Читать книгу The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping - Warwick Deeping - Страница 20
THE IMMORTALS
ОглавлениеThe white steamer lay motionless for a moment in the broken blue of the sea. She had dropped a boat like a white shell that dipped and rolled in the swell beside her.
Two men were scrambling about the boat, unhitching the falls and poling off from the ship’s side. A third man lay on a mattress in the stern sheets—one man whose face looked all red and mottled, and who sucked his lips in and out as he breathed. He wore nothing but a white shirt and a pair of dark coloured trousers; his feet were bare.
The two men got the oars out and began to pull, the blades of the oars cutting white into the green-blue water under the ship’s side. Rows of faces looked down at them—silent, solemn faces. Something dramatic was happening, and happening quietly as things happen with the English in war or at sea. A woman began to cheer and to wave her handkerchief, and the cheer ran along those rows of solemn, staring masks.
“That’s what I call courage! Oh, good luck, good luck!” The woman had tears in her eyes.
“Damned plucky!”
An officer stood on the rail and waved his cap.
“Cheerio! The doc. is weeping because he can’t come with you. We’ll be quarantined—but we’ll send someone back.”
The rowers looked up and smiled.
“Cheerio!”
“Good-bye, Mr. Cumberledge. Bollard, I’m proud of you.”
Bollard spat into the sea.
“Let’s get out of the limelight, Mister,” he said, loving it all the same.
They pulled clear of the steamer, and saw the white chasm at her stern as the screws began to revolve. She glided away, a white shape between the blue of the sky and the angrier blue of the sea. Obeying some common impulse the two men rested on their oars and stared at her, Bollard with his flattened head and projecting jaw, Cumberledge long and lean, with breed in every line of him. Then they looked at the man lying on the mattress. He was conscious of nothing; his dusky face was a grotesque attachment to his heavy, breathless chest.
Bollard spat again into the sea.
“Come on,” he said.
They resumed their rowing—staring over the boat’s stern at the white hull of the steamer that seemed to be sinking more deeply into the blue of the sea. Neither of them spoke; they pulled in silence towards the purple outline of the rocky island which was to be a sort of lazar house, refuge and home. The wind came with an increasing whip out of the clear sky; white horses were showing, and sometimes the top of a wave slapped heavily against the boat’s stern.
Bollard turned to look over his shoulder.
“How fur’s that durned island?”
Cumberledge stopped rowing and turned his head, and the boat began to swing across the seas.
“Look out, Mister—keep on pulling.”
“Sorry, Bollard. It looks as though we had another mile or so yet.”
“That ain’t worrying me. It’s the getting ashore—with that thing.”
“There’s a strip of sand. Mr. Carter made sure of that—through his glasses.”
“Funny, ain’t it!” and Bollard nodded his head at the sick man on the mattress; “suppose he’ll be a stiff in a day or two.”
“Not much doubt about it, I’m afraid. It is one of the deadliest things on earth.”
Bollard meditated—his blue jerseyed back swinging steadily.
“Now, if we’d been dagos,” he said presently, “we should have dropped the feller into the sea—two days before he was due for heaven. But being British——”
“Just so,” said Cumberledge; “we don’t do that sort of thing.”
There was another length of silent rowing before Bollard turned his head.
“Say—Mister?”
“Yes?”
“D’you believe in that squirt of stuff the doc. gave us both?”
“A bit.”
“Durned if I do.”
The top of a wave spilled itself over the stern of the boat. The wind had freshened suddenly as though a big door had been opened in that hard blue sky, and Bollard gave an anxious cock of the chin.
“The sooner we get ashore the better. Queer sea—this. I’ve known squalls drop on you—out of nothing—like a bucket of water. Keep her steady. Put yer back into it, Mister.”
They rowed hard, and Cumberledge—landsman that he was—noticed a peculiar and abrupt change in the surface of the sea. The troughs between the waves seemed broader and deeper, and the waves themselves had a steeper and more menacing curl. He heard Bollard grunt expressively.
“Shallow water. There must be a durned reef round the b—— island. Look out, Mister, or we’ll be swamped.”
