He had said it!—he had uttered the impossible thing; and his heart stood still with anguish. His arms loosened their hold upon her, and they faced one another in silence, while a thousand sparrows in the tree-tops chattered their merry morning salutation to the sun.
“Cad! Cad! Cad!” said the voice of his outraged conscience to him. “Bigamist and thief!” And his heart responded with the one reiterated excuse: “I love her, I love her!”
“You must give me time to think,” she said at length. “Go now, Jim. You must have some sleep, and I must see to Ian.”
For two days after this she would not see him, but on the third day, at mid-morning, he found himself once more in her drawing-room. It was a charming room, cool and airy; and it had a distinction which his own drawing-room at Eversfield had lamentably lacked. Dolly had been a victim of the nepotistic practice of loading the tables, piano-top, and shelves with photographs of herself, her friends, and her relatives. Pictures of this kind are well enough in a man’s study or a woman’s boudoir; but in the more public rooms they are only to be tolerated, if at all, in the smallest quantity. Monimé, however, whether by design or by force of circumstances, was free of this habit; and the more subtle essence of her personality was thus able to be enjoyed without distraction.
The walls were whitewashed and panelled with old Persian textiles; carpets of Karamania and Smyrna lay upon the stone-paved floors; the light furniture was covered with fine fabrics of local manufacture; and in Cyprian vases a mass of flowers greeted the eye with a hundred chromatic gradations and scented the air with the fragrance of summer.
Monimé, upon this occasion, had reverted to her accustomed serenity of manner; and as she refreshed her distracted lover with sandwiches of goat’s-milk cheese and the wine of the island poured from a Cyprian jug, she talked to him quietly of practical things.
She argued frankly for and against their marriage, and reviewed the financial aspect of the question without embarrassment. She told him that she had just received a proposal from her salesman in London that she should go over to Egypt at once and paint him a dozen desert subjects, there being a readier market for these than for pictures of little-known Cyprus. This, therefore, she intended to do; and, in view of Ian’s health, she proposed to send the boy and his nurse to England, there to await her return in four or five months’ time.
Jim moved restlessly in his chair as she spoke, for the thought of revisiting England was terrifying to him; yet if she went there he could hardly resist the temptation to follow. He knew that it was preposterous enough to think of a bigamous marriage to her, even here in the East, but in England such a union would be madness.
“I thought,” he said gloomily, “that you did not want to risk meeting your former friends.”
“What does it matter now?” she replied. “The scandal of my leaving my husband is forgotten, and he, poor man, is dead. I have never told you his name, have I? He was Richard Furnice, the banker.”