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In the Wilderness

R >> Robert Hichens >> In the Wilderness




"I don't think it quite amounts to that. Mr. Leith has never been a
schoolmaster."

And there she left it, with a faint smile in which there was just the
hint of an almost cynical sadness.

Since the trip to Brusa on the "Leyla" she had thought a great deal
about Dion Leith, and she was very sorry for him in a rather unusual
way. Out of her happiness with her husband she seemed to draw an
instinctive knowledge of what such a nature as Dion Leith's wanted and
of the extent of his loss. Once she said to Sir Carey, with a sort of
intensity such as she seldom showed:

"Good women do terrible things sometimes."

"Such as----?" said Sir Carey, looking at her almost with surprise in
his eyes.

"I think Mrs. Leith has done a terrible thing to her husband."

"Perhaps she loved the child too much."

"Even love can be almost abominable," said Lady Ingleton. "If we had a
child, and you had done what poor Dion Leith has done, do you think I
should have cast you out of my life?"

"But--are you a good woman?" he asked her, smiling.

"No, or you should never have bothered about me."

He touched her hand.

"When you do that," Lady Ingleton said, "I could almost cry over poor
Dion Leith."

Sir Carey bent down and kissed her with a very tender gallantry.

"You and I are secretly sentimentalists, Delia," he said. "That is why
we are so happy together."

"Why doesn't Dion Leith go to England?" she exclaimed, almost angrily.

"Perhaps England seems full of his misery. Besides, his wife is there."

"He ought to go to her. He ought to force her to see the evil she is
doing."

"Leith will never do that, I feel sure," said Sir Carey gravely. "And in
his place I don't know that I could."

Lady Ingleton looked at him with an almost sharp impatience such as she
seldom showed him.

"When a man has right on his side he ought to browbeat a woman!" she
exclaimed. "And even if he is in the wrong it's the best way to make
a woman see things through his eyes. Dion Leith is too delicate with
women."

After a moment she added:

"At any rate with some women, the first of whom is his own wife. A man
should always put up a big fight for a really big thing, and Dion Leith
hasn't done that!"

"He fought in South Africa for England."

"Ah," she said, lifting her chin, "that sort of thing is so different."

"Tell him what you think," said the Ambassador.

"I know him so little. But perhaps--who knows--some day I shall."

She said no more on that subject.

Meanwhile Dion was teaching Jimmy, who was really full of the happiest
ignorance. Jimmy's knowledge of Greek was a minus quantity, and he said
frankly that he considered all that kind of thing "more or less rot."
Nevertheless, Dion persevered. One morning when they were going to get
to work as usual in the pavilion,--chose by Mrs. Clarke as the suitable
place for his studies,--taking up the Greek Grammar Dion opened it
by chance. He stood by the table from which he had picked the book up
staring down at the page. By one of those terrible rushes of which the
mind is capable he was swept back to the famous mound which fronts the
plain of Marathon; he saw the curving line of hills, the sea intensely
blue and sparkling, empty of ships, the river's course through the
tawny land marked by the tall reeds and the sedges; he heard the distant
lowing of cattle coming from that old battlefield, celebrated by poets
and historians. And then he heard, as if just above him, the dry crackle
of brushwood--Rosamund moving in the habitation of Arcady. And he
remembered the cry, the intense human cry which had echoed in the
recesses of his soul on that day long--how long--ago in Greece,
"Whither? Whither am I and my great love going? To what end are we
journeying?"

He heard again that cry of his soul in the pavilion at Buyukderer, and
beneath the sunburn his lean cheeks went lividly pale.

Reluctantly Jimmy was getting an exercise book and a pen and ink out of
the drawer of a table, which Mrs. Clarke had had specially made for the
lessons by a little Greek carpenter who sometimes did odd jobs for her.
He found the ink bottle almost empty.

"I say," he began.

He looked up.

"I say, Mr. Leith----"

His voice died away and he stared.

"What's wrong?" he managed to bring out at last.

He thrust out a hand and laid hold of the grammar. Dion let it go.

His eyes searched the page.

"What's up, Mr. Leith?"

He looked frankly puzzled and almost afraid. He had never seen any one
look just like that before.

There was a moment of silence. Then, with a sudden change of manner,
Dion exclaimed:

"Come on, Jimmy! I don't feel like doing lessons this morning. I vote
we go out. I'm going to ask your mother if we can ride to the Belgrad
forest. Perhaps she'll come with us."

