But it was not these visible things, however potent, that so wholly overcame him. It was a thing for which we have no word, of which there is no material evidence, that moved from the girl, subtly, into every fiber of his body. A thing as actual and as potent as the forces moving the earth in its orbit—the wild, urgent, overpowering cry of elements, tom asunder at the beginning of things, to be rejoined. The most mysterious and the most hidden impulse in the world. And it seemed to the man that in some other incarnation this woman had been a part of him, a part of every nerve, every blood drop, every fragment of his flesh; and, at the door of life, by some divine surgery, she had been dissected out of his body; and, thus, from the day that he was born, he had been looking for her; and now that she was found, every element in him cried for that lost union.
These impressions, this sudden luminous conviction, flashed on the man, while he was speaking, while he was turning with the girl toward the others; and his mind, extraordinarily clear, seemed to observe these things as somehow detached from himself. The girl was speaking, and he walked beside her, presenting a conventional aspect. They went thus, in conversation, down the long drawing-room. The Marchesa Soderrelli advanced to meet them.
"I am delighted," she said, "to see the Duke of Dorset," then she put out her hands with a charming gesture.
At this moment the Duke saw, on a table, in its oval silver frame, a picture like that one which he had seen in the yacht at Oban—that face with its insolent, aggressive look. And fear took him by the throat. The dread, the terror, which used to seize him when he passed, each night, the picture on the stairway, descended on him. This man would strike out for what he wanted while he sat here mooning in a garden. How far had the man's suit been favored? The Duke turned the query backward and forward, like a hot coal in his hand, blowing on it while it burned him.
He trembled internally with panic. Without he was composed, he spoke calmly, he lifted his face, unmoved, like one indifferent to fortune, but every mouth in him, hungry for this woman, wailed. And that emotion in the service of the principle of life, its hands hot on him, turned his eyes constantly to what his destiny was losing.
The Duke of Dorset, like every lover with the taste of lotus in his mouth, saw this girl moving in a nimbus. He could not, for his life, fix her with things real. She came forth from haze, from shadow, like those fairy women drawn by painters to represent what the flesh of man eternally longs for. There clung about her that freshness, that mystery, beyond belief, alluring to the egoistic senses of a man. Evidenced by the immortality of that Arabian tale, wherein a Prince of Bagdad, cracking a roc's egg, found a woman sleeping within it, her elbow on her knee, her chin dimpling in her silk palm.
Moreover, he had found her traveling the highway of adventures. The perennial charm of romance attended her. He had gone, like fabled persons, desperately on a quest, seeking a dream woman, and had found her, a woman of this world, at the quest's end, against every probability of life. And, therefore, some authority, moving to a design inscrutable, had brought him to this woman; and therefore, by permission, by direction of that authority, she belonged to him.
The Duke thrilled under the proprietary word. His veins stretched with heat. Who was this man, or any man, to take what the gods, sitting in their spheres, had designed for him? All passion is essentially barbaric. Under the voices of it a man will do as his fathers did in the morning of the world, half naked in Asia. The customs, the forms of civilization may restrain him, but the impulse within him is as unchanged, after six thousand years of discipline, as fire burning in a dry tree.
That dinner the Duke of Dorset was never able to remember. The details of it passed one another into a blur. He sat down to a table beside Caroline Childers. He talked as one does conventionally at dinner. He observed the wit, the spirit of the Marchesa Soderrelli. How the host hung over her, like one charmed, how the woman had, somehow, for this night, got her beauty out of pawn! She wore a gown elaborately embroidered, her hair brightened by a jewel set here and there effectively in it, her face freshened as by a sheer determination to have back for a night's uses what the years had filched from her.