“Warm lemonade,” he remarked; “but it was better than nothing. A dam’ pretty woman in the next carriage. I’ve been trying to talk to her, but it was no good: we can’t understand each other.”
Jim stared at him in horror, as at a ghost. “Then it wasn’t you at the barrier?” he gasped in awe.
“What d’you mean?” the other asked. “Hullo, where’s my baggage?”
Jim blanched. “I threw it out of the window,” he said, swallowing convulsively.
“You didwhat?” the man exclaimed, staring at him in amazement.
“I thought,” Jim stammered, “it was the most neighbourly thing to do; you see, I....” But the remainder of the sentence failed upon his dry lips, as the corpulent stranger rose up before him in the crimson fullness of his fury.
Never had Jim, in all his vicissitudes, been subjected to so overwhelming a bombardment of abuse; and though he managed at length to explain the mistake he had made, he failed thereby to check the passionate maledictions which spluttered and burst about his devoted head like fireworks. At last he could stand it no longer, and, rising slowly to his feet, he smote the stranger a blow upon the jaw which sent him reeling across the compartment, as the train came to a standstill at another station.
The man staggered to the door, and, tumbling outon to the platform, shouted for help in a frenzied admixture of English, French, and Italian; but while a crowd of uncomprehending passengers and officials gathered around him, Jim opened the door at the opposite end of the carriage, and descended on to the deserted track. A moment later he had disappeared behind the wall of an adjacent shed, and soon was out on the high road, heading for his destination, which was yet some ten miles distant.
“That’s enough of neighbourly duty for one day,” he muttered, as he lit a cigarette.
A great part of August he spent amidst the woods of Monte Adamello, and in the Val Camonica; but, suddenly feeling a little bored, and having a desire for the sea, he made the long train-journey to Venice, and crossed the water to the Lido, where he bought himself a mad red-and-white bathing suit, and went daily into the sea with a crowd of merry Venetians.
The delights of the Stabilimento dei Bagni, however, did not long hold him in thrall. There was too much splashing and spitting; and, when the bathing hours were over for the day, the concert-hall and the open-air theatre offered a kind of entertainment which, owing to an unaccountable mood of discontent, soon began to pall. He therefore took ship across the Gulf of Venice to Trieste, and stayed for some days at a small hotel on the hillside towards Boschetto.
Here, one evening at dinner, he made the acquaintance of a ship’s officer, who told him that on the morrow the steamer on which he was employed was sailing for Cyprus; and, without amoment’s hesitation, Jim decided to take passage by it to that island of romance. It was September, and the weather was cooling fast. He had had some vague idea of crossing the sea to the Levant; but now this new suggestion came to him with a surprisingly definite appeal.
“Of Course, Cyprus!” he exclaimed. “The very place I have always wanted to visit. I had forgotten all about it.”
He had read books, and had heard travellers’ tales, about this wonderful land which rises from the blue waters of the eastern Mediterranean like a phantom isle of enchantment. Here the remains of temples dedicated to the old gods of Greece are to be seen: the mountain streams still resound at noon with the pipes of Pan; at sunset upon the seashore one may picture Aphrodite rising in her glory from the waves; and at midnight the barking of the dogs of Diana may be heard over the hills. The Crusaders endeavoured to establish a kingdom here on Frankish lines, and the place is full of the ruins of their efforts. The headlands are crested with crumbling baronial castles, and in the towns there still stand the walls of Gothic churches, wherein, at dead of night, they say that the ghostly chanting of hymns to the Blessed Virgin may be heard. Then came the Moslems; and to this day the call to prayer in the name of Allah synchronizes with the tolling of convent bells summoning the worshippers in the name of the Mother of Jesus, while the peasants, inwardly heedless of both, still make their little offerings at the traditional holy places of the gods of Olympus.
It is a land in which the movement of Time is forgotten, and in part it is a living remnant of the dead ages; and as such it had for long appealed to Jim’s imagination. Straightway, therefore, he wrote a letter to his bankers in Rome telling them to forward him some money to the Post Office at Nicosia, the capital city; and twenty hours later he was standing on the deck of the small coasting steamer, watching the land receding from sight in a haze of afternoon heat.
On the sixth morning, as the sun was rising, the anchor rattled into the blue waters of the roadstead before Larnaca, the chief port of Cyprus; and, after an early breakfast, Jim was rowed in a small boat, manned by a Greek and a negro, towards the little town which stood white and resplendent in the sunshine, its cupolas, minarets, and flat-roofed houses backed by the vivid green of the palms and the saffron of the hills. He knew a few words of Greek, and a considerable amount of Arabic; and, with the aid of his friend the ship’s officer, he had soon chartered the two-horse carriage in which he was to make the thirty-mile journey to Nicosia, the inland capital of the island.
The road passed across the bare, sunburnt uplands, and was flanked by scattered rocks, from which the basking lizards scampered as the carriage approached. Occasionally they passed a cart drawn by two long-horned bullocks, led by a scarlet-capped peasant; or a solitary shepherd driving his flock; or some cloaked and bearded rider upon a mule, jingling down to the coast. The glare of the road was great; but under the shelter of the dusty awning ofthe carriage Jim was cool enough, and there was a refreshing following-wind blowing up from the sea, which tempered the autumn heat.
The time passed quickly, and it did not seem long before they lurched, with a great cracking of the driver’s whip, into the half-way village of Dali. The second stage of the journey was more tedious, for now the novelty of the rugged scenery was gone, and the jolting of the rickety carriage was more noticeable. Jim was thankful, therefore, when, in the late afternoon, Nicosia came suddenly into sight, and the carriage presently rattled through the tunnelled gateway in the mediæval ramparts, and passed into the narrow and echoing streets of the city.
