Eve in her now silent room realised that all sounds of tumult had
died away. A shivering came over her, and, impelled by a suddenly
understood necessity, she lit the candles on her dressing-table and,
as the room sprang into light, began flinging the clothes out of the
drawers into a heap in the middle of the floor. They fluttered softly
from her hands, falling together in all their diverse loveliness of
colour and fragility of texture. She paused to smile to them, friends
and allies. She remembered now, with the fidelity of a child over a
well-learnt lesson, the final words of Malteios, 'A boat ready for you
both to-night, secret and without delay,' as earlier in the evening she
had remembered his other words, 'Midnight, at the creek at the back of
the islands ...'; she had acted upon her lesson mechanically, and in
its due sequence, conscientious, trustful.
She stood amongst her clothes, the long red sari which she had worn
on the evening of Julian's first triumph drooping from her hand. They
foamed about her feet as she stood doubtfully above them, strangely
brilliant herself in her Spanish shawl. They lay in a pool of rich
delicacy upon the floor. They hung over the backs of chairs, and across
the tumbled bed. They pleased her; she thought them pretty. Stooping,
she raised them one by one, and allowed them to drop back on to the
heap, aware that she must pack them and must also dress herself. But
she liked their butterfly colours and gentle rustle, and, remembering
that Julian liked them too, smiled to them again. He found her standing
there amongst them when after a knock at her door he came slowly into
her room.
He remained by the door for a long while looking at her in silence. She
had made a sudden, happy movement towards him, but inexplicably had
stopped, and with the sari still in her hand gazed back at him, waiting
for him to speak. He looked above all, mortally tired. She discovered
no anger in his face, not even sorrow; only that mortal weariness. She
was touched; she to whom those gentler emotions were usually foreign.
'Julian?' she said, seized with doubt.
'It is all over,' he began, quite quietly, and he put his hand against
his forehead, which was still bandaged, raising his arm with the same
lassitude; 'they landed where young Zapantiotis was on guard, and he
let them through; they were almost at the village before they were
discovered. There was very little fighting. They have allowed me to
come here. They are waiting for me downstairs. I am to leave.'
'Yes,' she said, and looked down at her heap of clothes.
He did not speak again, and gradually she realised the implication of
his words.
'Zapantiotis....' she said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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