In his contrition for the attack which he had made upon the honor of his
wife at his mother’s instigation, Beadon Clarke had given up all
claims on his boy’s time. Actually, though not legally, Mrs. Clarke had
complete control over Jimmy. He spent all his holidays with her, and
seldom saw his father, who was still attached to the British Embassy in
Madrid. He had never been allowed to read any reports of the famous case
which had been fought out between his parents, and was understood to
think that his father and mother had, for some mysterious reason, found
it impossible to “hit it off together,” and had therefore decided
to live apart. He was now rather vaguely fond of his father, whom he
considered to be “quite a good sort,” but he was devoted to his mother.
Mrs. Clarke’s peculiar self-possession and remarkably strong will made a
great impression on Jimmy. “It’s jolly difficult to score my mater off,
I can tell you,” he occasionally remarked to his more intimate chums at
school. He admired her appearance, her elegance, and the charm of her
way of living, which he called “doing herself jolly well”; even her
unsmiling face and characteristic lack of what is generally called
vivacity won his approval. “My mater’s above all that silly gushing and
giggling so many women go in for, don’t you know,” was his verdict on
Mrs. Clarke’s usually serious demeanor. Into her gravity boyishly he
read dignity of character, and in his estimation of her he set her very
high. Although something of a pickle, and by nature rather reckless
and inclined to be wild, he was swiftly obedient to his mother, partly
perhaps because, understanding young males as well as she understood
male beings of all ages, she very seldom drew the reins tight. He knew
very well that she loved him.
On the evening of his arrival at Buyukderer for the summer holidays
Jimmy had a confidential talk with his mother about “Mr. Leith,” whom
he had not yet seen, but about whom he had been making many anxious
inquiries.
“I’ll tell you to-night,” his mother had replied. And after dinner she
fulfilled her promise.
“You’ll see Mr. Leith to-morrow,” she said.
“Well, I should rather think so!” returned Jimmy, in an injured voice.
“Where is he?”
“He’s living in rooms in the house of a Greek not far from here.”
“I thought he was in the hotel. I say, mater, can’t I have a cigarette
just for once?”
“Yes, you may, just for once.”
Jimmy approached the cigarette box with the air of a nonchalant
conqueror. As he opened it with an apparently practised forefinger he
remarked:
“Well, mater?”
“He’s left the hotel. You know, Jimmy, Mr. Leith has had great
misfortunes.”
Jimmy had heard of the gun accident and its terrible result, and he now
looked very grave.
“I know--poor chap!” he observed. “But it wasn’t his fault. It was the
little brute of a pony. Every one knows that. It was rotten bad luck,
but who would be down on a fellow for bad luck?”
“Exactly. But it’s changed Mr. Leith’s life. His wife has left him. He’s
given up his business, and is, consequently, less well off than he was.
But this isn’t all.”
Jimmy tenderly struck a match, lighted a cigarette, and, with
half-closed eyes, blew forth in a professional manner a delicate cloud
of smoke. He was feeling good all over.
“First-rate cigarettes!” he remarked. “The very best! Yes, mater?”
“He’s rather badly broken up.”
“No wonder!” said Jimmy, with discrimination.
“You’ll find him a good deal changed. Sometimes he’s moody and even
bad-tempered, poor fellow, and he’s fearfully sensitive. I’m trying my
best to buck him up.”
“Good for you, mater! He’s our friend. We’re bound to stand by him.”
“And that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. When he’s a little difficult,
doesn’t take things quite as one means them--you know?”
“Rather! Do I?”
“I put it down to all the trouble he’s been through. I never resent it.
Now I ought really to have got out a holiday tutor for you.”
“Oh, I say, after I’ve swotted my head off all these months! A chap
needs some rest if he’s to do himself justice, hang it, mater, now!”
“I know all about that!”
She looked at him shrewdly, and he smiled on one side of his mouth.
“Go on, mater!”
