He sprang to his feet, and reeled backwards.
“Don’t torture me, my darling! You don’t know what you’re saying,” he said in a hoarse whisper, then very deliberately and aloud, “You must go home—go on alone for a minute, I’ll come.” The words sounded hollow in his own ears, he had a feeling that some one else, not himself at all, had said them. He put his hands over his eyes and muttered indistinctly, “God help me!” with a short choking gasp.
The perfume of her dress and hair was wafted to him, mingled with the night scents, in the intoxicating stillness under those dark branches; he reeled a little, then he saw that Jocelyn too was on her feet. She stood before him quite close, her figure swaying, her breast heaving. In her eyes was an infinite pity; they fastened on his, intent and searching, they seemed trying to read his soul. She put out her hands. He moved with a writhing, helpless gesture, and seized them in his own. With the touch of those burning hands, with the fastening of his eyes on hers, there came a change in the girl’s face, the strained look went out of her eyes, they seemed to swim and burn; no longer questioning, they gave him back look for look. Her lips parted slightly in a sigh.
“Sweetheart!” She leaned towards him.
In that second, with his lips almost touching hers, knowing that if they touched there could be no holding back and no recall, everything passed before him. He saw himself. He saw what he was doing. Like a drowning man he saw all that had gone before, all that was coming, stretched grimly into a dim future. He saw her mind—the pity in it, the reflection of his own passion. He saw his wife. He saw all things—love, pity, and honour. He weighed them in the scales, they were all as nothing.
A short, sobbing breath of wind sighed through the olives.
PART II
CHAPTER XI
Nielsen sat at one of many little marble-topped tables outside a café. It was dark, and the lights of the street avenue shone dubiously on either side through the foliage of the lime trees. From the interior of the café, at his back, the dull clack of dominoes and the flap of waiters’ slippered feet against the boarded floor came gently to his ears, with the occasional sharper sounds of men’s voices. Through the widely-opened doors and windows stray whiffs of rough, black tobacco, and of garlic, made their way to his nose. The thin strains of harp and mandolin quavered drawlingly into the warm air from a cantina lower down the street, and frogs croaked hoarsely in chorus from the bed of the dried watercourse under the bridge.