“Monimé!” he repeated. “Don’t you know me? I’m Jim—Jim Easton.” For a moment yet she did not speak. He could feel her hand trembling a little in his, and the movement of her breast revealed the haste of her breathing. She leaned back against the jamb of the door, and her eyes turned towards the garden behind her, as though she were contemplating flight into its shadows.
When at last she spoke, her words came rapidly. “Why have you come to Cyprus?” she asked passionately; and the sound of her voice brought a half-forgotten Alexandrian night racing back to his consciousness. “You couldn’t have known I was here, and nobody knows who I am. How did you find out where I lived?” She moved her head from side to side in a kind of anguish which he did not understand. “I don’t know that there is any need for you in the Villa Nasayan.”
“Nasayan?” he repeated, in query. “Is that the name of this house?” She nodded her head. “That’s the Arabic for ‘Forgetfulness,’” he said. “Why did you give it such a name?”
Her answer faltered. The serenity with which he associated her in his memory had temporarily left her. “There was much to forget,” she replied, “and much has been forgotten. Cyprus is called ‘The[196] Island of Forgetfulness.’ It is wonderful how bad one’s memory becomes here.”
She laughed nervously, and again put her hand to her head. The fingers of her other hand drummed upon the wall. “Why have you come?” she repeated.
“There was no reason,” he said. “I just thought I’d like to see Cyprus. I had no idea you were here. I only arrived to-day: I was just strolling about after dinner....”
“It’s more than four years,” she murmured. “Four years is a very long time. It was all so long ago, Jim, wasn’t it? Nobody can remember things as long ago as that, can they?”
She withdrew her hand from his, and stood staring at him with a baffling half-smile upon her lips. His heart sank, for it seemed to him that she was not minded to revive that dream of the past which to him had suddenly leapt once more into vivid reality.
“I have never forgotten,” he whispered, though he knew that the words needed qualification. “I knew it was you, almost before I saw your face.” He hesitated. “May I come into your garden?”
She allowed him to enter, and closed the door behind him. Together they walked in silence to a stone bench which stood in the moonlight beneath a dark cypress-tree; and here they seated themselves, side by side.
For a while they talked; but it was a sort of fencing with words, he thrusting and she parrying. He did not know what he said; for all his actual consciousness went out to her, not through speech, but through a kind of contact of their hidden hearts.
[197]
Then, without further preliminaries, she turned on him. “You say you have never forgotten,” she laughed. “But when you say that you are deceiving yourself, or trying to deceive me. I don’t like to hear you making conventional remarks, Jim: I have always thought of you as frank to the point of rudeness. Be frank with me now, and admit that you regarded our time together as a little episode in your wandering life, and that you went on your way without another thought for me....”
He interrupted her. “Was that how you felt about me?—you forgot me, too, didn’t you?”
“With a woman it is different,” she replied. “One is not always able to forget so soon.”
“But why didn’t you tell me your name, or give me some address?” he asked. “I wrote to you from the ship: I posted the letter at Marseilles. Didn’t you get it?”
“No,” she answered. “I stayed on at the Beaux-Esprits for a week or so, but nothing came. I left an address when I went away: I’m sure I did.”
He laughed. “I think you must have forgotten to. We are both just tramps....”
She made a gesture of deprecation. “At first I wanted to find you again very badly,” she said, turning her face from him. “I made inquiries, but nobody seemed to know anything about you. I remembered you said you’d inherited some property, and I even got a friend in England to look up recent wills and bequests for the name of Easton, but no trace could be found. Then, somehow, it didn’t seem to matter any more, and I told him not to look for you further.”
[198]
“Then you did care ...?”
“Who can tell?” she smiled, and her words baffled him, as did also the expression of her face in the moonlight.
“Why didn’t you tell me your name?” he asked. “I don’t yet know it.”
She looked at him in surprise. “My name is still ‘Smith,’” she laughed.
“I don’t believe you,” he answered.
She shrugged her shoulders. “They all know me as that in this place—just ‘Mrs. Smith.’”
“It used to be Miss Smith,” he said.
“One causes less comment as a married woman,” she explained. “Such friends as I have suppose that I am a widow who, being an artist, has come to live here because of the picturesqueness of the place and its cheapness.”
“And what is the real reason?” he asked, looking intently into her eyes.
Of a sudden she rose from the bench, and stood before him, her back to the moon, the light of which made a shining aureole round her hair. Her left hand was laid across her breast; the other was clenched at her side.
“Jim, I beg you ...” she said. “This is the Island of Forgetfulness, and you have strayed here, bringing Memory with you. There is no need for you in Nasayan. For my sake, for your own sake, go, I beg you. There is something here which we have in common, and yet which separates us: something which to me is a garland of Paradise, and which to you might be like the chains of hell. I beg you, I beg you: go away! Go back to the open road[199] and the Bedouin life. Leave me in Nasayan, in oblivion. I don’t want you to know more than this. I swear to you there is no call for you to stay. You have your wandering life: the hills and the valleys and the cities of the whole world are before you. Don’t stay here, don’t try to look into Nasayan....”
Her voice faltered, her gestures were those of pleading, yet even so she appeared to him to have that regal attitude which he remembered now so well.
The meaning of her words, the cause of their intensity, were obscure to him. His mind was confused, and there was a quality of dream in their situation. The black cypress trees which shot up around them into the pale sky like monstrous sentinels; the little orange-trees fantastically decked with their golden fruit; the tiled and moon-splashed pathways; the white walls of the villa, clad with rich creepers; the heavy scent of luxuriant flowers; the sparkling water in the marble basin of the fountain—all these things seemed unreal to him. They were like a legendary setting for the mysterious figure standing before him, a figure, so it seemed to him, of a queen of some kingdom of the old world, left solitary amongst the living long ages after her advisers and her palaces had crumbled to dust in the grasp of Time.
“I don’t understand,” he said, rising and confronting her. “What is the secret about you?—there was always mystery around you.”
“No,” she answered. “There was no mystery four years ago, except the mystery of our dream. My secret then was only a small matter. I was just a runaway. I had left my husband because I wanted[200] my freedom, and to follow my art in freedom. I had changed my name because I feared to be called back. But now he is dead, and I have nothing to fear in that direction.... No, there was no secret—then.”
“But now?—please tell me, Monimé,” he urged. “I want to know, I must know.”
Once more she fenced with him, and their words became useless. At length, however, his questions brought a crisis near to them again. She clenched and unclenched her hands. “I beg you, go away now,” she urged. “Forget me; go back to your freedom. There is something here which will trap you if you stay. Oh, can’t you understand? Don’t you see that I can’t tell whether Fate has brought you here for your happiness, or ev............