Chapter IX…

Chapter IX

Liverpool has a capacity for looking black which is perhaps, only surpassed by Manchester’s, and it looked its blackest on a day at the end of March in the following year, as the afternoon express from London roared into the Lime Street Station. The rain was coming down; it was small rain, and it descended with a sort of puny determination; it was sad rain without any dash, any boldness; it had affinities with the mists which sweep over stretches of moorland, but its power of saturation was remarkable. It soaked Liverpool. It issued out of blackness and seemed to carry a blackness with it which descended into the very soul of the city and lay coiled there like a snake.

Lady Ingleton was very sensitive to her surroundings, and as she lifted the rug from her knees, and put away the book she had been reading, she shivered. A deep melancholy floated over her and enveloped her. She thought, “Why did I come upon this adventure? What is it all to do with me?” But then the face of a man rose up before her, lean, brown, wrinkled, ravaged, with an expression upon it that for a long time had haunted her, throwing a shadow upon her happiness. And she felt that she had done right to come. Impulse, perhaps, had driven her; sentiment rather than reason had been her guide. Nevertheless, she did not regret her journey. Even if nothing good came of it she would not regret it. She would have tried for once at some small expense to herself to do a worthy action. She would for once have put all selfishness behind her.

A white-faced porter, looking anxious and damp, appeared at the door of the corridor. Lady Ingleton’s French maid arrived from the second class with Turkish Jane on her arm.

“Oh, Miladi, how black it is here!” she exclaimed, twisting her pointed little nose. “The black it reaches the heart.”

That was exactly what Lady Ingleton was thinking, but she said, in a voice less lazy than usual.

“There’s a capital hotel, Annette. We shall be very comfortable.”

“Shall we stay here long, Miladi?”

“No; but I don’t know how long yet. Is Jane all right?”

“She has been looking out of the window, Miladi, the whole way. She is in ecstasy. Dogs have no judgment, Miladi.”

When Lady Ingleton was in her sitting-room at the Adelphi Hotel, and had had the fire lighted and tea brought up, she asked to see the manager for a moment. He came almost immediately, a small man, very smart, very trim, self-possessed as a attache.

“I hope you are quite comfortable, my lady,” he said, in a thin voice which held no note of doubt. “Can I do anything for you?”

“I wanted to ask you if you knew the address of some one I wish to send a note to--Mr. Robertson. He’s a clergyman who--”

“Do you mean Father Robertson, of Holy Cross, Manxby Street, my lady?”

“Of Holy Cross; yes, that’s it.”

“He lives at--”

“Wait a moment. I’ll take it down.”

She went to the writing-table and took up a pen.

“Now, please!”

“The Rev. George Robertson, Holy Cross Rectory, Manxby Street, my lady.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Can I do anything more for you, my lady?”

“Please send me up a messenger in twenty minutes. Mr. Robertson is in Liverpool, I understand?”

“I believe so, my lady. He is generally here. Holidays and pleasure are not much in his way. The messenger will be up in twenty minutes.”

He looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and went softly out, holding himself very erect.

Lady Ingleton sat down by the tea-table. Annette was unpacking in the adjoining bedroom, and Turkish Jane was reposing in an arm-chair near the hearth.

“What would Carey think of me, if he knew?” was her thought, as she poured out the tea.

Sir Carey was at his post in Constantinople. She had left him and come to England to see her mother, who had been very ill, but who was now much better. When she had left Constantinople she had not known she was coming to Liverpool, but she had known that something was intruding upon her happiness, was worrying at her mind. Only when she found herself once more in England did she understand that she could not return to Turkey without making an effort to do a good deed. She had very little hope that her effort would be efficacious, but she knew that she had to make it.

It was quite a new role for her, the role of Good Samaritan. She smiled faintly as she thought that. How would she play it?

After tea she wrote this note:

“ADELPHI HOTEL, Tuesday

“DEAR MR. ROBERTSON,--As you will not know who I am, I must explain myself. My husband, Sir Carey Ingleton, is Ambassador at Constantinople. Out there we have made acquaintance with Mr. Dion Leith, who had the terrible misfortune to kill his little boy nearly a year and a half ago. I want very much to speak to you about him. I will explain why when I see you if you have the time to spare me an interview. I would gladly welcome you here, or I could come to you. Which do you prefer? I am telling the messenger to wait for an answer. To be frank, I have come to Liverpool on purpose to see you.--Yours sincerely,

“DELIA INGLETON”

The messenger came back without an answer. Father Robertson was out, but the note would be given to him as soon as he came home.

That evening, just after nine o’clock, he arrived at the hotel, and sent up his name to Lady Ingleton.

“Please ask him to come up,” she said to the German waiter who had mispronounced his name.

As she waited for her visitor she was conscious of a faint creeping of shyness through her. It made her feel oddly girlish. When had she last felt shy? She could not remember. It must have been centuries ago.

The German waiter opened the door and a white-haired man walked in. Directly she saw him Lady Ingleton lost her unusual feeling. As she greeted him, and made her little apology for bothering him, and thanked him for coming out at night to see a stranger, she felt glad that she had obeyed her impulse and had been, for once, a victim to altruism. When she looked at his eyes she knew that she would not mind saying to him all she wanted to say about Dion Leith. They were eyes which shone with clarity; and they were something else--they were totally incurious eyes. Perhaps from perversity Lady Ingleton had always rebelled against giving to curious people the exact food they were in search of.

“He won’t be greedy to know,” she thought. “And so I shan’t mind telling him.”

Unlike a woman, she came at once to the point. Although she could be very evasive she could also be very direct.

“You know Mrs. Dion Leith,” she said. “My friend Tippie Chetwinde, Mrs. Willie Chetwinde, told me she was living here. She came here soon after the death of her child, I believe.”

“Yes, she did, and she has been here ever since.”

“Do you know Dion Leith, Mr. Robertson?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair by the fire, and fixing her large eyes, that looked like an Italian’s, upon him.

“No, I have never seen him. I hoped to, but the tragedy of the child occurred so soon after his return from South Africa that I never had an opportunity.”

“Forgive me for correcting you,” she said, gently but very firmly. “But it is not the tragedy of a child. It’s the tragedy of a man. I am going to talk very frankly to you. I make no apology for doing so. I am what is called”--she smiled faintly--“a woman of the world, and you, I think, are an unworldly man. Because I am of the world, and you, in spirit”--she looked at him almost deprecatingly--“are not of it, I can say what I have come here to try to say. I couldn’t say it to a man of the world, because I could never give a woman away to such a man. Tell me though, first, if you don’t mind--do you care for Mrs. Dion Leith?”

“Very much,” said Father Robertson, simply and warmly.

“Do you care for her enough to tell her the truth?”

“I never wish to tell her anything else.”

Suddenly Lady Ingleton’s face flushed, her dark eyes flashed and then filled with tears, and she said in a voice that shook with emotion:

“Dion Leith killed a body by accident, the body of his little boy. She is murdering a soul deliberately, the soul of her husband.”

She did not know at all why she was so suddenly and so violently moved. She had not expected this abrupt access of feeling. It had rushed upon her from she knew not where. She was startled by it.

“I don’t know why I should care,” she commented, as if half ashamed of herself.

Then she added, with a touch of almost shy defiance:

“But I do care, I do care. That’s why I’ve come here.”

“You are right to care if it is so,” said Father Robertson.

“Such lots of women wouldn’t,” she continued, in a quite different, almost cynical, voice. “But that man is an exceptional man--not in intellect, but in heart. And I’m a very happy woman. Perhaps you wonder what that has to do with it. Well sometimes I see things through my happiness, just because of it; sometimes I see unhappiness through it.”

Her voice had changed again, had become much softer. She drew her chair a little nearer to the fire.

“Do you ever receive confessions, Mr. Robertson--as a priest, I mean?” she asked.

“Yes, very often.”

“They are sacred, I know, even in your church.”

“Yes,” he said, without emphasis.

His lack of emphasis decided her. Till this moment she had been undecided about a certain thing, although she herself perhaps was not fully aware of her hesitation.

“I want to do a thing that I have never yet done,” she said. “I want to be treacherous to a friend, to give a friend away. Will you promise to keep my treachery secret forever? Will you promise to treat what I am going to tell you about her as if I told it to you in the confessional?”

“If you tell it to me I will. But why must you tell it to me? I don’t like treachery. It’s an ugly thing.”

“I can’t help that. I really came here just for that--to be treacherous.”

She looked into the fire and sighed.

“I’ve covered a great sin with my garment,” she murmured slowly, “and I repent me!”

Then, with a look of resolve, she turned to her white-haired companion.

“I’ve got a friend,” she said--“a woman friend. Her name is Cynthia Clarke. (I’m in the confessional now!) You may have heard of her. She was a cause celebre some time ago. Her husband tried to divorce her, poor man, and failed.”

“No, I never heard her name before,” said Father Robertson.

“You don’t read causes celebres. You have better things to do. Well, she’s my friend. I don’t exactly know why. Her husband was Councillor in my husband’s Embassy. But I knew her before that. We always got on. She has peculiar fascination--a sort of strange beauty, a very intelligent mind, and the strongest will I have ever known. She has virtues of a kind. She never speaks against other women. If she knew a secret of mine I am sure she would never tell it. She is thoroughbred. I find her a very interesting woman. There is absolutely no one like her. She’s a woman one would miss. That’s on one side. On the other--she’s a cruel woman; she’s a consummate hypocrite; she’s absolutely corrupt. You wonder why she’s my friend?”

“I did not say so.”

“Nor look it. But you do. Well, I suppose I haven’t many scruples except about myself. And I have been trained in the let-other-people-alone tradition. Besides, Cynthia Clarke never told me anything. No one has told me. Being a not stupid woman, I just know what she is. I’ll put it brutally, Mr. Robertson. She is a huntress of men. That is what she lives for. But she deceives people into believing that she is a purely mental woman. All the men whom she doesn’t hunt believe in her. Even women believe in her. She has good friends among women. They stick to her. Why? Because she intends them to. She has a conquering will. And she never tells a secret--especially if it is her own. In her last sin--for it is a sin--I have been a sort of accomplice. She meant me to be one and”--Lady Ingleton slightly shrugged her shoulders--“I yielded to her will. I don’t know why. I never know why I do what Cynthia Clarke wishes. There are people like that; they just get what they want, because they want it with force, I suppose. Most of us are rather weak, I think. Cynthia Clarke hunted Dion Leith in his misery, and I helped her. Being an ambassadress I have social influence on the Bosporus, and I used it for Cynthia. I knew from the very first what she was about, what she meant to do. Directly she mentioned Dion Leith to me and asked me to invite him to the Embassy and be kind to him I understood. But I didn’t know Dion Leith then. If I had thoroughly known him I should never have been a willing cat’s-paw in a very ugly game. But once I had begun--I took them both for a yachting trip--I did not know how to get out of it all. On that yachting trip--I realized how that man was suffering and what he was. I have never before known a man capable of suffering so intensely as Dion Leith suffers. Does his wife know how he loves her? Can she know it? Can she ever have known it?”

Father Robertson was silent. As she looked at his eyelids--his eyes no longer met hers with their luminous glowing sincerity--Lady Ingleton realized that he was the Confessor.

“Sometimes I have been on the verge of saying to him, ‘Go back to England, go to your wife. Tell her, show her what she has done. Put up a big fight for the life of your soul.’ But I have never been able to do it. A grief like that is holy ground, isn’t it? One simply can’t set foot upon it. Besides, I scarcely ever see Dion Leith now. He’s gone down, I think, gone down very far.”

“Where is he?”

“In Constantinople. I saw him by chance in Stamboul, near Santa Sophia, just before I left for England. Oh, how he has changed! Cynthia Clarke is destroying him. I know it. Once she told me he had been an athlete with ideals. But now--now!”

Again the tears started into her eyes. Father Robertson looked up and saw them.

“Poor, poor fellow!” she said. “I can’t bear to see him destroyed. Some men--well, they seem almost entirely body. But he’s so different!”

She got up and stood by the fire.

“I have seen Mrs. Leith,” she said. “I once heard her sing in London. She is extraordinarily beautiful. At that time she looked radiant. What did you say?”

“Please go on,” Father Robertson said, very quietly.

“And she had a wonderful expression of joyous goodness which marked her out from other women. You have a regard for her, and you are good. But you care for truth, and so I’m going to tell you the truth. She may be a good woman, but she has done a wicked action. Can’t you make her see it? Or shall I try to?”

“You wish to see her?”

“I am ready to see her.”

Father Robertson again looked down. He seemed to be thinking deeply, to be genuinely lost in thought. Lady Ingleton noticed this and did not disturb him. For some minutes he sat without moving. At last he looked up and put a question to Lady Ingleton which surprised her. He said:

“Are you absolutely certain that your friend Mrs. Clarke and Dion Leith have been what people choose to call lovers?”

“Have been and are--absolutely certain. I could not prove it, but I know it. He lives in Constantinople only for her.”

“And you think he has deteriorated?”

“Terribly. I know it. The other day he looked almost degraded; as men look when they let physical things get absolute domination over them. It’s an ugly subject, but--you and I know of these things.”

In her voice there was a sound of delicate apology. It was her tribute to the serene purity of which she was aware in this man.

Again he seemed lost in thought. She trusted in his power of thought. He was a man--she was certain of it--who would find the one path which led out of the maze. His unself-conscious intentness was beautiful in its unconventional simplicity, and was a tribute to her sincerity which she was subtle enough to understand, and good woman enough to appreciate. He was concentrated not upon her but upon the problem which was troubling her.

“I am very glad you have come to Liverpool,” he said at length. “Very glad.”

He smiled, and she, without exactly knowing why, smiled back at him. And as she did so she felt extraordinarily simple, almost like a child.

“How long are you going to stay?”

“Till I know whether I can do any good,” she said, “till I have done it, if that is possible.”

“Without mentioning any names, may I, if I think it wise, tell Mrs. Leith of the change in her husband?”

“Oh, but would it be wise to say exactly what the nature of the change is? I’ve always heard that she is a woman with ideals, an exceptionally pure-natured woman. She might be disgusted, even revolted, perhaps, if--”

“Forgive me!” Father Robertson interrupted, rather abruptly. “What was your intention then? What did you mean to tell Mrs. Leith if you saw her?”

“Of his great wretchedness, of his broken life--I suppose I--I should have trusted to my instinct what to do when I saw her.”

“Ah!”

“But I can leave it to you,” she said, but still with a faint note of hesitation, of doubt. “You know her.”

“Yes, I know her.”

He paused. Then, with an almost obstinate firmness, a sort of pressure, he added, “Have I your permission--I may not do it--to tell Mrs. Leith that her husband has been unfaithful to her with some one in Constantinople?”

Lady Ingleton slightly reddened; she looked down and hesitated.

“It may be necessary if your purpose in coming here is to be achieved,” said Father Robertson, still with pressure.

“You may do whatever you think best,” she said, with a sigh.

He got up to go.

“Would you mind very much staying on here for two or three days, even for a week, if necessary?”

“No, no.”

He smiled.

“A whole week of Liverpool!” he said.

“How many years have you been here?”

“A good many. I’m almost losing count.”

When he was gone Lady Ingleton sat for a long while before the fire.

The sad influence of the blackness of rainy Liverpool had lifted from her. Her impulse had received a welcome which had warmed her.

“I love that man,” she thought. “Carey would love him too.”

He had said very little, and how loyal he had been in his silence, how loyal to the woman she had attacked. In words he had not defended her, but somehow he had conveyed to Lady Ingleton a sense of his protective love and immense pity for the woman who had been bereft of her child. How he had conveyed this she could not have said. But as she sat there before the fire she was aware that, since Father Robertson’s visit, she felt differently about Dion Leith’s wife. Mysteriously she began to feel the sorrow of the woman as well as, and side by side with, the sorrow of the man.

“If it had been my child?” she thought. “If my husband had done it?”

Chapter X

[Page missing in original book.]

Since the death of Robin and Rosamund’s arrival in Liverpool, Father Robertson had made acquaintance with her sister and with the mother of Dion. And both these women had condemned Rosamund for what she had done, and had begged him to try to bring about a change in her heart. Both of them, too, had dwelt upon the exceptional quality of Dion’s love for his wife. Mrs. Leith had been unable to conceal the bitterness of her feeling against Rosamund. The mother in her way, was outraged. Beatrice Daventry had shown no bitterness. She loved and understood her sister too well to rage against her for anything that she did or left undone. But this very love of her sister, so clearly shown, had made her condemnation of Rosamund’s action the more impressive. And her pity for Dion was supreme. Through Beatrice Father Robertson had gained an insight into Dion’s love, and into another love, too; but of that he scarcely allowed himself even to think. There are purities so intense that, like fire, they burn those who would handle them, however tenderly. About Beatrice Father Robertson felt that he knew something he dared not know. Indeed, he was hardly sincere about that matter with himself. Perhaps this was his only insincerity.

With his friend, Canon Wilton, too, he had spoken of Rosamund, and had found himself in the presence of a sort of noble anger. Now, in his little room, as he knelt in meditation, he remembered a saying of the Canon’s, spoken in the paneled library at Welsley: “Leith has a great heart. When will his wife understand its greatness?”

Father Robertson pressed his thin hands upon his closed eyes. He longed for guidance and he felt almost distressed. Rosamund had submitted herself to him, had given herself into his hands, but tacitly she had kept something back. She had never permitted him to direct her in regard to her relation with her husband. It was in regard to her relation with God that she had submitted herself to him.

How grotesque that was!

Father Robertson’s face burned.

Before Rosamund had come to him she had closed the book of her married life with a frantic hand. And Father Robertson had left the book closed. He saw his delicacy now as cowardice. In his religious relation with Rosamund he had been too much of a gentleman! When Mrs. Leith, Beatrice, Canon Wilton had appealed to him, he had said that he would do what he could some day, but that he felt time must be given to Rosamund, a long time, to recover from the tremendous shock she had undergone. He had waited. Something imperative had kept him back from ever going fully with Rosamund into the question of her separation from her husband. He had certainly spoken of it, but he had never discussed it, had never got to the bottom of it, although he had felt that some day he must be quite frank with her about it.

Some day! No doubt he had been waiting for a propitious moment, that moment which never comes. Or had his instinct told him that anything he could say upon that subject to Rosamund would be utterly impotent, that there was a threshold his influence could not cross? Perhaps really his instinct had told him to wait, and he was not a moral coward. For to strive against a woman’s deep feeling is surely to beat against the wind. When men do certain things all women look upon them with an inevitable disdain, as children being foolish in the dark.

Had he secretly feared to seem foolish in Rosamund’s eyes?

He wondered, genuinely wondered.

On the following morning he wrote to Rosamund and asked her to come to the vicarage at any hour when she was free. He had something important to say to her. She answered, fixing three-thirty. Exactly at that time she arrived in Manxby Street and was shown into Father Robertson’s study.

Rosamund had changed, greatly changed, but in a subtle rather than a fiercely definite way. She had not aged as many women age when overtaken by sorrow. Her pale yellow hair was still bright. There was no gray in it and it grew vigorously upon her classical head as if intensely alive. She still looked physically strong. She was still a young and beautiful woman. But all the radiance had gone out from her. She had been full of it; now she was empty of it.

In the walled garden at Welsley, as she paced the narrow walks and listened to the distant murmur of the organ, and the faint sound of the Dresden Amen, in her joy she had looked sometimes almost like a nun. She had looked as if she had the “vocation” for religion. Now, in her “sister’s” dress, she had not that inner look of calm, of the spirit lying still in Almighty arms, which so often marks out those who have definitely abandoned the ordinary life of the world for the dedicated life. Rosamund had taken no perpetual vows; she was free at any moment to withdraw from the Sisterhood in which she was living with many devoted women who labored among the poor, and who prayed, as some people work, with an ardor which physically tired them. But nevertheless she had definitely retired from all that means life to the average woman of her type and class, with no intention of ever going back to it. She had taken a step towards the mystery which many people think of casually on appointed days, and which many people ignore, or try to ignore. Yet now she did not look as if she had the vocation. When she had lived in the world she had seemed, in spite of all her joie de vivre, of all her animation and vitality, somehow apart from it. Now she seemed, somehow, apart from the world of religion, from the calm and laborious world in which she had chosen to dwell. She looked indeed almost strangely pure, but there was in her face an expression of acute restlessness, perpetually seen among those who are grasping at passing pleasures, scarcely ever seen among those who have deliberately resigned them.

This was surely a woman who had sought and who had not found, who was uneasy in self-sacrifice, who had striven, who was striving still, to draw near to the gates of heaven, but who had not come upon the path which led up the mountain-side to them. Sorrow was stamped on the face, and something else, too--the seal of that corrosive disease of the soul, dissatisfaction with self.

This was not Rosamund; this was a woman with Rosamund’s figure, face, hair, eyes, voice, gestures, movements--one who would be Rosamund but for some terrible flaw.

