CHAPTER XVI
At a few minutes past eleven Dion was in the vast cemetery on the hill. It was a gray morning, still and hot. Languor was in the air. The grayness, the silence, the oily waters, suggested a brooding resignation. The place of the dead was almost deserted. He wandered through it, and met only two or three Turks, who returned his glance impassively. After the sleepless night he had come out feeling painfully excited and scarcely master of himself. In Galata and on the boat he had not dared to look into the eyes of those who thronged about him. He had felt transparent, as if all his thoughts and his tumultuous feelings must be visible to any one who regarded him with attention. But now he was encompassed by a sensation of almost dull calmness. He looked at the grayness and at the innumerable graves, he was conscious of the stagnant heat, he seemed to draw into himself the wide silence, and the excitement faded out of him, was replaced by a curious inertia. Both his mind and his body felt tired and resigned. The gravestones suggested death, the end of the early hopes, aspirations, yearnings and despairs of men. A few bones and a headstone—to that he was traveling. And yet all through the night he had been on fire with longing, and with a fear that had seemed almost red hot. Now he thought he perhaps understood the fatalism of the Turk. Whatever must be must be. All was written surely from the beginning. It was written that to-day he should be alone in the cemetery of Eyub, and it was written that Rosamund should come to him there, or not come to him.
If she did not come?
He remembered the exact wording of his letter to her, and he realized for the first time that in her letter she had asked him to tell her how to go to their meeting-place “if it is difficult,” and he had not told her what she had to do in order to come to Eyub.
But of course she had a dragoman, and he would bring her. She could not possibly come alone.
Perhaps, however, she would not come.
Long ago she had opened and read his letter and had taken her decision. If she was coming, probably she was already on the way. He forced himself to imagine the whole day passed by him alone in the cemetery, the light failing as the evening drew on, the darkness of night swallowing up Stamboul, the knowledge forced upon him that Rosamund had abandoned the idea of seeing him again. He imagined himself returning to Constantinople in the night, going to the Hotel de Byzance and learning that she had left by the Orient express of that day for England.
What would he feel?
A handful of bones and a headstone! Whatever happened to-day, and in the future, he was on his way to just that. Then, why agonize, why allow himself to be riven and tormented by longings and fears that seemed born out of something eternal? Perhaps, indeed, there was nothing at all after this short life was ended, nothing but the blank grayness of eternal unconsciousness. If so, how little even his love for Rosamund meant. It must be some bodily attraction, some imperious call to his flesh which he had mistaken for a far greater thing. Men, perhaps, are merely tricked by those longings of theirs which seem defiant of time, by those passionate tendernesses in which eternity seems breathing. All that they think they live by may be illusion.
Mechanically, as the minutes drew on towards noon, he walked towards the Tekkeh of the Dervishes. Once he had come here to meet Cynthia Clarke, and now he had deliberately chosen the same place for the terrible interview with his wife. It could only be terrible. He did not know what he was going to do and say when she came (if she did come), but he did know that somehow he would tell her the whole truth about himself, without, of course, mentioning the name of a woman. He would lay bare his soul. It was fitting that he should confess his sin in the place of its beginnings. He had begun to sin against the woman whom he could never unlove here in this wilderness of the dead, when he had spoken against her to the woman who had long ago resolved some day to make him sin. (He told himself now that he had definitely spoken against Rosamund.) In this sad place of disordered peace, under the gray, and within sight of the minarets lifted to the Unknown God, he had opened the book of evil things; in this place he would close it forever—if Rosamund came. He felt now that there was something within him which, despite all his perversity, all that he had given himself to in the fury of the flesh, was irrevocably dedicated to that which was sane, clean and healthy. By this he was resolved to live henceforth, not because of any religious feeling, not because of any love of that Unknown God who—so he supposed—had flung him into the furnace of suffering as refuse may be flung into a fire, but because he now began to understand that this dedicated something was really Him, was of the core of his being, not to be rooted out. He had left Cynthia Clarke. In a short time—before the gray faded over the minarets of Stamboul—Rosamund would have done with him forever. He faced complete solitude, the wilderness without any human soul, good or bad, to keep him company; but he faced it with a sort of hard and final resignation. By nightfall he would have done with it all. And then—the living Death? Yes, no doubt that would be his portion. He smiled faintly as he thought of his furious struggle against just that.
“It was written,” he thought. “Everything is written. But we are tricked into a semblance of vigorous life and energy by our great delusion that we possess free will.”
He sat down beneath a cypress and remained quite still, looking downward towards the water, downward along the path by which, if Rosamund came, she would ascend the hill towards him.
