Chapter IX

"Naught is done that has not seeds in it."
MORLEY ROBERTS.

For both husband and wife, as for Sir Lakshman, September arrived too soon. Not even the lure of Egypt could make Lilamani other than loath to leave a corner of earth saturate with memories, sacred and imperishable as her love itself: and to Nevil, as the time drew near, there returned that faint prick of apprehension for which he hated himself the more because he could not disregard it altogether. But Lilamani on the sea was a revelation enchanting enough to banish all forebodings for a time; and present content was deepened by the knowledge that--conceit apart--he had achieved a remarkable summer's work.

In the seven weeks following on his return, three more pictures had been added to Sita in the hut: her first pleading with Rāma--that, as a portrait of Lilamani, excelled his study at Antibes; the setting forth of the three; and the abduction of Sita by Ravān. The completion of each had bred a larger confidence, a deeper understanding of the great subject chosen and inspired by his wife: while into the fourth he had infused a strange mingling of beauty and terror that at once amazed him and fired his ambition to bolder flights. A fifth picture, even, had been started: Sita, broken with grief, in the garden of Asoka, while she-fiends, on guard among the high enclosing bushes, leered at her through the dusk; their hideous shapes, half human, half bestial, grimly suggested rather than seen. They had given Lilamani nightmares; and her self-identification with Sita had so wrought upon her nerves, that she was not sorry to escape from the haunting nearness of Ravān and his myrmidons, for a time.

With Nevil it was otherwise. To tear himself from easel and canvas and the idea that dominated him was a greater wrench than he would have credited six months ago. But, in this crowning summer of his life, a very rage of work possessed him; a spontaneous flow of inspiration, not to be denied. It was as if all the thwarted and dammed up energies of those priceless years between twenty and thirty, having at last found their natural outlet, would give him no rest till they had atoned, in some measure, for achievement stultified and opportunities lost.

Happily for Lilamani, she herself was the mainspring of her husband's inspiration; while her absorption in his subject and her Eastern capacity for long spells of stillness made her an invaluable asset to his actual work. And afar, on the horizon of his golden present, the promise of the future glowed like a lamp. In Egypt he looked to imbibe large draughts of the colourful East; not in the self-conscious, notebook-and-pencil fashion of the journalist, but with all his creative fervour in abeyance, that the receptive faculties might have full play. Then, returning by Brindisi, they would spend a last fortnight in their land of enchantment before putting the Great Experiment to its ultimate test.

It had already been arranged that "Dreaming" should make its appearance in the Goupil Gallery at an autumn exhibition of English painters; and Martino looked that this picture alone should bring Sinclair's name into notice among the elect; thus preparing the way for his bold design of showing the Sita series independently when complete. Pamphlets, giving a brief outline of the Epic, should be supplied to all-comers, with a special description of each chosen scene; and Martino himself would brave the unspeakable English climate that he might have the pride and pleasure of inaugurating the Unique Event! Even Leseppes, prince of egoists, had shown keen interest in the new venture and promised a flying visit to Cadenabbia before Sinclair left.

With such stimulating visions and a radiant Lilamani for company, Nevil paid small heed to the whisper of apprehension during the brief voyage from Brindisi to Cairo; and through the first few days of varied and leisurely sightseeing, he strove loyally to convince himself that all was well. But upon the fourth day conviction went to pieces. Too late he recognized the wisdom of his instinctive recoil from Sir Lakshman's plan.

Hitherto he had seen the East through Lilamani's eyes, veiled and glorified by her idealism. Now he saw it in the fierce unsparing glare of its own sunlight; saw, too, how potently it drew and held the woman who had renounced it for love of him. True, it was not India; and the familiar-looking folk in street and desert spoke an unknown tongue. But the East, Near or Far, has its own indefinable atmosphere; and to Nevil Sinclair it was obvious that Lilamani drank it in as though it were the breath of life. An under-current of suppressed excitement vibrated in her low voice, and glowed fitfully in the brooding softness of her eyes. Acute consciousness of it pricked her husband to a not unreasoning jealousy, and even checked in a measure his own ardour of enjoyment.

