In the Wilderness by Robert Hichens (page 11)

“We can stroll up there later on, and then you can introduce him if you want to.”

“No.”

Lady Ingleton did not look surprised on receiving this brusk negative.

“Shall I get Carey to see him first?” she asked, in her lazy voice. “Cyril Vane has prepared the way before him, and Carey is all sympathy and readiness to do what he can. The Greek tragedy of the situation appeals to him tremendously, and of course he has a hundredfold more tact than I have.”

“Mr. Leith must go to the Embassy. But what he has been through has developed in him a sort of wildness that is almost like that of an animal. If he saw an outstretched hand he would probably bolt.”

“And yet he’s sitting in your pavilion.”

“Because he knows he won’t see any outstretched hand there. He was here for two days without coming near me, and even then he only came because I had taken no notice of him.”

“I know. You spread the food outside, go indoors and close the shutters, and then, when no one is looking, it creeps up, takes the food, and vanishes.”

“A very great grief eats away the conventions, and beneath the conventions there is always something strongly animal.”

For a moment Lady Ingleton looked at Mrs. Clarke and was silent. Then she said, very quietly and simply:

“Does he realize yet how cruel you are?”

“He isn’t thinking about me.”

“But he will.”

Mrs. Clarke stared at the wall for a minute. Then she said:

“Ask the Ambassador if he will ride with me to-morrow afternoon, will you, unless he’s engaged?”

“At what time?”

“Half-past four. Perhaps he’ll dine afterwards.”

“Very well. And now I’m going up to the pavilion.”

But she did not go, although she was genuinely curious about the man who had killed his son and had been cast out by the woman he loved. Secretly Lady Ingleton was much more softly romantic than Mrs. Clarke was. She was hard on bores, and floated in an atmosphere of delicate selfishness, but she could be very kind if her imagination was roused, and though almost strangely devoid of prejudices she had instincts that were not unsound.

That evening she gave Mrs. Clarke’s message to her husband.

“To-morrow–to-morrow?” he said, in his light tenor voice, inquiringly. “Yes, I can go. As it happens, I’m breakfasting with Borinsky at the Russian Palace, so I shall be on the spot. John can meet me with Freddie.”

Freddie was the Ambassador’s favorite horse.

“But can Borinsky put up with you till half-past four?”

“Cynthia Clarke won’t mind if I turn up before my time.”

“No. She’s devoted to you, and you know it, and love it.”

Sir Carey smiled. He and his wife were happy people, and he never wished to stray from his path of happiness, not even with Mrs. Clarke. But he had been a beautiful youth, whom many women had loved, and was a remarkably handsome man, although his red hair was turning gray. Honestly he liked to be admired by women, and to feel that his fascination for them was still intact. And he did not actively object to the fact of his wife’s being aware of it. For he loved her very much, and he knew that a woman does not love a man less because other women feel his power.

He appreciated Mrs. Clarke, and thought her full of intelligence, of nuances, and /tres fine/. Her husband had been his right-hand man at the Embassy, but he had taken Mrs. Clarke’s part when the divorce proceedings were initiated, and had stood up for her ever since. Like Esme Darlington he believed that she was a wild mind in an innocent body.

On the following day he rode with her towards Rumili Kavak, and presently, returning, to the four cross-roads at the mouth of the Valley of Roses. A Turkish youth was standing there. Mrs. Clarke spoke to him in Turkish and he replied. She turned to the Ambassador.

“You do want a cup of coffee, don’t you?”

“If you tell me I do.”

“By the stream just beyond the lane. And I’ll ride home. I’ve ordered all the things you like best for dinner. Ahmed Bey and Madame Davroulos will make a four.”

“And Delia and Cyril Vane a two!”

“You must try to control your very natural jealousy.”

“I will.”

He dismounted and gave the reins to the Turkish youth.

Sitting very erect on her black Arab horse, Mrs. Clarke watched him disappear down the lane in which Dion had heard the cantering feet of a horse as he sat alone beside the stream.

Then she rode back to Buyukderer.

CHAPTER IV

Whether Mrs. Clarke had put “The Kasidah” in a conspicuous place in the pavilion with a definite object, or whether she had been reading it and by chance had laid it down, Dion could not tell. He believed, however, that she had intended that this book should be read by him at this crisis in his life. She had frankly acknowledged that she wished to rouse him out of his inertia; she was a very mental woman; a book was a weapon that such a woman would be likely to employ.

At any rate, Dion felt her influence in “The Kasidah.”

The book took possession of him; it burnt him like a flame; even it made him for a short time forget. That was incredible, yet it was the fact.

It was an antichristian book. A woman’s love of God had made Dion in his bitterness antichristian. It was an enormously vital book, and called to the vitality which misery had not killed within him. There were passages in it which seemed to have been written specially for him–passages that went into him like a sword and drew blood from out of the very depths of him.

“Better the worm of Izrail than Death that walks in form of life”– that was for him. He had substituted for death, swift, easy, a mere nothing, the long, slow terrific something. Death that walks in form of life. Deliberately he had chosen that.

“On thought itself feed not thy thought; nor turn From Sun and Light to gaze
At darkling cloisters paved with tombs where rot The bones of bygone days—-“

What else had he done since he had wandered in the wilderness?

“There is no Good, there is no Bad, these be The whims of mortal will:
What works me weal that call I ‘good,’ what harms And hurts I hold as ‘ill.'”

These words drove out the pale Fantasy he had fallen down and worshiped. It had harmed and hurt him. Haji Abdu El-Yezdi bade him henceforth hold it as “ill.” If he could only do that, would not gates open before him, would not, perhaps, the power to live again in a new way arise within him?

“Do what thy Manhood bids thee do, from None but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes And keeps his self-made laws.

All other Life is living Death, a world where None but Phantoms dwell,
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling Of the Camel bell.”

He had lived the other life, for he had lived for another; he had lived to earn the applause of affection from Rosamund; he had striven always to fit his life into her pattern; now he was alone with the result.

“Pluck the old woman from thy breast: be Stout in woe, be stark in weal–
. . . . . . . spurn
Bribe of Heav’n and threat of Hell.”

He had chosen the death that walks in the form of life; now something powerful, stirred from sleep by the influence of one not dead, rose up in him to reject that death. And it was the same thing that long ago had enabled him to be pure before his marriage, the same thing which had enabled him to put England before even Rosamund, the same thing which had held him up in many difficult days in South Africa, and had kept him cheerful and bravely gay through the long separation from all he cared for, the same thing which had begun to dominate Rosamund during those few short days at Welsley, the brief period of reunion in happiness which had preceded the crash into the abyss; it was the fiery spark of Dion’s strength which not all his weakness had succeeded in extinguishing, a strength which had made for good in the past, a strength which might make for evil in the future.

Did Mrs. Clarke know of this strength, and was she subtly appealing to it?

“Pluck the old woman from thy breast.”

Again and again Dion repeated those words to himself, and he saw himself, an ineffably tragic, because a weak figure, feebly drifting with his black misery through cities which knew him not, wandering alone, sitting alone, peering at the lives of others, watching their vices without interest, without either approval or condemnation, staring with dull eyes at their fetes and their funerals, their affections, their cruelties, their passions, their crimes. He saw himself in a garden at Pera staring at painted women, neither desiring them nor turning from them with any disgust. He saw himself–as an old woman. A smoldering defiance within him sent out a spurt of scorching flame.

* * * * *

Sitting alone by the stream in the Valley of Roses Dion heard the sound of steps, and presently saw a slight, very refined-looking man in riding-breeches, with a hunting-crop in his hand, coming down to the bank. He sat down on a rough wooden bench under a willow tree, lit a cigar and gazed into the water. He had large, imaginative gray eyes. There was something military and something poetic in his manner and bearing and in his whole appearance. Almost directly from a little rustic cafe close by a Greek lad came, carrying a wooden stool. On it he placed a steaming brass coffee pot, a cup and saucer, sugar, a stick of burning incense in a tiny vase, and a rose with a long stalk. Then he went swiftly away, looking very intelligent. The stranger– obviously an Englishman–picked up the rose, held it, smelt it, laid it down and began to sip his coffee. Then in a very casual, easy-going way, like a man who was naturally sociable, and who enjoyed having a word with any one whom he came across, he began to speak to Dion.

When that day died Dion stood alone looking down into the stream. He looked till he saw in it the face of night. Broken stars quivered in the water; among them for a moment he perceived the eyes of a child, of a child who had been able to love him as a woman had not been able to love him, and to forgive him as a woman could not forgive him.

When Dion walked back to his hotel the candlelight glimmered over the dining-table at the Villa Hafiz where Mrs. Clarke sat with her three guests–the Ambassador, Madame Davroulos, the wife of a Greek millionaire whose home was at Smyrna, and Ahmed Bey, one of the Sultan’s adjutants.

