In the Wilderness

“Jimmy!” he called again. “What’s up. What’s the matter?”

There was no immediate reply, but in the deep silence Dion heard hurrying steps, and then:

“Mr. Leith!”

“Hallo!”

“Mr. Leith—it is you, is it?”

“Yes. What on earth’s the matter?”

“Stop a sec! I——”

The feet were pounding upward. Almost directly, in pyjamas and the slippers, which somehow still remained with him, Jimmy stood by Dion in the dark, breathing hard.

“Jimmy, what’s the matter? What has happened?”

“I say, why are you here?”

“I couldn’t sleep. The night was so hot. I had nothing to read in my rooms. Besides they’re stuck down right against the quay. You know your mother’s kind enough to let me have a key of the garden gate. I thought I might get more air on the top terrace. I was reading in the pavilion when I thought I heard a call.”

“Then the mater isn’t there?”

“Your mother?”

“Yes!”

“Of course not. Come on up!”

Dion took the boy by the arm with decision, and slowly led him upwards.

“What’s this about your mother? Do you mean she isn’t asleep?”

“Asleep? She isn’t in her bedroom! She hasn’t been there!”

“Hasn’t been there?”

“Hasn’t been to bed at all! I’ve been to her sitting-room—you know, upstairs—she isn’t there. I’ve been in all the rooms. She isn’t anywhere. She must be somewhere about here.”

They had arrived in front of the pavilion backed by trees. Looking in, Dion saw a lighted lamp. The slide of jeweled glass had been removed from it. A white ray fell on an open book laid on a table.

“I was reading here”—he looked—“a thing called ‘The Kasidah.’ Sit down!” He pulled the boy down. “Now what is all this? Your mother must be in the house.”

“But I tell you she isn’t!”

Dion had sat down between Jimmy and the opening on to the terrace. It occurred to him that he ought to have induced the boy to sit with his back to the terrace and his face turned towards the room. It was too late to do that now.

“I tell you she isn’t!” Jimmy repeated, with a sort of almost fierce defiance.

He was staring hard at Dion. His hair was almost wildly disordered, and his face looked pale and angry in the ray of the lamp. Dion felt that there was suspicion in his eyes. Surely those eyes were demanding of him the woman who was hiding among the trees.

“Where have you looked?” he said.

“I tell you I’ve looked everywhere,” said Jimmy, doggedly.

“Did you mother go to bed when you did?”

“No. I went very early. I was so infernally sleepy.”

“Where did you leave her?”

“In the drawing-room. She was playing the piano. But what’s the good of that? What time did you come here?”

“I! Oh, not till very late indeed.”

“Were there any lights showing when you came?”

“Lights! No! But it was ever so much too late for that.”

“Did you go on to the terrace by the drawing-room?”

“No. I came straight up here. It never occurred to me that any one would be up at such an hour. Besides, I didn’t want to disturb any one, especially your mother.”

“Well, just now I found the drawing-room window wide open, and mater’s bed hasn’t been touched. What do you make of that?”

Before Dion could reply the boy abruptly started up.

“I heard something. I know I did.”

As naturally as he could Dion got between Jimmy and the opening on to the terrace, and, forestalling the boy, looked out. He saw nothing; he could not have said with truth that any definite sound reached his ears; but he felt that at that exact moment Mrs. Clarke escaped from the terrace, and began to glide down towards the house below.

“There’s nothing! Come and see for yourself,” he said casually.

Jimmy pushed by him, then stood perfectly still, staring at the darkness and listening intently.

“I don’t hear it now!” he acknowledged gruffly.

“What did you think you heard?”

“I did hear something. I couldn’t tell you what it was.”

“Have you looked all through the garden?”

“You know I haven’t. You heard me calling down at the bottom. You must have, because you answered me.”

“We’d better have a good look now. Just wait one minute while I put out the lamp. I’ll put away the book I was reading, too.”

“Right you are!” said the boy, still gruffly.

