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A Table of Contents has been added.
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

DAUGHTERS OF MEN

DAUGHTERS OF MEN

BY

HANNAH LYNCH

AUTHOR OF
“TROUBLED WATERS,” ETC.

NEW YORK
JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY
150 WORTH ST., COR. MISSION PLACE

Copyright, 1892,
BY
UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY
———
[All rights reserved.]

TO DEMETRIOS BIKELAS.

My Dear Friend,

Of your kindly interpretation of the laughter here and there in this volume, purporting to be a picture of modern Greek life, I have no doubt. You at least know that I lack neither friendship nor sympathy with your race. We like not the less those whom we laugh at, provided our laughter is not meant to wound. For are not our own absurdities and weaknesses mirrored in those of others?

My more serious preoccupation is the accuracy of my judgment and observation. For any errors on this ground I claim your indulgence. The foreign observer is proverbially impertinent and inaccurate, as we in Ireland have sad reason to know. We do not lack our Abouts, though it may be doubted if we accept them in a spirit so generous as you do.

In placing your name before my story, I may be said to hoist the colours of Greece, and under them dare sail my little bark of Greek passengers without any fear of coming to grief upon Hellenic shores, should I have the honour to penetrate so far.

H. L.

CONTENTS

DAUGHTERS OF MEN.

CHAPTER I. AT THE AUSTRIAN EMBASSY.

The Austrian embassy at Athens was more largely and more brilliantly attended than usual. At nine o’clock the Patissia Road showed a line of carriages going backward towards the Platea Omonia from the gaily-lighted embassy. All the foreign ministers were there, as well as the Prime Minister of Greece, and whatever distinguished travellers Athens had the honour of entertaining at that time,—it being winter, there was a goodly number. A Russian Prince or two, presented by the Russian minister; two eminent English politicians on their way to Constantinople for a confidential exchange of views with the Sublime Sultan, to be remembered by jewelled snuff-boxes or some such trifles; a sprightly French mathematician straight from Paris the Blest; a half-dozen of celebrated archæologists, furnished by Europe and the United States, all viewing each other with more or less malevolence and suspicion—the Frenchman noticeably not on speaking terms with his distinguished brother from Germany; Dr. Jarovisky of world renown, fresh from Pergamos and recent discoveries at Argos, speaking various languages as badly as possible; a genial and witty Irish professor rushing through Greece with the intention of writing an exhaustive analysis of the country and the people, in that spirit of amiable impertinence so characteristic of hasty travellers. There was the flower of the so-called Greek aristocracy: Phanariote Princes, Græco-Italian Counts from Zante and Corfu, and retired merchants and speculators from Constantinople and Smyrna and London. There was a Greek poet, hardly distinguishable in accent and manner from a Parisian, except in a detail of appearance which gave him the head of a convict, so hideously do the Hellenes shave their heads to look as if they wore mouse-coloured skull caps; a prose translator of Shakespeare, who had lately visited the Immortal’s shrine at Warwick, and, in the interests of local colouring modelled himself since his return as closely as possible upon the accepted type of the English man of letters, and surveyed the frivolities under his eye with a British impassivity and glacial neutrality of gaze. All the musical dilettanti of the city of the Wise Maid were there, and all its presentable women. Some of the girls were pretty, and all were thickly powdered and richly dressed; all had large, brilliant dark eyes. And the gowns and frocks from Paris, the jewels, lace, aigrettes, flowers, and bare arms and shoulders made an effective and troublous contrast with the preponderance of masculine evening attire and semi-official splendour.

This large and distinguished gathering had been convened in honour of the return to her native city of Mademoiselle Photini Natzelhuber, a celebrated pianiste, the rival and friend of Rubinstein, the pupil of Liszt and not greatly inferior to her master, who, at Vienna, had been publicly named by him Queen of Pianists to match his recognised kingliness. All Athens was on tiptoe of expectation, eager to hear her, and still more eager to see her. It is not known, but extravagantly conjectured, with what sum the Baroness von Hohenfels was able to bid over the heads of her rival salonists and procure the honour of the Natzelhuber’s first appearance in Athens. Sane and discerning persons were probably right in putting it down to francs represented by four figures, for Austrian baronesses have a pretty accurate knowledge of the value of money. But for the moment six figures were supposed to represent the sum, and the matter was discussed with that singular absence of reserve or delicacy with which fashionable and well-bred society is apt to discuss the affairs of its host in the host’s own house.

Through the confused mingling of languages French could be detected as the most universal. A fair, pale young man, with the grave questioning air of a stranger who is disagreeably conscious of being shy and ill at ease, and, above all, utterly and helplessly alone, was walking about the rooms, amazed and bewildered by this Babel of tongues and types, and seemed to entreat by his look of gentle fear that no one should notice him or talk to him. He stared around with unquiet, troubled blue eyes, so very blue, so hopelessly, stupidly frank and clear, like a child’s, that they made more noticeable the extreme youthfulness of his face and most slender figure. A mere boy, twenty-one years of innocence and ignorance leaving him on the brink of manhood with only the potentialities of his sex faintly shadowed in the lightest gold stain above the soft upper lip. He had just stepped into the glare and turmoil of life from the protected shadow of an isolated old castle in Rapolden Kirchen, with no more reliable and scientific guide to the mysteries of existence than a tender and nervous mother, who, after bringing him up like a girl, had left him for another sphere, and no other knowledge of the passions and their complex sensations than that to be gathered in a close and fervent study of music. It is easy to picture him. A reserved lad of high-bred Austrian type, with a glacially pure face, and heart fluttering with girlish timidity, half-frightened and half-attracted by the world he interprets in the vague light of his own pathetic ignorance, just conscious of opening curiosities upon the eternal feminine, and ready to sink with shame the instant a strange woman looked at him.

“Who is that charming boy?” asked a handsome old lady, whose motherly heart was touched by the childish uneasiness and loneliness of his attitude.

“That fair-haired young fellow near the window?” her companion answered. “Nice looking, isn’t he? A very pretty young lady, eh?”

“Don’t be so malicious. Men are always jealous of a handsome boy. You know how powerfully he appeals to our sympathetic sex. But who is he?”

“Rudolph Ehrenstein—a nephew of Madame von Hohenfels. He has just lost his mother, and is travelling in search of distraction. Some of these young ladies will doubtless take compassion on him.”

“Yes, with that pretty face and doleful forsaken air he will not have to go far for a willing consoler.”

“It would be the very best thing for him,” said the popular poet, joining them. “One never knows how much to believe of gossip, especially in this centre of canards, but they speak of him already as the Natzelhuber’s latest flame.”

“Good heavens! Not possible, surely!” cried the old lady, in a tremor of delighted horror. “He has the face of an angel.”

“Angels have been known to fall, Madame,” said the poet, with his best Parisian bow and cynical shrug, throwing a challenging glance at his neighbour as if to defy him to prove that Théophile Gautier or Dumas could have capped an observation more neatly; and then quoted with a beatific consciousness of his own smartness: “L’ange n’est complet que lorsqu’ il est déchu.”

“Talk of women’s tongues! You men have never a good word to say either of yourselves or of us.”

“Is there not a proverb to that effect as regards the ladies?”

“Calumny, my friend, pure calumny. Men have had the monopoly of proverbs, and, of course, they have used them as they have used everything else, against us. It does not follow that even the clever man believes all the smart and satirical things he says of our sex, but an arrow shot at us looks a smarter achievement than a juster arrow aimed at yourselves. And the smart thing goes down to a duller posterity, and there’s your proverb. Truth is as likely to be in it as in the bottom of the proverbial well!”

“I shall seek it henceforth in you, Madame. Can you tell me if there is any truth in the announcement that the Natzelhuber is coming to-night?”

“Madame von Hohenfels looks certainly anxious and doubtful. You know Mademoiselle Natzelhuber has an alarming reputation.”

“Oh, yes, abominably eccentric—and ugly,” sighed the poet.

Rudolph Ehrenstein, modestly unconscious that the reliable voice of Public Opinion, glancing at his wings, had been pleased to pronounce them singed and soiled, had retreated into a deep recess and was nearly hidden by a silk curtain and tall palm branches. He sat down on a low chair, and rejoiced that here, at least, there were no bare obtrusive shoulders and brilliant orbs to dazzle him, no scented skirts to trouble him, and that the murmur of varied tongues and voices and the whirr of fans came to him in softened sound. He was just closing his eyes to think of the old dim castle of Rapolden Kirchen and his beloved mother, whose subdued manner and tone seemed to him the more exquisite to remember because of the noisy and strongly perfumed women around him, when a man near the door caught sight of him through his gold-rimmed eyeglass, and starting forward, burst into his retreat with clamorous recognition and two extended hands, the offering of demonstrative friendship.

