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HÊ KAINÊ DIATHÊKÊ was no more heeded, and the predestinate Jude sprang up and across the room. Foreseeing such an event he had already arrayed himself in his best clothes. In three minutes he was out of the house and descending by the path across the wide vacant hollow of corn-ground which lay between the village and the isolated house of Arabella in the dip beyond the upland.
I leaned out. My feverish gaze fell upon the shadowy depths, searching for those invisible rocks, the rocks upon which little Kaine had dashed himself. "That way!" I exclaimed, shuddering. "Why, it is two hundred feet from here to the ground." "The rope is two hundred and fifty," she replied. "It is a good strong rope which I stole in the oasis; they used it in felling trees. It is quite new."
"'How did little Kaine die? "'In a way that pained us all very much. I told you that he stayed longer among us than anyone else. We had become used to him. In Antinea's room, on a little Kairouan table, painted in blue and gold, there is a gong with a long silver hammer with an ebony handle, very heavy. Aguida told me about it.
There lay his book open, just as he had left it, and the capital letters on the title-page regarded him with fixed reproach in the grey starlight, like the unclosed eyes of a dead man: HÊ KAINÊ DIATHÊKÊ
That is Swanston Cottage, where my brother and I live with my aunt. If it really pleases you to see it, I shall be glad." When he left for Darfour, Douglas Kaine must surely have left in Edinburgh a Miss Flora, as blonde as Saint-Yves' Flora. But what are these slips of girls beside Antinea! Kaine, however sensible a mortal, however made for this kind of love, had loved otherwise. He was dead.
"It makes a delicious farce absolutely French." "French?" "Quite. Don't you think so, Lennie?" "Oh, quite," Kaine agreed. "They mean that it's so very light and yet so very subtle, Mr. Chilcote," Mary Esseltyn explained. "Indeed?" he said. "Then my imagination was at fault. I thought the piece was serious." "Serious!" Lillian smiled again. "Why, where's your sense of humor?
"Very little. I told you that you used the hammer as if you had done nothing else all your life." "Like little Kaine," I murmured. She smiled in surprise. "Oh, you know that story.... Yes, like little Kaine. But at least Kaine was sensible. You ... I do not understand." "I do not understand myself, very well." She looked at me with amused curiosity. "Antinea," I said. "What is it?"
The last time it had met his ears his environment had been vastly different; and this echo of it in an uncongenial atmosphere stung him to resentment. The vision of Eve, the thought of Eve, became suddenly dominant. "Love?" he repeated, coldly. "So love is the motive?" "Yes." This time it was Kaine who responded in his methodical, contented voice. "The motive of the play is love, as Lillian says.
He sat down, opened the book, and with his elbows firmly planted on the table, and his hands to his temples, began at the beginning: HÊ KAINÊ DIATHÊKÊ Had he promised to call for her? Surely he had! She would wait indoors, poor girl, and waste all her afternoon on account of him. There was a something in her, too, which was very winning, apart from promises. He ought not to break faith with her.
Something in the suggestion of unfitness appealed to Loder. It was the force of the real as opposed to the ideal. With a new expression on his face, he turned again to Kaine. "And how does it work?" he said. "This treatment that you find so French?" His voice as well as his expression had changed. He still spoke quietly, but he spoke with interest.
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