Upon the skirt of the olive-misted plain he dismounted, and entered the leafy shade of a little café garden, lost in a glade of scented pines and oleanders. Here he called for cognac, and sat moodily smoking until the sun went down.
Let us glance at the house of Karapolos now, situated in Solon Street. Miltiades is back from Thessaly, more glorious and more ferocious than ever. He learnt that morning of Rudolph’s reappearance in Athens, and communicated that fact to his family at dinner. That evening, as he returned from duty, he missed a dainty silver pistol his friend Hadji Adam had given him. With a brow of thunder and voice of menace he sallied forth and had his servant Theodore arrested for the robbery. While Theodore was being carried off, shrieking and protesting, and calling upon all the saints and the Virgin and the soul of his dead mother to witness that he was being falsely accused, Andromache, for some unaccountable reason was wandering about the steep solitudes of Lycabettus in company with the faithful Maria. She had been allowed to go forth in pursuit of veils and gloves in the frequented street of Hermes. Now, what, one asks, could take a young lady towards sunset up a lonely and rugged slope of Lycabettus, when her ostensible journey lay in the region of shops? This was a secret known only to Andromache and to the faithful Maria.
On the following afternoon, Andromache begged her mother to take her to hear the band play upon Constitution Square. The square was thronged, the ladies, as is customary in Athens, walking together, and the men in similar fraternity, Captain Miltiades was with these, and so were Agiropoulos and the popular poet.
A close observer might have noticed that Andromache’s pretty dark blue eyes glistened with a curious light; that the blood had left her face and lips, and that she walked like one in a state of nervous excitement. Poor, betrayed, little Andromache! if only she had confided her frantic purpose to somebody, and had not all these months repressed her sorrow, and striven to show a brave front to the curious world! Many horrors are spared the loquacious, and the worst follies are those committed by silent sufferers. Andromache kept looking fixedly round in evident watch for some one. If you want to meet any one in Athens, you are sure to do so between Stadion Street and Constitution Square. The person Andromache was looking for soon made his appearance, walking casually along, not caring greatly to examine the people that were hustling against him. He sat down at a café table, and called for coffee, and while waiting for it began to roll up a cigarette, and unconsciously hummed the melody of Waldteufel’s “Souvenir,” which the band was playing. Andromache made a step forward from her mother’s side to the table at which Rudolph was seated; and in a second she whipped out of her breast the little silver pistol, for the loss of which Theodore was in prison, and fired straight at the shoulder of her recreant lover. Imagine the commotion, the whirr of speech and explanation, the jostling to look at the injured maid and the wounded man. The band stopped playing in the middle of Waldteufel’s charming waltz, band-master and band attracted to the spot. Strange as it may appear, all Hellenic sympathies were upon the side of Andromache: not a single voice of censure was raised against her, but everybody seemed to think that she had performed a feat of courage. Here her courage ended; the pistol fell from her hand, and she dropped rigid into her mother’s arms. She was carried home, and soon passed into the unconsciousness of brain fever. Rudolph was not seriously injured, but faint enough to need the help of a carriage to take him back to the Austrian Embassy, with the prospect of confinement to his room for a few days.
The Baron von Hohenfels in his official position was greatly perturbed by this scandal, and made immediate application for a change of post. He was too angry to visit his luckless nephew’s room until the baroness’ prayers melted him. When Dr. Galenides had seen the patient, and pronounced him in a favourable condition for recovery, the baron suffered himself to be led to the bedside.
Rudolph looked very piteous upon his pillow, with the flush of fever on his white cheeks and a harassed, humble expression in his eyes. The much aggrieved baron relented, hummed and hawed a little as a kind of impatient protest, stroked his beard, and finally began, in a softened voice:
“My dear boy, are you quite satisfied now that you have made Athens too hot for an Austrian Ambassador?”
“I am very sorry, uncle,” said Rudolph, and he looked it.