Jim awoke next morning with the feeling that he had come back to earth from heaven. The events of the night before seemed to belong to a world of enchantment, and had no relation to the keen, practical sunlight which now struck into his room through the open windows, nor to the cool sea breeze which waved the curtains to and fro, nor yet to the vivid blue sea and the clean-cut rocks which came into sight as he sat up in bed. “In the next room,” he mused to himself, “sleeps a woman who in the darkness was to me the gateway of my dreams, but who in this bright sunlight will be again only a capable, pretty creature and an amusing companion. Night, after all, is woman’s kingdom, and in it she is mistress of all the magic arts of enchantment, she becomes greater than herself; but day belongs to man. How, then, shall I greet her?—for my very soul seemed surrendered to her a few hours ago, yet now I find myself still master of my destiny.”
Like an artist who steps back to view his picture, or like a poet who measures up his dream, he allowed his mind to take stock of his emotions. When her head had been thrown back upon the pillows, and the white column of her throat could be seen in the dim light of the moon against the black confusion of her hair, it had seemed to him that the[47] marks of the chisel of the Divine Artist were impressed upon the alabaster of her flesh. It was as though, gazing down at her beauty, his eyes had been opened and he had beheld the handicraft of Paradise.
And when, in his ardour, he had had the feeling of not knowing what next to do nor what words to utter, her silencing loveliness had baffled him, so it seemed, because her body was stamped with the seal of the Infinite and fashioned in the likeness of God. True, she was but imperfect woman; yet the art of the Lord of Arts had created her, and, by the magic of the night, he had found her rich in the inimitable craftsmanship of heaven.
He had seen the glory of heaven in her eyes. He had heard the voice of all the ages in her voice. In the touch of her lips there had been the rapture of the spheres, and the gods of the firmament had seemed to ride out upon the tide of her breath.
But was it she whom he had wanted when he held her pinioned in his arms? He could not say. It seemed more reasonable to suppose that through her he was looking towards the splendour which his soul sought. She was but the necromancy by which he had carried earth up to heaven; she was the magic by which he had brought heaven down to the earth. She had been the door of his dreams, the portal of the sky; and through her he had made his incursion into the kingdom beyond the stars.
“It was only an illusion,” he said, as he stood at the window, invigorated by the breeze. “We are actually almost strangers. I don’t know anything about her, and she knows little of me. It[48] was the magic of the night employed by scheming Nature for her one unchanging purpose; and all that happened in the darkness will be forgotten in the sunlight. We shall meet as friends.”
To some extent he was right, for when at mid-morning she came down to the blazing beach and seated herself by his side in the shade of the rocks, she greeted him quietly and serenely, with neither embarrassment nor familiarity.
“Are you going to bathe this morning?” he asked her, and on her replying in the affirmative, he told her that he thought he was well enough to do so, too. At this she showed some concern, but he reminded her that the water, at any rate near the shore, was warm to the touch and was hardly likely to do him harm.
The little sandy bay, flanked by rocks which projected into the sea, was the site of a number of bathing huts and tents used by the Europeans who lived in the surrounding villas and bungalows. The breakers rolled in upon this golden crescent, continuously driven forward by the prevalent north-west wind; but at one side a barrier of low, shelving rocks formed a small lagoon where the water was peaceful, and one might look down to the bottom, ten or twelve feet below the surface, and see the brilliant shells and seaweeds almost as clearly as though they were in the open air. So strong was the summer sunlight that every object and every plant at the bottom cast its shadow sharply upon the sparkling bed; and the passage of little wandering fishes was marked by corresponding shadows which moved over the fairyland below.
[49]
It was not long before Jim and Monimé were swimming side by side across this small lagoon to the encircling wall of rocks, and soon they had clambered on to them and had seated themselves where the surf rushed towards them from the open azure sea on the one side, drenching them with cool spray, and on the other side the low cliffs and rocks, surmounted by the clustered palms, were reflected in the still water. Here they sunned themselves and talked; and from time to time, when the heat became too great, they dived down together with open eyes into the cool, brilliant depths, gliding amongst the coloured sea-plants, grimacing at one another as they scrambled for some conspicuous pebble or shell, and rising again to the surface in a cloud of bubbles.
It was a joyous, exhilarating, agile occupation, far removed from the enchantments of the darkness; and the glitter of sun and sea effectually diminished the lure of the night’s witchery.
“You know,” said Jim, suddenly looking at his companion, as they lay basking upon the spray-splashed rocks, “I can hardly believe last night was anything but a dream.”
“Let us pretend that it was,” she answered. She pointed down into the translucent water. “Life is like that,” she said. “We dive down into those wonderful depths when the glare of actuality is too great, and we see all the pretty shells down there; and then we have to come up to the surface again, or we should drown.”
“I see,” he replied; “I was just a passing fancy of yours.”
