Mr. Achilles Part 3

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 b.u.t.terfly, 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 Sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sing days brought grateful rea.s.surance.... 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 a.s.sented. "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 Sh.o.r.e, 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 sh.o.r.e 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 ma.s.sive 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.sive 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 impa.s.sive jaw.