Chapter VII

Jocelyn had strolled away by herself--she had a longing to be alone with the sea. She did not know exactly what it was that she wanted, but it seemed to her that the sea would give her a feeling of rest. She was annoyed presently to find Nielsen beside her. He had humbly brought her the service of his green-lined umbrella, and she had not the heart to send him away, when he asked gently if he bored her.

They strolled together towards a group of rocks that jutted in a blunt, curving point into the sea.

“I want to get on that little green rock,” said Jocelyn, pointing to the furthermost rock separated from the others by an eddy of rippling, shallow water. In a moment she had whipped off her shoes and stockings, and with skirts raised to her ankles, was scrambling through the ripples of the circling waves, up the slippery, green slope of the rock.

Nielsen regarded her proceedings from the beach with an air of comical dismay and admiration.

“Take care, my dear young lady,” he kept on saying, rolling his r’s more than usual. His eyeglass was damp with the interest of his glance, and his umbrella hung uselessly over his shoulder.

“Come along,” said Jocelyn, “I thought you used to be an athlete?”

“It was not the part of the athlete in my day to climb slipperry rocks with young ladies,” he said plaintively, gallantly removing a boot, and standing on one leg in an amiable hesitation.

“_Mais en verité_,” he muttered to himself, drawing off the other boot and revealing pink socks, in the toe of one of which was a decided hole; “she is not a milk and butter Miss, _cette chère_ Jocelyn,” and he hastily divested himself of the holey sock.

Jocelyn having reached the summit, dropped her skirts, and, shading her face with her hand from the burning sun, looked over the hesitating Nielsen at the lines of the bay, that curved in under the stony, sparsely-covered mountains.

It was one of those cloudless Riviera days, when, seen from behind the sun, the coast loses all other colouring in the vivid tints of the sky and sea. The blue of the distant Esterelles melted in the far west into the paler blue of the heavens, and all the nearer hills and jutting promontories were bathed in a wonderful violet ether. One ultimate snowy peak reared itself aloft, emerging triumphant from the trammels of the light. Looking eastwards, where the sun had already sped his course, every line and patch of colouring was thrown into an intense relief. The white houses stared along the stony, drab slopes. The Campanile with the little black cross upon its summit, sprang up high over the old town of Bordighera, against masses of glistening olives beyond. Along a far spur of the hills an old Italian village stretched in straggling seclusion.

Jocelyn bent over to look into the turquoise pools that lapped with white edges round the green, weed-covered rocks, and now and again caught the shadowy gleam of a fish in the cloudy-blue water. On the next rock to her, two picturesque bare-legged fishers angled lazily with twelve-foot rods of stiff bamboo. The breeze caught her hair, and she turned and looked away over the sea, drawing the soft, salt air through her nostrils with an intense feeling of pleasure.

She was in one of her gipsy moods--it was good to set her back to the land, to those eternal ridges of hills which forced upon her a feeling of imprisonment; very good to turn to the sea, the salt sea, stretching before her in blue, illimitable vastness.

A wonderful glow of life and freedom came upon her with the beating of the soft wind against her face. She felt a wild desire to spread her wings in a long, long flight to a freer life, like the little, lateen-rigged fishing smack, running from the land before the wind--a flight away from convention, and the eternal need for repression; away from all her fears, from the horror which sometimes came over her, from the unconfessed longing which fought against it within her breast; away, into a solitude as great as the sea itself, where no other individualities should besiege her own, giving her a sense of suffocation--a solitude, where there should be no knowledge, and no distrust.

Nielsen’s gently imperturbable voice recalled her.

“I am coming, my dear young lady; just a little patience, it is very slipperry, don’t you see.” He was picking a gingerly way with his bare feet from one stone to another.

“Go back,” she cried almost harshly. “I’m coming off!”

What was the use of her wild thoughts! She was bound! bound to that undefined struggle which, whether she would or no, was always going on within her. Her face clouded with its wonted look of defeat, and she sighed. She waited till Nielsen was returning, and then waded back herself.

The feelings which the sea had roused in her made her irritable.

“It’s a dull sea--the Mediterranean,” she said from one side of a rock, putting on her shoes and stockings, “no tides, no ebb and flow; what a monotony! I wonder it finds it worth while to break on its shores at all!”

“You would not say that if you saw it in a storm,” came, in plaintive, half-choked parenthesis, from the other side of the rock, where the discreet Swede was also resuming his boots.

“It manages to break on every shore all round; I should like to know where it parts its hair,” continued Jocelyn meditatively.

“My dear young lady, it is like the bald-headed man, don’t you know; it does not part its hair at all, it has no hair to part in the middle, don’t you see, only a fringe that falls on all sides.”

Nielsen appeared suddenly from round the rock, his hat in his hand, smoothing his own well-covered, flaxen head appreciatively.

Jocelyn laughed gently. She had finished her toilet, and sat looking up at him with her head a little on one side, and her feet drawn under her skirts. Nielsen moved a step towards her, and his brown eyes glowed.

“Do you know you are quite charrming! May I not--“--he bent his head to her hand.

“Please don’t!” she said impatiently.

