The change was quite natural, nothing forced or awkward about it.

The significance had gone its way, but the results remained. They were in the 'sea' together. It 'had to be.' As from the beginning of the world they belonged to one another, each for the other--real. There was nothing about it of a text-book 'love affair,' absolutely nothing. Deeper far than a pa.s.sional relationship, guiltless of any fruit of mere propinquity, the foundations of the sudden intimacy were as ancient as immovable.

The inevitable touch lay in it. And Tom knew this partly confirmed, at any rate, by the emotion in him when she said 'my boy,' for the term woke no annoyance, conveyed no lightness. Yet there was a flavour of disappointment in it somewhere--something of necessary value that he missed in her. . . . To a man in love it must have sounded superior, contemptuous: whereas to him it sounded merely true. He was her boy.

This mother-touch was in her. To care, to cherish, somehow even to rescue, she had come to find him out--again. She had come _back_. . . .

It was thus, at first, he felt it. From somewhere above, beyond the place where he now stood in life, she had 'come back, come down, to fetch him.'

She was further on than he was. He longed to stand beside her. Until he did so . . . this gap in her must prevent absolute union. On both sides it was not entirely natural as yet. . . . Thought grew confused in him.

And, though he could not understand, he accepted it as inevitable.

The joy, moreover, was so urgent and uprising, that it smothered a delicate whisper that yet came with it--that the process involved also-- pain. Though aware, from time to time, of this vague uneasiness, he easily brushed it aside. It was the merest gossamer-thread of warning that with each recurrent appearance became more tenuous, until finally it ceased to make its presence felt at all. . . .

In the entire affair of this sudden intercourse he felt the Wave, yet the Wave, though steadily rising, ceased to make its presence too consciously known; the Whiff, the Sound, the Eyes seemed equally forgotten: that is, he did not realise them. He was living now, and introspection was a waste of time, living too intensely to reflect or a.n.a.lyse. He felt swept onwards upon a tide that was greater than he could manage, for instead of swimming consciously, he was borne and carried with it. There was certainly no attempt to stem. Life was rising. It rushed him forwards too deliciously to think. . . .

He began asking himself the old eternal question: 'Do I love? Am I in love--at last, then?' . . . Some time pa.s.sed, however, before he realised that he loved, and it was in a sudden, curious way that this realisation came. Two little words conveyed the truth--some days later, as they were at tea on the verandah of her hotel, watching the sunset behind the blue line of the Jura Mountains. He had been talking about himself, his engineering prospects--rather proudly--his partnership and the letter he expected daily from Sir William. 'I hope it will be a.s.souan,' he said, 'I've never been in Egypt. I'm awfully keen to see it.' She said she hoped so too. She knew Egypt well: it enchanted, even enthralled her: 'familiar as though I'd lived there all my life. A change comes over me, I become a different person--and a much older one; not physically,' she explained with a curious shy gaze at him, 'but in the sense that I feel a longer pedigree behind me.' She gave the little laugh that so often accompanied her significant remarks. 'I always think of the Nile as the 'stream' where I see the floating faces.'

They went on chatting for some minutes about it. Tom asked if she had met his cousin out there; yes, she remembered vaguely a Mr. Winslowe coming to tea on her _dahabieh_ once, but it was only when he described Tony more closely that she recalled him positively. 'He interested me,' she said then: 'he talked wildly, but rather picturesquely, about what he called the 'spiral movement of life,' or something.' 'He goes after birds,' Tom mentioned. 'Of course,' she replied, 'I remember distinctly now. It was something about the flight of birds that introduced the spiral part of it.

He had a good deal in him, that man,' she added, 'but he hid it behind a lot of nonsense--almost purposely, I felt.'

'That's Tony all over,' Tom a.s.sented, 'but he's a rare good sort and I'm awfully fond of him. He's 'real' in our sense too, I think.'

She said then very slowly, as though her thoughts were far away in Egypt at the moment: 'Yes, I think he is. I've seen _his_ face too.'

'Floating down, you mean--or on the bank?'

'Floating,' she answered. 'I'm sure I have.'

Tom laughed happily. 'Then you've got him to rescue too,' he said.

'But, remember, if we're both drowning, I come first.'

She looked into his face and smiled her answer, touching his fingers with her hand. And again it was not a woman's touch.

