To Jim the days which followed were chaotic. The whole movement of his existence seemed to be stimulated and speeded up, and the pace of his thoughts was increased out of all measure. It was as though some sort of drag or break had been removed from the wheels of his being, so that the fiery steeds of circumstance were able to leap forward after many a mile of heavy going. From now henceforth he was conscious of a general acceleration, a new vehemence, even a sort of frenzy in his progress along the high road of life; and, in consequence, his impressions were received with less observation of detail. In the high passion of love there is no peace of mind and little satisfaction. The lover can never believe that he is loved, yet his happiness seems to him to depend on that assurance. His anxiety haunts him, fevers him, and lays siege as it were to his very soul.
The true lover makes more abundant acquaintance with hell than with heaven. So sensitive is his condition that every moment not rich with his lady’s obvious adoration is a moment impoverished by doubts and fears. She is not so interested in him as she was, he thinks; she is bored; she is cold to-day; she is thinking of something else; she does not surrender herself impetuously as she would if she really[207] cared. So says the wretched lover in his heart, and so he gives himself over to the legion of ten thousand devils.
Monimé maintained towards Jim a quiet and tantalizing reserve. Mentally she seemed to be upon the mountain-top, and he in the valley below. When he visited her at her house she kept him waiting before she made her appearance: it was as though she were not eager to see him. Women have this in common with the feline race: they seem so often to be intent upon some hidden pursuit. They go their own way, bide their own time, and no man may know the secret of their doings. No man may be initiated into their mysteries; and that which occupies them upstairs before they descend to greet him is beyond his ken.
Like a number of men, Jim’s character was marked by a certain simplicity. He made no secret of his love: it was apparent in his every gesture. The only secret which he maintained was that of his marriage, lest he should lose her, and in this regard he lied to an extent which brought misery to his heart. He gave her to understand that the property he had inherited had proved to be of no great value, and that the little money he now possessed was all that remained of its proceeds.
He desired to forget the years at Eversfield utterly, and to live only in the present. To Monimé he had always been Jim Easton, and the fact that she had not so much as heard the names Tundering-West or Eversfield aided him in his deception. Yet in his own heart his marriage to Dolly and the change of identity by which he had effected his[208] escape were become the two appalling mistakes which shut him off from Monimé and their son.
The little boy proved to be all that he could wish. He was about three and a-half years of age, and was in the midst of that first great phase of inquiry which is the introduction to the school of life. He used the word “why” a hundred times a day; his large eyes stared in wondering contemplation at every object which newly came into his ken; and his fingers were ever busy with experiment.
It is a trying age for the “grown-up”; but Jim, not having too much of it, enjoyed it, and enjoyed watching Monimé’s handling of the situation.
Her attitude towards himself during the first days, however, was the cause of many a heartache. There was a curious expression on her face as she watched him playing with the boy: it was at first as though she did not recognize his parental position, nor regard him as being in any way essential to the domestic alliance. She seemed to be anxious as to his influence upon the child, and when once he made the jesting assertion that parents should not try to be a good example to their offspring, but rather an awful warning, she did not laugh.
The possession of a son was the source of the most intense satisfaction to him; but Monimé seemed at first to be endeavouring to check his belated enthusiasm. Sometimes she appeared to him, indeed, as a lioness protecting her cub from an interfering lion, and cuffing the intruder over the head with a not too gentle paw. She seemed to claim the boy as her own exclusive property, and she allowed Jim no free access to the nursery, nor[209] indeed to the house. There were days upon which the door was closed to him on one pretext or another; and at such times he experienced a variety of emotions, all of which were violent and passionate.
“People will talk,” she would say, “if you come here so often, Jim. I am not independent of the world as I used to be: I have the boy to consider.”
She had called the child Ian, which, she said, was the name of her father; and the fact that she had thus excluded him from a nomenclatural identity with the boy was a source to him of recurrent mortification. His son should have been James, or Stephen, or Mark, like his ancestors before him: it filled his heart with bitter remorse that the little chap should be merely “Ian Smith.”
Gradually, however, Monimé became more accustomed to his association with the boy; and at length there came a memorable occasion on which they sat together beside his cot for the best part of the night and nursed him through an alarming feverish attack. It was then that Jim saw in her face an expression of tenderness towards him which was like water to the thirsty.
“You know,” he said to her, as they walked in the garden together in the cool of the daybreak, “this is the first time you have let me feel that I have anything to do with Ian. I have been very hurt.”
She turned on him vehemently. “Oh, don’t you understand,” she said, “that your coming back into my life like this is very hard for me to bear? I don’t want you to feel yourself tied down. I am perfectly capable of looking after myself and my[210] boy without your help. You have set a struggle going in my mind that is distracting me. There is one side of me which resents your interference, because you are just a wanderer, perfectly capable of walking off once more with hardly a farewell. There is another side which finds a sort of sneaking comfort in your presence, and endows you with virtues you probably don’t possess. I was self-reliant until you came. Now I am swayed this way and that. At one moment I think I was wrong, and that we ought to be married and ought to go to some country where we are unknown, so that we can explain our child by pretending our marriage took place secretly four years ago. At another moment I remember that you have not suggested marriage to me, and that therefore you probably realize as well as I do your unfittedness for the r?le of husband. And then there’s the constant feeling of the unfairness of making you share, at this stage, the responsibilities I undertook of my own free will at Alexandria.”
“It was my doing as much as yours,” he replied.
