The Golden Hope. Robert H. Fuller
Ariston was carefully sealing this letter, a gaunt, sour-visaged woman entered the room. She was his wife and the one person on earth in whom he had confidence. Like most secretive men with whom duplicity is a daily study, he sometimes felt the need of telling the truth, if only to note the effect of his schemes upon another's mind. But even to his wife, whose covetousness was equal to his own, he never revealed all that was in his brain. Her lonely life was spent in a constant endeavor to piece out from what he imparted to her the full extent of his plans. She admired his intellect, but deep in her heart she feared him, and, womanlike, she was tormented by the suspicion that somewhere she had a rival to whom he told what he concealed from her. The consciousness of her own deficiency of charms made her manner all the more harsh and forbidding. As soon as she entered the room she noted that he was in an easy mood, and she made haste to take advantage of it.
"Who were these men?" she asked. "What are you about now?"
"Affairs of state, Xanthe, that are not for women to know," he said mockingly.
"All that concerns you concerns me," she replied. "Am I to do the work of a slave here like a mole in the dark? Who are these women you were talking of with that evil-looking man?"
"So you were listening!" Ariston said with a frown.
"Yes, I was, if you must know it," Xanthe said defiantly. "Do you think I am to know nothing? If you had consulted more freely with me before, we would not now be the paupers that we are, and many times I have told you this, but you will not listen to me because I am a woman."
There was something in this remonstrance that made an impression upon Ariston's mind, smarting as he was over the loss of his fortune. It might have been better, after all, if he had told her more.
"We were talking of only one woman," he said, with an impulse of frankness. "She is Artemisia."
"Artemisia!" Xanthe exclaimed. "Don't try to deceive me. Why should you wish Artemisia to be carried off? Is not Clearchus to make her his wife?"
"It is for that very reason," Ariston replied. "I do not wish him to do so."
"Why not?" Xanthe demanded in a tone of suspicion.
"Sit down and let us talk rationally," Ariston said. "Suppose they marry and have children. His property would be lost to us forever."
"That is true," Xanthe assented. "I had not thought of that, and we need it so much more than he. If he should die, would it belong to us?"
"It would," her husband answered, "and now you know why I wish to prevent the marriage."
He rose, and she aided him to adjust the folds of his himation.
"I am going to the Assembly," he said. "If we have war with Macedon, the price of corn will advance. Look to the house and let none enter while I am away."
It was not until after he had gone that Xanthe began to wonder how she and Ariston were to profit by preventing the marriage, since their nephew would still be alive and in the possession of his property. It could not be that Ariston intended to have him slain. She shuddered at the thought, for she was fond of Clearchus, and he had always been kind to her. Besides, such a crime could not be committed without almost certain detection. Ariston must have formed some other scheme for bringing about his object. She reproached herself for not having questioned him on this point while he was in a frame of mind to answer. The opportunity might not occur again and she could only guess at what was to come. The half-confidence that he had given her left her more watchful and suspicious than ever.
Syphax meantime had found his way back to the Agora and was about to enter a wine-shop when he felt some one pluck him by the elbow. Glancing back, his eyes met those of Mena.
"Ah, my fox," he exclaimed, "what brings you to Athens?"
"Necessity and my master," Mena replied. "And you?"
Syphax shook his head and made as if to move away, but Mena was not to be denied. An hour later they were still together, sitting side by side in a corner of the wine-shop, and it was fortunate for Ariston that the Egyptian was his ally instead of his enemy, for all that Syphax could tell, he knew.
CHAPTER IV
THE VOICE OF DEMOSTHENES
In the Theatre of Dionysus the citizens of Athens were gathering for the purpose of deciding whether to break their treaty with Macedon and by one stroke revenge upon Alexander the wrongs and humiliations that his father had made them suffer. Ariston walked through the spacious Agora, surrounded by colonnades and embellished by the statues of heroes and the Gods. The shopkeepers and merchants were closing their places of business and joining in the human tide that was setting all in the same direction.
Everywhere Ariston heard repeated the assertion that Alexander was dead. The news was announced in tones of joy, and invariably it was accompanied by an expression of desire for war while the enemy was still unprepared. There seemed to be only one opinion among the people. It was manifested in the clamor of gay and careless confusion that betrayed the nervous tension of the throng.
Ariston's face became more thoughtful as he proceeded. He had no doubt of what the Assembly would do if unchecked, and he foresaw the downfall of his plans. A declaration of war with Macedon would be fatal. Whatever the issue of such a conflict might be, it would certainly delay Alexander's invasion of Persia and keep Clearchus at home. He must be rid of Clearchus at all hazards, and without violence.
Moreover, he knew that the report of Alexander's death was false. It was impossible that any person in Athens should have been able to obtain information later than that which had been brought to him. He felt assured that the young king was fighting his way out of Illyria, with every prospect of escape, and that the report of his death had been started by Demosthenes as a stratagem to dispose the minds of the people to war. By preventing the success of this plan, he reflected, he would not only be serving his own ends, but also performing a public service. Such a coincidence had happened rarely enough in his career.
But he knew it would be useless to attempt any contradiction of the report at that moment. He was too thoroughly acquainted with the characteristics of his countrymen to think of it. They wished to believe and they would not allow that wish to be thwarted. He must watch and wait.
Pushing through the chattering crowd, he entered the Theatre. Before him, in a great semicircle, hewn partly out of the solid rock of the southeastern pitch of the Acropolis, he saw row on row and tier above tier of his fellow-citizens—the brilliant, unstable, cowardly, heroic, passionate, generous, cruel democracy of Athens. Above them towered the crag which they had crowned with triumphs of art and architecture beyond the power of the world to equal, guarded by the wonderful Athene, whose creator they had sent to die in prison. On the left the great temple of Olympian Zeus raised its massive fluted columns. In the Theatre where they sat their fathers had hissed or applauded the masterpieces of tragedy and comedy. The babel of talk and of light-hearted laughter, the shifting of many-hued garments under the intense blue arch of the sky, reminded Ariston of the fickle sunlit waves of the Ægean.
The cloud that for years had overshadowed Athens had been removed. Philip, the tenacious, subtle, resourceful monarch of barbarous Macedon, had fallen under the dagger of Pausanias, who had doubtless been inspired by the Gods to punish him for his crimes against the Athenians. Little by little, with a purpose that never swerved, he had made himself master of their fairest possessions. Time and again they had sought to shake him off with brief outbursts of restless fury; but he held what he had won, and in the lull that followed the storm he had never failed to creep nearer to their citadel. His advance seemed to them as inevitable as fate.
Now he was gone, resigning his power and his ambitions to his son, Alexander, a boy of twenty years, whom all Athens knew as a foolish and rash youth. After laying claim to the honors that his father had forced the states of Hellas to bestow upon