CHAPTER I

Robin, whose other name was Gabriel, arrived at the “little house,” of which Rosamund had spoken to Dion upon the hill of Drouva, early in the following year, on the last night of February to be exact.  For a long time before his coming his future home had been subtly permeated by an atmosphere of expectancy.

N Little Market Street was in Westminster, not far from the river and the Houses of Parliament, yet in a street which looked almost remote, and which was often very quiet although close to great arteries of life.  Dion sometimes thought it almost too dusky a setting for his Rosamund, but it was she who had chosen it, and they had both become quickly fond of it.  It was a house with white paneling, graceful ceilings and carved fireplaces, and a shallow staircase of oak.  There was a tiny but welcoming hall, and the landing on the first floor suggested potpourri, chintz-covered settees, and little curtains of chintz moved by a country wind coming through open windows.  There were, in fact, chintz-covered settees, and there was potpourri.  Rosamund had taken care about that; she had also taken care about many other little things which most London housewives, perhaps, think unworthy of their attention.  Every day, for instance, she burnt lavender about the house, and watched the sweet smoke in tiny wreaths curling up from the small shovel, as she gently moved it to and fro, with a half smile of what she called “rustic satisfaction.”  She laid lavender in the cupboards and in the chests of drawers, and, when she bought flowers, chose by preference cottage garden flowers, if she could get them, sweet williams, pansies, pinks, wallflowers, white violets, stocks, Canterbury bells.  Sometimes she came home with wild flowers, and had once given a little dinner with foxgloves for a table decoration.  An orchid, a gardenia, even a hyacinth, was never to be seen in the little house.  Rosamund confessed that hyacinths had a lovely name, and that they suggested spring, but she added that they smelt as if they had always lived in hothouses, and were quite ready to be friends with gardenias.

She opened her windows.  In this she was almost too rigorous for her maid-servants, who nevertheless adored her.  “Plenty of warmth but plenty of air,” was her prescription for a comfortable and healthy house, “and not too much or too many of anything.”  Dust, of course, was not to be known of in her dwelling, but “blacks” were accepted with a certain resignation as a natural chastening and a message from London.  “They aren’t our fault, Annie,” she had been known to observe to the housemaid.  “And dust can’t be anything else, however you look at it, can it?” And Annie said, “Well, no, ma’am!” and, when she came to think of it, felt she had not been a liar in the moment of speaking.

Rosamund never “splashed,” or tried to make a show in her house, and she was very careful never to exceed their sufficient, but not large, income; but the ordinary things, those things which of necessity come into the scheme of everyday life, were always of the very best when she provided them.  Dion declared, and really believed, perhaps with reason, that no tea was so fragrant, no bread and butter so delicious, no toast so crisp, as theirs; no other linen felt so cool and fresh to the body as the linen on the beds of the little house; no other silver glittered so brightly as the silver on their round breakfast-table; no other little white window curtains in London managed to look so perennially fresh, and almost blithe, as the curtains which hung at their windows.  Rosamund and Annie might have conversations together on the subject of “blacks,” but Dion never saw any of these distressing visitants.  The mere thought of Rosamund would surely keep them at a more than respectful distance.

She proved to be a mistress of detail, and a housekeeper whose enthusiasm was matched by her competence.  At first Dion had been rather surprised when he followed from afar, as is becoming in a man, this development.  Before they settled down in London he had seen in Rosamund the enthusiastic artist, the joyous traveler, the good comrade, the gay sportswoman touched with Amazonian glories; he had known in her the deep lover of pure beauty; he had divined in her something else, a little strange, a little remote, the girl to whom the “Paradiso” was a door opening into dreamland, the girl who escaped sometimes almost mysteriously into regions he knew nothing of; but he had not seen in her one capable of absolutely reveling in the humdrum.  Evidently, then, he had not grasped the full meaning of a genuine joie de vivre.

To everything she did Rosamund brought zest.  She kept house as she sang “The heart ever faithful,” holding nothing back.  Everything must be right if she could get it right; and the husband got the benefit, incidentally.  Now and then Dion found himself mentally murmuring that word.  A great love will do such things unreasonably.  For Rosamund’s joie de vivre, that gift of the gods, caused her to love and rejoice in a thing for the thing’s own sake, as it seemed, rather than for the sake of some one, any one, who was eventually to gain by the thing.  Thus she cared for her little house with a sort of joyous devotion and energy, but because it was “my little house” and deserved every care she could give it.  Rather as she had spoken of the small olive tree on Drouva, of the Hermes of Olympia, even of Athens, she spoke of it, with a sort of protective affection, as if she thought of it as a living thing confided to her keeping.  She possessed a faculty not very common in women, a delight in doing a thing for its own sake, rather than for the sake of some human being ­perhaps a man.  If she boiled an egg ­she went to the kitchen and did this sometimes ­she seemed personally interested in the egg, and keenly anxious to do the best by it; the boiling must be a pleasure to her, but also to the egg, and it must, if possible, be supremely well done.  As the cook once said, after a culinary effort by Rosamund, “I never seen a lady care for cooking and all such-like as she done.  If she as much as plucked a fowl, you’d swear she loved every feather of it.  And as to a roast, she couldn’t hardly seem to set more store by it if it was her own husband.”

Such a spirit naturally made for comfort in a house, and Dion had never before been so comfortable.  Nevertheless ­and he knew it with a keen savoring of appreciation ­there was a Spartan touch to be felt in the little house.  Comfort walked hand in hand with Rosamund, but so did simplicity; she was what the maids called “particular,” but she was not luxurious; she even disliked luxury, connecting it with superfluity, for which she had a feeling amounting almost to repulsion.  “I detest the sensation of sinking down in things,” was a favorite saying of hers; and the way she lived proved that she spoke the sheer truth.

All through the house, and all through the way of life in it, there prevailed a “note” of simplicity, even of plainness.  The odd thing, perhaps, was that it pleased almost every one who visited the young couple.  A certain well-known man, noted as a Sybarite, clever, decadent and sought after, once got into the house, he pretended by stealth, and spent half an hour there in conversation with Rosamund.  He came way “acutely conscious of my profound vulgarity,” as he explained later to various friends.  “Her house revealed to me the hideous fact that all the best houses in London smack of cocotte-try; the trail of cushions and liqueurs is over them all.  Mrs. Leith’s house is a vestal, and its lamp is always trimmed.”  Daventry’s comment on this was:  “Trimmed ­yes, but trimmings ­no!”

Even Esme Darlington highly approved of the “charming sobriety of N Little Market Street,” although he had had no hand in its preparation, no voice in the deciding of its colors, its stuffs, its rugs, or its stair-rods.  He was even heard to declare that “our dear Rosamund is almost the only woman I know who has the precious instinct of reticence; an instinct denied, by the way, even to that delightful and marvelous creature Elizabeth Browning ­requiescat.”

The “charming sobriety” was shown in various ways; in a lack of those enormous cushions which most women either love, or think necessary, in all sitting-rooms; in the comparative smallness of such sofas as were to be seen; in the moderation of depth in arm-chairs, and in the complete absence of footstools.  Then the binding of the many books, scattered about here and there, and ranged on shelves, was “quiet”; there was no scarlet and gold, or bright blue and gold; pictures were good but few; not many rugs lay on the polished wooden floors, and there was no litter of ornaments or bibelots on cabinets or tables.  A couple of small statuettes, copies of bronzes in the Naples Museum, and some bits of blue-and-white china made their pleasant effect the more easily because they had not to fight against an army of rivals.  There was some good early English glass in the small dining-room, and a few fine specimens of luster ware made a quiet show in Dion’s little den.  Apart from the white curtains, and outer curtains of heavier material, which hung at all the windows, there were no “draperies.”  Overmantels, “cosy-corners,” flung Indian shawls, “pieces” snatched from bazaars, and “carelessly” hung over pedestals and divans found no favor in Rosamund’s eyes.  There was a good deal of homely chintz about which lit up the rather old-fashioned rooms, and colors throughout the house were rather soft than hard, were never emphatic or designed to startle or impress.

Rosamund, indeed, was by far the most vivid thing in the house, and some people ­not males ­said she had taken care to supply for herself a background which would “throw her up.”  These people, if they believed what they said, did not know her.

She had on the first floor a little sitting-room all to herself; in this were now to be found the books which had been in her bedroom in Great Cumberland Place; the charwoman’s black tray with the cabbage rose, the mug from Greenwich, the flesh-colored vase, the china cow, the toy trombone, and other souvenirs of her girlhood to which Rosamund “held.”  On the brass-railed shelf of the writing-table stood a fine photogravure of the Hermes of Olympia with little Dionysos on his arm.  Very often, many times every day, Rosamund looked up at Hermes and the Child from account books, letters or notes, and then the green dream of Elis fell about her softly again; and sometimes she gazed beyond the Hermes, but instead of the wall of the chamber she saw, set in an oblong frame, and bathed in green twilight, a bit of the world of Pan, with a branch of wild olive flickering across the foreground; or, now and then, she saw a falling star, dropping from its place in the sky down towards a green wilderness, and carrying a wish from her with it, a wish that was surely soon to be granted.  Her life in the little house had been a happy life hitherto, but ­she looked again at the little Dionysos on the arm of Hermes, nestling against his shoulder ­how much happier it was going to be, how much happier!  She was not surprised, for deep in her heart she always expected happiness.

People had been delightful to her and to Dion.  Indeed, they had flocked to the small green door (the Elis door) of 5 Little Market Street in almost embarrassing numbers.  That was partly Mr. Darlington’s fault.  Naturally Rosamund’s and Bruce Evelin’s friends came; and of course Dion’s relations and friends came.  That would really have been enough.  Rosamund enjoyed, but was not at all “mad about,” society, and had no wish to give up the greater part of her time to paying calls.  But Mr. Darlington could not forbear from kind efforts on behalf of his delightful young friends, that gifted and beautiful creature Rosamund Leith, and her pleasant young husband.  He, who found time for everything, found time to give more than one “little party, just a few friends, no more,” specially for them; and the end of it was that they found themselves acquainted with almost too many interesting and delightful people.

At first, too, Rosamund continued to sing at concerts, but at the end of July, after their return from Greece, when the London season closed, she gave up doing so for the time, and accepted no engagements for the autumn.  Esme Darlington was rather distressed.  He worked very hard in the arts himself, and, having “launched” Rosamund, he expected great things of her, and wished her to go forward from success to success.  Besides “the money would surely come in very handy” to two young people as yet only moderately well off.  He did not quite understand the situation.  Of course he realized that in time young married people might have home interests, home claims upon them which might necessitate certain changes of procedure.  The day might come ­he sincerely hoped it would ­when a new glory, possibly even more than one, would be added to the delightful Rosamund’s crown; but in the meanwhile surely the autumn concerts need not be neglected.  He had heard no hint as yet of any ­h’m, ha!  He stroked his carefully careless beard.  But he had left town in August with his curiosity unsatisfied, leaving Rosamund and Dion behind him.  They had had their holiday, and had stayed steadily on in Little Market Street through the summer, taking Saturday to Monday runs into the country; more than once to the seacoast of Kent, where Bruce Evelin and Beatrice were staying, and once to Worcestershire to Dion’s mother, who had taken a cottage there close to the borders of Warwickshire.  The autumn had brought people back to town, and it was in the autumn that Rosamund withdrew from all contact with the hurly-burly of London.  She had no fears at all for her body, none of those sick terrors which some women have as their time draws near, no premonitions of disaster or presages of death, but she desired to “get ready,” and her way of getting ready was to surround her life with a certain stillness, to build about it white walls of peace.  Often when Dion was away in the City she went out alone and visited some church.  Sometimes she spent an hour or two in Westminster Abbey; and on many dark afternoons she made her way to St. Paul’s Cathedral where, sitting a long way from the choir, she listened to evensong.  The beautiful and tenderly cool singing of the distant boys came to her like something she needed, something to which her soul was delicately attuned.  One afternoon they and the men, who formed the deeply melodious background from which their crystalline voices seemed to float forward and upward, sang “The Wilderness” of Wesley.  Rosamund listened to it, thankful that she was alone, and remembering many things, among them the green wilderness beneath the hill of Drouva.

Very seldom she spoke to Dion about these excursions of hers.  There was something in her feeling for religion which loved reserve rather than expression; she who was so forthcoming in many moments of her life, who was genial and gay, who enjoyed laughter and was always at home with humanity, knew very well how to be silent.  There was a saying she cared for, “God speaks to man in the silence;” perhaps she felt there was a suspicion of irreverence in talking to any one, even to Dion, about her aspiration to God.  If, on his return home, he asked her how she had passed the day, she often said only, “I’ve been very happy.”  Then he said to himself, “What more can I want?  I’m able to make her happy.”

One windy evening in January, when an icy sleet was driving over the town, as he came into the little hall, he found Rosamund at the foot of the staircase, with a piece of mother’s work in her hand, about to go into the drawing-room which was on the ground floor of the house.

“Rose,” he said, looking down at the little white something she was holding, “do you think we shall both feel ever so much older in March?  It will be in March, won’t it?”

“I think so,” she answered, with a sort of deeply tranquil gravity.

“In March when we are parents?”

“Are you worrying about that?” she asked him, smiling now, but with, in her voice, a hint of reproach.

“Worrying ­no.  But do you?”

“Let us go into the drawing-room,” she said.

When they were there she answered him: 

“Absolutely different, but not necessarily older.  Feeling older must be very like feeling old, I think ­and I can’t imagine feeling old.”

“Because probably you never will.”

“Have you had tea, Dion?”

“Yes, at the Greville.  I promised I’d meet Guy there to-day.  He spoke about Beattie.”

“Yes?”

“Do you think Beattie would marry him if he asked her?”

“I don’t know.”

She sat down in the firelight near the hearth, and bent a little over her work on the tiny garment, which looked as if it were intended for the use of a fairy.  Dion looked at her head with its pale hair.  As he leaned forward he could see all the top of her head.  The firelight made some of her hair look quite golden, gave a sort of soft sparkle to the curve of it about her broad, pure forehead.

“Guy’s getting desperate,” he said.  “But he’s afraid to put his fortune to the test.  He thinks even uncertainty is better than knowledge of the worst.”

“Of one thing I’m certain, Dion.  Beattie doesn’t love Guy Daventry.”

“Oh well, then, it’s all up.”

Rosamund looked up from the little garment.

“I didn’t say that.”

“But if Beattie ­but Beattie’s the soul of sincerity.”

“Yes, I know; but I think she might consent to marry Guy Daventry.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know exactly.  She never told me.  I just feel it.”

“Oh, if you feel it, I’m sure it is so.  But how awfully odd.  Isn’t it?”

“Yes, it really is rather odd in Beattie.  Do you want Beattie to marry Guy Daventry?”

“Of course I do.  Don’t you?”

“Dear Beattie!  I want her to be happy.  But I think it’s very difficult, even when one knows some one very, very well, to know just how she can get happiness, through just what.”

“Rose, have I made you happy?”

“Yes.”

“As happy as you could be?”

“I think, perhaps, you will have ­soon.”

“Oh, you mean ?”

“Yes.”

She went on stitching quietly.  Her hands looked very contented.  Dion drew up a little nearer to the fire with a movement that was rather brusk.  It just struck him that his walk home in the driving sleet had decidedly chilled his body.

“I believe I know what you mean about Beattie,” he said, after a pause, looking into the fire.  “But do you think that would be fair to Guy?”

“I’m not quite sure myself what I mean, honestly, Dion.”

“Well, let’s suppose it.  If it were so, would it be fair?”

“I think Beattie’s so really good that Mr. Daventry, as he loves her, could scarcely be unhappy with her.”

Dion thought for a moment, then he said: 

“Perhaps with Guy it wouldn’t be unfair, but, you know, Rose, that sort of thing wouldn’t do with some men.  Some men could never stand being married for anything but the one great reason.”

He did not explain what that reason was, and Rosamund did not ask.  There was a sort of wide and sweet tranquillity about her that evening.  Dion noticed that it seemed to increase upon her, and about her, as the days passed by.  She showed no sign of nervousness, had evidently no dread at all of bodily pain.  Either she trusted in her splendid health, or she was so wrapped up in the thought of the joy of being a mother that the darkness to be passed through did not trouble her; or perhaps ­he wondered about this ­she was all the time schooling herself, looking up, in memory, to the columns of the Parthenon.  He was much more strung up, much more restless and excitable than she was, but she did not seem to notice it.  Always singularly unconscious of herself she seemed at this period to be also unobservant of those about her.  He felt that she was being deliberately egoistic for a great reason, that she was caring for herself, soul and body, with a sort of deep and quiet intensity because of the child.

“She is right,” he said to himself, and he strove in all ways in his power to aid her beautiful selfishness; nevertheless sometimes he felt shut out; sometimes he felt as if already the unseen was playing truant over the seen.  He was conscious of the child’s presence in the little house through Rosamund’s way of being before he saw the child.  He wondered what other women were like in such periods, whether Rosamund was instinctively conforming to an ancient tradition of her sex, or whether she was, as usual, strongly individualistic.  In many ways she was surely not like other women, but perhaps in these wholly natural crises every woman resembled all her sisters who were traveling towards the same sacred condition.  He longed to satisfy himself whether this was so or not, and one Saturday afternoon, when Rosamund was resting in her little sitting-room with a book, and the Hermes watching over her, he bicycled to Jenkins’s gymnasium in the Harrow Road, resolved to put in forty minutes’ hard work, and then to visit his mother.  Mrs. Leith and Rosamund seemed to be excellent friends, but Dion never discussed his wife with his mother.  There was no reason why he should do so.  On this day, however, instinctively he turned to his mother; he thought that she might help him towards a clearer knowledge of Rosamund.

Rosamund had long ago been formally made known to Bob Jenkins, Jim’s boxing “coach,” who enthusiastically approved of her, though he had never ventured to put his opinion quite in that form to Dion.  Even Jenkins, perhaps, had his subtleties, those which a really good heart cannot rid itself of.  Rosamund, in return, had made Dion known to her extraordinary friend, Mr. Thrush of Abingdon Buildings, John’s Court, near the Edgware Road, the old gentleman who went to fetch his sin every evening, and, it is to be feared, at various other times also, in a jug from the “Daniel Lambert.”  Dion had often laughed over Rosamund’s “cult” for Mr. Thrush, which he scarcely pretended to understand, but Rosamund rejoiced in Dion’s cult for the stalwart Jenkins.

“I like that man,” she said.  “Perhaps some day ­” She stopped there, but her face was eloquent.

In his peculiar way Jenkins was undoubtedly Doric, and therefore deserving of Rosamund’s respect.  Of Mr. Thrush so much could hardly be said with truth.  In him there were to be found neither the stern majesty and strength of the Doric, nor the lightness and grace of the Ionic.  As an art product he stood alone, always wearing the top hat, a figure Degas might have immortalized but had unfortunately never seen.  Dion knew that Mr. Thrush had once rescued Rosamund in a fog and had conveyed her home, and he put the rest of the Thrush matter down to Rosamund’s genial kindness towards downtrodden and unfortunate people.  He loved her for it, but could not help being amused by it.

When Dion arrived at the gymnasium, Jenkins was giving a lesson to a small boy of perhaps twelve years old, whose mother was looking eagerly on.  The boy, clad in a white “sweater,” was flushed with the ardor of his endeavors to punch the ball, to raise himself up on the bar till his chin was between his hands, to vault the horse neatly, and to turn somersaults on the rings.  The primrose-colored hair on his small round head was all ruffled up, perspiration streamed over his pink rosy cheeks, his eyes shone with determination, and his little white teeth were gritted as, with all the solemn intensity of childhood, he strove to obey on the instant Jenkins’s loud words of command.  It was obvious that he looked to Jenkins as a savage looks to his Tribal God.  His anxious but admiring mother was forgotten; the world was forgotten; Jenkins and the small boy were alone in a universe of grip dumb-bells, heavy weights, “exercisers,” boxing-gloves, horizontal bars, swinging balls and wooden “horses.”  Dion stood in the doorway and looked on till the lesson was finished.  It ended with a heavy clap on the small boy’s shoulders from the mighty paw of Jenkins, and a stentorian, “You’re getting along and no mistake, Master Tim!”

The face of Master Tim at this moment was a study.  All the flags of triumph and joy were hung out in it and floated on the breeze; a soul appeared at the two windows shining with perfect happiness; and, mysteriously, in all the little figure, from the ruffled primrose-colored feathers of hair to the feet in the white shoes, the pride of manhood looked forth through the glowing rapture of a child.

“What a jolly boy!” said Dion to Jenkins, when Master Tim and his mother had departed.  “It must be good to have a boy like that.”

“I hope you’ll have one some day, sir,” said Jenkins, speaking heartily in his powerful voice, but looking, for the moment, unusually severe.

He and Bert, his wife, had had one child, a girl, which had died of quinsy, and they had never had another.

“Now I’m ready for you, sir!” he added, with a sort of outburst of recovery.  “I should like a round with the gloves to-day, if it’s all the same to you.”

It was all the same to Dion, and, when he reached Queen Anne’s Mansions in the darkness of evening, he was still glowing from the exercise; the blood sang through his veins, and his heart was almost as light as his step.

Marion, the parlor-maid, let him in, and told him his mother was at home.  Dion put his hand to his lips, stole across the hall noiselessly, softly opened the drawing-room door, and caught his mother unawares.

Whenever he came into the well-known flat alone, he had a moment of retrogression, went back to his unmarried time, and was again, as for so many years, in the intimate life of his mother.  But to-day, as he opened the door, he was abruptly thrust out of his moment.  His mother was in her usual place on the high-backed sofa near the fire.  She was doing nothing, was just sitting with her hands, in their wrinkled gloves, folded in her lap, and her large, round blue eyes looking.  Dion thought of them as looking because they were wide open, but they were strangely emptied of expression.  All of his mother seemed to him for just the one instant which followed on his entrance to be emptied, as if the woman he had always known ­loving, satirical, clever, kind, observant ­had been poured away.  The effect upon him was one of indescribable, almost of horrible, dreariness.  Omar Khayyam, his mother’s black pug, was not in the room as usual, stretched out before the fire.

Even as Dion realized this, his mother was poured back into the round face and plump figure beside the fire, and greeted him with the usual almost saccharine sweet smile, and: 

“Dee-ar, I wasn’t expecting you to-day.  How is the beloved one?”

“The beloved one” was Mrs. Leith’s rendering of Rosamund.

“How particularly spry you look,” she added.  “I’m certain it’s the Jenkins paragon.  You’ve been standing up to him.  Now, haven’t you?”

Dion acknowledged that he had, and added: 

“But you, mother?  How are you?”

“Quite wickedly well.  I ought to be down with influenza like all well-bred people, ­Esme Darlington has it badly, ­but I cannot compass even one sneeze.”

“Where’s Omar?”

Mrs. Leith looked grave.

“Poor little chap, we must turn down an empty glass for him.”

“What ­you don’t mean ?”

“Run over yesterday just outside the Mansions, and by a four-wheeler.  I’m sure he never expected that the angel of death would come for him in a growler, poor little fellow.”

“I say!  Little Omar dead!  What a beastly shame!  Mother, I am sorry.”

He sat down beside her; he was beset by a sensation of calamity.  Oddly enough the hammer of fate had never yet struck on him so definitely as now with the death of a dog.  But, without quite realizing it, he was considering poor black Omar as an important element in his mother’s life, now abruptly withdrawn.  Omar had been in truth a rather greedy, self-seeking animal, but he had also been a companion, an adherent, a friend.

“You must get another dog,” Dion added quickly.  “I’ll find you one.”

“Good of you, dee-ar boy!  But I’m too old to begin on a new dog.”

“What nonsense!”

“It isn’t.  I feel I’m losing my nameless fascination for dogs.  A poodle barked at me this afternoon in Victoria Street.  One can’t expect one’s day to last for ever, though, really, some Englishwomen seem to.  But, tell me, how is the beloved one?”

“Oh ­to be sure!  I wanted to talk to you about Rose.”

The smile became very sweet and welcoming on Mrs. Leith’s handsome round face.

“There’s nothing wrong, I’m sure.  Your Rosamund sheds confidence in her dear self like a light all round her.”

“Nothing wrong ­no.  I didn’t mean that.”

Dion paused.  Now he was with his mother he did not know how to explain himself; his reason for coming began to seem, even to himself, a little vague.

