CHAPTER I

In June of the following year two young Englishmen, who were making a swift tour of the near East, were sitting one evening in a public garden at Pera.  The west wind, which had been blowing all day, had gone down with the coming of night.  The air was deliciously warm, but not sultry.  The travelers had dined well, but not too well, and were ready to be happy, and to see in others the reflection of their own contented holiday mood.  It was delightful to be “on the loose,” without responsibilities, and with a visit to Brusa to look forward to in the immediate future.  They sat under the stars, sipped their coffee, listened to the absurd music played by a fifth-rate band in a garishly-lighted kiosk, and watched with interest the coming and going of the crowd of Turks and Perotes, with whom mingled from time to time foreign sailors from ships lying off the entrance to the Golden Horn and a few tourists from the hotels of Pera.  Just behind them sat their guide, a thin and eager Levantine, half-Greek and half-Armenian, who, for some inscrutable reason, declared that his name was John.

There was little romance in this garden set in the midst of the noisy European quarter of Constantinople.  The music was vulgar; Greek waiters with dissipated faces ran to and fro carrying syrups and liqueurs; corpulent Turks sat heavily over glasses of lager beer; overdressed young men of enigmatic appearance, with oily thick hair, shifty eyes, and hands covered with cheap rings, swaggered about smoking cigarettes and talking in loud, ostentatious voices.  Some women were there, fat and garish for the most part, liberally powdered and painted, and crowned with hats at which Paris would have stared almost in fear.  There were also children, dark, even swarthy, with bold eyes, shrill voices, immodest bearing, who looked as if they had long since received the ugly freedom of the streets, and learned lessons no children ought to know.

Presently the band stopped playing and there was a general movement of the crowd.  People got up from the little tables and began to disperse.  “John” leaned forward to his employers, and in a quick and rattling voice informed them that a “fust-rate” variety entertainment was about to take place in another part of the garden.  Would they come to see it?  There would be beautiful women, very fine girls such as can only be gazed on in Constantinople, taking part in the “show.”

The young men agreed to “have a look at it,” and followed John to a place where many round tables and chairs were set out before a ramshackle wooden barrack of a theatre, under the shade of some pepper trees, through whose tresses the stars peeped at a throng and a performance which must surely have surprised them.

The band, or a portion of it, was again at work, playing an inane melody, and upon the small stage two remarkably well-developed and aquiline-featured women of mature age, dressed as very young children in white socks, short skirts which displayed frilled drawers, and muslin bonnets adorned with floating blue and pink ribbons, swayed to and fro and joined their cracked voices in a duet, the French words of which seemed to exhale a sort of fade obscenity.  While they swayed and jigged heavily, showing their muscular legs to the staring audience, they gazed eagerly about, seeking an admiration from which they might draw profit when their infantile task was over.  Presently they retired, running skittishly, taking small leaps into the air, and aimlessly blowing kisses to the night.

“Very fine girls!” murmured John to his young patrons.  “They make much money in Pera.”

One of the young men shrugged his shoulders with a smile.

“Get us two Turkish coffees, John!” he said.  Then he turned to his companion.  “I say, Ellis, have you noticed an English feller ­at least I take him to be English ­who’s sitting over there close to the stage, sideways to us?”

“No; where is he?” asked his companion.

“You see that old Turk with the double chin?”

“Rather.”

“Just beyond him, sitting with a guide who’s evidently Greek.”

“I’ve got him.”

“Watch him.  I never saw such a face.”

A blowzy young woman, in orange color and green, with short tinsel-covered skirts, bounded wearily on to the stage, smiling, and began to sing: 

“Je suis une boite de surprises! 
O la la!  O la la! 
Je suis une boite de surprises.”

Ellis looked across at the man to whom his attention had been drawn.  This man was seated by a little table on which were a siphon, a bottle of iced water, and a tall tumbler nearly half-full of a yellow liquid.  He was smoking a large dark-colored cigar which he now and then took from his mouth with a hand that was very thin and very brown.  His face was dark and browned by the sun, but looked startlingly haggard, as if it were pale or even yellowish under the sunburn.  About the eyes there were large wrinkles, spraying downwards over the cheek bones and invading the cheeks.  He wore a mustache, and was well-dressed in a tweed suit.  But his low collar was not very fresh, and his tie was arranged in a slovenly fashion and let his collar stud be seen.  He sat with his legs crossed, staring at the grimacing woman on the stage with a sort of horribly icy intentness.  The expression about his lips and eyes was more than bitter; it showed a frozen fierceness.

On the other side of the table was seated a lean, meager guide, obviously one of those Greeks who haunt the quays of Constantinople on the look out for arriving travelers.  Now and then this Greek leaned forward and, with a sort of servile and anxious intelligence, spoke to his companion.  He received no reply.  The other man went on smoking and staring at the boite de surprises as if he were alone.  And somehow he seemed actually to be alone, encompassed by a frightful solitude.

“A tragic face, isn’t it?” said the man who had first spoken.

“By Jove it is!” returned the officer.  “I wonder that woman can go on singing so close to it.”

“Probably she hasn’t seen him.  How many years do you give him?”

“Thirty-eight or forty.”

“He isn’t out for pleasure, that’s certain.”

“Pleasure!  One would suppose he’d been keeping house with Medusa and ­the deuce, she’s seen him!”

At this moment the singer looked towards the stranger, quavered, faltered, nearly broke down, then, as if with an effort, raised her voice more shrilly and defiantly, exaggerated her meaningless gestures and looked away.  A moment later she finished her song and turned to strut off the stage.  As she did so she shot a sort of fascinated glance at the dark man.  He took his cigar from his mouth and puffed the smoke towards her, probably without knowing that he did so.  With a startled jerk she bounded into the wings.

At this moment John returned with two cups of coffee.

“You know everything, John.  Tell us who that man over there is,” said Ellis, indicating the stranger.

John sent a devouring glance past the old Turk’s double chin, a glance which, as it were, swallowed at one gulp the dark man, his guide, the siphon, the water-bottle and the glass partially full of the yellow liquid.

“I dunno him.  He is noo.”

“Is he English?”

“Sure!” returned John, almost with a sound of contempt.

He never made a mistake about any man’s nationality, could even tell a Spanish Jew from a Portuguese Jew on a dark night at ten yards’ distance.

“I tell you who he is later.  I know the guide, a damned fool and a rogue of a Greek that has been in prison.  He robs all his people what take him.”

“You needn’t bother,” said Ellis curtly.

“Of course not.  Shut up, John, and don’t run down your brothers in crime.”

“That man my brother!”

John upraised two filthy ringed hands.

“That dirty skunk my brother!  That son of ­”

“That’ll do, John!  Be quiet.”

“To-morrow I till you all about the gentleman.  Here is another fine girl!  I know her very well.”

A languid lady, with a face painted as white as a wall, large scarlet lips, eyes ringed with bluish black, and a gleaming and trailing black gown which clung closely to her long and snake-like body, writhed on to the stage, looking carefully sinister.

The dark man swallowed his drink, got up and made his way to the exit from the garden.  He passed close to the two young men, followed by his Greek, at whom John cast a glance of scowling contempt, mingled, however, with very definite inquiry.

“By Jove!  He’s almost spoilt my evening,” said Ellis.  “But we made a mistake, Vernon.  He isn’t anything like forty.”

“No; more like thirty under a cloud.”

“By the look of things I should guess there are plenty of people under a cloud in Pera.  But that English feller stands out even here.  This girl is certainly a first-class wriggler, if she’s nothing else.”

They did not mention the stranger again that night.  But John had not forgotten him, and when he arrived at their hotel next day he at once opened his capacious mouth and let out the following information: 

“The gentleman’s name is Denton, his other name is Mervyn, he is three days in Constantinople, he lives in Hughes’s Hotel in Pera, a very poor house where chic people they never goes, he is out all day and always walkin’, he will not take a carriage, and he is never tired, Nicholas Gounaris ­the Greek guide ­he is droppin’ but the gentleman he does not mind, he only sayin’ if you cannot walk find me another guide what can, every night he is out, too, and he is goin’ to Stamboul when it is dark, he is afraid of nothin’ and goin’ where travelers they never go, one night Gounaris he had to show the traveler ­”

But at this point Ellis shut John up.

“That’ll do,” he observed.  “You’re a diligent rascal, John.  One must say that.  But we aren’t a couple of spies, and we don’t want to hear any more about that feller.”

And John, without bearing any malice, went off to complete his arrangements for the journey to Brusa.

Two days later, Mrs. Clarke, who was at Buyukderer in a villa she had taken for the summer months, but who had come into Constantinople to do some shopping, saw “Mervyn Denton” in a side street close to the British Embassy.  Those distressed eyes of hers were very observant.  There were many people in the street, and “Denton,” who was alone, was several yards away from her, and was walking with his back towards her; but she immediately recognized him, quickened her steps till she was close to him, and then said: 

“Dion Leith!”

Dion heard the husky voice and turned round.  He did not say anything, but he took off the soft hat he was wearing.  Mrs. Clarke stared at him with the unself-conscious directness which was characteristic of her.  She saw Dion for the first time since the tragedy which had changed his life, but she had written to him more than once.  Her last letter had come from Buyukderer.  He had answered it, but he had not told her where he was, had not even hinted to her that he might come to Constantinople.  Nevertheless, she did not now show any surprise.  She just looked at him steadily, absorbed all the change in him swiftly, and addressed herself to the new man who stood there before her.

“Come with me to the Hotel de Paris.  I’m spending the night there, and go back to-morrow to Buyukderer.  I had something to do in town.”

She had not given him her hand, and he did not attempt to take it.  He put on his hat, turned and walked at her side.  Neither of them spoke a word until they had come into the uproar of the Grande Rue, which surrounded them with a hideous privacy.  Then Mrs. Clarke said;

“Where are you staying?”

“At Hughes’s Hotel.”

“I never heard of it.”

“It’s in Brusa Street.  It’s cheap.”

“And horrible,” she thought.

But she did not say so.

“I have only been here three days,” Dion added.

“Do you remember that I once said to you I knew you would come back to Constantinople?”

For a moment his face was distorted.  When she saw that she looked away gravely, at the glittering shops and at the Perotes who were passing by with the slow and lounging walk which they affect in the Grande Rue.  Presently she heard him say: 

“You were right.  It was all arranged.  It was all planned out.  Even then I believe I knew it would be so, that I should come back here.”

“Why have you come?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, and his voice, which had been hard and fierce, became suddenly dull.

“He really believes that,” she thought.

“Here is the hotel,” she said.  “I’m all alone.  Jimmy has been out, but has had to go back to Eton.  I wish you had seen him.”

“Oh no!” said Dion, almost passionately.

They went up in a lift, worked by a Montenegrin boy with a big round forehead, to her sitting-room on the second floor.  It was large, bare and clean, with white walls and awnings at the windows.  She rang the bell.  A Corsican waiter came and she ordered tea.  The roar of the street noises penetrated into the shadowy room through the open windows, and came to Dion like heat.  He remembered the silence of Claridge’s.  Suddenly his head began to swim.  It seemed to him that his life, all of it that he had lived till that moment, was spinning round him, and that, as it spun, it gave out a deafening noise and glittered.  He sat down on a chair which was close to a small table, laid his arms on the table, and hid his face against them.  Still the deafening noise continued.  The sum of it was surely made up of the uproar of the Grand Rue with the uproar of his spinning life added to it.  He saw yellow balls ringed with pale blue rapidly receding from his shut eyes.

Mrs. Clarke looked at him for a moment; then she went into the adjoining bedroom and shut the door behind her.  She did not come back till the waiter knocked and told her that tea was ready.  Then she opened the door.  She had taken off her hat and gloves, and looked very white and cool, and very composed.

Dion was standing near the windows.  The waiter, who had enormously thick mustaches, and who evidently shaved in the evening instead of in the morning, was going out at the farther door.  He shut it rather loudly.

“Every one makes a noise in Pera.  It’s de rigueur,” said Mrs. Clarke, coming to the tea-table.

“Do you know,” said Dion, “I used to think you looked punished?”

“Punished ­I!”

There was a sudden defiance in her voice which he had never heard in it before.  He came up to the table.

“Yes.  In London I used to think you had a punished look and even a haunted look.  Wasn’t that ridiculous?  I didn’t know then what it meant to be punished, or to be haunted.  I hadn’t enough imagination to know, not nearly enough.  But some one or something’s seen to it that I shall know all about punishment and haunting.  So I shall never be absurd about you again.”

After a pause she said: 

“I wonder why you thought that about me?”

“I don’t know.  It just came into my head.”

“Well, sit down and let us have our tea.”

Dion sat down mechanically, and Mrs. Clarke poured out the tea.

“I wish it was Buyukderer,” she said.

“Oh, I like the uproar.”

“No, you don’t ­you don’t.  Pera is spurious, and all its voices are spurious voices.  To-morrow morning, before I go back, you and I will go to Eyub.”

“To the dust and the silence and the cypresses ­O God!” said Dion.

He got up from his chair.  He was beginning to tremble.  Was it coming upon him at last then, the utter breakdown which through all these months he had ­somehow ­kept at a distance?  Determined not to shake, he exerted his will violently, till he felt as if he were with dreadful difficulty holding, keeping together, a multitude of living, struggling things, which were trying to get away out of his grasp.  And these living things were the multitudinous parts of the whole which was himself.

All that now was had been foreshadowed.  There had been writing on the wall.

“I am grateful to you for several things.  I’m not going to give you the list now.  Some day, perhaps, I shall tell you what they are . . . among the cypresses of Eyub.”

She had said that to him in London, and her voice had been fatalistic as she spoke; and in the street that same day, on his way home, the voice of the boy crying the last horror had sounded to him like a voice from the sea, a strange and sad cry lifted up between Europe and Asia.  And now ­

“How did you know?” he said.  “How did you know that we should be here together some day?”

“Sit down.  You must sit down.”

She put her languid and imperative hand on his wrist, and he sat down.  He took her hand and put it against his forehead for a moment.  But that was no use.  For her hand seemed to add fever to his fever.

“I have seen you standing amongst graves in the shadow of cypress trees,” he said.  “In England I saw you like that.  But ­how did you know?”

“Drink your tea.  Don’t hurry.  We’ve got such a long time.”

“I have.  I have all the days and nights ­every hour of them ­at my own disposal.  I’m the freest man on earth, I suppose.  No work, no ties.”

“You’ve given up everything?”

“Oh, of course.  That is, the things that were still left to me to give up.  They didn’t mean much.”

“Eat something,” she said, in a casual voice, pushing a plate of delicious little cakes towards him.

“Thank you.”

He took one and ate.  He regained self-control, but he knew that at any moment, if anything unusual happened, or if he dared to think, or to talk, seriously about the horror of his life, he would probably go down with a crash into an abyss in which all of his manhood, every scrap of his personal dignity, would be utterly lost.  And still almost blindly he held on to certain things in the blackness which encompassed him.  He still wished to play the man, and though in bitterness he had tried sometimes to sink down in degradation, his body ­or so it had seemed to him ­had resisted the will of the injured soul, which had said to it, “Go down into the dirt; seek satisfaction there.  Your sanity and your purity of life have availed you nothing.  From them you have had no reward.  Then seek the rewards of the other life.  Thousands of men enjoy them.  Join that crowd, and put all the anemic absurdities of so-called goodness behind you.”

He had almost come to hate the state he conceived of as goodness; yet the other thing, its opposite, evil, he instinctively rebelled against and even almost feared.  The habit of a life-time was not to be broken in a day, or even in many days.  Often he had thought of himself as walking in nothingness, because he rejected evil.

Goodness had ruthlessly cast him out; and so far he had made no other friend, had taken no other comrade to his bruised and bleeding heart.

Mrs. Clarke began to talk to him quietly.  She talked abut herself, and he knew that she did this not because of egoism, but because delicately she wished to give him a full opportunity for recovery.  She had seen just where he was, and she had understood his recoil from the abyss.  Now she wished, perhaps, to help him to draw back farther from it, to draw back so far that he would no longer see it or be aware of it.

So she talked of herself, of her life at Buyukderer in the summer, and in Pera in the autumn and spring.

“I don’t go out to Buyukderer till the middle of May,” she said, “and I come back into town at the end of September.”

“You manage to stand Pera for some months every year?” said Dion, listening at first with difficulty, and because he was making a determined effort.

“Yes.  An Englishwoman ­even a woman like me ­can’t live in Stamboul.  And Pera, odious as it is, is in Constantinople, in the city which has a spell, though you mayn’t feel it yet.”

She was silent for a moment, and they heard the roar from the Grande Rue, that street which is surely the noisiest in all Europe.  Hearing it, Dion thought of the silence of the Precincts at Welsley.  That sweet silence had cast him out.  Hell must be full of roaring noises and of intense activities.  Then Mrs. Clarke went on talking.  There was something very feminine and gently enticing in her voice, which resembled no other voice ever heard by Dion.  He felt kindness at the back of her talk, the wish to alleviate his misery if only for a moment, to do what she could for him.  She could do nothing, of course.  Nevertheless he began to feel grateful to her.  She was surely unlike other women, incapable of bearing a grudge.  For he had not been very “nice” to her in the days when he was happy and she was in difficulties.  At this moment he vaguely exaggerated his lack of “niceness,” and perhaps also her pardoning temperament.  In truth, he was desperately in need of a touch from the magic wand of sympathy.  Believing, or even perhaps knowing, that to the incurably wounded man palliatives are of no lasting avail, he had deliberately fled from them, and gone among those who had no reason to bother about him.  But now he was grateful.

“Go on talking,” he said once, when she stopped speaking.  And she continued talking about her life.  She said nothing more about Jimmy.

The Corsican waiter came and took away the tea things noisily.  Her spell was broken.  For a moment Dion felt dazed.

He got up.

“I ought to go,” he said.

“Must you?”

“Must! ­Oh no!  My time is my own, and always will be, I suppose.”

“You have thrown up everything?”

“What else could I do?  The man who killed his own son!  How could I stay in London, go among business men who knew me, talk about investments to clients?  Suppose you had killed Jimmy!”

There was a long silence.  Then he said: 

“I’ve given up my name.  I call myself Mervyn Denton.  I saw the name in a novel I opened on a railway bookstall.”

She got up and came near to him quietly.

“This is all wrong,” she said.

“What is?”

“All you are doing, the way you are taking it all.”

“What other way is there of taking such a thing?”

“Will you come with me to Eyub to-morrow?”

“It was written long ago that I am to go there with you.  I’m quite sure of that.”

“I’ll tell you what I mean there to-morrow.”

She looked towards the window.

“It’s like the roar of hell,” he said.

And he went away.

That night Mrs. Clarke dined alone downstairs in the restaurant.  The cooking at the Hotel de Paris was famous, and attracted many men from the Embassies.  Presently Cyril Vane, one of the secretaries at the British Embassy, came in to dine.  He had with him a young Turkish gentleman, who was called away by an agent from the Palace in the middle of dinner.  Vane, thus left alone, presently got up and came to Mrs. Clarke’s table.

“May I sit down and talk to you for a little?” he said, with a manner that testified to their intimacy.  “My guest has deserted me.”

“Yes, do.  Tell the waiter to bring the rest of your dinner here.”

“But I have finished.”

“Light your cigar then.”

“If you don’t mind.”

They talked for a few minutes about the things of every day and the little world they both lived in on the Bosporus; then Mrs. Clarke said: 

“I met a friend from England unexpectedly to-day.”

“Did you?”

“A man called Dion Leith.”

“Dion Leith?” repeated Vane.

He looked at her earnestly.

“Now wait a moment!”

His large, cool blue eyes became meditative.

“It’s on the edge of my mind who that is, and yet I can’t remember.  I don’t know him, but I’m sure I know of him.”

“He fought in the South African War.”

Suddenly Vane leaned forward.  He was frowning.

“I’ve got it!  He fought, came back with the D.C.M., and only a few days afterwards killed his only child, a son, out shooting.  I remember the whole thing now, the inquest at which he was entirely exonerated and the rumors about his wife.  She’s a beautiful woman, they say.”

“Very beautiful.”

“She took it very badly, didn’t she?”

“What do you mean by very badly?”

“Didn’t she bear very hard on him?”

“She couldn’t endure to see him, or to have him near her.  Is that very wonderful?”

“You stand up for her then?”

“She was first and foremost a mother.”

“Do you know,” Vane said rather dryly, “you are the only woman I never hear speak against other women.  But when the whole thing was an accident?”

“We can’t always be quite fair, or quite reasonable, when a terrible shock comes to us.”

“It’s a problem, a terrible problem of the affections,” Vane said.  “Had she loved her husband?  Do you know?”

“I know that he loved her very much,” said Mrs. Clarke.  “He is here under an assumed name.”

Vane looked openly surprised and even, for a moment, rather disdainful.

“But then ­” He paused.

“Why did I give him away?”

“Well ­yes.”

“Because I wish to force him to face things fully and squarely.  It’s his only chance.”

“Won’t he be angry?”

“But I don’t mind that.”

“You’ve had a reason in telling me,” said Vane quietly.  “What is it?”

“Come up to my sitting-room.  We’ll have coffee there.”

“Willingly.  I feel your spell even when you’re weaving it for another man’s sake.”

Mrs. Clarke did not reject the compliment.  She only looked at Vane, and said: 

“Come.”

CHAPTER II

In the morning Mrs. Clarke sent a messenger to Hughes’s Hotel asking Dion to meet her at the landing-place on the right of the Galata Bridge at a quarter to eleven.

“We will go to Eyub by caïque,” she wrote, “and lunch at a Turkish cafe I know close to the mosque.”

She drove to the bridge.  When she came in sight of it she saw Dion standing on it alone, looking down on the crowded water-way.  He was leaning on the railing, and his right cheek rested on the palm of his brown hand.  Mrs. Clarke smiled faintly as she realized that this man who was waiting for her had evidently forgotten all about her.

She dismissed the carriage, paid the toll and walked on to the bridge.  As usual there was a crowd of pedestrians passing to and fro from Galata to Stamboul and from Stamboul to Galata.  She mingled with it, went up to Dion and stood near him without uttering a word.  For perhaps two minutes she stood thus before he noticed her.  Then he turned and sent her a hard, almost defiant glance before he recognized who his companion was.

“Oh, I didn’t know it was ­Why didn’t you speak?  Is it time to go?  I meant to be at the landing.”

He spoke like a man who had been a long way off, and who returned weary and almost dazed from that distance.  He looked at his watch.

“Please forgive me for putting you to the trouble of coming to find me.”

“You needn’t ever ask me to forgive you for anything.  Don’t let us bother each other with all the silly little things that worry the fools.  We’ve got beyond all that long ago.  There’s my caïque.”

She made a signal with her hand.  Two Albanians below saluted her.

“Shall we go at once?  Or would you rather stay here a little longer?”

“Let us go.  I was only looking at the water.”

He turned and sent a long glance to Stamboul.

“Your city!” he said.

“I shall take you.”

For the first time that day he looked at her intimately, and his look said: 

“Why do you trouble about me?”

They went down, got into the caïque, and were taken by the turmoil of the Golden Horn.  Among the innumerable caïques, the steamboats, the craft of all kinds, they went out into the strong sunshine, guarded on the one hand by the crowding, discolored houses of Galata rising to Pera, on the other hand by the wooden dwellings and the enormous mosques of Stamboul.  The voices of life pursued them over the water and they sat in silence side by side.  Dion made no social attempt to entertain his companion.  Had she not just said to him that long ago they had gone beyond all the silly little things that worry the fools?  In the midst of the fierce activity and the riot of noise which marks out the Golden Horn from all other water-ways, they traveled towards emptiness, silence, the desolation on the hill near the sacred place of the Turks, where each new Sultan is girded with the sword of Osman, and where the standard-bearer of the Prophet sleeps in the tomb that was seen in a vision.

In the strong heat of noon they left the caïque and walked slowly towards the hill which rises to the north-east, where the dark towers of the cypresses watch over the innumerable graves.  Mrs. Clarke had put up a sun umbrella.  Her face was protected by a thin white veil.  She wore a linen dress, pale gray in color, with white lines on it, and long loose gloves of suede.  She looked extraordinarily thin.  Her unshining, curiously colorless hair was partly covered by a small hat of burnt straw, turned sharply and decisively up on the left side and trimmed with a broad riband of old gold.  Dion remembered that he had thought of her once as a vision seen in water.  Now he was with her in the staring definite clearness of a land dried by the heats of summer and giving to them its dust.  And she was at home in this aridity.  In the dust he was aware of the definiteness of her.  Since the blackness had overtaken him people had meant to him less than shadows gliding on a wall mean to a joyous man.  Often he had observed them, even sharply and with a sort of obstinate persistence; he had been trying to force them to become real to him.  Invariably he had failed in his effort.  Mrs. Clarke was real to him as she walked in silence beside him, between the handsome railed-in mausoleums which line the empty roads from the water’s edge almost to the mosque of the Conqueror.  A banal phrase came to his lips, “You are in your element here.”  But he held it back, remembering that they walked in the midst of dust.

Leaving the mosque they ascended the hill and passed the Tekkeh of the dancing dervishes.  All around them were the Turkish graves with their leaning headstones, or their headstones fallen and lying prone in the light flaky earth above the smoldering corpses of the dead.  Here and there tight bunches of flowers were placed upon the graves.  Gaunt shadows from old cypresses fell over some of them, defining the sunlight.  Below was the narrowing sea, the shallow north-west arm of the Golden Horn, which stretches to Kiathareh, where are the sweet waters of Europe, and to Kiahat Haneh.

“We’ll sit here,” said Mrs. Clarke presently.

And she sat down, with the folding ease almost of an Oriental, on the warm earth, and leaned against the fissured trunk of a cypress.

Casually she had seemed to choose the resting-place, but she had chosen it well.  More times than she could count she had come to that exact place, had leaned against that cypress and looked down the Golden Horn to the divided city, one-half of which she loved as she loved few things, one-half of which she endured for the sake of the other.

“From here,” she said to Dion, “I can feel Stamboul.”

He had lain down near to her sideways and rested his cheek on his hand.  The lower half of his body was in sunshine, but the cypress threw its shadow over his head and shoulders.  As Mrs. Clarke spoke he looked down the Golden Horn to the Turkish city, and his eyes were held by the minarets of its mosques.  Seldom had he looked at a minaret without thinking of prayer.  He thought of prayer now, and then of his dead child, of the woman he had called wife, and of the end of his happiness.  The thought came to him: 

“I was kept safe in the midst of the dangers of war for a reason; and that reason was that I might go back to England and kill my son.”

And yet every day men went up into these minarets and called upon other men to bow themselves and pray.

God is great. . . .

In the sunlit silence of the vast cemetery the wheels of Dion’s life seemed for a moment to cease from revolving.

God is great ­great in His power to inflict misery upon men.  And so pray to Him!  Mount upon the minarets, go up high, till you are taken by the blue, till, at evening, you are nearer to the stars than other men, and pray to Him and proclaim His glory.  For He is the repository of the power to cover you with misery as with a garment, and to lay you even with the dust.  Pray then ­pray!  Unless the garment is upon you, unless the dust is already about you!

Dion lay on the warm earth and looked at the distant minarets, and smiled at the self-seeking slave-instinct in men, which men sought to glorify, to elevate into a virtue.

“Why are you smiling?” said a husky voice above.

He did not look up, but he answered: 

“Because I was looking at those towers of prayer.”

“The minarets.”

She was silent for a few minutes; after a while she said: 

“You remember the first time you met me?”

“Of course.”

“I was in difficulties then.  They culminated in the scandal of my divorce case.  Tell me, how did you think I faced all that trouble?”

“With marvelous courage.”

“In what other way can thoroughbred people face an enemy?  Suppose I had lost instead of won, suppose Jimmy had been taken from me, do you think it would have broken me?”

“I can’t imagine anything breaking you,” said Dion.  “But I don’t believe you ever pray.”

“What has that to do with it?”

“I believe the people who pray are the potential cowards.”

“Do you pray?”

“Not now.  That’s why I was smiling when I looked at the minarets.  But I don’t make a virtue of it.  I have nothing to pray for.”

“Well then, if you have put away prayer, that means you are going to rely on yourself.”

“What for?”

“For all the sustaining you will need in the future.  The people commonly called good think of God as something outside themselves to which they can apply in moments of fear, necessity and sorrow.  If you have really got beyond that conception you must rely on yourself, find in yourself all you need.”

“But I need nothing ­you don’t understand.”

“You nearly told me yesterday.”

“Perhaps if you hadn’t gone out of the room I should have been obliged to tell you, but not because I wished to.”

“I understood that.  That is why I went out of the room and left you alone.”

For the first time Dion looked up at her.  She had lifted her veil, and her haggard, refined face was turned towards him.

“Thank you,” he said.

At that moment he liked her as he had never liked her in the past.

“Can you tell me now because you wish to?”

“Here among the graves?”

“Yes.”

Again he looked at the distant minarets lifted towards the blue near the way of the sea.  But he said nothing.  She shut her sun umbrella, laid it on the ground beside her, pulled off her gloves and spread them out on her knees slowly.  She seemed to be hesitating; for she looked down and for a moment she knitted her brows.  Then she said;

“Tell me why you came to Constantinople.”

“I couldn’t.”

“If I hadn’t met you in the street by chance, would you have come to see me?”

“I don’t think I should.”

“And yet it was I who willed you to come here.”

Dion did not seem surprised.  There was something remote in him which perhaps could not draw near to such a simple commonplace feeling in that moment.  He had gone out a long way, a very long way, from the simple ordinary emotions which come upon, or beset, normal men living normal lives.

“Did you?” he asked.  “Why?”

“I thought I could do something for you.  I began last night.”

“What?”

“Doing something for you.  I told an acquaintance of mine called Vane, who is attached to the British Embassy, that you were here.”

A fierce flush came into Dion’s face.

“I said you would probably come out to Buyukderer,” she continued, “and that I wanted to bring you to the summer Embassy and to introduce you to the Ambassador and Lady Ingleton.”

Dion sat up and pressed his hands palm downwards on the ground.

“I shall not go.  How could you say that I was here?  You know I had dropped my own name.”

“I gave it back to you deliberately.”

“I think that was very brutal of you,” he said, in a low voice, tense with anger.

“You wanted to be very kind to me when I was in great difficulties.  Circumstances got rather in the way.  That doesn’t matter.  The intention was there, though you were too chivalrous to go very far in action.”

“Chivalrous to whom?”

“To her.”

His face went pale under its sunburn.

“What are you doing?” he said, in a low voice that was almost terrible.  “Where are you taking me?”

“Into the way you must walk in.  Dion ­“ ­even in calling him by his Christian name for the first time her voice sounded quite impersonal ­“you’ve done nothing wrong.  You have nothing, absolutely nothing, to be ashamed of.  Kismet!  We have to yield to fate.  If you slink through the rest of your years on earth, if you get rid of your name and hide yourself away, you will be just a coward.  But you aren’t a coward, and you are not going to act like one.  You must accept your fate.  You must take it right into your heart bravely and proudly, or, if you can’t do that, stoically.  I should.”

“If you had killed Jimmy?”

She was silent.

“If you had killed Jimmy?” he repeated, in a hard voice.

“I should never hide myself.  I should always face things.”

“You haven’t had the blow I have had.  I know I am not in fault.  I know I have nothing to blame myself for.  I wasn’t even careless with my gun.  If I had been I could never have forgiven myself.  But I wasn’t.”

“It was the pony.  I know.  I read the account of the inquest.  You were absolutely exonerated.”

“Yes.  The coroner and the jury expressed their deep sympathy with me,” he said, with intense bitterness.  “They realized how ­how I loved my little boy.  But the woman I loved more even than my boy, whom I had loved for ever since I first saw her ­well, she didn’t feel at all as the coroner and the jury did.”

“Where is she?  I hear now and then from Beatrice Daventry, but she never mentions her sister.”

“She is in Liverpool doing religious work, I believe.  She has given herself to religion.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“People give themselves to God, don’t they, sometimes?”

“Do they?” said Mrs. Clarke, with her curious grave directness, which seemed untouched by irony.

“It seems a way out of ­things.  But she always had a tendency that way.”

“Towards the religious life?”

“Yes.  She always cared for God a great deal more than she cared for me.  She cared for God and for Robin, and she seemed to be just beginning to care for me when I deprived her of Robin.  Since then she has hated me.”

He spoke quietly, sternly.  All the emotion of which she had been conscious on the previous afternoon had left him.

“I didn’t succeed in making her love me!” he continued.  “I thought I had gained a good deal in South Africa.  When I came back I felt I was starting again, and that I should carry things through.  Robin felt the difference in me directly.  He would have got to care for me very much, and I could have done a great deal for him when he had got older.  But God didn’t see things that way.  He had planned it all out differently.  When I was with her in Greece, one day I tore down a branch of wild olive and stripped the leaves from it.  She saw me do it, and it distressed her very much.  She had been dreaming over a child, and my action shattered her dream, I suppose.  Women have dreams men can’t quite understand ­about children.  She forgave me for that almost directly.  She knew I would never have done anything to make her unhappy even for a moment, if I had thought.  Now I have broken her life to pieces, and there’s no question of forgiveness.  If there were, I should not speak of her to you.  We are absolutely parted forever.  She would take the hand of the most dreadful criminal rather than my hand.  She has a horror of me.  I’m the thing that’s killed her child.”

He looked down at the dilapidated graves, and then at the lonely water which seemed trying to hide itself away in the recesses of the bare land.

“That’s how it is.  Robin forgave me.  He was alive for a moment ­after, and I saw by his eyes he understood.  Yes, he understood ­he understood!”

Suddenly his body began to shake and his arms jerked convulsively.  Instinctively, but quite quietly, Mrs. Clarke put out her hand as if she were going to lay hold of his right arm.

“No ­don’t!” he said.  “Yesterday your hand made me worse.”

She withdrew her hand.  Her face did not change.  She seemed wholly unconscious of any rudeness on his part.

“Let’s move ­let’s walk!” he said.

He sprang up.  When he was on his feet he regained control of his body.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” he said.  “I’m not ill.”

“My friend, it will have to come,” she said, getting up too.

“What?”

But she did not reply.

“I’ve never been like this till now,” he added vaguely.

She knew why, but she did not tell him.  She was a woman who knew how to wait.

They wandered away through that cemetery above the Golden Horn, among the cypresses and the leaning and fallen tombstones.  Now and then they saw veiled women pausing beside the graves with flowers in their hands, or fading among the cypress trunks into sunlit spaces beyond.  Now and then they saw a man praying.  Once they came to a tomb where children were sitting in a circle chanting the Koran with a sound like the sound of bees.

Before they went down to the Turkish cafe, which is close to the holy mosque, they stood for a long while together on the hillside, looking at distant Stamboul.  The cupolas of the many mosques and the tall and speary minarets gave their Eastern message ­that message which, even to Protestant men from the lands of the West, is as the thrilling sound of a still, small voice.  And the voice will not be gainsaid; it whispers, “In the East thou shalt find me if thou hast not found me in the West.”

“Why do you care for Stamboul so much?” Dion asked his companion.  “I think you are utterly without religion.  I may be wrong, but I think you are.  And Stamboul is full of calls to prayer and of places for men to worship in.”

“Oh, there is something,” she answered.  “There is the Unknown God.”

“The Unknown God?” he repeated, with a sort of still bitterness.

“And His city is Stamboul ­for me.  When the muezzin calls I bow myself in ignorance.  What He is, I don’t know.  All I know is that men cannot explain Him to me, or teach me anything about Him.  But Stamboul has lures for me.  It is not only the city of many prayers, it is also the city of many forgetfulnesses.  The old sages said, ’Eat not thy heart nor mourn the buried Past.’  Stay here for a time, and learn to obey that command.  Perhaps, eventually, Stamboul will help you.”

“Nothing can help me,” he answered.

They went down the hill by the Tekkeh of the Dancing Dervishes.

Mrs. Clarke did not go back to her villa at Buyukderer that day.  It was already late in the afternoon when her caïque touched the wharf at the foot of the Galata bridge.

“I shall stay another night at the hotel,” she said to Dion.  “Will you drive up with me?”

He assented.  When they reached the hotel he said: 

“May I come in for a few minutes?”

“Of course.”

When they were in the dim, rather bare room with the white walls, between which the fierce noises from the Grande Rue found a home, he said: 

“I feel before I leave I must speak about what you did last night, the message you gave to Vane of our Embassy.  I dare say you are right and that I ought to face things.  But no one can judge for a man in my situation, a man who’s had everything cut from under him.  I haven’t ended it.  That proves I’ve got a remnant of something ­you needn’t call it strength ­left in me.  Since you’ve told my name, I’ll take it back.  Perhaps it was cowardly to give it up.  I believe it was.  Robin might think so, if he knew.  And he may know things.  But I can’t meet casual people.”

“I’m afraid I did what I did partly for myself,” she said, taking off her little hat and laying it, with her gloves, on a table.

“For yourself?  Why?”

“I’ll explain to-morrow.  I shall see you before I go.  Come for me at ten, will you, and we’ll drive to Stamboul.  I’ll tell you there.”

“Please tell me now, if you’re not tired after being out all day.”

“I’m never tired.”

“Once Mrs. Chetwinde told me that you were made of iron.”

Mrs. Clarke sent him a curious keen glance of intense and almost lambent inquiry, but he did not notice it.  The strong interest that notices things was absent from him.  Would it ever be in him again?

“I suppose I have a great deal of stamina,” she said casually.  “Well, sit down, and I’ll try to explain.”

She lit a cigarette and sat on a divan in the far corner of the large room, between one of the windows and the door which led into the bedroom.  Dion sat down, facing her and the noise from the Grande Rue.  He wondered for a moment why she had chosen a place so close to the window.

“I had a double reason for doing what I did,” she said.  “One part unselfish, the other not.  I’ll be very frank.  I willed that you should come here.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I wanted to see you.  I wanted to help you.  You don’t think I, or any one, can do that.  You think everything is over for you ­”

“I know it is,” he interrupted, in a voice which sounded cold and dull and final.

“You think that.  Any man like you, in your situation, would think that.  Let us leave it for the moment.  I wished you to come here, and willed you to come here.  For some reason you have come.  You didn’t let me know you were here, but, by chance as it seems, we met.  I don’t mean to lose sight of you.  I intend that you shall come either to Buyukderer, or to some place on the Bosporus not far off that’s endurable in the summer, and that you shall stay there for a time.”

“Why?”

“I want to find out if I can be of any good to you.”

“You can’t.  I don’t even know why you wish to.  But you can’t.”

“We’ll leave that,” she said, with inflexible composure.  “I don’t much care what you think about it.  I shan’t be governed, or affected even, by that.  The point is, I mean you to come.  How are you to come, surreptitiously or openly, sneaking in by-ways, your real name concealed, or treading the highway, your real name known?  For your own sake it must be openly and with your own name, and for my sake too.  You need to face your great tragedy, to stand right up to it.  It’s your only chance.  A man is always pursued by what he runs away from; he can always make a friend of what he stands up to.”

“A friend?”

His voice broke in with the most piercing and bitter irony through the many noises in the room ­sounds of cries, of carriage wheels, of horses’ hoofs ringing on an uneven pavement, of iron shutters being pulled violently down over shop fronts, of soldiers marching, of distant bugles calling, of guitars and mandolins accompanying a Neapolitan song.

“Yes, a friend,” said the husky and inflexible, but very feminine voice, which resembled no other voice of woman that he had ever heard.  “So much for my thought of you.  And now for my thought of myself.  I am a woman who has faced a great scandal and come out of it the winner.  I was horribly attacked, and I succeeded in what the papers call reestablishing my reputation.  You and I know very well what that means.  I know by personal experience, you by the behavior of your own wife.”

Dion moved abruptly like a man in physical pain, but Mrs. Clarke continued: 

“I don’t ask you to forgive me for hurting you.  You and I must be frank with each other, or we can be of no use to each other.  After what has happened many women might be inclined to avoid me as your wife did.  Fortunately I have so many friends who believe in me that I am in a fairly strong position.  I don’t want to weaken that position on account of Jimmy.  Now, if you came to Buyukderer under an assumed name, I couldn’t introduce you to any one, or explain you without telling lies.  Gossip runs along the shores of the Bosporus like fire along a hayrick.  How can I be seen perpetually with a man whom I never introduce to any of my friends, who isn’t known at his own Embassy?  Both for your own sake and for mine we must be frank about the whole thing.”

“But I never said I should come to Buyukderer,” he said.

And there was a sort of dull, lifeless obstinacy in his voice.

