“Why?”
But Lady Ingleton did not say why. There were immense reticences between her and Cynthia Clarke.
Dion left Hughes’s Hotel and went to Buyukderer.
He had not consciously known why he did this. Until he met Mrs. Clarke near the British Embassy he had scarcely been aware how sordid and ugly and common under its small ostentations Hughes’s Hotel was. She made him see the dreariness of his surroundings, although she had never seen them; she made him again aware of things. That she was able to affect him strongly, although he did not care for her, he knew by the sudden approach to the brink of a complete emotional breakdown which she had brought about in him at their first meeting. He remembered the hand he had taken and had put against his forehead. There had been no cool solace in it for the fever within him. Why, then, did he go to Buyukderer? Certainly he did not go in hope. He was dwelling in a region far beyond where hope can live.
But here was some one who was far away from the land that had seen his tragedy, and who meant something in connexion with him, who intended something which had to do with him. In England his mother had been powerless to help him; Beattie had been powerless to help him. Canon Wilton had tried to use his almost stern power of manly sincerity on behalf of the soul of Dion. He and Dion had had a long interview after the inquest on the little body of Robin was over, and he had drawn nearer to the inmost chamber than any one else had, though Bruce Evelin, even in his almost fierce grief for Robin, had been wonderfully kind and understanding. But even Canon Wilton had utterly failed to be of any real use. Perhaps he had known Rosamund too well.
Till now Mrs. Clarke was the one human being who had succeeded in making a definite impression on Dion since Robin’s death and Rosamund’s fearful reception of the news of it. He felt her will, and perhaps he felt something else in her without telling himself that he did so: her knowledge of a life absolutely different from the life he had hitherto known, absolutely different, too, from the life known to, and lived by, those who had been nearest to him and with whom he had been most closely intimate. The old life with all its associations had cast him out. That was his feeling. Possibly, without being aware of it, and driven by the necessity that is within man to lay hold of something, to seek after refuge in the blackest moments of existence, he was feebly and instinctively feeling after an unknown life which was represented to his imagination by the pale beauty of Mrs. Clarke. She had described his situation as one of suspension between the heaven and the earth. His heaven had certainly rejected him. Possibly, without knowing it, and without any hope of future happiness or even of future peace, he faintly descried her earth; possibly, in going to Buyukderer, he was making an unconscious effort to gain it.
He wondered about this afterwards, but not at all in the moment of his going. Things were not clear to him then. He was still in the vague, but he was not to walk in vagueness forever. Fate which, by its malign action, had caused him to inflict a frightful injury upon the good woman he loved still held in reserve for him new and tremendous experience. He thought that in Welsley he had reached the ultimate depths which a man can sound. It was not so.
Dion came to Buyukderer on a breezy blue day, a day which seemed full of hope and elation, which was radiant with sunlight and dancing waters, and buoyant with ardent life. Gone were those delicate dreamy influences which sometimes float over the Bosporus even in the noontides of summer, when the winds are still, and the long shores of Asia seem to lie wrapped in a soft siesta, holding their secrets of the Orient closely hidden from the eyes of Europe. Europe gazes at Asia, but Asia is gravely indifferent to Europe; she listens only to the voices which come to her from her own depths, and, like an Almeh reclining, is stirred only by music unknown to the West.
As the steamer on which he traveled voyaged towards the Black Sea, Dion paced up and down the deck and looked always at the shore of Asia. That line of hills represented to him the unknown. If he could only lose himself in Asia and forget! But there was nothing passionate in his longing. It was only a gray desire born in a broken mind and a broken nature.
Once during the voyage he thought of Robin. Did Robin know where he was, whither he was going? Since Rosamund had utterly rejected him, strangely his dead boy and he had at moments seemed to Dion to be near to each other encompassed by the same thick darkness. Even once he had seemed to see Robin groping, like one lost and vainly seeking after light. His vagueness was broken upon sometimes by fantastic visions. But to-day he had no consciousness at all of Robin. The veil of death which hung between him and the child he had slain seemed to be of stone, absolutely impenetrable. And all his visions had left him.