He waited on the terrace while Dion went into the pavilion. As Dion took up “The Kasidah” he glanced down at the page at which Mrs. Clarke had chanced to set the book open, and read:

With a feeling of cold and abject soul-nausea he shut the book, put it away on a bookshelf in which he saw a gap, and went to turn out the lamp. As the flame flickered and died out he heard Jimmy’s foot shift on the terrace.

“Do what thy manhood bids thee do——”

Dion stood for a moment in the dark. He was in a darkness greater than any which reigned in the pavilion. His soul seemed to him to be pressing against it, to be hemmed in by it as by towering walls of iron. For an instant he shut his eyes. And when he did that he saw, low down, a little boy’s figure, two small outstretched hands groping.

Robin!

“Aren’t you coming, Mr. Leith? What’s the matter?”

“I was just seeing that the lamp was thoroughly out.”

“Well——”

Dion came out.

“We’ll look all over the garden. But if your mother had been in it she must have heard you calling her. I did, although I was inside there reading.”

“I know. I thought of that too,” returned Jimmy.

And Dion fancied that the boy’s voice was very cold; Dion fancied this but he was not sure. His conscience might be tricking him. He hoped that it was tricking him.

“We’d better look among the trees,” he said. “And then we’ll go to the terrace below.”

“It’s no use looking among the trees,” Jimmy returned. “If she was up here she must have heard us talking all this time.”

Abruptly he led the way to the steps near the plane tree. Dion followed him slowly. Was it possible that Jimmy had guessed? Was it possible that Jimmy had caught a glimpse of his mother escaping? The boy’s manner was surely almost hostile.

They searched the garden in silence, and at length found themselves by the fountain close to the French window of the drawing-room.

“You mother must be in the house,” said Dion firmly.

“But I know she isn’t!” Jimmy retorted, with a sort of dull fixed obstinacy.

“Did you rouse the servants?”

“No.”

“Where do they sleep?”

“Away from us, by themselves.”

“You’d better go and look again. If you can’t find your mother perhaps you’d better wake the servants.”

“I know,” said Jimmy, in a voice that had suddenly changed, become brighter, more eager—“I’ll go to Sonia.”

“Your mother’s maid? That’s it. She may know something. I’ll wait down here at the window. Got a candle?”

“Yes. I left it in there by the piano.”

He felt his way in and, almost immediately, struck a light. The candle flickered across his face and his disordered hair as he disappeared.

Dion waited by the fountain.

Where would Mrs. Clarke be? How would she explain matters? Would she have had time to——? Oh yes! She would have had time to be ready with some quite simple, yet quite satisfactory, piece of deception. Jimmy would find her, and she would convince him of all that it was necessary he should be convinced of.

Dion’s chin sank down and his head almost drooped. He felt mortally tired as he waited here. Already a very faint grayness of the coming dawn was beginning to filter in among the darknesses.

Another day to face! How could he face it? He had, he supposed, been what is called “true” to the woman who had given herself to him, but how damnably false he had been to himself that night!

Meanwhile Jimmy went upstairs, frowning and very pale. He went again to his mother’s bedroom and found it empty. The big bed, turned down, had held no sleeper. Nothing had been changed in the room since he had been away in the garden. He did not trouble to look once more in the adjoining sitting-room, but hurried towards the servants’ quarters. The double doors were shut. Softly he opened them and passed through into a wooden corridor. At the far end of it were two rooms sacred to Sonia, the Russian maid. The first room she slept in; the second was a large airy chamber lined with cupboards. In this she worked. She was a very clever needlewoman, expert in the mysteries of dressmaking.

As Jimmy drew near to the door of Sonia’s workroom he heard a low murmur of voices coming from within. Evidently Sonia was there, talking to some one. He crept up and listened.

