CHAPTER VII
In his contrition for the attack which he had made upon the honor of his wife at his mother’s instigation, Beadon Clarke had given up all claims on his boy’s time. Actually, though not legally, Mrs. Clarke had complete control over Jimmy. He spent all his holidays with her, and seldom saw his father, who was still attached to the British Embassy in Madrid. He had never been allowed to read any reports of the famous case which had been fought out between his parents, and was understood to think that his father and mother had, for some mysterious reason, found it impossible to “hit it off together,” and had therefore decided to live apart. He was now rather vaguely fond of his father, whom he considered to be “quite a good sort,” but he was devoted to his mother. Mrs. Clarke’s peculiar self-possession and remarkably strong will made a great impression on Jimmy. “It’s jolly difficult to score my mater off, I can tell you,” he occasionally remarked to his more intimate chums at school. He admired her appearance, her elegance, and the charm of her way of living, which he called “doing herself jolly well”; even her unsmiling face and characteristic lack of what is generally called vivacity won his approval. “My mater’s above all that silly gushing and giggling so many women go in for, don’t you know,” was his verdict on Mrs. Clarke’s usually serious demeanor. Into her gravity boyishly he read dignity of character, and in his estimation of her he set her very high. Although something of a pickle, and by nature rather reckless and inclined to be wild, he was swiftly obedient to his mother, partly perhaps because, understanding young males as well as she understood male beings of all ages, she very seldom drew the reins tight. He knew very well that she loved him.
On the evening of his arrival at Buyukderer for the summer holidays Jimmy had a confidential talk with his mother about “Mr. Leith,” whom he had not yet seen, but about whom he had been making many anxious inquiries.
“I’ll tell you to-night,” his mother had replied. And after dinner she fulfilled her promise.
“You’ll see Mr. Leith to-morrow,” she said.
“Well, I should rather think so!” returned Jimmy, in an injured voice. “Where is he?”
“He’s living in rooms in the house of a Greek not far from here.”
“I thought he was in the hotel. I say, mater, can’t I have a cigarette just for once?”
“Yes, you may, just for once.”
Jimmy approached the cigarette box with the air of a nonchalant conqueror. As he opened it with an apparently practised forefinger he remarked:
“Well, mater?”
“He’s left the hotel. You know, Jimmy, Mr. Leith has had great misfortunes.”
Jimmy had heard of the gun accident and its terrible result, and he now looked very grave.
“I know—poor chap!” he observed. “But it wasn’t his fault. It was the little brute of a pony. Every one knows that. It was rotten bad luck, but who would be down on a fellow for bad luck?”
“Exactly. But it’s changed Mr. Leith’s life. His wife has left him. He’s given up his business, and is, consequently, less well off than he was. But this isn’t all.”
Jimmy tenderly struck a match, lighted a cigarette, and, with half-closed eyes, blew forth in a professional manner a delicate cloud of smoke. He was feeling good all over.
“First-rate cigarettes!” he remarked. “The very best! Yes, mater?”
“He’s rather badly broken up.”
“No wonder!” said Jimmy, with discrimination.
“You’ll find him a good deal changed. Sometimes he’s moody and even bad-tempered, poor fellow, and he’s fearfully sensitive. I’m trying my best to buck him up.”
“Good for you, mater! He’s our friend. We’re bound to stand by him.”
“And that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. When he’s a little difficult, doesn’t take things quite as one means them—you know?”
“Rather! Do I?”
“I put it down to all the trouble he’s been through. I never resent it. Now I ought really to have got out a holiday tutor for you.”
“Oh, I say, after I’ve swotted my head off all these months! A chap needs some rest if he’s to do himself justice, hang it, mater, now!”
“I know all about that!”
She looked at him shrewdly, and he smiled on one side of his mouth.
“Go on, mater!”
“But having Mr. Leith here I thought I wouldn’t do that. Mr. Leith’s awfully fond of boys, and it seemed to me you might do him more good than any one else could.”
“Well, I’m blowed! D’you really think so?”
Jimmy came over and sat on the arm of her chair, blowing rings of smoke cleverly over her lovely little head.
“Put me up to it, mater, there’s a good girl. I’m awfully keen on Mr. Leith, as you know. He’s got the biggest biceps I ever saw, and I’m jolly sorry for him. What can I do? Put me up to it.”
And Mrs. Clarke proceeded to put Jimmy up to it. She had told Dion that Jimmy wouldn’t see the difference in him. Now she carefully prepared Jimmy to face that difference, and gave him his cue for the part she wished him to play. Jimmy felt very important as he listened to her explanations, trifling seriously with his cigarette, and looking very worldly-wise.
“I twig!” he interrupted occasionally, nodding his round young head, which was covered with densely thick, rather coarse hair. “I’ve got it.”
And he went off to bed very seriously, resolved to take Mr. Leith in hand and to do his level best for him.
So it was that when Dion and he met next day he was not surprised at the change in Dion’s appearance and manner. Nor were his young eyes merciless in their scrutiny. Just at first, perhaps, they stared with the unthinking observation of boyhood, but almost immediately Jimmy had taken the cue his mother had given him, and had entered into his part of a driver-away of trouble.
He played it well, with a tact that was almost remarkable in so young a boy; and Dion, ignorant of what Mrs. Clarke had done on the night of Jimmy’s arrival, was at first surprised at the ease with which they got on together. He had dreaded Jimmy’s coming, partly because of the secrets he must keep from the boy, but partly also because of Robin. A boy’s hands would surely tear at the wound which was always open. Sometimes Dion felt horribly sad when he was in contact with Jimmy’s light-hearted and careless gaiety; sometimes he felt the gnawing discomfort of one not by nature a hypocrite forced into a passive hypocrisy; nevertheless there were moments when the burden of his life was made a little lighter on his shoulders by the confidence his young companion had in him, by the admiration for him showed plainly by Jimmy, by the leaping spirits which ardently summoned a reply in kind.
The subtlety of Mrs. Clarke, too, helped Dion at first.
