Then he finished wrapping Marianne in her cocoon of sailcloth, slipped a rolled-up fishing net under her head, and signed to her to go to sleep.
At the other end of the boat, against the red sail whose colour faded with the fading light, the priest stood in an impassive and hieratic pose, eating black bread and onions, washed down by frequent draughts from a pot-bellied jar that he had beside him. When he had finished, he embarked on a lengthy prayer involving various ritual prostrations which, on the moving boat, called for considerable acrobatic skill. By the time this was over, it was quite dark and, curling himself into a ball with his strange-looking mitre tipped over his eyes, he settled himself into his corner and began to snore, without another glance at the creature whom his companion had fished out of the water.
Tired as she was, Marianne felt no desire to sleep. She was exhausted but the thirst, the terrible thirst, had gone; the oil on her face had soothed away some of the pain and she felt almost better. The heavy canvas protected her from the chill of night-time, and above her the stars were coming out, one by one. They were the same stars she had seen the night before, as she lay in the bottom of her boat, but then they had seemed cold and hostile. Tonight there was something friendly about them and from the bottom of her heart Marianne offered up a prayer of thanks to the God who had sent a saving hand to her just at the very moment when she had abandoned hope and decided to put an end to her existence. She could hear the man humming now, through closed lips, as he steered his little craft. She could not understand the language, she did not know to what land he was taking her, nor even where she was, but she was alive, and the sea that bore them up was the same sea that carried the American brig and the pirate who had taken possession of it. Wherever she was taken now, Marianne knew that it was only the first step towards her revenge. She knew, too, that she would know no rest until she had tracked down John Leighton and made him pay the price of his crimes in blood. Every sailor, friend or foe, who sailed the Mediterranean, must be pressed into service to pursue the slaver, so that Leighton might be hanged from the yard-arm of the ship he had stolen!
Towards midnight, the moon rose, a thin crescent giving scarcely more light than the stars. A light breeze sang in the sail, and the sea slid past the vessel's hull with a noise like silk. The fisherman's voice sank to a low, faintly melancholy chant, so slow and soothing that Marianne dropped off to sleep at last. She was sleeping too deeply to see the island, with its tall black cliffs, or hear the whispered colloquy between the priest and the fisherman, nor did she feel the hands that carried her ashore, wrapped in the sail.
When she woke, there was nothing but the absence of tormenting thirst to prove that she had not dreamed her rescue. She was lying in the shadow of a rock and a few stunted bushes on a shore of black sand strewn with silver weed. In front of her a sea the colour of indigo lapped at a fringe of black and white pebbles. The piece of sailcloth that had been wrapped round her had gone, like the boat, priest and fisherman, but her thin cotton rags were dry, and when she looked round she saw two bunches of golden grapes laid out neatly on a big flat stone. Automatically her hand crept out towards them. She felt incredibly weak and tired.
Raising herself on her elbow, she nibbled a few of the sweet, juicy grapes. They tasted real enough to assure her that this was not all part of some fantastic dream. She was dizzy and ill, but there was no time to ponder why her fisherman rescuer had apparently changed his mind and abandoned her again on a deserted shore, for at that moment the shore ceased to be deserted.
At the far end of the beach, where a path led down through the rocks, a white procession was emerging, so unexpectedly anachronistic in appearance that Marianne could only rub her eyes to ensure they were not deceiving her.
Led by a tall dark woman, as beautiful and queenly as Athena herself, and a pair of flute-players, came a file of young girls dressed in the many-folded antique chiton, their black hair bound with criss-crossing white fillets. Some carried branches, others bore an amphora on one shoulder, and they walked two by two, slowly and gracefully, like the priestesses of some ancient rite, singing a kind of chant to the piping notes of the flutes.
This curious procession was coming towards her. Marianne dragged herself over the sand until she felt that she was safely hidden by the rock, and with its help managed to stand upright. Her head was swimming and she was still very weak, far too weak to run away from this apparition from the past, which made her feel that she had taken a leap back over about two thousand four hundred years.
However, the women had not seen her, and so took no notice of her. The procession swung away towards a fig tree, in whose shade Marianne could make out a figure, a statue of Aphrodite, mutilated but undoubtedly ancient. The left arm was missing but the torso was undamaged and the right arm bent in a graceful attitude of welcome. The head, whose profile was turned to the girl by the rock, was perfect in its beauty and purity.
The flutes continued playing while the offerings were laid before the statue. Then the other girls prostrated themselves, and the tall dark woman stepped forward and addressed the goddess in the noble tongue of Demosthenes and Aristophanes, to the amazement of Marianne who still stood clinging breathlessly to her rock. Forgetting her own wretched plight for a moment, Marianne listened, wonderingly, to the language she had learned as part of Ellis Selton's plan for her niece's education, letting the woman's warm, grave tones sink into her being:
Deathless Aphrodite, on your shining throne,
Beguiling daughter of Zeus, to you I pray.
Do not with pain and anguish like a stone
Crush my poor heart.
But come to me, as you would come of old,
Hearing my cries of passion from afar,
Leaving your father's dwelling-house of gold,
To bear my part.
The bright-winged sparrows harnessed to your cap,
Flew swift from heaven through the midway air,
A myriad flutterings brought you from afar
To this black earth.
Soon, soon they came. And you, O Blessed One,
Your glorious face illumined with a smile,
Would ask what new grief, what insane desire
Consumed my heart.
What was it made me call to you again?
Whom must Persuasion lead back to your love?
Who is it, Sappho, who now gives you pain?
Who wrongs your heart…?
The music of the words, the inexpressible beauty of the Greek language, entered into Marianne and took possession of her already half disembodied spirit. She felt as if the burning prayer were pouring from her own heart. She too was in anguish; she too was suffering from wounded love, a love debased, disfigured and deformed. The passion by which she lived had turned against her and was rending her with its claws. The woman's complaint made her fully conscious of her own unhappiness which had been almost driven from her mind by her physical ordeal and by the violence of her hatred for John Leighton. Now she was brought face to face once more with the realities of her own situation: a very young woman, abandoned, grieving and bitterly hurt, and tortured by the childish need to be loved. She had been maltreated by life and by men, as though she were strong enough to stand up to their cruelty and selfishness. Everyone who had loved her had tried to make use of her, to dominate her, all of them, except perhaps the passionate, enigmatic lover of that night in Corfu. He had asked nothing but pleasure he had rendered back a hundredfold. He had been gentle… gentle, and tender. Her body remembered him with gladness, as in the torments of thirst it had remembered all the sweet water it had known. She had a sudden curious intuition that happiness, plain ordinary happiness, had come near to her and passed away again with the stranger.