Ferlie, nervous of Cyprian's penetration in the matter, attacked Digby one afternoon, when the work was about half finished.
"I don't think you quite understand," she said, "the strain this deception is putting upon me. Cyprian is inventing reasons in his own mind for my looking so ill. But I simply can't sleep."
"Tell him then."
"Do you really imagine that he would allow you to finish this, if I did?"
"In that case I should distinctly advise you not to tell him."
"Oh, you are a cad!" she burst out. "What man, worthy of the name, would take advantage of a private confidence inadvertently yielded, to further his own ends?"
"You forget," he said, "your Cyprian never, from the beginning, would admit that I was worthy of the name. Do you happen to know the terms in which he forbade me your company?"
"Whatever he said he was right."
"Why not, therefore, resign yourself to the worst where my actions are under discussion?"
"We had an agreement before T consented to this course," she reminded him. "I suppose you will not forget it."
"I denied any intention of employing tactics which had already failed to make you see my side." There was a sneer in his voice. "I have, nevertheless, abided by the word of a—no, I'll spare you. You started this conversation, not I."
She relapsed into hopeless silence.
"Do you think I have not suffered too?" he asked, more humanely. "Once, you would have noticed that I am hardly looking as if my own nights were undisturbed."
Then, as she answered nothing, "You had better ask Sterne where he intends to bring up his son that no stigma shall attach to his name in future as he seems persuaded it does to mine."
"You could save yours if you wished," she said, in tired tones. "It is what we are that matters, not what other people think we are."
"You may not be the hypocrite you seem. But as for your reputed brother ..."
"I think, if I were you, I'd leave it at that," Ferlie told him, so significantly that he paused and passed the rest of the sentence off with an unpleasant laugh.
"I don't understand exactly what you remind me of," was his next opening. "Have you, in England, any legends referring to the spirits of trees? We, in Burma, people our mountains and rivers and trees with 'nats,' which are powerfully angelic or demoniac spirits, but the tree-nats are the most popular, I think. I might have painted you as my conception of a Gul Mohur Nat, but, then, you would have had to stand nude among the shadows—hardly visible, but still nude, with the dull golden reflections of the flowers upon your pale skin."
Ferlie looked back steadily into the hard brightness of his eyes.
The attitude of purely English Club members might be, in part, responsible for the character-development here of weak expansiveness into bitter withdrawal, and natural animal passion to the impotent rage of unnatural excesses which lent him a spurious sense of power.
The real power on this occasion lay in her own self-control, and she knew it.
She spoke impersonally. "There is a story of the first Old Master to paint from the nude. It is not a story that appeals to me, somehow. The model and the artist regarded the occasion so sacred as to warrant their joint attendance at Mass first. Myself, I feel that they should never have realized the suggestion of lust, in anything so aloof as Art, enough to anticipate its interference."
She astonished and disconcerted him where he had hoped to disconcert her.
"You would, therefore, have raised no objection?" rather lamely.
"I should assuredly have refused—you. There is a form of Art, which only artists of a higher evolution than you are fit to practise. My objection would not have been founded on any idea that the human body must be concealed to all for the sake of those who misread its allegorical beauty."
He unscrewed a fresh tube with savagely nervous fingers, and descended to cheap reviling.
"Sterne, I gather, is one of the fortunately evolved specimens who do not misread the allegory and are, hence, privileged without the artist's excuse."
"Your thoughts just bore me," said Ferlie flatly. "I can see them passing across your face and they are ugly enough to mar any work you attempt. And, underneath all my angry disgust, I am sorry for you. If you came across a wounded snake what would you do?"
The palette crashed to the ground as he took a pace forward, clenching his stained hands.
"Put it out of its pain," he said.
A faint shadow of that hypnotic power, which Peter had so long suspected and, finally, developed in himself, supported her.
"If you are, as I believe you to be, a true artist under your skin," and she kept very still, "you will practise the restraint which should enable you to put your picture before your—passions. I have stood long enough for to-day."
She turned swiftly and retreated through the trees; nor did he attempt to call her back.
* * * * * *
Towards the end of the week Cyprian, who had left Ferlie at the Club surrounded by a new batch of English papers, and ridden out, himself, to an inspection connected with his work at some distance, returned late in the afternoon, to find her missing.
"Your sister, Mr. Sterne? No. She only stayed at the Club about a quarter of an hour."
Someone had seen her walking towards the river-path.
"Then I'll go home that way, skirting the hill," said Cyprian. "The servant met me with a telegram for her, having been to the bungalow and found her out."
He rode slowly off, flicking at the flies with his crop. Once on the narrow path above the bank he let the horse pick its own way. The back compounds of one or two bungalows, set far apart, straggled to the bushy slope above the water, but the vicinity of the river was too feverish in the evening to be popular, and it struck Cyprian as particularly unwise of Ferlie to choose this spot for a walk, in her present languid state of health.
He made up his mind to tackle her outright when they got home and insist upon knowing what was worrying her. He had taken refuge in patience, but she sometimes needed rousing by sharper methods.
There might have arrived a letter from Peter criticizing what Cyprian felt to be none of that gentleman's business. As an only brother, and older than Ferlie, it was possible that Peter's scruples had outweighed his discretion. Cyprian, having overcome his own, was not prepared for re-discussion of the situation with anybody. To have and to hold, whatever the future brought to either of them. He would plough the furrow now to the very end.
As he registered this resolve afresh, he heard voices ahead, but their owners were hidden behind a natural crescent of thick undergrowth which somebody had attempted, in the past, to train as a rude hedge. Above the tumble of scattered bushes appeared the ragged outline of a garden, flanked by two huge Gul Mohurs.
Cyprian recognized them as those which stood in Digby Maur's compound, reflecting with satisfaction that the latter had remained largely invisible since his return from leave.
The ruin of decaying vegetation on the dank path muffled the sound of his horse's hoofs and he had passed within a few yards of the foliage concealing the speakers when the identity of one was revealed to him.
"I told you yesterday that you make me pity you, in spite of myself," Ferlie was saying excitedly. "I am speaking cold sense when I repeat that it will be impossible for me to hide much longer from Cyprian that I am not spending my afternoons at the Club. I actually had to go there to-day to avoid questions before he went out into the district."
"Well, it's no use," Digby Maur's huskily uneven tones replied. "You're great on 'control' and all that, and the means you employ to get here do not concern me. You will continue to come for as long as I need you, because you can't help yourself; and I am not nearly finished with you yet."
Cyprian, on this statement, became entirely primitive man, and did not wait to consider the metamorphosis. He dismounted, crashed through the interlacing branches, and found himself standing between Ferlie and the individual who had made this astounding claim on her time.