Hadi Bey had long ago passed out of her life.

That evening the Ambassador got up to go rather early. His caique was lying against the quay.

“Come out by the garden gate, won’t you?” said Mrs. Clarke to him, and she led the way to the tangled rose garden, where sometimes she sat and read the poems of Hafiz.

Madame Davroulos was smoking a large cigar in a corner of the drawing- room and talking volubly to Ahmed Bey, who was listening as only a Turk can listen, with a smiling and immense serenity, twisting a string of amber beads in his padded fingers.

“He was there?” said Mrs. Clarke, in her quietest and most impersonal manner.

“Yes–he was there.”

The Ambassador paused by the fountain, and stood with one foot on the marble edge of the basin, gazing down on the blue lilies whose color looked dull and almost black in the night.

“He was there. I talked with him for quite half an hour. He seemed glad to talk; he talked almost fiercely.”

Mrs. Clarke’s white face looked faintly surprised.

“Eventually I told him who I was, and he told his name to me, watching me narrowly to see how I should take it. My air of complete serenity over the revelation seemed to reassure him. I said I knew he was a friend of yours and that my wife and I would be very glad to see him at Therapia, and at the Embassy in Pera later on. He said he would come to Therapia to-morrow.”

This time Mrs. Clarke looked almost strongly surprised.

“What did you talk about?” she asked.

“Chiefly about a book he seems to have been reading recently, Richard Burton’s ‘Kasidah.’ You know it, of course?”

“I remember Omar Khayyam much better.”

“He spoke strangely, almost terribly about it. Perhaps you know how converts to Roman Catholicism talk in the early days of their conversion, as if they alone understood the true meaning of being safe in sunlight, cradled and cherished in the blaze, as it were. Well, he spoke like one just converted to a belief in the all-sufficiency of this life if it is thoroughly lived; and, I confess, he gave me the impression of being cradled and cherished in thick darkness.”

Sir Carey was silent for a moment. Then he said:

“What was this man, Leith?”

“Do you mean—-?”

“Before his married life came to an end?”

“The straight, athletic, orthodox young Englishman; very sane and simple, healthily moral; not perhaps particularly religious, but full of sentiment and trust in a boyish sort of way. I remember he read Christian morals into Greek art.”

Sir Carey raised his eyebrows.

“One could sum him up by saying that he absolutely believed in and exclusively adored a strong religious, beautiful, healthy-minded and healthy-bodied Englishwoman, who has now, I believe, entered a sisterhood, or something of the kind. She colored his whole life. He saw life through her eyes, and believed through her faith. At least, I should think so.”

“Then he’s an absolutely different man from what he was.”

“The strong religious, beautiful, healthy-minded and bodied Englishwoman has condemned as a crime a mere terrible mistake. She has taken herself away from her husband and given herself to God. She cared for the child.”

Mrs. Clarke laid a curious cold emphasis on the last sentence.

“Horrible!” said Sir Carey slowly. “And so now he turns from the Protestant’s God to Destiny playing with the pawns upon the great chessboard. But if he’s a man of sentiment, and not an intellectual, he’ll never find this life all-sufficient, however he lives it. The darkness will never be enough for him.”

“It has to be enough for a great many of us,” said Mrs. Clarke.

There was a long pause, which she broke by saying, in a lighter voice:

“As he’s going to visit you, I can go on having him here. You’ll let people know, won’t you?”

“That he’s a friend of ours? Of course.”

“That will make things all right.”

“You run your unconventionalities always on the public race-course, in sight of the grand stand packed with the conventionalities.”

“What else can I do? Besides, secret things are always found out.”

“You never went in for them.”

“And yet my own husband misunderstood me.”

“Poor Beadon! He was an excellent councilor.”

“And an excellent husband.”

“But he made a great fool of himself.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Clarke, without any animus. “And so Mr. Leith made a sad impression upon you?”

“A few men can be tormented. He is one of them. He has gone down into the dark places. Perhaps the Furies are with him there, the attendants of the Goddess of Death.”

He glanced at his companion. She was standing absolutely still, gazing down into the water. Her white face looked beautiful, but strangely haggard and implacable in the night. And for a moment his mind dwelt on the image conjured up by his last words, and he thought of her as the Goddess of Death.

“Well,” he said, “I must go, or Delia will be wondering. She knows your power.”

“And knows I am too faithful to her not to resist yours.”

He pressed her hand, then said rather abruptly:

“Are you feverish to-night?”

“No,” said Mrs. Clarke, almost with the hint of a sudden irritation. “I am never feverish.”

Sir Carey went away to his caique.

When he had gone Mrs. Clarke stood alone by the fountain for a moment, frowning, and with her thin lips closely compressed, almost, indeed, pinched together. She gazed down at her hands. They were lovely hands, small, sensitive, refined; they looked clever, too, not like tapering fools. She knew very well how lovely they were, yet now she looked at them with a certain distaste. Betraying hands! Abruptly she extended them towards the fountain, and let the cool silver of the water spray over them. And as she watched the spray she thought of the wrinkles about Dion’s eyes.

“Ah, ma chere, qu’est que vous faites la toute seule? Vous prenez un bain?”

The powerful contralto of Madame Davroulos flowed out from the drawing-room, and her alluring mustache appeared at the lighted French windows.

Mrs. Clarke dried her hands with a minute handkerchief, and, without troubling about an explanation, turned away from the rose garden. But when her two guests were gone she told her Greek butler to bring out an arm-chair and a foot-stool, and the Russian maid, whom Dion had seen, to bring her a silk wrap. Then she sent them both to bed, lit a cigarette and sat down by the fountain, smoking cigarette after cigarette quickly. Not till the freshness of dawn was in the air, and a curious living grayness made the tangled rose bushes look artificial and the fountain strangely cold, did she get up to go to bed.

She looked very tired; but she always looked tired, although she scarcely knew what physical fatigue was. The gray of dawn grew about her and emphasized her peculiar pallor, the shadows beneath her large eyes, the haunted look about her cheeks and her temples.

As she went into the house she pulled cruelly at a rose bush. A white rose came away from its stalk in her hand. She crushed its petals and flung them away on the sill of the window.

While Mrs. Clarke was sitting by the fountain in the garden of the Villa Hafiz, Dion was sleepless in his bedroom at the Hotel Belgrad. He was considering whether he should end his life or whether he should change the way of his life. He was not conscious of struggle. He did not feel excited. But he did feel determined. The strength he possessed was asserting itself. It had slumbered within him; it had not died.

Either he would die now or he would genuinely live, would lay a grip on life somehow.

If he chose to die how would Mrs. Clarke take the news of his death? He imagined some one going to the Villa Hafiz from the Hotel Belgrad with a message: “The English gentleman Mr. Vane took the room for has just killed himself. What is to be done with the body?” What would Mrs. Clarke say? What would she look like? What would she do? He remembered the sign of the cross she had made in the flat in Knightsbridge. With that sign she had dismissed the soul of Brayfield into the eternities. Would she dismiss the soul of Dion Leith with the sign of the cross?

If she heard of his death, Rosamund would of course be unmoved, or would, perhaps, feel a sense of relief. And doubtless she would offer up to God a prayer in which his name would be mentioned. Women who loved God were always ready with a prayer. If it came too late, never mind! It was a prayer, and therefore an act acceptable to God.

But Mrs. Clarke? Certainly she would not pray about it. Dion had a feeling that she would be angry. He had never seen her angry, but he felt sure she could be enraged in a frozen, still, terrible way. If he died perhaps a thread would snap, the thread of her design. For she had some purpose in connexion with him. She had willed him to come to this place; she was willing him to remain in it. Apparently she wished to raise him out of the dust. He thought of Eyub, of Mrs. Clarke walking beside him on the dusty road. She had seemed very much at home in the dust. But she was not like Rosamund; she was not afraid of a speck of dust falling upon the robe of her ideals. What was Mrs. Clarke’s purpose in connexion with him? He did not pursue that question, but dismissed it, incurious still in his misery, which had become more active since his strength had stirred out of sleep. If he did not die how was he going to live? He had lived by the affections. Could he live by the lusts? He had no personal ambitions; he had no avarice to prompt him to energy; he was not in love with himself. Suddenly he realized the value of egoism to the egoist, and that he was very poor because he was really not an egoist by nature. If he had been, if he were, perhaps things would have gone better for him in the past, would be more endurable now. But he had lived not to himself but to another.

He told himself that to do that was the rankest folly. At any rate he would never do that again. But the unselfishness of love had become a habit with him. Even in his extreme youth he had instinctively saved up, moved, no doubt, by an inherent desire to have as large a gift as possible ready when the moment for giving came.