“You have come to Constantinople and you will come to Buyukderer,” she replied quietly.

He looked at her across the room.  The light was beginning to fade, but still the awnings were drawn down beyond the windows, darkening the large bare room.  He saw her as a study in gray and white, with colorless, unshining hair, a body so thin and flexible that it was difficult to believe it contained nerves like a network of steel and muscles capable of prolonged endurance, a face that was haggard in its white beauty, eyes that looked enormous and fixed in the twilight.  The whole aspect of her was melancholy and determined, beautiful and yet almost tragic.  He felt upon him the listless yet imperative grasp which he had first known in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room, the grasp which resembled Stamboul’s.

“I suppose I shall go to Buyukderer,” he said slowly.  “But I don’t know why you wish it.”

“I have always liked you.”

“Yes, I think you have.”

“I don’t care to see a man such as you are destroyed by a good woman.”

He got up.

“No one is destroying me,” he said, with a dull and hopeless defiance.

“Dion, don’t misunderstand me.  It wouldn’t be strange if you thought I bore your wife a grudge because she didn’t care about knowing me.  But, honestly, I am indifferent to a great many things that most women fuss about.  I quite understood her reluctance.  Directly I saw her I knew that she had ideals, and that she expected all those who were intimately in her life to live up to them.  Instead of accepting the world as it has been created, such women must go one better than the Creator (if there is one), and invent an imaginary world.  Now I shouldn’t be at home in an imaginary world.  I’m not good enough for that, and don’t want to be.  Your wife is very good, but she lives for herself, for her own virtues and the peace and happiness she gets out of them.”

“She lived for Robin,” he interrupted.

“Robin was a part of herself,” Mrs. Clarke said dryly.  “Women like that don’t know how to love as lovers, because they care for the virtues in men rather than for the men themselves.  They are robed in ideals, and they are in mortal fear of a speck of dust falling on the robe.  The dust of my scandal was upon me, so your wife avoided me.  That I was innocent didn’t matter.  I had been mixed up with something ugly.  Your chivalry was instinctively on the side of justice.  Her virtue inclined to the other side.  Her virtue is destructive.”

He was silent.

“Now it has driven you out like a scapegoat into the wilderness!”

“No, no!” he muttered, without conviction.

“But don’t let it destroy you.  I would rather deliberately destroy myself than let any one destroy me.  In the one case there’s strength of a kind, in the other there’s no strength at all.  I speak very plainly, but I’m not a woman full of ideals.  I accept the world just as it is, men just as they are.  If a speck of dust alights on me, I don’t think myself hopelessly befouled; and if some one I loved made a slip, I should only think that it is human to err and that it’s humanity I love.”

“Humanity!” he repeated, looking down.  “Ah!” He sighed deeply.

He raised his head.

“And if some one you loved killed your Jimmy?”

“As you ?”

“Yes ­yes?”

“I should love him all the more because of the misery added to him,” she said firmly.  “There’s only one thing a really great love can’t forgive.”

“What is it?”

“The deliberate desire and intention to hurt it and degrade it.”

“I never had that.”

“No.”

“Then ­then you think she never loved me at all?”

But Mrs. Clarke did not answer that question.

The daylight was rapidly failing.  She seemed almost to be fading away in the dimness and in the noises of evening which rose from the Grande Rue.  Yet something of her remained and was very definite, so definite that even Dion, broken on the wheel and indifferent to casual influences as few men are ever indifferent, felt it almost powerfully ­the concentration of her will, the unyielding determination of her mind, active and intense behind the pale mask of her physical body.

He turned away and went to the window farthest from her.  He leaned out to the Grande Rue.  Above his head was the sloping awning.  It seemed to him to serve as a sounding-board to the fierce noises of the mongrel city.

“Start again!”

Surely among the voices of the city now filling his ears there was a husky voice which had said that.

Had Mrs. Clarke spoken?

“Start again.”

But not on the familiar road!  To do that would be impossible.  If there were indeed any new life for him it must be an utterly different life from any he had known.

He had tried the straight life of unselfishness, purity, fidelity and devotion ­devotion to a woman and also to a manly ideal.  That life had convulsively rejected him.  Had he still within him sufficient energy of any kind to lay hold on a new life?

For a moment he saw before him under the awning Robin’s eyes as they had been when his little son was dying in his arms.

He drew back from the street.  The sitting-room was empty, but the door between it and the bedroom was open.  No doubt Mrs. Clarke had gone in there to put away her hat.  As he looked at the door the Russian maid, whom he had seen at Park Side, Knightsbridge, came from the inner room.

“Madame hopes Monsieur will call to see her to-morrow before she starts to Buyukderer,” she said, with her strong foreign accent.

“Thank you,” said Dion.

As he went out the maid shut the bedroom door.

CHAPTER III

Two days later Mrs. Clarke sat with the British Ambassadress in the British Palace at Therapia, a building of wood with balconies looking over the Bosporus.  She was alone with Lady Ingleton in the latter’s sitting-room, which was filled with curious Oriental things, with flowers, and with little dogs of the Pekinese breed, who lay about in various attitudes of contentment, looking serenely imbecile, and as if they were in danger of water on the brain.

Lady Ingleton was an old friend of Mrs. Clarke, and was a woman wholly indifferent to the prejudices which govern ordinary persons.  She had spent the greater part of her life abroad, and looked like a weary Italian, though she was half English, a quarter Irish, and a quarter French.  She was very dark, and had large, dreamy dark eyes which knew how to look bored, a low voice which could say very sharp things at times, and a languid manner which concealed more often than it betrayed an intelligence always on the alert.

“What is it, Cynthia?” said Lady Ingleton.  “But first tell me if you like this Sine carpet.  I found it in the bazaar last Thursday, and it cost the eyes out of my head.  Carey, of course, has said for the hundredth time that I am ruining him, and bringing his red hair in sorrow to the tomb.  Even if I am, it seems to me the carpet is worth it.”

Mrs. Clarke studied the carpet for a moment with earnest attention.  She even knelt down to look closely at it, and passed her hands over it gently, while Lady Ingleton watched her with a sort of dark and still admiration.

“It’s a marvel,” she said, getting up.  “If you had let it go I should almost have despised you.”

“Please tell that to Carey when he comes to you to complain.  And now, what is it?”

“You remember several months ago the tragedy of a man called Dion Leith, who fought in the South African War, came home and almost immediately after his return killed his only son by mistake out shooting?”

“Yes.  You knew him, I think you said.  He was married to that beautiful Rosamund Everard who used to sing.  I heard her once at Tippie Chetwinde’s.  Esme Darlington was a great admirer or hers, of course pour lé bon motif.”

“Dion Leith’s here.”

“In Therapia?”

“No, in a hideous little hotel in Constantinople.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think he knows.  His wife has given him up.  She was a mother, not a lover, so you can imagine her feelings about the man who killed her child.  It seems she was une mere folle.  She has left him and, according to him, has given herself to God.  He’s in a most peculiar condition.  He was a model husband, absolutely devoted and entirely irreproachable.  Even before marriage, I should think he had kept out of the way of ­things.  The athlete with ideals ­he was that, one supposes.”

“How extraordinarily attractive!” said Lady Ingleton, in a lazy and rather drawling voice.

“So he had a great deal to fasten on the woman who has cast him out.  Just now, like the coffin of Mohammed, he’s suspended.  That’s the impression I get from him.”

“Do you want to bring him down to earth?”

“All he’s known and cared for in life has failed him.  He was traveling under an assumed name even, for fear people should point him out as the man who killed his own son.  All that sort of thing is no use.  I gave his secret away deliberately to young Vane, and asked him to speak to the Ambassador.  And now I’ve come to you.  I want you to have him here once or twice and be nice to him.  Then I can see something of him, poor fellow, and do something for him.”

A faint smile curved Lady Ingleton’s sensitive lips.

“Of course.  Then he’s coming to the Bosporus?”

“He’ll probably spend some time at Buyukderer.  He must face his fate and take up life again.”

“He doesn’t intend to do what his wife has done?”

Lady Ingleton was still smiling faintly.

“I should say his experience rather inclines him to take an opposite direction.”

“Is he good-looking?”

“What he has been through has ravaged his face.”

“That probably makes him much handsomer than he ever was before.”

“He hates the thought of meeting any one.  But if you will have him here once or twice, and people know it, it will make things all right.”

“Will he come?”

“Yes.”

“You know I always do what you want.”

“I never want you to do dull things.”

“That’s true.  The dogs don’t come into play against the people you bring here.”

It was a legend in Constantinople in Embassy circles that Lady Ingleton always “set the dogs” at bores.  Even at official dinners, when she had as much as she could stand of the heavy bigwigs whom she was obliged to invite, she surreptitiously touched a bell.  This was a signal to the footman to bring in the dogs, who were trained to yap at and to investigate closely visitors.  The yapping and the investigations created a feeling of general restlessness and an almost inevitable movement, which invariably led to the speedy departure of the unwelcome guests; who went, as Lady Ingleton said, “not knowing why.”  Enough that they went!  The dogs were rewarded with lumps of sugar as are the canine performers in a circus.  Sir Carey complained that it was bad diplomacy, but he was devoted to his wife, and even secretly loved her characteristic selfishness.

“Let Dion Leith come and I’ll cast my mantle over him ­for your sake, Cynthia.  You are a remarkable woman.”

“Why?”

But Lady Ingleton did not say why.  There were immense réticences between her and Cynthia Clarke.

Dion left Hughes’s Hotel and went to Buyukderer.

He had not consciously known why he did this.  Until he met Mrs. Clarke near the British Embassy he had scarcely been aware how sordid and ugly and common under its small ostentations Hughes’s Hotel was.  She made him see the dreariness of his surroundings, although she had never seen them; she made him again aware of things.  That she was able to affect him strongly, although he did not care for her, he knew by the sudden approach to the brink of a complete emotional breakdown which she had brought about in him at their first meeting.  He remembered the hand he had taken and had put against his forehead.  There had been no cool solace in it for the fever within him.  Why, then, did he go to Buyukderer?  Certainly he did not go in hope.  He was dwelling in a region far beyond where hope can live.

But here was some one who was far away from the land that had seen his tragedy, and who meant something in connexion with him, who intended something which had to do with him.  In England his mother had been powerless to help him; Beattie had been powerless to help him.  Canon Wilton had tried to use his almost stern power of manly sincerity on behalf of the soul of Dion.  He and Dion had had a long interview after the inquest on the little body of Robin was over, and he had drawn nearer to the inmost chamber than any one else had, though Bruce Evelin, even in his almost fierce grief for Robin, had been wonderfully kind and understanding.  But even Canon Wilton had utterly failed to be of any real use.  Perhaps he had known Rosamund too well.

Till now Mrs. Clarke was the one human being who had succeeded in making a definite impression on Dion since Robin’s death and Rosamund’s fearful reception of the news of it.  He felt her will, and perhaps he felt something else in her without telling himself that he did so:  her knowledge of a life absolutely different from the life he had hitherto known, absolutely different, too, from the life known to, and lived by, those who had been nearest to him and with whom he had been most closely intimate.  The old life with all its associations had cast him out.  That was his feeling.  Possibly, without being aware of it, and driven by the necessity that is within man to lay hold of something, to seek after refuge in the blackest moments of existence, he was feebly and instinctively feeling after an unknown life which was represented to his imagination by the pale beauty of Mrs. Clarke.  She had described his situation as one of suspension between the heaven and the earth.  His heaven had certainly rejected him.  Possibly, without knowing it, and without any hope of future happiness or even of future peace, he faintly descried her earth; possibly, in going to Buyukderer, he was making an unconscious effort to gain it.

He wondered about this afterwards, but not at all in the moment of his going.  Things were not clear to him then.  He was still in the vague, but he was not to walk in vagueness forever.  Fate which, by its malign action, had caused him to inflict a frightful injury upon the good woman he loved still held in reserve for him new and tremendous experience.  He thought that in Welsley he had reached the ultimate depths which a man can sound.  It was not so.

Dion came to Buyukderer on a breezy blue day, a day which seemed full of hope and elation, which was radiant with sunlight and dancing waters, and buoyant with ardent life.  Gone were those delicate dreamy influences which sometimes float over the Bosporus even in the noontides of summer, when the winds are still, and the long shores of Asia seem to lie wrapped in a soft siesta, holding their secrets of the Orient closely hidden from the eyes of Europe.  Europe gazes at Asia, but Asia is gravely indifferent to Europe; she listens only to the voices which come to her from her own depths, and, like an Almeh reclining, is stirred only by music unknown to the West.

As the steamer on which he traveled voyaged towards the Black Sea, Dion paced up and down the deck and looked always at the shore of Asia.  That line of hills represented to him the unknown.  If he could only lose himself in Asia and forget!  But there was nothing passionate in his longing.  It was only a gray desire born in a broken mind and a broken nature.

Once during the voyage he thought of Robin.  Did Robin know where he was, whither he was going?  Since Rosamund had utterly rejected him, strangely his dead boy and he had at moments seemed to Dion to be near to each other encompassed by the same thick darkness.  Even once he had seemed to see Robin groping, like one lost and vainly seeking after light.  His vagueness was broken upon sometimes by fantastic visions.  But to-day he had no consciousness at all of Robin.  The veil of death which hung between him and the child he had slain seemed to be of stone, absolutely impenetrable.  And all his visions had left him.

Palaces and villas came into sight and vanished; Yildiz upon its hill scattered among the trees of its immense park; Dolmabaghcheh stretched out along the water’s edges, with its rose-beds before it; and its gravely staring sentinels; Beylerbey Serai on the Asian shore, with its marble quay and its terraced gardens, not far from Kandili and the sweet waters of Asia.  Presently the Giant’s Mountain appeared staring across the water at Buyukderer.  The prow of the steamer was headed for the European shore.  Dion saw the bay opening to receive them under its wooded hills which are pierced by the great valley.  It stretched its arms as if in welcome, and very calm was the water between them.  Here the wind failed.  Along the shore were villas, and gardens rising in terraces, where roses, lemon trees, laurels grew in almost rank abundance.  Across the water came the soft sound of music, a song of Greece lifted above the thrumming of guitars.  And something in the aspect of this Turkish haven, sheltered from the winds of that Black Sea which had come into sight off Kirech Burnu, something in the song which floated over the water, struck deep into Dion’s heart.  Abruptly he was released from his frozen detachment; tears sprang into his eyes, memories surged up in his mind ­memories of a land not very far from this land; of the maidens of the Porch; of the hill of Drouva kept by the stars and the sleeping winds; of Zante dreaming of the sunset; of Hermes keeping watch over the child in the green recesses of Elis.

“Why do I come here?  What have I to do here, or in any place dedicated to beauty and to peace?”

His brown face twitched, and the wrinkles which sprayed out from his eyelids over his thin cheeks worked till the network of them seemed to hold an independent and furious life.

“If I were a happy traveler as I once was!”

The thought pierced him, and was followed immediately by the remembrance of some words spoken by Mrs. Clarke: 

“My friend, it will have to come.”

That which had to come, would it come here, in this sheltered place, where the song died away like a thing enticed by the long valley to be kept by the amorous trees?  Mrs. Clarke’s voice had sounded full of inflexible knowledge when she had spoken these words, and she had looked at him with eyes that were full of knowledge.  It was as if those eyes had seen the weeping of many men.

The steamer drew near to the shore.  The bright bustle of the quay was apparent.  Dion made his effort and conquered himself.  But he felt almost afraid of Buyukderer.  In the ugly roar of the Grande Rue he had surely been safer than he would be here in this place which seemed planned for intimate happiness.

The steamer came alongside the pier.

When Dion stepped on to the quay a tall young Englishman with broad shoulders, rather a baby face, and large intelligent blue eyes immediately walked up to him.

“Are you Mr. Dion Leith?”

Dion, startled, was about to say “No” with determined hostility when he remembered Mrs. Clarke.  He had come here; he was, he supposed, going to stay here for some days at least; of course he must face things.

“Yes,” he said gruffly.

In an easy, agreeable manner the stranger explained that he was Cyril Vane, second secretary of the British Embassy, and a friend of Mrs. Clarke’s, and that he had come down at her request to meet Dion, and to tell him that there was a charming room reserved for him at the Belgrad Hotel.

“I’ll walk up with you if you like,” he added, in a casual voice.  “It’s no distance.  That your luggage?”

He put it in the charge of a porter from the hotel.

“I’m over at Therapia just now.  The Ambassador hopes to see you.  He’s a delightful fellow.”

He talked pleasantly, and looked remarkably unobservant till they reached the hotel, where he parted from Dion.

“I dare say I shall see you soon.  Very glad to do anything I can for you.  Mrs. Clarke lies at the Villa Hafiz.  Any one can tell you where it is.”

He walked coolly away in the sun, looking like an immense fair baby in his thin, light-colored clothes.

“Does he know?” thought Dion, looking after him.

Then he went up into his bedroom which looked out upon the sea.  When the luggage had been brought in and the door was shut, he sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the polished uncarpeted floor.

“Why have I come here?  What have I to do here?” he thought.

He missed the uproar of Pera.  It had exercised a species of pressure upon his soul, a deadening influence.

Ever since Robin’s death he had lived in towns, and had walked about streets.  He had been for a time in Paris, then in Marseilles, where he had stayed for more than two months haunted by an idea of crossing over to Africa and losing himself in the vastness of the lands of the sun.  But something had held him back, perhaps a dread of the immense loneliness which would surely beset him on the other side of the sea; and he had gone to Geneva, then to Zurich, to Milan, Genoa, Naples, Berlin and Budapest.  From Budapest he had come to Constantinople.  He had known the loneliness of cities, but an instinct had led him to avoid the loneliness of the silent and solitary places.  There had been an atmosphere of peace in quiet Welsley.  He was afraid of such an atmosphere and had sought always its opposite.

“Why have I come here?” he thought again.

In this small place he felt exposed, almost as if he were naked and could be seen by strangers.  In Pera at least he was covered.

“I shall have to go away from here,” he thought.

He got up from the bed and began to unpack.  As he did this, the uselessness of what he was doing, the arid futility of every bit of the web of small details which, in their sum, were his life, flowed upon his soul like stagnant water forced into movement by some horrible machinery.  He was like something agitating in a vast void, something whose incessant movements produced no effect, had no sort of relation to anything.  In his loneliness of the cities he had begun to lose that self-respect which belongs to all happy Englishmen of his type.  Mrs. Clarke had immediately noticed that certain details in his dress showed a beginning of neglect.  Since he had met her he had rectified them, almost unconsciously.  But now suddenly the burden of detail seemed unbearable.

It was only by an almost fierce exercise of the will that he forced himself to finish unpacking, and to lay his things out neatly in drawers and on the dressing-table.  Then he took off his boots and his jacket, stretched himself out on the bed with his arms behind him and his hands grasping the bedstead, and shut his eyes.

There was something shameful in his flaccid idleness, in the aimlessness of his whole life now, devoid of all work, undirected towards any effort.  But that was not his fault.  He had worked with energy in business, with equal energy in play, worked for self’s sake, for love’s sake, and for country’s sake.  And for all he had done, for his effort of purity as a boy and a youth, for his effort of love as a husband and a father, for his effort of valor as a soldier, he had been rewarded with the most horrible punishment which can fall upon a man.  Effort, therefore, on his part was useless; it was worse than useless, it was grotesque.  Let others make their efforts, his were done.

He wished that he could sleep.

The dreadful inertia of Dion did not seem to be dreadful to Mrs. Clarke.  Perhaps she was more intelligent than most women, and generated within herself so much energy of some kind that she was not driven to seek for it in others; or perhaps she was more sympathetic, more imaginative, than most women, and pardoned because she understood.  At any rate, she accepted Dion as he was, and neither criticized him, attempted to bully him, nor seemed to wish to change him.

She had indeed insisted that he must face his fate and had ruthlessly given him back his name; she had also deliberately set about to entangle him in the silken cords of a social relation.  But he knew within a couple of days of his arrival at Buyukderer that he did not fear her.  No woman perhaps ever lived who worried a man less in friendship, or who gave, without any insistence upon it, a stronger impression of loyalty, of tenacity in affection to those for whom she cared.  Although often almost delicately blunt in words, in action she was full of tact.  She was one of those rare women who absolutely understand men, and who know how to convey to men instantly the fact of their understanding.  Such women are always attractive to men.  Even if they are plain, and not otherwise specially clever, they possess for men a lure.

Mrs. Clarke had told Dion in Constantinople that she meant him to come to Buyukderer.  This was an almost insolent assertion of will-power.  But when he was there she let him alone.  On the day of his arrival there had come no message from the Villa Hafiz to his hotel.  He had, perhaps, expected one; he knew that he was relieved not to receive it.  Late in the afternoon he went for a solitary walk up the valley, avoiding the many people who poured forth from the villas and hotels to take their air, as the sun sank low behind Therapia, and the light upon the water lost in glory and gained in magic.  Gay parties embarked in caïques.  Some people drove in small victorias drawn by spirited, quick-trotting horses; others rode; others strolled up and down slowly by the edge of the sea.  A gay brightness of sociable life made Buyukderer intimately merry as evening drew on.  Instinctively Dion left the laughter and the voices behind him.

His wandering led him to the valley of roses, where he sat down by the stream, and for the first time tasted something of the simplicity and charm of Turkish country life.  It did not charm him, but in a dim way he felt it, was faintly aware of a soothing influence which touched him like a cool hand.  For a long time he stayed there, and he thought, “If I remain at Buyukderer I shall often visit this place beside the stream.”  Once he was disturbed by the noise of a cantering horse in the lane close by, but otherwise he was fortunate that day; few people came to his retreat, and none of them were foreigners.  Two or three Turks strolled by, holding their beads; and once some veiled women came, escorted by a eunuch, threw some petals of flowers upon the surface of the tinkling water, and walked on up the narrow valley, chattering in childish voices, and laughing with a twitter that was like the twitter of birds.

In the soft darkness he walked slowly back to his hotel.  And that night he slept better than he had ever slept in Pera.

On the following day there was still no message from the Villa Hafiz, and he did not see Mrs. Clarke.  He took a row boat, with a big Albanian boatman for company, and rowed out on the Bosporus till they came in sight of the Black Sea.  The wind got up; Dion stripped to his shirt and trousers, rolled his shirt sleeves up to the shoulders, and had a long pull at the oars.  He rowed till the perspiration ran down his lean body.  The boatman admired his muscles and his strength.

“Inglese?” he asked.

Dion nodded.

“Les Inglesi très forts, molto forte!” he observed, mixing French with Italian to show his linguistic accomplishments, “Moi très fort aussi.”

Dion talked to the man.  When he left the boat at the quay he said he would take it again on the morrow.  The intention to go away from Buyukderer, to drown himself again in the uproar of Pera, was already fading out of his mind.  Mrs. Clarke’s silence had, perhaps, reassured him.  The Villa Hafiz did not summon him.  He could seek it if he would.  Evidently it was not going to seek him.

Again he felt grateful to Mrs. Clarke.  Her silence, her neglect of him, increased his faith in her friendship for him.

His second day in Buyukderer dawned; in the late afternoon of it, now sure of his freedom, he went to the Villa Hafiz.

He did not know that Mrs. Clarke was rich.  Indeed he had heard in London that she only had a small income, but that she “did wonders” with it.  In London he had seen her at Claridge’s and at the marvelous flat in Knightsbridge.  Now, at Buyukderer, he found her in a small, but beautifully arranged and furnished, villa with a lovely climbing garden behind it.  Evidently she could not live in ugly surroundings or among cheap and unbeautiful things.  He saw at a glance that the rugs and carpets on the polished floors of the villa were exquisite, that the furniture was not merely graceful and in place but really choice and valuable, and that the few ornaments and pieces of china scattered about, with the most deft decision as to the exactly right place for each mirror, bowl, vase and incense holder, were rarely fine.  Yet in the airy rooms there was no dreary look of the museum.  On the contrary, they had an intimate, almost a homely air, in spite of their beauty.  Books and magazines were allowed their place, and on a grand piano, almost in the middle of the largest room, which opened by long windows into an adroitly tangled rose garden where a small fountain purred amongst blue lilies, there was a quantity of music.  The whole house was strongly scented with flowers.  Dion was greeted at its threshold by a wave of delicious perfume.

Mrs. Clarke received him in her most casual, most impersonal manner, and made no allusion to the fact that she knew he had already been for two days in Buyukderer without coming near her.  She asked him if his room at the hotel was all right, and when he thanked her for bothering about him said that Cyril Vane had seen to it.

“He’s a kind, useful sort of boy,” she added, “and often helps me with little things.”

That day she said nothing about the Ambassador and Lady Ingleton, and showed no disposition to assume any proprietorship over Dion.  She took him over the house, and also into the garden.

Upon the highest terrace of the latter, far above the house, between two magnificent cypresses, there stood a pavilion.  It was made of the wood of the plane tree, was painted dull green, had trees growing thickly at its back, and was partially concealed by a luxuriant creeper with deep orange-colored flowers, not unlike orange-colored jasmine, which Mrs. Clarke had seen first in Egypt and had acclimatized in Turkey.  The center of the front of this pavilion was open to the terrace, but could be closed by sliding doors which, when pushed back, fitted into the hollow walls on either side.  The interior was furnished with bookcases, divans covered with cushions and embroideries, coffee tables, and Eastern rugs.  Antique bronze lamps hung by chains from the painted ceiling, which was divided into lozenges alternately dull green and dull gold.  The view from this detached library was very beautiful.  Over the roof of the villa, beyond the broad white road and the quay, the long bay stretched out into the Bosporus.  Across its tranquil waters, and the waters beaten up into waves by the winds from the Black Sea, rose the shores of Asia, Beikos, Anadoli Kavak, Anadoli Fanar, with lines of hills and the Giant’s Mountain.  Immediately below, and stretching away to right and left, were the curving shores of Europe, with the villas and palaces of Buyukderer held between the blue sea and the tree-covered heights of Kabatash; the park of the Russian Palace, the summer home of Russia’s representative at the Sublime Porte, gardens of many rich merchants of Constantinople and of Turkish, Greek and Armenian magnates, and the fertile and well-watered country extending to Therapia, Stania and Bebek on the one hand, and to Rumili Kavak, with the great Belgrad forest behind it, and to Rumili Fanar, where the Bosporus flows into the Black Sea, on the other.

“Come up here whenever you like,” Mrs. Clarke said to Dion.  “You can ring at the side gate of the garden, and come up without entering the house or letting me know you are here.  I have my own sitting-room on the first floor of the villa next to my bedroom, the little blue-and-green room I showed you just now.  The books I’m reading at present are there.  No one will bother you, and you won’t bother any one.”

He thanked her, not very warmly, perhaps, but with a genuine attempt at real gratitude, and said he would come.  They walked up and down the terrace for a little while, in silence for the most part.  Before they went down he mentioned that he had been out rowing.

“I ride for exercise,” said Mrs. Clarke.  “You can easily hire a good horse here, but I have one of my own, Selim.  Nearly every afternoon I ride.”

“Were you riding the day before yesterday?” Dion asked.

“Yes, in the Kesstane Dereh, or Valley of Roses, as many people call it.”

“Were you alone?”

“Yes.”

Dion had thought of the cantering horse which he had heard in the lane as he sat beside the stream.  He felt sure it was Selim he had heard.  Mrs. Clarke did not ask the reason for his questions.  She seemed to him a totally incurious woman.  Presently they descended to the house, and he wished her good-by.  She did not ask him to stay any longer, did not propose any expedition, or any day or hour for another meeting.  She just let him go with a grave, and almost abstracted good-by.

When he was alone he realized something; she had assumed that he was going to make a long stay in Buyukderer.  Once, in speaking of the foliage, she had said, “You will notice in September ­” Why was she so certain he would stay on?  There was nothing to prevent him from going away by the steamer on the morrow.  She did nothing to curb his freedom; she seemed almost indifferent to the fact of his presence there; yet she had told him he would come, and was evidently certain that he would stay.

He wondered a little, but only a little, about her will.  Then his mind returned to an old haunt in which continually it wandered, obsessed by a horror that seemed already ancient, the walled garden at Welsley in which he had searched in the dark for a fleeing woman.  Perpetually he heard the movement of that woman’s dress as she disappeared into the darkness, and the sound of a door, the door of his own home, being locked against him to give her time to escape from him.  That sound had cut his life in two.  He saw, as he had seen many times in the past, the falling downwards of edges that bled, the edges of his severed life.

And he forgot the garden of the Villa Hafiz, the pavilion which stood on the hill looking over the sea to Asia, the grave woman who had told him, indifferently, that he could go to it when he would.

Nevertheless on the following day he found himself at the garden gate; he rang the bell; he was admitted by Osman, the placidly smiling gardener, and he ascended to the pavilion.  No one was there.  He stayed for three hours, and nobody came to interrupt him.  Down below the wooden villa held closely the secret of its life.  Once, as he gazed down on it, he wondered for a moment about Mrs. Clarke, how she passed her hours without a companion, which she was doing just then.  The siren of a steamer sounded in the bay.  He went into the pavilion.  On one of the coffee-tables he found lying a small thin book bound in white vellum.  He took it up and read the name in gold letters:  “The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi.”  It was the book he had found Beattie reading on the night when Robin was born, on the night when Bruce Evelin and Guy had discussed Mrs. Clarke’s divorce case and Mrs. Clarke.  He shuddered in the warmth of the pavilion.  Then resolutely he picked the book up.  At the beginning, after some blank pages, there was a portrait of Sir Richard Burton.  Dion looked at the strong, tragic face, with its burning expression, for a long time.  Then he stretched himself on one of the divans and began to read the book.

Down below, in the villa, Mrs. Clarke was sitting in the green-and-blue room in the first floor with Lady Ingleton, and they were talking about Dion.

“He’s here now,” said Mrs. Clarke to her friend.

“Where?”

“In the garden.  I haven’t seen him, but Osman tells me he has gone up to the pavilion.”

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Does he realize yet how cruel you are?”

“He isn’t thinking about me.”

“But he will.”

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

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

“At what time?”

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

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

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

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

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

Freddie was the Ambassador’s favorite horse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If you tell me I do.”

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

“And Delia and Cyril Vane a two!”

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

“I will.”

He dismounted and gave the reins to the Turkish youth.

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

Then she rode back to Buyukderer.

CHAPTER IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pluck the old woman from thy breast.”

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

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

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

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

Hadi Bey had long ago passed out of her life.

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

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

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

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

“Yes ­he was there.”

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

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

Mrs. Clarke’s white face looked faintly surprised.

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

This time Mrs. Clarke looked almost strongly surprised.

“What did you talk about?” she asked.

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

“I remember Omar Khayyam much better.”

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

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

“What was this man, Leith?”

“Do you mean ?”

“Before his married life came to an end?”

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

Sir Carey raised his eyebrows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That will make things all right.”

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

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

“You never went in for them.”

“And yet my own husband misunderstood me.”

“Poor Beadon!  He was an excellent councilor.”

“And an excellent husband.”

“But he made a great fool of himself.”

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

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

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

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

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

He pressed her hand, then said rather abruptly: 

“Are you feverish to-night?”

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

Sir Carey went away to his caïque.

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

“Ah, ma chère, qu’est que vous faîtes la toute seule?  Vous preñez un bain?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If he lived he would cast it away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

If only he could get rid of his long fidelity!

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

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

But the man only replied: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Especially people who are innocent,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

He shook her hand and went away.

That evening she said to her husband: 

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

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

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

“You don’t mean ?”

Sir Carey paused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER V

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

“I can’t come,” he said.

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

“I can’t.”

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

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

“Yes, I did,” she interrupted him.

“You did know?”

He stood staring blankly at her.

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

“You couldn’t hide it from me.”

“I must go away,” he said.

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

“It isn’t a party?”

“We shall be alone.”

“You meant to ask people?”

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

“I’ll come,” he said.

She turned away without another word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shuddered and turned sharply towards the pavilion.

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

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

She looked up at him.

“But not a breath!” she said.

After a pause she added: 

“Why do you ask such a thing?”

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

“That’s impossible.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” he said.

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

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

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

“But I wasn’t!”

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

“What were you thinking of?” she asked.

“Of the future.”

“Ah!”

“That’s why it is inexplicable.”

“I don’t understand.”

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

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

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

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

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

But she interrupted him inflexibly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And lives that are unhappy?”

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

“Are you unhappy?” he asked.

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

“You have your boy.”

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

“Are you unhappy, then?”

“What do you suppose about me?”

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

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

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

He heard her breathing quickly.  Then she added: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dion!” she said.  “Dion!”

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

“Dion!” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you suppose I meant?”

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

“Yes.”

“That you care about me?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

“Then it was only pity?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Once you telegraphed to me ­’May Allah have you in His hand.’”

“I remember.”

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

“We don’t know that.  You came back.”

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

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

“Your hand is like fire,” he whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He put one arm round his companion.

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

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

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

Obscurely he wished to do that.

CHAPTER VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was silent.  After a moment she continued: 

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“Have I asked you to go?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

“How do you know that?”

“I do know it.”

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

“And you know it too,” she said.

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

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

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

“Yes.”

She pulled his soft cuff with her little fingers.

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

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

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

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

She did not finish the sentence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ou allons-nous, Signore?”

“Vers Constantinople,” replied Dion.

“Bene!” replied the man.

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

“What is it?” she asked.

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

“A gentleman?  Have you got his card?”

“No, Madame; he gave no card.”

“What is he like?”

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

The waiter paused, then added: 

“He has a hungry look.”

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

“Go down and ask him to wait.”

“Yes, Madame.”

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

“Sonia!”

Her raised voice was rather harsh.

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

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

“And if it is not Monsieur Leith?”

“Come back and tell me who it is.”

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

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

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

“Monsieur Leith,” said the maid.

And she disappeared.

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

“I wanted to speak to you.”

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

“No, I don’t want it.”

“Did you come by steamer?”

“No, I rowed down.”

“All the way?”

He nodded.

“Where are you staying?”

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

“Of course not.  Dion, sit down.”

He sat down heavily.

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

“I haven’t brought any.”

She said nothing, but her distressed eyes questioned him.

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

“I’m glad,” she said.

But she did not look glad.

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

“I didn’t come for that,” he said.

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

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

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

“Now, what is it?”

“I’m sure you know.  It’s Jimmy.”

She lowered her eyelids, and her pale forehead puckered.

“Jimmy!  What about Jimmy?”

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

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

“I told you at Buyukderer.”

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

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

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

“I shall not act a lie.”

“But you will.”

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

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

“Take care, Dion!” she interrupted hastily.

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

“I forbid you to say that.”

“I will say it.  It’s true.”

And he repeated with a cruelly deliberate emphasis: 

“You don’t really love Jimmy.”

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

“Be quiet!” he said roughly.

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

“You don’t love Jimmy.”

“Do you wish me to hate you?”

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

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

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

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

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

Her great eyes were fixed steadily upon him.

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

He was silent.

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

“If I were it wouldn’t matter.”

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

Dion leaned forward.  His brown face was twitching.

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

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

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

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

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

“And then ­”

“Not after that,” she said grimly.

“I wonder he let you do all you did.”

“What do you mean?”

She let his hand go.

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

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

“You don’t trust me.”

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

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

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

“Wants me as a lover.”

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

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

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

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

“I know.  That’s just it!”

“What do you mean?”

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

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

She put her white cheek against his brown one.

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

She sighed against his cheek.

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

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

She put her thin lips against his.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

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

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

“Do you mean ­”

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

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

“I believe you would,” he said.

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

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

CHAPTER VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, you may, just for once.”

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

“Well, mater?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s rather badly broken up.”

“No wonder!” said Jimmy, with discrimination.

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

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

“And that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.  When he’s a little difficult, doesn’t take things quite as one means them ­you know?”

“Rather!  Do I?”

“I put it down to all the trouble he’s been through.  I never resent it.  Now I ought really to have got out a holiday tutor for you.”

“Oh, I say, after I’ve swotted my head off all these months!  A chap needs some rest if he’s to do himself justice, hang it, mater, now!”

“I know all about that!”

She looked at him shrewdly, and he smiled on one side of his mouth.

“Go on, mater!”

“But having Mr. Leith here I thought I wouldn’t do that.  Mr. Leith’s awfully fond of boys, and it seemed to me you might do him more good than any one else could.”

“Well, I’m blowed!  D’you really think so?”

Jimmy came over and sat on the arm of her chair, blowing rings of smoke cleverly over her lovely little head.

“Put me up to it, mater, there’s a good girl.  I’m awfully keen on Mr. Leith, as you know.  He’s got the biggest biceps I ever saw, and I’m jolly sorry for him.  What can I do?  Put me up to it.”

And Mrs. Clarke proceeded to put Jimmy up to it.  She had told Dion that Jimmy wouldn’t see the difference in him.  Now she carefully prepared Jimmy to face that difference, and gave him his cue for the part she wished him to play.  Jimmy felt very important as he listened to her explanations, trifling seriously with his cigarette, and looking very worldly-wise.

“I twig!” he interrupted occasionally, nodding his round young head, which was covered with densely thick, rather coarse hair.  “I’ve got it.”

And he went off to bed very seriously, resolved to take Mr. Leith in hand and to do his level best for him.

So it was that when Dion and he met next day he was not surprised at the change in Dion’s appearance and manner.  Nor were his young eyes merciless in their scrutiny.  Just at first, perhaps, they stared with the unthinking observation of boyhood, but almost immediately Jimmy had taken the cue his mother had given him, and had entered into his part of a driver-away of trouble.

He played it well, with a tact that was almost remarkable in so young a boy; and Dion, ignorant of what Mrs. Clarke had done on the night of Jimmy’s arrival, was at first surprised at the ease with which they got on together.  He had dreaded Jimmy’s coming, partly because of the secrets he must keep from the boy, but partly also because of Robin.  A boy’s hands would surely tear at the wound which was always open.  Sometimes Dion felt horribly sad when he was in contact with Jimmy’s light-hearted and careless gaiety; sometimes he felt the gnawing discomfort of one not by nature a hypocrite forced into a passive hypocrisy; nevertheless there were moments when the burden of his life was made a little lighter on his shoulders by the confidence his young companion had in him, by the admiration for him showed plainly by Jimmy, by the leaping spirits which ardently summoned a reply in kind.

The subtlety of Mrs. Clarke, too, helped Dion at first.

Since her son’s arrival, without ostentation she had lived for him.  She entered into all Jimmy’s plans, was ready to share his excitements and to taste, with him, those pleasures which were possible to a woman as well as to a boy.  But she was quick to efface herself where she saw that she was not needed or might even be in the way.  As a mother she was devoid of jealousy, was unselfish without seeming to be so.  She did not parade her virtue.  Her reticence was that of a perfectly finished artist.  When she was wanted she was on the spot; when she was not wanted she disappeared.  She sped Dion and Jimmy on their way to boating, shooting, swimming expeditions, with the happiest grace, and never assumed the look and manner of the patient woman “left behind.”

Not once, since Jimmy’s arrival, had she shown to Dion even a trace of the passionate and perverse woman he now knew her to be under her pale mask of self-controlled and very mental composure.  At the hotel in Constantinople she had said to Dion, “All the time Jimmy’s at Buyukderer we’ll just be friends.”  Now she seemed utterly to have forgotten that they had ever been what the world calls lovers, that they had been involved in scenes of passion, and brutality, and exhaustion, that they had torn aside the veil of reticence behind which women and men hide from each other normally the naked truth of what they can be.  She treated Dion casually, though very kindly, as a friend, and never, even by the swift glance or a lingering touch of her fingers, reminded him of the fires that burned within her.  Even when she was alone with him, when Jimmy ran off, perhaps, unexpectedly in the wake of a passing caprice, she never departed from her rôle of the friend who was before all things a mother.

So perfect was her hypocrisy, so absolutely natural in its manifestation, that sometimes, looking at her, Dion could scarcely forbear from thinking that she had forgotten all about their illicit connexion; that she had put it behind her forever; that she was one of those happy people who possess the power of slaying the past and blotting the murder out of their memories.

That scene between them in Constantinople on the eve of Jimmy’s arrival ­had it ever taken place?  Had she really ever tried to strike him on the mouth?  Had he caught her wrist in a grip of iron?  It seemed incredible.

And if he was involved in a great hypocrisy since the boy’s arrival he was released from innumerable lesser hypocrisies.  His life at present was what it seemed to be to the little world on the Bosporus.

Just at first he did not realize that though Mrs. Clarke genuinely loved her son she was not too scrupulous to press his unconscious services in aid of her hypocrisy.