She was alone in the little study for a few minutes before Father Robertson came. She did not sit down, but moved about, looking now at this thing, now at that. In her white forehead there were two vertical lines which were never smoothed out. An irreligious person, looking at her just then, might have felt moved to say, with a horrible irony, “And can God do no more than that for the woman who dedicates her life to His service?”

The truth of the whole matter lay in this: that whereas once God had seemed to stand between Rosamund and Dion, now Dion seemed to stand between Rosamund and God.

But even Father Robertson did not know this.

Presently the door opened and the Father came in.

Instantly Rosamund noticed that he looked slightly ill at ease, almost, indeed, embarrassed. He shook hands with her in his gentle way and made a few ordinary remarks about little matters in which they were mutually interested. Then he asked her to sit down, sat down near her and was silent.

“What is it?” she said, at last.

He looked at her, and there was something almost piercing in his eyes which she had never noticed in them before.

“Last night,” he said, “when I came home I found here a note from a stranger, asking me to visit her at the Adelphi Hotel where she was staying. She wrote that she had come to Liverpool on purpose to see me. I went to the hotel and had an interview with her. This interview concerned you.”

“Concerned me?” said Rosamund.

Her voice did not sound as if she were actively surprised. There was a lack of tone in it. It sounded, indeed, almost dry.

“Yes. Did you ever hear of Lady Ingleton?”

After an instant of consideration Rosamund said:

“Yes. I believe I met her somewhere once. Isn’t she married to an ambassador?”

“To our Ambassador at Constantinople.”

“I think I sang once at some house where she was, in the days when I used to sing.”

“She has heard you sing.”

“That was it then. But what can she want with me?”

“Your husband is in Constantinople. She knows him there.”

Rosamund flushed to the roots of her yellow hair. When he saw that painful wave of red go over her face Father Robertson looked away. All the delicacy in him felt the agony of her outraged reserve. Her body had stiffened.

“I must speak about this,” he said. “Forgive me if you can. But even if you cannot, I must speak.”

She looked down. Her face was still burning.

“You have let me know a great deal about yourself,” he went on. “That fact doesn’t give me any right to be curious. On the contrary! But I think, perhaps, your confidence has given me a right to try to help you spiritually even at the cost of giving you great mental pain. For a long time I have felt that perhaps in my relation to you I have been morally a coward.”

Rosamund looked up.

“You could never be a coward,” she said.

“You don’t know that. Nobody knows that, perhaps, except myself. However that may be, I must not play the coward now. Lady Ingleton met your husband in Turkey. She brings very painful news of him.”

Rosamund clasped her hands together and let them lie on her knees. She was looking steadily at Father Robertson.

“His--his misery has made such an impression upon her that she felt obliged to come here. She sent for me. But her real object in coming was to see you, if possible. Will you see her?”

“No, no; I can’t do that. I don’t know her.”

“I think I ought to tell you what she said. She asked me if you had ever understood how much your husband loves you. Her exact words were, ‘Does his wife know how he loves her? Can she know it? Can she ever have known it?’”

All the red had died away from Rosamund’s face. She had become very pale. Her eyes were steady. She sat without moving, and seemed to be listening with fixed, even with strained, attention.

“And then she went on to tell me something which might seem to a great many people to be quite contradictory of what she had just said--and she said it with the most profound conviction. She told me that your husband has fallen very low.”

“Fallen----?” Rosamund said, in a dim voice.

“Just before she left Constantinople she saw him in Stamboul by chance. She said that he had the dreadful appearance that men have when they are entirely dominated by physical things.”

“Dion!” she said.

And there was sheer amazement in her voice now.

After an instant she added:

“I don’t believe it. It wasn’t Dion.”

“I must tell you something more,” said Father Robertson painfully. “Lady Ingleton knows that your husband has been unfaithful to you; she knows the woman with whom he has been unfaithful. That unfaithfulness continues. So she affirms. And in spite of that, she asks me whether you can know how much your husband loves you.”

While he had been speaking he had been looking down. Now he heard a movement, a rustling. He looked up quickly. Rosamund was going towards the door.

“Please--don’t--don’t!” she whispered, turning her face away.

And she went out.

Father Robertson did not follow her.

Early in the following morning he received this note:

“ST. MARY’S SISTERHOOD, LIVERPOOL, Thursday

“DEAR FATHER ROBERTSON,--I don’t think I can see Lady Ingleton. I am almost sure I can’t. Perhaps she has gone already. If not, how long does she intend to stay here?

“R. L.”

The Father communicated with Lady Ingleton, and that evening let Rosamund know that Lady Ingleton would be in Liverpool for a few more days.

When Rosamund read his letter she wished, or believed that she wished, that Lady Ingleton had gone. Then this matter which tormented her would be settled, finished with. There would be nothing to be done, and she could take up her monotonous life again and forget this strange intrusion from the outside world, forget this voice from the near East which had told such ugly tidings. Till now she had not even known where Dion was. She knew he had given up his business in London and had left England; but that was all. She had refused to have any news of him. She had made it plainly understood long ago, when the wound was fresh in her soul, that Dion’s name was never to be mentioned in letters to her. She had tried by every means to blot his memory out of her mind as she had blotted his presence out of her life. In this effort she had totally failed. Dion had never left her since he had killed Robin. In the flesh he had pursued her in the walled garden at Welsley on that dark night of November when for her the whole world had changed. In another intangible, mysterious guise he had attended her ever since. He had been about her path and about her bed. Even when she knelt at the altar in the Supreme Service he had been there. She had felt his presence as she touched the water, as she lifted the cup. Through all these months she had learnt to know that there are those whom, once we have taken them in, we cannot cast out of our lives.

Since the death of Robin, in absence Dion had assumed a place in her life which he had never occupied in the days of their happiness. Sometimes she had bitterly resented this; sometimes she had tried to ignore it; sometimes, like a cross, she had taken it up and tried to bear it with patience or with bravery. She had even prayed against it.

Never were prayers more vain than those which she put up against this strange and terrible possession of herself by the man she had tried to cast out of her life. Sometimes even it seemed to her that when she prayed thus Dion’s power to affect her increased. It was as if mysteriously he drew nearer to her, as if he enveloped her with an influence from which she could not extricate herself. There were hours in the night when she felt afraid of him. She knew that wherever he was, however far off, his mind was concentrated upon her. She grew to realize, as she had never realized before, what mental power is. She had separated her body from Dion’s, but his mind would not leave her alone. Often she was conscious of hostility. When she strove to give herself absolutely and entirely to the life of religion and of charity she was aware of a force holding her back. This force--so it seemed to her--would not permit her to enter into the calm and the peace of the dedicated life. She was like some one looking in at a doorway, desirous of entering a room. She saw the room clearly; she saw others enjoying its warmth and its shelter and its serene and guarded tranquillity; but she was unable to cross the threshold.

That warm and sheltered room was not for her. And it was Dion’s force which held her back from entering it and from dwelling in it.

She could not give herself wholly to God because of Dion.

Of her struggle, of her frustration, of her mental torment in this connexion she had never spoken to Father Robertson. Even in confession she had been silent. He knew of her mother-agony; he did not know of the stranger, more subtle agony beneath it. He did not know that whereas the one agony with the lapse of time was not passing away--it would never do that--but was becoming more tender, more full of tears and of sweet recollections, the other agony grew harsher, more menacing.

Rosamund had gradually come to feel that Robin had been taken out of her arms for some great, though hidden, reason. And because of this feeling she was learning to endure his loss with a sort of resignation. She often thought that perhaps she had been allowed to have this consolation because she had made an immense effort. When Robin died she had driven Dion, who had killed her child, out of her life, but she had succeeded in saying to God, “Thy will be done!” She had said it at first as a mere formula, had repeated it obstinately again and again, without meaning it at all, but trying to mean it, meaning to mean it. She had made a prodigious, a truly heroic effort to conquer her powerfully rebellious nature, and, in this effort, she had been helped by Father Robertson. He knew of the anger which had overwhelmed her when her mother had died, of how she had wished to hurt God. He knew that, with bloody sweat, she had destroyed that enemy within her. She had wished to submit to the will of God when Robin had been snatched from her, and at last she had actually submitted. It was a great triumph of the spirit. But perhaps it had left her exhausted. At any rate she had never been able to forgive God’s instrument, her husband. And so she had never been able to know the peace of God which many of these women by whom she was surrounded knew. In her misery she contemplated their calm. To labor and to pray--that seemed enough to many of them, to most of them. She had known calm in the garden at Welsley; in the Sisterhood she knew it not.

The man who was always with her assassinated calm. She felt strangely from a distance the turmoil of his spirit. She knew of his misery occultly. She did not deduce it from her former knowledge of what he was. And his suffering made her suffer in a terrible way. He was her victim and she was his.

Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.

In the Sisterhood Rosamund had learnt, always against her will and despite the utmost effort of her obstinacy, the uselessness of that command; she had learnt that those whom God hath really joined together cannot be put asunder by man--or by woman. Dion had killed her child, but she had not been able to kill what she was to Dion and what Dion was to her. Through the mingling of their two beings there had been born a mystery which was, perhaps, eternal like the sound of the murmur in the pine trees above the Valley of Olympia.

She could not trample it into nothingness.

At first, after the tragedy of which Robin had been the victim, Rosamund had felt a horror of Dion which was partly animal. She had fled from him because she had been physically afraid of him. He had been changed for her from the man who loved her, and whom she loved in her different way, into the slayer of her child. She knew, of course, quite well that Dion was not a murderer, but nevertheless she thought of him as one thinks of a murderer. The blood of her child was upon his hands. She trembled at the thought of being near him. Nevertheless, because she was not mad, in time reason asserted itself within her. Dion disappeared out of her life. He did not put up the big fight for the big thing of which Lady Ingleton had once spoken to her husband. His type of love was far too sensitive to struggle and fight on its own behalf. When he had heard the key of his house door turned against him, when, later, Mr. Darlington with infinite precautions had very delicately explained to him why it had been done, Rosamund had attained her freedom. He had waited on for a time in England, but he had somehow never been able really to hope for any change in his wife. His effort to make her see the tragedy in its true light had exhausted itself in the garden at Welsley. Her frantic evasion of him had brought it to an end. He could not renew it. Even if he had been ready to renew it those about Rosamund would have dissuaded him from doing so. Every one who was near her saw plainly that “for the present”--as they put it--Dion must keep out of her life.

And gradually Rosamund had lost that half-animal fear of him, gradually she had come to realize something of the tragedy of his situation. A change had come about in her almost in despite of herself. And yet she had never been able to forgive him for what he had done. Her reason knew that she had nothing to forgive; her religious sense, her conception of God, obliged her to believe that Dion had been God’s instrument when he had killed his child; but something within her refused him pardon. Perhaps she felt that pardon could only mean one thing--reconciliation. And now had come Lady Ingleton’s revelation. Instinctively as Rosamund left Father Robertson’s little room she had tried to hide her face. She had received a blow, and the pain of it frightened her. She was startled by her own suffering. What did it mean? What did it portend? She had no right to feel as she did. Long ago she had abandoned the right to such a feeling.

The information Lady Ingleton had brought outraged Rosamund. Anger and a sort of corrosive shame struggled for the mastery within her.

She felt humiliated to the dust. She felt dirty, soiled.

Dion had been unfaithful to her.

With whom?

The white face of Mrs. Clarke came before Rosamund in the murky street, two wide-open distressed and intent eyes started into hers.

The woman was Mrs. Clarke.

Mrs. Clarke--and Dion. Mrs. Clarke had succeeded in doing what long ago she had designed to do. She had succeeded in taking possession of Dion.

“Because I threw him away! Because I threw him away!”

Rosamund found herself repeating those words again and again.

“I threw him away, I threw him away. Otherwise----”

She reached the Sisterhood and went to her little room. How she got through the remaining duties of that day she never remembered afterwards. The calmness of routine flagellated her nerves. She felt undressed and feared the eyes of the sisters. After the evening service in the little chapel attached to the Sisterhood she was unable either to meditate, to praise, or to pray. During the long pause for silent prayer she felt like one on a galloping horse. In the intense silence her ears seemed to hear the beating of hoofs on an iron road. And the furious horse was bearing her away into some region of darkness and terror.

There was a rustling movement. The sisters slowly rose from their knees. Again Rosamund was conscious of feeling soiled, dirty, in the midst of them. As they filed out, she with them, a burning hatred came to her. She hated the woman who was the cause of her feeling dirty. She wanted to use her hands, to tear something away from her body--the dirt, the foulness. For she felt it actually on her body. Her physical purity was desecrated by--she wouldn’t think of it.

When she was alone in her little sleeping-room, the door shut, one candle burning, her eyes went to the wooden crucifix beneath which every night before getting into her narrow bed she knelt in prayer, and she began to cry. She sat down on the bed and cried and cried. All her flesh seemed melting into tears.

“My poor life! My poor life!”

That was the interior cry of her being, again and again repeated--“My poor life--stricken, soiled, crushed down in the ooze of a nameless filth.”

Childless and now betrayed! How terrible had been her happiness on the edge of the pit! The days in Greece--Robin--Dion’s return from the war! And she had wished to live rightly; she had loved the noble things; she had had ideals and she had tried to follow them. Purity before all she had----

She sickened; her crying became violent. Afraid lest some of the sisters should hear her, she pressed her hands over her face and sank down on the bed.

Presently she saw Mrs. Clarke before her, the woman whom she had thought to keep out of her life--the fringe of her life--and who had found the way into the sacred places.

She cried for a long while, lying there on the bed, with her face pressed against her hands, and her hands pressed against the pillow; but at least she ceased from crying. She had poured out all the tears of her body.

She sat up. It was long past midnight. The house was silent. Slowly she began to undress, hating her body all the time. She bathed her face and hands in cold water, and, when she felt the water, shivered at the thought of the stain. When she was ready for bed she looked again at the crucifix. She ought to pray, she must pray. She went to the crucifix and stood in front of it, but her knees refused to bend. Her pride of woman had received a terrific blow that day, and just because of that she felt she could not humble herself.

“I cannot pray--I won’t pray,” she whispered.

And she turned away, put out the light and got into bed.

That Dion should have done that, should have been able to do that!

And she remembered what it was she had first loved in Dion, the thing which had made him different from other men; she remembered the days and the nights in Greece. She saw two lovers in a morning land descending the path from the hill of Drouva, going down into the green recesses of quiet Elis. She saw Hermes and the child.

All that night she lay awake. In the morning she sent the note to Father Robertson.

She could not see Lady Ingleton and yet she dreaded her departure. She wanted to know more, much more. A gnawing hunger of curiosity assailed her. This woman had been with Dion--since. This woman knew of his infidelity; yet she affirmed his love for his wife. But the one knowledge surely gave the lie to the other.

Why did she care? Why did she care so much? Rosamund asked herself the question almost with terror.

She found no answer.

But she could not pray. Whenever she tried to pray Mrs. Clarke came before her, and a man--could it be Dion?--stamped with the hideous imprint of physical lust.

* * * * *

Father Robertson was startled by the change in Rosamund’s appearance when she visited him two days after she had sent him the note. She looked physically ill. Her color had gone. Her eyes were feverish and sunken, and the skin beneath them was stained with that darkness which betokens nights without sleep. Her lips and hands twitched with a nervousness that was painful. But that which distressed him more than any other thing was the expression in her face--the look of shame and of self-consciousness which altered her almost horribly. Even in her most frantic moments of grief for Robin there had always been something of directness, of fearlessness, in her beauty. Now something furtive literally disfigured her, and she seemed trying to cover it with a dogged obstinacy which suggested a will stretched to the uttermost, vibrating like a string in danger of snapping.

“Has Lady Ingleton gone?” she asked, directly she was inside the room.

“No, not yet. You remember I wrote to you that she would stay on for a few days.”

“But she might have gone unexpectedly.”

“She is still here.”

“I believe I shall have to see her,” Rosamund said, with a sort of hard abruptness and determination.

“Go to see her,” said Father Robertson firmly. “Perhaps she was sent here.”

“Sent here?” said Rosamund, with a sharpness of sudden suspicion.

“Oh, my child,”--he put his hand on her arm, and made her sit down,--“not by a human being.”

Rosamund looked down and was silent.

“Before you go, if you are going,” Father Robertson continued, sitting down by the deal table on which he wrote his letters, “I must do what I ought to have done long ago; I must speak to you about your husband.”

Rosamund did not look up, but he saw her frown, and he saw a movement of her lips; they trembled and then set together in a hard line.

“I know what he was, not from you but from others; from his mother, from your sister, and from Canon Wilton. I’m going to tell you something Wilton said to me about you and him after you had separated from him.”

Father Robertson stopped, and fidgeted for a moment with the papers lying in disorder on his table. He hated the task he had set himself to do. All the tenderness in him revolted against it. He knew what this woman whom he cared for very much had suffered; he divined what she was suffering now. And he was going to add to her accumulated misery by striking a tremendous blow at the most sacred thing, her pride of woman. Would she be his enemy after he had spoken? It was possible. Yet he must speak.

“He said to me--‘Leith has a great heart. When will his wife understand its greatness?’”

There was a long silence. Then, without changing her position or lifting her head, Rosamund said in a hard, level voice:

“Canon Wilton was right about my husband.”

“He loved you. That’s a great deal. But he loved you in a very beautiful way. And that’s much more.”

“Who told you--about the way he loved me?”

“Your sister, Beatrice.”

“Beattie! Yes, she knew--she understood.”

She bent her head a little lower, then added:

“Beattie is worth more than I am.”

“You are worth a great deal, but--but I want to see you rise to the heights of your nature. I want to see you accomplish the greatest task of all.”

“Yes?”

“Conquer the last citadel of your egoism. Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat--Send the insistent I to sleep. I said it to you long ago before I knew you. I say it to you now when I do know you, when I know the deep waters you have passed through, and the darkness that has beset you. Fetter your egoism. Release your heart and your spirit in one great action. Don’t let him go down forever because of you. I believe your misery has been as nothing in comparison with his. If he has fallen--such a man--why is it?”

“I know why,” she almost whispered.

“You can never mount up while you are driving a soul downwards. Do you remember those words in the Bible: ‘Where thou goest I will go’?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps they might be changed in respect of you and the man who loved you so much and in such a beautiful way. You were linked; can the link ever be broken? You have tried to break it, but have you succeeded? And if not, wouldn’t it be true, drastically true, if you said--Where thou goest I must go? If he goes down because of you I think you’ll go down with him.”

Rosamund sat absolutely still. When Father Robertson paused again there was not a sound in the little room.

“And one thing more,” he said, not looking towards her. “There’s the child, your child and his. Is it well with the child?”

Rosamund moved and looked up. Then she got up from her chair.

“But--but--Robin’s----”

She stopped. Her eyes were fixed on Father Robertson. He looked up and met her eyes, and she saw plainly the mystic in him.

“What do we know?” he said. “What do we know of the effects of our actions? Can we be certain that they are limited to this earth? Is it well with the child? I say we don’t know. We dare not affirm that we know. He loved his father, didn’t he?”

Rosamund looked stricken. He let her go. He could not say any more to her.

That evening Lady Ingleton called in Manxby Street and asked for Father Robertson. He happened to be in and received her at once.

“I’ve had a note from Mrs. Leith,” she said.

“I am not surprised,” said Father Robertson. “Indeed I expected it.”

“She wishes to see me to-morrow. She writes that she will come to the hotel. How have you persuaded her to come?”

“I don’t think I have persuaded her though I wish her to see you. But I have told her of her husband’s infidelity.”

“You have told her----!”

Lady Ingleton stopped short. She looked unusually discomposed, even nervous and agitated.

“I said you might,” she murmured.

“It was essential.”

“If Cynthia knew!” said Lady Ingleton.

“I mentioned no name.”

“She must have guessed. It’s odd, when I told you I didn’t feel treacherous--not really! But now I feel a brute. I’ve never done anything like this before. It’s against all my code. I’ve come here, done all this, and now I dread meeting Mrs. Leith. I wish you could be there when she comes.”

She sent him a soft glance out of her Italian eyes.

“You make me feel so safe,” she added.

“You and she must be alone. Remember this! Mrs. Leith must go out to Constantinople.”

“Leave the Sisterhood! Will she ever do that?”

“You came here with the hope of persuading her, didn’t you?”

“A hope was it? A forlorn hope, perhaps.”

“Bring it to fruition.”

“But Cynthia! If she ever knows!”

Suddenly Father Robertson looked stern.

“If what you told me is true----”

“It is true.”

“Then she is doing the devil’s work. Put away your fears. They aren’t worthy of you.”

As she took his hand in the saying of good-by she said:

“Your code is so different from ours. We think the only possible thing to do--where a friend is concerned--is to shut the eyes and the lips, and to pretend, and to keep on always pretending. We call that being honorable.”

“Poor things!” said Father Robertson.

But he pressed her hand as he said it, and there was an almost tender smile on his lips.