On the fourth day, in question, he found her standing at the window of Sir Lakshman's private sitting-room, so absorbed in the street scene below that his entrance passed unheeded. He was almost at her elbow when she turned with a startled sound; and though her lips smiled a greeting, he saw the gleam of tears in her eyes.

"What is it, dear?" he asked.

"Not anything," she replied mendaciously, for she missed the note of sympathy in his voice.

The touch of her fingers on his coat sleeve elicited no response; and, after a second's hesitation, he said: "I'd sooner have the truth, Lilamani. You're not like yourself since you came. It excites you, upsets you, all this: perhaps--makes you regret----?"

"Oh, Nevil! Could you think such a thing?" Her fingers closed sharply on his arm. "Only--how can I help?--if it aches me sometimes, with reminding of my own country, my own peoples. Even though I cannot know their language; still, by their colour and movement--even by smell of shops and streets--all is speaking to me in the language of my heart. Have I made you understand?"

"Yes--yes. It's only natural. So long as it doesn't spoil your pleasure, I am content."

But although he patted the hand that held him, his tone belied his words, and he spoke looking down into the street, with its flow of noisy, leisurely life, its blinding patches of light and clear-cut, blue-black shadows.

A puzzled distress and the nearness of tears kept her silent; and he, with a muttered plea of letters to write, went out, leaving her a shade more puzzled, more distressed.

What was wrong? What was the nameless shadow that had come between them, dimming the radiance of her perfect week? For the past two days she had been vaguely aware of it; and now--his words, his manner, so unlike himself.

She brushed away the disturbing thought as if it were a fly that buzzed at her ear. But even as the fly returns, after futile circling, so the feeling came back, whenever some spontaneous outburst on her part forced Nevil to a show of response. Months of the real thing made her fatally quick to detect the counterfeit; and it saddened her beyond speech.

On the next night, when Sir Lakshman offered them another week at the hotel after he left, Sinclair would not see the eager pleading in his wife's face, while he thanked his father-in-law, and urged the need of finishing the picture on hand before going home in October. Yet after all, touched by her loyal seconding of his refusal, he stayed on three days--and regretted it. There were moments of unreasoning, yet invincible revulsion, when he could scarcely endure the sight of those other Eastern women who, in a dozen trifling ways, so subtly reminded him of his wife; robbing her, thus, of the unique quality that was for him an essential part of her charm. True, in happier intervals, he had absorbed much and observed much that was invaluable to an artist who aspired to interpret the East: but it was with a sense of undiluted relief that he trod the deck of their homeward-bound steamer and felt the hidden heart of it throb beneath his feet.

Not so Lilamani. Standing alone at the taffrail, while her husband interviewed the head-steward, she drank in every detail of the fast-retreating coast line, as if by intensity of looking she would stamp it for ever on her brain--that fervent and colourful East which spoke to her so feelingly in the language of her heart. No denying that this brief return to the atmosphere of her girlhood and the subsequent parting with her father had brought home to her the completeness of her own severance as nothing else could have done; had stirred afresh the ache of longing drugged, of late, by happiness almost beyond belief.

Yet did she not forget the price of return; the impasse from which her husband's love had so miraculously saved her: and even had it not been thus, regret were unthinkable. To belong body and soul to Nevil was, without question, the best fate that could befall a woman. Only, at this moment of parting, a perplexing conflict of emotions so perturbed her that when, at length, her husband came to her side, she could not turn and greet him because of chill tears that crept down her cheeks.

Nevil saw them, and for the first time they moved him to irritation rather than pity. His tone betrayed him.

"Crying again, Lilamani? Wishing you could have gone on with your father, I suppose, instead of having to come back with me?"

She winced and bit her lip. "Unkind to speak so," she murmured without looking round.