The holiday tutor whom she ought to have got out from England to improve the shining hour on Jimmy’s behalf was replaced by Dion in the eyes of Mrs. Clarke’s world.

One day she said to Dion: 

“Will you do me a good turn?”

“Yes, if I can.”

“It may bore you.”

“What is it?”

“Read a little bit with Jimmy sometimes, will you?  He’s abominably ignorant, and will never be a scholar, but I should like him just to keep up his end at school.”

“But I haven’t got any school-books.”

“I have.  He’s specially behindhand with his Greek.  His report tells me that.  If you’ll do a little Greek grammar and construing with him in the mornings now and them, I shall be tremendously grateful.  You see, owing to my miserable domestic circumstances, Jimmy is practically fatherless.”

“And you ask me to take his father’s place!” was in Dion’s mind.

But she met his eyes so earnestly and with such sincerity that he only said: 

“Of course I’ll read with him in the mornings.”

Despite the ardent protests to Jimmy Dion kept his promise.  Soon Mrs. Clarke’s numerous acquaintances knew of the morning hours of study.  She had happened to tell Sir Carey Ingleton about Jimmy’s backwardness in book-learning and Mr. Leith’s kind efforts to “get him on during the holidays.”  Sir Carey had spoken of it to Cyril Vane.  The thing “got about.”  The name of Dion Leith began to be connected rather with Jimmy Clarke than with Mrs. Clarke.  Continually Dion and Jimmy were seen about together.  Mrs. Clarke, meanwhile, often went among her friends alone, and when they asked about Jimmy she would say: 

“Oh, he’s gone off somewhere with Mr. Leith.  I don’t know where.  Mr. Leith’s a regular boy’s man and was a great chum of Jimmy’s in London; used to show him how to box and that sort of thing.  It’s partly for Jimmy that he came to Buyukderer.  They read together in the mornings.  Mr. Leith’s getting Jimmy on in Greek.”

Sometimes she would add: 

“Mr. Leith loves boys, and since his own child died so sadly I think he’s taken to Jimmy more than ever.”

Soon people began to talk of Dion Leith as “Jimmy Clarke’s holiday tutor.”  Once, when this was said in Lady Ingleton’s drawing-room at Therapia, she murmured: 

“I don’t think it quite amounts to that.  Mr. Leith has never been a schoolmaster.”

And there she left it, with a faint smile in which there was just the hint of an almost cynical sadness.

Since the trip to Brusa on the “Leyla” she had thought a great deal about Dion Leith, and she was very sorry for him in a rather unusual way.  Out of her happiness with her husband she seemed to draw an instinctive knowledge of what such a nature as Dion Leith’s wanted and of the extent of his loss.  Once she said to Sir Carey, with a sort of intensity such as she seldom showed: 

“Good women do terrible things sometimes.”

“Such as ?” said Sir Carey, looking at her almost with surprise in his eyes.

“I think Mrs. Leith has done a terrible thing to her husband.”

“Perhaps she loved the child too much.”

“Even love can be almost abominable,” said Lady Ingleton.  “If we had a child, and you had done what poor Dion Leith has done, do you think I should have cast you out of my life?”

“But ­are you a good woman?” he asked her, smiling.

“No, or you should never have bothered about me.”

He touched her hand.

“When you do that,” Lady Ingleton said, “I could almost cry over poor Dion Leith.”

Sir Carey bent down and kissed her with a very tender gallantry.

“You and I are secretly sentimentalists, Delia,” he said.  “That is why we are so happy together.”

“Why doesn’t Dion Leith go to England?” she exclaimed, almost angrily.

“Perhaps England seems full of his misery.  Besides, his wife is there.”

“He ought to go to her.  He ought to force her to see the evil she is doing.”

“Leith will never do that, I feel sure,” said Sir Carey gravely.  “And in his place I don’t know that I could.”

Lady Ingleton looked at him with an almost sharp impatience such as she seldom showed him.

“When a man has right on his side he ought to browbeat a woman!” she exclaimed.  “And even if he is in the wrong it’s the best way to make a woman see things through his eyes.  Dion Leith is too delicate with women.”

After a moment she added: 

“At any rate with some women, the first of whom is his own wife.  A man should always put up a big fight for a really big thing, and Dion Leith hasn’t done that!”

“He fought in South Africa for England.”

“Ah,” she said, lifting her chin, “that sort of thing is so different.”

“Tell him what you think,” said the Ambassador.

“I know him so little.  But perhaps ­who knows ­some day I shall.”

She said no more on that subject.

Meanwhile Dion was teaching Jimmy, who was really full of the happiest ignorance.  Jimmy’s knowledge of Greek was a minus quantity, and he said frankly that he considered all that kind of thing “more or less rot.”  Nevertheless, Dion persevered.  One morning when they were going to get to work as usual in the pavilion, ­chose by Mrs. Clarke as the suitable place for his studies, ­taking up the Greek Grammar Dion opened it by chance.  He stood by the table from which he had picked the book up staring down at the page.  By one of those terrible rushes of which the mind is capable he was swept back to the famous mound which fronts the plain of Marathon; he saw the curving line of hills, the sea intensely blue and sparkling, empty of ships, the river’s course through the tawny land marked by the tall reeds and the sedges; he heard the distant lowing of cattle coming from that old battlefield, celebrated by poets and historians.  And then he heard, as if just above him, the dry crackle of brushwood ­Rosamund moving in the habitation of Arcady.  And he remembered the cry, the intense human cry which had echoed in the recesses of his soul on that day long ­how long ­ago in Greece, “Whither?  Whither am I and my great love going?  To what end are we journeying?”

He heard again that cry of his soul in the pavilion at Buyukderer, and beneath the sunburn his lean cheeks went lividly pale.

Reluctantly Jimmy was getting an exercise book and a pen and ink out of the drawer of a table, which Mrs. Clarke had had specially made for the lessons by a little Greek carpenter who sometimes did odd jobs for her.  He found the ink bottle almost empty.

“I say,” he began.

He looked up.

“I say, Mr. Leith ­”

His voice died away and he stared.

“What’s wrong?” he managed to bring out at last.

He thrust out a hand and laid hold of the grammar.  Dion let it go.

His eyes searched the page.

“What’s up, Mr. Leith?”

He looked frankly puzzled and almost afraid.  He had never seen any one look just like that before.

There was a moment of silence.  Then, with a sudden change of manner, Dion exclaimed: 

“Come on, Jimmy!  I don’t feel like doing lessons this morning.  I vote we go out.  I’m going to ask your mother if we can ride to the Belgrad forest.  Perhaps she’ll come with us.”

He was suddenly afraid to remain alone with the boy, and he felt that he could not stay in that pavilion full of the atmosphere of feverish passion, of secrecy, of betrayal.  Yes, of betrayal!  For there he had betrayed the obstinate love, which he had felt at Marathon as a sort of ecstasy, and still felt, but now like a wound, within him in spite of Rosamund’s rejection of him.  Not yet had the current taken him and swept him away from all the old landmarks.  Perhaps it never would.  And yet he had given himself to it, he had not tried to resist.

Jimmy jumped up with alacrity, though he still looked rather grave and astonished.  They went down the terraced garden to the villa.

“Run up and ask your mother,” said Dion.  “Probably she’s in her sitting-room.  I’ll wait here to know what she says.”

“Right you are!”

He went off, looking rather relieved.

Robin at fifteen!  Dion shut his eyes.

Jimmy was away for more than ten minutes.  Then he came back to say that his mother would come with them to the forest and would be ready in an hour’s time.

“I’ll go back to my rooms, change my breeches, and order the horses,” said Dion.

He was longing to get away from the scrutiny which at this moment Jimmy could not forego.  He knew that Jimmy had been talking about him to Mrs. Clarke, had probably been saying how “jolly odd” he had been in the pavilion.  For once the boy’s tact had failed him, and Dion’s sensitiveness tingled.

An hour later they were on horseback and rode into the midst of the forest.  At the village of Belgrad they dismounted, left the horses in the care of a Turkish stableman, and went for a walk among the trees.  It was very hot and still, and presently Mrs. Clarke said she would sit down and rest.

“You and Jimmy go on if you want to,” she said.

But Jimmy threw himself down on the ground.

“I’m tired.  It’s so infernally hot.”

“Take a nap,” said his mother.

The boy laid his head on his curved arms sideways.  Mrs. Clarke leaned down and put his panama hat over his left cheek and eye.

“Thank you, mater,” he murmured.

He lay still.

Dion had stood by with an air of hesitation during this little talk between mother and son.  Now he looked away to the forest.

“You go,” Mrs. Clarke said to him.  “You’ll find us here when you come back.  The Armenians call the forest Defetgamm.  Perhaps you will come under its influence.”

“Defetgamm!  What does that mean?”

“Dispeller of care.”

He stood looking at her for a moment; then, without another word, he turned quickly away and disappeared among the trees.

Jimmy slept with his face hidden, and Mrs. Clarke, with wide-open eyes, sat motionless staring into the forest.

When they reached the Villa Hafiz late in the afternoon Dion helped Mrs. Clarke to dismount.  As she slid down lightly from the saddle she whispered, scarcely moving her lips: 

“The pavilion to-night eleven.  You’ve got the key.”

She patted Selim’s glossy black neck.

“Come, Jimmy!” she said.  “Say good night to Mr. Leith.  I’m sure he’s tired and has had more than enough of us for to-day.  We’ll give him a rest from us till to-morrow.”

And Jimmy bade Dion good-by without any protest.

As Dion rode off Mrs. Clarke did not turn to look after him.  She had not troubled even to question him with her eyes.  She had assumed that he would do what she wanted.  Would he do that?

At first he believed that he would not go.  He had been away in the forest with his misery for nearly two hours, struggling among the shadows of the trees.  Jimmy had seen in the pavilion that morning that his “holiday tutor” was strangely ill at ease, and had discussed the matter with his mater, and asked her why on earth the sight of a page of Greek grammar should make a fellow stand staring as if he were confronted by a ghost.  But Jimmy had no conception of what Dion had been through in the forest, where happy Greeks and Armenians were lazily enjoying the empty hours of summer, forgetting yesterday, and serenely careless of to-morrow.

In the forest Dion had fought with an old love of which he began to be angrily ashamed, with a love which was now his greatest enemy, a thing contemptible, inexplicable.  In the pavilion that morning it had suddenly risen up before him strong, intense, passionate.  It seemed irresistible.  But he was almost furiously resolved not merely to resist it, but to crush it down, to break it in pieces, or to drive it finally out of his life.

And he had fought with it alone in the forest which the Armenians call Defetgamm.  And in the forest something ­some adherent, it seemed ­had whispered to him, “To kill your enemy you must fill your armory with weapons.  The woman who came to you when you were neither in one world nor in the other is a weapon.  Why have you ceased to use her?”

And now, as if she had heard the voice of that adherent, and had known of the struggle in the forest, the woman herself had suddenly broken through the reserve she had imposed upon them both since the coming of her son.

In a hideous way Dion wanted to see her, and yet he shrank from going back to her secretly.  The coming of Jimmy, his relations with the boy, the boy’s hearty affection for him and admiration for him, had roused into intense activity that part of his nature which had always loved, which he supposed always must love, the straight life; the life with morning face and clear, unfaltering eyes; the life which the Hermes suggested, immune from the fret and fever of secret vices and passions, lifted by winged sandals into a region where soul and body were in perfect accord, and where, because of that, there was peace; not a peace of stagnation, but a peace living and intense.  But that part of his nature had led him even now instinctively back to the feet of Rosamund.  And he revolted against such a pilgrimage.

“The pavilion to-night eleven; you’ve got the key.”

Her face had not changed as she whispered the words, and immediately afterwards she had told a lie to her boy, or had implied a lie.  She had made Jimmy believe the thing that was not.  Loving Jimmy, she did not scruple to play a part to him.

Dion ate no dinner that night.  After returning to his rooms and getting out of his riding things into a loose serge suit he went out again and walked along the quay by the water.  He paced up and down, ignoring the many passers-by, the boatmen and watermen who now knew him so well.

He was considering whether he should go to the pavilion at the appointed hour or whether he should leave Buyukderer altogether and not return to it.  This evening he was in the mood to be drastic.  He might go down to Constantinople and finally cast his burden away there, never to take it up again ­the burden of an old love whose chains still hung about him; he might plunge into the lowest depths, into depths where perhaps the remembrance of Rosamund and the early morning would fade away from him, where even Mrs. Clarke would not care to seek for him, although her will was persistent.

He fully realized now her extraordinary persistence, the fierce firmness of character that was concealed by her quiet and generally impersonal manner.  Certainly she had the temperament of a ruler.  He remembered ­it seemed to him with a bizarre abruptness ­the smile on Dumeny’s lips in the Divorce Court when the great case had ended in Mrs. Clarke’s favor.

Did he really know Cynthia Clarke even now?

He walked faster.  Now he saw Hadi Bey before him, self-possessed, firm, with that curiously vivid look which had attracted the many women in Court.

And Jimmy believed in his mother.  Perhaps, until Dion’s arrival in Buyukderer, the boy had had reason in his belief ­perhaps not.  Dion was very uncertain to-night.

A sort of cold curiosity was born in him.  Until now he had accepted Mrs. Clarke’s presentment of herself to the world, which included himself, as a genuine portrait; now he began to recall the long speech of Beadon Clarke’s counsel.  But the man had only been speaking according to his brief, had been only putting forth all the ingenuity and talent which enabled him to command immense fees for his services.  And Mrs. Clarke had beaten him.  The jury had said that she was not what he had asserted her to be.

Suppose they had made a mistake, had given the wrong verdict, why should that make any difference to Dion?  He had definitely done with the goodness of good women.  Why should he fear the evil of a woman who was bad?  Perhaps in the women who were called evil by the respectable, or by those who were temperamentally inclined to purity, there was more warm humanity than the women possessed who never made a slip, or stepped out of the beaten path of virtue.  Perhaps those to whom much must be forgiven were those who knew how to forgive.

If Mrs. Clarke really were what Beadon Clarke’s counsel had suggested that she was, how would it affect him?  Dion pondered that question on the quay.  Mrs. Clarke’s pale and very efficient hypocrisy, which he had been able to observe at close quarters since he had been at Buyukderer, might well have been brought into play against himself, as it had been brought into play against the little world on the Bosporus and against Jimmy.

Dion made up his mind that he would go to the pavilion that night.  The cold curiosity which had floated up to the surface of his mind enticed him.  He wanted to know whether he was among the victims, if they could reasonably be called so, of Mrs. Clarke’s delicate hypocrisy.  He was still thinking of Mrs. Clarke as a weapon; he was also thinking that perhaps he did not yet know exactly what type of weapon she was.  He must find that out to-night.  Not even the thought of Jimmy should deter him.

At a few minutes before eleven he went back to his rooms, unlocked his despatch box, and drew out the key of the gate of Mrs. Clarke’s garden.  He thrust it into his pocket and set out on the short walk to the Villa Hafiz.  The night was dark and cloudy and very still.  Dion walked quickly and surreptitiously, not looking at any of the people who went by him in the darkness.  All the windows of the villa which faced the sea were shuttered and showed no lights.  He turned to the right, stood before the garden gate and listened.  He heard no sound except a distant singing on the oily waters of the Bay.  Softly he put his key into the gate, gently unlocked it, stepped into the garden.  A few minutes later he was on the highest terrace and approached the pavilion.  As he did so Mrs. Clarke came out of the drawing-room of the villa, passed by the fountain, and began to ascend the garden.

She was dressed in black and in a material that did not rustle.  Her thin figure did not show up against the night, and her light slow footfall was scarcely audible on the paths and steps as she went upward.  Jimmy had gone to bed long ago, tired out with the long ride in the heat.  She had just been into his bedroom, without a light, and had heard his regular breathing.  He was fast asleep, and once he was asleep he never woke till the light of day shone in at the window.  It was a comfort that one could thoroughly rely on the sleeping powers of a healthy boy of fifteen.

She sighed as she thought of Jimmy.  The boy was going to complicate her life.  She was by nature an unusually fearless woman, but she was beginning to realize that there might come a time when she would know fear ­unless she could begin to live differently as Jimmy began to grow up.  But how could she do that?  There are things which seem to be impossible even to strong wills.  Her will was very strong, but she had always used it not to renounce but to attain, not to hold her desires in check but to bring them to fruition.  And it was late in the day to begin reversing the powerful engine of her will.  She was not even sure that she could reverse it.  Hitherto she had never genuinely tried to do that.  She did not want to try now, partly ­but only partly ­because she hated to fail in anything she undertook.  And she had a suspicion, which she was not anxious to turn into a certainty, that she who had ruled many people was only a slave herself.  Perhaps some day Jimmy would force her to a knowledge of her exact condition.

For the first time in her life she was half afraid of that mysterious energy which men and women call love; she began to understand, with a sort of ample fulness of comprehension, that of all loves the most determined is the love of a mother for her only son.  A mother may, perhaps, have a son and not love him; but if once she loves him she holds within her a thing that will not die while she lives.

And if the thing that was without lust stood up in battle against the thing that was full of lust ­what then?

The black and still night seemed a battlefield.

Softly she stepped upon the highest terrace and stood for a moment under the great plane tree, where was the wooden seat on which she had waited for Dion to weep away the past and the good woman who had ruined his life.  To-night she was invaded by an odd uncertainty.  If she went to the pavilion and Dion were not there?  If he did not come?  Would some part of her, perhaps, be glad, the part that in a mysterious way was one with Jimmy?  She stared into the darkness, looking towards the pavilion.  Dion Leith had once said she looked punished.  Perhaps when he had said that he had shown that he had intuition.

Was he there?  It was past eleven now.  She had assumed that he would come, and she was inclined to believe that he had come.  If so she need not see him even now.  There was still time for her to go back to the villa, to shut herself in, to go to bed, as Jimmy had gone to bed.  But if she did that she would not sleep.  All night long she would lie wide awake, tossing from side to side, the helpless prey of her past life.

She frowned and slipped through the darkness, almost like a fluid, to the pavilion.

CHAPTER VIII

She came so silently that Dion heard nothing till against the background of the night he saw a shadow, her thin body, a faint whiteness, her face, motionless at the opening of the pavilion; from this shadow and this whiteness came a voice which said: 

“Did you come under the influence of Defetgamm?”

“It’s impossible that you see me!” he said.

“I see you plainly with some part of me, not my eyes.”

He got up from the divan where he had been sitting in the dark and went to the opening of the pavilion.

“Did you come under the influence of Defetgamm?” she repeated.

“You know I didn’t.”

He paused, then added: 

“I nearly didn’t come to-night.”

“And I nearly went down, after I had come up here, without seeing you.  And yet ­we are together again.”

“Why do you want to see me here?  We agreed ­”

“Yes, we agreed; but after to-day in the forest that agreement had to be broken.  When you left me under the trees you looked like a man who was thinking of starting on a very long journey.”

She spoke with a peculiar significance which at once conveyed her full meaning to him.

“No, I shall never do that,” he said.  “If I had been capable of it, I should have done it long ago.”

“Yes?  Let me in.”

He moved.  She slipped into the pavilion and sat down.

“How can you move without making any sound?” he asked somberly.

There had been in her movement a sort of perfection of surreptitiousness that was animal.  He noticed it, and thought that she must surely be accustomed to moving with precaution lest she should be seen or heard.  Rosamund could not move like that.  A life story seemed to him to be faintly traced in Mrs. Clarke’s manner of entering the pavilion and of sitting down on the divan.

He stood beside her in the dark.  She returned no answer to his question.

“You spoke of a journey,” he said.  “The only journey I have thought of making is short enough ­to Constantinople.  I nearly started on it to-night.”

“Why do you want to go to Constantinople?”

He was silent.

“What would you do there?”

“Ugly things, perhaps.”

“Why didn’t you go?  What kept you?”

“I felt that I must ask you something.”

He sat down beside her and took both her hands roughly.  They were dry and burning as if with fever.

“You trick Jimmy,” he said.  “You trick the Ingletons, Vane, all the people here ­”

“Trick!” she interrupted coldly, almost disdainfully.  “What do you mean?”

“That you deceive them, take them in.”

“What about?”

“You know quite well.”

After a pause, which was perhaps ­he could not tell ­a pause of astonishment, she said: 

“Do you really expect me to go about telling every one that I, a lonely woman, separated from my husband, unable to marry again, have met a man whom I care for, and that I’ve been weak enough ­or wicked enough, if you like ­to let him know it?”

Dion felt his cheeks burn in the darkness.  Nevertheless, something drove him on, forced him to push his way hardily through a sort of quickset hedge of reluctance and shame.

“No, I don’t expect absurdities.  I am not such a fool.  But ­but you do it so well!”

“Do what well?”

“Everything connected with deception.  You are such a mistress of it.”

“Well?”

“Isn’t that rather strange?”

“Do you expect a woman like me, a woman who can’t pretend to stupidity, and who has lived for years in the diplomatic world, to blunder in what she undertakes?”

“No, I don’t.  But you are too competent.”

He spoke with hard determination, but his cheeks were still burning.

“It’s impossible to be too competent.  If I make up my mind that a thing must be done I resolve to do it thoroughly and to do it well.  I despise blunderers and women who are afraid of what they do.  I despise those who give themselves and others away.  I cared for you.  I saw you needed me and I gave myself to you.  I am not sorry I did it, not a bit sorry.  I had counted the cost before I did it.”

“Counted the cost?  But what cost is there?  Neither of us loses anything.”

“I risk losing almost everything a woman cares for.  I don’t want to dwell upon it.  I detest women who indulge in reproaches, or who try to make men value them by pointing out how much they stand to lose by giving themselves.  But you are so strange to-night.  You have attacked me.  I don’t know why.”

“I’ve been walking on the quay and thinking.”

“What about?”

“You!”

“Go on.”

“I’ve been thinking that, as you take in Jimmy and all the people here so easily, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be taking me in too.”

In the dark a feeling was steadily growing within him that his companion was playing with him as he knew she had played with others.

“I’m forced to deceive the people here and my boy.  My relation with you obliges me to do that.  But nothing forces me to deceive you.  I have been sincere with you.  Ever since I met you in the street in Pera I’ve been sincere, even blunt.  I should think you must have noticed it.”

“I have.  In some ways you are blunt, but in many you aren’t.”

“What is it exactly that you wish to know?”

For a moment Dion was silent.  In the darkness of the pavilion he saw Dumeny’s lips smiling faintly, Hadi Bey’s vivid, self-possessed eyes, the weak mouth of Brayfield and his own double.  Was he a member of an ugly brotherhood, or did he stand alone?  He wanted to know, yet he felt that he could not put such a hideous question to his companion.

“Tell me exactly what it is,” she said.  “Don’t be afraid.  I wish to be quite sincere with you, though you think I don’t.  It is no pleasure to me to deceive people.  What I do in the way of deception I do in self-defense.  Circumstances often push us into doing what we don’t enjoy doing.  But you and I ought to be frank with one another.”

Her hands tightened on his.

“Go on.  Tell me.”

“I’ve been wondering whether your husband ought to have won his case,” said Dion, in a low voice.

“Is that all?” she said, very simply and without any emotion.

“All?”

“Yes.  Do you suppose, when I gave myself to you, I didn’t realize that my doing it was certain to make you doubt my virtue?  Dion, you don’t know how boyish you still are.  You will always be in some ways a boy.  I knew you would doubt me after all that had happened.  But what is the good of asking questions of a women whom you doubt?  If I am what you suspect, of course I shall tell lies.  If I am not, what is the good of my telling you the truth?  What is to make you believe it?”

He was silent.  She moved slightly and he felt her thin body against his side.  What sort of weapon was she?  That was the great question for him.  Since his struggle in the forest of Defetgamm he had come to the resolve to strike fierce and reiterated blows on that disabling and surely contemptible love of his, that love which had confronted him like a specter when he was in the pavilion with Jimmy.  He was resolved at last upon assassination, and he wanted a weapon that could slay, not a weapon that would bend, or perhaps break, in his hand.

“I don’t want to believe I am only one among many,” he said at last.

The sound of his voice gave her the cue to his inmost feeling.  She had been puzzled in the forest, she had been half afraid, seeing that he had arrived at an acute emotional crisis and not understanding what had brought him to it.  She did not understand that now, but she knew that he was asking from her more than he had ever asked before.  He had been cast out and now he was knocking hard on her door.  He was knocking, but lingering remnants of the influence of the woman who had colored his former life hung about him like torn rags, and his hands instinctively felt for them, pulled at them, to cover his nakedness.  Still, while he knocked, he looked back to the other life.  Nevertheless ­she knew this with all there was of woman in her ­he wanted from her all that the good woman had never given to him, was incapable of giving to him or to any one.  He wanted from her, perhaps, powers of the body which would suffice finally for the killing of those powers of the soul by which he was now tormented ceaselessly.  The sound of his voice demanded from her something no other man had ever demanded from her, the slaughter in him of what he had lived by through all his years.  Nevertheless he was still looking back to all the old purities, was still trying to hear all the old voices.  He required of her, as it were, that she should be good in her evil, gentle while she destroyed.  Well, she would even be that.  A rare smile curved her thin lips, but he did not see it.

“Suppose I told you that you were one of many?” she said.  “Would you give it all up?”

“I don’t know.  Am I?”

“No.  Do you think, if you were, I should have kept my women friends, Tippie Chetwinde, Delia Ingleton and all the rest?”

“I suppose not,” he said.

But he remembered tones in Mrs. Chetwinde’s voice when she had spoken of “Cynthia Clarke,” and even tones in Lady Ingleton’s voice.

“They stuck to me because they believed in me.  What other reason could they have?”

“Unless they were very devoted to you.”

“Women aren’t much given to that sort of thing,” she said dryly.

“I think you have an unusual power of making people do what you wish.  It is like an emanation,” he said slowly.  “And it seems not to be interfered with by distance.”

She leaned till her cheek touched his.

“Dion, I wish to make you forget.  I know how it is with you.  You suffer abominably because you can’t forget.  I haven’t succeeded with you yet.  But wait, only wait, till Jimmy goes, till the summer is over and we can leave the Bosporus.  It’s all too intimate ­the life here.  We are all too near together.  But in Constantinople I know ways.  I’ll stay there all the winter for you.  Even the Christmas holidays ­I’ll give them up for once.  I want to show you that I do care.  For no one else on earth would I give up being with Jimmy in his holidays.  For no one else I’d risk what I’m risking to-night.”

“Jimmy was asleep when you came?”

“Yes, but he might wake.  He never does, but he might wake just to-night.”

“Suppose he did!  Suppose he looked for you in your room and didn’t find you!  Suppose he came up here!”

“He won’t!”

She spoke obstinately, almost as if her assertion of the thing’s impossibility must make it impossible.

“And yet there’s the risk of it,” said Dion ­“the great risk.”

“There are always risks in connection with the big things in life.  We are worth very little if we won’t take them.”

“If it wasn’t for Jimmy would you come and live with me?  Would you drop all this deception?  Would you let your husband divorce you?  Would you give up your place in society for me?  I am an outcast.  Would you come and be an outcast with me?”

“Yes, if it wasn’t for Jimmy.”

“And for Jimmy you’d give me up for ever in a moment, wouldn’t you?”

“Why do you ask these questions?” she said, almost fiercely.

“I want something for myself, something that’s really mine.  Then perhaps ­”

He stopped.

“Perhaps what?”

“Perhaps I could forget ­sometimes.”

“And yet when you knew Jimmy was coming here you wanted to go away.  You were afraid then.  And even to-day ­”

“I want one thing or the other!” he interrupted desperately.  “I’m sick of mixing up good and bad.  I’m sick of prévarications and deceptions.  They go against my whole nature.  I hate struggling in a net.  It saps all my strength.”

“I know.  I understand.”

She put her arm round his neck.

“Perhaps I ought to give you up, let you go.  I’ve thought that.  But I haven’t the courage.  Dion, I’m lonely, I’m lonely.”

He felt moisture on his cheek.

“About you I’m absolutely selfish,” she said, in a low, swift voice.  “Even if all this hypocrisy hurts you I can’t give you up.  I’ve told you a lie ­even you.”

“When?”

“I said to you on that night ­”

She waited.

“I know,” he said.

“I said that I hadn’t cared for you till I met you in Pera, and saw what she had done to you.  That was a lie.  I cared for you in England.  Didn’t you know it?”

“Once or twice I wondered, but I was never at all sure.”

“It was because I cared that I wanted to make friends with your wife.  I had no evil reason.  I knew you and she were perfectly happy together.  But I wanted just to see you sometimes.  She guessed it.  That was why she avoided me ­the real reason.  It wasn’t only because I’d been involved in a scandal, though I told you once it was.  I’ve sometimes lied to you because I didn’t want to feel myself humiliated in your eyes.  But now I don’t care.  You can know all the truth if you want to.  You pushed me away ­oh, very gently ­because of her.  Did you think I didn’t understand?  You were afraid of me.  Perhaps you thought I was a nuisance.  When I came back from Paris on purpose for Tippie Chetwinde’s party you were startled, almost horrified, when you saw me.  I saw it all so plainly.  In the end, as you know, I gave it up.  Only when you went to the war I had to send that telegram.  I thought you might be killed, and I wanted you to know I was remembering you, and admiring you for what you had done.  Then you came with poor Brayfield’s letter ­”

She broke off, then added, with a long, quivering sigh: 

“You’ve made me suffer, Dion.”

“Have I?”

He turned till he was facing her in the darkness.

“Then at last you were overtaken by your tragedy, and she showed you her cruelty and cast you out.  From that moment I was resolved some day to let you know how much I cared.  I wanted you in your misery.  But I waited.  I had a conviction that you would come to me, drawn, without suspecting it, by what I felt for you.  Well, you came at last.  And now you ask me whether you are one of many.”

“Forgive me!” he whispered.

“But of course I shall always forgive you for everything.  Women who care for men always do that.  They can’t help themselves.  And you ­will you forgive me for my lies?”

He took her in his arms.

“Life’s full of them.  Only don’t tell me any more, and make me forget if you can.  You’ve got so much will.  Try to have the power for that.”

“Then help me.  Give yourself wholly to me.  You have struggled against me furtively.  You thought I didn’t know it, but I did.  You look back to the old ways.  And that is madness.  Turn a new page, Dion.  Have the courage to hope.”

“To ­hope!”

Her hot hands closed on him fiercely.

“You shall hope.  I’ll make you.  Cut out the cancer that is in you, and cut away all that is round it.  Then you’ll have health again.  She never knew how to feel in the great human way.  She was too fond of God ever to care for a man.”

Let that be the epitaph over the tomb in which all his happiness was buried.

In silence he made his decision, and Cynthia Clarke knew it.

The darkness covered them.

Down below in the Villa Hafiz Jimmy was sleeping peacefully, tired by the long ride to and from the forest in the heat.  He had gone to bed very early, almost directly after dinner.  His mother had not advised this.  Perhaps indeed, if she had not been secretly concentrated on herself and her own desires that evening, she would have made Jimmy stay up till at least half-past ten, even though he was “jolly sleepy.”  He had slept for at least two hours in the forest.  She ought to have remembered that, but she had forgotten it, and when, at a quarter to nine, on an enormous yawn, Jimmy had announced that he thought he would “turn in and get between the sheets,” she had almost eagerly acquiesced.  She wanted her boy asleep, soundly asleep that night.  When the clock had struck nine he had already traveled beyond the land of dreams.

The night was intensely hot and airless.  No breath of wind came from the sea.  Drops of perspiration stood on the boy’s forehead as he slept, with nothing over him but a sheet.  He lay on his side, with his face towards the open window and one arm outside the sheet.

People easily fall into habits of sleeping.  Jimmy was accustomed to sleep for about eight hours “on end,” as he put it.  When he had had his eight hours he generally woke up.  If he was not obliged to get up he often went to sleep again after an interval of wakefulness, but he seldom slept for as much as nine hours without waking.

On this night between two o’clock and three it seemed as if a layer of sleep were gently lifted from him.  He sighed, stirred, turned over and began to dream.

He dreamed confusedly about Dion, and there were pain and apprehension in his dream.  In it Dion seemed to be himself and yet not himself, to be near and at the same time remote, to be Jimmy’s friend and yet, in some strange and horrible way, hostile to Jimmy.  No doubt the boy was haunted in his sleep by an obscure phantom bred of that painful impression of the morning, when his friend had suddenly been changed in the pavilion, changed into a tragic figure from which seemed to emanate impalpable things very black and very cold.

In the dream Jimmy’s mother did not appear as an active figure; yet the dreamer seemed somehow to be aware of her, to know faintly that she was involved in unhappy circumstances, that she was the victim of distresses he could not fathom.  And these distresses weighed upon him like a burden, as things weigh upon us in dreams, softly and heavily, and with a sort of cloudy awfulness.  He wanted to strive against them for his mother, but he was held back from action, and Dion seemed to have something to do with this.  It was as if his friend and enemy, Dion Leith, did not wish his mother to be released from unhappiness.

Jimmy moved, lay on his back and groaned.  His eyelids fluttered.  Something from without, something from a distance, was pulling at him, and the hands of sleep, too inert, perhaps, for any conflict, relaxed their hold upon him.  Thoughts from two minds in a dark pavilion were stealing upon him, were touching him here and there, were whispering to him.

Another layer of sleep was softly removed from him.

He clenched his large hands ­he had already the hands and feet almost of the man he would some day grow into ­and his eyes opened wide for a moment.  But they closed again.  He was not awake yet.

At three o’clock he woke.  He had slept for six hours in the villa and for two hours in the forest.  He lay still in the dark for a few minutes.  A faint memory of his dream hung about him like a tattered mist.  He felt anxious, almost apprehensive, and strained his ears expectant of some sound.  But the silence of the airless night was deep and large all about him.  He began to think of his mother.  What had been the matter with her?  Who, or what, had persecuted her?  He realized now that he had been dreaming, said to himself, with a boy’s exaggeration, that he had had “a beastly nightmare!” Nevertheless his mother still appeared to him as the victim of distresses.  He could not absolutely detach himself from the impressions communicated to him in his dream.  He was obliged to think of his mother as unhappy and of Dion Leith as not wholly friendly either to her or to himself.  And it was all quite beastly.

Presently, more fully awake, he began to wonder about the time and to feel tremendously thirsty, as if he could “drink the jug.”

He stretched out a hand, found the matches and struck a light.  It went out with a sort of feeble determination.

“Damn!” he muttered.

He struck another match and lit the candle.  His silver watch lay beside it, and marked five minutes past three.  Jimmy was almost angrily astonished.  Only that!  He now felt painfully wide awake, as if his sleep were absolutely finished.  What was to be done?  He remembered that he had slept in the forest.  He had had his eight hours.  Perhaps that was the reason of his present wakefulness.  Anyhow, he must have a drink.  He thrust away the sheet, rolled out of bed, and went to the washhand-stand.  There was plenty of water in his bottle, but when he poured it into the tumbler he found that it was quite warm.  He was certain warm water wouldn’t quench his ardent thirst.  Besides, he loathed it.  Any chap would!  How beastly everything was!

He put down the tumbler without drinking, went to the window and looked out.  The still hot darkness which greeted him made him feel again the obscure distress of his dream.  He was aware of apprehension.  Dawn could not be so very far off; yet he felt sunk to the lips in the heavy night.

If only he could have a good drink of something very cold!  This wish made him think again of his mother.  He knew she did not require much sleep, and sometimes read during part of the night; he also knew that she kept some iced lemonade on the table beside her bed.  Now the thought of his mother’s lemonade enticed him.

He hesitated for a moment, then stuck his feet into a pair of red Turkish slippers without heels, buttoned the jacket of his pyjamas, which he had thrown open because of the heat, took his candle in hand, and shuffled ­he always shuffled when he had on the ridiculous slippers ­to the door.

There he paused.

The landing was fairly wide.  It looked dreary and deserted in the darkness defined by the light from his candle.  He could see the head of the staircase, the shallow wooden steps disappearing into the empty blackness in which the ground floor of the house was shrouded; he could see the door of his mother’s bedroom.  As he stared at it, considering whether his thirst justified him in waking her up ­for, if she were asleep, he felt pretty sure she would wake however softly he crept into her room ­he saw that the door was partly open.  Perhaps his mother had found the heat too great, and had tried to create a draught by opening her door.  There was darkness in the aperture.  She wasn’t reading, then.  Probably she was asleep.  He was infernally thirsty; the door was open; the lemonade was almost within reach; he resolved to risk it.  Carefully shading the candle with one hand he crept across the landing, adroitly abandoned his slippers outside the door, and on naked feet entered his mother’s room.

His eyes immediately rested on the tall jug of lemonade, which stood on a small table, with a glass and some books, beside the big, low bed.  He stole towards it, always shielding the candle with his hand, and not looking at the bed lest his glance might, perhaps, disturb the sleeper he supposed to be in it.  He reached the table, and was about to lay a desirous hand upon the jug, when it occurred to him that, in doing this, he would expose the candle ray.  Better blow the candle out!  He located the jug, and was on the edge of action ­his lips were pursed for the puff ­when the dead silence of the room struck him.  Could any one, even his remarkably quiet mother, sleep without making even the tiniest sound?  He shot a glance at the bed.  There was no one in it.  He bent down.  It had not been slept in that night.

Jimmy stood, with his mouth open, staring at the large, neat, unruffled bed.  What the dickens could the mater be up to?  She must, of course, be sitting up in her small sitting-room next door to the bedroom.  Evidently the heat had made her sleepless.

He took a pull at the lemonade, went to the sitting-room door and softly opened it, at the same time exclaiming, “I say, mater ­”

Darkness and emptiness confronted him.

He shut the door rather hurriedly, and again stood considering.  Something cracked.  He started, and the candle rattled in his hand.  A disagreeable sensation was stealing upon him.  He would not, of course, have acknowledged that an unpleasant feeling of loneliness, almost of desertion.  The servants slept in a small wing of the villa, shut off from the main part of the house by double doors.  Mrs. Clarke detested hearing the servants at night, and had taken good care to make such hearing impossible.  Jimmy began to feel isolated.

Where could the mater be?  And what could she be doing?

For a moment he thought of returning to his room, shutting himself in and waiting for the dawn, which would change everything ­would make everything seem quite usual and reasonable.  But something in the depths of him, speaking in a disagreeably distinct voice, remarked, “That’s right!  Be a funk stick!” And his young cheeks flushed red, although he was alone.  Immediately he went out on to the landing, thrust his feet again into the red slippers, and boldly started down the stairs into the black depths below.  Holding the candle tightly, and trying to shuffle with manly decision, he explored the sitting-rooms and the dining-room.  All of them were empty and dark.

Now Jimmy began to feel “rotten.”  Horrid fears for his mother bristled up in his mind.  His young imagination got to work and summoned up ugly things before him.  He saw his mother ravished away from him by unspeakable men ­Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Albanians ­God knows whom ­and carried off to some unknown and frightful fate; he saw her dead, murdered; he saw her dead, stricken by some sudden and horrible illness.  His heart thumped.  He could hear it.  It seemed to be beating in his ears.  And then he began to feel brave, to feel an intrepidity of desperation.  He must act.  That was certain.  It was his obvious business to jolly well get to work and do something.  His first thought was to rush upstairs, to rouse the servants, to call up Sonia, his mother’s confidential maid, to ­the pavilion!

Suddenly he remembered the pavilion, and all the books on its shelves.  His mother might be there.  She might have been sleepless, might have felt sure she couldn’t sleep, and so have stayed up.  She might be reading in the darkness.  She was afraid of nothing.  Darkness and solitude wouldn’t hinder her from wandering about if the fancy to wander took her.  She wouldn’t, of course, go outside the gates, but ­he now felt sure she was somewhere in the garden.

He looked round.  He was standing by the grand piano in the drawing-room, and he now noticed for the first time that the French window which gave on to the rose garden was open.  That settled it.  He put the candle down, hurried out into the garden and called, “Mater!”

No voice replied except the fountain’s voice.  The purring water rose in the darkness and fell among the lilies, rose and fell, active and indifferent, like a living thing withdrawn from him, wrapped in its own mystery.

“Mater!” he called again, in a louder, more resolute, voice.  “Mater!  Mater!”

In an absolutely still night a voice can travel very far.  On the highest terrace of the garden in the blackness of the pavilion Mrs. Clarke moved sharply.  She sat straight up on the divan, rigid, with her hands pressed palm downwards on the cushions.  Dion had heard nothing, and did not understand the reason for her abrupt, almost violent, movement.

“Why . . . ?” he began.

She caught his wrist and held it tightly, compressing her fingers on it with a fierce force that amazed him.