“But having Mr. Leith here I thought I wouldn’t do that. Mr. Leith’s
awfully fond of boys, and it seemed to me you might do him more good
than any one else could.”
“Well, I’m blowed! D’you really think so?”
Jimmy came over and sat on the arm of her chair, blowing rings of smoke
cleverly over her lovely little head.
“Put me up to it, mater, there’s a good girl. I’m awfully keen on Mr.
Leith, as you know. He’s got the biggest biceps I ever saw, and I’m
jolly sorry for him. What can I do? Put me up to it.”
And Mrs. Clarke proceeded to put Jimmy up to it. She had told Dion that
Jimmy wouldn’t see the difference in him. Now she carefully prepared
Jimmy to face that difference, and gave him his cue for the part she
wished him to play. Jimmy felt very important as he listened to her
explanations, trifling seriously with his cigarette, and looking very
worldly-wise.
“I twig!” he interrupted occasionally, nodding his round young head,
which was covered with densely thick, rather coarse hair. “I’ve got it.”
And he went off to bed very seriously, resolved to take Mr. Leith in
hand and to do his level best for him.
So it was that when Dion and he met next day he was not surprised at
the change in Dion’s appearance and manner. Nor were his young eyes
merciless in their scrutiny. Just at first, perhaps, they stared with
the unthinking observation of boyhood, but almost immediately Jimmy had
taken the cue his mother had given him, and had entered into his part of
a driver-away of trouble.
He played it well, with a tact that was almost remarkable in so young
a boy; and Dion, ignorant of what Mrs. Clarke had done on the night of
Jimmy’s arrival, was at first surprised at the ease with which they
got on together. He had dreaded Jimmy’s coming, partly because of the
secrets he must keep from the boy, but partly also because of Robin.
A boy’s hands would surely tear at the wound which was always open.
Sometimes Dion felt horribly sad when he was in contact with Jimmy’s
light-hearted and careless gaiety; sometimes he felt the gnawing
discomfort of one not by nature a hypocrite forced into a passive
hypocrisy; nevertheless there were moments when the burden of his life
was made a little lighter on his shoulders by the confidence his young
companion had in him, by the admiration for him showed plainly by Jimmy,
by the leaping spirits which ardently summoned a reply in kind.
The subtlety of Mrs. Clarke, too, helped Dion at first.
Since her son’s arrival, without ostentation she had lived for him. She
entered into all Jimmy’s plans, was ready to share his excitements and
to taste, with him, those pleasures which were possible to a woman as
well as to a boy. But she was quick to efface herself where she saw
that she was not needed or might even be in the way. As a mother she was
devoid of jealousy, was unselfish without seeming to be so. She did
not parade her virtue. Her reticence was that of a perfectly finished
artist. When she was wanted she was on the spot; when she was not
wanted she disappeared. She sped Dion and Jimmy on their way to boating,
shooting, swimming expeditions, with the happiest grace, and never
assumed the look and manner of the patient woman “left behind.”
Not once, since Jimmy’s arrival, had she shown to Dion even a trace of
the passionate and perverse woman he now knew her to be under her pale
mask of self-controlled and very mental composure. At the hotel in
Constantinople she had said to Dion, “All the time Jimmy’s at Buyukderer
we’ll just be friends.” Now she seemed utterly to have forgotten that
they had ever been what the world calls lovers, that they had been
involved in scenes of passion, and brutality, and exhaustion, that they
had torn aside the veil of reticence behind which women and men hide
from each other normally the naked truth of what they can be. She
treated Dion casually, though very kindly, as a friend, and never, even
by the swift glance or a lingering touch of her fingers, reminded him of
the fires that burned within her. Even when she was alone with him, when
Jimmy ran off, perhaps, unexpectedly in the wake of a passing caprice,
she never departed from her role of the friend who was before all things
a mother.