“It’s a little difficult,” he began at last, “but I’ve been wondering rather about women who are as Rosamund is just now.  D’you think all women become a good deal alike at such times?”

“In spirit, do you mean?”

“Well ­yes, of course.”

“I scarcely know.”

“I mean do they concentrate on the child a long while before it comes.”

“Many smart women certainly don’t.”

“Oh, smart women!  I mean women.”

“A good definition, dee-ar.  Well, lots of poor women don’t concentrate on the child either.  They have far too much to do and worry about.  They are ‘seeing to’ things up till the very last moment.”

“Then we must rule them out.  Let’s say the good women who have the time.”

“I expect a great many of them do, if the husband lets them.”

“Ah!” said Dion rather sharply.

“There are a few husbands, you see, who get fidgety directly the pedestal on which number one thinks himself firmly established begins to shake.”

“Stupid fools!”

“Eminently human stupid fools.”

“Are they?”

“Don’t you think so?”

“Perhaps.  But then humanity’s contemptible.”

“Extra-humanity, or the attempt at it, can be dangerous.”

“What do you mean exactly by that, mater?”

“Only that we have to be as we are, and can never really be, can only seem to be, as we aren’t.”

“What a whipping I’m giving to myself just now!” was her thought, as she finished speaking.

“Oh ­yes, of course.  That’s true.  I think ­I think Rosamund’s concentrating on the child, in a sort of quiet, big way.”

“There’s something fine in that.  But her doings are often touched with fineness.”

“Yes, aren’t they?  She doesn’t seem at all afraid.”

“I don’t think she need be.  She has such splendid health.”

“But she may suffer very much.”

“Yes, but something will carry her gloriously through all that, I expect.”

“And you think it’s very natural, very usual, her ­her sort of living alone with the child before it is born?”

Mrs. Leith saw in her son’s eyes an unmistakably wistful look at this moment.  It was very hard for her not to take him in her arms just then, not to say, “My son, d’you suppose I don’t understand it all ­all?” But she never moved, her hands lay still in her lap, and she replied: 

“Very natural, quite natural, Dion.  Your Rosamund is just being herself.”

“You think she’s able to live with the child already?”

Mrs. Leith hesitated for a moment.  In that moment certainly she felt a strong, even an almost terrible inclination to tell a lie to her son.  But she answered: 

“Yes, I do.”

“That must be very strange,” was all that Dion said just then; but a little later on ­he stayed with his mother longer than usual that day because poor little Omar was dead ­he remarked: 

“D’you know, mater, I believe it’s the right thing to be what’s called a thorough-paced egoist at certain moments, in certain situations.”

“Perhaps it is,” said his mother incuriously.

“I fancy there’s a good deal of rot talked about egoism and that sort of thing.”

“There’s a good deal of rot talked about most things.”

“Yes, isn’t there?  And besides, how is one to know?  Very often what seems like egoism may not be egoism at all.  As I grow older I often feel how important it is to search out the real reasons for things.”

“Sometimes they’re difficult to find,” returned his mother, with an unusual simplicity of manner.

“Yes, but still ­Well, I must be off.”

He stood up and looked at the Indian rug in front of the hearth.

“When are you coming to see us?” he asked.

“Almost directly, dee-ar.”

“That’s right.  Rosamund likes seeing you.  Naturally she depends upon you at such ­” He broke off.  “I mean, do come as often as you can.”

He bent down and kissed his mother.

“By the way,” he added, almost awkwardly, “about that dog?”

“What dog, dee-ar?”

“The dog I want to give you.”

“We must think about it.  Give me time.  After a black pug one doesn’t know all in a moment what type would be the proper successor.  You remember your poor Aunt Binn?”

“Aunt Binn!  Why, what did she do?”

“Gave Uncle Binn a hairless thing like a note of interrogation, that had to sleep in a coating of vaseline, when his enormous sheep-dog died who couldn’t see for hair.  She believed in the value of contrast, but Uncle Binn didn’t.  It would have led to a separation but for the hectic efforts of your aunt’s friend, Miss Vine.  When I’ve decided what type of dog, I’ll tell you.”

Dion understood the negative and, in spite of his feeling of fitness, went away rather uncomfortably.  He couldn’t forget the strange appearance of that emptied woman whom he had taken unawares by the fireside.  If only his mother would let him give her another dog!

When he got home he found Beatrice sitting with Rosamund.

Dion had grown very fond of Beatrice.  He had always been rather touched and attracted by her plaintive charm, but since she had become his sister-in-law he had learnt to appreciate also her rare sincerity and delicacy of mind.  She could not grip life, perhaps, could not mold it to her purpose and desire, but she could do a very sweet and very feminine thing, she could live, without ever being intrusive, in the life of another.  It was impossible not to see how “wrapped up” she was in Rosamund.  Dion had come to feel sure that it was natural to Beatrice to lead her life in another’s, and he believed that Rosamund realized this and often let Beatrice do little things for her which, full of vigor and “go” as she was, she would have preferred to do for herself.

“I’ve been boxing and then to see mother,” he said, as he took Beatrice’s long narrow hand in his.  “She sent her best love to you, Rosamund.”

“The dear mother!” said Rosamund gently.

Dion sat down by Beatrice.

“I’m quite upset by something that’s happened,” he continued.  “You know poor little Omar, Beattie?”

“Yes.  Is he ill?”

“Dead.  He was run over yesterday by a four-wheeler.”

“Oh!” said Beatrice.

“Poor little dog,” Rosamund said, again gently.

“When they picked him up ­are you going, Rose?”

“Only for a few minutes.  I am sorry.  I’ll write to the dear mother.”

She went quietly out of the room.  Dion sprang up to open the door for her, but she had been sitting nearer to the door than he, and he was too late; he shut it, however, and came slowly back to Beatrice.

“I wonder ­” He looked at Beatrice’s pale face and earnest dark eyes.  “D’you think Rosamund disliked my mentioning poor Omar’s being killed?”

“No.”

“But didn’t she leave us rather abruptly?”

“I think perhaps she didn’t want to hear any details.  You were just beginning to ­”

“How stupid of me!”

“You see, Rosamund has the child to live for now.”

“Yes ­yes.  What blunderers we men are, however much we try ­”

“That’s not a blame you ought to take,” Beatrice interrupted, with earnest gentleness.  “You are the most thoughtful man I know ­for a woman, I mean.”

Dion flushed.

“Am I?  I try to be.  If I am it’s because ­well, Beattie, you know what Rose is to me.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Dearer and dearer every day.  But nobody ­Mother thinks a lot of her.”

“Who doesn’t?  There aren’t many Roses like ours.”

“None.  Poor mother!  Beattie, d’you think she feels very lonely?  You know she’s got heaps of friends ­heaps.”

“Yes.”

“It isn’t as if she knew very few people, or lived alone in the country.”

“No but I’m very sorry her little dog’s dead.”

“I want to give her another.”

“It would be no use.”

“But why not?”

“You see, little Omar was always there when you were living there.”

“Well?”

“He was part of her life with you.”

“Oh ­yes.”

Dion looked rather hard at Beatrice.  In that moment he began to realize how much of the intelligence of the heart she possessed, and how widely she applied it.  His application of his intelligence of the heart was, he feared, much less widespread than hers.

“Go to see mother when you can, will you?” he said.  “She’s very fond of you, I think.”

“I’ll go.  I like going to her.”

“And, Beattie, may I say something rather intimate?  I’m your brother now.”

“Yes.”

She was sitting opposite to him near the fire on a low chair.  There was a large shaded lamp in the room, but it was on a rather distant table.  He saw Beatrice’s face by the firelight and her narrow thoroughbred figure in a dark dress.  And the firelight, he thought, gave to both face and figure a sort of strange beauty that was sad, and that had something of the strangeness and the beauty of those gold and red castles children see in the fire.  They glow ­and that evening there was a sort of glow in Beatrice; they crumble ­and then there was a pathetic something in Beatrice, too, which suggested wistful desires, perhaps faint hopes and an ending of ashes.

“Would you marry old Guy if he asked you?  Don’t be angry with me.”

“I’m not.”

“Of course, we’ve all known for ages how much he cares for you.  He spoke to me about it to-day.  He’s desperately afraid of your refusing him.  He daren’t put his fate to the test.  Beattie ­would you?”

A slow red crept over Beatrice’s face.  She put up one hand to guard herself from the glow of the fire.  For a moment she looked at Dion, and he thought, “What a strange expression firelight can give to a face!” Then she said: 

“I can’t tell you.”

Her voice was husky.

“Beattie, you’ve got a cold!”

“Have I?”

She got up.

“I must go, Dion.  I’ll just see Rosamund for a minute.”

As she left the room, she said: 

“I’ll go and see your mother to-morrow.”

The door shut.  Dion stood with one elbow resting on the mantelpiece and looked down into the fire.  He saw his mother sitting alone, a strange, emptied figure; he saw Beatrice.  And fire, which beautifies, or makes romantic and sad everything gave to Beatrice the look of his mother.  For a moment his soul was full of questions about the two women.

CHAPTER II

“I’ve joined the Artists’ Rifles,” Dion said to Rosamund one day.

He spoke almost bruskly.  Of late he had begun to develop a manner which had just a hint of roughness in it sometimes.  This manner was the expression of a strong inward effort he was making.  If, as his mother believed, already Rosamund was able to live with the child, Dion’s solitary possession of the woman he loved was definitely over, probably forever.  Something within him which, perhaps, foolishly, rebelled against this fact had driven him to seek a diversion; he had found it in beginning to try to live for the child in the man’s way.  He intended to put the old life behind him, and to march vigorously on to the new.  He called up Master Tim before him in the little white “sweater,” with the primrose-colored ruffled feathers of hair, the gritted white teeth, small almost as the teeth of a mouse, the moist, ardent cheeks, and the glowing eyes looking steadfastly to the Tribal God.  He must be the Tribal God to his little son, if the child were a son.

Rosamund did not seem surprised by Dion’s abrupt statement, though he had never spoken of an intention to join any Volunteer Corps.  She knew he was fond of shooting, and had been in camp sometimes when he was at a public school.

“What’s that?” she asked.  “I’ve heard of it, but I thought it was a corps for men who are painters, sculptors, writers and musicians.”

“It was founded, nearly forty years ago, I believe, for fellows working in the Arts, but all sorts of business men are let in now.”

“Will it take up much time?”

“No; I shall have to drill a certain amount, and in summer I shall go into camp for a bit, and of course, if a big war ever came, I could be of some use.”

“I’m glad you’ve joined.”

“I thought you would be.  I shall see a little less of you, I suppose, but, after all, a husband can’t be perpetually hanging about the house, can he?”

Rosamund looked at him and smiled, then laughed gently.

“Dion, how absurd you are!  In some ways you are only a boy still.”

“Why, what to you mean?”

“A man who sticks to business as you do, hanging about the house!”

“You wouldn’t like it if I did.”

“No, because I should know it was doing you harm.”

“And besides ­do you realize how independent you are?”

“Am I?”

“For a woman I think you are extraordinarily independent.”

She sat still for a minute, looking straight before her in an almost curious stillness.

“I believe I know why perhaps I seem so,” she said at length.

And then she quietly, and very naturally, turned the conversation into another channel; she was a quieter Rosamund in those days of waiting than the Rosamund unaffected by motherhood.  That Rosamund had been vigorous and joyous; this Rosamund was strongly serene.  In all she was and did at this time Dion felt strength; but it was shown chiefly in stillness.  She worked sometimes; she read a great deal sitting upstairs in her own little room.  One day Dion found her with a volume of Tennyson; another day she was reading Shakespeare’s “Henry the Fifth”; she had the “Paradiso” in hand, too, and the Greek Testament with the English text in parallel columns.  In the room there was a cottage piano, and one evening, when Dion had been drilling and came back late, he heard her singing.  He stood still in the hall, after shutting softly the door of the lobby, and listened to the warm and powerful voice of the woman he loved.  He could hear the words of the song, which was a setting of “Lead, kindly Light.”  Rosamund had only just begun singing it when he came into the hall; the first words he caught were, “The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead thou me on.”  He thrust his hands into the pockets of the black jacket he was wearing and did not move.  He had never before heard Rosamund sing any piece of music through without seeing her while she was doing it; her voice seemed to him now different from the voice he knew so well; perhaps because he was uninfluenced by her appearance.  That counted for much in the effect Rosamund created when she sang to people.  The thought went through Dion’s mind, “Am I really the husband of this voice?” It was beautiful, it was fervent, but it was strange, or seemed strange to him as it came down through the quiet house on this winter evening.  For the first time, listening thus, he was able imaginatively to realize something of what it must be like to be a mystic, or rather, perhaps, to have within one a definite tendency towards mysticism, a definite and ceaseless and governing aspiration towards harmony with the transcendental order.  When this voice which he heard above him sang “The night is dark, and I am far from home,” he felt a sort of sharp comprehension of the real meaning of homeless wandering such as he had certainly never experienced before.  He felt, too, that the spirit from which this voice proceeded could never be at home in the ordinary way of ordinary people, could not be at home even as he himself could be at home.  The spirit behind this voice needed something of which, till now, he had not consciously felt the need; something peculiar, out of the way and remote ­something very different from human love and human comfort.  Although he was musical, and could be critical about a composition according to its lights, Dion did not think about the music of this song qua music ­could not have said how good he considered it to be.  He knew only that this was not poor or insincere music.  But music sung in this peculiar way was only a means by which the under part of a human being, that which has its existence deep down under layers and layers of the things which commonly appear and are known of, rose to the surface and announced itself.

The Artists’ Rifles ­and this!

When the voice was silent, Dion went slowly upstairs.  The door of Rosamund’s little room was shut.  He paused outside it, and stood looking at it, the movable barrier of dark shining wood which divided him from the voice.  When he was ascending the stairs he had meant to go in to Rosamund.  But now he hesitated, and presently he turned away.  He felt that a greater barrier than the door was between them.  He might open the door easily enough, but the other barrier would remain.  The life of the body seemed to him just then an antagonist to the life of the soul.

“I’m on the lower plane,” said Dion to himself that evening.  “If it’s a boy, I shall have to look after his body; she’ll take care of the rest.  Perhaps mothers always do, but not as she could and will.”

From this moment he devoted himself as much as possible to his body, almost, indeed, with the ardor of one possessed by a sort of mania.  The Artists’ Corps took up part of his time; Jenkins another part; he practised rifle shooting as diligently almost as if he expected to have to take his place almost immediately in the field; he began to learn fencing.  Rosamund saw very little of him, but she made no comment.  He explained to her what he was doing.

“You see, Rose,” he said to her once, “if it’s a boy it will be my job eventually to train him up to be first-class in the distinctively man’s part of life.  No woman can ever do that.  I mustn’t let myself get slack.”

“You never would, I’m sure.”

“I hope not.  Still, lots of business men do.  And I’m sitting about three-quarters of my time.  One does get soft, and the softer a chap gets the less inclined he is to make the effort required of him, if he wants to get hard.  If I ever am to be the father of a growing-up son ­when they get to about sixteen, you know, they get awfully critical about games and athletics, sport, everything of that kind ­I should like to be able to keep my end up thoroughly well with him.  He’d respect me far more then.  I know exactly the type of fellow real boys look up to.  It isn’t the intelligent softy, however brainy he may be; it’s the man who can do all the ordinary things superlatively well.”

She smiled at him with her now curiously tranquil yellow-brown eyes, and he thought he saw in them approval.

“I think few men would prepare as you do,” she said.

“And how many women would prepare as you do?” he returned.

“I couldn’t do anything else.  But now I feel as if we were working together, in a way.”

He squeezed her hand.  She let it lie motionless in his.

“But if it weren’t a boy?” he said, struck by a sudden reaction of doubt.

And the thought went, like an arrow, through him: 

“What chance should I have then?”

“I know it will be a boy,” she answered.

“Why?  Not because you sleep north and south!” he exclaimed, with a laughing allusion to the assertion of Herrick.

“I don’t.”

“I always thought the bed ­”

“No, it’s east and west.”

“Fishermen say the dead sleep east and west.”

“Are you superstitious?”

“I don’t know.  Perhaps, where you are concerned.”

“Don’t be.  Superstition seems to me the opposite of belief.  Just wait, and remember, I know it will be a boy.”

One evening Dion went to Great Cumberland Place to dine with Bruce Evelin and Beatrice, leaving Rosamund apparently in her usual health.  She was going to have “something on a tray” in her sitting-room, and he went in there to say good-by to her just before he started.  He found her sitting by the fire, and looking at Hermes and the Child with steady eyes.  They were lit up rather faintly by a couple of wax candles placed on the writing-table.  The light from these candles and from the fire made a delicate and soothing radiance in the room, which was plainly furnished, and almost somber in color.  A very dim and cloudy purple-blue pervaded it, a very beautiful hue, but austere, and somehow suggestive of things ecclesiastical.  On a small, black oak table at Rosamund’s elbow two or three books were lying beside a bowl of dim blue glass which had opalescent lights in it.  This bowl was nearly full of water upon which a water-lily floated.  The fire on the hearth was small, but glowing with red and gold.  Dark curtains were drawn across the one window which looked out at the back of the house.  It was a frosty night and windless.

Dion stood still for a moment on the threshold of the room after he had opened the door.

“How quiet you are in here!” he said.

“This little room is always quiet.”

“Yes, but to-night it’s like a room to which some one has just said ‘Hush!’”

He came in and shut the door quietly behind him.

“I’ve just a minute.”

He came up to the fire.

“And so you were looking at him, our Messenger with winged sandals.  Oh, Rosamund, how wonderful it was at Olympia!  I wonder whether you and I shall ever see the Hermes together again.  I suppose all the chances are against it.”

“I hope we shall.”

“Do you?  And yet ­I don’t know.  It would be terrible to see him together again ­if things were much altered; if, for instance, one was less happy and remembered ­”

He broke off, came to the settee at right angles to the fire on which she was sitting, and sat down beside her.  At this moment ­he did not know why ­the great and always growing love he had for her seemed to surge forward abruptly like a tidal wave, and he was conscious of sadness and almost of fear.  He looked at Rosamund as if he were just going to part from her, anxiously, and with a sort of greed of detail.

“Alone I would never go back to Elis,” he said.  “Never.  What a power things have if they are connected in our hearts with people.  It’s ­it’s awful.”

A clock chimed faintly.

“I must go.”

He got up and stood for a moment looking down at the dear head loved so much, at her brow.

“I don’t know why it is,” he said, “but this evening I hate leaving you.”

“But it’s only for a little while.”

There was a tap at the door.

“Ah! here’s my tray.”

The maid came in carrying a woman’s meal, and Dion’s strange moment was over.

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

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

Dion clapped him on the shoulder.

“The way of salvation!”

“Where will it lead me?”

“To Salvation, of course.”

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

They were going upstairs.

“The woman ?”

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

Lurby opened the drawing-room door.

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

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

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

“Dinner is served, sir.”

“Daventry, will you take Beatrice?”

As Dion followed with Bruce Evelin, he said: 

“So you’ve got Daventry a case!”

“Yes.”

Bruce Evelin lowered his voice.

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

Dion understood.  Bruce Evelin wished Beatrice to marry Daventry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bruce Evelin had lighted his cigar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Subtle!  Why?”

“I was just coming to the professional secrets.”

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

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

He sat down.

“What’s this in your lap?”

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

“May I look?”

“Yes, do.”

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

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

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

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

“It doesn’t belong to Guy.”

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

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

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

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

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

He met the dark eyes of Beatrice.

“You care for that?”

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

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

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

“Dear old Beattie!” he said.

Moisture had sprung into his eyes.

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

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

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

“Can’t you?”

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

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

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

He put the book down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You really wish to walk?”

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

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

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

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

“When will it be?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And does Bruce Evelin?”

“I believe so.  I assume so.”

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

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

“What type is she?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you in love with Mrs. Clarke?”

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

“Have you forgotten her book again?”

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

He tapped the capacious side pocket of his coat.

“You saw it then?” he added.

“Beattie had it when I went upstairs.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that?”

Daventry put his arm through Dion’s.

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

He paused.

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

Dion pressed his arm.

“Bruce Evelin wants you to marry Beatrice.”

“He hasn’t told you so?”

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

Daventry stood still.

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

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

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

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

“Damn it!  Why rake up ?”

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

“Is it wonderful?”

“Yes.”

“Very wonderful?”

“Yes.”

“Children too!”

Daventry sighed.

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

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

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

“He’s evidently full of purpose.”

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

“I can.”

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

“Ask her.  I think she’ll have you.”

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

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

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

“I know why.”

“No, no.”

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

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

“Yes, unless Rosamund wants me.”

“That’s always understood.”

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

When the cab turned the corner of Great Market Street, Westminster, and came into Little Market Street, Dion saw in the distance before him two large, staring yellow eyes, which seemed to be steadily regarding him like the eyes of something on the watch.  They were the lamps of a brougham drawn up in front of N.  Dion’s cabman, perforce, pulled up short before the brown door of N.

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

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

“Rosamund!”

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

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

“Sir?”

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

“Yes, sir.  Doctor Mayson.”

“Well, I say, has he been here long?”

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

“Thanks.”

Dion turned again and assaulted the latchkey.

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

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

“No, sir?”

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

“I don’t know ­I couldn’t!”

The girl shut the door.

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

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

“How long ago?”

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

“But why wasn’t I sent for?”

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

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

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

“The nurse?”

“Sir?”

“Have you managed to get the nurse?”

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

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

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

“Why?  Doesn’t she wish it?”

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

“Then why not send for me?”

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

“When do you expect? . . .”

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

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

“Yes.  Are you?”

The low bass voice almost snapped out the question.

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

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

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

“But then why shouldn’t I see her?”

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

“But I’m perfectly calm.”

Doctor Mayson smiled.

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

“Very well.  I’ll do it of course.”

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

Dion stared into the fire.

“Have you many children?”

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

“I’m not,” said Dion bruskly.

“Capital!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daventry had mentioned that she had a hoarse voice.

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

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

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

“Yes?”

“By the way, it’s a boy.”

“Yes, of course.”

Doctor Mayson looked genuinely surprised.

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

“She knew it was going to be a boy.”

The doctor smiled faintly.

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

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

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

Dion saw the star falling above the hill of Drouva.

Did the Hermes know?

CHAPTER III

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

When they reached the house Daventry said: 

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

“Oh, it’s that ­”

“No, it isn’t.”

He gently pushed Mrs. Chetwinde’s bell.

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

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

“Where’s her child?  Here?”

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

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

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

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

“She’s like Echo after her punishment.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

“Very much indeed.”

“Then I’ll ­”

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

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

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

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

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

“Here are two chairs ­”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, of course you did.”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

His eyes met hers with a great deal of interest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know it could.”

“May I ask how you know?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are going back there?”

“Of course, when my case is over.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shall I go and tell him so?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No one can tell.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, I’m very keen on them.”

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

“Rather!”

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

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

“Thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

The case again!

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

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

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

“Yes, very much.  She interests me.”

“Ah?”

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

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

“Did she?”

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

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

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

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

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

Dion acknowledged that it had.

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

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

“I hope you’ll be even happier now.”

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

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

“Oh, no.”

“Is it a good-looking baby?”

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

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

Dion stood still.

“Oh, is that true really?”

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

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

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

“Beware of it, my boy.”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

“Yes, indeed.”

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

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

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

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

“Did she say so?” asked Canon Wilton.

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

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

“She seems to have.”

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

He held out his big, unwavering hand to Dion.

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

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

CHAPTER IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then do you feel completely changed?”

“Completely, utterly.”

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

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

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

“Release!  From what?”

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

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

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

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

“But your singing!”

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

“But you married me?” he interrupted.

“Yes.  So you see I gave it all up.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Business!” returned Dion laconically.

“What’s your real reason against it?”

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

“What did she say?”

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

“Yes?”

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

“I see.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You keep the door of your life.”

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

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

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

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

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

No need to ask why those faces were there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Isn’t she wonderful?”

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

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

“I believe she impressed them by her independence.”

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

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

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

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

Dion thought of his Rosamund’s tranquil wisdom.

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

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

“Well, but ­” Dion Began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you know her then?” he whispered.

“I’ve known her all my life.”

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

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

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

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

Didn’t that tell against Mrs. Clarke?

