'Cordova' was a splendid creature, she was a good girl, she had a

hundred fine qualities not always found together in a great prima

donna; but no power in the world could ever make her Margaret Donne

again.

Logotheti watched her and once or twice he sighed; for he knew that he

no longer wished to marry her. It is not in the nature of Orientals to

let their wives exhibit themselves to the public, and in most ways the

prejudices of a well-born Greek of Constantinople are just as strong as

those of a Mohammedan Turk.

As an artistic possession, 'Cordova' was as desirable as ever in

Logotheti's eyes; but she was no longer at all desirable as a wife. The

Greek, in spite of the lawless strain in him, was an aristocrat to the

marrow of his very solid bones. An aristocrat, doubtless, in the

Eastern sense, proud of his own long descent, but perfectly indifferent

to any such matter as a noble pedigree in the choice of a wife; quite

capable, if he had not chanced to be born a Christian, of taking to

himself, even by purchase, the jealously-guarded daughter of a

Circassian horse-thief, or of a Georgian cut-throat, a girl brought up

in seclusion for sale, like a valuable thoroughbred; but a man who

revolted at the thought of marrying a woman who could show herself upon

the stage, and for money, who could sing for money, and for the

applause of a couple of thousand people, nine-tenths of whom he would

never have allowed to enter his house. He was jealous of what he really

loved. To him, it would have been a real and keen suffering to see his

marble Aphrodite set up in a hall of the Louvre, to be admired in her

naked perfection by every passing tourist, criticised and compared with

famous living models by loose-talking art students, and furtively

examined by prurient and disapproving old maids from distant countries.

He prized her, and he had risked his life, not to mention the just

anger of a government, to get possession of her. If he could feel so

much for a piece of marble, it was not likely that he should feel less

keenly where the woman he loved was concerned; and circumstance for

circumstance, point for point, it was much worse that Margaret Donne

should stand and sing behind the footlights, for money, and disguise

herself as a man in the last act of Rigoletto, than that the

Aphrodite should go to the Louvre and take her place with the Borghese

Gladiator, the Venus of Milo and the Victory of Samothrace. It was true

that he would have given much to possess one of those other treasures,

too, but even then it would not have been like possessing the

Aphrodite. The other statues had been public property and had faced the

public gaze for many years; but he had found his treasure for himself,

buried safe in the earth since ages ago, and he had brought her thence

directly to that upper room where few eyes but his own had ever seen

her. Perhaps he was a little mad on this point, for strong natures that

hark back to primitive types often seem a little mad to us. But at the

root of his madness there was that which no man need be ashamed of, for

it has been the very foundation of human society--the right of every

husband to keep the mother of his children from the world in his own

home. For human society existed before the Ten Commandments, and a

large part of it seems tolerably able to survive without them even now;

but no nation has ever come to any good or greatness, since the world

began, unless its men have kept their wives from other men. Yet nature

is not mocked, and woman is a match for man; she first drove him to

invent divorce for his self-defence, and see, it is a two-edged sword

in her own hands and is turned against him! No strong nation, beginning

its life and history, ever questioned the husband's right to kill the

unfaithful wife; no old and corrupt race has ever failed to make it

easy for a wife to have many husbands--including those of her friends.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024