The air was pregnant with the labouring emotions of a drama as old as the world.
Digby Maur recovered first from the intrusion, for, aware that he now had his back to the wall he was, also, reliant on the sharpness of his teeth. Sterne was the kind of man to sell his soul in avoiding a scandal should such a drastic price be required of him.
"Good evening," he said. "These are my grounds and you will be ready to admit that even my humble home is my castle?"
For answer, the intruder stepped forward and slashed him across the face with the riding-crop.
The insolently poised figure reeled backwards as Cyprian spoke to Ferlie.
"The horse is here. I am going to put you up on it and lead it home. You don't look fit to walk."
Without a word she went with him down the slope. She would have refused his help in mounting only that he lifted her bodily and set her sideways on the saddle, putting the reins between her nerveless fingers.
The dull thudding progress of the horse was out of time with her quickening pulses.... Something in the life of Cyprian and herself was over, and of the new phase which loomed ahead she was afraid.
Arrived at the house she motioned him away and slipped unaided to the ground. He tossed the reins to a servant and followed her up the path to his office. She sank into a chair and sat motionless resting her chin in her palms, dimly aware that he had passed into his dressing-room. She heard the splutter of a syphon, and immediately he returned to push a weak mixture towards her. "Drink it up," he ordered in matter-of-fact tones. "And then, just when you're ready, Ferlie, you can begin."
So he had not forgotten his promise. Cyprian never made the same mistake twice. It took a long while for her to tell him, and during the whole recital he refrained from interruption. When she ended he drew a deep breath and stretched out a hand through the gathering dusk to lay it over hers in the old protective way.
"I have this to say," he told her. "We are through with any childish arguments concerning one another's rights. You have taken no irrevocable vows to obey me—in fact, I believe the word has lately been deleted from the orthodox marriage service, has it not?—but our united brains must be clear upon the point that two cannot walk together unless they are agreed, and, as it is impossible for two human souls of widely different impulses to agree identically upon the treatment of every problem they may be called upon to solve, it is necessary that in final decisions one should yield precedence to the other. In visionary matters beyond my ken I am willing to sit at your feet. Over practical matters and the verdicts that affect our material welfare, I claim precedence, Ferlie. You gave it to me when you gave yourself into my keeping at Black Towers. I am responsible for you; not you for me. Are you satisfied for this to be so?"
It was not in her power to speak, but she bowed her weary puzzled head over his hand and rested it there. He laid his free one upon her hair and continued speaking, while he absently smoothed the ruffled "bob."
"Yes? Well, in the circumstances, you had no shadow of right to take the law into your own hands and act deliberately against my wishes, just because my trust in you was too complete for me to conceive the possibility of such a thing. If that trust between us is to remain solid, our problems, in the future, will have to be shared. Neither must spare the other for a mistaken sense of self-sacrifice. You would not hide your joys from me—why, then, your sorrows? Again, I ask you: are you satisfied that I am right?"
"You know," said Ferlie's muffled tones. "You know...."
"Do I? Then I am going to extract a promise from you, here and now, that you will be fair with me, as I have been fair with you. Did I lie to you after the return of Hla Byu into our joint lives? Did I leave you and withdraw to fight my battle alone when she drowned herself? I wonder whether the earthly years make a difference, Ferlie, after all? I wonder whether you are capable of understanding what love means to a man who has lived nearly half a century without it, and who suddenly finds himself face to face with its illimitable mysteries? Surely, you will admit the fact that, since my probation has been double yours, I have earned the inevitable right to lead before I follow?"
Even then she did not stir under the strengthening touch of his sensitive fingers.
"Lead on," she said....
Said the Most Important Lady, she always knew that there was something queer about it. "Looks as if the whole of his ultimate objections to Mr. Maur were rooted in the fact that he knew Maur would probably let it out."
"But how did Maur himself find it out?"
"Probably the girl told him."
"Sounds hardly possible. Why should she?"
"My dear! He is not a young man exactly and she was obviously attracted by Maur. Hence these stripes!"
"Have you seen his face?"
"The men are rather inclined to doubt Maur's version."
"My dear! The men! She'd have had them all in tow if she hadn't suddenly concentrated upon Maur and disgusted everybody. Men are wax when it comes to a red head and a white skin. Children!"
"But what does Maur exactly say?"
"Apparently Sterne saw green over the portrait-sittings and insulted him. Maur referred him to his own little indiscretion and all parties began to snarl about their rights. The girl appears to have played the part of passive resister to both sides. That Type of Woman.... Well, Sterne lost his temper and hit Maur unawares when he was quite defenceless, and then the girl rushed between them and gave away the true relationship. From what one gathers, she was infatuated with Maur—got him to paint her twice over for an excuse to be with him—and, while he remained under the impression that she was Sterne's widowed sister, he admits to having considered the possibilities of matrimony. His discovery of what she really was—you know they say the husband divorced her and is still alive?—startled him into confessing that his feelings had altered in one respect.
"There was nothing for it then but for her to go home with Sterne; and Maur can hardly be blamed for doing his duty by this credulous Station which has also been suffering under the delusion that all was square and above-board."
"For the sake of the natives alone, one's got to be so down upon That Sort of Thing in this country."
"All the same," drawled the more tolerant voice of Somebody's Husband, "I don't see how anybody has suffered particularly except the Eternal Triangle. I've always considered Sterne a jolly decent fellow, and Mrs. Clifford not nearly so red-haired as Maur has probably painted her."
"Well, I think the whole business is fishy. There's something horrid about a household, in any case, which brazenly maintains that kind of Burmese child; and John is probably the co-respondent's son of the divorce case. The co-respondent can't be Sterne or, surely, he'd have married her. Probably the real man bunked after marrying her, and Sterne, aware that his own past would not bear too close a scrutiny, took pity on her and..."
"Aren't we getting on a little fast, Dolly? It makes a good story, I'll admit, but we couldn't hold to it in the face of a summons for libel, and you know you want to send the boys to Winchester."
In the bar one heard a good bit of low chuckling.
"And Diogenes wearing the air of a Trappist monk through the whole joke!"
"All the same, when it comes to bringing a woman of that stamp into a respectable God-fearing district, and introducing her to its wives and daughters under false pretences, it's a bit thick."
"Of course he'll have to go."
"Good God, yes! He'll have to go."
"And I shouldn't be sorry to kick out Digby Maur along with him."
"Oh, Maur! His doings cut no ice. But, somehow, we have looked upon Sterne as a creature with principles, and I, for one, am sorry for this smash-up."
"Personally, I was dashed keen on the little lady."
"Well, none of the crowd were better than they should be. Still, I am glad that someone has whacked Maur. I can't quite believe in his injured innocence. If he didn't deserve a licking for this he's simply asked for it elsewhere, for many moons. But I hate a rotten show of this sort in any Station. I wish Sterne would hurry up and get out. But wherever they go in Burma now, people can hardly be expected to call."
* * * * * *
Yes, most decidedly Cyprian would have to go. The children complicated matters, particularly Thu Daw. Otherwise, things were made easier by Peter's telegram which Cyprian had forgotten to give Ferlie until the morning after that interview in Digby Maur's garden.
It was a long telegram explaining that Maddock had been invited to betake himself, and party, on a visit to the Andaman Islands, where an old friend of his was acting as Chief Commissioner.
"Bring John and come self Cyprian if possible," ended the telegram.
"It's so like Peter to prepay the reply in order to give me no time to think," said Ferlie. "Do we go, Cyprian?"
That they should separate she did not contemplate for a moment. But he glanced at Thu Daw before raising questioning eyes to her.
She picked up the gurgling golden-skinned atom and smiled at him over its head.
"Why! We have no choice in the matter."
"I haven't, my dear, but you..."
"Have none either, then," said Ferlie.
He had sent in his resignation.
"And from now on," he said inconsequently, "it is to be the truth?"
"Why not?" she asked. "Can anything hurt us so long as we are together?"
His answering smile was very wistful.
"I had great ideas of protecting and caring for the woman I loved when I was twenty-eight," he said.
"And I had great ideas of protecting the man I loved when I was seven," said Ferlie.
She gently placed little Thu Daw on his feet and took up her position along the side of his chair, drawing his arm around her.
"When you come to think of it, Cyprian, it was very stupid of us not to guess that we couldn't live without one another. The night I was frightened, and you came up and told me about Muriel! Do you remember I wanted you to marry the vicar's daughter in my sublime faith that her home-made chocolate fudge would utterly console? And you promised that whoever you married you'd always love me best. And then, I was the first to marry, eleven years later. Oh, Cyprian, Cyprian! I want to get out—I want to get out of the cage."
Her sudden sobbing hurt him.
"Don't, dear. We are out. To me, we seem the great exception to every rule on earth."
"But earth isn't the end of everything," Ferlie gasped, "and you'll see that too, some day; even if I were to take advantage of your blindness now. Is there not one corner in all this wide world where you and I can hide ourselves with John and Thu Daw and live out our friendship in peace?"
"Dear, you've given me the key and I have turned the lock. The bolt is on the inside. I yielded up some none-too-solid convictions to your mysticism; cannot you, in return, yield a little of your mysticism to my common sense? We are in the twentieth century: it is a day of elastic ideas for all who have imbibed the plain truth that to live in peace we must let our neighbours live in peace. The minimum observance of Herd Law, and Civilization is satisfied. As a woman who has divorced her husband—in the last divorce bill we can find cause for that without touching upon more personal reasons—you'd be remarried to a man who had had a son by a dead Burmese girl. The position would, at least, be comprehensible, even to the narrow-minded. Why are we torturing ourselves with the precepts of a dead Jewish Teacher, whose dead words are only kept in evidence by those to whose interest it is to exploit them?"
He spoke with quick diffidence, pricked by the thought that he was literally attacking her God.
The circumstances in which they were living might meet with the censure of the Church's accumulated wisdom and understanding of human nature, but he would have had her oppose directly the inflexible word of One who taught all lovers that His Name is Love.
She pulled herself together and stood up, spreading wide her arms as if to embrace the light which eluded her.
"This much I will yield, Cyprian. Let me try and find some quiet place where we can be alone and think. I am glad we have been forced to sever all artificial connection with our fellow-men. Bless Aunt B.! We have enough money to go where we please, and when I have chosen a refuge where we can be, figuratively, apart in the desert, when we have had time to forget the harsh inharmonies of the past weeks; when there is no need any longer for us to live under the shadow of a lie, then I will promise you to approach the whole question with an open mind; to make sure that my sense of values is rightly adjusted. And there we can decide, at rest in one another's trust, which of us two in these visionary matters, as you describe them, is finally to follow and which to lead."
Before he could answer John walked into the room; the broad-brimmed cow-boy hat which he usually wore for shade, pressed flat against the back of his head like a plate. The Burman boy, who accompanied him daily on his afternoon jaunts, silently disappeared as he caught sight of the master and mistress.
"How funny you look, John," said Ferlie. "Pull your hat on properly if you are going out."
But John demurred.
"The Lord Jesus wears his topee like this," he informed them pleasantly.
And, "O crumbs!" exclaimed Cyprian collapsing. "Yet another Infant Samuel!"
But his amusement was short-lived. John had a grievance and had come to report it.
"Mother," he said, "there was one tea-party in the Gardens and nobody didn't let me go to it."
"How do you mean, darling?"
"It was Jimbo's birthday this day. And I tooked him the red coal-truck what Po Sein did make me to-morrow. And I saw's Jimbo going to the party and his nurse saw'd me and didn't stop, and Jimbo runned back an' she was werry angry. An' he said he could not take the truck, 'cos his mother said he wasn't not to play with me any more. An' he said Derrick's mother said he wasn't not to play with me neither, an' then his nurse comed up and told Po Sein we couldn't come up that road 'cos it was Mrs. Grey's party and Jimbo must go away at once."
Ferlie turned to look blankly at Cyprian. The sins of the fathers...
For the first time in her life he swore thoroughly and completely in her presence, and without apologizing. Then he pushed back his chair and swung John up on his shoulder.
"We have no time to think of parties now, you and I. Don't you know that we are going away in the train? And I do believe you've not packed a thing."
But when the pair of them had vanished down the verandah, shouting, Ferlie knelt down beside the baby on the floor whence it was surveying her with the puzzled concentrated gaze of the man she worshipped.
"Little thing, forgive them!" she whispered. "They, who know not what they do...."
As soon as it was possible the four of them, and Po Sein, boarded the evening express for Rangoon, and the house on the hill with the frangipani trees stood forlornly empty for quite a long time.
* * * * * *
They had decided to account for themselves verbally and not attempt the written word. Accordingly, they arrived, unwelcomed, to take up their quarters in the hotel, and it was agreed that Ferlie should send for Peter, while Cyprian sought an interview with Maddock.
Eventually, the exact opposite transpired. Peter, wearing a Head-of-the-Family air, presented himself before Cyprian with "my sister" possessively decorating his lips, and Ferlie ran the old Colonel, accidentally, to earth on the yacht, in the meantime.