Here Greeks and Armenians, Arabs and Turks thronged the intricate thoroughfares; and as the driver made his way towards the Greek hotel, to which Jim had been recommended, there was much pulling at the mouths of the weary horses and much hoarse shouting. Now their passage was obstructed by an oxen-drawn cart, piled high with earthenware jars; now they seemed to be about to unseat a turbaned Oriental from his white steed; and now a group of Greek girls bearing pitchers upon their heads was scattered to right and left as the carriage lumbered round a corner. Here was a priest entering a Gothic doorway dating from the days of Richard Cœur-de-Lion, and upon the wall above him were carved the arms of some forgotten knight of Normandy; here a sheikh in flowing silks stood kicking off his shoes before the tiled entrance of a mosque. Here were noisy Turkish children playing before a building which recalled the age of the Venetian Republic;and here wild-eyed Cypriot peasants wrangled and argued as they had argued since those far-off days when Cleopatra’s sister was queen of the island, and, ages earlier, when Phœnician seamen and the warriors of ancient Greece had held them in subjection.
At last the carriage pulled up in front of the white archway which led through a high, blank wall into the hotel; and presently Jim found himself in a quiet courtyard, where a tinkling fountain played amongst the orange-trees. The building was erected around the four sides of this secluded yard, the rooms leading off a red-tiled balcony, supported on a series of whitewashed arches, and approached by a flight of worn stone steps.
Up to this covered balcony he was led by the genial proprietor, a man with a fierce grey moustache which belied a fat and kindly face; and a room was assigned to him, from the door of which he could look down upon the fountain and the oranges, while from the window at the opposite end he commanded a short view across a jumble of flat housetops to a group of tall dark cypress trees, where the sparrows were chattering as they gathered to roost.
The walls of the room were whitewashed and were pleasantly devoid of pictures. It might have been a chamber in an ancient palace, and as Jim sat himself down upon the wooden bench he had the feeling that he had passed from the twentieth century into some period of the far past.
For some time there had been a vague kind of discontent in his mind. It was as though his life were incomplete. He seemed to be seeking forsomething, the nature of which he could not define. At times he had thought that this was due to a desire for romance, a natural urge of sex; but, on the other hand, his reason told him that he had had enough of women, and that his present emancipation was in essence very largely a freedom from them.
Now, however, in the dusk of this quiet room, his heart seemed of a sudden to be at rest; and when from a distant minaret there came to his ears the evening call to prayer, a sense of inevitability, a kind of acknowledgment ofKismet, or Fate, passed over him and soothed him into a hopeful and expectant peacefulness.
He was still in this tranquil mood when the summons to the evening meal brought him down the stone steps and across the courtyard, where the ripe oranges hung from the trees, and the fountain splashed. It was with quiet, dawdling steps, too, that he strolled out, hatless, into the narrow street after the meal was finished. The night was warm and close, with the moon at full; and the pale deserted thoroughfare was hushed as though it were concealing some secret. The barred windows and shut doors of the houses seemed to hide unspoken things, and the two or three passers-by, moving like shadows near to the wall, gave the impression that they were bent upon some mysterious mission.
Here and there between the houses on either side small gardens were hidden away behind high whitewashed walls, above which the tops of the trees could be seen. The door of one of these stood open, and Jim, standing in the middle of the empty street,paused to gaze through the white archway into the shadows and sprinkled moonlight beyond.
Then, quietly into the frame of the doorway there came the figure of a woman, peering out into the street, the moon shining upon her face and upon her white hand, which held the door as though she were about to shut it for the night. On the instant, and with a leap of his heart, Jim recognized her.
“Monimé!” he cried out in amazement, running forward to her. He saw her raise her arm to her forehead and step back into the shadow: he could hear her gasp of surprise. A moment later he had taken her hand in his, and her startled eyes had met his own.
“Monimé!” he repeated. “Don’t you know me? I’m Jim—Jim Easton.”
For a moment yet she did not speak. He could feel her hand trembling a little in his, and the movement of her breast revealed the haste of her breathing. She leaned back against the jamb of the door, and her eyes turned towards the garden behind her, as though she were contemplating flight into its shadows.
When at last she spoke, her words came rapidly. “Why have you come to Cyprus?” she asked passionately; and the sound of her voice brought a half-forgotten Alexandrian night racing back to his consciousness. “You couldn’t have known I was here, and nobody knows who I am. How did you find out where I lived?” She moved her head from side to side in a kind of anguish which he did not understand. “I don’t know that there is any need for you in the Villa Nasayan.”
“Nasayan?” he repeated, in query. “Is that the name of this house?” She nodded her head. “That’s the Arabic for ‘Forgetfulness,’” he said. “Why did you give it such a name?”
Her answer faltered. The serenity with which he associated her in his memory had temporarily left her. “There was much to forget,” she replied, “and much has been forgotten. Cyprus is called ‘TheIsland of Forgetfulness.’ It is wonderful how bad one’s memory becomes here.”
She laughed nervously, and again put her hand to her head. The fingers of her other hand drummed upon the wall. “Why have you come?” she repeated.
“There was no reason,” he said. “I just thought I’d like to see Cyprus. I had no idea you were here. I only arrived to-day: I was just strolling about after dinner....”
“It’s more than four years,” she murmured. “Four years is a very long time. It was all so long ago, Jim, wasn’t it? Nobody can remember things as long ago as that, can they?”
She withdrew her hand from his, and stood staring at him with a baffling half-smile upon her lips. His heart sank, for it seemed to him that she was not minded to revive that dream of the past which to him had suddenly leapt once more into vivid reality.
“I have never forgotten,” he whispered, though he knew that the words needed qualification. “I knew it was you, almost before I saw your face.” He hesitated. “May I come into your garden?”
She allowed him to enter, and closed the door behind him. Together they walked in silence to a stone bench which stood in the moonlight beneath a dark cypress-tree; and here they seated themselves, side by side.
For a while they talked; but it was a sort of fencing with words, he thrusting and she parrying. He did not know what he said; for all his actual consciousness went out to her, not through speech, but through a kind of contact of their hidden hearts.
Then, without further preliminaries, she turned on him. “You say you have never forgotten,” she laughed. “But when you say that you are deceiving yourself, or trying to deceive me. I don’t like to hear you making conventional remarks, Jim: I have always thought of you as frank to the point of rudeness. Be frank with me now, and admit that you regarded our time together as a little episode in your wandering life, and that you went on your way without another thought for me....”
