Yet the secret must be kept. Bitter was his regret that so it must be, thrice bitter his remorse that this son of his was a bastard. A Tundering-West and a Valory!—and the issue of that illustrious union a child without a name, hidden away in the Island of Forgetfulness!!
He went back to the hotel that day cursing Fate for its irony, hating himself for a fool. Then, of a sudden, there came a possible solution into his bewildered thoughts. Monimé was going to Egypt for some months: could he not return to England, reveal the fact of his existence to his wife, and oblige her to divorce him? The proceedings could be conducted quietly, and Monimé, unaware of his real name, would not identify him with them. He could return to her a free man, able to marry her, and in later years he could tell her the whole story.
Yet how could he bear the long absence from her, how could he face the terror that she might find out and reject him? “O God,” he cried in his heart, “I am punished for my foolishness! You have belaboured me enough: You, Whom they call merciful, have mercy!”
During the next few days Jim made a final arrangement of his poems, and, adding a title-page: Songs of the Highroad, by James Easton, posted them off to a well-known publisher in London, giving his bank in Rome as his address. While reading through these collected manuscripts he had come to the conclusion that the poems were rather good. “There’s quite a swing about some of the stuff,” he said to Monimé. “In fact I almost believe I could have shown you one or two of them without feeling an ass. But I suppose the thoughts in them, and the melancholy speculations about what is one’s ‘duty’ and all that sort of thing, are rather rot.”
As time passed, the idea of returning to England and obtaining a divorce developed in his mind. He was reluctant, however, to make a final decision, and his plans remained fluid long after those of Monimé had crystallized. This was due mainly to the suspense he was experiencing in regard to his relations with her. He avoided any pressing of the question of their marriage, for he shunned the thought of involving her in a possible bigamy case; yet he could see that so long as he maintained this inconclusive attitude he gave her no cause for confidence in him.
Matters came to a head one day at the end of October. Monimé had arranged with him to make the excursion to the mountain castle of St. Hilarion; and it is probable that both he and she had decided to talk things out during the hours they would be together. So far as he was concerned, at any rate, the situation as it stood was impossible.
The carriage in which they were to make this fifteen-mile journey resembled a barouche, but a kind of awning was stretched above it on four iron rods, and from this depended some dusty-looking curtains looped back by faded red cords and tassels, which might have been purloined from old men’s dressing-gowns. Four lean and crazily harnessed horses were attached to this vehicle, which looked somewhat like a four-poster bed on wheels; and a red-capped and baggy-trousered driver, apparently of Turkish nationality, sat high upon the box, Monimé’s man-servant being perched beside him.
Rattling down the narrow streets of the city and through the tunnel in the ramparts, they soon passed out into the open country, and, with loudly cracking whip, bowled along the sun-bathed road at a very fair pace, the sparkling morning air seeming to put vigour even into the emaciated horses.
At length they came to the foot-hills, and saw far above them, against the intense blue of the sky, the pass which leads through the mountains to the port of Kyrenia and the sea. Here their pace grew slower, and from time to time they walked beside the labouring vehicle as it crunched its way through soft gravel and sand, or lurched over half-buried boulders.
Reaching level ground once more they went with a fine flourish through a village where the dogs barked at them and the children stared or ran begging at their side. Now the slopes and ledges of rock were green with young pines, whose aromatic scent filled the warm air; and, as they slowly wound their way upwards, the size of these trees increased until they attained truly majestic proportions.