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

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

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

“She must have had wonderful times!”

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

The Court was adjourned.

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

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

“Of course, with pleasure.”

“Your Rosamund ?”

Her eyes were on him for a moment.

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

“Mr. Daventry can come too.”

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

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

“No.”

“Why did you come to-day?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I expect you know.”

He shook his head.

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

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I want to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

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

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

“Doesn’t it rather follow?”

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

“You wish to frighten me.”

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

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

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

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

“Are your nerves of steel?”

She leaned forward in the brougham.

“If your muscles are of iron.”

“My muscles!” he said.

“Haven’t you educated them?”

“Oh ­yes.”

“And perhaps I’ve educated my nerves.”

Mrs. Chetwinde’s spirited horses began to prance and show temper.  Mrs. Clarke sat back.  As the carriage moved away, Dion saw Mrs. Chetwinde’s eyes fixed upon him.  They looked at that moment not at all vague.  If they had not been her eyes, he would have been inclined to think them piercing.  But, of course, Mrs. Chetwinde’s eyes could never be that.

“How does one educate one’s nerves, Guy?” asked Dion, as the two friends walked away.

“By being defendant in a long series of divorce cases, I should say.”

“Has Mrs. Clarke ever been in another case of this kind?”

“Good heavens, no.  If she had, even I couldn’t believe in her innocence, as I do now.”

“Then where did she get her education?”

“Where do women get things, old Dion?  It seems to me sometimes straight from God, and sometimes straight from the devil.”

Dion’s mental comment on this was, “What about Mrs. Clarke?” But he did not utter it.

Before he left Daventry, he was pledged to be in court on the last day of the case, when the verdict would be given.  He wished to go to the court again on the morrow, but the thought of Rosamund decided him not to do this; he would, he knew, feel almost ashamed in telling her that the divorce court, at this moment, fascinated him, that he longed, or almost longed, to follow the colored fires of a certain torch down further shadowy alleys of the unwise life.  He felt quite sure that Mrs. Clarke was an innocent woman, but she had certainly been very unconventional indeed in her conduct.  He remembered the almost stern strength in her husky voice when she had said “my unconventionality, which I shall never give up.”  So even this hideous and widely proclaimed scandal would not induce her to bow in the future before the conventional gods.  She really was an extraordinary woman.  What would Rosamund think of her?  If she won her case she evidently meant to know Rosamund.  Of course, there could be nothing against that.  If she lost the case, naturally there could never be any question of such an acquaintance; he knew instinctively that she would never suggest it.  Whatever she was, or was not, she was certainly a woman of the world.

That evening, when he reached home, he found Rosamund sitting in the nursery in the company of Robin and the nurse.  The window was partially open.  Rosamund believed in plenty of air for her child, and no “cosseting”; she laughed to scorn, but genially, the nurse’s prejudice against “the night air.”

“My child,” she said, “must get accustomed to night as well as day, Nurse ­and the sooner the better.”  So now “Master Robin” was played upon by a little wind from Westminster.  He seemed in no way alarmed by it.  This evening he was serene, and when his father entered the room he assumed his expression of mild inquiry, vaguely agitated his small rose-colored fists, and blew forth a welcoming bubble.

Dion was touched at the sight.

“Little rogue!” he said, bending over Robin.  “Little, little rogue!”

Robin raised his, as yet scarcely defined, eyebrows, stared tremendously hard at the nursery atmosphere, pulled out his wet lips and gurgled, at the same time wagging his head, now nicely covered with silky fair hair, or down, whichever you chose to call it.

“He knows his papa, ma’am, and that he does, a boy!” said the nurse, who approved of Dion, and had said below stairs that he was “as good a husband as ever wore shoe-leather.”

“Of course he does,” said Rosamund softly.  “Babies have plenty of intelligence of a kind, and I think it’s a darling kind.”

Dion sat down beside her, and they both bent over Robin in the gathering twilight, while the nurse went softly out of the room.

Dion had quite forgotten the Clarke case.

CHAPTER V

Three days later Daventry called in Little Market Street early, and was shown into the dining-room where he found Rosamund alone at the breakfast-table.

“Do forgive me for bursting in upon the boiled eggs,” he said, looking unusually excited.  “I’m off almost directly to the Law Courts and I want to take Dion with me.  It’s the last day of Mrs. Clarke’s case.  We expect the verdict some time this evening.  I dare say the court will sit late.  Where’s Dion?”

“He’s just coming down.  We were both disturbed in the night, so we slept later than usual.”

“Disturbed?  Burglars?  Fire?”

“No; Robin’s not at all well.”

“I say!  I’m sorry for that.  What is it?”

“He’s had a very bad throat and been feverish, poor little chap.  But I think he’s better this morning.  The doctor came.”

“You’ll never be one of the fussy mothers.”

“I hope not,” she said, rather gravely; “I’m not fond of them.  Here’s Dion.”

Daventry sat with them while they breakfasted, and Dion agreed to keep his promise and go to the court.

“I told Uncle Biron I must be away from business to hear the summing-up,” he said.  “I’ll send a telegram to the office.  Do you think it will be all right for Mrs. Clarke?”

“She’s innocent, but nobody can say.  It depends so much on the summing-up.”

Dion glanced at Rosamund.

“You mustn’t think I’m going to turn into an idler, Rose.  This is a very special occasion.”

“I know.  Mr. Daventry’s first case.”

“Haven’t you followed it at all?” Daventry asked.

She shook her head.

“No, but I’ve been wished you well all the same.”

When the two men got up to go, Dion said: 

“Rosamund!”

“What is it?”

“If Mrs. Clarke wins and is completely exonerated, I think she would like very much to make your acquaintance.”

Rosamund looked surprised.

“What makes you think so?”

“Well, she said something to that effect the other day.”

“She’s a very interesting, clever woman,” interposed Daventry, with sudden warmth.

“I’m sure she is.  We must see.  It’s very kind of her.  Poor woman!  What dreadful anxiety she must be in to-day!  You’ll all be glad when it’s over.”

When the two friends were out in the sunshine, walking towards the Strand, Daventry said: 

“Why is your wife against Mrs. Clarke?”

“She isn’t.  What makes you thinks so?”

“I’m quite sure she doesn’t want to know her, even if she gets the verdict.”

“Well, of course all this sort of thing is ­it’s very far away from Rosamund.”

“You don’t mean to say you doubt Mrs. Clarke?”

“No, but ­”

“Surely if she’s innocent she’s as good as any other woman.”

“I know, but ­I suppose it’s like this:  there are different ways of being good, and perhaps Mrs. Clarke’s way isn’t Rosamund’s.  In fact, we know it isn’t.”

Daventry said nothing more on the subject; he began to discuss the case in all its bearings, and presently dwelt upon the great power English judges have over the decisions of juries.

“Mrs. Clarke gave her evidence splendidly on the whole,” he said.  “And Hadi Bey made an excellent impression.  My one fear is that fellow Aristide Dumeny.  You didn’t hear him, but, of course, you read his evidence.  He was perfectly composed and as clever as he could be in the box, but I’m sure, somehow, the jury were against him.”

“Why?”

“I hardly know.  It may be something in his personality.”

“I believe he’s a beast,” said Dion.

“There!” exclaimed Daventry, wrinkling his forehead.  “If the Judge thinks as you do it may just turn things against us.”

“Why did she make a friend of the fellow?”

“Because he’s chock-full of talent and knowledge, and she loves both.  Dion, my boy, the mind can play the devil with us as well as the body.  But I hope ­I hope for the right verdict.  Anyhow I’ve done well, and shall get other cases out of this.  The odd thing is that Mrs. Clarke’s drained me dry of egoism.  I care only to win for her.  I couldn’t bear to see her go out of court with a ruined reputation.  My nerves are all on edge.  If Mrs. Clarke loses, how d’you think she’ll take it?”

“Standing up.”

“I expect you’re right.  But I don’t believe I shall take it standing.  Perhaps some women make us men feel for them more than they feel for themselves.  Don’t look at me in court whatever you do.”

They had arrived at the Law Courts.  He hurried away.

Dion’s place was again beside Mrs. Chetwinde, who looked unusually alive, and whose vagueness had been swept away by something ­anxiety for her friend, perhaps, or the excitement of following day after day an unusually emotional cause célèbre.

Now, as Sir John Addington stood up to continue his speech on Mrs. Clarke’s behalf, begun on the previous day, Mrs. Chetwinde leaned forward and fixed her eyes upon him, closing her fingers tightly on the fan she had brought with her.

Sir John spoke with an earnestness and conviction which at certain moments rose almost to passion, as he drew the portrait of a woman whose brilliant mind and innocent nature had led her into the unconventional conduct which her enemies now asserted were wickedness.  Beadon Clarke’s counsel had suggested that Mrs. Clarke was an abominable woman, brilliantly clever, exquisitely subtle, who had chosen as an armor against suspicion a bold pretense of simplicity and harmless unconventionality, but who was the prey of a hidden and ungovernable vice.  He, Sir John, ventured to put forward for the jury’s careful examination a very different picture.  He made no secret of the fact that, from the point of view of the ordinary unconventional man or woman, Mrs. Clarke had often acted unwisely, and, with not too fine a sarcasm, he described for the jury the average existence of “a careful drab woman” in the watchful and eternally gossiping diplomatic world.  Then he contrasted with it the life led by Mrs. Clarke in the wonderful city of Stamboul ­a life “full of color, of taste, of interest, of charm, of innocent, joyous and fragrant liberty.  Which of us,” he demanded, “would not in our souls prefer the latter life to the former?  Which of us did not secretly long for the touch of romance, of strangeness, of beauty, to put something into our lives which they lacked?  But we have not the moral courage to break our prison doors and to emerge into the nobler world.”

“The dull, the drab, the platter-faced and platter-minded people,” he said, in a passage which Dion was always to remember, “who go forever bowed down beneath the heavy yoke of convention, are too often apt to think that everything charming, everything lively, everything unusual, everything which gives out, like sweet incense, a delicate aroma of strangeness, must be, somehow, connected with wickedness.  Everything which deviates from their pattern must deviate towards the devil, according to them; every step taken away from the beaten path must be taken towards ultimate destruction.  They have no conception of intimacies between women and men cemented not by similar lusts and similar vices, but by similar intellectual tastes and similar aspirations towards beauty.  In color such people always find blackness, in gaiety wickedness, in liberty license, in the sacred intimacies of the soul the hateful vices of the body.  But you, gentlemen of the jury ­”

His appeal to the twelve in the box at this moment was, perhaps, scarcely convincing.  He addressed them as if, like Mrs. Clarke and himself, they were enamored of the unwise life, which is only unwise because we live in a world of censorious fools, and as if he knew it.  The strange thing was that the jury were evidently impressed if not carried away, by his appeal.  They sat forward, stared at Sir John as if fascinated, and even began to assume little airs which were almost devil-may-care.  But when, with a precise and deliberately cold acuteness, Sir John turned to the evidence adverse to his client, and began to tear it to shreds, they stared less, frowned, and showed by their expressions their efforts to be legal.

As soon as Sir John had finished his speech, the Court rose for the luncheon interval.

“Are you going out?” said Mrs. Chetwinde to Dion.  “I’ve brought some horrible little sandwiches, and I shan’t stir.”

“I’m not hungry.  I’ll stay with you.”

He sighed.

“What a crowd!” he said, looking over the sea of hot, staring faces.  “How horrid people look sometimes!”

“When they’re feeling cruel.”

She began to eat her sandwiches, which were tightly packed in a small silver box.

“Isn’t Mrs. Clarke coming to-day?” Dion asked.

“Yes.  I expect her in a moment.  Esme Darlington is bringing her.”

“Mr. Darlington?”

“You’re surprised?”

“Well, I should hardly have expected somehow that ­I don’t know.”

“I do.  But Esme Darlington’s more of a man than he seems.  And he’s thoroughly convinced of Cynthia’s innocence.  Here they are.”

There was a stir in the crowd.  Many women present rustled as they turned in their seats; some stood up and craned forward; people in the gallery leaned over, looking eagerly down; a loud murmur and a wide hiss of whispering emphasized the life in the court.  The tall, loose-limbed figure of Esme Darlington, looking to-day singularly dignified and almost impressive, pushed slowly forward, followed by the woman whose social fate was so soon to be decided.

Mrs. Clarke glanced round over the many faces without any defiance as she made her way with difficulty to a seat beside her solicitor.  The lack of defiance in her expression struck Dion forcibly.  This woman did not seem to be mentally on the defensive, did not seem to be wishing to repel the glances, fierce with curiosity, which were leveled at her from all sides.  Apparently she had no fear at all of bristling bayonets.  Her haggard face was unsmiling, not cold, but intense with a sort of living calm which was surely not a mask.  She looked at Mrs. Chetwinde and at Dion as she passed near to them, giving them no greeting except with her large eyes which obviously recognized them.  In a moment she was sitting down between her solicitor and Esme Darlington.

“It will quite break Guy Daventry up if she doesn’t get the verdict,” said Dion in an uneven voice to Mrs. Chetwinde.

“Mr. Daventry?” she said, with an odd little stress of emphasis on the name.

“Of course I should hate it too.  Any man who feels a woman is innocent ­”

He broke off.  She said nothing, and went on eating her little sandwiches as if she rather disliked them.

“Mrs. Chetwinde, do tell me.  I believe you’ve got an extraordinary flair ­will she win?”

“My dear boy, now how can I know?”

Dion felt very young for a minute.

“I want to know what you expect.”

Mrs. Chetwinde closed the small silver box with a soft snap.

“I fully expect her to win.”

“Because she’s innocent?”

“Oh no.  That’s no reason in a world like this, unfortunately.”

“But, then, why?”

“Because Cynthia always does get what she wants, or needs.  She has quite abnormal will-power, and will-power is the conqueror.  If I’m to tell you the truth, I see only one reason for doubt, I don’t say fear, as to the result.”

“Can you tell me what it is?”

“Aristide Dumeny.”

At this moment the Judge returned to the bench.  An hour later he began to sum up.

He spoke very slowly and rather monotonously, and at first Dion thought that he was going to be “let down” by this almost cruelly level finale to a dramatic, sometimes even horrible, struggle between powerful opposing forces.  But presently he began to come under a new fascination, the fascination of a cool and very clear presentation of undressed facts.  Led by the Judge, he reviewed again the complex life at Constantinople, he followed again Mrs. Clarke’s many steps away from the beaten paths, he penetrated again through some of the winding ways into the shadows of the unwise life.  And he began to wonder a little and a little to fear for the woman who was sitting so near to him waiting for the end.  He could not tell whether the Judge believed her to be innocent or guilty, but he thought he could tell that the Judge considered her indiscreet, too heedless of those conventions on which social relations are based, too determined a follower after the flitting light of her own desires.  Presently the position of Beadon Clarke in the Constantinople ménage was touched upon, and suddenly Dion found himself imagining how it would be to have as his wife a Mrs. Clarke.  Suppose Rosamund were to develop the unconventional idiosyncrasies of a Cynthia Clarke?  He realized at once that he was not a Beadon Clarke; he could never stand that sort of thing.  He felt hot at the mere thought of his Rosamund making night expeditions in caïques alone with young men ­such, for instance, as Hadi Bey; or listening alone at midnight in a garden pavilion isolated, shaded by trees, to the music made by a Dumeny.

Dumeny!  The Judge pronounced his name.

“I come now to the respondent’s relation with the second co-respondent, Aristide Dumeny of the French Embassy in Constantinople.”

Dion leaned slightly forward and looked at Dumeny.  Dumeny was sitting bolt upright, and now, as the Judge mentioned his name, he folded his arms, raised his long dark eyes, and gazed steadily at the bench.  Did he know that he was the danger in the case?  If he did he did not show any apprehension.  His white face, typically French, with its rather long nose, slightly flattened temples, faintly cynical and ironic lips and small but obstinate chin, was almost sinister in its complete immobility.

“He’s certainly a corrupt beast,” Dion said to himself.  “But as certainly he’s an interesting, clever, knowledgeable beast.”

Dumeny’s very thick, glossy, and slightly undulating dark hair, growing closely round his low forehead, helped to make him almost romantically handsome, although his features were rather irregular.  His white ears were abnormally small, Dion noticed.

The Judge went with cold minuteness into every detail of Dumeny’s intimacy with Mrs. Clarke that had been revealed in the trial, and dwelt on the link of music which, it was said, had held them together.

“Music stimulates the passions, and may, in highly sensitive persons, generate impulses not easy to control, provided that the situation in which such persons find themselves, when roused and stirred, is propitious.  It has been given in evidence that Monsieur Dumeny frequently played and sang to the respondent till late in the night in the pavilion which has been described to you.  You have seen Monsieur Dumeny in the box, and can judge for yourselves whether he was a man likely to avail himself of any advantage his undoubted talents may have given him with a highly artistic and musical woman.”

There was nothing striking in the words, but to Dion the Judge’s voice seemed slightly changed as it uttered the last sentence.  Surely a frigid severity had crept into it, surely it was colored with a faint, but definite, contempt.  Several of the jury started narrowly at Aristide Dumeny, and the foreman, with a care and precision almost ostentatious, took a note.

The Judge continued his analysis of Mrs. Clarke’s intimacy with Dumeny.  He was scrupulously fair; he gave full weight to the mutual attraction which may be born out of common intellectual tastes ­an attraction possibly quite innocent, quite free from desire of anything but food for the brain, the subtler emotions, and the soul “if you like to call it so, gentlemen.”  But, somehow, he left upon the mind of Dion, and probably upon the minds of many others, an impression that he, the Judge, was doubtful as to the sheer intellectuality of Monsieur Dumeny, was not convinced that he had reached that condition of moral serenity and purification in which a rare woman can be happily regarded as a sort of disembodied spirit.

When the Judge at length finished with Dumeny and Dumeny’s relations with Mrs. Clarke, Dion felt very anxious about the verdict.  The Judge had not succeeded in making him believe that Mrs. Clarke was a guilty woman, but he feared that the jury had been made doubtful.  It was evident to him that the Judge had a bad opinion of Dumeny, and had conveyed his opinion to the jury.  Was the unwisdom of Mrs. Clarke to prove her undoing?  Esme Darlington was pulling his ducal beard almost nervously.  A faint hum went through the densely packed court.  Mrs. Chetwinde moved and used her fan for a moment.  Dion did not dare to look at Guy Daventry.  He was realizing, with a sort of painful sharpness, how great a change a verdict against Mrs. Clarke must make in her life.

Her boy, perhaps, probably indeed, would be taken from her.  She had only spoken to him casually about her boy, but he had felt that the casual reference did not mean that she had a careless heart.  The woman whose hand had held his for a moment would be tenacious in love.  He felt sure of that, and sure that she loved her naughty boy with a strong vitality.

When the Judge had finished his task and the jury retired to consider their verdict, it was past four o’clock.

“What do you think?” Dion said in a low voice to Mrs. Chetwinde.

“About the summing-up?”

“Yes.”

“It has left things very much as I expected.  Any danger there is lies in Monsieur Dumeny.”

“Do you know him?”

“Oh, yes.  I stayed with Cynthia once in Constantinople.  He took us about.”

She made no further comment on Monsieur Dumeny.

“I wonder whether the jury will be away long?” Dion said, after a moment.

“Probably.  I shan’t be at all surprised if they can’t agree.  Then there will be another trial.”

“How appalling!”

“Yes, it wouldn’t be very nice for Cynthia.”

“I can’t help wishing ­”

He paused, hesitating.

“Yes?” said Mrs. Chetwinde, looking about the court.

“I can’t help wishing Mrs. Clarke hadn’t been unconventional in quite such a public way.”

A faint smile dawned and faded on Mrs. Chetwinde’s lips and in her pale eyes.

“The public method’s often the safest in the end,” she murmured.

Then she nodded to Esme Darlington, who presently got up and managed to make his way to them.  He, too, thought the jury would probably disagree, and considered the summing-up rather unfavorable to Mrs. Clarke.

“People who live in the diplomatic world live in a whispering gallery,” he said, bending down, speaking in an under-voice and lifting and lowering his eyebrows.  “I told Cynthia so when she married.  I ventured to give her the benefit of my ­if I may say so ­long and intimate knowledge of diplomatic life and diplomatists.  I said to her, ’Remember you can always be under observation.’  Ah, well ­one can only hope the jury will take the right view.  But how can we expect British shopkeepers, fruit brokers, cigar merchants, and so forth to understand a ­really, one can only say ­a wild nature like Cynthia’s?  It’s a wild mind ­I’d say this before her! ­in an innocent body, just that.”

He pulled almost distractedly at his beard with bony fingers, and repeated plaintively: 

“A wild mind in an innocent body ­h’m, ha!”

“If only Mr. Grundy can be brought to comprehension of such a phenomenon!” murmured Mrs. Chetwinde.

It was obvious to Dion that his two friends feared for the result.

The Judge had left the bench.  An hour passed by, and the chime of a clock striking five dropped down coolly, almost frostily, to the hot and curious crowd.  Mrs. Clarke sat very still.  Esme Darlington had returned to his place beside her, and she spoke to him now and then.  Hadi Bey wiped his handsome rounded brown forehead with a colored silk handkerchief; and Aristide Dumeny, with half-closed eyes, ironically examined the crowd, whispered to a member of his Embassy who had accompanied him into court, folded his arms and sat looking down.  Beadon Clarke’s face was rigid, and a fierce red, like the red of a blush of shame, was fixed on his cheeks.  His mother had pulled a thick black veil with a pattern down over her face, and was fidgeting perpetually with a chain of small moonstones set in gold which hung from her throat to her waist.  Daventry, blinking and twitching, examined documents, used his handkerchief, glanced at his watch, hitched his gown up on his shoulders, looked at Mrs. Clarke and looked away.

Uneasiness, like a monster, seemed crouching in the court as in a lair.

At a quarter-past five, the Judge returned to the bench.  He had received a communication from the jury, who filed in, to say, through their foreman, that they could not agree upon a verdict.  A parley took place between the foreman and the Judge, who made inquiry about their difficulties, answered two questions, and finally dismissed them to further deliberations, urging them strongly to try to arrive at an unanimous conclusion.

“I am willing to stay here till nightfall,” he said, in a loud and almost menacing voice, “if there is any chance of a verdict.”

The jury, looking weary, harassed and very hot, once more disappeared, the Judge left the bench, and the murmuring crowd settled down to another period of waiting.

To Dion it seemed that a great tragedy was impending.  Already Mrs. Clarke had received a blow.  The fact that the jury had publicly announced their disagreement would be given out to all the world by the newspapers, and must surely go against Mrs. Clarke even if she got a verdict ultimately.

“Do you think there is any chance still?” he said to Mrs. Chetwinde.

“Oh, yes.  As I told you, Cynthia always manages to get what she wants.”

“I shouldn’t think she can ever have wanted anything so much as she wants the right verdict to-day.”

“I don’t know that,” Mrs. Chetwinde replied, with a rather disconcerting dryness.

She was using her fan slowly and monotonously, as if, perhaps, she were trying to make her mind calm by the repetition of a physical act.

“I’m sorry the foreman said they couldn’t agree,” Dion said, almost in a whisper.  “Even if the verdict is for Mrs. Clarke, I’m afraid that will go against her.”

“If she wins she wins, and it’s all right.  Cynthia’s not the sort of woman who cares much what the world thinks.  The only thing that really matters is what the world does; and if she gets the verdict the world won’t do anything ­except laugh at Beadon Clarke.”

