“Julius——!” I exclaimed, conscious that I flushed a little, “but she is wonderful; superior, too, in some magnificent way to—any——”
“Lady,” he came abruptly to my assistance, no vestige of annoyance visible.
“To anyone of our own class,” I completed the sentence more to my liking. “I admit I feel drawn to her—in a kind of understanding sympathy—though how can I pretend that I—that this sense of familiarity is really memory?” It was impossible to treat him lightly; his belief was his life, commanding a respect due to all great convictions of the soul. “You have found someone you can love,” I went on, aware that it gave me no pleasure to say it, “and someone who loves you. I—am delighted.”
He turned to me, standing hatless, the sunlight in his face, his eyes fixed steadily upon my own.
“We had to meet—all three,” he said slowly; “sooner or later. It’s an old, old debt we’ve got to settle up together, and the opportunity has come at last. I only ask your sympathy—and hers.” He shrugged his shoulders slightly. “To you it may seem a small thing, and, if you have no memory, a wild, impossible thing as well, even with delusion in it. But nothing is really small.” He paused. “I only ask that you shall not resist.” And then he added gravely: “The risk is mine.”
I felt uneasiness; the old schooldays’ basis of complete sincerity was not in me quite. I had lived too long in the world of ordinary men and women. His marriage seemed prompted by an impersonal sense of justice to the universe rather than by any desire for the companionship and sweetness that a woman’s love could give him. For a moment I knew not what to say. Could such a view be hers as well? Had she yielded herself to him upon a similar understanding? And if not—the thought afflicted me—might not this debt he spoke of have been discharged without claiming the whole life of another in a union that involved also physical ties?
Yet, while I could not find it in me to utter all I thought, there was a burning desire to hear details of the singular courtship. Almost I felt the right to know, yet shrank from asking it.
“Then nothing more definite stirs in you?” he asked quietly, his eyes still holding mine, “no memory you can recognise? No wave of feeling; no picture, even of that time when we—we three——”
“Julius, old friend,” I exclaimed with sudden impulsiveness, and hardly knowing why I said it, “it only seems to me that these pine woods behind you are out of the picture rather. They should be palms, with spaces of sand shimmering in a hot sun. And the châlet”—pointing over his shoulder—“seems still less to belong to you when I recall the temples we talked about before the plain where the worship of the rising sun took place——”
I broke off abruptly with a little shamefaced laughter: my invention, or imagination, seemed so thin. But Julius turned eagerly, his face alight.