Chapter IX: The Princess Returns

For the next ten days Rhodopé was a pandemonium of conflicting theory, and no half-dozen folk could agree as to the authorship of this incredible Bill. Some said that Sophia had gone mad, and was no longer fit to be the ruler of the country; some that Petros had tamed her haughty spirit, and that she was wax in his hands; some that things would explain themselves on the 31st. But all these divergent lines pulled to one resultant: it was impossible that the Bill should become law. It was a universally-allowed truth that, if the Bill was voted on, it must be opposed, and that the voice of the people must challenge the command of the Crown. Would Sophia accept such an affront? If she did accept it, what would follow? If she did not accept it, what would follow? The old Constitution in any case could not stand, and at this conclusion men bit their nails, and wondered what the new Constitution would be.

But there was yet another party--the ‘Extreme Loyalists,’ as they were ironically termed--who were faithful to Sophia. They were few in number, but fanatically sure of their own orthodoxy. There must be, they said, another explanation; it was not within the bounds of possibility that Sophia had originated this scheme, or was in any way responsible for its execution. These, when asked for any explanation that could hold water, would not commit themselves; some silently held Malakopf responsible, some Prince Petros; others, who had seen the wife of the Mayor of Amandos lose a hundred francs with a very bad grace at the tables, were ready to affirm that she, being born from princely blood, had secret schemes on the throne of Rhodopé. This last explanation was considered to be in indifferent taste; men did not just now desire jokes about the future of the monarchy.

But no crisis of feverish excitement could stay the passage of hours. Christmas Day, with its sequence of festas, was a mockery of merriment, and still there came no sign from those in authority, no word that could in any way allay the rising fever of the people. More than once crowds collected outside the Palace, and shouted for Prince Petros to speak to them. Once he appeared at the window and bowed to them, but shook his head, and those who saw him said he was pale and haggard and unshaved, and the mob dispersed in silence, feeling that perhaps there was a deeper tragedy than they knew. How unlike his gay and gallant figure was that mournful, dishevelled apparition! They would have been even more puzzled if they had been able to see him a moment after turn to Malakopf, who was sitting with him, and ask with a sprightly air, ‘Didn’t I do that well?’

Up till the 28th the serenity of the weather corresponded but ill with the tempest of the political outlook, but on that morning it seemed that even the elements were drawn into the vortex of the storm. A morning of sultry and unseasonable heat, thick like a blanket, ushered in a wailing wind from the east, but in some higher current of the air a rack of thunder-clouds, black and ominous, stole up from behind Corfu, and before evening had spread slowly and impenetrably over the sky. The heat of the morning had given place to a bitter and freezing cold, a cold which pierced the marrow and congealed the vital forces. But the east wind had dropped, and, a portent to behold, flash after flash of remote lightning lit up the gathering darkness of an Arctic night. About midnight the storm burst in a blinding hurricane of sleet and snow, and all the artillery of heaven thundered above it. At Amandos snow was as much a foreigner as thunder; often in summer the great hilltops round were cloaked in thunder-clouds or smouldered with lightning, yet no cloud obscured the brightness of the heaven from the valley. Again, in winter these same hilltops wore white mantles for four months, yet a genial sun, bright and invigorating, shone ever on the town. To lie beneath this double portent was an ominous thing, and the people, tuned to superstition by their new education at the tables, shook their heads, and prophesied a revolution of elements more intimate to them than snow or thunder.

An even livelier disquietude possessed Lady Blanche. The morning of the 29th it were an abuse of language to call a morning at all. The darkness, peopled by nothing but snowflakes and the maddened scream of the wind, seemed more palpable by the faint, sick glimmer of the day than it had been at night. All the forenoon the hurricane waxed ever fiercer, and, like drums, it was possible to hear, amid the shrill clamour of the wind, the booming of the great surges driven on the Cape of Mavromáti, a dozen miles away. Lady Blanche determined to telegraph to the Princess that should leave Corfu at once, even anticipating her arrival by a day rather than risk the danger of arriving an hour too late; but her fears were irremediable, the telegraph-wires to Mavromáti were down, Amandos was cut off from all the world.