A loud buzz of conversation rose from the court.  Presently the light began to fade, and the buzz faded with it; then some lights were turned on, and there was a crescendo of voices.  It was possible to see more clearly the multitude of faces, all of them hot, nearly all of them excited and expressive.  A great many people were standing, packed closely together and looking obstinate in their determined curiosity.  Most of them were either staring at, or were trying to stare at Mrs. Clarke, who was now talking to her solicitor.  Esme Darlington was eating a meat lozenge and frowning, evidently discomposed by the jury’s dilemma.  Lady Ermyntrude Clarke had lifted her veil and was whispering eagerly to her son, bending her head, and emphasizing her remarks with excited gestures which seemed to suggest the energy of one already uplifted by triumph.  Beadon Clarke listened with the passivity of a man encompassed by melancholy, and sunk deep in the abyss of shame.  Aristide Dumeny was reading a letter which he held with long-fingered, waxen-white hands very near to his narrow dark eyes.  His close-growing thick hair looked more glossy now that there was artificial light in the court; from the distance its undulations were invisible, and it resembled a cap of some heavy and handsome material drawn carefully down over his head.  Hadi Bey retained his vivid, alert and martial demeanor.  He was twisting his mustaches with a muscular brown hand, not nervously, but with a careless and almost a lively air.  Many women gazed at him as if hypnotized; they found the fez very alluring.  It carried their thoughts to the East; it made them feel that the romance of the East was not very far from them.  Some of them wished it very near, and thought of husbands in silk hats, bowlers, and flat caps of Harris tweed with the dawning of a dull distaste.  The woman just behind Dion was talking busily to her neighbor.  Dion heard her say: 

“Some women always manage to have a good time.  I wish I was one of them.  Dick is a dear, but still ­” She whispered for a minute or two; then out came her voice with, “There must be great chances for a woman in the diplomatic world.  I knew a girl who married an attache and went to Bucharest.  You can have no idea what the Roumanians ­” whisper, whisper, whisper.

That woman was envying Mrs. Clarke, it seemed, but surely not envying her innocence.  Dion began to be conscious of faint breaths from the furnace of desire, and suddenly he saw the gaunt and sickly-smiling head of hypocrisy, like the flat and tremulously moving head of a serpent, lifted up above the court.  Only a little way off Robin, now better, but still “not quite the thing,” was lying in his cozy cot in the nursery of N Little Market Street, with Rosamund sitting beside him.  The window to-day, for once, would probably be shut as a concession to Robin’s indisposition.  A lamp would be burning perhaps.  In fancy, Dion saw Rosamund’s head lit up by a gentle glow, her hair giving out little gleams of gold, as if fire were caught in its meshes.  How was it that her head always suggested to him purity; and not only her purity but the purity of all sweet, sane and gloriously vigorous women ­those women who tread firmly, nobly, in the great central paths of life?  He did not know, but he was certain that the head of no impure, of no lascivious woman could ever look like his Rosamund’s.  That nursery, holding little Robin and his mother in the lamplight, was near to this crowded court, but it was very far away too, as far as heaven is from hell.  It would be good, presently, to go back to it.

Chime after chime dropped down frostily into the almost rancid heat of the court.  Time was sending its warning that night was coming to London.

An epidemic of fidgeting and of coughing seized the crowd, which was evidently beginning to feel the stinging whip of an intense irritation.

“What on earth,” said the voice of a man, expressing the thought which bound all these brains together, “what on earth can the jury be up to?”

Surely by now everything for and against Mrs. Clarke must have been discussed ad nauseam.  Only the vainest of repetitions could be occupying the time of the jury.  People began positively to hate those twelve uninteresting men, torn from their dull occupations to decide a woman’s fate.  Even Mrs. Chetwinde showed vexation.

“This is really becoming ridiculous,” she murmured.  “Even twelve fools should know when to give their folly a rest.”

“I suppose there must be one or two holding out against all argument and persuasion.  Don’t you think so?” said Dion, almost morosely.

“I dare say.  I know a great deal about individual fools, but very little about them in dozens.  The heat is becoming unbearable.”

She sighed deeply and moved in her seat, opening and shutting her fan.

“She must be enduring torment,” muttered Dion.

“Yes; even Cynthia can hardly be proof against this intolerable delay.”

Another dropping down of chimes:  eight o’clock!  A long murmur went through the crowd.  Some one said:  “They’re coming at last.”

Every one moved.  Instinctively Dion leant forward to look at Mrs. Clarke.  He felt very much excited and nervous, almost as if his own fate were about to be decided.  As he looked he saw Mrs. Clarke draw herself up till she seemed taller than usual.  She had a pair of gloves in her lap, and she now began to pull one of these gloves on, slowly and carefully, as if she were thinking about what she was doing.  The jury filed in looking feverish, irritable and battered.  Three or four of them showed piteous and injured expressions.  Two others had the peculiar look of obstinate men who have been giving free rein to their vice, indulging in an orgy of what they call willpower.  Their faces were, at the same time, implacable and ridiculous, but they walked impressively.  The Judge was sent for.  Two or three minutes elapsed before he came in.  During those minutes there was no coughing and scarcely any moving.  The silence in the court was vital.  During it, Dion stared hard at the jury and strove to read the verdict in their faces.  Naturally he failed.  No message came from them to him.

The Judge came back to the bench, looking weary and harsh.

“Do you find that the respondent has been guilty or not guilty of misconduct with the co-respondent, Hadi Bey?” said the clerk of the court.

“We find that the respondent has not been guilty of misconduct with Hadi Bey.”

After a slight pause, speaking in a louder voice than before, the clerk of the court said: 

“Do you find that the respondent has been guilty or not guilty of misconduct with the co-respondent, Aristide Dumeny?”

“We find that the respondent has not been guilty of misconduct with Aristide Dumeny.”

Dion saw the Judge frown.

Slight applause broke out in the court, but it was fitful and uncertain and almost immediately died away.

Mrs. Chetwinde said in a low voice, almost as if to herself: 

“Cynthia has got what she wants ­again.”

Then, after the formalities, the crowd was in movement; the weary and excited people, their curiosity satisfied at last, began to melt away; the young barristers hurried out, eagerly discussing the rights and wrongs of the case; and Mrs. Clarke’s adherents made their way to her to offer her their congratulations.

Daventry was triumphant.  He shook his client’s hand, held it, shook it again, and could scarcely find words to express his excitement and delight.  Even Esme Darlington’s usual careful serenity was for the moment obscured by an emotion eminently human, as he spoke into Mrs. Clarke’s ear the following words of a ripe wisdom: 

“Cynthia, my dear, after this do take my advice and live as others live.  In a conventional world conventionality is the line of least resistance.  Don’t turn to the East unless the whole congregation does it.”

“I shall never forget your self-sacrifice in facing the crowd with me to-day, dear Esme,” was her answer.  “I know how much it cost you.”

“Oh, as to that, for an old friend ­h’m, ha!”

His voice failed in his beard.  He drew forth a beautiful Indian handkerchief ­a gift from his devoted friend the Viceroy of India ­and passed it over a face which looked unusually old.

Mrs. Chetwinde said: 

“I expected you to win, Cynthia.  It was stupid of the jury to be so slow in arriving at the inevitable verdict.  But stupid people are as lethargic as silly ones are swift.  How shall we get to the carriage?  We can’t go out by the public exit.  I hear the crowd is quite enormous, and won’t move.  We must try a side door, if there is one.”

Then Dion held Mrs. Clarke’s hand, and looked down at her haggard but still self-possessed face.  It astonished him to find that she preserved her earnestly observant expression.

“I’m very glad,” was all he found to say.

“Thank you,” she replied, in a voice perhaps slightly more husky than usual.  “I mean to stay on in London for some time.  I’ve got lots of things to settle” ­she paused ­“before I go back to Constantinople.”

“But are you really going back?”

“Of course ­eventually.”

Her voice, nearly drowned by the noise of people departing from the court, sounded to him implacable.

“You heard the hope of the Court that my husband and I would come together again?  Of course we never shall.  But I’m sure I shall get hold of Jimmy.  I know my husband won’t keep him from me.”  She stared at his shoulders.  “I want you to help me with Jimmy’s physical education ­I mean by getting him to that instructor you spoke of.”

“To be sure ­Jenkins,” he said, marveling at her.

“Jenkins ­exactly.  And I hope it will be possible for your wife and me to meet soon, now there’s nothing against it owing to the verdict.”

“Thank you.”

“Do tell her, and see if we can arrange it.”

Dumeny at this moment passed close to them with his friend on his way out of court.  His eyes rested on Mrs. Clarke, and a faint smile went over his face as he slightly raised his hat.

“Good-by,” said Mrs. Clarke to Dion.

And she turned to Sir John Addington.

Dion made his way slowly out into the night, thinking of the unwise life and of the smile on the lips of Dumeny.

CHAPTER VI

That summer saw, among other events of moment, the marriage of Beatrice and Daventry, the definite establishment of Robin as a power in his world, and the beginning of one of those noiseless contests which seem peculiar to women, and which are seldom, if ever, fully comprehended in all their bearings by men.

Beatrice, as she wished it, had a very quiet, indeed quite a hole-and-corner wedding in a Kensington church, of which nobody had ever heard till she was married in it, to the great surprise of its vicar, its verger, and the decent widow woman who swept its pews for a moderate wage.  For their honeymoon she and Daventry disappeared to the Garden of France to make a leisurely tour through the Chateaux country.

Meanwhile Robin, according to his nurse, “was growing something wonderful, and improving with his looks like nothing I ever see before, and me with babies ever since I can remember anything as you may say, a dear!” His immediate circle of wondering admirers was becoming almost extensive, including, as it did, not only his mother and father, his nurse, and the four servants at N Little Market Street, but also Mrs. Leith senior, Bruce Evelin ­now rather a lonely man ­and Mr. Thrush of John’s Court near the Edgware Road.

At this stage of his existence, Rosamund loved Robin reasonably but with a sort of still and holy concentration, which gradually impinged upon Dion like a quiet force which spreads subtly, affecting those in its neighborhood.  There was in it something mystical and, remembering her revelation to him of the desire to enter the religious life which had formerly threatened to dominate her, Dion now fully realized the truth of a remark once made by Mrs. Chetwinde about his wife.  She had called Rosamund “a radiant mystic.”

Now changes were blossoming in Rosamund like new flowers coming up in a garden, and one of these flowers was a beautiful selfishness.  So Dion called it to himself but never to others.  It was a selfishness surely deliberate and purposeful ­an unselfish selfishness, if such a thing can be.  Can the ideal mother, Dion asked himself, be wholly without it?  All that she is, perhaps, reacts upon the child of her bosom, the child who looks up to her as its Providence.  And what she is must surely be at least partly conditioned by what she does and by all her way of life.  The child is her great concern, and therefore she must guard sedulously all the gates by which possible danger to the child might strive to enter in.  This was what Rosamund had evidently made up her mind to do, was beginning to do.  Dion compared her with many of the woman of London who have children and who, nevertheless, continue to lead haphazard, frivolous, utterly thoughtless lives, caring apparently little more for the moral welfare of their children than for the moral welfare of their Pekinese.  Mrs. Clarke had a hatred of “things with wings growing out of their shoulders.”  Rosamund would probably never wish their son to have wings growing out of his shoulders, but if he had little wings on his sandals, like the Hermes, perhaps she would be very happy.  With winged sandals he might take an occasional flight to the gods.  Hermes, of course, was really a rascal, many-sided, and, like most many-sided people and gods, capable of insincerity and even of cunning; but the Hermes of Olympia, their Hermes, was the messenger purged, by Praxiteles of very bit of dross ­noble, manly, pure, serene.  Little Robin bore at present no resemblance to the Hermes, or indeed ­despite the nurse’s statements ­to any one else except another baby; but already it was beginning mysteriously to be possible to foresee the great advance ­long clothes to short clothes, short clothes to knickerbockers, knickerbockers to trousers.  Robin would be a boy, a youth, a man, and what Rosamund was might make all the difference in that Trinity.  The mystic who enters into religion dedicated her life to God.  Rosamund dedicated hers to her boy.  It was the same thing with a difference.  And as the mystic is often a little selfish in shutting out cries of the world ­cries sometimes for human aid which can scarcely be referred from the fellow-creature to God ­so Rosamund was a little selfish, guided by the unusual temperament which was housed within her.  She shut out some of the cries that she might hear Robin’s the better.

Robin’s sudden attack of illness during Mrs. Clarke’s ordeal had been overcome and now seemed almost forgotten.  Rosamund had encountered the small fierce shock of it with an apparent calmness and self-possession which at the time had astonished Dion and roused his admiration.  A baby often comes hardly into the world and slips out of it with the terrible ease of things fated to far-off destinies.  During one night Robin had certainly been in danger.  Perhaps that danger had taught Rosamund exactly how much her child meant to her.  Dion did not know this; he suspected it because, since Robin’s illness, he had become much more sharply aware of the depth of mother-love in Rosamund, of the hovering wings that guarded the nestling.  That efficient guarding implies shutting out was presently to be brought home to him with a definiteness leading to embarrassment.

The little interruptions a baby brings into the lives of a married couple were setting in.  Dion was sure that Rosamund never thought of them as interruptions.  When Robin grew much older, when he was in trousers, and could play games, and appreciate his father’s prowess and God-given capacities in the gymnasium, on the tennis lawn, over the plowland among the partridges, Dion’s turn would come.  Meanwhile, did he actually love Robin?  He thought he did.  He was greatly interested in Robin, was surprised by his abrupt manifestations and almost hypnotized by his outbursts of wrath; when Robin assumed his individual look of mild inquiry, Dion was touched, and had a very tender feeling at his heart.  No doubt all this meant love.  But Dion fully realized that his feeling towards Robin did not compare with Rosamund’s.  It was less intense, less profound, less of the very roots of being.  His love for Robin was a shadow compared with the substance of his love for Rosamund.  How would Rosamund’s two loves compare?  He began to wonder, even sometimes put to himself the questions, “Suppose Robin were to die, how would she take it?  And how would she take it if I were to die?” And then, of course, his mind sometimes did foolish things, asked questions beginning with, “Would she rather ?” He remembered his talks with Rosamund on the Acropolis ­talks never renewed ­and compared the former life without little Robin, with the present life pervaded gently, or vivaciously, or almost furiously by little Robin.  Among the mountains and by the deep-hued seas of Greece he had foreseen and wondered about Robin.  Now Robin was here; the great change was accomplished.  Probably Rosamund and he, Dion, would never again be alone with their love.  Other children, perhaps, would come.  Even if they did not, Robin would pervade their lives, in long clothes, short skirts, knickerbockers, trousers.  He might, of course, some day choose a profession which would carry him to some distant land:  to an Indian jungle or a West African swamp.  But by that time his parents would be middle-aged people.  And how would their love be then?  Dion knew that now, when Rosamund and he were still young, both less than thirty, he would give a hundred Robins, even if they were all his own Robins, to keep his one Rosamund.  That was probably quite natural now, for Robin was really rather inexpressive in the midst of his most unbridled demonstrations.  When he was calm and blew bubbles he had charm; when he was red and furious he had a certain power; when he sneezed he had pathos; when he slept the serenity of him might be felt; but he would mean very much more presently.  He would grow, and surely his father’s love for him would grow.  But could it ever grow to the height, the flowering height, of the husband’s love for Rosamund?  Dion already felt certain that it never could, that it was his destiny to be husband rather than parent, the eternal lover rather than the eternal father.  Rosamund’s destiny was perhaps to be the eternal mother.  She had never been exactly a lover.  Perhaps her remarkable and beautiful purity of disposition had held her back from being that.  Force, energy, vitality, strong feelings, she had; but the peculiar something in which body seems mingled with soul, in which soul seems body and body soul, was apparently lacking in her.  Dion had perhaps never, with full consciousness, missed that element in her till Robin made his appearance; but Robin, in his bubbling innocence, and almost absurd consciousness of himself and of others, did many things that were not unimportant.  He even had the shocking impertinence to open his father’s eyes, and to show him truths in a bright light ­truths which, till now, had remained half-hidden in shadow; babyhood enlightened youth, the youth persisting hardily because it had never sown wild oats.  Robin did not know that; he knew, in fact scarcely anything except when he wanted nourishment and when he desired repose.  He also knew his mother, knew her mystically and knew her greedily, with knowledge which seemed of God, and with an awareness whose parent was perhaps a vital appetite.  At other people he gazed and bubbled but with a certain infantile detachment, though his nurse, of course, declared that she had never known a baby to take such intelligent notice of all created things in its neighborhood.  “He knows,” she asseverated, with the air of one versed in mysteries, “he knows, does little master, who’s who as well as any one, and a deal better than some that prides themselves on this and that, a little upsy-daisy-dear!”

Mrs. Leith senior paid him occasional visits, which Dion found just the least bit trying.  Since Omar had been killed, Dion had felt more solicitous about his mother, who had definitely refused ever to have another dog.  If he had been allowed to give her a dog he would have felt more easy about her, despite Beatrice’s quiet statement of why Omar had meant so much.  As he might not do that, he begged his mother to come very often to Little Market Street and to become intimate with Robin.  But when he saw her with Robin he was generally embarrassed, although she was obviously enchanted with that gentleman, for whose benefit she was amazingly prodigal of nods and becks and wreathed smiles.  It was a pity, he thought, that his mother was at moments so apparently elaborate.  He felt her elaboration the more when it was contrasted with the transparent simplicity of Rosamund.  Even Robin, he fancied, was at moments rather astonished by it, and perhaps pushed on towards a criticism at present beyond the range of his powers.  But Mrs. Leith’s complete self-possession, even when immersed in the intricacies of a baby-language totally unintelligible to her son, made it impossible to give her a hint to be a little less ­well, like herself when at N.  So he resigned himself to a faint discomfort which he felt sure was shared by Rosamund, although neither of them ever spoke of it.  But they never discussed his mother, and always assumed that she was ideal both as mother-in-law and grandmother.  She was Robin’s godmother and had given him delightful presents.  Bruce Evelin and Daventry were his godfathers.

Bruce Evelin now lived alone in the large house in Great Cumberland Place.  He made no complaint of his solitude, which indeed he might be said to have helped to bring about by his effective, though speechless, advocacy of Daventry’s desire.  But it was obvious to affectionate eyes that he sometimes felt rather homeless, and that he was happy to be in the little Westminster home where such a tranquil domesticity reigned.  Dion sometimes felt as if Bruce Evelin were watching over that home in a wise old man’s way, rather as Rosamund watched over Robin, with a deep and still concentration.  Bruce Evelin had, he confessed, “a great feeling” for Robin, whom he treated with quiet common sense as a responsible entity, bearing, with a matchless wisdom, that entity’s occasional lapses from decorum.  Once, for instance, Robin chose Bruce Evelin’s arms unexpectedly as a suitable place to be sick in, without drawing down upon himself any greater condemnation than a quiet, “How lucky he selected a godfather as his receptacle!”

And Mr. Thrush of John’s Court?  One evening, when he returned home, Dion found that old phenomenon in the house paying his respects to Robin.  He was quite neatly dressed, and wore beneath a comparatively clean collar a wisp of black tie that was highly respectable, though his top hat, deposited in the hall, was still as the terror that walketh in darkness.  His poor old gray eyes were pathetic, and his long, battered old face was gently benign; but his nose, fiery and tremendous as ever, still made proclamation of his “failing.”  Dion knew that Mr. Thrush had already been two or three times to see Robin, and had wondered about it with some amusement.  “Where will your cult for Mr. Thrush lead you?” he had laughingly said to Rosamund.  And then he had forgotten “the phenomenon,” as he sometimes called Mr. Thrush.  But now, when he actually beheld Mr. Thrush in his house, seated on a chair in the nursery, with purple hands folded over a seedy, but carefully brushed, black coat, he genuinely marveled.

Mr. Thrush rose up at his entrance, quite unself-conscious and self-possessed, and as Dion, concealing his surprise, greeted the visitor, Rosamund, who was showing Robin, remarked: 

“Mr. Thrush has great ideas on hygiene, Dion.  He quite agrees with us about not wrapping children in cotton-wool.”

“Your conceptions are Doric, too, in fact?” said Dion to Thrush, in the slightly rough or bluff manner which he now sometimes assumed.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say exactly that, sir,” said Mr. Thrush, speaking with a sort of gentleness which was almost refined.  “But having been a chemist in a very good way of business ­just off Hanover Square ­during the best years of my life, I have my views, foolish or perhaps the reverse, on the question of infants.  My motto, so far as I have one, is, Never cosset.”

He turned towards Robin, who, from his mother’s arms, sent him a look of mild inquiry, and reiterated, with plaintive emphasis, “Never cosset!”

“There, Dion!” said Rosamund, with a delicious air of genial appreciation which made Mr. Thrush gently glow.

“And I’ll go further,” pursued that authority, lifting a purple hand and moving his old head to give emphasis to his deliverance, “I’ll go further even than that.  Having retired from the pharmaceutical brotherhood I’ll say this:  If you can do it, avoid drugs.  Chemists” ­he leaned forward and emphatically lowered his voice almost to a whisper ­“Chemists alone know what harm they do.”

“By Jove, though, and do they?” said Dion heartily.

“Terrible, sir, terrible!  Some people’s insides that I know of ­used to know of, perhaps I should say ­must be made of iron to deal with all the medicines they put into ’em.  Oh, keep your baby’s inside free from all such abominations!” (He loomed gently over Robin, who continued to stare at him with an expression of placid interrogation.) “Keep it away from such things as the Sampson Syrup, Mother Maybrick’s infant tablets, Price’s purge for the nursery, Tinkler’s tone-up for tiny tots, Ada Lane’s pills for the poppets, and above and before all, from Professor Jeremiah T. Iplock’s ‘What baby wants’ at two-and-sixpence the bottle, or in tabloid form for the growing child, two-and-eight the box.  Keep his inside clear of all such, and you’ll be thankful, and he’ll bless you both on his bended knees when he comes to know his preservation.”

“He’ll never have them, Mr. Thrush,” said Rosamund, with a sober voice and twinkling eyes.  “Never.”

“Bless you, ma’am, for those beautiful words.  And now really I must be going.”

“You’ll find tea in the housekeeper’s room, Mr. Thrush, as usual,” said Rosamund.

“And very kind of you to have it there, I’m sure, ma’am!” the old gentleman gallantly replied as he made his wavering adieux.

At the door he turned round to face the nursery once more, lifted one hand in a manner almost apostolic, and uttered the final warning “Never cosset!” Then he evaporated, not without a sort of mossy dignity, and might be heard tremblingly descending to the lower regions.

“Rose, since when do we have a housekeeper’s room?” asked Dion, touching Robin’s puckers with a gentle fore-finger.

“I can’t call it the servants’ hall to him, poor old man.  And I like to give him tea.  It may wean him from ­” An expressive look closed the sentence.

That night, at last, Dion drew from her an explanation of her Thrush cult.  On the evening when Mr. Thrush had rescued her in the fog, as they walked slowly to Great Cumberland Place, he had told her something of his history.  Rosamund had a great art in drawing from people the story of their troubles when she cared to do so.  Her genial and warm-hearted sympathy was an almost irresistible lure.  Mr. Thrush’s present fate had been brought about by a tragic circumstance, the death of his only child, a girl of twelve, who had been run over by an omnibus in Oxford Circus and killed on the spot.  Left alone with a peevish, nagging wife who had never suited him, or, as he expressed it, “studied” him in any way, he had gone down the hill till he had landed near the bottom.  All his love had been fastened on his child, and sorrow had not strengthened but had embittered him.

“But to me he seems a gentle old thing,” Dion said, when Rosamund told him this.

“He’s very bitter inside, poor old chap, but he looks upon us as friends.  He’s taken sorrow the wrong way.  That’s how it is.  I’m trying to get him to look at things differently, and Robin’s helping me.”

“Already!” said Dion, smiling, yet touched by her serious face.

“Yes.  He’s an unconscious agent.  Poor old Mr. Thrush has never learnt the lesson of our dear Greek tombs:  farewell!  He hasn’t been able to say that simply and beautifully, leaving all in other hands.  And so he’s the poor old wreck we know.  I want to get him out of it if I can.  He came into my life on a night of destiny too.”

But she explained nothing more.  And she left Dion wondering just how she would receive a sorrow such as had overtaken Mr. Thrush.  Would she be able to submit as those calm and simple figures on the tombs which she loved appeared to be submitting?  Would she let what she loved pass away into the shades with a brave and noble, “Farewell”?  Would she take the hand of Sorrow, that hand of steel and ice, as one takes the hand of a friend ­stern, terrible, unfathomed, never to be fathomed in this world, but a friend?  He wondered, but, loving her with that love which never ceased to grow within him, he prayed that he might never know.  She seemed born to shed happiness and to be happy, and indeed he could scarcely imagine her wretched.

It was after the explanation of Mr. Thrush’s exact relation to Rosamund that the silent contest began in the waning summer when London was rather arid, and even the Thames looked hot between its sluggish banks of mud.

