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In the Wilderness

by Robert Hichens · English · Gutenberg #4603 · 1,267,253 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: In the Wilderness

Author: Robert Hichens


        
Release date: April 13, 2006 [eBook #4603]
                Most recently updated: September 24, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4603

Credits: Produced by Dagny; John Bickers; David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE WILDERNESS ***




Produced by Dagny; John Bickers; David Widger





IN THE WILDERNESS


By Robert Hichens




BOOK I--HERMES AND THE CHILD



CHAPTER I

Amedeo Dorini, the hall porter of the Hotel Cavour in Milan, stood on
the pavement before the hotel one autumn afternoon in the year 1894,
waiting for the omnibus, which had gone to the station, and which was
now due to return, bearing--Amedeo hoped--a load of generously inclined
travelers. During the years of his not unpleasant servitude Amedeo had
become a student of human nature. He had learnt to judge shrewdly and
soundly, to sum up quickly, to deliver verdicts which were not unjust.
And now, as he saw the omnibus, with its two fat brown horses, coming
slowly along by the cab rank, and turning into the Piazza that is
presided over by Cavour’s statue, he prepared almost mechanically to
measure and weigh evidence, to criticize and come to a conclusion.

He glanced first at the roof of the omnibus to take stock of the luggage
pile there. There was plenty of it, and a good deal of it was leather
and reassuring. Amedeo had a horror of tin trunks--they usually gave
such small tips. Having examined the luggage he sent a searching glance
to two rows of heads which were visible inside the vehicle. The brawny
porters hurried out, the luggage chute was placed in position, the
omnibus door was opened, and the first traveler stepped forth.

A German of the most economical type, large, red and wary, with a mouth
like a buttoned-up pocket, was followed by a broad-waisted wife, with
dragged hair and a looped-up gown. Amedeo’s smile tightened. A Frenchman
followed them, pale and elaborate, a “one-nighter,” as Amedeo instantly
decided in his mind. Such Frenchmen are seldom extravagant in hotels.
This gentleman would want a good room for a small price, would be
extremely critical about the cooking, and have a wandering eye and a
short memory for all servants in the morning.

An elderly Englishwoman was the fourth personage to appear. She was
badly dressed in black, wore a tam-o’-shanter with a huge black-headed
pin thrust through it, clung to a bag, smiled with amiable patronage as
she emerged, and at once, without reason, began to address Amedeo and
the porters in fluent, incorrect, and too carefully pronounced Italian.
Amedeo knew her--the Tabby who haunts Swiss and Italian hotels, the
eternal Tabby drastically complete.

A gay Italian is gaiety in flight, a human lark with a song. But a
gloomy Italian is oppressive and almost terrible. Despite the training
of years Amedeo’s smile flickered and died out. A ferocious expression
surged up in his dark eyes as he turned rather bruskly to scrutinize
without hope the few remaining clients. But suddenly his face cleared as
he heard a buoyant voice say in English:

“I’ll get out first, Godfather, and give you a hand.”

On the last word, a tall and lithe figure stepped swiftly, and with a
sort of athletic certainty, out of the omnibus, turned at once towards
it, and, with a movement eloquent of affection and almost tender
reverence, stretched forth an arm and open hand.

A spare man of middle height, elderly, with thick gray hair, and a
clean-shaven, much-lined face, wearing a large loose overcoat and soft
brown hat, took the hand as he emerged. He did not need it; Amedeo
realized that, realized also that he was glad to take it, enjoyed
receiving this kind and unnecessary help.

“And now for Beatrice!” he said.

And he gave in his turn a hand to the girl who followed him.

There were still two people in the omnibus, the elderly man’s Italian
valet and an Englishman. As the latter got out, and stretched his limbs
cramped with much sitting, he saw Amedeo, with genuine smiles, escorting
the two girls and the elderly man towards the glass-roofed hall, on the
left of which was the lift. The figure of the girl who had stepped out
first was about to disappear. As the Englishman looked she vanished.
But he had time to realize that a gait, the carriage of a head and its
movement in turning, can produce on an observer a moral effect. A joyous
sanity came to him from this unknown girl and made him feel joyously
sane. It seemed to sweep over him, like a cool and fresh breeze of the
sea falling through pine woods, to lift from him some of the dust of
his journey. He resolved to give the remainder of the dust to the public
garden, told his name, Dion Leith, to the manager, learnt that the room
he had ordered was ready for him, had his luggage sent up to it, and
then made his way to the trees on the far side of the broad road which
skirts the hotel. When he was among them he took off his hat, kept it
in his hand, and, so, strolled on down the almost deserted paths. As
he walked he tasted the autumn, not with any sadness, but with an
appreciation that was almost voluptuous. He was at a time of life and
experience, when, if the body is healthy, the soul is untroubled by
care, each season of the year holds its thrill for the strongly beating
heart, its tonic gift for the mind. Falling leaves were handfuls of gold
for this man. The faint chill in the air as evening drew on turned his
thoughts to the brightness and warmth of English fires burning on the
hearths of houses that sheltered dear and protected lives. The far-off
voices of calling children, coming to him from hidden places among the
trees, did not make him pensive because of their contrast with things
that were dying. He hailed them as voices of the youth which lasts in
the world, though the world may seem to be old to those who are old.

Dion Leith had a powerful grip on life and good things. He was young,
just twenty-six, strong and healthy, though slim-built in body,
alert and vigorous in mind, unperturbed in soul, buoyant and warmly
imaginative. Just at that moment the joy of life was almost at full
flood in him, for he had recently been reveling in a new and glorious
experience, and now carried it with him, a precious memory.

He had been traveling, and his wanderings had given him glimpses of two
worlds. In one of these worlds he had looked into the depths, had felt
as if he realized fully for the first time the violence of the angry and
ugly passions that deform life; in the other he had scaled the heights,
had tasted the still purity, the freshness, the exquisite calm, which
are also to be found in life.

He had visited Constantinople and had sailed from it to Greece. From
Greece he had taken ship to Brindisi, and was now on his way home to
England.

What he had thought at the time to be an ill chance had sent him on his
way alone. Guy Daventry, his great friend, who was to go with him, had
been seized by an illness. It was too late then to find another man
free. So, reluctantly, and inclined to grumble a little at fate, Dion
had set off in solitude.

He knew now that his solitude had given him keen sensations, which
he could scarcely have felt with the best of friends. Never, in any
company, had he been so repelled, enticed, disgusted, deeply enchanted,
as on these lonely wanderings which were now a part of his life.

How he had hated Constantinople, and how he had loved Greece! His
expectation had been betrayed by the event. He had not known himself
when he left England, or the part of himself which he had known had been
the lesser part, and he had taken it for the greater. For he had set out
on his journey with his hopes mainly fixed on Constantinople. Its road
of wildness and tumult, its barbaric glitter, its crude mixture of
races, even its passions and crimes--a legend in history, a solid fact
of to-day--had allured his mind. The art of Greece had beckoned to him;
its ancient shrines had had their strong summons for his brain; but
he had scarcely expected to love the country. He had imagined it as
certainly beautiful but with an austere and desolate beauty that would
be, perhaps, almost repellent to his nature. He had conceived of it as
probably sad in its naked calm, a country weary with the weight of a
glorious past.

But he had been deceived, and he was glad of that. Because he had been
able to love Greece so much he felt a greater confidence in himself.
Without any ugly pride he said to himself: “Perhaps my nature is a
little bit better, a little bit purer than I had supposed.”

As the breeze in the public garden touched his bare head, slightly
lifting his thick dark hair, he remembered the winds of Greece; he
remembered his secret name for Greece, “the land of the early morning.”
 It was good to be able to delight in the early morning--pure, delicate,
marvelously fresh.

He at down on a bench under a chestnut tree. The children’s voices had
died away. Silence seemed to be drawing near to the garden. He saw a
few moving figures in the shadows, but at a distance, fading towards the
city.

The line of the figure, the poise of the head of that girl with whom he
had driven from the station, came before Dion’s eyes.



CHAPTER II

One winter day in 1895--it was a Sunday--when fog lay thickly over
London, Rosamund Everard sat alone in a house in Great Cumberland Place,
reading Dante’s “Paradiso.” Her sister, Beatrice, a pale, delicate
and sensitive shadow who adored her, and her guardian, Bruce Evelin, a
well-known Q.C. now retired from practice, had gone into the country to
visit some friends. Rosamund had also been invited, and much wanted, for
there was a party in the house, and her gaiety, her beauty, and her fine
singing made her a desirable guest; but she had “got out of it.” On this
particular Sunday she specially wished to be in London. At a church not
far from Great Cumberland Place--St. Mary’s, Welby Street--a man was
going to preach that evening whom she very much wanted to hear. Her
guardian’s friend, Canon Wilton, had spoken to her about him, and had
said to her once, “I should particularly like _you_ to hear him.” And
somehow the simple words had impressed themselves upon her. So, when
she heard that Mr. Robertson was coming from his church in Liverpool to
preach at St. Mary’s, she gave up the country visit to hear him.

Beatrice and Bruce Evelin had no scruples in leaving her alone for a
couple of days. They knew that she, who had such an exceptional faculty
for getting on with all sorts and conditions of men and women, and
who always shed sunshine around her, had within her a great love of,
sometimes almost a thirst for, solitude.

“I need to be alone now and then,” they had heard her say; “it’s like
drinking water to me.”

Sitting quietly by the fire with her delightful edition of Dante, her
left hand under her head, her tall figure stretched out in a low chair,
Rosamund heard a bell ring below. It called her from the “Paradiso.” She
sprang up, remembering that she had given the butler no orders about not
wishing to be disturbed. At lunch-time the fog had been so dense that
she had not thought about possible visitors; she hurried to the head of
the staircase.

“Lurby! Lurby! I’m not at--”

It was too late. The butler must have been in the hall. She heard the
street door open and a man’s voice murmuring something. Then the door
shut and she heard steps. She retreated into the drawing-room, pulling
down her brows and shaking her head. No more “Paradiso,” and she loved
it so! A moment before she had been far away.

The book was lying open on the arm-chair in which she had been sitting.
She went to close it and put it on a table. For an instant she looked
down on the page, and immediately her dream returned. Then Lurby’s dry,
soft voice said behind her:

“Mr. Leith, ma’am.”

“Oh!” She turned, leaving the book.

Directly she looked at Dion Leith she knew why he had come.

“I’m all alone,” Rosamund said. “I stayed here, instead of going to
Sherrington with Beattie and my guardian, because I wanted to hear a
sermon this evening. Come and sit down by the fire.”

“What church are you going to?”

“St. Mary’s, Welby Street.”

“Shall I go with you?”

Rosamund had taken up the “Paradiso” and was shutting it.

“I think I’ll go alone,” she said gently but quite firmly.

“What are you reading?”

“Dante’s ‘Paradiso.’”

She put the book down on a table at her elbow.

“I don’t believe you meant me to be let in,” he said bluntly.

“I didn’t know it was you. How could I know?”

“And if you had known?”

She hesitated. His brows contracted till he looked almost fierce.

“I’m not sure. Honestly I’m not sure. I’ve been quite alone since
Friday, when they went. And I’d got it into my head that I wasn’t going
to see any one till to-morrow, except, of course, at the church.”

Dion felt chilled almost to the bone.

“I can’t understand,” he almost burst out, in an uncontrolled way that
surprised himself. “Are you completely self-sufficing then? But it isn’t
natural. Could you live alone?”

“I didn’t say that.”

She looked at him steadily and calmly, without a hint of anger.

“But could you?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. I’ve never tried.”

“But you don’t hate the idea?”

His voice was almost violent.

“No; if--if I were living in a certain way.”

“What way?”

But she did not answer his question.

“I dare say I might dislike living alone. I’ve never done such a thing,
therefore I can’t tell.”

“You’re an enigma,” he exclaimed. “And you seem so--so--you have this
extraordinary, this abnormal power of attracting people to you. You are
friends with everybody.”

“Indeed I’m not.”

“I mean you’re so cordial, so friendly with everybody. Don’t you care
for anybody?”

“I care very much for some people.”

“And yet you could live alone! Shut in here for days with a book”--at
that moment he was positively jealous of old Dante, gone to his rest
five hundred and seventy-four years ago--“you’re perfectly happy.”

“The ‘Paradiso’ isn’t an ordinary book,” she said, very gently,
and looking at him with a kind, almost beaming expression in her
yellow-brown eyes.

“I don’t believe you ever read an ordinary book.”

“I like to feed on fine things. I’m half afraid of the second-rate.”

“I love you for that. Oh, Rosamund, I love you for so many things!”

He got up and stood by the fire, turning his back to her for a moment.
When he swung round his face was earnest but he looked calmer. She
saw that he was making a strong effort to hold himself in, that he was
reaching out after self-control.

“I can’t tell you all the things I love you for,” he said, “but your
independence of spirit frightens me. From the very first, from that
evening when I saw you in the omnibus at the Milan Station over a year
ago, I felt your independence.”

“Did I manifest it in the omnibus to poor Beattie and my guardian?” she
asked, smiling, and in a lighter tone.

“I don’t know,” he said gravely. “But when I saw you the same evening
walking with your sister in the public garden I felt it more strongly.
Even the way you held your head and moved--you reminded me of the
maidens of the Porch on the Acropolis. I connected you with Greece and
all my--my dreams of Greece.”

“Perhaps if you hadn’t just come from Greece--”

“Wasn’t it strange,” he said, interrupting her but quite unconscious
that he did so, “that almost the first words I heard you speak were
about Greece? You were telling your sister abut the Greek divers who
come to Portofino to find coral under the sea. I was sitting alone in
the garden, and you passed and I heard just a few words. They made me
think of the first Greek Island I ever saw, rising out of the sunset
as I voyaged from Constantinople to the Piraeus. It was wonderfully
beautiful and wonderfully calm. It was like a herald of all the beauty
and purity I found in Greece. It was--like you.”

“How you hated Constantinople!” she said. “I remember you denouncing its
noise and its dirt, and the mongrel horrors of Pera, to my guardian in
the hotel where we made friends. And he put in a plea for Stamboul.”

“Yes, I exaggerated. But Constantinople stood to me for all the uproar
of life, and Greece for the calm and beauty and happiness, the great
Sanity of the true happiness.”

He looked at her with yearning in his dark eyes.

“For all I want in my own life,” he added.

He paused; then an expression of strong, almost hard resolution made his
face look suddenly older.

“You told me at Burstal, on the Chilton Downs, after your debut in
‘Elijah,’ that you would give me an answer soon. I have waited a good
while--some weeks----”

“Why did you ask me just that day, after ‘Woe unto them’?”

“I felt I must,” he answered, but with a slight awkwardness, as if he
were evading something and felt half-guilty. “To-day I decided I would
ask you again, for the last time.”

“You would never----”

“No, never. If you say ‘Wait, and come later on and ask me,’ I shall not
come.”

She got up restlessly. She was obviously moved.

“Dion, I can’t tell you to-day.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I just feel I can’t. It’s no use.”

“When did you mean to tell me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you mean ever to allude to the matter again, if I hadn’t?”

“Yes, I should have told you, because I knew you were waiting.
I--I--often I have thought that I shall never marry any one.”

She looked into the fire. Her face had become almost mysterious.

“Some women don’t need--that,” she murmured.

The fire played over her pale yellow hair.

“Abnormal women!” he exclaimed violently.

She turned.

“Hush! You don’t know what you are saying. It isn’t abnormal to wish to
dedicate----”

She stopped.

“What?” he said.

“Don’t let us talk of these things. But you must not judge any woman
without knowing what is in her heart. Even your own mother, with whom
you have lived alone ever since your father’s death--do you know very
much of her? We can’t always show ourselves plainly as we are. It may
not be our fault.”

“You will marry. You must marry.”

“Why--must?”

He gazed at her. As she met his eyes she reddened slightly,
understanding his thought, that such a woman as she was ought not to
avoid the great vocation of woman. But there was another vocation, and
perhaps it was hers. She felt confused. Two desires were struggling
within her. It was as if her nature contained two necessities which were
wholly irreconcilable the one with the other.

“You can’t tell me?” he said, at last.

“Not now.”

“Then I am going, and I shall never ask you again. But I shall never be
able to love any one but you.”

He said nothing more, and went away without touching her hand.

Words of Dante ran in Rosamund’s head, and she repeated them to herself
after Dion had gone.

“_La divina volontate_!” She believed in it; she said to herself that
she trusted it absolutely. But how was she to know exactly what it
was? And yet, could she escape from it even if she wished to? Could she
wander away into any path where the Divine Will did not mean her to set
foot? Predestination--free will. “If only I were not so ignorant,” she
thought.

Soon after six she went up to her bedroom to put on her things for
church.

Her bedroom was very simple, and showed plainly an indifference to
luxury, a dislike of show and of ostentation in its owner. The walls and
ceiling were white. The bed, which stood against the wall in one corner,
was exceptionally long. This fact, perhaps, made it look exceptionally
narrow. It was quite plain, had a white wooden bedstead, and was covered
with a white bedspread of a very ordinary type. There was one arm-chair
in the room made of wickerwork with a rather hard cushion on the seat,
the sort of cushion that resolutely refuses to “give” when one sits
down on it. On the small dressing-table there was no array of glittering
silver bottles, boxes and brushes. A straw flagon of eau-de-Cologne was
Rosamund’s sole possession of perfume. She did not own a box of powder
or a puff. But it must be acknowledged that she never looked “shiny.”
 She had some ivory hair-brushes given to her one Christmas by Bruce
Evelin. Beside them was placed a hideous receptacle for--well, for
anything--pins, perhaps, buttons, small tiresomenesses of that kind.
It was made of some glistening black material, and at its center there
bloomed a fearful red cabbage rose, a rose all vulgarity, ostentation
and importance. This monstrosity had been given to Rosamund as a
thank-offering by a poor charwoman to whom she had been kind. It had
been in constant use now for over three years. The charwoman knew this
with grateful pride.

Upon the mantelpiece there were other gifts of a similar kind: a
photograph frame made of curly shells, a mug with “A present from
Greenwich” written across it in gold letters, a flesh-colored glass
vase with yellow trimmings, a china cow with its vermilion ears cocked
forward, lying down in a green meadow which just held it, and a toy
trombone with a cord and tassels. There were also several photographs of
poor people in their Sunday clothes. On the walls hung a photograph of
Cardinal Newman, a good copy of a Luini Madonna, two drawings of heads
by Burne-Jones, a small painting--signed “G. F. Watts”--of an old tree
trunk around which ivy was lovingly growing, and one or two prints.

The floor was polished and partially covered by three good-sized mats.
There was a writing-table on one side of the room with an ebony-and-gold
crucifix standing upon it. Opposite to it, on the other side of the
room near the fireplace, was a bookcase. On the shelves were volumes of
Shakespeare, Dante, Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Christina Rossetti,
Newman’s “Dream of Gerontius” and “Apologia,” Thomas a Kempis, several
works on mystics and mysticism, a life of St. Catherine of Genoa,
another of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius Loyola’s “Spiritual
Exercises,” Pascal’s “Letters,” etc., etc. Over the windows hung
gray-blue curtains.

Into this room Rosamund came that evening; she went to a wardrobe and
began to take down a long sealskin coat. Just then her maid appeared--an
Italian girl whom she had taken into her service in Milan when she had
studied singing there.

“Shan’t I come with you, Signorina?” she asked, as she took the jacket
from her mistress and held it for Rosamund to put on.

“No, thank you, Maria. I’m going to church, the Protestant church.”

“I could wait outside or come back to fetch you.”

“It’s not far. I shall be all right.”

“But the fog is terrible. It’s like a wall about the house.”

“Is it as bad as that?”

She went to one of the windows, pulled aside the curtains, lifted the
blind and tried to look out. But she could not, for the fog pressed
against the window panes and hid the street and the houses opposite.

“It is bad.”

She dropped the blind, let the curtains fall into place and turned
round.

“But I’d rather go alone. I can’t miss the way, and I’m not a nervous
person. You’d be far more frightened than I.” She smiled at the girl.

Apparently reassured, or perhaps merely glad that her unselfishness was
not going to be tested, Maria accompanied her mistress downstairs and
let her out. It was Lurby’s “evening off,” and for once he was not
discreetly on hand.

Church bells were chiming faintly in this City of dreadful night as
Rosamund almost felt her way onward. She heard them and thought they
were sad, and their melancholy seemed to be one with the melancholy of
the atmosphere. Some one passed by her. She just heard a muffled sound
of steps, just discerned a shadow--that was all.

To-morrow she must give an answer to Dion Leith. She went on slowly in
the fog, thinking, thinking. Two vertical lines showed in her usually
smooth forehead.

It was nearly half-past six when she turned into Welby Street. The
church was not a large one and there was no parish attached to it. It
was a proprietary chapel. The income of the incumbent came from pew
rents. His name was Limer, and he was a first-rate preacher of the
sensational type, a pulpit dealer in “actualities.” He was also an
excellent musician, and took great pains with his choir. In consequence
of these talents, and of his diligent application of them, St. Mary’s
was generally full, and all its pews were let at a high figure.
To-night, however, because of the fog, Rosamund expected to find few
people.

One bell was mournfully ringing as she drew near and presently saw a
faint gleaming of light through long narrow windows of painted glass.
“Ping, ping, ping!” It was a thin little summons to prayer. She passed
through a gateway in some railings of wrought ironwork, crossed a
slippery pavement and entered the church.

