Thus it ran:
“Madame,—
“I am abashed before the thought of my deep indebtedness to you, and the knowledge that it will never be my good fortune to repay you. More to me than your kind words is the comfort of knowing that, separated from him you write of as I am, by a fatality I have neither voice nor influence to avert, your presence makes amends to him for my enforced silence. Your letter breathes of tender regard for him. Is not that a debt of some magnitude you place on me? A debt I am proud to acknowledge. Alas! Madame, it is useless to hope to combat my father’s repugnance to the marriage you appear to think so natural. I know my father. His prejudices are few, and strong indeed must be that which raises an impassable barrier to my happiness. I hold it as a religious duty to respect it, and smother the feelings of rebellion that sometimes rise and stiffen my heart against him. I have no right to rebel, for he loves me—oh, he loves me very dearly. I think he would almost give his life for mine, and most willingly would I lay down mine for his. Since I was a little child he has cared for me and cherished me. He has tried to make me the sharer of his great learning, that there might be no division between us, that I might be rather a disciple following afar than an alien to the one object of his existence. You see, it is no common bond you ask me to break. It would be something more than the flight of a daughter,—it would be the defection of a pupil—and he, the tenderest master! I could not bear, by any action of mine, to forfeit my worthiness of such exclusive devotion, and should I not do so past excuse if I were to cause him one pang of disappointment or anger?
“To follow your counsel, and take my destiny into my own hands by one wild leap into the bliss my heart calls for, would be to risk his anger without the assurance that ultimately I should be forgiven. Do not urge me to it, I beseech you. My father ill and alone! The thought would make a mockery of my happiness. It would be a pall upon my bridal robes. Forgive me, Madame. I love you for your wish to help me, though the effort be ineffectual. If I boldly seem to criticise, believe me, it is with no intention to wound. You will think me a coward, perhaps, for I know that it is different with the women of your race. They act without scruple for themselves, and their parents have no other choice than to yield to theirs. But I cannot bring myself to regard this as right. He cannot surely desire that I should come to him thus—with the stain of strife and revolt upon our love. You see I am fastidiously jealous of the future. It is so fatally easy for the young, upon the impetus of ungovernable passion, to let themselves be precipitated into rash errors: so difficult to recover forfeited ground.
“But how fervently I thank you for your sweet sympathy and your offer of a home until such time as another would be mine, I have not words to say. Your heart must be fresh to be so tenderly open to the sorrows of the young. I shall bless the day that brings us face to face. If you would visit our island! But we are so rough and backward, and the stillness, I fear, would prove oppressive to one from a country where, I am assured, movement is the extremity of haste. And yet I love the place all the more from my short absence from it. It was like heaven to see it again, to feel the untrodden ground beneath my feet, to watch the unfretted stars from a world below as uneager and as changeless. The seasons are not more regular than our habits, and excitement is undreamed of by us. The villagers come to me with their simple woes, and I comfort them and doctor them, and instil into them such wisdom as my young head has mastered. Sometimes my dear father comes to my help,—not often, for they are less afraid of me. It is, I suppose, because I am nearer to them.
“This letter shames me, it is so idle and garrulous. What have I to say but that I love you, Madame,—I love you, and beg you to accept the assurance of my heartfelt gratitude and my affectionate friendship.
“Inarime Selaka.”
This letter might seem to lack the artlessness and spontaneity of girlhood. But its very restraint held a precious eloquence for Gustav, and it was not the less dear to him because he felt the writer was completely master of her mind. It held no want for him. He read between the lines, and adored the eyes the more that he understood their tears were held in check. The lips may have trembled in the reawakened force of passion, the gaze have grown dim with longing, the pulses throbbed to ache and ebbed away upon the sickening wave of despair, but the letter only breathed of weakness conquered, the pressure of a restraint imposed by life-long habit, and could not be called artificial. He reverenced her sweet reasonableness and her grave acceptance of the inevitable. He re-read the letter carefully, and kissed the name at the end. Why had she avoided the writing of his? He began to walk about the room, picking out sentences to burn upon his memory, when his eyes detected a slip of paper upon the ground. He pounced upon it with a presentiment of what it was. Herrn Gustav Reineke was written outside, and it was delicately folded. He opened it, and his breathing could have been heard at the other end of the room.
“Dear One—my dearest! My father has at last consented to let me remain unmarried—but that is all. We may hope for nothing more. Still, our love is respected. I cannot think it is wrong of me to send you this message. At least, I hope it is not. You have my faith. O, I love you, I love you.”
Gustav sat through the night with his head bent over this message. Desires and thoughts and wild hopes wavered and shot through him like arrows, now swift and sharp, now blunt and slow, needlessly lacerating in their passage. When morning came he shook off his dream, and replied to Miss Winter’s glance of veiled interrogation by a look supplicating silence.
CHAPTER XXIX. HOW A MAID OF ATHENS AVENGED HERSELF.
One day late in October the news somehow or other reached Rudolph, when at Cannes, that Selaka and his daughter were back in Athens. Without a word of explanation to Photini, who was engaged upon a public concert, he started off, and arrived in Athens late at night. The Baron and Baroness von Hohenfels were startled at their midday breakfast, next morning, by the entrance of the prodigal.
“Rudolph, good heavens!” cried the baron, and shook him gladly by the hand, but Rudolph was cold almost to rudeness. He suffered himself to be embraced by his aunt, and then went and stood against the mantelpiece. It was impossible not to note and deplore the change in him: from an engaging and innocent boy he had turned, in less than a year, into a hard and reckless-looking young-old man. His air was aristocratic but strangely unattractive, and his fair face was lined as no face should be lined at twenty-two. The blue eyes that used to be so soft in their clearness, so like his mother’s, as the Baroness thought, were now keen and glittering and held a dull fire within them. He stood thus looking moodily down, and then said curtly: