to jim the days which followed were chaotic. the whole movement of his existence seemed to be stimulated and speeded up, and the pace of his thoughts was increased out of all measure. it was as though some sort of drag or break had been removed from the wheels of his being, so that the fiery steeds of circumstance were able to leap forward after many a mile of heavy going. from now henceforth he was conscious of a general acceleration, a new vehemence, even a sort of frenzy in his progress along the high road of life; and, in consequence, his impressions were received with less observation of detail.
in the high passion of love there is no peace of mind and little satisfaction. the lover can never believe that he is loved, yet his happiness seems to him to depend on that assurance. his anxiety haunts him, fevers him, and lays siege as it were to his very soul.
the true lover makes more abundant acquaintance with hell than with heaven. so sensitive is his condition that every moment not rich with his lady’s obvious adoration is a moment impoverished by doubts and fears. she is not so interested in him as she was, he thinks; she is bored; she is cold to-day; she is thinking of something else; she does not surrender herself impetuously as she would if she really[207] cared. so says the wretched lover in his heart, and so he gives himself over to the legion of ten thousand devils.
monimé maintained towards jim a quiet and tantalizing reserve. mentally she seemed to be upon the mountain-top, and he in the valley below. when he visited her at her house she kept him waiting before she made her appearance: it was as though she were not eager to see him. women have this in common with the feline race: they seem so often to be intent upon some hidden pursuit. they go their own way, bide their own time, and no man may know the secret of their doings. no man may be initiated into their mysteries; and that which occupies them upstairs before they descend to greet him is beyond his ken.
like a number of men, jim’s character was marked by a certain simplicity. he made no secret of his love: it was apparent in his every gesture. the only secret which he maintained was that of his marriage, lest he should lose her, and in this regard he lied to an extent which brought misery to his heart. he gave her to understand that the property he had inherited had proved to be of no great value, and that the little money he now possessed was all that remained of its proceeds.
he desired to forget the years at eversfield utterly, and to live only in the present. to monimé he had always been jim easton, and the fact that she had not so much as heard the names tundering-west or eversfield aided him in his deception. yet in his own heart his marriage to dolly and the change of identity by which he had effected his[208] escape were become the two appalling mistakes which shut him off from monimé and their son.
the little boy proved to be all that he could wish. he was about three and a-half years of age, and was in the midst of that first great phase of inquiry which is the introduction to the school of life. he used the word “why” a hundred times a day; his large eyes stared in wondering contemplation at every object which newly came into his ken; and his fingers were ever busy with experiment.
it is a trying age for the “grown-up”; but jim, not having too much of it, enjoyed it, and enjoyed watching monimé’s handling of the situation.
her attitude towards himself during the first days, however, was the cause of many a heartache. there was a curious expression on her face as she watched him playing with the boy: it was at first as though she did not recognize his parental position, nor regard him as being in any way essential to the domestic alliance. she seemed to be anxious as to his influence upon the child, and when once he made the jesting assertion that parents should not try to be a good example to their offspring, but rather an awful warning, she did not laugh.
the possession of a son was the source of the most intense satisfaction to him; but monimé seemed at first to be endeavouring to check his belated enthusiasm. sometimes she appeared to him, indeed, as a lioness protecting her cub from an interfering lion, and cuffing the intruder over the head with a not too gentle paw. she seemed to claim the boy as her own exclusive property, and she allowed jim no free access to the nursery, nor[209] indeed to the house. there were days upon which the door was closed to him on one pretext or another; and at such times he experienced a variety of emotions, all of which were violent and passionate.
“people will talk,” she would say, “if you come here so often, jim. i am not independent of the world as i used to be: i have the boy to consider.”
she had called the child ian, which, she said, was the name of her father; and the fact that she had thus excluded him from a nomenclatural identity with the boy was a source to him of recurrent mortification. his son should have been james, or stephen, or mark, like his ancestors before him: it filled his heart with bitter remorse that the little chap should be merely “ian smith.”
gradually, however, monimé became more accustomed to his association with the boy; and at length there came a memorable occasion on which they sat together beside his cot for the best part of the night and nursed him through an alarming feverish attack. it was then that jim saw in her face an expression of tenderness towards him which was like water to the thirsty.