He was suddenly afraid to remain alone with the boy, and he felt that
he could not stay in that pavilion full of the atmosphere of feverish
passion, of secrecy, of betrayal. Yes, of betrayal! For there he had
betrayed the obstinate love, which he had felt at Marathon as a sort of
ecstasy, and still felt, but now like a wound, within him in spite of
Rosamund's rejection of him. Not yet had the current taken him and swept
him away from all the old landmarks. Perhaps it never would. And yet he
had given himself to it, he had not tried to resist.

Jimmy jumped up with alacrity, though he still looked rather grave and
astonished. They went down the terraced garden to the villa.

"Run up and ask your mother," said Dion. "Probably she's in her
sitting-room. I'll wait here to know what she says."

"Right you are!"

He went off, looking rather relieved.

Robin at fifteen! Dion shut his eyes.

Jimmy was away for more than ten minutes. Then he came back to say that
his mother would come with them to the forest and would be ready in an
hour's time.

"I'll go back to my rooms, change my breeches, and order the horses,"
said Dion.

He was longing to get away from the scrutiny which at this moment Jimmy
could not forego. He knew that Jimmy had been talking about him to Mrs.
Clarke, had probably been saying how "jolly odd" he had been in
the pavilion. For once the boy's tact had failed him, and Dion's
sensitiveness tingled.

An hour later they were on horseback and rode into the midst of the
forest. At the village of Belgrad they dismounted, left the horses in
the care of a Turkish stableman, and went for a walk among the trees.
It was very hot and still, and presently Mrs. Clarke said she would sit
down and rest.

"You and Jimmy go on if you want to," she said.

But Jimmy threw himself down on the ground.

"I'm tired. It's so infernally hot."

"Take a nap," said his mother.

The boy laid his head on his curved arms sideways. Mrs. Clarke leaned
down and put his panama hat over his left cheek and eye.

"Thank you, mater," he murmured.

He lay still.

Dion had stood by with an air of hesitation during this little talk
between mother and son. Now he looked away to the forest.

"You go," Mrs. Clarke said to him. "You'll find us here when you come
back. The Armenians call the forest _Defetgamm_. Perhaps you will come
under its influence."

"_Defetgamm_! What does that mean?"

"Dispeller of care."

He stood looking at her for a moment; then, without another word, he
turned quickly away and disappeared among the trees.

Jimmy slept with his face hidden, and Mrs. Clarke, with wide-open eyes,
sat motionless staring into the forest.

When they reached the Villa Hafiz late in the afternoon Dion helped
Mrs. Clarke to dismount. As she slid down lightly from the saddle she
whispered, scarcely moving her lips:

"The pavilion to-night eleven. You've got the key."

She patted Selim's glossy black neck.

"Come, Jimmy!" she said. "Say good night to Mr. Leith. I'm sure he's
tired and has had more than enough of us for to-day. We'll give him a
rest from us till to-morrow."

And Jimmy bade Dion good-by without any protest.

As Dion rode off Mrs. Clarke did not turn to look after him. She had
not troubled even to question him with her eyes. She had assumed that he
would do what she wanted. Would he do that?

At first he believed that he would not go. He had been away in the
forest with his misery for nearly two hours, struggling among the
shadows of the trees. Jimmy had seen in the pavilion that morning that
his "holiday tutor" was strangely ill at ease, and had discussed the
matter with his mater, and asked her why on earth the sight of a page
of Greek grammar should make a fellow stand staring as if he were
confronted by a ghost. But Jimmy had no conception of what Dion had
been through in the forest, where happy Greeks and Armenians were lazily
enjoying the empty hours of summer, forgetting yesterday, and serenely
careless of to-morrow.

In the forest Dion had fought with an old love of which he began to be
angrily ashamed, with a love which was now his greatest enemy, a thing
contemptible, inexplicable. In the pavilion that morning it had suddenly
risen up before him strong, intense, passionate. It seemed irresistible.
But he was almost furiously resolved not merely to resist it, but to
crush it down, to break it in pieces, or to drive it finally out of his
life.

And he had fought with it alone in the forest which the Armenians call
_Defetgamm_. And in the forest something--some adherent, it seemed--had
whispered to him, "To kill your enemy you must fill your armory with
weapons. The woman who came to you when you were neither in one world
nor in the other is a weapon. Why have you ceased to use her?"

And now, as if she had heard the voice of that adherent, and had known
of the struggle in the forest, the woman herself had suddenly broken
through the reserve she had imposed upon them both since the coming of
her son.