It was already more than three parts full, and there was a large
proportion of men in the congregation. A smart-looking young man,
evidently a gentleman, who was standing close to the door, nodded to
Rosamund and whispered:

“I’ll put you into Lady Millingham’s seat. You’ll find Mrs. Chetwinde
and Mr. Darlington there.”

“Oh, I’d rather--” began Rosamund.

But he had already begun to move up the aisle, and she was obliged to
follow him to a pew close to the pulpit, in which were seated a smartly
dressed woman with a vague and yet acute expression, pale eyes and
a Burne-Jones throat; and a thin, lanky and immensely tall man of
uncertain age, with pale brown, very straight hair, large white ears,
thick ragged eyebrows, a carefully disarranged beard and mustache, and
an irregular refined face decorated with a discreet but kind expression.
These were Mrs. Willie Chetwinde, who had a wonderful house in Lowndes
Square, and Mr. Esme Darlington, bachelor, of St. James’s Square, who
was everybody’s friend including his own.

Rosamund just recognized them gravely; then she knelt down and prayed
earnestly, with her face hidden against her muff. She still heard the
little bell’s insistent “Ping, ping, ping!” She pressed her shut eyes
so hard against the muff that rings of yellow light floated up in her
darkness, forming, retreating, melting away.

The bell ceased; the first notes of the organ sounded in a voluntary by
Mendelssohn, amiable and charming; the choir filed in as Rosamund rose
from her knees. In the procession the two last figures were Mr. Limer
and Mr.--or, as he was always called in Liverpool, Father--Robertson.

Mr. Limer was a short, squat, clean-shaven but hairy dark man, with
coal-black hair sweeping round a big forehead, a determined face and
large, indignant brown eyes. The Liverpool clergyman was of middle
height, very thin, with snow-white hair, dark eyes and eyebrows, and a
young almost boyish face, with straight, small features, and a luminous,
gentle and yet intense look. He seemed almost to glow, quietly,
definitely, like a lamp set in a dark place, and one felt that his glow
could not easily be extinguished. He walked tranquilly by the side of
Mr. Limer, and looked absolutely unselfconscious, quietly dignified and
simple.

When he went into the pulpit the lights were lowered and a pleasant
twilight prevailed. But the preacher’s face was strongly illuminated.

Mr. Robertson preached on the sin of egoism, and took as the motto of
his sermon the words--“_Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat_.” His method
of preaching was quiet, but intense; again the glow of the lamp. Often
there were passages which suggested a meditation--a soul communing with
itself fearlessly, with an unyielding, but never violent, determination
to arrive at the truth. And Rosamund, listening, felt as if nothing
could keep this man with the snow-white hair and the young face away
from the truth.

He ranged over a wide field--egoism being wide as the world--he exposed
many of the larger evils brought about by egoism, in connexion with the
Arts, with politics, with charity, with religious work in great cities,
with missionary enterprises abroad; he touched on some of the more
subtle forms of egoism, which may poison even the sources of love; and
finally he discussed the gains and the losses of egoism. “For,” he said,
“let us be honest and acknowledge that we often gain, in the worldly
sense, by our sins, and sometimes lose by our virtues.” Power of a kind
can be, and very often is, obtained by egoists through their egoism.
He discussed that power, showed its value and the glory of it. Then
he contrasted with it the power which is only obtained by those who,
completely unselfish, know not how to think of themselves. He enlarged
on this theme, on the Kingdom which can belong only to those who are
selfless. And then he drew to the end of his sermon.

“One of the best means I know,” he said, “for getting rid of egoism is
this: whenever you have to take some big decision between two courses
of action--perhaps between two life courses--ask yourself, ‘Which can I
share?’--which of these two paths is wide enough to admit of my treading
it with a companion, whose steps I can help, whose journey I can
enliven, whose weariness I can solace, and whose burden I can now and
then bear for a little while? And if only one of the paths is wide
enough, then choose that in preference to the other. I believe
profoundly in ‘sharing terms.’”

He paused, gazing at the congregation with his soft and luminous eyes.
Then he added:

“_Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat_. When the insistent _I_ sleeps, only
then perhaps can the heart be truly awake, be really watchful. Then let
us send the insistent I to sleep, and let us keep it slumbering.”

He half-smiled as he finished. There had been something slightly
whimsical about his final words, about his manner and himself when he
said them.

Silence and the fog, and Rosamund walking homewards with her hands deep
in her muff. All those bodies and minds and souls which had been in the
church had evaporated into the night. Mrs. Chetwinde and Esme Darlington
had wanted to speak to Rosamund, but she had slipped out of the church
quickly. She did not wish to talk to any one.

“_Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat_.”

What an odd little turn, or twist, the preacher had given to the meaning
of those words! “Whenever you have to take some big decision between
two life courses, ask yourself, ‘Which can I share?’ and if you can only
share one, choose that.”

Very slowly Rosamund walked on, bending a little above the big muff,
like one pulled forward by a weight of heavy thoughts. She turned a
corner. Presently she turned another corner and traversed a square,
which could not be seen to be a square. And then, quite suddenly, she
realized that she had not been thinking about her way home and that she
was lost in the impenetrable fog.

She stood still and listened. She heard nothing. Traffic seemed stopped
in this region. On her left there were three steps. She went up them and
was under the porch of a house. Light shone dully from within, and by it
she could just make out on the door the number “8.” At least it seemed
to her that probably it was an “8.” She hesitated, came down the steps,
and walked on. It was impossible to see the names of the streets and
squares. But presently she would come across a policeman. She went on
and on, but no policeman bulked shadowy against the background of night
and of the fog which at last seemed almost terrible to her.

Rosamund was not timid. She was constitutionally incapable of timidity.
Nor was she actively alarmed in a strong and definite way. But gradually
there seemed to permeate her a cold, almost numbing sensation of
loneliness and of desolation. For the first time in her life she felt
not merely alone but solitary, and not merely solitary but as if she
were condemned to be so by some power that was hostile to her.

It was a hideous feeling. Something in the fog and in the night made
an assault upon her imagination. Abruptly she was numbered among the
derelict women whom nobody wants, whom no man thinks of or wishes to be
with, whom no child calls mother. She felt physically and morally, “I
am solitary,” and it was horrible to her. She saw herself old and alone,
and she shuddered.

How long she walked on she did not know, but when at last she heard
a step shuffling along somewhere in front of her, she had almost--she
thought--realized Eternity.

The step was not coming towards her but was going onwards slowly before
her. She hastened, and presently came up with an old man, poorly dressed
in a dreadful frock-coat and disgraceful trousers, wearing on his long
gray locks a desperado of a top hat, and carrying, in a bloated and
almost purple hand, a large empty jug.

“Please!” said Rosamund.

The old gentleman shuffled on.

“Could you tell me--_please_--can you tell me where we are?”

She had grasped his left coat-sleeve. He turned and, bending, she peered
into the face of a drunkard.

“Close to the ‘Daniel Lambert,’” said an almost refined old voice.

And a pair of pathetic gray eyes peered up at her above a nose that was
like a conflagration.

“Where’s that? What is it?”

“Don’t you know the ‘Daniel Lambert’?”

The voice sounded very surprised and almost suspicious.

“No.”

“It’s well known, very well known. I’m just popping round there to get a
little something--eh!”

The voice died away.

“I want to find Great Cumberland Place.”

“Well, you’re pretty close to it. The ‘Daniel Lambert’s’ in the Edgware
Road.”

“Could you find it?--Great Cumberland Place, I mean?”

“Certainly.”

“I wish you would. I should be so grateful.”

The gray eyes became more pathetic.

“Grateful to me--would you, miss? I’ll go with you and very glad to do
it.”

The old gentleman took Rosamund home and talked to her on the way.
When they parted she asked for his name and address. He hesitated for
a moment and then gave it: “Mr. Thrush, 2 Albingdon Buildings, John’s
Court, near Edgware Road.”

“Thank you. You’ve done me a good turn.”

At this moment the front door was opened by the housemaid.

“Oh--miss!” she said.

Her eyes left Rosamund and fastened themselves, like weapons, on the
old gentleman’s nose. He lifted his desperado of a hat and immediately
turned away, trying to conceal his jug under his left arm, but
inadvertently letting it protrude.

“Good night, and thank you very much indeed!” Rosamund called after him
with warm cordiality.

“I’m glad you’ve got back, miss. We were in a way. It’s ever so late.”

“I got lost in the fog. That dear old man rescued me.”

“I’m very thankful, miss, I’m sure.”

The girl seemed stiffened with astonishment. She shut the street door
automatically.

“He used to be a chemist once.”

“Did he, miss?”

“Yes, quite a successful one too; just off Hanover Square, he told me.
He was going round to get something for his supper when we met.”

“Indeed, miss?”

Rosamund went upstairs.

“Yes, poor old man,” she said, as she ascended.

Like most people in perfect health Rosamund slept well; but that night
she lay awake. She did not want to sleep. She had something to decide,
something of vital importance to her. Two courses lay open to her. She
might marry Dion Leith, or she might resolve never to marry. Like most
girls she had had dreams, but unlike most girls, she had often dreamed
of a life in which men had no place. She had recently entered upon the
career of a public singer, not because she was obliged to earn money but
because she had a fine voice and a strong temperament, and longed for
self-expression. But she had always believed that her public career
would be a short one. She loved fine music and enjoyed bringing its
message home to people, but she had little or no personal vanity, and
the life of a public performer entailed a great deal which she already
found herself disliking. Recently, too, her successful career had
received a slight check. She had made her festival debut at Burstal in
“Elijah,” and no engagements for oratorio had followed upon it. Some
day, while she was still young, she meant to retire, and then----

If she married Dion Leith she would have to give up an old dream. On the
other hand, if she married him, perhaps some day she would be a mother.
She felt certain--she did not know why--that if she did not marry Dion
Leith she would never marry at all.

She thought, she prayed, she thought again. Sometimes in the dark hours
of that night the memory of her sensation of loneliness in the fog
returned to her. Sometimes Mr. Robertson’s “Which can I share?” echoed
within her, in the resonant chamber of her soul. He had been very quiet,
but he had made an enormous impression upon her; he had made her hate
egoism much more than she had hated it hitherto.

Even into the innermost sanctuary of religion egoism can perhaps find
a way. The thought of that troubled Rosamund in the dark. But when the
hour of dawn grew near she fell asleep. She had made up her mind, or,
rather, it had surely been made up for her. For a conviction had come
upon her that for good or for evil it was meant that her life should
be linked with Dion Leith’s. He possessed something which she valued
highly, and which, she thought, was possessed by very few men. He
offered it to her. If she refused it, such an offering would probably
never be made to her again.

To be a lonely woman; to be a subtle and profound egoist; to be loved,
cherished, worshiped; to be a mother.

Many lives of women seemed to float before her eyes.

Just before she lost consciousness it seemed to her, for a moment, that
she was looking into the pathetic eyes of the old man whom she had met
in the fog.

“Poor old man!” she murmured.

She slept.

On the following morning she sent this note to Dion Leith:


“MY DEAR DION,--I will marry you.

“ROSAMUND.”



CHAPTER III

In the following spring, Rosamund and Dion were married, and Dion took
Rosamund “to the land of the early morning.”

They arrived in Greece at the beginning of May, when the rains were over
and the heats of summer were at hand. The bed of Ilissus was empty. Dust
lay white in the streets of Athens and along the road to Phaleron and
the sea. The low-lying tracts of country were desert-dry, and about
Athens the world was arrayed in the garb of the East. Nevertheless there
was still a delicate freshness in the winds that blew to the little city
from the purple Aegean or from the mountains of Argolis; stirring the
dust into spiral dances among the pale houses upon which Lycabettos
looks down; shaking the tiny leaves of the tressy pepper trees near the
Royal Palace; whispering the antique secrets of the ages into the ears
of the maidens who, unwearied and happily submissive, bear up the Porch
of the Erechtheion; stealing across the vast spaces and between the
mighty columns of the Parthenon. The dawns and the twilights had not
lost the pure savor of their almost frail vitality. The deepness of
slumber still came with the nights.

Greece was, perhaps, at her loveliest. And Greece was almost deserted by
travelers. They had come and gone with the spring, leaving the land to
its own, and to those two who had come there to drink deep at the wells
of happiness. And, a little selfish as lovers are, Rosamund and Dion
took everything wonderful and beautiful as their possession.

The yellow-green pines near the convent of Daphni threw patches of shade
on the warm earth because they wanted to rest there; the kingfisher
rose in low and arrow-like flight from the banks of Khephissus to make a
sweet diversion for them; they longed for brilliance, and the lagoons of
Salamis were dyed with a wonder of emerald; they asked for twilight, and
the deep and deserted glades of Academe gave it them in full measure.
All these possessions, and many others, they enjoyed almost as children
enjoy a meadow full of flowers when they have climbed over the gate
that bars it from the high road. But the Acropolis was the stronghold
of their joy. Only when their feet pressed its silvery grasses, and trod
its warm marble pavements, did they hold the world within their grasp.

For some days after their arrival in Greece they almost lived among the
ruins. The long-coated guardians smiled at them, at first with a sort
of faint amusement, at last with a friendly pleasure. And they smiled
at themselves. Each evening they said, “To-morrow we will do this--or
that,” and each morning they said nothing, just looked at each other
after breakfast, read in each other’s eyes the repetition of desire, and
set out on the dear dusty road with which they were already so familiar.

Had there ever before been a honeymoon bounded by the precipices of the
Acropolis? They sometimes discussed that important question, and always
decided against the impertinent possibility. “What we are doing has
never been done before.” Dion went further than this, to “What I am
feeling has never been felt before.” His youth asserted itself in
silent, determined statements which seemed to him to ring with authentic
truth.

It was a far cry from the downs of Chilton to the summit of the
Acropolis. Dion remembered the crowd assembled to hear “Elijah”; he felt
the ugly heat, the press of humanity. And all that was but the prelude
to this! Even the voice crying “Woe unto them!” had been the prelude
to the wonderful silence of Greece. He felt marvelously changed. And
Rosamund often seemed to him changed, too, because she was his own. That
wonderful fact gave her new values, spread about her new mysteries. And
some of these mysteries Dion did not attempt to fathom at first. Perhaps
he felt that some silences of love are like certain ceremony with a
friend--a mark of the delicacy which is the sign-manual of the things
that endure. In the beginning of that honeymoon there was a beautiful
restraint which was surely of good augury for the future. Not all
the doors were set violently open, not all the rooms were ruthlessly
visited.

Dion found that he was able to reverence the woman who had given herself
to him more after he had received the gift than before. And this was
very wonderful to him, was even, somehow, perplexing. For Rosamund
had the royal way of bestowing. She was capable of refusal, but not of
half-measures or of niggardliness. There was something primitive in
her which spoke truth with a voice that was fearless; and yet that
very primitiveness seemed closely allied with her purity. Dion only
understood what that purity was when he was married to her. It was like
the radiant atmosphere of Greece to him. Had not Greece led him to it,
made him desire it with all that was best in his nature? Now he had
brought it to Greece. Actually, day after day, he trod the Acropolis
with Rosamund.

Greece had already, he believed, put out a hand and drawn them more
closely together.

“Love me, love the land I love.”

Laughingly, yet half-anxiously too, Dion had said that to Rosamund when
they left Brindisi and set sail for Greece. With her usual sincerity she
had answered:

“I want to love it. Do you wish me to say more than that, to make
promises I may not be able to keep?”

“No,” he had answered. “I only want truth from you.” And after a moment
he had added, “I shall never want anything from you but your truth.”

She had looked at him rather strangely, like one moved by conflicting
feelings, and after a slight hesitation she had said:

“Dion, do you realize all the meaning in those words of yours?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then if you really mean them you must be one of the most daring of
human beings. But I shall try a compromise with you. I shall try to give
you my best truth, never my worst. You deserve that, I think. Indeed, I
know you do.”

And he had left it to her. Was he not wise to do that? Already he
trusted her absolutely, as he had never thought to trust any one.

“I could face any storm with you,” he once said to Rosamund.

Rosamund had wanted to love Greece, and from the first moment of seeing
the land she had loved it.

In the beginning of their stay she had scarcely been able to believe
that she was really in Athens. A great name had aroused in her
imagination a conception of a great city. The soft familiarity, the
almost rustic simplicity and intimacy, the absolutely unpretentious
brightness and homely cheerfulness of the small capital of this unique
land had surprised, had almost confused her.

“Is this really Athens?” she had said, wondering, as they had driven
into what seemed a village set in bright bareness, sparsely shaded here
and there by small pepper-trees.

And the question had persisted in her mind, had almost trembled upon
her lips, for two or three days. But then had come a mysterious change,
brought about, perhaps, by affection. Quickly she had learnt to love
Athens, and then she had the feeling that if it had been in any way
different from what it was she could not have loved it. Its very
smallness delighted her, and she would not permit its faults to be
mentioned in her presence. Once, when Dion said that it was a great pity
the Athenians did not plant more trees, and a greater pity they so often
lopped off branches from the few trees they had, she exclaimed:

“You mustn’t run down my Athens. It likes to give itself to the sun
generously. It’s grateful, as it well may be, for all the sun has done
for it. Look at the color of that marble.”

And Dion looked at the honey color, and the wonderful reddish-gold, and,
laughing, said:

“Athens is the one faultless city, and the dogs tell us so every night
and all night long.”

“Dogs always bark when the moon is up,” she answered, with a
semi-humorous gravity.

“As they bark in Athens?” he queried.

“Yes, of course.”

“If I am ever criticized,” he asked, “will you be my defender?”

“I shan’t hear you criticized.”

“How do you know that?”

“I do know it,” she said, looking at him with her honest brown eyes;
“nobody will criticize you when I am there.”

He caught hold of her hand.

“And you? Don’t you often criticize me silently? I’m sure you do. Why
did you marry me, Rosamund?”

They were sitting on the Acropolis when he put that question. It was
a shining day. The far-off seas gleamed. There was a golden pathway to
Aegina. The brilliant clearness, not European but Eastern, did not
make the great view spread out beneath and around them hard. Greece
lay wrapped in a mystery of sunlight, different from, yet scarcely less
magical than, the mystery of shadows and the moon. Rosamund looked out
on the glory. She had taken off her hat, and given her yellow hair
to the sunlight. Without any head-covering she always looked more
beautiful, and, to Dion, more Greek than when her hair was concealed.
He saw in her then more clearly than at other times the woman of all the
ages rather than the woman of an epoch subject to certain fashions.
As he looked at her now, resting on a block of warm marble above the
precipice which is dominated by the little temple of Athena Nike, he
wondered, with the concealed humility of the great lover, how it was
that she had ever chosen to give herself to him. He had sworn to marry
her. He had not been weak in his wooing, had not been one of those men
who will linger on indefinitely at a woman’s feet, ready to submit to
unnumbered refusals. But now there rose up in the depths of him the cry,
“What am I?” and the answer, “Only a man like thousands of other men, in
no way remarkable, in no way more worthy than thousands of others of the
gift of great happiness.”

Rosamund turned from the shining view. There was in her eyes an unusual
vagueness.

“Why did you?”

“Why did I marry you, Dion?”

“Yes. When I found you with your ‘Paradise’ I don’t think you meant ever
to marry me.”

“I always liked you. But at first I didn’t think of you in that way.”

“But you had known for ages before Burstal----”

“Yes, of course. I knew the day I sang at Mr. Darlington’s, at that
party he gave to introduce me as a singer. I knew first from your
mother. She told me.”

“My mother?”

“By the look she gave me when you introduced me to her.”

“Was it an----How d’you mean?”

“I can scarcely explain. But it was a look that asked a great many
questions. And they wouldn’t have been asked if you hadn’t cared for me,
and if she hadn’t known it.”

“What did you think when you knew?”

“That it was kind of you to care for me.”

“Kind?”

“Yes. I always feel that about people who like me very much.”

“And did you just go on thinking me kind until that day at Burstal?”

“I suppose so. But I felt very much at home with you.”

“I don’t know whether that’s a compliment to a man who’s still young, or
not?”

“Nor do I. But that’s just how it was.”

He said nothing for a little while. When he spoke again it was with some
hesitation, and his manner was almost diffident.

“Rosamund, that day at Burstal, were you at all inclined to accept me?”

“Yes; I think, perhaps, I was. Why?”

“Sometimes I have fancied there was a moment when----”

He looked at her and then, for once, his eyes fell before hers almost
guiltily. They sat in silence for a moment. Behind them, on a bench set
in the shadow of a mighty wall, was a guardian of the Acropolis, a thin
brown man with very large ears sticking out from his head. He had been
dozing, but now stirred, shuffled his feet, and suddenly cleared his
throat. Then he sighed heavily.

“And if there was, why did you think it came, Dion?” said Rosamund
suddenly, with an almost startling swiftness of decision.

Dion reddened.

“Why don’t you like to tell me?”

“Oh, well--things go through the mind without our wishing them to. You
must know that, Rosamund. They are often like absurd little intruders.
One kicks them out if one can.”

“What kind of intruder did you kick out, or try to kick out, at
Burstal?”

She spoke half-laughingly, but half-challengingly.

He drew a little nearer to her.

“Sometimes I have fancied that perhaps, that day at Burstal, you
suddenly realized that love might be a more powerful upholder of life
than ambition ever could be.”