Since her son’s arrival, without ostentation she had lived for him. She entered into all Jimmy’s plans, was ready to share his excitements and to taste, with him, those pleasures which were possible to a woman as well as to a boy. But she was quick to efface herself where she saw that she was not needed or might even be in the way. As a mother she was devoid of jealousy, was unselfish without seeming to be so. She did not parade her virtue. Her reticence was that of a perfectly finished artist. When she was wanted she was on the spot; when she was not wanted she disappeared. She sped Dion and Jimmy on their way to boating, shooting, swimming expeditions, with the happiest grace, and never assumed the look and manner of the patient woman “left behind.”
Not once, since Jimmy’s arrival, had she shown to Dion even a trace of the passionate and perverse woman he now knew her to be under her pale mask of self-controlled and very mental composure. At the hotel in Constantinople she had said to Dion, “All the time Jimmy’s at Buyukderer we’ll just be friends.” Now she seemed utterly to have forgotten that they had ever been what the world calls lovers, that they had been involved in scenes of passion, and brutality, and exhaustion, that they had torn aside the veil of reticence behind which women and men hide from each other normally the naked truth of what they can be. She treated Dion casually, though very kindly, as a friend, and never, even by the swift glance or a lingering touch of her fingers, reminded him of the fires that burned within her. Even when she was alone with him, when Jimmy ran off, perhaps, unexpectedly in the wake of a passing caprice, she never departed from her role of the friend who was before all things a mother.
So perfect was her hypocrisy, so absolutely natural in its manifestation, that sometimes, looking at her, Dion could scarcely forbear from thinking that she had forgotten all about their illicit connexion; that she had put it behind her forever; that she was one of those happy people who possess the power of slaying the past and blotting the murder out of their memories.
That scene between them in Constantinople on the eve of Jimmy’s arrival—had it ever taken place? Had she really ever tried to strike him on the mouth? Had he caught her wrist in a grip of iron? It seemed incredible.
And if he was involved in a great hypocrisy since the boy’s arrival he was released from innumerable lesser hypocrisies. His life at present was what it seemed to be to the little world on the Bosporus.
Just at first he did not realize that though Mrs. Clarke genuinely loved her son she was not too scrupulous to press his unconscious services in aid of her hypocrisy.
The holiday tutor whom she ought to have got out from England to improve the shining hour on Jimmy’s behalf was replaced by Dion in the eyes of Mrs. Clarke’s world.
One day she said to Dion:
“Will you do me a good turn?”
“Yes, if I can.”
“It may bore you.”
“What is it?”
“Read a little bit with Jimmy sometimes, will you? He’s abominably ignorant, and will never be a scholar, but I should like him just to keep up his end at school.”
“But I haven’t got any school-books.”
“I have. He’s specially behindhand with his Greek. His report tells me that. If you’ll do a little Greek grammar and construing with him in the mornings now and them, I shall be tremendously grateful. You see, owing to my miserable domestic circumstances, Jimmy is practically fatherless.”
“And you ask me to take his father’s place!” was in Dion’s mind.
But she met his eyes so earnestly and with such sincerity that he only said:
“Of course I’ll read with him in the mornings.”
Despite the ardent protests to Jimmy Dion kept his promise. Soon Mrs. Clarke’s numerous acquaintances knew of the morning hours of study. She had happened to tell Sir Carey Ingleton about Jimmy’s backwardness in book-learning and Mr. Leith’s kind efforts to “get him on during the holidays.” Sir Carey had spoken of it to Cyril Vane. The thing “got about.” The name of Dion Leith began to be connected rather with Jimmy Clarke than with Mrs. Clarke. Continually Dion and Jimmy were seen about together. Mrs. Clarke, meanwhile, often went among her friends alone, and when they asked about Jimmy she would say:
“Oh, he’s gone off somewhere with Mr. Leith. I don’t know where. Mr. Leith’s a regular boy’s man and was a great chum of Jimmy’s in London; used to show him how to box and that sort of thing. It’s partly for Jimmy that he came to Buyukderer. They read together in the mornings. Mr. Leith’s getting Jimmy on in Greek.”
Sometimes she would add:
“Mr. Leith loves boys, and since his own child died so sadly I think he’s taken to Jimmy more than ever.”
Soon people began to talk of Dion Leith as “Jimmy Clarke’s holiday tutor.” Once, when this was said in Lady Ingleton’s drawing-room at Therapia, she murmured:
“I don’t think it quite amounts to that. Mr. Leith has never been a schoolmaster.”
And there she left it, with a faint smile in which there was just the hint of an almost cynical sadness.
Since the trip to Brusa on the “Leyla” she had thought a great deal about Dion Leith, and she was very sorry for him in a rather unusual way. Out of her happiness with her husband she seemed to draw an instinctive knowledge of what such a nature as Dion Leith’s wanted and of the extent of his loss. Once she said to Sir Carey, with a sort of intensity such as she seldom showed:
“Good women do terrible things sometimes.”
“Such as——?” said Sir Carey, looking at her almost with surprise in his eyes.
“I think Mrs. Leith has done a terrible thing to her husband.”
“Perhaps she loved the child too much.”
“Even love can be almost abominable,” said Lady Ingleton. “If we had a child, and you had done what poor Dion Leith has done, do you think I should have cast you out of my life?”
“But—are you a good woman?” he asked her, smiling.
“No, or you should never have bothered about me.”
He touched her hand.
“When you do that,” Lady Ingleton said, “I could almost cry over poor Dion Leith.”
Sir Carey bent down and kissed her with a very tender gallantry.
“You and I are secretly sentimentalists, Delia,” he said. “That is why we are so happy together.”
“Why doesn’t Dion Leith go to England?” she exclaimed, almost angrily.
“Perhaps England seems full of his misery. Besides, his wife is there.”
“He ought to go to her. He ought to force her to see the evil she is doing.”
“Leith will never do that, I feel sure,” said Sir Carey gravely. “And in his place I don’t know that I could.”
Lady Ingleton looked at him with an almost sharp impatience such as she seldom showed him.
“When a man has right on his side he ought to browbeat a woman!” she exclaimed. “And even if he is in the wrong it’s the best way to make a woman see things through his eyes. Dion Leith is too delicate with women.”
After a moment she added:
“At any rate with some women, the first of whom is his own wife. A man should always put up a big fight for a really big thing, and Dion Leith hasn’t done that!”
“He fought in South Africa for England.”
“Ah,” she said, lifting her chin, “that sort of thing is so different.”
