“The Lord succour him! He was a child when he came to Athens. As for that wretched woman who has brought him to this——”
“She did not. We are needlessly hard on women. He walked into the pit with his eyes open, and she was simply an instrument of his own choice. If she had not been there, he would have found other means,” said Gustav.
CHAPTER XXXI. SELAKA’S LAST WORD.
Winter had lashed the Eastern world with sharp frenzy, and now early spring was raging over the plain of Attica, driving madly in a whirlwind of dust down from the encircling hills, with its breath of ice and its shrewish roar. And soon it would be at its verge, and stand on tiptoe with wistful glance set upon the hurrying summer that so soon would consume its flowers and grasses and chattering rills.
Still Gustav lingered at Athens studying archæology and patiently waiting for Constantine’s message of hope. Exploring expeditions helped him through the long leisure. The last proposed by Miss Winters was to Vari, to do homage to the mythical Cave of Pan, where Plato was dedicated to Apollo and the Muses.
Gustav drove round from his hotel at seven o’clock in the morning to pick up Miss Winters and her paraphernalia, at her lodgings in front of the Columns of Jupiter. Upon the mountains, hue upon hue lay intermelted in one transfused whole of indescribable loveliness. The great forked flanks of Hymettus looked so desolate against the joy of the sky, as to suggest that here had Prometheus been chained and had stamped it with the legacy of permanent sadness. Under the hills stretched on either side wide fields sheeted with blood-red poppies; the birds woke the air with song, and the air was full of the lovely scent of the pine. Gustav’s senses thrilled to the exquisite charm of the hour, and Miss Winters’ gaze was a prayer and a thanksgiving.
When they had devoutly visited the shrine, difficult of access, and had come back into the pine region, flushed and tired and heated by the blaze of sunfire, they were accommodated by a courteous villager with an empty room, into which a table newly-washed and two chairs were introduced as additional helps to lunch. The villager supplied them with boiled eggs, water and bread, which was being baked at the general oven in the middle of the place, and Gustav produced a bottle of Santorin wine, some fruit and cold chicken. For a forlorn lover he ate a very hearty meal, and took an animated pleasure in supplying the absence of attendance.
After lunch they went and sat on a little wooden seat, and while Gustav smoked, Miss Winters, to the complete astonishment of these simple folk, fed all the dogs of the place upon bread and chicken just as if they had been Christians. Greek dogs are never fed, they pick up what they can here and there, and shrink instinctively from man, whose only caress is a kick.