the freshness of that young romance—when the heart seems ready to kindle again beneath the ashes—when the glance of an eye, the sound of a light footstep, the tone of a voice, have all the power of enchantment. And so it was then. That man, who had exhausted every pleasure of sense, and had sneered in cold and bitter scepticism, like a mocking fiend, at the romance of love and every pure and holy sentiment, was again the slave of woman’s unconscious witchery. The name and the voice of Katinka rang incessantly in his ears; and her image stood before him, fresh and pure as a dream of childhood.
With a feeble and lingering reluctance, he availed himself of the permission she had given, and in less than a week was a constant and welcome visitor at the house of Soutsos. His rank, his name, his generous sacrifices and enthusiasm in the cause of Greece, and, more than all, the graceful and winning affability that replaced the cold and melancholy reserve of his ordinary manner, gained irresistibly upon the unsophisticated family. It was strange to see them—when he told of his wandering life, his romantic history and mysterious adventures, or spoke of the glory and the heroism and the genius of the immortal Greeks of other times—hanging upon his words, and smiling through their tears.
“I shall visit these people no more,” he said, one night, as he passed along the silent street to his own residence. “I shall see Katinka but once again; her beauty and innocence are not for such as I am. When I speak, I see her heart looking through her eyes. Poor child! she is too pure to be guarded or suspicious. Those songs of love and chivalry which I compose in her own soft language she learns eagerly—she is intoxicated. I must leave her before it be too late.”
“It is three days since you were here,” were Katinka’s first words, when they met again.
“Yes, Katinka; and I come now for the last time.”
“Why? Are you going to the war?”
He answered only by a look of the most tender and sorrowful interest.
“You will see us no more, then?” she repeated. “It is well; for you are in love.”
“In love! With whom?”
“With me! You come not, I know, for sake of my father or mother; my sister Aspasia is but a child; it is Katinka, then, for whom you come.”
“Do you fear, then, for my peace of mind?” he asked, with a smile.
“Much more than for my own.”
He was silent again; for those words kindled a tumult of passion that had long slept within him—pride and pity and a rebellious feeling of humiliation. His inmost heart was read; and his power, to which so many haughty beauties had yielded, defied by a guileless and ignorant girl; and while his conscience struggled hard against the impulse to reverse the victory and place her at his mercy, he turned away, and left her still unanswered.
“’Tis all in vain,” he said, after some hours of silent and torturing conflict with himself. “Press down the wild fig-tree, and it only grows the stronger! I cannot steel my heart against the magic of that subtle sorcery that tempted even the bright-winged seraphim from heaven! That spell this girl has now laid upon me. I will meet her again, and she shall be mine!”
It was the hour of sunset—the gorgeous and many-hued sunset of Greece. Katinka and the stranger are moving slowly toward her home; and she walks beside him, free and fearless, as if he were her brother. They have been talking much, but both are silent now, for she guesses at the thought which he has not yet ventured to express.
Katinka was the first to speak; as they sat together in the garden, she on a rustic bench shaded by a pomegranate tree, and he on the ground, playing with the beads of a rosary tha hung from her girdle, and looking up into those lustrous eyes to which the deepening twilight lent a fearful power; for she seemed to him that moment the most beautiful being he had ever beheld. Her features were classic as those of the Ionian beauties of the old time, and her long raven hair streamed in thick braids from beneath the small embroidered cap of crimson and gold.
“Many women,” she said, “must have been conquered by your words, for they are resistless and fatal as the spell of the evil eye. You do not answer me? You seem as if your thoughts were far away.”
“Yes,” said he slowly. “I remember that, on such a night as this, some twenty years ago, I sat by the feet of another maiden, as I do now at yours. I was a suppliant then, as I am now; and she scorned the love I offered her.”
“Twenty years! Then she was your first love?”
“Yes; and you are the last.”
“She must have loved another, then!”
A cloud of dark and painful suspicion passed over the stranger’s face; and he bent his eyes upon her in a look of inquisitive alarm.
“Let us go in,” she said. “Night is coming, and I must not be here.”
“Katinka,” said he, as he arose to leave her, “why do you suppose that the lady of whom I spoke just now loved another? Do you love another?”
“Come again to-morrow,” she answered, “and I will tell you all.”
The morrow, accordingly, found him at an early hour again beside Katinka. She was singing in a low and trembling voice; but the song was one that he had not heard before, and the words and music both breathed the deepest anguish of despair. Suddenly her voice failed her, and she ceased, as if some convulsive emotion would vent itself in tears. While he turned toward her in alarm, she tottered and fell. In a moment he was bending over her, and supporting her head upon his knee.
“My Palikar is dead!” she murmured, drawing a letter from her bosom. “When he left me, we shared a poison between us: he, that he might not fall alive into the hands of the enemy; and I, that I should not survive him! Byron! avenge my country and my Palikar! Eis aióna chaire moi!”