“Tell him what you think,” said the Ambassador.
“I know him so little. But perhaps—who knows—some day I shall.”
She said no more on that subject.
Meanwhile Dion was teaching Jimmy, who was really full of the happiest ignorance. Jimmy’s knowledge of Greek was a minus quantity, and he said frankly that he considered all that kind of thing “more or less rot.” Nevertheless, Dion persevered. One morning when they were going to get to work as usual in the pavilion,—chose by Mrs. Clarke as the suitable place for his studies,—taking up the Greek Grammar Dion opened it by chance. He stood by the table from which he had picked the book up staring down at the page. By one of those terrible rushes of which the mind is capable he was swept back to the famous mound which fronts the plain of Marathon; he saw the curving line of hills, the sea intensely blue and sparkling, empty of ships, the river’s course through the tawny land marked by the tall reeds and the sedges; he heard the distant lowing of cattle coming from that old battlefield, celebrated by poets and historians. And then he heard, as if just above him, the dry crackle of brushwood—Rosamund moving in the habitation of Arcady. And he remembered the cry, the intense human cry which had echoed in the recesses of his soul on that day long—how long—ago in Greece, “Whither? Whither am I and my great love going? To what end are we journeying?”
He heard again that cry of his soul in the pavilion at Buyukderer, and beneath the sunburn his lean cheeks went lividly pale.
Reluctantly Jimmy was getting an exercise book and a pen and ink out of the drawer of a table, which Mrs. Clarke had had specially made for the lessons by a little Greek carpenter who sometimes did odd jobs for her. He found the ink bottle almost empty.
“I say,” he began.
He looked up.
“I say, Mr. Leith——”
His voice died away and he stared.
“What’s wrong?” he managed to bring out at last.
He thrust out a hand and laid hold of the grammar. Dion let it go.
His eyes searched the page.
“What’s up, Mr. Leith?”
He looked frankly puzzled and almost afraid. He had never seen any one look just like that before.
There was a moment of silence. Then, with a sudden change of manner, Dion exclaimed:
“Come on, Jimmy! I don’t feel like doing lessons this morning. I vote we go out. I’m going to ask your mother if we can ride to the Belgrad forest. Perhaps she’ll come with us.”
He was suddenly afraid to remain alone with the boy, and he felt that he could not stay in that pavilion full of the atmosphere of feverish passion, of secrecy, of betrayal. Yes, of betrayal! For there he had betrayed the obstinate love, which he had felt at Marathon as a sort of ecstasy, and still felt, but now like a wound, within him in spite of Rosamund’s rejection of him. Not yet had the current taken him and swept him away from all the old landmarks. Perhaps it never would. And yet he had given himself to it, he had not tried to resist.
Jimmy jumped up with alacrity, though he still looked rather grave and astonished. They went down the terraced garden to the villa.
“Run up and ask your mother,” said Dion. “Probably she’s in her sitting-room. I’ll wait here to know what she says.”
“Right you are!”
He went off, looking rather relieved.
Robin at fifteen! Dion shut his eyes.
Jimmy was away for more than ten minutes. Then he came back to say that his mother would come with them to the forest and would be ready in an hour’s time.
“I’ll go back to my rooms, change my breeches, and order the horses,” said Dion.
He was longing to get away from the scrutiny which at this moment Jimmy could not forego. He knew that Jimmy had been talking about him to Mrs. Clarke, had probably been saying how “jolly odd” he had been in the pavilion. For once the boy’s tact had failed him, and Dion’s sensitiveness tingled.
An hour later they were on horseback and rode into the midst of the forest. At the village of Belgrad they dismounted, left the horses in the care of a Turkish stableman, and went for a walk among the trees. It was very hot and still, and presently Mrs. Clarke said she would sit down and rest.
“You and Jimmy go on if you want to,” she said.
But Jimmy threw himself down on the ground.
“I’m tired. It’s so infernally hot.”
“Take a nap,” said his mother.
The boy laid his head on his curved arms sideways. Mrs. Clarke leaned down and put his panama hat over his left cheek and eye.
“Thank you, mater,” he murmured.
He lay still.
Dion had stood by with an air of hesitation during this little talk between mother and son. Now he looked away to the forest.
“You go,” Mrs. Clarke said to him. “You’ll find us here when you come back. The Armenians call the forest Defetgamm. Perhaps you will come under its influence.”
“Defetgamm! What does that mean?”
“Dispeller of care.”
He stood looking at her for a moment; then, without another word, he turned quickly away and disappeared among the trees.
Jimmy slept with his face hidden, and Mrs. Clarke, with wide-open eyes, sat motionless staring into the forest.
When they reached the Villa Hafiz late in the afternoon Dion helped Mrs. Clarke to dismount. As she slid down lightly from the saddle she whispered, scarcely moving her lips:
“The pavilion to-night eleven. You’ve got the key.”
She patted Selim’s glossy black neck.
“Come, Jimmy!” she said. “Say good night to Mr. Leith. I’m sure he’s tired and has had more than enough of us for to-day. We’ll give him a rest from us till to-morrow.”
And Jimmy bade Dion good-by without any protest.
As Dion rode off Mrs. Clarke did not turn to look after him. She had not troubled even to question him with her eyes. She had assumed that he would do what she wanted. Would he do that?
At first he believed that he would not go. He had been away in the forest with his misery for nearly two hours, struggling among the shadows of the trees. Jimmy had seen in the pavilion that morning that his “holiday tutor” was strangely ill at ease, and had discussed the matter with his mater, and asked her why on earth the sight of a page of Greek grammar should make a fellow stand staring as if he were confronted by a ghost. But Jimmy had no conception of what Dion had been through in the forest, where happy Greeks and Armenians were lazily enjoying the empty hours of summer, forgetting yesterday, and serenely careless of to-morrow.
In the forest Dion had fought with an old love of which he began to be angrily ashamed, with a love which was now his greatest enemy, a thing contemptible, inexplicable. In the pavilion that morning it had suddenly risen up before him strong, intense, passionate. It seemed irresistible. But he was almost furiously resolved not merely to resist it, but to crush it down, to break it in pieces, or to drive it finally out of his life.
