Then he groped for her hand and tried to hold it, but she wrenched it free with a cry; and now she had risen, and he too had risen, staring at her aghast. For Maddalena’s face was white to the lips, and her gentle, mothering eyes were on fire, and all of her shook with a kind of fury, and her voice when it came was choked with passion, so that he scarcely knew it.
“You will never come back, Gian-Luca,” she said wildly, “you will never come back any more—and as God is my witness I will not let you go—you belong to me only, and God gave you to me, therefore He cannot take you away—not like this, not while you still live, Gian-Luca. I need you, I need you far more than God does. He has got the whole world, I have only got you—”
“It is I who need Him,” said Gian-Luca.
“The Church—” she began.
But he held up his hand, and a strange, new authority looked from his eyes: “I am told to find God in my own way, Maddalena. I am told to go now and find Him.”
“You are told?” she said loudly. “Who has told you, Gian-Luca?”
And he answered: “I do not know; but I mean to obey that summons, Maddalena—I will not ignore it any longer.”
Then all that lies dormant in the heart of woman rose up and gripped Maddalena. The long years of civilization slipped from her, and she stood forth a naked, primitive thing, and she crushed down her spirit and she called on her body to help her in her fight for this man.
“I love you, I love you!” she whispered fiercely, and her arms were around his neck. Her soft, ample body was pressed against him, so that he could feel the warmth of her body; all that was gracious in it he felt, and the deep, happy comfort of her breasts. Her lips were on his, insistent, compelling, while she murmured the words of her love; and her love swept the years away from Maddalena, so that she seemed like the splendid young virgin who had walked that day by the side of her lover into the woods at Hadley.
“Stay with me—stay with me, amore,” she pleaded, “you cannot leave Maddalena—you have so often slept with your head on her breast—” and she lifted her hand and pressed down his head, as she had done long ago in the woods.
For one moment he let his cheek rest on her shoulder, kissing her strong, white throat—for was not this wife of his a woman made more lovely through her love for him? But then he must push her away very gently—pitiful and almost ashamed.
He said: “If you love me, have mercy, Maddalena.” And he knelt down before her and prayed for her mercy—prayed her to let him go forth in peace on this journey in quest of God.
Then the passion died out of Maddalena’s eyes, and the motherhood came back and possessed them entirely—and her eyes filled with gentle and most blessed tears, to see him kneeling before her. She stooped, and he grasped at her outstretched hands as she drew him up from his knees.
“May God go each step of the way beside you, and may you feel Him and know Him, Gian-Luca, and may He give you the thing you most need, which is surely peace,” she murmured.
Then they kissed each other very gravely and sadly and they looked into each other’s eyes, and Gian-Luca said: “God must exist somewhere, since you exist, Maddalena.”
X
I
The greatest adventures in the lives of men will sometimes be embarked on very simply, and that was how Gian-Luca set out on his journey—taking no heed for the morrow. To please Maddalena he must carry a suitcase in which she had managed to pack some warm flannels, and his raincoat she had strapped to the side of the suitcase, adding thereby to its bulk. For the rest he would take nothing but what he stood up in, and this for a very good reason; he intended to tramp to his destination, wherever that might ultimately be. A great longing for freedom of movement possessed him; he wanted to be quite untrammeled; he would not be restricted by so much as a map, far less by timetables and trains. He felt blessedly vague regarding his plans, though he meant to reach Staines by the evening; after that his road should be left to fate.
“Some place must be waiting for me,” he thought, “some place is always waiting—”
His clothes were quite as vague as his plans; he was wearing what had first come to hand—an old tweed suit, some well-worn brown shoes, and a shabby grey Homburg hat. To all Maddalena’s protests he had answered firmly: “I can buy what I need on the journey”; so what could she do but put up a prayer that the fine warm weather would hold?
He wandered along New Oxford Street, carrying that tiresome suitcase, a ridiculous encumbrance for a very long walk; he must buy himself something more practical, a knapsack—but he felt rather tender towards the suitcase, thinking of Maddalena.
“Just for a little I will keep it,” he mused, filled with his gratitude towards her, and filled with a certain sense of guilt also; he had not told her that he meant to tramp: “I will let you know where I am when I get there,” he had said, allowing his wife to suppose that he meant to get there by train.
The first part of his journey was dull and uninspiring, Bayswater, Shepherd’s Bush, and then Chiswick High Road; mile upon dreary mile of London—he felt as though the city were stretching out its coils, trying to trip him, to impede him.
“It will not
