In the same moment the rain came down in a deluge, swept the window-panes and beat a very devil's tattoo upon the roof. I flatter myself I am no coward, but I found myself clutching at the heavy work-bench for anchorage. By the wavering candle-light I discovered my host crowded back against the wall, his hands pressed to his eyes. He seemed to be in physical agony; it flashed to me that he was suffering a stroke of some kind.
I reached him in two steps:
"What is it? Sir—Mr. Twining!"
His mutterings were part of a disjointed prayer. I laid my hand on his shoulder, and suddenly he was clinging to me, like a child who finds an unexpected hand in the dark, and was speaking rapidly, incoherently:
"No, no, it's not the storm; it's the things it brings up here, in my head—images—scenes no human being should have. . .staged. I live it over again—over and over—like Macbeth. Don't leave me—don't! It's His will. He sends you, and the storm holds you here—impossible for you to reach the village this night. You shall stay with me, be my first guest in forty years. You shall hear my tale—and judge me."
"Yes, yes," I soothed him, drawing him to a chair, "of course I'll stay."
III.
HE subsided then, his head dropped to his arms which he had flung out on the bench before him; as the wind died down a little, he slowly regained complete control of himself.
"It's mad of me," he sighed, facing me at last; "sometimes I fear I am growing a little mad. But I've a fancy to tell to you—an impartial stranger—the story of how I came by the Euphronios fragment. But you must be hungry; you shall first have supper with me."
He became again the solicitous but unobtrusive host. He moved expertly about the kitchen, set a meticulous table with white linen cloth and pewter utensils, and served me clam broth out of a blue bowl, and brown bread and honey, and some sort of a flower wine of which Horace might have sung. The old man himself supped on three steamed clams and a glass of cold water. Yet he was the perfect host with his fine, aloof hospitality.
At last we settled to the story. Sitting there on opposite sides of his workbench, with the storm rising and falling in intermittent gusts, and with the broken fragment of the vase between us, its colors glowing out like black onyx and orange coral under the sputtering light of the candle, we dropped back into the old man’s past:
"I was abroad," he began, "in the middle of the eighties, on a year's leave of absence from my college, and with me was my friend—Lutz, let us call him—Paul Lutz. I may say here that I had no right to play friend to him, for at heart, I despised him—despised his methods, his creeds. One of my college colleagues, a younger man than I, he seemed to have taken a liking to me.
"It was odd, for he was of a wealthy family, and beyond our common interest in archeology and classical subjects—an interest which was rather a fad with him, I suspected—we were at opposite poles. He was shrewd, brilliant even, but how shall I describe him—he, had thick fingers, He was the handsome, spoiled, Byronic type: a full-blooded dark man, part Jew. I have sometimes wondered if I did not keep him by me to watch him, for we were rivals in the same field, even in the same little department, and in those days I made finger exercises of the theories of other scholars and dreamed of striking a great new chord of my own. I wanted fame, you see, recognition, and I was suspicious of Lutz's brilliance. I dare say the basis of many apparent friendships in this world is really a strong rivalry and a mutual suspicion.
"Lutz and I were rivals in more ways than on. There was. . . . a young lady in our college town; she received us both. Her name—it would do no harm to tell it now—was Lorna Story, and she was like her name, a fine, silver-gray girl. She had a beautiful mind. . . and a light shining through her gray eyes that was like the haunting line of a poem. . ."
The old man sat silent for a time, as he had been silent before the fine beauty of his Greek vase, and his old, frail face was lit by the same inner glow. He moved to take up from the base of the candlestick a hurt night moth, and, cupping it gently in his two hands, opened the window a crack and released it. Then he continued:
"Lutz and I were in Athens together in the spring in the interest of our college museum, which was then in its infancy. We had at our joint disposal a fund for any valuable specimens, and we haunted the excavation fields and the markets for antiquities. It was the merest chance which led us to the Acropolis at the time they had just started on the work of clearing out the debris which dated before the destruction of the Persians. And it was the merest chance which took us to the spot at the moment the workmen brought to light the vase, in two pieces.
A vase by the potter Euphronios—and the signature was actually visible through the coating of white earth deposits—here in this débris which went back to the days before the Persian sacking in 480! Now Euphronios had long been fixed at a date considerably later. That difference in dates was important: the inferences that followed—why, I had hit upon a tremendous, an epoch-making discovery! I saw my path to scholarly fame opening up before me.
"I talked with the young Greek who was directing operations there, and secured his promise that I should examine the specimen when it had been thoroughly cleaned. Lutz edged close to me, and I saw that he, too, was excited by the vase though concealing his excitement under an air of indifference. But I had no time for Lutz. I got away from him. I pursued those inferences for miles through the streets of Athens, and then tested out my conclusions in the classical library out at the American School. There was no error in my facts, no flaw in my logic.
"I walked the streets longer—hours longer—bit by bit built up my article. Then, in the flush of masterly achievement, I turned back to the small hotel where we were stopping.
"I opened the door of our room to find Lutz bent low over the table. He was gloating over something:
"'You beauty! And to fit with never a flaw—'
"'Good Lord!' I discovered. 'It's the vase!'
"'Right, old boy,' Lutz grinned up at me. 'I've finished giving her a bath with aqua fortis—oh, my caution was extreme, never fear. Now what do you think?"
"Think! What could I think? The colors were as you see them now, startling like black and orange enamel. Forgetful of theories, I fell into rhapsodies with him. Lutz caressed the glossy, painted surface with his plump hands and fairly purred; I darted from the tracery of face and garments to the Greek letters of the signature and sipped the honey of our rare find after my own fashion.
"We were like two eager boys who have come upon Captain Kidd's treasure. We dropped into heated argument, I recall: Lutz preferred the strong, battling Athena who hurled her spear at the giant, while I maintained that the quiet Athena, who sat with her head bowed to the music of her flute player, was the greater art. Laughingly, I took possession of my favorite half of