“Can you swim, Bollard?”
“Not a yard.”
Suddenly the boat jarred under them—swung round broadside to the seas—heeled over and filled. A wave caught her and rolled her right over.
Cumberledge lay panting on a flat rock just beyond the suck of the sea. His last three minutes had been spent in a chaotic struggle among the breakers that rumbled and splashed on a broken edged headland that jutted into the sea. The end of his long swim had found him fighting to make the strip of sand—but the set of the sea had carried him round the headland to the rocks.
He lay there, conscious only of exhaustion and a most damnable pain in his left leg. In his scramble up the rocks he had caught his left foot in a deep crevice, and the next wave had knocked him over, and the bones had given just above the ankle. His clothes were torn; his body felt one great bruise, and he had swallowed a lot of salt water.
For quite a long while he lay there in a semi-dazed state, with the sunlight beating on him, and the wind blowing flakes of spray over his body.
Presently he raised his head. The man in him revived. He began to work his way up the slope of the headland—dragging his left foot and cursing it. He crawled beyond the reach of the spray, and gained a little hollow on the top low headland; he was in the sun here and out of the wind, and he could see along the curve of towing sand strung between his headland and the next. But the climb and the pain had exhausted him. His head went down again.
He felt shocked, vastly discouraged, ready almost to weep. What an ending to a day of stiff-lipped courage! Poor Bollard dead—and the dying man soused in the sea! He had had no glimpse of Bollard since the over-turning of the boat—though he had swum round and round for a while, looking for him, and he guessed that the sailor had been stunned and had sunk in the deep water beyond the reef. And what a prospect for himself, marooned with a broken leg on an island that he believed to be deserted, foodless, waterless, without shelter!
Everything had been lost with the boat. What a futile sacrifice! They might just as well have dropped that moribund mass of infection over the ship’s side into the sea.
Again he raised his head and his manhood stiffened itself. Sunset had come, and behind the sky was a sheet of orange above the deep sombreness of the sea. He blinked, closed his eyes, opened them again, and raised an astonished head above the ledge of rock. He stared. Then he closed his eyes, and kept them closed for half a minute. But when he opened them again, the thing was still there; it had come nearer.
Cumberledge saw two figures in the sands. One figure lay half on the sand and half in the wash of the sea—a figure in a white shirt and dark breeches, and most obviously dead. The other was a thing of life—amazing, incredible—the figure of a girl running wild upon the sands. Cumberledge saw her as a vivid and brilliant creature; a little distant figure that glowed and raced at the edge of the sea.
She came nearer. It was obvious to Cumberledge that she had not seen the dead body lying on the shore, for a ridge of black rock jutted up just beyond it. He was absorbed in watching the girl, and as she came nearer, sometimes running with arms spread, sometimes taking a few quick steps that were like the steps of a dance, he was fascinated by her strangeness. She looked like a girl of three thousand years ago, some dark-haired child of Minoan Crete.
Her shoulders and arms were bare. Her bodice was red, her skirt an emerald green. She had a green fillet about her hair, great gold earrings, and a massive, barbaric chain of red beads dangling from her neck. And she wore sandals made of some stuff that glittered in the sunlight.
Cumberledge closed his eyes.
“It can’t be true,” he said to himself; “I must have had a knock on the head.”
He reopened his eyes and saw her close to the wall of black rock. She gave a little run, and rising like a bird, stood poised upon a flat boulder. For a moment she remained utterly still, save for the flutter of her green skirt. She had seen the body lying on the sands.
It was impossible for Cumberledge even to suspect that though she appeared most strange to him, the dead man appeared to her far more strange and impossible. He saw her leap down from the rock, run quickly towards the body and then stop. Her pose as of terror, of astonishment, of immense wonder. He saw her move forward step by step, shirkingly, one arm rigid—the four fingers spread—her other hand at her throat. She was close to the dead man’s head and looking down at him. Every part of her seemed to quail.
A vivid phrase came into his head.
“Life discovers Death!”
A moment later he had raised his head and was shouting to her.