And he had fought with it alone in the forest which the Armenians call Defetgamm. And in the forest something—some adherent, it seemed—had whispered to him, “To kill your enemy you must fill your armory with weapons. The woman who came to you when you were neither in one world nor in the other is a weapon. Why have you ceased to use her?”
And now, as if she had heard the voice of that adherent, and had known of the struggle in the forest, the woman herself had suddenly broken through the reserve she had imposed upon them both since the coming of her son.
In a hideous way Dion wanted to see her, and yet he shrank from going back to her secretly. The coming of Jimmy, his relations with the boy, the boy’s hearty affection for him and admiration for him, had roused into intense activity that part of his nature which had always loved, which he supposed always must love, the straight life; the life with morning face and clear, unfaltering eyes; the life which the Hermes suggested, immune from the fret and fever of secret vices and passions, lifted by winged sandals into a region where soul and body were in perfect accord, and where, because of that, there was peace; not a peace of stagnation, but a peace living and intense. But that part of his nature had led him even now instinctively back to the feet of Rosamund. And he revolted against such a pilgrimage.
“The pavilion to-night eleven; you’ve got the key.”
Her face had not changed as she whispered the words, and immediately afterwards she had told a lie to her boy, or had implied a lie. She had made Jimmy believe the thing that was not. Loving Jimmy, she did not scruple to play a part to him.
Dion ate no dinner that night. After returning to his rooms and getting out of his riding things into a loose serge suit he went out again and walked along the quay by the water. He paced up and down, ignoring the many passers-by, the boatmen and watermen who now knew him so well.
He was considering whether he should go to the pavilion at the appointed hour or whether he should leave Buyukderer altogether and not return to it. This evening he was in the mood to be drastic. He might go down to Constantinople and finally cast his burden away there, never to take it up again—the burden of an old love whose chains still hung about him; he might plunge into the lowest depths, into depths where perhaps the remembrance of Rosamund and the early morning would fade away from him, where even Mrs. Clarke would not care to seek for him, although her will was persistent.
He fully realized now her extraordinary persistence, the fierce firmness of character that was concealed by her quiet and generally impersonal manner. Certainly she had the temperament of a ruler. He remembered—it seemed to him with a bizarre abruptness—the smile on Dumeny’s lips in the Divorce Court when the great case had ended in Mrs. Clarke’s favor.
Did he really know Cynthia Clarke even now?
He walked faster. Now he saw Hadi Bey before him, self-possessed, firm, with that curiously vivid look which had attracted the many women in Court.
And Jimmy believed in his mother. Perhaps, until Dion’s arrival in Buyukderer, the boy had had reason in his belief—perhaps not. Dion was very uncertain to-night.
A sort of cold curiosity was born in him. Until now he had accepted Mrs. Clarke’s presentment of herself to the world, which included himself, as a genuine portrait; now he began to recall the long speech of Beadon Clarke’s counsel. But the man had only been speaking according to his brief, had been only putting forth all the ingenuity and talent which enabled him to command immense fees for his services. And Mrs. Clarke had beaten him. The jury had said that she was not what he had asserted her to be.
Suppose they had made a mistake, had given the wrong verdict, why should that make any difference to Dion? He had definitely done with the goodness of good women. Why should he fear the evil of a woman who was bad? Perhaps in the women who were called evil by the respectable, or by those who were temperamentally inclined to purity, there was more warm humanity than the women possessed who never made a slip, or stepped out of the beaten path of virtue. Perhaps those to whom much must be forgiven were those who knew how to forgive.
If Mrs. Clarke really were what Beadon Clarke’s counsel had suggested that she was, how would it affect him? Dion pondered that question on the quay. Mrs. Clarke’s pale and very efficient hypocrisy, which he had been able to observe at close quarters since he had been at Buyukderer, might well have been brought into play against himself, as it had been brought into play against the little world on the Bosporus and against Jimmy.
Dion made up his mind that he would go to the pavilion that night. The cold curiosity which had floated up to the surface of his mind enticed him. He wanted to know whether he was among the victims, if they could reasonably be called so, of Mrs. Clarke’s delicate hypocrisy. He was still thinking of Mrs. Clarke as a weapon; he was also thinking that perhaps he did not yet know exactly what type of weapon she was. He must find that out to-night. Not even the thought of Jimmy should deter him.
At a few minutes before eleven he went back to his rooms, unlocked his despatch box, and drew out the key of the gate of Mrs. Clarke’s garden. He thrust it into his pocket and set out on the short walk to the Villa Hafiz. The night was dark and cloudy and very still. Dion walked quickly and surreptitiously, not looking at any of the people who went by him in the darkness. All the windows of the villa which faced the sea were shuttered and showed no lights. He turned to the right, stood before the garden gate and listened. He heard no sound except a distant singing on the oily waters of the Bay. Softly he put his key into the gate, gently unlocked it, stepped into the garden. A few minutes later he was on the highest terrace and approached the pavilion. As he did so Mrs. Clarke came out of the drawing-room of the villa, passed by the fountain, and began to ascend the garden.
She was dressed in black and in a material that did not rustle. Her thin figure did not show up against the night, and her light slow footfall was scarcely audible on the paths and steps as she went upward. Jimmy had gone to bed long ago, tired out with the long ride in the heat. She had just been into his bedroom, without a light, and had heard his regular breathing. He was fast asleep, and once he was asleep he never woke till the light of day shone in at the window. It was a comfort that one could thoroughly rely on the sleeping powers of a healthy boy of fifteen.
She sighed as she thought of Jimmy. The boy was going to complicate her life. She was by nature an unusually fearless woman, but she was beginning to realize that there might come a time when she would know fear—unless she could begin to live differently as Jimmy began to grow up. But how could she do that? There are things which seem to be impossible even to strong wills. Her will was very strong, but she had always used it not to renounce but to attain, not to hold her desires in check but to bring them to fruition. And it was late in the day to begin reversing the powerful engine of her will. She was not even sure that she could reverse it. Hitherto she had never genuinely tried to do that. She did not want to try now, partly—but only partly—because she hated to fail in anything she undertook. And she had a suspicion, which she was not anxious to turn into a certainty, that she who had ruled many people was only a slave herself. Perhaps some day Jimmy would force her to a knowledge of her exact condition.
