Daughters of Men

by Hannah Lynch

She was standing close to him now; and he got up, placed his hands upon her shoulders, and looked earnestly into her eyes.

“It is no more than I might expect of you, Inarime” he said.

There was a dignity, a restraint about the relations of these two that was very striking. Perhaps Pericles affected the manner and bearing of the Ancients, with whom he exclusively communed, and perhaps Inarime had ostentatiously caught this trick from him. Laughter with them was as rare as anger, and both held their pulses in complete subjection.

Something of Inarime’s life,—while that lucky young man, known in Greece as “the man of confidence,” who can be trusted to act as knight to a lady, is leading her mule to the distant village of Mousoulou, and while Gustav Reineke, on the “Iris,” is speeding towards the shores of Tenos. This life is simple enough: unemotional, unanalysable; an eager student from youngest years, the sole companion of a sage who lived in the past. But Inarime enjoyed a local reputation that carried the mind back to antique or mediæval days. The equilibrium of Europe was not likely to be disturbed by it, but the peace of the island most certainly was. All things we know are relative, and it is possible the unknown and unsought conquests of Inarime would have been far enough from causing any excitement to a London sylph. But besides Inarime’s influence and reputation, extending over four mayoralties and sixty-two villages, with a list of suitors headed by a bachelor mayor and the two unmarried deputies, and including every single man and youth of the island, the London sylph will be seen to play a small and insignificant part in her own distinguished circle. She would probably turn up her patrician nose at the addresses of a shepherd and a barbaric demarch. But then the shepherd and the demarch would care as little about her.

Despite their inherited and undisguised contempt for women, the sons of Hellas have sense and taste enough to know the value of an antique head on live young shoulders. It was now nearly two years since the mountaineers, meeting on the rocky pathways that scale the crags and precipices and fringe the torrent-beds, began to ask why Selaka delayed to choose a son-in-law. Each man regarded himself as the only proper choice. And down in the cafés the townsfolk and fishermen wanted an answer to the same question. As a set-off against this suspense, there was the satisfactory knowledge that Selaka’s choice would find it no easy matter to bring home his bride. Indeed, a few young bloods, like Thomaso, the Mayor’s nephew, a quarrelsome fellow given to an undue consumption of raki, and Petrus Vitalis, whose father’s recent death left him the proud proprietor of three Caiques, openly spoke of abduction. Constantine Selaka was aware of all this, and was extremely anxious that Pericles should select a son-in-law from among his Athenian friends. Choice and preliminaries should, of course, be a matter of strict secrecy, as a preventive of warlike explosion, for he knew that Inarime’s suitors would prove as little amenable to reason and fair play as the graceless suitors of the unfortunate Penelope.

And if, by delay, his niece should be carried off by the desperate Thomaso or Petrus Vitalis, clack! Good-bye to the Athenian nephew-in-law.

“Idiots! how dare they aspire to her?” Pericles exclaimed, whenever such unsuitable proposal reached him.

“Well, Pericles, you must marry her to somebody, and you can’t expect a Phœbus Apollo, with the classics on the tip of his tongue. You would find him inconvenient enough,” the less exacting Constantine would explain.