After the trial of her divorce case was over, Mrs. Clarke had left London and gone into the country for a little while, to rest in a small house possessed by Esme Darlington at Hook Green, a fashionable part of Surrey.  At, and round about, Hook Green various well-known persons played occasionally at being rural; it suited Mrs. Clarke very well to stay for a time among them under Mr. Darlington’s ample and eminently respectable wing.  She hated being careful, but even she, admonished by Mr. Darlington, realized that immediately after emerging from the shadow of a great scandal she had better play propriety for a time.  It really must be “playing,” for, as had been proved at the trial, she was a thoroughly proper person who hadn’t troubled to play hitherto.  So she rested at Hook Green, till the season was over, with Miss Bainbridge, an old cousin of Esme’s; and Esme “ran down” for Saturdays and Sundays, and “ran up” from Mondays to Saturdays, thus seeing something of the season and also doing his chivalrous devoir by “poor dear Cynthia who had had such a cruel time of it.”

The season died, and Mr. Darlington then settled down for a while at Pinkney’s Place, as his house was called, and persuaded Mrs. Clarke to lengthen her stay there till the end of August.  He would invite a few of the people likely to “be of use” to her under the present circumstances, and by September things would be “dying down a little,” with all the shooting parties of the autumn beginning, and memories of the past season growing a bit gray and moldy.  Then Mrs. Clarke could do what she liked “within reason, of course, and provided she gave Constantinople a wide berth.”  This she had not promised to do, but she seldom made promises.

Rosamund had expressed to Daventry her pleasure in the result of the trial, but in the rather definitely detached manner which had always marked her personal aloofness from the whole business of the deciding of Mrs. Clarke’s innocence or guilt.  She had only spoken once again of the case to Dion, when he had come to tell her the verdict.  Then she had said how glad she was, and what a relief it must be to Mrs. Clarke, especially after the hesitation of the jury.  Dion had touched on Mrs. Clarke’s great self-possession, and ­Rosamund had begun to tell him how much better little Robin was.  He had not repeated to Rosamund Mrs. Clarke’s final words to him.  There was no necessity to do that just then.

Mrs. Clarke stayed at Hook Green till the end of August without making any attempt to know Rosamund.  By that time Dion had come to the conclusion that she had forgotten about the matter.  Perhaps she had merely had a passing whim which had died.  He was not sorry, indeed, he was almost actively glad, for he was quite sure Rosamund had no wish to make Mrs. Clarke’s acquaintance.  At the beginning of September, however, when he had just come back to work after a month in camp which had hardened him and made him as brown as a berry, he received the following note: 

“CLARIDGE’S HOTEL, 2 September, 1897

“DEAR Mr. LEITH, ­What of that charming project of bringing about a meeting between your wife and me?  Esme Darlington is always talking of her beauty and talent, and you know my love of the one and the other.  Beauty is the consolation of the world; talent the incentive to action stirring our latent vitality.  In your marriage you are fortunate; in mine I have been unfortunate.  You were very kind to me when things were tiresome.  I feel a desire to see your happiness.  I’m here arranging matters with my solicitor, and expect to be here off and on for several months.  Perhaps October will see you back in town, but if you happen to be in this dusty nothingness now, you might come and see me one day. ­Yours with goodwill,

“CYNTHIA CLARKE

“P.  S. ­My husband and I are separated, of course, but I have my boy a good deal with me.  He will be up with me to-morrow.  I very much want to take him to that physical instructor you spoke of to me.  I forget the name.  Is it Hopkins?”

As Dion read this note in the little house he felt the soft warm grip of Stamboul.  Rosamund and Robin were staying at Westgate till the end of September; he would go down there every week from Saturday till Monday.  It was now a Monday evening.  Four London days lay before him.  He put away the letter and resolved to answer it on the morrow.  This he did, explaining that his wife was by the sea and would not be back till the autumn.  He added that the instructor’s name was not Hopkins but Jenkins, and gave Mrs. Clarke the address of the gymnasium.  At the end of his short note he expressed his intention of calling at Claridge’s, but did not say when he would come.  He thought he would not fix the day and the hour until he had been to Westgate.  On a postcard Mrs. Clarke thanked him for Jenkins’s address, and concluded with “Suggest your own day, or come and dine if you like.  Perhaps, as you’re alone, you’ll prefer that. ­C.  C.”

At Westgate Dion showed Rosamund Mrs. Clarke’s letter.  As she read it he watched her, but could gather nothing from her face.  She was looking splendidly well and, he thought, peculiarly radiant.  A surely perfect happiness gazed bravely out from her mother’s eyes, changed in some mysterious way since the coming of Robin.

“Well?” he said, as she gave him back the letter.

“It’s very kind of her.  Esme Darlington turns us all into swans, doesn’t he?  He’s a good-natured enchanter.  How thankful she must be that it’s all right about her boy.  Oh, here’s Robin!  Robino, salute your father!  He’s a hard-bitten military man, and some day ­who knows? ­he’ll have to fight for his country.  Dion, look at him!  Now isn’t he trying to salute?”

“And that he is, ma’am!” cried the ecstatic nurse.  “He knows, a boy!  It’s trumpets, sir, and drums he’s after already.  He’ll fight some day with the best of them.  Won’t he then, a marchy-warchy-umtums?”

And Robin made reply with active fists and feet and martial noises, assuming alternate expressions of severe decision almost worthy of a Field-Marshal, and helpless bewilderment that suggested a startled puppy.  He was certainly growing in vigor and beginning to mean a good deal more than he had meant at first.  Dion was more deeply interested in him now, and sometimes felt as if Robin returned the interest, was beginning to be able to assemble and concentrate his faculties at certain moments.  Certainly Robin already played an active part in the lives of his parents.  Dion realized that when, on the following Monday, he returned to town without having settled anything with regard to Mrs. Clarke.  Somehow Robin had always intervened when Dion had drawn near to the subject of the projected acquaintance between the woman who kept the door of her life and the woman who, innocently, followed the flitting light of desire.  There were the evenings, of course, but somehow they were not propitious for a discussion of social values.  Although Robin retired early, he was apt to pervade the conversation.  And then Rosamund went away at intervals to have a look at him, and Dion filled up the time by smoking a cigar on the cliff edge.  The clock struck ten-thirty ­bedtime at Westgate ­before one had at all realized how late it was getting; and it was out of the question to bother about things on the edge of sleep.  That would have made for insomnia.  The question of Mrs. Clarke could easily wait till the autumn, when Rosamund would be back in town.  It was impossible for the two women to know each other when the one was at Claridge’s and the other at Westgate.  Things would arrange themselves naturally in the autumn.  Dion never said to himself that Rosamund did not intend to know Mrs. Clarke, but he did say to himself that Mrs. Clarke intended to know Rosamund.

He wondered a little about that.  Why should Mrs. Clarke be so apparently keen on making the acquaintance of Rosamund?  Of course, Rosamund was delightful, and was known to be delightful.  But Mrs. Clarke must know heaps of attractive people.  It really was rather odd.  He decidedly wished that Mrs. Clarke hadn’t happened to get the idea into her head, for he didn’t care to press Rosamund on the subject.  The week passed, and another visit to Westgate, and he had not been to Claridge’s.  In the second week another note came to him from Mrs. Clarke.

“CLARIDGE’S, ETC.

“DEAR Mr. LEITH, ­I’m enchanted with Jenkins.  He’s a trouvaille.  My boy goes every day to the ‘gym,’ as he calls it, and is getting on splendidly.  We are both grateful to you, and hope to tell you so.  Come whenever you feel inclined, but only then.  I love complete liberty too well ever to wish to deprive another of it ­even if I could.  How wise of your wife to stay by the sea.  I hope it’s doing wonders for the baby who (mercifully) isn’t wonderful. ­Yours sincerely,

“CYNTHIA CLARKE”

After receiving this communication Dion felt that he simply must go to see Mrs. Clarke, and he called at the hotel and asked for her about five-thirty on the following afternoon.  She was out, and he left his card, feeling rather relieved.  Next morning he had a note regretting she had missed him, and asking him, “when” he came again, to let her know beforehand at what time he meant to arrive so that she might be in.  He thanked her, and promised to do this, but he did not repeat his visit.  By this time, quite unreasonably he supposed, he had begun to feel decidedly uncomfortable about the whole affair.  Yet, when he considered it fully and fairly, he told himself that he was a fool to imagine that there could be anything in it which was not quite usual and natural.  He had been sympathetic to Mrs. Clarke when she was passing through an unpleasant experience; he was Daventry’s good friend; he was also a friend of Mrs. Chetwinde and of Esme Darlington; naturally, therefore, Mrs. Clarke was inclined to number him among those who had “stuck to her” when she was being cruelly attacked.  Where was the awkwardness in the situation?  After denying to himself that there was any awkwardness he quite suddenly and quite clearly realized one evening that such denial was useless.  There was awkwardness, and it arose simply from Rosamund’s passive resistance to the faint pressure ­he thought it amounted to that ­applied by Mrs. Clarke.  This it was which had given him, which gave him still, a sensation obscure, but definite, of contest.

Mrs. Clarke meant to know Rosamund, and Rosamund didn’t mean to know Mrs. Clarke.  Well, then, the obvious thing for him to do was to keep out of Mrs. Clarke’s way.  In such a matter Rosamund must do as she liked.  He had no intention of attempting to force upon her any one, however suitable as an acquaintance or even as a friend, whom she didn’t want to know.  He loved her far too well to do that.  He decided not to mention Mrs. Clarke again to Rosamund when he went down to Westgate; but somehow or other her name came up, and her boy was mentioned, too.

“Is he still with his mother?” Rosamund asked.

“Yes.  He’s nearly eleven, I believe.  She takes him to Jenkins for exercise.  She’s very fond of him, I think.”

After a moment of silence Rosamund simply said, “Poor child!” and then spoke of something else, but in those two words, said as she had said them, Dion thought he heard a definite condemnation of Mrs. Clarke.  He began to wonder whether Rosamund, although she had not read a full, or, so far as he knew, any account of the case in the papers, had somehow come to know a good deal about the unwise life of Constantinople.  Friends came to see her in London; she knew several people at Westgate; report of a cause célèbre floats in the air; he began to believe she knew.

At the end of September, just before Rosamund was to return to London for the autumn and winter, Mrs. Clarke wrote to Dion again.

“CLARIDGE’S, 28 September, 1897

“DEAR Mr. LEITH, ­I’m so sorry to bother you, but I wonder whether you can spare me a moment.  It’s about my boy.  He seems to me to have strained himself with his exercises.  Jenkins, as you probably know, has gone away for a fortnight’s holiday, so I can’t consult him.  I feel a little anxious.  You’re an athlete, I know, and could set me right in a moment if I’m making a fuss about nothing.  The strain seems to be in the right hip.  Is that possible? ­Yours sincerely,

“CYNTHIA CLARKE”

Dion didn’t know how to refuse this appeal, so he fixed an hour, went to Claridge’s, and had an interview with Mrs. Clarke and her son, Jimmy Clarke.  When he went up to her sitting-room he felt rather uncomfortable.  He was thinking of her invitation to dinner, and to call again, of his lack of response.  She must certainly be thinking of them, too.  But when he was with her his discomfort died away before her completely natural and oddly impersonal manner.  Dinners, visits, seemed far away from her thoughts.  She was apparently concentrated on her boy, and seemed to be thinking of him, not at all of Dion.  Had Dion been a vain man he might have been vexed by her indifference; as he was not vain, he felt relieved, and so almost grateful to her.  Jimmy, too, helped to make things go easily.  The young rascal, a sturdy, good-looking boy, with dark eyes brimming over with mischief, took tremendously to Dion at first sight.

“I say,” he remarked, “you must be jolly strong!  May I?”

He felt Dion’s biceps, and added, with a sudden profound gravity: 

“Well, I’m blowed!  Mater, he’s almost as hard as Jenkins.”

His mother gave Dion a swift considering look, and then at once began to consult him about Jimmy’s hip.  The visit ended with an application by Dion of Elliman’s embrocation, for which one of the hotel page-boys was sent to the nearest chemist.

“I say, mind you come again, Mr. Leith!” vociferated Jimmy, when Dion was going.  “You’re better than doctors, you know.”

Mrs. Clarke did not back up her son’s frank invitation.  She only thanked Dion quietly in her husky voice, and bade him good-by with an “I know how busy you must be, and how difficult you must find it ever to pay a call.  You’ve been very good to us.”  At the door she added, “I’ve never seen Jimmy take so much to anyone as to you.”  As Dion went down the stairs something in him was gently glowing.  He was glad that young rascal had taken to him at sight.  The fact gave him confidence when he thought of Robin and the future.

It occurred to him, as he turned into the Greville Club, that Mrs. Clarke had not once mentioned Rosamund during his visit.

CHAPTER VII

When Rosamund, Robin and the nurse came back to London on the last day of September, Beatrice and Daventry were settled in their home.  They had taken a flat in De Lorne Gardens, Kensington, high up on the seventh floor of a big building, which overlooked from a distance the trees of Kensington Gardens.  Their friends soon began to call on them, and one of the first to mount up in the lift to their “hill-top,” as Daventry called their seventh floor, was Mrs. Clarke.  A few nights after her call the Daventrys dined in Little Market Street, and Daventry, whose happiness had raised him not only to the seventh-floor flat, but also to the seventh heaven, mentioned that she had been, and that they were going to dine with her at Claridge’s on the following night.  He enlarged, almost with exuberance, upon her savoir-vivre, her knowledge and taste, and said Beattie was delighted with her.  Beatrice did not deny it.  She was never exuberant, but she acknowledged that she had found Mrs. Clarke attractive and interesting.

“A lot of the clever ones are going to-morrow,” said Daventry.  He mentioned several, both women and men, among them a lady who was famed for her exclusiveness as well as for her brains.

Evidently Mrs. Chetwinde had been speaking by the book when she had said at the trial, “If she wins, she wins, and it’s all right.  If she gets the verdict, the world won’t do anything, except laugh at Beadon Clarke.”  No serious impression had apparently been left upon society by the first disagreement of the jury.  The “wild mind in the innocent body” had been accepted for what it was.  And perhaps now, chastened by a sad experience, the wild mind was on the way to becoming tame.  Dion wondered if it were so.  After dinner he was undeceived by Daventry, who told him over their cigars that Mrs. Clarke was positively going back to live in Constantinople, and had already taken a flat there, “against every one’s advice.”  Beadon Clarke had got himself transferred, and was to be sent to Madrid, so she wouldn’t run against him; but nevertheless she was making a great mistake.

“However,” Daventry concluded, “there’s something fine about her persistence; and of course a guilty woman would never dare to go back, even after an acquittal.”

“No,” said Dion, thinking of the way his hand had been held in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room.  “I suppose not.”

“I wonder when Rosamund will get to know her,” said Daventry, with perhaps a slightly conscious carelessness.

“Never, perhaps,” said Dion, with equal carelessness.  “Often one lives for years in London without knowing, or even ever seeing, one’s next-door neighbor.”

“To be sure!” said Daventry.  “One of London’s many advantages, or disadvantages, as the case may be.”

And he began to talk about Whistler’s Nocturnes.  Dion had never happened to tell Daventry about Jimmy Clarke’s strained hip and his own application of Elliman’s embrocation.  He had told Rosamund, of course, and she had said that if Robin ever strained himself she should do exactly the same thing.

That night, when the Daventrys had gone, Dion asked Rosamund whether she thought Beattie was happy.  She hesitated for a moment, then she said with her usual directness: 

“I’m not sure that she is, Dion.  Guy is a dear, kind, good husband to her, but there’s something homeless about Beattie somehow.  She’s living in that pretty little flat in De Lorne Gardens, and yet she seems to me a wanderer.  But we must wait; she may find what she’s looking for.  I pray to God that she will.”

She did not explain; he guessed what she meant.  Had she, too, been a wanderer at first, and had she found what she had been looking for?  While Rosamund was speaking he had been pitying Guy.  When she had finished he wondered whether he had ever had cause to pity some one else ­now and then.  Despite the peaceful happiness of his married life there was a very faint coldness at, or near to, his heart.  It came upon him like a breath of frost stealing up out of the darkness to one who, standing in a room lit and warmed by a glowing fire, opens a window and lets in for a moment a winter night.  But he shut his window quickly, and he turned to look at the fire and to warm his hands at its glow.

Mrs. Clarke rapidly established a sort of intimacy with the Daventrys.  As Daventry had helped to fight for her, and genuinely delighted in her faculties, this was very natural; for Beatrice, unlike Rosamund, was apt to take her color gently from those with whom she lived, desiring to please them, not because she was vain and wished to be thought charming, but because she had an unusually sweet disposition and wished to be charming.  She was sincere, and if asked a direct question always returned an answer that was true; but she sometimes fell in with an assumption from a soft desire to be kind.  Daventry quite innocently assumed that she found Mrs. Clarke as delightful as he did.  Perhaps she did; perhaps she did not.  However it was, she gently accepted Mrs. Clarke as a friend.

Dion, of course, knew of this friendship; and so did Rosamund.  She never made any comment upon it, and showed no interest in it.  But her life that autumn was a full one.  She had Robin; she had the house to look after, “my little house”; she had Dion in the evenings; she had quantities of friends and acquaintances; and she had her singing.  She had now definitely given up singing professionally.  Her very short career as an artist was closed.  But she had begun to practise diligently again, and showed by this assiduity that she loved music not for what she could gain by it, but for its own sake.  Of her friends and acquaintances she saw much less than formerly.  Many of them complained that they never could get a glimpse of her now, that she shut them out, that “not at home” had become a parrot-cry on the lips of her well-trained parlor-maid, that she cared for nobody now that she had a husband and a baby, that she was self-engrossed, etc., etc.  But they could not be angry with her; for if they did happen to meet her, or if she did happen to be “at home” when they called, they always found her the genial, radiant, kind and friendly Rosamund of old; full, apparently, of all the former interest in them and their doings, eager to welcome and make the most of their jokes and good stories, sympathetic towards their troubles and sorrows.  To Dion she once said in explanation of her withdrawal from the rather bustling life which keeping up with many friends and acquaintances implies: 

“I think one sometimes has to make a choice between living deeply in the essentials and just paddling up to one’s ankles in the non-essentials.  I want to live deeply if I can, and I am very happy in quiet.  I can hear only in peace the voices that mean most to me.”

“I remember what you said to me once in the Acropolis,” he answered.

“What was that?”

“You said, ’Oh, Dion, if you knew how something in me cares for freshness and for peace.’”

“You remember my very words!”

“Yes.”

“Then you understand?”

“And besides,” he said slowly, and as if with some hesitation, “you used to long for a very quiet life, for the religious life; didn’t you?”

“Once, but it seems such ages ago.”

“And yet Robin’s not a year old yet.”

She looked at him with a sudden, and almost intense, inquiry; he was smiling at her.

“Robino maestro di casa!” he added.

And they both laughed.

Towards the end of November one day Daventry said to Dion in the Greville Club: 

“Beatrice is going to give a dinner somewhere, probably at the Carlton.  She thought of the twenty-eighth.  Are Rosamund and you engaged that night?  She wants you, of course.”

“No.  We don’t go out much.  Rose is an early rooster, as she calls it.”

“Then the twenty-eighth would do capitally.”

“Shall I tell Rose?”

“Yes, do.  Beattie will write too, or tell Rosamund when she sees her.”

“Whom are you going to have?”

“Oh, Mrs. Chetwinde for one, and ­we must see whom we can get.  We’ll try to make it cheery and not too imbecile.”

As Daventry was speaking, Dion felt certain that the dinner had an object, and he thought he knew what that object was.  But he only said: 

“It’s certain to be jolly, and I always enjoy myself at the Carlton.”

“Even with bores?” said Daventry, unable to refrain from pricking a bubble, although he guessed the reason why Dion had blown it.

“Anyhow, I’m sure you won’t invite bores,” said Dion, trying to preserve a casual air, and wishing, for the moment, that he and his friend were densely stupid instead of quite intelligent.

“Pray that Beattie and I may be guided in our choice,” returned Daventry, going to pick up the “Saturday Review.”

Rosamund said of course she would go on the twenty-eighth and help Beattie with her dinner.  She had accepted before she asked who were the invited guests.  Beattie, who was evidently quite guileless in the matter, told her at once that Mrs. Clarke was among them.  Rosamund said nothing, and appeared to be looking forward to the twenty-eighth.  She even got a new gown for it, and Dion began to feel that he had made a mistake in supposing that Rosamund had long ago decided not to know Mrs. Clarke.  He was very glad, for he had often felt uncomfortable about Mrs. Clarke, who, he supposed, must have believed that his wife did not wish to meet her, as her reiterated desire to make Rosamund’s acquaintance had met with no response.  She had, he thought, shown the tact of a lady and of a thorough woman of the world in not pressing the point, and in never seeking to continue her acquaintance, or dawning friendship, with him since his wife had come back to town.  He felt a strong desire now to be pleasant and cordial to her, and to show her how charming and sympathetic his Rosamund was.  He looked forward to this dinner as he seldom looked forward to any social festivity.

On the twenty-sixth of November Robin had a cold!  On the twenty-seventh it was worse, and he developed a little hard cough which was rather pathetic, and which seemed to surprise and interest him a good deal.  Rosamund was full of solicitude.  On the night of the twenty-seventh she said she would sit up with Robin.  The nurse protested, but Rosamund was smilingly firm.

“I want you to have a good night, Nurse,” she said.  “You’re too devoted and take too much out of yourself.  And, besides, I shouldn’t sleep.  I should be straining my ears all the time to hear whether my boy was coughing or not.”

Nurse had to give in, of course.  But Dion was dismayed when he heard of the project.

“You’ll be worn out!” he exclaimed.

“No, I shan’t But even if I were it wouldn’t matter.”

“But I want you to look your radiant self for Beattie’s dinner.”

“Oh ­the dinner!”

It seemed she had forgotten it.

“Robin comes first,” she said firmly, after a moment of silence.

And she sat up that night in an arm-chair by the nursery fire, ministering at intervals to the child, who seemed impressed and heartened in his coughings by his mother’s presence.

On the following day she was rather tired, the cough was not abated, and when Dion came back from business he learnt that she had telegraphed to Beattie to give up the dinner.  He was very much disappointed.  But she did really look tired; Robin’s cough was audible in the quiet house; the telegram had gone, and of course there was nothing more to be done.  Dion did not even express his disappointment; but he begged Rosamund to go very early to bed, and offered to sleep in a separate room if his return late was likely to disturb her.  She agreed that, perhaps, that would be best.  So, at about eleven-thirty that night, Dion made his way to their spare room, walking tentatively lest a board should creak and awaken Rosamund.

Everybody had missed her and had made inquiries about her, except Mrs. Clarke and Daventry.  The latter had not mentioned her in Dion’s hearing.  But he was very busy with his guests.  Mrs. Clarke had apparently not known that Rosamund had been expected at the dinner, for when Dion, who had sat next her, had said something about the unfortunate reason for Rosamund’s absence, Mrs. Clarke had seemed sincerely surprised.

“But I thought your wife had quite given up going out since her child was born?” she had said.

“Oh no.  She goes out sometimes.”

“I had no idea she did.  But now I shall begin to be disappointed and to feel I’ve missed something.  You shouldn’t have told me.”

It was quite gravely and naturally said.  As he went into the spare room, Dion remembered the exact tone of Mrs. Clarke’s husky voice in speaking it, the exact expression in her eyes.  They were strange eyes, he thought, unlike any other eyes he had seen.  In them there was often a look that seemed both intent and remote.  Their gaze was very direct but it was not piercing.  There was melancholy in the eyes but there was no demand for sympathy.  When Dion thought of the expression in Rosamund’s eyes he realized how far from happiness, and even from serenity, Mrs. Clarke must be, and he could not help pitying her.  Yet she never posed as une femme incomprise, or indeed as anything.  She was absolutely simple and natural.  He had enjoyed talking to her.  Despite her gravity she was, he thought, excellent company, a really interesting woman and strongly individual.  She seemed totally devoid of the little tiresomenesses belonging to many woman ­tiresomenesses which spring out of vanity and affectation, the desire of possession, the uneasy wish to “cut out” publicly other women.  Mrs. Clarke would surely never “manage” a man.  If she held a man it would be with the listless and yet imperative grip of Stamboul.  The man might go if he would, but ­would he want to go?

