air of seduction, “and you will be ready.” Emerging from the niche, she turned to the gentlemen who had come with her, and who had been holding whispered conversations: “Messieurs, nous sommes bien pressés.”
She inclined her head to the jeweller, and the heron feathers trembled. The four gentlemen let her precede them swiftly, and followed her silently and reverently.