“Keep away—keep away.”
She did not hear him, for the noise of the sea drowned his voice; nor need he have feared that she would touch the body of the man who had died of pneumonic plague, for she turned and fled with arms spread like the white wings of a bird.
Cumberledge felt dashed. He had a personal interest in life, and a broken leg that called for sympathy; night was coming on and he had no wish to spend it lying in the wind on the cold face of a rock. He hollowed his hands about his mouth and hailed her again. He saw her pause—only to realize that it was not his shout that had slowed her sandalled feet.
A second figure had appeared, the figure of a man. He had come over the further headland, and as the evening sunlight played upon him he looked like a tiny figure of gold. Cumberledge saw the girl run towards him and cling to him like a frightened child.
Then she pointed—and drew him by the hand—but for a minute or more they remained there, and even their gestures seemed strange. They were freer, more dramatic, more human than the gestures of the moderns and made Cumberledge think of two figures in a Greek tragedy. He forgot his broken leg in watching them, and their slow advance along the sands. The girl was clasping the man’s right arm—while he walked like a troubled Zeus treading the stately earth, a Zeus whom some Promethean treachery had angered. His hair and beard were a tawny gold; his loose cloak and tunic were of the same colour, and he wore sandals like the girl.
“I suppose I—do—see them?” thought Cumberledge, feeling his head.
He turned his eyes towards the body of Steel Maitland.
“That’s real. And the girl saw it. They must be real.”
When he looked again they were close to the black ridge of rock that screened the body. The man climbed it and went on, but the girl remained poised upon a rock—her arms folded over her bosom.
Cumberledge got on his knees, waved, and shouted:
“Keep away from that body.”
Again the noise of the great sea drowned his voice; but the girl saw his waving arm and his head and shoulders outlined against the yellow sky. She gave a cry. The man in gold turned and saw her pointing hand. For a moment he stood at gaze, and then walked slowly forward towards the headland. The girl followed him. He suffered her to come with him as far as the rocks—but there he motioned her back.
“Stay here, Ariadne.”
Cumberledge heard the words, and thrilled. The man had spoken in classic Greek.
His head appeared above the top of the rocks, a fine head, strangely young yet venerable, with sea-blue eyes that were clouded and angry, and for a moment these two men looked at each other with curiosity and mistrust.
“I should not come too close, sir,” said Cumberledge in English.
He was surprised when the man replied in English that was as English as his own.
“What are you doing here? No one is allowed to land on this island.”
His solemnity was epic. He looked like a god questioning a slave. His yellow, Zeus-like head seemed to have passed through life without any sound of laughter. It was Cumberledge who laughed. He could not help seeing the man as a clerified and superhuman squire asking some river party how they had dared to land on his island.
And then he was ashamed of his laughter. There was something in the man’s eyes that sobered him.
“I beg your pardon. Our boat was upset, and one of the men with me drowned. We did not know whether there was anyone on this island. Didn’t you see our steamer?”
The man regarded him steadily, and then looked out to sea.
“There is no steamer.”
“No—she dropped us. By the way—does the girl understand English?”
The man nodded.
“Well—I think you had better send her away. If she is your daughter——”
“Ariadne——!”
Her immense seriousness, her dark-eyed wonder, changed to a sudden smile. She turned quickly and disappeared. They heard her sandals on the rocks—and when Cumberledge saw her again she was walking slowly along the sands. Once or twice she turned and looked back.
“She is more obedient than I was,” said Cumberledge.
The man’s blue eyes flared.
“Now! Have you any excuses—anything to plead?”
Cumberledge looked at him in astonishment. If ever he had dreamed of an angry and outraged god——!
“I don’t understand you——”
“I am going to throw you back into the sea.”
For the moment, Cumberledge thought that the man was mad, and yet his face was not the face of a madman. It betrayed—rather—a calm wrath, a vast resentment against the mischance that had thrown a dead man and a live man upon this island. His eyes were lucid and steady. He meant what he said.
“That’s very hospitable of you!”
Cumberledge gave a cracked smile, and turned to ease his broken leg.