Just as well, perhaps; for, while Cyprian was quite equal to Peter's lofty dutifulness, Ferlie was much more likely to prove a match for the Colonel.
He had known her all her life but they had not met since her marriage. She did not mean to make a Father-Confessor of him, but his mellowness invited confidence. He had outlived all passionate visions of altering his neighbours' landmarks and had developed, instead, a distinct sense of humour.
Ferlie imagined Peter to be lacking a little in that commodity.
"Well, young woman!" was the Colonel's greeting as he unbashfully embraced her. "So you are playing truant and, likewise, leading the future Lord John Greville-Mainwaring astray from his ancient heritage. Are any of us to be enlisted as peace-makers?"
"Peace is my present objective," said Ferlie, "but I do not anticipate that Black Towers will supply it, Uncle Ricky, even at your invitation."
"What's the trouble, Duckie? I've given up trying to fit square pegs into round holes at my time of life. I'm a lonely old man and the secrets of a pretty girl would just about rejuvenate me."
"Yes, you're nice and old," she agreed pathetically; "it's the young who are so cruel."
"The young! Well, I'm... And who has been accusing you of dyeing that burning bingled bush? Show me the woman, for it was never no lady!"
"Uncle Ricky! You've asked Cyprian, John and me to join you. There'll be a Fourth Child too if we come. Will you be quite serious and listen to me for at least a quarter of an hour?"
He noted the tired shadows under her eyes and drew her arm through his.
"You come into my cubby-hole," he commanded.
He heard her out over American iced drinks with fruit floating in them. He was sane and sea-bronzed and unexclamatory.
"Of course, m'dear," he told her in the end, "the position would just about have killed your poor mother."
"I can't help being glad that I have been spared the hopeless task of trying to make darling Mother understand, this side of her tombstone," owned Ferlie. "But I've always been sure that if Father had not been so ill, he would have positively forbidden me to marry that particular Catch of the Season."
"Ill or well, he never knew, any more than the rest of us, that you cared for—anyone else," he reminded her.
"That was because Anyone Else wouldn't admit that he cared for me—no, not even to himself. And I couldn't force him to, though I did try. I knew we 'belonged.' But there was Peter and Mother and Margery Craven and Lady Cardew and everyone sighing over my hesitation, and at last it seemed the only thing to do to yield. Right up to the Wedding Voluntary I wondered if, perhaps, Cyprian might not rouse up and rescue me. But he only sent me a golden apple, and not a line with it! I began to believe that I'd mistaken what I knew was the truth about Cyprian and me."
He leant forward and patted her hand.
"What's finished is finished. The question now is to find the shortest cut to regularizing the affair. Divorce?"
"I'm a Catholic, you know."
"So? Most short-sighted of you. I thought it was just another dish Peter wanted to taste. But he, too, is going to set up a row of names, like ninepins, for me to knock down. Rude names that suit Biblical Royalty but not the sort of people one knows. Tut! tut! You were always a complicated couple. What of our self-restrained hero?"
"Cyprian? He—he is against divorce on principle, but..."
"Quite so! Quite so! Circumstances over which he has no control! By Gad, I'd take that line myself if you were the woman in the case!"
"Uncle Ricky! You've been a Christopher Columbus all your life. Don't you know one spot on this troublesome earth where Cyprian and I could have a peaceful holiday with the babies? He's had to retire, and without work and nowhere to go—Oh, don't you see we can't come to any conclusion while we are occupying the situation of living targets to Society's very natural curiosity?"
"Where on earth do you suppose you'd like to be?"
"Somewhere with sea and sands and open sky and trees and warmth and loveliness and ..."
"Here, Ferlie! Put the brake on. You want a tropical island, fully supplied with everything but worry."
She jumped at that.
"An island! Yes. You are going to the Andamans. What are they like?"
"Populated where habitable, alas!"
"Don't tease. There must be an odd one among the number, where we might picnic."
"Under what flag? I mean, with what suitable excuse? You'd be hunted up and fêted and asked to Government House.... No, but let me think."
When he next raised his head she saw a solution had struck him.
"It's a daft scheme enough," he muttered. "But you are just a pair of lunatics at present, so here goes."
He pulled open a drawer and unrolled a couple of maps, selecting one to push towards her.
"These are the Nicobars; the nearest of 'em is twenty-four hours' journey from Port Blair of the Andamans. The Nicobarese are a totally different race from the Andamanese aboriginals, and a solitary missionary lives among them obeying the letter of the Christian Law with more spiritual optimism than horse-sense.
A ship takes his mails from Port Blair every three months, and, once a year, the Chief Commissioner inspects the tin church on bamboos, the dozen beehive huts and the wooden shanty which constitutes the Settlement of Car Nicobar. The missionary has a luxurious wooden house of three or four rooms and a verandah.
He has to flavour his diet with quinine, and so will you if you join him. Mind, I don't advocate it, I'm merely putting it to you that, as I know him, I can run down there—it won't alter our course enough to matter—and introduce you as friends of mine who—well, desire to study the flora and fauna of the islands!
He'll offer to put you up at the Settlement, overwhelmed by the prospect of your company, but of course, if you prefer it, I suppose you can build yourselves huts, or get the converted sheep of his fold to build them for you——"
"Oh, huts!" cried Ferlie. "Of course, huts!"
He paused to study her transformed face.
"Bless my soul!" said the Colonel. "And I half expected to be dismissed as an old fool for my pains!"
* * * * * *
Cyprian and Peter interrupted them making detailed lists of stores and physic.
Cyprian had been finding Peter a little difficult; Peter had been finding Cyprian, to use his own desperate expression, "as little open to reason as Balaam's donkey."
"Which saw the guiding angel and was prepared to follow it, while Balaam was only likely to bump his nose against a tree," said Cyprian. And then resorted to brutality.
"Do you think it in the best of taste to criticize Ferlie and myself when our destiny has been completely blasted in order that yours might flourish?" he inquired.
"What are you getting at? Ferlie is a Catholic."
"Driven to become one by a marriage to which she was driven by necessity for money. Has it never struck you that Ferlie and I meant a great deal to one another before Greville-Mainwaring appeared upon her horizon—and her family's?"
Peter looked blank.
"The little idiot never said so!"
"No. She did not consider herself at all, Peter."
"All the same, that being true, you gave her up to him pretty coolly, if I remember rightly. Even Mother remarked that you seemed to have lost interest in Ferlie."
"I was cowardly enough to leave that particular decision to Ferlie," admitted Cyprian. "I bear my share of all now. But I hardly see where you come in."
"What you've told me certainly rather slams the door in my face. I thought Ferlie had cut loose simply because Clifford was impossible; not because you were the only possible dispenser of her happiness. But as to Clifford—have you heard anything about my hypnotic experiments?"
