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thing.'
'Tell me about yourself,' he invited. 'I know so little of your life--' He
indicated a large boulder, flat-topped, that lay by the river-bed. 'Let us sit a
while and talk.'
Sarah paused, then decided this was preferable to returning to that dismal
edifice he liked to call his home. Here, despite the primeval nature of the
terrain, was the sunset, and the softness which its lowering light was
spreading over everything. She sat down, with Charon at her side.
'There's not very much to tell,' she began, but Charon interrupted and in his
customary imperious manner told her to begin at the beginning and carry on.
She told him a little about her childhood, about the way her father had had to
bring her up after the death of her mother.
'You mention that it was your father who related to you tales of the Deep
Mani,' he interposed at one point when she paused in her narrative.
'Yes. He had it all from Mother. But he visited the Mani once--' She stopped
and a faint smile touched her mouth. 'He never wanted to visit it again,' she
added at length.
Charon laughed; she turned to watch his profile. He could be handsome, she
realized with a little shock of surprise.
'Tell me some more. You were clever at school, obviously.'
'I trained for teaching, then wanted to work abroad.'
A small silence followed before he asked, turning to face her,
'And now you regret the desire?' Half statement, half question; she made no
reply, and when she did speak it was to switch the subject and ask him what
his livelihood was.
'Many things,' he replied. 'I have several hotels; I own olive groves and
citrus orchards.'
'Hotels,' she murmured with interest. 'Where are they?'
'Two are in Athens, two in Corfu and one on the island of Hydra.'
Sarah's blue eyes flickered. Hydra ... where his yacht was moored. Hydra, a
most enchanting island, a place where almost anyone would be happy to
live. It was an island where resided several of Greece's wealthiest
shipowners, men whose ancestors acquired their riches by contraband
trading in the early years of the nineteenth century when Hydra's ships sailed
even as far as the West Indies. It was a small island, with a quaint little
harbour lying serenely at the foot of Mount Prophitis Illias, and from this
port the sponge-divers sailed every spring, to spend the summer sponge
fishing along the coast of Tunisia.
'Your hotel in Hydra ... you stay in it sometimes?'
Charon moved, bending to pick up the head of a pink oleander that had been
carried either by the breeze or by a bird, from another part of the river bank.
'Sometimes,' he offered at last, and she thought this was not quite the truth.
'Why don't you live there always?'
Again he hesitated. The air was strident with cicadas and he seemed to be
diverted by the noise.
'My home is in the Mani,' he replied presently. 'I've already told you that.'
She made no comment. Why should she care that he chose this bleak and
outlandish place in preference to somewhere like Hydra or Corfu? The Mani
suited him, no doubt of that. The land of eagle- haunted crags and gloomy
gorges, of pagan gods and superstitions the stark and untamed terrain
where Satan walked at noon and ghosts abounded, where at dead of night
witches led people up the mountains to inflict hideous tortures upon them,
where a man's blood calls out loudly the day before he dies, or where if a
man should go to sleep beneath a wild fig tree he will wake up mad.
Yes, this abominable realm suited the dark forbidding Charon Drakos
admirably ... and yet&
She looked at him in profile, saw the noble lines, sharply etched in the
afterglow of sunset, the firm chin and jaw, the aristocratic way in which his
head was held. Frowning suddenly, Sarah glanced aside, as if she would put
from her a picture which was beginning to hold her in some way which, to
her practical mind, was by no means desirable. The man was a fiend, a
primitive savage whose grandmother would commit murder at this very
moment should Charon choose to hand over his prisoner to her.
'What are you thinking about, my Sarah?' The voice of Charon came to her,
unexpectedly soft and gentle.
'You,' she said, and turned to him again, compelled by some force she could
not resist.
'Me?' in some surprise. 'Must I feel honoured, or sorry for myself?'
'My thoughts were neither flattering nor derogatory.'
'Tell me,' he said imperiously.
'You suit this infernal terrain.'
He laughed, and in the lowering shadows all the evil returned to his dark
features.
'I'm beyond redemption, you think?'
Her eyes flickered.
'What answer would you like to that?'
'I don't care what answer you give. However, I'm sure that, coming from
you, it'll be a truthful one.' [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]