“Sometimes? And you thought it first on the downs, or at any rate after
the concert?”

“I think I did.”

“Do you realize,” she said slowly, and as if with an effort, “that you
and I have never discussed my singing in ‘Elijah’?”

“I know we never have.”

“Let us do it now,” she continued, still seeming to make a strong
effort.

“But why should we?”

“I want to. Didn’t I sing well?”

“I thought you sang wonderfully well.”

“Then what was it that went wrong? I’ve never understood.”

“Why should you think anything went wrong? The critics said it was a
remarkable performance. You made a great effect.”

“I believe I did. But I felt for the first time that day that I was out
of sympathy with my audience. And then”--she paused, but presently added
with a certain dryness--“I was never offered any engagement to sing in
oratorio after Burstal.”

“I believe a good many people thought your talent would show at its best
in opera.”

“I shall never go on the stage. The idea is hateful to me, and always
has been. Would you like me to sing on the stage?”

“No.”

“Dion, why don’t you tell me what happened that day at Burstal?”

“I scarcely could.”

“I wish you would try.”

“Well--I think it was a mistake for you to begin your public career in
oratorio by singing ‘Woe unto them.’”

“Why?”

“It’s an unsympathetic thing. It’s a cruel sort of thing.”

“Cruel? But it’s one of the best-known things in oratorio.”

“You made it quite new.”

“How?”

“It sounded fanatical when you sang it. I never heard it sound like that
before.”

“Fanatical?” she said, and her voice was rather cold.

“Rosamund,” he said, quickly and anxiously, “you asked me to tell you
exactly what I meant, what I felt, that is----”

“Yes, I know. Go on, Dion. Well? It sounded fanatical----”

“To me. I’m only telling you my impression. When I’ve heard ‘Woe unto
them’ before it has always sounded sad, piteous if you like, a sort of
wailing. When you sang it, somehow it was like a curse, a tremendous
summoning of vengeance.”

“Why not? Are not the words ‘Destruction shall fall upon them’?”

“I know. But you made it sound--to me, I mean--almost as if you were
rejoicing personally at the thought of the destruction, as if you were
longing almost eagerly for it to overwhelm the faithless.”

“I see. That is what you meant by fanatical?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

After a long pause she said:

“Nobody has told me that till now.”

“Perhaps others didn’t feel it as I did.”

“I don’t know. What does one know about other people? Not even my
guardian said anything. I never could understand----”

She broke off, then continued steadily:

“So you think I repelled people that day?”

“It seems impossible that you--”

But she interrupted him.

“No, Dion, it isn’t at all impossible. I think if we are absolutely
sincere we repel people very often.”

“But you are the most sincere person I have ever seen, and you must know
how beloved you are, how popular you are wherever you go.”

“When I’m being sincere with the part of me that’s feeling kind or
affectionate. Let us go to the Parthenon.”

She got up, opened her white sun-umbrella and turned round, keeping her
hat in her left hand. As she stood there in that setting of marble, with
the sun caught in her hair, and the mighty view below and beyond her,
she looked wonderfully beautiful, Dion thought, but almost stern. He
feared perhaps he had hurt her. But was it his fault? She had told him
to speak.

Rosamund did not return to the subject of her debut at Burstal, but
in the late afternoon of that day she spoke of her singing, and of the
place it might have in their married life. Dion believed she did this
because of their conversation near the Temple of Nike.

They had spent most of the day on the Acropolis. Both had brought books:
she, Mahaffy’s “History of Greek Literature”; he, a volume of poems
written by a young diplomat who loved Greece and knew her well. Neither
of them had read many pages, but as the strong radiance began to soften
about them on the height, and the breeze from the Saronic Gulf came to
them with a more feathery warmth and freshness over the smiling bareness
of the Attic Plain, Dion, who had been half-dreamily turning the leaves
of his little book, said:

“Rosamund.”

“Yes?”

“Look at the sea and the mountains of Trigania, those far-off
mountains”--he pointed--“and the outpost of Hydra.”

She looked and said nothing. Then he read to her these lines of the
young diplomat-poet:

     “A crescent sail upon the sea,
     So calm and fair and ripple free
     You wonder storms can ever be;

     A shore with deep indented bays,
     And o’er the gleaming water-ways
     A glimpse of Islands in the haze;

     A face bronzed dark to red and gold,
     With mountain eyes that seem to hold
     The freshness of the world of old;

     A shepherd’s crook, a coat of fleece,
     A grazing flock;--the sense of peace,
     The long sweet silence,--this is Greece!”

Rosamund gazed before her at Greece in the evening light.

“‘The freshness of the world of old,’” she repeated, and her voice had
a thrill in it. “‘The sense of peace, the long sweet silence,--this is
Greece.’ If there was music with the music of those words I should love
to sing them.”

“And how you could sing them. Like no other.”

“At any rate my heart would be in them. ‘The freshness of the world of
old--the sense of peace, the long sweet silence.’”

She was standing now near the edge of the sacred rock, looking out over
the tawny plain flanked by gray Hymettos, and away to the sea. There
were no voices rising from below. There was no sound of traffic on
the white road which wound away down the slope to the hidden city. Her
contralto voice lingered on the words; her lips drew them out softly,
lengthening the sounds they loved.

“Freshness, that which belonged to the early world, long sweet silence,
peace. Oh, Dion, if you know how something in me cares for freshness and
for peace!”

Her glad energies were strangely stilled; yet there was a kind of force
in her stillness, the force that is in all deep truths of whatever
nature they may be. He felt that he was near to perhaps the most
essential part of her, to that which was perhaps more truly her than
even the radiant and buoyant humanity by means of which she drew people
to her.

“Could you live always out of the world?” he asked her.

“But it wouldn’t be out of the world.”

“Away from people--with me?”

“With you?”

She looked at him for a moment almost as if startled. Then there came
into her brown eyes a scrutiny that seemed half-inward, as if it were
partially applied to herself.

“It’s difficult to be certain what one could do. I suppose one has
several sides.”

“Ah! And your singing side?”

“I want to speak about that.”

Her voice was suddenly more practical, and her whole look and manner
changed, losing in romance and strangeness, gaining in directness and
energy.

“We’ve never discussed it.”

She sat down on a slab of rock at the edge of the precipice, and went
on:

“You don’t mind your wife being a public singer, do you, Dion?”

“Suppose I do?”

“Do you?”

“You’re so energetic I doubt if you could be happy in idleness.”

“I couldn’t in England.”

“And in Greece? But we are only here for such a short time.”

He took her hand in his.

“Learning the lessons of happiness.”

“Good lessons for us!” she said, smiling.

“The best there are. I believe in the education of joy. It opens the
heart, calls up all the generous things. But your singing; can I bear
your traveling about perpetually all over England?”

“If I get engagements.”

“You will. You had a good many for concerts last winter. You’ve got
several for June and July. You’ll get many more. But who’s to go with
you on your travels?”

“Beattie, of course. Why do you look at me like that?”

“How do we know Beatrice won’t marry?”

Rosamund looked grave.

“Why shouldn’t she?” asked Dion.

“She may, of course.”

“D’you think she’ll remain your apanage now?” he asked, with a hint of
smiling sarcasm that could not hurt her.

“My apanage?”

“Hasn’t she been something like that?”

“Perhaps she has. But Beattie always sinks herself in others. She
wouldn’t be happy if she didn’t do that. Of course, your friend Guy
Daventry’s in love with Beattie.”

“Deeply.”

“But I’m not at all sure that Beattie--”

She paused abruptly. After a moment she continued:

“You asked me to-day why I married you. I didn’t answer you and I’m not
going to answer you now--entirely. But you’re not like other men, most
other men.”

“In what way?”

“A way that means very much to me,” she answered, with a delicious
purity and directness. “Women feel such things very soon when they know
men. I could easily have never married, but I could never, never have
married a man who had lived, as I believe most men have lived.”

“I think I always knew that from the first moment I saw you.”

“Did you? I’m glad. I care tremendously for _that_ in you, Dion--more
than you will ever know.”

“That’s my great, too great reward,” he said soberly, almost with a
touch of deep awe. Then, reddening and looking away, he added, “You were
the very first.”

“Was I?”

“Yes, but--but you mustn’t think that it was a religious feeling,
anything of that kind, which kept me back from--from certain things. It
was more the desire to be strong, healthy, to have the sane mind in the
sane body, I think. I was mad about athletics, all that sort of thing.
Anyhow, you know now. You were the first. You will be the only one in my
life.”

There was a long silence between them. Then Rosamund said, with a change
of manner to practical briskness:

“If Beattie ever should marry, I could take a maid about with me.”

“Yes. An hotel in Liverpool with a maid! In Blackpool, in Huddersfield,
in Wolverhampton, in Glasgow, when there’s a heavy thaw on, with a maid!
Oh, how delightful it will be! Manchester on a wet day in early spring
with a--”

“Hush!” she put one hand on his lips gently, and looked at him with a
sort of smiling challenge in her eyes. “Do you mean to forbid me?”

“I don’t think I could ever forbid you to do anything.”

“We shall see in England.”

“But, Rosamund”--there was no one in sight, and he slipped one arm round
her--“if something came to fill your life, both our lives, to the brim?”

“Ah, then,”--a very remote expression came into her eyes,--“then it
would all be different.”

“All?”

“Yes. Everything would be quite different then.”

“Not our relation to each other?”

“Yes, even that. Perhaps that most of all.”

“I--I hardly like to hear you say that,” he said, struggling against
a perhaps stupid, or even hateful, feeling of depression mingled with
something else.

“But wouldn’t it? Think!”

“I don’t want that to change. I should hate any change in that.”

“What we want, and what we hate, doesn’t affect what has to be. And I
expect at the end we shall be thankful for that. But, Dion, yes, _if_
what you say, I could give it all up. Public singing! What would it
matter then? I’m a woman, not a singer. But perhaps it will never come.”

“Who knows?” he said.

And he sighed.

She turned towards him, leaned one hand on the stone and looked at him
almost anxiously.

“What is the matter, Dion?”

“Why? There is nothing the matter.”

“Would you rather we never had that in our lives?”

“A child?”

“Yes, a child.”

“I thought I longed for that,” he answered.

“Do you meant that you have changed and don’t long any more?”

“I suppose it’s like this. When a man’s very happy, perfectly happy, he
doesn’t--perhaps he can’t--want any change to come. If you’re perfectly
happy instinctively you almost fear any change. Till to-day, till this
very minute perhaps, I thought I wanted to have a child--some day.
Perhaps I still do really, or perhaps I shall. But--you must forgive me,
I can’t help it!--this evening, sitting here, I don’t want anything to
come between us. It seems to me that even a child of ours would take
some of you away from me. Don’t you see that?”

She shook her head.

“That’s a man’s feeling. I can’t share it.”

“But think--all the attention you would have to give to a child, all the
thoughts you would fasten on it, all the anxieties you’d have about it!”

“Well?”

“One only has a certain amount of time. You’d have to take away a good
deal, a great deal, of the time you can now give to me. Oh, it sounds
too beastly, I know! Perhaps I scarcely mean it! But surely you can see
how a man who loves a woman very much might, without being the least
bit unnatural, think, ‘I’d like to keep every bit of her for myself.
I’d like to have her all to myself!’ I dare say this feeling will pass.
Remember, Rose, we’re only just married, and we’re in Greece, right away
from every one. Don’t think me morbidly jealous, or a beast. I’m not. I
expect lots of men have felt as I do, perhaps even till the first child
came.”

“Ah, then it would be all right,” she said. “The natural things, the
things nature intends, are always all right.”

“How blessedly sane and central you are!”

“If we had a child--Dion, you must believe me!--we should be drawn ever
so much nearer together by it. If we ever do have one, we shall look
back on this time--you will--and think ‘We were much farther apart then
than we are now.’”

“I don’t like to hear you say that,” he said gravely, almost with pain.

Could a woman like Rosamund be driven by an instinct blindly? She
was such a perfect type of womanhood. It would be almost a tragedy if
she--such a woman--died childless. Perhaps instinct had obscurely warned
her of that, had taught her where to look for a mate. He, Dion, had
always lived purely. That day she had acknowledged that she had divined
it. Was that, perhaps, her real, her instinctive reason for marrying
him? But a man wants to be married for one thing only, because the
woman longs for him. And Dion was just an ordinary man with very strong
feelings.

“Let’s take one more stroll before we go down,” he said.

“Yes, to the maidens,” she answered.

Her voice sounded relieved. She pushed her arm gently through his as
they moved away, and he felt all his body thrill. The mystery of love
was almost painful to him at that moment. He realized that a great love
might grow to have an affinity with a disease. “I must be careful. I
must take great care with this love of mine,” he thought.

They went slowly over the slabs of marble and the gray rocks and passed
before the west front of the Parthenon. Dion felt slight resistance in
Rosamund’s arm, and stopped. In the changing light the marble was full
of warm color, was in places mysterious and translucent almost as amber.
The immense power, the gigantic calm of the temple, a sort of still
breathing of Eternity upon Time, confronted a glory which was beginning
to change in the face of its changelessness. Soon the seas that held
their dream under the precipices of Sunion, and along the shores of
Aegina, where the tall shepherd boys in their fleeces of white lead home
the flocks in the twilight, would lose the wonder of their shining, and
the skies the rapture of their diffused light. In the quietly austere
Attic Plain, through the whispering groves of Academe, and along the
sacred way to Eleusis, a very delicate vagueness was beginning to
travel, like a wanderer setting forth to greet the coming of the night.
The ranges of hills and mountains, Hymettos and Pentelicus, Parnes
stretching to the far distance, Mount Corydallus, the peak of Salamis,
the exquisitely long mountains of Trigania--“the greyhounds of their
tribe,” Rosamund loved to call them--were changing almost from moment
to moment, becoming a little softer, a little more tender, putting off
their distinct hues of the day for the colors of sleep and forgetting.
But the great Doric columns fronting them, the core of the heart of this
evening splendor, seemed not to defy, but to ignore, all the processes
of change. In its ruin the Parthenon seemed to say, “I have not
changed.” And it was true. For the same soul which had confronted
Pericles confronted the two lovers who now stood at the foot of the
temple.

“I wonder how many thousands of people of all nations have learnt the
same lesson here,” Rosamund said at last.

“The Doric lesson, you mean?”

“Yes, of strength, simplicity, endurance, calmness.”

“And I wonder how many thousands have forgotten the lesson.”

“Why do you say that, Dion?”

“I don’t know. Great art is a moral teacher, I’m sure of that. But men
are very light-minded as a rule, I think. If they lived before these
columns they might learn a great deal, they might even develop in a
splendid direction, I believe. But an hour, even a few hours, is that
enough? Impressions fade very quickly in most people.”

“Not in you. You never forget the Parthenon, and I shall never forget
it.”

She stood for some minutes quite still gazing steadily up at the
temple, gaining--it seemed to her--her own stillness from its tremendous
immobility.

“The greatest strength is in silence,” she thought. “The greatest power
is in motionlessness.”

She thought of the raging of the great sea. But no! There was more of
the essence of strength, of the stern inwardness of power, in that which
confronted life and Time in absolute stillness; in a mountain, in
this temple. And the temple spoke to something far down within her; to
something which desired long silences and deep retirement, to something
mystic which she did not understand. The temple was Pagan and she knew
that. But that in her to which it spoke was not Pagan. Before she left
Athens she meant to realize that the soul of man, when it speaks through
mighty and pure effort, of whatever kind, always speaks to the same
Listener, to but one, though man may not know it.

“Doric!” she said at last. “I have always known that for me that would
be the greatest. The simplest thing is the most sublime thing. That
temple is like the Sermon on the Mount to me. Didn’t you bring me here
because it meant so much to you?”

“Not entirely. No, Rosamund, I think I brought you here because I felt
that you belonged here.”

“This satisfies me.”

She sighed deeply, still gazing at the temple.

“You aren’t only in Greece, you are of Greece. Come to the maidens.”

As they went on slowly the acid voices of the little birds which fly
perpetually among the columns of the Parthenon followed them, bidding
them good night.

They descended over the uneven ground and came to the famous Porch of
the Caryatides, jutting out from the little Ionic temple which is the
handmaid of the Parthenon. Not far from the Porch, and immediately
before it, was a wooden bench. Already Rosamund and Dion had spent many
hours here, sometimes sitting on the bench, more often resting on the
warm ground in the sunshine, among the fragments of ruin and the speary,
silver-green grasses. Now Rosamund sat down and Dion stood by her side.

“Rosamund, those maidens are my ideal of womanhood shown in marble,” he
said.

“They are almost miraculously beautiful. And one scarcely knows why. But
I know that every time I see them the mystery of their beauty seems more
ineffable to me, and the meaning of it seems more profound. How did men
get so much meaning into marble?”

“By caring so much for what is beautiful in womanhood, I suppose.”

He sat down close beside her.

“I sometimes wonder whether women have any idea what some men, many men,
I believe, seek in women.”

“What do they seek?”

“What do those maidens that hold up the Porch suggest to you?”

“All that’s calm without a touch of coldness, and strong without a touch
of hardness, and noble without a touch of pride, and obedient without a
touch of servility.”

“Brave sweetness, too, and protectiveness. They are wonderful, and so
are some women. When I saw you in the omnibus at Milan I thought of
these maidens immediately.”

“How strange!”

“Why strange?”

“Isn’t it?” she said, gazing at the six maidens in their flowering
draperies of marble, who, upon their uncovered heads, bore tranquillity
up the marble architrave. “How wonderfully simple and unpretending they
are!”

“Are not you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t believe I think about it.”

“I do. Rosamund, sometimes I feel that I am an unique man--just think of
a fellow in a firm on the Stock Exchange being unique!--because I have
had an ideal, and I have attainted to it. When I was here alone, I
conceived for the first time an ideal of woman. I said to myself, ‘In
the days of ancient Greece there must have been such women in the flesh
as these maidens in marble. If I could have lived and loved then!’ And I
came away from Greece carrying a sort of romantic dream with me. And now
I sit here with you; I can’t think why I, a quite ordinary man, should
be picked out for perfect happiness.”

“Is it really perfect?” she asked, turning to him.

“I think so. In such a place with you!”

As the evening drew on, a little wind came and went over the rocky
height, but it had no breath of cold in it. Two Greek soldiers passed
by slowly behind them--short young men with skins almost as dark as
the skins of Arabs of the South, black eyes and faces full of active
mentality. They were talking eagerly, but stopped for a moment to look
at the English, and beyond them at the six maidens on their platform of
marble. Then they went on talking again, but presently hesitated, came
back, and stood not far off, gazing at the Porch with a mixture of
reverence and quiet wistfulness. Dion drew Rosamund’s attention to them.

“They feel the beauty,” he said.

“Yes, I like that.”

She looked at the two young men with a smile. One of them noticed it,
and smiled back at her almost boyishly, and with a sort of confidential
simplicity.

The light began to fail. The six maidens were less clearly seen, but the
deep meaning of them did not lessen. In the gathering darkness they and
their sweet effort became more touching, more lovable. Their persistence
was exquisite now that they confronted with serenity the night.

“They are beautiful by day, but at night they are adorable,” said
Rosamund.

“Don’t you know why I thought of them when I met you?” he whispered.

She got up slowly. The Greek soldiers moved, turned, and went down the
slope towards the Propylae. Their quick voices were heard again. Then
there was the sound of a bell.

“Time to go,” said Rosamund.

As they followed the soldiers she again put her arm through her young
husband’s.

“Dion,” she said, “I think I’m a little afraid of your ideals. I
understand them. I have ideals too. But I think perhaps mine are less in
danger of ever being shattered than yours are.”

“Why? But I know mine are not in danger.”

“How can you say that?”

“It’s no use trying to frighten me. But what about your ideals? What is
the nature of the difference between yours and mine, which makes yours
so much less vulnerable than mine?”

But she only said:

“I don’t believe I could explain it. But I feel it, and I shall go on
feeling it.”

They went down the steep marble steps, gave the guardian at the foot of
them good night, and walked almost in silence to Athens.



CHAPTER IV

After that day Rosamund and Dion often talked of the child who might
eventually come into their lives to change them. Rosamund indeed, now
that such a possibility had been discussed between them, returned to it
with an eagerness which she did not seek to conceal. She was wonderfully
frank, and her frankness seemed to belong naturally to her transparent
purity, to be an essential part of it. Dion’s momentary depression that
evening on the Acropolis had evidently stirred something in her which
would not let her rest until it had expressed itself. She had detected
for the first time in her husband a hint of something connected with his
love for her which seemed to her morbid. She could not forget it and she
was resolved to destroy it if possible. When they next stood together on
their beloved height she said to him:

“Dion, don’t you hate anything morbid?”

“Yes, loathe it!” he answered, with hearty conviction. “But surely you
know that. Why d’you ask me such a thing? How dare you?”

And he turned to her his brown face, bright this morning with good
spirits, his dark eyes sparkling with hopefulness and energy.