“But your love of truth isn’t quite dead yet,” he added, on the threshold of the door, as he let her out into the rain. “You haven’t been able to kill it. It’s an indomitable thing, thank God.”

“I wish I--why do you live always in Liverpool?” she murmured.

She put up her little silk umbrella and was gone.

There was a fire in her sitting-room on the following-morning. The day was windy and cold, for March was going out resentfully. Before the fire lay Turkish Jane on a cushion, blinking placidly at the flames. Already she had become reconciled to her new life in this unknown city. Her ecstasy of the journey had not returned, but the surprise which had succeeded to it was now merged in a stagnant calm, and she felt no objection to passing the remainder of her life in the Adelphi Hotel. She supposed that she was comfortably settled for the day when she heard her mistress call for Annette and give the most objectionable order.

“Please take Jane away, Annette,” said Lady Ingleton.

“Miladi!”

“I don’t want her here this morning. I’m expecting a visitor, and Jane might bark. I don’t wish to have a noise in the room.”

Annette, who looked decidedly sulky, approached the cushion, bent down, and rather abruptly snatched the amazed doyenne of the Pekinese from her voluptuous reveries.

“We shall probably leave here to-morrow,” Lady Ingleton added.

Annette’s expression changed.

“We’re going back to London, Miladi?”

“I think so. I’ll tell you this afternoon.”

She glanced at her watch.

“I don’t wish to be disturbed for an hour. Don’t leave Jane in my bedroom. Take her away to yours.”

“Very well, Miladi.”

Annette went out looking inquisitive, with Turkish Jane on her arm.

When she was gone Lady Ingleton took up “The Liverpool Mercury” and tried to read the news of the day. The March wind roared outside and made the windows rattle. She listened to it and forgot the chronicle of the passing hour. She was a women who cared to know the big things that were happening in the big world. She had always lived among men who were helping to make history, and she was intelligent enough to understand their efforts and to join in their discussions. Her husband had often consulted her when he was in a tight place, and sometimes he had told her she had the brain of a man. But she had the nerves and the heart of a woman, and at this moment public affairs and the news of the day did not interest her at all. She was concentrated on woman’s business. Into her hands she had taken a tangled love skein. And she was almost frightened at what she had ventured to do. Could she hope to be of any use, of any help, in getting it into order? Was there any chance for the man she had last seen in Stamboul near Santa Sophia? She almost dreaded Rosamund Leith’s arrival. She felt nervous, strung up. The roar of the wind added to her uneasiness. It suggested turmoil, driven things, the angry passions of nature. Beyond the Mersey the sea was raging. She had a stupid feeling that nature and man were always in a ferment, that it was utterly useless to wish for peace, or to try to bring about peace, that destinies could only be worked out to their appointed ends in darkness and in fury. She even forgot her own years of happiness for a little while and saw herself as a woman always anxious, doubtful, and envisaging untoward things. When a knock came on the door she started and got up quickly from her chair. Her heart was beating fast. How ridiculous!

“Come in!” she said.

A waiter opened the door and showed in Rosamund

Chapter XI

Lady Ingleton looked swiftly at the woman coming in at the doorway clad in the severe, voluminous, black gown and cloak, and black and white headgear, which marked out the members of the Sisterhood of St. Mary’s. Her first thought was “What a cold face!” It was succeeded immediately by the thought, “But beautiful even in its coldness.” She met Rosamund near the door, took her hand, and said:

“I am glad you were able to come. I wanted very much to meet you. I came here really with the faint hope of seeing you. Let me take your umbrella. What a day it is! Did you walk?”

“I came most of the way by tram. Thank you,” said Rosamund, in a contralto voice which sounded inflexible.

Lady Ingleton went to “stand” the umbrella in a corner. In doing this she turned away from her visitor for a moment. She felt more embarrassed, more “at a loss” than she had ever felt before; she even felt guilty, though she had done no wrong and was anxious only to do right. Her sense of guilt, she believed, was caused by the fact that in her heart she condemned her visitor, and by the additional, more unpleasant fact that she knew Rosamund was aware of her condemnation.

“It’s hateful--so much knowledge between two women who are strangers to each other!” she thought, as she turned round.

“Do sit down by the fire,” she said to Rosamund, who was standing near the writing-table immediately under a large engraving of “Wedded.”

She wished ardently that Rosamund wore the ordinary clothes of a well-dressed woman of the world. The religious panoply of the “sister’s” attire, with its suggestion of a community apart, got on her nerves, and seemed to make things more difficult.

Rosamund went to a chair and sat down. She still looked very cold, but she succeeded in looking serene, and her eyes, unworldly and pure, did not fall before Lady Ingleton’s.

Lady Ingleton sat down near her and immediately realized that she had placed herself exactly opposite to “Wedded.” She turned her eyes away from the large nude arms of the bending man and met Rosamund’s gaze fixed steadily upon her. That gaze told her not to delay, but to go straight to the tragic business which had brought her to Liverpool.

“You know of course that my husband is Ambassador at Constantinople,” she began.

“Yes,” said Rosamund.

“You and I met--at least we were in the same room once--at Tippie Chetwinde’s,” said Lady Ingleton, almost pleading with her visitor. “I heard you sing.”

“Yes, I remember. I told Father Robertson so.”

“I dare say you think it very strange my coming here in this way.”

In spite of the strong effort of her will Lady Ingleton was feeling with every moment more painfully embarrassed. All her code was absolutely against mixing in the private concerns of others uninvited. She had a sort of delicate hatred of curiosity. She longed to prove to the woman by the fire that she was wholly incurious now, wholly free from the taint of sordid vulgarity that clings to the social busybody.

“I’ve done it solely because I’m very sorry for some one,” she continued; “because I’m very sorry for your husband.”

She looked away from Rosamund, and again her eyes rested on the engraving of “Wedded.” The large bare arms of the man, his bending, amorous head, almost hypnotized her. She disliked the picture of which this was a reproduction. Far too many people had liked it; their affection seemed to her to have been destructive, to have destroyed any value it had formerly had. Yet now, as she looked almost in despite of herself, suddenly she saw through the engraving, through the symbol, to something beyond; to the prompting conception in the painter’s mind which had led to the picture, to the great mystery of the pathetic attempt of human beings who love, or who think they love, to unite themselves to each other, to mingle body with body and soul with soul. She saw a woman in the dress of a “sister,” the woman who was with her; she saw a man in an Eastern city; and abruptly courage came to her on the wings of a genuine emotion.

“I don’t know how to tell you what I feel about him, Mrs. Leith,” she said. “But I want to try to. Will you let me?”

“Yes. Please tell me,” said Rosamund, in a level, expressionless voice.

“Remember this; I never saw him till I saw him in Turkey, nor did my husband. We were not able to draw any comparison between the unhappy man and the happy man. We were unprejudiced.”

“I quite understand that; thank you.”

“It was in the summer. We were living at Therapia on the Bosporus. He came to stay in a hotel not far off. My husband met him in a valley which the Turks call Kesstane Dereh. He--your husband--was sitting there alone by a stream. They talked. My husband asked him to call at our summer villa. He came the next day. Of course I--I knew something of his story”--she hurried on--“and I was prepared to meet a man who was unhappy. (Forgive me for saying all this.)”

“But, please, I have come to hear,” said Rosamund, coldly and steadily.

“Your husband--I was alone with him during his first visit--made an extraordinary impression upon me. I scarcely know how to describe it.” She paused for a moment. “There was something intensely bitter in his personality. Bitterness is an active principle. And yet somehow he conveyed to me an impression of emptiness too. I remember he said to me, ‘I don’t quite know what I am going to do. I’m a free agent. I have no ties.’ I shall never forget his look when he said those words. I never knew anything about loneliness--anything really--till that moment. And after that moment I knew everything. I asked him to come on the yacht to Brusa, or rather to Mudania; from there one goes to Brusa. He came. You may think, perhaps, that he was eager for society, for pleasure, distraction. It wasn’t that. He was making a tremendous, a terrible effort to lay hold on life again, to interest himself in things. He was pushed to it.”

“Pushed to it!” said Rosamund, still in the hard level voice. “Who pushed him?”

“I can only tell you it was as I say,” said Lady Ingleton, quickly and with embarrassment. “We were very few on the yacht. Of course I saw a good deal of your husband. He was absolutely reserved with me. He always has been. You mustn’t think he has ever given me the least bit of confidence. He never has. I am quite sure he never would. We are only acquaintances. But I want to be a friend to him now. He hasn’t a friend, not one, out there. My husband, I think, feels rather as I do about him, in so far as a man can feel in our sort of way. He would gladly be more intimate with your husband. But your husband doesn’t make friends. He’s beyond anything of that kind. He tried, on the yacht and at Brusa. He did his utmost. But he was held back by his misery. I must tell you (it’s very uninteresting)”--her voice softened here, and her face slightly changed, became gentler, more intensely feminine--“that my husband and I are very happy together. We always have been; we always shall be; we can’t help it. Being with us your husband had to--to contemplate our happiness. It--I suppose it reminded him----”

She stopped; she could not bring herself to say it. Again her eyes rested upon “Wedded,” and, in spite of her long conviction of its essential banality--she classed it with “The Soul’s Awakening,” “Harmony,” and all the things she was farthest away from--she felt what it stood for painfully, almost mysteriously.

“One day,” she resumed, speaking more slowly, and trying to banish emotion from her voice, “I went out from the hotel where we stayed at Brusa, quite alone. There’s a mosque at Brusa called Jeshil Jami, the Green Mosque. It stands above the valley. It is one of the most beautiful things I know, and quite the most beautiful Osmanli building. I like to go there alone. Very often there is no one in the mosque. Well, I went there that day. When I went in--the guardian was on the terrace; he knows me and that I’m the British Ambassadress, and never bothers me--I thought at first the mosque was quite empty. I sat down close to the door. After I had been there two or three minutes I felt there was some one else in the mosque. I looked round. Before the Mihrab there was a man. It was your husband. He was kneeling on the matting, but--but he wasn’t praying. When I knew, when I heard what he was doing, I went away at once. I couldn’t--I felt that----”

Again she paused. In the pause she heard the gale tearing at the windows. She looked at the woman in the sister’s dress. Rosamund was sitting motionless, and was now looking down. Lady Ingleton positively hated the sister’s dress at that moment. She thought of it as a sort of armor in which her visitor was encased, an armor which rendered her invulnerable. What shaft could penetrate that smooth black and white, that flowing panoply, and reach the heart Lady Ingleton desired to pierce? Suddenly Lady Ingleton felt cruel. She longed to tear away from Rosamund all the religion which seemed to be protecting her; she longed to see her naked as Dion Leith was naked.

“I didn’t care to look upon a man in hell,” she said, in a voice which had become almost brutal, a voice which Sir Carey would scarcely have recognized if he had heard it.

Rosamund said nothing, and, after a moment, Lady Ingleton continued:

“With us on the yacht was one of my husband’s secretaries of Embassy, Cyril Vane, who had just become engaged to be married. He is married now. In his cabin on the yacht he had a photograph of the girl. One night he was walking up and down on deck with your husband, and your husband--I’d just told him about Vane’s engagement--congratulated him. Vane invited Mr. Leith into the cabin and showed him the photograph. Vane told me afterwards that he should never forget the look on your husband’s face as he took the photograph and gazed at it. When he put it down he said to Vane, ‘I hope you may be happy. She looks very kind, and very good, too; but there’s no cruelty on earth like the cruelty of a good woman.’” (Did the sister’s dress rustle faintly?) “Vane--he’s only a boy--was very angry for a moment, though he’s usually imperturbable. I don’t know exactly what he said, but I believe he made a rather strong protest about knowing his fiancee’s character au fond. Anyhow, your husband took hold of his arm and said to him, ‘Don’t love very much and you may be happy. That’s the only chance for a man--not to love the woman very much.’ Vane came to me and told me. I remember it was late at night and my husband was there. When Vane was leaving us Carey said to him, ‘Forget the advice that poor fellow gave you. Love her as much as you can, my boy. Dion Leith speaks out of the bitterness that is destroying him. But very few men can love as he can, and very few men have been punished by their love as he has been punished by his. His sorrow is altogether exceptional, and has made him lose the power of moral vision. His soul has been poisoned at the source.’ My husband was right.”

“You came here to tell me that?” said Rosamund, lifting her head and speaking coldly and very clearly.

“I didn’t know what I was going to tell you. At the time I am speaking of I had no thought of ever trying to see you. That thought came to me long afterwards.”

“Why?”

“I’m a happy woman. In my happiness I’ve learnt to respect love very much, and I’ve learnt to recognize it at a glance. Your husband is the victim of a great love, Mrs. Leith. I feel as if I couldn’t stand by and see him utterly destroyed by it.”

“Father Robertson tells me----” said Rosamund.

And then she was silent. All this time she was struggling almost furiously against pride and an intense reserve which seemed trying to suffocate every good impulse within her. She held on to the thought of Father Robertson (she was unable to hold on to the thought of God); she strove not to hate the woman who was treading in her sanctuary, and whose steps echoed harshly and discordantly to its farthest, its holiest recesses; but she felt herself to be hardening against her will, to be congealing, turning to ice. Nevertheless she was resolute not to leave the room in which she was without learning all that this woman had to tell her.

“Yes?” said Lady Ingleton.

And the thought went through her mind:

“Oh, how she is hating me!”

“Father Robertson told me there was someone else.”

“Yes, there is. Otherwise I might never have come here. I’m partly to blame. But I--but I can’t possibly go into details. You mustn’t ask me for any details, please. Try to accept the little I can say as truth, though I’m not able to give you any proof. You must know that women who are intelligent, and have lived long in the--well, in the sort of world I’ve lived in, are never mistaken about certain things. They don’t need what are called proofs. They know certain things are happening, or not happening, without holding any proofs for or against. Your husband has got into the wrong hands.”

“What do you mean by that?” said Rosamund steadily, even obstinately.

“In his misery and absolute loneliness he has allowed himself to be taken possession of by a woman. She is doing him a great deal of harm. In fact she is ruining him.”

She stopped. Perhaps she suspected that Rosamund, in defiance of her own denial of proofs, would begin asking for them; but Rosamund said nothing.

“He is going down,” Lady Ingleton resumed. “He has already deteriorated terribly. I saw him recently by chance in Stamboul (he never comes to us now), and I was shocked at his appearance. When I first met him, in spite of his bitterness and intense misery I knew at once that I was with a man of fine nature. There was something unmistakable, the rare imprint; that’s fading from him now. You know Father Robertson very well. I don’t. But the very first time I was with him I knew he was a man who was seeking the heights. Your husband now is seeking the depths, as if he wanted to hide himself and his misery in them. Perhaps he hasn’t found the lowest yet. I believe there is only one human being who can prevent him from finding it. I’m quite sure there is only one human being. That’s why I came here.”

She was silent. Then she added:

“I’ve told you now what I wished to tell you, all I can tell you.”

In thinking beforehand of what this interview would probably be like Lady Ingleton had expected it to be more intense, charged with greater surface emotion than was the case. Now she felt a strange coldness in the room. The dry rattling of the window under the assault of the gale was an interpolated sound that was in place.

“Your husband has never mentioned your name to me,” she said, influenced by an afterthought. “And yet I’ve come here, because I know that the only hope of salvation for him is here.”

Again her eyes went to “Wedded,” and then to the sister’s dress and close-fitting headgear which disguised Rosamund. And suddenly the impulsiveness which was her inheritance from her Celtic and Latin ancestors took complete possession of her. She got up swiftly and went to Rosamund.

“You hate me for having come here, for having told you all this. You will always hate me, I think. I’ve intruded upon your peaceful life in religion--your peaceful, comfortable, sheltered life.”

Her great dark eyes fixed themselves upon the cross which lay on Rosamund’s breast. She lifted her hand and pointed to it.

“You’ve nailed him on a cross,” she said, with almost fierce intensity. “How can you be happy in that dress, worshiping God with a lot of holy women?”

“Did I tell you I was happy?” said Rosamund.

She got up and stood facing Lady Ingleton. Her face still preserved something of the coldness, but the color had deepened in the cheeks, and the expression in the eyes had changed. They looked now much less like the eyes of a “sister” than they had looked when she came into the room.

“Take off that dress and go to Constantinople!” said Lady Ingleton.

Rosamund flushed deeply, painfully; her mouth trembled, and tears came into her eyes, but she spoke resolutely.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said. “You were right to come here and to tell me. If I hate you, as you say, that’s my fault, not yours.”

She paused. It was evident that she was making a tremendous effort to conquer something; she even shut her eyes for a brief instant. Then she added in a very low voice;

“Thank you!”

And she put out her hand.

Tears started into Lady Ingleton’s eyes as she took the hand. Rosamund turned and went quickly out of the room.

Some minutes after she had gone Lady Ingleton heard rain beating upon the window. The sound reminded her of the umbrella she had “stood” in the corner of the room when Rosamund came in. It was still there. Impulsively she went to the corner and took it up; then, realizing that Rosamund must already be on her way, she laid it down on the table. She stood for a moment looking from “Wedded” to the damp umbrella.

Then she sat down on the sofa and cried impetuously.

Chapter XII

It was the month of May. Already there had been several unusually hot days in Constantinople, and Mrs. Clarke was beginning to think about the villa at Buyukderer. She was getting tired of Pera. She had fulfilled her promise to Dion Leith. She had given up going to England for Jimmy’s Christmas holidays and had spent the whole winter in Constantinople. But now she had had enough of it for the present, indeed more than enough of it.

She was feeling weary of the everlasting diplomatic society, of the potins political and social, of the love affairs and intrigues of her acquaintances which she knew of or divined, of the familiar voices and faces. She wanted something new; she wanted to break away. The restlessness that was always in her, concealed beneath her pale aspect of calm, was persecuting her as the spring with its ferment drew near to the torrid summer.

The spring had got into her veins and had made her long for novelty.

One morning when Sonia came into Mrs. Clarke’s bedroom with the coffee she brought a piece of news.

“Miladi Ingleton arrived at the Embassy from England yesterday,” said Sonia, in her thick, soft voice.

The apparent recovery of Lady Ingleton’s mother had been a deception. She had had a relapse almost immediately after Lady Ingleton’s return from Liverpool to London; an operation had been necessary, and Lady Ingleton had been obliged to stay on in England several weeks. During this time Mrs. Clarke had had no news from her. Till Sonia’s announcement she had not known the date fixed for her friend’s return. She received the information with her usual inflexibility, and merely said:

“I’ll go to see her this afternoon.”

Then she took up a newspaper which Sonia had brought in with her and began to sip the coffee.

As soon as she was dressed she sent a note to the British Embassy to ask if her friend would be in at tea-time.

Lady Ingleton drew her brows together when she read it. She was delighted to be again in Constantinople, for she had missed Carey quite terribly, but she wished that Cynthia Clarke was anywhere else. Ever since her visit to Liverpool she had been dreading the inevitable meeting with the friend whose secret she had betrayed. Yet the meeting must take place. She would be obliged some day to look once more into Cynthia Clarke’s earnest and distressed eyes. When that happened would she hate herself very much for what she had done? She had often wondered. She wondered now, as she read the note written in her friend’s large upright hand, as she wrote a brief answer to say she would be in after five o’clock that day.

She was troubled by the fact that her visit to Liverpool had not yielded the result she had hoped for. Rosamund Leith had not sought her husband. But she had taken off the sister’s dress and had given up living in the north.

Lady Ingleton knew this from Father Robertson, with whom she corresponded. She had never seen Rosamund or heard from her since the interview in the Adelphi Hotel. And she was troubled, although she had recently received from Father Robertson a letter ending with these words:

“Pressure would be useless. I have found by experience that one cannot hurry the human soul. It must move at its own pace. You have done your part. Try to leave the rest with confidence in other hands. Through you she knows the truth of her husband’s condition. She has given up the Sisterhood. Surely that means that she has taken the first step on the road that leads to Constantinople.”

But now May was here with its heat, and its sunshine, and its dust, and Lady Ingleton must soon meet the eyes of Cynthia Clarke, and the man she had striven to redeem was unredeemed.

She sighed as she got up from her writing-table. Perhaps perversely she felt that she would mind meeting Cynthia Clarke less if her treachery had been rewarded by the accomplishment of her purpose. A useless treachery seemed to her peculiarly unpardonable. She hated having done a wrong without securing a quid pro quo. Even if Father Robertson was right, and Rosamund Leith’s departure from the Sisterhood were the first step on the road to Constantinople, she might arrive too late.

Although she was once more with Carey, Lady Ingleton felt unusually depressed.

Soon after five the door of her boudoir was opened by a footman, and Mrs. Clarke walked slowly in, looking Lady Ingleton thought, even thinner, even more haggard and grave than usual. She was perfectly dressed in a gown that was a marvel of subtle simplicity, and wore a hat that drew just enough attention to the lovely shape of her small head.

