Caroline Childers came forward to welcome the Duke when he entered the
drawing-room.
"I am so glad to see you," she said; "how did you ever find the way?"
"I had a very accurate map of the coast," replied the Duke.
"But how did you cross the mountains? The keeper's lodge was closed;
there was no one to meet you. I am so sorry."
"On the contrary," answered the Duke, "there was a most delightful
person to meet me."
"I am glad," said the girl, "but I am puzzled. Was it one of our
servants?"
"I asked him that," replied the Duke, "and he said that he used the word
'servant' only in his prayers."
"Oh," said the girl, "I understand. It was a native. Then you were
surely entertained."
"I have not been so entertained in half a lifetime," replied the Duke.
This dialogue, running before so charged a situation, seemed to the
man like some sort of prelude to a drama. The moment became, for him,
a vivid, luminous period. In it impressions flashed on him with the
rapidity of light; details of the great drawing-room richly fitted, its
Venetian mirrors, treasures of a Doge. But, more than any other thing,
he saw the beauty of the girl who came up the drawingroom to meet him,
who stood beside him, who spoke to him in the soft, deliberate accents
of the South. He noted every detail of her, her hair, her long lashes,
her exquisite mouth, her slim body, and the man's senses panted, as with
a physical thirst.
But it was not these visible things, however potent, that so wholly
overcame him. It was a thing for which we have no word, of which there
is no material evidence, that moved from the girl, subtly, into every
fiber of his body. A thing as actual and as potent as the forces moving
the earth in its orbit--the wild, urgent, overpowering cry of elements,
tom asunder at the beginning of things, to be rejoined. The most
mysterious and the most hidden impulse in the world. And it seemed to
the man that in some other incarnation this woman had been a part of
him, a part of every nerve, every blood drop, every fragment of his
flesh; and, at the door of life, by some divine surgery, she had been
dissected out of his body; and, thus, from the day that he was born, he
had been looking for her; and now that she was found, every element in
him cried for that lost union.
These impressions, this sudden luminous conviction, flashed on the man,
while he was speaking, while he was turning with the girl toward the
others; and his mind, extraordinarily clear, seemed to observe these
things as somehow detached from himself. The girl was speaking, and he
walked beside her, presenting a conventional aspect. They went thus,
in conversation, down the long drawing-room. The Marchesa Soderrelli
advanced to meet them.
"I am delighted," she said, "to see the Duke of Dorset," then she put
out her hands with a charming gesture.
At this moment the Duke saw, on a table, in its oval silver frame, a
picture like that one which he had seen in the yacht at Oban--that face
with its insolent, aggressive look. And fear took him by the throat. The
dread, the terror, which used to seize him when he passed, each night,
the picture on the stairway, descended on him. This man would strike out
for what he wanted while he sat here mooning in a garden. How far had
the man's suit been favored? The Duke turned the query backward and
forward, like a hot coal in his hand, blowing on it while it burned him.
He trembled internally with panic. Without he was composed, he spoke
calmly, he lifted his face, unmoved, like one indifferent to fortune,
but every mouth in him, hungry for this woman, wailed. And that emotion
in the service of the principle of life, its hands hot on him, turned
his eyes constantly to what his destiny was losing.
The Duke of Dorset, like every lover with the taste of lotus in his
mouth, saw this girl moving in a nimbus. He could not, for his life, fix
her with things real. She came forth from haze, from shadow, like
those fairy women drawn by painters to represent what the flesh of man
eternally longs for. There clung about her that freshness, that mystery,
beyond belief, alluring to the egoistic senses of a man. Evidenced
by the immortality of that Arabian tale, wherein a Prince of Bagdad,
cracking a roc's egg, found a woman sleeping within it, her elbow on her
knee, her chin dimpling in her silk palm.
Moreover, he had found her traveling the highway of adventures. The
perennial charm of romance attended her. He had gone, like fabled
persons, desperately on a quest, seeking a dream woman, and had
found her, a woman of this world, at the quest's end, against every
probability of life. And, therefore, some authority, moving to a
design inscrutable, had brought him to this woman; and therefore, by
permission, by direction of that authority, she belonged to him.
The Duke thrilled under the proprietary word. His veins stretched with
heat. Who was this man, or any man, to take what the gods, sitting
in their spheres, had designed for him? All passion is essentially
barbaric. Under the voices of it a man will do as his fathers did in
the morning of the world, half naked in Asia. The customs, the forms
of civilization may restrain him, but the impulse within him is as
unchanged, after six thousand years of discipline, as fire burning in a
dry tree.