She had lately found it difficult to take the sentimental remarks of the enamoured Swede as a matter of course.

“Forgive me,” said Nielsen humbly, “you are so beautiful, you see!”

“I would rather you didn’t talk like that, please,” said Jocelyn.

She rose and held out her hand to him frankly; Nielsen took it in his own, letting it go with a deep sigh.

Jocelyn restrained an inclination to laugh.

“What is that ship?” she asked, as they made their way towards the others. Nielsen screwed his eyeglass into his eye.

“A ‘messageries’ for China and the Indies; she will call at Genoa.”

Jocelyn’s eyes followed the great, black steamer racing past. The foam was churning up from under its bows, and along its sides. She looked at it wistfully with wide eyes--the longing was not out of her yet. Nielsen fastened on the look intuitively.

“If you would marry me, you should do that or anything else that you liked,” he said suddenly, pointing to the steamer “I am not verry poor now, you know--the ‘system’ has been verry good to me lately.”

There was an earnestness in his voice, that was in strong contrast to its habitual suave flattery, and his allusion to the “system”--which, with a gambler’s superstition, he never mentioned--struck Jocelyn. She stopped and looked at him.

Yes! He was evidently in earnest; the innumerable little lines and crow’s-feet in his face, showed cruelly in the blazing sunshine; he was paler than usual, and he looked at her with almost a dog’s look in his weary brown eyes. But all she said was--

“I think you spend too much time over the ‘system’!”

She had caught sight of Giles’s figure against the rock, and she felt a sudden, physical repulsion to the man standing beside her.

“But understand,” said Nielsen, “I love you--I love you! You cannot prevent that, you know.” He put out his hands, as if to take her in his arms, and his face twitched.

“Are you mad?” she cried, hurrying past him. She walked swiftly over the hard sand, and as she went a curious feeling came upon her, a feeling of delight that was almost pain. She had forgotten Nielsen, but the words, “I love you--I love you,” kept echoing within her; they had lost all sound and form, they had become like the breath of an inspiration. All her being rose in a trembling answer. A wave of crimson rushed into her face, and as she hastened she plucked nervously at the single yellow rose fastened in her dress. Nielsen stood still, looking after her. A minute later, however, he was beside her again, talking commonplaces with his usual plaintive, imperturbable drawl, his face showing no traces of its recent emotion.

When they reached the others, Jocelyn threw herself down by her aunt, close to a group of sea-washed rocks, through the broken crevices of which the little waves were leaping and flashing like white fairies at play; and when Giles came up, two minutes later, she seemed to be listening gaily to a story Nielsen was telling.

Mrs. Travis, fanning herself, insinuated gentle complaints of the heat. She wished to see the palm gardens, where it looked shady.

Giles led the way with alacrity; he longed to have Jocelyn to himself, with all the concentrated longing of many hours of repression. Mrs. Travis was soon in rapt admiration of the shrubs and flowers; and she impressed Nielsen into her service to make a bargain in French with the florist proprietor, for a weekly provision of flowers to be sent to Mentone, standing by to afford assistance; she had a great and wholly warranted faith in her powers of cheapening things.

Giles and Jocelyn strolled away from them, and were soon hidden by the thick palm foliage. The garden wound up and down in a mass of flowering plants and scented shrubs.

“It’s a kind of paradise,” said Giles, “rather cut and dried in parts.”

“Yes,” Jocelyn assented--“‘the trail of the florist is over it all.’ But the scents are good; I love the dear flowers.” She plucked a spray of roses daringly, and pinned them in the breast of her dress.

“I was always a thief with flowers, you know; I can’t help it, I _have_ to steal them.”

Presently they followed a little path running upwards at the top of the garden. It led them on to a rocky knoll over which, in a ring of spikey aloes and grotesque prickly pears, a shady olive spread its shimmering branches like a tent. Jocelyn seated herself beneath it, looking down upon the wilderness of the garden foliage. In her white skirt and pale silver-green blouse, she looked like the spirit of the tree, as she leant against the trunk with the yellow sunlight playing fantastically on her through the quivering leaves.

A bare and stony hill sloped behind them, planted here and there with vines and rose-trees, which served only to throw into a greater relief its yellow-grey harshness. In front, the tangled masses of palms and plants, the plain, unpretentious white houses straggling along the shore, and the straight line of the railway running beside the sea, gave the scene the unfinished look of some sub-tropical settlement. Across the dipped valley, under the lee of a high, rounded hill covered with olives and glancing green fig-trees, a little church spire rose modestly and incongruously out of a mass of palms.

Giles, who had turned the brim of his Panama hat down, like a mushroom, over his neck, lay on his face in the sun, looking up at Jocelyn. Her beauty, and the impelling, passionate yearning within him, deprived him helplessly of the power of speech. She was sitting with her hand on Shikari’s head, smelling at the flowers in her dress, her figure swaying a little as she hummed to herself.

Her cheeks were still flushed, and her eyes bright from that strange emotion.