In thinking of Mrs. Clarke, Dion of course always considered her with the detached spectator’s mind.  No woman on earth was of real importance to him except Rosamund.  His mother he did not consciously count among women.  She was to him just the exceptional being, the unique and homely manifestation a devoted mother is to the son who loves her without thinking about it; not numbered among women or even among mothers.  She stood to him for protective love unquestioning, for interest in him and all his doings unwavering, for faith in his inner worth undying, for the Eternities without beginning or ending; but probably he did not know it.  Of Rosamund, what she was, what she meant in his life, he was intensely, even secretly, almost savagely conscious.  In Mrs. Clarke he was more interested than he happened to be in any of the women who dwelt in the great world of those whom he did not love and never could love.

Had the dinner-party he had just been to been arranged by Daventry in order that Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke might meet in a perfectly natural way?  If so, it must have been Daventry’s idea and not Mrs. Clarke’s.  Dion had a feeling that Daventry had been vexed by Rosamund’s defection.  He knew his friend very well.  It was not quite natural that Daventry had not mentioned Rosamund.  But why should Daventry strongly wish Mrs. Clarke and Rosamund to meet if Mrs. Clarke had not indicated a desire to know Rosamund?  Daventry was an enthusiastic adherent of Mrs. Clarke’s.  He had, Dion knew, a chivalrous feeling for her.  Having helped to win her case, any slight put upon her would be warmly resented by him.

Had Rosamund put upon her a slight?  Had she deliberately avoided the dinner?

Dion was on the point of getting into the spare-room bed when he asked himself that question.  As he pulled back the clothes he heard a dry little sound.  It was Robin’s cough.  He stole to the door and opened it.  As he did so he saw the tail of Rosamund’s dressing-gown disappearing over the threshold of the nursery.  The nursery door shut softly behind her, and Dion got into bed feeling heartily ashamed of his suspicion.  How low it was to search for hidden motives in such a woman as Rosamund.  He resolved never to do that again.  He lay in bed listening, but he did not hear Robin’s cough again, and he wondered if the child was already old enough to be what nurses call “artful,” whether he had made use of his little affliction to get hold of his providence in the night.

What a mystery was the relation of mother and little child!  He lay for a long while musing about it.  Why hadn’t he followed Rosamund over the threshold of the nursery just now?  The mystery had held him back.

Was it greater than the mystery of the relation of man to woman in a love such as his for Rosamund?  He considered it, but he was certain that he could not fathom it.  No man, he felt sure, knew or ever could know how a mother like Rosamund, that is an intensely maternal mother, regarded her child when he was little and dependent on her; how she loved him, what he meant to her.  And no doubt the gift of the mother to the child was subtly reciprocated by the child.  But just how?

Dion could not remember at all what he had felt, or how he had regarded his mother when he was nine months old.  Presently he recalled Hermes and the child in that remote and hushed room hidden away in the green wilds of Elis; he even saw them before him ­saw the beautiful face of the Hermes, saw the child’s stretched-out arm.

Elis!  He had been wonderfully happy there, far away in the smiling wilderness.  Would he ever be there again?  And, if fate did indeed lead his steps thither, would he again be wonderfully happy?  Of one thing he was certain; that he would never see Elis, would never see Hermes and the child again, unless Rosamund was with him.  She had made the green wilderness to blossom as the rose.  She only could make his life to blossom.  He depended upon her terribly ­terribly.  Always that love of his was growing.  People, especially women, often said that the love of a man was quickly satisfied, more quickly than a woman’s, that the masculine satisfaction was soon followed by satiety.  Love such as that was only an appetite, a species of lust.  Such a woman as Rosamund could not awaken mere lust.  For her a man might have desire, but only the desire that every great love of a man for a woman encloses.  And how utterly different that was from physical lust.

He thought of the maidens upholding the porch of the Erechtheion.  His Rosamund descended from them, was as pure, as serene in her goodness, as beautiful as they were.

In thinking of the beloved maidens he did not think of them as marble.

Before he went to sleep Dion had realized that, since Rosamund was awake, the reason for his coming to the spare room did not exist.  Nevertheless he did not go to their bedroom that night.  Robin’s little dry cough still sounded in his ears.  To-night was Robin’s kingdom.

In a day or two Robin was better, in a week he was perfectly well.  If he had not chanced to catch cold, would Rosamund have worn that new evening-gown at the Carlton dinner?

On that question Dion had a discussion with Daventry which was disagreeable to him.  One day Daventry, who had evidently been, in silence, debating whether to speak or not, said to him: 

“Oh, Dion, d’you mind if I use a friend’s privilege and say something I very much want to say, but which you mayn’t be so keen to hear?”

“No, of course not.  We can say anything to each other.”

“Can we?  I’m not sure of that ­now.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Oh, well ­anyhow, this time I’ll venture.  Why did Rosamund throw us over the other night at almost the last moment?”

“Because Robin was ill.”

“He’s quite well now.”

“Why not.  It’s ten days ago.”

“He can’t have been so very ill.”

“He was ill enough to make Rosamund very anxious.  She was up with him the whole night before your dinner; and not only that, she was up again on the night of the dinner, though she was very tired.”

“Well, coming to our dinner wouldn’t have prevented that ­only eight till ten-thirty.”

“I don’t think, Guy, you at all understand Rosamund’s feeling for Robin,” said Dion, with a sort of dry steadiness.

“Probably not, being a man.”

“Perhaps a father can understand better.”

“Better?  It seems to me one either does understand a thing or one doesn’t understand it.”

There was a not very attractive silence which Daventry broke by saying: 

“Then you think if Beattie and I give another dinner at the Carlton ­a piece of reckless extravagance, but we are made on entertaining! ­Robin won’t be ill again?”

“Another dinner?  You’ll be ruined.”

“I’ve got several more briefs.  Would Robin be ill?”

“How the deuce can any one know?”

“I’ll hazard a guess.  He would be ill.”

Dion reddened.  There was sudden heat not only in his cheeks but also about his heart.

“I didn’t know you were capable of talking such pernicious rubbish!” he said.

“Let’s prove whether it’s rubbish or not.  Beattie will send Rosamund another dinner invitation to-morrow, and then we’ll wait and see what happens to Robin’s health.”

“Guy, I don’t want to have a quarrel with you.”

“A quarrel?  What about?”

“If you imply that Rosamund is insincere, is capable of acting a part, we shall quarrel.  Robin was really ill.  Rosamund fully meant to go to your dinner.  She bought a new dress expressly for it.”

“Forgive me, old Dion, and please don’t think I was attacking Rosamund.  No.  But I think sometimes the very sweetest and best women do have their little bit of insincerity.  To women very often the motive seems of more importance than the action springing from it.  I had an idea that perhaps Rosamund was anxious not to hurt some one’s feelings.”

“Whose?”

After a slight hesitation Daventry said: 

“Mrs. Clarke’s.”

“Did Mrs. Clarke know that Rosamund accepted to go to your dinner?” asked Dion abruptly, and with a forcible directness that put the not unastute Daventry immediately on his guard.

“What on earth has that to do with it?”

“Everything, I should think.  Did she?”

“No,” said Daventry.

“Then how could ?” Dion began.  But he broke off, and added more quietly: 

“Why are you so anxious that Rosamund should know Mrs. Clarke?”

“Well, didn’t Mrs. Clarke ages ago express a wish to know Rosamund if the case went in her favor?”

“Oh, I ­yes, I fancy she did.  But she probably meant nothing by it, and has forgotten it.”

“I doubt that.  A woman who has gone through Mrs. Clarke’s ordeal is generally hypersensitive afterwards.”

“But she’s come out splendidly.  Everybody believes in her.  She’s got her child.  What more can she want?”

“As she’s such a great friend of ours I think it must seem very odd to her not knowing Rosamund, especially as she’s good friends with you.  D’you mind if we ask Rosamund to meet her again?”

“You’ve done it once.  I should leave things alone.  Mind, Rosamund has never told me she doesn’t want to know Mrs. Clarke.”

“That may be another example of her goodness of heart,” said Daventry.  “Rosamund seldom or never speaks against people.  I’ll tell you the simple truth, Dion.  As I helped to defend Mrs. Clarke, and as we won and she was proved to be an innocent woman, and as I believe in her and admire her very much, I’m sensitive for her.  Perhaps it’s very absurd.”

“I think it’s very chivalrous.”

“Oh ­rot!  But there it is.  And so I hate to see a relation of my own ­I count Rosamund as a relation now ­standing out against her.”

“There’s no reason to think she’s doing that.”

An expression that seemed to be of pity flitted over Daventry’s intelligent face, and he slightly raised his eyebrows.

“Anyhow, we won’t bother you with another dinner invitation,” he said.

And so the conversation ended.

It left with Dion an impression which was not pleasant, and he could not help wondering whether, during the conversation, his friend had told him a direct and deliberate lie.

No more dinners were given by Beattie and Daventry at the Carlton.  Robin’s health continued to be excellent.  Mrs. Clarke was never mentioned at 5 Little Market Street, and she gave to the Leiths no sign of life, though Dion knew that she was still in London and was going to stay on there until the spring.  He did not meet her, although she knew many of those whom he knew.  This was partly due, perhaps, to chance; but it was also partly due to deliberate action by Dion.  He avoided going to places where he thought he might meet her:  to Esme Darlington’s, to Mrs. Chetwinde’s, to one or two other houses which she frequented; he even gave up visiting Jenkins’s gymnasium because he knew she continued to go there regularly with Jimmy Clarke, whom, since the divorce case, with his father’s consent, she had taken away from school and given to the care of a tutor.  All this was easy enough, and required but little management on account of Rosamund’s love of home and his love of what she loved.  Since Robin’s coming she had begun to show more and more plainly her root-indifference to the outside pleasures and attractions of the world, was becoming, Dion thought, week by week, more cloistral, was giving the rein, perhaps, to secret impulses which marriage had interfered with for a time, but which were now reviving within her.  Robin was a genuine reason, but perhaps also at moments an excuse.  Was there not sometimes in the quiet little house, quiet unless disturbed by babyhood’s occasional outbursts, a strange new atmosphere, delicate and subdued, which hinted at silent walks, at twilight dreamings, at slowly pacing feet, bowed heads and wide-eyed contemplation?  Or was all this a fancy of Dion’s, bred in him by Rosamund’s revelation of an old and haunting desire?  He did not know; but he did know that sometimes, when he heard her warm voice singing at a little distance from him within their house, he thought of a man’s voice, in some dim and remote chapel with stained-glass windows, singing an evening hymn in the service of Benediction.

In the midst of many friends, in the midst of the enormous City, Rosamund effected, or began to effect, a curiously intent withdrawal, and Dion, as it were, accompanied her; or perhaps it were truer to say, followed after her.  He loved quiet evenings in his home, and the love of them grew steadily upon him.  To the occasional protests of his friends he laughingly replied: 

“The fact is we’re both very happy at home.  We’re an unfashionable couple.”

Bruce Evelin, Esme Darlington and a few others, including, of course, Dion’s mother and the Daventrys, they sometimes asked to come to them.  Their little dinners were homely and delightful; but Mr. Darlington often regretted plaintively their “really, if I may say so, almost too definite domesticity.”  He even said to certain intimates: 

“I know the next thing we shall hear of will be that the Leiths have decided to bury themselves in the country.  And Dion Leith will wreck his nerves by daily journeys to town in some horrid business train.”

At the beginning of January, however, there came an invitation which they decided to accept.  It was to an evening party at Mrs. Chetwinde’s, and she begged Rosamund to be nice to her and sing at it.

“Since you’ve given up singing professionally one never hears you at all,” she wrote.  “I’m not going to tell the usual lie and say I’m only having a few people.  On the contrary, I’m asking as many as my house will hold.  It’s on January the fifteenth.”

It happened that the invitation arrived in Little Market Street by the last post, and that, earlier in the day, Daventry had met Dion in the Club and had casually told him that Mrs. Clarke was spending the whole of January in Paris, to get some things for the flat in Constantinople which she intended to occupy in the late spring.  Rosamund showed Dion Mrs. Chetwinde’s note.

“Let’s go,” he said at once.

“Shall we?  Do you like these crowds?  She says ’as many as my house will hold.’”

“All the better.  There’ll be all the more to enjoy the result of your practising.  Do say yes.”

His manner was urgent.  Mrs. Clarke would be in Paris.  This party was certainly no ingenuity of Daventry’s.

“We mustn’t begin to live like a monk and a nun,” he exclaimed.  “We’re too young and enjoy life too much for that.”

“Do monks and nuns live together?  Since when?” said Rosamund, laughing at him.

“Poor wretches!  If only they did, how much !”

“Hush!” she said, with a smiling pretense of thinking of being shocked presently.

She went to the writing-table.

“Very well, then, we’ll go if you want to.”

“Don’t you?” he asked, following her.

She had sat down and taken up a pen.  Now she looked up at him with her steady eyes.

“I’m sure I shall enjoy it when I’m there,” she answered.  “I generally enjoy things.  You know that.  You’ve seen me among people so often.”

“Yes.  One would think you reveled in society if one only knew you in that phase.”

“Well, I don’t really care for it one bit.  I can’t, because I never miss it if I don’t have it.”

“I believe you really care for very few things and for very few people,” he said.

“Perhaps that’s true about people.”

“How many people, I wonder?”

“I don’t think one always knows whom one cares for until something happens.”

“Something?”

“Until one’s threatened with loss, or until one actually does lose somebody one loves.  I” ­she hesitated, stretched out her hand, and drew some notepaper out of a green case which stood on the table ­“I had absolutely no idea what I felt for my mother until she died.  She died very suddenly.”

Tears rushed to her eyes and her whole face suddenly reddened.

“Then I knew!” she said, in a broken voice.

Dion had never before seen her look as she was looking now.

For a moment he felt almost as if he were regarding a stranger.  There was a sort of heat of anger in the face, which looked rebellious in its emotion; and he believed it was the rebellion in her face which made him realize how intensely she had been able to love her mother.

“Now I must write to Mrs. Chetwinde,” she said, suddenly bending over the notepaper, “and tell her we’ll come, and I’ll sing.”

“Yes.”

He stood a moment watching the moving pen.  Then he bent down and just touched her shoulder with a great gentleness.

“If you knew what I would do to keep every breath of sorrow out of your life!” he said, in a low voice.

Without looking up she touched his hand.

“I know you would.  You could never bring sorrow into my life.”

From that day Dion realized what intensity of feeling lay beneath Rosamund’s serene and often actively joyous demeanor.  Perhaps she cared for very few people, but for those few she cared with a force surely almost abnormal.  Her mother had now been dead for many years; never before had Rosamund spoken of her death to him.  He understood the reason of that silence now, and from that day the desire to keep all sorrow from her became almost a passion in him.  He even felt that its approach to her, that its cold touch resting upon her, would be a hateful and almost unnatural outrage.  Yet he saw all around him people closely companioned by sorrow and did not think that strange.  Sorrow even approached very near to Rosamund and to him in that very month of January, for Beatrice had a miscarriage and lost her baby.  She said very little about it, but Dion believed that she was really stricken to the heart.  He was very fond of Beatrice, he almost loved her; yet her sorrow was only a shadow passing by him, not a substance pressing upon him.  And that fact, which he realized, made him know how little even imagination and quiet affection can help men feel the pains of others.  The heart knoweth only its own bitterness and the bitterness of those whom it deeply and passionately loves.

CHAPTER VIII

On January the fifteenth Rosamund put on the gown which had been bought for the Carlton dinner but not worn at it.

Although she had not really wanted to go to Mrs. Chetwinde’s party she looked radiantly buoyant, and like one almost shining with expectation, when she was ready to start for Lowndes Square.

“You ought to go out every night,” Dion said, as he put her cloak over her shoulders.

“Why?”

“To enjoy and to give enjoyment.  Merely to look at you would make the dullest set of people in London wake up and scintillate.  Don’t tell me you’re not looking forward to it, because I couldn’t believe you.”

“Now that the war-paint is on I confess to feeling almost eager for the fray.  How nicely you button it.  You aren’t clumsy.”

“How could I be clumsy in doing something for you?  Where’s your music?”

“In my head.  Jennie will meet us there.”

Jennie was Rosamund’s accompanist, a clever Irish girl who often came to Little Market Street to go through things with Rosamund.

“It will be rather delightful singing to people again,” she added in a joyous voice as they got into the hired carriage.  “I hope I’ve really improved.”

“How you love a thing for itself!” he said, as they drove off.

“I think that’s the only way to love.”

“Of course it is.  You know the only way to everything beautiful and sane.  What I have learnt from you!”

“Dion,” she said, in the darkness, “I think you are rather a dangerous companion for me.”

“How can I be?”

“I’m not at all a piece of perfection.  Take care you don’t teach me to think I am.”

“But you’re the least conceited ­”

“Hush, you encourager of egoism!” she interrupted seriously.

“I’m afraid you’ll find a good many more at Mrs. Chetwinde’s.”

Dion thought he had been a true prophet half an hour later when, from a little distance, he watched and listened while Rosamund was singing her first song.  Seeing her thus in the midst of a crowd he awakened to the fact that Robin had changed her very much.  She still looked splendidly young but she no longer looked like a girl.  The married woman and the mother were there quite definitely.  Even he fancied that he heard them in her voice, which had gained in some way, perhaps in roundness, in mellowness.  This might be the result of study; he was inclined to believe it the result of motherhood.  She was wearing ear-rings ­tiny, not long drooping things, they were green, small emeralds; and he remembered how he had loved her better when he saw her wearing ear-rings for the first time in Mr. Darlington’s drawing-room.  How definite she was in a crowd.  Crowds effaced ordinary people, but when Rosamund was surrounded she always seemed to be beautifully emphasized, to be made more perfectly herself.  She did not take, she gave, and in giving showed how much she had.

She was giving now as she sang, “Caro mio ben.”

Towards the end of the song, when Dion was deeply in it and in her who sang it, he was disturbed by a woman’s whisper coming from close behind him.  He did not catch the beginning of what was communicated, but he did catch the end.  It was this:  “Over there, the famous Mrs. Clarke.”

But Mrs. Clarke was in Paris.  Daventry had told him so.  Dion looked quickly about the large and crowded room, but could not see Mrs. Clarke.  Then he glanced behind him to see the whisperer, and beheld a hard-faced, middle-aged and very well-known woman ­one of those women who, by dint of perpetually “going about,” become at length something less than human.  He was quite sure Mrs. Brackenhurst would not make a mistake about anything which happened at a party.  She might fail to recognize her husband, if she met him about her house, because he was so seldom there; she would not fail to recognize the heroine of a resounding divorce case.  Mrs. Clarke must certainly have returned from Paris and be somewhere in that room, listening to Rosamund and probably watching her.  Dion scarcely knew whether this fact made him sorry or glad.  He did know, however, that it oddly excited him.

When “Caro mio ben” was ended people began to move.  Rosamund was surrounded and congratulated, and Dion saw Esme Darlington bending to her, half paternally, half gallantly, and speaking to her emphatically.  Mrs. Chetwinde drifted up to her; and three or four young men hovered near to her, evidently desirous of putting in a word.  The success of her leaped to the eye.  Dion saw it and glowed.  But the excitement in him persisted, and he began to move towards the far side of the great room in search of Mrs. Clarke.  If she had just come in she would probably be near the door by which the pathetic Echo stood on her pedestal of marble, withdrawn in her punishment, in her abasement beautiful and wistful.  How different was Rosamund from Echo!  Dion looked across at her joyous and radiant animation, as she smiled and talked almost with the eagerness and vitality of a child; and he had the thought, “How goodness preserves!” Women throng the secret rooms of the vanity specialists, put their trust in pomades, in pigments, in tinctures, in dyes; and the weariness and the sin become lustrous, perhaps, but never are hidden or even obscured.  His Rosamund trusted in a wholesome life, with air blowing through it, with sound sleep as its anodyne, with purity on guard at its door; and radiance and youth sparkled up in her like fountain spray in the sunshine.  And the wholesomeness of her was a lure to the many even in a drawing-room of London.  He saw powdered women, women with darkened eyebrows, and touched-up lips, and hair that had forgotten long ago what was its natural color, looking at her, and he fancied there was a dull wonder in their eyes.  Perhaps they were thinking:  “Yes, that’s the recipe ­being gay in goodness!” And perhaps some of them were thinking, too:  “We’ve lost the power to follow that recipe, if we ever had it.”  Poor women!  With a sort of exultation he pitied them and their husbands.  A chord was sounded on the piano.  He stood still.  The loud buzz of conversation died down.  Was Rosamund going to sing again so soon?  Perhaps some one had begged for something specially beloved.  Jennie was playing a soft prelude as a gentle warning to a few of those who seem ever to find silence a physical difficulty.  She stopped, and began to play something Dion did not know, something very modern in its strange atmospheric delicacy, which nevertheless instantly transported him to Greece.  He was there, even before Rosamund began to sing in a voice that was hushed, in a far-off voice, not antique, but the voice of modernity, prompted by a mind looking away from what is near to what is afar and is deeply desired.

     “A crescent sail upon the sea,
     So calm and fair and ripple-free
     You wonder storms can ever be;

     A shore with deep indented bays,
     And o’er the gleaming water-ways
     A glimpse of Islands in the haze;

     A faced bronzed dark to red and gold,
     With mountain eyes that seem to hold
     The freshness of the world of old;

A shepherd’s crook, a coat of fleece,
A grazing flock ­the sense of peace,
The long sweet silence ­this is Greece.”

The accompaniment continued for a moment alone, whispering remoteness.  Then, like a voice far off in a blue distance, there came again from Rosamund, more softly and with less pressure: 

“ ­The sense of peace,
The long sweet silence ­this is Greece! 
This is Greece!”

It was just then that Dion saw Mrs. Clarke.  She had, perhaps, been sitting down; or, possibly, some one had been standing in front of her and had hidden her from him; for she was not far off, and he wondered sharply why he had not seen her till now, why, till now, she had refrained from snatching him away from his land of the early morning.  There was to him at this moment something actually cruel and painful in her instant suggestion of Stamboul.  Yet she was not looking at him, but was directing upon Rosamund her characteristic gaze of consideration, in which there was a peculiar grave thoroughness.  A handsome, fair young man, with a very red weak mouth, stood close to her.  Echo was just beyond.  Without speaking, Mrs. Clarke continued looking at Rosamund intently, when the music evaporated, and Greece faded away into the shining of that distance which hides our dreams.  And Dion noted again, with a faint creeping of wonder and of doubt, the strange haggardness of her face, which, nevertheless, he had come to think almost beautiful.

The fair young man spoke to her, bending and looking at her eagerly.  She turned her head slowly, and as if reluctantly towards him, and was evidently listening to what he said, listening with that apparent intentness which was characteristic of her.  She was dressed in black and violet, and wore a large knot of violets in her corsage.  Round her throat was clasped an antique necklace of dull, unshining gold, and dim purple stones, which looked beautiful, but almost weary with age.  Perhaps they had lain for years in some dim bazaar of Stamboul, forgotten under heaps of old stuffs.  Dion thought of them as slumbering, made drowsy and finally unconscious by the fumes of incense and the exhalations from diapered perfume vials.  As he looked at Mrs. Clarke, the bare and shining vision of Greece, evoked by the song Rosamund had just been singing, faded; the peculiar almost intellectually delicate atmosphere of Greece was gone; and he saw for a moment the umber mystery of Stamboul, lifted under tinted clouds of the evening beyond the waters of the Golden Horn; the great rounded domes and tapering speary minarets of the mosques, couchant amid the shadows and the trailing and gauzy smoke-wreaths, a suggestion of dense masses of cypresses, those trees of the night which only in the night can be truly themselves, guarding the innumerable graves of the Turkish cemeteries.

From that moment he connected Mrs. Clarke in his mind with the cypress.  Surely she must have spent very many hours wandering in those enormous and deserted gardens of the dead, where the very dust is poignant, and the cries of the sea come faintly up to Allah’s children crumbling beneath the stone flowers and the little fezes of stone.  Mrs. Clarke must love the cypress, for about her there was an atmosphere which suggested dimness and the gathering shadows of night.

Greece and Stamboul, the land of the early morning and the wonder-city of twilight; Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke, standing there for a moment, in the midst of the shifting crowd, Dion traveled, compared, connected and was alone in the soul’s solitude.

