CHAPTER XXIII.
GUESTS OF HONOUR.
THE music and the shouting had died away, and the lights of Strio were growing dim across the water as the yacht headed for Therma. Armitage, released at last from the duty of making elaborate and grateful bows to his parents-in-law, which had claimed him as long as he was within sight of the shore, heard a meek miserable voice at his elbow.
“Lord, may I speak to you?”
“I hope you don’t think it necessary to ask me that?” he said, turning round quickly. “Let us sit down here.”
There were two chairs comfortably placed in a sheltered nook, and he pulled one forward for her, and arranged the cushions. Danaë took a precarious seat at the very edge of the chair, and evidently found it shaky.
“Do you mind if I sit on the ground, lord?” she asked, slipping easily to the deck. Armitage did mind very much, but took the cushions from the rejected chair.
“You must let me put these for you, then. I knew it!” to himself, as she settled herself at his feet, where she could see his face distinctly, while hers was in shadow. “Now what has my lady to ask of her servant?” as she clasped her hands together and hesitated.
“Your forgiveness, lord,” was the prompt and unexpected answer. “And it is not kind to jest with me. Is it not yours to command? Here I am at your feet, ready to obey, but if your goodness will permit me to speak——?”
Unreasonably irritated, as he himself felt, Armitage leaned forward and took her hands. She made an instinctive effort to withdraw them, but left them passive in his. “My dear Lady Danaë—” he knew it was absurd to address her thus, but could not for the life of him resolve to shock her by calling her by name—“please understand once for all that you have a perfect right to speak to me on any subject you choose, and that I shall be delighted to hear what you have to say, and to do what you wish if it is in my power.”
“You are very good, lord.” Danaë’s tone implied that his assurance was mere politeness, such as she would have expected from him in the circumstances. “You forgive me, then, for yielding to my father and mother? Truly, lord, I intended to refuse, knowing that you did not in truth desire to marry me, but had spoken only to shield me from my father’s wrath. But my sister said to me, ‘You are always talking about dying, and now if you don’t marry Milordo you will die, and he will die too;’ and I knew it was true, and I did not want to die. And you had said ‘Trust me,’ and I thought you had some plan——”
“So I had,” said Armitage quickly, “but I could not get hold of you to find out your wishes. I sent you a message——”
“I received none, lord.”
“So I imagined. Well, I thought if you did not desire the marriage, I would ask Kyrios Chalkiadi to bring you on board and come with us to Therma, where he could place you under your brother’s protection.”
“He would not have received me. It would have been no use,” she said, and he read in her tones that she thought the proposal scandalous. “But ah, lord, it was good of you to think of it!” and to his utter horror she kissed his hand. He snatched the hand away and rubbed it involuntarily on his coat, as though to rub the kiss off.
“Forgive me, lord. I did not mean to offend you,” she said, and he felt as though he had struck a child.
“It’s not that!” he cried incoherently. “My dear girl, you mustn’t think I don’t like it—I like it very much. But it isn’t the thing—for a woman to kiss a man’s hand, I mean. It ought to be the other way about.”
“Not among us, lord,” she replied, gently but firmly. “But I will try to learn the ways of your people. And this, my offending you when I desire so much to please you, makes it easier for me to say what I wished to ask. Since I am now your wife, and it would grieve me to disgrace you before the great ones of your land, will you grant me a time in which I may study the things of Europe, and learn to talk about them?”
“It sounds a good idea,” said Armitage, irresistibly amused by the businesslike way in which she spoke. “But what exactly would you wish to study?”
“Lord, I am very ignorant. I can spin and weave and sew and embroider, and cook—I made all the sweetmeats for the feast to-day—loukoumi and almond-milk and all——” she paused.
“And very good they were,” said the bridegroom heartily.
“But I know nothing of the things European ladies do. I cannot write, nor read—save a very little—I can speak neither French nor English. Ah, lord!” she clasped her hands entreatingly, “take me to the Lady Zoe, and let her teach me. Indeed I will do my best to learn from her, to learn to be like her. And when you come back in two or three years——”
“That is quite out of the question,” said Armitage, with great firmness. “A year at the very outside.”
“As you will, lord. I must learn all the harder. But truly you need not fear that the Lady Zoe’s kindness will be wasted, as when I was with her before.”
“That certainly makes the plan more promising,” said Armitage gravely. “Then when I come back, you promise that you will be exactly like the Lady Zoe?”
“Yes, lord, as far as I can,” very meekly.
“And you won’t then mind having married me?”
“Mind, lord!” The words and their tone stirred Armitage with a most unwonted thrill. He caught Danaë’s hand again.
“Danaë, why should we trouble the Lady Zoe? Come on a long cruise with me, and let me teach you.”
But Danaë knew her own practical mind far too well to encourage such foolishness. “How could you teach me, lord? I want to become a European lady for your sake.”
“It’s quite true that I can’t offer to set you the example of that,” he said, discomfited. “What is it exactly you want to do, then?”
Danaë bent forward, and rested her clasped hands on his knee. “Ah, lord, as soon as ever we land let me go to Klaustra! The sooner I begin, the sooner the year will be over,” she added, with an evident effort at sympathy which would have sounded coquettish in anyone more sophisticated.
But Armitage replied seriously. “I’m afraid we can’t quite manage that. We must pay our respects to your brother in passing through Therma. He would have reason to be very much displeased if we did not, and he will probably wish us to spend a few days with him.” There was another reason for delay which he did not care to mention to Danaë. Experience of the complications which had beset the wedding of Prince and Princess Theophanis long before warned him that the Greek ceremony in Strio was almost certainly insufficient to make their own marriage legal, and he was anxious to consult Prince Romanos and the British Consul-General on the subject. Prince Christodoridi, to whom he had endeavoured to broach the question, persisted in regarding his efforts as an attempt either to back out of his engagement, or to cast a slur on the ministry of the Orthodox Church, so that he had abandoned them in despair.
Danaë hung her head. “But, lord—you will pardon me if I speak of it—there are European ladies at Therma, and I have only Striote clothes.”
“And I like you best in them, as you know. But don’t be afraid. You shall get just what you like in the way of clothes. We shall find some one who will advise you.”
“Ah, lord, you are too good! Do I not know that it is shameful I should have to ask you for clothes on the very day of our wedding? But I could not bear that the European ladies should laugh at your wife, or I would have held my tongue, knowing—knowing——” her voice failed.
“Now who has been talking to you?” cried Armitage angrily. “No one was to know anything about it.”
“Lord, it is better I should know. Otherwise how could I have understood the depth of your goodness to me?”
“Now you really mustn’t,” he expostulated. “It really is not what you think. I—I am sure your father would gladly have given you a dowry. It was I who refused it.”
Danaë withdrew her hands from his knee. “I am sorry you thought I deserved this of you, lord.”
“Oh, you won’t understand!” cried Armitage desperately. “Our customs are different from yours. With us it is the highest compliment to be willing to marry a girl without a dowry.”
Danaë’s aggrieved attitude was slightly modified, though her silence showed that she considered the custom, however honourable to the lady, likely to be inconvenient in practice. But Armitage was evidently waiting anxiously for some remark. “I am glad you have told me this, lord,” she said, in a repressed voice. “But I am also glad that my sister told me the truth. I might—I might have asked you for money.”
“I hope you would not have had to do that in any case. Of course you will have your own allowance, which you will spend exactly as you like.”
She lifted brimming eyes to his face for a moment then, mindful of her lesson, raised the corner of his coat and pressed it to her lips. Armitage rose abruptly.
“My dear girl, you mustn’t make so much of the most ordinary things. I—I hope we shall be very happy together, I’m sure. But I don’t know that I shall be able to spare you a year at Klaustra; six months or—or three—is more likely. I shall come now and then to see how you are getting on, and if I find that the improvement in you justifies it, don’t you know—— Oh, hang it! why will you make me talk like a prig?—well, I shall take you away.”
“Yes, lord,” was the meek and sorrowful reply, and Armitage realised that he was in danger of presenting himself to his bride as a tyrant depriving her little by little of what she was looking forward to as the most absolutely blissful period of her life. He spoke hurriedly.
“You must be tired, I am sure. I hope you will find your cabin comfortable. If there is anything you want, send your maid to row the steward. If he doesn’t understand, be sure you call to me. Understand that everything and everyone on board is here entirely for your convenience.”
For once Danaë was speechless. She seemed to have offended him in some way, and yet he only loaded her with fresh courtesies. Her impulse was to cover his hand with kisses, and entreat his forgiveness afresh, but happily she restrained herself in time. Passing the lighted deckhouse, she saw something that distracted her attention.
“Surely that was Petros, leaning against the door and talking to your officer?” she asked, turning on her husband eyes full of dismay.
“Why, yes,” he answered, surprised by her agitation. “It was he who told Kyrios Chalkiadi where I was, and brought him up to get me out of the dungeon, you know, and it seems it has made the island too hot to hold him. So I could hardly refuse him a passage to Therma when he asked for it, and he wants me to intercede for him with your brother and get him to take him back.”
“No doubt my brother will listen to you, lord, but I think friend Petros would be wise if he remained in his own place as he was told,” said Danaë drily, and Armitage wondered what she meant, and reflected that he had almost everything to learn about her still.
Prince Romanos justified his brother-in-law’s expectations by insisting on the bridal pair’s paying him a visit of some weeks when they reached Therma. It is true that it proved necessary for them to be married over again at the British Consulate, but it was also true that they arrived just in the nick of time to afford at once a much-needed distraction for the inhabitants of Therma, and an opportunity of showing civility to the foreign representatives. The arrangements outlined at Klaustra by Professor Panagiotis for getting the Prince out of his difficulties had not met with all the success that their ingenuity deserved. Pannonia and Scythia were intensely dissatisfied with the respective shares assigned to them in the railway project, and particularly with the fact that the most important portion of the proposed line, that from Klaustra to Therma, carrying with it the control of the historic harbour, was withheld from their hands, though had it been entrusted to either, the sky would have been rent by the protests of the other. Now they presented Notes almost daily, sometimes separately and sometimes together, drawing attention to the totally inadequate fulfilment of the Prince’s promises, while at the same time the popular orators in the Assembly were thundering against the surrender of so large a share in Emathian commerce and communication to the alien and the enemy. Nor was the dynastic question so easy of settlement as it had appeared. When Prince Romanos boldly announced at one and the same time his marriage with the heiress of Maxim Psicha, and the fact that she had been foully murdered some months before, no amount of splendour lavished upon her tomb, or of ostentatious provision for Janni as heir to the throne, could check the torrent of talk and scandal that arose. The general belief was that, for purposes of his own, the Prince had had his wife put out of the way—a slander which was not discouraged by the agents of the aggrieved Powers. Moreover, at the same time that the people tolerated the marriage because it promised at some future date to include Illyria within the Emathian boundaries, the Powers demanded assurances from Prince Romanos that he had no intention of taking any steps in that direction, so that he was hard put to it to satisfy their pressing inquiries without fettering himself with pledges that might prove inconvenient. Therma itself was also in a disturbed state. A certain low quarter of the city had become notorious for a series of mysterious murders, the perpetrators of which invariably escaped. The victims were chiefly foreigners, of such a class that their respective countries might have been imagined to be well rid of them, but their fate afforded the means of planting one more thorn in the pillow of the unhappy ruler of Emathia.
Thus, though it would have been Armitage’s last thought to allow himself to be used to bolster up the tottering throne of Prince Romanos, this was the purpose that he and his wife served. Much against his will, he was obliged to allow himself to be appointed—in virtue of his yacht and his relationship to the Prince—an honorary Admiral of the Emathian fleet, which consisted of two or three steam-launches, intended to prevent smuggling, which they failed most signally to do. In return, wearing the uniform of his new dignity, he entertained severally the members of the Assembly, the Consular body, the heads of the army, and selected burghers of the city, on board the yacht, and delighted the populace with illuminations and a firework display. Meanwhile Danaë wore European clothes all day long, had Janni with her whenever she was not out of doors, and found herself and her husband the cynosure of every eye and the attraction at every social gathering they could manage to attend. Armitage’s boyish face and grey hair made such a piquant contrast with the splendid beauty of his wife that it only needed the discovery that Lady Armitage was a child of nature from the islands to send Therma wild about them. The wife of the new British Consul-General who had succeeded Sir Frank Francis was herself newly married, and had a soul attuned to romance. The bride and bridegroom awoke in her a reminiscence of the Saracen maiden and Gilbert à Becket, and this in turn stirred vague memories of Pocahontas and the London locality supposed to be named after her. “La belle sauvage—” could anything be more appropriate? Mrs Wildsmith appreciated her discovery too well to keep it a secret. One whisper to her dearest friend, the wife of the Pannonian representative, and the nickname was public property throughout the foreign colony in Therma. As “la belle sauvage” Danaë was fêted to her heart’s content, and never dreamed of the truth.
It was no wonder that her head was a little turned, and that the quiet and hard work of Klaustra began to look less attractive. Prince Romanos had sent urgent invitations to his Theophanis rivals to be present at the series of festivities which were to celebrate at once his sister’s marriage and the anniversary of his own election, and it would have been natural enough for the Armitages to return with the Wylies when they went back. But Princess Theophanis was ill, and her husband would not leave her, so that the visit was postponed for the present, and Danaë took full advantage of her respite. She learned to drive quite contentedly in a carriage, which had frightened her horribly at first, and to endure with equanimity the scandalous spectacle of men and women dancing together. She never tried to sit at her husband’s feet or kiss his hand nowadays; instead, she claimed little services from him, and treated him occasionally with a parade of indifference which seemed delightfully wicked to herself and secretly amused him. She ran riot in the matter of clothes. At first she was content to ask Mrs Wildsmith’s help in selecting the least startling of the terrible ready-made German monstrosities which filled the “European” shops of Therma, and to let Armitage design her evening gowns. But beautiful as these last might be to the artistic eye, they were not conspicuously chic or “smart,” and these two qualities, as she was now aware, comprised the whole duty of woman with regard to dress. At last fortune placed it in her power to gratify her supremest aspirations after these elusive qualities. Just before a great ball at the British Consulate, the wife of the Pannonian Consul-General was obliged to go into slight mourning, and could not wear the gown she had ordered from Vindobona for the purpose. She showed Danaë the gown and lamented its cost, and Danaë, too unsophisticated to feel any delicacy in the matter, promptly offered to buy it. The sum asked staggered her, accustomed as she was to regard her allowance as boundless wealth, and in fact it allowed Mme. Melchthal a comfortable commission, but she paid it, and the coveted garment passed into her possession.
To say that she created a sensation when she appeared at the ball would be a mild term. The gown was of vivid emerald-green satin, with a cuirass of glittering sequins of the same colour. It had long hanging sleeves of gold gauze, and a fringed golden sash about the hips. On a plump, fair-haired woman like Mme. Melchthal it would have looked striking; on Danaë it was melodramatic, almost sinister. She saw the look of dismay in her husband’s eyes as she took off her cloak, and it spurred her to shock him still further. For the first time she tried to dance, which she did as badly as might have been expected, and having found a partner who spoke Greek, she talked and laughed—and both her voice and her laugh were louder than conventional custom prescribes. Prince Romanos, who held strongly to the opinion that a young dynasty could not be too careful of the strictness of its etiquette, watched her gloomily, and at length broke up the gathering at an unprecedentedly early hour by offering her his arm and leaving the ballroom, followed by Armitage and the suite. On the way home Danaë sulked undisguisedly. Her magnificent gown, the wonderful coiffure devised by the new Vindobonese maid who had superseded the old woman she had brought from Strio—with the strip of golden gauze twisted in and out of the blue-black locks—was all this to be wasted on a bare hour’s enjoyment? Arrived at the Palace, her brother escorted her punctiliously to the suite of rooms allotted to her and Armitage, and entered for a moment. Pure bravado impelled Danaë to throw off her cloak and display the offending gown again. To her intense astonishment, her husband quietly replaced it. Prince Romanos laughed, not pleasantly.