“Certainly she has the most delicious head I ever saw,” was Lady Ingleton’s first (preposterous) thought. “And the strongest will I ever encountered,” was the following thought, as she looked into her friend’s large eyes.

After they had talked London and Paris for a few minutes Lady Ingleton changed the subject, and with a sort of languid zest, which was intended to conceal a purpose she desired to keep secret, began to speak of Pera and of the happenings there while she had been away. Various acquaintances were discussed, and presently Lady Ingleton arrived, strolling, at Dion Leith.

“Mr. Leith is still here, isn’t he?” she asked. “Carey hasn’t seen him lately but thinks he is about.”

“Oh yes, he is still here,” said Mrs. Clarke’s husky voice.

“What does he do? How does he pass his time?”

“I often wonder,” replied Mrs. Clarke, squeezing a lemon into her cup, which was full of clear China tea.

She put the lemon, thoroughly squeezed, down on its plate, looking steadily at her friend, and continued:

“You remember last summer when I asked you to be kind to him, and told you why I was interested in him, poor fellow?”

“Oh yes.”

“I really thought at that time it would be possible to assist him to get back into life, what we understand by life. You helped me like a true friend.”

“Oh, I really did nothing.”

“You enabled me to continue my acquaintance with him here,” said Mrs. Clarke inflexibly.

Lady Ingleton was silent, and Mrs. Clarke continued:

“You know what I did, my efforts to interest him in all sorts of things. I even got Jimmy out because I knew Mr. Leith was fond of him, threw them together, even tried to turn Mr. Leith into a sort of holiday tutor. Anything to take him out of himself. Later on, when Jimmy went back to England, I though I would try hard to wake up Dion Leith’s mind.”

“Did you?” said Lady Ingleton, in her most languid voice.

“I took him about in Stamboul. I showed him all the interesting things that travelers as a rule know nothing about. I tried to make him feel Stamboul. I even spent the winter here chiefly because of him, though, of course, nobody must know that but you.”

“Entendu, ma chere!”

“But I’ve made a complete failure of it all.”

“You meant that Mr. Leith can’t take up life again?”

“He simply doesn’t care for the things of the mind. He has very few mental resources. I imagined that there was very much more in him to work upon than there is. If his heart receives a hard blow, an intellectual man can always turn for consolation to the innumerable things of art, philosophy, literature, that are food for the mind. But Mr. Leith unfortunately isn’t an intellectual man. And another thing----”

She had been speaking very quietly; now she paused.

“Yes?” said Lady Ingleton.

“Jimmy came out for the Easter holidays. It was absurd, because they’re so short, but I had to see him, and I couldn’t very well go to England. Well, Jimmy’s taken a violent dislike to Mr. Leith.”

“I thought Jimmy was very fond of him.”

“He was devoted to him, but now he can’t bear him. In fact, Jimmy won’t have anything to do with Dion Leith. I suppose--boys of that age are often very sharp--I suppose he sees the deterioration in Mr. Leith and it disgusts him.”

“Deterioration!” said Lady Ingleton, leaning forward, and speaking more impulsively than before.

“Yes. It is heart-rending.”

“Really!”

“And it makes things difficult for me.”

“I’m sorry for that.”

There was a moment of silence; then, as Mrs. Clarke did not speak, but sat still wrapped in a haggard immobility, Lady Ingleton said:

“When do you go to Buyukderer?”

“I shall probably go next week. I’ve very tired of Pera.”

“You look tired.”

“I didn’t mean physically. I’m never physically tired.”

“Extraordinary woman!” said Lady Ingleton, with a faint, unhumorous smile. “Come and see some Sevres I picked up at Christie’s. Carey is delighted with it, although, of course, horrified at the price I paid for it.”

She got up and went with Mrs. Clarke into one of the drawing-rooms. Dion Leith was not mentioned again.

That evening the Ingletons dined alone. Sir Carey said he must insist on a short honeymoon even though they were obliged to spend it in an Embassy. They had dinner in Bohemian fashion on a small round table in Lady Ingleton’s boudoir, and were waited upon by Sir Carey’s valet, a middle-aged Italian who had been for many years in his service and who had succeeded, in the way of Italian servants, in becoming one of the family. The Pekinese lay around solaced by the arrival of their mistress and of their doyenne.

When dinner was over and Sir Carey had lit his cigar, he breathed a sigh of contentment.

“At last I’m happy once more after all those months of solitude!”

He looked across at his wife, and added:

“But are you happy at being with me again?”

She smiled.

“Yes,” he said, “I know, of course.”

“Then why do you ask?”

“Well, I’m a trained observer, like every competent diplomatist, and--there’s something. I see in the lute of your happiness a tiny rift. It’s scarcely visible, but--I see it.”

“I’m not quite happy to-night.”

“And you won’t tell me why, on our honeymoon?”

“I want to tell you but I can’t. I have no right to tell you.”

“You only can judge of that.”

“I’ve done something that even you might think abominable, something treacherous. I had a great reason--but still!” She sighed. “I shall never be able to tell you what it is, because to do that would increase my sin. To-night I’m realizing that I’m not at all sorry for what I have done. And that not being sorry--as well as something else--makes me unhappy in a new way. It’s all very complicated.”

“Like Balkan politics! Shall we”--he looked round the room meditatively--“shall we set the dogs at it?”

She smiled.

“Even they couldn’t drive my tristesse quite away. You have more power with me than many dogs. Read me something. Read me ‘Rabbi ben Ezra.’”

Sir Carey went to fetch the exorcizer.

The truth was that Lady Ingleton’s interview with Cynthia Clarke had made her realize two things: that since she had come to know Father Robertson, and had betrayed to him the secret of her friend’s life, any genuine feeling of liking she had had for Cynthia Clarke had died; and that Cynthia Clarke was tired of Dion Leith.

That day Mrs. Clarke’s hypocrisy had, perhaps, for the first time, absolutely disgusted, and even almost horrified, Lady Ingleton. For years Lady Ingleton had known of it, but for years she had almost admired it. The cleverness, the subtlety, the competence of it had entertained her mind. She had respected, too, the courage which never failed Mrs. Clarke. But she was beginning to see her with new eyes. Perhaps Father Robertson had given his impulsive visitor a new moral vision.

During the conversation that afternoon at certain moments Lady Ingleton had almost hated Cynthia Clarke--when Cynthia had spoken of trying to wake up Dion Leith’s mind, of his not being an intellectual man, of Jimmy Clarke’s shrinking from him because of his deterioration. And when Cynthia had said that deterioration was “heart-rending” Lady Ingleton had quite definitely detested her. This feeling of detestation had persisted while, in the drawing-room, Cynthia was lovingly appreciating the new acquisition of Sevres. Lady Ingleton sickened now when she thought of the lovely hands sensitively touching, feeling, the thin china. There really was something appalling in the delicate mentality, in the subtle taste, of a woman in whom raged such devastating physical passions.

Lady Ingleton shuddered as she remembered her conversation with her “friend.” But it had brought about something. It had driven away any lingering regret of hers for having spoken frankly to Father Robertson. Cynthia was certainly tired of Dion Leith. Was she about to sacrifice him as she had sacrificed others? Lady Ingleton dreaded the future. For during the interview at the Adelphi Hotel she had realized Rosamund’s innate and fastidious purity. To forgive even one infidelity would be a tremendous moral triumph in such a woman as Rosamund. But if Cynthia Clarke threw Dion Leith away, and he fell into promiscuous degradation, then surely Rosamund’s nature would rise up in inevitable revolt. Even if she came to Constantinople then it would surely be too late.

Lady Ingleton had seen clearly enough into the mind of Cynthia Clarke, but there was hidden from her the greater part of a human drama not yet complete.

Combined with the ugly passion which governed her life, Mrs. Clarke had an almost wild love of personal freedom. As much as she loved to fetter she hated to be fettered. This hatred had led her into many difficulties during the course of her varied life, difficulties which had always occurred at moments when she wanted to get rid of people. Ever since she had grown up there had been recurring epochs when she had been tormented by the violent desire to rid herself of some one whom she had formerly longed for, whom she had striven to bind to her. Until now she had always eventually succeeded in breaking away from those who were beginning to involve her in weariness or to disgust her. There had sometimes been perilous moments, painful scenes, bitter recriminations. But by the exercise of her indomitable power of will, helped by her exceptional lack of scruple, she had always managed to accomplish her purpose. She had always found hitherto that she was more pitiless, and therefore more efficient, than anyone opposed to her in a severe struggle of wills. But Dion Leith was beginning to cause her serious uneasiness. She had known from the beginning of their acquaintance that he was an exceptional man; since his tragedy she had realized that the exceptional circumstances of his life had accentuated his individuality. In sorrow, in deterioration, he had broken loose from restraint. She had helped to make him what he had now become, the most difficult man she had ever had to deal with. When he had crossed the river to her he had burnt all the boats behind him. If he had sometimes been weak in goodness, in those former days long past, in what he considered as evil--Mrs. Clarke did not see things in white and black--he had developed a peculiar persistence and determination which were very like strength.

Looking back, Mrs. Clarke realized that the definite change in Dion, which marked the beginning of a new development, dated from the night in the garden at Buyukderer when Jimmy had so nearly learnt the truth. On that night she had forced Dion to save her reputation with her child by lying and playing the hypocrite to a boy who looked up to him and trusted in him. Dion had not forgotten his obedience. Perhaps he hated her because of it in some secret place of his soul. She was sure that he intended to make her pay for it. He had obeyed her in what she considered as a very trifling matter. (For of course Jimmy had to be deceived.) But since then he had often shown a bitter, even sometimes a brutal, disposition to make her obey him. She could not fully understand the measure of his resentment because she had none of his sense of honor and did not share his instinctive love of truth. But she knew he had suffered acutely in tricking and lying to Jimmy.

On that night, then, he had burnt his boats. She herself had told him to do it when she had said to him, “Give yourself wholly to me.” She was beginning to regret that she had ever said that.

At first, in her perversity, she had curiously enjoyed Dion’s misery. It had wrapped him in a garment that was novel. It had thrown about him a certain romance. But now she was becoming weary of it. She had had enough of it and enough of him. That horrible process, which she knew so well, had repeated itself once more: she had wanted a thing; she had striven for it; she had obtained it; she had enjoyed it (for she knew well how to enjoy and never thought that the game was not worth the candle). And then, by slow, almost imperceptible degrees, her power of enjoyment had begun to lessen. Day by day it had lost in strength. She had tried to stimulate it, to deceive herself about its decay, but the time had come, as it had come to her many times in the past, when she had been forced to acknowledge to herself that it was no longer living but a corpse. Dion Leith had played his part in her life. She wished now to put him outside of her door. She had made sacrifices for him; for him she had run risks. All that was very well so long as he had had the power to reward her. But now she was beginning to brood over those risks, those sacrifices, with resentment, to magnify them in her mind; she was beginning to be angry as she dwelt upon that which distortedly she thought of as her unselfishness.

After Jimmy had left Turkey to go back to Eton, and the summer had died, Mrs. Clarke had fulfilled her promise to Dion. She had settled at Pera for the winter, and she had arranged his life for him. From the moment of Jimmy’s departure Dion had given himself entirely to her. He had even given himself with a sort of desperation. She had been aware of his fierce concentration, and she had tasted it with a keenness of pleasure, she had savored it deliberately and fully in the way of an epicure. The force of his resolution towards evil--it was just that--had acted upon her abominably sensitive temperament as a strong tonic. That period had been the time when, to her, the game was worth the candle, was worth a whole blaze of candles.

Already, then, Dion had begun to show the new difficult man whom she, working hand in hand with sorrow, had helped to create within him; but she had at first enjoyed his crudities of temper, his occasional outbursts of brutality, his almost fierce roughness and the hardness which alternated with his moments of passion.

She had understood that he was flinging away with furious hands all the baggage of virtue he had clung to in the past, that he was readjusting his life, was reversing all the habits which had been familiar and natural to him in the existence with Rosamund. So much the better, she had thought. The fact that he was doing this proved to her her power over him. She had smiled, in her unsmiling way, upon his efforts to do what she had told him to do, to cut away the cancer that was in him and to cut away all that was round it. Away with the old moralities, the old hatred of lies and deceptions, the old love of sanity and purity of life.

But away, too, with the old reverence for, and worship of, the woman possessed.

Dion had taken to heart a maxim once uttered to him by Mrs. Clarke in the garden at Buyukderer. Mention had been made of the very foolish and undignified conduct of a certain woman in Pera society who had been badly treated by a young diplomat. In discussing the matter Dion had chanced to say:

“But if she does such things how can any man respect her?”

Mrs. Clarke’s reply, spoken with withering sarcasm, had been:

“Women don’t want to be respected by men.”

Dion had not forgotten that saying. It had sunk deep into his heart. He had come to believe it. Even when he thought of Rosamund still he believed it. He had respected her, and had shown his respect in the most chivalrous way at his command, and she had never really loved him. Evidently women were not what he had thought they were. Mrs. Clarke knew what they were and a thousand things that he did not know. He grasped at her cynicism, and he often applied it, translated through his personality, to herself. He even went farther in cynicism than she had ever gone, behaving like a convert to a religion which had the charm of novelty. He praised her for her capacities as a liar, a hypocrite, a subtle trickster, a thrower of dust in the eyes of her world. One of his favorite names for her was “dust-thrower.” Sometimes he abused her. She believed that at moments he detested her. But he clung to her and he did not mean to give her up. And she knew that.

After that horrible night when Jimmy had waked up she had succeeded in making Dion believe that he was deeply loved by her. She had really had an ugly passion for him, and she had contrived easily enough to dress it up and present it as love. And he clung to that semblance of love, because it was all that he had, because it was a weapon in his hand, and because he had made for it a sacrifice. He had sacrificed the truth that was in him, and he had received in part payment the mysterious dislike of the boy who had formerly looked up to him.

Jimmy had never been friendly with Dion since the night of their search for his mother in the garden.

His manner towards his mother had changed but little. He was slightly more reserved with her than he had been. Her faint air of sarcasm when, in Sonia’s room, he had shown her his boyish agitation, had made a considerable impression upon him. He was unable to forget it. And he was a little more formal with his mother; showed her, perhaps, more respect than before. But the change was trifling. His respect for Dion, however, was obviously dead. Indeed he had begun to show a scarcely veiled hostility towards Dion in the summer holidays, and in the recent Easter holidays, spent by him in Pera, he had avoided Dion as much as possible.

“That fellow still here!” he had said, with boyish gruffness, when his mother had first mentioned Dion’s name immediately after his arrival. And when he had seen Dion he had said straight out to his mother that he couldn’t “stand Leith at any price now.” She had asked him why, fixing her eyes upon him, but the only reply she had succeeded in getting had been that he didn’t trust the fellow, that he hadn’t trusted Leith for a long time.

“Since when?” she had said.

“Can’t remember,” had been the non-committal answer.

It seemed as if Jimmy had seen through Dion’s insincerity in the garden at Buyukderer. Yet there was nothing to show that he had not accepted his mother’s insincerity in Sonia’s room at its face value. Even Mrs. Clarke had not been able to understand exactly what was in her boy’s mind. But Jimmy’s hostility to Dion had troubled her obscurely, and had added to her growing weariness of this intrigue something more vital. Her intelligence divined, rather than actually perceived, the coming into her life of a definite menace to her happiness, if happiness it could be called. She felt as if Jimmy were on the track of her secret, and she was certain that Dion was the cause of the boy’s unpleasant new alertness. In the past she had taken risks for Dion. But she had had the great reason of what she chose to call passion. That reason was gone now. She was resolved not to take the greatest of all risks for a man whom she wanted to get rid of.

She was resolved; but she encountered now in Dion a resolve which she had not suspected he was capable of, and which began to render her seriously uneasy.

Lady Ingleton’s remark, “you look tired,” had struck unpleasantly on Mrs. Clarke’s ears, and she came away from the Embassy that day with them in her mind. She was on foot. As she came out through the great gateway of the Embassy she remembered that she had been coming from it on that day in June when she had seen Dion Leith for the first time in Pera. A sharp thrill had gone through her that day. He had come. He had obeyed the persistent call of her will. What she had desired for so long would be. And she had been fiercely glad for two reasons; one an ordinary reason, the other less ordinary. A mysterious reason of the mind. If her will had played her false for once, had proved inadequate, she would have suffered strangely. When she knew it had not she had triumphed. But now, as she walked onward slowly, she wished she had never seen Dion Leith in Pera, she wished that her will had played her false. It would have been better so, for she was in a difficult situation, and she foresaw that it was going to become more difficult. She was assailed by that recurring desire which is the scourge of the sensualist, the desire to rid herself violently, abruptly and forever of the possession she had schemed and made long efforts to obtain. Her torch was burnt out. She wished to stamp out the flame of another torch which still glowed with a baleful fire.

“And Delia has noticed something!” she thought.

The thought was scarcely out of her mind when she came face to face with Dion Leith. He stopped before her.

“Have you been to the Embassy?” he said.

“Yes. Delia Ingleton came back yesterday. You aren’t going to call there?”

“Of course not. I happened to see you walking in that direction, so I thought I would wait for you.”

With the manner of a man exercising a right he turned to walk back with her. A flame of irritation scorched her, but she did not show any emotion. She only said quietly:

“You know I am not particularly fond of being seen with men in the Grande Rue.”

“Very well. If you like, I’ll come to your flat by a round-about way. I’ll be there five minutes after you are.”

Before she had time to say anything he was gone, striding through the crowd.

Mrs. Clarke walked on and came into the Grande Rue.

She lived in a flat in a street which turned out of the Grande Rue on the left not very far from the Taxim Garden. As she walked on slowly she was trying to make up her mind to force a break with Dion. She had great courage and was naturally ruthless, yet for once she was beset by indecision. She did not any longer feel sure that she could dominate this man. She had bent him to her will when she took him; but could she do so when she wished to get rid of him?

When she reached the house, on the second floor of which was her flat, she found him there waiting for her.

“You must have walked very quickly, Dion,” she said.

“No, I didn’t,” he replied bruskly. “You walked very slowly.”

“I feel tired to-day.”

“I thought you were never tired.”

“Every woman is tired sometimes.”

They began to ascend the staircase. There was no lift.

“Are you going out to-night?” she heard him say behind her.

“No. I shall go to bed early.”

“I’ll stay till then.”

“You know you can’t stay very late here.”

She heard him laugh.

“When you’ve just said you are going to bed early!”

She said nothing more till they reached the flat. He followed her in and put his hat down.

“Will you have tea?”

“No, thanks; nothing.”

“Go into the drawing-room. I’ll come in a moment.”

She left him and went into her bedroom.

He waited for her in the drawing-room. At first he sat down. The room was full of the scent of flowers, and he remembered the strong flowery scent which had greeted him when he visited the villa at Buyukderer for the first time. How long ago that seemed--aeons ago! A few minutes passed, registered by the ticking of a little clock of exquisite bronze work on the mantelpiece. She did not come. He felt restless. He always felt restless in Constantinople. Now he got up and walked about the room, turning sharply from time to time, pausing when he turned, then resuming his walk. Once, as he turned, he found himself exactly opposite to a mirror. He stared into it and saw a man still young, but lined, with sunken eyes, a mouth drooping and bitter, a head on which the dark hair was no longer thick and springy. His hair had retreated from the temples, and this fact had changed his appearance, had lessened his good looks, and at the same time had given to his face an odd suggestion of added intellectuality which was at war with the plain stamp of dissipation imprinted upon it. Even in repose his face was almost horribly expressive.

As he stared into the glass he thought:

“If I cut off my mustache I should look like a tragic actor who was a thorough bad lot.”

He turned away, frowning, and resumed his walk. Presently he stood still and looked about the room. He was getting impatient. Irritability crept through him. He almost hated Mrs. Clarke for keeping him waiting so long.

“Why the devil doesn’t she come?” he thought.

He stood trying to control his nervous anger, clenching his muscular hands, and looking from one piece of furniture to another, from one ornament to another ornament, with quickly shifting eyes.

His attention was attracted by something unusual in the room which he had not noticed till now. On a writing-table of ebony near one of the windows he saw a large photograph in a curious frame of ruddy arbutus wood. He had never before seen a photograph in any room lived in by Mrs. Clarke, and he had heard her say that photographs killed a room, and might easily kill, too, with their staring impotence, any affection one felt for the friends they represented. Whose photograph could this be which triumphed over such a dislike? He walked to the table, bent down and saw a standing boy in flannels, bare-headed, with thick, disordered hair and bare arms, holding in his large hands a cricket bat. It was Jimmy, and his eyes looked straight into Dion’s.

A door clicked. There was a faint rustling. Mrs. Clarke walked into the room.

Dion turned round.

“What’s this photograph doing here?” he asked roughly.

“Doing?”

“Yes. You hate photographs. I’ve heard you say so.”

“Jimmy gave it to me on my birthday just before he left for England. It’s quite a good one.”

“You are going to keep it here?”

“Yes. I am going to keep it here. Come and sit down.”

He did not move.