It was nearly noon when he saw below him on this path the figure of a woman walking slowly. She was followed by a man.
Dion got up. He could not really see who this woman was, but he knew who she was. Instantly he knew. And instantly all the calm, all the fatalism of which for a moment he had believed himself possessed, all the brooding resignation of the man who says to his soul, “It is written!” was swept away. He stood there, bare of his pretenses, and he knew himself for what he was, just a man who was the prisoner of a great love, a man shaken by the tempest of his feeling, a man who would, who must, fight against the living Death which, only a moment before, he had been contemplating even with a smile.
She had come, and with her life.
He put one arm against the seamed trunk of the cypress. Mechanically, and unaware what he was doing, he had taken off his hat. He held it in his hand. All the change which sorrow and excess had wrought upon him was exposed for Rosamund to see. She had last seen him plainly as he drove away with little Robin from the Green Court of Welsley on that morning of fate. Now at last she was to see him again as she had remade him.
She came on slowly. Presently she turned to her Greek dragoman.
“Where’s the Tekkeh? Is it much farther?”
“No, Madame.”
He pointed. As he did so Rosamund saw Dion’s figure standing against the cypress. She stood still. Her face was white and drawn, but full of an almost flaming resolution. The mysticism which at moments Dion had detected in her expression, in her eyes, during the years passed with her, a mysticism then almost evasive, subtly withdrawn, shone now, like a dominating quality which scorned to hide itself, or perhaps could not hide itself. She looked like a woman under the influence of a fixed purpose, fascinated, drawn onward, almost in ecstasy, and yet somehow, somewhere, tormented.
“Please go back to the foot of the hill,” she said to the Greek who was with her.
“But, Madame, I dare not leave you alone here.”
“I shall not be alone.”
The Greek looked surprised.
“Some one is waiting for me, up there, by that cypress—a—a friend.”
“Oh—I see, Madame.”
With a look of intense comprehension he turned to go.
“At the foot of the hill, please!” said Rosamund.
“Certainly, Madame.”
The dragoman was smiling as he walked away. Rosamund stood still watching him till he was out of sight. Then she turned. The figure of a man was still standing motionless under the old cypress tree among the graves. She set her lips together and went towards it. Now that she saw Dion, even though he was in the distance, she felt again intensely, as if in her flesh, the bodily wrong he had done to her. She strove not to feel this. She told herself that, after her sin against him, she had no right to feel it. In her heart she knew that she was the greater sinner. She realized now exactly the meaning of what she had done. She had no more illusions about herself, about her conduct. She condemned herself utterly. She had come to that place of the dead absolutely resolved to ask forgiveness of Dion. And yet now that she saw his body the sense of personal outrage woke in her, gripped her. She grew hot, she tingled. A fierce jealousy of the flesh tormented her. And suddenly she was afraid of herself. Was her body then more powerful than her soul? Was she, who had always cared for the things of the soul hopelessly physical? It seemed to her that even now she might succumb to what she supposed was an overwhelming personal pride, that even now she might be unable to do what she had come all the long way from England to do. But she forced herself to go onward up the path. She looked down; she would not see that body of a man which had belonged to her and to which she had belonged; but she made herself go towards it.
Presently she felt that she was drawing near to it; then that she was close to it. Then she stopped. Standing still for a moment she prayed. She prayed that she might be able in this supreme crisis of her life to govern the baser part of herself, that she might be allowed, might be helped, to rise to those heights of which Father Robertson had spoken to her, that she might at last realize the finest possibilities of her nature, that she might be able to do the most difficult thing, to be humble, to forget any injury which had been inflicted upon herself, and to remember only the tremendous injury she had inflicted upon another. When her prayer was finished she did not know whether it had been heard, whether, if it had been heard, it had been accepted and would be granted. She did not know at all what she would be able to do. But she looked up and saw Dion. He was close to her, was standing just in front of her, with one arm holding the cypress trunk, trembling slightly and gazing at her, gazing at her with eyes that were terrible because they revealed so much of agony, of love and of terror. She looked into those eyes, she looked at the frightful change written on the face that had once been so familiar to her, and suddenly an immense pity inundated her. It seemed to her that she endured in that moment all the suffering which Dion had endured since the tragedy at Welsley added to her own suffering. She stood there for a moment looking at him. Then she said only:
“Forgive me, oh, forgive me!”
Tears rushed into her eyes. She had been able to say it. It had not been difficult to say. She could not have said anything else. And her soul had said it as well as her lips.
“Forgive me! Forgive me!” she repeated.
She went up to Dion, took his poor tortured temples, from which the hair, once so thick, had retreated, in her hands, and whispered again in the midst of her tears:
“Forgive me!”