"I know the line you've taken up. It must be hellish work."
"I suppose that's the best way to describe dragging folks out of hell," said Peter. "It's not always their own fault that they are there, you know. To my way of thinking, unfortunate products, like Clifford, and the Vane woman, are less worthy of censure than you with your Burmese kid."
Cyprian made no reply to this. His close-lipped control appealed to Peter as could have neither anger nor attempted self-justification.
"Never mind," he added, "you're a damned good fellow, Cyprian, and you'll be relieved to hear that I'm not going to shove my oar in any more. As Ferlie's only brother I considered I had no choice but to tackle you. It's a rotten business, and I am more sorry than I can say for you both; but, after all, I'm not Ferlie's confessor."
"That's all right, old chap," said Cyprian.
So Peter, though tempted to facetiousness, was inclined to be encouraging about the island.
"We could leave them the small motor-boat," he suggested to Maddock. "We never use it, Uncle Rick."
"Ferlie has wheedled more than half the contents of the yacht out of me already," grumbled the Colonel, who was immensely in his element as the only genuine man-of-the-world in the party untrammelled by Creed or Convention. "Look round my cabin, Sterne; mark down what suits you. Don't mind me."
"I wonder," said Peter, "when we call to fetch them, three months hence, before the monsoon sets in, whether they'll be tattooed all over and chastely clothed in the Nicobarese Sunday gear of half a coco-nut and an old top-hat?"
Thus, by a maintained flow of chaff, the sense of incipient strain in the atmosphere was dispelled.
Cyprian regarded Ferlie ruefully when she first broke the news.
"And you really want to disappear into this incomparably rural retreat?"
"Don't you think it's a perfect plan? We shall, at least, have time to breathe."
"Yes, there'll be plenty of time—for everything," he agreed.
One matter troubled the Colonel.
"It'll have to be as Mr. and Mrs. Sterne, you know, Ferlie. Not that that little Jellybrand is of a suspicious nature—they won't want a passport from him, hereafter, to prove that of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. But, hang it all, I'm standing sponsor for you, and I desire to take my undeservedly unblemished reputation to the grave. And you and Cyprian don't look at one another with either a brotherly or a sisterly regard. Best make it 'Ferlie Sterne,' and no questions asked."
"As if it were necessary for me to wear Cyprian's hat to indicate that I have belonged to him since the world began," stormed Ferlie. "All this bother comes from Civilization's idiotic habit of changing a woman's name. I am just 'Ferlie Marguerite' in this Evolution, and that's all about it. I'd rather be 'Ferlie Cyprian' than 'Sterne'; which is only half his name, because it certainly wasn't his mother's."
But Uncle Ricky was not going to be drawn into any more Ferlie-esque controversy.
"In whatever capacity you belonged to Cyprian twelve thousand years ago," he said, "and in whatever capacity you intend to belong to him when there is no more marrying and giving in marriage, you're landing on Car Nicobar as his lawful, or unlawful, wife."
Robinson Crusoe had had, as yet, little time to do more than leave his footprints on the stretch of white sand sliding into the summer seas of Car Nicobar, and the tide washed those out very quickly. Wilder, lovelier, more brilliant were these islands than the Andamans, while the Andamanese and the Nicobarese proved to be separate races indeed, having no connection with one another.
Their very huts and canoes were secular in design. The Nicobarese names, marking the different islands on the map, fascinated Ferlie. Chowra, Teressa, Bompoka, Trinkat and Katehal of the Central Group, and Great and Little Nicobar, with their satellites, Kondul and Pulo Milo in the south, varied as to dialect in a language so primitive that, as the Reverend Gabriel Jellybrand mournfully complained, there seemed no words to express either "gratitude" or "forgiveness." Which abstract nouns once eliminated from the Christian religion, his sermons became uphill work.
For some years he had toiled in seclusion among this semi-civilized yellowish flock, of whom it was said that, until Christianity came to their territory, never one had been known to steal or lie.
Originally acknowledged to be of Indo-Chinese extraction, they were Malayan-Mongolian in type; often above average height, well-made, simple, lazy and cowardly, but very good-natured and polite to strangers.
This, then, was the people among whom Ferlie and Cyprian came, with their respective sons, to reflect upon the sequel to Eden's story and decide what parts they would play in it themselves.
Gabriel Jellybrand accepted their arrival as a direct answer to prayer, for he had been sick of a fever lately and very lonely. His weak green eyes, rounded like marbles behind an enormous pair of sun-glasses, protruded so unusually that Ferlie expected them to pop out and hit her when she made clear her ambition to choose the quietest corner of the quietest island and erect a row of Nicobarese huts.
The padre invariably fought a losing battle with the letter "w."
"But there is no need to do that," he persisted. "The little bungalow w-which the forest officer uses on inspection is standing empty. There w-won't be enough beds, but if you say you've brought hammocks—a most original idea!"
He led the way to the Settlement, clad in a cotton cassock, tied round with a black cord which swung out and scourged anybody who ventured too near him when he held up the garment to leap from rock to rock, revealing an expanse of white cotton sock below a short tussore trouser-leg.
From time to time he would lose his topee, and then a faithful bodyguard of Baptismal Candidates, palpably prepared for total immersion at any moment, would hasten to hand him a large khaki umbrella, lined with green, which they took it by turns to carry again after the topee had been recovered from the puddle or overhanging branch which had claimed it.
"You might have warned us that he was a Comic Turn," Cyprian told Haddock reproachfully.
"Describe him to me again at our next meeting," said the Colonel, for whom Jellybrand betrayed a pathetically guileless admiration.
"Uncle Ricky has always had a number of the queerest friends," Ferlie whispered. "Generally they are lame dogs who would have perished in some one of the world's ditches but for him. This one, at any rate, seems too nearly an imbecile to take any interest in the obstruse riddles of our existence."
The jungle road, strewn with bamboo leaves, twisted them out on to a cleared space among the coco-nut trees, where a tiny church, which would have lost itself in an ordinary-sized drawing-room, stood on stilts, as indeed, did everything in the form of a building, so that, to reach the platforms on which they were built, it was necessary to run up a short step-ladder.