So perfect was her hypocrisy, so absolutely natural in its
manifestation, that sometimes, looking at her, Dion could scarcely
forbear from thinking that she had forgotten all about their illicit
connexion; that she had put it behind her forever; that she was one
of those happy people who possess the power of slaying the past and
blotting the murder out of their memories.
That scene between them in Constantinople on the eve of Jimmy’s
arrival--had it ever taken place? Had she really ever tried to strike
him on the mouth? Had he caught her wrist in a grip of iron? It seemed
incredible.
And if he was involved in a great hypocrisy since the boy’s arrival he
was released from innumerable lesser hypocrisies. His life at present
was what it seemed to be to the little world on the Bosporus.
Just at first he did not realize that though Mrs. Clarke genuinely loved
her son she was not too scrupulous to press his unconscious services in
aid of her hypocrisy.
The holiday tutor whom she ought to have got out from England to improve
the shining hour on Jimmy’s behalf was replaced by Dion in the eyes of
Mrs. Clarke’s world.
One day she said to Dion:
“Will you do me a good turn?”
“Yes, if I can.”
“It may bore you.”
“What is it?”
“Read a little bit with Jimmy sometimes, will you? He’s abominably
ignorant, and will never be a scholar, but I should like him just to
keep up his end at school.”
“But I haven’t got any school-books.”
“I have. He’s specially behindhand with his Greek. His report tells me
that. If you’ll do a little Greek grammar and construing with him in the
mornings now and them, I shall be tremendously grateful. You see,
owing to my miserable domestic circumstances, Jimmy is practically
fatherless.”
“And you ask me to take his father’s place!” was in Dion’s mind.
But she met his eyes so earnestly and with such sincerity that he only
said:
“Of course I’ll read with him in the mornings.”
Despite the ardent protests to Jimmy Dion kept his promise. Soon Mrs.
Clarke’s numerous acquaintances knew of the morning hours of study. She
had happened to tell Sir Carey Ingleton about Jimmy’s backwardness in
book-learning and Mr. Leith’s kind efforts to “get him on during the
holidays.” Sir Carey had spoken of it to Cyril Vane. The thing “got
about.” The name of Dion Leith began to be connected rather with Jimmy
Clarke than with Mrs. Clarke. Continually Dion and Jimmy were seen about
together. Mrs. Clarke, meanwhile, often went among her friends alone,
and when they asked about Jimmy she would say:
“Oh, he’s gone off somewhere with Mr. Leith. I don’t know where. Mr.
Leith’s a regular boy’s man and was a great chum of Jimmy’s in London;
used to show him how to box and that sort of thing. It’s partly for
Jimmy that he came to Buyukderer. They read together in the mornings.
Mr. Leith’s getting Jimmy on in Greek.”
Sometimes she would add:
“Mr. Leith loves boys, and since his own child died so sadly I think
he’s taken to Jimmy more than ever.”
Soon people began to talk of Dion Leith as “Jimmy Clarke’s holiday
tutor.” Once, when this was said in Lady Ingleton’s drawing-room at
Therapia, she murmured:
“I don’t think it quite amounts to that. Mr. Leith has never been a
schoolmaster.”
And there she left it, with a faint smile in which there was just the
hint of an almost cynical sadness.
Since the trip to Brusa on the “Leyla” she had thought a great deal
about Dion Leith, and she was very sorry for him in a rather unusual
way. Out of her happiness with her husband she seemed to draw an
instinctive knowledge of what such a nature as Dion Leith’s wanted and
of the extent of his loss. Once she said to Sir Carey, with a sort of
intensity such as she seldom showed:
“Good women do terrible things sometimes.”
“Such as----?” said Sir Carey, looking at her almost with surprise in
his eyes.
“I think Mrs. Leith has done a terrible thing to her husband.”
“Perhaps she loved the child too much.”
“Even love can be almost abominable,” said Lady Ingleton. “If we had a
child, and you had done what poor Dion Leith has done, do you think I
should have cast you out of my life?”
