"Nay, but the maddest gambler throws his heart."
Richard Maule waited a while to see if his cousin would come to him, and
then he went up to his bedroom.
He soon dismissed his man-servant, and the book he had meant to read in
the night--a book on the newly-revealed treasures of Cretan art--lay
ready to his feeble hand on the table by the wide, low bed which was the
only new piece of furniture placed there since the room had been the
nursery of his happy childhood. But he felt unwontedly restless, and
soon he began moving about the low-ceilinged, square room with dragging,
heavy footsteps.
When they had brought him back ill to death, as he had hoped, from Italy
eight years before, it was here that he had insisted on being put; and
there were good reasons for his choice, for the room communicated by
easy shallow stairs with that part of the house where were the Greek
Room, and the library which had been arranged for him by his grandfather
as a delightful surprise on his seventeenth birthday.
Mr. Maule's bedchamber was in odd contrast to the rest of Rede Place.
The furnishings were frankly ugly, substantial veneered furniture had
been chosen by the sensible, middle-aged woman to whom Theophilus Joy,
after anxious consultation with the leading doctor of the day, had
confided his precious orphan grandson. His old nurse's clean,
self-respecting presence haunted, not unpleasantly, the room at times
when Richard Maule only asked to forget the present in the past.
His wife, Athena, had never been in this room. Even when he was lying
helpless, scarcely able to make himself understood by his nurses, the
stricken man had been able to convey his strong wish concerning this
matter of his wife's banishment from his sick room to Dick Wantele, and
Athena had quietly acquiesced....
As time had gone on, Richard Maule had become in a very real sense
master of this one room; here at least none had the right to disturb him
or to spy on his infirmities unless he gave them leave.
He went across to the window which commanded a side view of the door by
which the inmates of Rede Place generally let themselves in and out.
Dick, so he felt sure, was out of doors--no doubt walking off, as the
young and hale are able to do, his anger and his pain.
A great yearning for his kinsman came over Richard Maule. Drawing the
folds of his luxurious dressing-gown round his shrunken limbs, he
painfully pushed a chair to a window and sat down there. And as he
looked out into the October night, waiting for the sound which would
tell him that Dick had come in, he allowed himself to do what he very
seldom did--he thought of the past and surveyed, dispassionately, the
present.
To the majority of people there is something repugnant in the sight of
an old man married to a lovely young woman, and this feeling is
naturally intensified when the husband happens to be in any way infirm.
Richard Maule was aware that these were the feelings with which he and
his wife had long been regarded, both by their immediate neighbours and
by the larger circle of the outer world where Mrs. Maule enjoyed the
popularity so easily accorded to any woman who contributes beauty and a
measure of agreeable animation to the common stock.
But this knowledge, painful as it might have been to a proud and
sensitive man, found Richard Maule almost indifferent. Had he been
compelled to define his feeling in words, he would probably have
observed that, after having brought his life to such utter shipwreck as
he had done, this added mortification was not of a nature to trouble him
greatly.
Richard Maule, in his day, and still by courtesy, a noted Hellenist, 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
gratitude 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 fashioning 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 grassy 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 association. 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 Ægean waters, he dreamed
dreams with the Greek patriots to whose aspirations he showed himself
willing to sacrifice, if need be, both blood and treasure. There also he
would bring together each winter bands of young Englishmen, dowered with
more romance than pence. The very brigands respected the rose-red marble
villa and its English owner, and Greece for many years was his true
country and his favourite dwelling-place.
This being so, it was perhaps not so very strange that in time Richard
Maule should have chosen an Ionian wife. His large circle--for in those
days the owner of Rede Place was a man with admiring friends in every
rank and condition of life, almost, it might be said, in every country
and capital of Europe--were much interested to learn that if Mrs. Maule
had borne before her marriage the respectable English name of Durdon,
she was through her Greek mother a Messala, the representative of a
house whose ancestors had borne titles transmitted to them from the days
when Venice held sway over the seven islands.
As was meet, the philo-Hellenist had met his future wife during a stay
in Athens, and to him there had been something at once fragrant and
austere in a courtship conducted in a rather humble villa reared on the
cliff at Phaleron, from whose cramped verandah there lay unrolled the
marvellous panorama of the plain of Athens, and eastwards, across the
bay, Hymettus.
It was there that Athena Durdon, her beauty made the more nymph-like and
ethereal by the opalescent light of a May moon, consented to exchange
the meagre life which had been led by her in the past as daughter of the
British Vice-Consul at Athens, for the life she had only known--but
known how well!--in dreams, that of the wife of an Englishman possessed
of a limitless purse and the key to every world.
Now, to-night, looking back on it all, stirred out of his usual
apathetic endurance by the knowledge of what Dick Wantele was feeling,
Richard Maule smiled, a grim inward smile, when he remembered how, even
during their brief honeymoon, spent at his ardent desire at Corinth,
Athena had made it quite clear that what she longed for was Paris,
London, or perhaps it would be more true to say the Champs Elysées and
Mayfair! They had been standing--he looking far younger than his
forty-five years, she in one of the white gowns in which he loved to see
her, but the simplicity of which she even then deplored--close to the
Pierian spring, when she had, by a few playful, but very eager, words
shown him what was in her heart.
* * * * *
And yet, whatever he might now believe, during the first two years which
had followed his marriage Richard Maule had been a happy man--happier,
he had been then wont to assure himself, than in the days before he had
married his enchanting, wayward, and often tantalisingly mysterious
Athena. In those days none had ever seemed to regard Richard Maule as
unreasonably older than Athena, for he had retained an amazing look, as
also an amazing feeling, of youth.
Then in a day, an hour, nay a moment, he had been struck down.
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 gods, as
Richard Maule believed--neither he nor his wife ever made any allusion;
indeed, when Dick 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 protégé 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 assent of her husband, that the young man
whose friendship 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.
* * * * *
Suddenly Dick Wantele's dark figure emerged into the moonlight from
under the trees which in the daytime now formed a ruddy wall round the
formal gardens of Rede Place. Mr. Maule moved back from his window. He
did not wish Dick to think he had been waiting, watching for him.
And then the sight of the dark figure in the moonlight had recalled to
the owner of Rede Place other vigils kept by him during the last year.
Sometimes, very often of late, Bayworth Kaye, unthinking of the honour
of the woman he loved, had tried to lengthen the precious moments he was
to spend with her by striking across that piece of moonlit sward which
could be seen so clearly from Richard Maule's window.
But the young soldier had always left the house by a more secret
way--Athena had seen to that--a way that led almost straight from her
boudoir on the ground floor of the house into the Arboretum and so into
the wider stretches of the wooded park.