"It is the Garden of Eden," replied Ricordo; "yes, the Garden of Eden before the serpent brought trouble."

She wanted to speak in reply; but nothing came to her to say. She felt that Herbert Briarfield was right. The man suggested mystery; she was not sure that he had favourably impressed her, and yet there was a kind of fascination in his presence.

"You know England?" she said presently; "you speak our language so well, you must have spent a good deal of time in the country."

"Can any man know a country?" asked Ricordo. "The geography, that is not difficult. An hour with a map, and even London can be known. But the fields, the hills, the roads, the towns, they do not make a country. The people of England, then? Ah, I am profoundly ignorant of the people."

"And yet we are not a difficult people to understand," remarked Olive.

"No, you think not? I do not know, I have never tried to know."

"No?"

"I am content to look on the surface."

"Is not that a strange att.i.tude of mind for an Eastern?"

"I am afraid I do not follow you."

"Well, I have always been led to believe that people from the East are very philosophical and great seekers after truth."

"Ah, but years teach wisdom, signorina, and that wisdom says, 'Never seek the truth.'"

"Why?"

"Because truth is never worth the knowing."

He spoke quite naturally, and did not seem to be aware that he was making a cynical statement. Neither did he lift his eyes to her. He walked slowly, keeping his eyes on the ground.

Olive felt a strange fascination in his presence; moreover, she could not feel that she was speaking to a stranger. She had a feeling that she had seen him before, heard him speak before. And yet everything about him was strange. His voice was not familiar to her, and it had a peculiar fluid tone which sounded un-English, and yet she fancied that she had heard it somewhere. As she listened, she found herself recalling the past, and thinking of the days before the dark shadow fell upon her life. Without knowing why, she found herself thinking of Leicester. The stranger's cynicism reminded her of the night when she first met him.

She remembered how Leicester had dominated the gathering at her father's house, and that she had found herself admiring him, even while she had disagreed with everything he had said. The same thing was happening now.

Herbert Briarfield, of whom she had thought a great deal during the last few days, seemed to have sunk in the background. He was one who did not matter, while the man who was a stranger had blotted him out. Perhaps this was because she found herself putting a double meaning on everything he said. Of course this might be because, owing to his Eastern a.s.sociations, he would regard things differently from the way an Englishman would regard them; but she had spoken to men from the Orient before, and they had not impressed her in the same way. Still, she felt a kind of pleasure in matching her wits with his, even although she felt she might not come off best in the encounter.

"But would not your att.i.tude of mind be fatal if it were universal, signore?" she asked.

"Pardon me, I think it is universal."

"You mean that we are not anxious to find the truth?"

"Exactly. Mind you, I do not say that you English people who boast of your honesty do not in theory hold that truth is the great thing to be sought after; but in action, in life, no. Let a man be true to truth and he is put down as a madman, a fool."

"Would you mind giving an example?"

"A dozen if you like. Here is one. It is a commonly accepted theory that well-being, happiness, depends not on what we possess, but on what we are. That 'to be' is more than 'to have.' How many are true to their creed? One in a million? Where one spends his energies in enriching his life, a million spend theirs on seeking to obtain what by common consent is evanescent. If half the energy were spent on beautifying character that is spent on 'getting on' in the ordinary acceptance of the term, what Christians call the millennium would come."

"Are you not a.s.suming a great deal, signore?"

"But what, signorina?"

"That you understand the motives of the human heart?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"One judges by what one sees," he said. "And it is best to content oneself with that. The man who looks beneath the surface goes mad."

"And yet you are not mad?" and she laughed gaily.

"I am not sure," he said, and there was a quiet intensity in his tones--"no, I am not sure. Sometimes I think I am. But what then, signorina? We have our little lives to live, our little part to play on the world's stage."

Again she was reminded of Leicester, and as she thought of him a kind of shiver pa.s.sed through her. This was Leicester over again; but another Leicester--a Leicester with a difference.

"But why play it, if it is so bad?"

"Ah, signorina, do you not think I have asked that question a thousand times? But then I have lived in the East. What can a man do against fate? The Arabians have got hold of a great truth: Kismet. Is not all philosophy centred in that?"

"No," she said, "I do not think so. If that is true, then every bad deed done would be the expression of G.o.d's will. Every murder, outrage, and abomination has His sanction, His benediction."

"Signorina has never lived in the East?"

"I do not see that that matters."

Signor Ricordo laughed quietly.

"It is refreshing to hear you," he said. "I can see into your mind now.

You are thinking that the fatalistic doctrine destroys all virtue, all responsibility."

"Exactly."

"And yet are we responsible? Is not every action of life determined for us by circ.u.mstances, disposition, heredity, all forces over which we have no control?"

"And after you admit all that, every faculty of your being tells you you are responsible. After you have conceded every fatalist argument, you know that it is wrong. And more, you know that when you do wrong you are haunted by remorse, because you feel that you _could_ have done right."

"Right! wrong!" said Ricordo, and he laughed in his soft, insinuating way.

"You do not believe in them?"

"Ah, signorina, let us cease to argue. Your faith is a tree which has borne such beautiful flowers and such wondrous fruits that you baffle logic. But then, signorina, you have never lived in h.e.l.l."

Both Herbert Briarfield and Olive cast quick glances at him, but he did not alter his position; he walked quietly on, his eyes fixed on the ground.

"I say, Signor Ricordo," said Briarfield in an expostulating tone.

"That's why I am afraid of the truth," went on Ricordo, without seeming to notice Briarfield. "When a man has lived in h.e.l.l for years, it upsets preconceived notions, it scatters logic to the winds, it makes conventional morality appear to be--what it is."

Olive Castlemaine felt that the man had thrown a kind of spell upon her.

She did not realise that, to say the least, their conversation was not what was natural between people who had met for the first time. Had any one told her the previous day that on meeting a stranger of whom she knew nothing she would enter into a discussion with him on such topics, she would have laughed at it as impossible, yet she felt nothing of the incongruity of the situation. Somehow Ricordo seemed like a voice out of the past, and for a time she forgot things present.

"You have lived--that is----"