“Mater!”

Had he really heard the word, or had he imagined it?

“Mater!”

He had heard it.

“It’s Jimmy!”

She had her thin lips close to his ear.  She still held his wrist in a grip of iron.

“He’s at the bottom of the garden.  He’ll come up here.  He won’t wait.  Go down and meet him.”

“But ­”

“Go down!  I’ll hide among the trees.  Let him come up here, or bring him up.  He must come.  Be sure he comes inside.  While you go I’ll light the lamp.  I can do it in a moment.  You couldn’t sleep.  You came here to read.  Of course you know nothing about me.  Keep him here for five or ten minutes.  You can come down then and help him to look for me.  Go at once.”

She took away her hand.

“My whole future depends upon you!”

Dion got up and went out.  As he went he heard her strike a match.

Scarcely knowing for a moment what he was doing, acting mechanically, in obedience to instinct, but always feeling a sort of terrible driving force behind him, he traversed the terrace on which the pavilion stood, passed the great plane tree and the wooden seat, and began to descend.  As he did so he heard again Jimmy’s voice crying: 

“Mater!”

“Jimmy!” he called out, in a loud voice, hurrying on.

As the sound died away he knew it had been nonchalant.  Surely she had made it so!

“Jimmy!” he called again.  “What’s up.  What’s the matter?”

There was no immediate reply, but in the deep silence Dion heard hurrying steps, and then: 

“Mr. Leith!”

“Hallo!”

“Mr. Leith ­it is you, is it?”

“Yes.  What on earth’s the matter?”

“Stop a sec!  I ­”

The feet were pounding upward.  Almost directly, in pyjamas and the slippers, which somehow still remained with him, Jimmy stood by Dion in the dark, breathing hard.

“Jimmy, what’s the matter?  What has happened?”

“I say, why are you here?”

“I couldn’t sleep.  The night was so hot.  I had nothing to read in my rooms.  Besides they’re stuck down right against the quay.  You know your mother’s kind enough to let me have a key of the garden gate.  I thought I might get more air on the top terrace.  I was reading in the pavilion when I thought I heard a call.”

“Then the mater isn’t there?”

“Your mother?”

“Yes!”

“Of course not.  Come on up!”

Dion took the boy by the arm with decision, and slowly led him upwards.

“What’s this about your mother?  Do you mean she isn’t asleep?”

“Asleep?  She isn’t in her bedroom!  She hasn’t been there!”

“Hasn’t been there?”

“Hasn’t been to bed at all!  I’ve been to her sitting-room ­you know, upstairs ­she isn’t there.  I’ve been in all the rooms.  She isn’t anywhere.  She must be somewhere about here.”

They had arrived in front of the pavilion backed by trees.  Looking in, Dion saw a lighted lamp.  The slide of jeweled glass had been removed from it.  A white ray fell on an open book laid on a table.

“I was reading here” ­he looked ­“a thing called ‘The Kasidah.’  Sit down!” He pulled the boy down.  “Now what is all this?  Your mother must be in the house.”

“But I tell you she isn’t!”

Dion had sat down between Jimmy and the opening on to the terrace.  It occurred to him that he ought to have induced the boy to sit with his back to the terrace and his face turned towards the room.  It was too late to do that now.

“I tell you she isn’t!” Jimmy repeated, with a sort of almost fierce defiance.

He was staring hard at Dion.  His hair was almost wildly disordered, and his face looked pale and angry in the ray of the lamp.  Dion felt that there was suspicion in his eyes.  Surely those eyes were demanding of him the woman who was hiding among the trees.

“Where have you looked?” he said.

“I tell you I’ve looked everywhere,” said Jimmy, doggedly.

“Did you mother go to bed when you did?”

“No.  I went very early.  I was so infernally sleepy.”

“Where did you leave her?”

“In the drawing-room.  She was playing the piano.  But what’s the good of that?  What time did you come here?”

“I!  Oh, not till very late indeed.”

“Were there any lights showing when you came?”

“Lights!  No!  But it was ever so much too late for that.”

“Did you go on to the terrace by the drawing-room?”

“No.  I came straight up here.  It never occurred to me that any one would be up at such an hour.  Besides, I didn’t want to disturb any one, especially your mother.”

“Well, just now I found the drawing-room window wide open, and mater’s bed hasn’t been touched.  What do you make of that?”

Before Dion could reply the boy abruptly started up.

“I heard something.  I know I did.”

As naturally as he could Dion got between Jimmy and the opening on to the terrace, and, forestalling the boy, looked out.  He saw nothing; he could not have said with truth that any definite sound reached his ears; but he felt that at that exact moment Mrs. Clarke escaped from the terrace, and began to glide down towards the house below.

“There’s nothing!  Come and see for yourself,” he said casually.

Jimmy pushed by him, then stood perfectly still, staring at the darkness and listening intently.

“I don’t hear it now!” he acknowledged gruffly.

“What did you think you heard?”

“I did hear something.  I couldn’t tell you what it was.”

“Have you looked all through the garden?”

“You know I haven’t.  You heard me calling down at the bottom.  You must have, because you answered me.”

“We’d better have a good look now.  Just wait one minute while I put out the lamp.  I’ll put away the book I was reading, too.”

“Right you are!” said the boy, still gruffly.

He waited on the terrace while Dion went into the pavilion.  As Dion took up “The Kasidah” he glanced down at the page at which Mrs. Clarke had chanced to set the book open, and read: 

“Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from
None but self expect applause ­”

With a feeling of cold and abject soul-nausea he shut the book, put it away on a bookshelf in which he saw a gap, and went to turn out the lamp.  As the flame flickered and died out he heard Jimmy’s foot shift on the terrace.

“Do what thy manhood bids thee do ­”

Dion stood for a moment in the dark.  He was in a darkness greater than any which reigned in the pavilion.  His soul seemed to him to be pressing against it, to be hemmed in by it as by towering walls of iron.  For an instant he shut his eyes.  And when he did that he saw, low down, a little boy’s figure, two small outstretched hands groping.

Robin!

“Aren’t you coming, Mr. Leith?  What’s the matter?”

“I was just seeing that the lamp was thoroughly out.”

“Well ­”

Dion came out.

“We’ll look all over the garden.  But if your mother had been in it she must have heard you calling her.  I did, although I was inside there reading.”

“I know.  I thought of that too,” returned Jimmy.

And Dion fancied that the boy’s voice was very cold; Dion fancied this but he was not sure.  His conscience might be tricking him.  He hoped that it was tricking him.

“We’d better look among the trees,” he said.  “And then we’ll go to the terrace below.”

“It’s no use looking among the trees,” Jimmy returned.  “If she was up here she must have heard us talking all this time.”

Abruptly he led the way to the steps near the plane tree.  Dion followed him slowly.  Was it possible that Jimmy had guessed?  Was it possible that Jimmy had caught a glimpse of his mother escaping?  The boy’s manner was surely almost hostile.

They searched the garden in silence, and at length found themselves by the fountain close to the French window of the drawing-room.

“You mother must be in the house,” said Dion firmly.

“But I know she isn’t!” Jimmy retorted, with a sort of dull fixed obstinacy.

“Did you rouse the servants?”

“No.”

“Where do they sleep?”

“Away from us, by themselves.”

“You’d better go and look again.  If you can’t find your mother perhaps you’d better wake the servants.”

“I know,” said Jimmy, in a voice that had suddenly changed, become brighter, more eager ­“I’ll go to Sonia.”

“Your mother’s maid?  That’s it.  She may know something.  I’ll wait down here at the window.  Got a candle?”

“Yes.  I left it in there by the piano.”

He felt his way in and, almost immediately, struck a light.  The candle flickered across his face and his disordered hair as he disappeared.

Dion waited by the fountain.

Where would Mrs. Clarke be?  How would she explain matters?  Would she have had time to ?  Oh yes!  She would have had time to be ready with some quite simple, yet quite satisfactory, piece of deception.  Jimmy would find her, and she would convince him of all that it was necessary he should be convinced of.

Dion’s chin sank down and his head almost drooped.  He felt mortally tired as he waited here.  Already a very faint grayness of the coming dawn was beginning to filter in among the darknesses.

Another day to face!  How could he face it?  He had, he supposed, been what is called “true” to the woman who had given herself to him, but how damnably false he had been to himself that night!

Meanwhile Jimmy went upstairs, frowning and very pale.  He went again to his mother’s bedroom and found it empty.  The big bed, turned down, had held no sleeper.  Nothing had been changed in the room since he had been away in the garden.  He did not trouble to look once more in the adjoining sitting-room, but hurried towards the servants’ quarters.  The double doors were shut.  Softly he opened them and passed through into a wooden corridor.  At the far end of it were two rooms sacred to Sonia, the Russian maid.  The first room she slept in; the second was a large airy chamber lined with cupboards.  In this she worked.  She was a very clever needlewoman, expert in the mysteries of dressmaking.

As Jimmy drew near to the door of Sonia’s workroom he heard a low murmur of voices coming from within.  Evidently Sonia was there, talking to some one.  He crept up and listened.

Very tranquil the voices sounded.  They were talking in French.  One was his mother’s, and he heard her say: 

“Another five minutes, Sonia, and perhaps I shall be ready for bed.  At last I’m beginning to feel as if I might be able to sleep.  If only I were like Jimmy!  He doesn’t know anything about the torments of insomnia.”

“Poor Madame!” returned Sonia, in her rather thick, but pleasantly soft, voice.  “Your head a little back.  That’s better!”

Jimmy was aware of an odd, very faint, sound.  He couldn’t make out what it was.

“Mater!” he said.

And he tapped on the door.

“Who’s that?” said Sonia’s voice.

“It’s Jimmy!”

The door was opened by the maid, and he saw his mother in a long, very thin white dressing-gown, seated in an arm-chair before a mirror.  Her colorless hair flowed over the back of the chair, against which her little head was leaning, supported by a silk cushion.  Her face looked very white and tired, and the lids drooped over her usually wide-open eyes, giving her a strange expression of languor, almost of drowsiness.  Sonia held a silver-backed brush in each hand.

“Monsieur Jimmy!” she said.

“Jimmy!” said Mrs. Clarke.  “What’s the matter?”

She lifted her head from the cushion, and sat straight up.  But she still looked languid.

“What is it?  Are you ill?”

“No, mater!  But I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”

There was a boyish reproach in his voice.

“Looking for me in the middle of the night!  Why?”

Jimmy began to explain matters.

“At last I thought I’d look in the garden.  I shouted out for you, and who should answer but Mr. Leith?” he presently said.

His mother ­he noticed it ­woke up fully at this point in the narrative.

“Mr. Leith!” she said, with strong surprise.  “How could he answer you?”

“He was up in the pavilion reading a book.”

Mrs. Clarke looked frankly astonished.  Her eyes traveled to Sonia, whose broad face was also full of amazement.

“At this hour!” said Mrs. Clarke.

“He couldn’t sleep either,” said Jimmy, quite simply.  “He’s waiting out there now to know whether I’ve found you.”

Mrs. Clarke smiled faintly.

“What a to do!” she said, with just a touch of gentle disdain.  “And all because I suffer from insomnia.  Run down to him, Jimmy, and tell him that as I felt it was useless to go to bed I sat by the fountain till I was weary, then read in my sitting-room, and finally came to Sonia to be brushed into sleep.  Set his mind at rest about me if you can.”

She smiled again.

Somehow that smile made Jimmy feel very small.

“And go back to bed, dear boy.”

She put out one hand, drew him to her, and gave him a gentle kiss with lips which felt very calm.

“I’m sorry you were worried about me.”

“Oh, that’s all right, mater!” said Jimmy, rather awkwardly.  “I didn’t know what to think.  You see ­”

“Of course you couldn’t guess that I was having my hair brushed.  Now go straight to bed, after you’ve told Mr. Leith.  I’m coming too in a minute.”

As Jimmy left the room Sonia was again at work with the two hair-brushes.

A moment later Jimmy reappeared at the French window of the drawing-room.  Dion lifted his head, but did not move from the place where he was standing close to the fountain.

“It’s all right, Mr. Leith,” said Jimmy.  “I’ve found mater.”

“Where was she?”

“In Sonia’s room having her hair brushed.”

Dion stared towards him but said nothing.

“She told me I was to set your mind at rest.”

“Did she?”

“Yes.  I believe she thought us a couple of fools for kicking us such a dust about her.”

Dion said nothing.

“I don’t know, but I’ve an idea girls and women often think they can laugh at us,” added Jimmy.  “Anyhow, it’ll be a jolly long time before I put myself in a sweat about the mater again.  I thought ­I don’t know what I thought, and all the time she was half asleep and having her hair brushed.  She made me feel ass number one.  Good night.”

“Good night.”

The boy shut the window, bent down and bolted it on the inside.

Dion looked at the gray coming of the new day.

CHAPTER IX

Liverpool has a capacity for looking black which is perhaps, only surpassed by Manchester’s, and it looked its blackest on a day at the end of March in the following year, as the afternoon express from London roared into the Lime Street Station.  The rain was coming down; it was small rain, and it descended with a sort of puny determination; it was sad rain without any dash, any boldness; it had affinities with the mists which sweep over stretches of moorland, but its power of saturation was remarkable.  It soaked Liverpool.  It issued out of blackness and seemed to carry a blackness with it which descended into the very soul of the city and lay coiled there like a snake.

Lady Ingleton was very sensitive to her surroundings, and as she lifted the rug from her knees, and put away the book she had been reading, she shivered.  A deep melancholy floated over her and enveloped her.  She thought, “Why did I come upon this adventure?  What is it all to do with me?” But then the face of a man rose up before her, lean, brown, wrinkled, ravaged, with an expression upon it that for a long time had haunted her, throwing a shadow upon her happiness.  And she felt that she had done right to come.  Impulse, perhaps, had driven her; sentiment rather than reason had been her guide.  Nevertheless, she did not regret her journey.  Even if nothing good came of it she would not regret it.  She would have tried for once at some small expense to herself to do a worthy action.  She would for once have put all selfishness behind her.

A white-faced porter, looking anxious and damp, appeared at the door of the corridor.  Lady Ingleton’s French maid arrived from the second class with Turkish Jane on her arm.

“Oh, Miladi, how black it is here!” she exclaimed, twisting her pointed little nose.  “The black it reaches the heart.”

That was exactly what Lady Ingleton was thinking, but she said, in a voice less lazy than usual.

“There’s a capital hotel, Annette.  We shall be very comfortable.”

“Shall we stay here long, Miladi?”

“No; but I don’t know how long yet.  Is Jane all right?”

“She has been looking out of the window, Miladi, the whole way.  She is in ecstasy.  Dogs have no judgment, Miladi.”

When Lady Ingleton was in her sitting-room at the Adelphi Hotel, and had had the fire lighted and tea brought up, she asked to see the manager for a moment.  He came almost immediately, a small man, very smart, very trim, self-possessed as a attache.

“I hope you are quite comfortable, my lady,” he said, in a thin voice which held no note of doubt.  “Can I do anything for you?”

“I wanted to ask you if you knew the address of some one I wish to send a note to ­Mr. Robertson.  He’s a clergyman who ­”

“Do you mean Father Robertson, of Holy Cross, Manxby Street, my lady?”

“Of Holy Cross; yes, that’s it.”

“He lives at ­”

“Wait a moment.  I’ll take it down.”

She went to the writing-table and took up a pen.

“Now, please!”

“The Rev. George Robertson, Holy Cross Rectory, Manxby Street, my lady.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Can I do anything more for you, my lady?”

“Please send me up a messenger in twenty minutes.  Mr. Robertson is in Liverpool, I understand?”

“I believe so, my lady.  He is generally here.  Holidays and pleasure are not much in his way.  The messenger will be up in twenty minutes.”

He looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and went softly out, holding himself very erect.

Lady Ingleton sat down by the tea-table.  Annette was unpacking in the adjoining bedroom, and Turkish Jane was reposing in an arm-chair near the hearth.

“What would Carey think of me, if he knew?” was her thought, as she poured out the tea.

Sir Carey was at his post in Constantinople.  She had left him and come to England to see her mother, who had been very ill, but who was now much better.  When she had left Constantinople she had not known she was coming to Liverpool, but she had known that something was intruding upon her happiness, was worrying at her mind.  Only when she found herself once more in England did she understand that she could not return to Turkey without making an effort to do a good deed.  She had very little hope that her effort would be efficacious, but she knew that she had to make it.

It was quite a new rôle for her, the rôle of Good Samaritan.  She smiled faintly as she thought that.  How would she play it?

After tea she wrote this note: 

“ADELPHI HOTEL, Tuesday

“DEAR MR. ROBERTSON, ­As you will not know who I am, I must explain myself.  My husband, Sir Carey Ingleton, is Ambassador at Constantinople.  Out there we have made acquaintance with Mr. Dion Leith, who had the terrible misfortune to kill his little boy nearly a year and a half ago.  I want very much to speak to you about him.  I will explain why when I see you if you have the time to spare me an interview.  I would gladly welcome you here, or I could come to you.  Which do you prefer?  I am telling the messenger to wait for an answer.  To be frank, I have come to Liverpool on purpose to see you. ­Yours sincerely,

“DELIA INGLETON”

The messenger came back without an answer.  Father Robertson was out, but the note would be given to him as soon as he came home.

That evening, just after nine o’clock, he arrived at the hotel, and sent up his name to Lady Ingleton.

“Please ask him to come up,” she said to the German waiter who had mispronounced his name.

As she waited for her visitor she was conscious of a faint creeping of shyness through her.  It made her feel oddly girlish.  When had she last felt shy?  She could not remember.  It must have been centuries ago.

The German waiter opened the door and a white-haired man walked in.  Directly she saw him Lady Ingleton lost her unusual feeling.  As she greeted him, and made her little apology for bothering him, and thanked him for coming out at night to see a stranger, she felt glad that she had obeyed her impulse and had been, for once, a victim to altruism.  When she looked at his eyes she knew that she would not mind saying to him all she wanted to say about Dion Leith.  They were eyes which shone with clarity; and they were something else ­they were totally incurious eyes.  Perhaps from perversity Lady Ingleton had always rebelled against giving to curious people the exact food they were in search of.

“He won’t be greedy to know,” she thought.  “And so I shan’t mind telling him.”

Unlike a woman, she came at once to the point.  Although she could be very evasive she could also be very direct.

“You know Mrs. Dion Leith,” she said.  “My friend Tippie Chetwinde, Mrs. Willie Chetwinde, told me she was living here.  She came here soon after the death of her child, I believe.”

“Yes, she did, and she has been here ever since.”

“Do you know Dion Leith, Mr. Robertson?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair by the fire, and fixing her large eyes, that looked like an Italian’s, upon him.

“No, I have never seen him.  I hoped to, but the tragedy of the child occurred so soon after his return from South Africa that I never had an opportunity.”

“Forgive me for correcting you,” she said, gently but very firmly.  “But it is not the tragedy of a child.  It’s the tragedy of a man.  I am going to talk very frankly to you.  I make no apology for doing so.  I am what is called” ­she smiled faintly ­“a woman of the world, and you, I think, are an unworldly man.  Because I am of the world, and you, in spirit” ­she looked at him almost deprecatingly ­“are not of it, I can say what I have come here to try to say.  I couldn’t say it to a man of the world, because I could never give a woman away to such a man.  Tell me though, first, if you don’t mind ­do you care for Mrs. Dion Leith?”

“Very much,” said Father Robertson, simply and warmly.

“Do you care for her enough to tell her the truth?”

“I never wish to tell her anything else.”

Suddenly Lady Ingleton’s face flushed, her dark eyes flashed and then filled with tears, and she said in a voice that shook with emotion: 

“Dion Leith killed a body by accident, the body of his little boy.  She is murdering a soul deliberately, the soul of her husband.”

She did not know at all why she was so suddenly and so violently moved.  She had not expected this abrupt access of feeling.  It had rushed upon her from she knew not where.  She was startled by it.

“I don’t know why I should care,” she commented, as if half ashamed of herself.

Then she added, with a touch of almost shy defiance: 

“But I do care, I do care.  That’s why I’ve come here.”

“You are right to care if it is so,” said Father Robertson.

“Such lots of women wouldn’t,” she continued, in a quite different, almost cynical, voice.  “But that man is an exceptional man ­not in intellect, but in heart.  And I’m a very happy woman.  Perhaps you wonder what that has to do with it.  Well sometimes I see things through my happiness, just because of it; sometimes I see unhappiness through it.”

Her voice had changed again, had become much softer.  She drew her chair a little nearer to the fire.

“Do you ever receive confessions, Mr. Robertson ­as a priest, I mean?” she asked.

“Yes, very often.”

“They are sacred, I know, even in your church.”

“Yes,” he said, without emphasis.

His lack of emphasis decided her.  Till this moment she had been undecided about a certain thing, although she herself perhaps was not fully aware of her hesitation.

“I want to do a thing that I have never yet done,” she said.  “I want to be treacherous to a friend, to give a friend away.  Will you promise to keep my treachery secret forever?  Will you promise to treat what I am going to tell you about her as if I told it to you in the confessional?”

“If you tell it to me I will.  But why must you tell it to me?  I don’t like treachery.  It’s an ugly thing.”

“I can’t help that.  I really came here just for that ­to be treacherous.”

She looked into the fire and sighed.

“I’ve covered a great sin with my garment,” she murmured slowly, “and I repent me!”

Then, with a look of resolve, she turned to her white-haired companion.

“I’ve got a friend,” she said ­“a woman friend.  Her name is Cynthia Clarke. (I’m in the confessional now!) You may have heard of her.  She was a cause célèbre some time ago.  Her husband tried to divorce her, poor man, and failed.”

“No, I never heard her name before,” said Father Robertson.

“You don’t read causes célèbres.  You have better things to do.  Well, she’s my friend.  I don’t exactly know why.  Her husband was Councillor in my husband’s Embassy.  But I knew her before that.  We always got on.  She has peculiar fascination ­a sort of strange beauty, a very intelligent mind, and the strongest will I have ever known.  She has virtues of a kind.  She never speaks against other women.  If she knew a secret of mine I am sure she would never tell it.  She is thoroughbred.  I find her a very interesting woman.  There is absolutely no one like her.  She’s a woman one would miss.  That’s on one side.  On the other ­she’s a cruel woman; she’s a consummate hypocrite; she’s absolutely corrupt.  You wonder why she’s my friend?”

“I did not say so.”

“Nor look it.  But you do.  Well, I suppose I haven’t many scruples except about myself.  And I have been trained in the let-other-people-alone tradition.  Besides, Cynthia Clarke never told me anything.  No one has told me.  Being a not stupid woman, I just know what she is.  I’ll put it brutally, Mr. Robertson.  She is a huntress of men.  That is what she lives for.  But she deceives people into believing that she is a purely mental woman.  All the men whom she doesn’t hunt believe in her.  Even women believe in her.  She has good friends among women.  They stick to her.  Why?  Because she intends them to.  She has a conquering will.  And she never tells a secret ­especially if it is her own.  In her last sin ­for it is a sin ­I have been a sort of accomplice.  She meant me to be one and” ­Lady Ingleton slightly shrugged her shoulders ­“I yielded to her will.  I don’t know why.  I never know why I do what Cynthia Clarke wishes.  There are people like that; they just get what they want, because they want it with force, I suppose.  Most of us are rather weak, I think.  Cynthia Clarke hunted Dion Leith in his misery, and I helped her.  Being an ambassadress I have social influence on the Bosporus, and I used it for Cynthia.  I knew from the very first what she was about, what she meant to do.  Directly she mentioned Dion Leith to me and asked me to invite him to the Embassy and be kind to him I understood.  But I didn’t know Dion Leith then.  If I had thoroughly known him I should never have been a willing cat’s-paw in a very ugly game.  But once I had begun ­I took them both for a yachting trip ­I did not know how to get out of it all.  On that yachting trip ­I realized how that man was suffering and what he was.  I have never before known a man capable of suffering so intensely as Dion Leith suffers.  Does his wife know how he loves her?  Can she know it?  Can she ever have known it?”

Father Robertson was silent.  As she looked at his eyelids ­his eyes no longer met hers with their luminous glowing sincerity ­Lady Ingleton realized that he was the Confessor.

“Sometimes I have been on the verge of saying to him, ’Go back to England, go to your wife.  Tell her, show her what she has done.  Put up a big fight for the life of your soul.’  But I have never been able to do it.  A grief like that is holy ground, isn’t it?  One simply can’t set foot upon it.  Besides, I scarcely ever see Dion Leith now.  He’s gone down, I think, gone down very far.”

“Where is he?”

“In Constantinople.  I saw him by chance in Stamboul, near Santa Sophia, just before I left for England.  Oh, how he has changed!  Cynthia Clarke is destroying him.  I know it.  Once she told me he had been an athlete with ideals.  But now ­now!”

Again the tears started into her eyes.  Father Robertson looked up and saw them.

“Poor, poor fellow!” she said.  “I can’t bear to see him destroyed.  Some men ­well, they seem almost entirely body.  But he’s so different!”

She got up and stood by the fire.

“I have seen Mrs. Leith,” she said.  “I once heard her sing in London.  She is extraordinarily beautiful.  At that time she looked radiant.  What did you say?”

“Please go on,” Father Robertson said, very quietly.

“And she had a wonderful expression of joyous goodness which marked her out from other women.  You have a regard for her, and you are good.  But you care for truth, and so I’m going to tell you the truth.  She may be a good woman, but she has done a wicked action.  Can’t you make her see it?  Or shall I try to?”

“You wish to see her?”

“I am ready to see her.”

Father Robertson again looked down.  He seemed to be thinking deeply, to be genuinely lost in thought.  Lady Ingleton noticed this and did not disturb him.  For some minutes he sat without moving.  At last he looked up and put a question to Lady Ingleton which surprised her.  He said: 

“Are you absolutely certain that your friend Mrs. Clarke and Dion Leith have been what people choose to call lovers?”

“Have been and are ­absolutely certain.  I could not prove it, but I know it.  He lives in Constantinople only for her.”

“And you think he has deteriorated?”

“Terribly.  I know it.  The other day he looked almost degraded; as men look when they let physical things get absolute domination over them.  It’s an ugly subject, but ­you and I know of these things.”

In her voice there was a sound of delicate apology.  It was her tribute to the serene purity of which she was aware in this man.

Again he seemed lost in thought.  She trusted in his power of thought.  He was a man ­she was certain of it ­who would find the one path which led out of the maze.  His unself-conscious intentness was beautiful in its unconventional simplicity, and was a tribute to her sincerity which she was subtle enough to understand, and good woman enough to appreciate.  He was concentrated not upon her but upon the problem which was troubling her.

“I am very glad you have come to Liverpool,” he said at length.  “Very glad.”

He smiled, and she, without exactly knowing why, smiled back at him.  And as she did so she felt extraordinarily simple, almost like a child.

“How long are you going to stay?”

“Till I know whether I can do any good,” she said, “till I have done it, if that is possible.”

“Without mentioning any names, may I, if I think it wise, tell Mrs. Leith of the change in her husband?”

“Oh, but would it be wise to say exactly what the nature of the change is?  I’ve always heard that she is a woman with ideals, an exceptionally pure-natured woman.  She might be disgusted, even revolted, perhaps, if ­”

“Forgive me!” Father Robertson interrupted, rather abruptly.  “What was your intention then?  What did you mean to tell Mrs. Leith if you saw her?”

“Of his great wretchedness, of his broken life ­I suppose I ­I should have trusted to my instinct what to do when I saw her.”

“Ah!”

“But I can leave it to you,” she said, but still with a faint note of hesitation, of doubt.  “You know her.”

“Yes, I know her.”

He paused.  Then, with an almost obstinate firmness, a sort of pressure, he added, “Have I your permission ­I may not do it ­to tell Mrs. Leith that her husband has been unfaithful to her with some one in Constantinople?”

Lady Ingleton slightly reddened; she looked down and hesitated.

“It may be necessary if your purpose in coming here is to be achieved,” said Father Robertson, still with pressure.

“You may do whatever you think best,” she said, with a sigh.

He got up to go.

“Would you mind very much staying on here for two or three days, even for a week, if necessary?”

“No, no.”

He smiled.

“A whole week of Liverpool!” he said.

“How many years have you been here?”

“A good many.  I’m almost losing count.”

When he was gone Lady Ingleton sat for a long while before the fire.

The sad influence of the blackness of rainy Liverpool had lifted from her.  Her impulse had received a welcome which had warmed her.

“I love that man,” she thought.  “Carey would love him too.”

He had said very little, and how loyal he had been in his silence, how loyal to the woman she had attacked.  In words he had not defended her, but somehow he had conveyed to Lady Ingleton a sense of his protective love and immense pity for the woman who had been bereft of her child.  How he had conveyed this she could not have said.  But as she sat there before the fire she was aware that, since Father Robertson’s visit, she felt differently about Dion Leith’s wife.  Mysteriously she began to feel the sorrow of the woman as well as, and side by side with, the sorrow of the man.

“If it had been my child?” she thought.  “If my husband had done it?”

CHAPTER X

[Page missing in original book.]

Since the death of Robin and Rosamund’s arrival in Liverpool, Father Robertson had made acquaintance with her sister and with the mother of Dion.  And both these women had condemned Rosamund for what she had done, and had begged him to try to bring about a change in her heart.  Both of them, too, had dwelt upon the exceptional quality of Dion’s love for his wife.  Mrs. Leith had been unable to conceal the bitterness of her feeling against Rosamund.  The mother in her way, was outraged.  Beatrice Daventry had shown no bitterness.  She loved and understood her sister too well to rage against her for anything that she did or left undone.  But this very love of her sister, so clearly shown, had made her condemnation of Rosamund’s action the more impressive.  And her pity for Dion was supreme.  Through Beatrice Father Robertson had gained an insight into Dion’s love, and into another love, too; but of that he scarcely allowed himself even to think.  There are purities so intense that, like fire, they burn those who would handle them, however tenderly.  About Beatrice Father Robertson felt that he knew something he dared not know.  Indeed, he was hardly sincere about that matter with himself.  Perhaps this was his only insincerity.

With his friend, Canon Wilton, too, he had spoken of Rosamund, and had found himself in the presence of a sort of noble anger.  Now, in his little room, as he knelt in meditation, he remembered a saying of the Canon’s, spoken in the paneled library at Welsley:  “Leith has a great heart.  When will his wife understand its greatness?”

Father Robertson pressed his thin hands upon his closed eyes.  He longed for guidance and he felt almost distressed.  Rosamund had submitted herself to him, had given herself into his hands, but tacitly she had kept something back.  She had never permitted him to direct her in regard to her relation with her husband.  It was in regard to her relation with God that she had submitted herself to him.

How grotesque that was!

Father Robertson’s face burned.

Before Rosamund had come to him she had closed the book of her married life with a frantic hand.  And Father Robertson had left the book closed.  He saw his delicacy now as cowardice.  In his religious relation with Rosamund he had been too much of a gentleman!  When Mrs. Leith, Beatrice, Canon Wilton had appealed to him, he had said that he would do what he could some day, but that he felt time must be given to Rosamund, a long time, to recover from the tremendous shock she had undergone.  He had waited.  Something imperative had kept him back from ever going fully with Rosamund into the question of her separation from her husband.  He had certainly spoken of it, but he had never discussed it, had never got to the bottom of it, although he had felt that some day he must be quite frank with her about it.

Some day!  No doubt he had been waiting for a propitious moment, that moment which never comes.  Or had his instinct told him that anything he could say upon that subject to Rosamund would be utterly impotent, that there was a threshold his influence could not cross?  Perhaps really his instinct had told him to wait, and he was not a moral coward.  For to strive against a woman’s deep feeling is surely to beat against the wind.  When men do certain things all women look upon them with an inevitable disdain, as children being foolish in the dark.

Had he secretly feared to seem foolish in Rosamund’s eyes?

He wondered, genuinely wondered.

On the following morning he wrote to Rosamund and asked her to come to the vicarage at any hour when she was free.  He had something important to say to her.  She answered, fixing three-thirty.  Exactly at that time she arrived in Manxby Street and was shown into Father Robertson’s study.

Rosamund had changed, greatly changed, but in a subtle rather than a fiercely definite way.  She had not aged as many women age when overtaken by sorrow.  Her pale yellow hair was still bright.  There was no gray in it and it grew vigorously upon her classical head as if intensely alive.  She still looked physically strong.  She was still a young and beautiful woman.  But all the radiance had gone out from her.  She had been full of it; now she was empty of it.

In the walled garden at Welsley, as she paced the narrow walks and listened to the distant murmur of the organ, and the faint sound of the Dresden Amen, in her joy she had looked sometimes almost like a nun.  She had looked as if she had the “vocation” for religion.  Now, in her “sister’s” dress, she had not that inner look of calm, of the spirit lying still in Almighty arms, which so often marks out those who have definitely abandoned the ordinary life of the world for the dedicated life.  Rosamund had taken no perpetual vows; she was free at any moment to withdraw from the Sisterhood in which she was living with many devoted women who labored among the poor, and who prayed, as some people work, with an ardor which physically tired them.  But nevertheless she had definitely retired from all that means life to the average woman of her type and class, with no intention of ever going back to it.  She had taken a step towards the mystery which many people think of casually on appointed days, and which many people ignore, or try to ignore.  Yet now she did not look as if she had the vocation.  When she had lived in the world she had seemed, in spite of all her joie de vivre, of all her animation and vitality, somehow apart from it.  Now she seemed, somehow, apart from the world of religion, from the calm and laborious world in which she had chosen to dwell.  She looked indeed almost strangely pure, but there was in her face an expression of acute restlessness, perpetually seen among those who are grasping at passing pleasures, scarcely ever seen among those who have deliberately resigned them.

This was surely a woman who had sought and who had not found, who was uneasy in self-sacrifice, who had striven, who was striving still, to draw near to the gates of heaven, but who had not come upon the path which led up the mountain-side to them.  Sorrow was stamped on the face, and something else, too ­the seal of that corrosive disease of the soul, dissatisfaction with self.

This was not Rosamund; this was a woman with Rosamund’s figure, face, hair, eyes, voice, gestures, movements ­one who would be Rosamund but for some terrible flaw.

She was alone in the little study for a few minutes before Father Robertson came.  She did not sit down, but moved about, looking now at this thing, now at that.  In her white forehead there were two vertical lines which were never smoothed out.  An irreligious person, looking at her just then, might have felt moved to say, with a horrible irony, “And can God do no more than that for the woman who dedicates her life to His service?”

The truth of the whole matter lay in this:  that whereas once God had seemed to stand between Rosamund and Dion, now Dion seemed to stand between Rosamund and God.

But even Father Robertson did not know this.

Presently the door opened and the Father came in.

Instantly Rosamund noticed that he looked slightly ill at ease, almost, indeed, embarrassed.  He shook hands with her in his gentle way and made a few ordinary remarks about little matters in which they were mutually interested.  Then he asked her to sit down, sat down near her and was silent.

“What is it?” she said, at last.

He looked at her, and there was something almost piercing in his eyes which she had never noticed in them before.

“Last night,” he said, “when I came home I found here a note from a stranger, asking me to visit her at the Adelphi Hotel where she was staying.  She wrote that she had come to Liverpool on purpose to see me.  I went to the hotel and had an interview with her.  This interview concerned you.”

“Concerned me?” said Rosamund.

Her voice did not sound as if she were actively surprised.  There was a lack of tone in it.  It sounded, indeed, almost dry.

“Yes.  Did you ever hear of Lady Ingleton?”

After an instant of consideration Rosamund said: 

“Yes.  I believe I met her somewhere once.  Isn’t she married to an ambassador?”

“To our Ambassador at Constantinople.”

“I think I sang once at some house where she was, in the days when I used to sing.”

“She has heard you sing.”

“That was it then.  But what can she want with me?”

“Your husband is in Constantinople.  She knows him there.”

Rosamund flushed to the roots of her yellow hair.  When he saw that painful wave of red go over her face Father Robertson looked away.  All the delicacy in him felt the agony of her outraged reserve.  Her body had stiffened.

“I must speak about this,” he said.  “Forgive me if you can.  But even if you cannot, I must speak.”

She looked down.  Her face was still burning.

“You have let me know a great deal about yourself,” he went on.  “That fact doesn’t give me any right to be curious.  On the contrary!  But I think, perhaps, your confidence has given me a right to try to help you spiritually even at the cost of giving you great mental pain.  For a long time I have felt that perhaps in my relation to you I have been morally a coward.”

Rosamund looked up.

“You could never be a coward,” she said.

“You don’t know that.  Nobody knows that, perhaps, except myself.  However that may be, I must not play the coward now.  Lady Ingleton met your husband in Turkey.  She brings very painful news of him.”

Rosamund clasped her hands together and let them lie on her knees.  She was looking steadily at Father Robertson.

“His ­his misery has made such an impression upon her that she felt obliged to come here.  She sent for me.  But her real object in coming was to see you, if possible.  Will you see her?”

“No, no; I can’t do that.  I don’t know her.”

“I think I ought to tell you what she said.  She asked me if you had ever understood how much your husband loves you.  Her exact words were, ’Does his wife know how he loves her?  Can she know it?  Can she ever have known it?’”

All the red had died away from Rosamund’s face.  She had become very pale.  Her eyes were steady.  She sat without moving, and seemed to be listening with fixed, even with strained, attention.

“And then she went on to tell me something which might seem to a great many people to be quite contradictory of what she had just said ­and she said it with the most profound conviction.  She told me that your husband has fallen very low.”

“Fallen ?” Rosamund said, in a dim voice.

“Just before she left Constantinople she saw him in Stamboul by chance.  She said that he had the dreadful appearance that men have when they are entirely dominated by physical things.”

“Dion!” she said.

And there was sheer amazement in her voice now.

After an instant she added: 

“I don’t believe it.  It wasn’t Dion.”

“I must tell you something more,” said Father Robertson painfully.  “Lady Ingleton knows that your husband has been unfaithful to you; she knows the woman with whom he has been unfaithful.  That unfaithfulness continues.  So she affirms.  And in spite of that, she asks me whether you can know how much your husband loves you.”

While he had been speaking he had been looking down.  Now he heard a movement, a rustling.  He looked up quickly.  Rosamund was going towards the door.

“Please ­don’t ­don’t!” she whispered, turning her face away.

And she went out.

Father Robertson did not follow her.

Early in the following morning he received this note: 

“ST. MARY’S SISTERHOOD, LIVERPOOL, Thursday

“DEAR FATHER ROBERTSON, ­I don’t think I can see Lady Ingleton.  I am almost sure I can’t.  Perhaps she has gone already.  If not, how long does she intend to stay here?

“R.  L.”

The Father communicated with Lady Ingleton, and that evening let Rosamund know that Lady Ingleton would be in Liverpool for a few more days.

When Rosamund read his letter she wished, or believed that she wished, that Lady Ingleton had gone.  Then this matter which tormented her would be settled, finished with.  There would be nothing to be done, and she could take up her monotonous life again and forget this strange intrusion from the outside world, forget this voice from the near East which had told such ugly tidings.  Till now she had not even known where Dion was.  She knew he had given up his business in London and had left England; but that was all.  She had refused to have any news of him.  She had made it plainly understood long ago, when the wound was fresh in her soul, that Dion’s name was never to be mentioned in letters to her.  She had tried by every means to blot his memory out of her mind as she had blotted his presence out of her life.  In this effort she had totally failed.  Dion had never left her since he had killed Robin.  In the flesh he had pursued her in the walled garden at Welsley on that dark night of November when for her the whole world had changed.  In another intangible, mysterious guise he had attended her ever since.  He had been about her path and about her bed.  Even when she knelt at the altar in the Supreme Service he had been there.  She had felt his presence as she touched the water, as she lifted the cup.  Through all these months she had learnt to know that there are those whom, once we have taken them in, we cannot cast out of our lives.

Since the death of Robin, in absence Dion had assumed a place in her life which he had never occupied in the days of their happiness.  Sometimes she had bitterly resented this; sometimes she had tried to ignore it; sometimes, like a cross, she had taken it up and tried to bear it with patience or with bravery.  She had even prayed against it.

