Part 7 (2/2)

Richard Maule, in his day, and still by courtesy, a noted h.e.l.lenist, had come to a sure if secret conclusion concerning human life. He believed that the old Greeks were right in thinking that Fate dogs the steps of the fortunate, and lies in ambush eager to deal those who are too happy stinging, and sometimes deadly, blows. How else account for that which had befallen himself?

Till he had been forty-four, that is, till only ten years ago--for Richard Maule was by no means old as age counts now--his life had been, so he was now tempted to think looking back, ideal from every point of view.

True, he had lost both his parents in childhood, but he had been adored and tenderly cherished by his mother's father, the cultivated, benignant Theophilus Joy, of whom he often thought with a vivid affection and grat.i.tude seldom vouchsafed to the dead. He trusted that the old man in the Elysian Fields was ignorant of the strange gloom which now enwrapped Rede Place.

The Fate in which Richard Maule believed had only dealt two backward blows at the cultivated hedonist whom Richard Maule now knew his grandfather to have been. One had been the premature death, by consumption, of the wife so carefully chosen, to whom there had never been a successor; and then, twenty-two years later, the death of his only child, Richard Maule's mother.

But these two offerings had satisfied grim Nemesis, and perhaps it was open to question whether the creator of Rede Place had not spent a really happier old age in moulding and fas.h.i.+oning his grandson, as far as possible, to his own image, than if the beloved wife and only daughter had lived.

In these latter days, when Richard Maule was enduring, not enjoying, life, he was apt to find a certain consolation in going back to the days of his delightful childhood. His grandfather had been the King, he the Heir Apparent, of a kingdom full of infinite delights and happy surprises to an imaginative and highly-strung little boy.

Each of the ornate rooms of Rede Place, each of the gra.s.sy glades outside, was to him peopled with groups of agreeable ghosts--the ghosts of the clever men and witty women whom his grandfather delighted to bring there at certain times of each year, especially during the three summer months, when the beautiful pleasaunce he had created out of an equally exquisite wilderness was in glowing perfection.

The only dark period of the boy's life--and that he would now have been unwilling to admit--was the two years spent at Eton--the Eton of the 'sixties. His grandfather, though worldly-wise enough not to wish the lad to grow up too singular a human being, had not realized that the life he had made his grandson lead up to the age of fourteen was not a fit preliminary to a public school. At the end of two years the boy was withdrawn from Eton and once more entrusted, as he had been before, to the care of an intelligent tutor, and to teachers of foreign tongues.

Oxford proved more successful, but with Balliol, with which he had many pleasant memories, Richard Maule had one sad a.s.sociation. It was while he was sitting there in Hall that he had received the news of his grandfather's death.

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 aegean 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 t.i.tles transmitted to them from the days when Venice held sway over the seven islands.

As was meet, the philo-h.e.l.lenist had met his future wife during a stay in Athens, and to him there had been something at once fragrant and austere in a courts.h.i.+p 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 d.i.c.k 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 Elysees 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 a.s.sure 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.

Not even his cousin, the young man whom he now trusted and loved as men only trust and love an only son, had ever received any explanation of what had happened. To that stroke--that act of the malicious G.o.ds, as Richard Maule believed--neither he nor his wife ever made any allusion; indeed, when d.i.c.k Wantele had once spoken of the matter to Athena she had shrunk from the subject with shuddering annoyance.

The facts were briefly these. Richard Maule, walking in the garden of a villa he had taken close to Naples, had suddenly been seized with some kind of physical attack. He had lain in the hot sun till by a fortunate chance there had come up to where he was lying his wife, Athena herself.

She had been accompanied by a young man, an Italian protege of the Maules, who had discovered well-born musical genius starving in a garret of the paternal palace he had had to let out in suites of apartments to pay debts contracted not only by himself but by his brothers.

This youth had been treated with the kindliest, most delicate generosity by the man whom he was wont to describe as his English saviour. The two, Mrs. Maule and the young Italian count, had been in a summer-house not many yards from where Mr. Maule must have fallen, but so absorbed had they been in a score on which the count was working that they had heard and seen nothing of what was happening in the garden outside.

One curious effect of the change in Mr. Maule's physical condition was the sudden dislike, almost horror, he betrayed for the genius to whom he had been so kind. So it had finally been arranged by Mrs. Maule, with, it was understood, the full a.s.sent of her husband, that the young man whose friends.h.i.+p with his benefactor had been so strangely and sadly interrupted, should continue his musical studies at the latter's expense, the only stipulation being that he should never come to England when the Maules happened to be there.

Since that time, that is eight years ago, Richard Maule had practically recovered, not his health, but what he was inclined to style with a twisted smile, his wits.

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