CHAPTER XXIV. A DRAUGHT FROM CIRCE’S CUP.
There was no hope for it. Harmony fled the Austrian Embassy. It had already been bruited that young Ehrenstein was inconveniently demanded by a bloodthirsty warrior, whose sister he had jilted in a scandalous way. The report reached Selaka’s ear, and he looked askance upon the perfidious youth. At first the baron dismissed the affair with a laugh, then, upon scandal mounting higher, and taking a shriller tone, he questioned Rudolph, and being a gentleman, expressed himself in very strong terms upon the young reprobate’s conduct.
Rudolph had sulked and fretted and made everybody around him only a degree less uncomfortable than himself. Twice he had started to go to Andromache and confess the full extent of his iniquity, but he had not had the courage to face the ordeal. If she should cry, or reproach him, or meet him with sad silence! it would be equally unbearable, and there would be nothing left for him but to go away and cut his throat. What was the good of anything? Life was a blunder, a fret, a torment. Without any evil in him, kindly, pure, sweet natured, here was he involved in a mesh of inextricable troubles, behaving to a dear and innocent child like an arrant villain. And all the while his heart bled for her, and in any moment left him by the haunting thought of Inarime, he was pursued by the soft pain of Andromache’s pretty eyes.
But every one blamed him, and all Athens spoke of him as a heartless scoundrel. The baroness, who was coldly condemnatory, suggested a return to Austria. The baron, sarcastic, plagued him in the “I warned you” tone.
“You are much too sentimental and susceptible, Rudolph, for a life of idleness. You have yet to learn the art of trifling gracefully and uncompromisingly. Remember, a man has not to choose between being a victim or a brute. You have proved yourself both to that little Athenian—first the victim and then the brute. Now, my advice to you is, go back to Rapoldenkirchen. Meditate instructively upon the excellent advantages you have had here, and resolve to continue your education in matters feminine with the married ladies. Avoid girls as you would avoid poison, until you are ready to fix yourself in reasonable harness with one particular girl, whom I advise you to choose as little as possible like yourself. Vienna or Paris will be of infinite service to you just now, and if you like, I could use my influence to obtain you a diplomatic post. As long as you remain in this state of lamentable idleness, so long will your life be precarious.”
But this excellent counsel had fallen on dull ears. An hour after Inarime’s rejection, Rudolph started to go to Andromache, and instead of cutting through Academy Street, as he should have done, he turned up towards the barrack, and before even he was aware of the propelling instinct that pushed him, he was knocking at Photini’s door.
“Is Mademoiselle Natzelhuber visible?” he asked of Polyxena, with an indifference of look and tone not at all assumed.
“She is upstairs, if that is what you mean,” cried Polyxena, and left him to shut the door behind him.
He walked up the steep stone stairs without a sign of hurry or purpose, and rapped listlessly at Photini’s door. In response to a loud “Come in,” he entered, and found Photini in the midst of her cats and dogs, reading the “Palingenesia.” She threw away the shabby little newspaper, and made room for him on the sofa beside her, eyeing him with a look of sharp scrutiny.
“Well?” she said.
“I am most abjectly miserable, Photini,” he said, and sat down beside her, staring at the floor.
“You look it, my friend.”
“I suppose so. Photini, I want you to let me stay with you.”
“Stay with me! What the deuce do you mean?”
“Just what I say. There are no words to describe my wretchedness. I am sick of everything and everybody. You, at least, won’t criticise or blame. Your own life has not been so successful that you need censure very harshly the blunders of mine.”
He looked at her drearily, unnotingly, and yet he felt drawn to her by an immense personal sympathy and a kind of remembered affection that nothing could ever quite obliterate.
“Oh, for that, I am not disposed to censure any one but the smug hypocrites, who talk religion and virtue until one longs to fling something in their faces. For the idiots I have a tremendous weakness, I confess.”
“You care a little for me, don’t you, Photini?” Rudolph cried, like a forsaken child.
Photini moved towards him, and gathered him into her arms.
“I love you furiously, you wretched boy,” she exclaimed, and held him to her. “But just because you are an idiot, you are not to pay any heed to it.”