If he lived on he must live for himself; he must reverse all his rules of conduct; he must fling himself into the life of self-gratification. He had come to believe that the men who trample are the men who succeed and who have the happiest lives. Sensitiveness does not pay; loving consideration of others brings no real reward; men do not get what they give. It is the hard and the passionate man who is the victor in life, not the man who is tender, thoughtful, even unselfish in the midst of his passion. Self-control–what a reward Dion had received for the self-control of his youth!

If he lived he would cast it away.

He sat at his window till dawn, till the sea woke and the hills of Asia were visible under a clear and delicate sky. He leaned out and felt the atmosphere of beginning that is peculiar to the first hour of daylight. Could he begin again? It seemed impossible. Yet now he felt he could not deprive himself of life. Suicide is a cowardly act, even though a certain kind of courage must prompt the pulling of the trigger, the insertion of the knife, or the pouring between the lips of the poison. Dion had not the courage of that cowardice, or the cowardice of that courage. Perhaps, without knowing it, in deciding to live he was only taking one more step on the road whose beginning he had seen in Elis, as he waited alone outside of the house where Hermes watched over the child; was saving the distant Rosamund from a stroke which would pierce through her armor even though she knelt before the throne of God. But he was conscious only of the feeling that he could not kill himself, though he did not know why he could not. The capacity for suicide evidently was not contained in his nature. He rejected the worm of Izrail; he rejected, too, the other death. He must, then, live.

He washed and lay down on his bed. And directly he lay down he wondered why he had been sitting up and mentally debating a great question. For in the Valley of Roses he had surely decided it before he spoke to Sir Carey Ingleton. When he said he would visit Lady Ingleton he must have decided. That visit would mean the return to what is called normal life, the exit from the existence of a castaway, the entrance into relations with his kind. He dreaded that visit, but he meant to pay it. In paying it he would take his first step away from the death that walks in form of life.

He could not sleep, and soon he got up again and went to the window. A gust of wind came to him from the sea. It seemed to hint at a land that was cold, and he thought of Russia, and then again of the distant places in which he might lose himself, places in which no one would know who he was, or trouble about the past events of his life. There before him was Asia rising out of the dawn. He had only to cross a narrow bit of sea and a continent was ready to receive him and to hide him. So he had thought of Africa on many a night as he sat in the Hotel des Colonies at Marseilles. But he had not crossed to Africa.

The wind died away. It had only been a capricious gust, a wandering guest of the morning. Down below in the Bay of Buyukderer the waters were quiet; the row boats lay still at the edge of the quay; the small yachts, with their sails furled, slept at their moorings. The wind had been like a summons, a sudden tug at him as of a hand saying, with its bones, its muscles, its nerves, its sinews, “Come with me!”

Once before he had felt something like that in a London Divorce Court, but it had been fainter, subtler and perhaps warmer. The memory of his curiosity about the unwise life returned to him, somehow linked with the wandering wind. In his months of the living death he had often looked on at it in the cities through which he had drifted, but he had never taken part in it. He had been emptied of the force to do that by his misery. Now he was conscious of force though his misery was not lessened, seemed to him even to have increased. He had often been dulled by grief; now he felt cruelly alive.

He went down to the sea, found the Albanian boatman with whom he had rowed on his first day at Buyukderer, took his boat out and bathed from it. The current beyond the bay was strong. He had a longing to let it take him whither it would. If only he could find an influence to which he could give himself, an influence which would sweep him away!

If only he could get rid of his long fidelity!

When he climbed dripping, and with his hair plastered down on his forehead, into the boat, the Albanian stared at him as if in surprise.

“What’s the matter?” said Dion in French, when he was dry and getting into his clothes.

But the man only replied:

“Monsieur tres fort molto forte, moi aussi tres fort. Monsieur venez sempre con moi!”

And he smiled with the evident intention of being agreeable to a valuable client. Dion did not badger him with any more questions. As the boat touched the quay he told the man to be ready to start for Therapia that day at any time after three o’clock.

When he reached the summer villa of the Ambassador he was informed by a tall English footman that Lady Ingleton was at home. She received Dion in the midst of the little dogs, but after he had been with her for a very few minutes she rang for a servant and banished them. Secretly she was deeply interested in this man who had killed his son, but she gave Dion no reason to suppose that she was concentrating on him. Her lazy, indifferent manner was perfectly natural, but perhaps now and then she was more definitely kind than usual; and she managed somehow to show Dion that she was ready to be his friend.

“If you stay long we must take you over one day on the yacht to Brusa,” she said presently. “Cynthia loves Brusa, and so does my husband. We went over there once with Pierre Loti. Cynthia and poor Beadon Clarke were of the party, I remember. We had a delightful time.”

“Why do you say poor Beadon Clarke?” asked Dion abruptly.

That day he was at a great parting of the ways. He was concentrated upon himself and his own decision, so concentrated that the conventions meant little to him. He was totally unaware of the bruskness of such a question asked of a woman whom he had never seen before.

“One pities a thoroughly good fellow who does a thoroughly foolish thing. It was a very, very foolish thing to do to attack Cynthia.”

“I was in court during part of the trial.”

“Well, then, you know how foolish it was. Some people can’t be attacked with impunity.”

The inflexion of Lady Ingleton’s voice at that moment made Dion think of Mrs. Chetwinde. Once or twice Mrs. Chetwinde’s voice had sounded almost exactly like that when she had spoken of Mrs. Clarke.

“Especially people who are innocent,” he said.

“Naturally, as Cynthia was. Beadon Clarke made a terrible mistake, poor fellow.”

When Dion got up to go she again alluded to his staying on at Buyukderer, with an “if” attached to the allusion, and her dark eyes, which looked like an Italian’s, rested upon him with a soft, but very intelligent, scrutiny. He had an odd feeling that she had taken a liking to him, and yet that she did not wish him to stay on in Buyukderer.

“I don’t quite know what I am going to do,” he said.

As he spoke the hideous freedom of his empty life seemed to gather itself together, and to flow stealthily upon him like a filthy wave bearing refuse upon its surface.

“I’m a free agent,” he added, looking hard at Lady Ingleton. “I have no ties.”

He shook her hand and went away.

That evening she said to her husband:

“I have felt sorry for myself occasionally, and for other people in my Christian moments, but I have never in the past felt so sorry for any one as I feel now for Mr. Leith.”

“Because of the tragedy which has marred his life?”

“It isn’t only that. He’s on the edge of so much.”

“You don’t mean—-?”

Sir Carey paused.

“No, no,” Lady Ingleton said, almost impatiently. “Life hasn’t done with that man yet. I could almost find it in my heart to wish it had. Shall we take him to Brusa on the yacht? That would advertise our acquaintance with him to all the gossips on the Bosporus. I promised Cynthia I would throw my mantle over him.”

“I’m always ready for a visit to your only rival,” said Sir Carey.

“La Mosquee Verte! I’ll think about it. We might go for three or four days.”

Her warm voice sounded rather reluctant; yet her husband knew that she wished to go.

“It would be an excellent way of showing your mantle to the gossips,” he remarked. “But you always think of excellent ways.

Two days later the Embassy yacht, the “Leyla,” having on board Sir Carey and Lady Ingleton, Mrs. Clarke, Cyril Vane, Dion, and Turkish Jane, the doyenne of the Pekinese, sailed for Mudania on the sea of Marmora, which is the Port of Brusa.

CHAPTER V

On the day after the return of the “Leyla” from Mudania, Mrs. Clarke asked Dion if he would dine with her at the Villa Hafiz. She asked him by word of mouth. They had met on the quay. It was morning, and Dion was about to embark in the Albanian’s boat for a row on the Bosporus when he saw Mrs. Clarke’s thin figure approaching him under a white umbrella lined with delicate green. She was wearing smoked spectacles, which made her white face look strange and almost forbidding in the strong sunlight.

“I can’t come,” he said.

And there was a sound almost of desperation in his voice.

“I can’t.”

She said nothing, but she stood there beside him looking very inflexible. Apparently she was waiting for an explanation of his refusal, though she did not ask for it.

“I can’t be with people. It’s no use. I’ve tried it. You didn’t know–“

“Yes, I did,” she interrupted him.

“You did know?”

He stood staring blankly at her.

“Surely I–I tried my best. I did my utmost to hide it.”

“You couldn’t hide it from me.”

“I must go away,” he said.

“Come to-night. Nobody will be there.”

“It isn’t a party?”

“We shall be alone.”

“You meant to ask people?”

“I won’t. I’ll ask nobody. Half-past eight?”

“I’ll come,” he said.

She turned away without another word.