“Jimmy loathes me,” he said.

“Nonsense.”

“He does. Through you he has come to loathe me, and you keep his photograph here----”

“I don’t allow any one to criticize what I do in my own drawing-room,” she interrupted. “You are really childish to-day.”

His intense irritability had communicated itself to her. She felt an almost reckless desire to get rid of him. His look of embittered wretchedness tormented her nerves. She wondered how it had ever been able to interest her, even to lure her. She was amazed at her own perversity.

“I cannot allow you to come here if you are going to try to interfere with my arrangements,” she added, with a sort of fierce coldness.

“I have a right to come here.”

“You have not. You have no rights over me, none at all. I have made a great many sacrifices for you, far too many, but I shall never sacrifice my complete independence for you or for any one.”

“Sacrifices for me!” he exclaimed.

He snatched up the photograph, held it with both his hands, exerted his strength, smashed the glass, broke the frame, tore the photograph in half, and threw it, the fragments of red wood and the bits of glass on the table.

“You’ve made your boy hate me, and you shan’t have him there,” he said savagely.

“How dare you!” she exclaimed, in a low, hoarse voice.

She flung out her hands. In snatching at the ruined photograph she picked up with it a fragment of glass. It cut her hand slightly, and a thin thread of blood ran down over her white skin.

“Oh, your hand!” exclaimed Dion, in a changed voice. “It’s bleeding!”

He pulled out his handkerchief.

“Leave it alone! I forbid you to touch it!”

She put the fragments of the photograph inside her dress, gently, tenderly even. Then she turned and faced him.

“To-morrow I shall telegraph to England for another photograph to be sent out, and it will stand here,” she said, pointing with her bleeding hand at the writing-table. “It will always stand on my table here and in the Villa Hafiz.”

Then she bound her own handkerchief about her hand and rang the bell. Sonia came.

“I’ve stupidly cut my hand, Sonia. Come and tie it up. Mr. Leith is going in a moment, and then you shall bathe it.”

Sonia looked at Dion, and, without a word, adjusted the handkerchief deftly, and pinned it in place with a safety-pin which she drew out of her dress. Then she left the room with her flat-footed walk. As she shut the door Dion said doggedly:

“You’d better let her bathe it now, because I’m not going in a moment.”

“When I ask you to go you will go.”

“Sit down. I must speak to you.”

He pointed to a large sofa. She went very deliberately to a chair and sat down.

“Why don’t you sit on the sofa?”

“I prefer this.”

He sat on the sofa.

“I must speak to you about Jimmy.”

“Well?”

“What’s the matter with him? What have you been up to with him?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why should he turn against me and not against you?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You do. It’s since that night in the garden when you made me lie to him. Ever since that night he’s been absolutely different with me. You know it.”

“I can’t help it.”

“He believed your lies to him, apparently. Why doesn’t he believe mine?”

“Of course he believed what you told him.”

“He didn’t, or he wouldn’t have changed. He hates your having anything to do with me. He’s told you so. I’m sure of it.”

“Jimmy would never dare to do that.”

“Anyhow, you know he does.”

She did not deny it.

“Remember this,” Dion said, looking straight at her, “I’m not going to be sacrificed a second time on account of a child.”

After a long pause, during which Mrs. Clarke sat without moving, her lovely head leaning against a cushion which was fastened near the top of the back of the chair, she said:

“What do you mean exactly by being sacrificed, Dion?”

Her manner had changed. The hostility had gone out of it. Her husky voice sounded gentle almost, and she looked at him earnestly.

“I mean just this: my life with the woman I once cared for was smashed to pieces by a child, my own dead child. I’m not going to allow my life with you to be smashed to pieces by Jimmy. Isn’t a man more than a child? Can’t he feel more than a child feels, give more than a child can give? Isn’t a thing full grown as valuable, as worth having as a thing that’s immature?”

He spoke with almost passionate resentment.

“D’you mean to tell me that a man’s love always means less to a woman than a child’s love means?”

Silently, while he spoke, she compared the passion she had had for Dion Leith with the love she would always have for Jimmy. The one was dead; the other could not die. That was the difference between such things.

“The two are so different that it is useless to compare them,” she replied. “Surely you could not be jealous of a child.”

“I could be jealous of anything that threatened me in my life with you. It’s all I’ve got now, and I won’t have it interfered with.”

“But neither must you attempt to interfere with my life with my child,” she said, very calmly.

“You dragged me into your life with Jimmy. You have always used Jimmy as a means. It began long ago in London when you were at Claridge’s.”

“There is no need--”

“There is need to make you see clearly why I have every right to take a stand now against--against----”

“Against what?”

“I feel you’re changing. I don’t trust you. You are not to be trusted. Since Jimmy has been here again I feel that you are different.”

“I am obliged to be specially careful now the boy is beginning to grow up. He notices things now he wouldn’t have noticed a year or two ago. And it will get worse from year to year. That isn’t my fault.”

His sunken eyes looked fixedly at her from the midst of the network of wrinkles which disfigured his face.

“Now what are you trying to lead up to?” he said.

“It’s very foolish of you to be always suspicious. Only stupid people are always suspecting others of sharp practise.”

“I’m stupid compared with you, but I’m not so stupid that I haven’t learnt to know you better than other people know you, better, probably, than any one else on earth knows you. It is entirely through you that Jimmy has got to hate me. I’m not going to let you use his hatred of me as a weapon against me. I’ve been wanting to tell you this, but I thought I’d wait till he had gone.”

“Why should I want to use a weapon against you?”

“I don’t know. It isn’t always easy to know why you want things. You’re such an inveterate liar, and so tricky that you’d puzzle the devil himself.”

“Do you realize that all you are saying to-day implies something? It implies that in your opinion I am not a free agent, that you consider you have a right to govern my actions. But I deny that.”

She spoke firmly, but without any heat.

“Do you mean to say that what we are to each other gives me no more rights over you than mere acquaintances have?”

“It gives you no more rights over me than mere acquaintances have.”

He sat looking at her for a minute. Then he said:

“Cynthia, come and sit here, please, beside me.”

“Why should I?”

“Please come.”

“Very well.”

She got up, came to the sofa with a sort of listless decision, and sat down beside him. He took her uninjured hand. His hand was burning with heat. He closed and unclosed his fingers as he went on speaking.

“What is there in such a relation as ours if it carries no rights? You have altered my whole life. Is that nothing? I live out here only because of you. I have nothing out here but you. All these months, ever since we left Buyukderer, I’ve lived just as you wished. I went into society at Buyukderer because you wished me to. When you didn’t care any more about my doing that I lived in the shade in Galata. I’ve fallen in with every deception you thought necessary, I’ve told every lie you wished me to tell. Ever since you made me lie to Jimmy I haven’t cared much. But you’ll never know, because you can’t understand such things, what the loss of Jimmy’s confidence and respect has meant to me. However, that’s all past. I’m as much of a hypocrite as you are; I’m as false as you are; I’m as rotten as you are--with other people. But don’t, for God’s sake, let’s be rotten with each other. That would be too foul, like thieves falling out.”

“I’ve always been perfectly straight with you,” she said coldly. “I have nothing to reproach myself with.”

The closing of his fingers on her hand, and their unclosing, irritated her whole body. To-day she disliked his touch intensely, so intensely that she could scarcely believe she had ever liked it, longed for it, schemed for it.

“Please keep your hand still!” she said.

“What?”

“It makes me nervous your doing that. Either hold my hand or don’t hold it.”

“I don’t understand. What was I doing?”

“Oh, never mind. I’ve always been straight with you. I don’t know why you are attacking me.”

“I feel you are changing towards me. So I thought I’d tell you that I don’t intend to be driven out a second time by a child. It’s better you should know that. Then you won’t attempt the impossible.”

She looked into his sunken eyes.

“Jimmy has got to dislike you,” she said. “It’s unfortunate, but it can’t be helped. I don’t know exactly why it is so. It may be because he’s older, just at the age when boys begin to understand about men and women. You’re not always quite so careful before him as you might be. I don’t mean in what you say, but in your manner. I think Jimmy fancies you like me in a certain way. I think he probably took it into his head that you were hanging about the garden that night because perhaps you hoped to meet me there. A very little more and he might begin to suspect me. You have been frank with me to-day. I’ll be frank with you. I want you to understand that if there ever was a question of my losing Jimmy’s love and respect I should fight to keep them, sacrifice anything to keep them. Jimmy comes first with me, and always will. It couldn’t be otherwise. I prefer that you should know it.”

He shot a glance at her that was almost cunning. She had been prepared for a perhaps violent outburst, but he only said:

“Jimmy won’t be here again for some time, so we needn’t bother about him.”

She was genuinely surprised, but she did not show it.

“It was you who brought up the question,” she said.

“Never mind. Don’t worry about it. If Jimmy comes out for the summer holidays----”

“He will, of course.”

“Then I can go away from Buyukderer just for those few weeks.”

“I----” She paused; then went on: “I must tell you that you mustn’t come to Buyukderer again this summer.”

“Then you won’t go there?”

“Of course I must go. I have the villa. I am going there next week.”

“If you go, then I shall go. But I’ll leave when Jimmy comes, as you are so fussed about him.”

She could scarcely believe that it was Dion who was speaking to her. Often she had heard him speak violently, irritably, even cruelly and rudely. But there was a sort of ghastly softness in his voice. His hand still held hers, but its grasp had relaxed. In his touch, as in his voice, there was a softness which disquieted her.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t let you come to Buyukderer this summer,” she said. “Once did not matter. But if you came again my reputation would suffer.”

“Then I’ll stay at some other place on the Bosporus and come over.”

“That would be just as bad.”

“Do you seriously mean that we are to be entirely separated during the whole of this summer?”

“I must be careful of my reputation now Jimmy’s growing up. The Bosporus is the home of malicious gossip.”

“Do answer my question. Do you mean that we are to be separated during the summer?”

“I don’t see how it can be helped.”

“It can be helped very easily. Don’t go to Buyukderer.”

“I must. I have the villa.”

“Let it.”

“I couldn’t possibly stand Constantinople in the summer.”

“There’s no need to do that. There are other places besides Constantinople and Buyukderer. You might go to one of them. Or you might travel.”

She sat down for a moment looking down.

“Do you mean that I might travel with you?” she said, at last.

“Not with me. But I could happen to be where you are.”

“That’s not possible. Some one would get to know of it.”

“How absurdly ingenue you have become all of a sudden!” he said, with soft, but scathing, irony.

And he laughed, let out a long, low, and apparently spontaneous laugh, as if he were genuinely amused.

“Really one would hardly imagine that you were the heroine of the famous divorce case which interested all London not so very long ago. When I remember the life you acknowledged you had lived, the life you were quite defiant about, I can’t help being amused by this sudden access of conventional Puritanism. You declared then that you didn’t choose to live a dull, orthodox life. One would suppose that the leopard could change his spots after all.”

While he was speaking she lifted her head and looked fixedly at him.

“It’s just that very divorce case which has made me alter my way of living,” she said. “Any one who knew anything of the world, any one but a fool, could see that.”

“Ah, but I am a fool,” he returned doggedly. “I was a fool when I ran straight, and it seems I’m a fool when I run crooked. You’ve got to make the best of me as I am. Take your choice. Go to Buyukderer if you like. If you do I shall stay on the Bosporus. Or travel if you like, and I’ll happen to be where you are. It’s quite easy. It’s done every day. But you know that as well as I do. I can’t give you points in the game of throwing dust in the eyes of the public.”

“It’s too late now to let the villa, even if I cared to. And I can’t afford to shut it up and leave it standing empty while I wander about in hotels. I shall go to Buyukderer next week.”

“All right. I’ll go back to the rooms I had last year, and we can live as we did then. Give me the key of the garden gate and I can use the pavilion as my sitting-room again. It’s all quite simple.”

A frown altered her white face. His mention of the pavilion had suddenly recalled to her exactly what she had felt for him last year. She compared it with what she felt for him now. With an impulsive movement she pulled her hand away from his.

“I shall not give you the key. I can’t have you there. I will not. People have begun to talk.”

“I don’t believe it. They never see us together here. You have taken good care of that in the last few months. Why, we’ve met like thieves in the night.”

“Here, yes. In a great town one can manage, but not in a place like Buyukderer.”

He leaned forward and said, with dogged resolution:

“One thing is certain--I will not be separated from you during the summer. Do whatever you like, but remember that. Make your own plans. I will fall in with them. But I shall pass the summer where you pass it.”

“I--really I didn’t know you cared so much about me,” she murmured, with a faint smile.

“Care for you!”

He stared into her face and the twinkles twitched about his eyes.

“How should I not care for you?”

He gripped her hand again.

“Haven’t you taught me how to live in the dust? Haven’t you shown me the folly of being honorable and the fun of deceiving others? Haven’t you led me into the dark and made me able to see in it? And there’s such a lot to see in the dark! Why, good God, Cynthia, you’ve made a man in your own image and then you’re surprised at his worshipping you. Where’s your cleverness?”

“I often believe you detest me.”

“Oh, as for that, a woman such as you are can be loved and hated almost at the same time. But she can’t be given up. No!”

As she looked at him she saw the red gleam of the torch he carried. Hers had long ago died out into blackness.

“Is it possible that you really wish to ruin my reputation?”

“Not a bit of it! You’re so clever that you can always guard against that.”

“Yes, I can when I’m dealing with gentlemen,” she said, with sudden, vicious sharpness. “But you are behaving like a cad. Of all the men I--”

She stopped. A sort of nervous fury possessed her. It had nearly driven her to make a false step. And yet--would it be a false step? As she paused, looking at Dion, marking the hard obstinacy in his eyes, feeling the hard, hot grip of his hand, it occurred to her that perhaps she had blundered upon the one way out, the way of escape. Amid the wreckage of his beliefs she knew that Dion still held to one belief, which had been shaken once, but which her cool adroitness had saved and made firm in a critical moment. If she destroyed it now would he let her go? Just how low had he fallen through her? She wished she knew. But she did not know, and she waited, looking at him.

“Go on!” he said. “Of all the men you--what?”

“How low down is he? How low down?” she asked herself.

“Can you go on?” he said harshly.

“Of all the men who have cared for me you are the only man who has ever dared to interfere with my freedom,” she said.

Her voice had become almost raucous, and a faint dull red strangely discolored and altered her face.

“I will not permit it. I shall go to Buyukderer, and I forbid you to follow me there. Now it’s getting late and I’m tired. Please go away.”

“Men who have cared for you!”

“Yes. Yes.”

“What d’you mean by that? D’you mean Brayfield?”

“Yes.”

“Have there been many others who have cared as Brayfield did?”

“Yes.”

“Hadi Bey was one of them, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“And Dumeny was another?”

“Yes.”

“Poor fellows!”

His lips were smiling, but his eyes looked dreadfully intent and searching.

“You made them suffer and gave them no reward. I can see you doing it and enjoying it.”

“That’s untrue.”

“What is untrue?”

“To say that I gave them no reward.”

At this moment there was a tap on the door.

“Come in!” said Mrs. Clarke, in her ordinary voice.

Sonia opened the door and came in.

“Excuse me, Madame,” she said, “but you told me I was to bathe your hand. If it is not bathed it will look horrible to-morrow. I have the warm water all ready.”

She stood in front of her mistress, broad, awkward and yet capable. Dion felt certain this woman meant to get rid of him because she was aware that her mistress wanted him to go. He had always realized that Sonia knew Mrs. Clarke better than any other woman did. As for himself--she had never shown any feeling towards him. He did not know whether she liked him or disliked him. But now he knew that he disliked her.

He looked almost menacingly at her.

“Your mistress can’t go at present,” he said. “Her hand is all right. It was only a scratch.”

Sonia looked at her mistress.

“Sonia is quite right,” said Mrs. Clarke, getting up. “And as the water is warm I will go. Good-by.”

“I will stay here till you have finished,” he said, still looking at Sonia.

“It’s getting very late. We might finish our talk to-morrow.”

“I will stay.”

After a slight pause Mrs. Clarke, whose face was still discolored with red, turned to the maid and said:

“Go away, Sonia.”

Sonia went away very slowly. At the door she stopped for a moment and looked round. Then she disappeared, and the door closed slowly and as if reluctantly behind her.

“Now what did you mean?” Dion said.

He got up.

“What did you mean?”

“Simply this, that my husband ought to have won his case.”

“Ah!”

He stood with his hands hanging at his sides, looking impassive, with his head bent and the lids drooping over his eyes. She waited--for her freedom. She did not mind the disgust which she felt like an emanation in the darkening room, if only it would carry him far enough in hatred of her. Would it do that?

There was a very long silence between them. During it he remained motionless. With his hanging hands and his drooping head he looked, she thought, almost as much like a puppet as like a man. His whole body had a strange aspect of listlessness, almost of feebleness. Yet she knew how muscular and powerful he still was, although he had long ago ceased from taking care of his body. The silence lasted so long, and he stood so absolutely still, that she began to feel uneasy, even faintly afraid. The nerves in her body were tingling. They could have braced themselves to encounter violence, but this immobility and dumbness tormented them. She wanted to speak, to move, but she felt obliged to wait for him. At last he looked up. He came to her, lifted his hands and laid them heavily on her emaciated shoulders.

“So that’s what you are!”

He stared into her haggard face. She met his eyes resolutely.

“That’s what you are!”

“Yes.”

“Why have you told me this to-day?”

“Of course you knew it long ago.”

“Answer me. Why have you told me to-day?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do. You have told me to-day because you have had enough of me. You meant to use Jimmy to get rid of me as you once used him to get to know me more intimately. When you found that wouldn’t serve your turn, you made up your mind to speak a word or two of truth. You thought you would disgust me into leaving you.”

“Of course you knew it long ago,” she repeated in a dull voice.

“I didn’t know it. I might have suspected it. In fact, once I did, and I told you so. But you drove out my suspicion. I don’t know exactly how. And since then--after you got your verdict in London I saw Dumeny smile at you as he went out of the Court. I have never been able to forget that smile. Now I understand it. One by one you’ve managed to get rid of them all. And now at last you’ve arrived at me, and you’ve said to yourself, ‘It’s his turn to be kicked out now.’ Haven’t you?”

“Nothing can last forever,” she murmured huskily.

“No. But this time you’re not going to scrawl ‘finis’ exactly when you want to.”

“It’s getting dark, and I’m tired. My hand is hurting me.”

He gripped her shoulders more firmly.

“If you meant some day to get rid of me, to kick me out as you’ve kicked out the others,” he said grimly, “you shouldn’t have made me come to you that night when Jimmy was at Buyukderer. That was a mistake on your part.”

“Why?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

“Because that night through you I lost something; I lost the last shred of my self-respect. Till that night I was still clinging on to it. You struck my hands away and made me let go. Now I don’t care. And that’s why I’m not going to let you make the sign of the cross over me and dismiss me into hell. Your list closes with me, Cynthia. I’m not going to give you up.”

She shook slightly under his hands.

“Why are you trembling?”

“I’m not trembling; but I’m tired; let me alone.”

“You can go to Sonia now if you like, and have your hand bathed.”

He lifted his hands from her shoulders, but she did not move.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I shall wait for you here.”

“Wait for me?”

“Yes. We’ll dine together to-night.”

“Where?” she said helplessly.

“Here, if you like.”

“There’s scarcely anything to eat. I didn’t intend----”

“I’ll take you out somewhere. It’s going to be a dark night. We’ll manage so that no one sees us. We’ll dine together and, after dinner----”

“I must come home early. I’m very tired.”

“After dinner we’ll go to those rooms you found so cleverly near the Persian Khan.”

She shuddered.

“Now go and bathe your hand, and I’ll wait here. Only don’t be too long or I shall come and fetch you. And don’t send Sonia to make excuses, for it will be no use.”

He sat down on the sofa.

She stood for a moment without moving. She put her bandaged hand up to her discolored face. Then she went slowly out of the room.

He sat waiting for her to come back, with his elbows on his knees and his face hidden in his hands.

He felt like a man sunk in mire. He felt the mire creeping up to his throat.

* * * * *

Almost at that same hour beside a platform at Victoria Station in London a long train with “Dover” placarded on it was drawn up. Before the door of a first-class carriage two women in plain traveling dresses were standing with a white-haired clergyman. Presently the shorter of the two women said to the other:

“I think I’ll get in now, and leave you to last words.”

She held out her hand to the clergyman.

“Good-by, Father Robertson.”

He grasped her hand warmly, and looked at her with a great tenderness shining in his eyes.

“Take good care of her. But you will, I know,” he said.

Beatrice Daventry got into the carriage, and stood for a moment at the door. There were tears in her eyes as she looked at the two figures now pacing slowly up and down on the platform; she wiped them away quickly, and sat down. She was bound on a long journey. And what would be the end? In her frail body Beatrice had a strong soul, but to-night she was stricken with a painful anxiety. She said to herself that she cared about something too much. If the object of this journey were not attained she felt it would break her heart. She shut her eyes, and she conjured up a child whom she had loved very much and who was dead.

