At last the river came in sight, growing slate-colour in the earliest dawn. He could see the boat nuzzling up against the pier, and snoring in its sleep. He said to himself that this was Styx and the fare an obolus. As he jumped on board, with hot face and hotter heart, Charon clicked his signal to the engines; the boat slowly snuffled itself half awake, and shoved out into the sleepy water.
As they crossed, the light grew, and the gas-lamps of Tyre beaconed with fading gleam. Overhead began a restlessness in the clouds, as of a giant drowsily shuffling off some of his bedclothes; but as yet he slept, and only the silver bosom of his spouse, the moon, was uncovered.
When they landed, the streets of Tyre were already light, but empty, as though they had got up early to meet some one who had not arrived. Damon sped through them like a sea-gull that has the harbour to itself, and was not long in reaching the theatre. How desolate the play-bills looked that had been so companionable but three or four hours before! And there was her photograph! Surely it was an omen.
"Ah, my angel! See, I am bringing you my heart in a song. 'All my heart in this my singing!'"
He dropped the letter into the box; but, as he turned away, momentarily glancing up the long street, he caught sight of an approaching figure that could hardly be mistaken. Good Heavens! it was Pythias, and he too was carrying a letter.
CHAPTER XIV
CONTRIBUTIONS TOWARDS A GENEALOGY
The egregious Miss Bashkirtseff did not greatly fascinate Esther. Her egotism was too hard, too self-bounded, even for egotism, and there was generally about her a lack of sympathy. Her passion for fame had something provincial in its eagerness, and her broadest ideals seemed to become limited by her very anxiety to compass them. Even her love of art seemed a form of snobbery. In all these young Mesuriers there was implicit,--partly as a bye-product of the sense of humour, and partly as an unconscious mysticism,--a surprising instinct for allowing the successes of this world their proper value and no more. Even Esther, who was perhaps the most worldly of them all, and whose ambitions were largely social, as became a bonny girl whom nature had marked out to be popular, and on whom, some day when Mike was a great actor,--and had a theatre of his own!--would devolve the cares of populous "at home" days, bright after-the-performance suppers, and all the various diplomacies of the popular wife of fame,--even Esther, however brilliant her life might become, would never for a moment imagine that such success was a thing worth winning, at the expense of the smallest loss to such human realities as the affection she felt for Mike and Henry. To love some one well and faithfully, to be one of a little circle vowed to eternal fidelity one to the other,--such was the initial success of these young lives; and it was to make them all their days safe from the dangers of more meretricious successes.
All the same, though the chief performer in Marie Bashkirtseff's "Confessions" interested her but little, the stage on which for a little while she had scolded and whimpered did interest her--for should it not have been her stage too, and Henry's stage, and Dot's stage, father's and mother's stage too? You had only to look at father to realise that nature had really meant him for the great stage; here in Sidon, what was he but a god in exile, bending great powers and a splendid character upon ridiculously unimportant interests? Indeed, was not his destiny, more or less, their destiny as a family? Henry would escape from it through literature, and she through Mike. But what of Dot, what of Mat, not yet to speak of "the children"?