“I’ve been false to you,” he said huskily. “I’ve broken my vow to you. I’ve lived with another woman—for months. I’ve been a beast. I’ve wallowed. I’ve gone right down. Everything horrible—I’ve—I’ve done it. Only last night I meant to—to—I only broke away from it all last night. I heard you were here and then I—I——”
“Forgive me!”
She felt as if God were speaking in her, through her. She felt as if in that moment God had taken complete possession of her, as if for the first time in her life she was just an instrument, formed for the carrying out of His tremendous purposes, able to carry them out. Awe was upon her. But she felt a strange joy, and even a wonderful sense of peace.
“But you don’t hear what I tell you. I have been false to you. I have sinned against you for months and months.”
“Hush! It was my sin.”
“Yours? Oh, Rosamund!”
She was still holding his temples. He put his hands on her shoulders.
“Yes, it was my sin. I understand now how you love me. I never understood till to-day.”
“Yes, I love you.”
“Then,” she said, very simply. “I know you will be able to forgive me. Don’t tell me any more ever about what you have done. It’s blotted out. Just forgive me—and let us begin again.”
She took away her hands from his temples. He did not kiss her, but he took one of her hands, and they stood side by side looking towards Stamboul, towards the City of the Unknown God. His eyes and hers were on the minarets, those minarets which seem to say to those who have come to them from afar, and whose souls are restless:
“In the East thou shalt find me if thou hast not found me in the West.”
After a long silence Rosamund pressed Dion’s hand, and it seemed to him that never, in the former days of their union—not even in Greece—had she pressed it with such tenderness, with such pulse-stirring intimacy and trust in him. Then, still with her eyes upon the minarets, she said in a low voice:
“I think Robin knows.”
CHAPTER XVII
Not many days later, when the green valley of Olympia was wrapped in the peace of a sunlit afternoon, and a faint breeze drew from the pine trees on the hills of Kronos a murmur as of distant voices whispering the message of Eternity, the keeper of the house of the Hermes was disturbed in a profound reverie by the sound of slow footfalls not far from his dwelling. He stirred, lifted his head and stared vaguely about him. No travelers had come of late to the shrine he guarded. Hermes had been alone with the child upon his arm, dreaming of its unclouded future with the serenity of one who had trodden the paths where the gods walk, and who could rise at will above the shadowed ways along which men creep in anxiety, dreading false steps and the luring dangers of their fates. Hermes had been alone with his happy burden, forgotten surely by the world which his delicate majesty ignored without disdain. But now pilgrims, perhaps from a distant land, were drawing near to look upon him, to spend a little while in the atmosphere of his shining calm, perhaps to learn something of the message he had to give to those who were capable of receiving it.
A man and a woman, moving slowly side by side, came into the patch of strong sunshine which made a glory before the house, paused there and stood still.
From the shadow in which he was sitting the guardian examined them with the keen eyes of one who had looked upon travelers of many nations. He knew at once that the woman was English. As for the man—yes, probably he was English too, Dark, lean, wrinkled, he was no doubt an Englishman who had been much away from his own country, which the guardian conceived of as wrapped in perpetual fogs and washed by everlasting rains.
The guardian stared hard at this man, then turned his bright eyes again upon the woman. As he looked at her some recollection began to stir in his mind.
Not many travelers came twice to the green recesses of Elis. He was accustomed to brief acquaintanceships, closed by small gifts of money, and succeeded by farewells which troubled his spirit not at all. But this woman seemed familiar to him; and even the man——
He got up from his seat and went towards them.
As he came into the sunlight the woman saw him and smiled. And, when she smiled, he knew he had seen her before. The deep gravity of her face as she approached had nearly tricked his memory, but now he remembered all about her. She was the beautiful fair Englishwoman who had camped on the hill of Drouva not so many years ago, who had gone out shooting with that young rascal, Dirmikis, and who had spent solitary hours wrapt in contemplation of the statue whose fame doubtless had brought her to Elis.
Not so many years ago! But was this the man the husband who had been with her then, and who had evidently been deeply in love with her?
It seemed to the guardian that there was some puzzling change in the beautiful woman. As to the man——Still wondering, the guardian took off his cap politely and uttered a smiling welcome in Greek. Then the man smiled too, faintly, and still preserving the under-look of deep gravity, and the guardian knew him. It was indeed the husband, but grown to look very much older, and different in some almost mysterious way.
The woman made a gesture towards the museum. The guardian bowed, turned and moved to lead the way through the vestibule into the great room of the Victory. But the woman spoke behind him and he paused. He did not understand what she said, but the sound of her voice seemed to plead with him—or to command him. He looked at her and understood.