Just after half-past eight he rang at the door of the villa.

As he went into the hall and smelt the strong perfume of flowers he wondered that he had dared to come. But he had been with Mrs. Clarke when she was in horrible circumstances; he had sat and watched her when she was under the knife; he had helped her to pass through a crowd of people fighting to stare at her and making hideous comments upon her. Then why, even to-night, should he dread her eyes? His remembrance of her tragedy made him feel that hers was the one house into which he could enter that night.

As he walked into the drawing-room he recollected walking into Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room, full of interest in the woman who was in sanctuary, but who was soon to be delivered up, stripped by a man of the law’s horrible allegations, to the gaping crowd. Now she was living peacefully among her friends, the custodian of her boy, a woman who had won through; and he was a wanderer, a childless father, the slayer of his son.

Mrs. Clarke kept him waiting for a few minutes. He stood at the French window and listened to the fountain. In the fall of the water there was surely an undertune. He seemed to know that it was there and yet he could not hear it; and he felt baffled as if by a thin mystery.

Then Mrs. Clarke came in and they went at once to dinner.

During dinner they talked very little. She spoke when the Greek butler was in the room, and Dion did his best in reply; nevertheless the conversation languished. Although Dion had so few words to give to his hostess he felt abnormally alive. The whole of him was like a quivering nerve.

When dinner was over Mrs. Clarke said to the butler:

“Osman will make the coffee for us. He knows about it. We shall have it in the pavilion.”

The butler, who, although a Greek, looked at that moment almost incredibly stolid, moved his rather pouting lips, no doubt in assent, and was gone. They saw him no more that night.

They walked slowly from terrace to terrace of the climbing garden till they came to the height on which the pavilion stood guarded by the two mighty cypresses. There was no moon, and the night was a very dark purple night, with stars that looked dim and remote, like lost stars in the wilderness of infinity. From the terraces came the scent of flowers. In the pavilion one hanging lamp gave a faint light which emphasized the obscurity. It shone through colored panes and drew thick shadows on the floor and on sections of the divans. The heaps of cushions were colorless, and had a strange look of unyielding massiveness, as if they were blocks of some hard material. Osman stood beside one of the coffee-tables.

As soon as his mistress appeared he began to make the coffee. Dion stayed upon the terrace, and Mrs. Clarke went into the pavilion and sat down.

The cypresses were like dark towers in the night. Dion looked up at them. Their summits were lost in the brooding purple darkness. Cypresses! Why had he thought of cypresses in England in connexion with Mrs. Clarke? Why had he seen her standing among cypresses, seen himself coming to her and with her in the midst of the immense shadows they cast? No doubt simply because he knew she lived much in Turkey, the land of the cypress. That must have been the reason. Nevertheless now he was oppressed by a weight of mystery somehow connected with those dark and gigantic trees; and he remembered the theory that the past, the present and the future are simultaneously in being, and that those who are said to read the future in reality possess only the power of seeing what already is on another plane. Had he in England, however vaguely, however dimly, seen as through a crack some blurred vision of what was already in existence? He felt almost afraid of the cypresses. Nevertheless, as he stood looking up at them, his sense almost of fear tempted him to make an experiment. He remained absolutely still, and strove to concentrate all his faculties. After a long pause he shut his eyes.

“If the far future is even now in being,” he said mentally, “let me look upon it now.”

He saw nothing; but immediately he heard the sound of wind among pine trees, as he had heard it with Rosamund in the green valley of Elis. It rose in the silent night, that long murmur of eternity, and presently faded away.

He shuddered and turned sharply towards the pavilion.

Osman had gone, and Mrs. Clarke was pouring the coffee into the tiny cups.

“There’s no wind, is there–is there?” he asked her.

She looked up at him.

“But not a breath!” she said.

After a pause she added:

“Why do you ask such a thing?”

“I heard wind in–in the tops of trees,” he almost stammered.

“That’s impossible.”

“But I say I did!” he exclaimed, with violence. “In pine trees.”

“There are no pine trees here,” she said, in her husky voice. “Sit down and have your coffee.”

He obeyed her and sat down quickly, and quickly he took the coffee-cup from her.

“Have a little /mastika/ with it,” she said.

And she pushed a tall liqueur-glass full of the colorless liquid towards him.

“Yes,” he said.

As he drank he looked out sideways through the wide opening in the pavilion. There was not a breath of wind.

“I can’t understand why I heard the noise of wind in pine trees,” he forced himself to say.

“Seemed to hear it,” she corrected him. “Perhaps you were thinking of it.”

“But I wasn’t!”

A jeweled gleam from the lamp fell upon one side of her face. She moved, and the light dropped away from her.

“What were you thinking of?” she asked.

“Of the future.”

“Ah!”

“That’s why it is inexplicable.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t let us talk about it any more,” he said, in an almost terrible voice. “I must have had an hallucination.”

“Have you ever before thought you were the victim of an hallucination?” she asked.

“Yes. Several times I have seen the eyes of my little boy. I saw them a few nights ago in the stream that flows through the Valley of Roses, just after Sir Carey had left me.”

“Don’t look into water again except in daylight. It is the night that brings fancies with it. If you gaze very long at anything in a dim light you are sure to see something strange or horrible.”

“But an hallucination of sound! I must go away from here! Perhaps in some other place–“

But she interrupted him inflexibly.

“Going away would be absolutely useless. A man can’t travel away from himself.”

“But I can’t lead a normal life. It’s impossible. Those horrible nights on the ‘Leyla’—-“

He stopped. The effort he had made during the trip to Brusa seemed to have exhausted the last remnants of any moral force he had still possessed when he started on that journey.

“I had made up my mind to begin again, to lay hold on some sort of real life,” he continued, after a pause. “I was determined to face things. I called at Therapia. I accepted Lady Ingleton’s invitation. I’ve done all I can to make a new start. But it’s no use. I can’t keep it up. I haven’t the force for it. It was hell–being with happy people.”

“You mean the Ingletons. Yes, they are very happy.”

“And Vane, who’s just engaged to be married. I saw her photograph in his cabin. They were all–all very kind. Lady Ingleton did everything to make me feel at ease. He’s a delightful fellow–the Ambassador, I mean. But I simply can’t stand mingling my life with lives that are happy. So I had better go away and be alone again.”

“And lives that are unhappy?”

“What do you mean?”

“Can’t you mingle your life with them, or with one of them?”

He was silent, looking towards her. She was wearing a very dark blue tea-gown of some thin material in which her thin body seemed lost. He saw the dark folds of it flowing over the divan on which she was leaning, and trailing to the rug at her feet. Her face was a faint whiteness under her colorless hair. Her eyes were two darknesses in it. He could not see them distinctly, but he knew they were looking intent and distressed.

“Haven’t you told me I look punished?” said the husky voice.

“Are you unhappy?” he asked.

“Do you think I have much reason to be happy?”

“You have your boy.”

“For a few weeks in the year. I have lost my husband in a horrible way, worse than if he had died. I live entirely alone. I can’t marry again. And yet I’m not at all old, and not at all finished. But perhaps you have never really thought about my situation seriously. After all, why should you? Why should any one? I won my case, and so of course it’s all right.”

“Are /you/ unhappy, then?”

“What do you suppose about me?”

“I know you’ve gone through a great deal. But you have your boy.”

There was a sound almost of dull obstinacy in his voice.

“Some women are not merely mothers, or potential mothers!” said an almost fierce voice. “Some women are just women first and mothers second. There are women who love men for themselves, not merely because men are possible child-bringers. To a real and complete woman no child can ever be the perfect substitute for a husband or a lover. Even nature has put the lover first and the child second. I forbid you to say that I have my boy, as if that settled the question of my happiness. I forbid you.”

He heard her breathing quickly. Then she added:

“But how could you be expected to understand women like me?”

The intensity of her sudden outburst startled him as the strength of the current in the Bosporus had startled him when he plunged into the sea from the Albanian’s boat.

“You have been brought up in another school,” she continued slowly, and with a sort of icy bitterness. “I forgive you.”

She got up from the divan and went out upon the terrace, leaving him alone in the pavilion, which seemed suddenly colder when she had left it.

He did not follow her. A breath from a human furnace had scorched him –had scorched the nerve, and the nerve quivered.

“You have been brought up in a different school.” Welsley and Stamboul –Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke. Once, somewhere, he had made that comparison. As he sat in the pavilion it seemed to him that for a moment he heard the cool chiming of bells in a gray cathedral tower, the faint sound of the Dresden Amen. But he looked out through the opening in the pavilion, and far down below he saw lights on the Bay of Buyukderer, the vague outlines of hills; and the perfume that came to him out of the night was not the damp smell of an English garden.

An English garden! In the darkness of a November night he stood within the walls of an English garden; he heard a cry, saw the movement of a woman’s body, and knew that his life was in ruins. The woman fled, but he followed her blindly; he sought for her in the dark. He wanted to tell her that he had been but the instrument of Fate, that he was not to blame, that he needed compassion more than any other man living. But she eluded him in the darkness, and presently he heard a key grind in a lock. A friend had locked the door of his home against him in order that his wife might have time to escape from him.

Then he heard a husky voice say, “My friend, it will have to come.” And, suddenly it came.

He broke down absolutely, threw himself on his face on the divan with his arms stretched out beyond his head, grasped the cushions and sobbed. His body shook and twitched; his face was contorted; his soul writhed. A storm that came from within him broke upon him. He crashed into the abyss. Down, down he went, till the last faint ray from above was utterly blotted out. She whom he had loved so much sent him down, she who far away had given herself to God. He felt her ruthless hands –the hands of a good woman, the hands of a loving mother–pressing him down. Let her have her will. He would go into the last darkness. Then, perhaps, she would be more at ease; then, perhaps, she would know the true peace of God. He would pay to the uttermost farthing both for himself and for her.

Outside, just hidden from him by the pavilion wall, Mrs. Clarke stood in the shadow of one of the cypresses, and listened. The trip on the “Leyla” had served two purposes. It was better so. When a thing must be, the sooner it is over the better. And she had waited for a very long time. She drew her brows together as she thought of the long time she had waited. Then she moved and walked away down the terrace. She had heard enough.

She went to the far end of the terrace. A wooden seat was placed there in the shadow of a plane tree. She sat down on it, rested her pointed chin in the palm of her right hand, with her elbow on her knee, and remained motionless. She was giving him time; time to weep away the past and the good woman who had ruined his life. Even now she knew how to be patient. In a way she pitied him. If she had not had to be patient for such a long time she would have pitied him much more. But he had often hurt her; and, as Lady Ingleton had said, she was by nature a cruel woman. Nevertheless she pitied him for being, or for having been, so exclusive in love. And she wondered at him not a little.

Lit-up caiques glided out on the bay far beneath her. A band was playing on the quay. She wished it would stop, and she glanced at a little watch which Aristide Dumeny had given her, and which was pinned among the dark blue folds of her gown. But she could not see its face clearly, and she lit a match. A quarter-past ten. The band played till eleven. She lit a cigarette and stared down the hill at the moving lights in the bay.

She had made many water excursions at night. Some of them–two or three at least–had been mentioned in the Divorce Court. She had had a narrow escape that summer in London. It had given her a lesson; but she still had much to learn before she could be considered a past mistress in the school of discretion. Almost ever since she could remember she had been driven by the reckless spirit within her. But she had been given a compensation for that in the force of her will. That force had done wonders for her all through her life. It had even captured and retained for her many women friends. Driven she had been, and no doubt would always be, but she believed that she would always skirt the precipices of life, and would never fall into the abysses.

The timorous and overscrupulous women were the women who missed their footing, because, when they made a false step, they made it in fear and trembling, with the shadow of regret always dogging their heels. And yet, now Jimmy was getting a big boy, even she knew moments of fear.

She moved restlessly. The torch was luring her on, and yet now, for an instant, she was conscious of holding back. August was not far off; Jimmy was coming out to her for his holidays. Suppose, after all, she gave it up? A word from her–or merely a silence–and that man in the pavilion close by would go away from Buyukderer and would probably never come back. If, for once in her life, she played for safety?

The sound of the band on the quay–there had been a short interval of silence–came up to her again. Forty minutes more! She would give that man in the pavilion and herself forty minutes. She could see the lights which outlined the kiosk. When they went out she would come to a decision. Till then, sitting alone, she could indulge in a mental debate. The mere fact that, at this point, she debated the question which filled her mind proved Jimmy’s power over her. As she thought that she began to resent her boy’s power. And it would grow; inevitably it would grow. She moved her thin shoulders. Then she sat very still.

If only she didn’t love Jimmy so much! Suppose she had lost her case in the Divorce Case and Jimmy had been taken away from her? Even now she shuddered when she thought of the risk she had run. She remembered again the period of waiting when the jury could not come to an agreement. What torture she had endured, though no one knew it, or, perhaps, ever would know it! Had not that torture been a tremendous warning to her against the unwise life? Why go into danger again? But perhaps there was no danger any more. A man who has tried to divorce his wife once, and has failed, is scarcely likely to try again. Nevertheless she was full of hesitation to-night.

This fact puzzled and almost alarmed her, for she was not given to hesitation. She was a woman who thought clearly, who knew what she wanted and what she did not want, and who acted promptly and decisively. Perhaps she hesitated now because she had been forced to remain inactive in this particular case for such a long time; or perhaps she had received an obscure warning from something within her which knew what she–the whole of her that was Cynthia Clarke–did not consciously know.

The leaves of the plane tree rustled above her head, and she sighed. As she sat there in the purple darkness she looked like a victim; and for a moment she thought of herself as a victim.

Even that man in the pavilion who was agonizing had said to her that she looked “punished.” She had been surprised, almost startled, by his flash of discernment. But she was sure he thought that matter only a question of coloring, of emaciation, of the shapes of features, and of the way eyes were set in the head.

When would the lights far below go out? She hated her indecision. It was new to her, and she felt it to be a weakness. Whatever she had been till now, she had certainly never been a weak woman, except perhaps from the absurd point of view of the Exeter Hall moralist. Scruples had been strangers to her, a baggage she had not burdened herself with on her journey.

Jimmy! That night Dion Leith had told her that he had seen the eyes of his boy in the stream that flowed through the Kesstane Dereh. She looked out into the purple night, and somewhere in the dim vastness full of mysteries and of half revelations she saw the frank and merciless eyes of a young Eton boy.

Should she be governed by them? Could she submit to the ignorant domination of a child who knew nothing of the complications of human life, nothing of the ways in which human beings are driven by imperious desires, or needs, which have perhaps been sown in ground of flesh and blood by dead parents, or by ancestors laid even with the dust? Could she immolate herself before the altar of the curious love which grew within her as Jimmy grew?

She was by nature perverse, and it was partly her love for Jimmy which pushed her towards the man who killed his son. But she had not told that even to herself. And she never told her secrets to other people, not even when they were women friends!

The lights on the kiosk on the quay went out. Mrs. Clarke was startled by the leaping up of the darkness which seemed to come from the sea. For her ears had been closed against the band, and she had forgotten the limit she had mentally put to her indecision. Eleven o’clock already! She got up from her seat. But still she hesitated. She did not know what she was going to do. She stood for a moment. Then she walked softly towards the pavilion. When she was near to it she stopped and listened. She did not hear any sound from within. There was nothing to prevent her from descending to the villa, from writing a note to Dion Leith asking him to leave Buyukderer on the morrow, and from going up to her bedroom. He would find the note in the hall when he came down; he would go away; she need never see him again. If she did that it would mean a new life for her, free from complications, a life dedicated to Jimmy, a life deliberately controlled.

It would mean, too, the futile close of a long pursuit; the crushing of an old and hitherto frustrated desire; the return, when Jimmy went back to England after the holidays, to an empty life which she hated, more than hated, a life of horrible restlessness, a life in which the imagination preyed, like a vulture, upon the body. It would mean the wise, instead of the unwise, life.

She stood there. With one hand she felt the little watch which Dumeny had given her. It was cold to the touch of her dry, hot hand. She felt the rough emerald set in the back of it. She and Dumeny had found that in the bazaars together, in those bazaars which Dumeny changed from Eastern shops into the Arabian Nights. Dion Leith could never do such a thing for her. But perhaps she could do it for him. The thought of that lured her. She stood at the street corner; it was very dark and still; she knew that the strange ways radiated from the place where she stood, but there was no one to go with her down them. She waited– waited. And then she saw far off the gleam of the torch from which spring colored fires. It flitted through the darkness; it hovered. The gleam of it lit up, like a goblin light, the beginnings of the strange ways. She saw shadowy forms slipping away stealthily into their narrow and winding distances; she saw obscure stairways, leaning balconies full of soft blackness. She divined the rooms beyond. And whispering voices came to her ears.

All the time she was feeling the watch with its rough uncut emerald.

Government came upon her. She felt, as often before, a great hand catch her in a grip of iron. She ceased to resist.

Still holding the watch, she went to the opening in the pavilion.

The hanging lamp had gone out. For a moment she could only see darkness in the interior. It looked empty. There was no sound within. Could the man she had been thinking about, debating about, have slipped away while she was sitting under the plane tree? She had been thinking so deeply that she had not heard the noise of the band on the quay; she might not have heard his footsteps. While she had been considering whether she should leave him perhaps he had fled from her.

