Chapter 2

The woman’s eyes were veiled with sudden mist. She drew the child close. “Tell mother about it.”

Betty Harris looked down, stroking her mother’s sleeve. A little smile of memory held her lips. “He was a beautiful man!” she said.

The mother waited, breathless.

“I was walking home, and I came to his shop--”

“To his shop!”

She nodded reassuringly. “His fruit-shop--and--oh, I forgot--” She reached into the little bag at her side, tugging at something. “He gave me these.” She produced the round box and took off the lid, looking into it with pleased eyes. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

The mother bent blindly to it. “Pomegranates,” she said. Her lips were still a little white, but they smiled bravely with the child’s pleasure.

“Pomegranates,” said Betty, nodding. “That is what he called them. I should like to taste one--” She was looking at them a little wistfully.

“We will have them for luncheon,” said the mother. She had touched the bell with quick decision.

“Marie”--she held out the box--“tell Nesmer to serve these with luncheon.”

“Am I to have luncheon with you, mother-dear?” The child’s eyes were on her mother’s face.

“With me--yes.” The reply was prompt--if a little tremulous.

The child sighed happily. “It is being a marvellous day,” she said, quaintly.

The mother smiled. “Come and get ready for luncheon, and then you shall tell me about the wonderful man.”

So it came about that Betty Harris, seated across the dark, shining table, told her mother, Mrs. Philip Harris, a happy adventure wherein she, Betty Harris, who had never before set foot unattended in the streets of Chicago, had wandered for an hour and more in careless freedom, and straying at last into the shop of a marvellous Greek--one Achilles Alexandrakis by name--had heard strange tales of Greece and Athens and the Parthenon--tales at the very mention of which her eyes danced and her voice rippled.

And her mother, listening across the table, trembled at the dangers the child touched upon and flitted past. It had been part of the careful rearing of Betty Harris that she should not guess that the constant attendance upon her was a body-guard--such as might wait upon a princess. It had never occurred to Betty Harris that other little girls were not guarded from the moment they rose in the morning till they went to bed at night, and that even at night Miss Stone slept within sound of her breath. She had grown up happy and care-free, with no suspicion of the danger that threatened the child of a marked millionaire. She did not even know that her father was a very rich man--so protected had she been. She was only a little more simple than most children of twelve. And she met the world with straight, shining looks, speaking to rich and poor with a kind of open simplicity that won the heart.

Her mother, watching the clear eyes, had a sudden pang of what the morning might have been--the disillusionment and terror of this unprotected hour--that had been made instead a memory of delight--thanks to an unknown Greek named Achilles Alexandrakis, who had told her of the beauties of Greece and the Parthenon, and had given her fresh pomegranates to carry home in a round box. The mother’s thoughts rested on the man with a quick sense of gratitude. He should be paid a thousand times over for his care of Betty Harris--and for pomegranates.

“They are like the Parthenon,” said the child, holding one in her hand and turning it daintily to catch the light on its pink surface. “They grew in Athens.” She set her little teeth firmly in its round side.

IV

AND ACHILLES DREAMS

Achilles, in his little shop, went in and out with the thought of the child in his heart. His thin fingers flitted lightly among the fruit. The sadness in his face had given way to a kind of waking joy and thoughtfulness. As he made change and did up bags and parcels of fruit, his thoughts kept hovering about her, and his lips moved in a soft smile, half-muttering again the words he had spoken to her--praises of Athens, city of light, sky of brightness, smiles, and running talk.... It was all with him, and his heart was free. How the child’s eyes had followed the words, full of trust! He should see her again--and again.... Outside a halo rested on the smoky air--a little child, out of the rattle and din, had spoken to him. As he looked up, the big, sooty city became softly the presence of the child.... The sound of pennies clinking in hurried palms was no longer harsh upon his ears; they tinkled softly--little tunes that ran. Truly it had been a wonderful day for Achilles Alexandrakis.

He paused in his work and looked about the little shop. The same dull-shining rows of fruit, the same spicy smell and the glowing disks of yellow light. He drew a deep, full breath. It was all the same, but the world was changed. His heart that had ached so long with its pent-up message of Greece--the glory of her days, the beauty of temples and statues and tombs--was freed by the tale of his lips. The world was new-born for him. He lifted the empty fig-box, from which the child had set free the butterfly that had hung imprisoned in its grey cocoon throughout the long winter, and placed it carefully on the shelf. The lettering traced along its side was faded and dim; but he saw again the child’s eyes lifted to it--the lips half-parted, the eager question and swift demand--that he should tell her of Athens and the Parthenon--and the same love and the wonder that dwelt in his own heart for the city of his birth. It was a strange coincidence that the child should have come to him. Perhaps she was the one soul in the great, hurrying city who could care. They did not understand--these hurrying, breathless men and women--how a heart could ache for something left behind across the seas, a city of quiet, the breath of the Past--sorrow and joy and sweet life.... No, they could not understand! But the child--He caught his breath a little. Where was she--in the hurry and rush? He had not thought to ask. And she was gone! Only for a moment the dark face clouded. Then the smile flooded again. He should find her. It might be hard--but he would search. Had he not come down the long way of the Piraeus to the sea--blue in the sun. Across the great waters by ship, and the long miles by train. He should find her.... They would talk again. He laughed quietly in the dusky shop.

