They rode on. Her horse was following his along the windings of the river. Presently she said:
“Where are we going to sleep? Surely there isn’t a possible inn in this remoteness?—or have they build one for travelers who come here in winter and spring?”
“Our inn will be a little above Olympia.”
The green valley seemed closing about them, as if anxious to take them to itself, to keep them in its closest intimacy, with a gentle jealousy. Rosamund had a sensation, almost voluptuous, of yielding to the pastoral greenness, to the warm stillness, to the hush of the delicate wilds.
“Elis! Elis!” she whispered to herself. “I am riding up into Elis, where once the processions passed to the games, where Nero built himself a mansion. And there’s a secret here for me.”
Then suddenly there came into her mind the words in the “Paradiso” which she had been dreaming over in London on the foggy day when Dion had asked her to marry him.
The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence from warm love and living hope which conquereth the Divine will.
It was strange that the words should come to her just then. She could not think why they came. But, repeating them to herself, she felt how very far off she was from Paganism. Yet she had within her warm love surely and living hope. Could such things, as they were within her, ever do violence to the Kingdom of Heaven? She looked between her horse’s perpetually moving ears at the hollow athletic back of her young husband. If she had not married she would have given rein to deep impulses within her which now would never be indulged. They would not have led her to Greece. If she had been governed by them she would never have been drawn on by the secret of Olympia. How strange it was that, within the compass of one human being, should be contained two widely differing characters. Well, she had chosen, and henceforth she must live according to the choice she had made. But how would she have been in the other life of which she had dreamed so often, and so deeply, in her hours of solitude? She would never know that. She had chosen the warm love and the living hope, but the Kingdom of Heaven should never suffer violence from anything she had chosen. There are doubtless many ways of consecrating a life, of rendering service.
They came into a scattered and dingy hamlet. Hills rose about it, but the narrowing valley still wound on.
“We are close to the ruins,” said Dion.