He interrupted her. “Was that how you felt about me?—you forgot me, too, didn’t you?”
“With a woman it is different,” she replied. “One is not always able to forget so soon.”
“But why didn’t you tell me your name, or give me some address?” he asked. “I wrote to you from the ship: I posted the letter at Marseilles. Didn’t you get it?”
“No,” she answered. “I stayed on at the Beaux-Esprits for a week or so, but nothing came. I left an address when I went away: I’m sure I did.”
He laughed. “I think you must have forgotten to. We are both just tramps....”
She made a gesture of deprecation. “At first I wanted to find you again very badly,” she said, turning her face from him. “I made inquiries, but nobody seemed to know anything about you. I remembered you said you’d inherited some property, and I even got a friend in England to look up recent wills and bequests for the name of Easton, but no trace could be found. Then, somehow, it didn’t seem to matter any more, and I told him not to look for you further.”
“Then you did care ...?”
“Who can tell?” she smiled, and her words baffled him, as did also the expression of her face in the moonlight.
“Why didn’t you tell me your name?” he asked. “I don’t yet know it.”
She looked at him in surprise. “My name is still ‘Smith,’” she laughed.
“I don’t believe you,” he answered.
She shrugged her shoulders. “They all know me as that in this place—just ‘Mrs. Smith.’”
“It used to beMissSmith,” he said.
“One causes less comment as a married woman,” she explained. “Such friends as I have suppose that I am a widow who, being an artist, has come to live here because of the picturesqueness of the place and its cheapness.”
“And what is the real reason?” he asked, looking intently into her eyes.
Of a sudden she rose from the bench, and stood before him, her back to the moon, the light of which made a shining aureole round her hair. Her left hand was laid across her breast; the other was clenched at her side.
“Jim, I beg you ...” she said. “This is the Island of Forgetfulness, and you have strayed here, bringing Memory with you. There is no need for you in Nasayan. For my sake, for your own sake, go, I beg you. There is something here which we have in common, and yet which separates us: something which to me is a garland of Paradise, and which to you might be like the chains of hell. I beg you, I beg you: go away! Go back to the open roadand the Bedouin life. Leave me in Nasayan, in oblivion. I don’t want you to know more than this. I swear to you there is no call for you to stay. You have your wandering life: the hills and the valleys and the cities of the whole world are before you. Don’t stay here, don’t try to look into Nasayan....”
Her voice faltered, her gestures were those of pleading, yet even so she appeared to him to have that regal attitude which he remembered now so well.
The meaning of her words, the cause of their intensity, were obscure to him. His mind was confused, and there was a quality of dream in their situation. The black cypress trees which shot up around them into the pale sky like monstrous sentinels; the little orange-trees fantastically decked with their golden fruit; the tiled and moon-splashed pathways; the white walls of the villa, clad with rich creepers; the heavy scent of luxuriant flowers; the sparkling water in the marble basin of the fountain—all these things seemed unreal to him. They were like a legendary setting for the mysterious figure standing before him, a figure, so it seemed to him, of a queen of some kingdom of the old world, left solitary amongst the living long ages after her advisers and her palaces had crumbled to dust in the grasp of Time.
“I don’t understand,” he said, rising and confronting her. “What is the secret about you?—there was always mystery around you.”
“No,” she answered. “There was no mystery four years ago, except the mystery of our dream. My secret then was only a small matter. I was just a runaway. I had left my husband because I wantedmy freedom, and to follow my art in freedom. I had changed my name because I feared to be called back. But now he is dead, and I have nothing to fear in that direction.... No, there was no secret—then.”
“But now?—please tell me, Monimé,” he urged. “I want to know, Imustknow.”
Once more she fenced with him, and their words became useless. At length, however, his questions brought a crisis near to them again. She clenched and unclenched her hands. “I beg you, go away now,” she urged. “Forget me; go back to your freedom. There is something here which will trap you if you stay. Oh, can’t you understand? Don’t you see that I can’t tell whether Fate has brought you here for your happiness, or even for my happiness, or whether it is for our sorrow that you have been brought. I can’t tell, I can’t tell! We are almost strangers to one another.”
He put his arms about her and held her to him. She neither shrank from him, nor responded to him. At that moment all else in time, all else in life, was blotted from his mind, and he knew only that he had found again the lost gateway of his dreams.
“You must speak out,” he cried. “I must know all that there is to know about you. You must explain what you mean.”
She made a movement from him, and suddenly it seemed that her mind was resolved. “Very well, then,” she said. “Come with me into the house.”
She led the way in silence down the pathway, and through a doorway almost hidden beneath thecreepers. A dark passage, screened by a curtain, led into a square hall, softly lit by candles; and at one side of this a stone staircase passed up to a gallery from which two doors opened.
To one of these doors she brought him, a shaded candle held in her hand. Her face was turned from him as they entered the room, and he could not tell what her expression might be; but her step was stealthy and her finger was held up.
Then, suddenly, as in a flash, he understood; and instantly he knew what he was going to see in the little bed which stood against the wall.
She held the candle aloft and motioned him silently to approach the bed. It was only a mop of dark curls that he could see, and a chubby face half buried in the pillows.
He turned to her with a burning question on his lips, but the beating of his heart seemed to deprive him of the power of speech. She nodded gently to him, her face once more serene and calm, and now, too, very proud.
“He is your son,” she said.
With a quick eager movement he pulled the light blanket back, and snatched up the sleeping little figure in his arms. Even though the eyes were tight shut, the mouth absurdly open, and the head falling loosely from side to side, he saw at once the likeness to himself, and to all the Tundering-Wests at whose portraits he had gazed during those years at Eversfield. His heart leapt within him.
“Don’t wake him!” she exclaimed, hastening forward; and as she laid the child upon the bed once more Jim saw her revealed in a new aspect—that ofa mother. Her attitude as she bent over the sleeping form, the encircling, protecting arms, the crooning words—they were tokens of a sort of universal motherhood. She was Isis, the mother-goddess of Egypt; she was Hathor; she was Venus Genetrix; she was Mary. Upon her broad bosom she nursed for ever the child of man; and her lips smiled eternally with the pride of creation.