Then his eye fell upon it--the music roll that had slipped quietly to the floor when her eager hand had lifted itself to touch the butterfly, opening and closing his great wings in the fig-box. He crossed to it and lifted it almost reverently, brushing a breath of dust from its leather sides.... He bent closer to it, staring at a little silver plate that swung from the strap. He carried it to the window, rubbing it on the worn black sleeve, and bending closer, studying the deep-cut letters. Then he lifted his head. A quick sigh floated from him. Miss Elizabeth Harris, 108 Lake Shore Drive. He knew the place quite well--facing the lake, where the water boomed against the great break-water. He would take it to her--to-morrow--the next day--next week, perhaps.... He wrapped it carefully away and laid it in a drawer to wait. She had asked him to come.

V

THE GREEK PROFESSOR LAUGHS

To Mrs. Philip Harris, in the big house looking out across the lake, the passing days brought grateful reassurance.... Betty was safe--Miss Stone was well again--and the man had not come.... She breathed more freely as she thought of it. The child had told her that she had asked him. But she had forgotten to give him her address; and it would not do to be mixed up with a person like that--free to come and go as he liked. He was no doubt a worthy man. But Betty was only a child, and too easily enamoured of people she liked. It was strange how deep an impression the man’s words had made on her. Athens and Greece filled her waking moments. Statues and temples--photographs and books of travel loaded the school-room shelves. The house reeked with Greek learning. Poor Miss Stone found herself drifting into archaeology; and an exhaustive study of Greek literature, Greek life, Greek art filled her days. The theory of Betty Harris’s education had been elaborately worked out by specialists from earliest babyhood. Certain studies, rigidly prescribed, were to be followed whether she liked them or not--but outside these lines, subjects were to be taken up when she showed an interest in them. There could be no question that the time for the study of Greek history and Greek civilisation had come. Miss Stone laboured early and late. Instruction from the university down the lake was pressed into service.... But out of it all the child seemed, by some kind of precious alchemy, to extract only the best, the vital heart of it.

The instructor in Greek marvelled a little. “She is only a child,” he reported to the head of the department, “and the family are American of the newest type--you know, the Philip Harrises?”

The professor nodded. “I know--hide and hoof a generation back.”

The instructor assented. “But the child is uncanny. She knows more about Greek than--”

“Than _I_ do, I suppose.” The professor smiled indulgently. “She wouldn’t have to know much for that.”

“It isn’t so much what she _knows_. She has a kind of _feeling_ for things. I took up a lot of photographs to-day--some of the _later_ period mixed in--and she picked them out as if she had been brought up in Athens.”

The professor looked interested. “Modern educational methods?”

“As much as you like,” said the instructor. “But it is something more. When I am with the child I am in Athens itself. Chicago makes me blink when I come out.”

The professor laughed. The next day he made an appointment to go himself to see the child. He was a famous epigraphist and an authority in his subject. He had spent years in Greece--with his nose, for the most part, held close to bits of parchment and stone.

When he came away, he was laughing softly. “I am going over for a year,” he said, when he met the instructor that afternoon in the corridor.

“Did you see the little Harris girl?” asked the instructor.

The professor paused. “Yes, I saw her.”

“How did she strike you?”

“She struck me dumb,” said the professor. “I listened for the best part of an hour while she expounded things to me--asked me questions I couldn’t answer, mostly.” He chuckled a little. “I felt like a fool,” he added, frankly, “and it felt good.”

The instructor smiled. “I go through it twice a week. The trouble seems to be that she’s alive, and that she thinks everything Greek is alive, too.”

The professor nodded. “It’s never occurred to her it’s dead and done with, these thousand years and more.” He gave a little sigh. “Sometimes I’ve wondered myself whether it is--quite as dead as it looks to you and me,” he added. “You know that grain--wheat or something--that Blackman took from the Egyptian mummy he brought over last spring--”

“Yes, he planted it--”

“Exactly. And all summer he was tending a little patch of something green up there in his back yard--as fresh as the eyes of Pharaoh’s daughter ever looked on--”

The instructor opened his eyes a little. This was a wild flight for the head epigraphist.

“That’s the way she made me feel--that little Harris girl,” explained the professor--“as if my mummy might spring up and blossom any day if I didn’t look out.”

