In the Wilderness

by Robert Hichens

“Then it could never be your sin.”

“Hush!”

They no longer heard the nightingale. The voices and the houses of Athens were about them.

As the days slipped by, Dion felt that Rosamund and he grew closer together. He knew, though he could not perhaps have said how, that he would be the only man in her intimate life. Even if he died she would never—he felt sure of this—yield herself to another man. The tie between them was to her a bond for eternity. Her body would never be given twice. That he knew. But sometimes he asked himself whether her whole soul would ever be given even once. The insatiable greed of a great and exclusive love was alive within him, needing always something more than it had. At first, after their marriage, he had not been aware of this greed, had not realized that nothing great is content to remain just as it is at a given moment. His love had to progress, and gradually, in Greece, he became conscious of this fact.

His inner certainty, quite unshakable, that Rosamund would never belong to another man in the physical sense made jealousy of an ordinary kind impossible to him. The lowness, the hideous vulgarity of the jealousy which tortures the writhing flesh would never be his. Yet he wanted more than he had sometimes, stretched out arms to something which did not come to nestle against him.

There was a great independence in Rosamund, he thought, which set her apart from other women, Not only could she bear to be alone, she sometimes wished to be alone. Dion, on the contrary, never wished to be away from her. It might be necessary for him to leave her. He was not a young doting fool who could not detach himself even for a moment from his wife’s apron strings. But he knew very well that at all times he preferred to be with her, close to her, that he relished everything more when he was in her company than when he was alone. She added to his power of enjoyment, to his faculty of appreciation, by being beside him. The Parthenon even was made more sublime to him by her. That was a mystery. And the mystery of her human power to increase penetrated everywhere through their life in common, like a percolating flood that could not be gainsaid. She manifested her influence upon him subtly through the maidens of the Porch, through the almost neat perfection of the Theseion, through the detached grandeur of those columns in the waste place, that golden and carved Olympieion which acts as an outpost to Athens. It was as if she had the power to put something of herself into everything that he cared for so that he might care for it more, whether it were a golden sunset on the sea over which they drifted in a sailing-boat off the coast of old Phaleron, or a marble figure in a museum. She dwelt in the stones of a ruined temple; she set her feet upon the dream of the distant mountains; she was in the dawn, the twilight, and in all the ways of the moon, because he loved her and found her in all things when they were together.

He did not know whether she, in a similar mysterious way, found him in all that she enjoyed. He did not ask her the question. Perhaps, really, in that truth of apprehension which lives very far down in a man, he had divined the answer, although he told himself that he did not know.

He found always something new to enjoy and to worship in Rosamund.

They had many tastes in common. At first, of deliberate choice, they had bounded their honeymoon with the precipices of the Acropolis, learning the Doric lesson on that height above the world. Then one day they had made a great sacrifice and gone to pass their hours in the pine woods of Kephissia. They had returned to the Acropolis quite athirst. But by degrees the instinct to wander a little farther afield took greater hold upon them, their love of physical exercise asserted itself. They began to take long rides on horseback, carrying food in their saddle-bags. The gently wild charm of Greece laid its spell upon them. They both loved Athens, but now they began to love, too, escaping from Athens.

Directly they were out of the city they were in a freedom that appealed to the gipsy in both. Dion’s strong boyishness, which had never yet been cast off, was met and countered by the best of good fellowship in Rosamund. Though she could be very serious, and even what he called “strange,” she was never depressed or sad. Her good spirits were unfailing and infectious. She reveled in a “jaunt” or a “day out,” and her physical strength kept fatigue far from her. She could ride for many hours without losing her freshness and zest. Every little episode of the wayside interested and entertained her. Everything comic made her laugh. She showed an ardor almost like an intelligent child’s in getting to understand all she saw. Scenery, buildings, animal life, people, every offering of Greece was eagerly accepted, examined and discussed by her. She was the perfect comrade for the wilds. Their common joy in the wilds drew her and Dion more closely together. Never before had Rosamund been quite away from civilization, from the hitherto easily borne trammels of modern complicated life. She “found herself” in the adventure. The pure remoteness of Greece came to her like natal air. She breathed it in with a sort of rapture. It was as Dion had said. She was not merely in, she was of, Greece.