Here at these walls Richard Cœur de Lion, King of England, with trumpets had summoned the garrison to surrender; but the walls remembered it no more. Here the Kings and Queens of Cyprus, of the House of Lusignan, had held their court in that strange admixture of Western chivalry and Eastern splendour which had characterized the dynasty; but the glamour of those days was passed into oblivion. Here the soldiers of Venice had looted and plundered; but the ruin they left behind them had steeped its wounds in the balm of forgetfulness.
Only Monimé and her lover were awake in this place of dreams. Seated here, as it were, upon a throne rising in the very centre of the ancient world, she seemed to Jim to be one with all the dim, forgotten queens of the past; all the romance of all the pages of history was focussed and brought again to life in her person; and in her face there was the mystery of regnant womanhood throughout the ages.
Just as now she sat with her chin resting upon her hand, gazing over the summer seas to the adventurous coasts of the ancient kingdoms of the Mediterranean, so Arsinoe had gazed, perhaps upon this very mountain-top; so Cleopatra, her sister, had gazed, over there in her Alexandrian palace; so Helen had gazed yonder from the casements of Troy; so the Queen of Sheba, camping upon Lebanon, had gazed as she travelled from Jerusalem. The past was forgotten; but, all unknowing, it lived again in Monimé, enticing him with her lips, looking tenderly upon him with her eyes, beckoning him with her smiles, repulsing him with her indifference, bewildering him with her serenity, maddening him with her unfathomable heart.
“Monimé, I can’t go on like this,” he said, taking her hands in his. “You must tell me here and now that you love me, or that I am to go out of your life.”
“The future lies in your hands, Jim,” she answered, quietly and with deep sincerity. “Surely you can understand my attitude. I will not bind myself to a man who will not be bound, even though I were to love him with all my soul.”
“I have asked you to marry me,” he told her.
“Your words carried no conviction,” she replied.
“I ask you again,” he said, daring all.
“You do not know what you are saying,” she answered. “Go away to England, or to Italy, Jim, and think it over. Stay away from me for some months; and if you find that your feelings do not change, if I remain a vital thing in your life and do not fade into a memory, then you can come back to me, knowing that I will not fail you. We have had enough of Bedouin love. If I were to be honest with myself I would tell you that long ago circumstances made me realize that we did wrong at Alexandria, because we were unfair to the unborn generation. I set myself in opposition to accepted custom, and I have been beaten by just one thing—my anxiety for the welfare of the child my emancipation brought me, my terror in case there should be a slur upon his name. There must be no more playing with vital things.”