Silently he watched her as she smoothed the pillows, and there came to him the memory of that day at Alexandria when he had awakened from unconsciousness to find her leaning over him, her hand upon his forehead; and suddenly he seemed to understand the nature of one of the veils of mystery which enwrapped her, and which, indeed, enwraps all women who are true to their sex. It is the veil which hangs before the sanctuary of motherhood aglow with the inner illumination of the everlasting wisdom of maternity.
An overwhelming emotion shook his life to its foundations: he could have gone down on his knees and kissed the hem of her garment. He could not trust himself to speak, but silently he took her hand in his and pressed it to his dry lips.
She led him out of the room and down the stairs; and presently they were seated once more upon the bench in the moonlight. In answer to his eager questions, she told him in a low voice how she had hidden herself in Constantinople when her time was approaching, and how the baby was born in a convent-hospital. She had found in the city an English nurse, the widow of a soldier, and at length with hershe had taken ship to Cyprus, and had rented this house.
“I want you to understand,” she said, “that there is no obligation of any kind upon you. Here in Nicosia there are a few English people: they have received me without question, and I am not lonely. I send my pictures to London from time to time, and the money I receive for them is ample for my needs. When my boy is a little older I will take him to some place in Italy or France where he can be educated and I can paint. Don’t think that there is any call upon you: don’t feel that here is a chain to bind you....”
He stopped her with an excited gesture. “You don’t understand. This is the most wonderful thing that could possibly have happened to me. I want you to let me stay on at the hotel, and come over to see you every day.... May I come to-morrow morning?—I must see that boy when he’s awake. My son! He’s my son! Good Lord!—I’ve never felt so all up in the air before.”
A sudden thought frenzied him. If only he had known her address, or she had known his, his disastrous marriage would never have taken place. He would have married Monimé, and ultimately this little son of theirs would have been the Tundering-West of Eversfield Manor. But now, the boy was nameless, and the inheritance was gone as the price of freedom.
“Oh, Monimé,” he cried. “How can you ever forgive me? Oh, why, why didn’t I cable to you after I left Egypt?—why didn’t we keep in touch?”
He paced to and fro, running his fingers throughhis dark hair and pulling at it so that it fell over his forehead. His eyes were wild, and his face looked white and haggard in the moonlight.
“The fault was as much mine as yours,” she declared. “It was just Bedouin love, and we let it slip from us. We dreamed our dreams, and in the morning we went our ways, like the tramps that we are. And then when I found that I had need of you, it was too late....”
“But now we must make up for it,” he said. “We must never lose each other again. I love you, Monimé. I believe I have always loved you, somewhere at the back of my mind.”
She smiled the wise smile of the old gods. “It was four years ago,” she said, “and our little dream was so short. In a way we are strangers to one another.”
Presently she rose, and told him that he must go. “The hotel keeps early hours,” she said.
She led him to the door of the garden, but to his fervent adieux she gave no great response. The expression on her face was placid once more, and his excited senses could make nothing of it.
He walked down the silent, mediæval street oblivious to his surroundings. Behind a shuttered window there were sounds of the rhythmic beating of a tambourine and the twanging of some sort of stringed instrument; but he heeded them not. A cloaked and hooded figure, leaning upon a staff, passed him, and bade him “Good-night” in Arabic; but he did not respond. He entered the hotel, and walked up the steps to his bedroom without any real consciousness of his actions.
His whole being was, as it were, in an uproar, andhis emotions were playing riot with his reason. He had chanced again upon the woman he had loved and almost forgotten, the woman he ought to have married; and suddenly the great miracle had been wrought within him, and he was deeply, wildly, madly in love with her. She was the mother of his son—his son, his son, his son!
Over and over again, he repeated it to himself, and the words seemed to go roaring like a tempest through the crowded halls of his thoughts. But presently, as he sat upon the foot of his bed, new whirlwinds of actuality came to the assault, and scattered the shouting multitude of his dreams.
If he married Monimé he would be a bigamist, and within the reach of the law. If he told her that he was married he might lose her for ever. Even if he kept his real identity a secret, and risked detection, the fact remained that he had thrown away his home and his fortune, and had nothing in prospect when his present means were exhausted.
For the first time since the early days of his inheritance he realized the value of the property to which he had succeeded, he realized the merit of the name he had abandoned. In later years how could he ever look his son in the face, and tell him of the home and income that had been thrown away? Yet if he kept his secret, how could he endure to live daily to Monimé a fundamental lie?
Bitterly he reproached himself for his past actions. Bitterly he cursed Dolly for her part in the dilemma. There seemed no way out of the mess; and far into the night he sat with his head resting upon his hands, his fingers deep in his hair.
To Jim the days which followed were chaotic. The whole movement of his existence seemed to be stimulated and speeded up, and the pace of his thoughts was increased out of all measure. It was as though some sort of drag or break had been removed from the wheels of his being, so that the fiery steeds of circumstance were able to leap forward after many a mile of heavy going. From now henceforth he was conscious of a general acceleration, a new vehemence, even a sort of frenzy in his progress along the high road of life; and, in consequence, his impressions were received with less observation of detail.
In the high passion of love there is no peace of mind and little satisfaction. The lover can never believe that he is loved, yet his happiness seems to him to depend on that assurance. His anxiety haunts him, fevers him, and lays siege as it were to his very soul.
The true lover makes more abundant acquaintance with hell than with heaven. So sensitive is his condition that every moment not rich with his lady’s obvious adoration is a moment impoverished by doubts and fears. She is not so interested in him as she was, he thinks; she is bored; she is cold to-day; she is thinking of something else; she does not surrender herself impetuously as she would if she reallycared. So says the wretched lover in his heart, and so he gives himself over to the legion of ten thousand devils.
