The man who planned it had loved it, and as it rose there in the light it was perfect in every detail as it had been conceived—with one little exception. On either side the doorway crouched massive grey-pink lions wrought in stone, the heavy outspread paws and firm-set haunches resting at royal ease. In the original plan these lions had not appeared. But in their place had been two steers—wide-flanked and short-horned, with lifted heads and nostrils snuffling free—something crude, brusque, perhaps, but full of power and quick onslaught. The house that rose behind them had been born of the same thought. Its pointed gable and its facades, its lifted front, had the same look of challenge; the light, firm-planted hoofs, the springing head, were all there—in the soft, red stone running to brown in the flanks.
The stock-yard owner and his wife had liked the design—with no suspicion of the symbol undergirding it. The man had liked it all—steers and red-brown stone and all—but the wife had objected. She had travelled far, and she had seen, on a certain building in Rome, two lions guarding a ducal entrance.
Now that the house was finished, the architect seldom passed that way. But when he did he swore at the lions, softly, as he whirred by. He had done a mighty thing—conceived in steel and stone a house that fitted the swift life out of which it came, a wind-swept place in which it stood, and all the stirring, troublous times about it. There it rose in its spirit of lightness, head up-lifted and nostrils sniffing the breeze—and in front of it squatted two stone lions from the palmy days of Rome. He gritted his teeth, and drove his machine hard when he passed that way.
But to Achilles, standing with bared head, the breeze from the lake touching his forehead, the lions were of no account. He let them go. The spirit of the whole possessed him. It was as if a hand had touched him lightly on the shoulder, in a crowd, staying him. A quick breath escaped his lips as he replaced his hat and crossed to the red-brown steps. He mounted them without a glance at the pink monsters on either hand. A light had come into his face. The child filled it.
The stiff butler eyed him severely, and the great door seemed ready to close of itself. Only something in the poise of Achilles’s head, a look in his eyes, held the hinge waiting a grudging minute while he spoke.
He lifted his head a little; the look in his eyes deepened. “I am called—Miss Elizabeth Harris—and her mother—to see,” he said, simply.
The door paused a little and swung back an inch. He might be a great savant... some scholar of parts—an artist. They came for the child—to examine her—to play for her—to talk with her.... Then there was the music-roll. It took the blundering grammar and the music-roll to keep the door open—and then it opened wide and Achilles entered, following the butler’s stateliness up the high, dark hall. Rich hangings were about them, and massive pictures, bronzes and statues, and curious carvings. Inside the house the taste of the mistress had prevailed.
At the door of a great, high-ceiled room the butler paused, holding back the soft drapery with austere hand. “What name—for madame?” he said.
The clear eyes of Achilles met his. “My name is Achilles Alexandrakis,” he said, quietly.
The eyes of the butler fell. He was struggling with this unexpected morsel in the recesses of his being. Plain Mr. Alexander would have had small effect upon him; but Achilles Alexandrakis—! He mounted the long staircase, holding the syllables in his set teeth.