For the first time in her life she was half afraid of that mysterious energy which men and women call love; she began to understand, with a sort of ample fulness of comprehension, that of all loves the most determined is the love of a mother for her only son. A mother may, perhaps, have a son and not love him; but if once she loves him she holds within her a thing that will not die while she lives.
And if the thing that was without lust stood up in battle against the thing that was full of lust—what then?
The black and still night seemed a battlefield.
Softly she stepped upon the highest terrace and stood for a moment under the great plane tree, where was the wooden seat on which she had waited for Dion to weep away the past and the good woman who had ruined his life. To-night she was invaded by an odd uncertainty. If she went to the pavilion and Dion were not there? If he did not come? Would some part of her, perhaps, be glad, the part that in a mysterious way was one with Jimmy? She stared into the darkness, looking towards the pavilion. Dion Leith had once said she looked punished. Perhaps when he had said that he had shown that he had intuition.
Was he there? It was past eleven now. She had assumed that he would come, and she was inclined to believe that he had come. If so she need not see him even now. There was still time for her to go back to the villa, to shut herself in, to go to bed, as Jimmy had gone to bed. But if she did that she would not sleep. All night long she would lie wide awake, tossing from side to side, the helpless prey of her past life.
She frowned and slipped through the darkness, almost like a fluid, to the pavilion.
CHAPTER VIII
She came so silently that Dion heard nothing till against the background of the night he saw a shadow, her thin body, a faint whiteness, her face, motionless at the opening of the pavilion; from this shadow and this whiteness came a voice which said:
“Did you come under the influence of Defetgamm?”
“It’s impossible that you see me!” he said.
“I see you plainly with some part of me, not my eyes.”
He got up from the divan where he had been sitting in the dark and went to the opening of the pavilion.
“Did you come under the influence of Defetgamm?” she repeated.
“You know I didn’t.”
He paused, then added:
“I nearly didn’t come to-night.”
“And I nearly went down, after I had come up here, without seeing you. And yet—we are together again.”
“Why do you want to see me here? We agreed—”
“Yes, we agreed; but after to-day in the forest that agreement had to be broken. When you left me under the trees you looked like a man who was thinking of starting on a very long journey.”
She spoke with a peculiar significance which at once conveyed her full meaning to him.
“No, I shall never do that,” he said. “If I had been capable of it, I should have done it long ago.”
“Yes? Let me in.”
He moved. She slipped into the pavilion and sat down.
“How can you move without making any sound?” he asked somberly.
There had been in her movement a sort of perfection of surreptitiousness that was animal. He noticed it, and thought that she must surely be accustomed to moving with precaution lest she should be seen or heard. Rosamund could not move like that. A life story seemed to him to be faintly traced in Mrs. Clarke’s manner of entering the pavilion and of sitting down on the divan.
He stood beside her in the dark. She returned no answer to his question.
“You spoke of a journey,” he said. “The only journey I have thought of making is short enough—to Constantinople. I nearly started on it to-night.”
“Why do you want to go to Constantinople?”
He was silent.
“What would you do there?”
“Ugly things, perhaps.”
“Why didn’t you go? What kept you?”
“I felt that I must ask you something.”
He sat down beside her and took both her hands roughly. They were dry and burning as if with fever.
“You trick Jimmy,” he said. “You trick the Ingletons, Vane, all the people here—”
“Trick!” she interrupted coldly, almost disdainfully. “What do you mean?”
“That you deceive them, take them in.”
“What about?”
“You know quite well.”
After a pause, which was perhaps—he could not tell—a pause of astonishment, she said:
“Do you really expect me to go about telling every one that I, a lonely woman, separated from my husband, unable to marry again, have met a man whom I care for, and that I’ve been weak enough—or wicked enough, if you like—to let him know it?”
Dion felt his cheeks burn in the darkness. Nevertheless, something drove him on, forced him to push his way hardily through a sort of quickset hedge of reluctance and shame.
“No, I don’t expect absurdities. I am not such a fool. But—but you do it so well!”
“Do what well?”
“Everything connected with deception. You are such a mistress of it.”
“Well?”
“Isn’t that rather strange?”
“Do you expect a woman like me, a woman who can’t pretend to stupidity, and who has lived for years in the diplomatic world, to blunder in what she undertakes?”
“No, I don’t. But you are too competent.”
He spoke with hard determination, but his cheeks were still burning.
“It’s impossible to be too competent. If I make up my mind that a thing must be done I resolve to do it thoroughly and to do it well. I despise blunderers and women who are afraid of what they do. I despise those who give themselves and others away. I cared for you. I saw you needed me and I gave myself to you. I am not sorry I did it, not a bit sorry. I had counted the cost before I did it.”
“Counted the cost? But what cost is there? Neither of us loses anything.”
“I risk losing almost everything a woman cares for. I don’t want to dwell upon it. I detest women who indulge in reproaches, or who try to make men value them by pointing out how much they stand to lose by giving themselves. But you are so strange to-night. You have attacked me. I don’t know why.”
“I’ve been walking on the quay and thinking.”
“What about?”
“You!”
“Go on.”
“I’ve been thinking that, as you take in Jimmy and all the people here so easily, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be taking me in too.”
In the dark a feeling was steadily growing within him that his companion was playing with him as he knew she had played with others.
“I’m forced to deceive the people here and my boy. My relation with you obliges me to do that. But nothing forces me to deceive you. I have been sincere with you. Ever since I met you in the street in Pera I’ve been sincere, even blunt. I should think you must have noticed it.”
“I have. In some ways you are blunt, but in many you aren’t.”
“What is it exactly that you wish to know?”
For a moment Dion was silent. In the darkness of the pavilion he saw Dumeny’s lips smiling faintly, Hadi Bey’s vivid, self-possessed eyes, the weak mouth of Brayfield and his own double. Was he a member of an ugly brotherhood, or did he stand alone? He wanted to know, yet he felt that he could not put such a hideous question to his companion.
“Tell me exactly what it is,” she said. “Don’t be afraid. I wish to be quite sincere with you, though you think I don’t. It is no pleasure to me to deceive people. What I do in the way of deception I do in self-defense. Circumstances often push us into doing what we don’t enjoy doing. But you and I ought to be frank with one another.”
Her hands tightened on his.
“Go on. Tell me.”