Monimé maintained towards Jim a quiet and tantalizing reserve. Mentally she seemed to be upon the mountain-top, and he in the valley below. When he visited her at her house she kept him waiting before she made her appearance: it was as though she were not eager to see him. Women have this in common with the feline race: they seem so often to be intent upon some hidden pursuit. They go their own way, bide their own time, and no man may know the secret of their doings. No man may be initiated into their mysteries; and that which occupies them upstairs before they descend to greet him is beyond his ken.
Like a number of men, Jim’s character was marked by a certain simplicity. He made no secret of his love: it was apparent in his every gesture. The only secret which he maintained was that of his marriage, lest he should lose her, and in this regard he lied to an extent which brought misery to his heart. He gave her to understand that the property he had inherited had proved to be of no great value, and that the little money he now possessed was all that remained of its proceeds.
He desired to forget the years at Eversfield utterly, and to live only in the present. To Monimé he had always been Jim Easton, and the fact that she had not so much as heard the names Tundering-West or Eversfield aided him in his deception. Yet in his own heart his marriage to Dolly and the change of identity by which he had effected hisescape were become the two appalling mistakes which shut him off from Monimé and their son.
The little boy proved to be all that he could wish. He was about three and a-half years of age, and was in the midst of that first great phase of inquiry which is the introduction to the school of life. He used the word “why” a hundred times a day; his large eyes stared in wondering contemplation at every object which newly came into his ken; and his fingers were ever busy with experiment.
It is a trying age for the “grown-up”; but Jim, not having too much of it, enjoyed it, and enjoyed watching Monimé’s handling of the situation.
Her attitude towards himself during the first days, however, was the cause of many a heartache. There was a curious expression on her face as she watched him playing with the boy: it was at first as though she did not recognize his parental position, nor regard him as being in any way essential to the domestic alliance. She seemed to be anxious as to his influence upon the child, and when once he made the jesting assertion that parents should not try to be a good example to their offspring, but rather an awful warning, she did not laugh.
The possession of a son was the source of the most intense satisfaction to him; but Monimé seemed at first to be endeavouring to check his belated enthusiasm. Sometimes she appeared to him, indeed, as a lioness protecting her cub from an interfering lion, and cuffing the intruder over the head with a not too gentle paw. She seemed to claim the boy as her own exclusive property, and she allowed Jim no free access to the nursery, norindeed to the house. There were days upon which the door was closed to him on one pretext or another; and at such times he experienced a variety of emotions, all of which were violent and passionate.
“People will talk,” she would say, “if you come here so often, Jim. I am not independent of the world as I used to be: I have the boy to consider.”
She had called the child Ian, which, she said, was the name of her father; and the fact that she had thus excluded him from a nomenclatural identity with the boy was a source to him of recurrent mortification. His son should have been James, or Stephen, or Mark, like his ancestors before him: it filled his heart with bitter remorse that the little chap should be merely “Ian Smith.”
Gradually, however, Monimé became more accustomed to his association with the boy; and at length there came a memorable occasion on which they sat together beside his cot for the best part of the night and nursed him through an alarming feverish attack. It was then that Jim saw in her face an expression of tenderness towards him which was like water to the thirsty.
“You know,” he said to her, as they walked in the garden together in the cool of the daybreak, “this is the first time you have let me feel that I have anything to do with Ian. I have been very hurt.”
She turned on him vehemently. “Oh, don’t you understand,” she said, “that your coming back into my life like this is very hard for me to bear? I don’t want you to feel yourself tied down. I am perfectly capable of looking after myself and myboy without your help. You have set a struggle going in my mind that is distracting me. There is one side of me which resents your interference, because you are just a wanderer, perfectly capable of walking off once more with hardly a farewell. There is another side which finds a sort of sneaking comfort in your presence, and endows you with virtues you probably don’t possess. I was self-reliant until you came. Now I am swayed this way and that. At one moment I think I was wrong, and that we ought to be married and ought to go to some country where we are unknown, so that we can explain our child by pretending our marriage took place secretly four years ago. At another moment I remember that you have not suggested marriage to me, and that therefore you probably realize as well as I do your unfittedness for the rôle of husband. And then there’s the constant feeling of the unfairness of making you share, at this stage, the responsibilities I undertook of my own free will at Alexandria.”
“It was my doing as much as yours,” he replied.
“No,” she answered, with a smile. “Any woman worth her salt handles those sorts of situations, and makes up her own mind. Man proposes, woman disposes. The whole thing is in the woman’s hands: to think otherwise is to insult my sex. Men and women are both pieces in Nature’s game; but Nature is a woman, and she works out her plans through her own sex.”
She sat down upon the stone bench, and, with hands folded, gazed up to the dawning glory of the sunrise. It was as though she were a consciousdaughter of Hathor, Mother of all things, looking for guidance in her perplexity. Jim seated himself by her side, and for some time there was silence between them, though his brain seemed to him to be full of the clamour of shackled words and incarcerated emotions.
Her reference to their marriage had pierced his heart as with a sharp sword. He desired to make her his wife more intensely than ever he had desired anything in his life before; yet he was unable to do so. He wanted to possess her, to have the right to protect her, to be able to dedicate his whole entity to her service; yet he was tied hand and foot, and could make no such proposal.
He felt ashamed, exasperated, and thwarted; and suddenly springing to his feet, he swung about on his heel, kicked viciously at the bushes, and swore a round, hearty oath.
“What’s the matter?” she asked in surprise. “Has something stung you?”
He laughed crazily. “Yes, I’m stung all over,” he cried. “There are a hundred serpents with all their flaming fangs in me. I think I’m going mad.”
He paced to and fro, tearing at his hair; and when at length he resumed his seat he seized both her hands in his, and frenziedly kissed her every finger.
“I’m on fire,” he gasped. “I believe my heart is a roaring furnace. I must be full of blazing light inside; and in a few minutes I think I shall drop down dead with longing for you, Monimé. Then you’ll have to bury me; but I tell you there’ll be a volcanic eruption above my grave, and flames willissue forth from my bare bones. I don’t believe Death itself could extinguish me: my love will burst out in fearful torrents of lava, and the whole earth will tremble at my convulsions. I shall come to you again in earthquakes and tidal waves and a falling rain of comets. I shall blow the whole blasted world to smithereens before I go roaring into hell.... That’s how I feel! That’s what you’ve done to me!”