Very tranquil the voices sounded. They were talking in French. One was his mother’s, and he heard her say:

“Another five minutes, Sonia, and perhaps I shall be ready for bed. At last I’m beginning to feel as if I might be able to sleep. If only I were like Jimmy! He doesn’t know anything about the torments of insomnia.”

“Poor Madame!” returned Sonia, in her rather thick, but pleasantly soft, voice. “Your head a little back. That’s better!”

Jimmy was aware of an odd, very faint, sound. He couldn’t make out what it was.

“Mater!” he said.

And he tapped on the door.

“Who’s that?” said Sonia’s voice.

“It’s Jimmy!”

The door was opened by the maid, and he saw his mother in a long, very thin white dressing-gown, seated in an arm-chair before a mirror. Her colorless hair flowed over the back of the chair, against which her little head was leaning, supported by a silk cushion. Her face looked very white and tired, and the lids drooped over her usually wide-open eyes, giving her a strange expression of languor, almost of drowsiness. Sonia held a silver-backed brush in each hand.

“Monsieur Jimmy!” she said.

“Jimmy!” said Mrs. Clarke. “What’s the matter?”

She lifted her head from the cushion, and sat straight up. But she still looked languid.

“What is it? Are you ill?”

“No, mater! But I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”

There was a boyish reproach in his voice.

“Looking for me in the middle of the night! Why?”

Jimmy began to explain matters.

“At last I thought I’d look in the garden. I shouted out for you, and who should answer but Mr. Leith?” he presently said.

His mother—he noticed it—woke up fully at this point in the narrative.

“Mr. Leith!” she said, with strong surprise. “How could he answer you?”

“He was up in the pavilion reading a book.”

Mrs. Clarke looked frankly astonished. Her eyes traveled to Sonia, whose broad face was also full of amazement.

“At this hour!” said Mrs. Clarke.

“He couldn’t sleep either,” said Jimmy, quite simply. “He’s waiting out there now to know whether I’ve found you.”

Mrs. Clarke smiled faintly.

“What a to do!” she said, with just a touch of gentle disdain. “And all because I suffer from insomnia. Run down to him, Jimmy, and tell him that as I felt it was useless to go to bed I sat by the fountain till I was weary, then read in my sitting-room, and finally came to Sonia to be brushed into sleep. Set his mind at rest about me if you can.”

She smiled again.

Somehow that smile made Jimmy feel very small.

“And go back to bed, dear boy.”

She put out one hand, drew him to her, and gave him a gentle kiss with lips which felt very calm.

“I’m sorry you were worried about me.”

“Oh, that’s all right, mater!” said Jimmy, rather awkwardly. “I didn’t know what to think. You see—”

“Of course you couldn’t guess that I was having my hair brushed. Now go straight to bed, after you’ve told Mr. Leith. I’m coming too in a minute.”

As Jimmy left the room Sonia was again at work with the two hair-brushes.

A moment later Jimmy reappeared at the French window of the drawing-room. Dion lifted his head, but did not move from the place where he was standing close to the fountain.

“It’s all right, Mr. Leith,” said Jimmy. “I’ve found mater.”

“Where was she?”

“In Sonia’s room having her hair brushed.”

Dion stared towards him but said nothing.

“She told me I was to set your mind at rest.”

“Did she?”

“Yes. I believe she thought us a couple of fools for kicking us such a dust about her.”

Dion said nothing.

“I don’t know, but I’ve an idea girls and women often think they can laugh at us,” added Jimmy. “Anyhow, it’ll be a jolly long time before I put myself in a sweat about the mater again. I thought—I don’t know what I thought, and all the time she was half asleep and having her hair brushed. She made me feel ass number one. Good night.”

“Good night.”

The boy shut the window, bent down and bolted it on the inside.

Dion looked at the gray coming of the new day.

CHAPTER IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shall we stay here long, Miladi?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of Holy Cross; yes, that’s it.”

“He lives at—”

“Wait a moment. I’ll take it down.”

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

“Now, please!”

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

“Thank you very much.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was quite a new 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.