“Come with us, Robin!” she whispered. “Come with us to your father.”

And the whisper was like a prayer.

“Beattie!”

Rosamund’s voice was speaking.

“We are just off.”

“Are we?”

“Take your seats, please!” shouted a loud bass voice.

There was a sound of the banging of doors.

Rosamund leaned out of the window.

“Good-by, Father!”

The train began to move.

“Good-by. Cor meum vigilat.”

Rosamund pulled down her veil quickly over her face.

She was weary of rebellion. Yet she knew that deep down within her dwelt one who was still a rebel. She was starting on a great journey but she could not foresee what would happen at its end. For she no longer knew what she was capable of doing, and what would be too great a task for her poor powers. She was trying; she would try; that was all she knew.

As the train pushed on through the fading light she said to herself again and again:

“La divina volontate! La divina volontate!”

Chapter XIII

A week had passed, and the Villa Hafiz had not yet opened its door to receive its mistress. The servants, with the exception of Sonia, had arrived. The Greek butler had everything in order downstairs. Above stairs the big, low bed was made, and there were flowers in the vases dotted about here and there in the blue-and-green sitting-room. Osman, the gardener, had trimmed the rose-bushes, had carefully cleaned the garden seats, and had swept straying leaves from the winding paths. The fountain sang its under-song above the lilies. On the highest terrace, beyond the climbing garden, the pavilion waited for the woman and man who had hidden themselves in it to go down into the darkness. But no one slept in the big, low bed, or sat in the blue-and-green room; the garden was deserted; by night no feet trod softly to the pavilion.

For the first time in her life Cynthia Clarke was in the toils. She who loved her personal freedom almost wildly no longer felt free. She dared not go to Buyukderer.

She looked back to that night when she had told Dion Leith the truth, and it stood out among all the nights of her life, more black and fatal than any of them, because on it she had been false to herself, had been weak. She had not followed up her strength in words by strength in action! She had allowed Dion Leith to dominate her that night, to make of her against her will his creature. In doing that she had taken a step down--a step away from the path in which hitherto she had always walked. And that departure from inflexible selfishness seemed strangely to have weakened her will.

She was afraid of Dion because she felt that he was ungovernable by her, that her will no longer meant anything to him. He did not brace himself to defy it; simply, he did not bother about it. He seemed to have passed into a region where such a trifle as a woman’s will faded away from his perception.

His serpent had swallowed up hers.

She ought to have defied him that night, to have risked a violent scene, to have risked everything. Instead, she had come back to the drawing-room, had gone out into the night with him, had even gone to the rooms near the Persian Khan. She had put off, had said to herself “To-morrow”; she had tried to believe that Dion’s desperate mood would pass, that he needed gentle handling for the moment, and that, if treated with supreme tact, he would eventually be “managed” into letting her have her will.

But now she had no illusions. Her distressed eyes saw quite clearly, and she knew that she had made a fatal mistake in being obedient to Dion that night. She felt like one at the beginning of an inclined plane that was slippery as ice. She had stepped upon it, and she could not step back. She could only go forward and downward.

Dion was reckless. Appeals to reason, to chivalry, to pity, had no effect upon him. He only laughed at them, took them as part of her game of hypocrisy. In her genuine and growing fear and distress she had become almost horribly sincere, but he would not believe in, or heed, her sincerity. She knew her increasing hatred of him was matched by his secret detestation of her. Yes, he detested her with all that was most characteristic in him, with all those inherent qualities of which, do what he would he was unable to rid himself. And yet there was a link which bound them together--the link of a common degradation of body. She longed to smash that link which she had so carefully and sedulously labored to forge. But he wished to make it stronger. By her violent will she had turned him to perversity, and now he was actually more perverse than she was. She saw herself outdistanced on the course towards the ultimate blackness, saw herself forced to follow where he led.

She dared not got to Buyukderer. She could not, she knew, keep him away from there. He would follow her from Constantinople, would resume his life of last summer, would perhaps deliberately accentuate his intimacy with her instead of being careful to throw over it a veil. In his hatred and recklessness he might be capable even of that, the last outrage which a man can inflict upon a woman, to whose safety and happiness his chivalrous secrecy is essential. His clinging to her in hatred was terrible to her. She began to think that perhaps he had in his mind abominable plans for the destruction of her happiness.

One day he told her that if she went to Buyukderer he would not only follow her there, but he would remain there when Jimmy came out for the summer holidays.

“Jimmy must learn to like me again,” he said. “That is necessary.”

She shuddered when she realized the tendency of Dion’s mind. Fear made her clairvoyant. There were moments when she seemed to look into that mind as into a room through an open window, to see the thoughts as living things going about their business. There was something appalling in this man’s brooding desire to strike her in the heart combined with his determination to continue to be her lover. It affected her as she had never been affected before. By torturing her imagination it made havoc of her will-power. Her situation rendered her almost desperate, and she could not find an outlet from it.

What was she to do? If she went to Buyukderer she felt certain there would be a scandal. Even if there were not, she could not now dare to risk having Jimmy out for his holidays. Jimmy and Dion must not meet again. She might travel in the summer, as Dion had suggested, but if she did that she would be forced to endure a solitude a deux with him untempered by any social distractions. She could not endure that. To be alone with his bitterness, his misery, and his monopolizing hatred of her would be unbearable. And the problem of Jimmy’s holidays would not be solved by travel. Unless she traveled to England!

A gleam of hope came to her as she thought of England. Dion had fled from England. Would he dare to go back there, to the land which had seen his tragedy, and where the woman lived who had cast him out? Mrs. Clarke wondered, turning the thought of England over and over in her mind.

The longer she thought on the matter the more convinced she became that she had hit upon a final test, by means of which it would be possible for her to ascertain Dion’s exact mental condition. If he was ready to follow her even to England, to show himself there as her intimate friend, if not as her lover, than the man whom she had known in London was dead indeed beyond hope of resurrection.

She resolved to find out what Dion’s feeling about England was.

Since the evening when she had told him the truth she had seen him--he had obliged her to see him--every day, but he had not come again to her flat. They had met in secret, as they had been meeting for many months. For the days when they had wandered about Stamboul together, when she had tried to play to him the part Dumeny had once played to her, were long ago over.

On the day when the thought of England occurred to Mrs. Clarke as a possible place of refuge she had promised to meet Dion late in the evening at their rooms near the Persian Khan. She loathed going to those rooms. They reminded her painfully of all she had felt for Dion and felt no longer. They spoke to her of the secrecy of a passion that was dead. She was afraid of them. But she was still more afraid of seeing Dion in her flat. Nevertheless, now the gleam of hope which had come to her suddenly woke up in her something of her old recklessness. Since the servants had gone to the Villa Hafiz she had been living in the flat with Sonia, who was an excellent cook as well as a capital maid. She resolved to ask Dion to dinner that night, and to try her fortune once more with him. England must be horrible to him. Then she would go to England. And if he followed her there he would at least be punished for his persecution of her.

Already she called his determination not to break their intrigue persecution. She had a short memory.

After a talk with Sonia she summoned a messenger and sent Dion a note, asking him to dinner that night. He replied that he would come. His answer ended with the words: “We can go to the rooms later.”

As Mrs. Clarke read them her fingers closed on the paper viciously, and she said to herself:

“I’ll not go. I’ll never go to them again.”

She told Sonia about the dinner. Then she dressed and went out.

It was a warm and languid day. She took a carriage and told the coachman to drive to Stamboul--to drive on till she gave him the direction where to go in Stamboul. She had no special object in view. But she longed to be out in the air, to drive, to see people about her, the waterway, the forest of shipping, the domes and the minarets, the cypresses, the glades stretching towards Seraglio Point, the long, low hills of Asia. She longed, too, to hear voices, hurrying feet, the innumerable sounds of life. She hoped by seeing and hearing to fortify her will. The spirit of adventure was the spirit that held her, was the most vital part within her, and such a spirit needed freedom to breathe in. She was fettered. She had been a coward, or almost a coward, false, perhaps, to her fortunate star. Hitherto she had always followed Nietzsche’s advice and had lived perilously. Was she now to be governed by fear? Even to keep Jimmy’s respect and affection could she endure such dominion? As the sun touched her with his fingers of gold, and the air, full of a strangely languid vitality, whispered about her, as she heard the cries from the sea, and saw human beings, vividly egoistic, going by on their pilgrimage, she said to herself, “Not even for Jimmy!” The clamorous city, with its fierce openness and its sinister suggestions of hidden things, woke up in her the huntress, and, for the moment, lulled the mother to sleep.

“Not even for Jimmy!” she thought. “I must be myself. I cannot be otherwise. I must live perilously. To live in any other way for me would be death.”

And the line in “The Kasidah” which Dion had pondered over came to her, and she thought of the “death that walks in form of life.”

As the carriage went upon the bridge she looked across to Stamboul, and was faced by the Mosque of the Valideh. So familiar to her was the sight of its facade, of its cupolas and minarets, that she seldom now even thought of it when she crossed the bridge; but to-day, perhaps because she was unusually strung up, was restive and almost horribly alert, she gazed at it and was intensely conscious of it. She had once said to Dion that Stamboul was the City of the Unknown God, and now suddenly she felt that she was nearing His altars. A strange, perverse desire to pray came to her; to go up into one of the mosques of this mysterious city which she loved, and to pray for her release from Dion Leith.

She smiled faintly as this idea came into her mind. The Unknown God had surely made her as she was, had made her a huntress. Well, then, surely she had the right to pray to Him to give her a free course for her temperament.

“Santa Sophia!” she called to the coachman.

He cracked his whip and drove furiously on to Stamboul. In less than a quarter of an hour he pulled up his horses before the vast Church of Santa Sophia.

Mrs. Clarke sat still in the carriage for a moment looking up at the ugly towering walls, covered with red and white stripes. Her face was haggard in the sunshine, and her pale lips were set together in a hard line. A beggar with twisted stumps instead of arms whined a petition to her, but she neither saw him nor heard him. As she stared at the walls on which the sun blazed she was wondering about her future. The love of life was desperately strong within her that day. The longing for new experiences tormented her physically. She felt as if she could not wait, could not be patient any more. If Dion to-night refused again to give her her freedom she must do something desperate. She must get away secretly and hide herself from him, take a boat to Greece or Rumania, or slip into the Orient express and vanish over the tracks of Europe.

But first she must go into the church and pray to the Unknown God.

She got out of the carriage. The beggar thrust one of his diseased stumps in front of her face. She turned on him with a malignant look, and the whining petition died on his lips. Then she made her way to the Porta Basilica and passed into the church. But as its great spaces opened out before her a thought, childishly superstitious, came to her, and she turned abruptly, went out, made her way to the beggar who had worried her, gave him a coin and said something kind to him. His almost soprano voice, raised in clamorous benediction, followed her as she returned to the church, moving slowly with horrible loose slippers protecting its floor from her Christian feet. She always laughed in her mind when she wore those slippers and thought of what she was. This sanctuary of the unknown God must, it seemed, be protected from her because she was a Christian!

There were a good many people in the church, but it looked almost empty because of its immense size. She knew it very well, better perhaps than she knew any other sacred building, and she cared for it very much. She was fond of mosques, delighting in their airy simplicity, in their casual holiness which seemed to say to her, “Worship in me if you will. If you will not, never mind; dream in me with open eyes, or, if you prefer it, go to sleep in a corner of me. When you wake you can mutter a prayer, or not, just as you please.”

Santa Sophia did not, perhaps, say that, though it had now for long years been in use as a mosque, and always seemed to Mrs. Clarke more like a mosque than like a church. It was richly adorned, and something of Christianity still lingered within it. In it there seemed, even to Mrs. Clarke, to be something impelling which asked of each one who entered it more than mere dreams, more than those long meditations which are like prayers of the mind separated from the prayers of the heart and soul. But it possessed the air of freedom which is characteristic of mosques, did not seize those who entered it in a clutch of tenacious sanctity; but seemed to let them alone, and to influence them by just being wonderful, beautiful, unself-consciously sacred.

At first Mrs. Clarke wandered slowly about the church, without any purpose other than that of gathering to herself some of its atmosphere. During the last few days she had been feeling really tormented. Dion had once said she looked punished. Now he had made her feel punished. And she sought a moment of peace. It could not come to her from mysticism, but it might come to her from great art, which suggests to its votaries mystery, the something beyond, untroubled and shiningly serene.

Presently Mrs. Clarke felt the peace of Santa Sophia, and she felt it in a new way, because she had recently suffered, indeed was suffering still in a new way; she felt it as something desirable, which might be of value to her, if she were able to take it to herself and to fold it about her own life. Had she made a mistake in living perilously through many years? Her mind went to the woman who had abandoned Dion and entered a Sisterhood to lead a religious life. She seldom thought about Rosamund except in relation to Dion. She had scarcely known her, and since her first few interviews with Dion in this land of the cypress he had seldom mentioned his wife. She neither liked, nor actively disliked, Rosamund, whose tacit rejection of her acquaintance had not stirred in her any womanly hatred; for though she was a ruthless woman she was not venomous towards other women. She did not bother about them enough for that. But now she considered that other woman with whom she had shared Dion Leith, or rather who, not knowing it doubtless, had shared Dion Leith with her. And she wondered whether Rosamund, in her Sisterhood, was happier than she was in the world. In the Sisterhood there must surely be peace--monotony, drudgery, perhaps, but peace.

Santa Sophia, with its vast spaces, its airy dome, its great arches and galleries, its walls of variegated marble, its glittering mosaics and columns of porphyry, to-day made her realize that in her life of adventure and passion she was driven, as if by a demon with a whip, and that her horrible situation with Dion was but the culmination of a series of horrible situations. She had escaped from them only after devastating battles, in which she had had to use all her nervous energy and all her force of will. Was it worth while? Was the game she was always playing worth the candles she was always burning? Would it not be wiser to seek peace and ensue it? As she drove to Santa Sophia she had longed fiercely to be free so that she might begin again; might again have adventures, might again explore the depths of human personalities, and satisfy her abnormal curiosities and desires. Now she was full of unusual hesitation. Suppose she did succeed in getting rid of Dion by going to England, suppose her prayer--she had not offered it up yet, but she was going to offer it up in a moment--to the Unknown God received a favorable answer, might it not be well for her future happiness if she retired from the passionate life, with its perpetual secrecies, and intrigues, and lies, and violent efforts, into the life of the ideal mother, solely devoted to her only child?

She felt that the struggle with Dion, the horrible scenes she had had with him, the force of her hatred of him and his hatred of her, the necessity of yielding to him in hatred that which should never be given save with desire, had tried her as nothing else had ever tried her. She felt that her vitality was low, and she supposed that out of that lowered vitality had come her uncharacteristic desire for peace. She had almost envied for a moment the woman whom she had replaced in the life of Dion. Even now--she sighed; a great weariness possessed her. Was she going to be subject to a weakness which she had always despised, the weakness of regret?

She paused beside a column not very far from the raised tribune on the left of the dome which is set apart for the use of the Sultan, and is called the Sultan’s seat. Her large eyes stared at it, but at first she did not see it. She was looking onward upon herself. Then, in some distant part of the mosque, a boy’s voice began to sing, loudly, almost fiercely. It sounded fanatical and defiant, but tremendously believing, proud in the faith which it proclaimed to faithful and unfaithful alike. It echoed about the mosque, raising a clamor which nobody seemed to heed; for the few ulemas who were visible continued reading the Koran aloud on the low railed-in platforms which they frequent; a Dervish in a pointed hat slept peacefully on, stretched out in a corner; before the prayer carpet of the Prophet, not far from the Mihrab, a half-naked Bedouin, with a sheep-skin slung over his bronzed shoulders, preserved his wild attitude of savage adoration; and here and there, in the distance, under the low hanging myriads of lamps, the figures of Turkish soldiers, of street children, of travelers, moved noiselessly to and fro.

The voice of this boy, heedless and very powerful, indeed almost impudent, stirred Mrs. Clarke. It brought her back to her worship of force. One must worship something, and she chose force--force of will, of temperament, of body, of brain. Now she saw the Sultan’s tribune, and it made her think of an opera box and of the worldly life. The boy sang on, catching at her mind, pulling her towards the East. The curious peace of any religious life was certainly not for her, yet to-day she felt weary of the life in her world. And she wished she could have in her existence peace of some kind; she wished that she were not a perpetual wanderer. She remembered some of those with whom from time to time, she had linked herself--her husband, Hadi Bey, Dumeny, Brayfield, Dion Leith. Now she was struggling, and so far in vain, to thrust Dion out of her life. If she succeeded--what then? Where was stability in her existence? Her love for Jimmy was the only thing that lasted, and that often made her afraid now. She was seized by an almost sentimental desire to lose herself in a love for a man that would last as her love for Jimmy had lasted, to know the peace of an enduring and satisfied desire.

The voice of the boy died away. She turned in the direction of the Mihrab to offer up her prayer to the Unknown God, as the pious Mussulman turns in the direction of the Sacred City when he puts up his prayer to Allah.

Her eyes fell upon the Bedouin.

As she looked at him, this man of the desert come up into the City, with the fires of the dunes in his veins, the vast spaces mirrored in his eyes, the passion for wandering in his soul, she felt that in a mysterious and remote way she was akin to him, despite all her culture, her subtle mentality, the difference of her life from his. For she had her wildness of nature, dominant and unceasing, as he had his. He was forever traveling in body and she in mind. He sought fresh, and ever fresh, camping-places, and so did she. The black ashes of burnt-out fires marked his progress and hers. She looked at him as she uttered her prayer to the Unknown God.

And she prayed for a master, that she might meet a man who would be able to dominate her, to hold her fast in the grip of his nature. At this moment Dion dominated her in an ugly way, and she knew it too well. But she needed some one whom she would willingly obey, whom she would lust to obey, because of love. The restlessness in her life had been caused by a lack; she had never yet found the man who could be not her tyrant for a time, but her master while she lived. Now she prayed for that, the only peace that she really wanted.

While she prayed she was conscious always of the attitude of the Bedouin, which suggested the fierce yielding of one who could never be afraid of the God he worshiped. Nor could she be afraid. For she was not ashamed of what she was, though she hid what she was from motive of worldly prudence and for the sake of her motherhood. She believed that she was born into the world not in order to be severely educated, but in order that she might live to the uttermost, according to the dictates of her temperament. Now at last she knew what that temperament needed, what it had been seeking, why it had never been able to cease from its journeying. Santa Sophia had told her.

Her knowledge roused in her a sort of fury of longing for release from Dion Leith. She saw the Bedouin riding across the sands in the freedom he had captured, and she ached to be free that she might seek her master. Somewhere there must be the one man who had the power to fasten the yoke on her neck.

“Let me find him!” she prayed, almost angrily, and using her will.

She had forgotten Jimmy. Her whole nature was concentrated in the desire for immediate release from Dion Leith in order that she might be free to pursue consciously the search which till this moment she had pursued unconsciously.

The Bedouin did not move. His black, bird-like eyes were wide open, but he seemed plunged in a dream as he gazed at the Sacred Carpet. He was absolutely unaware of his surroundings and of Mrs. Clarke’s consideration of him. There was something animal and something royal in his appearance and his supreme unconsciousness of others. He looked as if he were a law unto himself, even while he was adoring. How different he was from Dion Leith.

She shut her eyes as she prayed that Dion might be removed from her life, somehow, anyhow, by death if need be. In the dark she created for herself she saw the minarets pointing to the sky as she and Dion had seen them together from the hill of Eyub as they sat under the giant cypress. Then she had wanted Dion; now she prayed:

“Take him away! Let me be free from him! Let me never see him again!”

And she felt as if the Unknown God were listening to her somewhere far off, knew all that was in her mind.

A stealthy movement quite near to her made her open her eyes. The Bedouin had risen to his feet and was approaching her, moving with a little step over the matting on his way out of the church. As he passed Mrs. Clarke he enveloped her for a moment in an indifferent glance of fire. He burnt her with his animal disdain of her observation of him, a disdain which seemed to her impregnated with flame. She felt the sands as he passed. When he was gone a sensation of loneliness, even of desolation, oppressed her.

She hesitated for a moment; then she turned and followed him slowly. He went before her, wrapped in his supreme indifference, through the Porta Basilica, and came out into the blaze of the sunshine. As she emerged, she saw him standing quite still. He seemed--she was just behind him--to be staring at a very fair woman who, accompanied by a guide, was coming towards the church. Mrs. Clarke, intent on the Bedouin, was aware of this woman’s approach, but felt no sort of interest in her until she was quite close; then something, some dagger-thrust of the mind, coming from the woman, pierced Mrs. Clarke’s indifference.

She looked up and met the sad, pure eyes of Rosamund Leith.

For a moment she stood perfectly still gazing into those eyes.

Rosamund had stopped, but she made no gesture of recognition and did not open her lips. She only looked at Mrs. Clarke, and as she looked a deep flush slowly spread over her face and down to her throat.