“Delighted, charming boy, delighted to see you so soon again. Heard from the baroness you were expected in Athens, but no idea you would be here to-night.”

“I arrived last evening,” said Ehrenstein, standing up and grasping the proffered hands with a look of relief, as if he found the necessary restorative in their touch. “What a quantity of strangers there are here! All their different languages have made my head ache.”

His companion was a rich Greek merchant from Trieste, who was arrayed in extremely florid evening dress and wore a very large white camelia. He glanced at the boy’s mourning studs and sighed as if recalled suddenly to the stern sorrows of life, and then blew a little whiff which expressed the recognised evanescence of even sorrow and bereavement, and thrust their presence from him.

“Well, you see, we Greeks have to draw very largely upon foreign countries for our entertainments,” he said, slipping his arm into Ehrenstein’s and dragging him gently out of the recess. “As a Greek from abroad, I regret to say that it would be impossible to mix with the pure Athenians for any purposes of social pleasure. They can neither talk, dance, nor eat like civilised beings. In fact, my dear Ehrenstein, they are not civilised.”

“What a dreadful thing to say of the descendants of the ancient Greeks,” laughed Rudolph.

“Oh, the ancient Greeks!” exclaimed Agiropoulos, airily. “If you are going back to those old fossils, I will candidly admit that I am out of my depth. There is nothing I am more heartily sick of than the ancient Greek. There’s Jarovisky over there, a perfect lunatic on the subject. Homer for breakfast, Homer for dinner, and Homer for supper admits of variety with improvement. He reads Homer on the terrace by moonlight, and falls asleep with Homer under his pillow. My opinion of the ancient Greeks is, that they were not one whit better than their amiable representatives of to-day. They were men of great natural eloquence and literary gifts, and knew how to lay on their colours with an eye to future generations. But we have only their version, and it would require at least twenty connecting evidences to prove the word of one Athenian. Why, to hear them talk to-day, one might imagine theirs the chief nation of Europe, and Athens its handsomest capital—dull, ugly little Athens!”

They were walking round the rooms, when Agiropoulos, surveying the crowd through his aggressive eyeglass, suddenly asked his friend if he had been introduced to any ladies.

“I have been introduced to nobody yet except the Greek Minister—oh, I forgot, a young English attaché.”

“Ah, I see the baroness is resolved to keep you hovering yearningly upon the skirts of paradise. Never mind, my child, I will find you a houri. There is a very handsome brunette, the prettiest girl in Athens. Her French is fit for the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and her dot acceptable should your views incline that way. My faith, I would not object to either myself, but my time has not come for settling down. Butterfly, you know, from sweet to sweet, and that sort of thing. Sad dog, as those droll English say. Ah!—””

Before Rudolph could demand an explanation of this singular and enigmatic avowal, understood by even such white innocence as his to hint at something darkly and yet pleasantly irregular, the Baroness von Hohenfels bore down upon the young men with a disturbed expression of face. She tapped Agiropoulos on the shoulder with her fan, and said hurriedly:—

“My dear M. Agiropoulos, I am greatly alarmed about the Natzelhuber. You, I believe, are the best authority on her movements and caprices. Do you know why she has not come?”

“I do not, indeed, Madame la Baronne,” answered Agiropoulos, bowing, and twirling his moustache with a fatuous smile. “But it is not so very late.”

“Don’t you know what very primitive hours we keep in Athens?” the baroness cried testily. “Did you see her to-day, Rudolph?”

Young Ehrenstein flushed and shrank a little with a hint of anxious pain in his blue eyes.

“No, aunt, I called, but Mademoiselle Natzelhuber was not visible,” he said.

Agiropoulos looked at him sharply with an imperceptible frown, and then, turning to his hostess, resumed his smile of fatuous security, and said:

“To relieve your doubts, Madame la Baronne, I will drive at once to the lady’s house, and carry her back with me, if even I must employ force.”

“Do so, and you will earn my lasting gratitude. We are all dying to hear her play, and her name was the attraction to-night,” and Madame von Hohenfels brightened. “Come with me, Rudolph. I must find you some lively girl to chat you into good-humour. Delay as little as possible, M. Agiropoulos.”

Agiropoulos bowed low and retired, while Rudolph silently offered his arm to his aunt, shrinking still and wounded.

“It is a great disappointment that M. Reineke is not here to-night. He, also, is a new lion—singularly handsome and captivating and very clever, they say. He created quite a sensation in Paris last winter. But he got ill coming from Egypt and I suppose he will make his first appearance at the Jaroviskys’ ball next week.”

“Is there to be a ball next week?” Rudolph asked listlessly.

“Of course; are we not all vying to honour an English Cabinet minister? He will probably write about us when he gets home.”

“Who are those girls laughing so loudly?” Rudolph asked, with no particular desire for information.

“They belong to the American legation. Not exactly the choice I would have you make in girls’ society, my dear,—intolerably loud and vulgar,” said the Baroness, surveying them through her long-handled and elegant face-à-main which she raised to her eyes. “They represent the United States—most deplorably. I want you to cultivate the society of the Mowbray Thomases—English Embassy. Here is the son, Vincent, a very nice boy who can speak intelligible French for a wonder, and will, I am sure, be glad to teach you tennis and cricket.”

“He is quite a boy,” cried Rudolph, cheerfully. “I shall be less afraid of him than of your lively young ladies.”

Agiropoulos had in the meantime driven to Academy Street, where Mademoiselle Photini Natzelhuber was staying. He found the house in complete darkness, and only when he had made a considerable noise did a somnolent and astonished servant thrust her head out of a window and demand his business.

“Where is your mistress, Polyxena?” cried Agiropoulos.

“In bed, sir.”

“In the name of all that is wonderful, has Photini gone clean out of her senses? In bed, and all Athens waiting for her at the Austrian Embassy!”

Polyxena leisurely unbolted the door, and Agiropoulos rushed past her up the stairs, and hammered frantically outside Photini’s bedroom door.

“Photini, get up and dress this instant. I insist. I swear I will not leave off knocking until you come out—not even at the risk of driving all the neighbours mad!” he shouted.

“What the devil do you want at this time of night, Agiropoulos?” was roared back to him. “I will box that girl’s ears for letting you in. Stop that row. You must be drunk.”

“Come, no nonsense, Photini. I am serious, on my soul I am. You’ve been expected at the Austrian Embassy for the last hour and a half. It is just eleven, and Athenian receptions break up at midnight, you know.”

“I suppose they want me to play. I had forgotten all about it. The mischief take the idiots! For goodness’ sake stop that noise, and I’ll get up.”

It was a little after eleven when a murmur ran through the rooms on the Patissia Road that Agiropoulos had returned with the missing Pleiad. Every one pressed eagerly forward to see the great and eccentric artist. Corns were gratuitously trodden upon and the proprietors forgot to swear, dresses were crushed, and no lady remembered to cover a cross expression with a mendacious smile and a feeble “It does not matter;” all faces wore an expression of open anxiety, curiosity, and wonder.

“Quite a bear, I hear,” somebody whispered, audibly, “bites and snarls even. Dresses abominably, and swears like a trooper.”

Mademoiselle Natzelhuber entered the room a little in advance of Agiropoulos, whose smile was one of radiant self-approval and triumph,—he quite enjoyed this open recognition of his ménage irregulier. Photini wore a look of hardly concealed contempt and indifference, and advanced slowly, meeting the multitudinous gaze of curiosity with a regal calmness. Her dress was dowdy and common: she was stout and low-sized, but she succeeded in carrying off these details with truly majestic grace. It was impossible to titter or sneer; despite all shocks of disappointment, it was impossible not to meet gravely that grave indifferent glance, and recognise a strange kind of superiority in its lambent topaz imperturbability. All eyes were fixed upon her but two boyish blue eyes that, after one swift and inquiring look, were averted in a poignant confusion of emotions. Instead, they rested on Agiropoulos.

Madame von Hohenfels moved towards the artist with a gracious smile of welcome, and expressed her pleasure in very cordial terms,—she could afford to be exuberant now that she was relieved of the terror of this woman’s possible defection.

“This, I believe, is your first appearance in Athens after a long absence, Mademoiselle Natzelhuber.”

“Where is your piano, Madame? You did not invite me for the sake of my handsome face, I suppose. Then pass compliments and come to business.”

