“Have you been waiting for me ever since, father?” she asked. A still more curious fact, she did not speak the insular dialect, but pure Athenian, with a faultless accent.
“Yes, my dear,” said Pericles, addressing her in the same language, though he had spoken good Teniote to Annunziata. “It is well that you have come now. I think, my dear, it will be better for you to spend a few days with your aunt at Mousoulou, and it has occurred to me that you might go there this afternoon.”
“But, why? I have no desire to go to Mousoulou,” protested Inarime.
“Well, if you would just please me in this matter, I cannot tell you how grateful I should be to you, Inarime,” said her father, who always treated her as an equal. For this young creature was to him more son than daughter, since he had brought her up in a masculine fashion, in the matter of education and training.
“It is strange, father, that you should turn capricious and mysterious, but I will obey you in this as in all else,” she said, with an exquisite gravity which likened her more than ever to a young goddess.
She was standing close to him now; and he got up, placed his hands upon her shoulders, and looked earnestly into her eyes.
“It is no more than I might expect of you, Inarime” he said.
There was a dignity, a restraint about the relations of these two that was very striking. Perhaps Pericles affected the manner and bearing of the Ancients, with whom he exclusively communed, and perhaps Inarime had ostentatiously caught this trick from him. Laughter with them was as rare as anger, and both held their pulses in complete subjection.
Something of Inarime’s life,--while that lucky young man, known in Greece as “the man of confidence,” who can be trusted to act as knight to a lady, is leading her mule to the distant village of Mousoulou, and while Gustav Reineke, on the “Iris,” is speeding towards the shores of Tenos. This life is simple enough: unemotional, unanalysable; an eager student from youngest years, the sole companion of a sage who lived in the past. But Inarime enjoyed a local reputation that carried the mind back to antique or mediæval days. The equilibrium of Europe was not likely to be disturbed by it, but the peace of the island most certainly was. All things we know are relative, and it is possible the unknown and unsought conquests of Inarime would have been far enough from causing any excitement to a London sylph. But besides Inarime’s influence and reputation, extending over four mayoralties and sixty-two villages, with a list of suitors headed by a bachelor mayor and the two unmarried deputies, and including every single man and youth of the island, the London sylph will be seen to play a small and insignificant part in her own distinguished circle. She would probably turn up her patrician nose at the addresses of a shepherd and a barbaric demarch. But then the shepherd and the demarch would care as little about her.