“Perhaps because I’m seeing a new girl who’s got even more woman in her than I knew till to-day.”
“Most women are like that, Dion, when they get the chance.”
“To think you knew all those tricks and never told me!”
“Help me down.”
He stretched out his arms to her. When she was on the ground he still held her for a moment.
“You darling!” he whispered. “Never shall I forget this day at Marathon, the shining, the child, and you—you!”
They did not talk much on the long ride homeward. The heat was great, but they were not afraid of it, for the shining fires of this land on the edge of the east cherished and did not burn them. The white dust lay deep on the road, and flew in light clouds from under the feet of their horses as they rode slowly upwards, leaving the blue of their pastoral behind them, and coming into the yellow of the pine woods. Later, as they drew nearer to Athens, the ancient groves of the olives, touched with a gentle solemnity, would give them greeting; the fig trees and mulberry trees would be about them, and the long vineyards watched over by the aristocratic cypress lifting its dark spire to the sun. But now the kingdom of the pine trees joyously held them. They were in the happy woods in which even to breathe was sheer happiness. Now and then they pulled up and looked back to the crescent-shaped plain which held a child instead of armies. They traced the course of the river marked out by the reeds and sedges. They saw the tiny dark specks, which were cattle grazing, with the wonder of blue beyond them. In these moments, half-unconsciously, they were telling memory to lay in its provision for the future. Perhaps they would never come back; never again would Rosamund rest in her brushwood chamber, never again would Dion hear the dry music above him, and feel the growth of his love, the urgency of its progress just as he had felt them that day. They might be intensely happy, but exactly the same happiness would probably not be theirs again through all the years that were coming. The little boy and his dog had doubtless gone out of their lives for ever. Their good-by to Marathon might well be final. They looked back again and again, till the blue of the sea was lost to them. Then they rode on, faster. The horses knew they were going homeward, and showed a new liveliness, sharing the friskiness of the little graceful trees about them. Now and then the riders saw some dusty peasants—brown and sun-dried men wearing the fustanella, and shoes with turned-up toes ornamented with big black tassels; women with dingy handkerchiefs tied over their heads; children who looked almost like the spawn of the sun in their healthy, bright-eyed brownness. And these people had cheerful faces. Their rustic lot seemed enviable. Who would not shed his sorrows under these pine trees, in the country where the solitudes radiated happiness, and even bareness was like music? Here was none of the heavy and exotic passion, none of the lustrous and almost morbid romance of the true and distant East, drowsy with voluptuous memories. That setting was not for Rosamund. Here were a lightness, a purity and sweetness of Arcadia, and people who looked both intelligent and simple.
At a turn of the road they met some Vlachs—rascally wanderers, lean as greyhounds, chicken-stealers and robbers in the night, yet with a sort of consecration of careless cheerfulness upon them. They called out. In their cries there was the sound of a lively malice. Their brown feet stirred up the dust and set it dancing in the sunshine, a symbol surely of their wayward, unfettered spirits. A little way off, on a slope among the trees, their dark tents could be partially seen.
“Lucky beggars!” murmured Dion, as he threw them a few small coins, while Rosamund smiled at them and waved her hand in answer to their greetings. “I believe it’s the ideal life to dwell in the tents.”
“It seems so to-day.”