'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.