“But—before you throw me back into the sea—and by the way—I have got a broken leg—may I explain how and why I happened to land on your island?”
The man sat down on a flat rock.
“Be quick,” he said.
“Thank you. My name is Cumberledge; I was a passenger on the Otranto, and bound for England. Three or four days ago my cabin companion fell sick; it turned out to be pneumonic plague. The news leaked through the ship and there was something like a panic. Well, to be brief—another man and myself volunteered to take the fellow off the ship—land on one of these islands, and run an isolation hospital for one. We might develop the disease; we had to chance that—and we chanced it. As it happened—our boat upset on that reef—the sailor with me was drowned; so was our patient. That’s him—there.”
He nodded towards the body on the darkening sands. The sky had lost its warm flush and the sea had changed to amethyst. The man turned his head and looked at the dead man who had been washed ashore—and the wind seemed to blow more coldly.
“So, you will observe, sir, that I did not land on your island for a picnic. Also, I would suggest that I am an infected person, and that in throwing me into the sea, you might inbreathe the infection.”
He ended with a touch of fierceness, sarcasm. The man sat very still on his rock, his yellow hair and beard turning to a ghostly silver. Presently, he spoke.
“Is that a threat?”
“I should call it a warning.”
They eyed each other in the dusk and, somehow, Cumberledge felt that the other man had softened, that his inexplicable anger had entered a shadow of perplexity.
“By the way—it would interest me to know what sin I have committed in being washed ashore on this island?”
The man seemed to reflect.
“The sin of bringing death where no death is.”
“You mean——?”
“Man,” and his voice had a fierce solemnity, “you have blundered in upon a great experiment. That dead thing down there has spoilt the work of twenty years.”
Cumberledge’s pale face strained out of the dusk.
“Do you mean to say that nothing has ever died on this island?”
“Not since I have been here.”
“And your daughter——?”
“She does not know that there is such a thing as death. I have brought her up to believe that we go on living and living for a thousand years, and that then—the Great Messenger comes for us. I wanted to see whether the body would grow old, when the soul did not know that old age—as we know it—and death, existed.”
“But, good heavens, man,” said Cumberledge, “what about heredity, the habit of millions of years?”
“I am a mystic. The body is for the soul, not the soul for the body.”
He looked over the darkening sea, and then he turned to Cumberledge.
“How old do you think I am?”
“You look forty-five.”
“I am seventy, and my daughter is thirty.”
“She looks eighteen.”
“Exactly. I expect to live another thirty years, and I expected the girl to look just as she is now, thirty years hence. But you, and that body——”
“Look here,” said Cumberledge a little testily; “do you mean to tell me that nothing has died here, that she has never seen a dead bird or a dead animal?”
“There are no birds and no animals on the island.”
“Fish, then?”
“I have never seen a dead fish.”
“And there are just you two?”
“I have three servants.”
“And how would you explain, then, to your daughter, supposing——?”
“She believes that they are nearly a thousand years old.”
“And they pretend——?”
“Yes. There are reasons.”
“But how do you live?”
“On fruit and vegetables. Twice a year a ship calls, and we land stores in our boat, but the sailors never come ashore. Of course, I have had to pay, and pay heavily.”
It grew darker, and they could no longer see the body on the sands.
“It seems to me,” said Cumberledge, “that the solution of the difficulty is very simple, I mean, the explaining of that dead body. He was a thousand years old, and the Great Messenger had come for his soul.”
The man made a movement of the head.
“Then—there is me.”
“Yes, there is you.”
They looked at each other steadily in the dusk, this Englishman and this neo-Greek who once had been an Englishman. There was a sense of struggle and of perplexity; the present became penetrated by the past.
“Let us consider,” said Cumberledge, “the idea of your pitching me back into the sea. The trouble is that the girl has seen me—very much alive.”
The man sat with bowed head.
“Wait,” he said; “be patient—a moment. Something is speaking inside me——!”
He stood up; he seemed strangely agitated. Then, he clambered down the rocks and began to walk up and down on the sand. He was visible to Cumberledge as a dim, moving shape, a ghost, troubled, distracted. The stars were shining; the wind seemed to blow less keenly.