"I'm sorry. But you provoke it. You seem so heartbroken----"

"Not that. Only--a little sad. How can I help?"--then controlling herself, she looked up at him, smiling mistily. "But it is foolishness. And surely--we shall come again?"

He frowned. "I don't know. There won't be much surplus money for pleasure trips just at present. I've a big place to keep up, you see, and precious little to keep it on."

"How pity," she said softly, not quite following the drift of his last remark.

Again the vanishing coast line absorbed her; and he, still frowning, regarded her delicate profile in a speculative silence. Then he turned abruptly away; and strolling down the deck, soon fell into talk with the first officer.

Left alone again, the tears fell faster; till, in shame at her own weakness, and fearful of discovery, though dusk had fallen, she stumbled blindly down to their cabin--alone. In crossing the hatchway, she caught sight of Nevil and his companion pacing the deck. He saw her go. She knew it. But the minutes passed and he did not come. He was content to walk and talk with a stranger, while she lay crying softly in the half-dark; not only because the East was slipping farther from her with every throb of the ship's pulses, but because the radiance of her wonderful ten days had been dimmed by a shadow whose substance she could not divine.

So deeply and entirely had they lived hitherto in the world of imagination and emotion, wherein their unity was complete, that she scarce recognized, as yet, the possibility of serious divergence. She only knew that for near a week they had been living in a tangle of cross purposes which she was powerless to unravel; that now, for the first time, her tears had moved him to vexation, and he had left her to find her way about this strange ship alone: events of no mean significance in the early stage of marriage. But why? What harm had she done to cause this break in his unfailing tenderness; this first real sense of apartness from him who was more than ever her all, since India had claimed her father? Only one answer suggested itself. Always, at such moments, that unforgetable sentence in Jane's letter would prick softly, like a thorn left under the skin, reminding her--"I am here."

By the time he came into the cabin, tears had ceased; and bending down he kissed her flushed cheek; then, without a word, passed a soothing hand over her hair. She caught the hand and pressed it passionately to her lips. So, once again, comfort was restored--for the moment. Yet still--she did not understand: and therein lay the seeds of tragedy.

Egypt once out of sight things readjusted themselves insensibly, though the effect produced on Nevil could not be lightly shaken off. There was no more jarring irritability. But there were times when his wife was still aware of that intangible barrier; times when he was so absent and distrait that she felt as if the real Nevil had slipped miles away from her and only the shell of him lay beside her in the long deck-chair. Once, when she ventured on comment, he had frowned as if interrupted in a train of thought, and answered that between digesting new impressions and heavy responsibilities ahead, he had a good deal on his mind just then: which was true, though not the whole truth, as she was quick to divine.

Thenceforward she kept silence. But her thoughts were less easily bridled than speech, and during that short return voyage, she found herself too often at their mercy. On most nights Nevil would take her down to the cabin, and there leave her, while he himself returned to pace the deck in troubled meditation; faintly, indefinably alienated by a nameless something too elusive for definition; hating himself heartily; yet temporarily at the mercy of his mood. More than ever was he thankful for the few weeks of seclusion in store for them at Cadenabbia. Both being hypersensitive to the spirit of place, and of association, he relied confidently on these to restore that completeness of harmony, of fusion, without which he scarce dared contemplate the last great test of England and Bramleigh Beeches.

In this reliance they were unconsciously at one. Through the long hours when she was supposed to be asleep, Lilamani lay listening, instead, to the rhythmical swish-swish under her port-hole and the heart-throbs of the ship that bore her, minute by minute, nearer to the familiar peace of their sanctuary. There at least she had reigned supreme; there she had been essential both to his life and work; the woman's incurable need. There, surely, this shadow of division, of disappointment, would pass.