'He was in Warsaw, too, a few weeks ago,' Tom went on, 'so we were all three there together. Rather odd, you know. He was ski-ing with me in the Carpathians,'; and he described their meeting at Zakopane after the long interval since boyhood. 'He told me about you in Egypt, too, now I come to think of it. He mentioned the _dahabieh_, but called you a Russian--yes, I remember now,--and a Russian Princess into the bargain.

Evidently you made less impression on Tony than----'

It was then he stopped as though he had been struck. The idle conversation changed. He heard her interrupting words from a curious distance. They fell like particles of ice upon his heart.

'Polish, of course, not Russian,' she mentioned casually, 'but the rest is right, though I never use the t.i.tle. My husband, in his own country, is a Prince, you see.'

Something reeled in him, then instantly righted itself. For a moment he felt as though the freedom of their intercourse had received a shock that blighted it. The words, 'my husband,' struck chill and ominous into his heart. The recovery, however,--almost simultaneous--showed him that both the freedom and the intercourse were right and unashamed. She gave him nothing that belonged to any other: she was loyal and true to that other as she was loyal and true to himself. Their relationship was high above mere pa.s.sional intrigue; it could exist--in the way she knew it, felt it-- side by side with that other one, before that other one's very eyes, if need be. . . . He saw it true: he saw it innocent as daylight. . . .

For what he felt was somehow this: the woman in her was not his, but more than that--it was not any one's. It still lay dormant. . . .

If there was a momentary confusion in his own mind, there was none, he felt positive, in hers. The two words that struck him such a blow, she uttered as lightly, innocently, as the rest of the talk between them.

Indeed, had that other--even in thought Tom preferred the paraphrase--been present, she would have introduced them to each other then and there.

He heard her saying the little phrases even: 'My husband,' and, 'This is Tom Kelverdon whom I've loved since childhood.'

Nothing brought more home to him the high innocence, the purity and sweetness of this woman than the reflections that flung after one another in his mind as he realised that his hope of her being a widow was not justified, and at the same moment that he desired exclusive possession of her--that he was definitely in love.

That she was unaware of any discovery, even if she divined the storm in him at all, was clear from the way she went on speaking. For, while all this flashed through his mind, she added quietly: 'He is in Warsaw now.

He--lives there. I go to him for part of every year.' To which Tom heard his voice reply something as natural and commonplace as 'Yes--I see.'

Of the hundred pregnant questions that presented themselves, he did not ask a single one: not that he lacked the courage so much as that he felt the right was--not yet--his. Moreover, behind her quiet words he divined a tragedy. The suffering that had become sweetness in her face was half explained, but the full revelation of it belonged to 'that other' and to herself alone. It had been their secret, he remembered, for at least fifteen years.

CHAPTER X

Yet, knowing himself in love, he was able to set his house in order.

Confusion disappeared. With the method and thoroughness of his character he looked things in the face and put them where they belonged.

Even to wake up to an untidy room was an affliction. He might arrive in a hotel at midnight, but he could not sleep until his trunks were empty and everything in its place. In such outer details the intensity of his nature showed itself: it was the intensity, indeed, that compelled the orderliness.

And the morning after this conversation, he woke up to an ordered mind-- thoughts and emotions in their proper places where he could see and lay his hand upon them. The strength and weakness of his temperament betrayed themselves plainly here, for the security that pedantic order brought precluded the perspective of a larger vision. This careful labelling enclosed him within somewhat rigid fences. To insist upon this precise ticketing had its perilous corollary; the entire view--perspective, proportion, vision--was lost sight of.

'I'm in love: she's beautiful, body, mind and soul. She's high above me, but I'll climb up to where she is.' This was his morning thought, and the thought that accompanied him all day long and every day until the moment came to separate again. . . . 'She's a married woman, but her husband has no claim on her.' Somehow he was positive of that; the husband had forfeited all claim to her; details he did not know; but she was free; she did no wrong.

In imagination he furnished plausible details from sensational experiences life had shown him. These may have been right or wrong; possibly the husband had ill-treated, then deserted her; they were separated possibly, though--she had told him this--there were no children to complicate the situation. He made his guesses. . . . There was a duty, however, that she would not, did not neglect: in fulfilment of its claim she went to Warsaw every year. What it was, of course, he did not know; but this thought and the emotions caused by it, he put away into their proper places; he asked no questions of her; the matter did not concern him really. The shock experienced the day before was the shock of realising that--he loved. Those two significant words had suddenly shown it to him.