Presently, he came climbing back to where Cumberledge lay.
“Your father was at Trinity?”
“Yes.”
“He rowed in the Cambridge boat?”
“That’s true.”
“So did I.”
There was a pause, tense with significance.
“My name is Ringwood,” said the man; “you may have heard it.”
Cumberledge had heard it.
“Not the Ringwood, Lord Test——?”
“Yes, twenty years ago—I was that.”
Cumberledge sat silent. Young man that he was that name was known to him, a name that had drawn to itself a little world of mystery and tragic strangeness. He had heard old gossips at the “clubs” speak of the “Ringwood affair,” and of the tales that were told of its vague aftermath. No one had ended the tale in the same way. Ringwood was alive and he was dead; he had disappeared in Central Africa; he had been last heard of in Thibet; he had died of drink in Paris. Some men still remembered him as the scholar, the traveller, the collector of old books and of precious stones, the great gentleman, the maker of gardens, and the planter of trees.
“I see,” said Cumberledge in a hushed voice; “I see.”
Ringwood was standing and looking down at him.
“The easiest way would be for me to take you on my back,” he said.
Cumberledge gave a jerk of the chin.
“What! You mean——?”
“I have a garden-house on the edge of my wood of cypresses and pines. You could be isolated there; no one else need come near you.”
There was a short, tense silence. Then Cumberledge spoke.
“It can’t be done,” he said.
“It must be done,” said the other.
He came close, but Cumberledge put up a hand.
“No, stand off. If you could rig up a shelter or something in the sands, and bring food and water, and lash up this leg of mine, I could manage.”
A calm but stubborn voice answered him out of the darkness.
“Is that our tradition? No. You were ready to risk your life for the sake of a lot of strangers. What do you think your father would have done in my place? The moon will be up soon.”
“But, look here, sir, what about the others, your daughter?”
“That will be arranged. The servants will not come too near to the garden-house. They will leave us food.”
Cumberledge half rose on one knee.
“Us! You are not going to——?”
“That is just what I am going to do.”
“But your theory—the living-for-ever idea——?”
“Life is stronger than theories, Cumberledge, so is tradition, sometimes. I realized that—an hour ago when I was down there on the sands.”
The sun shone full on the garden-house, but Cumberledge lay in the shade. He looked out between pillars of white stone at the house standing in the valley below, surrounded by its gardens, and for its background the blue of the sea. It was not such a house as northern Europe knows, but a thing of the old Ægean life, and Cumberledge could see its white porticoes and colonnades shining behind the cypresses and pines. A tiny stream coming down from the hills was caught in great cisterns of white marble. Everywhere the water had been led into little murmuring channels among the orange groves, and between the vines Cumberledge could hear nothing but the trickle of the water, and the sighing of the wind in the cypresses and pines. A life that was thousands of years old, a life that seemed capable of going on for ever.
And yet this air of permanency was an illusion, and Cumberledge knew it to be an illusion. He lay and wondered what Ringwood thought—the Zeus of this little island who had had rugs spread under the shade of a pine, and who sat and slept there, and talked. Two days had gone by, and it seemed to Cumberledge that Ringwood had grown suddenly and perceptibly older, that he had withered slightly in a night. Was it possible that Time, his seventy years, had suddenly overtaken him?
And the girl?
Daily, she came as far as the low stone wall that divided the wood and the wilderness from the garden. There was a stone seat here under the shade of the tree, and she would sit there and watch the two men as though she was trying to understand something, to fathom their secret. Cumberledge felt that she had begun to realize that there was a secret. He conceived an immense pity for her, and something more than pity. This father of hers had dreamed of giving her a sort of perennial youth, a beautiful, cold immaturity. Was such a youth desirable? Had he not withheld from her the real food of the immortals, love, pain, sacrifice?
