“Decidedly, Athens is a charming place,” he thought to himself. “All my life till now I have been frozen at this time of the year, and here the sun is shining, the birds are singing, the sea is smiling out there its very bluest smile, and it would be impossible to paint the lovely colours of the landscape. Hills everywhere, with a long silver plain—the plain of Attica! I wonder where this road leads to? Somewhere out into the country, but it does not matter. I’ll ride to the end of it, and then I’ll ride back.”
It was an enchanting ride. He saw a little beer garden, and stopped to see if the beer of Athens were as refreshing as its air. Well, no; he thought on the whole that he had tasted better beer in Vienna, but the place was quaint, and, who knows? perhaps a centre of classic memories. He would look into Baedeker on his return. Certainly the waiters left much to be desired in manner, in attendance, and in personal appearance. Then he thought of riding back, paid his score, leaving what would have been considered a satisfactory tip for any one but a proverbially prodigal milord,—that article, with a proper respect for itself, not being thought guilty of a knowledge of coppers,—mounted his horse, and turned its head towards Athens.
His pace this time was not so brisk, nor did his face or the atmosphere seem quite so happy. A vague consciousness of what was awaiting him was slowly beginning to make itself felt through the recent satisfaction of moral superiority, and that consciousness weighted his horse’s step, as it weighted his own boy’s heart. And yet it was fate that was guiding him, and not his own will. Of course not. When does the will ever guide the unwilling, and where would any of us be in moments of complicated decision, if it were not for that convenient scapegoat and disentangler—Fate?
The museums afforded an excuse for putting off the evil moment, and a lad was found to hold the bay while Rudolph went inside to examine the curiosities. He did all that was to be done; stood gravely before Greek vase after Greek vase, each one the exact counterpart of the other, and while running the silver handle of his riding-whip along his lips, told himself that it was really curious that so many intelligent people should be found ready to go into ecstasies over this sort of thing, and prefer to look at a cracked red vase with mad figures on it, to a living pretty face, or a pine-fringed mountain, or the rain-clouds scattered across the blue heavens. And then he gazed at the coins; gazed at broken statues, and at whatever wearied and polite attendants were willing to show him.
“Well, I am not archæological, that is certain,” he thought, mounting his bay with an open alacrity that might be described as a silent “Hurrah!” and flew—not to the Austrian Embassy, but to Academy Street.
When he asked Polyxena in his blandest tones if her mistress was visible, that gracious minister unto art nodded, and pointed with her thumb over her shoulder:
“Go up there, you will find her about.”
“The Natzelhuber has picked up a perfect counterpart of herself,” Agiropoulos had remarked, which struck Rudolph as unpleasantly accurate.
When Rudolph, after a timid knock, opened the door, he found the pianiste lying on a worn black sofa, smoking a cigarette and reading a French novel, with three cats about her, one comfortably seated at her head, and one across her feet. On the hearthrug there were two dogs feigning to be asleep, in order the more conveniently to pry into the affairs of man, and ridicule together the secrets they had discerned between two blinks and a snap at a fly. The room was poorly furnished and disorderly. A piano which had seen battle and better days, a faded carpet; music on the floor, music on tables, music on chairs. Over the mantelpiece a large portrait of Liszt, under it Rubinstein, above Beethoven, and on either side Chopin and George Sand.
In this little group of portraits consisted the sole decoration of the bare white walls, and a table in a corner held all that its owner had amassed of precious things in her public career: her medals gained at the Conservatoire, the few gifts of gold-studded objects she had condescended in her most amenable moods to accept from grand dukes and duchesses, and other courtly and wealthy admirers. She looked at Ehrenstein without getting up, and said: