In the Wilderness by Robert Hichens (page 4)

When he got to Great Cumberland Place, Daventry, who was to make a fourth, had just arrived, and was taking off his coat in the hall. He looked unusually excited, alert in an almost feverish way, which was surprising in him.

“I’m in a case,” he said, “a quite big case. Bruce Evelin’s got it for me. I’m going to be junior to Addington; Lewis & Lewis instruct me. What d’you think of that?”

Dion clapped him on the shoulder.

“The way of salvation!”

“Where will it lead me?”

“To Salvation, of course.”

“I’ll walk home with you to-night, old Dion. I must yap across the Park with you to Hyde Park Corner, and tell you all about the woman from Constantinople.”

They were going upstairs.

“The woman—-?”

“My client, my client. My dear boy, this is no ordinary case”–he waved a small hand ceremoniously–“it’s a /cause celebre/ or I shouldn’t have bothered myself with it.”

Lurby opened the drawing-room door.

“How’s Rosamund?” was Beatrice’s first question to Dion, as they shook hands.

“All right. I left her just going to feed from a tray in her little room.”

“Rosamund always loved having a meal on a tray,” said Bruce Evelin. “She’s a big child still. But enthusiasts never really grow up, luckily for them.”

“Dinner is served, sir.”

“Daventry, will you take Beatrice?”

As Dion followed with Bruce Evelin, he said:

“So you’ve got Daventry a case!”

“Yes.”

Bruce Evelin lowered his voice.

“He’s a good fellow and a clever fellow, but he’s got to work. He’s been slacking for years.”

Dion understood. Bruce Evelin wished Beatrice to marry Daventry.

“He respects you tremendously, sir. If any one can make him work, you can.”

“I’m going to,” returned Bruce Evelin, with his quiet force. “He’s got remarkable ability, and the slacker–well—-“

He looked at Dion with his dark, informed eyes, in which knowledge of the world and of men always seemed sitting.

“I can bear with bad energy almost more easily and comfortably than with slackness.”

During dinner, without seeming to, Dion observed and considered Beatrice and Daventry, imagining them wife and husband. He felt sure Daventry would be very happy. As to Beatrice, he could not tell. There was always in Beatrice’s atmosphere, or nearly always, a faint suggestion of sadness which, curiously, was not disagreeable but attractive. Dion doubted whether Daventry could banish it. Perhaps no one could, and Daventry had, perhaps, that love which does not wish to alter, which says, “I love you with your little sadness–keep it.”

Daventry was exceptionally animated at dinner. The prospect of actually appearing in court as counsel in a case had evidently worked upon him like a powerful tonic. Always able to be amusing when he chose, he displayed to-night a new something–was it a hint of personal dignity?–which Dion had not hitherto found in him. “Dear old Daventry,” the agreeable, and obviously clever, nobody, who was a sure critic of others, and never did anything himself, who blinked at moments with a certain feebleness, and was too fond of the cozy fireside, or the deep arm-chairs of his club, had evidently caught hold of the flying skirts of his self-respect, and was thoroughly enjoying his capture. He did not talk very much to Beatrice, but it was obvious that he was at every moment enjoying her presence, her attention; when she listened earnestly he caught her earnestness and it seemed to help him; when she laughed, in her characteristic delicate way,–her laugh seemed almost wholly of the mind,–he beamed with a joy that was touching in a man of his type because it was so unself-conscious. His affection for Beatrice had performed the miracle of drawing him out of the prison of awareness in which such men as he dwell. To-night he was actually unobservant. Dion knew this by the changed expression of his eyes. Even Beatrice he was not observing; he was just feeling what she was, how she was. For once he had passed beyond the narrow portals and had left satire far behind him.

When Beatrice got up to go to the drawing-room he opened the door for her. She blushed faintly as she went out. When the door was shut, and the three men were alone, Bruce Evelin said to Dion:

“Will you mind if Daventry and I talk a little shop to-night?”

“Of course not. But would you rather I went up and kept Beattie company?”

“No; stay till you’re bored, or till you think Beatrice is bored. Let us light up.”

He walked slowly, with his gently precise gait, to a cigar cabinet, opened it, and told the young men to help themselves.

“And now for the Clarke case,” he said.

“Is that the name of the woman from Constantinople?” asked Dion.

“Yes, Mrs. Beadon Clarke,” said Daventry. “But she hates the Beadon and never uses it. Beadon Clarke’s trying to divorce her, and I’m on her side. She’s staying with Mrs. Chetwinde. Esme Darlington, who’s an old friend of hers, thinks her too unconventional for a diplomatist’s wife.”

Bruce Evelin had lighted his cigar.

“We mustn’t forget that our friend Darlington has always run tame rather than wild,” he remarked, with a touch of dry satire. “And now, Daventry, let us go through the main facts of the case, without, of course, telling any professional secrets.”

And he began to outline the Clarke case, which subsequently made a great sensation in London.

It appeared that Mrs. Clarke had come first to him in her difficulty, and had tried hard to persuade him to emerge from his retirement and to lead for her defense. He had been determined in refusal, and had advised her to get Sir John Addington, with Daventry as junior. This she had done. Now Bruce Evelin was carefully “putting up” Daventry to every move in the great game which was soon to be played out, a game in which a woman’s honor and future were at stake. The custody of a much-loved child might also come into question.

“Suppose Addington is suddenly stricken with paralysis in the middle of the case, you must be ready to carry it through triumphantly alone,” he observed, with quietly twinkling eyes, to Daventry.

“May I have a glass of your oldest brandy, sir?” returned Daventry, holding on to the dinner-table with both hands.

The brandy was given to him and the discussion of the case continued. By degrees Dion found himself becoming strongly interested in Mrs. Clarke, whose name came up constantly. She was evidently a talented and a very unusual woman. Perhaps the latter fact partially accounted for the unusual difficulties in which she was now involved. Her husband, Councilor to the British Embassy at Constantinople, charged her with misconduct, and had cited two co-respondents,–Hadi Bey, a Turkish officer, and Aristide Dumeny, a French diplomat,–both apparently men of intellect and of highly cultivated tastes, and both slightly younger than Mrs. Clarke. A curious fact in the case was that Beadon Clarke was deeply in love with his wife, and had–so Dion gathered from a remark of Bruce Evelin’s–probably been induced to take action against her by his mother, Lady Ermyntrude Clarke, who evidently disliked, and perhaps honestly disbelieved in, her daughter- in-law. There was one child of the marriage, a boy, to whom both the parents were deeply attached. The elements of tragedy in the drama were accentuated by the power to love possessed by accuser and accused. As Dion listened to the discussion he realized what a driving terror, what a great black figure, almost monstrous, love can be–not only the sunshine, but the abysmal darkness of life.

Presently, in a pause, while Daventry was considering some difficult point, Dion remembered that Beatrice was sitting upstairs alone. Her complete unselfishness always made him feel specially chivalrous towards her. Now he got up.

“It’s tremendously interesting, but I’m going upstairs to Beattie,” he said.

“Ah, how subtle of you, my boy!” said Bruce Evelin.

“Subtle! Why?”

“I was just coming to the professional secrets.”

Dion smiled and went off to Beattie. He found her working quietly, almost dreamily, on one of those fairy garments such as he had seen growing towards its minute full size in the serene hands of his Rosamund.

“You too!” he said, looking down at the filmy white. “How good you are to us, Beattie!”

He sat down.

“What’s this in your lap?”

The filmy white had been lifted in the process of sewing, and a little exquisitely bound white book was disclosed beneath it.

“May I look?”

“Yes, do.”

Dion took the book up, and read the title, “The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi.”

“I never heard of this. Where did you get it?”

“Guy Daventry left it here by mistake yesterday. I must give it to him to-night.”

Dion opened the book, and saw on the title page: “Cynthia Clarke, Constantinople, October 1896,” written in a curiously powerful, very upright caligraphy.

“It doesn’t belong to Guy.”

“No; it was lent to him by his client, Mrs. Clarke.”

Dion turned some of the leaves of the book, began to read and was immediately absorbed.

“By Jove, it’s wonderful, it’s simply splendid!” he said in a moment. “Just listen to this:

“True to thy nature, to thyself,
Fame and disfame nor hope, nor fear; Enough to thee the still small voice
Aye thundering in thine inner ear.

From self-approval seek applause:
What ken not men thou kennest thou! Spurn every idol others raise:
Before thine own ideal bow.”

He met the dark eyes of Beatrice.

“You care for that?”

“Yes, very much,” she answered, in her soft and delicate voice.

“Beattie, I believe you live by that,” he said, almost bruskly.

Suddenly he felt aware of a peculiar sort of strength in her, in her softness, a strength not at all as of iron, mysterious and tenacious.

“Dear old Beattie!” he said.

Moisture had sprung into his eyes.

“How lonely our lives are,” he continued, looking at her now with a sort of deep curiosity. “The lives of all of us. I don’t care who it is, man, woman, child, he or she, every one’s lonely. And yet—-“

A doubt had surely struck him. He sat very still for a minute.

“When I think of Rosamund I can’t think of her as lonely.”

“Can’t you?”

“No. Somehow it seems as if she always had a companion with her.”

He turned a few more pages of Mrs. Clarke’s book, glancing here and there.

“Rosamund would hate this book,” he said presently. “It seems thoroughly anti-Christian. But it’s very wonderful.”

He put the book down.

“Dear Beattie! Guy cares very much for you.”

“Yes, I know,” said Beatrice, with a great simplicity.

“If he comes well out of this case, and feels he’s on the road to success, he’ll be another man. He’ll dare as a man ought to dare.”

She went on sewing the little garment for Dion’s child.

“I’ll walk across the Park with you, old Dion,” said Daventry that night, as they left the house in Great Cumberland Place, “whether you’re going to walk home or whether you’re not, whether you’re in a devil of a hurry to get back to your Rosamund, or whether you’re in a mood for friendship. What time is it, by the way?”

He was wrapped in a voluminous blue overcoat, with a wide collar, immense lapels, and apparently only one button, and that button so minute that it was scarcely visible to the naked eye. From somewhere he extracted a small, abnormally thin watch with a gold face.

“Only twenty minutes to eleven. We dined early.”

“You really wish to walk?”

“I not only wish to walk, I will walk.”

The still glory of frost had surely fascinated London, had subdued the rumbling and uneasy black monster; it seemed to Dion unusually quiet, almost like something in ecstasy under the glittering stars of frost, which shone in a sky swept clear of clouds by the hand of the lingering winter. It was the last night of February, but it looked, and felt, like a night dedicated to the Christ Child, to Him who lay on the breast of Mary with cattle breathing above Him. As Dion gazed up at the withdrawn and yet almost piercing radiance of the wonderful sky, instinctively he thought of the watching shepherds, and of the coming of that Child who stands forever apart from all the other children born of women into this world. He wished Rosamund were with him to see the stars, and the frost glistening white on the great stretches of grass, and the naked trees in the mysterious and romantic Park.

“Shall we take the right-hand path and walk round the Serpentine?” said Daventry presently.

“Yes. I don’t mind. Rosamund will be asleep, I think. She goes to bed early now.”

“When will it be?”

“Very soon, I suppose; perhaps in ten days or so.”

Daventry was silent. He wanted and meant to talk about his own affairs, but he hesitated to begin. Something in the night was making him feel very small and very great. Dion gave him a lead by saying:

“D’you mind my asking you something about the Clarke case?”

“Anything you like. I’ll answer if I may.”

“Do you believe Mrs. Clarke to be guilty or innocent?”

“Oh, innocent!” exclaimed Daventry, with unusual warmth.

“And does Bruce Evelin?”

“I believe so. I assume so.”

“I noticed that, while I was listening to you both, he never expressed any opinion, or gave any hint of what his opinion was on the point.”

“I feel sure he thinks her innocent,” said Daventry, still almost with heat. “Not that it much matters,” he added, in a less prejudiced voice. “The point is, we must prove her to be innocent whether she is nor not. I happen to feel positive she is. She isn’t the least the siren type of woman, though men like her.”

“What type is she?”

“The intellectual type. Not a blue-stocking! God forbid! I couldn’t defend a blue-stocking. But she’s a woman full of taste, who cares immensely for fine and beautiful things, for things that appeal to the eye and the mind. In that way, perhaps, she’s almost a sensualist. But, in any other way! I want you to know her. She’s a very interesting woman. Esme Darlington says her perceptions are exquisite. Mrs. Chetwinde’s backing her up for all she’s worth.”

“Then she believes her to be innocent too, of course.”

“Of course. Come with me to Mrs. Chetwinde’s next Sunday afternoon. She’ll be there.”

“On a night like this, doesn’t a divorce case seem preposterous?”

“Well, you have the tongue of the flatterer!”–he looked up–“But perhaps it does, even when it’s Mrs. Clarke’s.”

“Are you in love with Mrs. Clarke?”

“Deeply, because she’s my first client in a /cause celebre/.”

“Have you forgotten her book again?”

“Her book? ‘The Kasidah’? I’ve got it here.”

He tapped the capacious side pocket of his coat.

“You saw it then?” he added.

“Beattie had it when I went upstairs.”

“I wonder what she made of it,” Daventry said, with softness in his voice. “Don’t ever let Rosamund see it, by the way. It’s anything rather than Christian. Mrs. Clarke gets hold of everything, dives into everything. She’s got an unresting mind.”

They had come to the edge of the Serpentine, on which there lay an ethereal film of baby ice almost like frosted gauze. The leafless trees, with their decoration of filigree, suggested the North and its peculiar romance–nature trailing away into the mighty white solitudes where the Pole star reigns over fields of ice.

“Hyde Park is bringing me illusions to-night,” said Daventry. “That water might be the Vistula. If I heard a wolf howling over there near the ranger’s lodge, I shouldn’t be surprised.”

A lifeguardsman, in a red cloak, and a woman drifted away over the frost among the trees.

“I love Mrs. Clarke as a client, but perhaps I love her even more because, through her, I hope to get hold of something I’ve–I’ve let drop,” continued Daventry.

“What’s that?”

Daventry put his arm through Dion’s.

“I don’t know whether I can name it even to you; but it’s something a man of great intelligence, such as myself, should always keep in his fist.”

He paused.

“The clergy are apt to call it self-respect,” he at length added, in a dry voice.

Dion pressed his arm.

“Bruce Evelin wants you to marry Beatrice.”

“He hasn’t told you so?”

“No, except by taking the trouble to force you to work.”

Daventry stood still.

“I’m going to ask her–almost directly.”

“Come on, Guy, or we shall have all the blackbirds round us. Look over there.”

Not far off, among the trees, two slinking and sinister shadows of men seemed to be intent upon them.

“Isn’t it incredible to practise the profession of a blackmailer out of doors on a night like this?” said Dion. “D’you remember when we were in the night train coming from Burstal? You had a feather that night.”

“Damn it! Why rake up–?”

“And I said how wonderful it would be if some day I were married to Rosamund.”

“Is it wonderful?”

“Yes.”

“Very wonderful?”

“Yes.”

“Children too!”

Daventry sighed.

“One wants to be worthy of it all,” he murmured. “And then”–he laughed, as if calling in his humor to save him from something–“the children, in their turn, feel they would like to live up to papa. Dion, people can be caught in the net of goodness very much as they can be caught in the net of evil. Let us praise the stars for that.”

They arrived at the bridge. The wide road, which looked to-night extraordinarily clean, almost as if it had been polished up for the passing of some delicate procession in the night, was empty. There were no vehicles going by; the night-birds kept among the trees. The quarter after eleven chimed from some distant church. Dion thought of Rosamund, as he paused on the bridge, thought of himself as a husband yielding his wife up to the solitude she evidently desired. He took Daventry for his companion; she had the child for hers. There was suffering of a kind even in a very perfect marriage, but what he had told Daventry was true; it had been very wonderful. He had learnt a great deal in his marriage, dear lessons of high-mindedness in desire, of purity in possession. If Rosamund were to be cut off from him even to-night he had gained enormously by the possession of her. He knew what woman can be, and without disappointment; for he did not choose to reckon up those small, almost impalpable things which, like passing shadows, had now and then brought a faint obscurity into his life with Rosamund, as disappointments. They came, perhaps, from himself. And what where they? He looked out over the long stretch of unruffled water, filmed over with ice near the shores, and saw a tiny dark object traveling through it with self-possession and an air of purpose beneath the constellations; some aquatic bird up to something, heedless of the approaching midnight and the Great Bear.

“Look at that little beggar!” said Daventry. “And we don’t know so very much more about it all than he does. I expect he’s a Muscovy duck, or drake, if you’re a pedant about genders.”

“He’s evidently full of purpose.”

“Out in the middle of the ice-cold Serpentine. He’s only a speck now, like our world in space. Now I can’t see him.”

“I can.”

“You’re longer-sighted than I am. But, Dion, I’m seeing a longish way to-night, farther than I’ve seen before. Love’s a great business, the greatest business in life. Ambition, and greed, and vanity, and altruism, and even fanaticism, must give place when it’s on hand, when it harnesses its winged horses to a man’s car and swings him away to the stars.”

“Ask her. I think she’ll have you.”

A star fell through the frosty clear sky. Dion remembered the falling star above Drouva. This time he was swift with a wish, but it was not a wish for his friend.

They reached Hyde Park Corner just before midnight and parted there. Dion hailed a hansom, but Daventry declared with determination that he was going to walk all the way home to Phillimore Gardens.

“To get up my case, to arrange things mentally,” he explained. “Big brains always work best at night. All the great lawyers toil when the stars are out. Why should I be an exception? I dedicate myself to Cynthia Clarke. She will have my undivided attention and all my deepest solicitude.”

“I know why.”

“No, no.”

He put one hand on the apron which Dion had already closed.

“No, really, you’re wrong. I am deeply interested in Mrs. Clarke because she is what she is. I want her to win because I’m convinced she’s innocent. Will you come to Mrs. Chetwinde’s next Sunday and meet her?”

“Yes, unless Rosamund wants me.”

“That’s always understood.”

The cab drove away, and the great lawyer was left to think of his case under the stars.

When the cab turned the corner of Great Market Street, Westminster, and came into Little Market Street, Dion saw in the distance before him two large, staring yellow eyes, which seemed to be steadily regarding him like the eyes of something on the watch. They were the lamps of a brougham drawn up in front of No. 5. Dion’s cabman, perforce, pulled up short before the brown door of No. 4.

“A carriage in front of my house at this time of night!” thought Dion, as he got out and paid the man.

He looked at the coachman and at the solemn brown horse between the shafts, and instantly realized that this was the carriage of a doctor.

“Rosamund!”

With a thrill of anxiety, a clutch at his heart, he thrust his latchkey into the door. It stuck; he could not turn it. This had never happened before. He tried, with force, to pull the key out. It would not move. He shook it. The doctor’s coachman, he felt, was staring at him from the box of the brougham. As he struggled impotently with the key his shoulders began to tingle, and a wave of acute irritation flooded him. He turned sharply round and met the coachman’s eyes, shrewd, observant, lit, he thought, by a flickering of sarcasm.

“Has the doctor been here long?” said Dion.

“Sir?”

“This is a doctor’s carriage, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. Doctor Mayson.”

“Well, I say, has he been here long?”

“About an hour, sir, or a little more.”

“Thanks.”

Dion turned again and assaulted the latchkey.

But he had to ring the bell to get in. When the maid came, looking excited, he said:

“I don’t know what on earth’s the matter with this key. I can’t either turn it or get it out.”

“No, sir?”

The girl put her hand to the key, and without any difficulty drew it out of the door.

“I don’t know–I couldn’t!”

The girl shut the door.

“What’s the matter? Why’s the doctor here? It isn’t—-?”

“Yes, sir,” said the girl, with a sort of intensely feminine significance. “It came on quite sudden.”

“How long ago?”

“A good while, sir. I couldn’t say exactly.”

“But why wasn’t I sent for?”

“My mistress wouldn’t have you sent for, sir. Besides, we were expecting you every moment.”

“Ah! and I–and now it’s past midnight.”

He had quickly taken off his coat, hat and gloves. Now he ran up the shallow steps of the staircase. There was a sort of tumult within him. He felt angry, he did not know why. His whole body was longing to do something strong, eager, even violent. He hated his latchkey, he hated the long stroll in Hyde Park, the absurd delay upon the bridge, his preoccupation with the Muscovy duck, or whatever bird it was, voyaging over the Serpentine. Why had nothing told him not to lose a moment but to hurry home? He remembered that he had been specially reluctant to leave Rosamund that evening, that he had even said to her, “I don’t know why it is, but this evening I hate to leave you.” Perhaps, then, he had been warned, but he had not comprehended the warning. As he had looked at the stars he had thought of the coming of the most wonderful Child who had ever visited this earth. Perhaps then, too—- He tried to snap off his thought, half confusedly accusing himself of some sort of blasphemy. At the top of the staircase he turned and looked down into the hall.

“The nurse?”

“Sir?”

“Have you managed to get the nurse?”

“Yes, sir; she’s been here some time.”

At this moment Doctor Mayson opened the door of Rosamund’s room and came out upon the landing–a tall, rosy and rather intellectual- looking man, with tranquil gray eyes, and hair thinning above the high knobby forehead. Dion had never seen him before. They shook hands.

“I shouldn’t go into your wife’s room,” said Doctor Mayson in a low bass voice.

“Why? Doesn’t she wish it?”

“She wished you very much to be in the house.”

“Then why not send for me?”

“She was against it, I understand. And she doesn’t wish any one to be with her just now except the nurse and myself.”

“When do you expect . . .?”

“Some time during the night. It’s evidently going to be an easy confinement. I’m just going down to send away my carriage. It’s no use keeping the horse standing half the night in this frost. I’m very fond of horses.”

“Fond of horses–are you?” said Dion, rather vacantly.

“Yes. Are you?”

The low bass voice almost snapped out the question.

“Oh, I dare say. Why not? They’re useful animals. I’ll come down with you if I’m not to go into my wife’s room.”

He followed the doctor down the stairs he had just mounted. When the carriage had been sent away, he asked Doctor Mayson to come into his den for a moment. The pains of labor had come on unexpectedly, but were not exceptionally severe; everything pointed to an easy confinement.

“Your wife is one of the strongest and healthiest women I have ever attended,” Doctor Mayson added; “superb health. It’s a pleasure to see any one like that. I look after so many neurotic women in London. They give themselves up for lost when they are confronted with a perfectly natural crisis. Mrs. Leith is all courage and self-possession.”

“But then why shouldn’t I see her?”

“Well, she seems to have an extraordinary sense of duty towards the child that’s coming. She thinks you might be less calm than she is.”

“But I’m perfectly calm.”

Doctor Mayson smiled.

“D’you know, it’s really ever so much better for us men to keep right out of the way in such moments as these. It’s the kindest thing we can do.”

“Very well. I’ll do it of course.”

“I never go near my own wife when she’s like this.”

Dion stared into the fire.

“Have you many children?”

“Eleven,” remarked the bass voice comfortably. “But I married very young, before I left Guy’s. Now I’ll go up again. You needn’t be the least alarmed.”

“I’m not,” said Dion bruskly.

“Capital!”

And Doctor Mayson went off, not treading with any precaution. It was quite obvious that his belief in his patient was genuine.

Eleven children! Well, some people were prepared to take any risks and to face any responsibilities. Was it very absurd to find in the coming of one child a tremendous event? Really, Doctor Mayson had almost succeeded in making Dion feel a great fool. Just another child in the world–crying, dribbling, feebly trying to grasp the atmosphere; another child to cut its first tooth, with shrieks, to have whooping- cough, chicken-pox, rose rash and measles; another child to eat of the fruit of the tree; another child to combat and love and suffer and die. No, damn it, the matter was important. Doctor Mayson and his rosy face were unmeaning. He might have eleven, or a hundred and eleven children, but he had no imagination.

Dion shut himself into his room, sat down in a big armchair, lit his pipe and thought about the Clarke case. He had just told Doctor Mayson a white lie. He was determined not to think about his Rosamund: he dared not do that; so his mind fastened on the Clarke case. Almost ferociously he flung himself upon it, called upon the unknown Mrs. Clarke, the woman whom he had never seen to banish from him his Rosamund, to interpose between her and him. For Rosamund was inevitably suffering, and if he thought about that suffering his deep anxiety, his pity, his yearning would grow till they were almost unendurable, might even lead his feet to the room upstairs, the room forbidden to him to-night. So he called to Mrs. Clarke, and at last, obedient to his insistent demand, she came and did her best for him, came, he imagined, from Constantinople, to keep him company in this night of crisis.

As Daventry had described her, as Bruce Evelin had, with casual allusions and suggestive hints, built her up before Dion in the talk after dinner that night, so she was now in the little room: a woman of intellect and of great taste, with an intense love for, and fine knowledge of, beautiful things: a woman who was almost a sensualist in her adoration for fine and rare things.

“I detest the sensation of sinking down in things!”

Who had said that once with energy in Dion’s hearing? Oh–Rosamund, of course! But she must not be admitted into Dion’s life in these hours of waiting. Mrs. Clarke must be allowed to reign. She had come (in Dion’s imagination) all the way from the city of wood and of marble beside the seaway of the Golden Horn, a serious, intellectual and highly cultivated woman, whom a cruel fate–Kismet–was now about to present to the world as a horrible woman. Pale, thin, rather melancholy she was, a reader of many books, a great lover of nature, a woman who cared very much for her one child. Why should Fate play such a woman such a trick? Perhaps because she was very unconventional, and it is unwise for the bird which sings in the cage of diplomacy to sing any but an ordinary song.

Daventry had dwelt several times on Mrs. Clarke’s unconventionality; evidently the defense meant to lay stress on it.

So now Dion sat with a pale, thin, unconventional woman, and she told him about the life at Stamboul. She knew, of course, that he had hated Constantinople. He allowed her to know that. And she pointed out to him that he knew nothing of the wonderful city, upon which Russia breathes from the north, and which catches, too, strange airs and scents and murmurs of voices from distant places of Asia. What does the passing tourist of a Pera hotel know about the great city of the Turks? Nothing worth knowing. The roar of the voices of the Levant deafens his ears; the glitter of the shop windows in the Grande Rue blinds his eyes. He knows not the exquisite and melancholy charm, full of nuances and of the most fragile and evanescent subtleties, which Constantinople holds for those who know her and love her well.

The defense was evidently going to make much of Mrs. Clarke’s passion for the city on the Bosporus. Daventry had alluded to it more than once, and Bruce Evelin had said, “Mrs. Clarke has always had an extraordinary feeling for places. If her husband had accused her of a liaison with Eyub, or of an unholy fancy for the forest of Belgrad, we might have been in a serious difficulty. She had, I know, a regular romance once with the Mosquee Verte at Brusa.”

Evidently she was a woman whom ordinary people would be likely to misunderstand. Dion sat in his arm-chair trying to understand her. The effort would help him to forget, or to ignore if he couldn’t forget, what was going on upstairs in the little house. He pulled hard at his pipe, as an aid to his mind; he sat alone for a long while with Mrs. Clarke. Sometimes he looked across the Golden Horn from a bit of waste ground in Pera, near to a small cemetery: it was from there, towards evening, that he had been able to “feel” Stamboul, to feel it as an unique garden city, held by the sea, wooden and frail, marble and enduring. And somewhere in the great and mysterious city Mrs. Clarke had lived and been adored by the husband who, apparently still adoring, was now trying to get rid of her.

Sometimes Dion heard voices rising from the crowded harbor of the Golden Horn. They crept up out of the mystery of the evening; voices from the caiques, and from the boats of the fishermen, and from the big sailing vessels which ply to the harbors of the East, and from the steamers at rest near the Galata Bridge, and from the many craft of all descriptions strung out towards the cypress-crowned hill of Eyub. And Mrs. Clarke, standing beside him, began to explain to him in a low and hoarse voice what these strange cries of the evening meant.

Daventry had mentioned that she had a hoarse voice.

At a little after three o’clock Dion sat forward abruptly in his chair and listened intently. He fancied he had heard a faint cry. He waited, surrounded by silence, enveloped by silence. There was a low drumming in his ears. Mrs. Clarke had escaped like a phantom. Stamboul, with its mosques, its fountains, its pigeons and its plane trees, had faded away. The voices from the Golden Horn were stilled. The drumming in Dion’s ears grew louder. He stood up. He felt very hot, and a vein in his left temple was beating–not fluttering, but beating hard.

He heard, this time really heard, a cry overhead, and then the muffled sound of some one moving about; and he went to the door, opened it and passed out into the hall. He did not go upstairs, but waited in the hall until Doctor Mayson came down, looking as rosy and serene and unconcerned as ever.

“Well, Mr. Leith,” he said, “you’re a father. I congratulate you. You wife has got through beautifully.”

“Yes?”

“By the way, it’s a boy.”

“Yes, of course.”

Doctor Mayson looked genuinely surprised.

“Why ‘of course’? I don’t quite understand.”

“She knew it was going to be a boy.”

The doctor smiled faintly.

“Women often have strange fancies at such times. I mean before they are confined.”

“But you see she was right. It is a boy.”

“Exactly,” returned the doctor, looking at his nails.

Dion saw the star falling above the hill of Drouva.

Did the Hermes know?

CHAPTER III

On the following Sunday afternoon Dion was able to fulfil his promise to Daventry. Rosamund and the baby were “doing beautifully”; he was not needed at home, so he set out with Daventry, who came to fetch him, to visit Mrs. Willie Chetwinde in Lowndes Square.

When they reached the house Daventry said:

“Now for Mrs. Clarke. She’s really a wonderful woman, Dion, and she’s got a delicious profile.”

“Oh, it’s that–“

“No, it isn’t.”

He gently pushed Mrs. Chetwinde’s bell.

As they went upstairs they heard a soft hum of voices.

“Mrs. Clarke’s got heaps of people on her side,” whispered Daventry. “This is a sort of rallying ground for the defense.”

“Where’s her child? Here?”

“No, with some relations till the trial’s over.”

The butler opened the door, and immediately Dion’s eyes rested on Mrs. Clarke, who happened to be standing very near to it with Esme Darlington. Directly Dion saw her he knew at whom he was looking. Something–he could not have said what–told him.

By a tall pedestal of marble, on which was poised a marble statuette of Echo,–not that Echo who babbled to Hera, but she who, after her punishment, fell in love with Narcissus,–he saw a very thin, very pale, and strangely haggard-looking woman of perhaps thirty-two talking to Esme Darlington. At first sight she did not seem beautiful to Dion. He was accustomed to the radiant physical bloom of his Rosamund. This woman, with her tenuity, her pallor, her haunted cheeks and temples, her large, distressed and observant eyes–dark hazel in color under brown eyebrows drawn with a precise straightness till they neared the bridge of the nose and there turning abruptly downwards, her thin and almost white-lipped mouth, her cloudy brown hair which had no shine or sparkle, her rather narrow and pointed chin, suggested to him unhealthiness, a human being perhaps stricken by some obscure disease which had drained her body of all fresh color, and robbed it of flesh, had caused to come upon her something strange, not easily to be defined, which almost suggested the charnel-house.

As he was looking at her, Mrs. Clarke turned slightly and glanced up at the statue of Echo, and immediately Dion realized that she had beauty. The line of her profile was wonderfully delicate and refined, almost ethereal in its perfection; and the shape of her small head was exquisite. Her head, indeed, looked girlish. Afterwards he knew that she had enchanting hands–moving purities full of expressiveness–and slim little wrists. Her expression was serious, almost melancholy, and in her whole personality, shed through her, there was a penetrating refinement, a something delicate, wild and feverish. She looked very sensitive and at the same time perfectly self-possessed, as if, perhaps, she dreaded Fate but could never be afraid of a fellow- creature. He thought:

“She’s like Echo after her punishment.”

On his way to greet Mrs. Chetwinde, he passed by her; as he did so she looked at him, and he saw that she thoroughly considered him, with a grave swiftness which seemed to be an essential part of her personality. Then she spoke to Esme Darlington. Dion just caught the sound of her voice, veiled, husky, but very individual and very attractive–a voice that could never sing, but that could make of speech a music frail and evanescent as a nocturne of Debussy’s.

“Daventry’s right,” thought Dion. “That woman is surely innocent.

Mrs. Chetwinde, who was as haphazard, as apparently absent-minded and as shrewd in her own house as in the houses of others, greeted Dion with a vague cordiality. Her husband, a robust and very definite giant, with a fan-shaped beard, welcomed him largely.

“Never appear at my wife’s afternoons, you know,” he observed, in a fat and genial voice. “But to-day’s exceptional. Always stick to an innocent woman in trouble.”

He lowered his voice in speaking the last sentence, and looked very human. And immediately Dion was aware of a special and peculiar atmosphere in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room on this Sunday afternoon, of something poignant almost, though lightly veiled with the sparkling gossamer which serves to conceal undue angularities, something which just hinted at tragedy confronted with courage, at the attempted stab and the raised shield of affection. Here Mrs. Clarke was in sanctuary. He glanced towards her again with a deepening interest.

“Canon Wilton’s coming in presently,” said Mrs. Chetwinde. He’s preaching at St. Paul’s this afternoon, or perhaps it’s Westminster Abbey–something of that kind.”

“I’ve heard him two or three times,” answered Dion, who was on very good, though not on very intimate, terms with Canon Wilton. “I’d rather hear him than anybody.”

“In the pulpit–yes, I suppose so. I’m scarcely an amateur of sermons. He’s a volcano of sincerity, and never sends out ashes. It’s all red- hot lava. Have you met Cynthia Clarke?”

“No.”

“She’s over there, echoing my Echo. Would you like—-?”

“Very much indeed.”

“Then I’ll–“

An extremely pale man, with long, alarmingly straight hair and wandering eyes almost the color of silver, said something to her.

“Watteau? Oh, no–he died in 1721, not in 1722,” she replied. “The only date I can never remember is William the Conqueror. But of course you couldn’t remember about Watteau. It’s distance makes memory. You’re too near.”

“That’s the fan painter, Murphy-Elphinston, Watteau’s reincarnation,” she added to Dion. “He’s always asking questions about himself. Cynthia–this is Mr. Dion Leith. He wishes—-” She drifted away, not, however, without dexterously managing to convey Mr. Darlington with her.

Dion found himself looking into the large, distressed eyes of Mrs. Clarke. Daventry was standing close to her, but, with a glance at his friend, moved away.

“I should like to sit down,” said Mrs. Clarke.

“Here are two chairs—-“

“No, I’d rather sit over there under the Della Robbia. I can see Echo from there.”

She walked very slowly and languidly, as if tired, to a large and low sofa covered with red, which was exactly opposite to the statuette. Dion followed her, thinking about her age. He supposed her to be about thirty-two or thirty-three, possibly a year or two more or less. She was very simply dressed in a gray silk gown with black and white lines in it. The tight sleeves of it were unusually long and ended in points. They were edged with some transparent white material which rested against her small hands.

She sat down and he sat down by her, and they began to talk. Unlike Mrs. Chetwinde, Mrs. Clarke showed that she was alertly attending to all that was said to her, and, when she spoke, she looked at the person to whom she was speaking, looked steadily and very unself- consciously. Dion mentioned that he had once been to Constantinople.

“Did you care about it?” said Mrs. Clarke, rather earnestly.

“I’m afraid I disliked it, although I found it, of course, tremendously interesting. In fact, I almost hated it.”

“That’s only because you stayed in Pera,” she answered, “and went about with a guide.”

“But how do you know?”–he was smiling.

“Well, of course you did.”

“Yes.”

“I could easily make you love it,” she continued, in an oddly impersonal way, speaking huskily.

Dion had never liked huskiness before, but he liked it now.

“You are fond of it, I believe?” he said.

His eyes met hers with a great deal of interest.

He considered her present situation an interesting one; there was drama in it; there was the prospect of a big fight, of great loss or great gain, destruction or vindication.

In her soul already the drama was being played. He imagined her soul in turmoil, peopled with a crowd of jostling desires and fears, and he was thinking a great many things about her, and connected with her, almost simultaneously–so rapidly a flood of thoughts seemed to go by in the mind–as he put his question.

“Yes, I am,” replied Mrs. Clarke. “Stamboul holds me very fast in its curiously inert grip. It’s a grip like this.”

She held out her small right hand, and he put his rather large and sinewy brown hand into it. The small hand folded itself upon his in a curious way–feeble and fierce at the same time, it seemed–and held him. The hand was warm, almost hot, and soft, and dry as a fire is dry –so dry that it hisses angrily if water is thrown on it.

“Now, you are trying to get away,” she said. “And of course you can, but—-“

Dion made a movement as if to pull away his hand, but Mrs. Clarke retained it. How was that? He scarcely knew; in fact he did not know. She did not seem to be doing anything definite to keep him, did not squeeze or grip his hand, or cling to it; but his hand remained in hers nevertheless.

“There,” she said, letting his hand go. “That is how Stamboul holds. Do you understand?”

Mrs. Chetwinde’s vague eyes had been on them during this little episode. Dion had had time to see that, and to think, “Now, at such a time, no one but an absolutely innocent woman would do in public what Mrs. Clarke is doing to me.” Mrs. Chetwinde, he felt sure, full of all worldly knowledge, must be thinking the very same thing.

“Yes,” he said. “I think I do. But I wonder whether it could hold me like that.”

“I know it could.”

“May I ask how you know?”

“Why not? Simply by my observation of you.”

Dion remembered the swift grave look of consideration she had given to him as he came into the room. Something almost combative rose up in him, and he entered into an argument with her, in the course of which he was carried away into the revelation of his mental comparison between Constantinople and Greece, a comparison into which entered a moral significance. He even spoke of the Christian significance of the Hermes of Olympia. Mrs. Clarke listened to him with a very still, and apparently a very deep, attention.

“I’ve been to Greece,” she said simply, when he had finished.

“You didn’t feel at all as I did, as I do?”

“You may know Greece, but you don’t know Stamboul,” she said quietly.

“If you had shown it to me I might feel very differently,” Dion said, with a perhaps slightly banal politeness.

And yet he did not feel entirely banal as he said it.

“Come out again and I will show it to you,” she said.

She was almost staring at him, at his chest and shoulders, not at his face, but her eyes still kept their unself-conscious and almost oddly impersonal look.

“You are going back there?”

“Of course, when my case is over.”

Dion felt very much surprised. He knew that Mrs. Clarke’s husband was accredited to the British Embassy at Constantinople; that the scandal about her was connected with that city and with its neighborhood– Therapia, Prinkipo, and other near places, that both the co-respondents named in the suit lived there. Whichever way the case went, surely Constantinople must be very disagreeable to Mrs. Clarke from now onwards. And yet she was going back there, and apparently intended to take up her life there again. She evidently either saw or divined his surprise, for she added in the husky voice:

“Guilt may be governed by circumstances. I suppose it is full of alarms. But I think an innocent woman who allows herself to be driven out of a place she loves by a false accusation is merely a coward. But all this is very uninteresting to you. The point is, I shall soon be settled down again at Constantinople, and ready to make you see it as it really is, if you ever return there.”

She had spoken without hardness or any pugnacity; there was no defiance in her manner, which was perfectly simple and straightforward.

“Your moral comparison between Constantinople and Greece–it isn’t fair, by the way, to compare a city with a country–doesn’t interest me at all. People can be disgusting anywhere. Greece is no better than Turkey. It has a wonderfully delicate, pure atmosphere; but that doesn’t influence the morals of the population. Fine Greek art is the purest art in the world; but that doesn’t mean that the men who created it had only pure thoughts or lived only pure lives. I never read morals into art, although I’m English, and it’s the old hopeless English way to do that. The man who made Echo”–she turned her large eyes towards the statuette–“may have been an evil liver. In fact, I believe he was. But Echo is an exquisite pure bit of art.”

Dion thought of Rosamund’s words about Praxiteles as they sat before Hermes. His Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke were mentally at opposite poles; yet they were both good women.

“My friend Daventry would agree with you, I know,” he said.

“He’s a clever and a very dear little man. Who’s that coming in?”

Dion looked and saw Canon Wilton. He told Mrs. Clarke who it was.

“Enid told me he was coming. I should like to know him.”

“Shall I go and tell him so?”

“Presently. How’s your baby? I’m told you’ve got a baby.”

Dion actually blushed. Mrs. Clarke gazed at the blush, and no doubt thoroughly understood it, but she did not smile, or look arch, or full of feminine understanding.

“It’s very well, thank you. It’s just like other babies.”

“So was mine. Babies are always said to be wonderful, and never are. And we love ours chiefly because they aren’t. I hate things with wings growing out of their shoulders. My boy’s a very naughty boy.”

They talked about the baby, and then about Mrs. Clarke’s son of ten; and then Canon Wilton came up, shook hands warmly with Dion, and was introduced by Mrs. Chetwinde to Mrs. Clarke.

Presently, from the other side of the room where he was standing with Esme Darlington, Dion saw them in conversation; saw Mrs. Clarke’s eyes fixed on the Canon’s almost fiercely sincere face.

“It’s going to be an abominable case,” murmured Mr. Darlington in Dion’s ear. “We must all stand round her.”

“I can’t imagine how any one could think such a woman guilty,” said Dion.

“It has all come about through her unconventionality.” He pulled his beard and lifted his ragged eyebrows. “It really is much wiser for innocent people, such as Cynthia, to keep a tight hold on the conventions. They have their uses. They have their place in the scheme. But she never could see it, and look at the result.”

“But then don’t you think she’ll win?”

“No one can tell.”

“In any case, she tells me she’s going back to live at Constantinople.”

“Madness! Sheer madness!” said Mr. Darlington, almost piteously. “I shall beg her not to.”

Dion suppressed a smile. That day he had gained the impression that Mrs. Clarke had a will of iron.

When he went up to say good-by to her, Daventry had already gone; he said he had work to do on the case.

“May I wish you success?” Dion ventured to say, as he took her hand.

“Thank you,” she answered. “I think you must go in for athletic exercises, don’t you?”

Her eyes were fixed on the breadth of his chest, and then traveled to his strong, broad shoulders.

“Yes, I’m very keen on them.”

“I want my boy to go in for them. It’s so important to be healthy.”

“Rather!”

He felt the Stamboul touch in her soft, hot hand. As he let it go, he added:

“I can give you the address of a first-rate instructor if your boy ever wants to be physically trained. I go to him. His name’s Jenkins.”

“Thank you.”

She was still looking at his chest and shoulders. The expression of distress in her eyes seemed to be deepening. But a tall man, Sir John Killigrew, one of her adherents, spoke to her, and she turned to give him her complete attention.

“I’ll walk with you, if you’re going,” said Canon Wilton’s strong voice in Dion’s ear.

“That’s splendid. I’ll just say good-by to Mrs. Chetwinde.”

He found her by the tea-table with three or four men and two very smart women. As he came up one of the latter was saying:

“It’s all Lady Ermyntrude’s fault. She always hated Cynthia, and she has a heart of stone.”

The case again!

“Oh, are you going?” said Mrs. Chetwinde.

She got up and came away from the tea-table.

“D’you like Cynthia Clarke?” she asked.

“Yes, very much. She interests me.”

“Ah?”

She looked at him, and seemed about to say something, but did not speak.

“You saw her take my hand,” he said, moved by a sudden impulse.

“Did she?”

“We were talking about Stamboul. She did it to show me—-” He broke off. “I saw you felt, as I did, that no one but a through and through innocent woman could have done it, just now–like that, I mean.”

“Of course Cynthia is innocent,” Mrs. Chetwinde said, rather coldly and very firmly. “There’s Canon Wilton waiting for you.”

She turned away, but did not go back to the tea-table; as Dion went out of the room he saw her sitting down on the red sofa by Mrs. Clarke.

Canon Wilton and he walked slowly away from the house. The Canon, who had some heart trouble of which he never spoke, was not allowed to walk fast; and to-day he was tired after his sermon at the Abbey. He inquired earnestly about Rosamund and the child, and seemed made happy by the good news Dion was able to give him.

“Has it made all life seem very different to you?” he asked.

Dion acknowledged that it had.

“I was half frightened at the thought of the change which was coming,” he said. “We were so very happy as we were, you see.”

The Canon’s intense gray eyes shot a glance at him, which he felt rather than saw, in the evening twilight.

“I hope you’ll be even happier now.”

“It will be a different sort of happiness now.”

“I think children bind people together more often than not. There are cases when it’s not so, but I don’t think yours is likely to be one of them.”

“Oh, no.”

“Is it a good-looking baby?”

“No, really it’s not. Even Rosamund thinks that. D’you know, so far she’s marvelously reasonable in her love.”

“That’s splendid,” said Canon Wilton, with a strong ring in his voice. “An unreasonable love is generally a love with something rotten at its roots.”

Dion stood still.

“Oh, is that true really?”

The Canon paused beside him. They were in Eaton Square, opposite to St. Peter’s.

“I think so. But I hate anything that approaches what I call mania. Religious mania, for instance, is abhorrent to me, and, I should think, displeasing to God. Any mania entering into a love clouds that purity which is the greatest beauty of love. Mania–it’s detestable!”

He spoke almost with a touch of heat, and put his hand on Dion’s shoulder.

“Beware of it, my boy.”

“Yes.”

They walked on, talking of other things. A few minutes before they parted they spoke of Mrs. Clarke.

“Did you know her before to-day?” asked the Canon.

“No. I’d never even seen her. How dreadful for her to have to face such a case.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“The fact that she’s innocent gives her a great pull, though. I realized what a pull when I was having a talk with her.”

“I don’t know much about the case,” was all that the Canon said. “I hope justice will be done in it when it comes on.”

Dion thought that there was something rather implacable in his voice.

“I don’t believe Mrs. Clarke doubts that.”

“Did she say so?” asked Canon Wilton.

“No. But I felt that she expected to win–almost knew she would win.”

“I see. She has confidence in the result.”

“She seems to have.”

“Women often have more confidence in difficult moments than we men. Well, here I must leave you.”

He held out his big, unwavering hand to Dion.

“Good-by. God bless you both, and the child, whether it’s plain or not. One good thing’s added to us when we start rather ill-favored; the chance of growing into something well-favored.”

He gripped Dion’s hand and walked slowly, but powerfully, away.

CHAPTER IV

As Dion had said, the baby was an ordinary baby. “In looks,” the nurse remarked, “he favors his papa.” Certainly in this early stage of his career the baby had little of the beauty and charm of Rosamund. As his head was practically bald, his forehead, which was wrinkled as if by experience and the troubles of years, looked abnormally high. His face, full of puckers, was rather red; his nose meant very little as yet; his mouth, with perpetually moving lips, was the home of bubbles. His eyes were blue, and looked large in his extremely small countenance, which was often decorated with an expression of mild inquiry. This expression, however, sometimes changed abruptly to a network of wrath, in which every feature, and even the small bald head, became involved. Then the minute feet made feeble dabs, or stabs, at the atmosphere; the tiny fists doubled themselves and wandered to and fro as if in search of the enemy; and a voice came forth out of the temple, very personal and very intense, to express the tempest of the soul.

“Hark at him!” said the nurse. “He knows already what he wants and what he /don’t/ want.”

And Rosamund, listening as only a mother can listen, shook her head over him, trying to condemn the rage, but enjoying the strength of her child in the way of mothers, to whom the baby’s roar perhaps brings the thought, “What a fine, bold man he’ll be some day.” If Rosamund had such a thought the nurse encouraged it with her. “He’s got a proud spirit already, ma’am. He’s not to be put upon. Have his way he will, and I don’t altogether blame him.” Nor, be sure, did Rosamund altogether blame the young varmint for anything. Perhaps in his tiny fisticuffs and startlingly fierce cries she divined the Doric, in embryo, as it were; perhaps when “little master” shrieked she thought of the columns of the Parthenon.

But Dion told the truth to Canon Wilton when he had said that Rosamund was marvelously reasonable, so far, in her love for her baby son. The admirable sanity, the sheer healthiness of outlook which Dion loved in her did not desert her now. To Dion it seemed that in the very calmness and good sense of her love she showed its great depth, showed that already she was thinking of her child’s soul as well as of his little body.

Dion felt the beginnings of a change in Rosamund, but he did not find either her or himself suddenly and radically changed by the possession of a baby. He had thought that perhaps as mother and father they would both feel abruptly much older than before, even perhaps old. It was not so. Often Dion gazed at the baby as he bubbled and cooed, sneezed with an air of angry astonishment, stared at nothing with a look of shallow surmise, or, composing his puckers, slept, and Dion still felt young, even very young, and not at all like a father.

“I’m sure,” he once said to Rosamund, “women feel much more like mothers when they have a baby than men feel like fathers.”

“I feel like a mother all over,” she replied, bending above the child. “In every least little bit of me.”

“Then do you feel completely changed?”

“Completely, utterly.”

Dion sat still for a moment gazing at her. She felt his look, perhaps, for she lifted her head, and her eyes went from the baby to him.

“What is it, Rosamund? What are you considering?”

“Well—-” She hesitated. “Perhaps no one could quite understand, but I feel a sense of release.”

“Release! From what?”

Again she hesitated; then she looked once more at the child almost as if she wished to gain something from his helplessness. At last she said:

“Dion, as you’ve given me /him/, I’ll tell you. Very often in the past I’ve had an urgent desire some day to enter into the religious life.”

“D’you–d’you mean to become a Roman Catholic and a nun?” he exclaimed, feeling, absurdly perhaps, almost afraid and half indignant.

“No. I’ve never wished to change my religion. There are Anglican sisterhoods, you know.”

“But your singing!”

“I only intended to sing for a time. Then some day, when I felt quite ready, I meant–“

“But you married me?” he interrupted.

“Yes. So you see I gave it all up.”

“But you said it was the child which had brought you a sensation of release!”

“Perhaps you have never been a prisoner of a desire which threatens to dominate your soul forever,” she said, quietly evading his point and looking down, so that he could not see her eyes. “Look, he’s waking!”

Surely she had moved abruptly and the movement had awakened the child. She began playing with him, and the conversation was broken.

The Clarke trial came on in May, when Robin was becoming almost elderly, having already passed no less than ten weeks in the midst of this wicked world. On the day before it opened, Daventry made Dion promise to come into court at least once to hear some of the evidence.

“A true friend would be there every day,” he urged–“to back up his old chum.”

“Business!” returned Dion laconically.

“What’s your real reason against it?”

“Well, Rosamund hates this kind of case. I spoke to her about it the other day.”

“What did she say?”

“That she was delighted you had something to do, and that she hoped, if Mrs. Clarke were innocent, she’d win. She pities her for being dragged through all this mud.”

“Yes?”

“She said at the end that she hoped I wouldn’t think her unsympathetic if she neither talked about the case nor read about it. She hates filling her mind with ugly details and horrible suggestions.”

“I see.”

“You know, Guy, Rosamund thinks–she’s told me so more than once–that the mind and the soul are very sensitive, and that–that they ought to be watched over, and–and taken care of.”

Dion looked rather uncomfortable as he finished. It was one thing to speak of such matters with Rosamund, and quite another to touch on them with a man, even a man who was a trusted friend.

“Perhaps you’d rather not come at all?”

“No, no. I’ll come once. You know how keen I am on your making a good start.”

Daventry took him at his word, and got him a seat beside Mrs. Chetwinde on the third day of the trial, when Mrs. Clarke’s cross- examination, begun on the previous day, was continued by Sir Edward Jeffson, Beadon Clarke’s leading counsel.

Dion told Rosamund where he was going when he left the house in the morning.

“I hope it will go well for poor Mrs. Clarke,” she said kindly, but perhaps rather indifferently.

She had not looked at the reports of the case in the papers, and had not discussed its progress with Dion. He was not sorry for that. It was a horrible case, full of abominable allegations and suggestions such as he would have hated to discuss with Rosamund. As he stood in the little hall of their house, which was delicately scented with lavender and lit by pale sunshine, bidding her good-by, he realized the impossibility of such a woman as she was ever being “mixed up” in such a trial. Simply that couldn’t happen, he thought. Instinct would keep her far from every suggestion of a possible impurity. He felt certain that Mrs. Clarke was innocent, but, as he looked into Rosamund’s honest brown eyes, he thought that Mrs. Clarke must have been singularly imprudent. He remembered how she had held his hand in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room. Wisdom and unwisdom; he compared them: the one was a builder up, the other a destroyer of beauty–the beauty that is in every completely sane and perfectly poised life.

“Rose,” he said, leaning forward to kiss his wife, “I think you are very wise.”

“Why wise all of a sudden?” she asked, smiling.

“You keep the door of your life.”

He glanced round at the little hall, simple, fresh, with a few white roses in a blue pot, the pale sunshine lying on the polished floor of wood, the small breeze coming in almost affectionately between snowy curtains. Purity–everything seemed to whisper of that, to imply that; simplicity ruling, complexity ruled out.

And then he was sitting in the crowded court, breathing bad air, hearing foul suggestions, watching strained or hateful faces, surrounded by people who were attracted by ugly things as vultures are attracted by the stench of dead and decaying bodies. At first he loathed being there; presently, however, he became interested, then almost fascinated by his surroundings and by the drama which was being played slowly out in the midst of them.

Daventry, in wig and gown, looked tremendously legal and almost severe in his tense gravity. Sir John Addington, his leader, a man of great fame, was less tense in his watchfulness, amazingly at his ease with the Court, and on smiling terms with the President, who, full of worldly and unworldly knowledge, held the balance of justice with an unwavering firmness. The jury looked startlingly commonplace, smug and sleepy, despite the variety of type almost inevitably presented by twelve human beings. Not one of them looked a rascal; not one of them looked an actively good man. The intense Englishness of them hit one in the face like a well-directed blow from a powerful fist. And they had to give the verdict on this complex drama of Stamboul! How much they would have to tell their wives presently! Their sense of their unusual importance pushed through the smugness heavily, like a bulky man in broadcloth showing through a dull crowd.

Mrs. Clarke occasionally glanced at them with an air of almost distressed inquiry, as if she had never seen such cabbages before, and was wondering about their gray matter. Her life in Stamboul must have effected changes in her. She looked almost exotic in this court, despite the simplicity of her gown, her unpretending little hat; as if her mind, perhaps, had become exotic. But she certainly did not look wicked. Dion was struck again by the strong mentality of her and by her haggardness. To him she seemed definitely a woman of mind, not at all an animal woman. When he gazed at her he felt that he was gazing at mind rather than at body. Just before she went into the box she met his eyes. She stared at him, as if carefully and strongly considering him; then she nodded. He bowed, feeling uncomfortable, feeling indeed almost a brute.

“She’ll think I’ve come out of filthy curiosity,” he thought, looking round at the greedy faces of the crowd.

No need to ask why those faces were there.

He felt still more uncomfortable when Mrs. Clarke was in the witness- box, and Sir Edward Jeffson took up the cross-examination which he had begun late in the afternoon of the previous day.

Dion had very seldom been in a Court of Justice, and had never before been in the Divorce Court. As the cross-examination of Mrs. Clarke lengthened out he felt as if his clothes, and the clothes of all the human beings who crowded about him, were being ruthlessly stripped off, as if an ugly and abominable nakedness were gradually appearing. The shame of it all was very hateful to him; and yet–yes, he couldn’t deny it–there was a sort of dreadful fascination in it, too.

The two co-respondents, Hadi Bey and Aristide Dumeny of the French Embassy in Constantinople, were in court, sitting not far from Dion, to whom Mrs. Chetwinde, less vague than, but quite as self-possessed as, usual, pointed them out.

Both were young men. Hadi Bey, who of course wore the fez, was a fine specimen of the smart, alert, cosmopolitan and cultivated Turk of modern days. There was a peculiar look of vividness and brightness about him, in his piercing dark eyes, in his red lips, in his healthy and manly face with its rosy brown complexion and its powerful decided chin. He had none of the sleepiness and fatalistic languor of the fat hubble-bubble smoking Turk of caricature. The whole of him looked aristocratic, energetic, perfectly poised and absolutely self- possessed. Many of the women in court glanced at him without any distaste.

Aristide Dumeny was almost strangely different–an ashy-pale, dark- eyed, thin and romantic-visaged man, stamped with a curious expression of pain and fatalism. He looked as if he had seen much, dreamed many dreams, and suffered not a little. There was in his face something slightly contemptuous, as if, intellectually, he seldom gazed up at any man. He watched Mrs. Clarke in the box with an enigmatic closeness of attention which seemed wholly impersonal, even when she was replying to hideous questions about himself. That he had an interesting personality was certain. When his eyes rested on the twelve jurymen he smiled every so faintly. It seemed to him, perhaps, absurd that they should have power over the future of the woman in the witness-box.

That woman showed an extraordinary self-possession which touched dignity but which never descended to insolence. Despite her obvious cleverness and mental resource she preserved a certain simplicity. She did not pose as a passionate innocent, or assume any forced airs of supreme virtue. She presented herself rather as a woman of the world who was careless of the conventions, because she thought of them as chains which prevented free movement and were destructive of genuine liberty. She acknowledged that she had been a great deal with Hadi Bey and Dumeny, that she had often made long excursions with each of them on foot, on horseback, in caiques, that she had had them to dinner, separately, on many occasions in a little pavilion which stood at the end of her husband’s garden and looked upon the Bosporus. These dinners had frequently taken place when her husband was away from home. Monsieur Dumeny was a good musician and had sometimes sung and played to her till late in the night. Hadi Bey had sometimes been her guide in Constantinople and had given to her the freedom of his strange and mysterious city of Stamboul. With him she had visited the mosques, with him she had explored the bazaars, with him she had sunk down in the strange and enveloping melancholy of the vast Turkish cemeteries which are protected by forests of cypresses. All this she acknowledged without the least discomposure. One of her remarks to the cross-examining counsel was this:

“You suggest that I have been very imprudent. I answer that I am not able to live what the conventional call a prudent life. Such a life would be a living death to me.”

“Kindly confine yourself to answering my questions,” retorted Counsel harshly. “I suggest that you were far more than imprudent. I suggest that when you and Hadi Bey remained together in that pavilion on the Bosporus until midnight, until after midnight, you—-” and then followed another hideous accusation, which, gazing with her observant eyes at the brick-red shaven face of her accuser, Mrs. Clarke quietly denied. She never showed temper. Now and then she gave indications of a sort of cold disgust or faint surprise. But there were no outraged airs of virtue. A slight disdain was evidently more natural to the temperament of this woman than any fierceness of protestation. Once when Counsel said, “I shall ask the jury to infer”–something abominable, Mrs. Clarke tranquilly rejoined:

“Whatever they infer it won’t alter the truth.”

Daventry moved his shoulders. Dion was certain that he considered this remark ill-advised. The jury, however, at whom Mrs. Clarke gazed in the short silence which followed, seemed, Dion thought, impressed by her firmness. The luncheon interval prevented Counsel from saying anything further just then, and Mrs. Clarke stepped down from the box.

“Isn’t she wonderful?”

Dion heard this murmur, which did not seem to be addressed to any particular person. It had come from Mrs. Chetwinde, who now got up and went to speak to Mrs. Clarke. The whole court was in movement. Dion went out to have a hasty lunch with Daventry.

“A pity she said that!” Daventry said in a low voice to Dion, hitching up his gown. “Juries like to be deferred to.”

“I believe she impressed them by her independence.”

“Do you, though? She’s marvelously intelligent. Perhaps she knows more of men, even of jurymen, than I do.”

At lunch they discussed the case. Daventry had had two or three chances given to him by Sir John Addington, and thought he had done quite well.

“Do you think Mrs. Clarke will win?” said Dion.

“I know she’s innocent, but I can’t tell. She’s so infernally unconventional and a jury’s so infernally conventional that I can’t help being afraid.”

Dion thought of his Rosamund’s tranquil wisdom.

“I think Mrs. Clarke’s very clever,” he said. “But I suppose she isn’t very wise.”

“I’ll tell you what it is, old Dion; she prefers life to wisdom.”

“Well, but—-” Dion Began.

But he stopped. Now he knew Mrs. Clarke a little better, from her own evidence, he knew just what Daventry meant. He looked upon the life of unwisdom, and he was able to feel its fascination. There were scents in it that lured, and there were colors that tempted; in its night there was music; about it lay mystery, shadows, and silver beams of the moon shining between cypresses like black towers. It gave out a call to which, perhaps, very few natures of men were wholly deaf. The unwise life! Almost for the first time Dion considered it with a deep curiosity.

He considered it more attentively, more curiously, during the afternoon, when Mrs. Clarke’s cross-examination was continued.

It was obvious that during this trial two women were being presented to the judge and jury, the one a greedy and abominably secret and clever sensualist, who hid her mania beneath a cloak of intellectuality, the other a genuine intellectual, whose mental appetites far outweighed the appetites of her body, who was, perhaps, a sensualist, but a sensualist of the spirit and not of the flesh. Which of these two women was the real Cynthia Clarke? The jury would eventually give their decision, but it might not be in accordance with fact. Meanwhile, the horrible unclothing process was ruthlessly proceeded with. But already Dion was becoming accustomed to it. Perhaps Mrs. Clarke’s self-possession helped him to assimilate the nauseous food which was offered to him.

Beadon Clarke was in court, and had been pointed out to Dion, an intellectual and refined-looking man, bald, with good features, and a gentle, but now pained, expression; obviously a straight and aristocratic fellow. Beside him sat his mother, that Lady Ermyntrude who, it was said, had forced on the trial. She sat upright, her eyes fixed on her daughter-in-law, a rather insignificant small woman, not very well dressed, young looking, with hair done exactly in Queen Alexandra’s way, and crowned with a black toque.

Dion noticed that she had a very firm mouth and chin. She did not look actively hostile as she gazed at the witness, but merely attentive– deeply, concentratedly attentive. Mrs. Clarke never glanced towards her.

Perhaps, whatever Lady Ermyntrude had believed hitherto, she was now beginning to wonder whether her conception of her son’s wife had been a wrong one, was beginning to ask herself whether she had divined the nature of the soul inhabiting the body which now stood up before her.

About an hour before the close of the sitting the heat in the court became almost suffocating, and the Judge told Mrs. Clarke she might continue her evidence sitting down. She refused this favor.

“I’m not at all tired, my lord,” she said.

“She’s made of iron,” Mrs. Chetwinde murmured to Dion. “Though she generally looks like a corpse. She was haggard even as a girl.”

“Did you know her then?” he whispered.

“I’ve known her all my life.”

Daventry wiped his brow with a large pocket-handkerchief, performing the action legally. One of the jurymen, who was too fat, and had something of the expression of a pug dog, opened his mouth and rolled slightly in his seat. The cross-examination became with every moment more disagreeable. Beadon Clarke never lifted his eyes from his knees. All the women in court, except Mrs. Chetwinde and Mrs. Clarke, were looking strangely alive and conscious. Dion had forgotten everything except Stamboul and the life of unwisdom. Suppose Mrs. Clarke had lived the life imputed to her by Counsel, suppose she really were a consummately clever and astoundingly ingenious humbug, driven, as many human beings are driven, by a dominating vice which towered over her life issuing commands she had not the strength to resist, how had it profited her? Had she had great rewards in it? Had she been led down strange ways guided by fascination bearing the torch from which spring colored fires? Good women sometimes, perhaps oftener than many people realize, look out of the window and try to catch a glimpse of the world of the wicked women, asking themselves, “Is it worth while? Is their time so much better than mine? Am I missing–missing?” And they shut the window–for fear. Far away, turning the corner of some dark alley, they have seen the colored gleam of the torch.

Rosamund would never do that–would never even want to do that. She was not one of the good women who love to take just a peep at evil “because one ought to know something of the trials and difficulties of those less fortunately circumstanced than oneself.”

But, for the moment, Dion had quite forgotten his Rosamund. She was in England, but he was in Stamboul, hearing the waters of the Bosporus lapping at the foot of Mrs. Clarke’s garden pavilion, while Dumeny played to her as the moon came up to shine upon the sweet waters of Asia; or sitting under the plane trees of the Pigeon Mosque, while Hadi Bey showed her how to write an Arabic love-letter–to somebody in the air, of course. In this trial he felt the fascination of Constantinople as he had never felt it when he was in Constantinople; but he felt, too, that only those who strayed deliberately from the beaten paths could ever capture the full fascination of the divided city, which looks to Europe and to Asia, and is set along the way of the sea.

Whether innocent or guilty, Mrs. Clarke had certainly done that. He watched her with a growing interest. How very much she must know that he did not know. Then he glanced at Hadi Bey, who still sat up alertly, who still looked bright and vivid, intelligent, ready for anything, a man surely with muscles of steel and a courageous robust nature, and at Aristide Dumeny. Upon the latter his eyes rested for a long time. When at last he again looked at Mrs. Clarke he had formed the definite impression that Dumeny was corrupt–an interesting man, a clever, probably a romantic as well as a cynical man, but certainly corrupt.

Didn’t that tell against Mrs. Clarke?

She was now being questioned about a trip at night in a caique with Hadi Bey down the sweet waters of Asia where willows lean over the stream. Mrs. Chetwinde’s pale eyes were fastened upon her. Beadon Clarke bent his head a little lower as, in her husky voice, his wife said that he knew of the expedition, had apparently smiled upon her unconventionalities, knowing how entirely free she was from the ugly bias towards vice attributed to her by Counsel.

Lady Ermyntrude Clarke shot a glance at her son, and her firm mouth became firmer.

The willows bent over the sweet waters in the warm summer night; the Albanian boatmen were singing.

“She must have had wonderful times!”

The whisper came from an unseen woman sitting just behind Dion. His mind echoed the thought she had expressed. Now the Judge was rising from the bench and bowing to the Court; Mrs. Clarke was stepping down from the witness-box; Dumeny, his eyes half closed, was brushing his shining silk hat with the sleeve of his coat; Beadon Clarke was leaning to speak to his mother.

The Court was adjourned.

As Dion got up he felt the heat as if it were heat from a furnace. His face and his body were burning.

“Come and speak to Cynthia, and take us to tea somewhere–can you?” said Mrs. Chetwinde.

“Of course, with pleasure.”

“Your Rosamund—-?”

Her eyes were on him for a moment.

“She won’t expect me at any particular time.”

“Mr. Daventry can come too.”

Dion never forgot their difficult exit from the court. It made him feel ashamed for humanity, for the crowd which frantically pressed to stare at a woman because perhaps she had done things which were considered by all right-minded people to be disgusting. Mrs. Clarke and her little party of friends had to be helped away by the police. When at length they were driving away towards Claridge’s Hotel, Dion was able once more to meet the eyes of his companions, and again he was amazed at the self-possession of Mrs. Clarke. Really she seemed as composed, as completely mistress of herself, as when he had first seen her standing near the statue of Echo in the drawing-room of Mrs. Chetwinde.

“You haven’t been in court before to-day, have you?” she said to Dion.

“No.”

“Why did you come to-day?”

“Well, I—-” He hesitated. “I promised Mr. Daventry to come to-day.”

“That was it!” said Mrs. Clarke, and she looked out of the window.

Dion felt rather uncomfortable as he spoke to Mrs. Chetwinde and left further conversation with Mrs. Clarke to Daventry; but when they were all in a quiet corner of the tearoom at Claridge’s, a tea-table before them and a band playing softly at a distance, he was more at his ease. The composure of Mrs. Clarke perhaps conveyed itself to him. She spoke of the case quite naturally, as a guilty woman surely could not possibly have spoken of it–showing no venom, making no attack upon her accusers.

“It’s all a mistake,” she said, “arising out of stupidity, out of the most widespread and, perhaps, the most pitiable and dangerous lack in human nature.”

“And what’s that?” asked Daventry, rather eagerly.

“I expect you know.”

He shook his head.

“Don’t you?” she asked of Dion, spreading thinly some butter over a piece of dry toast.

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Cynthia means the lack of power to read character, the lack of psychological instinct,” drifted from the lips of Mrs. Chetwinde.

“Three-quarters of the misunderstandings and miseries of the world come from that,” said Mrs. Clarke, looking at the now buttered toast. “If my mother-in-law and my husband had any psychological faculty they would never have mistaken my unconventionality, which I shall never give up, for common, and indeed very vulgar, sinfulness.”

“Confusing the pastel with the oleograph,” dropped out Mrs. Chetwinde, looking abstractedly at an old red woman in a turret of ostrich plumes, who was spread out on the other side of the room before a plate of cakes.

“You are sure Lady Ermyntrude didn’t understand?” said Daventry, with a certain sharp legality of manner.

“You mean that she might be wicked instead of only stupid?”

“Well, yes. I suppose it does come to that.”

“Believe me, Mr. Daventry, she’s a quite honest stupid woman. She honestly thinks that I’m a horrible creature.”

And Mrs. Clarke began to bite the crisp toast with her lovely teeth. Mrs. Chetwinde’s eyes dwelt on her for a brief instant with, Dion thought, a rather peculiar look which he could not quite understand. It had, perhaps, a hint of hardness, or of cold admiration, something of that kind, in it.

“Tell me some more about the baby,” was Mrs. Clarke’s next remark, addressed to Dion. “I want to get away for a minute into a happy domestic life. And yours is that, I know.”

How peculiarly haggard, and yet how young she looked as she said that! She added:

“If the case ends as I feel sure it will, I hope your wife and I shall get to know each other. I hear she’s the most delightful woman in London, and extraordinarily beautiful. Isn’t she?”

“I think she is beautiful,” Dion said simply.

And then they talked about Robin, while Mrs. Chetwinde and Daventry discussed some question of the day. Before they parted Dion could not help saying:

“I want to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“Why do you feel sure that the trial will end as it ought to end? Surely the lack of the psychological instinct is peculiarly abundant– if a lack can be abundant!”–he smiled, almost laughed, a little deprecatingly–“in a British jury?”

“And so you think they’re likely to go wrong in their verdict?”

“Doesn’t it rather follow?”

She stared at him, and her eyes were, or looked, even more widely opened than usual. After a long pause she said;

“You wish to frighten me.”

She got up, and began to draw on her dove-colored Swedish kid gloves.

“Tippie,” she said to Mrs. Chetwinde, “I must go home now and have a little rest.”

Only then did Dion realize how marvelously she was bearing a tremendous strain. He began to admire her prodigiously.

When he said good-by to her under the great porch he couldn’t help asking:

“Are your nerves of steel?”

She leaned forward in the brougham.

“If your muscles are of iron.”

“My muscles!” he said.

“Haven’t you educated them?”