“you know,” he said to her, as they walked in the garden together in the cool of the daybreak, “this is the first time you have let me feel that i have anything to do with ian. i have been very hurt.”
she turned on him vehemently. “oh, don’t you understand,” she said, “that your coming back into my life like this is very hard for me to bear? i don’t want you to feel yourself tied down. i am perfectly capable of looking after myself and my[210] boy without your help. you have set a struggle going in my mind that is distracting me. there is one side of me which resents your interference, because you are just a wanderer, perfectly capable of walking off once more with hardly a farewell. there is another side which finds a sort of sneaking comfort in your presence, and endows you with virtues you probably don’t possess. i was self-reliant until you came. now i am swayed this way and that. at one moment i think i was wrong, and that we ought to be married and ought to go to some country where we are unknown, so that we can explain our child by pretending our marriage took place secretly four years ago. at another moment i remember that you have not suggested marriage to me, and that therefore you probably realize as well as i do your unfittedness for the r?le of husband. and then there’s the constant feeling of the unfairness of making you share, at this stage, the responsibilities i undertook of my own free will at alexandria.”
“it was my doing as much as yours,” he replied.
“no,” she answered, with a smile. “any woman worth her salt handles those sorts of situations, and makes up her own mind. man proposes, woman disposes. the whole thing is in the woman’s hands: to think otherwise is to insult my sex. men and women are both pieces in nature’s game; but nature is a woman, and she works out her plans through her own sex.”
she sat down upon the stone bench, and, with hands folded, gazed up to the dawning glory of the sunrise. it was as though she were a conscious[211] daughter of hathor, mother of all things, looking for guidance in her perplexity. jim seated himself by her side, and for some time there was silence between them, though his brain seemed to him to be full of the clamour of shackled words and incarcerated emotions.
her reference to their marriage had pierced his heart as with a sharp sword. he desired to make her his wife more intensely than ever he had desired anything in his life before; yet he was unable to do so. he wanted to possess her, to have the right to protect her, to be able to dedicate his whole entity to her service; yet he was tied hand and foot, and could make no such proposal.
he felt ashamed, exasperated, and thwarted; and suddenly springing to his feet, he swung about on his heel, kicked viciously at the bushes, and swore a round, hearty oath.
“what’s the matter?” she asked in surprise. “has something stung you?”
he laughed crazily. “yes, i’m stung all over,” he cried. “there are a hundred serpents with all their flaming fangs in me. i think i’m going mad.”
he paced to and fro, tearing at his hair; and when at length he resumed his seat he seized both her hands in his, and frenziedly kissed her every finger.
“i’m on fire,” he gasped. “i believe my heart is a roaring furnace. i must be full of blazing light inside; and in a few minutes i think i shall drop down dead with longing for you, monimé. then you’ll have to bury me; but i tell you there’ll be a volcanic eruption above my grave, and flames will[212] issue forth from my bare bones. i don’t believe death itself could extinguish me: my love will burst out in fearful torrents of lava, and the whole earth will tremble at my convulsions. i shall come to you again in earthquakes and tidal waves and a falling rain of comets. i shall blow the whole blasted world to smithereens before i go roaring into hell.... that’s how i feel! that’s what you’ve done to me!”
he took her in his arms, and, holding her crushed and powerless to resist, poured out his love for her in wild desperate words, his face close to hers. the sun was rising, and the first rays of golden light were flung upon the tops of the surrounding houses and trees while yet the garden was blue with the shadow of the vanishing night.
“don’t jim,” she whispered. “for god’s sake, don’t! we’ve got to be sensible. we’ve got to think what’s best for ian. give me a chance to think.”
“i want you,” he cried. “i want you more than any man has ever wanted anything. you belong to me: you’re my wife in the eyes of god. i want you to marry me....”
he had said it!—he had uttered the impossible thing; and his heart stood still with anguish. his arms loosened their hold upon her, and they faced one another in silence, while a thousand sparrows in the tree-tops chattered their merry morning salutation to the sun.
“cad! cad! cad!” said the voice of his outraged conscience to him. “bigamist and thief!”[213] and his heart responded with the one reiterated excuse: “i love her, i love her!”
