“Yes.”
“I’ve always loved them, just those words. Even when I was quite a child I liked to say them. And I remember once, when I was staying at Sherrington, we drove over to the cathedral. Canon Wilton took us into the stalls. It was a week-day and there were very few people. The anthem was Wesley’s ‘The Wilderness.’ I had never heard it before, and when I heard those words—my words—being sung, I had such a queer thrill. I wanted to cry and I was startled. To most people, I suppose, the word wilderness suggests something dreary and parched, ugly desolation.”
“Yes. The scapegoat was driven out into the wilderness.”
“I think I’d rather take my sin into the wilderness than anywhere else. Purification might be found there.”
“Your sin!” he said. “As if——” He was silent.
Zante seemed sleeping in the distance of the Ionian Sea, far away as the dream from which one has waked, touched with a dream’s mystic remoteness. The great plain, stretching to mountains and sea, vast and green and lonely—but with the loneliness that smiles, desiring nothing else—seemed uninhabited. Perhaps there were men in it, laboring among the vineyards or toiling among the crops, women bending over the earth by which they lived, or washing clothes on the banks of the river. Rosamund did not look for them and did not see them. In the green landscape, over which from a distance the mountains kept their quiet and deeply reserved watch, she detected no movement. Even the silver of the river seemed immobile, as if its journeyings were now stilled by an afternoon spell.
“It’s as empty as the plain of Marathon, but how much greater!” she said at last.
“At Marathon there was the child.”
“Yes, and here there’s not even a child.”
She sighed.