He took her in his arms, and, holding her crushed and powerless to resist, poured out his love for her in wild desperate words, his face close to hers. The sun was rising, and the first rays of golden light were flung upon the tops of the surrounding houses and trees while yet the garden was blue with the shadow of the vanishing night.
“Don’t Jim,” she whispered. “For God’s sake, don’t! We’ve got to be sensible. We’ve got to think what’s best for Ian. Give me a chance to think.”
“I want you,” he cried. “I want you more than any man has ever wanted anything. You belong to me: you’re my wife in the eyes of God. I want you to marry me....”
He had said it!—he had uttered the impossible thing; and his heart stood still with anguish. His arms loosened their hold upon her, and they faced one another in silence, while a thousand sparrows in the tree-tops chattered their merry morning salutation to the sun.
“Cad! Cad! Cad!” said the voice of his outraged conscience to him. “Bigamist and thief!”And his heart responded with the one reiterated excuse: “I love her, I love her!”
“You must give me time to think,” she said at length. “Go now, Jim. You must have some sleep, and I must see to Ian.”
For two days after this she would not see him, but on the third day, at mid-morning, he found himself once more in her drawing-room. It was a charming room, cool and airy; and it had a distinction which his own drawing-room at Eversfield had lamentably lacked. Dolly had been a victim of the nepotistic practice of loading the tables, piano-top, and shelves with photographs of herself, her friends, and her relatives. Pictures of this kind are well enough in a man’s study or a woman’s boudoir; but in the more public rooms they are only to be tolerated, if at all, in the smallest quantity. Monimé, however, whether by design or by force of circumstances, was free of this habit; and the more subtle essence of her personality was thus able to be enjoyed without distraction.
The walls were whitewashed and panelled with old Persian textiles; carpets of Karamania and Smyrna lay upon the stone-paved floors; the light furniture was covered with fine fabrics of local manufacture; and in Cyprian vases a mass of flowers greeted the eye with a hundred chromatic gradations and scented the air with the fragrance of summer.
Monimé, upon this occasion, had reverted to her accustomed serenity of manner; and as she refreshed her distracted lover with sandwiches of goat’s-milk cheese and the wine of the island pouredfrom a Cyprian jug, she talked to him quietly of practical things.
She argued frankly for and against their marriage, and reviewed the financial aspect of the question without embarrassment. She told him that she had just received a proposal from her salesman in London that she should go over to Egypt at once and paint him a dozen desert subjects, there being a readier market for these than for pictures of little-known Cyprus. This, therefore, she intended to do; and, in view of Ian’s health, she proposed to send the boy and his nurse to England, there to await her return in four or five months’ time.
Jim moved restlessly in his chair as she spoke, for the thought of revisiting England was terrifying to him; yet if she went there he could hardly resist the temptation to follow. He knew that it was preposterous enough to think of a bigamous marriage to her, even here in the East, but in England such a union would be madness.
“I thought,” he said gloomily, “that you did not want to risk meeting your former friends.”
“What does it matter now?” she replied. “The scandal of my leaving my husband is forgotten, and he, poor man, is dead. I have never told you his name, have I? He was Richard Furnice, the banker.”
Jim glanced up quickly. “I know the name,” he said, with simplicity, for who did not? “But I don’t remember ever reading of his domestic troubles.”
“No,” she replied. “The scandal was kept out of the papers. He was as successful in explainingaway my absence as he had been in explaining away the presence of his mistress. Yes,” she added, in answer to his look of inquiry, “he led the usual double life.”
“Very rich, wasn’t he?” Jim asked.
“Yes, very,” she answered. “But I have never cared much about money. I have always agreed with the man who said ‘Wealth is acquired by over-reaching our neighbors, and is spent in insulting them.’”
“I like money well enough,” said Jim, “but I’ve never been much good at earning it.”
She asked him why he did not send some of his verses to a publisher in England, and talked to him so persuasively in this regard that he promised to consider doing so.
“But if you return to England,” he said, returning to the problem before him, “are there none of your relations who will make it awkward for you and Ian?”
She shook her head. “My father died several years ago, and I was the only child. We have no close relations. You now may as well know his name, too. He was Sir Ian Valory, the African explorer.”
Jim looked at her in surprise. “Why, he was one of my heroes as a boy,” he declared. “I read his books over and over again. This is wonderful!—tell me more.”
But as she did so, there arose a new clamour in his brain. He longed to be able to tell her that his own blood was fit to match with hers. The Tundering-Wests stood high in the annals of explorationand adventure: his ancestors had roamed the world, as Knights of the Cross, as King’s Envoys, as Constables of frontier castles, as Admirals of England. He himself was blood of their blood, and bone of their bone; and his son combined this high heritage with that of Valory.
Yet the secret must be kept. Bitter was his regret that so it must be, thrice bitter his remorse that this son of his was a bastard. A Tundering-West and a Valory!—and the issue of that illustrious union a child without a name, hidden away in the Island of Forgetfulness!!
He went back to the hotel that day cursing Fate for its irony, hating himself for a fool. Then, of a sudden, there came a possible solution into his bewildered thoughts. Monimé was going to Egypt for some months: could he not return to England, reveal the fact of his existence to his wife, and oblige her to divorce him? The proceedings could be conducted quietly, and Monimé, unaware of his real name, would not identify him with them. He could return to her a free man, able to marry her, and in later years he could tell her the whole story.
Yet how could he bear the long absence from her, how could he face the terror that she might find out and reject him? “O God,” he cried in his heart, “I am punished for my foolishness! You have belaboured me enough: You, Whom they call merciful, have mercy!”