The interior of the church was fraught with the pathos of primitive endeavour. There was a crucifix, smothered in fading hibiscus heads; a great many common candles, some of which were, nakedly, two shortened corpses stuck one on top of the other to attain the regulation length; a canopy of bamboo and coloured paper, enshrining a Madonna with a broken nose imperfectly mended by means of hot wax, which gave her a somewhat rakish appearance; the crudest of moral-enforcing missionary prints; a framed St. Paul (after whom the building was named) so literally "in the pink" as to impress one instantaneously with his possible value in a football scrum, and—Oh, lift up your heads!—a small shiny harmonium on which the little padre had, in the course of a year, just learnt to accompany his flock with one finger, though he had not yet given up hope of bringing the other nine into requisition somewhen. For the rest, they relied upon a catechist with a concertina, who knew seven hymns which he performed in strict rotation.
"But now that you have come..." said Jellybrand, eyeing Ferlie with eager expectancy. And she had not the heart to erect a barrier of doctrinal differences, for her protection, between his hungry enthusiasm and the harmonium stool.
"I see you have started a shop," said Colonel Maddock emerging from a thatched fastness, wherein lay heaped up some yards of calico, red flannel, a few tin pots and pans, coloured prints, packets of tea, pounds of sugar and several bright glass necklaces.
"Oh, dear me, yes. W-would you believe it? Mr. Pell, here—w-where are you, Mr. Pell?—a most unselfish person, w-who always acts on the excellent principle that it is more blessed to give than to receive, w-was left in charge of the shop w-when I w-was over at Nankauri, visiting. And—w-would you believe it?—he gave every single thing away w-without taking any coco-nuts in payment! Of course, the people are ready now to let the Government start any number of shops...."
Mr. Pell, hitching up the nether garments which were the outward and visible sign of his inward state of grace, beamed urbanely upon the newcomers.
"This," said Jellybrand, indicating a gentleman with a string of cowrie shells about his middle and a battered English straw upon his head, "is Friend-of-England, the chief of the village. He is not yet a member of my little community though he w-wishes us w-well, I am sure.
"A long w-while ago, he had forty devils extracted from him by the menluana, or w-witch doctors, and it is hardly surprising that, under their conscientious exorcism, he nearly died. All the men in the village sat round him in a circle and on anyone's perceiving a devil he pounced on it, w-wrapped it in a leaf, and put it in the corner of the house.
"Every year, the Chief Commissioner, w-when he inspects us from Port Blair, presents him w-with a suit of clothes in virtue of his position; but he reserves them for festivals and always puts them away w-when it rains.
"The two beside him are Mr. Corney Grain and Mr. Don Juan. The traders coming to the islands give them those names in fun, but I hope to baptize them soon and then they w-will be Peter and Paul—much more suitable."
Ferlie wondered why.
A man with enormous calves supporting a very small body approached the speaker confidentially and, presently, Jellybrand interpreted.
"This is James Snook. He and Friend-of-England have both, as you see, got elephantiasis. A lot of them suffer from it—most unfortunate. He w-wishes to show you his new house."
Encouraged to proceed, James waved the party towards a thatched beehive supported on four rickety poles, seeming not to possess, at first sight, either door or window. However, a ladder discovered underneath the contraption vanished into a yawning hole, and Cyprian and Ferlie braved this first, to fall gasping on to a palm-plaited floor which bounded like a spring mattress beneath them. They could not stand upright and there was a thick warmth of atmosphere and almost total darkness until Mr. Snook removed a loose lump of thatch from the wall.
In one corner of the room lay his cooking utensils opposite the rag bundle on which he slept nightly, after blocking out all oxygen.
The walls were covered with works of art cut from any ancient illustrated paper which had happened to fall into his hands from the padre's stock. They were hung, for the most part, upside down, and thus Pavlova waved mocking legs at a Mission print of Christ crucified, into the Figure of which the enlightened James had brilliantly bethought himself to hammer real nails.
Above, glared a garish painting on talc of a Hindu deity with six arms.
Truly, Gabriel Jellybrand stood in need of that optimism which accompanies the faith of all Heaven's "little children."
* * * * * *
The steam-yacht pushed off again with the evening tide, leaving Cyprian and Ferlie wandering back from the shore, the coco-nut trees chattering above their heads in the falling breeze. Occasionally she picked up Thu Daw whose legs were not, as yet, quite to be trusted, and would carry him away to the left or to the right, down slight inclines into some cave of dark foliage.
"And is this Heaven?" asked John, following out some private train of thought connected with Jellybrand and the concertina, the owner of which could be heard practising in the distance.
"'Over the fields of glory,' you know, Mother, and 'over the jasper sea'!"
"Not that Heaven, yet," said Ferlie. "This is more like the Garden of Paradise in your Hans Andersen."
"I sometimes wish," said Cyprian, "that you and John were not so inordinately well read."
"Anyway," finished John, after a thoughtful pause, "will I be let sleep in one of them kennels to-night?"
"There! He has said it." Cyprian rounded on Ferlie. "I trust, Ferlie, you are going to permit us the unromantic shelter of the forest bungalow, but I have not really any hope. Of course, if John honestly finds it coincides with his conception of the Simple Life to share the couch of James Snook—but I noticed several holes in the roof of the bungalow which should give primitive colour to the place for our satisfaction and more holes in the floor, which intuition tells me represent the overcrowded tenement lodgings of considerable families of snakes and rats."
"Firstly," said Ferlie, "you are sleeping out of doors. We will sling our hammocks between trees, under the mosquito nets. Secondly, John, you are not so much as to enter a kennel without leave. I don't know whether that elephantiasis is catching. Thirdly, an educated man's intuition should assure him that snakes and rats seldom dwell together in sunny amity."
"Scorpions, then," insisted Cyprian gloomily.
"Fourthly, a perforated roof cannot affect us until the Rains, and there will be ample time before they break, should we still be here, for you to have constructed us a model mansion with hot and cold water laid on and clematis and cabbages before and behind respectively.... Do I hear the sweet chiming of the village bells?"
"You do," replied Cyprian. "And, if I mistake not, shortly they will be drowned by the pious fervour of the village choir."
When they emerged at the clearing the bell was, indeed, ringing to Evensong.
Jellybrand had added a voluminous surplice and a limp stole to his attire, but had raptly removed his white canvas shoes instead of his topee, in absent-minded imitation of his parishioners.
A procession was forming outside the church led by Mr. Pell in the capacity of cross-bearer; in fact, it was Mr. Pell's top-hat that caused the padre to recollect that he was being reverent the wrong end for the colour of his skin, before the red-breeched row of boys proceeded to "survey the wondrous cross" in the highest key of which the concertina was capable.
The Unsaved of the village were cutting bamboo decorations, in the background, for a moonlight festival about to be held with the object of securing a mate for a lonely demon, who had been bringing bad luck to the community and was expected to depart in peace as soon as a she-demon could be found to share his flitting.