“But--are you a good woman?” he asked her, smiling.
“No, or you should never have bothered about me.”
He touched her hand.
“When you do that,” Lady Ingleton said, “I could almost cry over poor
Dion Leith.”
Sir Carey bent down and kissed her with a very tender gallantry.
“You and I are secretly sentimentalists, Delia,” he said. “That is why
we are so happy together.”
“Why doesn’t Dion Leith go to England?” she exclaimed, almost angrily.
“Perhaps England seems full of his misery. Besides, his wife is there.”
“He ought to go to her. He ought to force her to see the evil she is
doing.”
“Leith will never do that, I feel sure,” said Sir Carey gravely. “And in
his place I don’t know that I could.”
Lady Ingleton looked at him with an almost sharp impatience such as she
seldom showed him.
“When a man has right on his side he ought to browbeat a woman!” she
exclaimed. “And even if he is in the wrong it’s the best way to make
a woman see things through his eyes. Dion Leith is too delicate with
women.”
After a moment she added:
“At any rate with some women, the first of whom is his own wife. A man
should always put up a big fight for a really big thing, and Dion Leith
hasn’t done that!”
“He fought in South Africa for England.”
“Ah,” she said, lifting her chin, “that sort of thing is so different.”
“Tell him what you think,” said the Ambassador.
“I know him so little. But perhaps--who knows--some day I shall.”
She said no more on that subject.
Meanwhile Dion was teaching Jimmy, who was really full of the happiest
ignorance. Jimmy’s knowledge of Greek was a minus quantity, and he said
frankly that he considered all that kind of thing “more or less rot.”
Nevertheless, Dion persevered. One morning when they were going to get
to work as usual in the pavilion,--chose by Mrs. Clarke as the suitable
place for his studies,--taking up the Greek Grammar Dion opened it
by chance. He stood by the table from which he had picked the book up
staring down at the page. By one of those terrible rushes of which the
mind is capable he was swept back to the famous mound which fronts the
plain of Marathon; he saw the curving line of hills, the sea intensely
blue and sparkling, empty of ships, the river’s course through the
tawny land marked by the tall reeds and the sedges; he heard the distant
lowing of cattle coming from that old battlefield, celebrated by poets
and historians. And then he heard, as if just above him, the dry crackle
of brushwood--Rosamund moving in the habitation of Arcady. And he
remembered the cry, the intense human cry which had echoed in the
recesses of his soul on that day long--how long--ago in Greece,
“Whither? Whither am I and my great love going? To what end are we
journeying?”
He heard again that cry of his soul in the pavilion at Buyukderer, and
beneath the sunburn his lean cheeks went lividly pale.
Reluctantly Jimmy was getting an exercise book and a pen and ink out of
the drawer of a table, which Mrs. Clarke had had specially made for the
lessons by a little Greek carpenter who sometimes did odd jobs for her.
He found the ink bottle almost empty.
“I say,” he began.
He looked up.
“I say, Mr. Leith----”
His voice died away and he stared.
“What’s wrong?” he managed to bring out at last.
He thrust out a hand and laid hold of the grammar. Dion let it go.
His eyes searched the page.
“What’s up, Mr. Leith?”
He looked frankly puzzled and almost afraid. He had never seen any one
look just like that before.
There was a moment of silence. Then, with a sudden change of manner,
Dion exclaimed:
“Come on, Jimmy! I don’t feel like doing lessons this morning. I vote
we go out. I’m going to ask your mother if we can ride to the Belgrad
forest. Perhaps she’ll come with us.”
He was suddenly afraid to remain alone with the boy, and he felt that
he could not stay in that pavilion full of the atmosphere of feverish
passion, of secrecy, of betrayal. Yes, of betrayal! For there he had
betrayed the obstinate love, which he had felt at Marathon as a sort of
ecstasy, and still felt, but now like a wound, within him in spite of
Rosamund’s rejection of him. Not yet had the current taken him and swept
him away from all the old landmarks. Perhaps it never would. And yet he
had given himself to it, he had not tried to resist.