The Greek guide said something to her; she moved, lowered her eyes and went on into the church without looking back.

The Bedouin strode slowly away into the blaze of the sunshine.

Mrs. Clarke remained where she was, motionless. For the first time perhaps in her life she was utterly amazed by an event. Rosamund Leith here in Constantinople! What did that mean?

Mrs. Clarke knew the arrival of Rosamund meant something that might be tremendously important to herself. As she stood there before the church she was groping to find this something; but her mental faculties seemed to be paralyzed, and she could not find it. Rosamund Leith’s eyes had told Mrs. Clarke something, that Rosamund knew of Dion’s unfaithfulness and who the woman was. What did the fact of Rosamund’s coming to Constantinople in possession of that knowledge mean?

From the minaret above her head the muezzin in a piercing and nasal voice began the call to prayer. His cry seemed to tear its way through Mrs. Clarke’s inertia. Abruptly she was in full possession of her faculties. That Eastern man up there, nearer to the blue than she was, cried, “Come to prayer!” But she had already uttered her prayer, and surely Rosamund Leith was the answer.

As she drove away towards the Golden Horn she passed the Bedouin striding along in the sun.

She looked at him, but he took no notice of her; the indifference of the desert was about him.

Chapter XIV

Mrs. Clarke was in her bedroom with the door open that evening when she heard a bell sound in the flat. She had fixed eight for the dinner hour. It was now only half-past six. Nevertheless she felt sure that it was Dion who had just rung. She went swiftly across the room and shut the bedroom door. Two or three minutes later Sonia came in.

“Mr. Leith has come already, Madame,” she said, looking straight at her mistress.

“I expected him early, Sonia. You can tell him I will come almost directly.”

“Yes, Madame.”

“Sonia, wait a minute! How am I looking this evening?”

“How?” said Sonia, with rather heavy emphasis.

“Yes. I feel--feel as if I were looking unlike my usual self.”

Sonia stared hard at Mrs. Clarke. Then she said:

“So you are, Madame.”

“In what way?”

“You look almost excited and younger than usual.”

“Younger!”

“Yes, as if you were expecting something, almost as a girl expects. I never saw you just like this before.”

Mrs. Clarke looked at herself in a mirror earnestly, and for a long time.

“That’s all, Sonia,” she said, turning round. “You can tell Mr. Leith.”

Sonia went out.

Mrs. Clarke followed her ten minutes later. When she came into the little hall she saw lying on a table beside Dion’s hat several letters. She stopped by the table and looked down at them. They lay there in a pile held together by an elastic band, and she could only see the writing on the envelope which was at the top. It was addressed to Dion and had been through the post. She wondered whether among those letters there was one from Rosamund. Had she written to the husband whom she had cast out to tell him of the great change which had led her to give up the religious life, to come out to the land of the cypress?

Mrs. Clarke glanced round; then she bent down noiselessly, picked up the packet, slipped off the elastic band and examined the letters one by one. She had never chanced to see Rosamund’s handwriting, but she felt sure she would know at once if she held in her hand the letter which might mean her own release. She did not find it; but on two envelopes she saw Beatrice’s delicate handwriting, which she knew very well. She longed to know what Beatrice had written. With a sigh she slipped the elastic band back into its place, put the packet down and went into the drawing-room.

Directly she saw Dion she was certain that he knew nothing of the change in Rosamund’s life. There was no excitement in his thin and wrinkled brown face; no expectation lit up his sunken eyes making them youthful. He looked hard, wretched and strangely old, but ruthless and forceful in a kind of shuttered and ravaged way. She thought of a ruined house with a cold strong light in the window. He was sitting when she came in, leaning forward, with his hands hanging down between his knees. When he saw her he got up slowly.

“I was near here and had nothing to do, so I came early,” he said, not apologetically, but carelessly.

He looked at her and added:

“What’s happened to you to-day?”

“Nothing. What an extraordinary question!”

“Is it? You look different. There’s a change.”

A suspicious expression made his face ugly.

“Have you met any one?”

“Of course. How can one go out in Constantinople without meeting people?”

“Any one new, I meant.”

“No.”

“You look as if you had.”

“Do I?” she said, with indifference.

“Yes. You look--I don’t know----”

He paused.

“I think it’s younger,” he added. “You never are tired or ill, but you generally look both. To-day you don’t.”

“Please don’t blame me for looking moderately well for once in my life.”

“Why did you ask me to dinner here?”

The sound of his voice was as suspicious as the expression on his face.

“Oh, I don’t know. Once in a while it doesn’t matter. And all the servants have gone away to Buyukderer.”

“Then you are going there?”

“I’m not sure if I shall be able to stay there for more than a few days if I do go.”

“Why not?” he said slowly.

“It’s just possible I may have to go over to England on business. Something’s gone wrong with my money matters, not the money my husband allows me, but my own money. I had a letter from my lawyer.”

“When?”

“To-day.”

He stood before her in silence.

“By the way,” she added, “I saw all those letters for you on the hall table. Why don’t you read them?”

“Going to England, are you?” he said, frowning.

“I may have to.”

“Surely you must know from your lawyer’s letter whether it will be necessary or not.”

“I expect it will be necessary.”

He turned slowly away from her and went to the window, where he stood for a moment, apparently looking out. She sat down on the sofa and glanced at the clock. How were they to get through a long evening together? She wished she could bring about a crisis in their relations abruptly. Dion turned round. He had his hands in his pockets.

“I wish you’d let me look at that lawyer’s letter,” he said.

“It wouldn’t interest you.”

“If it’s about money matters I might be able to help you. You know they used to be my job. Even now anything to do with investments----”

“Oh, I won’t bother you,” she said coolly. “I always do business through some one I can pay.”

“Well, you can pay me.”

“No, I can’t.”

“But I say you can.”

“How?” she said.

And instantly she regretted having asked the question.

He looked at her in silence for a minute, then he said:

“By sticking always to me, by proving yourself loyal.”

Her mouth twitched. The intense irony in the last word made her feel inclined to laugh hysterically.

“But you don’t always behave in such a way as to make me feel loyal,” she said, controlling herself.

“I’m going to try to be more clever with you in the future.”

She got up abruptly.

“I didn’t expect you quite so early, and I’ve got a letter to write to Jimmy--”

“And a letter to your lawyer!” he interrupted.

“No, that can wait till to-morrow. I must think things over. But I must write to Jimmy now.”

“Give him a kind message from me.”

“What will you do while I am writing?”

“I’ll sit here.”

“But do something! Why not read your letters?”

“Yes, I may as well look at them. There was quite a collection waiting for me at the British Post Office. I haven’t been there for months.”

“Why don’t you go more regularly?”

“Because I’ve done with the past!” he exclaimed, with sudden savagery. “And letters from home only rake it up.”

She looked at him narrowly.

“But have we ever done with the past?” she said, with her eyes upon him. “If we think so isn’t that a stupidity on our part?”

“You’re talking like a parson!”

“Even a parson may hit upon a truth now and then.”

“It depends upon oneself. I say I have done with the past.”

“And yet you’re afraid to read letters from England.”

“I’m not.”

“And you never go to England.”

“There’s nothing to prevent me from going to England.”

“Except your own feelings about things.”

“One gets over feelings with the help of Time. I’m not such a sensitive fool as I used to be. Life has knocked all that sort of rot out of me.”

She sat down at the writing-table from which Jimmy’s photograph had vanished.

“Read your letters, or read a book,” she said.

And she picked up a pen.

She did not look at him again, and she tried hard to detach her mind from him. She took a sheet of writing-paper, and began to write to Jimmy, but she was painfully aware of Dion’s presence in the room, of every slightest movement that he made. She heard him sit down and move something on a table, then sigh; complete silence followed. She felt as if her whole body were flushing with irritation. Why didn’t he get his letters? She was positive Beatrice had written to tell him that Rosamund had left the Sisterhood, and she was longing to know what effect that news would have upon him.

Presently he moved again and got up, and she heard him go over to the window. She strove, with a bitter effort, to concentrate her thoughts on Jimmy, but now the Bedouin came between her and the paper; she saw him striding indifferently through the blaze of sunshine.

“About the summer holidays this year--I am not quite sure yet what my plans will be----” she wrote slowly.

Dion was moving again. He came away from the window, crossed the room behind her, and opened the door. He was going to fetch his letters. She wrote hurriedly on. He went out into the little hall and returned.

“I’m going to have a look at my letters,” he said, behind her.

She glanced round.

“What did you say? Oh--your letters.”

“They look pretty old,” he said, turning them over.

She saw Beatrice’s handwriting.

“Here’s one from Beatrice Daventry,” he added, in a hard voice.

“Does she often write to you?”

“She hasn’t written for a long time.”

He thrust a finger under the envelope. Mrs. Clarke turned and again bent over her letter to Jimmy.

* * * * *

“Dinner is ready, Madame!”

Mrs. Clarke looked up from the writing-table at Sonia standing squarely in the doorway, then at the clock.

“Dinner! But it’s only a quarter-past seven.”

“I thought you ordered it for a quarter-past seven, Madame,” replied Sonia, with quiet firmness.

“Oh, did I? I’d forgotten.”

She pushed away the writing-paper and got up.

“D’you mind dining so early?” she asked Dion, looking at him for the first time since he had read his letters.

“No,” he replied, in a voice which had no color at all. His face was set like a mask.

“Do you want to wash your hands? If so, Sonia will bring you some hot water to the spare room.”

“Thanks, I’ll go; but I prefer cold water.”

He went out of the room carrying the opened letters with him. After a moment Sonia came back.

“I hope I didn’t do wrong about dinner, Madame,” she said. “I thought as Monsieur Leith came so early Madame would wish dinner earlier.”

Mrs. Clarke put her hand on her servant’s substantial arm.

“You always understand things, Sonia,” she said. “I’m tired. I mean to go to bed very early to-night.”

“But will he----?”

She raised her heavy eyebrows.

“I must rest to-night,” said Mrs. Clarke. “I must, I must.”

“Let me tell him, then, if he--”

“No, no.”

Mrs. Clarke put one hand to her lips. She heard Dion in the hall. When he came in she saw at once that he had been dashing cold water on his face. His eyes fell before hers. She could not divine what he had found in his letters or what was passing in his mind.

“Come to dinner,” she said.

And they went at once to the dining-room.

During the meal they talked because Mrs. Clarke exerted herself. She was helped, perhaps, by her concealed excitement. She had never before felt so excited, so almost feverishly alert in body and mind as she felt that night, except at the climax of her divorce case. And she was waiting now for condemnation or acquittal as she had waited then. It was horrible. She was painfully conscious of a desperate strength in Dion. It was as if he had grown abruptly, and she had as abruptly diminished. His savage assertion about the past had impressed her disagreeably. It might be true. He might really have succeeded in slaying his love for his wife. If so, what chance had the woman who had taken him of regaining her freedom of action. She was afraid to play her last card.

When dinner was over Dion said:

“Shall we be off?”

She did not ask where they were going; she had no need to ask. After a moment’s hesitation she said:

“Not just yet. Come into the drawing-room. You can smoke, and if you like I’ll play you something.”

“All right.”

They went into the drawing-room. It was dimly lighted. Blinds and curtains were drawn. Dion sank down heavily in a chair.

“The cigarettes are there!”

“Yes, I see. Thanks.”

A strange preoccupation seemed to be descending upon him and to be covering him up. Sonia came in with coffee. Dion put his cup, full, down beside him on a table. He did not sip the coffee, nor did he light a cigarette. While Mrs. Clarke was drinking her coffee he sat without uttering a word.

She went to the piano. She played really well. Otherwise she would not have played to him, or to any one. She was specially at home in the music of Chopin, and had studied minutely many of the “Etudes.” Now she began to play the Etude in E flat. As she played she felt that the intense nervous irritation which had possessed her was diminishing slightly, was becoming more bearable. She played several of the Etudes, and presently began the one in Thirds and Sixths which she had once found abominably difficult. She remembered what a struggle she had had with it before she had conquered it. She had been quite a girl then, but already she had been a worshipper of will-power, and had resolved to cultivate and to increase her own will. And she had used this Etude as a means of testing herself. Over and over again, when she had almost despaired of ever overcoming its difficulties, she had said to herself, “Vouloir c’est pouvoir;” and at last she had succeeded in playing the excessively difficult music as if it were quite easy to her. That had been the first stepping upwards towards power.

She remembered that now and she set her teeth. “Vouloir c’est pouvoir.” She had proved the saying true again and again; she must prove it true to-night. She willed her release; she would somehow obtain it.

Directly she finished the Etude she got up from the piano.

“You play that wonderfully well,” Dion said, with a sort of hard recognition of her merit, but with no enthusiasm. “Do you know that there’s something damnably competent in you?”

She stood looking down on him.

“I’m very glad there is. I don’t care to bungle what I undertake.”

“I believe I knew that the first time I saw you, standing by Echo. You held my hand that day. Do you remember?”

He laughed faintly.

“No, I don’t remember.”

“The hand of Stamboul was upon me then. By God, we are under the yoke. It was fated then that you should destroy me.”

“Destroy you?”

“Yes. What’s the good of what lies between us? You’ve destroyed me. That’s why you want to get rid of me. Your instinct tells you the work is done, and you’re right. But you must stick to the wreckage. After all, it’s your wreckage.”

“No. A man can only destroy himself,” she said, with cold defiance.

“Don’t let’s argue about it. The thing’s done--done!”

In his voice there was a sound of almost wild despair, but his face preserved its hard, mask-like look.

“And there’s no returning from destruction,” he added. “Those who try to fancy there is are just fools.”

He looked up at her as she stood before him, and seemed suddenly struck by the expression on her face.

“Who’s to be the one to destroy you?” he said. “D’you think the Unknown God has singled me out for the job? Or do you really expect to escape scot-free after making the sign of the cross over so many lost souls.”

“The sign of the cross?”

“Yes. Don’t you remember when I told you of Brayfield’s death? You’ve never given him a thought since, I suppose. But I’ll make you keep on thinking about me.”

“What has happened to-night?” she asked sharply.

“Happened?”

“To make you talk like this?”

“Nothing has happened.”

“That’s not true. Since you came into the house you’ve quite changed.”

“Merely because I’ve been reckoning things up, taking stock of the amount of damage that’s been done. It’ll have to be paid for, I suppose. Everything’s paid for in the end, isn’t it? When are you going to England?”

“I didn’t say it was absolutely decided.”

“No; but it is. I want to know the date, so that I may pack up to accompany you. It will be jolly to see Jimmy again. I shall run down to Eton and take him out.”

“I am not going to allow you to do me any harm. Because lately I’ve given in to you sometimes, you mustn’t think you can make a slave of me.”

“And you mustn’t think you’ll get rid of me in one way if you can’t in another. This English project is nothing but an attempt to give me the slip. You thought I couldn’t face England, so you chose England as the place you would travel to. You’ve never had a letter from your lawyer, and there’s no reason why you should go to England on business. But I can face England. I’ve never done anything there that I’m ashamed of. My record there is a clean one.”

Suddenly he thrust his hand into his jacket and pulled out the letters he had brought from the British Post Office.

“And apart from that, you made a mistake in reckoning on my sensitiveness.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what you mean by that,” she said, with frigid calm.

“Yes, you do. You thought I wouldn’t follow you to England because I should shrink from facing my mother, perhaps, and my wife’s relatives, and all the people who know what I’ve done. I don’t shrink from meeting any one, and I’ll prove it to you.”

He pulled a letter out of its envelope.

“This is from Beatrice Daventry. In it she tells me a piece of news.” (He glanced quickly over the sheets.) “My wife has got tired of leading a religious life and has left the Sisterhood in which she was, and gone to live in London. Here it is: ‘Rosamund is living once more in Great Cumberland Place with my guardian. She never goes into society, but otherwise she is leading an ordinary life. I am quite sure she will never go back to Liverpool.’--So if I go to London I may run across my wife any day. Why not?”

“You wife has left the Sisterhood!” said Mrs. Clarke slowly, forcing a sound of surprise into her husky voice.

“I’ve just told you so. You and I may meet her in London. If we do, I should think she’ll be hard put to it to recognize me. Now put on your things and we’ll be off.”

“I shall not go out to-night. I intend----”

She paused.

“What do you intend?”

“I don’t mean ever to go to those rooms again.”

“Indeed. Why not?” he asked, with cold irony.

“I loathe them.”

“You found them. You chose the furniture for them. Your perfect taste made them what they are.”

“I tell you I loathe them!” she repeated violently.

“We’ll change them, then. We can easily find some others that will do just as well.”

“Don’t you understand that I loathe them because I meet you in them?”

“I understood that a good while ago.”

“And yet you--”

“My dear!” he interrupted her. “Didn’t I tell you you had destroyed me? The man I was might have bothered about trifles of that kind, the man I am simply doesn’t recognize them. Jimmy hates me too, but I haven’t done with Jimmy yet, nevertheless.”

“You shall never meet Jimmy again. I shall prevent it.”

“How can you?”

“You’re not fit to be with him.”

“But you have molded me into what I am. He must get accustomed to his own mother’s handiwork.”

“Jimmy can’t bear you. He told me so when he was last here. He detests you.”

“Ah!” said Dion, with sudden savagery, springing up from his chair. “So you and he have talked me over! I was sure of it. And no doubt you told Jimmy he was right in hating me.”

“I never discussed the matter with him at all. I couldn’t prevent his telling me what he felt about you.”

Dion had become very pale. He stood for a moment without speaking, clenching his hands and looking at her with blazing eyes. For a moment she thought that perhaps he was going to strike her. He seemed to be struggling desperately with himself, to be striving to conquer something within him. At last he turned away from her. She heard him twice mutter the name of her boy, “Jimmy! Jimmy!” Then he went away from her to the far end of the room, where the piano was, and stood by it. She saw his broad shoulders heaving. He held on to the edge of the piano with both hands, leaning forward. She stayed where she was, staring at him. She realized that to-night he might be dangerous to her. She had set out to defy him. But she was not sure now whether, perhaps, gentleness and an air of great sincerity might not be the only effective weapons against him in his present abnormal condition. Possibly even now it was not too late to use them. She crossed the room and came to him swiftly.

“Dion!” she said.

He did not move.

“Dion!” she repeated, putting her hand on his shoulder.

He turned round. His pale face was distorted. She scarcely recognized him.

“Dion, let us look things in the face.”

“Oh, God--that is what I’m doing,” he said.

His lips twisted, his face was convulsed. She looked at him in silence, wondering what was going to happen. For a moment she was almost physically afraid. Something in him to-night struck hard upon her imagination and she felt as if it were trembling.

“Come and sit down,” he said, at last.

And she saw that for the moment he had succeeded in regaining self-control.

“Very well.”

She went to sit down; he sat opposite her.

“You hate me, don’t you?” he said.

She hesitated.

“Don’t you?” he repeated.

“We needn’t use ugly words,” she said at last.

“For ugly things? I believe it’s best. You hate me and I hate you. D’you know why I hate you? Not because you deliberately made me care for you with my body, in the beastly, wholly physical way, but because you wouldn’t let the other thing alone.”

“The other thing?”

“Haven’t we got something else as well as the body? Look here--before I ever knew you I was always trying to build. At first I tried to build for a possible future which might never come. Well, it did come, and I was glad I’d stuck to my building--sometimes when it was difficult. Then I tried to build for--for my wife--and then my child came and I tried to build for him, too. So it went on. I was always building, or trying to. In South Africa I was doing it, and I came back feeling as if I’d got something to show, not much, but something, for my work. Then the crash came, and I thought I knew sorrow and horror down to the bones. But I didn’t. I’ve only got to know them to the bones here. You’ve made me know them. If you’d loved me I should never have complained, have attacked you, been brutal to you; but when I think that you’ve never cared a rap about me, never cared for anything but my body, and that--that----” his voice broke for a moment; then he recovered himself and went on, more harshly,--“and that merely from desire, or whatever you choose to call it, you’ve sent the last stones of my building to dust, I sometimes feel as if I could murder you. If you meant to kick me out and be free of me when you had had enough of me, you should never have brought Jimmy into the matter; for in a way you could never understand Jimmy was linked up with my boy, with Robin. When you made me earn Jimmy’s hatred by being utterly false to all I really was, you separated me from my boy. I killed him, but till then I was sometimes near him. Ever since that night of lying and dirty pretense he’s--he’s--I’ve lost him. You’ve taken my boy from me. Why should I leave you yours?”

“But you’re mad--when my boy’s alive and--”

“And so’s mine!”

She stared at him in silence.

“You can’t give him back to me. Jimmy shrinks from me not because of what I’ve done, but because of what I’ve become, and my boy feels as Jimmy does. He--he----”

Mrs. Clarke pushed back her chair bruskly. She was now feeling really afraid. She longed to call in Sonia. She wished the other servants were in the flat instead of at Buyukderer.

