"My dear Ned!" she laughed, "don't be so ridiculous! What _are_ you going to do? You look tired!"
"Tired!" he echoed, with a quaint hint of a break in his voice; "I should think I was tired! So would you be if you had to consort with--how is it Walt Whitman puts it?--'tinsmiths, locksmiths, and they who work with the hammer, cabmen and mothers of large families.'
I know now how my uncle must have felt. Excuse me, Helen, but I am a little bit harassed. You don't know what I've had to do and haven't had to do over this business; but I've got through it without any one guessing I was the syndicate. However, since I've started you, I really am off to Athens to-night. Afraid I shan't have your company on the Oriental express--ah, Ramsay? Now, as I have to see Ted Cruttenden--who is just back, I hear, from Paris--before I start, I'll say good-bye."
"But will you catch the express?" asked Dr. Ramsay incredulously.
"I expect so. I have a special," replied Lord Blackborough carelessly.
They looked at each other after he had left the room.
"I hope he will take a rest," said Helen, still more anxiously. "I've never seen him look so--so curious--as if he were seeing visions----"
"He is a little fine-drawn," said the doctor shortly; "quiet will set him all right, I expect."
Meanwhile Ned in his motor was running close up to time-limit on his way to Ted's office. Even if he missed the express he was not going away without telling the latter that he had spoken to Aura, that she had refused him, but that--well! he had some reason for hoping she might change her mind. He would have written this had he been able to get Ted's address in Paris, but no one knew it at the office, or at any rate they professed not to know it. Ted, however, had returned that morning, and Ned had telephoned down to him warning him to expect a visit.
So there he was in his private room, looking just a little disturbed, just a little combative; yet the Paris visit had been successful beyond his hopes. So successful indeed, that there was a really magnificent diamond ring in his breast-pocket awaiting leisure for him to take it down to Cwmfaernog.
"I'm off for six weeks--to be exact, for thirty-nine days--to Athens,"
said Ned, "and I wanted to see you for a moment first, because I have something to tell you--that, I think, you ought to know. I asked Aura Graham to marry me--on New Year's Day it was----"
Ted's heart gave a great thump. It made him conscious of the engagement ring, in its fine blue morocco case, in his breast-pocket.
"Yes----" he said chillily--"and--and----" He could not get his tongue to say "she accepted you," although, the instant he heard Ned's confession, he made up his mind that it must not force his hand in any way. The engagement was not yet made public; they had a perfect right to keep it secret if they chose.
"She refused me--but----" Here Ned found some little difficulty in going on, "but I am not so sure if--if she would refuse me again. That really is all I've come to say."
He looked frankly at his companion.
Ted stooped down and stirred the fire.
"Thanks. Of course that is your opinion--I--I don't agree with it; but anyhow a man can but take his chance. You take yours and I'll take mine."
"Done!" said Ned with a laugh, and they parted.
CHAPTER XX
Little blue wavelets were lapping on the pure white coral dust at his feet; above his head little white cloudlets were sailing upon the pure blue of the sky as Ned Blackborough lay on the flat of his back looking out over the soft southern sea. He had edged himself away from the turf beyond the sand for fear of crushing the great drifts of tiny iris which everywhere grew encircled by their bodyguard of grey-green scimitar-shaped leaves. Whether they were actually of the same sort as the one which Aura had dubbed "the most beautiful thing in the most beautiful place in the world," Ned was not botanist enough to know; but his heart warmed to them because of their likeness to it.
But then his heart went out to almost everything in this wonder island of the Sporades group, which he had purchased for a mere song from the Turkish Government. A mere song indeed! It filled him with awe to think of becoming the possessor of so much pure loveliness, when he had spent hundreds--nay! thousands of times as much--in trying to make one house fit for children to die in!
Even as it stood, it was an earthly paradise. When he had finished spending a little more money and a good deal more leisure on it, when the white marble ruins on it were restored, when books and music came to its pleasant pavilions, above all when Love came to take up her abode there, it would be a veritable fragment of the heavenly Jerusalem chipped off and dropped here by chance in the still, deep blue sea.
Yes! it was extraordinarily beautiful! It satisfied the soul!
Straight away from the water's edge, save where here and there a coral-sanded creek broke the clear cut of the cliff, the land rose steadily, cleft by sharp ravines, to a central peak, not high, yet high enough to hold, on this early morning in February, a dusting of frosty dew upon its summit, which shone evanescently, like snow, then disappeared before the rising sunbeams as they fell.
The ilex woods were already green and bronze in their new, soft, yet spike-set shoots; the olives grew sturdily amongst the burnished leafage of the wild lemon and the wild orange, and down the ravines, where trickled scantily among the stones tiny streams of water, the oleanders were already preparing their blaze of red and white.
And the flowers! Ye gods! what flowers! It would take Aura a lifetime simply to find out their names! Every thicket showed them aburst with coming blossom; and, the open spaces, even thus early, were carpeted with fritillaries and narcissus.