It was a pale morning, such as often comes to Athens even at the edge
of the summer. They were standing on the little terrace near to the
Acropolis Museum, looking down over the city and to helmet-shaped
Lycabettos. The wind, too fond of the Attic Plain, was blowing, not
wildly, but with sufficient force to send the dust whirling in light
clouds over the pale houses and the little Byzantine churches. Long
and narrow rivulets of dust marked the positions of the few roads
which stretched out along the plain. The darkness of the groves which
sheltered the course of the Kephisos contrasted strongly with the flying
pallors and seemed at enmity with them. The sky was milky white and
gray, broken up in places by clouds of fantastic shapes, along the
ruffled edges of which ran thin gleams of sunshine like things half
timorous and ashamed. Upon the flat shores near Phaleron the purple
seas broke in spray, and the salty drops were caught up by the wind and
mingled with the hurrying grains of dust. It was not exactly a sad day,
but there was an uneasiness abroad. The delicate calm of Greece was
disturbed. Nevertheless Dion was feeling gay and light-hearted, inclined
to enjoy everything the world about him offered to him. Even the
restlessness beneath and around them accorded with his springing
spirits. The whirling spirals of dust suggested to him the gaiety of a
dance. The voice of the wind was a joyous music in his ears.

“How dare you?” he repeated with a happy pretense of indignation.

“Because I think you were almost morbid yesterday.”

“I? When?”

“When we spoke of the possibility of our some day having a child.”

“I had a moment of thinking that too,” he agreed. “Yes, Rose, the
thought went through my mind that a great love, such as mine for you,
might become almost a disease if one didn’t watch it, hold it in.”

“If it ever did become like that, do you know what would happen?”

“What, Rose?”

“Instead of rejoicing in it I should shrink from it.”

“That’s enough for me!”

He spoke gaily, confidently.

“Besides, I don’t really believe I’m a man to love like that. I
only imagined I might for a moment, perhaps because it was twilight.
Imaginings come with the twilight.”

“I could never bear to think, if a child came, that you didn’t want it,
that you wished it out of the way.”

“I never should. But I expect lots of young married people have queer
thoughts and feelings which they keep entirely to themselves--I blurted
mine out. You’ve got a dangerously sincere husband, Rose. The whole
matter lies in your own hands. If we ever have a child, love it, but
don’t love it more than me.”

“I should love it so differently! How could maternal love interfere with
the love of woman for man?”

“No, I don’t suppose it could.”

“Of course it never could.”

“Then that’s settled. Where shall we go to get out of the wind? It seems
to be rising.”

After searching for a place of shelter in vain they eventually took
refuge in the Parthenon, under the shadow of the great western wall.
Perhaps in consequence of the wind the Acropolis was entirely deserted.
Only the guardians were hidden somewhere, behind columns, in the Porch
of the Museum, under the roof of their little dwelling at the foot of
the marble staircase which leads up to the Propylae. The huge wall of
the Parthenon kept off the wind from the sea, and as Rosamund and Dion
no longer saw the whirling dust clouds in the plain they had, for the
moment, almost an illusion of peace. They sat down on the guardian’s
bench, just beneath some faint fragments of paintings which dated
from the time when the temple was made use of as a church by Greek
Christians; and immediately Rosamund went on talking about the child.
She spoke very quietly and earnestly, with the greatest simplicity, and
by degrees Dion came to see her as a mother, to feel that perhaps only
as a mother could she fulfil herself. The whole of her beauty would
never be revealed unless she were seen with a child of her own. Hitherto
he had thought of her chiefly in relation to himself, as the girl he
longed to win, then as the girl he most wonderfully had succeeded in
winning. She put herself before him now in a different light, and he
saw in her new and beautiful possibilities. While she was talking his
imagination began to play about the child, and presently he realized
that he was thinking of it as a boy. Then, in a moment, he realized that
on the previous evening he had thought of a male, not of a female child.
With this in his mind he said abruptly:

“What sort of a child do you wish to have, Rosamund?”

“What sort?” she said, looking at him with surprise in her brown eyes.

“Yes.”

“What do you mean? A beautiful, strong, healthy child, of course, the
sort of child every married woman longs to have, and imagines having
till it comes.”

“Beautiful, strong, healthy!” he repeated, returning her look. “Of
course it could only be that--your child. But I meant, do you want it to
be a boy or a girl?”

“Oh!”

She paused, and looked away from him and down at the uncemented marble
blocks which form the pavement of the Parthenon.

“Well?” he said, as she kept silence.

“If it were to be a girl I should love it.”

“You wish it to be a girl?”

“I didn’t say that. The fact is, Dion”--and now she again looked at him,
“I have always thought of our child as a boy. That’s why your question
almost startled me. I have never even once thought of having a girl. I
don’t know why.”

“I think I do.”

“Why then?”

“The thought was born of the desire. You wanted our child to be a son
and so you thought of it as a son.”

“Perhaps that was it.”

“Wasn’t it?”

He spoke with a certain pressure. She remained silent for a moment, and
two little vertical lines appeared in her forehead. Then she said:

“Yes, I believe it was. And you?”

“I confess that when yesterday we spoke of a child I was thinking all
the time about a boy.”

She gazed at him with something visionary in her eyes, which made them
look for a moment like the eyes of a woman whom he had not seen till
now. Then she said quietly:

“It will be a boy, I think. Indeed, if it weren’t perhaps absurd, I
should say that I know it will be a boy.”

He said nothing more just then, but at that moment he felt as if he,
too, knew, not merely hoped, or guessed, something about their joint
future, knew in the depths of him that a boy-child would some day be
sent to Rosamund and to him, to influence and to change their lives.

The wind began to fail almost suddenly, the sky grew brighter, a shaft
of sun lay on the marble at their feet.

“It’s going to be fine,” Dion said. “Let’s be active for once. The wind
has made me restless. Suppose we get a couple of horses and ride out to
the convent of Daphni!”

She got up at once.

“Yes. I’ve brought my habit, and haven’t had it on once.”

As they left the Great Temple she looked up at the mighty columns and
said;

“Doric! If we have a boy let us bring him up to be Doric.”

“Yes, Rosamund,” he said quietly and strongly. “We will.”

Afterward he believed that it was then, and only then, that he caught
something of her deep longing to have a child. He began to see how a
man’s child might influence him and affect his life, might even send him
upwards by innocently looking up to him. It would be bad, very bad, to
fail as a husband, but, by Jove! it would be one of the great tragedies
to fail as a father. Mentally Dion measured the respective heights
of himself and a very small boy; saw the boy’s trusting eyes looking,
almost peering, up at him. Such eyes could change, could become very
attentive. “It wouldn’t do to be adversely criticized by your boy,” he
thought. And one day he said to Rosamund, but in almost a casual way:

“If we ever do have a boy, Rose, and want him to be Doric, we shall have
to start in by being Doric ourselves, eh?”

“Yes,” she answered, “I’ve thought that, too.”

“D’you think I could ever learn to be that?”

“I know you could. You are on the way already, I think. I noticed
in London that you were never influenced by all the affectations and
absurdities, or worse, that seem to have taken hold of so many people
lately.”

“There has been a wave of something rather beastly passing over London
certainly. But I almost wonder you knew it.”

“Why?”

“Can your eyes see anything that isn’t good?”

“Yes. But I don’t want ever to look long on what I hate.”

“You aren’t afraid you might cease from hating it!”

“Oh, no. But I believe in feeding always on wholesome food.”

“Modern London doesn’t.”

“I shall never be modern, I’m afraid,” she said, half laughing, and with
a soft touch of apparently genuine deprecation.

“Be eternal, that’s better!” he almost whispered. “Listen to that
nightingale. It’s singing a song of all the ages. You have a message
like that for me.”

They had strolled out after dinner in the warm May night, and had walked
a little way up the steep flank of Lycabettos till they reached a wooden
bench near which were a few small fir trees. Somewhere among these trees
there was hidden a nightingale, which sang with intensity to Athens
spread out below, a small maze of mellow lights and of many not
inharmonious voices. Even in the night, and at a distance, they felt the
smiling intimacy of the little city they loved. Its history was like
a living thing dwelling among the shadows, hallowed and hallowing, its
treasures, like night flowers, breathed out a mysterious message to
them. They received it, and felt that they understood it. Had the
nightingale been singing to any city its song must have seemed to them
beautiful. But it was singing to Athens, and that fact gave to its
voice, in their ears, a magical meaning.

They sat for a while in silence. Nobody passed on the winding path.
Their impulse to solitude was unshared by the dwellers in Athens.
Neither knew exactly what thoughts were passing through the other’s
mind, what aspirations were flaming up in the heart of the other. But
they knew that they were close bound in sympathy just then, voyaging
towards a common future. That future lay over the sea in gray England.
Their time in Greece was but an interlude. But in it they were
gathering up impressions, were laying in stores for their journey. The
nightingale’s song was part of their provision. It had to sing to just
them for some hidden reason. And to Dion it seemed that the nightingale
knew the reason while they did not, that it comprehended all the under
things of love and of sorrow of which they were ignorant. When he spoke
again he said:

“A bird’s song always makes me feel very unlearned. Do you know what I
mean?”

“Yes. We’ve got to learn so much.”

“Together.”

“Yes--partly.”

“Partly?” he said quickly.

“I think there’s a great deal that can only be learnt quite alone.”

Again, as sometimes before, Dion trod on the verges of mystery, felt as
if something in Rosamund chided him, and was chilled for a moment.

“I dare say you are right,” he said. “But I believe I could learn any
lesson more easily with you to help me.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Perhaps we shall know which is right, you or I, when we’ve been much
longer together,” he said, with an effort to speak lightly.

“Yes.”

“Rosamund, sometimes you make me feel as if you thought I didn’t know
you, I mean didn’t know you thoroughly.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

Again silence fell between them. As Dion listened once more to the
persistent nightingale he felt that there was pain somewhere at the back
of its ecstasy. He looked down at the soft lights of little Athens, and
suddenly knew that much sorrow lay in the shadows of all the cities of
the earth. There was surely a great reserve in the girl who had given
herself to him. That was natural, perhaps. But to-night he felt that she
was aware of this reserve and was consciously guarding it like a sacred
thing. Presently they got up and went slowly down the hill.

“Suppose you had never married,” he said, as they drew near to the city,
“how would you have lived, do you think?”

“Perhaps for my singing, at first,” she answered.

“And afterwards?”

“Afterwards? Very quietly, I think.”

“You won’t tell me.”

“I don’t know for certain, and what does it matter? I have married. If I
hadn’t, perhaps I should have been very selfish and thought myself very
self-sacrificing.”

“I wonder in what way selfish.”

“There are so many ways. I heard a sermon once on a foggy night in
London.”

“Ah--that evening I called on you.”

“I didn’t say so. It made me understand egoism better than I had
understood it before. Perhaps it’s the unpardonable sin.”

“Then it could never be your sin.”

“Hush!”

They no longer heard the nightingale. The voices and the houses of
Athens were about them.

As the days slipped by, Dion felt that Rosamund and he grew closer
together. He knew, though he could not perhaps have said how, that he
would be the only man in her intimate life. Even if he died she would
never--he felt sure of this--yield herself to another man. The tie
between them was to her a bond for eternity. Her body would never be
given twice. That he knew. But sometimes he asked himself whether her
whole soul would ever be given even once. The insatiable greed of a
great and exclusive love was alive within him, needing always something
more than it had. At first, after their marriage, he had not been aware
of this greed, had not realized that nothing great is content to
remain just as it is at a given moment. His love had to progress, and
gradually, in Greece, he became conscious of this fact.

His inner certainty, quite unshakable, that Rosamund would never belong
to another man in the physical sense made jealousy of an ordinary kind
impossible to him. The lowness, the hideous vulgarity of the jealousy
which tortures the writhing flesh would never be his. Yet he wanted more
than he had sometimes, stretched out arms to something which did not
come to nestle against him.

There was a great independence in Rosamund, he thought, which set
her apart from other women, Not only could she bear to be alone, she
sometimes wished to be alone. Dion, on the contrary, never wished to be
away from her. It might be necessary for him to leave her. He was not
a young doting fool who could not detach himself even for a moment from
his wife’s apron strings. But he knew very well that at all times he
preferred to be with her, close to her, that he relished everything
more when he was in her company than when he was alone. She added to his
power of enjoyment, to his faculty of appreciation, by being beside
him. The Parthenon even was made more sublime to him by her. That was
a mystery. And the mystery of her human power to increase penetrated
everywhere through their life in common, like a percolating flood that
could not be gainsaid. She manifested her influence upon him subtly
through the maidens of the Porch, through the almost neat perfection
of the Theseion, through the detached grandeur of those columns in the
waste place, that golden and carved Olympieion which acts as an outpost
to Athens. It was as if she had the power to put something of herself
into everything that he cared for so that he might care for it more,
whether it were a golden sunset on the sea over which they drifted in
a sailing-boat off the coast of old Phaleron, or a marble figure in a
museum. She dwelt in the stones of a ruined temple; she set her feet
upon the dream of the distant mountains; she was in the dawn, the
twilight, and in all the ways of the moon, because he loved her and
found her in all things when they were together.

He did not know whether she, in a similar mysterious way, found him in
all that she enjoyed. He did not ask her the question. Perhaps, really,
in that truth of apprehension which lives very far down in a man, he had
divined the answer, although he told himself that he did not know.

He found always something new to enjoy and to worship in Rosamund.

They had many tastes in common. At first, of deliberate choice, they had
bounded their honeymoon with the precipices of the Acropolis, learning
the Doric lesson on that height above the world. Then one day they had
made a great sacrifice and gone to pass their hours in the pine woods
of Kephissia. They had returned to the Acropolis quite athirst. But by
degrees the instinct to wander a little farther afield took greater hold
upon them, their love of physical exercise asserted itself. They began
to take long rides on horseback, carrying food in their saddle-bags. The
gently wild charm of Greece laid its spell upon them. They both loved
Athens, but now they began to love, too, escaping from Athens.

Directly they were out of the city they were in a freedom that appealed
to the gipsy in both. Dion’s strong boyishness, which had never yet
been cast off, was met and countered by the best of good fellowship
in Rosamund. Though she could be very serious, and even what he called
“strange,” she was never depressed or sad. Her good spirits were
unfailing and infectious. She reveled in a “jaunt” or a “day out,” and
her physical strength kept fatigue far from her. She could ride for many
hours without losing her freshness and zest. Every little episode of the
wayside interested and entertained her. Everything comic made her laugh.
She showed an ardor almost like an intelligent child’s in getting to
understand all she saw. Scenery, buildings, animal life, people, every
offering of Greece was eagerly accepted, examined and discussed by her.
She was the perfect comrade for the wilds. Their common joy in the wilds
drew her and Dion more closely together. Never before had Rosamund been
quite away from civilization, from the hitherto easily borne trammels of
modern complicated life. She “found herself” in the adventure. The pure
remoteness of Greece came to her like natal air. She breathed it in with
a sort of rapture. It was as Dion had said. She was not merely in, she
was of, Greece.

They rode one day to Eleusis; on another day to Tatoi, buried in
oak-woods on the slope of Parnes; on another through noisy and mongrel
Piraeus, and over undulating wrinkled ground, burnt up by the sun and
covered with low scrub and bushes of myrtle, to the shore of the gulf
opposite to Salamis; on yet another to Marathon, where they lunched on
the famous mound beneath which the bodies of the Athenians who fell in
the battle were buried. They took no companion with them. Dion carried
a revolver in his hip pocket, but never had reason to show or to use
it. When they dismounted they tethered the horses to a bush or tree, or
sometimes hobbled their forelegs, and turned them loose for a while.

Such days were pure joy to them both. In them they went back to the
early world. They did not make the hard and self-conscious imaginative
effort of the prig to hurl themselves into an historic past. They just
let the land and its memories take them. As, sitting on the warm ground
among the wild myrtle bushes, they looked across the emerald green
unruffled waters to Salamis, that very long isle with its calm gray and
orange hills and its indented shores, perhaps for a moment they talked
of the Queen of Halicarnassus, and of the deception of Xerxes watching
from his throne on Mount Aegaleos. But the waters were now so solitary,
the peace about them was so profound, that the memory of battles soon
faded away in the sunshine. Terror and death had been here once. A queen
had destroyed her own people in that jeweled sea, a king had fled from
those delicate mountains. But now sea and land were for lovers. A fly
with shining wings journeyed among the leaves of the myrtles, a beetle
crept over the hot sandy ground leaving a minute pattern behind it;
and Rosamund and Dion forgot all about Artemisia, as they brooded,
wide-eyed, over the activities of the dwellers in the waste. At such
moments they realized the magic of life, as they had never realized it
in the turmoil of London. The insect with its wings that caught the
sun, the intent and preoccupied little traveler whose course could be
deflected by a twig, revealed the wonder that is lost and forgotten in
the crowded highways of men.

It was when they were at Marathon that Rosamund told Dion she loved
Greece partly because of its emptiness. The country was not only rather
bare of vegetation, despite its groves of glorious old olives, its woods
of oaks round Tatoi, its delicious curly forests of yellow-green pines,
which looked, Rosamund declared, as if they had just had their dainty
heads perfectly dressed by an accomplished coiffeur, it was also almost
strangely bare of men.

“Where are the Greeks?” Rosamund had often asked during their first few
rides, as they cantered on and on, scarcely ever meeting a human being.

“In the towns to be sure!” Dion had answered.

“And where are the towns?”

“Ah! That’s more than I can tell you!” he had said, laughing.

To one hitherto accustomed to England, the emptiness of the country,
even quite near to Athens, was at first surprising. Soon it became
enchanting.

“This is a country I can thoroughly trust,” Rosamund declared at
Marathon.

Dion had just finished hobbling the two horses, and now lifted himself
up. His brown face was flushed from bending. His thin riding-clothes
were white with dust, which he beat off with hands that looked almost as
if they wore gloves, so deeply were they dyed by the sun. As the cloud
dispersed he emerged carrying their lunch in a straw pannier.

“Why trust--specially?” he said. “Ah,” he threw himself down by her
side with a sigh of happiness, “this is good! The historic mound, and
we think of it merely as a resting-place, vandals that we are. But--why
trust?”

“I mean that Greece never keeps any unpleasant surprises up her sleeve,
surprises such as other countries have of noisy, intruding people. It’s
terrible how accustomed I’m getting to having everything all to myself,
and how I simply love it.”

He began slowly unpacking the pannier, and laying its contents out on
the mound.

“You’re a puzzle, Rosamund,” he said.

“Why?”

“You have a greater faculty for making yourself delightful to all sorts
of people than I have found in any other person, woman or man. And yet
you are developing a perfect passion for solitude.”

“Do you want people here?”

“No.”

“Then you agree with me.”

“But you have an absolute lust for an empty world.”

“Look!”

She stretched out her right arm--she was leaning on the other with her
cheek in her hand--and pointed to the crescent-shaped plain which
lay beyond them, bounded by a sea which was a wonder of sparkling and
intense blue, and guarded by a curving line of low hills. There were
some clouds in the sky, but the winds were at rest, and the clouds were
just white things dreaming. In the plain there were no trees. Here and
there some vague crops hinted at the languid labors of men. No human
beings were visible, but in the distance, not very far from the sea
edge, a few oxen were feeding. Their dark slow-moving bodies intersected
the blue. There were no ships or boats upon the stretch of sea which
Rosamund and Dion gazed at. Behind them the bare hills showed no sign of
life. The solitude was profound but not startling. It seemed in place,
necessary and beautiful. In the emptiness there was something touching,
something reticently satisfying. It was a land and seascape delicately
purged.

“Greece and solitude,” said Rosamund. “I shall always connect them
together. I shall always love each for the other’s sake.”

In the silence which followed the words the far-off lowing of oxen came
to them over the flats. Rosamund shut her eyes, Dion half shut his, and
the empty world was a shining dream.

When they had lunched, Rosamund said:

“I am going to climb up into that house. The owner will never come, I’m
sure.”

Near them upon the mound was a dwelling of Arcady, in which surely a
shepherd sometimes lay and piped to the sun and the sea god. It was
lifted upon a tripod of poles, and was deftly made of brushwood, with
roof, floor and two walls all complete. A ladder of wood, from which the
bark had been stripped, led up to it.

“You want to sleep?” Dion asked.

She looked at him.

“Perhaps.”

He helped her up to her feet. Quickly she mounted the ladder and stepped
into the room.

“Good-by!” she said, looking down at him and smiling.

“Good-by!” he answered, looking up.

She made a pretense of shutting a door and withdrawing into privacy. He
lit his pipe, hesitated a moment, then went to lie down under her room.
Now he no longer saw her, but he heard her movements overhead. The dry
brushwood crackled as she lay down, as she settled herself. She was
lying surely at full length. He guessed that she had stretched out her
arms and put her two hands under her head. She sighed. Below he echoed
her sigh with a long breath of contentment. Then they both lay very
still.

Marathon!

He remembered his schoolbooks. He remembered beginning Greek. He had
never been very good at Greek. His mother, if she had been a man and had
gone to Oxford or Cambridge, would have made a far better classic than
he. She had helped him sometimes during the holidays when he was
quite small. He remembered exactly how she had looked when he had been
conjugating--half-loving and half-satirical. He had made a good many
mistakes. Later he had read Greek history with his mother, he had read
about the battle of Marathon.

“Marathon”--it was written in his school history, “became a magic
word at Athens . . . the one hundred and ninety-two Athenians who had
perished in the battle were buried on the field, and over their remains
a tumulus or mound was erected, which may still be seen about half
a mile from the sea.” As a small boy he had read that with a certain
inevitable detachment. And now here he lay, a man, on that very tumulus,
and the brushwood creaked above his head with the movement of the woman
he loved.