Never were prayers more vain than those which she put up against this strange and terrible possession of herself by the man she had tried to cast out of her life.  Sometimes even it seemed to her that when she prayed thus Dion’s power to affect her increased.  It was as if mysteriously he drew nearer to her, as if he enveloped her with an influence from which she could not extricate herself.  There were hours in the night when she felt afraid of him.  She knew that wherever he was, however far off, his mind was concentrated upon her.  She grew to realize, as she had never realized before, what mental power is.  She had separated her body from Dion’s, but his mind would not leave her alone.  Often she was conscious of hostility.  When she strove to give herself absolutely and entirely to the life of religion and of charity she was aware of a force holding her back.  This force ­so it seemed to her ­would not permit her to enter into the calm and the peace of the dedicated life.  She was like some one looking in at a doorway, desirous of entering a room.  She saw the room clearly; she saw others enjoying its warmth and its shelter and its serene and guarded tranquillity; but she was unable to cross the threshold.

That warm and sheltered room was not for her.  And it was Dion’s force which held her back from entering it and from dwelling in it.

She could not give herself wholly to God because of Dion.

Of her struggle, of her frustration, of her mental torment in this connexion she had never spoken to Father Robertson.  Even in confession she had been silent.  He knew of her mother-agony; he did not know of the stranger, more subtle agony beneath it.  He did not know that whereas the one agony with the lapse of time was not passing away ­it would never do that ­but was becoming more tender, more full of tears and of sweet recollections, the other agony grew harsher, more menacing.

Rosamund had gradually come to feel that Robin had been taken out of her arms for some great, though hidden, reason.  And because of this feeling she was learning to endure his loss with a sort of resignation.  She often thought that perhaps she had been allowed to have this consolation because she had made an immense effort.  When Robin died she had driven Dion, who had killed her child, out of her life, but she had succeeded in saying to God, “Thy will be done!” She had said it at first as a mere formula, had repeated it obstinately again and again, without meaning it at all, but trying to mean it, meaning to mean it.  She had made a prodigious, a truly heroic effort to conquer her powerfully rebellious nature, and, in this effort, she had been helped by Father Robertson.  He knew of the anger which had overwhelmed her when her mother had died, of how she had wished to hurt God.  He knew that, with bloody sweat, she had destroyed that enemy within her.  She had wished to submit to the will of God when Robin had been snatched from her, and at last she had actually submitted.  It was a great triumph of the spirit.  But perhaps it had left her exhausted.  At any rate she had never been able to forgive God’s instrument, her husband.  And so she had never been able to know the peace of God which many of these women by whom she was surrounded knew.  In her misery she contemplated their calm.  To labor and to pray ­that seemed enough to many of them, to most of them.  She had known calm in the garden at Welsley; in the Sisterhood she knew it not.

The man who was always with her assassinated calm.  She felt strangely from a distance the turmoil of his spirit.  She knew of his misery occultly.  She did not deduce it from her former knowledge of what he was.  And his suffering made her suffer in a terrible way.  He was her victim and she was his.

Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.

In the Sisterhood Rosamund had learnt, always against her will and despite the utmost effort of her obstinacy, the uselessness of that command; she had learnt that those whom God hath really joined together cannot be put asunder by man ­or by woman.  Dion had killed her child, but she had not been able to kill what she was to Dion and what Dion was to her.  Through the mingling of their two beings there had been born a mystery which was, perhaps, eternal like the sound of the murmur in the pine trees above the Valley of Olympia.

She could not trample it into nothingness.

At first, after the tragedy of which Robin had been the victim, Rosamund had felt a horror of Dion which was partly animal.  She had fled from him because she had been physically afraid of him.  He had been changed for her from the man who loved her, and whom she loved in her different way, into the slayer of her child.  She knew, of course, quite well that Dion was not a murderer, but nevertheless she thought of him as one thinks of a murderer.  The blood of her child was upon his hands.  She trembled at the thought of being near him.  Nevertheless, because she was not mad, in time reason asserted itself within her.  Dion disappeared out of her life.  He did not put up the big fight for the big thing of which Lady Ingleton had once spoken to her husband.  His type of love was far too sensitive to struggle and fight on its own behalf.  When he had heard the key of his house door turned against him, when, later, Mr. Darlington with infinite precautions had very delicately explained to him why it had been done, Rosamund had attained her freedom.  He had waited on for a time in England, but he had somehow never been able really to hope for any change in his wife.  His effort to make her see the tragedy in its true light had exhausted itself in the garden at Welsley.  Her frantic evasion of him had brought it to an end.  He could not renew it.  Even if he had been ready to renew it those about Rosamund would have dissuaded him from doing so.  Every one who was near her saw plainly that “for the present” ­as they put it ­Dion must keep out of her life.

And gradually Rosamund had lost that half-animal fear of him, gradually she had come to realize something of the tragedy of his situation.  A change had come about in her almost in despite of herself.  And yet she had never been able to forgive him for what he had done.  Her reason knew that she had nothing to forgive; her religious sense, her conception of God, obliged her to believe that Dion had been God’s instrument when he had killed his child; but something within her refused him pardon.  Perhaps she felt that pardon could only mean one thing ­reconciliation.  And now had come Lady Ingleton’s revelation.  Instinctively as Rosamund left Father Robertson’s little room she had tried to hide her face.  She had received a blow, and the pain of it frightened her.  She was startled by her own suffering.  What did it mean?  What did it portend?  She had no right to feel as she did.  Long ago she had abandoned the right to such a feeling.

The information Lady Ingleton had brought outraged Rosamund.  Anger and a sort of corrosive shame struggled for the mastery within her.

She felt humiliated to the dust.  She felt dirty, soiled.

Dion had been unfaithful to her.

With whom?

The white face of Mrs. Clarke came before Rosamund in the murky street, two wide-open distressed and intent eyes started into hers.

The woman was Mrs. Clarke.

Mrs. Clarke ­and Dion.  Mrs. Clarke had succeeded in doing what long ago she had designed to do.  She had succeeded in taking possession of Dion.

“Because I threw him away!  Because I threw him away!”

Rosamund found herself repeating those words again and again.

“I threw him away, I threw him away.  Otherwise ­”

She reached the Sisterhood and went to her little room.  How she got through the remaining duties of that day she never remembered afterwards.  The calmness of routine flagellated her nerves.  She felt undressed and feared the eyes of the sisters.  After the evening service in the little chapel attached to the Sisterhood she was unable either to meditate, to praise, or to pray.  During the long pause for silent prayer she felt like one on a galloping horse.  In the intense silence her ears seemed to hear the beating of hoofs on an iron road.  And the furious horse was bearing her away into some region of darkness and terror.

There was a rustling movement.  The sisters slowly rose from their knees.  Again Rosamund was conscious of feeling soiled, dirty, in the midst of them.  As they filed out, she with them, a burning hatred came to her.  She hated the woman who was the cause of her feeling dirty.  She wanted to use her hands, to tear something away from her body ­the dirt, the foulness.  For she felt it actually on her body.  Her physical purity was desecrated by ­she wouldn’t think of it.

When she was alone in her little sleeping-room, the door shut, one candle burning, her eyes went to the wooden crucifix beneath which every night before getting into her narrow bed she knelt in prayer, and she began to cry.  She sat down on the bed and cried and cried.  All her flesh seemed melting into tears.

“My poor life!  My poor life!”

That was the interior cry of her being, again and again repeated ­“My poor life ­stricken, soiled, crushed down in the ooze of a nameless filth.”

Childless and now betrayed!  How terrible had been her happiness on the edge of the pit!  The days in Greece ­Robin ­Dion’s return from the war!  And she had wished to live rightly; she had loved the noble things; she had had ideals and she had tried to follow them.  Purity before all she had ­

She sickened; her crying became violent.  Afraid lest some of the sisters should hear her, she pressed her hands over her face and sank down on the bed.

Presently she saw Mrs. Clarke before her, the woman whom she had thought to keep out of her life ­the fringe of her life ­and who had found the way into the sacred places.

She cried for a long while, lying there on the bed, with her face pressed against her hands, and her hands pressed against the pillow; but at least she ceased from crying.  She had poured out all the tears of her body.

She sat up.  It was long past midnight.  The house was silent.  Slowly she began to undress, hating her body all the time.  She bathed her face and hands in cold water, and, when she felt the water, shivered at the thought of the stain.  When she was ready for bed she looked again at the crucifix.  She ought to pray, she must pray.  She went to the crucifix and stood in front of it, but her knees refused to bend.  Her pride of woman had received a terrific blow that day, and just because of that she felt she could not humble herself.

“I cannot pray ­I won’t pray,” she whispered.

And she turned away, put out the light and got into bed.

That Dion should have done that, should have been able to do that!

And she remembered what it was she had first loved in Dion, the thing which had made him different from other men; she remembered the days and the nights in Greece.  She saw two lovers in a morning land descending the path from the hill of Drouva, going down into the green recesses of quiet Elis.  She saw Hermes and the child.

All that night she lay awake.  In the morning she sent the note to Father
Robertson.

She could not see Lady Ingleton and yet she dreaded her departure.  She wanted to know more, much more.  A gnawing hunger of curiosity assailed her.  This woman had been with Dion ­since.  This woman knew of his infidelity; yet she affirmed his love for his wife.  But the one knowledge surely gave the lie to the other.

Why did she care?  Why did she care so much?  Rosamund asked herself the question almost with terror.

She found no answer.

But she could not pray.  Whenever she tried to pray Mrs. Clarke came before her, and a man ­could it be Dion? ­stamped with the hideous imprint of physical lust.

Father Robertson was startled by the change in Rosamund’s appearance when she visited him two days after she had sent him the note.  She looked physically ill.  Her color had gone.  Her eyes were feverish and sunken, and the skin beneath them was stained with that darkness which betokens nights without sleep.  Her lips and hands twitched with a nervousness that was painful.  But that which distressed him more than any other thing was the expression in her face ­the look of shame and of self-consciousness which altered her almost horribly.  Even in her most frantic moments of grief for Robin there had always been something of directness, of fearlessness, in her beauty.  Now something furtive literally disfigured her, and she seemed trying to cover it with a dogged obstinacy which suggested a will stretched to the uttermost, vibrating like a string in danger of snapping.

“Has Lady Ingleton gone?” she asked, directly she was inside the room.

“No, not yet.  You remember I wrote to you that she would stay on for a few days.”

“But she might have gone unexpectedly.”

“She is still here.”

“I believe I shall have to see her,” Rosamund said, with a sort of hard abruptness and determination.

“Go to see her,” said Father Robertson firmly.  “Perhaps she was sent here.”

“Sent here?” said Rosamund, with a sharpness of sudden suspicion.

“Oh, my child,” ­he put his hand on her arm, and made her sit down, ­“not by a human being.”

Rosamund looked down and was silent.

“Before you go, if you are going,” Father Robertson continued, sitting down by the deal table on which he wrote his letters, “I must do what I ought to have done long ago; I must speak to you about your husband.”

Rosamund did not look up, but he saw her frown, and he saw a movement of her lips; they trembled and then set together in a hard line.

“I know what he was, not from you but from others; from his mother, from your sister, and from Canon Wilton.  I’m going to tell you something Wilton said to me about you and him after you had separated from him.”

Father Robertson stopped, and fidgeted for a moment with the papers lying in disorder on his table.  He hated the task he had set himself to do.  All the tenderness in him revolted against it.  He knew what this woman whom he cared for very much had suffered; he divined what she was suffering now.  And he was going to add to her accumulated misery by striking a tremendous blow at the most sacred thing, her pride of woman.  Would she be his enemy after he had spoken?  It was possible.  Yet he must speak.

“He said to me ­’Leith has a great heart.  When will his wife understand its greatness?’”

There was a long silence.  Then, without changing her position or lifting her head, Rosamund said in a hard, level voice: 

“Canon Wilton was right about my husband.”

“He loved you.  That’s a great deal.  But he loved you in a very beautiful way.  And that’s much more.”

“Who told you ­about the way he loved me?”

“Your sister, Beatrice.”

“Beattie!  Yes, she knew ­she understood.”

She bent her head a little lower, then added: 

“Beattie is worth more than I am.”

“You are worth a great deal, but ­but I want to see you rise to the heights of your nature.  I want to see you accomplish the greatest task of all.”

“Yes?”

“Conquer the last citadel of your egoism. Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat ­Send the insistent I to sleep.  I said it to you long ago before I knew you.  I say it to you now when I do know you, when I know the deep waters you have passed through, and the darkness that has beset you.  Fetter your egoism.  Release your heart and your spirit in one great action.  Don’t let him go down forever because of you.  I believe your misery has been as nothing in comparison with his.  If he has fallen ­such a man ­why is it?”

“I know why,” she almost whispered.

“You can never mount up while you are driving a soul downwards.  Do you remember those words in the Bible:  ’Where thou goest I will go’?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps they might be changed in respect of you and the man who loved you so much and in such a beautiful way.  You were linked; can the link ever be broken?  You have tried to break it, but have you succeeded?  And if not, wouldn’t it be true, drastically true, if you said ­Where thou goest I must go?  If he goes down because of you I think you’ll go down with him.”

Rosamund sat absolutely still.  When Father Robertson paused again there was not a sound in the little room.

“And one thing more,” he said, not looking towards her.  “There’s the child, your child and his.  Is it well with the child?”

Rosamund moved and looked up.  Then she got up from her chair.

“But ­but ­Robin’s ­”

She stopped.  Her eyes were fixed on Father Robertson.  He looked up and met her eyes, and she saw plainly the mystic in him.

“What do we know?” he said.  “What do we know of the effects of our actions?  Can we be certain that they are limited to this earth?  Is it well with the child?  I say we don’t know.  We dare not affirm that we know.  He loved his father, didn’t he?”

Rosamund looked stricken.  He let her go.  He could not say any more to her.

That evening Lady Ingleton called in Manxby Street and asked for Father Robertson.  He happened to be in and received her at once.

“I’ve had a note from Mrs. Leith,” she said.

“I am not surprised,” said Father Robertson.  “Indeed I expected it.”

“She wishes to see me to-morrow.  She writes that she will come to the hotel.  How have you persuaded her to come?”

“I don’t think I have persuaded her though I wish her to see you.  But I have told her of her husband’s infidelity.”

“You have told her !”

Lady Ingleton stopped short.  She looked unusually discomposed, even nervous and agitated.

“I said you might,” she murmured.

“It was essential.”

“If Cynthia knew!” said Lady Ingleton.

“I mentioned no name.”

“She must have guessed.  It’s odd, when I told you I didn’t feel treacherous ­not really!  But now I feel a brute.  I’ve never done anything like this before.  It’s against all my code.  I’ve come here, done all this, and now I dread meeting Mrs. Leith.  I wish you could be there when she comes.”

She sent him a soft glance out of her Italian eyes.

“You make me feel so safe,” she added.

“You and she must be alone.  Remember this!  Mrs. Leith must go out to Constantinople.”

“Leave the Sisterhood!  Will she ever do that?”

“You came here with the hope of persuading her, didn’t you?”

“A hope was it?  A forlorn hope, perhaps.”

“Bring it to fruition.”

“But Cynthia!  If she ever knows!”

Suddenly Father Robertson looked stern.

“If what you told me is true ­”

“It is true.”

“Then she is doing the devil’s work.  Put away your fears.  They aren’t worthy of you.”

As she took his hand in the saying of good-by she said: 

“Your code is so different from ours.  We think the only possible thing to do ­where a friend is concerned ­is to shut the eyes and the lips, and to pretend, and to keep on always pretending.  We call that being honorable.”

“Poor things!” said Father Robertson.

But he pressed her hand as he said it, and there was an almost tender smile on his lips.

“But your love of truth isn’t quite dead yet,” he added, on the threshold of the door, as he let her out into the rain.  “You haven’t been able to kill it.  It’s an indomitable thing, thank God.”

“I wish I ­why do you live always in Liverpool?” she murmured.

She put up her little silk umbrella and was gone.

There was a fire in her sitting-room on the following-morning.  The day was windy and cold, for March was going out resentfully.  Before the fire lay Turkish Jane on a cushion, blinking placidly at the flames.  Already she had become reconciled to her new life in this unknown city.  Her ecstasy of the journey had not returned, but the surprise which had succeeded to it was now merged in a stagnant calm, and she felt no objection to passing the remainder of her life in the Adelphi Hotel.  She supposed that she was comfortably settled for the day when she heard her mistress call for Annette and give the most objectionable order.

“Please take Jane away, Annette,” said Lady Ingleton.

“Miladi!”

“I don’t want her here this morning.  I’m expecting a visitor, and Jane might bark.  I don’t wish to have a noise in the room.”

Annette, who looked decidedly sulky, approached the cushion, bent down, and rather abruptly snatched the amazed doyenne of the Pekinese from her voluptuous reveries.

“We shall probably leave here to-morrow,” Lady Ingleton added.

Annette’s expression changed.

“We’re going back to London, Miladi?”

“I think so.  I’ll tell you this afternoon.”

She glanced at her watch.

“I don’t wish to be disturbed for an hour.  Don’t leave Jane in my bedroom.  Take her away to yours.”

“Very well, Miladi.”

Annette went out looking inquisitive, with Turkish Jane on her arm.

When she was gone Lady Ingleton took up “The Liverpool Mercury” and tried to read the news of the day.  The March wind roared outside and made the windows rattle.  She listened to it and forgot the chronicle of the passing hour.  She was a women who cared to know the big things that were happening in the big world.  She had always lived among men who were helping to make history, and she was intelligent enough to understand their efforts and to join in their discussions.  Her husband had often consulted her when he was in a tight place, and sometimes he had told her she had the brain of a man.  But she had the nerves and the heart of a woman, and at this moment public affairs and the news of the day did not interest her at all.  She was concentrated on woman’s business.  Into her hands she had taken a tangled love skein.  And she was almost frightened at what she had ventured to do.  Could she hope to be of any use, of any help, in getting it into order?  Was there any chance for the man she had last seen in Stamboul near Santa Sophia?  She almost dreaded Rosamund Leith’s arrival.  She felt nervous, strung up.  The roar of the wind added to her uneasiness.  It suggested turmoil, driven things, the angry passions of nature.  Beyond the Mersey the sea was raging.  She had a stupid feeling that nature and man were always in a ferment, that it was utterly useless to wish for peace, or to try to bring about peace, that destinies could only be worked out to their appointed ends in darkness and in fury.  She even forgot her own years of happiness for a little while and saw herself as a woman always anxious, doubtful, and envisaging untoward things.  When a knock came on the door she started and got up quickly from her chair.  Her heart was beating fast.  How ridiculous!

“Come in!” she said.

A waiter opened the door and showed in Rosamund

CHAPTER XI

Lady Ingleton looked swiftly at the woman coming in at the doorway clad in the severe, voluminous, black gown and cloak, and black and white headgear, which marked out the members of the Sisterhood of St. Mary’s.  Her first thought was “What a cold face!” It was succeeded immediately by the thought, “But beautiful even in its coldness.”  She met Rosamund near the door, took her hand, and said: 

“I am glad you were able to come.  I wanted very much to meet you.  I came here really with the faint hope of seeing you.  Let me take your umbrella.  What a day it is!  Did you walk?”

“I came most of the way by tram.  Thank you,” said Rosamund, in a contralto voice which sounded inflexible.

Lady Ingleton went to “stand” the umbrella in a corner.  In doing this she turned away from her visitor for a moment.  She felt more embarrassed, more “at a loss” than she had ever felt before; she even felt guilty, though she had done no wrong and was anxious only to do right.  Her sense of guilt, she believed, was caused by the fact that in her heart she condemned her visitor, and by the additional, more unpleasant fact that she knew Rosamund was aware of her condemnation.

“It’s hateful ­so much knowledge between two women who are strangers to each other!” she thought, as she turned round.

“Do sit down by the fire,” she said to Rosamund, who was standing near the writing-table immediately under a large engraving of “Wedded.”

She wished ardently that Rosamund wore the ordinary clothes of a well-dressed woman of the world.  The religious panoply of the “sister’s” attire, with its suggestion of a community apart, got on her nerves, and seemed to make things more difficult.

Rosamund went to a chair and sat down.  She still looked very cold, but she succeeded in looking serene, and her eyes, unworldly and pure, did not fall before Lady Ingleton’s.

Lady Ingleton sat down near her and immediately realized that she had placed herself exactly opposite to “Wedded.”  She turned her eyes away from the large nude arms of the bending man and met Rosamund’s gaze fixed steadily upon her.  That gaze told her not to delay, but to go straight to the tragic business which had brought her to Liverpool.

“You know of course that my husband is Ambassador at Constantinople,” she began.

“Yes,” said Rosamund.

“You and I met ­at least we were in the same room once ­at Tippie Chetwinde’s,” said Lady Ingleton, almost pleading with her visitor.  “I heard you sing.”

“Yes, I remember.  I told Father Robertson so.”

“I dare say you think it very strange my coming here in this way.”

In spite of the strong effort of her will Lady Ingleton was feeling with every moment more painfully embarrassed.  All her code was absolutely against mixing in the private concerns of others uninvited.  She had a sort of delicate hatred of curiosity.  She longed to prove to the woman by the fire that she was wholly incurious now, wholly free from the taint of sordid vulgarity that clings to the social busybody.

“I’ve done it solely because I’m very sorry for some one,” she continued; “because I’m very sorry for your husband.”

She looked away from Rosamund, and again her eyes rested on the engraving of “Wedded.”  The large bare arms of the man, his bending, amorous head, almost hypnotized her.  She disliked the picture of which this was a reproduction.  Far too many people had liked it; their affection seemed to her to have been destructive, to have destroyed any value it had formerly had.  Yet now, as she looked almost in despite of herself, suddenly she saw through the engraving, through the symbol, to something beyond; to the prompting conception in the painter’s mind which had led to the picture, to the great mystery of the pathetic attempt of human beings who love, or who think they love, to unite themselves to each other, to mingle body with body and soul with soul.  She saw a woman in the dress of a “sister,” the woman who was with her; she saw a man in an Eastern city; and abruptly courage came to her on the wings of a genuine emotion.

“I don’t know how to tell you what I feel about him, Mrs. Leith,” she said.  “But I want to try to.  Will you let me?”

“Yes.  Please tell me,” said Rosamund, in a level, expressionless voice.

“Remember this; I never saw him till I saw him in Turkey, nor did my husband.  We were not able to draw any comparison between the unhappy man and the happy man.  We were unprejudiced.”

“I quite understand that; thank you.”

“It was in the summer.  We were living at Therapia on the Bosporus.  He came to stay in a hotel not far off.  My husband met him in a valley which the Turks call Kesstane Dereh.  He ­your husband ­was sitting there alone by a stream.  They talked.  My husband asked him to call at our summer villa.  He came the next day.  Of course I ­I knew something of his story” ­she hurried on ­“and I was prepared to meet a man who was unhappy. (Forgive me for saying all this.)”

“But, please, I have come to hear,” said Rosamund, coldly and steadily.

“Your husband ­I was alone with him during his first visit ­made an extraordinary impression upon me.  I scarcely know how to describe it.”  She paused for a moment.  “There was something intensely bitter in his personality.  Bitterness is an active principle.  And yet somehow he conveyed to me an impression of emptiness too.  I remember he said to me, ’I don’t quite know what I am going to do.  I’m a free agent.  I have no ties.’  I shall never forget his look when he said those words.  I never knew anything about loneliness ­anything really ­till that moment.  And after that moment I knew everything.  I asked him to come on the yacht to Brusa, or rather to Mudania; from there one goes to Brusa.  He came.  You may think, perhaps, that he was eager for society, for pleasure, distraction.  It wasn’t that.  He was making a tremendous, a terrible effort to lay hold on life again, to interest himself in things.  He was pushed to it.”

“Pushed to it!” said Rosamund, still in the hard level voice.  “Who pushed him?”

“I can only tell you it was as I say,” said Lady Ingleton, quickly and with embarrassment.  “We were very few on the yacht.  Of course I saw a good deal of your husband.  He was absolutely reserved with me.  He always has been.  You mustn’t think he has ever given me the least bit of confidence.  He never has.  I am quite sure he never would.  We are only acquaintances.  But I want to be a friend to him now.  He hasn’t a friend, not one, out there.  My husband, I think, feels rather as I do about him, in so far as a man can feel in our sort of way.  He would gladly be more intimate with your husband.  But your husband doesn’t make friends.  He’s beyond anything of that kind.  He tried, on the yacht and at Brusa.  He did his utmost.  But he was held back by his misery.  I must tell you (it’s very uninteresting)” ­her voice softened here, and her face slightly changed, became gentler, more intensely feminine ­“that my husband and I are very happy together.  We always have been; we always shall be; we can’t help it.  Being with us your husband had to ­to contemplate our happiness.  It ­I suppose it reminded him ­”

She stopped; she could not bring herself to say it.  Again her eyes rested upon “Wedded,” and, in spite of her long conviction of its essential banality ­she classed it with “The Soul’s Awakening,” “Harmony,” and all the things she was farthest away from ­she felt what it stood for painfully, almost mysteriously.

“One day,” she resumed, speaking more slowly, and trying to banish emotion from her voice, “I went out from the hotel where we stayed at Brusa, quite alone.  There’s a mosque at Brusa called Jeshil Jami, the Green Mosque.  It stands above the valley.  It is one of the most beautiful things I know, and quite the most beautiful Osmanli building.  I like to go there alone.  Very often there is no one in the mosque.  Well, I went there that day.  When I went in ­the guardian was on the terrace; he knows me and that I’m the British Ambassadress, and never bothers me ­I thought at first the mosque was quite empty.  I sat down close to the door.  After I had been there two or three minutes I felt there was some one else in the mosque.  I looked round.  Before the Mihrab there was a man.  It was your husband.  He was kneeling on the matting, but ­but he wasn’t praying.  When I knew, when I heard what he was doing, I went away at once.  I couldn’t ­I felt that ­”

Again she paused.  In the pause she heard the gale tearing at the windows.  She looked at the woman in the sister’s dress.  Rosamund was sitting motionless, and was now looking down.  Lady Ingleton positively hated the sister’s dress at that moment.  She thought of it as a sort of armor in which her visitor was encased, an armor which rendered her invulnerable.  What shaft could penetrate that smooth black and white, that flowing panoply, and reach the heart Lady Ingleton desired to pierce?  Suddenly Lady Ingleton felt cruel.  She longed to tear away from Rosamund all the religion which seemed to be protecting her; she longed to see her naked as Dion Leith was naked.

“I didn’t care to look upon a man in hell,” she said, in a voice which had become almost brutal, a voice which Sir Carey would scarcely have recognized if he had heard it.

Rosamund said nothing, and, after a moment, Lady Ingleton continued: 

“With us on the yacht was one of my husband’s secretaries of Embassy, Cyril Vane, who had just become engaged to be married.  He is married now.  In his cabin on the yacht he had a photograph of the girl.  One night he was walking up and down on deck with your husband, and your husband ­I’d just told him about Vane’s engagement ­congratulated him.  Vane invited Mr. Leith into the cabin and showed him the photograph.  Vane told me afterwards that he should never forget the look on your husband’s face as he took the photograph and gazed at it.  When he put it down he said to Vane, ’I hope you may be happy.  She looks very kind, and very good, too; but there’s no cruelty on earth like the cruelty of a good woman.’” (Did the sister’s dress rustle faintly?) “Vane ­he’s only a boy ­was very angry for a moment, though he’s usually imperturbable.  I don’t know exactly what he said, but I believe he made a rather strong protest about knowing his fiancee’s character au fond.  Anyhow, your husband took hold of his arm and said to him, ’Don’t love very much and you may be happy.  That’s the only chance for a man ­not to love the woman very much.’  Vane came to me and told me.  I remember it was late at night and my husband was there.  When Vane was leaving us Carey said to him, ’Forget the advice that poor fellow gave you.  Love her as much as you can, my boy.  Dion Leith speaks out of the bitterness that is destroying him.  But very few men can love as he can, and very few men have been punished by their love as he has been punished by his.  His sorrow is altogether exceptional, and has made him lose the power of moral vision.  His soul has been poisoned at the source.’  My husband was right.”

“You came here to tell me that?” said Rosamund, lifting her head and speaking coldly and very clearly.

“I didn’t know what I was going to tell you.  At the time I am speaking of I had no thought of ever trying to see you.  That thought came to me long afterwards.”

“Why?”

“I’m a happy woman.  In my happiness I’ve learnt to respect love very much, and I’ve learnt to recognize it at a glance.  Your husband is the victim of a great love, Mrs. Leith.  I feel as if I couldn’t stand by and see him utterly destroyed by it.”

“Father Robertson tells me ­” said Rosamund.

And then she was silent.  All this time she was struggling almost furiously against pride and an intense reserve which seemed trying to suffocate every good impulse within her.  She held on to the thought of Father Robertson (she was unable to hold on to the thought of God); she strove not to hate the woman who was treading in her sanctuary, and whose steps echoed harshly and discordantly to its farthest, its holiest recesses; but she felt herself to be hardening against her will, to be congealing, turning to ice.  Nevertheless she was resolute not to leave the room in which she was without learning all that this woman had to tell her.

“Yes?” said Lady Ingleton.

And the thought went through her mind: 

“Oh, how she is hating me!”

“Father Robertson told me there was someone else.”

“Yes, there is.  Otherwise I might never have come here.  I’m partly to blame.  But I ­but I can’t possibly go into details.  You mustn’t ask me for any details, please.  Try to accept the little I can say as truth, though I’m not able to give you any proof.  You must know that women who are intelligent, and have lived long in the ­well, in the sort of world I’ve lived in, are never mistaken about certain things.  They don’t need what are called proofs.  They know certain things are happening, or not happening, without holding any proofs for or against.  Your husband has got into the wrong hands.”

“What do you mean by that?” said Rosamund steadily, even obstinately.

“In his misery and absolute loneliness he has allowed himself to be taken possession of by a woman.  She is doing him a great deal of harm.  In fact she is ruining him.”

She stopped.  Perhaps she suspected that Rosamund, in defiance of her own denial of proofs, would begin asking for them; but Rosamund said nothing.

“He is going down,” Lady Ingleton resumed.  “He has already deteriorated terribly.  I saw him recently by chance in Stamboul (he never comes to us now), and I was shocked at his appearance.  When I first met him, in spite of his bitterness and intense misery I knew at once that I was with a man of fine nature.  There was something unmistakable, the rare imprint; that’s fading from him now.  You know Father Robertson very well.  I don’t.  But the very first time I was with him I knew he was a man who was seeking the heights.  Your husband now is seeking the depths, as if he wanted to hide himself and his misery in them.  Perhaps he hasn’t found the lowest yet.  I believe there is only one human being who can prevent him from finding it.  I’m quite sure there is only one human being.  That’s why I came here.”

She was silent.  Then she added: 

“I’ve told you now what I wished to tell you, all I can tell you.”

In thinking beforehand of what this interview would probably be like Lady Ingleton had expected it to be more intense, charged with greater surface emotion than was the case.  Now she felt a strange coldness in the room.  The dry rattling of the window under the assault of the gale was an interpolated sound that was in place.

“Your husband has never mentioned your name to me,” she said, influenced by an afterthought.  “And yet I’ve come here, because I know that the only hope of salvation for him is here.”

Again her eyes went to “Wedded,” and then to the sister’s dress and close-fitting headgear which disguised Rosamund.  And suddenly the impulsiveness which was her inheritance from her Celtic and Latin ancestors took complete possession of her.  She got up swiftly and went to Rosamund.

“You hate me for having come here, for having told you all this.  You will always hate me, I think.  I’ve intruded upon your peaceful life in religion ­your peaceful, comfortable, sheltered life.”

Her great dark eyes fixed themselves upon the cross which lay on Rosamund’s breast.  She lifted her hand and pointed to it.

“You’ve nailed him on a cross,” she said, with almost fierce intensity.  “How can you be happy in that dress, worshiping God with a lot of holy women?”

“Did I tell you I was happy?” said Rosamund.

She got up and stood facing Lady Ingleton.  Her face still preserved something of the coldness, but the color had deepened in the cheeks, and the expression in the eyes had changed.  They looked now much less like the eyes of a “sister” than they had looked when she came into the room.

“Take off that dress and go to Constantinople!” said Lady Ingleton.

Rosamund flushed deeply, painfully; her mouth trembled, and tears came into her eyes, but she spoke resolutely.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said.  “You were right to come here and to tell me.  If I hate you, as you say, that’s my fault, not yours.”

She paused.  It was evident that she was making a tremendous effort to conquer something; she even shut her eyes for a brief instant.  Then she added in a very low voice;

“Thank you!”

And she put out her hand.

Tears started into Lady Ingleton’s eyes as she took the hand.  Rosamund turned and went quickly out of the room.

Some minutes after she had gone Lady Ingleton heard rain beating upon the window.  The sound reminded her of the umbrella she had “stood” in the corner of the room when Rosamund came in.  It was still there.  Impulsively she went to the corner and took it up; then, realizing that Rosamund must already be on her way, she laid it down on the table.  She stood for a moment looking from “Wedded” to the damp umbrella.

Then she sat down on the sofa and cried impetuously.

CHAPTER XII

It was the month of May.  Already there had been several unusually hot days in Constantinople, and Mrs. Clarke was beginning to think about the villa at Buyukderer.  She was getting tired of Pera.  She had fulfilled her promise to Dion Leith.  She had given up going to England for Jimmy’s Christmas holidays and had spent the whole winter in Constantinople.  But now she had had enough of it for the present, indeed more than enough of it.

She was feeling weary of the everlasting diplomatic society, of the potins political and social, of the love affairs and intrigues of her acquaintances which she knew of or divined, of the familiar voices and faces.  She wanted something new; she wanted to break away.  The restlessness that was always in her, concealed beneath her pale aspect of calm, was persecuting her as the spring with its ferment drew near to the torrid summer.

The spring had got into her veins and had made her long for novelty.

One morning when Sonia came into Mrs. Clarke’s bedroom with the coffee she brought a piece of news.

“Miladi Ingleton arrived at the Embassy from England yesterday,” said Sonia, in her thick, soft voice.

The apparent recovery of Lady Ingleton’s mother had been a deception.  She had had a relapse almost immediately after Lady Ingleton’s return from Liverpool to London; an operation had been necessary, and Lady Ingleton had been obliged to stay on in England several weeks.  During this time Mrs. Clarke had had no news from her.  Till Sonia’s announcement she had not known the date fixed for her friend’s return.  She received the information with her usual inflexibility, and merely said: 

“I’ll go to see her this afternoon.”

Then she took up a newspaper which Sonia had brought in with her and began to sip the coffee.

As soon as she was dressed she sent a note to the British Embassy to ask if her friend would be in at tea-time.

Lady Ingleton drew her brows together when she read it.  She was delighted to be again in Constantinople, for she had missed Carey quite terribly, but she wished that Cynthia Clarke was anywhere else.  Ever since her visit to Liverpool she had been dreading the inevitable meeting with the friend whose secret she had betrayed.  Yet the meeting must take place.  She would be obliged some day to look once more into Cynthia Clarke’s earnest and distressed eyes.  When that happened would she hate herself very much for what she had done?  She had often wondered.  She wondered now, as she read the note written in her friend’s large upright hand, as she wrote a brief answer to say she would be in after five o’clock that day.

She was troubled by the fact that her visit to Liverpool had not yielded the result she had hoped for.  Rosamund Leith had not sought her husband.  But she had taken off the sister’s dress and had given up living in the north.

Lady Ingleton knew this from Father Robertson, with whom she corresponded.  She had never seen Rosamund or heard from her since the interview in the Adelphi Hotel.  And she was troubled, although she had recently received from Father Robertson a letter ending with these words: 

“Pressure would be useless.  I have found by experience that one cannot hurry the human soul.  It must move at its own pace.  You have done your part.  Try to leave the rest with confidence in other hands.  Through you she knows the truth of her husband’s condition.  She has given up the Sisterhood.  Surely that means that she has taken the first step on the road that leads to Constantinople.”

But now May was here with its heat, and its sunshine, and its dust, and Lady Ingleton must soon meet the eyes of Cynthia Clarke, and the man she had striven to redeem was unredeemed.

She sighed as she got up from her writing-table.  Perhaps perversely she felt that she would mind meeting Cynthia Clarke less if her treachery had been rewarded by the accomplishment of her purpose.  A useless treachery seemed to her peculiarly unpardonable.  She hated having done a wrong without securing a quid pro quo.  Even if Father Robertson was right, and Rosamund Leith’s departure from the Sisterhood were the first step on the road to Constantinople, she might arrive too late.

Although she was once more with Carey, Lady Ingleton felt unusually depressed.

Soon after five the door of her boudoir was opened by a footman, and Mrs. Clarke walked slowly in, looking Lady Ingleton thought, even thinner, even more haggard and grave than usual.  She was perfectly dressed in a gown that was a marvel of subtle simplicity, and wore a hat that drew just enough attention to the lovely shape of her small head.

“Certainly she has the most delicious head I ever saw,” was Lady Ingleton’s first (preposterous) thought.  “And the strongest will I ever encountered,” was the following thought, as she looked into her friend’s large eyes.

After they had talked London and Paris for a few minutes Lady Ingleton changed the subject, and with a sort of languid zest, which was intended to conceal a purpose she desired to keep secret, began to speak of Pera and of the happenings there while she had been away.  Various acquaintances were discussed, and presently Lady Ingleton arrived, strolling, at Dion Leith.

“Mr. Leith is still here, isn’t he?” she asked.  “Carey hasn’t seen him lately but thinks he is about.”

“Oh yes, he is still here,” said Mrs. Clarke’s husky voice.

“What does he do?  How does he pass his time?”

“I often wonder,” replied Mrs. Clarke, squeezing a lemon into her cup, which was full of clear China tea.

She put the lemon, thoroughly squeezed, down on its plate, looking steadily at her friend, and continued: 

“You remember last summer when I asked you to be kind to him, and told you why I was interested in him, poor fellow?”

“Oh yes.”

“I really thought at that time it would be possible to assist him to get back into life, what we understand by life.  You helped me like a true friend.”

“Oh, I really did nothing.”

“You enabled me to continue my acquaintance with him here,” said Mrs. Clarke inflexibly.

Lady Ingleton was silent, and Mrs. Clarke continued: 

“You know what I did, my efforts to interest him in all sorts of things.  I even got Jimmy out because I knew Mr. Leith was fond of him, threw them together, even tried to turn Mr. Leith into a sort of holiday tutor.  Anything to take him out of himself.  Later on, when Jimmy went back to England, I though I would try hard to wake up Dion Leith’s mind.”

“Did you?” said Lady Ingleton, in her most languid voice.

“I took him about in Stamboul.  I showed him all the interesting things that travelers as a rule know nothing about.  I tried to make him feel Stamboul.  I even spent the winter here chiefly because of him, though, of course, nobody must know that but you.”

“Entendu, ma chère!”

“But I’ve made a complete failure of it all.”

“You meant that Mr. Leith can’t take up life again?”

“He simply doesn’t care for the things of the mind.  He has very few mental resources.  I imagined that there was very much more in him to work upon than there is.  If his heart receives a hard blow, an intellectual man can always turn for consolation to the innumerable things of art, philosophy, literature, that are food for the mind.  But Mr. Leith unfortunately isn’t an intellectual man.  And another thing ­”

She had been speaking very quietly; now she paused.

“Yes?” said Lady Ingleton.

“Jimmy came out for the Easter holidays.  It was absurd, because they’re so short, but I had to see him, and I couldn’t very well go to England.  Well, Jimmy’s taken a violent dislike to Mr. Leith.”

“I thought Jimmy was very fond of him.”

“He was devoted to him, but now he can’t bear him.  In fact, Jimmy won’t have anything to do with Dion Leith.  I suppose ­boys of that age are often very sharp ­I suppose he sees the deterioration in Mr. Leith and it disgusts him.”

“Deterioration!” said Lady Ingleton, leaning forward, and speaking more impulsively than before.

“Yes.  It is heart-rending.”

“Really!”

“And it makes things difficult for me.”

“I’m sorry for that.”

There was a moment of silence; then, as Mrs. Clarke did not speak, but sat still wrapped in a haggard immobility, Lady Ingleton said: 

“When do you go to Buyukderer?”

“I shall probably go next week.  I’ve very tired of Pera.”

“You look tired.”

“I didn’t mean physically.  I’m never physically tired.”

“Extraordinary woman!” said Lady Ingleton, with a faint, unhumorous smile.  “Come and see some Sèvres I picked up at Christie’s.  Carey is delighted with it, although, of course, horrified at the price I paid for it.”

She got up and went with Mrs. Clarke into one of the drawing-rooms.  Dion
Leith was not mentioned again.

That evening the Ingletons dined alone.  Sir Carey said he must insist on a short honeymoon even though they were obliged to spend it in an Embassy.  They had dinner in Bohemian fashion on a small round table in Lady Ingleton’s boudoir, and were waited upon by Sir Carey’s valet, a middle-aged Italian who had been for many years in his service and who had succeeded, in the way of Italian servants, in becoming one of the family.  The Pekinese lay around solaced by the arrival of their mistress and of their doyenne.