“you must give me time to think,” she said at length. “go now, jim. you must have some sleep, and i must see to ian.”
for two days after this she would not see him, but on the third day, at mid-morning, he found himself once more in her drawing-room. it was a charming room, cool and airy; and it had a distinction which his own drawing-room at eversfield had lamentably lacked. dolly had been a victim of the nepotistic practice of loading the tables, piano-top, and shelves with photographs of herself, her friends, and her relatives. pictures of this kind are well enough in a man’s study or a woman’s boudoir; but in the more public rooms they are only to be tolerated, if at all, in the smallest quantity. monimé, however, whether by design or by force of circumstances, was free of this habit; and the more subtle essence of her personality was thus able to be enjoyed without distraction.
the walls were whitewashed and panelled with old persian textiles; carpets of karamania and smyrna lay upon the stone-paved floors; the light furniture was covered with fine fabrics of local manufacture; and in cyprian vases a mass of flowers greeted the eye with a hundred chromatic gradations and scented the air with the fragrance of summer.
monimé, upon this occasion, had reverted to her accustomed serenity of manner; and as she refreshed her distracted lover with sandwiches of goat’s-milk cheese and the wine of the island poured[214] from a cyprian jug, she talked to him quietly of practical things.
she argued frankly for and against their marriage, and reviewed the financial aspect of the question without embarrassment. she told him that she had just received a proposal from her salesman in london that she should go over to egypt at once and paint him a dozen desert subjects, there being a readier market for these than for pictures of little-known cyprus. this, therefore, she intended to do; and, in view of ian’s health, she proposed to send the boy and his nurse to england, there to await her return in four or five months’ time.
jim moved restlessly in his chair as she spoke, for the thought of revisiting england was terrifying to him; yet if she went there he could hardly resist the temptation to follow. he knew that it was preposterous enough to think of a bigamous marriage to her, even here in the east, but in england such a union would be madness.
“i thought,” he said gloomily, “that you did not want to risk meeting your former friends.”
“what does it matter now?” she replied. “the scandal of my leaving my husband is forgotten, and he, poor man, is dead. i have never told you his name, have i? he was richard furnice, the banker.”
jim glanced up quickly. “i know the name,” he said, with simplicity, for who did not? “but i don’t remember ever reading of his domestic troubles.”
“no,” she replied. “the scandal was kept out of the papers. he was as successful in explaining[215] away my absence as he had been in explaining away the presence of his mistress. yes,” she added, in answer to his look of inquiry, “he led the usual double life.”
“very rich, wasn’t he?” jim asked.
“yes, very,” she answered. “but i have never cared much about money. i have always agreed with the man who said ‘wealth is acquired by over-reaching our neighbors, and is spent in insulting them.’”
“i like money well enough,” said jim, “but i’ve never been much good at earning it.”
she asked him why he did not send some of his verses to a publisher in england, and talked to him so persuasively in this regard that he promised to consider doing so.
“but if you return to england,” he said, returning to the problem before him, “are there none of your relations who will make it awkward for you and ian?”
she shook her head. “my father died several years ago, and i was the only child. we have no close relations. you now may as well know his name, too. he was sir ian valory, the african explorer.”
jim looked at her in surprise. “why, he was one of my heroes as a boy,” he declared. “i read his books over and over again. this is wonderful!—tell me more.”
but as she did so, there arose a new clamour in his brain. he longed to be able to tell her that his own blood was fit to match with hers. the tundering-wests stood high in the annals of exploration[216] and adventure: his ancestors had roamed the world, as knights of the cross, as king’s envoys, as constables of frontier castles, as admirals of england. he himself was blood of their blood, and bone of their bone; and his son combined this high heritage with that of valory.
yet the secret must be kept. bitter was his regret that so it must be, thrice bitter his remorse that this son of his was a bastard. a tundering-west and a valory!—and the issue of that illustrious union a child without a name, hidden away in the island of forgetfulness!!
he went back to the hotel that day cursing fate for its irony, hating himself for a fool. then, of a sudden, there came a possible solution into his bewildered thoughts. monimé was going to egypt for some months: could he not return to england, reveal the fact of his existence to his wife, and oblige her to divorce him? the proceedings could be conducted quietly, and monimé, unaware of his real name, would not identify him with them. he could return to her a free man, able to marry her, and in later years he could tell her the whole story.
yet how could he bear the long absence from her, how could he face the terror that she might find out and reject him? “o god,” he cried in his heart, “i am punished for my foolishness! you have belaboured me enough: you, whom they call merciful, have mercy!”