Sometimes she sang to them, touching the strings of her zither; sometimes she talked; for the seat was less than thirty paces away, and in that serene stillness the voice carried far. Cumberledge understood that she had been forbidden to come nearer, and that she had accepted Ringwood’s orders as she had accepted life upon the island. Yet she, too, had changed. Her eyes had begun to question things. There were moments when they betrayed resentment, impatience; the impatience of a child who is learning to ask questions, the resentment of the woman who demands that they shall be answered.
Very often the eyes of these two met with questioning significance across that space of thyme and lavender.
“Oh, stranger, what art thou?”
“Ariadne, I am life and death.”
The servants brought food, wine and water, and left them half-way between the garden-house and the garden. They were quiet, softly-moving, sombre creatures dressed in some coarse white material, and looking like old Cistercian monks. Cumberledge never heard them speak. Their eyes regarded Ringwood as though he were no common man, but a clean god and a master.
Two more days slipped by, and Cumberledge had listened to all the mystical philosophy that had filled the life of this strange exile. On the fifth day he noticed a change in Ringwood’s voice, it seemed flatter and less vital, less full of confidence. He appeared restless; his blue eyes had lost their tranquility. In the cool of the evening he disappeared, and darkness was falling before he returned, walking slowly and with a suggestion of effort.
Cumberledge heard him cough. That most prosaic of sounds was the opening note of the tragedy.
He sat down a few yards from the door of the garden-house, and Cumberledge could hear him breathing, and it was the breathing of physical distress.
“Ringwood,” he said, “what is wrong?”
The doomed man remained very still.
“It has come,” he answered, “and it has come suddenly. I have been deciding what I ought to do.”
“Good God!” said Cumberledge, sitting up, “forgive me.”
Ringwood stretched out an expressive hand.
“It is fate—my message. Listen to what I have to say. Let us look at things calmly. This disease kills, and kills quickly. Yet—I should be lying there on those rugs, a thing sodden with fever, delirious, unconscious. What would happen? The child would come to me. Nothing, no persuasion would be able to keep her away. She would catch the disease and die.”
He spoke very calmly yet with tragic tenderness.
“That must not happen. You, you, when the thing has passed over, will have to tell her——”
“Man, what do you mean?”
“You will have to tell her the truth, for I shall not be here.”
And then, he stretched out his hands eloquently, pleadingly, with infinite meaning.
“Cumberledge, I have loved this child, and perhaps too well. Perhaps, I have been wrong; perhaps I have made her life too much that of a beautiful figure in a case of glass. I appeal to you, the son of my old friend. She will not lack anything of the grosser things of life, but you can give her what I can no longer give.”
He bowed his head, and seemed to struggle for breath.
“Love,” he said—and lost his voice in a spasm of coughing—“the most sacred of all things, the immortal fire.”
He covered his head with his arms and stood up.
“Promise——”
“I promise. But, Ringwood——”
“The truth, tell her——”
“I will try. But, man, what is in your mind——?”
“Explicit,” said Ringwood suddenly, and passed into the darkness out of Cumberledge’s view.
Cumberledge sat and trembled. He could hear a rustling sound as though a man were groping for something among the bushes.
“Ringwood,” he called. “Ringwood, where are you——?”
The shadowy figure reappeared; it had something dark, like a loose bundle on its shoulder.
“I shall burn these,” it said, “down by the shore—the rugs and blankets. Man—remember.”
He drew back and disappeared; but Cumberledge called after him in a voice of tragedy:
“Ringwood, come back. Where are you going?”
There was no answer. Cumberledge sat and listened, overwhelmed by a sense of his own helplessness. He knew Ringwood had gone to the sea.
It was the most perfect dawn that Cumberledge ever remembered, an enchanted, Homeric dawn of purple and gold. The motionless cypresses stood as black spires against the changing sapphire of the sea. There was no wind, no movement; nothing but a solemn ecstasy of silence, a beautiful sadness in the eyes of the day’s joy.
And Cumberledge waited. He had lain awake half the night, had watched the stars grow pale and night snatching her dark robe from off the sea. He was wondering what he would say to Ariadne, how he would tell her, what she would do.
Presently he saw one of the servants come up from the garden with the morning’s meal in two Samian bowls. Cumberledge called to him.