The instructor laughed out. “So you’re going over with it?”

“A year--two years, maybe,” said the professor. “I want to watch it sprout.”

VI

ACHILLES CALLS ON BETTY HARRIS

In another week Achilles Alexandrakis had made ready to call on Betty Harris. There had been many details to attend to--a careful sponging and pressing of his best suit, the purchase of a new hat, and cuffs and collars of the finest linen--nothing was too good for the little lady who had flitted into the dusky shop and out, leaving behind her the little line of light.

Achilles brushed the new hat softly, turning it on his supple wrist with gentle pride. He took out the music-roll from the drawer and unrolled it, holding it in light fingers. He would carry it back to Betty Harris, and he would stay for a while and talk with her of his beloved Athens. Outside the sun gleamed. The breeze came fresh from the lake. As he made his way up the long drive of the Lake Shore, the water dimpled in the June sun, and little waves lapped the great stones, touching the ear with quiet sound. It was a clear, fresh day, with the hint of coming summer in the air. To the left, stone castles lifted themselves sombrely in the soft day. Grim or flaunting, they faced the lake--castles from Germany, castles from France and castles from Spain. Achilles eyed them with a little smile as his swift, thin feet traversed the long stones. There were turrets and towers and battlements frowning upon the peaceful, workaday lake. Minarets and flowers in stone, and heavy marble blocks that gripped the earth. Suddenly Achilles’s foot slackened its swift pace. His eye dropped to the silver tag on the music-roll in his hand, and lifted itself again to a gleaming red-brown house at the left. It rose with a kind of lightness from the earth, standing poised upon the shore of the lake, like some alert, swift creature caught in flight, brought to bay by the rush of waters. Achilles looked at it with gentle eyes, a swift pleasure lighting his glance. It was a beautiful structure. Its red-brown front and pointed, lifting roof had hardly a Greek line or hint; but the spirit that built the Parthenon was in it--facing the rippling lake. He moved softly across the smooth roadway and leaned against the parapet of stone that guarded the water, studying the line and colour of the house that faced him.

The man who planned it had loved it, and as it rose there in the light it was perfect in every detail as it had been conceived--with one little exception. On either side the doorway crouched massive grey-pink lions wrought in stone, the heavy outspread paws and firm-set haunches resting at royal ease. In the original plan these lions had not appeared. But in their place had been two steers--wide-flanked and short-horned, with lifted heads and nostrils snuffling free--something crude, brusque, perhaps, but full of power and quick onslaught. The house that rose behind them had been born of the same thought. Its pointed gable and its facades, its lifted front, had the same look of challenge; the light, firm-planted hoofs, the springing head, were all there--in the soft, red stone running to brown in the flanks.

The stock-yard owner and his wife had liked the design--with no suspicion of the symbol undergirding it. The man had liked it all--steers and red-brown stone and all--but the wife had objected. She had travelled far, and she had seen, on a certain building in Rome, two lions guarding a ducal entrance.

Now that the house was finished, the architect seldom passed that way. But when he did he swore at the lions, softly, as he whirred by. He had done a mighty thing--conceived in steel and stone a house that fitted the swift life out of which it came, a wind-swept place in which it stood, and all the stirring, troublous times about it. There it rose in its spirit of lightness, head up-lifted and nostrils sniffing the breeze--and in front of it squatted two stone lions from the palmy days of Rome. He gritted his teeth, and drove his machine hard when he passed that way.

But to Achilles, standing with bared head, the breeze from the lake touching his forehead, the lions were of no account. He let them go. The spirit of the whole possessed him. It was as if a hand had touched him lightly on the shoulder, in a crowd, staying him. A quick breath escaped his lips as he replaced his hat and crossed to the red-brown steps. He mounted them without a glance at the pink monsters on either hand. A light had come into his face. The child filled it.

The stiff butler eyed him severely, and the great door seemed ready to close of itself. Only something in the poise of Achilles’s head, a look in his eyes, held the hinge waiting a grudging minute while he spoke.

He lifted his head a little; the look in his eyes deepened. “I am called--Miss Elizabeth Harris--and her mother--to see,” he said, simply.

The door paused a little and swung back an inch. He might be a great savant... some scholar of parts--an artist. They came for the child--to examine her--to play for her--to talk with her.... Then there was the music-roll. It took the blundering grammar and the music-roll to keep the door open--and then it opened wide and Achilles entered, following the butler’s stateliness up the high, dark hall. Rich hangings were about them, and massive pictures, bronzes and statues, and curious carvings. Inside the house the taste of the mistress had prevailed.

At the door of a great, high-ceiled room the butler paused, holding back the soft drapery with austere hand. “What name--for madame?” he said.

The clear eyes of Achilles met his. “My name is Achilles Alexandrakis,” he said, quietly.