Jimmy jumped up with alacrity, though he still looked rather grave and
astonished. They went down the terraced garden to the villa.
“Run up and ask your mother,” said Dion. “Probably she’s in her
sitting-room. I’ll wait here to know what she says.”
“Right you are!”
He went off, looking rather relieved.
Robin at fifteen! Dion shut his eyes.
Jimmy was away for more than ten minutes. Then he came back to say that
his mother would come with them to the forest and would be ready in an
hour’s time.
“I’ll go back to my rooms, change my breeches, and order the horses,”
said Dion.
He was longing to get away from the scrutiny which at this moment Jimmy
could not forego. He knew that Jimmy had been talking about him to Mrs.
Clarke, had probably been saying how “jolly odd” he had been in
the pavilion. For once the boy’s tact had failed him, and Dion’s
sensitiveness tingled.
An hour later they were on horseback and rode into the midst of the
forest. At the village of Belgrad they dismounted, left the horses in
the care of a Turkish stableman, and went for a walk among the trees.
It was very hot and still, and presently Mrs. Clarke said she would sit
down and rest.
“You and Jimmy go on if you want to,” she said.
But Jimmy threw himself down on the ground.
“I’m tired. It’s so infernally hot.”
“Take a nap,” said his mother.
The boy laid his head on his curved arms sideways. Mrs. Clarke leaned
down and put his panama hat over his left cheek and eye.
“Thank you, mater,” he murmured.
He lay still.
Dion had stood by with an air of hesitation during this little talk
between mother and son. Now he looked away to the forest.
“You go,” Mrs. Clarke said to him. “You’ll find us here when you come
back. The Armenians call the forest _Defetgamm_. Perhaps you will come
under its influence.”
“_Defetgamm_! What does that mean?”
“Dispeller of care.”
He stood looking at her for a moment; then, without another word, he
turned quickly away and disappeared among the trees.
Jimmy slept with his face hidden, and Mrs. Clarke, with wide-open eyes,
sat motionless staring into the forest.
When they reached the Villa Hafiz late in the afternoon Dion helped
Mrs. Clarke to dismount. As she slid down lightly from the saddle she
whispered, scarcely moving her lips:
“The pavilion to-night eleven. You’ve got the key.”
She patted Selim’s glossy black neck.
“Come, Jimmy!” she said. “Say good night to Mr. Leith. I’m sure he’s
tired and has had more than enough of us for to-day. We’ll give him a
rest from us till to-morrow.”
And Jimmy bade Dion good-by without any protest.
As Dion rode off Mrs. Clarke did not turn to look after him. She had
not troubled even to question him with her eyes. She had assumed that he
would do what she wanted. Would he do that?
At first he believed that he would not go. He had been away in the
forest with his misery for nearly two hours, struggling among the
shadows of the trees. Jimmy had seen in the pavilion that morning that
his “holiday tutor” was strangely ill at ease, and had discussed the
matter with his mater, and asked her why on earth the sight of a page
of Greek grammar should make a fellow stand staring as if he were
confronted by a ghost. But Jimmy had no conception of what Dion had
been through in the forest, where happy Greeks and Armenians were lazily
enjoying the empty hours of summer, forgetting yesterday, and serenely
careless of to-morrow.
In the forest Dion had fought with an old love of which he began to be
angrily ashamed, with a love which was now his greatest enemy, a thing
contemptible, inexplicable. In the pavilion that morning it had suddenly
risen up before him strong, intense, passionate. It seemed irresistible.
But he was almost furiously resolved not merely to resist it, but to
crush it down, to break it in pieces, or to drive it finally out of his
life.
