He stood and stared at the lamp after she had gone, as if its feeble ray would illuminate the puzzle of a woman's face and words. He did not know that for the first time in her life Belle had turned on Fate. "I do not care," she had said, recklessly, as she walked up and down waiting for him amid the flowering oleanders. "One cannot be always thinking, thinking. He has come back and I am glad. Surely that is enough for to-night."
It was not much to claim, and yet it made the puzzle so much the harder for Philip Marsden. He sat on the edge of his bed, and swore to himself that he did not know what it all meant, that he did not even know his own feelings. To leave a girl with whom you fancied yourself in love and who apparently hated you; to die, and fall out of love, only to find when you came back to life, that she who had scorned you living had taken a fancy to your memory. Nay more, to find that something in you had survived death. What? Were the elements of a French novel born out of such materials? He had never thought over these questions, being one of those men who, from a certain physical fastidiousness, are not brought into contact with them. So he may have been said to be, in his way, quite as conventional in his morality as any woman; and the suggestion of such a situation offended him quite as much as it would have offended Belle. The pride and combativeness of the man rose up against the suggestion even while the very thought of her glad welcome thrilled him through and through. He wished no harm to her,--God forbid! And yet if one were to believe the world--bah! what was one to believe? He was too restless to sleep, and, with the curious instinct which drives most good men to be tempted of the devil in the wilderness, he put on a pair of thick boots, turned up his trousers methodically, and set out to seek peace in a moonlight walk. Bathos, no doubt; but if the sublime borders on the ridiculous, the commonplaces of life must touch on its tragedy. It was a broad white road down which he started at a rattling pace. Before, behind, it merged into a treeless horizon and it led--God knows where! For all he knew it might be the road leading to destruction; the ready-made conventional turnpike worn by the feet of thousands following some bell-wether who had tinkled down to death when the world was young. The moon shone garishly, eclipsing the stars. It seemed a pity, seeing they were at least further from this detestable world than she,--a mere satellite dancing attendance on a half-congealed cinder, and allowing it to come between her and the light at every critical moment! A pretty conceit, but not thought; and Philip was there with the firm intention of thinking out the position. Yet again and again he found himself basking in the remembrance of Belle's welcome. How glad, how unfeignedly, innocently glad she had been, till fear crept in. Fear of what? Of the French novel, of course. He had felt it himself; he had asked himself the same question, doubtless, as she had; and what in heaven's name was to be the answer? Must love always be handfast to something else? Or was it possible for it to exist, not in the self-denying penance of propriety and duty, but absolutely free and content in itself? Why not?
As he tramped along, stunning noises came from a neighbouring village; thrummings of tom-toms, and blares of inconceivable horns mingling in a wild, beast-like tumult. That meant a marriage in all its unglozed simplicity of purpose; a marriage, to use the jargon, unsanctified by love. But after all what had love to do with marriage? What could the most unselfish dream of humanity have to do with the most selfish, the most exacting, the most commonplace of all ties? Love, it is true, might exist side by side with marriage, but the perfection of the one was not bound up in the perfection of the other. Had not the attempt to find an unnecessary fig-leaf by uniting sentiment to passion, only ended in an apotheosis of animalism not much above that which found expression in those hideous yells and brayings? Above! nay below! for it degraded love and passion alike by false shame.
To escape the wedding party he struck away from the road, and felt relieved when he had got rid of its hard-and-fast lines, its arrogance of knowing the way. The clumps of tall tiger-grass shot arrowlike against the velvet sky, and every now and again a faint rustle at their roots told of something watching the intruder; a brooding partridge may be, perhaps a snake with unwinking eyes. And as he walked, his thoughts seemed to lead him on, till something of the truth, something naked yet not ashamed as it had been before mankind ate of the sorrowful tree, came home to him. It could not be true, that verdict of the world. He would defy it.
Suddenly he found himself confronted by a strange barrier, blocking his way. As far as eye could reach on either side rose a wall of shadow twenty feet high, a wall dense and dark below, filmy as cobwebs where the tasselled reeds of which it was composed touched the purple of the sky. The gossamer wings of a day could pass through those feathery tops; but below, even the buffalo had to seek an oozy track here and there. He had often heard of this reed wall, which, following the old river bed, divides village from village as effectually as when the stream ran fast and deep; but its curious aptness to his thoughts startled him. Impenetrable save for those who sought the mire, or those with the wings of a dove. Which was it to be? As he stood arrested by his own fancy a night-heron flitted past; its broad white wings whirred softly, and its plumed head, craning forward, with blood-red eyes searching the shadows, cleft the moonlight. By some strange jugglery of fancy it reminded him of a picture by Gustave Doré, and with the remembrance of Francesca da Rimini came that of the scared look in poor Belle's face.
He turned aside impatiently beset once more by the desire for escape and struck across the plain; coming, after a time, on a footpath which he followed mechanically through the tamarisk bushes, until he emerged on an open space where a hoar frost of salt crystals glittered on rows and rows of tiny mounds. So pure, so white, that the eye might have sworn to a winter's night even while the other senses told of more than summer's heat; a deception increasing the unreality with which Philip recognised that his wandering steps had led him to a village grave-yard. A far cry from the marriage feast! He sat down on the pile of disordered bricks and stucco which marked the resting-place of the saint round whose bones the faithful had gathered, and asked himself what chance there was of standing out against the opinion of the many in life, if even in death it was always follow my leader?
A quaint place it was; no enclosure, no token of hope or grief, no symbol of faith; nothing but the dead, clean forgotten and out of mind. Ah! but Belle had not forgotten him, and if he had remained dead she would have gone on giving him the best part of herself without reproach, without remorse. Was death then the only freedom from the body? He sat so long immersed in his own thoughts that the slow stars were wheeling to meet the dawn ere he rose, and threw out his arms cramped by long stillness. Dead, yet alive,--that was the old panacea. Was nothing else attainable? Must love be killed? Why?
A rustle in the tamarisks beyond the open made him turn sharply, and make his way towards the corner whence it proceeded. As he did so a group of men defiled from the bushes, set down the burden they carried, and, without looking round, began to dig a grave. The hour, the absence of wailing, gave Philip a momentary thought that he might be assisting at the concealment of some crime, but his knowledge of the people reassured him. Yet as he approached, all the party--save a very old man mumbling his beads--scurried into the jungle, and so he judged it wiser to stop and give the orthodox salutation. The patriarch rose in feeble haste. "Allah be praised! we thought you were the ghost already. Come back; come back!" he cried in louder quavering voice. "'Tis only a Presence, seeking sport, doubtless. Come back, and get her under earth ere dawn, or 'twill be the worse for all."
Then, as one by one his companions crept back to their task, he answered Philip's curious looks with waggling head. "Only a wanton woman, Huzoor. Seven months ago meek as a dove, playing about the village with maiden-plaited hair. But when the matrons unbound it for the bridegroom, as in due course of duty, the wickedness came out. It is so with some women; a fancy that hath not bit nor bridle; a wantonness of mind when God made them to be mothers. And she would have been one--ay, a happy one--for all her fancies, had she not wept herself into a wasting and died with her unborn child. Cursed creature, bringing evil on the whole village with her whims! Quick, quick, my sons! Hide her before dawn, with the irons round her thumbs, and the nails through her feet. Then will I sow the mustard-seed in her path homewards, so that cock-crow will ever send her back to the worms ere she hath done gathering. And all for a fancy when God made women to be mothers! A wanton mind! A wanton mind!"
The broken, quavering voice went on accusingly as Philip turned away sick at heart. Here was the other side of the shield; and which was the truth?