How wonderful was the weaving of the Fates!

And if some day he should sit in the place of his mother, and should
hear a small boy, his small boy, conjugating. By Jove! He would have to
rub up his classics! Not for ten years old; he wasn’t so bad as that;
but for twenty, when the small boy would be going up to Oxford, and
would, perhaps, be turning out alarmingly learned.

Rosamund the mother of a young man!

But Dion shied away from that. He could imagine her as the mother of a
child, beautiful mother of a child almost as beautiful; but he could not
conceive of her as the “mater” of a person with a mustache.

Their youth, their youth--must it go?

Again she moved slightly above him. The twigs crackled, making an almost
irritable music of dryness. Again the lowing of cattle came over that
old battlefield from the edge of the sea. And just then, at that very
moment, Dion knew that his great love could not stand still, that, like
all great things, it must progress. And the cry, that intense human cry,
“Whither?” echoed in the deep places of his soul. Whither were he and
his great love going? To what end were they journeying? For a moment
sadness invaded him, the sadness of one who thinks and is very ignorant.
Why cannot a man think deeply without thinking of an end? “All things
come to an end!” That cruel saying went through his mind like footsteps
echoing on iron, and a sense of fear encompassed him. There is something
terrible in a great love, set in the little life of a man like a vast
light in a tiny attic.

Did Rosamund ever have such thoughts? Dion longed to ask her. Was she
sleeping perhaps now? She was lying very still. If they ever had a child
its coming would mark a great step onwards along the road, the closing
of a very beautiful chapter in their book of life. It would be over,
their loneliness in love, man and woman in solitude. Even the sexual tie
would be changed. All the world would be changed.

He lay flat on the ground, stretched out, his elbows firmly planted, his
chin in his palms, his face set towards the plain and the sea.

What he looked at seemed gently to chide him. There were such a
brightness and simplicity and such a delicious freedom from all
complication in this Grecian landscape edged by the wide frankness of
the sea that he felt reassured. Edging the mound there were wild aloes
and the wild oleander. A river intersected the plain which in many
places was tawny yellow. Along the river bank grew tall reeds, sedges
and rushes. Beyond the plain, and beyond the blue waters, rose the
Island of Euboea, and ranges of mountains, those mountains of Greece
which are so characteristic in their unpretentious bareness, which
neither overwhelm nor entice, but which are unfailingly delicate,
unfailing beautiful, quietly, almost gently, noble. In the distance,
when he turned his head, Dion could see the little Albanian village of
Marathon, a huddle of tiny houses far off under the hills. He looked at
it for a moment, then again looked out over the plain, rejoicing in
its emptiness. Along the sea edge the cattle were straying, but their
movements were almost imperceptible. Still they were living things and
drew Dion’s eyes. The life in them sent out its message to the life in
him, and he earnestly watched them grazing. Their vague and ruminating
movements really emphasized the profound peace which lay around Rosamund
and him. To watch them thus was a savoring of peace. For every contented
animal is a bearer of peaceful tidings. In the Garden of Eden with the
Two there were happy animals. And Dion recalled the great battle which
had dyed red this serene wilderness, a battle which was great because
it had been gently sung, lifted up by the music of poets, set on high
by the lips of orators. He looked over the land and thought: “Here
Miltiades won the name which has resounded through history. To that
shore, where I see the cattle, the Persians were driven.” And it
seemed to him that the battle of Marathon had been fought in order that
Rosamund and he, in the nineteenth century, might be drawn to this place
to meet the shining afternoon. Yes, it was fought for that, and to make
this place the more wonderful for them. It was their Garden of Eden
consecrated by History.

What a very small animal that was which had strayed away from its kind
over the tawny ground where surely there was nothing to feed upon! The
little dark body of it looked oddly detached as it moved along. And
now another animal was following it quickly. The arrival of the second
darkness, running, made Dion know that the first was human, the guardian
of the beasts, no doubt.

So Eden was invaded already! He smiled as he thought of the serpent. The
human being came on slowly, always moving in the direction of the mound,
and always accompanied by its attendant animal--a dog, of course. Soon
Dion knew that both were making for the mound. It occurred to him
that Rosamund was in the private room of him who was approaching, was
possibly sound asleep there.

“Rosamund!” he almost whispered.

There was no answer.

“Rosamund!” he murmured, looking upward to his roof, which was her
floor.

“Hush!” came down to him through the brushwood. “I’m willing it to come
to us.”

“What--the guardian of the cattle?”

“Guardian of the ----! It’s a child!”

“How do you know?”

“I do know. Now you’re not to frighten it.”

“Of course not!”

He lay very still, his chin in his palms, watching the on-comers. How
had she known? And then, seeing suddenly through her eyes, he knew that
of course it was a child, that it could not be anything else. All its
movements now proclaimed to him its childishness, and he watched it with
a sort of fascination.

For he had never seen Rosamund with a child. That would be for him a new
experience with something, perhaps, prophetic in it.

Child and animal approached steadily, keeping an undeviating course, and
presently Dion saw a very small, but sturdy, Greek boy of perhaps ten
years old, wearing a collarless shirt, open at a deep brown throat,
leggings of some thin material, boots, and a funny little patched brown
coat and pointed hood made all in one, and hanging down with a fulness
almost of skirts about the small determined legs. The accompanying dog
was a very sympathetic, blunt-nosed, round-headed, curly-coated type,
whose whiteness, which positively invited the stroking hand, was broken
by two great black blotches set all askew on the back, and by a black
patch which ringed the left eye and completely smothered the cocked-up
left ear. The child carried a stick, which nearly reached to his
shoulder, and which ended in a long and narrow crook. The happy dog,
like its master, had no collar.

When these two reached the foot of the tumulus they stood still and
stared upwards. The dog uttered a short gruff bark, looked at the boy,
wagged a fat tail, barked again, abruptly depressed the fore part of its
body till its chin was against the ground between its paws, then jumped
into the air with a sudden demeanor of ludicrously young, and rather
uncouth, waggishness, which made Dion laugh.

The small boy replied with a smile almost as sturdy as his legs, which
he now permitted to convey him with decisive firmness through the wild
aloes and oleanders to the summit of the tumulus. He stood before Dion,
holding his crooked staff tightly in his right hand, but his large dark
eyes were directed upwards. Evidently his attention was not to be
given to Dion. His dog, on the contrary, after a stare and two muffled
attempts at a menacing bark, came to make friends with Dion in a way
devoid of all dignity, full of curves, wrigglings, tail waggings and
grins which exposed rows of smiling teeth.

“Dion!” came Rosamund’s voice from above.

“Yes?”

“Do show him the way up. He wants to come up.”

Dion got up, took the little Greek’s hand firmly, led him to the foot
of the ladder, and pointed to Rosamund who leaned from her brushwood
chamber and held out inviting hands, smiling, and looking at the child
with shining eyes. He understood that he was very much wanted, gravely
placed his staff on the ground, laid hold of the ladder, and slowly
clambered up, with the skirts of his coat sticking out behind him. His
dog set up a loud barking, scrambled at the ladder, and made desperate
efforts to follow him.

“Help him up, Dion!” came the commanding voice from above.

Dion seized the curly coat of the dog--picked up handfuls of dog. There
was a struggle. The dog made fierce motions as if swimming, and whined
in a thin and desperate soprano. Its body heaved upwards, its forepaws
clutched the edge of the brushwood floor, and it arrived.

“Bravo!” cried Rosamund, as she proceeded to settle down with her
guests. “But why don’t I know Greek?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Dion murmured, standing with his hands on the
ladder. “You know their language.”

Rosamund was sitting now, half-curled up, with her back against the
brushwood wall. Her light sun-helmet lay on the floor. In her ruffled
hair were caught two or three thin brown leaves, their brittle edges
curled inwards. The little boy, slightly smiling, yet essentially
serious, as are children tested by a great new experience, squatted
close to her and facing her, with one leg under him, the other leg
stretched out confidentially, as much as to say, “Here it is!” The dog
lay close by panting, smiling, showing as much tongue and teeth as
was caninely possible in the ardor of feeling tremendously uplifted,
important, one of the very few.

And Rosamund proceeded to entertain her guests.

What did she do? Sometimes, long afterwards in England, Dion, recalling
that day--a very memorable day in his life--asked himself the question.
And he could never remember very much. But he knew that Rosamund showed
him new aspects of tenderness and fun. What do women who love and
understand little boys do to put them at their ease, to break down their
small shynesses? Rosamund did absurd things with deep earnestness and
complete concentration. She invented games, played with twigs and straws
which she drew from the walls of her chamber. She changed the dog’s
appearance by rearrangements of his ears, to which he submitted with
a slobbering ecstasy, gazing at her with yellow eyes which looked
flattened in his head. Turned quite back, their pink insides exposed
to view, the ears changed him into a brand-new dog, at which his master
stared with an amazement which soon was merged in gratification. With a
pocket-handkerchief she performed marvels of impersonation which the boy
watched with an almost severe intentness, even putting out his tongue
slowly, and developing a slight squint, when the magician rose to the
top of her powers. She conjured with a silver coin, and of course let
the child play with her watch. She had realized at a glance that those
things which would be considered as baby nonsense by an English boy of
ten, to this small dweller on the plain of Marathon were full of the
magic of the unknown. And at last:

“Throw me up an orange, Dion!” she cried. “I know there are two or three
left in the pannier.”

Dion bent down eagerly, rummaged and found an orange.

“Here!” he said. “Catch!”

He threw it up. She caught it with elaboration to astonish the boy.

“What are you going to do?” asked Dion.

“Throw me up your pocket-knife and you’ll see.”

Again he threw and she caught, while the boy’s mouth gaped.

“Now then!” cried Rosamund.

She set to work, and almost directly had introduced her astounded guest
of the Greek kingdom to the famous “Crossing the Channel” tragedy.

So great was the effect of this upon little Miltiades,--so they both
always called the boy when talking of him in after times,--that he began
to perspire, and drops of saliva fell from the corners of his small and
pouting mouth in imitation of the dreadfully human orange by which he
was confronted. Thereupon Rosamund threw off all ceremony and frankly
played the mother. She drew the boy, smiling, sideways to her, wiped his
mouth with her handkerchief, gently blew his small nose and gave him a
warm kiss.

“There!” she said.

And upon this the child made a remark.

Neither of them ever knew what it meant. It was long, and sounded
like an explanation. Having spoken, Miltiades suddenly looked shy. He
wriggled towards the top of the ladder. Dion thought that Rosamund would
try to stop him from leaving her, but she did not. On the contrary,
she drew up her legs and made way for him, carefully. The child deftly
descended, picked up his staff and turned. The dog, barking joyously,
had leaped after him, and now gamboled around him. For a moment the
child hesitated, and in that moment Dion popped the remains of their
lunch into his coat pockets; then slowly he walked to the side of the
tumulus by which he had come up. There he stood for two or three minutes
staring once more up at Rosamund. She waved a friendly hand to him,
boyishly, Dion thought. He smiled cautiously, then confidentially,
suddenly turned and bolted down the slope uttering little cries--and so
away once more to the far-off cattle on the old battlefield, followed by
his curly dog.

When Dion had watched him into the distance, beyond which lay the
shining glory of the sea, and looked up to Rosamund again, she was
pulling the little dry leaves from her undulating hair.

“I’m all brushwood,” she said, “and I love it.”

“So do I.”

“I ought to have been born a shepherdess. Why do you look at me like
that?”

“Perhaps because I’m seeing a new girl who’s got even more woman in her
than I knew till to-day.”

“Most women are like that, Dion, when they get the chance.”

“To think you knew all those tricks and never told me!”

“Help me down.”

He stretched out his arms to her. When she was on the ground he still
held her for a moment.

“You darling!” he whispered. “Never shall I forget this day at Marathon,
the shining, the child, and you--you!”

They did not talk much on the long ride homeward. The heat was great,
but they were not afraid of it, for the shining fires of this land on
the edge of the east cherished and did not burn them. The white dust lay
deep on the road, and flew in light clouds from under the feet of their
horses as they rode slowly upwards, leaving the blue of their pastoral
behind them, and coming into the yellow of the pine woods. Later, as
they drew nearer to Athens, the ancient groves of the olives, touched
with a gentle solemnity, would give them greeting; the fig trees and
mulberry trees would be about them, and the long vineyards watched over
by the aristocratic cypress lifting its dark spire to the sun. But now
the kingdom of the pine trees joyously held them. They were in the happy
woods in which even to breathe was sheer happiness. Now and then they
pulled up and looked back to the crescent-shaped plain which held a
child instead of armies. They traced the course of the river marked
out by the reeds and sedges. They saw the tiny dark specks, which were
cattle grazing, with the wonder of blue beyond them. In these moments,
half-unconsciously, they were telling memory to lay in its provision
for the future. Perhaps they would never come back; never again would
Rosamund rest in her brushwood chamber, never again would Dion hear the
dry music above him, and feel the growth of his love, the urgency of
its progress just as he had felt them that day. They might be intensely
happy, but exactly the same happiness would probably not be theirs again
through all the years that were coming. The little boy and his dog had
doubtless gone out of their lives for ever. Their good-by to Marathon
might well be final. They looked back again and again, till the blue
of the sea was lost to them. Then they rode on, faster. The horses
knew they were going homeward, and showed a new liveliness, sharing the
friskiness of the little graceful trees about them. Now and then the
riders saw some dusty peasants--brown and sun-dried men wearing the
fustanella, and shoes with turned-up toes ornamented with big black
tassels; women with dingy handkerchiefs tied over their heads;
children who looked almost like the spawn of the sun in their healthy,
bright-eyed brownness. And these people had cheerful faces. Their rustic
lot seemed enviable. Who would not shed his sorrows under these pine
trees, in the country where the solitudes radiated happiness, and even
bareness was like music? Here was none of the heavy and exotic passion,
none of the lustrous and almost morbid romance of the true and distant
East, drowsy with voluptuous memories. That setting was not for
Rosamund. Here were a lightness, a purity and sweetness of Arcadia, and
people who looked both intelligent and simple.

At a turn of the road they met some Vlachs--rascally wanderers, lean as
greyhounds, chicken-stealers and robbers in the night, yet with a sort
of consecration of careless cheerfulness upon them. They called out.
In their cries there was the sound of a lively malice. Their brown feet
stirred up the dust and set it dancing in the sunshine, a symbol surely
of their wayward, unfettered spirits. A little way off, on a slope among
the trees, their dark tents could be partially seen.

“Lucky beggars!” murmured Dion, as he threw them a few small coins,
while Rosamund smiled at them and waved her hand in answer to their
greetings. “I believe it’s the ideal life to dwell in the tents.”

“It seems so to-day.”

“Won’t it to-morrow? Won’t it when we are in London?”

“Perhaps more than ever then.”

Was she gently evading an answer? They had reached the brow of the hill
and put their horses to a canter. The white dust settled over them. They
were like millers on horseback as they left the pine woods behind them.
But the touch of the dust was as the touch of nature upon their faces
and hands. They would not have been free of it as they rode towards
Athens, and came to the region of the vineyards, of the olive groves and
the cypresses. Now and then they passed ramshackle cafes made of boards
roughly nailed together anyhow, with a straggle of vine sprawling over
them, and the earth for a flooring. Tables were set out before them,
or in their shadows; a few bottles were visible within; on benches or
stools were grouped Greeks, old and young, busily talking, no doubt
about politics. Carts occasionally passed by the riders, sending out
dust to mingle with theirs. Turkeys gobbled at them, dogs barked in
front of one-storied houses. They saw peasants sitting sideways on
pattering donkeys, and now and then a man on horseback. By thin runlets
of water were women, chattering as they washed the clothes of their
households. Then again, the horses came into the bright and solitary
places where the cheerful loneliness of Greece held sway.

And so, at last they cantered into the outskirts of Athens when the
evening was falling. Another day had slipped from them. But both felt it
was a day which they had known very well, had realized with an unusual
fulness.

“It’s been a day of days!” Dion said that evening.

And Rosamund nodded assent.

A child had been in that day, and, with a child’s irresistible might,
had altered everything for them. Now Dion knew how Rosamund would be
with a child of her own, and Rosamund knew that Dion loved her more
deeply because he had seen her with a child. A little messenger had
come to them over the sun-dried plain of Marathon bearing a gift of
knowledge.

The next day they spent quietly. In the morning they visited the
National Museum, and in the late afternoon they returned to the
Acropolis.

In the Museum Rosamund was fascinated by the tombs. She, who always
seemed so remote from sorrow, who, to Dion, was the personification of
vitality and joyousness, was deeply moved by the record of death, by
the wonderfully restrained, and yet wonderfully frank, suggestion of the
grief of those who, centuries ago, had mingled their dust with the dust
of the relations, the lovers, the friends, whom they had mourned for.

“What a lesson this is for me!” she murmured at last, after standing for
a long while wrapped in silence and contemplation.

“Why for you, specially?” he asked.

She looked up at him. There were tears in her eyes. He believed she
was hesitating, undecided whether to let him into a new chamber of her
being, or whether to close a half-opened door against him.

“It’s very difficult to submit, I think, for some of us,” she answered,
after a pause, slowly. “Those old Greeks must have known how to do it.”

“To submit to sorrow?”

“Yes, to a great sorrow. Such a thing is like an attack in the dark. If
I am attacked I want to strike back and hurt.”

“But whom could you reasonably hurt on account of a death that came in
the course of nature? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

After a slight hesitation she said:

“Do you mean that you don’t think we can hurt God?”

“I wonder,” Dion answered.

“I don’t. I know we can.”

She looked again at the tomb before which they were standing. It showed
a woman seated and stretching out her right arm, which a woman friend
was touching. In the background was another, contemplative, woman and
a man wearing a chaplet of leaves, his hand lifted to his face. For
epitaph there was one word cut in marble.

“It means farewell, doesn’t it?” asked Rosamund.

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you’ll smile, but I think these tombs are the most beautiful
things I have seen in Greece. It’s a miracle--their lack of violence.
What a noble thing grief could be. That little simple word. It’s great
to be able to give up the dearest thing with that one little word. But I
couldn’t--I couldn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I know, because I didn’t.”

She said nothing more on the subject that morning, but when they were
on the Acropolis waiting, as so often before, for the approach of the
evening, she returned to it. Evidently it was haunting her that day.

“I believe giving up nobly is a much finer thing than attaining nobly,”
 she said. “And yet attaining wins all the applause, and giving up, if it
gets anything, only gets that ugly thing--pity.”

“But is pity an ugly thing?” said Dion.

He had a little stone in his hand, and, as he spoke, he threw it gently
towards the precipice, taking care not to send it over the edge.

“I think I would rather have anything on earth from people than their
pity.”

“Suppose I were to pity you because I loved you?”

He picked up another stone and held it in his hand.

“I should hate it.”

He had lifted his hand for the throw, but he kept hold of the stone.

“What, pity that came straight out of love?”

“Any sort of pity.”

“You must be very proud--much prouder than I am then. If I were unhappy
I should wish to have pity from you.”

“Perhaps you have never been really unhappy.”

Dion laid the stone down. He thought hard for a moment.

“Without any hope at all of a change back to happiness--no, actually I
never have.”

“Ah, then you’ve never had to brace up and see if you could find a
strong voice to utter your ‘farewell’!”

She spoke with firmness, a firmness that rang like true metal struck
with a hammer and giving back sincerity.

“That sounds tremendously Doric,” he said.

His lips were smiling, but there was an almost surprised expression in
his eyes.

“Dion, do you know you’re intuitive to-day?”

“Ah, your training--your training!”

“Didn’t you say we should have to be Doric ourselves if----?”

“Come, Rosamund, it’s time for the Parthenon.”

Once more they went over the uneven ground to stand before its solemn
splendor.

“Shall we have learnt before we go?” said Dion.

“It’s strange, but I think the tombs teach me more. They’re more within
my reach. This is so tremendous that it’s remote. Perhaps a man, or--or
a boy----”

She looked at him.

“A boy?”

“Yes.”

He drew her down. She clasped her hands, that looked to him so capable
and so pure, round her knees.

“A boy? Go on, Rose.”

“He might learn his lesson here, with a man to help him. The Parthenon’s
tremendously masculine. Perhaps women have to learn from the gentleness
of those dear tombs.”

Never before had she seemed to him so soft, so utterly soft of nature.

“You’ve been thinking a great deal to-day of our boy, haven’t you?” he
said.

“Yes.”

“Suppose we did have a boy and lost him?”

“Lost him?”

Her voice sounded suddenly almost hostile.

“Such a thing has happened to parents. It might happen to us.”

“I don’t believe it would happen to me,” Rosamund said, with a sort of
curious, almost cold decision.

“But why not?”

“What made you think of such a thing?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps it was because of what you said this morning
about grief, and then about bracing up and finding a firm voice to utter
one’s ‘farewell.’”

“You don’t understand what a woman would feel who lost her child.”

“Are you sure that you do?”

“Partly. Quite enough to----Don’t let us speak about it any more.”

“No. There’s nothing more futile than imagining horrors that are never
coming upon us.”

“I never do it,” she said, with resolute cheerfulness. “But we shall
very soon have to say one ‘farewell.’”

“To the Parthenon?”

“Yes.”

“Say it to-night!”

She turned round to face him.