Rudolph for answer flung his arms round her, laid his head upon her bosom, and burst into wild hysteric sobs.
“Oh, you baby!” shouted Photini, trying to shake him off, but he only clung to her the more convulsively, and tightened his clasp of her until she could hardly breathe.
“Finish! this is absurd. What has happened to you, child?”
“Everybody is against me,” he said, striving hard to choke back his tears. “I hate myself. I have made a mess of everything, and I wish I were dead.”
“That is why you have come to me, I suppose. If you are destined to be damned in the next world, you are willing to begin the operation in this,” said Photini, drily.
“I want to stay with you. If you repulse me, Photini, I swear I’ll go straightway and blow my brains out.”
“It would not be much worse.”
“Than staying with you?”
“Yes, than staying with me. The one would be followed by an inquest and a funeral—and behold a swift and respectable end. The other—my friend, have you measured its consequences?”
“Yes; we should have a great deal of music all to ourselves. We might go away to France or Algiers, and I should forget Athens.”
“No, you would not. There is no such thing as forgetfulness until you take to drink, and then you only forget when you are drunk. The instant you become sober, memory probes your empty heart more strongly than ever.”
“Then we will drink together, Photini,” cried Rudolph, recklessly. “Give me some brandy.”
“I will not. I insist on your going back to that silly chit you’ve treated so badly. Dry her eyes—they are very pretty eyes, my friend Rudolph, and a man might be less agreeably employed. She’ll soon forgive you if you manage to look penitent enough. I boxed her ears once, and I like her all the better for it. Tell her an old woman who loves you sent you back to her.”
“Photini, you are not old,” protested Rudolph, disinclined to speak of Andromache to her. “Come back to the point. Will you have me? You say you love me.”
“Rudolph, you are an ass. Don’t you see that I am trying to save you? What does it matter for myself? You, Agiropoulos, another,—it is all the same. My life is blotted, ruined, disfigured past redemption. One liaison more or less cannot practically affect me. But with you it is different. You are a delicately-trained boy, of fastidious tastes. You are unfit to battle with the coarser elements of life. A robuster morale and a less dainty nature than yours can buffet and wrestle with brutal conditions, and be none the worse for a hundred false steps, but you will sink irretrievably upon the first. Vice sits indifferently well on some of us, and on others most deplorably. That is why women sink so much more rapidly than men. Despair and self-contempt are stones that hang fatally round their necks, and this,” she said, pointing to a flask of brandy, “helps them to carry the weight until they are crushed by it.”
“It will help me, too, I’ve no doubt,” said Rudolph.
“It is from that I would save you, and from the rest. It is not my habit to express my opinions. I despise people too much to talk seriously to them, but I am not only a musical machine in the lucid pauses of a toper. I have thought a little, too, and I know what I have lost.”
She was walking up and down the room with her hands joined behind her, and there was a glow upon her strange face that made it almost noble. When she had finished, she stood in front of Rudolph, scanned him closely, and asked:
“Are you going? I have had quite enough of this sort of thing.”
“I am not going, Photini. My mind is made up. I will stay with you. Be kind to me. Say you want me.”
“I must not, for then I could not bring myself to give you up. Go away, and think over it. Mind, I would far rather you did not come back, and I think I should be able to kiss with gratitude a note from you telling me you had gone back to that girl.”
“You will get no such note from me, for I am going to stay now,” Rudolph exclaimed, impetuously.
“You are a fool. There, I would have saved you—now, it is as heaven wills it. But please remember this. When you come to repent this step, as you will surely in a week, a month, or a year, have the goodness not to bluster and expend your rage on me, or lay your folly to my account.”
Rudolph laughed bitterly.
“I think, mademoiselle, you would very soon make short work of me and my bluster and rage,” he said.
“Well, yes, I believe I should be able for that emergency.”
“Photini, will you play me the ‘Barcarolle’?” Rudolph asked, as he rubbed his cheek caressingly against her arm.
She stooped over him, kissed his hair and forehead, and their lips met in a burning kiss—Rudolph’s first.