In a hideous way Dion wanted to see her, and yet he shrank from going
back to her secretly. The coming of Jimmy, his relations with the boy,
the boy's hearty affection for him and admiration for him, had roused
into intense activity that part of his nature which had always loved,
which he supposed always must love, the straight life; the life with
morning face and clear, unfaltering eyes; the life which the Hermes
suggested, immune from the fret and fever of secret vices and passions,
lifted by winged sandals into a region where soul and body were in
perfect accord, and where, because of that, there was peace; not a peace
of stagnation, but a peace living and intense. But that part of his
nature had led him even now instinctively back to the feet of Rosamund.
And he revolted against such a pilgrimage.

"The pavilion to-night eleven; you've got the key."

Her face had not changed as she whispered the words, and immediately
afterwards she had told a lie to her boy, or had implied a lie. She had
made Jimmy believe the thing that was not. Loving Jimmy, she did not
scruple to play a part to him.

Dion ate no dinner that night. After returning to his rooms and getting
out of his riding things into a loose serge suit he went out again and
walked along the quay by the water. He paced up and down, ignoring the
many passers-by, the boatmen and watermen who now knew him so well.

He was considering whether he should go to the pavilion at the appointed
hour or whether he should leave Buyukderer altogether and not return to
it. This evening he was in the mood to be drastic. He might go down to
Constantinople and finally cast his burden away there, never to take it
up again--the burden of an old love whose chains still hung about him;
he might plunge into the lowest depths, into depths where perhaps the
remembrance of Rosamund and the early morning would fade away from him,
where even Mrs. Clarke would not care to seek for him, although her will
was persistent.

He fully realized now her extraordinary persistence, the fierce firmness
of character that was concealed by her quiet and generally impersonal
manner. Certainly she had the temperament of a ruler. He remembered--it
seemed to him with a bizarre abruptness--the smile on Dumeny's lips in
the Divorce Court when the great case had ended in Mrs. Clarke's favor.

Did he really know Cynthia Clarke even now?

He walked faster. Now he saw Hadi Bey before him, self-possessed, firm,
with that curiously vivid look which had attracted the many women in
Court.

And Jimmy believed in his mother. Perhaps, until Dion's arrival in
Buyukderer, the boy had had reason in his belief--perhaps not. Dion was
very uncertain to-night.

A sort of cold curiosity was born in him. Until now he had accepted Mrs.
Clarke's presentment of herself to the world, which included himself,
as a genuine portrait; now he began to recall the long speech of Beadon
Clarke's counsel. But the man had only been speaking according to his
brief, had been only putting forth all the ingenuity and talent which
enabled him to command immense fees for his services. And Mrs. Clarke
had beaten him. The jury had said that she was not what he had asserted
her to be.

Suppose they had made a mistake, had given the wrong verdict, why
should that make any difference to Dion? He had definitely done with the
goodness of good women. Why should he fear the evil of a woman who was
bad? Perhaps in the women who were called evil by the respectable, or by
those who were temperamentally inclined to purity, there was more warm
humanity than the women possessed who never made a slip, or stepped
out of the beaten path of virtue. Perhaps those to whom much must be
forgiven were those who knew how to forgive.

If Mrs. Clarke really were what Beadon Clarke's counsel had suggested
that she was, how would it affect him? Dion pondered that question on
the quay. Mrs. Clarke's pale and very efficient hypocrisy, which he had
been able to observe at close quarters since he had been at Buyukderer,
might well have been brought into play against himself, as it had been
brought into play against the little world on the Bosporus and against
Jimmy.

Dion made up his mind that he would go to the pavilion that night. The
cold curiosity which had floated up to the surface of his mind enticed
him. He wanted to know whether he was among the victims, if they could
reasonably be called so, of Mrs. Clarke's delicate hypocrisy. He was
still thinking of Mrs. Clarke as a weapon; he was also thinking that
perhaps he did not yet know exactly what type of weapon she was. He must
find that out to-night. Not even the thought of Jimmy should deter him.

At a few minutes before eleven he went back to his rooms, unlocked his
despatch box, and drew out the key of the gate of Mrs. Clarke's garden.
He thrust it into his pocket and set out on the short walk to the Villa
Hafiz. The night was dark and cloudy and very still. Dion walked quickly
and surreptitiously, not looking at any of the people who went by him
in the darkness. All the windows of the villa which faced the sea were
shuttered and showed no lights. He turned to the right, stood before the
garden gate and listened. He heard no sound except a distant singing on
the oily waters of the Bay. Softly he put his key into the gate, gently
unlocked it, stepped into the garden. A few minutes later he was on the
highest terrace and approached the pavilion. As he did so Mrs. Clarke
came out of the drawing-room of the villa, passed by the fountain, and
began to ascend the garden.