during the next few days jim made a final arrangement of his poems, and, adding a title-page: songs of the highroad, by james easton, posted them off to a well-known publisher in london, giving[217] his bank in rome as his address. while reading through these collected manuscripts he had come to the conclusion that the poems were rather good. “there’s quite a swing about some of the stuff,” he said to monimé. “in fact i almost believe i could have shown you one or two of them without feeling an ass. but i suppose the thoughts in them, and the melancholy speculations about what is one’s ‘duty’ and all that sort of thing, are rather rot.”
as time passed, the idea of returning to england and obtaining a divorce developed in his mind. he was reluctant, however, to make a final decision, and his plans remained fluid long after those of monimé had crystallized. this was due mainly to the suspense he was experiencing in regard to his relations with her. he avoided any pressing of the question of their marriage, for he shunned the thought of involving her in a possible bigamy case; yet he could see that so long as he maintained this inconclusive attitude he gave her no cause for confidence in him.
matters came to a head one day at the end of october. monimé had arranged with him to make the excursion to the mountain castle of st. hilarion; and it is probable that both he and she had decided to talk things out during the hours they would be together. so far as he was concerned, at any rate, the situation as it stood was impossible.
the carriage in which they were to make this fifteen-mile journey resembled a barouche, but a kind of awning was stretched above it on four iron rods, and from this depended some dusty-looking curtains looped back by faded red cords and tassels,[218] which might have been purloined from old men’s dressing-gowns. four lean and crazily harnessed horses were attached to this vehicle, which looked somewhat like a four-poster bed on wheels; and a red-capped and baggy-trousered driver, apparently of turkish nationality, sat high upon the box, monimé’s man-servant being perched beside him.
rattling down the narrow streets of the city and through the tunnel in the ramparts, they soon passed out into the open country, and, with loudly cracking whip, bowled along the sun-bathed road at a very fair pace, the sparkling morning air seeming to put vigour even into the emaciated horses.
at length they came to the foot-hills, and saw far above them, against the intense blue of the sky, the pass which leads through the mountains to the port of kyrenia and the sea. here their pace grew slower, and from time to time they walked beside the labouring vehicle as it crunched its way through soft gravel and sand, or lurched over half-buried boulders.
reaching level ground once more they went with a fine flourish through a village where the dogs barked at them and the children stared or ran begging at their side. now the slopes and ledges of rock were green with young pines, whose aromatic scent filled the warm air; and, as they slowly wound their way upwards, the size of these trees increased until they attained truly majestic proportions.
towards noon they entered the pass, and jim and monimé were afoot once more, whilst the tired horses rested. behind them the gorges and valleys carried the eye down into the hazy distances, and[219] they could see nicosia lying like a white cameo upon the velvet of the plains. before them a cleft in the towering rocks revealed the azure expanse of the mediterranean, and beyond it the far-off coasts of asia minor, rising like the vision of a dream from the placid ocean.
monimé shaded her eyes as she gazed over the sea. “there is phrygia,” she exclaimed, “where monimé lived, and cappadocia and cilicia! and away behind them is pontus, the land her husband took her to....”
“i have no home to take you to, monimé,” he said, unable to eschew the hazardous subject of their marriage.
“that’s just as well,” she answered, “because in the story, you remember, he involved her in his domestic troubles, which led to his suicide, and her own death followed.”
she smiled as she spoke, but to him her words were dark with portentous meaning. he felt like a criminal.
entering the carriage once more, they descended from the pass for some distance, as though making for kyrenia, which they could see far below them; but presently a rough track led them through the pines, and brought them at last to the foot of a tremendous bluff of rock, upon the summit of which stood the ruined walls and towers of the castle of st. hilarion. here the carriage was abandoned, and hand-in-hand they clambered up the track, the servant following with the luncheon basket.
soon they passed within the ruinous walls of the castle, and, having rested in the shade and eaten[220] their picnic meal, made their way amongst fallen stones and a profusion of weeds and grasses towards the main buildings, which mounted up the cliffs in front of them in a confused array of walls and turrets, roofs and chimneys, battlements and bastions, standing silent and withered in a blaze of sunlight.
through a crumbling door they went, and up a flight of broken steps; through the ruined chapel, on the walls of which the faded frescoes could still be seen; along a shadowed passage, and up again by a rock-hewn stairway; until at last they reached a roofless chamber locally known as the queen’s apartment.