“Andrew——”
The man set the bowls down on a patch of grass, and stood staring. He saw that the rugs had gone, and that his master was not there.
“Andrew, did your master tell you why none of you were to come near us?”
“No, sir.”
“It was because I had come from a ship in which there had been a deadly disease. He wished no one else to face the danger of taking it. The disease has passed me over; but last night your master sickened.”
The man looked scared.
“He has taken his bed away, sir.”
Cumberledge was leaning forward, his face tense and lined.
“Andrew, I believe that your master has drowned himself; he did it so that your mistress shall be safe. Go, all three of you, and search the island; make sure. But say nothing to her.”
The man’s face was like a tragic mask.
“That was like him,” he said; “he was more of a god than a man.”
An hour passed, and Cumberledge lay back and waited, his eyes fixed on the two Samian bowls, one of which held the mortal food that Ringwood would taste no more. He had drunk the wine of self-sacrifice; he was with the immortals; the Samian bowl was for the living, not for the dead.
Presently Cumberledge heard a voice, the voice of a girl singing as she came up through the garden.
“Dear God!” he thought, “and I must tell her that it was I who brought death to this island!”
As she climbed the steps he saw her dark beauty rise against the green of the cypresses and the blue of the sea. She stood there, looking across the white portico of the garden-house, her hands clasped behind her head, a Greek girl, a woman, a child.
Cumberledge called to her, softly.
“Ariadne.”
She dropped her hands, smiled and came across to him through the knee-deep lavender and thyme, and when she saw the two Samian bowls with the food in them untouched she paused, surprised.
“You have had no food, neither you nor my father.”
He saw her glance pass to the place where Ringwood’s bed had been.
“The bed has gone!”
Cumberledge was sitting up, watching her between the stone pillars.
“Ariadne,” he said, “I have something to say to you. Your father left a message for you.”
Her eyes were fixed on him, they seemed to grow larger, to fill themselves with darkness. Her body lost its flowing youthfulness and grew rigid.
“I do not understand.”
“The Great Messenger——” he said.
For one moment she remained very still, then she flung herself down on the scented maquis. Her arms were folded over her head, her face buried in the grey foliage; she did not move or utter a sound, but lay there like a mourner in a temple stretched at the feet of her god. And into the silence came the figure of the man Andrew. He looked at Cumberledge and made a sign, and Cumberledge understood.
The man vanished, but Ariadne did not move. Cumberledge sat and watched her, wondering whether it was time to speak. Yet, while he was hesitating, she raised herself a little; he could see her dark hair but not her face.
“He did not say good-bye to me,” she said.
The seal of a perplexed silence fell from the man’s lips.
“Ariadne, have you never heard of death?”
Her sombre eyes lifted to his.
“Death! What is death?”
“The Great Messenger. He called your father, and your father heard him. Death comes for us all. Listen, and I will tell you.”
She lay curled up like a wounded thing, listening, half-hidden in the scented bushes. Cumberledge spoke very simply, just as he would have spoken to a child. He told her the truth—that most difficult of all things to tell.
“It was I who brought death here—thinking to save other lives. Your father saved me, and when the Great Messenger came for him he went like the great man that he was. He did not stay to say good-bye to you, for if he had stayed death might have taken you also. He did not wish you to die.”
She stood up; she turned away and went slowly down towards the garden, her arms hanging limply. She disappeared down the steps and was lost in a grove of cypresses, but presently Cumberledge heard her voice utter one wailing bitter cry. Then there was silence, a silence that hurt his heart.
“How she must hate me!” he thought.
His own helplessness exasperated him. His glance lighted again on the two Samian bowls standing on the patch of grass in the morning sunlight. He remembered that he had not eaten, and realized that his fast could not last for ever.
“God helps those ...” he thought, and sat considering his splinted leg and how best he could crawl to fetch his food. He was in the very act of moving himself from the mattress that was laid upon the floor when he saw Ariadne reascending the steps that led from the garden. She came forward, bent down, picked up one of the Samian bowls and carried it towards the portico.