During the next few days Jim made a final arrangement of his poems, and, adding a title-page:Songs of the Highroad, by James Easton, posted them off to a well-known publisher in London, givinghis bank in Rome as his address. While reading through these collected manuscripts he had come to the conclusion that the poems were rather good. “There’s quite a swing about some of the stuff,” he said to Monimé. “In fact I almost believe I could have shown you one or two of them without feeling an ass. But I suppose the thoughts in them, and the melancholy speculations about what is one’s ‘duty’ and all that sort of thing, are rather rot.”
As time passed, the idea of returning to England and obtaining a divorce developed in his mind. He was reluctant, however, to make a final decision, and his plans remained fluid long after those of Monimé had crystallized. This was due mainly to the suspense he was experiencing in regard to his relations with her. He avoided any pressing of the question of their marriage, for he shunned the thought of involving her in a possible bigamy case; yet he could see that so long as he maintained this inconclusive attitude he gave her no cause for confidence in him.
Matters came to a head one day at the end of October. Monimé had arranged with him to make the excursion to the mountain castle of St. Hilarion; and it is probable that both he and she had decided to talk things out during the hours they would be together. So far as he was concerned, at any rate, the situation as it stood was impossible.
The carriage in which they were to make this fifteen-mile journey resembled a barouche, but a kind of awning was stretched above it on four iron rods, and from this depended some dusty-looking curtains looped back by faded red cords and tassels,which might have been purloined from old men’s dressing-gowns. Four lean and crazily harnessed horses were attached to this vehicle, which looked somewhat like a four-poster bed on wheels; and a red-capped and baggy-trousered driver, apparently of Turkish nationality, sat high upon the box, Monimé’s man-servant being perched beside him.
Rattling down the narrow streets of the city and through the tunnel in the ramparts, they soon passed out into the open country, and, with loudly cracking whip, bowled along the sun-bathed road at a very fair pace, the sparkling morning air seeming to put vigour even into the emaciated horses.
At length they came to the foot-hills, and saw far above them, against the intense blue of the sky, the pass which leads through the mountains to the port of Kyrenia and the sea. Here their pace grew slower, and from time to time they walked beside the labouring vehicle as it crunched its way through soft gravel and sand, or lurched over half-buried boulders.
Reaching level ground once more they went with a fine flourish through a village where the dogs barked at them and the children stared or ran begging at their side. Now the slopes and ledges of rock were green with young pines, whose aromatic scent filled the warm air; and, as they slowly wound their way upwards, the size of these trees increased until they attained truly majestic proportions.
Towards noon they entered the pass, and Jim and Monimé were afoot once more, whilst the tired horses rested. Behind them the gorges and valleys carried the eye down into the hazy distances, andthey could see Nicosia lying like a white cameo upon the velvet of the plains. Before them a cleft in the towering rocks revealed the azure expanse of the Mediterranean, and beyond it the far-off coasts of Asia Minor, rising like the vision of a dream from the placid ocean.
Monimé shaded her eyes as she gazed over the sea. “There is Phrygia,” she exclaimed, “where Monimé lived, and Cappadocia and Cilicia! And away behind them is Pontus, the land her husband took her to....”
“I have no home to take you to, Monimé,” he said, unable to eschew the hazardous subject of their marriage.
“That’s just as well,” she answered, “because in the story, you remember, he involved her in his domestic troubles, which led to his suicide, and her own death followed.”
She smiled as she spoke, but to him her words were dark with portentous meaning. He felt like a criminal.
Entering the carriage once more, they descended from the pass for some distance, as though making for Kyrenia, which they could see far below them; but presently a rough track led them through the pines, and brought them at last to the foot of a tremendous bluff of rock, upon the summit of which stood the ruined walls and towers of the castle of St. Hilarion. Here the carriage was abandoned, and hand-in-hand they clambered up the track, the servant following with the luncheon basket.
Soon they passed within the ruinous walls of the castle, and, having rested in the shade and eatentheir picnic meal, made their way amongst fallen stones and a profusion of weeds and grasses towards the main buildings, which mounted up the cliffs in front of them in a confused array of walls and turrets, roofs and chimneys, battlements and bastions, standing silent and withered in a blaze of sunlight.
Through a crumbling door they went, and up a flight of broken steps; through the ruined chapel, on the walls of which the faded frescoes could still be seen; along a shadowed passage, and up again by a rock-hewn stairway; until at last they reached a roofless chamber locally known as the Queen’s Apartment.
This side of the castle, which was built at the edge of an appalling precipice, seemed to be clinging perilously to the summit of the mountain; and through the broken tracery of the Gothic windows they looked down in awe to the pine forests two thousand feet below. All about them the bold mountain peaks rose up from the shadowed and mysterious valleys near the coastline; and before them the purple and azure sea was spread, divided from the cloudless sky by the hazy hills of Asia Minor.
From these valleys there rose to their ears the frail and far-off tinkle of goats’ bells, and sometimes the song of a shepherd was lifted up to them upon the tender wings of the breeze. All visible things seemed to be motionless in the warmth of the afternoon, with the exception only of two vultures, which slowly circled in mid-air with tranquil pinions extended. It was as though the crumblingstones of the castle, and the forests and valleys they surmounted, were deep in an enchanted slumber, from which they would never again awake.
Here at these walls Richard Cœur de Lion, King of England, with trumpets had summoned the garrison to surrender; but the walls remembered it no more. Here the Kings and Queens of Cyprus, of the House of Lusignan, had held their court in that strange admixture of Western chivalry and Eastern splendour which had characterized the dynasty; but the glamour of those days was passed into oblivion. Here the soldiers of Venice had looted and plundered; but the ruin they left behind them had steeped its wounds in the balm of forgetfulness.
Only Monimé and her lover were awake in this place of dreams. Seated here, as it were, upon a throne rising in the very centre of the ancient world, she seemed to Jim to be one with all the dim, forgotten queens of the past; all the romance of all the pages of history was focussed and brought again to life in her person; and in her face there was the mystery of regnant womanhood throughout the ages.