“Qu’elle est grossière,” was the comment that ran round the room, and the English Cabinet Minister, the Right Honourable Samuel Warren, gazed at her through his eyeglass, and lisped, “What a very extraordinary creature!” One does not mix in the highest diplomatic circles for nothing, and the Baroness von Hohenfels was perfectly competent to extricate herself and her guests from an awkward situation with both grace and glory. She laughed musically, as if something specially witty had been said, and led the way to the grand piano. The seat was a high one, and Photini tranquilly kicked it down, and gazed around her in search of a low stool. Agiropoulos rushed forward with a chair of the required height, and the artist sat down amid universal silence and touched the keys lightly, upon which her nose might conveniently have played, so near were both. After a few searching bars she burst into Liszt’s splendid orchestral arrangement of “Don Giovanni.”

Agiropoulos cared nothing whatever about her music, and wandered round the room till he reached the place where Ehrenstein was standing.

“That was a delicate mission, eh, Ehrenstein?” he said, with his persistent smile. “Successfully accomplished too.”

“Its success is as apparent as its delicacy,” retorted Rudolph. He was filled with astonishment at the wave of bitterness towards this oily self-satisfied Greek that swelled within him.

Agiropoulos caught the unmistakable ironical tone.

“Might I request you to define your precise meaning, my young friend?” he asked, drily.

“That is easily done. You have acted to-night as no gentleman should.”

All girlish timidity had faded out of Rudolph’s eyes, which flashed like gem fire in the sparkle of honest indignation.

“Ho! is that where we are?” cried the Greek, with a low exasperating laugh, as he twisted his moustache and examined the gloss of his shoes. “And the crime?”

“In permitting my aunt to speak to you in a distinctly offensive way of Mademoiselle Natzelhuber, and in smiling as you did when you entered the room with her.”

“My dear fellow, what a simpleton you are to talk in this superannuated style about the Natzelhuber.”

“Mademoiselle Natzelhuber is a woman. An honourable gentleman makes no distinction between women as regards certain laws. The same courtesy and consideration are due to all.”

“Don’t tilt against windmills in this extravagant way, Ehrenstein,” said Agiropoulos, laughing good-humoredly. “Why, Photini would be the first to laugh at us for a pair of imbeciles if she heard that we quarrelled about her. She does not want consideration. She is rather a fine fellow in a rough and manly way of her own—very rough, I admit.”

“Pray, make no mistake about me. I object to such vulgar classification as you are disposed to make,” cried Rudolph, sharply.

“I’ll be as wide and as refined as you like—platonic, artistic, spiritual—whichever suits you best. But we may not doubt the admiration, my friend.”

“To prevent gross misinterpretation, I will give you the situation. I hold myself willingly and proudly enslaved to such genius as hers. I would gladly sit in silence all my life if my ear might be filled with music such as hers. For the sake of that, I am ready to offer my friendship, and forget the rest.”

Rudolph stood back a little with a listening rapt expression, and Agiropoulos glanced contemptuously down at Photini. Agiropoulos was constitutionally incapable of understanding disinterested admiration. His sentiments were coarse and definite, and to him were unknown the conditions of strife, probation, unrewarded and unexacting love, self-distrust and tremulous aspiration and fear; above all, was he free from a young man’s humble reverence of womanhood, which, in the abstract, was to him something so greatly inferior to himself as to be below consideration. Cheerful it must be to escape the hesitations and exquisitely painful flutterings between doubt and hope, and the thousand and one causes of clouded bliss, to the more fastidious and ideal Northern nature. He looked forward to a suitable marriage when his relations with Photini should come to an end, but was not concerned with the question of choice. Girls are plentiful enough, and handsome or ugly, they come to the same thing in the long run: mothers of children of whose looks their husbands are unconscious.

In response to the loud applause which greeted her last chord, Mademoiselle Natzelhuber rose slowly, bent her head as low as her knees, the mossy black curls rolling over her forehead like a veil, and her hands hanging straight down beside her. No one present had ever seen a lady bow in this masculine fashion, and following the breathless magnificence of her playing it so awed her spectators that some moments of dead silence passed before they were able to break into their many-tongued speech.

“Let me have some cognac, if you please,” she said, curtly, turning to her delighted hostess.

What will not the mistress of a salon endure if she may furnish her guests with a thoroughly new sensation! And certainly Mademoiselle was a very novel sensation.

The cognac was promptly administered to the artist, and the people began to move about and express their opinions.

“That girl is tremendously admired here,” said Agiropoulos to Rudolph, drawing his attention to a noticeable group of young ladies. “Her name is Mademoiselle Eméraude Veritassi. She was not christened Eméraude, I may mention, but we are so very Parisian at Athens that we insist on translating everything, even our own names, into French. The girl beside her is Miss Mary Perpignani, and her brother Mr. John Perpignani, though neither of them knows a word of English. It is chic with us. I am Tonton. I can’t exactly say what language it may be, but it isn’t Greek, and that you see is the main thing. My sister Persephone calls herself Proserpine.”

“What bad taste! Persephone is surely a beautiful name.”

“Ah, but it is Greek—not fashionable, not chic. And if we have no chic, my friend, we have no raison d’être.”

“Who is that going to play now?” asked Rudolph.

“Good heavens! it’s Melpomene—and after the Natzelhuber!”

No wonder there was much admiration expressed at the nerve of the lady who bravely undertook to play such a masterpiece as Chopin’s “Barcarolle” in the presence of a master not given to handle offenders gently. But everyone was disposed to receive the amiable imperfection of an amateur with indulgence, while it was impossible to conjecture the feelings of the short-haired woman who was quietly sipping her second glass of cognac on an ottoman and listening with a fixed neutral stare in her yellow eyes. When the piece was over, the artist rose, and said with awful measured politeness:

“Does Madame imagine that she has played Chopin’s ‘Barcarolle?’ Doubtless Madame has mistaken the name. I will play the ‘Barcarolle’ now.”

It is easy to understand the feelings with which Madame retired, and the feelings aroused in the breast of Madame’s irate husband, who glared vengeance from the other end of the room; and for one moment every one recognised that a star is not the most agreeable ornament of society, but this idea was soon swept away upon magic sound. Could there be anything dreamed of on earth like the beauty of the “Barcarolle” so played? Enthusiasm reached the white-heat of passion. Ladies tore the flowers from their bosoms, men from their button-holes and flung them at her; faces went white and red, and eyes filled with tears. And there stood Agiropoulos smiling blandly and taking half the triumph as his own, while Rudolph had gone back to his recess and was sobbing unrestrainedly in sheer ecstasy.

When the first wave of emotion had subsided, and the artist had bowed her acknowledgment in the same curious way, too contemptuous even to shake the flowers off her person, her host stepped forward to offer her his arm and lead her towards the buffet in another room. Somebody else stepped forward with gracious intent, a young self-sufficient viscount, the nephew of the distinguished French minister. He bowed low, and acquainted her with the agreeable fact that he had never heard anything like her playing of the “Barcarolle,” and his regret that Chopin himself could not hear it. Mademoiselle looked at him meditatively for some trying seconds, then said calmly:

“Do you really believe, sir, that I require your approval? Be so good, sir, as to confine your observations on music to your equals.”

“Truly a remarkable and slightly disconcerting person,” said the English Cabinet Minister, arranging his eyeglass the better to observe her. “Extraordinary, egad! I suppose artists are bound to be erratic. But don’t you think they could play just as well with hair like everybody else, and decent manners?”

His companion was of opinion they could, and suggested that the artist in question would create a lively sensation in a London drawing-room.

“By Jove, yes. Suppose we strike a bargain with her, and carry her back with us. We might label her—‘authentic specimen of a Greek barbarian, picked up near the Acropolis; dangerous.’”

All the guests now struggled forward in search of refreshments. But Rudolph strolled about waiting for an opportunity to see Photini alone. His gratitude and admiration were at that exalted pitch when an outpouring is imperative. He knew nothing of the vile report that had been circulated concerning his own relations with her, and sought her with the damning candour of complete innocence. He found her, and the discovery sent a shock of horror through him that almost stopped the beating of his heart. She was in the centre of a noisy laughing group of men, smoking a cigarette and holding an empty liqueur glass in her hand into which the Baron von Hohenfels was pouring some brandy, laughing boisterously and joking hideously. Every nerve within him thrilled in an agony of shame. This the glorious interpreter of heavenly sound! This the artist he so passionately desired to reverence as a woman, while worshipping her genius! He was half prompted to go away in silence, when his eyes caught the sarcastic triumph of Agiropoulos’ smile. With a mighty effort he gulped down the bitterness of disappointment and shocked surprise, and bravely went forward.