This flashing thought brought her back at once to her true and irrevocable self, and she was filled instantly with fierce determination and a cold intense anger. Jimmy was forgotten. He was dead to her at that moment. She leaned forward, peering into the darkness.

“Dion!” she said. “Dion!”

There was no answer, but she saw something stir within, something low down. He was there–or something was there, something alive. She went into the pavilion, and knelt down by it.

“Dion!” she said.

He raised himself on the divan, and turned on his side.

“Why are you kneeling down?” he said. “Don’t kneel. I hate to see a woman kneeling, and I know /you/ never pray. Get up.”

He spoke in a voice that was new to her. It seemed to her hot and hard. She obeyed him at once and got up from her knees.

“What did you mean just now when you asked me whether I couldn’t mingle my life with an unhappy life? Sit here beside me.”

She sat down on the edge of the divan very near to him.

“What do you suppose I meant?”

“Do you mean to say you like me in that way?”

“Yes.”

“That you care about me?”

“Yes.”

“You said you willed me to come out to Constantinople. Was it for that reason?”

She hesitated. She had an instinctive understanding of men, but she knew that, in one way, Dion was not an ordinary man; and even if he had been, the catastrophe in his life might well have put him for the time beyond the limits of her experience, wide though they were.

“No,” she said, at last. “I didn’t like you in that way till I met you in the street, and saw what she had done to you.”

“Then it was only pity?”

“Was it? I knew your value in England.”

She paused, then added, in an almost light and much more impersonal voice:

“I think I may say that I’m a connoisseur of values. And I hate to see a good thing flung away.”

“I’m not a good thing. Perhaps I might have become one. I believe I was on the way to becoming worth something. But now I’m nothing, and I wish to be nothing.”

“I don’t wish you to be anything but what you are.”

“Once you telegraphed to me–‘May Allah have you in His hand.'”

“I remember.”

“It’s turned out differently,” he said, almost with brutality.

“We don’t know that. You came back.”

“Yes. I was kept safe for a very good reason. I had to kill my child. I’ve accomplished that mission, and now, perhaps, Allah will let me alone.”

She could not see his face or the expression in his eyes clearly, but now she saw his body move sharply. It twisted to the right and back again. She put out her hand and took his listlessly, almost as she had taken it in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room when she had met him for the first time.

“Your hand is like fire,” he whispered.

“Do you think I am ice?” she whispered back, huskily.

“Once I tried to take my hand away from yours.”

“Try to take it away now, if you wish.”

As she spoke she closed her hand tenaciously upon his. Her little fingers felt almost like steel on his hand, and he thought of the current of the Bosporus which had pulled at his swimming body.

To be taken and swept away! That at least would be better than drifting, better than death in the form of life, better than slinking in loneliness to watch the doings of others.

“I don’t wish to take it away,” he said.

And with the words mentally he bade an eternal farewell to Rosamund and to all the aspirations of his youth. From her and from them he turned away to follow the gleam of the torch. It flickered through the darkness; it wavered; it waited–for him. He had tried the life of wisdom, and it had cast him out; perhaps there was a place for him in the unwise life. He felt spiritually exhausted; but there was within him a physical fever which answered to the fever in the hand which had closed on his.

“Let the spirit die,” he thought, “that the body may live!”

He put one arm round his companion.

“If you want me—-” he whispered, on a deep breath.

His voice died away in the darkness between the giant cypresses, those trees which watch over the dead in the land of the Turk.

/She/ had said once that the human being can hurt God.

Obscurely he wished to do that.

CHAPTER VI

Mrs. Clarke looked up from a letter written in a large boyish hand which had just been brought out on the terrace of the fountain by the butler.

“Jimmy will be here on Thursday–that is, in Constantinople. The train ought to be in early in the morning.”

Her eyes rested on Dion for a moment; then she looked down again at the letter from Eton.

“He’s in a high state of spirits at the prospect of the journey. But perhaps I oughtn’t to have had him out; perhaps I ought to have gone to England for his holidays.”

“Do you mean because of me?” said Dion.

“I was thinking of cricket,” she replied impassively.

He was silent. After a moment she continued:

“There are no suitable companions for him out here. I wish the Ingletons had a son. Of course there is riding, swimming, boating, and we can make excursions. You’ll be good to him, won’t you?”

She folded the letter up and put it into the envelope.

“I always keep all Jimmy’s letters,” she said.

“Look here!” Dion said in a hard voice. “I think I’d better go.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“Have I asked you to go?”

“No, but I think I shall clear out. I don’t feel like acting a part to a boy. I’ve never done such a thing, and it isn’t at all the sort of thing I could do well.”

“There will be no need to act a part. Be with Jimmy as you were in London.”

“Look at me!” he exclaimed with intense bitterness. “Am I the man I was in London?”

“If you are careful and reasonable, Jimmy won’t notice any difference. Hero worship doesn’t look at things through a microscope. Jimmy’s got his idea of you. It will be your fault if he changes it.”

“Did you tell him I should be here during the holidays?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t help that,” he said, almost brutally.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you answered for me before you knew where I should be.”

He got up from the straw chair on which he was sitting, almost as if he meant to go away from her and from Buyukderer at once.

“Dion, you mustn’t go,” she said inflexibly. “I can’t let you. For if you go, you will never come back.”

“How do you know that?”

“I do know it.”

They looked at each other across the fountain; his eyes fell at last almost guiltily before her steady glance.

“And you know it too,” she said.

“I may go, nevertheless. Who is to prevent me?”

She got up, went to the other side of the fountain, and put her hand behind his arm, after a quick glance round to make sure that no eyes were watching her. She pushed her hand down gently and held his wrist.

“Do you realize how badly you sometimes treat me?” she said.

“Yes.”

She pulled his soft cuff with her little fingers.

“I do realize it, but I can’t help it. I have to do it.”

“If I didn’t know that I should mind it much more,” she said.

“I never thought I had it in me to treat a woman as I sometimes treat you. I used–to be so different.”

“You were too much the other way. But yours is a nature of extremes. That’s partly why I—-“

She did not finish the sentence.

“Then you don’t resent my beastliness to you?” he asked.

“Not permanently. Sometimes you are nice to me. But if you were ever to treat me badly when Jimmy was with me, I don’t think I could ever forgive you.”

“I dread his coming,” said Dion. “I had much better go. If you don’t let me go, you may regret it.”

In saying that he acknowledged the power she had already obtained over him, a power from which he did not feel sure that he could break away, although he was acutely aware of it and sometimes almost bitterly resented it. Mrs. Clarke knew very well that most men can only be held when they do not know that they are held, but Dion, in his present condition, was not like any other man she had known. More than once in the earliest stages of their intimacy she had had really to fight to keep him near her, and so he knew how arbitrary she could be when her nature was roused.

Sometimes he hated her with intensity, for she had set herself to destroy the fabric of his spirit, which not even Rosamund had been able entirely to destroy by her desertion of him. Sometimes he felt a sort of ugly love of her, because she was the agent through whom he was learning to get rid of all that Rosamund had most prized in him. It was as if he called out to her, “Help me to pull down, to tear down, all that I built up in the long years till not one stone is left upon another. What I built up was despised and rejected. I won’t look upon it any more. I’ll raze it to the ground. But I can’t do that alone. Come, you, and help me.” And she came and she helped in the work of destruction, and in an ugly, horrible way he loved her for it sometimes, as a criminal might love an assistant in his crime.

But from such a type of love there are terrible reactions. During these reactions Dion had treated Cynthia Clarke abominably sometimes, showing the hatred which alternated with his ugly love, if love it could properly be called. He hated her in such moments for the fierce lure she had for the senses, a lure which he felt more and more strongly as he left farther behind him the old life of sane enjoyments and of the wisdom which walks with restraint; he hated her for the perversity which he was increasingly conscious of as he came to know her more intimately; he hated her because he had so much loved the woman who would not make a friend of her; he hated her because he knew that she was drawing him into a path which led into the center of a maze, the maze of hypocrisy.

Hitherto Dion had been essentially honest and truthful, what men call “open and above-board.” He had walked clear-eyed in the light; he had had nothing dirty to hide; what his relations with others had seemed to be that they had actually been. But since that first night in the pavilion Cynthia Clarke had taught him very thoroughly the hypocrisy a man owes to the woman with whom he has a secret liaison.

He still believed that till that night she had been what the world calls “a straight woman.” She did not ape a rigid morality for once betrayed by passion, or pretend to any religious scruples, or show any fears of an eventual punishment held in reserve for all sinners by an implacable Power; she did not, when Dion was brutal to her, ever reproach him with having made of her a wicked or even a light woman. But she made him feel by innumerable hints and subtleties that for him she had exchanged a safe life for a life that was beset with danger, the smiled-on life of a not too conventional virtue for something very different. She seemed sometimes uneasy in her love, as if such a love were an error new to her experience.