Just as now she sat with her chin resting upon her hand, gazing over the summer seas to the adventurous coasts of the ancient kingdoms of the Mediterranean, so Arsinoe had gazed, perhaps upon this very mountain-top; so Cleopatra, her sister, had gazed, over there in her Alexandrian palace; so Helen had gazed yonder from the casements of Troy; so the Queen of Sheba, camping upon Lebanon, had gazed as she travelled from Jerusalem. The past was forgotten; but, all unknowing, it lived again in Monimé, enticing him with her lips, lookingtenderly upon him with her eyes, beckoning him with her smiles, repulsing him with her indifference, bewildering him with her serenity, maddening him with her unfathomable heart.
“Monimé, I can’t go on like this,” he said, taking her hands in his. “You must tell me here and now that you love me, or that I am to go out of your life.”
“The future lies in your hands, Jim,” she answered, quietly and with deep sincerity. “Surely you can understand my attitude. I will not bind myself to a man who will not be bound, even though I were to love him with all my soul.”
“I have asked you to marry me,” he told her.
“Your words carried no conviction,” she replied.
“I ask you again,” he said, daring all.
“You do not know what you are saying,” she answered. “Go away to England, or to Italy, Jim, and think it over. Stay away from me for some months; and if you find that your feelings do not change, if I remain a vital thing in your life and do not fade into a memory, then you can come back to me, knowing that I will not fail you. We have had enough of Bedouin love. If I were to be honest with myself I would tell you that long ago circumstances made me realize that we did wrong at Alexandria, because we were unfair to the unborn generation. I set myself in opposition to accepted custom, and I have been beaten by just one thing—my anxiety for the welfare of the child my emancipation brought me, my terror in case there should be a slur upon his name. There must be no more playing with vital things.”
Her suggestion that he should go away from her for some months, while she worked in Egypt on her desert pictures, came to him like the voice of Providence, offering to him the opportunity to carry out his plan for ridding himself once and for all of Dolly by divorce; and his mind was made up on the instant.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll go away—though not because I feel the slightest doubt about my love for you. I’ll go to Larnaca to-morrow: some people from the hotel are going then, so as to catch the steamer the day after....”
She interrupted him. “Oh Jim, must it be to-morrow?”
He looked up quickly at her. “Do you care?” he asked, eagerly.
She had begun to reply, and he was hanging upon her words, when the native servant made his appearance. Jim clapped his hand to his head in a frenzy of exasperation. “Confound you!—what do you want?” he shouted to the man.
“I suppose he’s come to tell us it’s high time to be going,” said Monimé, laughing in his face.
Jim picked up a stone and hurled it viciously over the wall into the void beyond. He would willingly have leapt upon the inoffensive servant and throttled him where he stood.
Thus it came about that Jim took ship back to Trieste, leaving Monimé and Ian to go the following week to Alexandria, whence the boy and his nurse would Journey by a P. and O. liner direct to England.
It was a blustering evening in early November when he arrived in London, and to his sad heart the streets through which he passed and the small hotel where he was to stay were dreary in the extreme. His brain was full of the sunshine of the Mediterranean; and the burning passion of his love for Monimé seemed to draw all his vitality inwards, and to leave frozen and desolate that part of his entity which had to encounter the immediate world of actuality.
Upon the following morning it rained, and for some time he lay in bed, staring out through the wet window-pane at the grey sky and the grimy chimney pots, dreading to arise and meet his fate. His first object was to find Mrs. Darling. She had always been understanding and sympathetic, and now she would perhaps aid him in his predicament. The news that he was still alive would then have to be broken gently to Dolly, and the situation would have to be handled in such a way that she would find it to her advantage to divorce him. His heart sank as the thought occurred to him that very possiblyshe would welcome his return and refuse to part from him. In that case the game would be lost and life would be intolerable.
At the outset, however, his plans met with a check. An early visit to the flat where Mrs. Darling lived revealed the fact that she had rented it furnished, and the only address known to the present tenant was that of Eversfield. This did not necessarily mean that she was staying with her daughter, and Jim was left on the doorstep wondering what was the best way of getting hold of her quickly.
A sudden resolve caused him to hail a taxi and to drive to Paddington Station. He would catch the first train to Oxford, pay a surreptitious visit to Eversfield, and try to get into touch with Smiley-face, his one friend there. The poacher would give him all the news, and would doubtless be of assistance to him in various ways; and his reliability in regard to keeping the secret was unquestionable. Smiley was a master of the art of secrecy.
Jim was wearing a high-collared raincoat and a slouch hat, and, with the one turned up and the other pulled down, he would easily avoid recognition, even if, in the by-ways he proposed to follow, he were to meet with anybody of his acquaintance. And after all, since he would be obliged, in any event, to come back from the dead for the purpose of his divorce, an indefinite rumour that he had been seen might be the gentlest manner of breaking the news to Dolly. He wanted to spare her a sudden shock.
He had not long to wait for a train, and by noon he was setting out across the muddy fields behindthe houses of Oxford, munching some railway sandwiches as he went. The rain had cleared off, but the sky was still grey; and the mild, misty atmosphere of the Thames Valley filled his heart with gloom and brought recollections of the days of his captivity crowding back into his mind. He could hardly believe that he had been absent not much more than six months. He had lived through an eternity in that brief space.
Nobody was encountered on the way, and when he mounted the last stile, and stepped into the familiar pathway behind the church at Eversfield he was still a solitary figure, moving like a ghost through the damp mist.
It was his intention now to skirt the village, and to walk on to the isolated cottage where Smiley-face lived with old Jenny; but the silence of his surroundings, and the deathlike stillness of the little church, induced him to creep across the graveyard and to slip through the door into the building.
In the aisle he stood for a while lost in thought; while the old clock in the gallery ticked out the seconds. He felt as though he were a spirit come back from the dead; and, indeed, the sight of the familiar pews, the escutcheons, and the memorial tablets of his ancestors, produced in him a sensation such as a midnight ghost might feel when called out of death’s celestial dream to walk again amidst the scenes of his misdeeds.
Suddenly a new and shining brass tablet at the side of the chancel caught his eye; and he hastened forward, his heart beating with a kind of dread ofthat which he would see written thereon for all to read. The inscription was truly staggering:—