When dinner was over and Sir Carey had lit his cigar, he breathed a sigh of contentment.

“At last I’m happy once more after all those months of solitude!”

He looked across at his wife, and added: 

“But are you happy at being with me again?”

She smiled.

“Yes,” he said, “I know, of course.”

“Then why do you ask?”

“Well, I’m a trained observer, like every competent diplomatist, and ­there’s something.  I see in the lute of your happiness a tiny rift.  It’s scarcely visible, but ­I see it.”

“I’m not quite happy to-night.”

“And you won’t tell me why, on our honeymoon?”

“I want to tell you but I can’t.  I have no right to tell you.”

“You only can judge of that.”

“I’ve done something that even you might think abominable, something treacherous.  I had a great reason ­but still!” She sighed.  “I shall never be able to tell you what it is, because to do that would increase my sin.  To-night I’m realizing that I’m not at all sorry for what I have done.  And that not being sorry ­as well as something else ­makes me unhappy in a new way.  It’s all very complicated.”

“Like Balkan politics!  Shall we” ­he looked round the room meditatively ­“shall we set the dogs at it?”

She smiled.

“Even they couldn’t drive my tristesse quite away.  You have more power with me than many dogs.  Read me something.  Read me ‘Rabbi ben Ezra.’”

Sir Carey went to fetch the exorcizer.

The truth was that Lady Ingleton’s interview with Cynthia Clarke had made her realize two things:  that since she had come to know Father Robertson, and had betrayed to him the secret of her friend’s life, any genuine feeling of liking she had had for Cynthia Clarke had died; and that Cynthia Clarke was tired of Dion Leith.

That day Mrs. Clarke’s hypocrisy had, perhaps, for the first time, absolutely disgusted, and even almost horrified, Lady Ingleton.  For years Lady Ingleton had known of it, but for years she had almost admired it.  The cleverness, the subtlety, the competence of it had entertained her mind.  She had respected, too, the courage which never failed Mrs. Clarke.  But she was beginning to see her with new eyes.  Perhaps Father Robertson had given his impulsive visitor a new moral vision.

During the conversation that afternoon at certain moments Lady Ingleton had almost hated Cynthia Clarke ­when Cynthia had spoken of trying to wake up Dion Leith’s mind, of his not being an intellectual man, of Jimmy Clarke’s shrinking from him because of his deterioration.  And when Cynthia had said that deterioration was “heart-rending” Lady Ingleton had quite definitely detested her.  This feeling of detestation had persisted while, in the drawing-room, Cynthia was lovingly appreciating the new acquisition of Sèvres.  Lady Ingleton sickened now when she thought of the lovely hands sensitively touching, feeling, the thin china.  There really was something appalling in the delicate mentality, in the subtle taste, of a woman in whom raged such devastating physical passions.

Lady Ingleton shuddered as she remembered her conversation with her “friend.”  But it had brought about something.  It had driven away any lingering regret of hers for having spoken frankly to Father Robertson.  Cynthia was certainly tired of Dion Leith.  Was she about to sacrifice him as she had sacrificed others?  Lady Ingleton dreaded the future.  For during the interview at the Adelphi Hotel she had realized Rosamund’s innate and fastidious purity.  To forgive even one infidelity would be a tremendous moral triumph in such a woman as Rosamund.  But if Cynthia Clarke threw Dion Leith away, and he fell into promiscuous degradation, then surely Rosamund’s nature would rise up in inevitable revolt.  Even if she came to Constantinople then it would surely be too late.

Lady Ingleton had seen clearly enough into the mind of Cynthia Clarke, but there was hidden from her the greater part of a human drama not yet complete.

Combined with the ugly passion which governed her life, Mrs. Clarke had an almost wild love of personal freedom.  As much as she loved to fetter she hated to be fettered.  This hatred had led her into many difficulties during the course of her varied life, difficulties which had always occurred at moments when she wanted to get rid of people.  Ever since she had grown up there had been recurring epochs when she had been tormented by the violent desire to rid herself of some one whom she had formerly longed for, whom she had striven to bind to her.  Until now she had always eventually succeeded in breaking away from those who were beginning to involve her in weariness or to disgust her.  There had sometimes been perilous moments, painful scenes, bitter recriminations.  But by the exercise of her indomitable power of will, helped by her exceptional lack of scruple, she had always managed to accomplish her purpose.  She had always found hitherto that she was more pitiless, and therefore more efficient, than anyone opposed to her in a severe struggle of wills.  But Dion Leith was beginning to cause her serious uneasiness.  She had known from the beginning of their acquaintance that he was an exceptional man; since his tragedy she had realized that the exceptional circumstances of his life had accentuated his individuality.  In sorrow, in deterioration, he had broken loose from restraint.  She had helped to make him what he had now become, the most difficult man she had ever had to deal with.  When he had crossed the river to her he had burnt all the boats behind him.  If he had sometimes been weak in goodness, in those former days long past, in what he considered as evil ­Mrs. Clarke did not see things in white and black ­he had developed a peculiar persistence and determination which were very like strength.

Looking back, Mrs. Clarke realized that the definite change in Dion, which marked the beginning of a new development, dated from the night in the garden at Buyukderer when Jimmy had so nearly learnt the truth.  On that night she had forced Dion to save her reputation with her child by lying and playing the hypocrite to a boy who looked up to him and trusted in him.  Dion had not forgotten his obedience.  Perhaps he hated her because of it in some secret place of his soul.  She was sure that he intended to make her pay for it.  He had obeyed her in what she considered as a very trifling matter. (For of course Jimmy had to be deceived.) But since then he had often shown a bitter, even sometimes a brutal, disposition to make her obey him.  She could not fully understand the measure of his resentment because she had none of his sense of honor and did not share his instinctive love of truth.  But she knew he had suffered acutely in tricking and lying to Jimmy.

On that night, then, he had burnt his boats.  She herself had told him to do it when she had said to him, “Give yourself wholly to me.”  She was beginning to regret that she had ever said that.

At first, in her perversity, she had curiously enjoyed Dion’s misery.  It had wrapped him in a garment that was novel.  It had thrown about him a certain romance.  But now she was becoming weary of it.  She had had enough of it and enough of him.  That horrible process, which she knew so well, had repeated itself once more:  she had wanted a thing; she had striven for it; she had obtained it; she had enjoyed it (for she knew well how to enjoy and never thought that the game was not worth the candle).  And then, by slow, almost imperceptible degrees, her power of enjoyment had begun to lessen.  Day by day it had lost in strength.  She had tried to stimulate it, to deceive herself about its decay, but the time had come, as it had come to her many times in the past, when she had been forced to acknowledge to herself that it was no longer living but a corpse.  Dion Leith had played his part in her life.  She wished now to put him outside of her door.  She had made sacrifices for him; for him she had run risks.  All that was very well so long as he had had the power to reward her.  But now she was beginning to brood over those risks, those sacrifices, with resentment, to magnify them in her mind; she was beginning to be angry as she dwelt upon that which distortedly she thought of as her unselfishness.

After Jimmy had left Turkey to go back to Eton, and the summer had died, Mrs. Clarke had fulfilled her promise to Dion.  She had settled at Pera for the winter, and she had arranged his life for him.  From the moment of Jimmy’s departure Dion had given himself entirely to her.  He had even given himself with a sort of desperation.  She had been aware of his fierce concentration, and she had tasted it with a keenness of pleasure, she had savored it deliberately and fully in the way of an epicure.  The force of his resolution towards evil ­it was just that ­had acted upon her abominably sensitive temperament as a strong tonic.  That period had been the time when, to her, the game was worth the candle, was worth a whole blaze of candles.

Already, then, Dion had begun to show the new difficult man whom she, working hand in hand with sorrow, had helped to create within him; but she had at first enjoyed his crudities of temper, his occasional outbursts of brutality, his almost fierce roughness and the hardness which alternated with his moments of passion.

She had understood that he was flinging away with furious hands all the baggage of virtue he had clung to in the past, that he was readjusting his life, was reversing all the habits which had been familiar and natural to him in the existence with Rosamund.  So much the better, she had thought.  The fact that he was doing this proved to her her power over him.  She had smiled, in her unsmiling way, upon his efforts to do what she had told him to do, to cut away the cancer that was in him and to cut away all that was round it.  Away with the old moralities, the old hatred of lies and deceptions, the old love of sanity and purity of life.

But away, too, with the old reverence for, and worship of, the woman possessed.

Dion had taken to heart a maxim once uttered to him by Mrs. Clarke in the garden at Buyukderer.  Mention had been made of the very foolish and undignified conduct of a certain woman in Pera society who had been badly treated by a young diplomat.  In discussing the matter Dion had chanced to say: 

“But if she does such things how can any man respect her?”

Mrs. Clarke’s reply, spoken with withering sarcasm, had been: 

“Women don’t want to be respected by men.”

Dion had not forgotten that saying.  It had sunk deep into his heart.  He had come to believe it.  Even when he thought of Rosamund still he believed it.  He had respected her, and had shown his respect in the most chivalrous way at his command, and she had never really loved him.  Evidently women were not what he had thought they were.  Mrs. Clarke knew what they were and a thousand things that he did not know.  He grasped at her cynicism, and he often applied it, translated through his personality, to herself.  He even went farther in cynicism than she had ever gone, behaving like a convert to a religion which had the charm of novelty.  He praised her for her capacities as a liar, a hypocrite, a subtle trickster, a thrower of dust in the eyes of her world.  One of his favorite names for her was “dust-thrower.”  Sometimes he abused her.  She believed that at moments he detested her.  But he clung to her and he did not mean to give her up.  And she knew that.

After that horrible night when Jimmy had waked up she had succeeded in making Dion believe that he was deeply loved by her.  She had really had an ugly passion for him, and she had contrived easily enough to dress it up and present it as love.  And he clung to that semblance of love, because it was all that he had, because it was a weapon in his hand, and because he had made for it a sacrifice.  He had sacrificed the truth that was in him, and he had received in part payment the mysterious dislike of the boy who had formerly looked up to him.

Jimmy had never been friendly with Dion since the night of their search for his mother in the garden.

His manner towards his mother had changed but little.  He was slightly more reserved with her than he had been.  Her faint air of sarcasm when, in Sonia’s room, he had shown her his boyish agitation, had made a considerable impression upon him.  He was unable to forget it.  And he was a little more formal with his mother; showed her, perhaps, more respect than before.  But the change was trifling.  His respect for Dion, however, was obviously dead.  Indeed he had begun to show a scarcely veiled hostility towards Dion in the summer holidays, and in the recent Easter holidays, spent by him in Pera, he had avoided Dion as much as possible.

“That fellow still here!” he had said, with boyish gruffness, when his mother had first mentioned Dion’s name immediately after his arrival.  And when he had seen Dion he had said straight out to his mother that he couldn’t “stand Leith at any price now.”  She had asked him why, fixing her eyes upon him, but the only reply she had succeeded in getting had been that he didn’t trust the fellow, that he hadn’t trusted Leith for a long time.

“Since when?” she had said.

“Can’t remember,” had been the non-committal answer.

It seemed as if Jimmy had seen through Dion’s insincerity in the garden at Buyukderer.  Yet there was nothing to show that he had not accepted his mother’s insincerity in Sonia’s room at its face value.  Even Mrs. Clarke had not been able to understand exactly what was in her boy’s mind.  But Jimmy’s hostility to Dion had troubled her obscurely, and had added to her growing weariness of this intrigue something more vital.  Her intelligence divined, rather than actually perceived, the coming into her life of a definite menace to her happiness, if happiness it could be called.  She felt as if Jimmy were on the track of her secret, and she was certain that Dion was the cause of the boy’s unpleasant new alertness.  In the past she had taken risks for Dion.  But she had had the great reason of what she chose to call passion.  That reason was gone now.  She was resolved not to take the greatest of all risks for a man whom she wanted to get rid of.

She was resolved; but she encountered now in Dion a resolve which she had not suspected he was capable of, and which began to render her seriously uneasy.

Lady Ingleton’s remark, “you look tired,” had struck unpleasantly on Mrs. Clarke’s ears, and she came away from the Embassy that day with them in her mind.  She was on foot.  As she came out through the great gateway of the Embassy she remembered that she had been coming from it on that day in June when she had seen Dion Leith for the first time in Pera.  A sharp thrill had gone through her that day.  He had come.  He had obeyed the persistent call of her will.  What she had desired for so long would be.  And she had been fiercely glad for two reasons; one an ordinary reason, the other less ordinary.  A mysterious reason of the mind.  If her will had played her false for once, had proved inadequate, she would have suffered strangely.  When she knew it had not she had triumphed.  But now, as she walked onward slowly, she wished she had never seen Dion Leith in Pera, she wished that her will had played her false.  It would have been better so, for she was in a difficult situation, and she foresaw that it was going to become more difficult.  She was assailed by that recurring desire which is the scourge of the sensualist, the desire to rid herself violently, abruptly and forever of the possession she had schemed and made long efforts to obtain.  Her torch was burnt out.  She wished to stamp out the flame of another torch which still glowed with a baleful fire.

“And Delia has noticed something!” she thought.

The thought was scarcely out of her mind when she came face to face with Dion Leith.  He stopped before her.

“Have you been to the Embassy?” he said.

“Yes.  Delia Ingleton came back yesterday.  You aren’t going to call there?”

“Of course not.  I happened to see you walking in that direction, so I thought I would wait for you.”

With the manner of a man exercising a right he turned to walk back with her.  A flame of irritation scorched her, but she did not show any emotion.  She only said quietly: 

“You know I am not particularly fond of being seen with men in the Grande Rue.”

“Very well.  If you like, I’ll come to your flat by a round-about way.  I’ll be there five minutes after you are.”

Before she had time to say anything he was gone, striding through the crowd.

Mrs. Clarke walked on and came into the Grande Rue.

She lived in a flat in a street which turned out of the Grande Rue on the left not very far from the Taxim Garden.  As she walked on slowly she was trying to make up her mind to force a break with Dion.  She had great courage and was naturally ruthless, yet for once she was beset by indecision.  She did not any longer feel sure that she could dominate this man.  She had bent him to her will when she took him; but could she do so when she wished to get rid of him?

When she reached the house, on the second floor of which was her flat, she found him there waiting for her.

“You must have walked very quickly, Dion,” she said.

“No, I didn’t,” he replied bruskly.  “You walked very slowly.”

“I feel tired to-day.”

“I thought you were never tired.”

“Every woman is tired sometimes.”

They began to ascend the staircase.  There was no lift.

“Are you going out to-night?” she heard him say behind her.

“No.  I shall go to bed early.”

“I’ll stay till then.”

“You know you can’t stay very late here.”

She heard him laugh.

“When you’ve just said you are going to bed early!”

She said nothing more till they reached the flat.  He followed her in and put his hat down.

“Will you have tea?”

“No, thanks; nothing.”

“Go into the drawing-room.  I’ll come in a moment.”

She left him and went into her bedroom.

He waited for her in the drawing-room.  At first he sat down.  The room was full of the scent of flowers, and he remembered the strong flowery scent which had greeted him when he visited the villa at Buyukderer for the first time.  How long ago that seemed ­aeons ago!  A few minutes passed, registered by the ticking of a little clock of exquisite bronze work on the mantelpiece.  She did not come.  He felt restless.  He always felt restless in Constantinople.  Now he got up and walked about the room, turning sharply from time to time, pausing when he turned, then resuming his walk.  Once, as he turned, he found himself exactly opposite to a mirror.  He stared into it and saw a man still young, but lined, with sunken eyes, a mouth drooping and bitter, a head on which the dark hair was no longer thick and springy.  His hair had retreated from the temples, and this fact had changed his appearance, had lessened his good looks, and at the same time had given to his face an odd suggestion of added intellectuality which was at war with the plain stamp of dissipation imprinted upon it.  Even in repose his face was almost horribly expressive.

As he stared into the glass he thought: 

“If I cut off my mustache I should look like a tragic actor who was a thorough bad lot.”

He turned away, frowning, and resumed his walk.  Presently he stood still and looked about the room.  He was getting impatient.  Irritability crept through him.  He almost hated Mrs. Clarke for keeping him waiting so long.

“Why the devil doesn’t she come?” he thought.

He stood trying to control his nervous anger, clenching his muscular hands, and looking from one piece of furniture to another, from one ornament to another ornament, with quickly shifting eyes.

His attention was attracted by something unusual in the room which he had not noticed till now.  On a writing-table of ebony near one of the windows he saw a large photograph in a curious frame of ruddy arbutus wood.  He had never before seen a photograph in any room lived in by Mrs. Clarke, and he had heard her say that photographs killed a room, and might easily kill, too, with their staring impotence, any affection one felt for the friends they represented.  Whose photograph could this be which triumphed over such a dislike?  He walked to the table, bent down and saw a standing boy in flannels, bare-headed, with thick, disordered hair and bare arms, holding in his large hands a cricket bat.  It was Jimmy, and his eyes looked straight into Dion’s.

A door clicked.  There was a faint rustling.  Mrs. Clarke walked into the room.

Dion turned round.

“What’s this photograph doing here?” he asked roughly.

“Doing?”

“Yes.  You hate photographs.  I’ve heard you say so.”

“Jimmy gave it to me on my birthday just before he left for England. 
It’s quite a good one.”

“You are going to keep it here?”

“Yes.  I am going to keep it here.  Come and sit down.”

He did not move.

“Jimmy loathes me,” he said.

“Nonsense.”

“He does.  Through you he has come to loathe me, and you keep his photograph here ­”

“I don’t allow any one to criticize what I do in my own drawing-room,” she interrupted.  “You are really childish to-day.”

His intense irritability had communicated itself to her.  She felt an almost reckless desire to get rid of him.  His look of embittered wretchedness tormented her nerves.  She wondered how it had ever been able to interest her, even to lure her.  She was amazed at her own perversity.

“I cannot allow you to come here if you are going to try to interfere with my arrangements,” she added, with a sort of fierce coldness.

“I have a right to come here.”

“You have not.  You have no rights over me, none at all.  I have made a great many sacrifices for you, far too many, but I shall never sacrifice my complete independence for you or for any one.”

“Sacrifices for me!” he exclaimed.

He snatched up the photograph, held it with both his hands, exerted his strength, smashed the glass, broke the frame, tore the photograph in half, and threw it, the fragments of red wood and the bits of glass on the table.

“You’ve made your boy hate me, and you shan’t have him there,” he said savagely.

“How dare you!” she exclaimed, in a low, hoarse voice.

She flung out her hands.  In snatching at the ruined photograph she picked up with it a fragment of glass.  It cut her hand slightly, and a thin thread of blood ran down over her white skin.

“Oh, your hand!” exclaimed Dion, in a changed voice.  “It’s bleeding!”

He pulled out his handkerchief.

“Leave it alone!  I forbid you to touch it!”

She put the fragments of the photograph inside her dress, gently, tenderly even.  Then she turned and faced him.

“To-morrow I shall telegraph to England for another photograph to be sent out, and it will stand here,” she said, pointing with her bleeding hand at the writing-table.  “It will always stand on my table here and in the Villa Hafiz.”

Then she bound her own handkerchief about her hand and rang the bell.  Sonia came.

“I’ve stupidly cut my hand, Sonia.  Come and tie it up.  Mr. Leith is going in a moment, and then you shall bathe it.”

Sonia looked at Dion, and, without a word, adjusted the handkerchief deftly, and pinned it in place with a safety-pin which she drew out of her dress.  Then she left the room with her flat-footed walk.  As she shut the door Dion said doggedly: 

“You’d better let her bathe it now, because I’m not going in a moment.”

“When I ask you to go you will go.”

“Sit down.  I must speak to you.”

He pointed to a large sofa.  She went very deliberately to a chair and sat down.

“Why don’t you sit on the sofa?”

“I prefer this.”

He sat on the sofa.

“I must speak to you about Jimmy.”

“Well?”

“What’s the matter with him?  What have you been up to with him?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why should he turn against me and not against you?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You do.  It’s since that night in the garden when you made me lie to him.  Ever since that night he’s been absolutely different with me.  You know it.”

“I can’t help it.”

“He believed your lies to him, apparently.  Why doesn’t he believe mine?”

“Of course he believed what you told him.”

“He didn’t, or he wouldn’t have changed.  He hates your having anything to do with me.  He’s told you so.  I’m sure of it.”

“Jimmy would never dare to do that.”

“Anyhow, you know he does.”

She did not deny it.

“Remember this,” Dion said, looking straight at her, “I’m not going to be sacrificed a second time on account of a child.”

After a long pause, during which Mrs. Clarke sat without moving, her lovely head leaning against a cushion which was fastened near the top of the back of the chair, she said: 

“What do you mean exactly by being sacrificed, Dion?”

Her manner had changed.  The hostility had gone out of it.  Her husky voice sounded gentle almost, and she looked at him earnestly.

“I mean just this:  my life with the woman I once cared for was smashed to pieces by a child, my own dead child.  I’m not going to allow my life with you to be smashed to pieces by Jimmy.  Isn’t a man more than a child?  Can’t he feel more than a child feels, give more than a child can give?  Isn’t a thing full grown as valuable, as worth having as a thing that’s immature?”

He spoke with almost passionate resentment.

“D’you mean to tell me that a man’s love always means less to a woman than a child’s love means?”

Silently, while he spoke, she compared the passion she had had for Dion Leith with the love she would always have for Jimmy.  The one was dead; the other could not die.  That was the difference between such things.

“The two are so different that it is useless to compare them,” she replied.  “Surely you could not be jealous of a child.”

“I could be jealous of anything that threatened me in my life with you.  It’s all I’ve got now, and I won’t have it interfered with.”

“But neither must you attempt to interfere with my life with my child,” she said, very calmly.

“You dragged me into your life with Jimmy.  You have always used Jimmy as a means.  It began long ago in London when you were at Claridge’s.”

“There is no need ­”

“There is need to make you see clearly why I have every right to take a stand now against ­against ­”

“Against what?”

“I feel you’re changing.  I don’t trust you.  You are not to be trusted.  Since Jimmy has been here again I feel that you are different.”

“I am obliged to be specially careful now the boy is beginning to grow up.  He notices things now he wouldn’t have noticed a year or two ago.  And it will get worse from year to year.  That isn’t my fault.”

His sunken eyes looked fixedly at her from the midst of the network of wrinkles which disfigured his face.

“Now what are you trying to lead up to?” he said.

“It’s very foolish of you to be always suspicious.  Only stupid people are always suspecting others of sharp practise.”

“I’m stupid compared with you, but I’m not so stupid that I haven’t learnt to know you better than other people know you, better, probably, than any one else on earth knows you.  It is entirely through you that Jimmy has got to hate me.  I’m not going to let you use his hatred of me as a weapon against me.  I’ve been wanting to tell you this, but I thought I’d wait till he had gone.”

“Why should I want to use a weapon against you?”

“I don’t know.  It isn’t always easy to know why you want things.  You’re such an inveterate liar, and so tricky that you’d puzzle the devil himself.”

“Do you realize that all you are saying to-day implies something?  It implies that in your opinion I am not a free agent, that you consider you have a right to govern my actions.  But I deny that.”

She spoke firmly, but without any heat.

“Do you mean to say that what we are to each other gives me no more rights over you than mere acquaintances have?”

“It gives you no more rights over me than mere acquaintances have.”

He sat looking at her for a minute.  Then he said: 

“Cynthia, come and sit here, please, beside me.”

“Why should I?”

“Please come.”

“Very well.”

She got up, came to the sofa with a sort of listless decision, and sat down beside him.  He took her uninjured hand.  His hand was burning with heat.  He closed and unclosed his fingers as he went on speaking.

“What is there in such a relation as ours if it carries no rights?  You have altered my whole life.  Is that nothing?  I live out here only because of you.  I have nothing out here but you.  All these months, ever since we left Buyukderer, I’ve lived just as you wished.  I went into society at Buyukderer because you wished me to.  When you didn’t care any more about my doing that I lived in the shade in Galata.  I’ve fallen in with every deception you thought necessary, I’ve told every lie you wished me to tell.  Ever since you made me lie to Jimmy I haven’t cared much.  But you’ll never know, because you can’t understand such things, what the loss of Jimmy’s confidence and respect has meant to me.  However, that’s all past.  I’m as much of a hypocrite as you are; I’m as false as you are; I’m as rotten as you are ­with other people.  But don’t, for God’s sake, let’s be rotten with each other.  That would be too foul, like thieves falling out.”

“I’ve always been perfectly straight with you,” she said coldly.  “I have nothing to reproach myself with.”

The closing of his fingers on her hand, and their unclosing, irritated her whole body.  To-day she disliked his touch intensely, so intensely that she could scarcely believe she had ever liked it, longed for it, schemed for it.

“Please keep your hand still!” she said.

“What?”

“It makes me nervous your doing that.  Either hold my hand or don’t hold it.”

“I don’t understand.  What was I doing?”

“Oh, never mind.  I’ve always been straight with you.  I don’t know why you are attacking me.”

“I feel you are changing towards me.  So I thought I’d tell you that I don’t intend to be driven out a second time by a child.  It’s better you should know that.  Then you won’t attempt the impossible.”

She looked into his sunken eyes.

“Jimmy has got to dislike you,” she said.  “It’s unfortunate, but it can’t be helped.  I don’t know exactly why it is so.  It may be because he’s older, just at the age when boys begin to understand about men and women.  You’re not always quite so careful before him as you might be.  I don’t mean in what you say, but in your manner.  I think Jimmy fancies you like me in a certain way.  I think he probably took it into his head that you were hanging about the garden that night because perhaps you hoped to meet me there.  A very little more and he might begin to suspect me.  You have been frank with me to-day.  I’ll be frank with you.  I want you to understand that if there ever was a question of my losing Jimmy’s love and respect I should fight to keep them, sacrifice anything to keep them.  Jimmy comes first with me, and always will.  It couldn’t be otherwise.  I prefer that you should know it.”

He shot a glance at her that was almost cunning.  She had been prepared for a perhaps violent outburst, but he only said: 

“Jimmy won’t be here again for some time, so we needn’t bother about him.”

She was genuinely surprised, but she did not show it.

“It was you who brought up the question,” she said.

“Never mind.  Don’t worry about it.  If Jimmy comes out for the summer holidays ­”

“He will, of course.”

“Then I can go away from Buyukderer just for those few weeks.”

“I ­” She paused; then went on:  “I must tell you that you mustn’t come to Buyukderer again this summer.”

“Then you won’t go there?”

“Of course I must go.  I have the villa.  I am going there next week.”

“If you go, then I shall go.  But I’ll leave when Jimmy comes, as you are so fussed about him.”

She could scarcely believe that it was Dion who was speaking to her.  Often she had heard him speak violently, irritably, even cruelly and rudely.  But there was a sort of ghastly softness in his voice.  His hand still held hers, but its grasp had relaxed.  In his touch, as in his voice, there was a softness which disquieted her.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t let you come to Buyukderer this summer,” she said.  “Once did not matter.  But if you came again my reputation would suffer.”

“Then I’ll stay at some other place on the Bosporus and come over.”

“That would be just as bad.”

“Do you seriously mean that we are to be entirely separated during the whole of this summer?”

“I must be careful of my reputation now Jimmy’s growing up.  The Bosporus is the home of malicious gossip.”

“Do answer my question.  Do you mean that we are to be separated during the summer?”

“I don’t see how it can be helped.”

“It can be helped very easily.  Don’t go to Buyukderer.”

“I must.  I have the villa.”

“Let it.”

“I couldn’t possibly stand Constantinople in the summer.”

“There’s no need to do that.  There are other places besides Constantinople and Buyukderer.  You might go to one of them.  Or you might travel.”

She sat down for a moment looking down.

“Do you mean that I might travel with you?” she said, at last.

“Not with me.  But I could happen to be where you are.”

“That’s not possible.  Some one would get to know of it.”

“How absurdly ingenue you have become all of a sudden!” he said, with soft, but scathing, irony.

And he laughed, let out a long, low, and apparently spontaneous laugh, as if he were genuinely amused.

“Really one would hardly imagine that you were the heroine of the famous divorce case which interested all London not so very long ago.  When I remember the life you acknowledged you had lived, the life you were quite defiant about, I can’t help being amused by this sudden access of conventional Puritanism.  You declared then that you didn’t choose to live a dull, orthodox life.  One would suppose that the leopard could change his spots after all.”

While he was speaking she lifted her head and looked fixedly at him.

“It’s just that very divorce case which has made me alter my way of living,” she said.  “Any one who knew anything of the world, any one but a fool, could see that.”

“Ah, but I am a fool,” he returned doggedly.  “I was a fool when I ran straight, and it seems I’m a fool when I run crooked.  You’ve got to make the best of me as I am.  Take your choice.  Go to Buyukderer if you like.  If you do I shall stay on the Bosporus.  Or travel if you like, and I’ll happen to be where you are.  It’s quite easy.  It’s done every day.  But you know that as well as I do.  I can’t give you points in the game of throwing dust in the eyes of the public.”

“It’s too late now to let the villa, even if I cared to.  And I can’t afford to shut it up and leave it standing empty while I wander about in hotels.  I shall go to Buyukderer next week.”

“All right.  I’ll go back to the rooms I had last year, and we can live as we did then.  Give me the key of the garden gate and I can use the pavilion as my sitting-room again.  It’s all quite simple.”

A frown altered her white face.  His mention of the pavilion had suddenly recalled to her exactly what she had felt for him last year.  She compared it with what she felt for him now.  With an impulsive movement she pulled her hand away from his.

“I shall not give you the key.  I can’t have you there.  I will not.  People have begun to talk.”

“I don’t believe it.  They never see us together here.  You have taken good care of that in the last few months.  Why, we’ve met like thieves in the night.”

“Here, yes.  In a great town one can manage, but not in a place like Buyukderer.”

He leaned forward and said, with dogged resolution: 

“One thing is certain ­I will not be separated from you during the summer.  Do whatever you like, but remember that.  Make your own plans.  I will fall in with them.  But I shall pass the summer where you pass it.”

“I ­really I didn’t know you cared so much about me,” she murmured, with a faint smile.

“Care for you!”

He stared into her face and the twinkles twitched about his eyes.

“How should I not care for you?”

He gripped her hand again.

“Haven’t you taught me how to live in the dust?  Haven’t you shown me the folly of being honorable and the fun of deceiving others?  Haven’t you led me into the dark and made me able to see in it?  And there’s such a lot to see in the dark!  Why, good God, Cynthia, you’ve made a man in your own image and then you’re surprised at his worshipping you.  Where’s your cleverness?”

“I often believe you detest me.”

“Oh, as for that, a woman such as you are can be loved and hated almost at the same time.  But she can’t be given up.  No!”

As she looked at him she saw the red gleam of the torch he carried.  Hers had long ago died out into blackness.

“Is it possible that you really wish to ruin my reputation?”

“Not a bit of it!  You’re so clever that you can always guard against that.”

“Yes, I can when I’m dealing with gentlemen,” she said, with sudden, vicious sharpness.  “But you are behaving like a cad.  Of all the men I ­”

She stopped.  A sort of nervous fury possessed her.  It had nearly driven her to make a false step.  And yet ­would it be a false step?  As she paused, looking at Dion, marking the hard obstinacy in his eyes, feeling the hard, hot grip of his hand, it occurred to her that perhaps she had blundered upon the one way out, the way of escape.  Amid the wreckage of his beliefs she knew that Dion still held to one belief, which had been shaken once, but which her cool adroitness had saved and made firm in a critical moment.  If she destroyed it now would he let her go?  Just how low had he fallen through her?  She wished she knew.  But she did not know, and she waited, looking at him.

“Go on!” he said.  “Of all the men you ­what?”

“How low down is he?  How low down?” she asked herself.

“Can you go on?” he said harshly.

“Of all the men who have cared for me you are the only man who has ever dared to interfere with my freedom,” she said.

Her voice had become almost raucous, and a faint dull red strangely discolored and altered her face.

“I will not permit it.  I shall go to Buyukderer, and I forbid you to follow me there.  Now it’s getting late and I’m tired.  Please go away.”

“Men who have cared for you!”

“Yes.  Yes.”

“What d’you mean by that?  D’you mean Brayfield?”

“Yes.”

“Have there been many others who have cared as Brayfield did?”

“Yes.”

“Hadi Bey was one of them, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“And Dumeny was another?”

“Yes.”

“Poor fellows!”

His lips were smiling, but his eyes looked dreadfully intent and searching.

“You made them suffer and gave them no reward.  I can see you doing it and enjoying it.”

“That’s untrue.”

“What is untrue?”

“To say that I gave them no reward.”

At this moment there was a tap on the door.

“Come in!” said Mrs. Clarke, in her ordinary voice.

Sonia opened the door and came in.

“Excuse me, Madame,” she said, “but you told me I was to bathe your hand.  If it is not bathed it will look horrible to-morrow.  I have the warm water all ready.”

She stood in front of her mistress, broad, awkward and yet capable.  Dion felt certain this woman meant to get rid of him because she was aware that her mistress wanted him to go.  He had always realized that Sonia knew Mrs. Clarke better than any other woman did.  As for himself ­she had never shown any feeling towards him.  He did not know whether she liked him or disliked him.  But now he knew that he disliked her.

He looked almost menacingly at her.

“Your mistress can’t go at present,” he said.  “Her hand is all right.  It was only a scratch.”

Sonia looked at her mistress.

“Sonia is quite right,” said Mrs. Clarke, getting up.  “And as the water is warm I will go.  Good-by.”

“I will stay here till you have finished,” he said, still looking at Sonia.

“It’s getting very late.  We might finish our talk to-morrow.”

“I will stay.”

After a slight pause Mrs. Clarke, whose face was still discolored with red, turned to the maid and said: 

“Go away, Sonia.”

Sonia went away very slowly.  At the door she stopped for a moment and looked round.  Then she disappeared, and the door closed slowly and as if reluctantly behind her.

“Now what did you mean?” Dion said.

He got up.

“What did you mean?”

“Simply this, that my husband ought to have won his case.”

“Ah!”

He stood with his hands hanging at his sides, looking impassive, with his head bent and the lids drooping over his eyes.  She waited ­for her freedom.  She did not mind the disgust which she felt like an emanation in the darkening room, if only it would carry him far enough in hatred of her.  Would it do that?

There was a very long silence between them.  During it he remained motionless.  With his hanging hands and his drooping head he looked, she thought, almost as much like a puppet as like a man.  His whole body had a strange aspect of listlessness, almost of feebleness.  Yet she knew how muscular and powerful he still was, although he had long ago ceased from taking care of his body.  The silence lasted so long, and he stood so absolutely still, that she began to feel uneasy, even faintly afraid.  The nerves in her body were tingling.  They could have braced themselves to encounter violence, but this immobility and dumbness tormented them.  She wanted to speak, to move, but she felt obliged to wait for him.  At last he looked up.  He came to her, lifted his hands and laid them heavily on her emaciated shoulders.

“So that’s what you are!”

He stared into her haggard face.  She met his eyes resolutely.

“That’s what you are!”

“Yes.”

“Why have you told me this to-day?”

“Of course you knew it long ago.”

“Answer me.  Why have you told me to-day?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do.  You have told me to-day because you have had enough of me.  You meant to use Jimmy to get rid of me as you once used him to get to know me more intimately.  When you found that wouldn’t serve your turn, you made up your mind to speak a word or two of truth.  You thought you would disgust me into leaving you.”

“Of course you knew it long ago,” she repeated in a dull voice.

“I didn’t know it.  I might have suspected it.  In fact, once I did, and I told you so.  But you drove out my suspicion.  I don’t know exactly how.  And since then ­after you got your verdict in London I saw Dumeny smile at you as he went out of the Court.  I have never been able to forget that smile.  Now I understand it.  One by one you’ve managed to get rid of them all.  And now at last you’ve arrived at me, and you’ve said to yourself, ‘It’s his turn to be kicked out now.’  Haven’t you?”

“Nothing can last forever,” she murmured huskily.

“No.  But this time you’re not going to scrawl ‘finis’ exactly when you want to.”

“It’s getting dark, and I’m tired.  My hand is hurting me.”

He gripped her shoulders more firmly.

“If you meant some day to get rid of me, to kick me out as you’ve kicked out the others,” he said grimly, “you shouldn’t have made me come to you that night when Jimmy was at Buyukderer.  That was a mistake on your part.”

“Why?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

“Because that night through you I lost something; I lost the last shred of my self-respect.  Till that night I was still clinging on to it.  You struck my hands away and made me let go.  Now I don’t care.  And that’s why I’m not going to let you make the sign of the cross over me and dismiss me into hell.  Your list closes with me, Cynthia.  I’m not going to give you up.”

She shook slightly under his hands.

“Why are you trembling?”

“I’m not trembling; but I’m tired; let me alone.”

“You can go to Sonia now if you like, and have your hand bathed.”

He lifted his hands from her shoulders, but she did not move.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I shall wait for you here.”

“Wait for me?”

“Yes.  We’ll dine together to-night.”

“Where?” she said helplessly.

“Here, if you like.”

“There’s scarcely anything to eat.  I didn’t intend ­”

“I’ll take you out somewhere.  It’s going to be a dark night.  We’ll manage so that no one sees us.  We’ll dine together and, after dinner ­”

“I must come home early.  I’m very tired.”

“After dinner we’ll go to those rooms you found so cleverly near the Persian Khan.”

She shuddered.

“Now go and bathe your hand, and I’ll wait here.  Only don’t be too long or I shall come and fetch you.  And don’t send Sonia to make excuses, for it will be no use.”

He sat down on the sofa.

She stood for a moment without moving.  She put her bandaged hand up to her discolored face.  Then she went slowly out of the room.

He sat waiting for her to come back, with his elbows on his knees and his face hidden in his hands.

He felt like a man sunk in mire.  He felt the mire creeping up to his throat.

Almost at that same hour beside a platform at Victoria Station in London a long train with “Dover” placarded on it was drawn up.  Before the door of a first-class carriage two women in plain traveling dresses were standing with a white-haired clergyman.  Presently the shorter of the two women said to the other: 

“I think I’ll get in now, and leave you to last words.”

She held out her hand to the clergyman.

“Good-by, Father Robertson.”

He grasped her hand warmly, and looked at her with a great tenderness shining in his eyes.

“Take good care of her.  But you will, I know,” he said.

Beatrice Daventry got into the carriage, and stood for a moment at the door.  There were tears in her eyes as she looked at the two figures now pacing slowly up and down on the platform; she wiped them away quickly, and sat down.  She was bound on a long journey.  And what would be the end?  In her frail body Beatrice had a strong soul, but to-night she was stricken with a painful anxiety.  She said to herself that she cared about something too much.  If the object of this journey were not attained she felt it would break her heart.  She shut her eyes, and she conjured up a child whom she had loved very much and who was dead.

“Come with us, Robin!” she whispered.  “Come with us to your father.”

And the whisper was like a prayer.

“Beattie!”

Rosamund’s voice was speaking.

“We are just off.”

“Are we?”

“Take your seats, please!” shouted a loud bass voice.

There was a sound of the banging of doors.

Rosamund leaned out of the window.

“Good-by, Father!”

The train began to move.

“Good-by. Cor meum vigilat.”

Rosamund pulled down her veil quickly over her face.

She was weary of rebellion.  Yet she knew that deep down within her dwelt one who was still a rebel.  She was starting on a great journey but she could not foresee what would happen at its end.  For she no longer knew what she was capable of doing, and what would be too great a task for her poor powers.  She was trying; she would try; that was all she knew.

As the train pushed on through the fading light she said to herself again and again: 

“La divina volontate!  La divina volontate!”

CHAPTER XIII

A week had passed, and the Villa Hafiz had not yet opened its door to receive its mistress.  The servants, with the exception of Sonia, had arrived.  The Greek butler had everything in order downstairs.  Above stairs the big, low bed was made, and there were flowers in the vases dotted about here and there in the blue-and-green sitting-room.  Osman, the gardener, had trimmed the rose-bushes, had carefully cleaned the garden seats, and had swept straying leaves from the winding paths.  The fountain sang its under-song above the lilies.  On the highest terrace, beyond the climbing garden, the pavilion waited for the woman and man who had hidden themselves in it to go down into the darkness.  But no one slept in the big, low bed, or sat in the blue-and-green room; the garden was deserted; by night no feet trod softly to the pavilion.