this side of the castle, which was built at the edge of an appalling precipice, seemed to be clinging perilously to the summit of the mountain; and through the broken tracery of the gothic windows they looked down in awe to the pine forests two thousand feet below. all about them the bold mountain peaks rose up from the shadowed and mysterious valleys near the coastline; and before them the purple and azure sea was spread, divided from the cloudless sky by the hazy hills of asia minor.
from these valleys there rose to their ears the frail and far-off tinkle of goats’ bells, and sometimes the song of a shepherd was lifted up to them upon the tender wings of the breeze. all visible things seemed to be motionless in the warmth of the afternoon, with the exception only of two vultures, which slowly circled in mid-air with tranquil pinions extended. it was as though the crumbling[221] stones of the castle, and the forests and valleys they surmounted, were deep in an enchanted slumber, from which they would never again awake.
here at these walls richard c?ur de lion, king of england, with trumpets had summoned the garrison to surrender; but the walls remembered it no more. here the kings and queens of cyprus, of the house of lusignan, had held their court in that strange admixture of western chivalry and eastern splendour which had characterized the dynasty; but the glamour of those days was passed into oblivion. here the soldiers of venice had looted and plundered; but the ruin they left behind them had steeped its wounds in the balm of forgetfulness.
only monimé and her lover were awake in this place of dreams. seated here, as it were, upon a throne rising in the very centre of the ancient world, she seemed to jim to be one with all the dim, forgotten queens of the past; all the romance of all the pages of history was focussed and brought again to life in her person; and in her face there was the mystery of regnant womanhood throughout the ages.
just as now she sat with her chin resting upon her hand, gazing over the summer seas to the adventurous coasts of the ancient kingdoms of the mediterranean, so arsinoe had gazed, perhaps upon this very mountain-top; so cleopatra, her sister, had gazed, over there in her alexandrian palace; so helen had gazed yonder from the casements of troy; so the queen of sheba, camping upon lebanon, had gazed as she travelled from jerusalem. the past was forgotten; but, all unknowing, it lived again in monimé, enticing him with her lips, looking[222] tenderly upon him with her eyes, beckoning him with her smiles, repulsing him with her indifference, bewildering him with her serenity, maddening him with her unfathomable heart.
“monimé, i can’t go on like this,” he said, taking her hands in his. “you must tell me here and now that you love me, or that i am to go out of your life.”
“the future lies in your hands, jim,” she answered, quietly and with deep sincerity. “surely you can understand my attitude. i will not bind myself to a man who will not be bound, even though i were to love him with all my soul.”
“i have asked you to marry me,” he told her.
“your words carried no conviction,” she replied.
“i ask you again,” he said, daring all.
“you do not know what you are saying,” she answered. “go away to england, or to italy, jim, and think it over. stay away from me for some months; and if you find that your feelings do not change, if i remain a vital thing in your life and do not fade into a memory, then you can come back to me, knowing that i will not fail you. we have had enough of bedouin love. if i were to be honest with myself i would tell you that long ago circumstances made me realize that we did wrong at alexandria, because we were unfair to the unborn generation. i set myself in opposition to accepted custom, and i have been beaten by just one thing—my anxiety for the welfare of the child my emancipation brought me, my terror in case there should be a slur upon his name. there must be no more playing with vital things.”
[223]
her suggestion that he should go away from her for some months, while she worked in egypt on her desert pictures, came to him like the voice of providence, offering to him the opportunity to carry out his plan for ridding himself once and for all of dolly by divorce; and his mind was made up on the instant.
“very well,” he said. “i’ll go away—though not because i feel the slightest doubt about my love for you. i’ll go to larnaca to-morrow: some people from the hotel are going then, so as to catch the steamer the day after....”
she interrupted him. “oh jim, must it be to-morrow?”
he looked up quickly at her. “do you care?” he asked, eagerly.
she had begun to reply, and he was hanging upon her words, when the native servant made his appearance. jim clapped his hand to his head in a frenzy of exasperation. “confound you!—what do you want?” he shouted to the man.
“i suppose he’s come to tell us it’s high time to be going,” said monimé, laughing in his face.
jim picked up a stone and hurled it viciously over the wall into the void beyond. he would willingly have leapt upon the inoffensive servant and throttled him where he stood.