Then Mrs. Chetwinde spoke to him, and he saw Bruce Evelin in the distance going towards Rosamund.

Mrs. Chetwinde told him that Rosamund had made a great advance.

“Now that she’s given up singing professionally she’s singing better than ever.  That Grecian song is the distilled essence of Greece felt in our new way.  For we’ve got our new way of feeling things.  Rosamund tells us she repeated the words to Jennie Stileman, and Jennie had them set by a young Athenian who’s over here studying English.  He catches the butterfly, lets it flutter for a moment in his hand and go.  He doesn’t jab a pin into it as our composers would.  Oh, there’s Cynthia!  I hope she heard the last thing.”

“Yes, she did.”

“Ah?”

“I thought Mrs. Clarke was spending January in Paris.”

“She came back to-day, and sent round to ask if she might come.”

Mrs. Chetwinde wandered away, insouciant and observant as ever.  Even at her own parties she always had an air of faintly detached indifference, never bothered about how “it” was “going.”  If it chose to stop it could, and her guests must put up with it.

When she left him Dion hesitated.  Mrs. Clarke had just seen him and sent him a grave nod of recognition.  Should he go to her?  But the fair young man was still at her side, was still, with his weak red mouth, talking into her ear.  Dion felt a strange distaste as he saw those moving lips under the brushed-up, almost ridiculously small, golden mustache; and just as he was conscious of this distaste Mrs. Clarke got rid of the young man, and spoke to a woman.  Then she moved forward slowly.  Mr. Chetwinde spoke to her, moving his ample fan-shaped beard, which always looked Assyrian, though he was profoundly English and didn’t know it.  She drew nearer to Dion as she answered Mr. Chetwinde, but in a wholly unconscious manner.  To-night she looked more haggard even than usual, no doubt because of the journey from Paris.  But Mrs. Chetwinde had once said of her:  “Cynthia is made of iron.”  Could that be true?  She was quite close to Dion now, and he was aware of a strange faint perfume which reminded him of Stamboul; and he realized here in Lowndes Square that Stamboul was genuinely fascinating, was much more fascinating than he had realized when he was in it.

Mrs. Clarke passed him without looking at him, and he felt sure quite unconscious of his nearness to her.  Evidently she had forgotten all about him.  Just after she had gone by he decided that of course he ought to go and speak to her, and that to-night he must introduce Rosamund to her.  Not to do so would really be rude.  Daventry was not there to be chivalrous.  The illness of Beattie, and doubtless his own distress at the loss of his unborn child, had kept him away.  Dion thought that he would be unchivalrous if he now neglected to make a point of speaking to Mrs. Clarke and of introducing his wife to her.

Having made up his mind on this he turned to follow Mrs. Clarke, and at once saw that Esme Darlington, that smoother of difficult social places, was before him.  A little way off he saw Mr. Darlington, with Rosamund well but delicately in hand, making for Mrs. Clarke somewhat with the gait of Agag.  In a moment the thing was done.  The two women were speaking to each other, and Rosamund had sent to Mrs. Clarke one of her inquiring looks.  Then they sat down together on that red sofa to which Mrs. Clarke had led Dion for his first conversation with her.  Esme Darlington remained standing before it.  The full acquaintance was joined at last.

Were they talking about the baby?  Dion wondered, as for a moment he watched them, forgetting his surroundings.  Rosamund was speaking with her usual swift vivacity.  At home she was now often rather quiet, moving, Dion sometimes thought, in an atmosphere of wide serenity; but in society she was always full of sunshine and eager life.  Something within her leaped up responsively at the touch of humanity, and to-night she had just been singing, and the whole of her was keenly awake.  The contrast between her and Mrs. Clarke was almost startling:  her radiant vitality emphasized Mrs. Clarke’s curious, but perfectly natural, gravity; the rose in her cheeks, the yellow in her hair, the gaiety in her eyes, drew the attention to Mrs. Clarke’s febrile and tense refinement, which seemed to have worn her body thin, to have drained the luster out of her hair, to have fixed the expression of observant distress in her large and fearless eyes.  Animal spirits played through Rosamund to-night; from Mrs. Clarke they were absent.  Her haggard composure, confronting Rosamund’s pure sparkle, suggested the comparison of a hidden and secret pool, steel colored in the depths of a sunless forest, with a rushing mountain stream leaping towards the sea in a tangle of sun-rays.  Dion realized for the first time that Mrs. Clarke never laughed, and scarcely ever smiled.  He realized, too, that she really was beautiful.  For Rosamund did not “kill” her; her delicacy of line and colorless clearness stood the test of nearness to Rosamund’s radiant beauty.  Indeed Rosamund somehow enhanced the peculiarly interesting character of Mrs. Clarke’s personality, which was displayed, but with a sort of shadowy reticence, in her physique, and at the same time underlined its melancholy.  So might a climbing rose, calling to the blue with its hundred blossoms, teach something of the dark truth of the cypress through which its branches are threaded.

But Mrs. Clarke would certainly never be Rosamund’s stairway towards heaven.

Some one he knew spoke to Dion, and he found himself involved in a long conversation; people moving hid the two women from him, but presently the piano sounded again, and Rosamund sang that first favorite of hers and of Dion’s, the “Heart ever faithful,” recalling him to a dear day at Portofino where, in a cozy room, guarded by the wintry woods and the gray sea of Italy, he had felt the lure of a faithful spirit, and known the basis of clean rock on which Rosamund had built up her house of life.  Bruce Evelin stood near to him while she sang it now, and once their eyes met and exchanged affectionate thoughts of the singer, which went gladly out of the gates eager to be read and understood.

When the melody of Bach was finished many people, impelled thereto by the hearty giant whom Mrs. Chetwinde had most strangely married, went downstairs to the black-and-white dining-room to drink champagne and eat small absurdities of various kinds.  A way was opened for Dion to Mrs. Clarke, who was still on the red sofa.  Dion noticed the fair young man hovering, and surely with intention in his large eyes, in the middle distance, but he went decisively forward, took Mrs. Clarke’s listless yet imperative hand, and asked her if she would care to go down with him.

“Oh no; I never eat at odd times.”

“Do you ever eat at all?”

“Yes, at my chosen moments.  Do find another excuse.”

“For going to eat?”

“Or drink.”

His reply was to sit down beside her.  Mrs. Chetwinde’s dining-room was large.  People probably knew that, for the drawing-room emptied slowly.  Even the fair young man went away to seek consolation below.  Rosamund had descended with Bruce Evelin and Esme Darlington.  There was a pleasant and almost an intimate hush in the room.

“I heard you were to be in Paris this month,” Dion said.

“I came back to-day.”

“Aren’t you tired?”

“No.  I want to speak to you about Jimmy, if you don’t mind.”

“Please do,” said Dion rather earnestly, struck by a sort of little pang as he remembered the boy’s urgent insistence that his visitor was to come again soon.

“I’m not quite satisfied with his tutor.”

She began to ask Dion’s advice with regard to the boy’s bringing up, explaining that her husband had left that matter in her hands.

“He’s very sorry and ashamed now, poor man, about his attacks on me, and tries to make up from a distance by trusting me completely with Jimmy.  I don’t bear him any malice, but of course the link between us is smashed and can’t ever be resoldered.  I’m asking you what I can’t ask him because he’s a weak man.”

The implication was obvious and not disagreeable to Dion.  He gave advice, and as he did so thought of Robin at ten.

Mrs. Clarke was a remarkably sensible woman, and agreed with his views on boys, and especially with his theory, suddenly discovered in the present heat of conversation, that to give them “backbone” was of even more importance than to develop their intellectual side.  She spoke of her son in a way that was almost male.

“He mustn’t be small,” she said, evidently comprehending both soul and body in the assertion.  “D’you know Lord Brayfield who was talking to me just now?”

“You mean a fair man?”

“Yes, with a meaningless mouth.  Jimmy mustn’t grow up into anything of that kind.”

The conversation took a decidedly Doric turn as Mrs. Clarke developed her ideas of what a man ought to be.  In the midst of it Dion remembered Dumeny, and could not help saying: 

“But that type” ­they had been speaking of what he considered to be Rosamund’s type of man, once described by her as “a strong soul in a strong body, and a soft heart but not a softy’s heart” ­“is almost the direct opposite of the artistic type of man, isn’t it?”

Her large eyes looked “Well?” at him, but she said nothing.

“I thought you cared so very much for knowledge and taste in a man.”

“So I do.  But Jimmy will never have knowledge and taste.  He’s the boisterous athletic type.”

“And you’re glad?”

“Not sorry, at any rate.  He’ll just be a thorough man, if he’s brought up properly, and that will do very well.”

“I think you’re very complex,” Dion said, still thinking of Dumeny.

“Because I make friends in so many directions?”

“Well ­yes, partly,” he answered, wondering if she was reading his thought.

“Jimmy’s not a friend but my boy.  I know very well Monsieur Dumeny, for instance, whom you saw, and I dare say wondered about, at the trial; but I couldn’t bear that my boy should develop into that type of man.  You’ll say I am a treacherous friend, perhaps.  It might be truer to say I was born acquisitive and too mental.  I never really liked Monsieur Dumeny; but I liked immensely his musical talent, his knowledge, his sure taste, and his power of making almost everything flower into interestingness.  Do you know what I mean?  Some people take light from your day; others add to its light and paint in wonderful shadows.  If I went to the bazaars alone they were Eastern shops; if I went with Dumeny they were the Arabian Nights.  Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“The touch of his mind on a thing gave it life.  It stirred.  One could look into its heart and see the pulse beating.  I care to do that, so I cared to go about with Monsieur Dumeny.  But one doesn’t love people for that sort of thing.  In the people one loves one needs character, the right fiber in the soul.  You ought to know that.”

“Why?” he asked, almost startled.

“I was introduced to your wife just now.”

“Oh!”

There was a pause.  Then Dion said: 

“I’m glad you have met.”

“So am I,” said Mrs. Clarke, in a voice that sounded more husky even than usual.  “She sang that Greek song quite beautifully.  I’ve just been telling her that I want to show her some curious songs I have heard in Turkey, and Asia Minor, at Brusa.  There was one man who used to sing to me at Brusa outside the Mosquée Verte.  Dumeny took down the melody for me.”

“Did you like the ’Heart ever faithful’?”

“Of course it’s excellent in that sledge-hammer sort of way, a superb example of the direct.  Stamboul is very indirect.  Perhaps it has colored my taste.  It’s full of mystery.  Bach isn’t mysterious, except now and then ­in rare bits of his passion music, for instance.”

“I wonder if my wife could sing those Turkish songs.”

“We must see.  She sang that Greek song perfectly.”

“But she’s felt Greece,” said Dion.  “And I think there’s something in her that ­”

“Yes?”

“I only mean,” he said, with reserve in his voice, “that I think there’s something of Greece in her.”

“She’s got a head like a Caryatid.”

“Yes,” he said, with much less reserve.  “Hasn’t she?”

Mrs. Clarke had paid his Rosamund two noble compliments, he thought; and he liked her way of payment, casual yet evidently sincere, the simple utterance of two thoughts in a mind that knew.  He felt a sudden glow of real friendship for her, and, on the glow as it were, she said: 

“Jimmy’s quite mad about you.”

“Still?” he blurted out, and was instantly conscious of a false step.

“He’s got an extraordinary memory for a biceps, and then Jenkins talks about you to him.”

As they went on talking people began coming up from the black-and-white dining-room.  Dion said he would come to see Jimmy again, would visit the gymnasium in the Harrow Road one day when Jimmy was taking his lesson.  Did Jimmy ever go on a Saturday?  Yes, he was going next Saturday at four.  Dion would look in next Saturday.  Now Mrs. Clarke and Rosamund had met, and Mrs. Clarke evidently admired Rosamund in two ways, Dion felt quite different about his acquaintance with her.  If it had already been agreed that Mrs. Clarke should show Rosamund Turkish songs, there was no need for further holding back.  The relief which had come to him made Dion realize how very uncomfortable he had been about Mrs. Clarke in the immediate past.  He was now thoroughly and cordially at his ease with her.  They talked till the big drawing-room was full again, till Rosamund reappeared in the midst of delightful friends; talked of Jimmy’s future, of the new tutor who must be found, ­a real man, not a mere bloodless intellectual, ­and, again, of Constantinople, to which Mrs. Clarke would return in April, against the advice of her friends, and in spite of Esme Darlington’s almost frantic protests, “because I love it, and because I don’t choose to be driven out of any place by liars.”  Her last remark to him, and he thought it very characteristic of her, was this: 

“Liberty’s worth bitterness.  I would buy it at the price of all the tears in my body.”

It was, perhaps, also very characteristic that she made the statement with a perfectly quiet gravity which almost concealed the evidently tough inflexibility beneath.

And then, when people were ready to go, Rosamund sung Brahm’s “Wiegenlied.”

Dion stood beside Bruce Evelin while Rosamund was singing this.  She sang it with a new and wonderful tenderness which had come to her with Robin, and in her face, as she sang, there was a new and wonderful tenderness.  The meaning of Robin in Rosamund’s life was expressed to Dion by Rosamund in this song as it had never been expressed before.  Perhaps it was expressed also to Bruce Evelin, for Dion saw tears in his eyes almost brimming over, and his face was contracted, as if only by a strong, even a violent, effort he was able to preserve his self-control.

As people began to go away Dion found himself close to Esme Darlington.

“My dear fellow,” said Mr. Darlington, with unusual abandon, “Rosamund has made a really marvelous advance ­marvelous.  In that ‘Wiegenlied’ she reached high-water mark.  No one could have sung it more perfectly.  What has happened to her?”

“Robin,” said Dion, looking him full in the face, and speaking with almost stern conviction.

“Robin?” said Mr. Darlington, with lifted eyebrows.

Then people intervened.

In the carriage going home Rosamund was very happy.  She confessed to the pleasure her success had given her.

“I quite loved singing to-night,” she said.  “That song about Greece was for you.”

“I know, and the ‘Wiegenlied’ was for Robin.”

“Yes,” she said.

She was silent; then her voice came out of the darkness: 

“For Robin, but he didn’t know it.”

“Some day he will know it.”

Not a word was said about Mrs. Clarke that night.

On the following day, however, Dion asked Rosamund how she had liked Mrs. Clarke.

“I saw you talking to her with the greatest animation.”

“Was I?” said Rosamund.

“And she told me it had been arranged that she should ­no, I don’t mean that; but she said she wanted to show you some wonderful Turkish songs.”

“Did she?  What a beautiful profile she has!”

“Ah, you noticed that!”

“Oh yes, directly.”

“Didn’t she mention the Turkish songs?”

“I believe she did, but only in passing, casually.  D’you know, Dion, I’ve got an idea that Greece is our country, not Turkey at all.  You hate Constantinople, and I shall never see it, I’m sure.  We are Greeks, and Robin has to be a Greek, too, in one way ­a true Englishman, of course, as well.  Do you remember the Doric boy?”

And off went the conversation to the hills of Drouva, and never came back to Turkey.

When Friday dawned Dion thought of his appointment for Saturday afternoon at the gymnasium in the Harrow Road, and began to wish he had not made it.  Rosamund had not mentioned Mrs. Clarke again, and he began to fear that she had not really liked her, although her profile was beautiful.  If Rosamund had not liked Mrs. Clarke, his cordial enthusiasm at Mrs. Chetwinde’s ­in retrospect he felt that his attitude and manner must have implied that ­had been premature, even, perhaps, unfortunate.  He wished he knew just what impression Mrs. Clarke had made upon Rosamund, but something held him back from asking her.  He had asked her already once, but somehow the conversation had deviated ­was it to Mrs. Clarke’s profile? ­and he had not received a direct answer.  Perhaps that was his fault.  But anyhow he must go to the gymnasium on the morrow.  To fail in doing that after all that had happened, or rather had not happened, in connexion with Mrs. Clarke would be really rude.  He did not say anything about the gymnasium to Rosamund on Friday, but on the Saturday he told her what had been arranged.

“Her son, Jimmy Clarke, has taken a boyish fancy to me, it seems.  I said I’d look in and see his lesson just for once.”

“Is he a nice boy?”

“Yes, first-rate, I should think, rather a pickle, and likely to develop into an athlete.  The father is awfully ashamed now of what he did ­that horrible case, I mean ­and is trying to make up for it.”

“How?” said Rosamund simply.

“By giving her every chance with the boy.”

“I’m glad the child likes you.”

“I’ve only seen him once.”

“Twice won’t kill his liking,” she returned affectionately.

And then she went out of the room.  She always had plenty to do.  Small though he was, Robin was a marvelous consumer of his mother’s time.

When Dion got to the gymnasium Mrs. Clarke and Jimmy were already there, and Jimmy, in flannels and a white sweater, his dark hair sticking up in disorder, and his face scarlet with exertion, was performing feats with an exerciser fixed to the wall, while Mrs. Clarke, seated on a hard chair in front of a line of heavy weights and dumb-bells, was looking on with concentrated attention.  Jenkins was standing in front of Jimmy, loudly directing his movements with a stentorian:  “One ­two ­one ­two ­one ­two!  Keep it up!  No slackening!  Put some guts into it, sir!  One ­two ­one ­two!”

As Dion came in Mrs. Clarke looked round and nodded; Jimmy stared, unable to smile because his mouth and lower jaw were working, and he had no superfluous force to spare for polite efforts; and Jenkins uttered a gruff, “Good day, sir.”

“How are you, Jenkins?” returned Dion, in his most off-hand manner.

Then he jerked his hand at Jimmy with an encouraging smile, went over to Mrs. Clarke, shook her hand and remained standing beside her.

“Do you think he’s doing it well?” she murmured, after a moment.

“Stunningly.”

“Hasn’t he broadened in the chest?”

“Rather!”

She looked strangely febrile and mental in the midst of the many appliances for developing the body.  Rosamund, with her splendid physique and glowing health, would have crowned the gymnasium appropriately, have looked like the divine huntress transplanted to a modern city where still the cult of the body drew its worshipers.  The Arcadian mountains ­Olympia in Elis, ­Jenkins’s “gym” in the Harrow Road ­differing shrines but the cult was the same.  Only the conditions of worship were varied.  Dion glanced down at Mrs. Clarke.  Never had she seemed more curiously exotic.  Yet she did not look wholly out of place; and it occurred to him that a perfectly natural person never looks wholly out of place anywhere.

“Face to the wall, sir!” cried Jenkins.

Jimmy found time for a breathless and half-inquiring smile at Dion as he turned and prepared for the most difficult feat.

“His jaw always does something extraordinary in this exercise,” said Mrs. Clarke.  “It seems to come out and go in again with a click.  Jenkins says it’s because Jimmy gets his strength from there.”

“I know.  Mine used to do just the same.”

“Jimmy doesn’t mind.  It amuses him.”

“That’s the spirit!”

“He finishes with this.”

“Already?” said Dion, surprised.

“You must have been a little late.  How did you come?”

“On my bicycle.  I had a puncture.  That must have been it.  And there was a lot of traffic.”

“Keep it up, sir!” roared Jenkins imperatively.  “What’s the matter with that left arm?”

Click went Jimmy’s lower jaw.

“Dear little chap!” muttered Dion, full of sympathetic interest.  “He’s doing splendidly.”

“You really think so?”

“Couldn’t be better.”

“You understand boys?”

“Better than I understand women, I expect,” Dion returned, with a sudden thought of Rosamund at home and the wonderful Turkish songs Mrs. Clarke wished to show to her.

Mrs. Clarke said nothing, and just at that moment Jenkins announced: 

“That’ll do for to-day, sir.”

In a flood of perspiration Jimmy turned round, redder than ever, his chest heaving, his mouth open, and his eyes, but without any conceit, asking for a word of praise from Dion, who went to clap him on the shoulder.

“Capital!  Hallo!  What muscles we’re getting!  Eh, Jenkins?”

“Master Jimmy’s not doing badly, sir.  He puts his heart into it.  That I must say.”

Jimmy shone through the red and the perspiration.

“He sticks it,” continued Jenkins, in his loud voice.  “Without grit there’s nothing done.  That’s what I always tell my pupils.”

“I say” ­began Jimmy, at last finding a small voice ­“I say, Mr. Leith, you haven’t hurried over it.”

“Over what?”

“Letting me see you again.  Why, it’s ­”

“Run along to the bath, sir.  You’ve got to have it before you cool down,” interposed the merciless Jenkins.

And Jimmy made off with an instant obedience which showed his private opinion of the god who was training him.

When he was gone Jenkins turned to Dion and looked him over.

“Haven’t seen much of you, sir, lately,” he remarked.

“No, I’ve been busy,” returned Dion, feeling slightly uncomfortable as he remembered that the reason for his absence from the Harrow Road was listening to the conversation.

“Going to have a round with the gloves now you are here, sir?” pursued Jenkins.

Dion looked at Mrs. Clarke.

“Well, I hadn’t thought of it,” he said, rather doubtfully.

“Just as you like, sir.”

“Do, Mr. Leith,” said Mrs. Clarke, getting up from the hard chair, and standing close to the medicine ball with her back to the vaulting-horse.  “Jimmy and I are going in a moment.  You mustn’t bother about us.”

“Well, but how are you going home?”

“We shall walk.  Of course have your boxing.  It will do you good.”

“You’re right there, ma’am,” said Jenkins, with a sort of stern approval.  “Mr. Leith’s been neglecting his exercises lately.”

“Oh, I’ve been doing a good deal in odd times with the Rifle Corps.”

“I don’t know anything about that, sir.”

“All right, I’ll go and change,” said Dion, who always kept a singlet and flannels at the gymnasium.  “Then ­” he turned to Mrs. Clarke as if about to say good-by.

“Oh, Jimmy will want to see you for a moment after his bath.  We’ll say good-by then.”

“Yes, I should like to see him,” said Dion, and went off to the dressing cubicles.

When he returned ready for the fray, with his arms bared to the shoulder, he found Jimmy, in trousers and an Eton jacket, with still damp hair sleeked down on his head, waiting with his mother, but not to say good-by.

“We aren’t going,” he announced, in a voice almost shrill with excitement, as Dion came into the gymnasium.  “The mater was all for a trot home, but Jenkins wishes me to stay.  He says it’ll be a good lesson for me.  I mean to be a boxer.”

“Why not?” observed the great voice of Jenkins.  “It’s the best sport in the world bar none.”

“There!” said Jimmy.  “And if I can’t be anything else I’ll be a bantam, that’s what I’ll be.”

“Oh, you’ll grow, sir, no doubt.  We may see you among the heavy-weights yet.”

“What’s Mr. Leith?  Is he a heavy-weight?” vociferated Jimmy.  “Just look at his arms.”

“You’ll see him use them in a minute,” observed Jenkins, covering Dion with a glance of almost grim approval, “and then you can judge for yourself.”

“You can referee us, Jimmy,” said Dion, smiling, as he pulled on the gloves.

“I say, by Jove, though!” said Jimmy, looking suddenly overwhelmed and very respectful.

He shook his head and blushed, then abruptly grinned.

“The mater had better do that.”

They all laughed except Mrs. Clarke.  Even Jenkins unbent, and his bass “Ha ha!” rang through the large vaulted room.  Mrs. Clarke smiled faintly, scarcely changing the expression of her eyes.  She looked unusually intent and, when the smile was gone, more than usually grave.

“I hope you don’t mind our staying just for a few minutes,” she said to Dion.  “You see what he is!”

She looked at her boy, but not with deprecation.

“Of course not, but I’m afraid it will bore you.”

“Oh no, it won’t.  I like to see skill of any kind.”

She glanced at his arms.

“I’ll get out of your way.  Come, Jimmy!”

She took him by the arm and went back to the hard chair, while Dion and Jenkins in the middle of the floor stood up opposite to one another.

“Have you got a watch, Master Jimmy?” said Jenkins, looking over his shoulder at his pupil.

“Rather!” piped Jimmy.

“Well, then, you’d better time us if you don’t referee us.”

Jimmy sprang away from his mother.

“Keep out of our road, or you may chance to get a kidney punch that’ll wind you.  Better stand here.  That’s it.  Three-minute rounds.  Keep your eye on the watch.”

“Am I to say ’Go’?” almost whispered Jimmy, tense with a fearful importance such as Cæsar and Napoleon never felt.

“Who else?  You don’t expect us to order ourselves about, do you?”