“To-night? Why?”

“For a little while.”

A sudden happy idea had come to him. A shadow had fallen over her for
a moment. He wanted to drive it away, to set her again in the full
sunshine for which she was born, and in which, if he could have his
will, she should always dwell.

“You wanted to take me away somewhere.”

“Yes. You must see a little more of Greece before we go home. Say your
‘farewell,’ Rosamund.”

She did not know what was in his mind, but she obeyed him, and, looking
up at the great marble columns, glowing with honey-color and gold in the
afternoon light, she murmured:

“Farewell.”

On the following day they left Athens and set out on the journey to
Olympia.



CHAPTER V

“Why are you bringing me to Olympia?”

That question, unuttered by her lips, was often in Rosamund’s eyes as
they drew near to the green wilds of Elis. Of course they had always
meant to visit Olympia before they sailed away to England, but she knew
very well that Dion had some special purpose in his mind, and that it
was closely connected with his great love of her. She had understood
that on the Acropolis, and her “farewell” had been an act of submission
to his will not wholly unselfish. Her curiosity was awake.

What was the secret of Olympia?

They had gone by train to Patras, slept there, and thence rode
on horseback to Pyrgos through the vast vineyards of the
Peloponnesus--vineyards that stretched down to the sea and were dotted
with sentinel cypresses. The heat was much greater than it had been in
Athens. Enormous aloes hedged gardens from which came scents that seemed
warm. The sandy soil, turned up by the horses’ feet, was hot to the
touch. The air quivered, and was shot with a music of insects faint but
pervasive.

Pyrgos was suffocating and noisy, but Rosamund was amused by democracy
at close quarters, showing its naked love of liberty. Her strong
humanity rose to the occasion, and she gave herself with a smiling
willingness to the streets, in which men, women, children and animals,
with lungs of leather, sent forth their ultimate music. Nevertheless,
she was glad when she and Dion set out again, and followed the banks of
the Alpheus, leaving the cries of the city behind them. It seemed to her
that they were traveling to some hidden treasure, secluded in the folds
of a green valley where the feet of men seldom, if ever, came. Dion’s
eyes told her that they were drawing nearer and nearer to the secret he
knew of, and was going to reveal to her. She often caught him looking
at her with an almost boyish expression of loving anticipation; and more
than once he laughed happily when he saw her question, but he would not
give her an answer.

Peasants worked in the vineyards, shoulder-high in the plants, brown and
sweating in the glare. Swarthy children, with intelligent eyes, often
with delicate noses, and those pouting lips which are characteristic of
many Greek statues, ran to stare at them, and sometimes followed them a
little way, but without asking for alms. Then the solitudes took them,
and they wound on and on, with their guide as their only companion.

He was a gentle, even languid-looking youth, called Nicholas Agathoulos,
who was a native of Patras, but who had lived a good deal in Athens,
who spoke a few words of English and French, and who professed a deep
passion for Lord Byron. Nicholas rode on a mule, leading, or not leading
as the case might be--for he was a charmingly careless person--a
second mule on which was fastened Rosamund’s and Dion’s scanty luggage.
Rosamund, like a born vagabond, was content to travel in this glorious
climate with scarcely any impedimenta. When Nicholas was looked at he
smiled peacefully under his quiet and unpretending black mustache. When
he was not looked at he seemed to sleep with open eyes. He never sang
or whistled, had no music at all in him; but he could quote stanzas from
“Don Juan” in Greek, and, when he did that, he woke up, sparks of fire
glowed in his eyes, and his employers realized that he shared to the
full the patriotism of his countrymen.

Did he know the secret of Olympia which Dion was concealing so
carefully, and enjoying so much, as the little train of pilgrims wound
onwards among fruit trees and shrubs of arbutus, penetrating farther and
ever farther into a region sweet and remote? Of course he must know it.

“I shall ask Nicholas,” Rosamund said once to Dion, perversely.

“What?”

“You know perfectly well what.”

His face was a map of innocence as he touched his thin horse with the
whip and rode forward a little faster.

“What is there to see at Olympia, Nicholas?” she said, speaking rather
loudly in order that Dion might hear.

Nicholas woke up, and hastily, in a melodious voice, quoted some scraps
of guide-book. Rosamund did not find what she wanted among them. She
knew already about the ruins, about the Nike of Paeonius and the Hermes
of Praxiteles. So she left the young Greek to his waking dream, and
possessed her soul in a patience that was not difficult. She liked to
dwell in anticipation. And she felt that any secret this land was about
to reveal to her would be, must be, beautiful. She trusted Greece.

“We aren’t far off now,” said Dion presently, as they rode up the
valley--a valley secluded from the world, pastoral and remote, shaded by
Judas trees.

“How peaceful and lovely it is.”

“And full of the echoes of the Pagan feet which once trod here.”

“I don’t hear them,” said Rosamund, “and I am listening.”

“Perhaps you could never hear Pagan echoes. And yet you love Greece.”

“Yes. But I have nothing Pagan in me. I know that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You are the ideal woman to be in Greece
with. If I don’t come back to Greece with you, I shall never come back.”

They rode on. Her horse was following his along the windings of the
river. Presently she said:

“Where are we going to sleep? Surely there isn’t a possible inn in
this remoteness?--or have they build one for travelers who come here in
winter and spring?”

“Our inn will be a little above Olympia.”

The green valley seemed closing about them, as if anxious to take them
to itself, to keep them in its closest intimacy, with a gentle jealousy.
Rosamund had a sensation, almost voluptuous, of yielding to the pastoral
greenness, to the warm stillness, to the hush of the delicate wilds.

“Elis! Elis!” she whispered to herself. “I am riding up into Elis, where
once the processions passed to the games, where Nero built himself a
mansion. And there’s a secret here for me.”

Then suddenly there came into her mind the words in the “Paradiso” which
she had been dreaming over in London on the foggy day when Dion had
asked her to marry him.

The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence from warm love and living hope
which conquereth the Divine will.

It was strange that the words should come to her just then. She could
not think why they came. But, repeating them to herself, she felt how
very far off she was from Paganism. Yet she had within her warm love
surely and living hope. Could such things, as they were within her, ever
do violence to the Kingdom of Heaven? She looked between her horse’s
perpetually moving ears at the hollow athletic back of her young
husband. If she had not married she would have given rein to deep
impulses within her which now would never be indulged. They would not
have led her to Greece. If she had been governed by them she would never
have been drawn on by the secret of Olympia. How strange it was that,
within the compass of one human being, should be contained two widely
differing characters. Well, she had chosen, and henceforth she must live
according to the choice she had made. But how would she have been in
the other life of which she had dreamed so often, and so deeply, in her
hours of solitude? She would never know that. She had chosen the warm
love and the living hope, but the Kingdom of Heaven should never suffer
violence from anything she had chosen. There are doubtless many ways of
consecrating a life, of rendering service.

They came into a scattered and dingy hamlet. Hills rose about it, but
the narrowing valley still wound on.

“We are close to the ruins,” said Dion.

“Already! Where are we going to sleep?”

“Up there!”

He pointed to a steep hill that was set sheer above the valley.

“Go on with the mules, Nicholas.”

Nicholas rode on, smiling.

“What’s that building on the hump?”

“The Museum.”

“I wonder why they put the inn so far away.”

“It isn’t really very far, not many minutes from here. But the way’s
pretty steep. Now then, Rosamund!”

They set their horses to the task. Nicholas and the mules were out of
sight. A bend of the little track had hidden them.

“Why, there’s a village up here!” said Rosamund, as they came to a
small collection of houses with yards and rough gardens and scattered
outbuildings.

“Yes--Drouva. Our inn is just beyond it, but quite separated from it.”

“I’m glad of that. They don’t bother very much about cleanliness here, I
should think.”

He was smiling at her now. His lips were twitching under his mustache,
and his eyes seemed trying not to tell something to her.

“Surely the secret isn’t up here?”

He shook his head, still smiling, almost laughing.

They were now beyond the village, and emerged on a plateau of rough
short grass which seemed to dominate the world.

“This is the top of the hill of Drouva,” said Dion, with a ring of joy,
and almost of pride, in his voice. “And there’s our inn, the Inn of
Drouva.”

Rosamund pulled up her horse. She did not say a word. She just looked,
while her horse lowered his head and sniffed the air in through his
twitching nostrils. Then he sent forth a quivering neigh, his welcome to
the Inn of Drouva. The view was immense, but Rosamund was not looking
at it. A small dark object not far off in the foreground of this great
picture held her eyes. For the moment she saw little or nothing else.

She saw a dark, peaked tent pitched in the middle of the plateau. Smoke
from a fire curled up behind it. Two or three figures moved near it.
Beyond, Nicholas was unloading the mules.

She dropped the cord by which she had been guiding her horse and slipped
down to the ground. Her legs were rather stiff from riding. She held on
to the saddle for a moment.

“A camp?” she said at last.

Dion was beside her.

“An awfully rough one.”

“How jolly!”

She said the words almost solemnly.

“Dion, you are a brick!” she added, after a pause. “I’ve never stayed in
camp before. A real brick! But you always are.”

“Aren’t you coming into the camp?”

She put her hand on his arm and kept him back.

“No--wait! What did you mean by shaking your head when I asked you if
the secret was up here?”

“This isn’t the real secret. It wasn’t because of this that I asked you
suddenly on the Acropolis to say ‘farewell’ to the Parthenon.”

“There’s another secret?”

“There’s another reason, the real reason, why I hurried you to Olympia.
But I’m going to let you find it out for yourself. I shan’t tell you
anything.”

“But how shall I know when----?”

“You will know.”

“To-day?”

“Don’t you think we might stay on our hill-top till to-morrow?”

“Yes, all right. It’s glorious here; I won’t be impatient. But how could
you manage to get the tent here before we came?”

“We’ve been two nights on the way, Patras and Pyrgos. That gave plenty
of time to the magician to work the spell. Come along.”

This time she did not hold him back. Her eagerness was as great as his.
Certainly it was a very ordinary camp, scarcely, in fact, a camp at all.
The tent was small and of the roughest kind, but there were two neat
little camp-beds within it, with their toes planted on the short dry
grass. In the iron washhand stand were a shining white basin and a jug
filled with clear water. There was a cake of remarkable pink soap with a
strange and piercing scent; there was a “tooth glass”; there was a straw
mat.

“What isn’t there?” cried Rosamund, who was almost as delighted as a
child.

A grave and very handsome gentleman from Athens, Achilles Stavros
by name, received her congratulations with a classical smile of
satisfaction.

“He’s even got a genuine Greek nose for the occasion!” Rosamund said
delightedly to Dion, when Achilles retired for a moment to give some
instructions about tea to the cook. “Where did you find him?”

“That’s my secret.”

“I never realised how delicious a camp was before. My wildest dreams are
surpassed.”

As they looked at the two small, hard chairs with straw bottoms which
were solemnly set out side by side facing the view, and upon which
Achilles expected them to sink voluptuously for the ritual of tea, they
broke into laughter at Rosamund’s exaggerated expressions of
delight. But directly she was able to stop laughing she affirmed with
determination:

“I don’t care what anybody says, or thinks; I repeat it”--she glanced
from the straw mat to the cake of anemic pink soap--“my wildest dreams
are surpassed. To think”--she spread out her hands--“only to think of
finding a tooth glass here! It’s--it’s admirable!”

She turned upon him an almost fanatical eye, daring contradiction; and
they both laughed again, long and loud like two children who, suddenly
aware of a keen physical pleasure, prolong it beyond all reasonable
bounds.

“What are we going to have for tea?” she asked.

“Tea,” Dion cried.

“You ridiculous creature!”

From a short distance, Achilles gazed upon the merriment of theses
newly-married English travelers. Nobody had told him they were newly
married; he just knew it, had known it at a glance. As he watched, the
laughter presently died away, and he saw the two walk forward to the
edge of the small plateau, then stand still to gaze at the view.

The prospect from the hill of Drouva above Olympia is very great, and
all Rosamund’s inclination to merriment died out of her as she looked
upon it. Even her joy in the camp was forgotten for a moment.

Upon their plateau, sole guests of the bareness, stood two small olive
trees, not distorted by winds. Rosamund leaned against one of them
as she gazed, put her arms round it with a sort of affectionate
carelessness that was half-protective, that seemed to say, “You dear
little tree! How nice of you to be here. But you almost want taking care
of.” Then the tree was forgotten, and the Hellenic beauty reigned over
her spirit, as she gazed upon the immense pastoral bounded by mountains
and the sea; a green wilderness threaded by a serpentine river of
silver--a far-flung river which lingered on its way, journeying hither
and thither, making great curves as if it loved the wilderness
and wished to know it well, to know all of it before being merged
irrevocably with the sea.

“Those are the valleys of the Kladeos and the Alpheios.”

“Yes.”

“And that far-off Isle is the Island of Zante.”

“Of Zante,” she repeated.

After a long pause she said:

“You know those words somewhere in the Bible--‘the wilderness and the
solitary places’?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve always loved them, just those words. Even when I was quite a
child I liked to say them. And I remember once, when I was staying at
Sherrington, we drove over to the cathedral. Canon Wilton took us into
the stalls. It was a week-day and there were very few people. The anthem
was Wesley’s ‘The Wilderness.’ I had never heard it before, and when I
heard those words--my words--being sung, I had such a queer thrill. I
wanted to cry and I was startled. To most people, I suppose, the word
wilderness suggests something dreary and parched, ugly desolation.”

“Yes. The scapegoat was driven out into the wilderness.”

“I think I’d rather take _my_ sin into the wilderness than anywhere
else. Purification might be found there.”

“_Your_ sin!” he said. “As if----” He was silent.

Zante seemed sleeping in the distance of the Ionian Sea, far away as
the dream from which one has waked, touched with a dream’s mystic
remoteness. The great plain, stretching to mountains and sea, vast and
green and lonely--but with the loneliness that smiles, desiring nothing
else--seemed uninhabited. Perhaps there were men in it, laboring among
the vineyards or toiling among the crops, women bending over the earth
by which they lived, or washing clothes on the banks of the river.
Rosamund did not look for them and did not see them. In the green
landscape, over which from a distance the mountains kept their quiet and
deeply reserved watch, she detected no movement. Even the silver of
the river seemed immobile, as if its journeyings were now stilled by an
afternoon spell.

“It’s as empty as the plain of Marathon, but how much greater!” she said
at last.

“At Marathon there was the child.”

“Yes, and here there’s not even a child.”

She sighed.

“I wonder what one would learn to be if one lived on the hill of
Drouva?” she said.

“It will be much more beautiful at sunset. We are looking due west. Soon
we shall have the moon rising behind us.”

“What memories I shall carry away!”

“And I.”

“You were here before alone?”

“Yes. I walked up from the village just before sunset after a long day
among the ruins. I--I didn’t know then of your existence. That seems
strange.”

But she was gazing at the view, and now with an earnestness in which
there seemed to him to be a hint of effort, as if she were, perhaps,
urging imagination to take her away and to make her one with that on
which she looked. It struck him just then that, since they had been
married, she had changed a good deal, or developed. A new dreaminess had
been added to her power and her buoyancy which, at times, made her very
different from the radiant girl he had won.

“The Island of Zante!” she said once more, with a last look at the sea,
as they turned away in answer to the grave summons of Achilles. “Ah,
what those miss who never travel!”

“And yet I remember your saying once that you had very little of the
normal in you, and even something about the cat’s instinct.”

“Probably I meant the cat’s instinct to say nasty things. Every woman--”

“No, what you meant--”

He began actually to explain, but her “Puss, Puss, Puss!” stopped him.
Her dream was over and her laugh rang out infectiously as they returned
to the tent.

The tea was fairly bad, but she defended its merits with energy, and
munched biscuits with an excellent appetite. Afterwards she smoked a
cigarette and Dion his pipe, sitting on the ground and leaning against
the tent wall. In vain Achilles drew her attention to the chairs.
Rosamund stretched out her long limbs luxuriously and shook her head.

“I’m not a school-teacher, Achilles,” she said.

And Dion had to explain what she meant perhaps--only perhaps, for he
wasn’t sure about it himself,--to that classical personage.

“These chairs fight against the whole thing,” she said, when Achilles
was gone.

“I’ll hide them,” said Dion.

He was up in a moment, caught hold of the chairs, gripping one in each
hand, and marched off with them. When he came back Rosamund was no
longer sitting on the ground by the tent wall. She had slipped away. He
looked round. She must have gone beyond the brow of the hill, for she
was not on the plateau. He hesitated, pulling hard at his pipe. He knew
her curious independence, knew that sometimes she wanted to be alone.
No doubt she had gone to look at the great view from some hidden place.
Well, then, he ought not to try to find her, he ought to respect her
wish to be by herself. But this evening it hurt him. As he stood there
he felt wounded, for he remembered telling her that the great view would
be much more beautiful at sunset when the moon would be rising behind
them. The implication of course had been, “Wait a little and I’ll
show you.” It was he who had chosen the place for the camp, he who had
prepared the surprise. Perhaps foolishly, he had thought of the whole
thing, even of the plain, the river, the mountains, the sea and the
Island of Zante, as a sort of possession which he was going gloriously
to share with her. And now----! He felt deprived, almost wronged. The
sky was changing. He turned and looked to the east. Above Olympia, in
a clear and tremulous sky, a great silver moon was rising. It was his
hour, and she had hidden herself.

Again, at that moment, Dion felt almost afraid of his love.

His pipe had gone out. He took it from his lips, bent, and knocked out
the tobacco against the heel of his boot. He was horribly disappointed,
but he was not going to search for Rosamund; nor was he ever going to
let her know of his disappointment. Perhaps by concealing it he would
kill it. He thrust his pipe into his pocket, hesitated, then walked a
little way from the camp and sat down on the side of the hill. What rot
it was his always wanting to share everything now. Till he met Rosamund
he had always thought only women could never be happy unless they shared
their pleasures, and preferably with a man. Love apparently could
play the very devil, bridge the gulf between sexes, make a man who was
thoroughly masculine in all his tastes and habits have “little feelings”
 which belonged properly only to women.

Doric! Suddenly the word jumped up in his mind, and a vision of the
Parthenon columns rose before his imagination, sternly glorious, almost
with the strength of a menace. He set his teeth together and cursed
himself for a fool and a backslider.

Rosamund and he were to be Doric. Well, this evening he didn’t know
exactly what he was, but he certainly was not Doric.

Just then he heard the sound of a shot. He did not know what direction
it came from, but, fantastically enough, it seemed to be a comment on
his thought, a brusk, decisive exclamation flung at him from out of the
silent evening. “Sentimentalist! Take that, and get out of your mush
of feeling!” As he recognized it--he now forced himself to that
sticking-point--to be a mush, the shot’s comment fell in, of course,
with his own view of the matter.

He sat still for a moment, thinking of the shot, and probably expecting
it to be repeated. It was not repeated. A great silence prevailed, the
silence of the Hellenic wild held in the hand of evening. And abruptly,
perhaps, from that large and pervasive silence, Dion caught a coldness
of fear. All his perceptions rushed upon him, an acute crowd. He sprang
up, put his hand to his revolver. Rosamund out alone somewhere in the
loneliness of Greece--evening--a shot!

He was over the brow of the hill towards the west in a moment. All
respect for Rosamund’s evening whim, all remembrance of his own proper
pride, was gone from him.

“Rosamund!” he called; “Rosamund!”

“Here!” replied her strong voice from somewhere a little way below him.

And he saw her standing on the hillside and looking downwards. He thrust
his revolver back into his pocket quickly. Already his pride was pushing
its head up again. He stood still, looking down on her.

“It’s all right, it is?”

This time she lifted her head and turned her face up to him.

“All right?”

“I heard a shot.”

He saw laughter dawning in her face.

“You don’t mean to say----?”

She laughed frankly.

“Come down here!”

He joined her.

“What was it?”

“Did you, or didn’t you, think I’d been attacked by Greek brigands?”

“Of course not! But I heard a shot, and it just struck me----”

At that moment he was almost ashamed of loving her so much.

“Well, there’s the brigand, and I do believe he’s going to shoot again.
The ruffian! Yes, he’s taking aim! Oh, Dion, let’s seek cover.”

Still laughing, she shrank against him. He put one arm round her
shoulder bruskly, and his hand closed on her tightly. A little way below
them, relieved with a strange and romantic distinctness against the
evening light, in which now there was a strong suggestion of gold, was
a small figure, straight, active--a figure of the open air and the wide
spaces--with a gun to its right shoulder. A shot rang out.

“He’s got it,” said Rosamund.

And there was a note of admiring praise in her voice.

“That child’s a dead shot,” she added. “It’s quail he’s after, I
believe. Look! He’s picking it up.”

The small black figure bent quickly down, after running forward a little
way.

“He retrieves as well as he shoots. Shall we go to him and see whether
it’s quail?”

“Another child,” said Dion.

He still had his arm round her shoulder.

“Why did you come here?” he asked.

“To look at the evening coming to me over the wilderness. But he made me
forget it for a moment.”

Dion was staring at her now.

“I believe a child could make you forget anything,” he said.

“Let’s go to him.”

