Then had begun for Richard Maule the second happy period of his life.
He had become a wanderer, but a wanderer possessed of the carpet of Fortunatus, and with a youth, a vigour, a zest for life sharpened to finer issues than had been the nature of Theophilus Joy.
Very soon Richard Maule made a real place for himself among that band of thinkers and lovers of the best which may always be found at the apex of every civilised society. His enthusiasm for the Greece of the past translated itself into an ardent love of modern Attica. He built a villa on Pentelicus, and there, within sight of the Ægean waters, he dreamed dreams with the Greek patriots to whose aspirations he showed himself willing to sacrifice, if need be, both blood and treasure. There also he would bring together each winter bands of young Englishmen, dowered with more romance than pence. The very brigands respected the rose-red marble villa and its English owner, and Greece for many years was his true country and his favourite dwelling-place.
This being so, it was perhaps not so very strange that in time Richard Maule should have chosen an Ionian wife. His large circle—for in those days the owner of Rede Place was a man with admiring friends in every rank and condition of life, almost, it might be said, in every country and capital of Europe—were much interested to learn that if Mrs. Maule had borne before her marriage the respectable English name of Durdon, she was through her Greek mother a Messala, the representative of a house whose ancestors had borne titles transmitted to them from the days when Venice held sway over the seven islands.
As was meet, the philo-Hellenist had met his future wife during a stay in Athens, and to him there had been something at once fragrant and austere in a courtship conducted in a rather humble villa reared on the cliff at Phaleron, from whose cramped verandah there lay unrolled the marvellous panorama of the plain of Athens, and eastwards, across the bay, Hymettus.
It was there that Athena Durdon, her beauty made the more nymph-like and ethereal by the opalescent light of a May moon, consented to exchange the meagre life which had been led by her in the past as daughter of the British Vice-Consul at Athens, for the life she had only known—but known how well!—in dreams, that of the wife of an Englishman possessed of a limitless purse and the key to every world.
Now, to-night, looking back on it all, stirred out of his usual apathetic endurance by the knowledge of what Dick Wantele was feeling, Richard Maule smiled, a grim inward smile, when he remembered how, even during their brief honeymoon, spent at his ardent desire at Corinth, Athena had made it quite clear that what she longed for was Paris, London, or perhaps it would be more true to say the Champs Elysées and Mayfair! They had been standing—he looking far younger than his forty-five years, she in one of the white gowns in which he loved to see her, but the simplicity of which she even then deplored—close to the Pierian spring, when she had, by a few playful, but very eager, words shown him what was in her heart.
And yet, whatever he might now believe, during the first two years which had followed his marriage Richard Maule had been a happy man—happier, he had been then wont to assure himself, than in the days before he had married his enchanting, wayward, and often tantalisingly mysterious Athena. In those days none had ever seemed to regard Richard Maule as unreasonably older than Athena, for he had retained an amazing look, as also an amazing feeling, of youth.
Then in a day, an hour, nay a moment, he had been struck down.