“Stay with me! What the deuce do you mean?”
“Just what I say. There are no words to describe my wretchedness. I am sick of everything and everybody. You, at least, won’t criticise or blame. Your own life has not been so successful that you need censure very harshly the blunders of mine.”
He looked at her drearily, unnotingly, and yet he felt drawn to her by an immense personal sympathy and a kind of remembered affection that nothing could ever quite obliterate.
“Oh, for that, I am not disposed to censure any one but the smug hypocrites, who talk religion and virtue until one longs to fling something in their faces. For the idiots I have a tremendous weakness, I confess.”
“You care a little for me, don’t you, Photini?” Rudolph cried, like a forsaken child.
Photini moved towards him, and gathered him into her arms.
“I love you furiously, you wretched boy,” she exclaimed, and held him to her. “But just because you are an idiot, you are not to pay any heed to it.”
Rudolph for answer flung his arms round her, laid his head upon her bosom, and burst into wild hysteric sobs.
“Oh, you baby!” shouted Photini, trying to shake him off, but he only clung to her the more convulsively, and tightened his clasp of her until she could hardly breathe.
“Finish! this is absurd. What has happened to you, child?”
“Everybody is against me,” he said, striving hard to choke back his tears. “I hate myself. I have made a mess of everything, and I wish I were dead.”
“That is why you have come to me, I suppose. If you are destined to be damned in the next world, you are willing to begin the operation in this,” said Photini, drily.
“I want to stay with you. If you repulse me, Photini, I swear I’ll go straightway and blow my brains out.”
“Yes, than staying with me. The one would be followed by an inquest and a funeral--and behold a swift and respectable end. The other--my friend, have you measured its consequences?”
“Yes; we should have a great deal of music all to ourselves. We might go away to France or Algiers, and I should forget Athens.”
“No, you would not. There is no such thing as forgetfulness until you take to drink, and then you only forget when you are drunk. The instant you become sober, memory probes your empty heart more strongly than ever.”