“I’ve been wondering whether your husband ought to have won his case,” said Dion, in a low voice.
“Is that all?” she said, very simply and without any emotion.
“All?”
“Yes. Do you suppose, when I gave myself to you, I didn’t realize that my doing it was certain to make you doubt my virtue? Dion, you don’t know how boyish you still are. You will always be in some ways a boy. I knew you would doubt me after all that had happened. But what is the good of asking questions of a women whom you doubt? If I am what you suspect, of course I shall tell lies. If I am not, what is the good of my telling you the truth? What is to make you believe it?”
He was silent. She moved slightly and he felt her thin body against his side. What sort of weapon was she? That was the great question for him. Since his struggle in the forest of Defetgamm he had come to the resolve to strike fierce and reiterated blows on that disabling and surely contemptible love of his, that love which had confronted him like a specter when he was in the pavilion with Jimmy. He was resolved at last upon assassination, and he wanted a weapon that could slay, not a weapon that would bend, or perhaps break, in his hand.
“I don’t want to believe I am only one among many,” he said at last.
The sound of his voice gave her the cue to his inmost feeling. She had been puzzled in the forest, she had been half afraid, seeing that he had arrived at an acute emotional crisis and not understanding what had brought him to it. She did not understand that now, but she knew that he was asking from her more than he had ever asked before. He had been cast out and now he was knocking hard on her door. He was knocking, but lingering remnants of the influence of the woman who had colored his former life hung about him like torn rags, and his hands instinctively felt for them, pulled at them, to cover his nakedness. Still, while he knocked, he looked back to the other life. Nevertheless—she knew this with all there was of woman in her—he wanted from her all that the good woman had never given to him, was incapable of giving to him or to any one. He wanted from her, perhaps, powers of the body which would suffice finally for the killing of those powers of the soul by which he was now tormented ceaselessly. The sound of his voice demanded from her something no other man had ever demanded from her, the slaughter in him of what he had lived by through all his years. Nevertheless he was still looking back to all the old purities, was still trying to hear all the old voices. He required of her, as it were, that she should be good in her evil, gentle while she destroyed. Well, she would even be that. A rare smile curved her thin lips, but he did not see it.
“Suppose I told you that you were one of many?” she said. “Would you give it all up?”
“I don’t know. Am I?”
“No. Do you think, if you were, I should have kept my women friends, Tippie Chetwinde, Delia Ingleton and all the rest?”
“I suppose not,” he said.
But he remembered tones in Mrs. Chetwinde’s voice when she had spoken of “Cynthia Clarke,” and even tones in Lady Ingleton’s voice.
“They stuck to me because they believed in me. What other reason could they have?”
“Unless they were very devoted to you.”
“Women aren’t much given to that sort of thing,” she said dryly.
“I think you have an unusual power of making people do what you wish. It is like an emanation,” he said slowly. “And it seems not to be interfered with by distance.”
She leaned till her cheek touched his.
“Dion, I wish to make you forget. I know how it is with you. You suffer abominably because you can’t forget. I haven’t succeeded with you yet. But wait, only wait, till Jimmy goes, till the summer is over and we can leave the Bosporus. It’s all too intimate—the life here. We are all too near together. But in Constantinople I know ways. I’ll stay there all the winter for you. Even the Christmas holidays—I’ll give them up for once. I want to show you that I do care. For no one else on earth would I give up being with Jimmy in his holidays. For no one else I’d risk what I’m risking to-night.”
“Jimmy was asleep when you came?”
“Yes, but he might wake. He never does, but he might wake just to-night.”
“Suppose he did! Suppose he looked for you in your room and didn’t find you! Suppose he came up here!”
“He won’t!”
She spoke obstinately, almost as if her assertion of the thing’s impossibility must make it impossible.
“And yet there’s the risk of it,” said Dion—“the great risk.”
“There are always risks in connection with the big things in life. We are worth very little if we won’t take them.”
“If it wasn’t for Jimmy would you come and live with me? Would you drop all this deception? Would you let your husband divorce you? Would you give up your place in society for me? I am an outcast. Would you come and be an outcast with me?”
“Yes, if it wasn’t for Jimmy.”
“And for Jimmy you’d give me up for ever in a moment, wouldn’t you?”
“Why do you ask these questions?” she said, almost fiercely.
“I want something for myself, something that’s really mine. Then perhaps——”
He stopped.
“Perhaps what?”
“Perhaps I could forget—sometimes.”
“And yet when you knew Jimmy was coming here you wanted to go away. You were afraid then. And even to-day—”
“I want one thing or the other!” he interrupted desperately. “I’m sick of mixing up good and bad. I’m sick of prevarications and deceptions. They go against my whole nature. I hate struggling in a net. It saps all my strength.”
“I know. I understand.”
She put her arm round his neck.
“Perhaps I ought to give you up, let you go. I’ve thought that. But I haven’t the courage. Dion, I’m lonely, I’m lonely.”
He felt moisture on his cheek.
“About you I’m absolutely selfish,” she said, in a low, swift voice. “Even if all this hypocrisy hurts you I can’t give you up. I’ve told you a lie—even you.”
“When?”
“I said to you on that night——”
She waited.
“I know,” he said.
“I said that I hadn’t cared for you till I met you in Pera, and saw what she had done to you. That was a lie. I cared for you in England. Didn’t you know it?”
“Once or twice I wondered, but I was never at all sure.”
“It was because I cared that I wanted to make friends with your wife. I had no evil reason. I knew you and she were perfectly happy together. But I wanted just to see you sometimes. She guessed it. That was why she avoided me—the real reason. It wasn’t only because I’d been involved in a scandal, though I told you once it was. I’ve sometimes lied to you because I didn’t want to feel myself humiliated in your eyes. But now I don’t care. You can know all the truth if you want to. You pushed me away—oh, very gently—because of her. Did you think I didn’t understand? You were afraid of me. Perhaps you thought I was a nuisance. When I came back from Paris on purpose for Tippie Chetwinde’s party you were startled, almost horrified, when you saw me. I saw it all so plainly. In the end, as you know, I gave it up. Only when you went to the war I had to send that telegram. I thought you might be killed, and I wanted you to know I was remembering you, and admiring you for what you had done. Then you came with poor Brayfield’s letter——”
She broke off, then added, with a long, quivering sigh:
“You’ve made me suffer, Dion.”