“I have been looking for you, Mademoiselle,” he said coldly. “I wanted so much to thank you for the delight you have given me to-night—this addition to past delight,” he added, holding out his hand.

“Ah! my little Austrian page!” Photini cried, laughing into his solemn grieved face. “I got your card to-day. You must come and see me again. The ‘Mélodiés Hongroises’ you know. I’ve promised you that. A pretty fellow is your nephew, Baron, and quite as charming as he is pretty. But too grave, too grave, and too—sans reproche,” she added cynically.

All the men looked at Rudolph curiously, and laughed. The boy flushed scarlet, bowed and walked away. The rooms were rapidly thinning, and recognising him as a member of the Hohenfels family, several guests stopped to shake hands with him as they passed him. He received their advances mechanically, hardly heard a word addressed to him, and was still in a dream when his aunt and her husband returned to join him in the empty chambers.

CHAPTER II. THE BARON VON HOHENFELS EXPRESSES AN OPINION.

That night Rudolph did not go to bed. He spent some hours walking up and down his room in a nervous agitation he could by no means account for. It seemed to him that he had been dropped into a disagreeably topsy-turvy world, and the thought made him wretched and unhappy: dissatisfied and perplexed by his own state, fierce in a vague kind of resentment against Agiropoulos, and filled with an immeasurable grief for Photini. With such soul in her fingers she appeared to him through an ugly cloud like a battered and draggled angel, and he sat disconsolately gazing at the blue and golden flames from the beautiful star-fire above, and asked himself how had it happened, and was there for her henceforth no struggling back into the paths of sweet womanhood from which she had strangely and openly strayed?

Yet why should he grieve so passionately for Photini? No affair of his if she courted slander and irreverent familiarity; nor yet if she indulged in inadmissible tastes in public, and wounded and insulted all who came near her. His own birth and its responsibilities surely excluded him from such preoccupations, and his natural fastidiousness made relations, however slight and flexible, with a woman like Photini impossible. This he knew well, and despite the knowledge felt miserably sad and unquiet. He wanted so much that she should not degrade his high ideal of the artist who has received nature’s patent of nobility, and a lonely impressionable boy like Rudolph could not afford to stand by tamely and watch the dethroning of his idol. For Photini had been his idol long before they had met. Her name had been borne into his retreat from many quarters, and no one had hinted to him her unlovableness—her disreputableness. Liszt had only spoken to him of her genius with enthusiasm. Had his small circle deliberately conspired to keep him in ignorance of this cruel reality, while he was wandering and losing himself in a forest of delicate and poetic illusions?—building hope upon hope of an unanalysable nature until his whole happiness grew to bind itself round the thought of this unknown woman crowned by art with a glory greater than her womanhood? Photini Natzelhuber! His mother had often told him of the time she first came to Vienna, a slip of a girl, with a curly boyish head and the strangest topaz eyes. Mossy dark hair and topaz eyes with divine fingers—what more did it require to set aflame a dreamy imaginative lad? And when strangers visited the Castle at Rapolden Kirchen and spoke of her, he never seemed to understand that years had flown and left her less girlish, but pictured her like Art, like a goddess ever young. And when he read of knightly reverence and allegiance, he told himself that one day he should go abroad and seek Photini. He dreamed of no conditions or reward, not of marriage or of love in the ordinary sense. To wear her colours, serve her in true devotion, honour her above all women, and humbly sue the privilege to obey her commands and caprices with some considerable recreative pauses for music—this was Rudolph’s innocent dream. Remember he was brought up by a high-bred mother, all grace and gentle benignity, a woman who wore her widowhood like a sovereign lady to whom man’s homage was a sweet claim. And her pretty and impracticable theories but helped to feed the fires of a fatally romantic temperament, while his complete and unboylike isolation left him an easy prey to the riotous play of fancy. Then is it any wonder that reality at the outset should both crush and bewilder him?

He opened the window, and leant far out with his head against his hand, that the cold night air might blow upon him. Through the confusion of his mind he could gather no dim or possible conclusion upon which to shape immediate action. He dreaded meeting Photini again, for he felt he could never forgive her for the havoc she had made of all his bright hopes. Then softly through the silence of the night waved in echoing dimness the lovely strains of the “Barcarolle,” with its ever recurrent note of passionate melancholy, its very voluptousness of exquisite pain and the musical rhythm of the oars breaking through the water murmur. The memoried sounds flushed his cheek with trembling delight, and he rushed to his violin and tried to pick out the dominant melody. But who could ever hope to play it as she did? And, happily, he became mindful of the possible objections of others to this faint nocturnal music, and generously put up his instrument.

“Ah!” he sighed, “if Photini be hardly a woman, what an artist, good heavens!” Must much not be forgiven undeniable genius? And was all the ideal love irrevocably vanished? If only he could know. For this uncertainty disturbed him and made him unhappy, and unhappiness is not exactly the condition that enables a young man to see clearly into his own mind or into anybody else’s. He would try to sleep, and then this tempest of emotion and harassing conflict would blow over and leave his eyes clearer to see what he ought to do and leave undone.

But Rudolph did not sleep, and a sleepless night, we know, works disastrously upon the nerves and looks. When he appeared downstairs his uncle glanced up casually from his papers, and, stirring his chocolate, said in surprise:

“Why, whatever is the matter with you, Rudolph? This is too absurd. A girl wouldn’t look so battered after a first ball.”

“Well, I am battered, I suppose. I’ve passed a bad night and I am not used to it,” said Rudolph listlessly.

“A bad night! a fellow of your age! Is it possible? Fact is, my dear boy, your mother has ruined you. Nothing worse than to pamper and coddle up lads as if they were girls. Your mother had no business to keep you immured in that ghostly old place with no hardier society than her own.”

“I wish she were there still and I with her,” said poor Rudolph, with a little break in his voice and a faint clouding of his blue eyes.

“Of course, of course,” hastily cried the volatile baron, whom all evidence of emotion struck chill. “The wish does you and her credit. But all the same, it is not exactly fit training for a boy. Makes him whimsical and sensitive and shy—a lively prey for all adventurers male and female, especially female. Fact is, it is most enervating and absurd. You ought to have seen something of society long ago, Rudolph; you ought indeed. Men and manners—you know your classics?”

“That is just my difficulty. Men and manners—to find them disappointing and strange. My brief glimpse of them has both sickened and saddened me.”

“Nonsense! You must face life like a man; not dream it away like a puny sentimental girl. You want backbone and nerve, Rudolph, you do indeed. Men are not saints nor women angels. Well, what of that? They are not expected to be so until they get into the next world, which time, as far as I am concerned, I trust will be postponed to the furthest limits. Then the ladies find their wings and the men get canonised, that is, if they haven’t taken snuff. I believe a very estimable saint was once refused canonisation because he took snuff; can’t swear to it, however. For the rest, my boy, adopt the aphorism of the wise German, who was good enough to discover that everything is arranged for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”

“You can take things lightly, uncle, but I cannot.”

“Of course not,” rejoined the baron, lighting a cigar. “Whoever heard of a young man taking anything lightly except his debts?”

“I do not ask that men should be saints nor women angels.”

“It is considerate of you to be so unexacting. Pass the saintship of your own sex, young men have the extremely awkward habit of quarrelling with women as soon as they discover they are not angels.”

“But I do seek for evidences of gentlemanly feeling, for decent manners and chivalrous speech,” Rudolph went on, ignoring the Baron’s interruptions.

“Now you are hardly so unexacting. This strikes me as demanding something more than sanctity, for it is quite possible that a saint may be an ill-mannered cad,” said the baron gravely.

“I hope, sir, that you will not be offended with me if I express a wish to return to Austria,” said Rudolph, after a pause, nervously devoted to industrious crumbling.

“Indeed, Rudolph,” cried the baron, facing him with a disconcerting steadiness of gaze, “I am very seriously offended to hear you express such a wish. Your aunt and I have cherished the hope that you would find your stay with us pleasant enough to make your visit a prolonged one. What has upset you? If there is anything we can do to make you comfortable, I beg you will state your wishes and count them fulfilled.”

“Nothing, nothing indeed, I assure you. You and my dear aunt are kindness itself, and I am most truly grateful. But I am not happy, uncle. Do not blame me if I seem capricious.”

“Seem! Well, and are you not?”

“I cannot help it if I am perplexed and grieved. I think I should feel less troubled in Rapolden Kirchen, that is all,” Rudolph slowly explained, bending his head with apparent anxiety over the little heap of crumbs he was making with his knife.

His uncle watching him narrowly saw the sensitive lips tremble under the soft moustache.