Ferlie and Cyprian stood some way apart from the two groups of worshippers while the crimson sunlight streamed across the stems of the coco-nut palms, and stained the uplifted cross as its followers passed, two by two, into the toy church and the last notes of the hymn thinned into silence.
The words were dragged out painfully by the child-voices singing in a strange tongue of a strange story, brought to them by strangers from another land.
"His dying crimson like a robe,Spread o'er His Body on the Tree;Then am I dead to all the globe,And all the globe is dead to me."
Ferlie left Cyprian among the lengthening shadows and, herself, moved slowly across the sunlit space, and so up the wooden steps, into the tiny forlorn mansion of God.
* * * * * *
By the time they had decided to settle the bungalow as their headquarters, and making expeditions in the motor-boat to the neighbouring islands whenever they desired complete isolation, Cyprian, whose instincts for research had awakened with the cessation of his ordinary work, brought Ferlie an oddly carved board covered with paintings and punctured sketches.
"The padre calls these Henta. They are samples of the form in which the Nicobarese preserve their legends, and I ask you to look at the tangled thread of Christianity running through the whole. Jellybrand has been explaining. The first man offended the Chief of the Spirits at the instigation of the first woman. The Spirit's name, Deuse, savours of the mission teaching by your Church. Here, you see Deuse, in arrestingnégligé, surrounded by his cooking-pots, and below him huts, trees, birds and dancing figures. Also mermaids and mermen, because dugongs and whales are indigenous to these waters. The Henta are made to please the iwi-ka, or good spirits, and to alarm iwi-pot or demons."
"You are an inquisitive soul, Cyprian. Are you hitting at the Missions, or what?"
"No. Except that, but for them, in this Eden we should have been able to escape the story of the Fall. Apart from that teaching, the people believe their origin dates from the time a shipwrecked sailor was cast up on these shores with a pet dog. By her he had a son whom she concealed in her leaf petticoat, or ngong, and this son, on attaining years of discretion, slew his father and married his mother to continue the race.
"Therefore, the young men wear a bow of coco-nut leaves on their foreheads, representing the ears of the dog-ancestor, and all dogs are well treated in her honour."
"And poor little Jellybrand is trying to replace their allegories with ours? The one they will really appreciate will be Jonah and the whale."
"The most ridiculous part of it all to me is the way that each race, temporarily in power here, has striven to produce a different form of Christianity. Think of the waste labour since 1756, after the Danish Mission departed and was followed by the Dutch. When the Dutch attempt at colonization failed, the Jesuits and Moravians were inspired to try their luck till the British took over with Danish consent in order to try and stop the piracy then rife in these waters. But I don't understand Jelly's line, Ferlie. He is not a Roman."
"In England he would belong to what was once known as the High Church Party, but now has developed into Anglo-Catholicism. I can easily imagine that his successor will probably have ultra-Protestant and anti-Catholic notions and solemnly smash the pink St. Paul and the battered Madonna which to-day are the pride of the converts."
"I think he is an amazing specimen," said Cyprian.
"I think he is an amazing duck.... And doesn't he just remind me of a white rat!"
"Mother," and John broke in upon Cyprian's amusement, "I've found a house and they say the man in it is going to have a baby. Come and see how he does it."
Ferlie looked at him.
"The daily round and common task will furnish all you need to ask here, I can foresee, my son," she told him.
"Dare we investigate?" asked Cyprian, when he had recovered his gravity. "He may have discovered something interesting in the way of a rite."
He had. The hut he referred to was, to the islanders, tabu, or forbidden, since an unfortunate husband, about to become a father, was imprisoned within it beside his wife, sharing her troubles by sympathetic imitation. He was deprived of the luxury of a bath and betel-chewing and, for some while before, he had not been allowed to bind any objects together nor to attend feasts. Moreover, a whole month must elapse, after the child's birth, before he would be permitted to escape.
Friend-of-England, whom they chanced upon in the vicinity, described the custom in much-broken English, and Ferlie managed to keep a straight face while Cyprian examined the texture of coco-nut leaves and wished, for the time being, that he had never been born at all, or, at any rate, that nobody knew how.
"Ought John to discover these things?" he asked Ferlie later; "isn't it spoiling his innocence rather young?"
She laughed at him. "I should be sorry to think that you had lost yours in learning of them," she said. "Nature did not fall with the Fall. But so long as Mankind is content to lie supine, including all Nature in his own disgrace, so long will the serpent insinuate horror into the man-made Eden."
"I suppose, in due course, you will interpret; but sometimes I do not know whether to regard you as a totally unnatural product of Super-civilization or merely a successful example of the triumph of mind over matter."
He did not know, either, how to read the look she gave him.
"In a little while, my dear," she said, "you will be able to decide."
* * * * * *
The days fled by; long days of lethargic rest. The children had grown popular with the Mission, and one lady member in particular had attached herself to them as a kind of voluntary nurse. This left the two Explorers time for longer expeditions round the islands than they could have taken with John and Thu Daw.
One day they lost themselves in a more impenetrable part of the forest, where ten yards of experimenting with paths was sufficient to shut out the sky and enclose inexperienced travellers in a leafy tomb. On escaping from it, stained and breathless, just as they were beginning to think they had better make their peace with the invisible heavens, preparatory to holding it for ever, they nearly fell over the bank of an unexpected river.
Ferlie contemplated it awhile in silence and then turned deliberately back a little way into the jungle.
"You can have that palm tree all to yourself," she told Cyprian.
But he was still attitudinizing, incomprehensive, on the bank of the river when she returned in a somewhat scantily improvised bathing dress.
"Ferlie!"
"Aren't you ready?"
The quiver of amusement in the challenge did it. He flung back his head and laughed outright.
"Why not? But, oh, Ferlie, you are incorrigible!"
She was trailing her feet in the water when he joined her, forgetful of all problems not directly connected with the cool green water.
"I shall dive off and swim to that log," pointing to one barely visible near the opposite bank. "From there I shall encourage your amateur efforts and proffer suitable advice."
Said Ferlie: "I shall be sitting on the most comfortable end of the log long before your slow-coach head has emerged from the weedy depths to be mistaken for a floating coco-nut by some water-fowl in search of a raft."
But as she slipped into the water, the log on which they anticipated basking rolled over without rhyme or reason into deep water. It splashed lazily upstream breaking the green jade surface into a million ripples before, having yawned in their faces with thoughtful deliberation, it sank gracefully out of sight.
After an instant's smitten silence they collapsed backwards on the soft mud above the bank, sobbing with relieved merriment.
"Which is the most comfortable end of him?" gasped Cyprian.
Cheated of their swim, they threw themselves on to higher ground and stretched full length along the warm grass.