“Have I?”
He turned till he was facing her in the darkness.
“Then at last you were overtaken by your tragedy, and she showed you her cruelty and cast you out. From that moment I was resolved some day to let you know how much I cared. I wanted you in your misery. But I waited. I had a conviction that you would come to me, drawn, without suspecting it, by what I felt for you. Well, you came at last. And now you ask me whether you are one of many.”
“Forgive me!” he whispered.
“But of course I shall always forgive you for everything. Women who care for men always do that. They can’t help themselves. And you—will you forgive me for my lies?”
He took her in his arms.
“Life’s full of them. Only don’t tell me any more, and make me forget if you can. You’ve got so much will. Try to have the power for that.”
“Then help me. Give yourself wholly to me. You have struggled against me furtively. You thought I didn’t know it, but I did. You look back to the old ways. And that is madness. Turn a new page, Dion. Have the courage to hope.”
“To—hope!”
Her hot hands closed on him fiercely.
“You shall hope. I’ll make you. Cut out the cancer that is in you, and cut away all that is round it. Then you’ll have health again. She never knew how to feel in the great human way. She was too fond of God ever to care for a man.”
Let that be the epitaph over the tomb in which all his happiness was buried.
In silence he made his decision, and Cynthia Clarke knew it.
The darkness covered them.
Down below in the Villa Hafiz Jimmy was sleeping peacefully, tired by the long ride to and from the forest in the heat. He had gone to bed very early, almost directly after dinner. His mother had not advised this. Perhaps indeed, if she had not been secretly concentrated on herself and her own desires that evening, she would have made Jimmy stay up till at least half-past ten, even though he was “jolly sleepy.” He had slept for at least two hours in the forest. She ought to have remembered that, but she had forgotten it, and when, at a quarter to nine, on an enormous yawn, Jimmy had announced that he thought he would “turn in and get between the sheets,” she had almost eagerly acquiesced. She wanted her boy asleep, soundly asleep that night. When the clock had struck nine he had already traveled beyond the land of dreams.
The night was intensely hot and airless. No breath of wind came from the sea. Drops of perspiration stood on the boy’s forehead as he slept, with nothing over him but a sheet. He lay on his side, with his face towards the open window and one arm outside the sheet.
People easily fall into habits of sleeping. Jimmy was accustomed to sleep for about eight hours “on end,” as he put it. When he had had his eight hours he generally woke up. If he was not obliged to get up he often went to sleep again after an interval of wakefulness, but he seldom slept for as much as nine hours without waking.
On this night between two o’clock and three it seemed as if a layer of sleep were gently lifted from him. He sighed, stirred, turned over and began to dream.
He dreamed confusedly about Dion, and there were pain and apprehension in his dream. In it Dion seemed to be himself and yet not himself, to be near and at the same time remote, to be Jimmy’s friend and yet, in some strange and horrible way, hostile to Jimmy. No doubt the boy was haunted in his sleep by an obscure phantom bred of that painful impression of the morning, when his friend had suddenly been changed in the pavilion, changed into a tragic figure from which seemed to emanate impalpable things very black and very cold.
In the dream Jimmy’s mother did not appear as an active figure; yet the dreamer seemed somehow to be aware of her, to know faintly that she was involved in unhappy circumstances, that she was the victim of distresses he could not fathom. And these distresses weighed upon him like a burden, as things weigh upon us in dreams, softly and heavily, and with a sort of cloudy awfulness. He wanted to strive against them for his mother, but he was held back from action, and Dion seemed to have something to do with this. It was as if his friend and enemy, Dion Leith, did not wish his mother to be released from unhappiness.
Jimmy moved, lay on his back and groaned. His eyelids fluttered. Something from without, something from a distance, was pulling at him, and the hands of sleep, too inert, perhaps, for any conflict, relaxed their hold upon him. Thoughts from two minds in a dark pavilion were stealing upon him, were touching him here and there, were whispering to him.
Another layer of sleep was softly removed from him.
He clenched his large hands—he had already the hands and feet almost of the man he would some day grow into—and his eyes opened wide for a moment. But they closed again. He was not awake yet.
At three o’clock he woke. He had slept for six hours in the villa and for two hours in the forest. He lay still in the dark for a few minutes. A faint memory of his dream hung about him like a tattered mist. He felt anxious, almost apprehensive, and strained his ears expectant of some sound. But the silence of the airless night was deep and large all about him. He began to think of his mother. What had been the matter with her? Who, or what, had persecuted her? He realized now that he had been dreaming, said to himself, with a boy’s exaggeration, that he had had “a beastly nightmare!” Nevertheless his mother still appeared to him as the victim of distresses. He could not absolutely detach himself from the impressions communicated to him in his dream. He was obliged to think of his mother as unhappy and of Dion Leith as not wholly friendly either to her or to himself. And it was all quite beastly.
Presently, more fully awake, he began to wonder about the time and to feel tremendously thirsty, as if he could “drink the jug.”
He stretched out a hand, found the matches and struck a light. It went out with a sort of feeble determination.
“Damn!” he muttered.
He struck another match and lit the candle. His silver watch lay beside it, and marked five minutes past three. Jimmy was almost angrily astonished. Only that! He now felt painfully wide awake, as if his sleep were absolutely finished. What was to be done? He remembered that he had slept in the forest. He had had his eight hours. Perhaps that was the reason of his present wakefulness. Anyhow, he must have a drink. He thrust away the sheet, rolled out of bed, and went to the washhand-stand. There was plenty of water in his bottle, but when he poured it into the tumbler he found that it was quite warm. He was certain warm water wouldn’t quench his ardent thirst. Besides, he loathed it. Any chap would! How beastly everything was!
He put down the tumbler without drinking, went to the window and looked out. The still hot darkness which greeted him made him feel again the obscure distress of his dream. He was aware of apprehension. Dawn could not be so very far off; yet he felt sunk to the lips in the heavy night.
If only he could have a good drink of something very cold! This wish made him think again of his mother. He knew she did not require much sleep, and sometimes read during part of the night; he also knew that she kept some iced lemonade on the table beside her bed. Now the thought of his mother’s lemonade enticed him.