For the first time in her life Cynthia Clarke was in the toils.  She who loved her personal freedom almost wildly no longer felt free.  She dared not go to Buyukderer.

She looked back to that night when she had told Dion Leith the truth, and it stood out among all the nights of her life, more black and fatal than any of them, because on it she had been false to herself, had been weak.  She had not followed up her strength in words by strength in action!  She had allowed Dion Leith to dominate her that night, to make of her against her will his creature.  In doing that she had taken a step down ­a step away from the path in which hitherto she had always walked.  And that departure from inflexible selfishness seemed strangely to have weakened her will.

She was afraid of Dion because she felt that he was ungovernable by her, that her will no longer meant anything to him.  He did not brace himself to defy it; simply, he did not bother about it.  He seemed to have passed into a region where such a trifle as a woman’s will faded away from his perception.

His serpent had swallowed up hers.

She ought to have defied him that night, to have risked a violent scene, to have risked everything.  Instead, she had come back to the drawing-room, had gone out into the night with him, had even gone to the rooms near the Persian Khan.  She had put off, had said to herself “To-morrow”; she had tried to believe that Dion’s desperate mood would pass, that he needed gentle handling for the moment, and that, if treated with supreme tact, he would eventually be “managed” into letting her have her will.

But now she had no illusions.  Her distressed eyes saw quite clearly, and she knew that she had made a fatal mistake in being obedient to Dion that night.  She felt like one at the beginning of an inclined plane that was slippery as ice.  She had stepped upon it, and she could not step back.  She could only go forward and downward.

Dion was reckless.  Appeals to reason, to chivalry, to pity, had no effect upon him.  He only laughed at them, took them as part of her game of hypocrisy.  In her genuine and growing fear and distress she had become almost horribly sincere, but he would not believe in, or heed, her sincerity.  She knew her increasing hatred of him was matched by his secret detestation of her.  Yes, he detested her with all that was most characteristic in him, with all those inherent qualities of which, do what he would he was unable to rid himself.  And yet there was a link which bound them together ­the link of a common degradation of body.  She longed to smash that link which she had so carefully and sedulously labored to forge.  But he wished to make it stronger.  By her violent will she had turned him to perversity, and now he was actually more perverse than she was.  She saw herself outdistanced on the course towards the ultimate blackness, saw herself forced to follow where he led.

She dared not got to Buyukderer.  She could not, she knew, keep him away from there.  He would follow her from Constantinople, would resume his life of last summer, would perhaps deliberately accentuate his intimacy with her instead of being careful to throw over it a veil.  In his hatred and recklessness he might be capable even of that, the last outrage which a man can inflict upon a woman, to whose safety and happiness his chivalrous secrecy is essential.  His clinging to her in hatred was terrible to her.  She began to think that perhaps he had in his mind abominable plans for the destruction of her happiness.

One day he told her that if she went to Buyukderer he would not only follow her there, but he would remain there when Jimmy came out for the summer holidays.

“Jimmy must learn to like me again,” he said.  “That is necessary.”

She shuddered when she realized the tendency of Dion’s mind.  Fear made her clairvoyant.  There were moments when she seemed to look into that mind as into a room through an open window, to see the thoughts as living things going about their business.  There was something appalling in this man’s brooding desire to strike her in the heart combined with his determination to continue to be her lover.  It affected her as she had never been affected before.  By torturing her imagination it made havoc of her will-power.  Her situation rendered her almost desperate, and she could not find an outlet from it.

What was she to do?  If she went to Buyukderer she felt certain there would be a scandal.  Even if there were not, she could not now dare to risk having Jimmy out for his holidays.  Jimmy and Dion must not meet again.  She might travel in the summer, as Dion had suggested, but if she did that she would be forced to endure a solitude a deux with him untempered by any social distractions.  She could not endure that.  To be alone with his bitterness, his misery, and his monopolizing hatred of her would be unbearable.  And the problem of Jimmy’s holidays would not be solved by travel.  Unless she traveled to England!

A gleam of hope came to her as she thought of England.  Dion had fled from England.  Would he dare to go back there, to the land which had seen his tragedy, and where the woman lived who had cast him out?  Mrs. Clarke wondered, turning the thought of England over and over in her mind.

The longer she thought on the matter the more convinced she became that she had hit upon a final test, by means of which it would be possible for her to ascertain Dion’s exact mental condition.  If he was ready to follow her even to England, to show himself there as her intimate friend, if not as her lover, than the man whom she had known in London was dead indeed beyond hope of resurrection.

She resolved to find out what Dion’s feeling about England was.

Since the evening when she had told him the truth she had seen him ­he had obliged her to see him ­every day, but he had not come again to her flat.  They had met in secret, as they had been meeting for many months.  For the days when they had wandered about Stamboul together, when she had tried to play to him the part Dumeny had once played to her, were long ago over.

On the day when the thought of England occurred to Mrs. Clarke as a possible place of refuge she had promised to meet Dion late in the evening at their rooms near the Persian Khan.  She loathed going to those rooms.  They reminded her painfully of all she had felt for Dion and felt no longer.  They spoke to her of the secrecy of a passion that was dead.  She was afraid of them.  But she was still more afraid of seeing Dion in her flat.  Nevertheless, now the gleam of hope which had come to her suddenly woke up in her something of her old recklessness.  Since the servants had gone to the Villa Hafiz she had been living in the flat with Sonia, who was an excellent cook as well as a capital maid.  She resolved to ask Dion to dinner that night, and to try her fortune once more with him.  England must be horrible to him.  Then she would go to England.  And if he followed her there he would at least be punished for his persecution of her.

Already she called his determination not to break their intrigue persecution.  She had a short memory.

After a talk with Sonia she summoned a messenger and sent Dion a note, asking him to dinner that night.  He replied that he would come.  His answer ended with the words:  “We can go to the rooms later.”

As Mrs. Clarke read them her fingers closed on the paper viciously, and she said to herself: 

“I’ll not go.  I’ll never go to them again.”

She told Sonia about the dinner.  Then she dressed and went out.

It was a warm and languid day.  She took a carriage and told the coachman to drive to Stamboul ­to drive on till she gave him the direction where to go in Stamboul.  She had no special object in view.  But she longed to be out in the air, to drive, to see people about her, the waterway, the forest of shipping, the domes and the minarets, the cypresses, the glades stretching towards Seraglio Point, the long, low hills of Asia.  She longed, too, to hear voices, hurrying feet, the innumerable sounds of life.  She hoped by seeing and hearing to fortify her will.  The spirit of adventure was the spirit that held her, was the most vital part within her, and such a spirit needed freedom to breathe in.  She was fettered.  She had been a coward, or almost a coward, false, perhaps, to her fortunate star.  Hitherto she had always followed Nietzsche’s advice and had lived perilously.  Was she now to be governed by fear?  Even to keep Jimmy’s respect and affection could she endure such dominion?  As the sun touched her with his fingers of gold, and the air, full of a strangely languid vitality, whispered about her, as she heard the cries from the sea, and saw human beings, vividly egoistic, going by on their pilgrimage, she said to herself, “Not even for Jimmy!” The clamorous city, with its fierce openness and its sinister suggestions of hidden things, woke up in her the huntress, and, for the moment, lulled the mother to sleep.

“Not even for Jimmy!” she thought.  “I must be myself.  I cannot be otherwise.  I must live perilously.  To live in any other way for me would be death.”

And the line in “The Kasidah” which Dion had pondered over came to her, and she thought of the “death that walks in form of life.”

As the carriage went upon the bridge she looked across to Stamboul, and was faced by the Mosque of the Valideh.  So familiar to her was the sight of its façade, of its cupolas and minarets, that she seldom now even thought of it when she crossed the bridge; but to-day, perhaps because she was unusually strung up, was restive and almost horribly alert, she gazed at it and was intensely conscious of it.  She had once said to Dion that Stamboul was the City of the Unknown God, and now suddenly she felt that she was nearing His altars.  A strange, perverse desire to pray came to her; to go up into one of the mosques of this mysterious city which she loved, and to pray for her release from Dion Leith.

She smiled faintly as this idea came into her mind.  The Unknown God had surely made her as she was, had made her a huntress.  Well, then, surely she had the right to pray to Him to give her a free course for her temperament.

“Santa Sophia!” she called to the coachman.

He cracked his whip and drove furiously on to Stamboul.  In less than a quarter of an hour he pulled up his horses before the vast Church of Santa Sophia.

Mrs. Clarke sat still in the carriage for a moment looking up at the ugly towering walls, covered with red and white stripes.  Her face was haggard in the sunshine, and her pale lips were set together in a hard line.  A beggar with twisted stumps instead of arms whined a petition to her, but she neither saw him nor heard him.  As she stared at the walls on which the sun blazed she was wondering about her future.  The love of life was desperately strong within her that day.  The longing for new experiences tormented her physically.  She felt as if she could not wait, could not be patient any more.  If Dion to-night refused again to give her her freedom she must do something desperate.  She must get away secretly and hide herself from him, take a boat to Greece or Rumania, or slip into the Orient express and vanish over the tracks of Europe.

But first she must go into the church and pray to the Unknown God.

She got out of the carriage.  The beggar thrust one of his diseased stumps in front of her face.  She turned on him with a malignant look, and the whining petition died on his lips.  Then she made her way to the Porta Basilica and passed into the church.  But as its great spaces opened out before her a thought, childishly superstitious, came to her, and she turned abruptly, went out, made her way to the beggar who had worried her, gave him a coin and said something kind to him.  His almost soprano voice, raised in clamorous benediction, followed her as she returned to the church, moving slowly with horrible loose slippers protecting its floor from her Christian feet.  She always laughed in her mind when she wore those slippers and thought of what she was.  This sanctuary of the unknown God must, it seemed, be protected from her because she was a Christian!

There were a good many people in the church, but it looked almost empty because of its immense size.  She knew it very well, better perhaps than she knew any other sacred building, and she cared for it very much.  She was fond of mosques, delighting in their airy simplicity, in their casual holiness which seemed to say to her, “Worship in me if you will.  If you will not, never mind; dream in me with open eyes, or, if you prefer it, go to sleep in a corner of me.  When you wake you can mutter a prayer, or not, just as you please.”

Santa Sophia did not, perhaps, say that, though it had now for long years been in use as a mosque, and always seemed to Mrs. Clarke more like a mosque than like a church.  It was richly adorned, and something of Christianity still lingered within it.  In it there seemed, even to Mrs. Clarke, to be something impelling which asked of each one who entered it more than mere dreams, more than those long meditations which are like prayers of the mind separated from the prayers of the heart and soul.  But it possessed the air of freedom which is characteristic of mosques, did not seize those who entered it in a clutch of tenacious sanctity; but seemed to let them alone, and to influence them by just being wonderful, beautiful, unself-consciously sacred.

At first Mrs. Clarke wandered slowly about the church, without any purpose other than that of gathering to herself some of its atmosphere.  During the last few days she had been feeling really tormented.  Dion had once said she looked punished.  Now he had made her feel punished.  And she sought a moment of peace.  It could not come to her from mysticism, but it might come to her from great art, which suggests to its votaries mystery, the something beyond, untroubled and shiningly serene.

Presently Mrs. Clarke felt the peace of Santa Sophia, and she felt it in a new way, because she had recently suffered, indeed was suffering still in a new way; she felt it as something desirable, which might be of value to her, if she were able to take it to herself and to fold it about her own life.  Had she made a mistake in living perilously through many years?  Her mind went to the woman who had abandoned Dion and entered a Sisterhood to lead a religious life.  She seldom thought about Rosamund except in relation to Dion.  She had scarcely known her, and since her first few interviews with Dion in this land of the cypress he had seldom mentioned his wife.  She neither liked, nor actively disliked, Rosamund, whose tacit rejection of her acquaintance had not stirred in her any womanly hatred; for though she was a ruthless woman she was not venomous towards other women.  She did not bother about them enough for that.  But now she considered that other woman with whom she had shared Dion Leith, or rather who, not knowing it doubtless, had shared Dion Leith with her.  And she wondered whether Rosamund, in her Sisterhood, was happier than she was in the world.  In the Sisterhood there must surely be peace ­monotony, drudgery, perhaps, but peace.

Santa Sophia, with its vast spaces, its airy dome, its great arches and galleries, its walls of variegated marble, its glittering mosaics and columns of porphyry, to-day made her realize that in her life of adventure and passion she was driven, as if by a demon with a whip, and that her horrible situation with Dion was but the culmination of a series of horrible situations.  She had escaped from them only after devastating battles, in which she had had to use all her nervous energy and all her force of will.  Was it worth while?  Was the game she was always playing worth the candles she was always burning?  Would it not be wiser to seek peace and ensue it?  As she drove to Santa Sophia she had longed fiercely to be free so that she might begin again; might again have adventures, might again explore the depths of human personalities, and satisfy her abnormal curiosities and desires.  Now she was full of unusual hesitation.  Suppose she did succeed in getting rid of Dion by going to England, suppose her prayer ­she had not offered it up yet, but she was going to offer it up in a moment ­to the Unknown God received a favorable answer, might it not be well for her future happiness if she retired from the passionate life, with its perpetual secrecies, and intrigues, and lies, and violent efforts, into the life of the ideal mother, solely devoted to her only child?

She felt that the struggle with Dion, the horrible scenes she had had with him, the force of her hatred of him and his hatred of her, the necessity of yielding to him in hatred that which should never be given save with desire, had tried her as nothing else had ever tried her.  She felt that her vitality was low, and she supposed that out of that lowered vitality had come her uncharacteristic desire for peace.  She had almost envied for a moment the woman whom she had replaced in the life of Dion.  Even now ­she sighed; a great weariness possessed her.  Was she going to be subject to a weakness which she had always despised, the weakness of regret?

She paused beside a column not very far from the raised tribune on the left of the dome which is set apart for the use of the Sultan, and is called the Sultan’s seat.  Her large eyes stared at it, but at first she did not see it.  She was looking onward upon herself.  Then, in some distant part of the mosque, a boy’s voice began to sing, loudly, almost fiercely.  It sounded fanatical and defiant, but tremendously believing, proud in the faith which it proclaimed to faithful and unfaithful alike.  It echoed about the mosque, raising a clamor which nobody seemed to heed; for the few ulémas who were visible continued reading the Koran aloud on the low railed-in platforms which they frequent; a Dervish in a pointed hat slept peacefully on, stretched out in a corner; before the prayer carpet of the Prophet, not far from the Mihrab, a half-naked Bedouin, with a sheep-skin slung over his bronzed shoulders, preserved his wild attitude of savage adoration; and here and there, in the distance, under the low hanging myriads of lamps, the figures of Turkish soldiers, of street children, of travelers, moved noiselessly to and fro.

The voice of this boy, heedless and very powerful, indeed almost impudent, stirred Mrs. Clarke.  It brought her back to her worship of force.  One must worship something, and she chose force ­force of will, of temperament, of body, of brain.  Now she saw the Sultan’s tribune, and it made her think of an opera box and of the worldly life.  The boy sang on, catching at her mind, pulling her towards the East.  The curious peace of any religious life was certainly not for her, yet to-day she felt weary of the life in her world.  And she wished she could have in her existence peace of some kind; she wished that she were not a perpetual wanderer.  She remembered some of those with whom from time to time, she had linked herself ­her husband, Hadi Bey, Dumeny, Brayfield, Dion Leith.  Now she was struggling, and so far in vain, to thrust Dion out of her life.  If she succeeded ­what then?  Where was stability in her existence?  Her love for Jimmy was the only thing that lasted, and that often made her afraid now.  She was seized by an almost sentimental desire to lose herself in a love for a man that would last as her love for Jimmy had lasted, to know the peace of an enduring and satisfied desire.

The voice of the boy died away.  She turned in the direction of the Mihrab to offer up her prayer to the Unknown God, as the pious Mussulman turns in the direction of the Sacred City when he puts up his prayer to Allah.

Her eyes fell upon the Bedouin.

As she looked at him, this man of the desert come up into the City, with the fires of the dunes in his veins, the vast spaces mirrored in his eyes, the passion for wandering in his soul, she felt that in a mysterious and remote way she was akin to him, despite all her culture, her subtle mentality, the difference of her life from his.  For she had her wildness of nature, dominant and unceasing, as he had his.  He was forever traveling in body and she in mind.  He sought fresh, and ever fresh, camping-places, and so did she.  The black ashes of burnt-out fires marked his progress and hers.  She looked at him as she uttered her prayer to the Unknown God.

And she prayed for a master, that she might meet a man who would be able to dominate her, to hold her fast in the grip of his nature.  At this moment Dion dominated her in an ugly way, and she knew it too well.  But she needed some one whom she would willingly obey, whom she would lust to obey, because of love.  The restlessness in her life had been caused by a lack; she had never yet found the man who could be not her tyrant for a time, but her master while she lived.  Now she prayed for that, the only peace that she really wanted.

While she prayed she was conscious always of the attitude of the Bedouin, which suggested the fierce yielding of one who could never be afraid of the God he worshiped.  Nor could she be afraid.  For she was not ashamed of what she was, though she hid what she was from motive of worldly prudence and for the sake of her motherhood.  She believed that she was born into the world not in order to be severely educated, but in order that she might live to the uttermost, according to the dictates of her temperament.  Now at last she knew what that temperament needed, what it had been seeking, why it had never been able to cease from its journeying.  Santa Sophia had told her.

Her knowledge roused in her a sort of fury of longing for release from Dion Leith.  She saw the Bedouin riding across the sands in the freedom he had captured, and she ached to be free that she might seek her master.  Somewhere there must be the one man who had the power to fasten the yoke on her neck.

“Let me find him!” she prayed, almost angrily, and using her will.

She had forgotten Jimmy.  Her whole nature was concentrated in the desire for immediate release from Dion Leith in order that she might be free to pursue consciously the search which till this moment she had pursued unconsciously.

The Bedouin did not move.  His black, bird-like eyes were wide open, but he seemed plunged in a dream as he gazed at the Sacred Carpet.  He was absolutely unaware of his surroundings and of Mrs. Clarke’s consideration of him.  There was something animal and something royal in his appearance and his supreme unconsciousness of others.  He looked as if he were a law unto himself, even while he was adoring.  How different he was from Dion Leith.

She shut her eyes as she prayed that Dion might be removed from her life, somehow, anyhow, by death if need be.  In the dark she created for herself she saw the minarets pointing to the sky as she and Dion had seen them together from the hill of Eyub as they sat under the giant cypress.  Then she had wanted Dion; now she prayed: 

“Take him away!  Let me be free from him!  Let me never see him again!”

And she felt as if the Unknown God were listening to her somewhere far off, knew all that was in her mind.

A stealthy movement quite near to her made her open her eyes.  The Bedouin had risen to his feet and was approaching her, moving with a little step over the matting on his way out of the church.  As he passed Mrs. Clarke he enveloped her for a moment in an indifferent glance of fire.  He burnt her with his animal disdain of her observation of him, a disdain which seemed to her impregnated with flame.  She felt the sands as he passed.  When he was gone a sensation of loneliness, even of desolation, oppressed her.

She hesitated for a moment; then she turned and followed him slowly.  He went before her, wrapped in his supreme indifference, through the Porta Basilica, and came out into the blaze of the sunshine.  As she emerged, she saw him standing quite still.  He seemed ­she was just behind him ­to be staring at a very fair woman who, accompanied by a guide, was coming towards the church.  Mrs. Clarke, intent on the Bedouin, was aware of this woman’s approach, but felt no sort of interest in her until she was quite close; then something, some dagger-thrust of the mind, coming from the woman, pierced Mrs. Clarke’s indifference.

She looked up and met the sad, pure eyes of Rosamund Leith.

For a moment she stood perfectly still gazing into those eyes.

Rosamund had stopped, but she made no gesture of recognition and did not open her lips.  She only looked at Mrs. Clarke, and as she looked a deep flush slowly spread over her face and down to her throat.

The Greek guide said something to her; she moved, lowered her eyes and went on into the church without looking back.

The Bedouin strode slowly away into the blaze of the sunshine.

Mrs. Clarke remained where she was, motionless.  For the first time perhaps in her life she was utterly amazed by an event.  Rosamund Leith here in Constantinople!  What did that mean?

Mrs. Clarke knew the arrival of Rosamund meant something that might be tremendously important to herself.  As she stood there before the church she was groping to find this something; but her mental faculties seemed to be paralyzed, and she could not find it.  Rosamund Leith’s eyes had told Mrs. Clarke something, that Rosamund knew of Dion’s unfaithfulness and who the woman was.  What did the fact of Rosamund’s coming to Constantinople in possession of that knowledge mean?

From the minaret above her head the muezzin in a piercing and nasal voice began the call to prayer.  His cry seemed to tear its way through Mrs. Clarke’s inertia.  Abruptly she was in full possession of her faculties.  That Eastern man up there, nearer to the blue than she was, cried, “Come to prayer!” But she had already uttered her prayer, and surely Rosamund Leith was the answer.

As she drove away towards the Golden Horn she passed the Bedouin striding along in the sun.

She looked at him, but he took no notice of her; the indifference of the desert was about him.

CHAPTER XIV

Mrs. Clarke was in her bedroom with the door open that evening when she heard a bell sound in the flat.  She had fixed eight for the dinner hour.  It was now only half-past six.  Nevertheless she felt sure that it was Dion who had just rung.  She went swiftly across the room and shut the bedroom door.  Two or three minutes later Sonia came in.

“Mr. Leith has come already, Madame,” she said, looking straight at her mistress.

“I expected him early, Sonia.  You can tell him I will come almost directly.”

“Yes, Madame.”

“Sonia, wait a minute!  How am I looking this evening?”

“How?” said Sonia, with rather heavy emphasis.

“Yes.  I feel ­feel as if I were looking unlike my usual self.”

Sonia stared hard at Mrs. Clarke.  Then she said: 

“So you are, Madame.”

“In what way?”

“You look almost excited and younger than usual.”

“Younger!”

“Yes, as if you were expecting something, almost as a girl expects.  I never saw you just like this before.”

Mrs. Clarke looked at herself in a mirror earnestly, and for a long time.

“That’s all, Sonia,” she said, turning round.  “You can tell Mr. Leith.”

Sonia went out.

Mrs. Clarke followed her ten minutes later.  When she came into the little hall she saw lying on a table beside Dion’s hat several letters.  She stopped by the table and looked down at them.  They lay there in a pile held together by an elastic band, and she could only see the writing on the envelope which was at the top.  It was addressed to Dion and had been through the post.  She wondered whether among those letters there was one from Rosamund.  Had she written to the husband whom she had cast out to tell him of the great change which had led her to give up the religious life, to come out to the land of the cypress?

Mrs. Clarke glanced round; then she bent down noiselessly, picked up the packet, slipped off the elastic band and examined the letters one by one.  She had never chanced to see Rosamund’s handwriting, but she felt sure she would know at once if she held in her hand the letter which might mean her own release.  She did not find it; but on two envelopes she saw Beatrice’s delicate handwriting, which she knew very well.  She longed to know what Beatrice had written.  With a sigh she slipped the elastic band back into its place, put the packet down and went into the drawing-room.

Directly she saw Dion she was certain that he knew nothing of the change in Rosamund’s life.  There was no excitement in his thin and wrinkled brown face; no expectation lit up his sunken eyes making them youthful.  He looked hard, wretched and strangely old, but ruthless and forceful in a kind of shuttered and ravaged way.  She thought of a ruined house with a cold strong light in the window.  He was sitting when she came in, leaning forward, with his hands hanging down between his knees.  When he saw her he got up slowly.

“I was near here and had nothing to do, so I came early,” he said, not apologetically, but carelessly.

He looked at her and added: 

“What’s happened to you to-day?”

“Nothing.  What an extraordinary question!”

“Is it?  You look different.  There’s a change.”

A suspicious expression made his face ugly.

“Have you met any one?”

“Of course.  How can one go out in Constantinople without meeting people?”

“Any one new, I meant.”

“No.”

“You look as if you had.”

“Do I?” she said, with indifference.

“Yes.  You look ­I don’t know ­”

He paused.

“I think it’s younger,” he added.  “You never are tired or ill, but you generally look both.  To-day you don’t.”

“Please don’t blame me for looking moderately well for once in my life.”

“Why did you ask me to dinner here?”

The sound of his voice was as suspicious as the expression on his face.

“Oh, I don’t know.  Once in a while it doesn’t matter.  And all the servants have gone away to Buyukderer.”

“Then you are going there?”

“I’m not sure if I shall be able to stay there for more than a few days if I do go.”

“Why not?” he said slowly.

“It’s just possible I may have to go over to England on business.  Something’s gone wrong with my money matters, not the money my husband allows me, but my own money.  I had a letter from my lawyer.”

“When?”

“To-day.”

He stood before her in silence.

“By the way,” she added, “I saw all those letters for you on the hall table.  Why don’t you read them?”

“Going to England, are you?” he said, frowning.

“I may have to.”

“Surely you must know from your lawyer’s letter whether it will be necessary or not.”

“I expect it will be necessary.”

He turned slowly away from her and went to the window, where he stood for a moment, apparently looking out.  She sat down on the sofa and glanced at the clock.  How were they to get through a long evening together?  She wished she could bring about a crisis in their relations abruptly.  Dion turned round.  He had his hands in his pockets.

“I wish you’d let me look at that lawyer’s letter,” he said.

“It wouldn’t interest you.”

“If it’s about money matters I might be able to help you.  You know they used to be my job.  Even now anything to do with investments ­”

“Oh, I won’t bother you,” she said coolly.  “I always do business through some one I can pay.”

“Well, you can pay me.”

“No, I can’t.”

“But I say you can.”

“How?” she said.

And instantly she regretted having asked the question.

He looked at her in silence for a minute, then he said: 

“By sticking always to me, by proving yourself loyal.”

Her mouth twitched.  The intense irony in the last word made her feel inclined to laugh hysterically.

“But you don’t always behave in such a way as to make me feel loyal,” she said, controlling herself.

“I’m going to try to be more clever with you in the future.”

She got up abruptly.

“I didn’t expect you quite so early, and I’ve got a letter to write to Jimmy ­”

“And a letter to your lawyer!” he interrupted.

“No, that can wait till to-morrow.  I must think things over.  But I must write to Jimmy now.”

“Give him a kind message from me.”

“What will you do while I am writing?”

“I’ll sit here.”

“But do something!  Why not read your letters?”

“Yes, I may as well look at them.  There was quite a collection waiting for me at the British Post Office.  I haven’t been there for months.”

“Why don’t you go more regularly?”

“Because I’ve done with the past!” he exclaimed, with sudden savagery.  “And letters from home only rake it up.”

She looked at him narrowly.

“But have we ever done with the past?” she said, with her eyes upon him.  “If we think so isn’t that a stupidity on our part?”

“You’re talking like a parson!”

“Even a parson may hit upon a truth now and then.”

“It depends upon oneself.  I say I have done with the past.”

“And yet you’re afraid to read letters from England.”

“I’m not.”

“And you never go to England.”

“There’s nothing to prevent me from going to England.”

“Except your own feelings about things.”

“One gets over feelings with the help of Time.  I’m not such a sensitive fool as I used to be.  Life has knocked all that sort of rot out of me.”

She sat down at the writing-table from which Jimmy’s photograph had vanished.

“Read your letters, or read a book,” she said.

And she picked up a pen.

She did not look at him again, and she tried hard to detach her mind from him.  She took a sheet of writing-paper, and began to write to Jimmy, but she was painfully aware of Dion’s presence in the room, of every slightest movement that he made.  She heard him sit down and move something on a table, then sigh; complete silence followed.  She felt as if her whole body were flushing with irritation.  Why didn’t he get his letters?  She was positive Beatrice had written to tell him that Rosamund had left the Sisterhood, and she was longing to know what effect that news would have upon him.

Presently he moved again and got up, and she heard him go over to the window.  She strove, with a bitter effort, to concentrate her thoughts on Jimmy, but now the Bedouin came between her and the paper; she saw him striding indifferently through the blaze of sunshine.

“About the summer holidays this year ­I am not quite sure yet what my plans will be ­” she wrote slowly.

Dion was moving again.  He came away from the window, crossed the room behind her, and opened the door.  He was going to fetch his letters.  She wrote hurriedly on.  He went out into the little hall and returned.

“I’m going to have a look at my letters,” he said, behind her.

She glanced round.

“What did you say?  Oh ­your letters.”

“They look pretty old,” he said, turning them over.

She saw Beatrice’s handwriting.

“Here’s one from Beatrice Daventry,” he added, in a hard voice.

“Does she often write to you?”

“She hasn’t written for a long time.”

He thrust a finger under the envelope.  Mrs. Clarke turned and again bent over her letter to Jimmy.

“Dinner is ready, Madame!”

Mrs. Clarke looked up from the writing-table at Sonia standing squarely in the doorway, then at the clock.

“Dinner!  But it’s only a quarter-past seven.”

“I thought you ordered it for a quarter-past seven, Madame,” replied Sonia, with quiet firmness.

“Oh, did I?  I’d forgotten.”

She pushed away the writing-paper and got up.

“D’you mind dining so early?” she asked Dion, looking at him for the first time since he had read his letters.

“No,” he replied, in a voice which had no color at all.  His face was set like a mask.

“Do you want to wash your hands?  If so, Sonia will bring you some hot water to the spare room.”

“Thanks, I’ll go; but I prefer cold water.”

He went out of the room carrying the opened letters with him.  After a moment Sonia came back.

“I hope I didn’t do wrong about dinner, Madame,” she said.  “I thought as Monsieur Leith came so early Madame would wish dinner earlier.”

Mrs. Clarke put her hand on her servant’s substantial arm.

“You always understand things, Sonia,” she said.  “I’m tired.  I mean to go to bed very early to-night.”

“But will he ?”

She raised her heavy eyebrows.

“I must rest to-night,” said Mrs. Clarke.  “I must, I must.”

“Let me tell him, then, if he ­”

“No, no.”

Mrs. Clarke put one hand to her lips.  She heard Dion in the hall.  When he came in she saw at once that he had been dashing cold water on his face.  His eyes fell before hers.  She could not divine what he had found in his letters or what was passing in his mind.

“Come to dinner,” she said.

And they went at once to the dining-room.

During the meal they talked because Mrs. Clarke exerted herself.  She was helped, perhaps, by her concealed excitement.  She had never before felt so excited, so almost feverishly alert in body and mind as she felt that night, except at the climax of her divorce case.  And she was waiting now for condemnation or acquittal as she had waited then.  It was horrible.  She was painfully conscious of a desperate strength in Dion.  It was as if he had grown abruptly, and she had as abruptly diminished.  His savage assertion about the past had impressed her disagreeably.  It might be true.  He might really have succeeded in slaying his love for his wife.  If so, what chance had the woman who had taken him of regaining her freedom of action.  She was afraid to play her last card.

When dinner was over Dion said: 

“Shall we be off?”

She did not ask where they were going; she had no need to ask.  After a moment’s hesitation she said: 

“Not just yet.  Come into the drawing-room.  You can smoke, and if you like I’ll play you something.”

“All right.”

They went into the drawing-room.  It was dimly lighted.  Blinds and curtains were drawn.  Dion sank down heavily in a chair.

“The cigarettes are there!”

“Yes, I see.  Thanks.”

A strange preoccupation seemed to be descending upon him and to be covering him up.  Sonia came in with coffee.  Dion put his cup, full, down beside him on a table.  He did not sip the coffee, nor did he light a cigarette.  While Mrs. Clarke was drinking her coffee he sat without uttering a word.

She went to the piano.  She played really well.  Otherwise she would not have played to him, or to any one.  She was specially at home in the music of Chopin, and had studied minutely many of the “Etudes.”  Now she began to play the Etude in E flat.  As she played she felt that the intense nervous irritation which had possessed her was diminishing slightly, was becoming more bearable.  She played several of the Etudes, and presently began the one in Thirds and Sixths which she had once found abominably difficult.  She remembered what a struggle she had had with it before she had conquered it.  She had been quite a girl then, but already she had been a worshipper of will-power, and had resolved to cultivate and to increase her own will.  And she had used this Etude as a means of testing herself.  Over and over again, when she had almost despaired of ever overcoming its difficulties, she had said to herself, “Vouloir c’est pouvoir;” and at last she had succeeded in playing the excessively difficult music as if it were quite easy to her.  That had been the first stepping upwards towards power.

She remembered that now and she set her teeth.  “Vouloir c’est pouvoir.”  She had proved the saying true again and again; she must prove it true to-night.  She willed her release; she would somehow obtain it.

Directly she finished the Etude she got up from the piano.

“You play that wonderfully well,” Dion said, with a sort of hard recognition of her merit, but with no enthusiasm.  “Do you know that there’s something damnably competent in you?”

She stood looking down on him.

“I’m very glad there is.  I don’t care to bungle what I undertake.”

“I believe I knew that the first time I saw you, standing by Echo.  You held my hand that day.  Do you remember?”

He laughed faintly.

“No, I don’t remember.”

“The hand of Stamboul was upon me then.  By God, we are under the yoke.  It was fated then that you should destroy me.”

“Destroy you?”

“Yes.  What’s the good of what lies between us?  You’ve destroyed me.  That’s why you want to get rid of me.  Your instinct tells you the work is done, and you’re right.  But you must stick to the wreckage.  After all, it’s your wreckage.”

“No.  A man can only destroy himself,” she said, with cold defiance.

“Don’t let’s argue about it.  The thing’s done ­done!”

In his voice there was a sound of almost wild despair, but his face preserved its hard, mask-like look.

“And there’s no returning from destruction,” he added.  “Those who try to fancy there is are just fools.”

He looked up at her as she stood before him, and seemed suddenly struck by the expression on her face.

“Who’s to be the one to destroy you?” he said.  “D’you think the Unknown God has singled me out for the job?  Or do you really expect to escape scot-free after making the sign of the cross over so many lost souls.”

“The sign of the cross?”

“Yes.  Don’t you remember when I told you of Brayfield’s death?  You’ve never given him a thought since, I suppose.  But I’ll make you keep on thinking about me.”

“What has happened to-night?” she asked sharply.

“Happened?”

“To make you talk like this?”

“Nothing has happened.”

“That’s not true.  Since you came into the house you’ve quite changed.”

“Merely because I’ve been reckoning things up, taking stock of the amount of damage that’s been done.  It’ll have to be paid for, I suppose.  Everything’s paid for in the end, isn’t it?  When are you going to England?”

“I didn’t say it was absolutely decided.”

“No; but it is.  I want to know the date, so that I may pack up to accompany you.  It will be jolly to see Jimmy again.  I shall run down to Eton and take him out.”

“I am not going to allow you to do me any harm.  Because lately I’ve given in to you sometimes, you mustn’t think you can make a slave of me.”

“And you mustn’t think you’ll get rid of me in one way if you can’t in another.  This English project is nothing but an attempt to give me the slip.  You thought I couldn’t face England, so you chose England as the place you would travel to.  You’ve never had a letter from your lawyer, and there’s no reason why you should go to England on business.  But I can face England.  I’ve never done anything there that I’m ashamed of.  My record there is a clean one.”

Suddenly he thrust his hand into his jacket and pulled out the letters he had brought from the British Post Office.

“And apart from that, you made a mistake in reckoning on my sensitiveness.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what you mean by that,” she said, with frigid calm.

“Yes, you do.  You thought I wouldn’t follow you to England because I should shrink from facing my mother, perhaps, and my wife’s relatives, and all the people who know what I’ve done.  I don’t shrink from meeting any one, and I’ll prove it to you.”

He pulled a letter out of its envelope.

“This is from Beatrice Daventry.  In it she tells me a piece of news.”  (He glanced quickly over the sheets.) “My wife has got tired of leading a religious life and has left the Sisterhood in which she was, and gone to live in London.  Here it is:  ’Rosamund is living once more in Great Cumberland Place with my guardian.  She never goes into society, but otherwise she is leading an ordinary life.  I am quite sure she will never go back to Liverpool.’ ­So if I go to London I may run across my wife any day.  Why not?”

“You wife has left the Sisterhood!” said Mrs. Clarke slowly, forcing a sound of surprise into her husky voice.

“I’ve just told you so.  You and I may meet her in London.  If we do, I should think she’ll be hard put to it to recognize me.  Now put on your things and we’ll be off.”

“I shall not go out to-night.  I intend ­”

She paused.

“What do you intend?”

“I don’t mean ever to go to those rooms again.”

“Indeed.  Why not?” he asked, with cold irony.

“I loathe them.”

“You found them.  You chose the furniture for them.  Your perfect taste made them what they are.”

“I tell you I loathe them!” she repeated violently.

“We’ll change them, then.  We can easily find some others that will do just as well.”

“Don’t you understand that I loathe them because I meet you in them?”

“I understood that a good while ago.”

“And yet you ­”

“My dear!” he interrupted her.  “Didn’t I tell you you had destroyed me?  The man I was might have bothered about trifles of that kind, the man I am simply doesn’t recognize them.  Jimmy hates me too, but I haven’t done with Jimmy yet, nevertheless.”

“You shall never meet Jimmy again.  I shall prevent it.”

“How can you?”

“You’re not fit to be with him.”

“But you have molded me into what I am.  He must get accustomed to his own mother’s handiwork.”

“Jimmy can’t bear you.  He told me so when he was last here.  He detests you.”

“Ah!” said Dion, with sudden savagery, springing up from his chair.  “So you and he have talked me over!  I was sure of it.  And no doubt you told Jimmy he was right in hating me.”

“I never discussed the matter with him at all.  I couldn’t prevent his telling me what he felt about you.”

Dion had become very pale.  He stood for a moment without speaking, clenching his hands and looking at her with blazing eyes.  For a moment she thought that perhaps he was going to strike her.  He seemed to be struggling desperately with himself, to be striving to conquer something within him.  At last he turned away from her.  She heard him twice mutter the name of her boy, “Jimmy!  Jimmy!” Then he went away from her to the far end of the room, where the piano was, and stood by it.  She saw his broad shoulders heaving.  He held on to the edge of the piano with both hands, leaning forward.  She stayed where she was, staring at him.  She realized that to-night he might be dangerous to her.  She had set out to defy him.  But she was not sure now whether, perhaps, gentleness and an air of great sincerity might not be the only effective weapons against him in his present abnormal condition.  Possibly even now it was not too late to use them.  She crossed the room and came to him swiftly.

“Dion!” she said.

He did not move.

“Dion!” she repeated, putting her hand on his shoulder.

He turned round.  His pale face was distorted.  She scarcely recognized him.

“Dion, let us look things in the face.”

“Oh, God ­that is what I’m doing,” he said.

His lips twisted, his face was convulsed.  She looked at him in silence, wondering what was going to happen.  For a moment she was almost physically afraid.  Something in him to-night struck hard upon her imagination and she felt as if it were trembling.

“Come and sit down,” he said, at last.

And she saw that for the moment he had succeeded in regaining self-control.

“Very well.”

She went to sit down; he sat opposite her.

“You hate me, don’t you?” he said.

She hesitated.

“Don’t you?” he repeated.

“We needn’t use ugly words,” she said at last.

“For ugly things?  I believe it’s best.  You hate me and I hate you.  D’you know why I hate you?  Not because you deliberately made me care for you with my body, in the beastly, wholly physical way, but because you wouldn’t let the other thing alone.”

“The other thing?”

“Haven’t we got something else as well as the body?  Look here ­before I ever knew you I was always trying to build.  At first I tried to build for a possible future which might never come.  Well, it did come, and I was glad I’d stuck to my building ­sometimes when it was difficult.  Then I tried to build for ­for my wife ­and then my child came and I tried to build for him, too.  So it went on.  I was always building, or trying to.  In South Africa I was doing it, and I came back feeling as if I’d got something to show, not much, but something, for my work.  Then the crash came, and I thought I knew sorrow and horror down to the bones.  But I didn’t.  I’ve only got to know them to the bones here.  You’ve made me know them.  If you’d loved me I should never have complained, have attacked you, been brutal to you; but when I think that you’ve never cared a rap about me, never cared for anything but my body, and that ­that ­” his voice broke for a moment; then he recovered himself and went on, more harshly, ­“and that merely from desire, or whatever you choose to call it, you’ve sent the last stones of my building to dust, I sometimes feel as if I could murder you.  If you meant to kick me out and be free of me when you had had enough of me, you should never have brought Jimmy into the matter; for in a way you could never understand Jimmy was linked up with my boy, with Robin.  When you made me earn Jimmy’s hatred by being utterly false to all I really was, you separated me from my boy.  I killed him, but till then I was sometimes near him.  Ever since that night of lying and dirty pretense he’s ­he’s ­I’ve lost him.  You’ve taken my boy from me.  Why should I leave you yours?”

