CHAPTER XXXII. CONCLUSION.
Time, summer afternoon, touching sunset, early in the month of June.—Scene, the beach of Phalerum.
The band is playing a lively selection from Lecocq, whose works are delighting the Athenians, interpreted by a third-rate French company three times a week at the Olympian Theatre of Athens, and three times nightly at the theatre of the Piræus. All the seats outside the Grand Hotel are filled, as are those edging the golden strand where the children are digging and making sand-pies—quantities of babies, dressed in French taste, in English taste, and overdressed whatever the taste, and quarrelling and making-up in a variety of tongues.
Every table shows a display of coffee cups, of liqueur glasses and of empty ice plates. The Athenian gilded youth walk up and down, twirling slim canes; with shorn heads, wide-brimmed hats, white trousers, and moustaches turned up with emphasis. Droll youths with a serious belief in their own fascinations, made up, some of them imprisoned in corsets. Such boots and trousers, such coats and moustaches! Ah! misfortune to the susceptible maidens of Athens! Their hour is surely come with these lions abroad.
And the young ladies! Such chatter and beaming smiles, such hats, high heels, ribbons, laces, veils, powder and perfume! Such miracles of millinery produced without any regard to cost! Ah, there are two sides to the picture, my friends, and is it quite so certain that the lions facing these nymphs will have the best of the encounter? There are enough uniforms here to convince the sceptical traveller that he is in a land of heroes. Infantry officers of every rank, in light blue. Numbers of artillerymen in black with crimson velveteen collar and cuffs. Yes, there yonder is the glorious Miltiades, linked with that Phœbus Apollo, Hadji Adam. How the heart gladdens at the sight, how the nerves shake at the clanking of that terrible sabre of his, at the rattle of his glittering spurs, and with what cordial delight do we recognise his military salute and meet the condescension of his hand-clasp! One singles out the pair instinctively, amid the multiplicity of uniforms, above the rank and file of mere marine officers and saucy midshipmen. For, be it known to benighted foreigners, all male Athens dons a uniform, military or naval. Either politics or the uniform nothing else counts. Epaulettes or the Bouléor le néant.
And the band is playing—is playing with a desperate fervour, befitting noisy, volatile Athens. The waiters are rushing wildly about with trays of cognac and vermouth, of ices and coffee, the fragrance of Greek tobacco fills the air, the chatter of human voices and the shrill cry of excited children mingle with the soft murmur of the sea, that beats so gently upon the sand. A charming hour, a charming scene. The sky as blue as the lucid waters beneath; shifting hues wavering upon the sharp mountain sides; the early lights flickering against the trees, and the sound of happy laughter and speech heard above the band!
The blessed, foolish, frivolous people, self-intoxicated, needing nothing but its daily gossip, its leaflets called newspapers, coffee and cigarettes, the excitement of the half-hourly trains to Phalerum of a summer evening, the rascalities of its politicians to denounce, along with the nameless Turk and the faithless Mr. Gladstone, to the strains of its bad, vivacious music!
With regret do I ask the reader to stand with me under the shade of the Grand Hotel, and cast a farewell glance upon the scene. By the last train from town old acquaintances arrive—a young pair on their wedding tour. Three years ago we last saw one of them facing the hero of Greece at an uncomfortable hour of the morning upon uncomfortable business. Now he is the husband—of whom? Of whom but that elegant young lady of the great world, Mademoiselle Eméraude Veritassi. They were married at Rome, where the Baron von Hohenfels is Austrian plenipotentiary, with Rudolph for one of his attachés. The bride and bridegroom have taken Athens on their way to St. Petersburg, to which Embassy Rudolph now belongs. Ehrenstein looks what he is—an aristocrat in faultless attire, who has lived hard and enjoys the reputation of a strong attachment to brandy and music. Pale, thin, stern and fastidious, with an air of quiescent wretchedness. Poor Rudolph! Is this all that his mutable affections have brought him—indifference and hopelessness? Photini had died, and he had mourned her passionately, not her, perhaps, but his blighted youth. And when he found Mademoiselle Veritassi disposed to overlook his shady past for the sake of his expectations, his wealth, and his fair, handsome face, it did not seem to him he could do very much better than marry her.
They walked the beach once, and then returned, and seated themselves a little above the Grand Hotel, Ehrenstein gloomily facing the sea while he waited for his cognac; and his bride, in Worth’s latest splendours, looking landwards, expecting an ice.