Chapter II…

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 caique,” she wrote, “and lunch at a Turkish café 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 caique.”

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 caique, and were taken by the turmoil of the Golden Horn. Among the innumerable caiques, 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 caique 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 caique 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 le 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 reticences 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 caiques. 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 tres forts, molto forte!” he observed, mixing French with Italian to show his linguistic accomplishments, “Moi tres 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 tres 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.

“Pluck the old woman from thy breast: be Stout in woe, be stark in weal-- . . . . . . . spurn Bribe of Heav’n and threat of Hell.”

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 fetes 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 caique 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 caique.

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 chere, qu’est que vous faites la toute seule? Vous prenez 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 tres fort molto forte, moi aussi tres 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 Mosquee 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 caiques 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 role 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 prevarications 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.