She was wet to her arm-pits and Digby Maur might have long sought a more suitable subject for a River Nat.
The sense of comfort and physical well-being, as he lay sunning himself, occupied Cyprian too completely for his attention to rivet itself at once upon the near intimacy of her, outlined on an emerald shield, defenceless in her slim fairness against his eyes.
Idly tossing twigs into the stream, one missed its mark and alighted on her bare shoulder.
She smiled in absent acknowledgment, but her gaze remained fixed upon the shifting reflections ahead.
He studied her then, with sleepy interest and, by the subconscious link between them, was aware that she knew his attitude of mind to be both puzzled and interrogative. He gathered that something was busily revolving in her brain which she would not yet disclose.
And as the leaves above them made changing patterns upon his own rapidly browning limbs, he forgot the scantiness of his attire and this outright defiance of all safeguarding law which stood between him and the whip of that Master Force from whose dominion she had despairingly wondered whether Mankind would ever be free.
Once-known sentences in Greek intruded, word by word, upon his brain, till the whole resolved itself into a fragment from Plato's immortal Republic preserved fresh, since, on the earlier waxen tablets of the mind, impressions remain cut singly and deep, though neglected for long periods in the crowded years which follow:
Greek text
He saw himself again, an angular youth still in the magic teens, wrestling studiously with the paragraph; his sympathies completely with Thrasymachus of Chalcedon and his subsequent bull-like attack upon Polemarchus and Socrates, when, "playing the fool together in mutual complaisance," they had expanded the drivellings of old Cephalus concerning the abatement of his appetites into an interminable and exceedingly toilsome-to-translate discussion on the nature of Justice.
Words, words, words, thought Cyprian, now as then. The ancient writers of all nations might philosophize and analyse and theorize through pages of intellectual war, but still Justice struggled to dwell upon this globe, and still the Frantic Master scourged men on to deeds which drove her out. With what object? The perpetual propagation of a mortal race, apparently doomed (while the chemical atoms of mud and water to which they clung, held together) to blind burrowings for some Philosopher's Stone upon which might be engraved the key to their existence.
Always that awareness, stifling their half-developed senses, of bodily decay and rotting death, mental and physical, till the spirit cried out like a terrified child in the imprisonment of a gradually enveloping Darkness.
Was it wonderful if the mind strove to drug realization of the conditions under which it existed by resorting to fruitless accumulation of metal and mummified matter, materially precious only because so far as Man knew, there was not enough of it to go round? Was it wonderful if, wearying of this empty labour, he passed from the opium dreams of wealth to the cocaine illusions of power over his fellows, or acted yet another part, inebriate with meditation upon a solitary mountain top, or grovelled in a secret cave, denying access to any who might wish to awaken him from dreams to cold reality once more?
Was not the ascetic, hugging and hoarding his visions, as useless a product as the miser hugging and hoarding his gold?—and the mystic, luxuriating in a religious mirage, as much a glutton for prayer as his Epicurean neighbour might prove himself a glutton for pleasure?
What did he, himself, desire of the gods that be, asked Cyprian. Ferlie? And of Ferlie, what? Her white limbs entwined in his, ever and anon, throughout the years, in the thirsting hope that much yielding to a fitful and passing emotion would so unite him with her Being that nothing could separate them again?...
"For sudden ... a peace out of pain...Then a light, then thy breast,Oh, thou, soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,And with God be the rest!"
Not this way lay the road to that satisfied unity. And she knew it. God, yes! How terribly well she must know it! He, in Thu Daw, she, in John, had yielded to the Earth that heritage it demanded of all living creatures which crawled upon its face. They had added their quota to Creation, lest Life perish here before its incomprehensible purpose should have been fulfilled.
Was another life required of them to perfect the love they bore one another? All life is by no means conceived in love. Did not that which was weigh more precious in the scales of Eternity than any conceived in duty to the natural law of a source called "God"? And yet ... out here, where one could almost listen to the pulses of Nature beating, unregulated and unquickened by the fevers which dull the senses of Earth's normal sons and daughters, how had these barriers melted which the crowded places interposed between his Self and Hers? What law but the natural one was good in the eyes of Nature's Creator?
And Nature bade him reach out to her his starving arms. He stirred among the shrivelling strands of fibre, strewing the turf, and sat up, clasping his hands about his knees.
Still she did not look at him, and savagely he tore in imagination at the filmy veil barring him out of her dreams.
But she spoke, dispassionately as an oracle, from her strongly splendid aloofness.
"Think it out a little further, Cyprian, before you decide."
He felt the Master's lash about his body; and was stung by it to sharpened understanding.
Deliberately and fearlessly, Ferlie was challenging his faith. By it she would rise or fall.
If it drove him along that path of desire which led but to the grave, she would follow because her own will was pledged to his, "through all the beauty and all the loving of the eternal years...." She did not believe that this momentary impulse was grounded in his faith.
He saw, as in a drowning panorama, all the forms of all the acknowledged great lovers who had staked their gift of life upon Desire and, with the fading of that frail rainbow thing, had discovered themselves upon the edge of the burnt-out desert, Age, beyond which flowed only the bitterly black waters of Death. With the inexorable tread of the years Ferlie and he would be dying slowly before one another's watching eyes. The end must come in sweating battle with the impotency of those same bodies, glowing now in the deceiving radiance of a sun which would, some day, itself be darkened. Of what avail then the agonizing vows, sealed lip to lip in the sheltering purple shadows of dead nights whose beauty was now a scorching memory to contrast with the starless darkness of the opening tomb? (Ferlie had always been able to visualize that tomb.) There must be some other fulfilment for the love which has kept watch o'er its immortality. Some other road than this, along which the faithless "Little Ones" had stumbled with bleeding feet down the revealing arches of the years.... One was risking all for a shadow.... But as one saw the shadow it was that of a very mighty reality.... Behind every shadow there must be a substance. Ferlie had decided that herself ... already. In this, it was, fairly, hers to lead.
"Lead on," echoed Cyprian aloud of his heart, remembering when she had used the selfsame words to him.
She put out, to touch his, a hand still cool and damp with undried crystals of moisture.
"It is extraordinary to remember," she said, "that the crocodile had probably never set eyes on a human being before. There is, practically, no animal life in these forests, so Jelly told me, except pigs and birds. In the interior there are rumours of bison and, of course, the hamadryad we have always with us."
"Yes, your Garden of Paradise is certainly not serpentless," Cyprian answered, a note of amusement now in his voice.
She got up and shook the clinging twigs from her hair.
"I am dry. I must go and dress. The one thing which calms my fear of serpents is a discovery that if you keep still when they are about, and leave them alone, they invariably leave you alone."