“But you’re mad ­when my boy’s alive and ­”

“And so’s mine!”

She stared at him in silence.

“You can’t give him back to me.  Jimmy shrinks from me not because of what I’ve done, but because of what I’ve become, and my boy feels as Jimmy does.  He ­he ­”

Mrs. Clarke pushed back her chair bruskly.  She was now feeling really afraid.  She longed to call in Sonia.  She wished the other servants were in the flat instead of at Buyukderer.

“You boy’s dead,” she said, dully, obstinately.  “Jimmy has nothing to do with him ­never had anything to do with him.  And as for me, I have never interfered between you and your child.”

She got up.  So did he.

“Never, never!” she repeated.  “But your mind is warped and you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I do.  But we won’t argue about it.  You’re a materialist and you can’t understand the real things.”

His own words seemed suddenly to strike upon him like a great blow.

“The real things!” he exclaimed.  “I’ve lost them all for ever.  But I’ll keep what I’ve got.  I’ll keep what I’ve got.  You hate me and I hate you, but we belong to each other and we’ll stick together, and Jimmy must make up his mind to it.  Once you said that if he was twenty-one you’d tell him all about it.  If you’re going to England I’ll go there too, and we can enlighten Jimmy a little sooner.  Now let us be off to the rooms.  As you’ve taken a dislike to them we’ll give them up.  But we must pay a last visit to them, a visit of good-bye.”

She shuddered.  The thought of being shut up alone with him horrified her imagination.  She waited a moment; then she said: 

“Very well.  I’ll go and put on my things.”

And she went out of the room.  She wanted to gain time, to be alone for a moment.

When she was in her bedroom she did not summon Sonia, who was in the kitchen washing up.  Slowly she went to get out a wrap and a hat.  Standing before the glass she adjusted the hat on her head carefully, adroitly; then she drew the wrap around her shoulders and picked up a pair of long gloves.  After an instant of hesitation she began to pull them on.  The process took several minutes.  She was careful to smooth out every wrinkle.  While she did so she was thinking of Rosamund Leith.

All through the evening she had been on the verge of telling Dion that his wife was in Constantinople, but something had held her back.  And even now she could not make up her mind whether to tell him or not.  She was afraid to risk the revelation because she did not know at all how he would take it.  When he knew she might be free.  There was the possibility of that.  He must realize, he would surely be obliged to realize, that his wife could have but one purpose in deliberately traveling out to the place where he was living.  She must be seeking a reconciliation, in spite of the knowledge which Mrs. Clarke had read in her eyes that day.  But would Dion face those eyes with the hard defiance of one irreparably aloof from his former life?  If he were really ready and determined to show himself in London as the lover of another woman would he not be ready to do the same thing here in Constantinople?

To tell him seemed to Mrs. Clarke the one chance of escape for her now, but she was afraid to tell him because she was afraid to know that what seemed the only possible avenue to freedom was barred against her.  She had said to herself at the piano “Vouloir c’est pouvoir,” and she had determined to be free, but again Dion’s will of a desperate man had towered up over hers.  It was the fact that he was desperate which gave to him this power.

At last the gloves lay absolutely smooth on her hands and arms, and she went back to the drawing-room.  Till she opened the door of it she did not know what she was going to do.

“So you’re dressed!” Dion said as she came in.  “That’s right.  Let’s be off.”

“What is the good of going?  You have said we hate each other.  How can this sort of thing go on in hatred?  Dion, let us give it all up.”

“Why have you put on your things?”

“I don’t know.  Let us say good-by to-night, and not in anger.  We were not suited to be together for long.  We are too different.”

“How many men have you said all this to already?  Come along!”

He took her firmly by the wrist.

“Wait, Dion!”

“Why should we wait?”

“There’s something I must tell you before we go.”

He kept his hand on her wrist.

“Well?  What is it?”

“I went to Santa Sophia to-day.”

As she spoke the Bedouin came before her again.  She saw his bronze-colored arms and his bird-like eyes.

“Santa Sophia!  Did you go to pray?”

She stared at him.  His lips were curled in a smile.

“No,” she said.  “But I like to go there sometimes.  As I was coming away I met some one.”

“Well?”

“Some one you know ­a woman.”

“A woman?  Lady Ingleton?”

“No; your wife.”

The fingers which held her wrist became suddenly cold, but they still pressed firmly upon her flesh.

“That’s a lie!” he said hoarsely.

“It isn’t!”

“How dare you tell me such a lie?”

He bent and gazed into her eyes.

“Liar!  Liar!”

But though his lips made the assertion, his eyes, in agony, seemed to be asking a question.  He seized her other wrist.

“What’s your object in telling me such a lie?  What are you trying to gain by it?  Do you think you’ll get rid of me for to-night, and that to-morrow, by some trick, you’ll escape from me forever?  D’you think that?”

“I met your wife to-day just outside Santa Sophia,” she said steadily.  “When she saw me she stopped.  We looked at each other for a minute.  Neither of us spoke a word.  But she told me something.”

“Told you . . . ?”

“With her eyes.  She knows about you and me.”

His hands fell from her wrists.  By the look in his eyes she saw that he was beginning to believe her.

“She knows,” Mrs. Clarke repeated.  “And yet she had come here.  What does that mean?”

“What does that mean?” he repeated, in a muttering voice.

“Do you believe what I say?”

“Yes; she is here.”

A fierce wave of red went over his face.  For a moment his eyes shone.  Then a look of despair and horror made him frightful, and stirred even in her a sensation of pity.

He began to tremble.

“Don’t!  Don’t!” she said, putting out her hands and moving away.

“She can’t know!” he said, trembling more violently.

“She does know.”

“She wouldn’t have come.  She doesn’t know.  She doesn’t know.”

“She does know.  Now I’m ready, if you want to go to the rooms.”

Dion went white to the lips.  He came towards her.  His eyes were so menacing that she felt sure he was going to do her some dreadful injury; but when he was close to her he controlled himself and stood still.  For what seemed to her a very long time he stood there, looking at her as a man looks at the heap of his sins when the sword has cloven a way into the depths of his spirit.  Then he said: 

“You’re free.”

He went out of the room, leaving the door open.  A moment later Mrs. Clarke heard the front door shut, and his footsteps on the stone stairs outside.  They died away.

Then she began to sob.  She felt shaken and frightened almost like a child.  But presently her sobs ceased.  She took off her hat and wrap and her gloves, lay down on the sofa, put her hands behind her small head, and, motionless, gazed at the pale gray wall of the room.  It seemed to fade away after she had gazed at it for two or three minutes; a world opened out before her, and she saw a barrier, like a long deep trench, stretching into a far distance.  On one side of this trench stood a boy with densely thick hair and large hands and frank, observant eyes; on the other stood a Bedouin of the desert.

Then she shuddered.  Dion had told her she was free.  But was she free? 
Could she ever be free now?

Suddenly she broke into a passion of tears.  She was inundated with self-pity.  She had prayed to the Unknown God.  He had answered her prayer, but nevertheless, he had surely cursed her.  For love and lust were at merciless war within her.  She was tormented.

That night she knew she had run up a debt which she would be forced to pay; she knew that her punishment was beginning.

CHAPTER XV

When Dion came out into the street he stood still on the pavement.  It was between ten and eleven o’clock.  Stamboul, the mysterious city, was plunged in darkness, but Pera was lit and astir, was full of blatant and furtive activities.  He listened to its voices as he stood under the stars, and presently from them the voice of a woman detached itself, and said clearly and with a sort of beautifully wondering slowness, “I can see the Pleiades.”

Tears started into his eyes.  He was afraid of that voice and yet his whole being longed desperately to hear it again.  The knowledge that Rosamund was here in Constantinople, very near to him ­how it had changed the whole city for him!  Every light that gleamed, every sound that rose up, seemed to hold for him a terrible vital meaning.  And he knew that all the time he had been living in Constantinople it had been to him a horrible city of roaring emptiness, and he knew that now, in a moment, it had become the true center of the world.  He was amazed and he was horrified by the power and intensity of the love within him.  In this moment he knew it for an undying thing.  Nothing could kill it, no act of Rosamund’s, no act of his.  Even lust had not suffocated the purity of it, even satiety of the flesh had not lessened the yearning of it, or availed to deprive it of its ardent simplicity, of its ideal character.  In it there was still the child with his wonder, the boy with his stirring aspirations towards life, the man with his full-grown passion.  He had sought to kill it and he had not even touched it.  He knew that now and was shaken by the knowledge.  Where did it dwell then, this thing that governed him and that he could not break?  He longed to get at it, to seize it, hold it to some fierce light, examine it.  And then?  Would he wish to cast it away?

“I can see the Pleiades.”

For a moment the peace of Olympia was about him, and he heard the voices of Eternity whispering among the pine trees.  Then the irreparable blotted out that green beauty, that message from the beyond; reality rushed upon him.  He turned and looked at the building he had just left.  It towered above him, white, bare, with its rows of windows.  He knew that he would never go into it again, that he had done forever with the woman in there who hated him.  Yes, he had done with her insomuch as a man can finish with any one who has been closely, intimately, for good or for evil, in his life.  As he watched her windows for a moment his mind reviewed swiftly his connection with her, from the moment when she had held his hand indifferently, yet with intention, in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room, till the moment, just past, when he had said to her, “You are free.”  And he knew that from the first moment when she had seen him she had made up her mind that some day he should be her lover.  He hated her, and yet he knew now that in some strange and obscure way he almost respected her, for her determination, her unscrupulous courage, her will to live as she chose to live.  She at any rate possessed a kind of evil strength.  And he ?

Slowly he turned away from that house.  He did not know where Rosamund was staying, but he thought she was probably at the Hotel de Byzance, and he walked almost mechanically towards it.  He was burning with excitement, and yet there was within him something cold, capable and relentless, which considered him almost as a judge considers a criminal, which seemed to be probing into the rotten part of his nature, determined to know once and for all just how rotten it was.  Rosamund surely was strong in her goodness as Mrs. Clarke was strong in her evil.  He had known the cruelty of both those strengths.  And why?  Surely because he himself had never been really strong.  Intensity of feeling had constantly betrayed him into weakness.  And even now was it not weakness in him, this inability to leave off loving Rosamund after all that had happened?  Perhaps the power of feeling intensely was the great betrayer of a man.

He descended the Grande Rue, moving in the midst of a press of humanity, but strongly conscious only of Rosamund’s nearness to him, until at last he was in front of the Hotel de Byzance.  He stood on the opposite side of the way, looking at the lighted windows, at the doorway through which people came and went.  Was she in there, close to him?  Why had she come to Constantinople?

She must have come there because of him.  There could not surely be any other reason for her traveling so far to the city where she knew he was living.  But then she must have repented of her cruelty after the death of Robin, have thought seriously of resuming her married life.  It must be so.  Inexorably Dion’s reason led him to that conclusion.  Having reached it he looked at himself, and again his own weakness confronted him like a specter which would not leave him, which dogged him relentlessly down all the ways of his life.  Prompted, governed by that weakness, which he had actually mistaken madly for strength, for an assertion of his manhood, he had raised up between Rosamund and himself perhaps the only barrier which could never be broken down, the barrier of a great betrayal.  What she had most cared for in him he had trampled into the dirt; he had slain the purity which had drawn her to him.

Mrs. Clarke had said that Rosamund knew of their connexion.  He believed her.  He could not help trusting her horrible capacity to read such a truth in another woman’s eyes.  It must be so.  Rosamund surely could only have learned in Constantinople the horrible truth which would forever divide them.  She must have traveled out with the intention of seeing him again, of telling him that she repented of what she had done, and then in the city which had seen his degradation she must have found out what he was.

He saw her outraged, bitterly ashamed of having made the long journey to seek a man who had betrayed her; he saw her wounded in the soul.  She had wounded him in the soul, but at this moment he scarcely thought of that.  The knowledge that she was near to him seemed to have suddenly renewed the pure springs of his youth.  When Cynthia Clarke had said, “Now I’m ready if you want to go to the rooms,” she had received her freedom from the Dion who had won Rosamund, not from the withered and embittered man upon whom she had perversely seized in his misery and desolation.

That Rosamund should travel to him and then know him for what he was!  All his intense bitterness against her was swept away by the flood of his hatred of himself.

Suddenly the lights of the city seemed to fade before his eyes and the voices of the city seemed to lose their chattering gaiety.  Darkness and horrible mutterings were about him.  He heard the last door closing against him.  He accounted himself from henceforth among the damned.  Lifting his head he stared for a moment at the Hotel de Byzance.  Now he felt sure that she was there.  He knew that she was there, and he bade her an eternal farewell.  Not she ­as for so long he had thought ­but he had broken their marriage.  She had sinned in the soul.  But to-night he did not see her sin.  He saw only his black sin of the body, the irreparable sin he had committed against her shining purity to which he had been united.

How could he have committed that sin?

He turned away from the hotel, and went down towards his lodgings in Galata; he felt as he walked, like one treading a descent which led down into eternal darkness.

How had he come to do what he had done?

Already he saw Cynthia Clarke as something far away, an almost meaningless phantom.  He wondered why he had felt power in her; he wondered what it was that had led him to her, had kept him beside her, had bound him to her.  She was nothing.  She had never really been anything to him.  And yet she had ruined his life.  He saw her pale and haggard face, her haunted cheeks and temples, the lovely shape of her head with its cloud of unshining hair, her small tenacious hands.  He saw her distinctly.  But she was far away, utterly remote from him.  She had meant nothing to him, and yet she had ruined him.  Let her go.  Her work was done.

It was near midnight when he went at last to his lodgings, which were in a high house not far from the Tophane landing.  From his windows he could see the Golden Horn, and the minarets and domes of Stamboul.  His two rooms, though clean, were shabbily furnished and unattractive.  He had a Greek servant who came in every day to do what was necessary.  He never received any visitors in these rooms, which he had taken when he gave up going into the society of the diplomats and others, to whom he had been introduced at Buyukderer.

His feet echoed on the dirty staircase so he mounted slowly up till he stood in front of his own door.  Slowly, like one making an effort that was almost painful to him he searched for his key and drew it out.  His hand shook as he inserted the key into the keyhole.  He tried to steady his hand, but he could not control its furtive and perpetual movement.  When the door was open he struck a match, and lit a candle that stood on a chair in the dingy and narrow lobby.  Then he turned round wearily to shut the door.  He was possessed by a great fatigue, and wondered whether, if he fell on his bed in the blackness, he would be able to sleep.  As he turned, he saw, lying on the matting at his feet, a square white envelope.  It was lying upside down.  Some one must have pushed it under the door while he was out.

He stood looking at it for a minute.  Then he shut the door, bent down, picked up the envelope, turned it over and held it near the candle flame.  He read his name and the handwriting was Rosamund’s.

After a long pause he took the candle and carried the letter into his sitting-room.  He set the candle down on the table on which lay “The Kasidah” and a few other books, laid the letter beside it, with trembling hands drew up a chair and sat down.

Rosamund had written to him.  When?  Before she had learnt the truth or afterwards?

For a long time he sat there, leaning over the table, staring at the address which her hand had written.  And he saw her hand, so different from Mrs. Clarke’s, and he remembered its touch upon his, absolutely unlike the touch of any other hand ever felt by him.  Something quivered in his flesh.  The agony of the body rushed upon him and mingled with the agony of the soul.  He bent down, laid his hot forehead against the letter, and shut his eyes.

A clock struck presently.  He opened his eyes, lifted his head, took up the envelope, quickly tore it, and unfolded the paper within.

“HOTEL DE BYZANCE, CONSTANTINOPLE, Wednesday evening

“I am here.  I want to see you.  Shall I come to you to-morrow?  I can come at any time, or I can meet you at any place you choose.  Only tell me the hour and how to go if it is difficult.

“ROSAMUND.”

Wednesday evening!  It was now the night of Wednesday.  Then Rosamund had written to him after she had been to Santa Sophia and had met Mrs. Clarke.  She knew, and yet she wrote to him; she asked to see him; she even offered to come to his rooms.  The thing was incomprehensible.

He read the note again.  He pored over every word in it almost like a child.  Then he held it in his hand, sat back in his chair and wondered.

What did Rosamund mean?  Why did she wish to see him?  What could she intend to do?  His intimate knowledge of what Rosamund was companioned him at this moment ­that knowledge which no separation, which no hatred even, could ever destroy.  She was fastidiously pure.  She could never be anything else.  He could not conceive of her ever drawing near to, and associating herself deliberately with, bodily degradation.  He thought of her as he had known her, with her relations, her friends, with himself, with Robin.  Always in every relation of life a radiant purity had been about her like an atmosphere; always she had walked in rays of the sun.  Until Robin had died!  And then she had withdrawn into the austere purity of the religious life.  He felt it to be absolutely impossible that she should seek him, even seek but one interview with him, if she knew what his life had been during the last few months.  And, feeling that, he was now forced to the conclusion that Mrs. Clarke’s intuition had gone for once astray.  If Rosamund knew she would never have written that note.  Again he looked at it, read it.  It must have been written in complete ignorance.  Mrs. Clarke had made a mistake.  Perhaps she had been betrayed into error by her own knowledge of guilt.  And yet such a lapse was very uncharacteristic of her.  He compared his knowledge of her with his knowledge of Rosamund.  It was absolutely impossible that Rosamund had written that letter to him with full understanding of his situation in Constantinople.  But she might have heard rumors.  She might have resolved to clear them up.  Having traveled out with the intention of seeking a reconciliation she might have thought it due to him to accept evil tidings of him only from his own lips.  Always, he knew, she had absolutely trusted in his loyalty and faithfulness to her.  Perhaps then, even though she had put him out of her life, she was unable to believe that he had tried to forget her in unfaithfulness.  Perhaps that was the true explanation of her conduct.

Could he then save himself from destruction by a great lie?

He sat pondering that problem, oblivious of time.  Could he lie to Rosamund?  All his long bitterness against her for the moment was gone, driven out by his self-condemnation.  A great love must forgive.  It cannot help itself.  It carries within it, as a child is carried in the womb, the sweet burden of divinity, and shares in the attributes of God.  So it was with Dion on that night as he sat in his dingy room.  And presently his soul rejected the lie he had abominably thought of.  He knew he could not tell Rosamund a life.  Then what was he to do?

He drew out of a drawer a piece of letter paper, dipped a pen in ink.  He had a mind to write the horrible truth which he could surely never speak.

“I have received your letter,” he wrote, in a blurred and unsteady handwriting.  Then he stopped.  He stared at the paper, pushed it away from him, and got up.  He could not write the truth.  He went to the window and looked out into the dark night.  Here and there he saw faint lights.  But Stamboul was almost hidden in the gloom, a city rather suggested by its shadow than actually visible.  The Golden Horn was a tangled mystery.  There were some withdrawn stars.

Should he not reply to Rosamund’s letter?  If she had heard rumors about his life would not his silence convey to her the fact that they were true?  He had perhaps only to do nothing and Rosamund would understand and ­would leave Constantinople.

The blackness which shrouded Stamboul suddenly seemed to him to become more solid, impregnable.  He felt that his own life would be drowned in blackness if Rosamund went away.  And abruptly he knew that he must see her.  Whatever the cost, whatever the shame and bitterness, he must see her at once.  He would tell her, or try to tell her, what he had been through, what he had suffered, why he had done what he had done.  Possibly she would be able to understand.  If only he could find the words that would give her the inner truth perhaps they might reach her heart.  Something intense told him that he must try to make her understand how he had loved her, through all his hideous attempts to slay his love of her.  Could a woman understand such a thing?  Desperately he wondered.  Might not his terrible sincerity perhaps overwhelm her doubts?

He left the window, sat down again at the table, and wrote quickly.

“I have your letter.  Will you meet me to-morrow at Eyub, in the cemetery on the hill?  I will be near the Tekkeh of the dancing Dervishes.  I will be there before noon, and will wait all day.

“DION”

When he began to write he knew that he could not make his confession to Rosamund within the four walls of his sordid and dingy room.  Her power to understand would surely be taken from her there.  Might it not be released under the sky of morning, within sight of those minarets which he had sometimes feared, but which he had always secretly, in some obscure way, loved even in the most abominable moments of his abominable life, as he had always secretly, beneath all the hard bitterness of his stricken heart, loved Rosamund?  From them came the voice which would not be gainsaid, the voice which whispered, “In the East thou shalt find me if thou hast not found me in the West.”  Might not that voice help him when he spoke to Rosamund, help her to understand him, help her perhaps even to ­

But there he stopped.  He dared not contemplate the possibility of her being able to accept the man he had become as her companion.  And yet now he felt himself somehow closely akin to the former Dion, flesh of that man’s flesh, bone of his bone.  It was as if his sin fell from him when he so utterly repented of it.

Slowly he put the note he had written into an envelope, sealed it and wrote the address ­“Mrs. Dion Leith, Hotel de Byzance.”  He blotted it.  Then he fetched his hat and stick.  He meant to take the note himself to the Hotel de Byzance.  The night might be made for sleep, but he knew he could not sleep till he had seen Rosamund.  When he was out in the air, and was walking uphill towards Pera, he realized that within him, in spite of all, something of hope still lingered.  Rosamund’s letter to him had wrought already a wonderful change in his tortured life.  The knowledge that he would see her again, be with her alone, even if only for an hour, even if only that he might tell her what would alienate her from him forever, thrilled through him, seemed even to shed a fierce strength and alertness through his body.  Now that he was going to see her once more he knew what the long separation from her had meant to him.  He had known the living death.  Within a few hours he would have at least some moments of life.  They would be terrible moments, shameful ­but they would take him back into life.  Fiercely, passionately, he looked forward to them.

He left his letter at the hotel, giving it into the hands of a weary Albanian night porter.  Then he returned to his rooms, undressed, washed in cold water, and lay down on his bed.  And presently he was praying in the dark, instinctively almost as a child prays.  He was praying for the impossible.  For he believed that it was absolutely impossible the Rosamund could ever forgive him for what he had done, and yet he prayed that she might forgive him.  And he felt as if he were praying with all his body as well as with all his soul.

In the dawn he was tired.  But he did not sleep at all.

About ten o’clock he went out to take the boat to Eyub.

CHAPTER XVI

At a few minutes past eleven Dion was in the vast cemetery on the hill.  It was a gray morning, still and hot.  Languor was in the air.  The grayness, the silence, the oily waters, suggested a brooding resignation.  The place of the dead was almost deserted.  He wandered through it, and met only two or three Turks, who returned his glance impassively.  After the sleepless night he had come out feeling painfully excited and scarcely master of himself.  In Galata and on the boat he had not dared to look into the eyes of those who thronged about him.  He had felt transparent, as if all his thoughts and his tumultuous feelings must be visible to any one who regarded him with attention.  But now he was encompassed by a sensation of almost dull calmness.  He looked at the grayness and at the innumerable graves, he was conscious of the stagnant heat, he seemed to draw into himself the wide silence, and the excitement faded out of him, was replaced by a curious inertia.  Both his mind and his body felt tired and resigned.  The gravestones suggested death, the end of the early hopes, aspirations, yearnings and despairs of men.  A few bones and a headstone ­to that he was traveling.  And yet all through the night he had been on fire with longing, and with a fear that had seemed almost red hot.  Now he thought he perhaps understood the fatalism of the Turk.  Whatever must be must be.  All was written surely from the beginning.  It was written that to-day he should be alone in the cemetery of Eyub, and it was written that Rosamund should come to him there, or not come to him.

If she did not come?

He remembered the exact wording of his letter to her, and he realized for the first time that in her letter she had asked him to tell her how to go to their meeting-place “if it is difficult,” and he had not told her what she had to do in order to come to Eyub.

But of course she had a dragoman, and he would bring her.  She could not possibly come alone.

Perhaps, however, she would not come.

Long ago she had opened and read his letter and had taken her decision.  If she was coming, probably she was already on the way.  He forced himself to imagine the whole day passed by him alone in the cemetery, the light failing as the evening drew on, the darkness of night swallowing up Stamboul, the knowledge forced upon him that Rosamund had abandoned the idea of seeing him again.  He imagined himself returning to Constantinople in the night, going to the Hotel de Byzance and learning that she had left by the Orient express of that day for England.

What would he feel?

A handful of bones and a headstone!  Whatever happened to-day, and in the future, he was on his way to just that.  Then, why agonize, why allow himself to be riven and tormented by longings and fears that seemed born out of something eternal?  Perhaps, indeed, there was nothing at all after this short life was ended, nothing but the blank grayness of eternal unconsciousness.  If so, how little even his love for Rosamund meant.  It must be some bodily attraction, some imperious call to his flesh which he had mistaken for a far greater thing.  Men, perhaps, are merely tricked by those longings of theirs which seem defiant of time, by those passionate tendernesses in which eternity seems breathing.  All that they think they live by may be illusion.

Mechanically, as the minutes drew on towards noon, he walked towards the Tekkeh of the Dervishes.  Once he had come here to meet Cynthia Clarke, and now he had deliberately chosen the same place for the terrible interview with his wife.  It could only be terrible.  He did not know what he was going to do and say when she came (if she did come), but he did know that somehow he would tell her the whole truth about himself, without, of course, mentioning the name of a woman.  He would lay bare his soul.  It was fitting that he should confess his sin in the place of its beginnings.  He had begun to sin against the woman whom he could never unlove here in this wilderness of the dead, when he had spoken against her to the woman who had long ago resolved some day to make him sin. (He told himself now that he had definitely spoken against Rosamund.) In this sad place of disordered peace, under the gray, and within sight of the minarets lifted to the Unknown God, he had opened the book of evil things; in this place he would close it forever ­if Rosamund came.  He felt now that there was something within him which, despite all his perversity, all that he had given himself to in the fury of the flesh, was irrevocably dedicated to that which was sane, clean and healthy.  By this he was resolved to live henceforth, not because of any religious feeling, not because of any love of that Unknown God who ­so he supposed ­had flung him into the furnace of suffering as refuse may be flung into a fire, but because he now began to understand that this dedicated something was really Him, was of the core of his being, not to be rooted out.  He had left Cynthia Clarke.  In a short time ­before the gray faded over the minarets of Stamboul ­Rosamund would have done with him forever.  He faced complete solitude, the wilderness without any human soul, good or bad, to keep him company; but he faced it with a sort of hard and final resignation.  By nightfall he would have done with it all.  And then ­the living Death?  Yes, no doubt that would be his portion.  He smiled faintly as he thought of his furious struggle against just that.

“It was written,” he thought.  “Everything is written.  But we are tricked into a semblance of vigorous life and energy by our great delusion that we possess free will.”

He sat down beneath a cypress and remained quite still, looking downward towards the water, downward along the path by which, if Rosamund came, she would ascend the hill towards him.

It was nearly noon when he saw below him on this path the figure of a woman walking slowly.  She was followed by a man.

Dion got up.  He could not really see who this woman was, but he knew who she was.  Instantly he knew.  And instantly all the calm, all the fatalism of which for a moment he had believed himself possessed, all the brooding resignation of the man who says to his soul, “It is written!” was swept away.  He stood there, bare of his pretenses, and he knew himself for what he was, just a man who was the prisoner of a great love, a man shaken by the tempest of his feeling, a man who would, who must, fight against the living Death which, only a moment before, he had been contemplating even with a smile.

She had come, and with her life.

He put one arm against the seamed trunk of the cypress.  Mechanically, and unaware what he was doing, he had taken off his hat.  He held it in his hand.  All the change which sorrow and excess had wrought upon him was exposed for Rosamund to see.  She had last seen him plainly as he drove away with little Robin from the Green Court of Welsley on that morning of fate.  Now at last she was to see him again as she had remade him.

She came on slowly.  Presently she turned to her Greek dragoman.

“Where’s the Tekkeh?  Is it much farther?”

“No, Madame.”

He pointed.  As he did so Rosamund saw Dion’s figure standing against the cypress.  She stood still.  Her face was white and drawn, but full of an almost flaming resolution.  The mysticism which at moments Dion had detected in her expression, in her eyes, during the years passed with her, a mysticism then almost evasive, subtly withdrawn, shone now, like a dominating quality which scorned to hide itself, or perhaps could not hide itself.  She looked like a woman under the influence of a fixed purpose, fascinated, drawn onward, almost in ecstasy, and yet somehow, somewhere, tormented.

“Please go back to the foot of the hill,” she said to the Greek who was with her.

“But, Madame, I dare not leave you alone here.”

“I shall not be alone.”

The Greek looked surprised.

“Some one is waiting for me, up there, by that cypress ­a ­a friend.”

“Oh ­I see, Madame.”

With a look of intense comprehension he turned to go.

“At the foot of the hill, please!” said Rosamund.

“Certainly, Madame.”

The dragoman was smiling as he walked away.  Rosamund stood still watching him till he was out of sight.  Then she turned.  The figure of a man was still standing motionless under the old cypress tree among the graves.  She set her lips together and went towards it.  Now that she saw Dion, even though he was in the distance, she felt again intensely, as if in her flesh, the bodily wrong he had done to her.  She strove not to feel this.  She told herself that, after her sin against him, she had no right to feel it.  In her heart she knew that she was the greater sinner.  She realized now exactly the meaning of what she had done.  She had no more illusions about herself, about her conduct.  She condemned herself utterly.  She had come to that place of the dead absolutely resolved to ask forgiveness of Dion.  And yet now that she saw his body the sense of personal outrage woke in her, gripped her.  She grew hot, she tingled.  A fierce jealousy of the flesh tormented her.  And suddenly she was afraid of herself.  Was her body then more powerful than her soul?  Was she, who had always cared for the things of the soul hopelessly physical?  It seemed to her that even now she might succumb to what she supposed was an overwhelming personal pride, that even now she might be unable to do what she had come all the long way from England to do.  But she forced herself to go onward up the path.  She looked down; she would not see that body of a man which had belonged to her and to which she had belonged; but she made herself go towards it.

Presently she felt that she was drawing near to it; then that she was close to it.  Then she stopped.  Standing still for a moment she prayed.  She prayed that she might be able in this supreme crisis of her life to govern the baser part of herself, that she might be allowed, might be helped, to rise to those heights of which Father Robertson had spoken to her, that she might at last realize the finest possibilities of her nature, that she might be able to do the most difficult thing, to be humble, to forget any injury which had been inflicted upon herself, and to remember only the tremendous injury she had inflicted upon another.  When her prayer was finished she did not know whether it had been heard, whether, if it had been heard, it had been accepted and would be granted.  She did not know at all what she would be able to do.  But she looked up and saw Dion.  He was close to her, was standing just in front of her, with one arm holding the cypress trunk, trembling slightly and gazing at her, gazing at her with eyes that were terrible because they revealed so much of agony, of love and of terror.  She looked into those eyes, she looked at the frightful change written on the face that had once been so familiar to her, and suddenly an immense pity inundated her.  It seemed to her that she endured in that moment all the suffering which Dion had endured since the tragedy at Welsley added to her own suffering.  She stood there for a moment looking at him.  Then she said only: 

“Forgive me, oh, forgive me!”

Tears rushed into her eyes.  She had been able to say it.  It had not been difficult to say.  She could not have said anything else.  And her soul had said it as well as her lips.

“Forgive me!  Forgive me!” she repeated.

She went up to Dion, took his poor tortured temples, from which the hair, once so thick, had retreated, in her hands, and whispered again in the midst of her tears: 

“Forgive me!”

“I’ve been false to you,” he said huskily.  “I’ve broken my vow to you.  I’ve lived with another woman ­for months.  I’ve been a beast.  I’ve wallowed.  I’ve gone right down.  Everything horrible ­I’ve ­I’ve done it.  Only last night I meant to ­to ­I only broke away from it all last night.  I heard you were here and then I ­I ­”

“Forgive me!”

She felt as if God were speaking in her, through her.  She felt as if in that moment God had taken complete possession of her, as if for the first time in her life she was just an instrument, formed for the carrying out of His tremendous purposes, able to carry them out.  Awe was upon her.  But she felt a strange joy, and even a wonderful sense of peace.

“But you don’t hear what I tell you.  I have been false to you.  I have sinned against you for months and months.”

“Hush!  It was my sin.”

“Yours?  Oh, Rosamund!”

She was still holding his temples.  He put his hands on her shoulders.

“Yes, it was my sin.  I understand now how you love me.  I never understood till to-day.”

“Yes, I love you.”

“Then,” she said, very simply.  “I know you will be able to forgive me.  Don’t tell me any more ever about what you have done.  It’s blotted out.  Just forgive me ­and let us begin again.”

She took away her hands from his temples.  He did not kiss her, but he took one of her hands, and they stood side by side looking towards Stamboul, towards the City of the Unknown God.  His eyes and hers were on the minarets, those minarets which seem to say to those who have come to them from afar, and whose souls are restless: 

“In the East thou shalt find me if thou hast not found me in the West.”

After a long silence Rosamund pressed Dion’s hand, and it seemed to him that never, in the former days of their union ­not even in Greece ­had she pressed it with such tenderness, with such pulse-stirring intimacy and trust in him.  Then, still with her eyes upon the minarets, she said in a low voice: 

“I think Robin knows.”

CHAPTER XVII

Not many days later, when the green valley of Olympia was wrapped in the peace of a sunlit afternoon, and a faint breeze drew from the pine trees on the hills of Kronos a murmur as of distant voices whispering the message of Eternity, the keeper of the house of the Hermes was disturbed in a profound reverie by the sound of slow footfalls not far from his dwelling.  He stirred, lifted his head and stared vaguely about him.  No travelers had come of late to the shrine he guarded.  Hermes had been alone with the child upon his arm, dreaming of its unclouded future with the serenity of one who had trodden the paths where the gods walk, and who could rise at will above the shadowed ways along which men creep in anxiety, dreading false steps and the luring dangers of their fates.  Hermes had been alone with his happy burden, forgotten surely by the world which his delicate majesty ignored without disdain.  But now pilgrims, perhaps from a distant land, were drawing near to look upon him, to spend a little while in the atmosphere of his shining calm, perhaps to learn something of the message he had to give to those who were capable of receiving it.

A man and a woman, moving slowly side by side, came into the patch of strong sunshine which made a glory before the house, paused there and stood still.

From the shadow in which he was sitting the guardian examined them with the keen eyes of one who had looked upon travelers of many nations.  He knew at once that the woman was English.  As for the man ­yes, probably he was English too, Dark, lean, wrinkled, he was no doubt an Englishman who had been much away from his own country, which the guardian conceived of as wrapped in perpetual fogs and washed by everlasting rains.

The guardian stared hard at this man, then turned his bright eyes again upon the woman.  As he looked at her some recollection began to stir in his mind.

Not many travelers came twice to the green recesses of Elis.  He was accustomed to brief acquaintanceships, closed by small gifts of money, and succeeded by farewells which troubled his spirit not at all.  But this woman seemed familiar to him; and even the man ­

He got up from his seat and went towards them.

As he came into the sunlight the woman saw him and smiled.  And, when she smiled, he knew he had seen her before.  The deep gravity of her face as she approached had nearly tricked his memory, but now he remembered all about her.  She was the beautiful fair Englishwoman who had camped on the hill of Drouva not so many years ago, who had gone out shooting with that young rascal, Dirmikis, and who had spent solitary hours wrapt in contemplation of the statue whose fame doubtless had brought her to Elis.

Not so many years ago!  But was this the man the husband who had been with her then, and who had evidently been deeply in love with her?

It seemed to the guardian that there was some puzzling change in the beautiful woman.  As to the man ­Still wondering, the guardian took off his cap politely and uttered a smiling welcome in Greek.  Then the man smiled too, faintly, and still preserving the under-look of deep gravity, and the guardian knew him.  It was indeed the husband, but grown to look very much older, and different in some almost mysterious way.

The woman made a gesture towards the museum.  The guardian bowed, turned and moved to lead the way through the vestibule into the great room of the Victory.  But the woman spoke behind him and he paused.  He did not understand what she said, but the sound of her voice seemed to plead with him ­or to command him.  He looked at her and understood.

She was gazing at him steadily, and her eyes told him not to go before her, told him to stay where he was.

He nodded his head, slightly pursing his small mouth.  She knew the way of course.  How should she not know it?

Gently she came up to him and just touched his coat sleeve ­to thank him.  Then she went on slowly with her companion, traversed the room of the Victory, looking neither to right nor left, crossed the threshold of the smaller chamber beyond it and disappeared.

For a moment the guardian stood at gaze.  Then he went back to his seat, sat down and sighed.  A faint sense of awe had come upon him.  He did not understand it, and he sighed again.  Then, pulling himself together, he felt for a cigarette, lit it and began to smoke, staring at the patch of sunlight outside, and at the olive tree which grew close to the doorway.

Within the chamber of the Hermes for a long time there was silence.  Rosamund was sitting before the statue.  Dion stood near to her, but not close to her.  The eyes of both of them were fixed upon Hermes and the child.  Once again they were greeted by the strange and exquisite hush which seems, like a divine sentinel, to wait at the threshold of that shrine in Elis; once again the silence seemed to come out of the marble and to press softly against their two hearts.  But they were changed, and so the great peace of the Hermes seemed to them subtly changed.  They knew now the full meaning of torment ­torment of the body and of the soul.  They knew the blackness of rebellion.  But they knew also, or at least were beginning to know, the true essence of peace.  And this beginning of knowledge drew them nearer to the Hermes than they had been in the bygone years, than they had ever been before the coming of little Robin into their lives, and before Robin had left them, obedient to the call from beyond.

The olive branch was gone from the doorway.  Something beautiful was missing from the picture of Elis which had reminded Rosamund of the glimpse of distant country in Raphael’s “Marriage of the Virgin.”  And they longed to have it there, that little olive branch ­ah, how they longed!  There was pain in their hearts.  But there was no longer the cruel fierceness of rebellion.  They were able to gaze at the child on whom Hermes was gazing, if not with his celestial serenity yet with a resignation that was even subtly mingled with something akin to gratitude.

“Shall we reach that goal and take a child with us?”

Long ago that had been Dion’s thought in Elis.  And long ago Rosamund had broken the silence within that room by the words: 

“I’m trying to learn something here, how to bring him up if he ever comes.”

And now God had given them a child, and God had taken him from them.  Robin had gone from all that was not intended, but that, for some inscrutable reason, had come to be.  Robin was in the released world.

As the twilight began to fall another twilight came back flooding with its green dimness the memories of them both.  And at last Rosamund spoke.

“Dion!”

“Yes.”

“Come a little nearer to me.”

He came close to her and stood beside her.

“Do you remember something you said to me here?  It was in the twilight ­”

She paused.  Tears had come into her eyes and her voice had trembled.

“It was in the twilight.  You said that it seemed to you as if Hermes were taking the child away, partly because of us.”

Her voice broke.

“I ­I disliked your saying that.  I told you I couldn’t feel that.”

“I remember.”

“And then you explained exactly what you meant.  And we spoke of the human fear that comes to those who look at a child they love and think, ‘what is life going to do to the child?’ This evening I want to tell you that in a strange way I am able to be glad that Robin has gone, glad with some part of me that is more mother than anything else in me, I think.  Robin is ­is so safe now.”

The tears came thickly and fell upon her face.  She put out a hand to Dion.  He clasped it closely.

“God took him away, and perhaps because of us.  I think it may have been to teach us, you and me.  Perhaps we needed a great sorrow.  Perhaps nothing else could have taught us something we had to learn.”

“It may be so,” he almost whispered.

She got up and leaned against his shoulder.

“Whatever happens to me in the future,” she said, “I don’t think I shall ever distrust God again.”

He put his arm round her and, for the first time since their reunion, he kissed her, and she returned his kiss.

Over Elis the twilight was falling, a green twilight, sylvan and very ethereal, tremulous in its delicate beauty.  It stole through the green doors, and down through the murmuring pine trees.  The sheep-bells were ringing softly; the flocks were going homeward from pasture; and the chime of their little bells mingled with the wide whispering of the eternities among the summits of the pine trees.  Music of earth mingled with the music from a distance that knew what the twilight knew.

Presently the two marble figures in the chamber of the Hermes began to fade away gradually, as if deliberately withdrawing themselves from the gaze of men.  At last only their outlines were visible to Rosamund and to Dion.  But even these told of the Golden Age, of the age of long peace.

“FAREWELL!”

Some one had said it within that chamber, and a second voice had echoed it.

As the guardian of the Hermes watched the two pilgrims walking slowly away down the valley he noticed that the man’s right arm clasped the woman’s waist.  And, so, they passed from his sight and were taken by the green twilight of Elis.