That dinner the Duke of Dorset was never able to remember. The details
of it passed one another into a blur. He sat down to a table beside
Caroline Childers. He talked as one does conventionally at dinner. He
observed the wit, the spirit of the Marchesa Soderrelli. How the host
hung over her, like one charmed, how the woman had, somehow, for
this night, got her beauty out of pawn! She wore a gown elaborately
embroidered, her hair brightened by a jewel set here and there
effectively in it, her face freshened as by a sheer determination to
have back for a night's uses what the years had filched from her.
*****
They went from dinner out into the garden. The night, like that other
night in the bay of Oban, was rather a sort of fairy day, except that
here the world was illumined by a great yellow moon beginning to emerge
from the distant tree tops, while there the sun seemed merely to have
gone behind a colored window.
[Illustration: 0271]
The Marchesa Soderrelli and Cyrus Childers remained on the first terrace
beside those exquisite pools rimmed with marble. The Duke and Caroline
walked on, moved by that vague wanderlust with which this mysterious
dead world seems to inspire every living creature when it moves naked
and golden above the earth. They descended slowly from one terrace to
another along the paths of the Italian garden to the green tile wall
of the Egyptian garden. The soft white light, the broad stretches of
delicate shadow, and these perfect gardens, lying one below the other,
enveloped the world with an atmosphere of sorcery.
To the man this was no real land. This was some delicate, vague kingdom
of illusion. It would presently vanish. There could be only an hour of
it, and the value of that hour he could not measure.
It seemed to the man, walking slowly beside the girl, that he had
purchased this hour at some staggering hideous cost. He must go when the
hour struck, hack as he had come, through the door in the hill. There
was no time, no time! The object, the sole moving object of every
day that he had lived, of every day that he would yet live, seemed to
converge into these moments that escaped with the sound of his feet
moving in this garden. How they sped away, these moments, and how big
with fate they were!
Suddenly the man spoke. "Do you know," he said, "why I have come?"
"Yes," replied the girl, "I know. You came to see if the shadow of Asia
were lying on a British possession."
"No," he said, "I did not come for that. The thing that made me come was
the thing that made my uncle go down to that dead pool on the coast of
Brittany. I have done better than my uncle."
The girl replied softly, like one dealing with a memory.
"But have you done better than the stranger in the legend? Do not the
peasants say that he, too, followed, sinking in the water to his knees?"
"I think," continued the man, "that he was one of us; that the thing
has been always in our blood. But I think all the others failed. I think
that first one of us finally went down as the second one of us went
down. I think, I alone have been able to stagger across the sea."
"And to what have you come?" said the girl.
"That is the strange part of it," replied the man. "After all that
hideous journey, after all that staggering through the sea, I seem to
have come again, like that first one of us, to that ancient city, and,
like him, to have entered into the king's palace and sat down."
The girl drew back against the green tile wall of the Egyptian garden.
"You make me afraid," she said.
She spread out her arms against the wall. Her eyes grew wide. Her
lips trembled. She stared out over the beautiful estate, made doubly
exquisite in the fantastic light.
"I have always been afraid. But how could the sea enter over this? And
there is no king, and no saint."
"But there is a woman," said the Duke of Dorset, "'with hair like spun
darkness, and eyes like the violet core of the night.'"
The girl gave a little cry.
The man flung up his head like one suddenly awakened. He strode across
the bit of turf to where the girl stood. He caught up her hand, lying on
the low cornice of the wall, and carried it to his mouth.
"Forgive me," he said, "I did not mean to frighten you--I would not for
the world frighten you. I love you!"
Words old as the world; old as the first man, the first woman--old
as that garden in Asia; inevitably the same since the world began its
swinging, poured out over this kissed hand.
"I love you! I love you!" What do the expressions, the sentences, the
other words that make a vehicle for these three words matter? They are
nothing. These three words are the naked body. All the others are but
the garments, the ornaments, the tinsel. These are the only words a
woman ever hears. The others, all the others, running before them,
following behind them, signifieth nothing. Whether there be wisdom
in all the other words, it shall vanish away. Only "I love you" never
faileth.
"I love you!" These words are of the divine logos. They are the words
into whose keeping the Great Mother has confided the principle of
life. They are the words at which the children of men are accustomed to
surrender themselves to the will of Nature, which is the will of God.
They are words, so old, so potent, so mysterious, that, like certain
ancient, fabled formulas, they cannot be uttered without presenting
something of their virtue. If a man say these words a woman will listen.
Though he say them in jest, in mockery, yet will she listen. Though she
do not believe them, though she do not love him, yet will she listen, so
great a virtue hath this formula of the oldest magic--this rune of the
oldest sorcery.
The girl standing here against the wall of the garden listened. Her body
seemed to relax and cling to the wall. For a moment she did not move.