Yes, it was disappointment; that she had decided; having arrived at her own solution of the problem in those wakeful hours; a solution characteristic of her race. Six months a wife and yet no promise of that other--the supreme gift, that should crown her first one, the finding of himself. For the Eastern woman, marriage means motherhood, or an abiding sense of failure: and the least delay in the fulfilment of her divine mission breeds a lurking anxiety lest the worst befall. Already it knocked softly at the door of Lilamani's heart, and that it should visit her husband also seemed to her the most natural thing imaginable. He too had hoped. He too was disappointed. And although his tender consideration forbade speech he could not hide it altogether from one who loved and understood.

Thus she wove around his perplexing mood her primitive-womanly myth that was leagues removed from the truth; and longed only for courage to broach the subject, that pain might be lessened by sharing. But the mere imagining wrought her to such agony of shyness that she knew speech could not be between them--as yet. She could only wait--and pray. In the meantime she hoped great things from the spirit of peace that dwelt in their balcony, their little white boat, and their garden of dreams. Absorbed once more in their joint enterprise, the evil demons of vexation and disappointment must be driven out--if only for a time.

And it was so. The spirit of place and the very real love Nevil Sinclair had for his wife achieved their perfect work. The mood of aloofness vanished as though it had never been; and again, as after the lesser interruption of Jane's letter, the ardour of work flowed on over the incident, blotting it almost out of memory.

Leseppes' promised visit proved a foretaste of triumphs to come. He applauded Martino's verdict; insisted upon hearing long extracts from the Ramayāna; and covered Lilamani with confusion by advertising his admiration with a frankness of gaze that in her view amounted to insolence. For himself, he enjoyed her embarrassment. It added a provocative quality to her beauty; and to stare a pretty woman into a crimson silence was a delectable amusement that never palled. But of this by-play his host was unaware. He took good care of that, and Lilamani was too shy to speak.

For Nevil, in truth, the artist eclipsed the man. For him Leseppes the prince of egoists, the reputed libertine, was submerged in Leseppes the inimitable colourist, the godfather of his own lesser gift; and the great man's words at parting exalted him as the praise of no other living painter could have done.

"I tell you this, _mon ami_, and I speak from wide knowledge," said he, wringing the younger man's hand in the effusive fashion of his race--"those pictures of yours are unique, of their kind. They have the colour and sensuousness, the emotion and idealism of the East. _Mon Dieu_! They shall stir the blood even of those colossal Philistines, your own countrymen! I shall be over with Martino when your exhibition opens."

It was a very elated husband and wife that drank "Success to Sita" at dinner that evening.

"And it's all your doing--yours, my own little Sita Devi," he assured her, silencing her protest, as it deserved. "We'll block out the Hanuman scene to-morrow. I wish to God we could stay on here till the whole thing was done!"

How passionately Lilamani echoed that wish she dared not confess. Yet a flicker of hope gleamed in her eyes as she asked: "If you are so much wishing, Nevil--could it not be?"

"'Fraid not. Don't tempt me, sweetheart. Jane would have a fit; and there's a deal that needs my personal supervision. No joke playing the double rôle of artist and impoverished landowner. But after all its high time we started our real life together in our real home. I've picked a capital room in the East Tower for the studio; and we'll have one blessed fortnight all to ourselves before the new Lady Sinclair takes the family by storm!"

Lilamani shook her head, smiling uncertainly. "Lady Sinclair is afraid----"

"Afraid? Nonsense! She is going to be an unqualified success all round!"

His serene optimism stilled her qualms--for the moment at least. The date of their departure was fixed; and on a golden afternoon of October the little white boat set out for the last time. Lilamani, crouched in the stern, elbows planted on the cushioned seat, watched their chalet recede and dwindle till all outlines were blurred, and in spite of herself a muffled sob betrayed her "foolishness." This time it did not move Nevil to irritation. Balancing his sculls he leaned forward and caressed her shoulder.

"Why break your heart over the good days gone, beloved?" he reproved her gently. "There are plenty more ahead; and we'll come back here again, I promise you."

"Yes--yes; we must come back," she murmured, choking down her tears. But young as she was, already she began to perceive that the scheme of life does not admit of "coming back." It is an eternal, inexorable passing on.

END OF BOOK II