The order of his life was changed. 'She is essential to me; I am essential to her.' But 'She's all the world to me,' involved equally 'I'm all the world to her.' The sense of his own importance was enormously increased. The Wave surged upwards with a sudden leap. . . .

There was one thing lacking in this love, perhaps, though he hardly noticed it--the element of surprise. Ever since childhood he had suspected this would happen. The love was predestined, and in so far seemed a deliberate affair, pedestrian, almost calm. This sense of the inevitable robbed it of that amazing unearthly glamour which steals upon those who love for the first time, taking them deliciously by surprise.

He saw her beautiful, and probably she was, but her beauty was familiar to him. He had come up with the childhood dream, and in coming up with it he recognised it. It seemed thus somewhat. . . . But her mind and soul were beautiful too, only these were more beautiful than he had dreamed.

In that lay surprise and wonder too. There was genuine magic here, discovery and exhilarating novelty. He had not caught up with _that_.

The love as a whole, however, was expected, natural. It was inevitable.

The familiarity alone remained strange, a flavour of the uncanny about it almost--yet certainly real.

And these things also he tried to face and label, though with less success. To bring order into them was beyond his powers. She had outstripped him somehow in her soul, but had come back to fetch him--also to get something for herself she lacked. The rest was oddly familiar: it had happened before. It was about to happen now again, but on a higher level; only before it could happen completely he must overtake her.

The spiral idea lay in it somewhere. But the Wave contained and drove it. . . . His mind was not supple; a.n.a.logy, that spiritual solvent, did not help him. Yet the fact remained that he somehow visualised the thing in picture form; a rising wave bore them charging up the spiral curve to a point whence they both looked down upon a pa.s.sage they had made before.

She was always a little in front of him, beyond him. But when the Wave finally broke they would rush together--become one . . . there would be pain, but joy would follow.

And during all their subsequent happy days of companionship this one thing alone marred his supreme contentment--this sense of elusiveness, that while he held her she yet slipped between his fingers and escaped.

He loved; but whereas to most men love brings a feeling of finality and rest, as of a search divinely ended, to Tom came the feeling that his search was merely resumed, or, indeed, had only just begun. He had not come into full possession of this woman: he had only found her. . . .

She was deep; her deceptive simplicity hid surprises from him; much--and it was the greater part--he could not understand. Only when he came up with that would possession be complete. Not that she said or did a single thing that suggested this; she was not elusive of set purpose; she was entirely guiltless of any desire to hold back a fraction of herself, and to conceal was as foreign to her nature as to play with him; but that some part of her hung high above his reach, and that he, knowing this, admitted a subtle pain behind the joy. 'I can't get at her--quite,' he put it to himself. 'Some part of her is not mine yet--doesn't belong to me.'

He thought chiefly, that is, of his own possible disabilities rather than of hers.

'I often wonder why we've come together like this,' he said once, as they lay in the shade of a larch wood above Corvaux and looked towards the snowy summits of Savoy. 'What brought us together, I mean? There's something mysterious about it to me----'

'G.o.d,' she said quietly. 'You needed me. You've been lonely. But you'll never be lonely again.'

Her introduction of the Deity into a conversation did not displease.

Fate, or any similar word, could have taken its place; she merely conveyed her sense that their coming together was right and inevitable.

Moreover, now that she said it, he recognised the fact of loneliness--that he always had been lonely, but that it was no longer possible. He felt like a boy and spoke like a boy. She had come to look after, care for him. She asked nothing for herself. The thought gave him a sharp and sudden pang.

'But my love means a lot to you, doesn't it?' he asked tenderly.

'I mean, you need me too?'

'Everything, Tom,' she told him softly. He was conscious of the mother in her, as though the mother overshadowed the woman. But while he loved it, the tinge of resentment still remained.

'You couldn't do without me, could you?' He took the hand she placed upon his knee and looked up into her quiet eyes. 'You'd be lonely too if--I went?'

For a moment she gazed down at him and did not answer; he was aware of both the pain and sweetness in her face; an interval of thoughtfulness again descended on them both: then a great tenderness came welling up into her eyes as she answered slowly: 'You couldn't go, Tom. You couldn't leave me ever.'