For a moment, expanded into the duration of a life, she listened to
these words--these old, potent, mysterious words! These words, charged
with all the ecstasy of all the men and women who have ever loved, with
the destiny of future generations, with the "joy that lieth at the root
of life," poured out over her kissed hand.
For this long, potent, delirious moment the girl was merely a wisp of
blossom, clinging to these tiles. Her consciousness, her will, her very
identity had gone out from her. For this moment she was under the one
tremendous dominating impulse of the world. For this moment she was only
the eternal woman yielding herself to the eternal call.
Her eyes were wide. Her lips parted, her body relaxed, soft, plastic.
Then suddenly, as though they had but stood aside for the passage of
some authority above them, her consciousness, her will, her identity
poured back into her body. She sprang up. She escaped. She drew back
into the angle of the wall. She put her hands to her face, to her hair.
Then almost fiercely she thrust them out before her.
"No, no, no," she cried. "You must not say it. I must not hear it. I
have decided; and you helped me. You convinced me. Don't you remember
that afternoon in the bay of Oban? I did not know what to do. I was
undecided then, and I asked you.... No, no; you did not understand that
I was asking you--you did not understand; but I was; I was asking you
and you told me. Oh, I could say every word of what you told me. You
told me that older persons knew, that one's own impulses were nothing;
that one ought to obey--to obey--one's family. Well, I have promised to
obey, and I will obey. While he lives, while my uncle lives, I will obey
him."
She withdrew her hands and pressed them on her face, and on her hair.
The man took a step toward her, and again, with that fierce gesture, she
thrust her hands out.
"Don't," she cried. "Don't, don't come to undo what you have done."
And like a flash she was gone.
She fled past him, through the garden, from one terrace to another,
swiftly toward the château.
The man turned, walked along the terrace, through a little gate, and
returned by the great road, across the turf court, to the library. And
he walked firmly like one who has finally laid his hands on a thing that
eluded him, like one who has finally found, standing defiant in some
cranny of the rocks, an enemy that, until now, he could never overtake.
In her mad flight, on the highest terrace in the exquisite Italian
garden, Caroline Childers came on the Marchesa Soderrelli. She was
standing erect, unmoving, like one of the figures in the niches along
the wall. Her face was lifted, her arms lay stiffly extended along her
body. Her eyes looked out over this sea of moonlight washing a shore of
tree tops. There lay about her the atmosphere of some resolution that
cast down the plans of life.
Behind her, as though they had put the riddle which she had answered, as
though they had presented to her that eternal question, which they had
presented to all the daughters of the world since that ball began its
turning, those figures surmounting the stone pillars of the bronze
gates, those figures having the face and bust of a woman and the body of
a monster, those inscrutable chimeras, seemed in the soft light to lie
content in the attitude of life.
The girl stopped when she saw the Marchesa Soderrelli. Then, with a
cry, she flew to her and flung her arms around her and crushed her
face against her bosom. The impulsive act awakened the woman. Her face
softened; her body relaxed. She put her arm around the girl and drew her
gently up against her heart.
"What is it, dear?" she said.
"Oh, Marchesa," the girl sobbed, "I have refused--I have refused to go
to the city of Dreams."
The woman leaned over and kissed the girl's hair.
"My child," she said, "your uncle has just asked me to be his wife, and
I have said that I would not."
*****
When the Duke of Dorset entered the library he found it empty; but a
casement window leading down to a terrace lying along the side of the
château was open. He crossed to the window and looked out. There below
him Cyrus Childers moved along this terrace; he was alone, and he walked
with his curious, hovering motion; his arms and his hands moved; his
plowshare jaw protruded. All the energy of the man seemed to have got
into action. Something had prodded this energy into a deadly vigor.
The Duke of Dorset, having found the man for whom he was seeking, went
back to the library table, got a cigar, lighted it, and sat down at the
window. The potent characteristic of his race was strong on him. Now
that a definite struggle for the thing he wanted was visible before him,
he could wait. What it was needful to say, he would presently say when
this man was finally ready to hear him.
The old man continued to walk from one end of the terrace to the other,
passing below the window. And above him the Duke of Dorset waited. An
hour passed and he continued to walk. A black shadow, creeping out from
his feet, skulked behind him, changing, as he moved, into fantastic
shapes; now a cross when he thrust out his arms; now a creature with
wings when his elbows were lifted; now a formless thing that jerked
itself along. Finally, the man passing the steps by the casement window,
turned and entered the library. He went over to the great table, stopped
and began to select a cigar. The Duke of Dorset arose. At this moment a
voice spoke to Cyrus Childers from the door.
"Uncle," it said, "I cannot find a servant in the house."