He hesitated for a moment, then stuck his feet into a pair of red Turkish slippers without heels, buttoned the jacket of his pyjamas, which he had thrown open because of the heat, took his candle in hand, and shuffled—he always shuffled when he had on the ridiculous slippers—to the door.
There he paused.
The landing was fairly wide. It looked dreary and deserted in the darkness defined by the light from his candle. He could see the head of the staircase, the shallow wooden steps disappearing into the empty blackness in which the ground floor of the house was shrouded; he could see the door of his mother’s bedroom. As he stared at it, considering whether his thirst justified him in waking her up—for, if she were asleep, he felt pretty sure she would wake however softly he crept into her room—he saw that the door was partly open. Perhaps his mother had found the heat too great, and had tried to create a draught by opening her door. There was darkness in the aperture. She wasn’t reading, then. Probably she was asleep. He was infernally thirsty; the door was open; the lemonade was almost within reach; he resolved to risk it. Carefully shading the candle with one hand he crept across the landing, adroitly abandoned his slippers outside the door, and on naked feet entered his mother’s room.
His eyes immediately rested on the tall jug of lemonade, which stood on a small table, with a glass and some books, beside the big, low bed. He stole towards it, always shielding the candle with his hand, and not looking at the bed lest his glance might, perhaps, disturb the sleeper he supposed to be in it. He reached the table, and was about to lay a desirous hand upon the jug, when it occurred to him that, in doing this, he would expose the candle ray. Better blow the candle out! He located the jug, and was on the edge of action—his lips were pursed for the puff—when the dead silence of the room struck him. Could any one, even his remarkably quiet mother, sleep without making even the tiniest sound? He shot a glance at the bed. There was no one in it. He bent down. It had not been slept in that night.
Jimmy stood, with his mouth open, staring at the large, neat, unruffled bed. What the dickens could the mater be up to? She must, of course, be sitting up in her small sitting-room next door to the bedroom. Evidently the heat had made her sleepless.
He took a pull at the lemonade, went to the sitting-room door and softly opened it, at the same time exclaiming, “I say, mater——”
Darkness and emptiness confronted him.
He shut the door rather hurriedly, and again stood considering. Something cracked. He started, and the candle rattled in his hand. A disagreeable sensation was stealing upon him. He would not, of course, have acknowledged that an unpleasant feeling of loneliness, almost of desertion. The servants slept in a small wing of the villa, shut off from the main part of the house by double doors. Mrs. Clarke detested hearing the servants at night, and had taken good care to make such hearing impossible. Jimmy began to feel isolated.
Where could the mater be? And what could she be doing?
For a moment he thought of returning to his room, shutting himself in and waiting for the dawn, which would change everything—would make everything seem quite usual and reasonable. But something in the depths of him, speaking in a disagreeably distinct voice, remarked, “That’s right! Be a funk stick!” And his young cheeks flushed red, although he was alone. Immediately he went out on to the landing, thrust his feet again into the red slippers, and boldly started down the stairs into the black depths below. Holding the candle tightly, and trying to shuffle with manly decision, he explored the sitting-rooms and the dining-room. All of them were empty and dark.
Now Jimmy began to feel “rotten.” Horrid fears for his mother bristled up in his mind. His young imagination got to work and summoned up ugly things before him. He saw his mother ravished away from him by unspeakable men—Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Albanians—God knows whom—and carried off to some unknown and frightful fate; he saw her dead, murdered; he saw her dead, stricken by some sudden and horrible illness. His heart thumped. He could hear it. It seemed to be beating in his ears. And then he began to feel brave, to feel an intrepidity of desperation. He must act. That was certain. It was his obvious business to jolly well get to work and do something. His first thought was to rush upstairs, to rouse the servants, to call up Sonia, his mother’s confidential maid, to—the pavilion!
Suddenly he remembered the pavilion, and all the books on its shelves. His mother might be there. She might have been sleepless, might have felt sure she couldn’t sleep, and so have stayed up. She might be reading in the darkness. She was afraid of nothing. Darkness and solitude wouldn’t hinder her from wandering about if the fancy to wander took her. She wouldn’t, of course, go outside the gates, but—he now felt sure she was somewhere in the garden.
He looked round. He was standing by the grand piano in the drawing-room, and he now noticed for the first time that the French window which gave on to the rose garden was open. That settled it. He put the candle down, hurried out into the garden and called, “Mater!”
No voice replied except the fountain’s voice. The purring water rose in the darkness and fell among the lilies, rose and fell, active and indifferent, like a living thing withdrawn from him, wrapped in its own mystery.
“Mater!” he called again, in a louder, more resolute, voice. “Mater! Mater!”
In an absolutely still night a voice can travel very far. On the highest terrace of the garden in the blackness of the pavilion Mrs. Clarke moved sharply. She sat straight up on the divan, rigid, with her hands pressed palm downwards on the cushions. Dion had heard nothing, and did not understand the reason for her abrupt, almost violent, movement.
“Why . . . ?” he began.
She caught his wrist and held it tightly, compressing her fingers on it with a fierce force that amazed him.
“Mater!”
Had he really heard the word, or had he imagined it?
“Mater!”
He had heard it.
“It’s Jimmy!”
She had her thin lips close to his ear. She still held his wrist in a grip of iron.
“He’s at the bottom of the garden. He’ll come up here. He won’t wait. Go down and meet him.”
“But——”
“Go down! I’ll hide among the trees. Let him come up here, or bring him up. He must come. Be sure he comes inside. While you go I’ll light the lamp. I can do it in a moment. You couldn’t sleep. You came here to read. Of course you know nothing about me. Keep him here for five or ten minutes. You can come down then and help him to look for me. Go at once.”
She took away her hand.
“My whole future depends upon you!”
Dion got up and went out. As he went he heard her strike a match.
Scarcely knowing for a moment what he was doing, acting mechanically, in obedience to instinct, but always feeling a sort of terrible driving force behind him, he traversed the terrace on which the pavilion stood, passed the great plane tree and the wooden seat, and began to descend. As he did so he heard again Jimmy’s voice crying:
“Mater!”
“Jimmy!” he called out, in a loud voice, hurrying on.
As the sound died away he knew it had been nonchalant. Surely she had made it so!