'Come into the drawing-room and listen to the music, Julian,' she said,
pulling at his arm.
He came morosely; they exchanged the court with its pool of light
for the darkness of the drawing-room; she felt her way, holding his
hand, towards a window seat; sat down, and pulled him down beside her;
through the rusty iron grating they saw the sea, lit up by the rising
moon.
'We can just hear the music,' she whispered.
Her heart was beating hard and fast: they had been as under a spell,
so close were they to one another, but now she was bitterly conscious
of having lost him. She knew that he had slipped from the fairyland of
Aphros back to the world of principles, of morals both conventional and
essential. In fairyland, whither she had enticed him, all things were
feasible, permissible, even imperative. He had accompanied her, she
thought, very willingly, and they had strayed together down enchanted
paths, abstaining, it is true, from adventuring into the perilous
woods that surrounded them, but hand in hand, nevertheless, their
departure from the path potential at any rate, if not imminent. They
had been alone; she had been so happy, so triumphant. Now he had fled
her, back to another world inhabited by all the enemies she would have
had him forget: her cruelties, her vanities--her vanities! he could
never reconcile her vanities and her splendour; he was incapable of
seeing them both at the same time; the one excluded the other, turn
and turn about, in his young eyes; her deceptions, her evasions of
the truth, the men she had misled, the man, above all, that she had
killed and whose death she had accepted with comparative indifference.
These things rose in a bristling phalanx against her, and she faced
them, small, afraid, and at a loss. For she was bound to admit their
existence, and the very vivid, the very crushing, reality of their
existence, all-important to her, in Julian's eyes; although she
herself might be too completely devoid of moral sense, in the ordinary
acceptance of the word, to admit any justification for his indignation.
She knew with sorrow that they would remain for ever as a threat in
the background, and that she would be fortunate indeed if in that
background she could succeed in keeping them more or less permanently.
Her imagination sighed for a potion of forgetfulness. Failing that,
never for an instant must she neglect her rôle of Calypso. She knew
that on the slightest impulse to anger on Julian's part--and his
impulses to anger were, alas, both violent and frequent--all those
enemies in their phalanx would instantly rise and range themselves on
his side against her. Coaxed into abeyance, they would revive with
fatal ease.
She knew him well in his present mood of gloom. She was afraid, and a
desperate anxiety to regain him possessed her. Argument, she divined,
would be futile. She whispered his name.
He turned on her a face of granite.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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