“Some women are not merely mothers, or potential mothers!” said an almost fierce voice. “Some women are just women first and mothers second. There are women who love men for themselves, not merely because men are possible child-bringers. To a real and complete woman no child can ever be the perfect substitute for a husband or a lover. Even nature has put the lover first and the child second. I forbid you to say that I have my boy, as if that settled the question of my happiness. I forbid you.”
He heard her breathing quickly. Then she added:
“But how could you be expected to understand women like me?”
The intensity of her sudden outburst startled him as the strength of the current in the Bosporus had startled him when he plunged into the sea from the Albanian’s boat.
“You have been brought up in another school,” she continued slowly, and with a sort of icy bitterness. “I forgive you.”
She got up from the divan and went out upon the terrace, leaving him alone in the pavilion, which seemed suddenly colder when she had left it.
He did not follow her. A breath from a human furnace had scorched him—had scorched the nerve, and the nerve quivered.
“You have been brought up in a different school.” Welsley and Stamboul—Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke. Once, somewhere, he had made that comparison. As he sat in the pavilion it seemed to him that for a moment he heard the cool chiming of bells in a gray cathedral tower, the faint sound of the Dresden Amen. But he looked out through the opening in the pavilion, and far down below he saw lights on the Bay of Buyukderer, the vague outlines of hills; and the perfume that came to him out of the night was not the damp smell of an English garden.
An English garden! In the darkness of a November night he stood within the walls of an English garden; he heard a cry, saw the movement of a woman’s body, and knew that his life was in ruins. The woman fled, but he followed her blindly; he sought for her in the dark. He wanted to tell her that he had been but the instrument of Fate, that he was not to blame, that he needed compassion more than any other man living. But she eluded him in the darkness, and presently he heard a key grind in a lock. A friend had locked the door of his home against him in order that his wife might have time to escape from him.
Then he heard a husky voice say, “My friend, it will have to come.” And, suddenly it came.