[50]
She answered him gravely. “Women in that respect are not so different to men. Judge me by yourself.”
“Oh, but there’s a world of difference,” he said, chilled by her words. “I am simply a vagabond, a wandering Bedouin, here to-day and over the hills and far away to-morrow.”
“I am also a wanderer,” she smiled. “We are both free beings who have broken away from the beaten path. We both earn our living, and claim our independence.”
“Yet the difference is this,” he reminded her, “that the world will shrug its shoulders at my actions, but will condemn yours.”
She made an impatient gesture. “Oh, that threadbare truism!” she said. “I have turned my back on the world, and I don’t care what it thinks. I act according to my principles, and in this sort of thing the first principle is very simple. If a woman is a thoughtful, responsible being, earning her own living, and able to lead her own life without being in the slightest degree dependent on the man of her choice, or on any other living soul, she is entitled to respond to the call of nature at that precious and rare moment when her heart tells her to do so. There should be no such thing as a different law for the man and for the woman: there should only be a different law for the self-supporting and the dependent. The sin is when a woman is a parasite.”
With that she took a header into the water, and he watched her gliding amidst the swaying tendrils of the sea-plants, like a sinuous mermaiden.
[51]
When she rose to the surface once more he dived in, and swam over to her, his face emerging but a few inches from hers. “Do you love me?” he asked, smiling amongst the bubbles.
“No, I hate you,” she replied, striking out towards the shore.
“Why?” he called after her.
“Because you haven’t the sense to leave well alone,” she said, and thereat she dived once more, nor came to the surface again until she had reached shallow water.
At luncheon she met him with an ambiguous smile upon her lips; but finding that he was not eating his food with much appetite, she at once became motherly and solicitous, refused to allow him to eat the salad, offered to cut up the meat for him, and directed the waiter to bring some toast in place of the over-fresh roll which he was about to break. At the conclusion of the meal she ordered him to take a siesta in his room, and in this he was glad enough to obey her, for he was certainly tired.
When he woke up, an hour or so later, and presently went out on to the balcony, he saw her standing in her room, contemplating her painting materials.
“May I come in?” he asked.
She nodded. “Have you had a good sleep?” she inquired. “Sit down and talk to me. I have a feeling of loneliness this afternoon. I’m not in a mood to paint; yet I suppose I must, or I shall run short of money.”
He went to her side and put his hands upon her[52] shoulders, drawing her to him; but she pushed him away from her, with averted face.
“I said ‘sit down,’” she repeated.
Jim was abashed. “You’re very difficult,” he told her. “I think that under the circumstances I’d better go. I don’t know where I am with you.”
“You haven’t tried to find out,” she answered. “You’re quite capable of understanding me: I should never have let you come into my life at all if I had not been certain that you had it in you to understand.”
“Tact is not my strong point,” he said. “I’m just a man.”
“Nonsense!” she replied. “Don’t belittle yourself.”
He was puzzled. “Why, what’s wrong with men?”
“Their refusal to study women,” she answered.
She was not in a communicative mood, and would not be drawn into argument. He was left, thus, with a disconcerting sense of frustration, bordering on annoyance. It seemed evident to him that yesterday, by some secret conjunction of the planets, so to speak, their destinies had met together in one sentient hour of sympathy; but that now they had sprung apart once more, and he knew not what stars in their courses would bring back to him the ripe and mystic moment.
An appalling loneliness descended like a cloud upon him, and he was conscious that she too, was experiencing the same feeling. It was the lot, he supposed, of all persons who were born with the[53] Bedouin temperament; and he accepted it with resignation.
At length she conducted him—or did he lead her?—down to the verandah of the hotel; and now she had her paints with her, and occupied herself in making some colour-notes of the brilliant sea which stretched before them, and of the golden rocks and vivid green palms. Jim, meanwhile, read an English newspaper, some weeks old, which he had chanced upon in the salon; but from time to time he sat back in his chair and watched her as she worked, his admiration manifesting itself in his eyes.
“What are you staring at?” she asked him, presently.
“I was admiring the way you handle your paints,” he replied. “You’re a real artist.”
“The fact that a woman paints,” she remarked, “does not mean that she is an artist, any more than the fact that she talks means that she is a thinker. To be an artist requires two things, firstly, that you have something to express, and, only secondly, that you know technically how to express it. It is the point of view, the angle of vision, that counts; and in fact one can say that primarily one must live an art.”
He nodded. He wondered whether the events of the previous night were but the living of her art; and the thought engendered a kind of mild bitterness which led him to give her measure for measure. “I know what you mean so well,” he said, “because I happen to have the talent to put things into nice metre and rhyme; but it is the subject matter that really counts, and that’s where I feel my[54] stuff is so flat. Sometimes I am obliged to seek experience to help me.”
“You must let me see some of these poems,” she said, pursuing the theme no further.