She was gazing at him steadily, and her eyes told him not to go before her, told him to stay where he was.
He nodded his head, slightly pursing his small mouth. She knew the way of course. How should she not know it?
Gently she came up to him and just touched his coat sleeve—to thank him. Then she went on slowly with her companion, traversed the room of the Victory, looking neither to right nor left, crossed the threshold of the smaller chamber beyond it and disappeared.
For a moment the guardian stood at gaze. Then he went back to his seat, sat down and sighed. A faint sense of awe had come upon him. He did not understand it, and he sighed again. Then, pulling himself together, he felt for a cigarette, lit it and began to smoke, staring at the patch of sunlight outside, and at the olive tree which grew close to the doorway.
Within the chamber of the Hermes for a long time there was silence. Rosamund was sitting before the statue. Dion stood near to her, but not close to her. The eyes of both of them were fixed upon Hermes and the child. Once again they were greeted by the strange and exquisite hush which seems, like a divine sentinel, to wait at the threshold of that shrine in Elis; once again the silence seemed to come out of the marble and to press softly against their two hearts. But they were changed, and so the great peace of the Hermes seemed to them subtly changed. They knew now the full meaning of torment—torment of the body and of the soul. They knew the blackness of rebellion. But they knew also, or at least were beginning to know, the true essence of peace. And this beginning of knowledge drew them nearer to the Hermes than they had been in the bygone years, than they had ever been before the coming of little Robin into their lives, and before Robin had left them, obedient to the call from beyond.
The olive branch was gone from the doorway. Something beautiful was missing from the picture of Elis which had reminded Rosamund of the glimpse of distant country in Raphael’s “Marriage of the Virgin.” And they longed to have it there, that little olive branch—ah, how they longed! There was pain in their hearts. But there was no longer the cruel fierceness of rebellion. They were able to gaze at the child on whom Hermes was gazing, if not with his celestial serenity yet with a resignation that was even subtly mingled with something akin to gratitude.
“Shall we reach that goal and take a child with us?”
Long ago that had been Dion’s thought in Elis. And long ago Rosamund had broken the silence within that room by the words:
“I’m trying to learn something here, how to bring him up if he ever comes.”
And now God had given them a child, and God had taken him from them. Robin had gone from all that was not intended, but that, for some inscrutable reason, had come to be. Robin was in the released world.
As the twilight began to fall another twilight came back flooding with its green dimness the memories of them both. And at last Rosamund spoke.
“Dion!”
“Yes.”
“Come a little nearer to me.”
He came close to her and stood beside her.
“Do you remember something you said to me here? It was in the twilight——”
She paused. Tears had come into her eyes and her voice had trembled.
“It was in the twilight. You said that it seemed to you as if Hermes were taking the child away, partly because of us.”
Her voice broke.
“I—I disliked your saying that. I told you I couldn’t feel that.”
“I remember.”
“And then you explained exactly what you meant. And we spoke of the human fear that comes to those who look at a child they love and think, ‘what is life going to do to the child?’ This evening I want to tell you that in a strange way I am able to be glad that Robin has gone, glad with some part of me that is more mother than anything else in me, I think. Robin is—is so safe now.”
The tears came thickly and fell upon her face. She put out a hand to Dion. He clasped it closely.
“God took him away, and perhaps because of us. I think it may have been to teach us, you and me. Perhaps we needed a great sorrow. Perhaps nothing else could have taught us something we had to learn.”
“It may be so,” he almost whispered.
She got up and leaned against his shoulder.
“Whatever happens to me in the future,” she said, “I don’t think I shall ever distrust God again.”
He put his arm round her and, for the first time since their reunion, he kissed her, and she returned his kiss.
Over Elis the twilight was falling, a green twilight, sylvan and very ethereal, tremulous in its delicate beauty. It stole through the green doors, and down through the murmuring pine trees. The sheep-bells were ringing softly; the flocks were going homeward from pasture; and the chime of their little bells mingled with the wide whispering of the eternities among the summits of the pine trees. Music of earth mingled with the music from a distance that knew what the twilight knew.
Presently the two marble figures in the chamber of the Hermes began to fade away gradually, as if deliberately withdrawing themselves from the gaze of men. At last only their outlines were visible to Rosamund and to Dion. But even these told of the Golden Age, of the age of long peace.
“FAREWELL!”
Some one had said it within that chamber, and a second voice had echoed it.
As the guardian of the Hermes watched the two pilgrims walking slowly away down the valley he noticed that the man’s right arm clasped the woman’s waist. And, so, they passed from his sight and were taken by the green twilight of Elis.