"Carrie!" they heard Mrs. Morris call her sister after an interval, and her voice sounded faint and flat and unusual. There was the soft hissing of some whispered words outside and a m.u.f.fled exclamation. Then Mrs.
Wilder and Mrs. Morris and Betty came into the room. Mrs. Wilder came first, and Mrs. Morris with an alarmed face as if sheltering behind her.
"We want to tell you something," said Amanda.
"Amanda and I are going to marry each other," said Benham, standing in front of her.
For an instant the others made no answer; they looked at each other.
"BUT DOES HE KNOW?" Mrs. Morris said in a low voice.
Amanda turned her eyes to her lover. She was about to speak, she seemed to gather herself for an effort, and then he knew that he did not want to hear her explanation. He checked her by a gesture.
"I KNOW," he said, and then, "I do not see that it matters to us in the least."
He went to her holding out both his hands to her.
She took them and stood shyly for a moment, and then the watchful gravity of her face broke into soft emotion. "Oh!" she cried and seized his face between her hands in a pa.s.sion of triumphant love and kissed him.
And then he found himself being kissed by Mrs. Morris.
She kissed him thrice, with solemnity, with thankfulness, with relief, as if in the act of kissing she transferred to him precious and entirely incalculable treasures.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON
1
It was a little after sunrise one bright morning in September that Benham came up on to the deck of the st.u.r.dy Austrian steamboat that was churning its way with a sedulous deliberation from Spalato to Cattaro, and lit himself a cigarette and seated himself upon a deck chair. Save for a yawning Greek sailor busy with a mop the first-cla.s.s deck was empty.
Benham surveyed the haggard beauty of the Illyrian coast. The mountains rose gaunt and enormous and barren to a jagged fantastic silhouette against the sun; their almost vertical slopes still plunged in blue shadow, broke only into a little cold green and white edge of olive terraces and vegetation and houses before they touched the clear blue water. An occasional church or a house perched high upon some seemingly inaccessible ledge did but accentuate the vast barrenness of the land.
It was a land desolated and destroyed. At Ragusa, at Salona, at Spalato and Zara and Pola Benham had seen only variations upon one persistent theme, a dwindled and uncreative human life living amidst the giant ruins of preceding times, as worms live in the sockets of a skull.
Forward an unsavoury group of pa.s.sengers still slumbered amidst fruit-peel and expectorations, a few soldiers, some squalid brigands armed with preposterous red umbrellas, a group of curled-up human lumps brooded over by an aquiline individual caparisoned with bra.s.s like a horse, his head wrapped picturesquely in a shawl. Benham surveyed these last products of the "life force" and resumed his pensive survey of the coast. The sea was deserted save for a couple of little lateen craft with suns painted on their gaudy sails, sea b.u.t.terflies that hung motionless as if unawakened close insh.o.r.e....
The travel of the last few weeks had impressed Benham"s imagination profoundly. For the first time in his life he had come face to face with civilization in defeat. From Venice hitherward he had marked with c.u.mulative effect the cl.u.s.tering evidences of effort spent and power crumbled to nothingness. He had landed upon the marble quay of Pola and visited its deserted amphitheatre, he had seen a weak provincial life going about ign.o.ble ends under the walls of the great Venetian fortress and the still more magnificent cathedral of Zara; he had visited Spalato, cl.u.s.tered in sweltering grime within the ample compa.s.s of the walls of Diocletian"s villa, and a few troublesome sellers of coins and iridescent gla.s.s and fragments of tessellated pavement and such-like loot was all the population he had found amidst the fallen walls and broken friezes and columns of Salona. Down this coast there ebbed and flowed a mean residual life, a life of violence and dishonesty, peddling trades, vendettas and war. For a while the unstable Austrian ruled this land and made a sort of order that the incalculable chances of international politics might at any time shatter. Benham was drawing near now to the utmost limit of that extended peace. Ahead beyond the mountain capes was Montenegro and, further, Albania and Macedonia, lands of lawlessness and confusion. Amanda and he had been warned of the impossibility of decent travel beyond Cattaro and Cettinje but this had but whetted her adventurousness and challenged his spirit. They were going to see Albania for themselves.
The three months of honeymoon they had been spending together had developed many remarkable divergences of their minds that had not been in the least apparent to Benham before their marriage. Then their common resolve to be as spirited as possible had obliterated all minor considerations. But that was the limit of their unanimity. Amanda loved wild and picturesque things, and Benham strong and clear things; the vines and brushwood amidst the ruins of Salona that had delighted her had filled him with a sense of tragic retrogression. Salona had revived again in the acutest form a dispute that had been smouldering between them throughout a fitful and lengthy exploration of north and central Italy. She could not understand his disgust with the mediaeval colour and confusion that had swamped the pride and state of the Roman empire, and he could not make her feel the ambition of the ruler, the essential discipline and responsibilities of his aristocratic idea. While his adventurousness was conquest, hers, it was only too manifest, was brigandage. His thoughts ran now into the form of an imaginary discourse, that he would never deliver to her, on the decay of states, on the triumphs of barbarians over rulers who will not rule, on the relaxation of patrician orders and the return of the robber and a.s.sa.s.sin as lordship decays. This coast was no theatrical scenery for him; it was a shattered empire. And it was shattered because no men had been found, united enough, magnificent and steadfast enough, to hold the cities, and maintain the roads, keep the peace and subdue the brutish hates and suspicions and cruelties that devastated the world.
And as these thoughts came back into his mind, Amanda flickered up from below, light and noiseless as a sunbeam, and stood behind his chair.
Freedom and the sight of the world had if possible brightened and invigorated her. Her costume and bearing were subtly touched by the romance of the Adriatic. There was a flavour of the pirate in the cloak about her shoulders and the light knitted cap of scarlet she had stuck upon her head. She surveyed his preoccupation for a moment, glanced forward, and then covered his eyes with her hands. In almost the same movement she had bent down and nipped the tip of his ear between her teeth.
"Confound you, Amanda!"
"You"d forgotten my existence, you star-gazing Cheetah. And then, you see, these things happen to you!"
"I was thinking."
"Well--DON"T.... I distrust your thinking. This coast is wilder and grimmer than yesterday. It"s glorious...."
She sat down on the chair he unfolded for her.
"Is there nothing to eat?" she asked abruptly.
"It is too early."
2
"This coast is magnificent," she said presently.
"It"s hideous," he answered. "It"s as ugly as a heap of slag."
"It"s nature at its wildest."
"That"s Amanda at her wildest."
"Well, isn"t it?"
"No! This land isn"t nature. It"s waste. Not wilderness. It"s the other end. Those hills were covered with forests; this was a busy civilized coast just a little thousand years ago. The Venetians wasted it.
They cut down the forests; they filled the cities with a mixed mud of population, THAT stuff. Look at it"!--he indicated the sleepers forward by a movement of his head.
"I suppose they WERE rather feeble people," said Amanda.
"Who?"
"The Venetians."
"They were traders--and nothing more. Just as we are. And when they were rich they got splendid clothes and feasted and rested. Much as we do."
Amanda surveyed him. "We don"t rest."
"We idle."
"We are seeing things."
"Don"t be a humbug, Amanda. We are making love. Just as they did. And it has been--ripping. In Salona they made love tremendously. They did nothing else until the barbarians came over the mountains...."
"Well," said Amanda virtuously, "we will do something else."
He made no answer and her expression became profoundly thoughtful. Of course this wandering must end. He had been growing impatient for some time. But it was difficult, she perceived, to decide just what to do with him....
Benham picked up the thread of his musing.