“You are beginning to see what comes of marrying a beauty of the harem!” he said. “Well, I did my best to warn you. But I do not propose to have my family made the laughing-stock of Europe. If you had been remaining here, Lady Danaë, I should have recommended your husband to engage for you some elderly lady who would have taught you to behave with the propriety in which you are totally deficient, but happily it is not necessary.”
“I wonder you don’t recommend him to beat me,” said Danaë insolently.
“If I thought there was the slightest likelihood of his doing it, you may be sure I would. But remember, however foolishly indulgent your husband may be, you owe a debt to me. You have yet to earn your life. I have the right to claim your services, and if you continue to repay me by such displays as this——”
“I don’t understand you, Prince,” said Armitage.
“One would think I was Petros,” said Danaë.
“After all, you are not so very different from Petros,” said Prince Romanos meaningly. “I hope your wife will be in a better mind in the morning, Lord Armitage. Good-night.”
Armitage escorted him to the door, and came back to find Danaë sitting with her arms upon the table. “What did he mean?” she asked, without looking at him.
“I don’t know. Your brother has been rather strange of late. Perhaps it is just as well that you will not have much opportunity of irritating him further at present, Danaë.”
“What have you and he been plotting together?” she asked.
He took no notice of the tone. “You will be glad to hear that Glafko and Princess Zoe will be here in a day or two. They were to leave Klaustra to-day, and Theophanis will follow them when the Princess is stronger.”
“You have asked them to come at once!” cried Danaë.
“You have no objection, have you? Purely as a matter of taste, wouldn’t you yourself rather be like Princess Zoe than Madame Melchthal?”
“You want to shut me up where I shall see nobody!”
“But surely going to Klaustra was your own idea? I wrote to Princess Zoe by your request, but if you would rather not pay the visit just at present I am sure you will be able to arrange things with her, and we will go for a cruise first.”
“But you have made this new arrangement without letting me know. You are determined to take me away from Therma and all my friends—do you think I don’t see that? Why didn’t you tell me what you meant to do? Have I ever disobeyed you?”
“I have never requested you to do anything that you have refused.” Armitage evaded the point politely. “But as to my wishes——”
“Oh, you are like all husbands!” Danaë caught a twinkle in her husband’s eye at the suggestion of her vast experience of matrimony, and qualified her words hastily. “Dearest Koralie says they are all alike—grumbling if one gets a single good gown. Now if this”—she flung out her train—“had cost only a few drachmæ, you would have been charmed with it.”
“I can’t imagine that I could have disliked it in that case more than I do now, but I assure you I should have objected to it quite as much.”
“Yes, and I know why. Husbands are all like that—sweetest Koralie says—they are angry and make a fuss at once if anyone even looks at you.”
“Then I think I have shown remarkable self-control this evening,” said Armitage imperturbably.
“I suppose you will tell me next that you don’t want to see me smart and chic and European?” There were tears in Danaë’s voice as she sprang up and displayed her stately figure in all its bravery, but her husband remained irresponsive.
“You can hardly expect me to prefer you as you are now to the girl who sat on deck with me on the night of our wedding?”
This was the climax. She could not succeed in making him angry, but such a proof of irremediable bad taste destroyed the last remnants of Danaë’s temper. She snatched up a large pair of scissors from the table—she had been cutting pictures from a Vindobona fashion-paper before going to dress for the ball—and deliberately slashed a long jagged rent in the front of the green satin skirt.
“Now I hope you are pleased!” she cried. “I can never wear it again!” and bursting into stormy sobs she rushed away and into her own room. Ordering her maid out in a voice which made the insulted menial vow mutely to give notice at the first moment when her mistress looked less capable of stabbing her on the spot, she slammed and locked the door, and throwing herself on the bed, sobbed and raged half the night.