And he had fought with it alone in the forest which the Armenians call
_Defetgamm_. And in the forest something--some adherent, it seemed--had
whispered to him, “To kill your enemy you must fill your armory with
weapons. The woman who came to you when you were neither in one world
nor in the other is a weapon. Why have you ceased to use her?”
And now, as if she had heard the voice of that adherent, and had known
of the struggle in the forest, the woman herself had suddenly broken
through the reserve she had imposed upon them both since the coming of
her son.
In a hideous way Dion wanted to see her, and yet he shrank from going
back to her secretly. The coming of Jimmy, his relations with the boy,
the boy’s hearty affection for him and admiration for him, had roused
into intense activity that part of his nature which had always loved,
which he supposed always must love, the straight life; the life with
morning face and clear, unfaltering eyes; the life which the Hermes
suggested, immune from the fret and fever of secret vices and passions,
lifted by winged sandals into a region where soul and body were in
perfect accord, and where, because of that, there was peace; not a peace
of stagnation, but a peace living and intense. But that part of his
nature had led him even now instinctively back to the feet of Rosamund.
And he revolted against such a pilgrimage.
“The pavilion to-night eleven; you’ve got the key.”
Her face had not changed as she whispered the words, and immediately
afterwards she had told a lie to her boy, or had implied a lie. She had
made Jimmy believe the thing that was not. Loving Jimmy, she did not
scruple to play a part to him.
Dion ate no dinner that night. After returning to his rooms and getting
out of his riding things into a loose serge suit he went out again and
walked along the quay by the water. He paced up and down, ignoring the
many passers-by, the boatmen and watermen who now knew him so well.
He was considering whether he should go to the pavilion at the appointed
hour or whether he should leave Buyukderer altogether and not return to
it. This evening he was in the mood to be drastic. He might go down to
Constantinople and finally cast his burden away there, never to take it
up again--the burden of an old love whose chains still hung about him;
he might plunge into the lowest depths, into depths where perhaps the
remembrance of Rosamund and the early morning would fade away from him,
where even Mrs. Clarke would not care to seek for him, although her will
was persistent.
He fully realized now her extraordinary persistence, the fierce firmness
of character that was concealed by her quiet and generally impersonal
manner. Certainly she had the temperament of a ruler. He remembered--it
seemed to him with a bizarre abruptness--the smile on Dumeny’s lips in
the Divorce Court when the great case had ended in Mrs. Clarke’s favor.
Did he really know Cynthia Clarke even now?
He walked faster. Now he saw Hadi Bey before him, self-possessed, firm,
with that curiously vivid look which had attracted the many women in
Court.
And Jimmy believed in his mother. Perhaps, until Dion’s arrival in
Buyukderer, the boy had had reason in his belief--perhaps not. Dion was
very uncertain to-night.
A sort of cold curiosity was born in him. Until now he had accepted Mrs.
Clarke’s presentment of herself to the world, which included himself,
as a genuine portrait; now he began to recall the long speech of Beadon
Clarke’s counsel. But the man had only been speaking according to his
brief, had been only putting forth all the ingenuity and talent which
enabled him to command immense fees for his services. And Mrs. Clarke
had beaten him. The jury had said that she was not what he had asserted
her to be.
Suppose they had made a mistake, had given the wrong verdict, why
should that make any difference to Dion? He had definitely done with the
goodness of good women. Why should he fear the evil of a woman who was
bad? Perhaps in the women who were called evil by the respectable, or by
those who were temperamentally inclined to purity, there was more warm
humanity than the women possessed who never made a slip, or stepped
out of the beaten path of virtue. Perhaps those to whom much must be
forgiven were those who knew how to forgive.
If Mrs. Clarke really were what Beadon Clarke’s counsel had suggested
that she was, how would it affect him? Dion pondered that question on
the quay. Mrs. Clarke’s pale and very efficient hypocrisy, which he had
been able to observe at close quarters since he had been at Buyukderer,
might well have been brought into play against himself, as it had been
brought into play against the little world on the Bosporus and against
Jimmy.