“Come, unveil the mystery, Rudolph,” he said with a quiet smile. “Who is the woman? For, Gad, it looks deucedly like a first prick of love. Nothing else smarts so keenly at your age.”

Rudolph shrank visibly from the coarse frank glance of worldly eyes directed upon a wound so intangible, so especially delicate, and yet open to misconstruction. To grieve about a woman argues the existence of the commoner sentiment, and he loathed the thought of his fine instinct being so misinterpreted. But could a bland and heavy ambassador, who smokes the best cigars and lounges on the softest cushions in irreproachable attire, skilful in gastronomy and a connoisseur in feminine points, be possibly expected to seize and rightly interpret the daintier emotions and pangs of a more exquisite and spiritual organism?

“There is nothing of that matter in my trouble, but I believe I am unfitted for society. I don’t like it; much that others, possibly wiser and better than I, hardly note offends me.”

“You find the charming illusions nurtured in the seclusion of Rapolden Kirchen rudely dispelled,” suggested the baron, looking what he felt, a trifle bored by the lad’s heavy earnestness, but admirably sustained by the comfort of good tobacco. “That happens to every one, though I have no doubt it would afford you immeasurable satisfaction to look upon your case as exceptional. All this is quite correct, since it is so, and if this very interesting and pleasant world realised the fastidious ideal of youth, my dear fellow, it would not be a fit place for any sensible man to live in. Be reasonable, Rudolph. Give poor society another chance before you decide to abandon it to inevitable perdition. There will be plenty of balls presently. Stay and see if you cannot reconcile your flighty imagination to a waltz or two with some pretty Athenians. You may not credit it, but there are two very pretty girls here.”

CHAPTER III. FAREWELL TO YOU!—TO YOU GOOD CHEER!

Given a young man of average resolution in force against an acknowledged and violently self-disapproved inclination, seated in a pleasant morning-room, with clear broad rays of December sunshine, as it knows how to shine in winter in Greece, pouring in through the lattice-work of the windows, every leaf in the garden singing and proclaiming that out-of-doors there is gladness of sight as well as gladness of sound, to soothe the mind of restless and melancholy youth. It will go hard with that young man to resist the temptation to get up, shake out the draggled plumes of thought, and canter away into the country—or why own an uncle who has a horse or two to be had for the asking? One cannot lock oneself away in a dismal chamber merely as a correction against one’s own irregular impulses. Besides, was not his resolution there to act as constable, and move them on if unruly subjects showed any tendency to loiter on the way? So Rudolph made himself look very spruce in a dark green riding coat he had bought in Vienna, and much more suited to the forest depths of Rapolden Kirchen than the high-road of a modern town, put on a pair of brown gauntlet gloves, also scenting too suspiciously of the forest, with long black boots, and he only wanted a forester’s plumed hat to complete the picture. But he looked exceedingly handsome, and as, abroad, all eccentricities of costume are credited to the English, he was taken as a fair young milord as he cantered briskly along the Partissia Road. Somebody met him and remarked afterwards to the Baron von Hohenfels that “he had had the pleasure of seeing his nephew on horseback got up like Gessler without the hat.”

On the youth rode, quite pleased with his green coat and his fine boots, flicking away an occasional fly from the ear of his bay with a dainty riding whip, and inhaling delightedly the soft odours of the winter landscape. He would have liked to whistle or sing.

“Decidedly, Athens is a charming place,” he thought to himself. “All my life till now I have been frozen at this time of the year, and here the sun is shining, the birds are singing, the sea is smiling out there its very bluest smile, and it would be impossible to paint the lovely colours of the landscape. Hills everywhere, with a long silver plain—the plain of Attica! I wonder where this road leads to? Somewhere out into the country, but it does not matter. I’ll ride to the end of it, and then I’ll ride back.”

It was an enchanting ride. He saw a little beer garden, and stopped to see if the beer of Athens were as refreshing as its air. Well, no; he thought on the whole that he had tasted better beer in Vienna, but the place was quaint, and, who knows? perhaps a centre of classic memories. He would look into Baedeker on his return. Certainly the waiters left much to be desired in manner, in attendance, and in personal appearance. Then he thought of riding back, paid his score, leaving what would have been considered a satisfactory tip for any one but a proverbially prodigal milord,—that article, with a proper respect for itself, not being thought guilty of a knowledge of coppers,—mounted his horse, and turned its head towards Athens.

His pace this time was not so brisk, nor did his face or the atmosphere seem quite so happy. A vague consciousness of what was awaiting him was slowly beginning to make itself felt through the recent satisfaction of moral superiority, and that consciousness weighted his horse’s step, as it weighted his own boy’s heart. And yet it was fate that was guiding him, and not his own will. Of course not. When does the will ever guide the unwilling, and where would any of us be in moments of complicated decision, if it were not for that convenient scapegoat and disentangler—Fate?

The museums afforded an excuse for putting off the evil moment, and a lad was found to hold the bay while Rudolph went inside to examine the curiosities. He did all that was to be done; stood gravely before Greek vase after Greek vase, each one the exact counterpart of the other, and while running the silver handle of his riding-whip along his lips, told himself that it was really curious that so many intelligent people should be found ready to go into ecstasies over this sort of thing, and prefer to look at a cracked red vase with mad figures on it, to a living pretty face, or a pine-fringed mountain, or the rain-clouds scattered across the blue heavens. And then he gazed at the coins; gazed at broken statues, and at whatever wearied and polite attendants were willing to show him.

“Well, I am not archæological, that is certain,” he thought, mounting his bay with an open alacrity that might be described as a silent “Hurrah!” and flew—not to the Austrian Embassy, but to Academy Street.

When he asked Polyxena in his blandest tones if her mistress was visible, that gracious minister unto art nodded, and pointed with her thumb over her shoulder:

“Go up there, you will find her about.”

“The Natzelhuber has picked up a perfect counterpart of herself,” Agiropoulos had remarked, which struck Rudolph as unpleasantly accurate.

When Rudolph, after a timid knock, opened the door, he found the pianiste lying on a worn black sofa, smoking a cigarette and reading a French novel, with three cats about her, one comfortably seated at her head, and one across her feet. On the hearthrug there were two dogs feigning to be asleep, in order the more conveniently to pry into the affairs of man, and ridicule together the secrets they had discerned between two blinks and a snap at a fly. The room was poorly furnished and disorderly. A piano which had seen battle and better days, a faded carpet; music on the floor, music on tables, music on chairs. Over the mantelpiece a large portrait of Liszt, under it Rubinstein, above Beethoven, and on either side Chopin and George Sand.

In this little group of portraits consisted the sole decoration of the bare white walls, and a table in a corner held all that its owner had amassed of precious things in her public career: her medals gained at the Conservatoire, the few gifts of gold-studded objects she had condescended in her most amenable moods to accept from grand dukes and duchesses, and other courtly and wealthy admirers. She looked at Ehrenstein without getting up, and said:

“What do you want?”

“Nothing,” he retorted, sitting down uninvited, and staring at her a moment in cold inquiry.

She was not handsome, nay, she was ugly, and he was glad of it, being still of the innocent belief that the face is the clear index of the soul, and that a fair exterior cannot possibly cover a foul interior. Then, too, the fact that she was unprepossessing made the course he was contemplating so much the easier, since, however sincerely he might regret the artist, he could not in conscience pretend it possible that he should regret her face.

“You are doing well, my young friend,” laughed the Natzelhuber, “excellently well, ’pon my soul. Not so long ago a convent girl could not beat you in humility, and to-day you’ve cheek enough to lend even Agiropoulos a little.”

“Oh!” said Rudolph, lifting his eyebrows, and then changing his tone, suddenly, “but I did not mean to be rude.”

“Then what the devil do you mean?” the artist cried, lighting another cigarette, with almost maternal precautions against disturbing her cats. “Is that the way to come into a woman’s room, making yourself at home without being asked, and impertinently saying you want nothing?”

“If it comes to that, I might ask, is it habitual for morning callers to be received by their hostess lying on a sofa, nursing three cats, smoking, and to be asked what they wanted?”

“A very reasonable attitude if it suits me, and a very reasonable question. But since you are so susceptible and cantankerous, I’ll do you the grace to change both to suit you,” she said good-humoredly, removing her cats and placing them back on the sofa when she stood up; then seating herself in an arm-chair, she added:

“Now, what have you come for?”

“To see you,” he said, smiling in spite of himself.

“Much obliged, I am sure. Well, look away, and in the meantime I’ll finish this chapter of my book.”

The method of being severe and renunciatory, with a suitable Byronic fold of the lip and stern compression of the brows—a kind of “fare thee well, and if forever” expression—with a woman like this! Fancy such a reception at twenty-one—when a young man is oldest, gravest, intensest, and slightly melodramatic—from the object of shattered dreams, the creature of agitated and complex feelings, and the cause of poignant humiliation and vexed wonder! Yet the Natzelhuber was unconsciously working most effectually for the boy’s good, and every stab was a definite step on the road to recovery, and to a full lifting of the veil of his own signal folly.

“What makes you look so unhappy, Ehrenstein?” she asked, after a considerable pause. “Have you been playing?”

“No, mademoiselle. I did not know that I looked unhappy,” Rudolph answered, colouring slightly.

“You do then. But there is no need to ask why you are unhappy. You wear your nature in your face, and that proves to me that you will never be happy—any more than my unlucky self.”

“Why?”

“Because you are too refined and too fastidious, and too everything else that goes to the making of a first-class irrational humbug. A man who wishes to make the best of life should be able to take a little of its mud comfortably, whereas you are ready even to turn up your aristocratic nose at a little elegant dust.”

“And you, mademoiselle? Why are you not happy?—for I cannot regard dust or mud as the impediment here,” said Rudolph sarcastically.

“Oh, for just the contrary reason. I am too gamine! It comes to the same thing, child. We are both mad, though reaching the condition by diametrically opposed roads. My life is ending, and it is too late now to change had I even the desire,—but yours is beginning. Get rid of all that superfluous refinement, and tell yourself that there are things more real and more absolutely necessary than sugar and ice-cream.”

“What you say is very true, and I will remember it. But have you no words of equal wisdom for your own case—although they say that doctors are always better able to treat cholera in an alien body than a fit of indigestion in themselves.”

“I could say much, but I could not be sure of finding an attentive audience in myself. You see I am a poor devil. Not so long ago I had the musical world at my feet—only two names above me, and the second Rubinstein, not so far away. Like this we were crowned,” she explained, making a dot on the cover of her book, and calling it Liszt, with a second lower down, on the right hand side, which represented Rubinstein, and the last, on the left, hardly more than a thought below the second—“there! the Natzelhuber. And turn from my fame to reality. An ugly old woman without a sou, alone, friendless, ill, the only companions of my solitude these cats and dogs, and that,” she added, pointing to a bottle of brandy.

“Is that not a very bad companion in solitude?” asked Rudolph, pained.

“Not so very bad when it keeps you from cutting your throat in a morbid moment.”

“Mademoiselle, command me—command all your true friends, for surely it is impossible that genius such as yours has gathered no honest friendship along its path, as well as empty honours. Whatever my shortcomings may be in the way of entertaining, I will prove a better counsellor than your present one,” he urged, forgetting all about himself in his anxiety to save her from the approach of certain degradation.

She looked at him sharply, and then a curious softened light came into the yellow eyes, making them once again beautiful and fascinating with their old charm. She placed her two powerful little hands on his shoulders, and seemed to gaze down into his very soul.

“My dear boy, I believe you are sincere. You are as good as you look, and that is saying much. A tired old woman thanks you with all her heart, but it is too late. Some demon fixed himself in that old woman’s head when she was born, and never could manage to find its way out ever since.”

Rudolph was on the point of protesting, when the door opened, and a woman in black, followed by a young girl entered. The Natzelhuber wheeled round brusquely, and demanded:

“Who are you, madame? and what brings you here, pray?”

The woman, who was stout and hot, stared anxiously, gasped, clutched in vain at her scattered ideas, and murmured something relative to the great honour the illustrious Mademoiselle Natzelhuber had done her in consenting to teach her daughter Andromache, the interview having been arranged for to-day.

“All very well. But that does not explain how you came to enter my room unannounced,” cried the pianiste.

“Your servant sent us up, madame.”

“Polyxena!” roared the Natzelhuber, holding the door open.

Rudolph, ready to sink with shame at the unpleasantness of his position, and eager to beat a hasty retreat, happened to look at the girl who was staring from the stormy musician to him with large dark blue eyes, dark fringed, and full of beseeching anxiety and fright. She was a very pretty girl of somewhat exotic type: olive tints, blue-black hair, with a thin, sedately arranged row of curls upon the forehead. A face of meagre intelligence, without a shade of those subtle and tremulous surprises, that delicate eloquence of opening sensibilities and wonder, that make up so much of girlish beauty in northern races. But Andromache was very touching in that moment of perplexity and humiliation, and having looked at her once, Rudolph felt constrained to look again—which he did willingly enough, though he blushed scarlet at his own audacity.

“Polyxena, who the devil gave you leave to send me strangers when I am engaged?”

“How was I to know you were engaged? Haven’t I my work to do without looking after your danglers? Do you think I’m going to walk up here every time your bell rings to find out what I am to say? Ah, then, and upon my word, you’d have first to go into treaty with my Maker to fashion me another pair of legs,” retorted Polyxena, turning on her heel.

“That is the way she always answers me,” said the Natzelhuber, smiling. “But I am fond of servants. They are the only part of humanity that has retained a bit of originality or naturalness. When she is in a good humour that girl delights me with the extraordinary things she says,” she remarked to Rudolph. “So, madame, this is the young woman you want me to turn into an artiste,” she exclaimed, menacingly, standing before the trembling Andromache with her hands joined behind her.

After a long scrutiny, she thrust up her chin, and muttered:

“Pouf! she doesn’t look very bright.”

“Everybody says she is very clever, mademoiselle,” the girl’s mother ventured to plead humbly, “and she plays really well.”

“Who is ‘everybody’? half a dozen brutes of Athenians who couldn’t tell you the difference between C major and F sharp. If you have come here to cite me the opinion of that distinguished and discriminating critic, Everybody, madame, instead of waiting to hear mine, you and your daughter may go about your business, and see what your Everybody will do for you.”

Rudolph made a movement towards the door, hoping to escape unnoticed, but the Natzelhuber, having had enough of her last visitors, detained him with an invitation to smoke a cigarette, and drink a glass of brandy.

“Wouldn’t you like me to play you something?”

“Not to-day, thanks. Another time. It’s just breakfast time,” he said hurriedly.

She turned her back on him without another word, and opening the piano, pointed to Andromache to sit down before it. The girl’s hands shook as she removed her gloves, and Rudolph, going downstairs, could hear how unsteady and timid were the first notes that she played.

“Weber’s ‘Invitation à la Danse.’ She will surely fly into another rage when she hears that,” he thought. “But I do wish she would be kind and encouraging to the poor girl. Such pretty eyes as she has! I have never seen prettier. Just like the March violets in Rapoldenkirchen that I used to gather for my mother.”

In the meantime the frightened owner of these eyes like the March violets of Rapoldenkirchen was passing through the worst moment of her existence. Two bars of the “Invitation” served to bring down the wrath of artistic majesty on her head, and very nearly on her hands.

“What do you call that?”

“Weber’s ‘Invitation,’” died away in the girl’s throat.

“Weber’s ‘Rubbish,’ you idiot! It is as little like the ‘Invitation’ as the music of my cats is like the ‘Funeral March.’ But you have a good touch. Something may be made of you when you have learnt your scales, and know how to sit before a piano. Seat low, thumb covered, body tranquil. Are you prepared to regard yourself as a beginner, with less knowledge than a stammering infant—or do you still cherish the opinion of ‘Everybody’ that you are very clever?”

“I know very well that I am quite ignorant, and it is because I want to learn that I have come to you,” Andromache said, with a simple dignity that mollified the artist.

“Well, I see you are not a fool like your respectable mother,” she said. “Now go home and practice as many scales as you can for three or four or even more hours a day, and come to me at the end of a week. Hard work and slow results, remember.”

CHAPTER IV. AN ATHENIAN HOUSEHOLD.

Among the many curious customs of the modern Athenians—at least those unprovided with permanent tents—is their habit of changing residence every first of September. When they go into each new house, they have at last found their earthly paradise, which they at once begin to maltreat in every possible way, until, by summer-time there is hardly a clean spot left on any of the walls, a door left with a handle, a cupboard with a lock, or a window with a fastening entire in its panes. Then the earthly paradise, is described in terms as exaggeratedly expressive of the reverse of comfort; the family look around for the next September move, and a new home or flat is found with the same fate awaiting it. The only rational way of accounting for this startling custom, which would greatly disturb any reasonable person compelled to follow it, is by supposing that the natives find something exciting and morally or mentally beneficial in their annual migrations.

In compliance with the law, Andromache’s mother, the previous September, had moved from a flat on the second floor in Solon Stettore, a ground floor flat with plenty of underground accommodation, in one of the many yet unnamed streets that break from the foot of Lycabettus like concentric rays to drop into the straight line of Solon Street, and proceed on a wider and recognised course down among the larger thoroughfares. These baby passages are rarely traversed by any but those who enjoy the qualified happiness of living in them. There is always a river of flowing water edging their entrance like a barrier, which a lady with dainty boots would doubtless view with disapprobation if she were asked to ford it upon an afternoon call. Children by the hundred play about these streets—variously coloured children, ragged, ugly, showing every condition but that of cleanliness and beauty, with little twisted mouths and sharp black eyes that always seem to be measuring in the spectator a possible foe; with coarse matted hair, or shaven heads looking like nothing more than the skin of a mouse worn as a skull cap, or dirty straw, bleached nearly white, hanging about them in unapproachable wisps and understood to be fair hair. As well as the householders, the infants, and running water, the streets offer, as further attraction, the cries of the itinerant merchants, who draw their carts up the dusty, unpaved little hills, and yell out the contents of their store in a way only to be heard in burning cities, where yelling, public and domestic, becomes an art, cultivated with zeal, and heard with joy—by all but the nervous traveller. All day long these vendors come and go, and the aforementioned happy householders need only appear on their thresholds to buy stuffs, soap, candles, sponges, carpets, etc.

In the sweet spot Kyria Karapolos had pitched her tent with her family, consisting of two sons, the eldest a dashing captain of the Artillery, known in town as Captain Miltiades, understood to have no relations, and to sleep on horseback, dine on gallantry and the recital of his own prowess, and enjoy relaxation from equine exercise in the ball-room. The second son, Themistocles, a dapper little fellow, had a position in the Corinthian Bank, not very remunerative, but enabling him to dress with what he considered Parisian taste, and walk Stadion Street with two or three other fashionable youths, all equally gloved, caned—and killing. He had a violin too, and disliking his family, when constrained to remain at home, spent the time in his own room, which looked out upon the sloping gardens of the French School, and tortured the silence by irritating this poor instrument, deluded into a fond belief that he was playing Gounod’s “Ave Maria” and Schubert’s “Serenade.”

He cherished a hopeless passion for a young lady in the next street who had no fortune; neither had he, nor, what is worse in an aspiring husband, any prospect of making one.

A girl came next, Julia, of abnormal plainness of feature, considerably heightened by a pimpled, sallow complexion and a furtive, untrustworthy expression. Unlike the rest of her family, she had no special qualification, but while the others enjoyed every kind of discomfort, her fortune was pleasantly counted into the Corinthian Bank, to be taken out the day a husband should present himself for her and for it, especially for it. In this land of dowered maidens young gentlemen of expensive tastes and empty purses find it feasible and honourable to incur debts on the understanding that they will be paid out of somebody’s dowry by and by. Personal looks or qualities are secondary questions, so the absence of attractions in Julia did not weigh in the eyes of her brother and mother in their anxiety to marry her.

The youngest was Andromache, as pretty as Julia was plain, resembling her brother, the redoubtable Captain Miltiades; a sweet girl, too, if suggestive of the unvarying sweetness which is another word for feebleness of character—fond of music, and showing some ability in that direction, never taking part in the family quarrels which were always raging at the table and elsewhere between the rest. But she had the tastes of the woman of warm latitudes. In the house she was rarely fit to be seen,—and she had a passion for powder, unguents and strong perfumes. She was a tolerably efficient housekeeper, and generally spent her mornings in the kitchen, superintending and helping Maria, the maid of all work, who had enough in all conscience to do to keep Captain Miltiades in clean shirts.

Captain Miltiades was not only the hero of his domestic circle, but the hero of all Greece—or so he believed, which comes to the same thing; the boldest soldier, the mightiest captain, the best horseman and dancer, and, crown in romantic imaginations, the most impecunious ornament of Athenian society. His fierce and military moustache and bronzed cheek awed beholders, and his noble brow merging into a bald crown gently fringed with short black hair, which made a thin line above his black military coat and crimson velvet collar, seemed to hold the concentrated wisdom of ages. But gallant and youthful was the spirit of Captain Miltiades—amatory, too, as behoves a son of Mars. “One may be bald and not old for that,” said his flashing dark-blue eye whenever a maiden’s thoughtful glance rested on the discrowned region. His French left much to be desired, and of other European languages he knew nothing. But then scientific was his knowledge of the gay cotillon, entrancing his movement in the waltz and mazurka; at least the young ladies of Athens thought so. However, be it known to all who care to learn noteworthy facts, Captain Miltiades was an authority on these important subjects; a kind of dancing Master of Ceremonies at the Palace, where he danced with royal partners and was amazingly in demand. But, sad to relate, nobody dreamed of falling in love with him, in spite of his military prowess and carpet-pirouetting. The ladies regarded him as a kind of amiable harlequin, and his presence and warm declarations only excited a smile on the lips of the weakest. Of course he sighed and dangled after every dot, but sighed in vain, for neither his fierce moustache nor his dark blue eyes have brought him somebody’s one figure and countless noughts of francs.

It was twelve o’clock, and Captain Miltiades might be heard galloping up the unpaved street, looking as if nothing short of a miracle could bring horse or rider to stop before they reached the overhanging point of Lycabettus. The miracle was accomplished without flinging the gallant Captain headforemost into the dust or into the nearest flowing stream, and the Captain’s military servant, Theodore, emerged from the side entrance to carry off the panting war-horse, and refresh its foaming flanks with the stable brush, while the warrior, with stern brow and dissatisfied lips under the nodding red plumes of his cap—this modern Achilles always appeared in a white heat of suppressed anger in the domestic circle—rapped at the glass door which Julia opened.

“Where is Maria?” asked Captain Miltiades.

“In the kitchen, of course, cooking the breakfast.”

“Maria! Maria!”

“Yes, sir,” cried the unfortunate servant, rushing from the steaming pilaf she was preparing, and showing a spacious bosom hardly restrained within the compass of the strained and long since colourless cloth that untidily covered it, and a ragged skirt, and fuzzy black hair that she found as much difficulty in keeping out of the soup as out of her own coal-black eyes—only far greater effort was made to accomplish the latter feat.

“Maria, the balls are commencing, and I shall be going out regularly; you must have two clean shirts for me every day. Do you hear?”

“And how on earth do you think, Captain, I am to get through my work? Two shirts a day indeed! And the same for Mr. Themistocles, I suppose. Four bedrooms to see to, cooking, washing for five persons: and one poor girl to do it all for twenty-five francs a month. You may look for another servant.”

“Get away, or I’ll wring your ear, Maria. You have Theodore to help you in the kitchen, and you know that both my mother and Andromache help you in the housework.”

“Wonderful, indeed! It only wants every one in the house to sit down and do nothing, and the young ladies to ask me to starch them two white petticoats apiece every day. Ah, animals, pigs, the whole of you,” she added as she retired to the kitchen, and the gallant Captain to his chamber.

Another masculine entrance, and this time the thin piping voice of little Themistocles was heard, calling on the unhappy maid of all work.

“What does this fool want now?” roared the infuriated Maria, appearing in the corridor with a large spoon which she brandished menacingly.

“I am going out this evening, Maria, and I want a second clean shirt,” said Themistocles, thrusting his head out of his room.

“A second clean shirt! Oh, of course. What else? Don’t you think, sir, you might find something more for me to do? I have so very little to do that it would really be a kindness to keep an idle girl in work. Clean shirts for Miltiades, clean shirts for Themistocles. ’Pon my word, it is poor Maria herself who wants clean shirts—and she has not even time to wash her face!”

“Really, it is absurd the trouble you men give in a house,” cried Julia over her embroidery in the hall. “You seem to think there are no limits to what a servant is to be asked to do.”

“Hold your tongue, Julia, and speak more respectfully of your brothers,” retorted little Themistocles.

“What do you mean by quarrelling with your sister, you whipper-snapper?” cried Miltiades, combing his moustache, as he came out of his room to join in the fray. “Another impertinent word to Julia, and it would not take much to make me kick you out into the street.”

One word from the head of the house, as Captain Miltiades was called, full twenty years his senior, was enough to silence Themistocles, who retired into his room, and proceeded to make a careful study of the libretto of “La Princesse des Canaries.”

The third tap that morning at the glass door of the street, announcing the return of Andromache and her mother, was the cheerful herald of breakfast. Everybody was seated at table, wearing a more or less bellicose air, while Theodore, looking as correct and rigid as an ill-fitting military undress would permit, served out the pilaf when Andromache and Kyria Karapolos entered the dining-room.