And the birds! A pair of tiny sun-birds flitted past him twittering, playful, a flash of scarlet wheeling wings and ruby throats. On the rock yonder, an emerald and sapphire kingfisher sat silent, looking with large, piercing eyes out to sea.
So indeed might Halcyon have sat looking for her Ceyx! And as he watched the bird, immobile, mournful, the full beauty of the far-way Greek legend struck Ned Blackborough's mind with new force.
Ay! So must all those who love the Something they know not what, which they find, or seem to find, in some woman's beauty, some man's strength--so must they watch and wait, flitting ever over the waves of life seeking the Beloved. Not even the halcyon days when Zeus gives the wisdom of calm, could end that ceaseless quest. Aura had been right. Behind love was the "Something better" which he had felt, in which both he and she had been lost, as they had sat together, hand in hand, listening to the robin as it sang on the holly-tree.
The sun-birds flitted past again less playfully, more lovingly, and Ned Blackborough started up remembering that it was the 14th of February--St. Valentine's day! Naturally the birds were pairing.
Naturally there was spring in the air. Naturally his blood seemed to race through his veins; he also could have made love!
_Fautes de mieux_, why should he not send Aura a valentine? He had not written to her, he had virtually said he would not; but a valentine--especially a valentine by wire as this must be--was a very impersonal affair.
He strolled over to the rocky point, behind which, in a natural harbour, lay a fair-sized English sailing-boat. Beyond, at anchor, rode a steam yacht; but its fires were out--its crew had gone off that morning in a double lateen-sailed felucca to Rhodes for some festival--St. Valentine's day, no doubt.
But for this it would have been easy to steam over to the telegraph office.
There was the sailing-boat, however, and the weather was perfect. He looked out seawards critically. There was a certain hardness of outline in that deep blue horizon; otherwise the calm of fourteen days might well be beginning.
It would be a lovely sail. Twenty miles or so over these ripples, with just enough warm southerly wind behind one to blow the boat straight to the telegraph office without a tack! As for the return journey the felucca's crew would have to make that, and bring the yacht for him next morning. He liked Rhodes; it was a quaint old town full of memories, pagan and Christian.
Five minutes afterwards he was afloat, the sheet looped within reach, the tiller set steady towards a pale-blue cloud which lay upon the north-west horizon.
It was the most perfect of mornings. The boat lay over a trifle to the wind, which was stronger beyond the lee of the island, and sent a little half-apologetic tinkling, bubbling laugh of water along the side as it slid through the waving lines of ripple.
"Let me pass! good people," it seemed to say. "Let me laugh! I have a purpose--you have none. Ha--ha--ha!"
So, unheeding of the ripples, might the unchanging Purpose behind all things break through the little waves of the world and laugh at their disturbance.
Ned Blackborough lit a cigarette--a good sound, opium-soddened Egyptian cigarette such as his soul loved--and set himself deliberately to day-dreams. It was becoming more and more a temptation for him to do this, for he was only just beginning to realise the intense pleasure he derived from it! A sensual, purely Esthetic pleasure for the most part, though every now and again.... Yes! every now and again he left even the super-sensual part of him behind, and lost himself utterly. In what, he did not know. He only knew that _It_ was there, and _He_ was forgotten.
To-day, however, he was in no mood for the infinite; the finite was quite sufficient for him, so he amused himself by looking steadily at the shining dark surface of some bilge water which lay by the tarred keel of the boat, and trying to imagine that he would see visions in it, as the little Cairo boys see them in a drop of ink.
He had tested this often, and knew that they did see strange things, just as Helen apparently had seen the fire on Cam's point in the crystal. Truly there were many mysteries!
It was, of course, not hard to conjure up Aura's face, or see her seated in the sheep shelter listening to the bird, or standing in the moonlight among the cedar shadows on the lawn holding out the sovereign, or on her knees beside the little purple iris while the sphinx looked down on her.
But beyond all these tricks of memory, what could he see? Nothing. Yet what was this? A wide stretch of blue--blue everywhere. Bah! it was only the reflection of the sky; it was the floor of heaven!
His eyes narrowed themselves from dreaminess to thought. It was strange that that inner eye, which could produce things from the past with such absolute accuracy, should be so helpless in regard to the present except in negation. It could make one forget that altogether.
As for the future? Truly the mind of man dreamt idly when it sought to discover what lay beyond; possibly because it sought to recognise itself in conditions in which Self should have been merged in something beyond Self.
So as he sat idly looking at the drop of dark water, he felt for a moment--aided, no doubt, by the opium in his cigarette!--as if he were sailing on over a sea that vibrated ceaselessly with a soft quiver which brought no sensation of light to his eyes, no sense of feeling to his touch, no sense of sound to his ears.
And the old Indian definition recurred to him--"A bubble upon the Ocean of Bliss."