Jimmy was her chief weapon against Dion’s natural sincerity. Dion realized that she was passionately attached to her boy, and that she would make almost any sacrifice rather than lose his respect and affection. Nevertheless, she was ready to take great risks. The risks she was not prepared to take were the smaller risks. And in connexion with them her call for hypocrisy was incessant. If Dion ever tried to resist her demands for small lies and petty deceptions, she would look at him, and say huskily:

“I have to do these things now because of Jimmy. No one must ever have the least suspicion of what we are to each other, or some day Jimmy might get to know of it. It isn’t my husband I’m afraid of, it’s Jimmy.”

If Dion had been by nature a suspicious man, or if he had had a wider experience with women, Mrs. Clarke’s remarkable ingenuity in hypocrisy would almost certainly have suggested to him that she was no novice in the life of deception. Her appearance of frankness, even of bluntness, was admirable. To every one she presented herself as a woman of strong will and unconventional temperament who took her own way openly, having nothing to conceal, and therefore nothing to fear. She made a feature of her friendship with the tragic Englishman; she even dwelt upon it and paraded it for the pretense of blunt and Platonic friendship was the cloud with which she concealed the fire of their illicit relation. The trip on the “Leyla” to Brusa had tortured Dion. Since the episode in the pavilion a more refined torment had been his. Mrs. Clarke had not allowed him to escape from the social ties which were so hateful to him. She had made him understand that he must go among her acquaintances now and then, that he must take a certain part in the summer life of Therapia and Buyukderer, that the trip to Brusa had been only a beginning. More than once he had tried to break away, but he had not succeeded in his effort. Her will had been too strong for his, not merely because she did not fear at moments to be fierce and determined, but because behind her fierceness and determination was an unuttered plea which his not dead chivalry heard; “For you I have become what I was falsely accused of being in London.” He remembered the wonderful fight she had made then; often her look and manner, when they were alone together, implied, “I couldn’t make such a fight now.” She never said that, but she made him float in an atmosphere of that suggestion.

He believed that she loved him. Sometimes he compared her love with the affection which Rosamund had given him, and then it seemed to his not very experienced heart that perhaps intense love can only show itself by something akin to degradation, by enticements which a genuinely pure nature could never descend to, by perversities which the grand simplicity and wholesomeness of goodness would certainly abhor. Then a distortion of love presented itself to his tragic investigation as the only love that was real, and good and evil lost for him their true significance. He had said to himself, “Let the spirit die that the body may live.” He had wished, he still wished, to pull down. He had a sort of demented desire for ruins and dust. But he longed for action, on the grand scale. Small secrecies, trickeries, tiptoeing through the maze–all these things revolted that part of his nature which was, perhaps, unchangeable. They seemed to him unmanly. In his present condition he could quite easily have lain down in the sink of Pera’s iniquity, careless whether any one knew; but it was horribly difficult to him to dine with the Ingletons and Vane at the Villa Hafiz, to say “Good night” to Mrs. Clarke before them, to go away, leaving them in the villa, and then, very late, to sneak back, with a key, to the garden gate, when all the servants were in bed, and to creep up, like a thief, to the pavilion. Some men would have enjoyed all the small deceptions, would have thought them good fun, would have found that they added a sharp zest to the pursuit of a woman. Dion loathed them.

And now he was confronted with something he was going to loathe far more, something which would call for more sustained and elaborate deception than any he had practised yet. He feared the eyes of an English boy more than he feared the eyes of the diplomats and the cosmopolitans of varying types who were gathered on the Bosporus during the months of heat. He detested the idea of playing a part to a boy. How could a mother lay plots to deceive her son? And yet Mrs. Clarke adored Jimmy.

Rosamund and Robin started up in his mind. He saw them before him as he had seen them one night in Westminster when Rosamund had been singing to Robin. Ah, she had been a cruel, a terribly cruel, wife, but she had been an ideal mother! He saw her head bent over her child, the curve of her arm round his little body. A sensation of sickness came upon him, of soul-nausea; and again he thought, “I must get away.”

The night before the day on which Jimmy was due to arrive, Mrs. Clarke was in Constantinople. She had gone there to meet Jimmy, and had started early in the morning, leaving Dion at Buyukderer. When she was gone he took the Albanian’s boat and went out on the Bosporus for a row. The man and he were both at the oars, and pulled out from the bay. When they had gone some distance–they had been rowing for perhaps ten minutes–the man asked:

“Ou allons-nous, Signore?”

“Vers Constantinople,” replied Dion.

“Bene!” replied the man.

That night Mrs. Clarke had just finished dinner when a waiter tapped at her sitting-room door.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A gentleman asks if he can see you, Madame.”

“A gentleman? Have you got his card?”

“No, Madame; he gave no card.”

“What is he like?”

“He is English, I think, very thin and very brown. He looks very strong.”

The waiter paused, then added:

“He has a hungry look.”

Mrs. Clarke stared at the man with her very wide-open eyes.

“Go down and ask him to wait.”

“Yes, Madame.”

The man went out. When he had shut the door Mrs. Clarke called:

“Sonia!”

Her raised voice was rather harsh.

The bedroom door was opened, and the Russian maid looked into the sitting-room.

“Sonia,” said Mrs. Clarke rapidly in French, “some one–a man–has called and asked for me. He’s waiting in the hall. Go down and see who it is. If it’s Mr. Leith you can bring him up.”

“And if it is not Monsieur Leith?”

“Come back and tell me who it is.”

The maid came out of the bedroom, shut the door, crossed the sitting- room rather heavily on flat feet, and went out on to the landing.

“Shut the door!” Mrs. Clarke called after her.

When the sitting-room door was shut she sat waiting with her forehead drawn to a frown. She did not move till the sitting-room door was opened by the maid and a man walked in.

“Monsieur Leith,” said the maid.

And she disappeared.

“Come and sit down,” said Mrs. Clarke. “Why have you come to Pera?”

“I wanted to speak to you.”

“How tired you look! Have you had dinner?”

“No, I don’t want it.”

“Did you come by steamer?”

“No, I rowed down.”

“All the way?”

He nodded.

“Where are you staying?”

“I haven’t decided yet where I shall stay. Not here, of course.”

“Of course not. Dion, sit down.”

He sat down heavily.

“If you haven’t decided about an hotel, where is your luggage?”

“I haven’t brought any.”

She said nothing, but her distressed eyes questioned him.

“I started out for a row. The current set towards Constantinople, so I came here.”

“I’m glad,” she said.

But she did not look glad.

“We can spend a quiet evening together,” she added nonchalantly.

“I didn’t come for that,” he said.

He began to get up, but she put one hand on him.

“Do sit still. What is it, then? Whatever it is, tell me quietly.”

He yielded to her soft but very imperative touch, and sat back in his chair.

“Now, what is it?”

“I’m sure you know. It’s Jimmy.”

She lowered her eyelids, and her pale forehead puckered.

“Jimmy! What about Jimmy?”

“I don’t want to be at Buyukderer while he’s with you.”

“And you have rowed all the way from Buyukderer to Constantinople, without even a brush and comb, to tell me that!”

“I told you at Buyukderer.”

“And we decided that it would be much jollier for Jimmy to have you there for his holidays. I depend upon you to make things tolerable for Jimmy. You know how few people there are near us who would trouble themselves about a boy. You will be my stand-by with Jimmy all through his holidays.”

She spoke serenely, even cheerfully, but there was a decisive sound in her voice, and the eyes fixed upon him were full of determination.

“I can’t understand how you can be willing to act a lie to your own boy, especially when you care for him so much,” said Dion, almost violently.

“I shall not act a lie.”

“But you will.”

“Sometimes you are horribly morbid,” she said coldly.

“Morbid! Because I want to keep a young schoolboy out of–“

“Take care, Dion!” she interrupted hastily.

“If you–you don’t really love Jimmy,” he said.

“I forbid you to say that.”

“I will say it. It’s true.”

And he repeated with a cruelly deliberate emphasis:

“You don’t really love Jimmy.”

Her white face was suddenly flooded with red, which even covered her forehead to the roots of her hair. She put up one hand with violence and tried to strike Dion on the mouth. He caught her wrist.

“Be quiet!” he said roughly.

Gripping her wrist with his hard, muscular brown fingers he repeated:

“You don’t love Jimmy.”

“Do you wish me to hate you?”

“I don’t care. I don’t care what happens to me.”

She sat looking down. The red began to fade out of her face. Presently she curled her fingers inwards against his palm and smiled faintly.