Andromache took her seat in silence beside Julia, and slowly unfolded her napkin with an absent air, and her mother at the head of the table began to puff and pant and violently fan herself.

“Pooh! pooh! pooh! what a woman! I thought she would eat poor Andromache.”

“The music-woman,” remarked Captain Miltiades, indistinctly, through a mouthful of pilaf.

“A savage, Miltiades. She has a servant just like herself, who received us as if we were beggars, and told us to go upstairs and look for the Natzelhuber ourselves. And when we went up, there was a nice-looking young gentleman with her, a foreigner, fair, I should say an Englishman or a Russian—what country do you think he comes from, Andromache?”

“Who, mamma?” asked Andromache, coming down from the clouds.

“That fair young man we saw at Natzelhuber’s.”

“I don’t know, I did not pay much attention to him,” Andromache replied; and turned her eyes to the dish of roast meat Theodore was placing on the table.

“Well, this young man, as I said, was with her, and when we entered the room, I assure you she all but ordered us out again.”

“And why did you not go away?” demanded the Captain, hotly. “You are always getting yourself insulted for want of proper spirit.”

“You are just like your father, ever ready to fly into a rage for nothing,” protested Kyria Karapolos, sulkily. “If one followed your advice, there would be nothing but quarrelling in the world. By acting civilly I have been able to beat down the Natzelhuber’s terms very much below my expectations. When I asked her what she charged a lesson, I nearly fainted at her answer. Thirty francs! However, when I expressed our position, and how absolutely impossible it would be for us to pay more than ten, she consented to receive Andromache as a pupil on those terms. But whenever I spoke she snubbed me in the most violent manner,—called me an old fool.”

“Perhaps you gave her cause,” sneered Themistocles, who felt bitter towards his mother, regarding her as his natural enemy since she had warned the mother of the young lady in the next street of his pennilessness, a warning which served to close the doors of that paradise forever to him.

“How dare you, sir, speak in such a way to your mother?” thundered the irate Captain, always ready to pounce on the small bank-clerk, whom he despised very cordially. “I told you to-day that it would not take much to make me kick you into the street. Another offensive word, and see!”

This ebullition quenched all further family expansion round the breakfast-table. The girls hurried through the meal in silence, keeping their eyes resolutely fixed on their plate. One man glowered, and the other sulked in offended dignity, rising hurriedly the instant Theodore appeared with two small cups of Turkish coffee for Kyria Karapolos and the Captain. In another instant the street door was heard to bang behind Themistocles, who, with his slim cane, his yellow gloves, and minute waist, had gone down to indulge in a clerkly saunter as far as Constitution Place, and unbosom his harassed and manly soul to two other minute confidants previous to turning into the Corinthian Bank.

After his coffee, the Captain went back to his barracks beyond the Palace, and Andromache sat down to practice her scales on a cracked piano in the little salon, with a view of the rugged steepness of Lycabettus and the trellised gardens of the French School through the long window. It was a pretty little room, with some excellent specimens of Greek art and Byzantine embroidery, foolish Byzantine saints, in gilt frames, with an artificial vacuity of gaze, the artistic achievements of the rival Athenian photographers, Romaïdes and Moraïtes, views of the Parthenon and the Temple of Jupiter, a bomb that had exploded at the very feet of Captain Miltiades in the late outbreak at Larissa, upon which memorable occasion he had gallantly mangled the bodies of five thousand Turks and scattered their armies in shame. This valuable piece of historic information I insert for the special benefit of those who may presume to question the direct succession of this mighty Captain from the much admired warriors of Homer. In olden days Captain Miltiades’ glory would have quite outshone that of his puny namesake; as a complete hero, upon his own description, he would have occupied the niche of fame with Hercules and Theseus.

Necessarily there was the sofa, the Greek seat of honour, upon which all distinguished visitors are at once installed, this law, like that of the Medes and Persians, knowing no change. Also sundry tables decorated with albums and the school prizes of the young ladies, the bank-clerk, and the Captain of the Artillery. All the chairs were covered with white dimity, and the floor was polished with bees’ wax, which gave the room an aspect of chill neatness.

Andromache was interrupted in a conscientious study of scales by the entrance of her mother and Julia, and the former’s irrelevant question:

“Don’t you think that young man was English, Andromache?”

“I don’t know, mother, possibly,” was Andromache’s impatient answer, for, though it grieves me to unveil the secret workings of a maiden’s mind, I must perforce confess that the student was thinking just then of Rudolph’s kind and sympathetic glance.

“Can’t you stop that horrible noise and describe him?” said Julia. “You know I always want to hear about foreigners.”

“He was fair and tall and handsome, with very kind blue eyes, light, not dark like those of Miltiades—there, that’s all I can say about him,” said Andromache, rising, and standing at the window to stare across at the gardens of the French School.

CHAPTER V. HOW GUSTAV REINEKE MISSED MADAME JAROVISKY’S BALL.

The illustrious Dr. Galenides had just seated himself at his desk to write a note to his no less illustrious colleague, Dr. Melanos, while his hat and gloves on the study table and his carriage outside were testimony of a contemplated professional drive. The study door was suddenly opened with what Dr. Galenides regarded as undue familiarity, and looking up sharply, prepared to administer the deserved rebuke, the learned physician recognised in the intruder an old friend and brother in profession. The new-comer, a rough, provincial-looking Hercules, was Dr. Selaka of Tenos, a member of his Majesty’s parliament, called for some unaccountable reason, “The King of Tenos.” Instead of a rebuke, Dr. Galenides administered an effusive embrace, and clasped this insular majesty to his capacious bosom.

“What a splendid surprise, my dear Constantine!” he cried, when he had kissed both Selaka’s bronzed cheeks. “When did you come to Athens?”

“Last night. I have come to oppose two new measures of the Minister. Have you read his speech on the Budget?”

“Of course. I thought it displayed great moderation and sagacity. There’s a statesman if you will, Constantine.”

“May the devil sit upon his moustache for an English humbug! England here, England there! Ouf! But wait until he has me to tackle him.”

“You’ll lead him a dance, I’ve no doubt,” laughed Galenides. “But how are all the family?”

“Very well. My niece Inarime is growing more beautiful every day. All the islanders are in love with her. A queer old dog is Pericles. He has brought that girl up in the maddest fashion. Nothing but ancient Greek and that sort of thing, and he has made up his mind she will marry a foreign archæologist, or die an old maid.”

“Yes, I always thought him unpractical and foolish, but I tremendously respect his learning. Why doesn’t he bring the girl to Athens, if he won’t marry her to a Teniote?”

“Well, he talks vaguely of some such intention. You are going out, I see.”

“Yes, and that reminds me, Selaka. I was just writing a line to Melanos, but you’ll do just as well. There is a foreigner sick in the Hôtel de la Grande Bretagne who has sent for me. Could you go round and look at him? I haven’t a spare moment to-day. If I am absolutely wanted for a consultation, of course, I’ll endeavour to attend.”

Selaka consented with alacrity, and the friends parted with cordiality at the door, one to seat himself in a comfortable carriage, and be rolled swiftly to the Queen’s Hospital in the new quarter of Athens, the Teniote to walk to the Hôtel de la Grande Bretagne, a little above Constitution Square, overlooking the orange trees and fountains in front of the Royal Palace. He was delighted with the prospect of meeting a distinguished foreigner, distinction proclaimed in the choice of hotel, and he would profit by the occasion to discuss the politics of Bismarck with this M. Reineke.

The waiters favoured him with that insolent reception usually bestowed by waiters of distinguished hotels upon foot and provincial-looking arrivals. But the mention of the illustrious Dr. Galenides cleared the haughty brow of Demosthenes; and when Selaka furthermore stated that that great personage had sent him to feel the pulse of the sick foreigner, Demosthenes condescended to call to Socrates, a lesser luminary among the hotel officials, and signified to his satellite that Dr. Selaka might be conducted to M. Reineke’s chamber.

Selaka found his patient, a young man of about twenty-eight, lying on a sofa, wrapped in a silk dressing-gown, with an elegant travelling rug thrown across his feet. Selaka’s keen glance rested in amazement on a delicate Eastern head, long grave eyes of the unfathomable and colourless shade of water flowing over dark tones, with a very noble and intense look in them, a high smooth brow that strengthened this expression of nobility, and finely-cut lips seen through the waves of dark beard and moustache as benign as a sage’s. It was a thoughtful, spiritual face, serene in its strength, unimpassioned in its kindliness—the face of a student and a gentleman.