“No,” she answered, with a smile. “Any woman worth her salt handles those sorts of situations, and makes up her own mind. Man proposes, woman disposes. The whole thing is in the woman’s hands: to think otherwise is to insult my sex. Men and women are both pieces in Nature’s game; but Nature is a woman, and she works out her plans through her own sex.”
She sat down upon the stone bench, and, with hands folded, gazed up to the dawning glory of the sunrise. It was as though she were a conscious[211] daughter of Hathor, Mother of all things, looking for guidance in her perplexity. Jim seated himself by her side, and for some time there was silence between them, though his brain seemed to him to be full of the clamour of shackled words and incarcerated emotions.
Her reference to their marriage had pierced his heart as with a sharp sword. He desired to make her his wife more intensely than ever he had desired anything in his life before; yet he was unable to do so. He wanted to possess her, to have the right to protect her, to be able to dedicate his whole entity to her service; yet he was tied hand and foot, and could make no such proposal.
He felt ashamed, exasperated, and thwarted; and suddenly springing to his feet, he swung about on his heel, kicked viciously at the bushes, and swore a round, hearty oath.
“What’s the matter?” she asked in surprise. “Has something stung you?”
He laughed crazily. “Yes, I’m stung all over,” he cried. “There are a hundred serpents with all their flaming fangs in me. I think I’m going mad.”
He paced to and fro, tearing at his hair; and when at length he resumed his seat he seized both her hands in his, and frenziedly kissed her every finger.
“I’m on fire,” he gasped. “I believe my heart is a roaring furnace. I must be full of blazing light inside; and in a few minutes I think I shall drop down dead with longing for you, Monimé. Then you’ll have to bury me; but I tell you there’ll be a volcanic eruption above my grave, and flames will[212] issue forth from my bare bones. I don’t believe Death itself could extinguish me: my love will burst out in fearful torrents of lava, and the whole earth will tremble at my convulsions. I shall come to you again in earthquakes and tidal waves and a falling rain of comets. I shall blow the whole blasted world to smithereens before I go roaring into hell.... That’s how I feel! That’s what you’ve done to me!”
He took her in his arms, and, holding her crushed and powerless to resist, poured out his love for her in wild desperate words, his face close to hers. The sun was rising, and the first rays of golden light were flung upon the tops of the surrounding houses and trees while yet the garden was blue with the shadow of the vanishing night.
“Don’t Jim,” she whispered. “For God’s sake, don’t! We’ve got to be sensible. We’ve got to think what’s best for Ian. Give me a chance to think.”
“I want you,” he cried. “I want you more than any man has ever wanted anything. You belong to me: you’re my wife in the eyes of God. I want you to marry me....”
He had said it!—he had uttered the impossible thing; and his heart stood still with anguish. His arms loosened their hold upon her, and they faced one another in silence, while a thousand sparrows in the tree-tops chattered their merry morning salutation to the sun.
“Cad! Cad! Cad!” said the voice of his outraged conscience to him. “Bigamist and thief!”[213] And his heart responded with the one reiterated excuse: “I love her, I love her!”
“You must give me time to think,” she said at length. “Go now, Jim. You must have some sleep, and I must see to Ian.”
For two days after this she would not see him, but on the third day, at mid-morning, he found himself once more in her drawing-room. It was a charming room, cool and airy; and it had a distinction which his own drawing-room at Eversfield had lamentably lacked. Dolly had been a victim of the nepotistic practice of loading the tables, piano-top, and shelves with photographs of herself, her friends, and her relatives. Pictures of this kind are well enough in a man’s study or a woman’s boudoir; but in the more public rooms they are only to be tolerated, if at all, in the smallest quantity. Monimé, however, whether by design or by force of circumstances, was free of this habit; and the more subtle essence of her personality was thus able to be enjoyed without distraction.
The walls were whitewashed and panelled with old Persian textiles; carpets of Karamania and Smyrna lay upon the stone-paved floors; the light furniture was covered with fine fabrics of local manufacture; and in Cyprian vases a mass of flowers greeted the eye with a hundred chromatic gradations and scented the air with the fragrance of summer.
Monimé, upon this occasion, had reverted to her accustomed serenity of manner; and as she refreshed her distracted lover with sandwiches of goat’s-milk cheese and the wine of the island poured[214] from a Cyprian jug, she talked to him quietly of practical things.
She argued frankly for and against their marriage, and reviewed the financial aspect of the question without embarrassment. She told him that she had just received a proposal from her salesman in London that she should go over to Egypt at once and paint him a dozen desert subjects, there being a readier market for these than for pictures of little-known Cyprus. This, therefore, she intended to do; and, in view of Ian’s health, she proposed to send the boy and his nurse to England, there to await her return in four or five months’ time.
Jim moved restlessly in his chair as she spoke, for the thought of revisiting England was terrifying to him; yet if she went there he could hardly resist the temptation to follow. He knew that it was preposterous enough to think of a bigamous marriage to her, even here in the East, but in England such a union would be madness.
“I thought,” he said gloomily, “that you did not want to risk meeting your former friends.”
“What does it matter now?” she replied. “The scandal of my leaving my husband is forgotten, and he, poor man, is dead. I have never told you his name, have I? He was Richard Furnice, the banker.”
Jim glanced up quickly. “I know the name,” he said, with simplicity, for who did not? “But I don’t remember ever reading of his domestic troubles.”
“No,” she replied. “The scandal was kept out of the papers. He............