She began to sing a little Finnish song that he knew well, with notes that suggested “sobbing” for a refrain. She had a tiny voice, “_niedlich_,” as the Germans say. But in the middle of a verse she stopped suddenly and pointed with her ungloved hand at a large, yellow-fanged drover’s dog, which had appeared on the side of the knoll. Shikari sprang up with a growl, his teeth showing. The two dogs approached one another snarling, and before Giles could rise to prevent them, had each other by the throat, and were rolling over and over on the ground. He leaped hastily to his feet, and gripped Shikari hard by the collar; getting a purchase with his foot against the other dog’s shoulder, with a violent, pushing kick, he sent him sprawling down the slope.

As he turned his head for a second, he saw Jocelyn holding Shikari with her arms laced round his neck--the dog was growling and licking her face at the same time--but in another minute the drover’s dog came up the slope again, and, with a savage snarl, sprang at his throat.

Throwing out both hands stiffly, he caught at the brute’s neck, but his grip slipped on the short, wiry hair, and the impetus of the dog’s spring carried him backwards on to the ground.

Jocelyn saw his hands slip, saw him stagger, and fall; it seemed impossible to her that he could keep those hideous fangs from his throat. Involuntarily she threw her hands up to her eyes. She had a mental vision of a torn throat--a gaping, jagged wound. A cloud of hot, whirling dust rose from the dry ground, where the man and beast were struggling. For one second of sheer horror she stood still, her face crimson and as suddenly white, then with a little cry she ran towards them; but the struggle was already over. The first movement of her hands had released the greyhound. The drover’s dog had turned with his teeth on Giles’s throat to attack his old enemy, and Giles scrambling to his feet, had seized his stick, dealing the brute a heavy blow, which half stunned him.

Jocelyn saw him leaning over the two dogs, a hand twisted in the collar of each, his face very pale, his figure strained with the effort of holding them apart; his clothes were covered with dust, and he bled from a scratch on one hand. He released the cowed brute, who slunk away down the hill, and stood up, breathing hard, keeping a foot on Shikari, who growled angrily.

Jocelyn went softly up to him. Even now, seeing him erect, she hardly dared look at his throat, so vivid was the memory of the wound that had gleamed, red and angry, before her covered eyes.

She gave a little choke and put out her hands.

When he felt the touch of her fingers on his shoulder he faced her suddenly. In the moments of fierce excitement, when his muscles and his nerves had been strung and braced, all thought of Jocelyn had left him, he had felt only the fighting fever and the consciousness of strength; but his blood was coursing wildly through his veins, and the touch of those fingers was like a spark to a magazine. All his passion returned with tenfold strength.

He faced her with blazing eyes, and his lips quivered.

“Are you hurt, Giles?” she said.

Her eyes were bent on him with a strained look, the black pupils expanding; and her lips were tremulous and parted.

“My darling!” he cried, “did you care?”

She looked at him, frightened at his words, yet wondering he should ask.

“Care? Yes.”

“I love you, Jocelyn, I love you! My God! What am I saying?”

He bent his head down to the level of her hands; one of them stole up and smoothed his hair with a little shrinking caress. When he looked again, her eyes were soft and wet, and he knew somehow that she had been glad.

He was nearly choked by the joy that leaped in his heart, but the tears in her eyes helped him to a mastery of himself.

“Dear,” he said, “I am sorry, I couldn’t help it! Forget it--forgive me, I couldn’t help it--you are so sweet and lovely--so sweet and lovely--after all, you knew it long ago.”

He spoke in short, broken sentences, catching his breath with gasps.

She smiled at him softly and sadly, and for one moment he caught, as in a revelation, the love-light in her eyes. Her lips still trembled; with her hands she brushed the dust mechanically from his clothes.

She looked swiftly up at him.

“I was so frightened,” she said, “I thought--” and covered her eyes with her hands, shuddering.

He caught them in his, and stood looking down upon her dark head. He could see the little fluffy hair on her neck, and her shoulders heaving softly. He was too happy to speak; and he was afraid--afraid of the passionate words that rose to his lips. The dry leaves of the olive tree rustled crisply over their heads, and from the road below came the tinkle of cowbells.

Voices broke in upon their silence. They went down in answer to Mrs. Travis’s calling, and as they went, Giles said softly--

“Whatever comes, dear, this has been the hour of my life.”

They drove home without stopping at the villa, putting Nielsen down at the Ventimiglia station. He had been very silent on the return journey. He said to Jocelyn when he left them--

“I must get back to Monte Carrlo, you know, and appease the Fates for my desertion.”

As they passed the last hill into Mentone the evening light was already spreading, mellow and soft, over the town, and the sun was dying behind the Esterelles. The tired little horses, toiling up the steep ascent, nodded their heads diligently.

Jocelyn and Giles got out to walk. Half-way up, Jocelyn stopped and stretched out her arms, saying with a sigh--

“Look! The evening is coming over everything, like a cool blessing, gentle--gentle--”

“Yes!” said Giles. Their eyes met for one moment, and not another word was said.

When they reached the hotel, he took his leave of them. Jocelyn turned on the steps.

“_Buona Sera!_ my friend!” she said. “_Buona Sera!_” She gave him her hand for a second time. Her eyes looked unnaturally large in the uncertain light. Giles stood with his hat off till she had disappeared--he could not speak.