She was dressed in black and in a material that did not rustle. Her thin
figure did not show up against the night, and her light slow footfall
was scarcely audible on the paths and steps as she went upward. Jimmy
had gone to bed long ago, tired out with the long ride in the heat.
She had just been into his bedroom, without a light, and had heard his
regular breathing. He was fast asleep, and once he was asleep he never
woke till the light of day shone in at the window. It was a comfort that
one could thoroughly rely on the sleeping powers of a healthy boy of
fifteen.

She sighed as she thought of Jimmy. The boy was going to complicate
her life. She was by nature an unusually fearless woman, but she was
beginning to realize that there might come a time when she would know
fear--unless she could begin to live differently as Jimmy began to
grow up. But how could she do that? There are things which seem to be
impossible even to strong wills. Her will was very strong, but she had
always used it not to renounce but to attain, not to hold her desires in
check but to bring them to fruition. And it was late in the day to begin
reversing the powerful engine of her will. She was not even sure that
she could reverse it. Hitherto she had never genuinely tried to do that.
She did not want to try now, partly--but only partly--because she hated
to fail in anything she undertook. And she had a suspicion, which she
was not anxious to turn into a certainty, that she who had ruled many
people was only a slave herself. Perhaps some day Jimmy would force her
to a knowledge of her exact condition.

For the first time in her life she was half afraid of that mysterious
energy which men and women call love; she began to understand, with
a sort of ample fulness of comprehension, that of all loves the most
determined is the love of a mother for her only son. A mother may,
perhaps, have a son and not love him; but if once she loves him she
holds within her a thing that will not die while she lives.

And if the thing that was without lust stood up in battle against the
thing that was full of lust--what then?

The black and still night seemed a battlefield.

Softly she stepped upon the highest terrace and stood for a moment under
the great plane tree, where was the wooden seat on which she had waited
for Dion to weep away the past and the good woman who had ruined his
life. To-night she was invaded by an odd uncertainty. If she went to the
pavilion and Dion were not there? If he did not come? Would some part
of her, perhaps, be glad, the part that in a mysterious way was one with
Jimmy? She stared into the darkness, looking towards the pavilion. Dion
Leith had once said she looked punished. Perhaps when he had said that
he had shown that he had intuition.

Was he there? It was past eleven now. She had assumed that he would
come, and she was inclined to believe that he had come. If so she need
not see him even now. There was still time for her to go back to the
villa, to shut herself in, to go to bed, as Jimmy had gone to bed. But
if she did that she would not sleep. All night long she would lie wide
awake, tossing from side to side, the helpless prey of her past life.

She frowned and slipped through the darkness, almost like a fluid, to
the pavilion.



CHAPTER VIII

She came so silently that Dion heard nothing till against the background
of the night he saw a shadow, her thin body, a faint whiteness, her
face, motionless at the opening of the pavilion; from this shadow and
this whiteness came a voice which said:

"Did you come under the influence of _Defetgamm_?"

"It's impossible that you see me!" he said.

"I see you plainly with some part of me, not my eyes."

He got up from the divan where he had been sitting in the dark and went
to the opening of the pavilion.

"Did you come under the influence of _Defetgamm_?" she repeated.

"You know I didn't."

He paused, then added:

"I nearly didn't come to-night."

"And I nearly went down, after I had come up here, without seeing you.
And yet--we are together again."

"Why do you want to see me here? We agreed--"

"Yes, we agreed; but after to-day in the forest that agreement had to be
broken. When you left me under the trees you looked like a man who was
thinking of starting on a very long journey."

She spoke with a peculiar significance which at once conveyed her full
meaning to him.

"No, I shall never do that," he said. "If I had been capable of it, I
should have done it long ago."

"Yes? Let me in."

He moved. She slipped into the pavilion and sat down.

"How can you move without making any sound?" he asked somberly.

There had been in her movement a sort of perfection of surreptitiousness
that was animal. He noticed it, and thought that she must surely be
accustomed to moving with precaution lest she should be seen or heard.
Rosamund could not move like that. A life story seemed to him to be
faintly traced in Mrs. Clarke's manner of entering the pavilion and of
sitting down on the divan.

He stood beside her in the dark. She returned no answer to his question.

