“One causes less comment as a married woman,” she explained. “Such friends as I have suppose that I am a widow who, being an artist, has come to live here because of the picturesqueness of the place and its cheapness.”
“And what is the real reason?” he asked, looking intently into her eyes.
Of a sudden she rose from the bench, and stood before him, her back to the moon, the light of which made a shining aureole round her hair. Her left hand was laid across her breast; the other was clenched at her side.
“Jim, I beg you ...” she said. “This is the Island of Forgetfulness, and you have strayed here, bringing Memory with you. There is no need for you in Nasayan. For my sake, for your own sake, go, I beg you. There is something here which we have in common, and yet which separates us: something which to me is a garland of Paradise, and which to you might be like the chains of hell. I beg you, I beg you: go away! Go back to the open road and the Bedouin life. Leave me in Nasayan, in oblivion. I don’t want you to know more than this. I swear to you there is no call for you to stay. You have your wandering life: the hills and the valleys and the cities of the whole world are before you. Don’t stay here, don’t try to look into Nasayan....”
Her voice faltered, her gestures were those of pleading, yet even so she appeared to him to have that regal attitude which he remembered now so well.
The meaning of her words, the cause of their intensity, were obscure to him. His mind was confused, and there was a quality of dream in their situation. The black cypress trees which shot up around them into the pale sky like monstrous sentinels; the little orange-trees fantastically decked with their golden fruit; the tiled and moon-splashed pathways; the white walls of the villa, clad with rich creepers; the heavy scent of luxuriant flowers; the sparkling water in the marble basin of the fountain—all these things seemed unreal to him. They were like a legendary setting for the mysterious figure standing before him, a figure, so it seemed to him, of a queen of some kingdom of the old world, left solitary amongst the living long ages after her advisers and her palaces had crumbled to dust in the grasp of Time.
“I don’t understand,” he said, rising and confronting her. “What is the secret about you?—there was always mystery around you.”
“No,” she answered. “There was no mystery four years ago, except the mystery of our dream. My secret then was only a small matter. I was just a runaway. I had left my husband because I wanted my freedom, and to follow my art in freedom. I had changed my name because I feared to be called back. But now he is dead, and I have nothing to fear in that direction.... No, there was no secret—then.”
“But now?—please tell me, Monimé,” he urged. “I want to know, I must know.”
Once more she fenced with him, and their words became useless. At length, however, his questions brought a crisis near to them again. She clenched and unclenched her hands. “I beg you, go away now,” she urged. “Forget me; go back to your freedom. There is something here which will trap you if you stay. Oh, can’t you understand? Don’t you see that I can’t tell whether Fate has brought you here for your happiness, or even for my happiness, or whether it is for our sorrow that you have been brought. I can’t tell, I can’t tell! We are almost strangers to one another.”