He shook his head. “They are only doggerel, like the one I sang last night,” he laughed. “They are as shallow as my heart.”
She resumed her painting and he his reading; but his mind was not following the movement of his eyes.
He was thinking how little he understood his companion. She was clearly a woman of strong views, one who had taken her life into her own hands and was facing the world with reliant courage. In fact, it might be said of her that she was the sort of woman who would not be turned from what she knew to be right by any qualms of guilty conscience. He smiled to himself at the epigram, and again allowed his thoughts to speculate upon her alluring personality.
He found at length, however, that the matter was beyond him; and presently he turned to his reading once more.
It was while he was so engaged that suddenly he sat up in his chair, gazing with amazement at the printed page before him.
“Great Scott!” he whispered, pronouncing the words slowly and capaciously. There was a crazy look of astonishment upon his face.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, glancing at him, but unable to tell from the whimsical expression of his mouth and eyes what manner of news had taken his attention.
He looked at her as though he did not see her. Then he read once more the words, which seemed[55] to dance before him, and again stared through her into the distance of his breathless thoughts.
“News that concerns you?” she asked.
He nodded, holding his hand to his forehead.
“Bad news?”
“Yes,” he answered, as though speaking in a dream. “Very bad ... wonderful!”
She could not help smiling, and her intuition quickly jumped to the truth. “Somebody has died and left you some money?” she suggested.
He uttered an almost hysterical laugh. “I’m free!” he cried. “Free! I shall never have to go back to the mines.”
He sprang to his feet, folding the newspaper, and crushing it in his hand.
“Don’t go and faint again,” she said, quietly.
He laughed loudly, and a moment later was hastening into the hotel. He snatched his hat from a peg in the hall, and hurried out through the dusty little garden at the front of the building, and so into the afternoon glare of the main road. Here he hailed a carriage, and, telling the driver to take him to the Eastern Exchange Telegraph office, sat back on the jolting seat, and directed his eyes once more to the Agony Column of the newspaper. The incredible message read thus:
James Champernowne Tundering-West, heir to the late Stephen Tundering-West, of the Manor, Eversfield, Oxon, is requested to communicate with Messrs. Browne & Beadle, 135a, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London.
His uncle was dead, then, and the two sons, his unknown cousins, must have predeceased him or died with him! He had never for one moment thought of himself as a possible heir to the little property;[56] and heaven knows how long it might have been before he would have had knowledge of his good fortune had he not chanced upon this old newspaper.
Arrived at his destination, he despatched a cablegram to the solicitors, notifying them that he would come to England by the first possible boat. Then he drove on to Cook’s office in the heart of the city, which he reached not long before it closed; and here, after some anxious delay, he was told that a berth, just returned by its prospective occupant, was available on a French liner sailing for Marseilles that night at eleven o’clock. This he secured without hesitation, and so went galloping back towards the hotel as the sun went down.
In the open road, between the city and the hotel another carriage passed him in which Monimé was sitting, on her way to dine with some friends, of whom she had spoken to him. He waved to her, and both she and he called their drivers to a halt. Then, hastening across to her, he told her excitedly that he was sailing for England that night.
“You see, I’ve inherited some property,” be explained. “I must go and claim it at once.”
Her face was inscrutable, but there was no light of happiness in it. “I’m sorry it has come to an end so soon,” she cried.
“What?” he cried, and it was evident that he was not listening to her. “You’ve been wonderful to me. We mustn’t lose sight of each other. This thing has got to go on and on for ever.”
He hardly knew what he was saying. An hour ago she had been almost the main factor in his existence. Now she was but a fragment of a life he was setting behind him. It was almost as though[57] she were fading into a memory before his very eyes. He was, as it were, looking through her at an amazing picture which was unfolding itself beyond. The yellow walls of the houses, the sea, the palms, the sunset, were dissolving; and in their stead he was staring at the green fields of England, at the timbered walls of an old manor-house last seen when he was a boy, at the grey stone church amongst the ilex-trees and the moss-covered tombstones.
“I must go on and pack at once,” he said, standing first on one leg and then on the other. “You’re sure to be back before I leave. You can get away by ten, can’t you?”
He wrung her hand effusively, and hurried to his carriage, from which, standing up, he waved his hat wildly to her as they drove off in opposite directions.
But when the clock struck ten there was no sign of Monimé and a few minutes later the hotel porter, who was to accompany him to the harbour, began to urge him to delay his departure no longer. Being somewhat flurried, he thought to himself that he would write her a farewell letter from the steamer, and give it to the porter to carry back with him.
But by the time he had found his cabin and seen to his baggage, the siren was blowing, and the porter in alarm was hurrying down the gangway.
“I’ll write or cable from Marseilles,” he said to himself. “I don’t suppose she cares a rap about me: the whole thing was due to our romantic surroundings. But still one would be a fool to lose sight of a real woman like that.... I wish I knew her name.”