After a pause Jimmy murmured, “No” in a low voice.  So might a mortal whisper a reply when interrogated from Olympus as to his readiness to be starter at a combat of the immortal gods.

“Now, then, watch in hand and no favoritism!” bellowed Jenkins, whose sense of humor was as boisterous as his firmness was grim.  “Are we ready?”

Dion and he shook hands formally and lifted their arms, gazing at each other warily.  Mrs. Clarke leaned forward in the chair which stood among the dumb-bells.  Jimmy perspired and his eyes became round.  He had his silver watch tight in his right fist.  Jenkins suddenly turned his head and stared with his shallow and steady blue eyes, looking down from Olympus upon the speck of a mortal far below.

“Go!” piped Jimmy, in the voice of an ardent, but awestruck mouse.

Homeric was that combat in the Harrow Road; to its starter and timekeeper a contest of giants, awful in force, in skill, in agility, in endurance.  Dion boxed quite his best that day, helped by his gallery.  He fought to win, but he didn’t win.  Nobody won, for there was no knock-out blow given and taken, and, when appealed to for a decision on points, Jimmy, breathing stertorously from excitement, was quite unable to give the award.  He could only stare at the two glorious heroes before him and drop the silver watch, glass downwards of course, on the floor, where its tinkle told of destruction.  Later on, when he spoke, he was able to say: 

“By Jove!” which he presently amplified into, “I say, mater, by Jove ­eh, wasn’t it, though?”

“Not so bad, sir!” said Jenkins to Dion, after the latter had taken the shower bath.  “You aren’t as stale as I expected to find you, not near as stale.  But I hope you’ll keep it up now you’ve started with it again.”

And Dion promised he would, put his bicycle on the top of a fourwheeler, sent it off to Westminster, and walked as far as Claridge’s with Mrs. Clarke and Jimmy.

The boy made him feel tremendously intimate with Mrs. Clarke.  The hero-worship he was receiving, the dancing of the blood through his veins, the glow of hard exercise, the verdict of Jenkins on his physical condition ­all these things combined spurred him to a joyous exuberance in which body and mind seemed to run like a matched pair of horses in perfect accord.  Although not at all a conceited man, the feeling that he was being admired, even reverenced, was delightful to him, and warmed his heart towards the jolly small boy who kept along by his side through the busy streets.  He and Jimmy talked in a comradely spirit, while Mrs. Clarke seemed to listen like one who has things to learn.  She was evidently a capital walker in spite of her delicate appearance.  To-day Dion began to believe in her iron health, and, in his joy of the body, he liked to think of it.  After all delicacy, even in a woman, was a fault ­a fault of the body, a sort of fretful imperfection.

“Are you strong?” he said to her, when Jimmy’s voice ceased for a moment to demand from him information or to pour upon him direct statement.

“Oh yes.  I’ve never been seriously ill in my life.  Don’t I look strong?” she asked.

“I don’t think you do, but I feel as if you are.”

“It’s the wiry kind of strength, I suppose.”

“The mater’s a stayer,” quoth Jimmy, and forthwith took up the wondrous tale with his hero, who began to consult him seriously on the question of “points.”

“If you’d had to give a decision, Jimmy, which of us would have got it, Jenkins or I?”

Jimmy looked very grave and earnest.

“It’s jolly difficult to tell a thing like that, isn’t it?” he said, after a longish pause.  “You see, you’re both so jolly strong, aren’t you?”

His dark eyes gazed at the bulk of Dion.

“Well, which is the quicker?” demanded Dion.

But Jimmy was not to be drawn.

“I think you’re both as quick as ­as cats,” he returned diplomatically, seeking anxiously for the genuine sporting comparison that would be approved at the ring-side.  “Don’t you, mater?”

Mrs. Clarke huskily agreed.  They were now nearing Claridge’s, and Jimmy was insistent that Dion should come in and have a real jam tea with them.

“Do, Mr. Leith, if you have the time,” said Mrs. Clarke, but without any pressure.

“The strawberry they have is ripping, I can tell you!” cried Jimmy, with ardor.

But Dion refused.  Till he was certain of Rosamund’s attitude he felt he simply couldn’t accept Mrs. Clarke’s hospitality.  He was obliged to get home that day.  Mrs. Clarke did not ask why, but Jimmy did, and had to be put off with an evasion, the usual mysterious “business,” which, of course, a small boy couldn’t dive into and explore.

Dion thought Mrs. Clarke was going to say good-by without any mention of Rosamund, but when they reached Claridge’s she said: 

“Your wife and I didn’t decide on a day for the Turkish songs.  You remember I mentioned them to you the other night?  I can’t recollect whether she left it to me to fix a time, or whether I left it to her.  Can you find out?  Do tell her I was stupid and forgot.  Will you?”

Dion said he would.

“I think they’ll interest her.  Now, Jimmy!”

But Jimmy hung on his god.

“I say, you’ll come again now!  You promise!”

What could Dion do?

“You put your honor into it?” pursued Jimmy, with desperate earnestness.  “You swear?”

“If I swear in the open street the police will take me up,” said Dion jokingly.

“Not they!  One from the shoulder from you and I bet they lose enough claret to fill a bucket.  You’ve given your honor, hasn’t he, mater?”

“Of course we shall see him again,” said Mrs. Clarke, staring at Dion.

“What curious eyes she has!” Dion thought, as he walked homeward.

Did they ever entirely lose their under-look of distress?

CHAPTER IX

That evening Dion told Rosamund what Mrs. Clarke had said when he parted from her at Claridge’s.

“I promised her I’d find out which it was,” he added.  “Do you remember what was said?”

After a minute of silence, during which Rosamund seemed to be considering something, she answered: 

“Yes, I do.”

“Which was it?”

“Neither, Dion.  Mrs. Clarke has made a mistake.  She certainly spoke of some Turkish songs for me, but there was never any question of fixing a day for us to try them over together.”

“She thinks there was.”

“It’s difficult to remember exactly what is said, or not said, in the midst of a crowd.”

“But you remember?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’d rather not try them over?”

“After what you’ve told me about Constantinople I expect I should be quite out of sympathy with Turkish music,” she answered, lightly and smiling.  “Let us be true to our Greek ideal.”

She seemed to be in fun, but he detected firmness of purpose behind the fun.

“What shall I say to Mrs. Clarke?” he asked.

“I should just leave it.  Perhaps she’ll forget all about it.”

Dion was quite sure that wouldn’t happen, but he left it.  Rosamund had determined not to allow Mrs. Clarke to be friends with her.  He wished very much it were otherwise, not because he really cared for Mrs. Clarke, but because he liked her and Jimmy, and because he hated the idea of hurting the feelings of a woman in Mrs. Clarke’s rather unusual situation.  He might, of course, have put his point of view plainly to Rosamund at once.  Out of delicacy he did not do this.  His great love for Rosamund made him instinctively very delicate in all his dealings with her; it told him that Rosamund did not wish to discuss her reasons for desiring to avoid Mrs. Clarke.  She had had them, he believed, before Mrs. Clarke and she had met.  That meeting evidently had not lessened their force.  He supposed, therefore, that she had disliked Mrs. Clarke.  He wondered why, and tried to consider Mrs. Clarke anew.  She was certainly not a disagreeable woman.  She was very intelligent, thoroughbred, beautiful in a peculiar way, ­even Rosamund thought that, ­ready to make herself pleasant, quite free from feminine malice, absolutely natural, interested in all the really interesting things.  Beattie liked her; Daventry rejoiced in her; Mrs. Chetwinde was her intimate friend; Esme Darlington had even made sacrifices for her; Bruce Evelin ­

There Dion’s thought was held up, like a stream that encounters a barrier.  What did Bruce Evelin think of Mrs. Clarke?  He had not gone to the trial.  But since he had retired from practise at the Bar he had never gone into court.  Dion had often heard him say he had had enough of the Law Courts.  There was no reason why he should have been drawn to them for Mrs. Clarke’s sake, or even for Daventry’s.  But what did he think of Mrs. Clarke?  Dion resolved to tell him of the rather awkward situation which had come about through his own intimacy ­it really amounted to that ­with Mrs. Clarke, and Rosamund’s evident resolve to have nothing to do with her.

One day Dion went to Great Cumberland Place and told Bruce Evelin all the facts, exactly what Mrs. Clarke had said and done, exactly what Rosamund had said and done.  As he spoke it seemed to him that he was describing a sort of contest, shadowy, perhaps, withdrawn and full of reserves, yet definite.

“What do you think of it?” he said, when he had told the comparatively little there was to tell.

“I think Rosamund likes to keep her home very quiet, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Even her friends complain that she shuts them out.”

“I know they do.”

“She may not at all dislike Mrs. Clarke.  She may simply not wish to add to her circle of friends.”

“The difficulty is, that Mrs. Clarke is such friends with Beattie and Guy, and that I’ve got to know her quite well.  Then there’s her boy; he’s taken a fancy to me.  If Mrs. Clarke and Rosamund could just exchange calls it would be all right, but if they don’t it really looks rather as if Rosamund ­well, as if she thought the divorce case had left a slur on Mrs. Clarke.  What I mean is, that I feel Mrs. Clarke will take it in that way.”

“She may, of course.”

“I wonder why she is so determined to make friends with Rosamund,” blurted out Dion abruptly.

“You think she is determined?” said Bruce Evelin quietly.

“Yes.  Telling you had made me feel that quite plainly.”

“Anyhow, she’ll be gone back to Constantinople in April, and then your little difficulty will come to an end automatically.”

Dion looked rather hard at Bruce Evelin.  When he spoke to Rosamund of Mrs. Clarke, Rosamund always seemed to try for a gentle evasion.  Now Bruce Evelin was surely evading the question, and again Mrs. Clarke was the subject of conversation.  Bruce Evelin was beginning to age rather definitely.  He had begun to look older since Beattie was married.  But his dark eyes were still very bright and keen, and one could not be with him for even a few minutes without realizing that his intellect was sharply alert.

“Isn’t it strange that she should go back to live in Constantinople?” Dion said.

“Yes.  Not many women in her position would do it.”

“And yet there’s reason in her contention that an innocent woman who allows herself to be driven away from the place she lived in is a bit of a coward.”

“Beadon Clarke’s transferred to Madrid, so Mrs. Clarke’s reason ­it was a diplomatic one ­for living in Constantinople falls to the ground.”

“Yes, that’s true.  But of course her husband and she have parted.

“Naturally.  So she has the world to choose from.”

“For a home, you mean?  Yes.  It’s an odd choice, Constantinople.  But she’s not an ordinary woman.”

“No, I suppose not,” said Bruce Evelin.

Again Dion was definitely conscious of evasion.  He got up to go away, feeling disappointed.

“Then you advise me to do nothing?” he said.

“What about, my boy?”

“About Mrs. Clarke.”

“What could you do?”

Dion was silent.

“I think it’s better to let women settle these little things among themselves.  They have a deep and comprehensive understanding of trifles which we mostly lack.  How’s Robin?”

Robin again!  Was he always to be the buffer between 5 Little Market Street and Mrs. Clarke?

“He’s well and tremendously lively, and I honestly think he’s growing better looking.”

“Dear little chap!” said Bruce Evelin, with a very great tenderness in his voice.  “Dion, we shall have to concentrate on Robin.”

Dion looked at him with inquiry.

“Poor Beattie, I don’t think she’ll have a child.”

“Beattie!  Not ever?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Dion was shocked and startled.

“But I haven’t heard a word ­” he began.

“No.  Both Beattie and Guy feel it terribly.  I had a talk with Beattie’s doctor to-day.”

“How dreadful!  I’m sorry.  But ­” He paused.

He didn’t like to ask intimate questions about Beattie.

“I’m afraid it is so,” said Bruce Evelin.  “You must let us all have a share in your Robin.”

He spoke very quietly, but there was a very deep, even intense, feeling in his voice.

“Poor Beattie!” Dion said.

And that, too, was an evasion.

He went away from Great Cumberland Place accompanied by a sense of walking, not perhaps in darkness, but in a dimness which was not delicately beautiful like the dimness of twilight, but was rather akin to the semi-obscurity of fog.

Not a word more was said about Mrs. Clarke between Rosamund and Dion, and the latter never let Mrs. Clarke know about the Turkish songs, never fulfilled his undertaking to go and see Jimmy again.  In a contest he could only be on Rosamund’s side.  The whole matter seemed to him unfortunate, even almost disagreeable, but, for him, there could be no question as to whether he wished Rosamund’s or Mrs. Clarke’s will to prevail.  Whatever Rosamund’s reason was for not choosing to be friends with Mrs. Clark he knew it was not malicious or petty.  Perhaps she had made a mistake about Mrs. Clarke.  If so it was certainly an honest mistake.  It was when he thought of his promise to Jimmy that he felt most uncomfortable about Rosamund’s never expressed decision.  Jimmy had a good memory.  He would not forget.  As to Mrs. Clarke, of course she now fully understood that Mrs. Dion Leith did not want to have anything to do with her.  She continued to go often to Beattie and Daventry, consolidated her friendship with them.  But Dion never met her in De Lorne Gardens.  From Daventry he learnt that Mrs. Clarke had been extraordinarily kind to Beattie when Beattie’s expectation of motherhood had faded away.  Bruce Evelin’s apprehension was well founded.  For reasons which Daventry did not enter into Beattie could never now hope to have a child.  Daventry was greatly distressed about it, but rather for Beattie’s sake than for his own.

“I married Beattie because I loved her, not because I wanted to become a father,” he said.

After a long pause he added, almost wistfully.

“As to Beattie’s reasons for marrying me, well, Dion, I haven’t asked what they were and I never shall.  Women are mysterious, and I believe it’s wisdom on our part not to try to force the locks and look into the hidden chambers.  I’ll do what I can to make up to Beattie for this terrible disappointment.  It won’t be nearly enough, but that isn’t my fault.  Rosamund and you can help her a little.”

“How?”

“She ­she’s extraordinarily fond of Robin.”

“Extraordinarily?” said Dion, startled almost by Daventry’s peculiar emphasis on the word.

“Yes.  Let her see a good deal of Robin if you can.  Poor Beattie!  She’ll never have a child of her own to live in.”

Dion told Rosamund of this conversation, and they agreed to encourage Beattie to come to Little Market Street as often as possible.  Nevertheless Beattie did not come very often.  It was obvious that she adored Robin, who was always polite to her; but perhaps delicacy of feeling kept her from making perpetual pilgrimages to the shrine before which an incense not hers was forever ascending; or perhaps she met a gaunt figure of Pain in the home of her sister.  However it was, her visits were rather rare, and no persuasion availed to make her come oftener.  At this time she and Dion’s mother drew closer together, The two women loved and understood each other well.  Perhaps between them there was a link of loneliness, or perhaps there was another link.

Early in April Dion received one morning the following letter: 

“CLARIDGE’S HOTEL 6 April

“DEAR MR. LEITH, ­I feel pretty rotten about you.  I thought when once a clever boxer gave his honor on a thing it was a dead cert.  The mater wouldn’t let me write before, though I’ve been at her over it every day for weeks.  But now we’re going away, so she says I may write and just tell you.  If you want to say good-by could you telephone, she says.  P’raps you don’t.  P’raps you’ve forgotten us.  I can tell you Jenkins is sick about it all and your never going to the Gim.  He said to me to-day, ‘I don’t know what’s come over Mr. Leith.’  No more do I. The mater says you’re a busy man and have a kid.  I say a true friend is never too busy to be friendly.  I really do feel rotten over it, and now we are going. ­Your affectionate JIMMY.”

Dion showed Rosamund the letter, and telephoned to say he would call on the following day.  Jimmy’s voice answered on the telephone and said: 

“I say, you have been beastly to us.  The mater says nothing, but we thought you liked us.  Jenkins says that between boxers there’s always a ­”

At this point Jimmy was cut off in the flow of his reproaches.

On arriving at Claridge’s Dion found Jimmy alone.  Mrs. Clarke was out but would return in a moment.  Jimmy received his visitor not stiffly but with exuberant and vociferous reproaches, and vehement demands to know the why and wherefore of his unsportsmanlike behavior.

“I’ve ordered you a real jam tea all the same,” he concluded, with a magnanimity which did him honor, and which, as he was evidently aware, proved him to be a true sportsman.

“You’re a trump,” said Dion, pulling the boy down beside him on a sofa.

“Oh, well ­but I say, why didn’t you come?”

He stared with the mercilessly inquiring eyes of boyhood.

“I don’t think I ever said on my honor that I would come.”

“But you did.  You swore.”

“No.  I was afraid of the policeman.”

“I say, what rot!  As if you could be afraid of any one!  Why, Jenkins says you’re the best pupil he’s ever had.  Why didn’t you?  Don’t you like us?”

“Of course I do.”

“The mater says you’re married, and married men have no time to bother about other people’s kids.  Is that true?”

“Well, of course there’s a lot to be done in London, and I go to business every day.”

“You’ve got a kid, haven’t you?”

“Yes!”

“It’s a boy, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I say, how old is it?”

“A year and a month old, or a little over.”

Jimmy’s face expressed satire.

“A year and a month!” he repeated.  “Is that all?  Then it can’t be much good yet, can it?”

“It can’t box or do exercise as you can.  You are getting broad.”

“Rather!  Box?  I should think not!  A kid of a year old boxing!  I should like to see it with Jenkins.”

He begin to giggle.  By the time Mrs. Clarke returned and they sat down to the real jam tea, the ice was in fragments.

“I believe you were right, mater, and it was all the kid that prevented Mr. Leith from sticking to his promise,” Jimmy announced, as he helped Dion to “the strawberry,” with a liberality which betokened an affection steadfast even under the stress of blighting circumstances.

“Of course I was right,” returned his mother gravely.

Dion was rather glad that she looked away from him as she said it.

Her manner to him was unchanged.  Evidently she was a woman not quick to take offense.  He liked that absence of all “touchiness” from her, and felt that a man could rest comfortably on her good breeding.  But this very good breeding increased within him a sense of discomfort which amounted almost to guilt.  He tried to smother it by being very jolly with Jimmy, to whom he devoted most of his attention.  When tea was over Mrs. Clarke said to her son: 

“Now, Jimmy, you must go away for a little while and let me have a talk with Mr. Leith.”

“Oh, mater, that’s not fair.  Mr. Leith’s my pal.  Aren’t you, Mr. Leith?  Why, even Jenkins says ­”

“I should rather think so.  Why ­”

“You shall see Mr. Leith again before he goes.”

He looked at his mother, suddenly became very grave, and went slowly out of the room.  It was evident to Dion that Mrs. Clarke knew how to make people obey her when she was in earnest.

As soon as Jimmy had gone Mrs. Clarke rang for the waiter to take away the tea-table.

“Then we shan’t be bothered,” she remarked.  “I hate people coming in and out when I’m trying to have a quiet talk.”

“So do I,” said Dion.

The waiter rolled the table out gently and shut the door.

Mrs. Clarke sat down on a sofa.

“Do light a cigar,” she said.  “I know you want to smoke, and I’ll have a cigarette.”

She drew out of a little case which lay on a table beside her a Turkish cigarette and lit it, while Dion lighted a cigar.

“So you’re really going back to Constantinople?” he began.  “Are you taking Jimmy with you?”

“Yes, for a time.  My husband raises no objection.  In a year I shall send Jimmy to Eton.  Lady Ermyntrude is furious, of course, and has tried to stir up my husband.  But her influence with him is dead.  He’s terribly ashamed at what she made him do.”

“The action?”

“Yes.  It was she who made him think me guilty against his real inner conviction.  Now, poor man, he realizes that he dragged me through the dirt without reason.  He’s ashamed to show his face in the Clubs, and nearly resigned from diplomacy.  But he’s a valuable man, and they’ve persuaded him to go to Madrid.”

“Why go back to Constantinople?”

“Merely to show I’m not afraid to and that I won’t be driven from my purpose by false accusations.”

“And you love it, of course.”

“Yes.  My flat will be charming, I think.  Some day you’ll see it.”

Dion was silent in surprise.

“Don’t you realize that?” she asked, staring at him.

“I think it very improbable that I shall ever go back to
Constantinople.”

“And I’m sure you will.”

“Why are you sure?”

“That I can’t tell you.  Why is one sometimes sure that certain things will come about?”

“Do you claim to be psychic?” said Dion.

“I never make verbal claims.  Now about Jimmy.”

She discussed for a little while seriously her plans for the boy’s education while he stayed with her.  She had found a tutor, a young Oxford man, who would accompany them to Turkey, but she wanted Dion’s advice on certain points.  He gave it, wondering all the time why she consulted him after his neglect of her and of her son, after his failure to accept invitations and to fulfil pledges (or to stick to the understandings which were almost pledges), after the tacit refusals of Rosamund.  Did it not show a strange persistence, even a certain lack of pride in her?  Perhaps she heard the haunting questions which he did not utter, for she suddenly turned from the topic of the boy and said: 

“You’re surprised at my bothering you with all this when we really know each other so slightly.  It is unconventional; but I shall never learn the way to conventionality in spite of all poor Esme’s efforts to shepherd me into the path he thinks narrow and I find broad ­a way that leads to destruction.  I feel you absolutely understand boys, and know by instinct the best way with them.  That’s why I still come to you.”

She paused.  She had deliberately driven home her meaning by a stress on one word.  Now she sat looking at him, with a wide-eyed and deeply grave fixity, as if considering what more she should say.  Dion murmured something about being very glad if he could help her in any way with regard to Jimmy.

“You can be conventional,” she remarked.  “Well, why not?  Most English people are perpetually playing for safety.”

“I wish you wouldn’t go back to Constantinople,” said Dion.

“Why?”

“I believe it’s a mistake.  It seems to me like throwing down a defiance to your world.”

“But I never play for safety.”

“But think of the danger you’ve passed through.”

The characteristic distressed look deepened in her eyes till they seemed to him tragic.  Nevertheless, fearlessness still looked out of them.

“What shall I gain by doing that?” she asked.

“Esme Darlington once said you were a wild mind in an innocent body.  I believe he was right.  But it seems to me that some day your wild mind may get you into danger again and that perhaps you won’t escape from it unscathed a second time.”

“How quiet and safe it must be at Number 5!” she rejoined, without any irony.

“You wouldn’t care for that sort of life.  You’d find it humdrum,” said Dion, with simplicity.

“You never would,” she said, still without irony, without even the hint of a sneer.  “And the truth is that the humdrum is created not by a way of living but by those who follow it.  Your wife and the humdrum could never occupy the same house.  I shall always regret that I didn’t see something of her.  Do give her a cordial ‘au revoir’ from me.  You’ll hear of me again.  Don’t be frightened about me in your kind of chivalrous heart.  I am grateful to you for several things.  I’m not going to give the list now.  That would either bore you, or make you feel shy.  Some day, perhaps, I shall tell you what they are, in a caïque on the sweet waters of Asia or among the cypresses of Eyub.”

With the last sentence she transported Dion, as on a magic carpet, to the unwise life.  Her husky voice changed a little; her face changed a little too; the one became slower and more drowsy; the other less haggard and fixed in its expression of distress.  This woman had her hours of happiness, perhaps even of exultation.  For a moment Dion envisaged another woman in her.  And when he had bidden her good-by, and had received the tremendous farewells of Jimmy, he realized that she had made upon him an impression which, though soft, was certainly deep.  He thought of how a cushion looks when it lies on a sofa in an empty room, indented by the small head of a woman who has been thinking, thinking alone.  For a moment he was out of shape, and Mrs. Clarke had made him so.

In the big hall, as he passed out, he saw Lord Brayfield standing in front of the bureau speaking to the hall porter.

“Some day, perhaps, I shall tell you what they are, in a caïque on the sweet waters of Asia or among the cypresses of Eyub.”

Dion smiled as he recalled Mrs. Clarke’s words, which had been spoken fatalistically.  Then his face became very grave.

Suddenly there dawned upon him, like a vision in the London street, one of the vast Turkish cemeteries, dusty, forlorn, disordered, yet full of a melancholy touched by romance; and among the thousands of graves, through the dark thickets of cypresses, he was walking with Mrs. Clarke, who looked exactly like Echo.

A newsboy at the corner was crying his latest horror ­a woman found stabbed in Hyde Park.  But to Dion his raucous and stunted voice sounded like a voice from the sea, a strange and sad cry lifted up between Europe and Asia.