'Greta wouldn't be in the way,' said Ellie, 'and she'd be very useful. Really, I don't know what I'd do without her. I mean, she manages and arranges everything.'
I frowned. 'I don't think I'd like that. Besides, we want our own house – our dream house, after all, Ellie – we want it to ourselves.'
'Yes,' said Ellie, 'I know what you mean. But all the same -' She hesitated. 'I mean, it would be very hard on Greta not to have anywhere to live. After all, she's been with me, done everything for me for four years now. And look how she's helped me to get married and all that.'
'I won't have her butting in between us all the time!'
'But she's not like that at all, Mike. You haven't even met her yet.'
'No. No, I know I haven't but, but it's nothing to do with, oh with liking her or not. We want to be by ourselves, Ellie.'
'Darling Mike,' said Ellie softly.
We left it at that for the moment.
During the course of our travels we had met Santonix. That was in Greece. He had been in a small fisherman's cottage near the sea. I was startled by how ill he looked, much worse than when I had seen him a year ago. He greeted both Ellie and myself very warmly.
'So you've done it, you two,' he said.
'Yes,' said Ellie, 'and now we're going to have our house built, aren't we?'
'I've got the drawings for you here, the plans,' he said to me. 'She's told you, hasn't she, how she came and ferreted me out and gave me her – commands,' he said, choosing the word thoughtfully.
'Oh! not commands,' said Ellie. 'I just pleaded.'
'You know we've bought the site?' I said.
'Ellie wired and told me. She sent me dozens of photographs.'
'Of course you've got to come and see it first,' said Ellie. 'You mightn't like the site.'
'I do like it.'
'You can't really know till you've seen it.'
'But I have seen it, child. I flew over five days ago. I met one of your hatchet-faced lawyers there – the English one.'
'Mr. Crawford?'
'That's the man. In fact, operations have already started; clearing the ground, removing the ruins of the old house, foundations – drains. When you get back to England I'll be there to meet you.' He got out his plans then and we sat talking and looking at our house to be. There was even a rough water-colour sketch of it as well as the architectural elevations and plans.
'Do you like it, Mike?'
I drew a deep breath.
'Yes,' I said, 'that's it. That's absolutely it.'
'You used to talk about it enough, Mike. When I was in fanciful mood I used to think that piece of land had laid a spell upon you. You were a man in love with a house that you might never own, that you might never see, that might never even be built.'
'But it's going to be built,' said Ellie. 'It's going to be built, isn't it?'
'If God or the devil wills it,' said Santonix. 'It doesn't depend on me.'
'You're not any – any better?' I asked doubtfully.
'Get it into your thick head. I shall never be better. That's not on the cards.'
'Nonsense,' I said. 'People are finding cures for things all the time. Doctors are gloomy brutes. They give people up for dead and then the people laugh and cock a snook at them and live for another fifty years.'
'I admire your optimism, Mike, but my malady isn't one of that kind. They take you to hospital and give you a change of blood and back you come again with a little lee-way of life, a little span of time gained. And so on, getting weaker each time.'
'You are very brave,' said Ellie.
'Oh no, I'm not brave. When a thing is certain there's nothing to be brave about. All you can do is to find your consolation.'
'Building houses?'
'No, not that. You've less vitality all the time, you see, and therefore building houses becomes more difficult, not easier. The strength keeps giving out. No. But there are consolations. Sometimes very queer ones.'
'I don't understand you,' I said.
'No, you wouldn't, Mike. I don't know really that Ellie would. She might.' He went on, speaking not so much to us as to himself. 'Two things run together, side by side. Weakness and strength. The weakness of fading vitality and the strength of frustrated power. It doesn't matter, you see, what you do now! You're going to die anyway. So you can do anything you choose. There's nothing to deter you, there's nothing to hold you back. I could walk through the streets of Athens shooting down every man or woman whose face I didn't like. Think of that.'
'The police could arrest you just the same,' I pointed out.
'Of course they could. But what could they do? At the most take my life. Well my life's going to be taken by a greater power than the law in a very short time. What else could they do? Send me to prison for twenty – thirty years? That's rather ironical, isn't it, there aren't twenty or thirty years for me to serve. Six months – one year – eighteen months at the utmost. There's nothing anyone can do to me. So in the span that's left to me I am king. I can do what I like. Sometimes it's a very heady thought. Only – only, you see, there's not much temptation because there's nothing particularly exotic or lawless that I want to do.'
After we had left him, as we were driving back to Athens, Ellie said to me,
'He's an odd person. Sometimes you know, I feel frightened of him.'
'Frightened, of Rudolf Santonix – why?'
'Because he isn't like other people and because he has a – I don't know, a ruthlessness and an arrogance about him somewhere. And I think that he was trying to tell us, really, that knowing he's going to die soon has increased his arrogance. Supposing,' said Ellie, looking at me in an animated way, with almost a rapt and emotional expression on her face, 'supposing he built us our lovely castle, our lovely house on the cliff's edge there in the pines, supposing we were coming to live in it. There he was on the doorstep and he welcomed us in and then -'
'Well, Ellie?'
'Then, supposing he came in after us, he slowly closed the doorway behind us and sacrificed us there on the threshold. Cut our throats or something.'
'You frighten me, Ellie. The things you think of!'
'The trouble with you and me, Mike, is that we don't live in the real world. We dream of fantastic things that may never happen.'
'Don't think of sacrifices in connection with Gipsy's Acre.'
'It's the name, I suppose, and the curse upon it.'
'There isn't any curse,' I shouted. 'It's all nonsense. Forget it.'
That was in Greece.
Chapter 10
It was, I think, the day after that. We were in Athens.
Suddenly, on the steps of the Acropolis Ellie ran into people that she knew. They had come ashore from one of the Hellenic cruises. A woman of about thirty-five detached herself from the group and rushed along the steps to Ellie exclaiming, 'Why, I never did. It's really you, Ellie Guteman? Well, what are you doing here? I'd no idea. Are you on a cruise?'
'No,' said Ellie, 'just staying here.'
'My, but it's lovely to see you. How's Cora, is she here?'
'No, Cora is at Salzburg I believe.'