"You spoke of a journey," he said. "The only journey I have thought
of making is short enough--to Constantinople. I nearly started on it
to-night."

"Why do you want to go to Constantinople?"

He was silent.

"What would you do there?"

"Ugly things, perhaps."

"Why didn't you go? What kept you?"

"I felt that I must ask you something."

He sat down beside her and took both her hands roughly. They were dry
and burning as if with fever.

"You trick Jimmy," he said. "You trick the Ingletons, Vane, all the
people here--"

"Trick!" she interrupted coldly, almost disdainfully. "What do you
mean?"

"That you deceive them, take them in."

"What about?"

"You know quite well."

After a pause, which was perhaps--he could not tell--a pause of
astonishment, she said:

"Do you really expect me to go about telling every one that I, a lonely
woman, separated from my husband, unable to marry again, have met a man
whom I care for, and that I've been weak enough--or wicked enough, if
you like--to let him know it?"

Dion felt his cheeks burn in the darkness. Nevertheless, something drove
him on, forced him to push his way hardily through a sort of quickset
hedge of reluctance and shame.

"No, I don't expect absurdities. I am not such a fool. But--but you do
it so well!"

"Do what well?"

"Everything connected with deception. You are such a mistress of it."

"Well?"

"Isn't that rather strange?"

"Do you expect a woman like me, a woman who can't pretend to stupidity,
and who has lived for years in the diplomatic world, to blunder in what
she undertakes?"

"No, I don't. But you are too competent."

He spoke with hard determination, but his cheeks were still burning.

"It's impossible to be too competent. If I make up my mind that a thing
must be done I resolve to do it thoroughly and to do it well. I despise
blunderers and women who are afraid of what they do. I despise those who
give themselves and others away. I cared for you. I saw you needed me
and I gave myself to you. I am not sorry I did it, not a bit sorry. I
had counted the cost before I did it."

"Counted the cost? But what cost is there? Neither of us loses
anything."

"I risk losing almost everything a woman cares for. I don't want to
dwell upon it. I detest women who indulge in reproaches, or who try
to make men value them by pointing out how much they stand to lose by
giving themselves. But you are so strange to-night. You have attacked
me. I don't know why."

"I've been walking on the quay and thinking."

"What about?"

"You!"

"Go on."

"I've been thinking that, as you take in Jimmy and all the people here
so easily, there is no reason why you shouldn't be taking me in too."

In the dark a feeling was steadily growing within him that his companion
was playing with him as he knew she had played with others.

"I'm forced to deceive the people here and my boy. My relation with you
obliges me to do that. But nothing forces me to deceive you. I have been
sincere with you. Ever since I met you in the street in Pera I've been
sincere, even blunt. I should think you must have noticed it."

"I have. In some ways you are blunt, but in many you aren't."

"What is it exactly that you wish to know?"

For a moment Dion was silent. In the darkness of the pavilion he saw
Dumeny's lips smiling faintly, Hadi Bey's vivid, self-possessed eyes,
the weak mouth of Brayfield and his own double. Was he a member of an
ugly brotherhood, or did he stand alone? He wanted to know, yet he felt
that he could not put such a hideous question to his companion.

"Tell me exactly what it is," she said. "Don't be afraid. I wish to be
quite sincere with you, though you think I don't. It is no pleasure
to me to deceive people. What I do in the way of deception I do in
self-defense. Circumstances often push us into doing what we don't enjoy
doing. But you and I ought to be frank with one another."

Her hands tightened on his.

"Go on. Tell me."

"I've been wondering whether your husband ought to have won his case,"
said Dion, in a low voice.

"Is that all?" she said, very simply and without any emotion.

"All?"

"Yes. Do you suppose, when I gave myself to you, I didn't realize that
my doing it was certain to make you doubt my virtue? Dion, you don't
know how boyish you still are. You will always be in some ways a boy.
I knew you would doubt me after all that had happened. But what is the
good of asking questions of a women whom you doubt? If I am what you
suspect, of course I shall tell lies. If I am not, what is the good of
my telling you the truth? What is to make you believe it?"

He was silent. She moved slightly and he felt her thin body against his
side. What sort of weapon was she? That was the great question for
him. Since his struggle in the forest of _Defetgamm_ he had come to
the resolve to strike fierce and reiterated blows on that disabling and
surely contemptible love of his, that love which had confronted him like
a specter when he was in the pavilion with Jimmy. He was resolved at
last upon assassination, and he wanted a weapon that could slay, not a
weapon that would bend, or perhaps break, in his hand.