She was panic-stricken, seized with a terror she could not control. Guessing that she was on the point of screaming aloud, Jason spoke more tenderly than ever.
'Hush! Be quiet,' he murmured against her lips. 'Don't you think it's time you told me the truth? Don't you know yet that I love you – and that you can safely trust me?'
'But – what do you want me to tell?'
'What I have a right to know. I know I may not have given you much cause to think that I will understand. I have been brutal, cruel, violent and unjust. But I have been sorry for it, Marianne! All through those days when I lay like a corpse in the sunshine at Monemvasia, waiting for the recovery that seemed to elude me, I thought only of you, of us two – and of all that I had so wantonly destroyed. If I had helped and understood you then, we would not be here now. You would have carried out your mission and at this moment we would be sailing back to my country, instead of journeying endlessly over these barbarous steppes. So let us have no more foolishness, no more lies and pretence! Let us cast off everything but ourselves, as we cast off our clothes to love one another. I want to see your naked soul, my love… Tell me the truth. It is more than time if we want to be able ever to build up a true happiness—'
The truth?'
'Yes. I will help you. Where is your child, Marianne?'
Her heart missed a beat. She had always known that, sooner or later, Jason would ask her that question but until that moment she had tried to ward off all the possible answers, perhaps from an unconscious weariness at all the lies she had been forced to tell.
She knew that he was right, that they must make an end, once and for all, of all misunderstandings, and that only then would all things become possible. Yet she still shrank, unaccountably, from uttering the words, like a little girl trembling on the brink of a deep ditch.
'My child…' she began slowly, halting over the words, 'he is…"
'With his father, is he not? Or at least with the man who would be a father to him? He is with Turhan Bey, or rather, with your permission, with the Prince Sant'Anna.'
Once again, there was silence but this time there was a different quality in the air. A sudden relief, a clear note of release rang in Marianne's voice as she asked, almost timidly: 'How did you find out? Who told you?'
'No one – and everyone. He, most of all, I think, a man who could choose slavery by going aboard my ship. He had no reason to bear what he did from me and from others unless it was to protect some other person, and that someone you. To be sure, I did not guess it all at once. But the thick web that was woven so closely about you became amazingly clear one morning at the palace of Humayunabad, when I met the Sant'Annas' faithful servant bearing the last of those princes with such triumphant joy and pride to be presented to a simple merchant, of no very certain nationality, who, in the ordinary way, could not have had so pressing an interest in the child that all else must make way for it. But you, Marianne? When did you learn the truth?'
She told him then. Eager to complete the tale he had already heard from Jolival, she told him everything, emptying her heart and her memory once and for all with an inexpressible feeling of release. She told him all about the nocturnal visit to Rebecca's house, about the Prince's demand and her stay at the Morousi palace, about the bargain she had made with her husband, the peril she had been in from the English ambassador and her installation in the palace by the Bosphorus, culminating in the Prince's sudden departure with the child, believing that its mother had rejected it, at the very moment when she had come to know her own heart. Last of all, she told him of her fears as to his own reactions when he should learn that she had been married to a black.
'We had agreed to part,' she said, 'so what was the good of telling you all this at the risk of making you angry again?'
He uttered a mirthless little laugh.
'Making me angry? So, in your eyes, I am nothing more than some kind of slave trader?' he said bitterly. 'I suppose you'll never understand that I grew up among black people, that I owe some of the best parts of my childhood to them, and that to me it seems quite natural that I should be their master and love them just the same? As for him—'
'Yes, tell me. How do you think of him?'
He thought for a moment and she heard him sigh.
'I don't really know. With liking, certainly, and respect for his courage and his selflessness. But with anger, too – and jealousy. He is altogether too great a man. Too noble, too remote from other men, from common or garden adventurers like me! And a darn sight too good-looking also! What's more, in spite of everything, he is your husband. You bear his name in the sight of God and men. And then he has your child, flesh of your flesh – something of you! So you see, there are times when I think that for all his willing sacrifice, he has the luck…'
All at once there had come into the privateer's voice a sadness so deep and bitter that Marianne was overwhelmed. Instinctively, she clung more closely to him. Never before had she felt herself so close to him, felt how much she loved him. She belonged to him utterly and not for anything in the world, in spite of all the suffering he had caused her, would she have had it any other way, for tears and suffering were the strongest mortar of love.
Pressing her lips against the firm muscles of his neck, she whispered fiercely: 'Don't think of it, not any more, I beg you. Forget all that… I have told you, I shall not remain the Prince's wife. There will be a divorce. He is in full agreement and there is nothing now stands between me and my freedom, thanks to the Emperor's new laws, but a simple formality. When that is done I can be yours entirely and for ever. All this part of my life will be wiped out, like a bad dream—'
'And the child? Will that be wiped out too?'
She jerked away from him as though he had struck her and remained staring. He had a sudden feeling that beneath the soft skin every muscle in the girl's body had tensed. But it was only for a moment. Then, with a sigh that might have been unconscious, she was back in his arms again, hugging him to her with all her might, in a primitive need to assure herself that both of them were really there. At the end of one long kiss and then another, she gave a sigh.
'I think I've always known that there is no true joy or happiness on earth that does not have to be paid for sooner or later. Old Dobbs, the head groom at Selton, taught me that when I was very small.'
'Your head groom was a philosopher, then?'
'Philosopher is too strong a word. He was a strange old man, though, full of wisdom and good sense. He never spoke much and what he said was mostly in proverbs and old sayings he had picked up here and there all over the world, for he had been a sailor in his youth, under Admiral Cornwallis. One day when I was determined to ride Firebird, the finest and most mettlesome of all our horses, and was beginning to throw a tantrum because he would not let me, Dobbs took his pipe out of his mouth – he was always smoking a pipe – and said, quite calmly: "Very well, then, Miss Marianne. If you're set on breaking a leg, or maybe two, let alone your head into the bargain, that's your business. As to that, there's a saying I once heard somewhere comes to my mind. There's God, you see, a-showing man all the pleasures of the world and 'Take all you want,' says He, 'take it and pay!' " '
'And did you ride Firebird?'
'Indeed I did not! But I never forgot what Dobbs had said and I've had cause to test the truth of it more than once. I've even come to think that the child is the price I have to pay for the right to be with you. Because, I can confess it to you, ever since he was born I have been longing to ask the Prince to give him to me. So much that I actually considered taking him back without his permission. But that would be wrong, cruel even, because it was he who wanted him, much more than I. I was rejecting him with all my might. He is the one hope, the one happiness in a life of complete self-sacrifice—'