The eyes of the butler fell. He was struggling with this unexpected morsel in the recesses of his being. Plain Mr. Alexander would have had small effect upon him; but Achilles Alexandrakis--! He mounted the long staircase, holding the syllables in his set teeth.

“Alexandrakis?” His mistress turned a little puzzled frown upon him. “What is he like, Conner?”

The man considered a safe moment. “He’s a furriner,” he said, addressing the wall before him with impassive jaw.

A little light crossed her face--not a look of pleasure. “Ask Miss Stone to come to me--at once,” she said.

The man bowed himself out and departed on silken foot.

Miss Stone, gentle and fluttering and fine-grained, appeared a moment later in the doorway.

“He has come,” said the woman, without looking up.

“He--?” Miss Stone’s lifted eyebrows sought to place him--

“The Greek--I told you--”

“Oh--The Greek--!” It was slow and hesitant. It spoke volumes for Miss Stone’s state of mind. Hours of Greek history were in it, and long rows of tombs and temples--the Parthenon of gods and goddesses, with a few outlying scores of heroes and understudies. “The--Greek,” she repeated, softly.

“The Greek,” said the woman, with decision. “He has asked for Betty and for me. I cannot see him, of course.”

“You have the club,” said Miss Stone, in soft assent.

“I have the club--in ten minutes.” Her brow wrinkled. “You will kindly see him--”

“And Betty--?” said Miss Stone, waiting.

“The child must see him. Yes, of course. She would be heart-broken--You drive at three,” she added, without emphasis.

“We drive at three,” repeated Miss Stone.

She moved quietly away, her grey gown a bit of shimmering in the gorgeous rooms. She had been chosen for the very qualities that made her seem so curiously out of place--for her gentleness and unassuming dignity, and a few ancestors. The country had been searched for a lady--so much the lady that she had never given the matter a thought. Miss Stone was the result. If Betty had charm and simplicity and instinctive courtesy toward those whom she met, it was only what she saw every day in the little grey woman who directed her studies, her play, her whole life.

The two were inseparable, light and shadow, morning and night. Betty’s mother in the house was the grand lady--beautiful to look upon--the piece of bronze, or picture, that went with the house; but Miss Stone was Betty’s own--the little grey voice, a bit of heart-love, and something common and precious.

They came down the long rooms together, the child’s hand resting lightly in hers, and her steps dancing a little in happy play. She had not heard the man’s name. He was only a wise man whom she was to meet for a few minutes, before she and Miss Stone went for their drive. The day was full of light outside--even in the heavily draped rooms you could feel its presence. She was eager to be off, out in the sun and air of the great sea of freshness, and the light, soft wind on her face.

Then she saw the slim, dark man who had risen to meet her, and a swift light crossed her face.... She was coming down the room now, both hands out-stretched, fluttering a little in the quick surprise and joy. Then the hands stayed themselves, and she advanced demurely to meet him; but the hand that lifted itself to his seemed to sing like a child’s hand--in spite of the princess.

“I am glad you have come,” she said. “This is Miss Stone.” She seated herself beside him, her eyes on his face, her little feet crossed at the ankle. “Have you any new fruit to-day?” she asked, politely.

He smiled a little, and drew a soft, flat, white bit of tissue from his pocket, undoing it fold on fold--till in the centre lay a grey-green leaf.

The child bent above it with pleased glance. Her eyes travelled to his face.

He nodded quickly. “I thought of you. It is the Eastern citron. See--” He lifted the leaf and held it suspended. “It hangs like this--and the fruit is blue--grey-blue like--” His eye travelled about the elaborate room. He shook his head slowly. Then his glance fell on the grey gown of Miss Stone as it fell along the rug at her feet, and he bowed with gracious appeal for permission. “Like the dress of madame,” he said--“but warmer, like the sun--and blue.”

A low colour crept up into the soft line of Miss Stone’s cheek and rested there. She sat watching the two with slightly puzzled eyes. She was a lady--kindly and gracious to the world--but she could not have thought of anything to say to this fruit-peddler who had seemed, for days and weeks, to be tumbling all Greek civilisation about her head. The child was chatting with him as if she had known him always. They had turned to each other again, and were absorbed in the silken leaf--the man talking in soft, broken words, the child piecing out the half-finished phrase with quick nod and gesture, her little voice running in and out along the words like ripples of light on some dark surface.

The face of Achilles had grown strangely radiant. Miss Stone, as she looked at it again, was almost startled at the change. The sombre look had vanished. Quick lights ran in it, and little thoughts that met the child’s and laughed. “They are two children together,” thought Miss Stone, as she watched them. “I have never seen the child so happy. She must see him again.” She sat with her hands folded in her grey lap, a little apart, watching the pretty scene and happy in it, but outside it all, untouched and grey and still.

VII

TO MEET THE “HALCYON CLUB”