The gold of the evening was strengthening and deepening. The vast view,
which was the background to the child’s little figure, was losing its
robe of green and of blue, green of the land, blue of the sea, was
putting on velvety darkness and gold. The serpentine river was a long
band of gold flung out, as if by a careless enchanter, towards the
golden sea in which Zante was dreaming. Remote and immense this land
had seemed in the full daytime, a tremendous pastoral deserted by
men, sufficient to itself and existing only for its own beauty. Now it
existed for a child. The human element had caused nature, as it were,
to recede, to take the second place. A child, bending down to pick up a
shot quail, then straightening up victoriously, held the vast panorama
in submission, as if he had quietly given out the order, “Make me
significant.” And Rosamund, who had stolen away to meet the evening, was
now only intent on knowing whether the shot bird was a quail or not.

It was a quail, and a fat one.

When they came to the boy they found him a barefooted urchin, with
tattered coarse clothes and densely thick, uncovered black hair growing
down almost to his fiery young eyes, which stared at them proudly. There
was a wild look in those eyes never to be found in the eyes of a dweller
in cities, a wild grace in his figure, and a complete self-possession in
his whole bearing. The quail just shot he had in his hand. Another was
stuffed into the large pocket of his jacket. He pulled it out and showed
it to them, reading at a glance the admiration in Rosamund’s eyes. Dion
held out a hand to the boy’s gun, but at this his manner changed, he
clutched it tightly, moved a step or two back, and scowled.

“He’s a regular young savage,” said Dion.

“I like him as he is. Besides, why should he give his gun to a stranger?
He knows nothing about us.”

“You’re immense!” said Dion, laughing.

“Let’s have the quail for our dinner.”

“D’you expect him to give them to us without a stand-up fight and
probably bloodshed? For he’s armed, unfortunately!”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Look here, Dion, you go off for a minute, and
leave him with me. I think you get on his nerves.”

“Well, I’m----!”

But he went. He left the two figures together, and presently saw them
both from a distance against the vastness of the gold. Bushes and
shrubs, and two or three giant pine trees, between the summit of Drouva
and the plain, showed black, and the figures of woman and child were
almost ebon. Dion watched them. He could not see any features. The
two were now like carved things which could move, and only by their
movements could they tell him anything. The gun over the boy’s shoulder
was like a long finger pointing to the west where a redness was creeping
among the gold. The great moon climbed above Drouva. Bluish-gray smoke
came from the camp-fire at a little distance. It ascended without
wavering straight up in the windless evening. Far down in the hidden
valley, behind Dion and below the small village, shadows were stealing
through quiet Elis, shadows were coming to shroud the secret that was
held in the shrine of Olympia. A slight sound of bells stole up on the
stillness from somewhere below, somewhere not far from those two ebon
figures. And this sound, suggestive of moving animals coming from
pasture to protected places for the night, put a heart in the breast of
this pastoral. Thin was the sound and delicate, fit music for Greece
in the fragile evening. As Dion listened to it, he looked at that black
finger below him pointing to the redness in the west. Then he remembered
it was a gun, and, for an instant, looking at the red, he thought of the
color of fresh blood.

At this moment the tall figure, Rosamund, took hold of the gun, and the
two figures moved away slowly down the winding track in the hill, and
were hidden at a turning of the path.

Almost directly a third shot rang out. The young dweller in the
wilderness was allowing Rosamund to give a taste of her skill with the
gun.



CHAPTER VI

Rosamund came back to the camp that evening with Dirmikis,--so the boy
of the wilderness was called,--and five quail, three of them to her gun.
She was radiant, and indeed had an air almost of triumph. Her eyes
were sparkling, her cheeks were glowing; she looked like a beautiful
schoolgirl as she walked in over the plateau with the sunset flushing
scarlet behind her, and the big moon coming to meet her. Dirmikis, at
her side, carried the quail upside down in his brown hands. Rosamund had
the gun under her right arm.

“It’s a capital gun,” she called out to Dion. “I got three. Here,
Dirmikis,”--she turned to the boy,--“show them.”

“Does he understand English?”

“No, but he understands me!” she retorted with pride. “Look there!”

Dirmikis held up the birds, smiling a savage smile.

“Aren’t they fat? Feel them, Dion! The three fattest ones fell to my
gun, but don’t tell _him_.”

She sketched a delicious wink, looking about sixteen.

“I really have a good eye,” she added, praising herself with gusto.
“It’s no use being over-modest, is it? If one has a gift, well one just
has it. Here, Dirmikis!”

She gave his gun carefully to the barefooted child.

“He’s a little stunner, and so chivalrous. I never met a boy I liked
more. Do give him a nice present, Dion, and let him feed in the camp if
he likes.”

“Well, what next? What am I to give him?”

“Nothing dressy. He isn’t a manikin, he’s a real Doric boy.”

She slapped Dirmikis on the back with a generous hand. He smiled
radiantly, this time without any savagery.

“The sort of boy who’ll be of some use in the world.”

“I’ll give him a tip.”

Rosamund seemed about to assent when an idea struck her, as she
afterwards said, “with the force of a bomb.”

“I know what he’ll like better than anything.”

“Well?”

“Your revolver, to be sure!”

“My revolver to be suren’t!” exclaimed Dion passionately, inventing a
negative. “I bought it at great cost to defend you with, not for the
endowment of a half-naked varmint from the wilderness under Drouva.”

“Be careful, Dion; you’re insulting a Doric boy!”

“Here--I’ll insult him with a ten-lepta piece.”

“Don’t be mean. Bribe him thoroughly if you’re going to bribe him. We go
shooting together again to-morrow evening.”

“Do you indeed?”

“Yes, directly after tea. It’s all arranged. Dirmikis suggested it with
the most charming chivalry, and I gave yes for an answer. So we must
keep on good terms with him at whatever cost.”

She cocked up her chin and walked exultantly into the tent. A minute
afterwards there rang out to the evening a warm contralto voice singing.

Dirmikis looked at the tent and then at Dion with an air of profound
astonishment. The quail dropped from his hands, and he did not even
snatch at them as he listened to the remarkable sounds which, he could
not doubt, flowed from his Amazon. His brows came down over his fiery
eyes, and he seemed to stand at gaze like an animal, half-fascinated
and half-suspicious. The voice died away and was followed by a sound of
pouring water. Then Dirmikis accepted two ten-lepta pieces and picked up
the quail. Dion introduced him to the cook, and it was understood that
he should be fed in the camp, and that the quail should form part of the
evening meal.

Very good they proved to be, cooked in leaves with the addition of
some fried slices of fat ham. Rosamund exulted again as she ate them,
recognizing the birds she had shot “by the taste.”

“This is one! Aren’t mine different from Dirmikis’s?” she exclaimed. “So
much more succulent!”

“Naturally, you great baby!”

“Life is glorious!” she exclaimed resonantly. “To eat one’s own bag on
the top of Drouva under the moon! Oh!”

She looked at the moon, then bent over her plate of metal-ware which
was set on the tiny folding-table. In her joy she was exactly like a big
child.

“I wonder how many I shall get to-morrow. I got my eye in at the very
start. Really, Dion, you know, I’m a gifted creature. It isn’t every
one----”

And she ran on, laughing at herself, reveling in her whimsical pretense
of conceit till dinner was over.

“Now a cigarette! Never have I enjoyed any meal so much as this! It’s
only out of doors that one gets hold of the real _joie de vivre_.”

“You’re never without it, thank God,” returned Dion, striking a match
for her.

So still was the evening that the flame burned steadily even upon that
height facing immensities. Rosamund leaned to it with the cigarette
between her lips. Her face was browned to the sun. She looked rather
like a splendid blonde gipsy, with loose yellow hair and the careless
eyes of those who dwell under smiling heavens. She sent out a puff of
cigarette smoke, directing it with ardor to the moon which now rode high
above them.

“I’d like to catch up nature in my arms to-night,” she said. “Come,
Dion, let’s go a little way.”

She was up, and put her arm through his like a comrade. He squeezed her
arm against his side and, strolling there in the night on the edge of
the hill, she talked at first with almost tumultuous energy, with an
energy as of an Amazon who cared for the things of the soul as much as
for the things of the body. To-night her body and soul seemed on the
same high level of intensity.

At first she talked of the present, of their life in Greece and of what
it had meant to her, what it had done for her; and then, always with her
arm through Dion’s, she began to talk of the future.

“We’ve got to go away from all this, but let us carry it with us; you
know, as one can carry things that one has really gathered up, really
got hold of. It will mean a lot to us afterwards in England, in our
regular humdrum life. Not that life’s ever humdrum. We must take Drouva
to England, and Marathon, and the view from the Acropolis, and the
columns of the Parthenon above all those, and the tombs.”

“But they’re sad.”

“We must take them. I’m quite sure the way to make life splendid, noble,
what it is meant to be to each of us, is to press close against
one’s heart all that is sent to one, the sorrows as well as the joys.
Everything one tries to keep at arm’s length hurts one.”

“Sins?”

“Sins, Dion? I said what is sent to us.”

“Don’t you think----?”

“Sins are never sent to us, we always have to go and fetch them. It’s
like that poor old chemist going round the corner in the fog with a jug
for what is ruining his life.”

“What poor old chemist?” he asked.

“A great friend of mine in London--Mr. Thrush. You shall know him some
day. Oh--but London! Now, Dion, can we, you and I, live perpetually in
London after all this?”

“Well, dearest, I must stick close to business.”

“I know that. And we’ve got the little house. But later on?”

“And your singing, your traveling all over the place with a maid!”

“I wonder if I shall. To-night I don’t feel as if I shall.”

She stood still abruptly, and was silent for a minute.

“Don’t you think,” she said, in a different and less exuberant voice,
and with a changed and less physical manner--“don’t you think sometimes,
in exceptional hours, one can feel what is to come, what is laid up for
one? I do. This is an exceptional hour. We are on the heights and it’s
very wonderful. Well, perhaps to-night we can feel what is coming. Let’s
try.”

“How?”

“Let’s just be quiet, and give ourselves up to the hill of Drouva, and
Greece, and the night, and--and what surrounds and permeates us and all
this.”

With a big and noble gesture she indicated the sleeping world far below
them, breathless under the moon; the imperceptible valleys merged in the
great plain through which the river, silver once more, moved unsleeping
between its low-lying banks to the sea; the ranges of mountains which
held themselves apart in the night, a great company, reserved and almost
austere, yet trodden with confidence by the feet of those fairies who
haunt the ancient lands; the sea which drew down the moon as a lover
draws down his mistress; Zante riding the sea like a shadow in harbor.

And they were silent. Dion had a sensation of consciously giving
himself, almost as a bather, to the sea. Did he feel what was coming to
him and to this girl at his side, who was part of him, and yet who was
alone, whose arm clasped his, yet whose soul dwelt far off in its own
remoteness? Would the years draw them closer and closer together, knit
them together, through greater knowledge, through custom, through shared
joys and beliefs, through common beliefs, through children, till they
were as branches growing out of one stem firmly rooted?

He gave himself and gave himself, or tried to give himself in the
silence. Yet he could not have said truly that any mystical knowledge
came to him. Only one thing he seemed strangely to know, that they would
never have children. The sleeping world and the sea, and, as Rosamund
had said, “what surrounds and permeates us and all this” seemed to
permit him mysteriously to get at that one bit of foreknowledge.
Something seemed to say to him, “You will be the father of one child.”
 And yet, when he came to think of it, he realized how probable, how
indeed almost certain it was that the silent voice issued from within
himself. Rosamund and he had talked about a child, a boy, had begun
almost to sketch out mental plans for that boy’s upbringing; they had
never talked about children. He believed that he had penetrated to the
secret of the voice. He said to himself, “All that sort of thing comes
out of one’s self. It doesn’t reach one from the outside.” And yet, when
he looked out over the world, which seemed wrapped in ethereal garments,
garments woven by spirit on looms no hand of woman or man might ever
touch, he was vaguely conscious that all within him which was of any
real value was there too. Surely he did not possess. Rather was he
possessed of.

He looked at Rosamund at last.

“Have you got anything?”

But she did not answer him. There was a great stillness in her big
eyes. All the vital exuberance of body and spirit mingled together had
vanished from her abruptly. Nothing of the Amazon who had captured the
heart of Dirmikis remained. As Dion looked at her now, he simply could
not see the beautiful schoolgirl of sixteen, the blonde gipsy who had
bent forward, cigarette in mouth, to his match, who had leaned back and
blown rings to the moon above Drouva. Had she ever set the butt of a gun
against her shoulder? Something in this woman’s eyes made him suddenly
feel as if he ought to leave her alone. Yet her arm still lay on his,
and she was his.

Against the silver of the moon the twisted trunks of the two small
olive trees showed black and significant. The red of the dying camp-fire
glowed not far from the tent. Dogs were barking in the hamlet of Drouva.
She neither saw details nor heard ugly sounds in the night. He knew
that. And the rest? It seemed to him that something of her, the spirit
of her, perhaps, or some part of it with which his had never yet had any
close contact, was awake and at work in the night. But though he held
her arm in his she was a long way from him. And there came to him this
thought:

“I felt as if I ought to leave her alone. But she has left me alone.”

Almost mechanically, and slowly, he straightened his arm, thus letting
hers slip. She did not seem to notice his action. She gazed out towards
Zante over a world that now looked very mystical. In the daylight it had
been a green pastoral. Now there was over it, and even surely in it, a
dim whiteness, a something pure and hushed, like the sound, remote and
curiously final, of a quiet sleeper.

That night, when they went to bed, Rosamund was full of the delight of
a new experience. She insisted that the flap of the tent should not be
kept shut down. She had never slept in a tent before, and was resolved
to look out and see the stars from her pillow.

“And my olive tree,” she added.

Obediently, as soon as she was in her camp-bed, Dion lifted the flap.
A candle was still burning, set on a chair between the two beds. As the
moonlight came in, Rosamund lifted herself on one arm, leaned over and
blew it out.

“How horrible moonlight makes candlelight,” she said.

Dion, in his pyjamas, was outside fastening back the flap, his bare feet
on the short dry grass.

“I can see the Pleiades!” she added earnestly.

“There!” said Dion.

He looked up at the sky.

“The Pleiades, the Great Bear, Mars.”

“Oh!” she drew in her breath. “A shooting star!”

She pressed her lips together and half-shut her eyes. By her contracted
forehead Dion saw that she was wishing almost fiercely. He believed he
read her wish. He had not seen the traveling star, and did not try to
wish with her, lest he should cross the path of the Fates and throw his
shadow on her desire.

He came softly into the tent which was full of the whiteness of the
moon. Sleeping thus with Rosamund in the bosom of nature was very
wonderful to him. It was like a sort of re-marriage. The moon and the
stars looking in made his relation to her quite new and more beautiful.

“I shall never forget Olympia,” he whispered, leaning over her.

He kissed her very gently, not with any passion. He had the feeling that
she would almost resent passion just then.

He got into his bed and lay with his arm crooked, his cheek in his hand.
Part of the Milky Way was visible to him, that dust of little stars
powdering the deep of the sky. If he, too, should see a falling star
to-night, dropping down towards the hidden sea, vanishing below the line
of the hill! Would he echo her wish?

“Are you sleepy, Rosamund?” he asked presently.

“No I don’t want to sleep. It would make me miss all the stars.”

“And if you’re tired to-morrow?”

“I shan’t be. I shan’t be tired while we are in camp. I should like
never to go to bed in a room again. I should like always to dwell in the
wilderness.”

He longed for the addition of just two words. They did not come. But
of course they were to be understood. There is no need to state things
known. The fact that she had let him bring her to the wilderness was
enough. The last words he heard Rosamund say that night were these,
almost whispered slowly to herself and to the stars:

“The wilderness--and--the solitary places.”

Very early in the morning she awoke while Dion was sleeping. She slipped
softly out of the little camp-bed, wrapped a cloak around her, and went
out to gaze at the dawn.

When they sat at breakfast she said:

“And now are you going to tell me the secret?”

“No. I’m going to let you find it out for yourself.”

“But if I can’t?”

“You will.”

They set off, about ten, down the hill on foot. The morning was very
still and already very hot. As they descended towards the basin in which
lies Olympia, heat ascended to meet them and to give them a welcome--a
soft and almost enticing heat like a breath from some green fastness
where strange marvels were secluded.

“Elis even smells remote,” Rosamund said.

“Are you sorry to leave the hill-top?” he asked.

“I was, but already I’m beginning to feel drawn on. There’s something
here--what is it?”

She looked at him.

“Something for you.”

“Specially for me?”

“Specially for you.”

“Hidden in the folds of the green. Where are we going first?”

“To the ruins.”

He was carrying their lunch in a straw pannier slung over his shoulder.

“We’ll lunch in the house of Nero, and rest there.”

“That sounds rather dreadful, Dion.”

“Wait till you see it.”

“I can’t imagine that monster in Elis.”

“He was a very artistic monster, you remember.”

“Like some of the decadents in London. Why is it that those who hate
moral beauty so often worship all the other beauties?”

“D’you think in their hearts they actually hate moral beauty?”

“Well, despise it, laugh at it, try to tarnish it.”

“Paganism!”

“Good heavens, no!”

And they both laughed as they went down the narrow path to the soft
green valley that awaited them, hushed in the breathless morning,
withdrawn among the hills, holding its memories of the athletic triumphs
of past ages. Near the Museum they stopped for a moment to look down on
the valley.

“Is the Hermes in there?” Rosamund asked, glancing at the closed and
deserted building.

“Yes.”

“What a strange and delicious home for him.”

“You shall visit him presently. There are jackals in this valley.”

“I didn’t hear any last night.”

She looked again at the closed door of the Museum.

“When do they open it?”

“Probably the guardian’s in there. That’s where he lives.”

He pointed to a small dwelling close to the museum. Just then a tiny
murmur of some far-away wind stirred the umbrella pines which stood
sentinel over the valley.

“Oh, Dion, what an exquisite sound!” she said.

She held up one hand like a listening child. There was awe in her eyes.

“This is a shrine,” she said, when the murmur failed. “Dion, I know you
planned to go first to the ruins.”

“Yes. They’re just below us. Look--by the river!”

“Let me see the Hermes first, just for a moment.”

Their eyes met. He thought she was reading his mind, though he tried to
keep it closed against her just then.

“Why are you in such a hurry?” he asked.

“I feel I must see it,” she answered, with a sort of sweet obstinacy.

He hesitated.

“Well, then--I’ll see if I can find the guardian.”

In a moment he came back with a smiling Greek who was holding a key. As
the man went to open the door, Dion said:

“Rose, will you follow my directions?”

“When?”

“Now, when you go into the Museum.”

“But aren’t you coming too?”

“Not now. I will when we’ve seen the ruins. When you go into the Museum
go straight through the vestibule where the Roman Emperors are. Don’t
turn to the right. In front of you you’ll see a hall with a wooden roof
and red walls. The ‘Victory’ is there. But don’t stay there. Go into the
small room beyond, the last room, and you mustn’t let the guardian go
with you.”

From behind came the sound of the big door being opened.

“Then that is the secret, and I knew about it all the time!”

“Knew about it--yes.”

She looked down on the green cup surrounded by hills, with its little
river where now two half-naked men were dragging with a hand-net for
fish. Again the tiny breath from the far-away wind stirred in the pine
trees, evoking soft sounds of Eternity. She turned away and went into
the Museum.

Left alone, Dion lifted the lunch-pannier from his shoulder and laid it
down on the ground. Then he sat down under one of the pine trees. A wild
olive grew very near it. He thought of the crown of wild olive which the
victors received in days when the valley resounded with voices and the
trampling of the feet of horses. He took off his hat and laid it beside
him on the ground by the lunch-pannier. One of the men in the river
cried out to his companion. Sheep-bells sounded softly down the valley.
Some peasants went by with a small train of donkeys on a path which
wound away at the foot of the hill of Kronos.

Dion was being unselfish. In staying where he was, beyond the outer
door of the house of Hermes, he was taking the first firm step on a path
which might lead him on very far. He had slept in the dawn when Rosamund
slipped out of the tent, but till the stars waned he had been awake, and
in the white light of the moon he had seen the beginning of the path.
Men were said to be selfish. People, especially women, often talked
as if selfishness were bred in the very fiber of men, as if it were
ineradicable, and must be accepted by women. He meant to prove to one
woman that even a man could be unselfish, moved by something greater
than himself. Up there on Drouva he had definitely dedicated himself
to Rosamund. His acute pain when, coming back to the place where he
had left her by the tent before sunset, he had not found her, his
sense almost of smoldering anger, had startled him. In the night he had
thought things over, and then he had come to the beginning of the path.
A really great love, if it is to be worthy to carry the torch, must
tread in the way of unselfishness. He would conform to the needs,
doubtless imperious, of Rosamund’s nature, even when they conflicted
with his.

So now he sat outside under the pine tree, and she was within alone. A
first step was taken on the path.

Would she presently come through the hall of the Victory to call him in?

He heard the guardian cough in the vestibule of the Emperors; the cough
was that of a man securely alone with his bodily manifestations. The
train of peasants had vanished. Still the sheep-bells sounded, but the
chime seemed to come to him now from a greater distance.

The morning was wearing on. When would she come back to him from the
secret of Olympia?

He heard again above his head the eternities whispering in the pine
branches. The calmness and heat of the valley mingled together, and rose
to him, and wanted to take him to themselves. But he was detached from
them, terribly detached by his virtue--his virtue, which involved him in
a struggle, pushed them off.

