may rest.  Ishmael sat on by the bed; sometimes he looked at him, even laid his fingers on his pulse to make sure, with as much mechanical care as ever, that he was indeed only sleeping.  He sat on where he was, but with his eyes staring out of the window, though they hardly saw the rolling fields that lay, a burnished green, beneath the evening light.  Once a step came again to the door, and a voice asked if everything were all right.  Ishmael answered “Yes,” bidding the questioner go away, and he never knew that it had been Nicky’s voice which asked.

CHAPTER IV

HESTER

Ishmael sat and watched his own thoughts pass before him.  It is not given to every man to see all that he has lived by lying broken around him, and this was what had happened to Ishmael.  He could see, now that he had lost him, how it was the thought of his son at Cloom, far more than Cloom itself, which had held ever deepening place in his heart and soul.  He remembered the night when Phoebe had whispered to him that she was going to have a baby ... how she had clung about his neck and how happy she had seemed.  He remembered too—­the recollection swam up to him through years of blurred forgetting—­an earlier night, when Phoebe had won him back to her ... that night of passion which must have been on her side a calculated thing, a trap for him to fall in blindly—­as he had.  Phoebe—­who had seemed so transparent, and whom, as he now realised, no one but Archelaus had ever really known....  Yet none of that hurt or even outraged him.  What Phoebe had been was of supreme unimportance.  Not at this distance of years could he conjure up the emotions of an outraged husband which even at the time would have seemed to him both inadequate and ridiculous.  Not the realisation that that night of passion had been a faked thing on her part—­a set-piece on a stage—­touched him.  He took, as he was guiltily aware, too little to it himself, beyond animal appetite, for him to dare judge of that.

But that other night, after she had told him he was to expect a child to be born to him, that night when he had gone out into the scented garden and felt drowning and yet uplifted on the tide of the deepest emotion of his life—­to know that that had all been based on a delusion was what upset the whole of life now.

Could truth be built on untruth?  If what he had felt then was all the time based upon a lie, how could there be anything worth the living for in that which he had left?  The rapture, the deep and sacred joy, when through his fatherhood he had felt kin to God Himself—­what of that?  What of the life, the religion, the love, the hopes, that had gone on piling up upon that one thing from that day on?  Were they all as valueless as what they had been built on?  If so, then he was bereft indeed, left in an empty world, that only echoed mockery to the plaints of men and the quiet eternal laughter of the Being who made them for ends of supreme absurdity.