Читать книгу In the Wilderness - Robert Hichens - Страница 9

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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.