“I am not going to quarrel with you,” she said quietly.

He loosened his grip on her; but now she caught and held his hand.

“I do love Jimmy, and you know it when you aren’t mad. But I care for you, too, and I am not going to lose you. If you went away while Jimmy was out here I should never see you again. You would disappear. Perhaps you would cross over to Asia.”

Her great eyes were fixed steadily upon him.

“Ah, you have thought of that!” she said, almost in a whisper.

He was silent.

“Women would get hold of you. You would sink; you would be ruined, destroyed. I know!”

“If I were it wouldn’t matter.”

“To me it would. I can’t risk it. I am not going to risk it.”

Dion leaned forward. His brown face was twitching.

“Suppose you had to choose between Jimmy and me!”

He was thinking of Robin and Rosamund. A child had conquered him once. Now once again a child–for Jimmy was no more than a child as yet, although he thought himself important and almost a young man–intruded into his life with a woman.

“I shall not have to choose. But I have told you that a child is not enough for the happiness of a woman like me. You know what I am, and you must know I am speaking the truth.”

“Did you love your husband?” he asked, staring into her eyes.

“Yes,” she replied, without even a second of hesitation. “I did till he suspected me.”

“And then—-“

“Not after that,” she said grimly.

“I wonder he let you do all you did.”

“What do you mean?”

She let his hand go.

“I would never have let you go about with other men, however innocently. I thought about that at your trial.”

“I should never let any one interfere with my freedom of action. If a man loves me I expect him to trust me.”

“You don’t trust me.”

“Sometimes you almost hate me. I know that.”

“Sometimes I hate everybody, myself most of all. But I should miss you. You are the only woman in all the world who wants me now.”

Suddenly a thought of his mother intruded into his mind, and he added:

“Wants me as a lover.”

She got up quickly, almost impulsively, and went close to him.

“Yes, I want you, I want you as a lover, and I can’t let you go. That is why I ask you, I beg you, to stay with me while Jimmy’s here.”

She leaned against him, and put her small hands on his shoulders.

“How can a child understand the needs of a woman like me and of a man like you? How can he look into our hearts or read the secrets of our natures–secrets which we can’t help having? You hate what you call deceiving him. But he will never think about it. A boy of Jimmy’s age never thinks about his mother in that way.”

“I know. That’s just it!”

“What do you mean?”

But he did not explain. Perhaps instinctively he felt that her natural subtlety could not be in accord with his natural sincerity, felt that in discussing certain subjects they talked in different languages. She put her arms round his neck.

“I need the two lives,” she said, in a very low voice. “I need Jimmy and I need you. Is it so very wonderful? Often when a woman who isn’t old loses her husband and is left with her child people say, ‘It’s all right for her. She has got her child.’ And so she’s dismissed to her motherhood, as if that must be quite enough for her. Dion, Dion, the world doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, how women suffer. Women don’t speak about such things. But I am telling you because I don’t want to have secrets from you. I have suffered. Perhaps I have some pride in me. Anyhow, I don’t care to go about complaining. You know that. You must have found that out in London. I keep my secrets, but not from you.”

She put her white cheek against his brown one.

“It’s only the two lives joined together that make life complete for a woman who is complete, who isn’t lopsided, lacking in something essential, something that nature intends. I am a complete woman, and I’m not ashamed of it. Do you think I ought to be?”

She sighed against his cheek.

“You are a courageous woman,” he said; “I do know that.”

“Don’t /you/ test my courage. Perhaps I’m getting tired of being courageous.”

She put her thin lips against his.

“It’s acting–deception I hate,” he murmured. “With a boy especially I like always to be quite open.”

Again he thought of Robin and of his old ideal of a father’s relation to his son; he thought of his preparation to be worthy of fatherhood, worthy to guide a boy’s steps in the path towards a noble manhood. And a terrible sense of the irony of life almost overcame him. For a moment he seemed to catch a glimpse of the Creator laughing in darkness at the aspiration of men; for a moment he was beset by the awful conviction that the world is ruled by a malign Deity.

“All the time Jimmy is at Buyukderer we’ll just be friends,” said the husky voice against his cheek.

The sophistry of her remark struck home to him, but he made no comment upon it.

“There are white deceptions,” she continued, “and black deceptions, as there are white and black lies. Whom are we hurting, you and I?”

“Whom are we hurting?” he said, releasing himself from her.

And he thought of God in a different way–in Rosamund’s way.

“Yes?”

He looked at her as if he were going to speak, but he said nothing. He felt that if he answered she would not understand, and her face made him doubtful. Which view of life was the right one, Rosamund’s or Cynthia Clarke’s? Rosamund had been pitiless to him and Cynthia Clarke was merciful. She put her arms round his neck when he was in misery, she wanted him despite the tragedy that was his perpetual companion. Perhaps her view of life was right. It was a good working view, anyhow, and was no doubt held by many people.

“We can base our lives on truth,” she continued, as he said nothing. “On being true to ourselves. That is the great truth. But we can’t always tell it to all the casual people about us, or even to those who are closely in our lives, as for instance Jimmy is in mine. They wouldn’t understand. But some day Jimmy will be able to understand.”

“Do you mean—-“

“I mean just this: if Jimmy were twenty-one I would tell him everything.”

He looked down into her eyes, which never fell before the eyes of another.

“I believe you would,” he said.

She continued looking at him, as if tranquilly waiting for something.

“I’ll–I’ll go back to Buyukderer,” he said.

CHAPTER VII

In his contrition for the attack which he had made upon the honor of his wife at his mother’s instigation, Beadon Clarke had given up all claims on his boy’s time. Actually, though not legally, Mrs. Clarke had complete control over Jimmy. He spent all his holidays with her, and seldom saw his father, who was still attached to the British Embassy in Madrid. He had never been allowed to read any reports of the famous case which had been fought out between his parents, and was understood to think that his father and mother had, for some mysterious reason, found it impossible to “hit it off together,” and had therefore decided to live apart. He was now rather vaguely fond of his father, whom he considered to be “quite a good sort,” but he was devoted to his mother. Mrs. Clarke’s peculiar self-possession and remarkably strong will made a great impression on Jimmy. “It’s jolly difficult to score my mater off, I can tell you,” he occasionally remarked to his more intimate chums at school. He admired her appearance, her elegance, and the charm of her way of living, which he called “doing herself jolly well”; even her unsmiling face and characteristic lack of what is generally called vivacity won his approval. “My mater’s above all that silly gushing and giggling so many women go in for, don’t you know,” was his verdict on Mrs. Clarke’s usually serious demeanor. Into her gravity boyishly he read dignity of character, and in his estimation of her he set her very high. Although something of a pickle, and by nature rather reckless and inclined to be wild, he was swiftly obedient to his mother, partly perhaps because, understanding young males as well as she understood male beings of all ages, she very seldom drew the reins tight. He knew very well that she loved him.

On the evening of his arrival at Buyukderer for the summer holidays Jimmy had a confidential talk with his mother about “Mr. Leith,” whom he had not yet seen, but about whom he had been making many anxious inquiries.

“I’ll tell you to-night,” his mother had replied. And after dinner she fulfilled her promise.

“You’ll see Mr. Leith to-morrow,” she said.

“Well, I should rather think so!” returned Jimmy, in an injured voice. “Where is he?”

“He’s living in rooms in the house of a Greek not far from here.”

“I thought he was in the hotel. I say, mater, can’t I have a cigarette just for once?”

“Yes, you may, just for once.”

Jimmy approached the cigarette box with the air of a nonchalant conqueror. As he opened it with an apparently practised forefinger he remarked:

“Well, mater?”

“He’s left the hotel. You know, Jimmy, Mr. Leith has had great misfortunes.”

Jimmy had heard of the gun accident and its terrible result, and he now looked very grave.

“I know–poor chap!” he observed. “But it wasn’t his fault. It was the little brute of a pony. Every one knows that. It was rotten bad luck, but who would be down on a fellow for bad luck?”

“Exactly. But it’s changed Mr. Leith’s life. His wife has left him. He’s given up his business, and is, consequently, less well off than he was. But this isn’t all.”

Jimmy tenderly struck a match, lighted a cigarette, and, with half- closed eyes, blew forth in a professional manner a delicate cloud of smoke. He was feeling good all over.

“First-rate cigarettes!” he remarked. “The very best! Yes, mater?”

“He’s rather badly broken up.”

“No wonder!” said Jimmy, with discrimination.

“You’ll find him a good deal changed. Sometimes he’s moody and even bad-tempered, poor fellow, and he’s fearfully sensitive. I’m trying my best to buck him up.”

“Good for you, mater! He’s our friend. We’re bound to stand by him.”