Dion made up his mind that he would go to the pavilion that night. The
cold curiosity which had floated up to the surface of his mind enticed
him. He wanted to know whether he was among the victims, if they could
reasonably be called so, of Mrs. Clarke’s delicate hypocrisy. He was
still thinking of Mrs. Clarke as a weapon; he was also thinking that
perhaps he did not yet know exactly what type of weapon she was. He must
find that out to-night. Not even the thought of Jimmy should deter him.
At a few minutes before eleven he went back to his rooms, unlocked his
despatch box, and drew out the key of the gate of Mrs. Clarke’s garden.
He thrust it into his pocket and set out on the short walk to the Villa
Hafiz. The night was dark and cloudy and very still. Dion walked quickly
and surreptitiously, not looking at any of the people who went by him
in the darkness. All the windows of the villa which faced the sea were
shuttered and showed no lights. He turned to the right, stood before the
garden gate and listened. He heard no sound except a distant singing on
the oily waters of the Bay. Softly he put his key into the gate, gently
unlocked it, stepped into the garden. A few minutes later he was on the
highest terrace and approached the pavilion. As he did so Mrs. Clarke
came out of the drawing-room of the villa, passed by the fountain, and
began to ascend the garden.
She was dressed in black and in a material that did not rustle. Her thin
figure did not show up against the night, and her light slow footfall
was scarcely audible on the paths and steps as she went upward. Jimmy
had gone to bed long ago, tired out with the long ride in the heat.
She had just been into his bedroom, without a light, and had heard his
regular breathing. He was fast asleep, and once he was asleep he never
woke till the light of day shone in at the window. It was a comfort that
one could thoroughly rely on the sleeping powers of a healthy boy of
fifteen.
She sighed as she thought of Jimmy. The boy was going to complicate
her life. She was by nature an unusually fearless woman, but she was
beginning to realize that there might come a time when she would know
fear--unless she could begin to live differently as Jimmy began to
grow up. But how could she do that? There are things which seem to be
impossible even to strong wills. Her will was very strong, but she had
always used it not to renounce but to attain, not to hold her desires in
check but to bring them to fruition. And it was late in the day to begin
reversing the powerful engine of her will. She was not even sure that
she could reverse it. Hitherto she had never genuinely tried to do that.
She did not want to try now, partly--but only partly--because she hated
to fail in anything she undertook. And she had a suspicion, which she
was not anxious to turn into a certainty, that she who had ruled many
people was only a slave herself. Perhaps some day Jimmy would force her
to a knowledge of her exact condition.
For the first time in her life she was half afraid of that mysterious
energy which men and women call love; she began to understand, with
a sort of ample fulness of comprehension, that of all loves the most
determined is the love of a mother for her only son. A mother may,
perhaps, have a son and not love him; but if once she loves him she
holds within her a thing that will not die while she lives.
And if the thing that was without lust stood up in battle against the
thing that was full of lust--what then?
The black and still night seemed a battlefield.
Softly she stepped upon the highest terrace and stood for a moment under
the great plane tree, where was the wooden seat on which she had waited
for Dion to weep away the past and the good woman who had ruined his
life. To-night she was invaded by an odd uncertainty. If she went to the
pavilion and Dion were not there? If he did not come? Would some part
of her, perhaps, be glad, the part that in a mysterious way was one with
Jimmy? She stared into the darkness, looking towards the pavilion. Dion
Leith had once said she looked punished. Perhaps when he had said that
he had shown that he had intuition.
Was he there? It was past eleven now. She had assumed that he would
come, and she was inclined to believe that he had come. If so she need
not see him even now. There was still time for her to go back to the
villa, to shut herself in, to go to bed, as Jimmy had gone to bed. But
if she did that she would not sleep. All night long she would lie wide
awake, tossing from side to side, the helpless prey of her past life.
She frowned and slipped through the darkness, almost like a fluid, to
the pavilion.