Surely an hour had passed, perhaps even more. He began to tingle with
impatience. The sound of the sheep-bells had died away beyond the
colonnade of the echoes. A living silence was now about him.

At last he put on his hat and got up. The Hermes was proving his power
too mercilessly, was stealing the hours like a thief at work in the
dark. The knowledge that Rosamund was his own for life did not help Dion
at all at this moment. He had planned out this day as if they were never
to have another. Their time in Greece was nearly over, and they could
not linger for very long anywhere. Anyhow, just this day, once gone,
could never be recaptured.

He looked towards the doorway of the Museum, hesitating. He was devoured
by impatience. Nevertheless he did not wish to step out of that path,
the beginning of which he had seen in the night. Determined not to seek
Rosamund, yet driven by restlessness, he did one of those meaningless
things which, bringing hurt to nature, are expected by man to bring him
at least a momentary solace. His eyes happened to rest on the olive tree
which stood not far from the Museum. One branch of it was stretched out
beyond the others. He walked up to the tree, pulled at the branch, and
finally snapped it off, stripped it of its leaves and threw it on the
ground.

As he finished this stupid and useless act, Rosamund came out of the
Museum, looking almost angry.

“Oh, Dion, was it you?” she asked. “What could make you do such a
thing?”

“But--what do you mean?” he asked.

She looked down at the massacred branch at his feet.

“A branch of wild olive! If you only knew how it hurt me.”

“Oh--that! But how could you know?”

She still looked at him with a sort of shining of anger in her eyes.

“I saw from the room of the Hermes. The doorway of the Museum is the
frame for such a picture of Elis! It’s almost, in its way, as dream-like
and lovely as the distant country one sees through the temple door in
Raphael’s ‘Marriage of the Virgin’ in Milan. And hanging partly across
it was that branch of wild olive. I was looking at it and loving it in
the room of the Hermes when a man’s arm, your arm, was thrust into the
picture, and the poor branch was torn away.”

She had spoken quite excitedly, still evidently under the impulse of
something like anger. Now she suddenly pulled herself up with a little
forced laugh.

“Of course you didn’t know; you couldn’t. I suppose I was dreaming,
and it--it looked like a sort of murder. But still I don’t see why you
should tear the branch off, and all the leaves too.”

“I’m sorry, I’m very sorry, Rosamund. It was idiotic. Of course I hadn’t
an idea what you were doing, I mean, that you were looking at it. One
does senseless little things sometimes.”

“It looked so angry.”

“What did?”

“Your hand, your arm. You can have no idea how----”

She broke off again.

“Let me come in with you. Let’s go to the Hermes.”

“Oh no, not now.”

She spoke with almost brusk decision.

“Very well, then, I’ll just pay the man something, and we’ll be off to
the ruins.”

“Yes.”

Dion went to pay the guardian, whom he found standing up among the Roman
Emperors in a dignified and receptive attitude. When he came back he
picked up the lunch-basket, slung it over his shoulder, and they walked
down the small hill and towards the ruins in silence. He felt involved
in a tragedy, pained and discomforted. Yet it was all rather absurd,
too. He did not know what to say, how to take it, and he looked straight
ahead, seeking instinctively for some diversion. When they were on the
river bank he found it in the fishermen who were wading in the shallows
with their nets.

“I wonder what they catch here,” he said. “There’s not much water.”

Rosamund took up the remark with her usual readiness and sympathetic
cordiality, and soon they were chattering again much as usual.

The great heat of the hour after noontide found them lunching among the
ruins of Nero’s house. By this time the spell of the place had fast
hold of them both. Nature had long since taken the ruins to her gentle
breast; she took Rosamund and Dion with them. In her green lap she
sheltered them; with her green hills and her groves of pine trees she
wrapped them round; with her tall grasses, her bushes, her wild flowers
and her leaves she caught at and caressed them. A jackal whined in its
lair near the huge limestone blocks of the temple of Zeus. Green lizards
basked on the pavements which still showed the little ruts constructed
to save the feet of contending athletes from slipping. All along the
green valley the birds flew and sang; blackberry bushes climbed over
the broken walls of the mansion of Nero, and red and white daisies and
silvery grasses grew in every cranny where the kindly earth found a
foothold.

“Look at those butterflies, Dion!” Rosamund said.

Two snow-white butterflies, wandering among the ruins, had found their
way to the house of Nero, and seemed inclined to make it their home.
Keeping close together, as if guided by some sweet and whimsical
purpose, they flew from stone to stone, from daisy to daisy, often
alighting, as if bent on a thorough investigation of this ancient
precinct, then fluttering forward again, with quivering wings, not quite
satisfied, in an airy search for the thing or place desired. Several
times they seemed about to abandon the ruins of Nero’s house, but,
though they fluttered away, they always returned. And at last they
alighted side by side on a piece of uneven wall, and rested, as if
asleep in the sun, with folded wings.

“That’s the finishing touch,” said Rosamund. “White butterflies asleep
in the house of Nero.”

She looked round over the ruins, poetic and beautiful in their
prostration, as if they had fallen to kiss the vale which, in return,
had folded them in an eternal embrace.

“Don’t take me to Delphi this time, Dion; don’t take me anywhere else,”
 she said.

“I was thinking only to-day that our time’s very short now. We lingered
so long in Athens.”

“We’ll say our good-by to Greece from the Acropolis. That’s--of course!
The grandeur and wonder are there. But the dream of Greece--that’s here.
This is a shrine.”

“For Pan?”

“Oh no, not for Pan, though I dare say he often comes here.”

From the Kronos Hill, covered with little pines, came the mystical voice
of the breeze, speaking to them in long and remote murmurs.

“That’s the most exquisite sound in the world,” Rosamund continued. “But
it has nothing to do with Pan. You remember that day we went into the
Russian church in Athens, Dion?”

“Yes.”

“There was the same sort of sound in those Russian voices when they were
singing very softly. It could never come from a Pagan world.”

“You find belief behind it?”

“No--knowledge.”

He did not ask her to define exactly what she meant. It was not an hour
for definition, but for dreaming, and he was happy again; the cloud of
the morning had passed away; he had his love with untroubled eyes among
the ruins. Thinking of that, realizing that with a sudden intensity, he
took her warm hand from the warm stone on which it was resting, and held
it closely in his.

“Oh, Rosamund, shall I ever have another hour as happy as this?” he
said.

A little way off, in that long meadow in the breast of which the Stadium
lay hidden, the sheep-bells sounded almost pathetically; a flock was
there happily at pasture.

“It’s as if all the green doors were closing upon us to keep us in Elis
forever, isn’t it?” she said. “But----”

She looked at him with a sort of smiling reproach:

“You wouldn’t be allowed to stay.”

“Why not?”

“You committed a crime this morning. Nature’s taken possession of
Olympia, and you struck at her.”

“D’you know why I did that?”

“No.”

But she did not again ask him why, and he never told her. When the heat
had lessened a little, they wandered once more through that garden of
ruins, where scarcely a column is standing, where convulsions of nature
have helped the hands of man to overthrow man’s work, and where nature
has healed every wound, and made every scar tender and beautiful. And
presently Rosamund said:

“I want to know exactly where Hermes was found.”

“Come, and I’ll show you.”

He led her on among the wild flowers and the grasses, till they came to
the clearly marked base of the Heraeon, the most ancient known temple
of Greece. Two of its columns were standing, tremendously massive Doric
columns of a warm golden-brown color.

“The Hermes was found in this temple. It stood between two of the
columns, but I believe it was lying down when it was found.”

“It’s difficult to imagine him between such columns as these.”

“Yet you love Doric.”

“Yes, but I don’t know----”

She looked at the columns, even put her hands on them as if trying to
clasp them.

“It must have been right. The Greeks knew. Strength and grace, power and
delicacy, that’s the bodily ideal. So the Hermes stood actually here.”

She looked all round, she listened to the distant sheep-bells, she drew
into her nostrils the green scents of the valley.

“And left his influence here for ever,” she added. “His quiet
influence.”

“Let me come to see him with you on the way home.”

And this time she said, “Yes.”



At a little after four they left the sweet valley, and, passing over
the river ascended the hill to the Museum. The door was open, and the
guardian was sitting profoundly asleep in the vestibule of the Emperors.

“You see, that’s the picture-frame,” Rosamund whispered, when they
were inside, pointing to the doorway. “The branch came just there in my
picture.”

She had lifted her hand. He took her by the wrist and gently pulled her
hand down.

“You mustn’t show me that.”

“Don’t let us wake him.”

A fly buzzed outside on the sunny threshold of the door, making a sleepy
sound like the winding of a rustic horn in the golden stillness, as they
went forward on tiptoe between the dull red walls of the hall of the
Victory, and came into the room beyond, where the Hermes stood alone but
for the little Dionysos on his arm.

There a greater silence seemed to reign--the silence of the harmony
which lies beyond music, as a blue background of the atmosphere lies
beyond the verges of the vastest stretch of land that man’s eyes have
power to see; he sees the blue, but almost as if with his soul, and
in like manner hears the harmony. Both Rosamund and Dion felt the
difference in the silence directly they entered that sacred room.

There was no room beyond it. Not very large, it was lighted by three
windows set in a row under a handsome roof of wood. The walls were dull
red like the walls in the hall of the Victory. On the mosaic pavement
were placed two chairs. Rosamund went straight up to one of them, and
sat down in front of the statue, which was raised on a high pedestal,
and set facing the right-hand wall of the chamber. Dion remained
standing a little way behind her.

He remembered quite well his first visit to Olympia, his first sight
of the Hermes. He had realized then very clearly the tragedy of large
Museums in which statues stand together in throngs, enclosed within
roaring cities. From its situation, hidden in the green breast of this
valley in Elis, the Hermes seemed to receive a sort of consecration, a
blessing from its shrine; and the valley received surely from the Hermes
a gracious benediction, making it unlike any other valley, however
beautiful, in any land of the earth. Nowhere else could the Hermes have
been so serenely tender, so exquisitely benign in its contemplation; and
no other valley could have kept it safe with such gentle watchfulness,
such tranquilly unwearied patience. Surely each loved the other, and so
each gained something from the other.

Through all the months since his visit, Dion had remembered the unique
quality of the peace of Olympia, like no other peace, and the strange
and exquisite hush which greeted the pilgrim at the threshold of the
chamber in which the Hermes stood. He had remembered, but now he felt.
Again the silence seemed to come out of the marble to greet him, a
remembered pilgrim who had returned to his worship bringing another
pilgrim. He entered once more into the peace of the Hermes, and now
Rosamund shared that peace. As he looked at her for a moment, he knew he
had made a complete atonement; he had sent the shadow away.

How could any shadow stand in the presence of the Hermes? The divine
calm within this chamber had a power which was akin to the power of
nature in the twilight of a windless evening, or of a beautiful soul at
ease in its own simplicity. It purified. Dion could not imagine any
man being able to look at the Hermes and feel the attraction of sin.
Rosamund was right, he thought. Surely men have to go and fetch their
sins. Their goodness is given to them. The mother holds it, and is aware
of it, when her baby is put into her arms for the first time.

For a long while these two watched Hermes and the child in the silence
of Elis, bound together by an almost perfect sympathy. And they
understood as never before the beauty of calm--calm of the nerves, calm
of the body, calm of the mind, the heart and the soul; peace physical,
intellectual and moral. In looking at the Hermes they saw, or seemed to
themselves to see, the goal, what struggling humanity is meant for--the
perfect poise, all faculties under effortless control, and so peace.

“We must be meant for that,” Dion said to himself. “Shall we reach that
goal, and take a child with us?”

Then he looked down at Rosamund, saw her pale yellow hair, the back of
her neck, in which, somehow, purity was manifested, and thought:

“I might perhaps get there through her, but only through her.”

She turned round, looked at him and smiled.

“Isn’t he divine? And the child’s attitude!”

Dion moved and sat down beside her.

“If this is Paganism,” she continued, “it’s the same thing as
Christianity. It’s what God means. Men try to separate things that are
all one. I feel that when I look at Hermes. Oh, how beautiful he is! And
his beauty is as much moral as physical. You know the Antinous mouth?”

“Of course.”

“Look at his mouth. Could any one, comparing the two, honestly say that
purity doesn’t shine like a light in darkness? Aren’t those lips stamped
with the Divine seal?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Dion, I’m so thankful I have a husband who’s kept the power to see that
even physical beauty must have moral beauty behind it to be perfect.
Many men can’t see that, I think.”

“Is it their fault?”

“Yes.”

After another long silence she said:

“Spirit really is everything. Hermes tells me that almost as plainly as
the New Testament. Lots of people we know in London would laugh at me
for saying so, the people who talk of ‘being Greek’ and who never can be
Greek. And he stood between Doric columns. I’m trying to learn something
here.”

“What?”

“How to bring _him_ up if he ever comes.”

Dion felt for her hand.



They stayed on for a week at Drouva. Each evening Rosamund shot with
the boy of the wilderness, and they ate any birds that fell, at their
evening meal. The nights were given to the stars till sleep came. And
all the days were dedicated to Hermes, the child, and the sweet green
valley which served as a casket for the perfect jewel which the earth
had given up after centuries of possession. Since Rosamund had told the
dear secret of her heart, what she was trying to learn, Dion was able to
see her go in alone to the inner chamber without any secret jealousy or
any impatience. The given confidence had done its blessed work swiftly
and surely; the spring behind the action, revealed so simply, was
respected, was almost loved by Dion. Often he sat among the ruins alone,
smoking his pipe; or he wandered away after the call of the sheep-bells,
passing between the ruined walls overgrown with brambles and grasses and
mosses, shaded here and there by a solitary tree, and under the low arch
of the Athletes’ entrance into the great green space where the contests
had been held. Here he found the wearers of music feeding peacefully,
attended by a dreaming boy. With the Two in the Garden of Eden there
were happy animals. The sheep-bells ringing tranquilly in his ears made
Eden more real to him, and also more like something in one of the happy
dreams of a man.

A world that had risen to great heights of emotion in this valley was
dead, but that did not sadden him. He found it impossible to be sad in
Olympia, because his own life was so happy.

A delicious egoism, the birthright of his youth, had him safe in its
grasp. But sometimes, when Rosamund was alone in the room of the Hermes,
learning her lesson, and he was among the ruins, or walking above the
buried Stadium where the flocks were at pasture, he recalled the great
contests of the Athletes of ancient Greece; the foot-races which were
the original competitions at the games, the races in armor, the long
jumps, the wrestling matches, the discus and dart-throwing, the boxing
and the brutal _pankration_. And he remembered that at the Olympic
Games there were races for boys, for quite young boys. A boy had won at
Olympia who was only twelve years old. When Dion recalled that fact one
golden afternoon, it seemed to him that perhaps his lesson was to be
learnt among the feeding sheep in the valley, rather even than on the
hill where the Hermes dwelt. The father surely shapes one part of the
sacred clay of youth, while on the other part, with a greater softness,
a perhaps subtler care, the mother works.

He would try to make his boy sturdy and strong and courageous, swift
to the race of life; he would train his boy to be a victor, to be a boy
champion among other boys. Her son must not fail to win the crown of
wild olive. And when he was a man----! But at that point in his dreams
of the future Dion always pulled up. He could not see Rosamund as the
mother of a man, could not see Rosamund old. She would, of course, be
beautiful in old age, with a perhaps more spiritual beauty than she had
even now. He shut his eyes, tried to imagine her, to see her before him
with snow-white hair, a face perhaps etherealized by knowledge of life
and suffering; once he even called up the most perfect picture of old
age he knew of--the portrait of Whistler’s mother, calm, dignified,
gentle, at peace, with folded hands; but his efforts were in vain; he
simply could not see his Rosamund old. And so, because of that, he could
only see their child as a very young boy, wearing a boy’s crown of wild
olive, such as had once been won by the boy of twelve in the games at
Olympia.

The last day of their visit to the green wilds and the hilltops dawned,
still, cloudless and very hot. There was a light haze over Zante, and
the great plain held a look of sleep--not the sleep of night but of the
siesta, when the dreams come out of the sun, and descend through the
deep-blue corridors to visit those who are weary in the gold. Rosamund,
bareheaded, stood on the hill of Drouva and gazed towards the sea; her
arm was round her olive tree; she looked marvelously well, lithe and
strong, but her face was grave, held even a hint of sadness.

“Our last day here!” she said to Dion. “One more night with the stars,
only one! Dion, when you brought me here, you did a dangerous thing.”

“Gave you opportunities for regret? D’you mean that?”

She nodded, still gazing towards Zante.

“Such opportunities!”

“It couldn’t be helped. I had to bring you.”

“Of course. I know. If you had let me leave Greece without coming here,
and I had ever come to understand what I had missed, I don’t believe I
could have forgiven even you.”

“I always meant to bring you here.”

“But you had a sudden impulse, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Why exactly did it come?”

He hesitated. Suddenly he felt reserved; but he broke through his
reserve and answered:

“I saw I had made you feel sad.”

“Did you? Why was that?”

“Don’t you remember?”

She was catching the dream of the plain, perhaps, for she replied, with
an almost preoccupied air:

“I don’t think so.”

“I wanted to make you happy again, very happy, to give you a treat as
quickly as possible. The idea of this”--he flung out a brown hand--“came
to me suddenly. That’s how it was. You--you don’t know how I wish to
keep every breath of sorrow out of your life.”

“I know you do; I feel it. But you’ve put a sorrow in.”

She spoke with a half-whimsical smile.

“Have I?”

“The sorrow of leaving all this, of leaving the Hermes. I didn’t know
it was possible to grow to care for a lifeless thing as I care for
him. Sometimes I believe the marble has actually retained nothing of
Praxiteles as a man. I mean as apart from a sculptor. But he must have
been full of almost divine feelings and conceptions, or he could never
have made my Hermes. No man can make the divine without having divinity
in him. I’ve learnt more here in these few days than I have learnt in
all my years.”

“From the statue of a Pagan. Isn’t that strange?”

“No, I don’t think so. For I was able to see the Christianity in it. I
know what Praxiteles was only able to feel mysteriously. Sometimes in
London I’ve heard people--you know the sort of people I mean--regretting
they didn’t live in the old Greek world.”

“I’ve regretted that.”

“Have you? But not in their way. When I look at the Hermes I feel very
thankful I have lived since.”

“Tell me just why.”

“Because I live in a world which has received definitely and finally the
message the Hermes knew before it was sent down.”

She took away her arm from the olive tree and sighed.

“Oh, Dion, I shall hate going away, leaving the tent and Drouva and him.
But I believe whenever I think of Olympia I shall feel the peace that,
thank God, doesn’t pass all understanding.”

They went down to the valley that day to pay their final visit to the
Hermes. Twilight had not yet come, but was not very far off when, for
the last time, they crossed the threshold of his chamber. More silent
than ever, more benignly silent, did the hush about him seem to Dion;
more profound were his peace and serenity. He and the child had surely
withdrawn a little farther from all that was not intended, but that, for
some inscrutable reason, had come to be. His winged sandals had carried
him still farther away. As Dion looked at him he seemed to be afar.

“Rosamund!”

“Yes?”

“This evening I have a feeling about the Hermes I’ve never had before.”

“What is it?”

“That he’s taking the child away, quite away.”

“But he’s always been here, and not here. That’s what I love so much.”

“I don’t mean quite that. It’s as if he were taking the child farther
and farther away, partly because of us.”

“I don’t like that. I don’t feel that at all.”

“We belong to this world, you see, and are subject to all its
conditions. We are in it and of it.”

“Well?”

“He belongs to such a different world.”

“Yes, the released world, where no ugly passions can ever get in.”

“The way he looks at Dionysos tells one that. He hasn’t any fear for the
boy’s future when he grows up and comes to know things. It just strikes
me that no human being who thinks could ever look at a human child like
that. There would always be the fear behind--‘What is life going to do
to the child?’”

She looked at him, and her face was very grave.

“D’you think we should feel that?”

“Surely.”

“Unless we got the serene courage of the Hermes.”

“But he lived among gods, and we live among men.”

“Not always.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Perhaps some day you will,” she answered.

Into her eyes there had come a strange look of withdrawal.

At that moment the atmosphere in the room of the Hermes seemed to Dion
more full of peace even than before, but the peace was like something
almost tangible. It troubled him a little because he felt that the
Hermes, the child and Rosamund were of it, while he was not. They were
surrounded by the atmosphere necessary to them, and to which they were
mysteriously accustomed, while he was for the first time in such an
atmosphere. He felt separated from Rosamund by a gulf, perhaps very
narrow, but probably very deep.

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; it crossed the shallow
river, and made its way to the garden of ruins where once the Hermes had
stood between Doric Columns in the Heraeon. Through the colonnade of the
echoes it passed, and under the arch of the Athletes. Over the crude and
almost terrible strength of the ruins of the temple of Zeus it let its
green garments trail down, as it felt its way softly but surely to the
buried Stadium where once a boy of twelve had won the crown of wild
olive. The sheep-bells were ringing softly; the flocks were going
homeward from pasture. They were making their way up the valley now at
the base of the Kronos Hill, 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.

The tall oblong of the Museum doorway on the hill framed a tiny picture
of Elis, bathed in green and tremulous light; a small section of
hillside, a fragment of empty, poetic country--Pan’s world rather hinted
at than revealed--a suggestion of evening sky, remote, with infinity
lost in its distance. But there was no branch of wild olive flickering
across th

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