“You boy’s dead,” she said, dully, obstinately. “Jimmy has nothing to do with him--never had anything to do with him. And as for me, I have never interfered between you and your child.”

She got up. So did he.

“Never, never!” she repeated. “But your mind is warped and you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I do. But we won’t argue about it. You’re a materialist and you can’t understand the real things.”

His own words seemed suddenly to strike upon him like a great blow.

“The real things!” he exclaimed. “I’ve lost them all for ever. But I’ll keep what I’ve got. I’ll keep what I’ve got. You hate me and I hate you, but we belong to each other and we’ll stick together, and Jimmy must make up his mind to it. Once you said that if he was twenty-one you’d tell him all about it. If you’re going to England I’ll go there too, and we can enlighten Jimmy a little sooner. Now let us be off to the rooms. As you’ve taken a dislike to them we’ll give them up. But we must pay a last visit to them, a visit of good-bye.”

She shuddered. The thought of being shut up alone with him horrified her imagination. She waited a moment; then she said:

“Very well. I’ll go and put on my things.”

And she went out of the room. She wanted to gain time, to be alone for a moment.

When she was in her bedroom she did not summon Sonia, who was in the kitchen washing up. Slowly she went to get out a wrap and a hat. Standing before the glass she adjusted the hat on her head carefully, adroitly; then she drew the wrap around her shoulders and picked up a pair of long gloves. After an instant of hesitation she began to pull them on. The process took several minutes. She was careful to smooth out every wrinkle. While she did so she was thinking of Rosamund Leith.

All through the evening she had been on the verge of telling Dion that his wife was in Constantinople, but something had held her back. And even now she could not make up her mind whether to tell him or not. She was afraid to risk the revelation because she did not know at all how he would take it. When he knew she might be free. There was the possibility of that. He must realize, he would surely be obliged to realize, that his wife could have but one purpose in deliberately traveling out to the place where he was living. She must be seeking a reconciliation, in spite of the knowledge which Mrs. Clarke had read in her eyes that day. But would Dion face those eyes with the hard defiance of one irreparably aloof from his former life? If he were really ready and determined to show himself in London as the lover of another woman would he not be ready to do the same thing here in Constantinople?

To tell him seemed to Mrs. Clarke the one chance of escape for her now, but she was afraid to tell him because she was afraid to know that what seemed the only possible avenue to freedom was barred against her. She had said to herself at the piano “Vouloir c’est pouvoir,” and she had determined to be free, but again Dion’s will of a desperate man had towered up over hers. It was the fact that he was desperate which gave to him this power.

At last the gloves lay absolutely smooth on her hands and arms, and she went back to the drawing-room. Till she opened the door of it she did not know what she was going to do.

“So you’re dressed!” Dion said as she came in. “That’s right. Let’s be off.”

“What is the good of going? You have said we hate each other. How can this sort of thing go on in hatred? Dion, let us give it all up.”

“Why have you put on your things?”

“I don’t know. Let us say good-by to-night, and not in anger. We were not suited to be together for long. We are too different.”

“How many men have you said all this to already? Come along!”

He took her firmly by the wrist.

“Wait, Dion!”

“Why should we wait?”

“There’s something I must tell you before we go.”

He kept his hand on her wrist.

“Well? What is it?”

“I went to Santa Sophia to-day.”

As she spoke the Bedouin came before her again. She saw his bronze-colored arms and his bird-like eyes.

“Santa Sophia! Did you go to pray?”

She stared at him. His lips were curled in a smile.

“No,” she said. “But I like to go there sometimes. As I was coming away I met some one.”

“Well?”

“Some one you know--a woman.”

“A woman? Lady Ingleton?”

“No; your wife.”

The fingers which held her wrist became suddenly cold, but they still pressed firmly upon her flesh.

“That’s a lie!” he said hoarsely.

“It isn’t!”

“How dare you tell me such a lie?”

He bent and gazed into her eyes.

“Liar! Liar!”

But though his lips made the assertion, his eyes, in agony, seemed to be asking a question. He seized her other wrist.

“What’s your object in telling me such a lie? What are you trying to gain by it? Do you think you’ll get rid of me for to-night, and that to-morrow, by some trick, you’ll escape from me forever? D’you think that?”

“I met your wife to-day just outside Santa Sophia,” she said steadily. “When she saw me she stopped. We looked at each other for a minute. Neither of us spoke a word. But she told me something.”

“Told you . . . ?”

“With her eyes. She knows about you and me.”

His hands fell from her wrists. By the look in his eyes she saw that he was beginning to believe her.

“She knows,” Mrs. Clarke repeated. “And yet she had come here. What does that mean?”

“What does that mean?” he repeated, in a muttering voice.

“Do you believe what I say?”

“Yes; she is here.”

A fierce wave of red went over his face. For a moment his eyes shone. Then a look of despair and horror made him frightful, and stirred even in her a sensation of pity.

He began to tremble.

“Don’t! Don’t!” she said, putting out her hands and moving away.

“She can’t know!” he said, trembling more violently.

“She does know.”

“She wouldn’t have come. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know.”

“She does know. Now I’m ready, if you want to go to the rooms.”

Dion went white to the lips. He came towards her. His eyes were so menacing that she felt sure he was going to do her some dreadful injury; but when he was close to her he controlled himself and stood still. For what seemed to her a very long time he stood there, looking at her as a man looks at the heap of his sins when the sword has cloven a way into the depths of his spirit. Then he said:

“You’re free.”

He went out of the room, leaving the door open. A moment later Mrs. Clarke heard the front door shut, and his footsteps on the stone stairs outside. They died away.

Then she began to sob. She felt shaken and frightened almost like a child. But presently her sobs ceased. She took off her hat and wrap and her gloves, lay down on the sofa, put her hands behind her small head, and, motionless, gazed at the pale gray wall of the room. It seemed to fade away after she had gazed at it for two or three minutes; a world opened out before her, and she saw a barrier, like a long deep trench, stretching into a far distance. On one side of this trench stood a boy with densely thick hair and large hands and frank, observant eyes; on the other stood a Bedouin of the desert.

Then she shuddered. Dion had told her she was free. But was she free? Could she ever be free now?

Suddenly she broke into a passion of tears. She was inundated with self-pity. She had prayed to the Unknown God. He had answered her prayer, but nevertheless, he had surely cursed her. For love and lust were at merciless war within her. She was tormented.

That night she knew she had run up a debt which she would be forced to pay; she knew that her punishment was beginning.

Chapter XV

When Dion came out into the street he stood still on the pavement. It was between ten and eleven o’clock. Stamboul, the mysterious city, was plunged in darkness, but Pera was lit and astir, was full of blatant and furtive activities. He listened to its voices as he stood under the stars, and presently from them the voice of a woman detached itself, and said clearly and with a sort of beautifully wondering slowness, “I can see the Pleiades.”

Tears started into his eyes. He was afraid of that voice and yet his whole being longed desperately to hear it again. The knowledge that Rosamund was here in Constantinople, very near to him--how it had changed the whole city for him! Every light that gleamed, every sound that rose up, seemed to hold for him a terrible vital meaning. And he knew that all the time he had been living in Constantinople it had been to him a horrible city of roaring emptiness, and he knew that now, in a moment, it had become the true center of the world. He was amazed and he was horrified by the power and intensity of the love within him. In this moment he knew it for an undying thing. Nothing could kill it, no act of Rosamund’s, no act of his. Even lust had not suffocated the purity of it, even satiety of the flesh had not lessened the yearning of it, or availed to deprive it of its ardent simplicity, of its ideal character. In it there was still the child with his wonder, the boy with his stirring aspirations towards life, the man with his full-grown passion. He had sought to kill it and he had not even touched it. He knew that now and was shaken by the knowledge. Where did it dwell then, this thing that governed him and that he could not break? He longed to get at it, to seize it, hold it to some fierce light, examine it. And then? Would he wish to cast it away?

“I can see the Pleiades.”

For a moment the peace of Olympia was about him, and he heard the voices of Eternity whispering among the pine trees. Then the irreparable blotted out that green beauty, that message from the beyond; reality rushed upon him. He turned and looked at the building he had just left. It towered above him, white, bare, with its rows of windows. He knew that he would never go into it again, that he had done forever with the woman in there who hated him. Yes, he had done with her insomuch as a man can finish with any one who has been closely, intimately, for good or for evil, in his life. As he watched her windows for a moment his mind reviewed swiftly his connection with her, from the moment when she had held his hand indifferently, yet with intention, in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room, till the moment, just past, when he had said to her, “You are free.” And he knew that from the first moment when she had seen him she had made up her mind that some day he should be her lover. He hated her, and yet he knew now that in some strange and obscure way he almost respected her, for her determination, her unscrupulous courage, her will to live as she chose to live. She at any rate possessed a kind of evil strength. And he----?

Slowly he turned away from that house. He did not know where Rosamund was staying, but he thought she was probably at the Hotel de Byzance, and he walked almost mechanically towards it. He was burning with excitement, and yet there was within him something cold, capable and relentless, which considered him almost as a judge considers a criminal, which seemed to be probing into the rotten part of his nature, determined to know once and for all just how rotten it was. Rosamund surely was strong in her goodness as Mrs. Clarke was strong in her evil. He had known the cruelty of both those strengths. And why? Surely because he himself had never been really strong. Intensity of feeling had constantly betrayed him into weakness. And even now was it not weakness in him, this inability to leave off loving Rosamund after all that had happened? Perhaps the power of feeling intensely was the great betrayer of a man.

He descended the Grande Rue, moving in the midst of a press of humanity, but strongly conscious only of Rosamund’s nearness to him, until at last he was in front of the Hotel de Byzance. He stood on the opposite side of the way, looking at the lighted windows, at the doorway through which people came and went. Was she in there, close to him? Why had she come to Constantinople?

She must have come there because of him. There could not surely be any other reason for her traveling so far to the city where she knew he was living. But then she must have repented of her cruelty after the death of Robin, have thought seriously of resuming her married life. It must be so. Inexorably Dion’s reason led him to that conclusion. Having reached it he looked at himself, and again his own weakness confronted him like a specter which would not leave him, which dogged him relentlessly down all the ways of his life. Prompted, governed by that weakness, which he had actually mistaken madly for strength, for an assertion of his manhood, he had raised up between Rosamund and himself perhaps the only barrier which could never be broken down, the barrier of a great betrayal. What she had most cared for in him he had trampled into the dirt; he had slain the purity which had drawn her to him.

Mrs. Clarke had said that Rosamund knew of their connexion. He believed her. He could not help trusting her horrible capacity to read such a truth in another woman’s eyes. It must be so. Rosamund surely could only have learned in Constantinople the horrible truth which would forever divide them. She must have traveled out with the intention of seeing him again, of telling him that she repented of what she had done, and then in the city which had seen his degradation she must have found out what he was.

He saw her outraged, bitterly ashamed of having made the long journey to seek a man who had betrayed her; he saw her wounded in the soul. She had wounded him in the soul, but at this moment he scarcely thought of that. The knowledge that she was near to him seemed to have suddenly renewed the pure springs of his youth. When Cynthia Clarke had said, “Now I’m ready if you want to go to the rooms,” she had received her freedom from the Dion who had won Rosamund, not from the withered and embittered man upon whom she had perversely seized in his misery and desolation.

That Rosamund should travel to him and then know him for what he was! All his intense bitterness against her was swept away by the flood of his hatred of himself.

Suddenly the lights of the city seemed to fade before his eyes and the voices of the city seemed to lose their chattering gaiety. Darkness and horrible mutterings were about him. He heard the last door closing against him. He accounted himself from henceforth among the damned. Lifting his head he stared for a moment at the Hotel de Byzance. Now he felt sure that she was there. He knew that she was there, and he bade her an eternal farewell. Not she--as for so long he had thought--but he had broken their marriage. She had sinned in the soul. But to-night he did not see her sin. He saw only his black sin of the body, the irreparable sin he had committed against her shining purity to which he had been united.

How could he have committed that sin?

He turned away from the hotel, and went down towards his lodgings in Galata; he felt as he walked, like one treading a descent which led down into eternal darkness.

How had he come to do what he had done?

Already he saw Cynthia Clarke as something far away, an almost meaningless phantom. He wondered why he had felt power in her; he wondered what it was that had led him to her, had kept him beside her, had bound him to her. She was nothing. She had never really been anything to him. And yet she had ruined his life. He saw her pale and haggard face, her haunted cheeks and temples, the lovely shape of her head with its cloud of unshining hair, her small tenacious hands. He saw her distinctly. But she was far away, utterly remote from him. She had meant nothing to him, and yet she had ruined him. Let her go. Her work was done.

It was near midnight when he went at last to his lodgings, which were in a high house not far from the Tophane landing. From his windows he could see the Golden Horn, and the minarets and domes of Stamboul. His two rooms, though clean, were shabbily furnished and unattractive. He had a Greek servant who came in every day to do what was necessary. He never received any visitors in these rooms, which he had taken when he gave up going into the society of the diplomats and others, to whom he had been introduced at Buyukderer.

His feet echoed on the dirty staircase so he mounted slowly up till he stood in front of his own door. Slowly, like one making an effort that was almost painful to him he searched for his key and drew it out. His hand shook as he inserted the key into the keyhole. He tried to steady his hand, but he could not control its furtive and perpetual movement. When the door was open he struck a match, and lit a candle that stood on a chair in the dingy and narrow lobby. Then he turned round wearily to shut the door. He was possessed by a great fatigue, and wondered whether, if he fell on his bed in the blackness, he would be able to sleep. As he turned, he saw, lying on the matting at his feet, a square white envelope. It was lying upside down. Some one must have pushed it under the door while he was out.

He stood looking at it for a minute. Then he shut the door, bent down, picked up the envelope, turned it over and held it near the candle flame. He read his name and the handwriting was Rosamund’s.

After a long pause he took the candle and carried the letter into his sitting-room. He set the candle down on the table on which lay “The Kasidah” and a few other books, laid the letter beside it, with trembling hands drew up a chair and sat down.

Rosamund had written to him. When? Before she had learnt the truth or afterwards?

For a long time he sat there, leaning over the table, staring at the address which her hand had written. And he saw her hand, so different from Mrs. Clarke’s, and he remembered its touch upon his, absolutely unlike the touch of any other hand ever felt by him. Something quivered in his flesh. The agony of the body rushed upon him and mingled with the agony of the soul. He bent down, laid his hot forehead against the letter, and shut his eyes.

A clock struck presently. He opened his eyes, lifted his head, took up the envelope, quickly tore it, and unfolded the paper within.

“HOTEL DE BYZANCE, CONSTANTINOPLE, Wednesday evening

“I am here. I want to see you. Shall I come to you to-morrow? I can come at any time, or I can meet you at any place you choose. Only tell me the hour and how to go if it is difficult.

“ROSAMUND.”

Wednesday evening! It was now the night of Wednesday. Then Rosamund had written to him after she had been to Santa Sophia and had met Mrs. Clarke. She knew, and yet she wrote to him; she asked to see him; she even offered to come to his rooms. The thing was incomprehensible.

He read the note again. He pored over every word in it almost like a child. Then he held it in his hand, sat back in his chair and wondered.

What did Rosamund mean? Why did she wish to see him? What could she intend to do? His intimate knowledge of what Rosamund was companioned him at this moment--that knowledge which no separation, which no hatred even, could ever destroy. She was fastidiously pure. She could never be anything else. He could not conceive of her ever drawing near to, and associating herself deliberately with, bodily degradation. He thought of her as he had known her, with her relations, her friends, with himself, with Robin. Always in every relation of life a radiant purity had been about her like an atmosphere; always she had walked in rays of the sun. Until Robin had died! And then she had withdrawn into the austere purity of the religious life. He felt it to be absolutely impossible that she should seek him, even seek but one interview with him, if she knew what his life had been during the last few months. And, feeling that, he was now forced to the conclusion that Mrs. Clarke’s intuition had gone for once astray. If Rosamund knew she would never have written that note. Again he looked at it, read it. It must have been written in complete ignorance. Mrs. Clarke had made a mistake. Perhaps she had been betrayed into error by her own knowledge of guilt. And yet such a lapse was very uncharacteristic of her. He compared his knowledge of her with his knowledge of Rosamund. It was absolutely impossible that Rosamund had written that letter to him with full understanding of his situation in Constantinople. But she might have heard rumors. She might have resolved to clear them up. Having traveled out with the intention of seeking a reconciliation she might have thought it due to him to accept evil tidings of him only from his own lips. Always, he knew, she had absolutely trusted in his loyalty and faithfulness to her. Perhaps then, even though she had put him out of her life, she was unable to believe that he had tried to forget her in unfaithfulness. Perhaps that was the true explanation of her conduct.

Could he then save himself from destruction by a great lie?

He sat pondering that problem, oblivious of time. Could he lie to Rosamund? All his long bitterness against her for the moment was gone, driven out by his self-condemnation. A great love must forgive. It cannot help itself. It carries within it, as a child is carried in the womb, the sweet burden of divinity, and shares in the attributes of God. So it was with Dion on that night as he sat in his dingy room. And presently his soul rejected the lie he had abominably thought of. He knew he could not tell Rosamund a life. Then what was he to do?

He drew out of a drawer a piece of letter paper, dipped a pen in ink. He had a mind to write the horrible truth which he could surely never speak.

“I have received your letter,” he wrote, in a blurred and unsteady handwriting. Then he stopped. He stared at the paper, pushed it away from him, and got up. He could not write the truth. He went to the window and looked out into the dark night. Here and there he saw faint lights. But Stamboul was almost hidden in the gloom, a city rather suggested by its shadow than actually visible. The Golden Horn was a tangled mystery. There were some withdrawn stars.

Should he not reply to Rosamund’s letter? If she had heard rumors about his life would not his silence convey to her the fact that they were true? He had perhaps only to do nothing and Rosamund would understand and--would leave Constantinople.

The blackness which shrouded Stamboul suddenly seemed to him to become more solid, impregnable. He felt that his own life would be drowned in blackness if Rosamund went away. And abruptly he knew that he must see her. Whatever the cost, whatever the shame and bitterness, he must see her at once. He would tell her, or try to tell her, what he had been through, what he had suffered, why he had done what he had done. Possibly she would be able to understand. If only he could find the words that would give her the inner truth perhaps they might reach her heart. Something intense told him that he must try to make her understand how he had loved her, through all his hideous attempts to slay his love of her. Could a woman understand such a thing? Desperately he wondered. Might not his terrible sincerity perhaps overwhelm her doubts?

He left the window, sat down again at the table, and wrote quickly.

“I have your letter. Will you meet me to-morrow at Eyub, in the cemetery on the hill? I will be near the Tekkeh of the dancing Dervishes. I will be there before noon, and will wait all day.

“DION”

When he began to write he knew that he could not make his confession to Rosamund within the four walls of his sordid and dingy room. Her power to understand would surely be taken from her there. Might it not be released under the sky of morning, within sight of those minarets which he had sometimes feared, but which he had always secretly, in some obscure way, loved even in the most abominable moments of his abominable life, as he had always secretly, beneath all the hard bitterness of his stricken heart, loved Rosamund? From them came the voice which would not be gainsaid, the voice which whispered, “In the East thou shalt find me if thou hast not found me in the West.” Might not that voice help him when he spoke to Rosamund, help her to understand him, help her perhaps even to----

But there he stopped. He dared not contemplate the possibility of her being able to accept the man he had become as her companion. And yet now he felt himself somehow closely akin to the former Dion, flesh of that man’s flesh, bone of his bone. It was as if his sin fell from him when he so utterly repented of it.

Slowly he put the note he had written into an envelope, sealed it and wrote the address--“Mrs. Dion Leith, Hotel de Byzance.” He blotted it. Then he fetched his hat and stick. He meant to take the note himself to the Hotel de Byzance. The night might be made for sleep, but he knew he could not sleep till he had seen Rosamund. When he was out in the air, and was walking uphill towards Pera, he realized that within him, in spite of all, something of hope still lingered. Rosamund’s letter to him had wrought already a wonderful change in his tortured life. The knowledge that he would see her again, be with her alone, even if only for an hour, even if only that he might tell her what would alienate her from him forever, thrilled through him, seemed even to shed a fierce strength and alertness through his body. Now that he was going to see her once more he knew what the long separation from her had meant to him. He had known the living death. Within a few hours he would have at least some moments of life. They would be terrible moments, shameful--but they would take him back into life. Fiercely, passionately, he looked forward to them.

He left his letter at the hotel, giving it into the hands of a weary Albanian night porter. Then he returned to his rooms, undressed, washed in cold water, and lay down on his bed. And presently he was praying in the dark, instinctively almost as a child prays. He was praying for the impossible. For he believed that it was absolutely impossible the Rosamund could ever forgive him for what he had done, and yet he prayed that she might forgive him. And he felt as if he were praying with all his body as well as with all his soul.

In the dawn he was tired. But he did not sleep at all.

About ten o’clock he went out to take the boat to Eyub.