A ring of genuine pleasure had come into the young voice which a few moments before had only too plainly told a tale of dejection and bitterness.

Wantele turned and looked at her. For the first time that evening he smiled broadly, and there came into his eyes the humorous light which generally dwelt there.

"I suppose you know all about him," he said dryly. "I suppose you followed every step of the Expedition?"

"Of course I did!" she exclaimed. "How father would have loved to meet General Lingard"--there came a touch of keen regret into her voice.

"I expect you'll meet your hero very often before you've done with him, Mabel"--as he said the words he struck a match and lit a cigarette--"for he and Jane Oglander are going to be married."

"General Lingard and Jane Oglander?" Mabel could not keep a measure of extreme surprise and excitement out of her voice, but she was, what her dead father's old soldier servant always described her as being, "a thorough little lady," and after hearing Wantele's quiet word of a.s.sent to her involuntary question, she refrained, without any seeming effort, from pursuing the subject.

At last Wantele got up. "Well," he said. "Well, Mabel? This is a queer, 'unked' kind of world, isn't it?"

She nodded her head, and without offering him her hand she unlatched the door.

When she knew him to be well away, she came back and, laying her head on the table, burst into tears. She loved Jane Oglander--she rejoiced in Jane's good fortune--but the contrast was too great between Jane's fate and hers.

But for Athena Maule, but for the spell Athena had cast over Bayworth Kaye, she, Mabel, would probably by now have been Bayworth's wife, on the way to India--India the land of her childish, of her girlish dreams.

CHAPTER V

"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 d.i.c.k 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.

d.i.c.k, 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 d.i.c.k had come in, he allowed himself to do what he very seldom did--he thought of the past and surveyed, dispa.s.sionately, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.