Then she would have sent a messenger to Mavromáti with her message, but that too was impossible. Who could hope to pass alive through the forest in which the road lay, where the pines were falling like ninepins and snapping under the snow like matches? Noon came, unmarked except by the clock, and her anxiety grew irrepressible. Outside the Legation windows lay the square of the town, which had been so gay for Sophia’s wedding; to-day it might have been a rural scene in Spitzbergen, so completely had the snow denuded it of its evidences of civilization. A desert of white drifts was all her view; one could scarce believe that a row of houses ran north and south from their door, that a hundred yards away rose the cathedral, or that fifty paces to the left were the steps of the Assembly, which in two days would meet--for what? Yet it was necessary, no less, that Princess Sophia should be here in forty-eight hours, and it was this problem of how it was possible that she should get here that Blanche, crushing her temples in her hands, set herself to solve.

She must get here, so much was certain; that, at any rate, was a fixed point in this awful vagueness. The Adriatic boomed its shipwrecking denial; twelve miles of tree-strewn, snow-drifted forest lay between Mavromáti and Amandos. How, how, and yet again, how?

Of the Princess’s courage to face, if need be, the final storm, the trumpet of the Archangel, Blanche had no doubt. Yet what sane skipper would put to sea in such a madness of the heavens? A telegram must be sent to tell Sophia that all the powers of hell must not hinder her return. The telegram had to be sent. Who could be trusted to go to Mavromáti, and not turn back, saying that the mission was beyond all possibility? Instantly the solution struck her--she would go herself. Lord Abbotsworthy dozing after lunch; she broke in on his slumbers.

‘Oh, father,’ she said, ‘there is not time to explain, but take my word for it. Unless Sophia--unless the Princess--is here before that forged Bill of hers comes before the House on the thirty-first, she is no more Princess of Rhodopé. She, her line, her country, are at stake. She is at Corfu--ah! do not ask me how I know, but I know she is--with the Empress, ready to return. Come she must.’

Lord Abbotsworthy held up a listening hand.

‘Boom! boom!’ he said; ‘that is the Adriatic. But you are so unexpected, Blanche. Dear me, how sleepy I am! Princess Sophia may be at Corfu, or the Falkland Islands; it is all one. Why should she come? In any case, she cannot.’

The Minister was still struggling with the drowsiness that snow brings, and regarded Blanche’s voice more as the imaginings of a political nightmare than the tones of his child.

‘Oh, you don’t understand!’ she cried. ‘But I know all about this wicked Bill. It is an invention of Malakopf and that husband of Sophia’s. I am in communication with the Princess. Well, the wires are down between here and Mavromáti, and I am going there to tell her to come back at once.’

Lord Abbotsworthy was by this time sufficiently awake to understand that Blanche was in earnest.

‘My dear child, you can’t go,’ he said. ‘But a man might get through. Shall I telegraph to the Foreign Office? Oh, I forget, the wires are down.’

He rose and went to the window.

‘It is impossible,’ he said; ‘the drifts will be deeper than a man’s height through the forests.’

‘I know,’ said Blanche, ‘but one could follow the river till one came out on to the lower plain. There will probably be less snow there. And I must go myself. I must see Sophia before she comes to Amandos; it is her crown to her.’

Lord Abbotsworthy looked at Blanche approvingly. His diplomatic calm never left him.

‘You are not the first woman of your race who has shown a man’s pluck,’ he said. ‘Well, you shall have your way. There is a bridle-path by the river, is there not? Take two men with you--Yanni, and the English groom, who will see to the horses. Yanni can find his way anywhere, even at Waterloo Junction. Meantime, Blanche, if this is likely to be a question of an hour or two losing or winning everything, I will send out some men to clear the path for the Princess’s return. I take your word for the whole matter, and I will not delay you by asking questions. I assume that I can do nothing, or else you would have told me what I could do.’

‘Oh, father, that is good of you!’ she cried. ‘Let them do all they can to make the carriage-road passable by Wednesday morning; one can go quicker that way. I will send for Yanni.’

In half an hour they were off. Lord Abbotsworthy’s head-keeper, a shrewd greyhound of an Albanian, who knew the forests as a man knows his house, had said that it would be possible to make a way along the bridle-path by the river, thus avoiding the delay and danger of falling or fallen trees, and the groom took the order with the bland imperturbability of an English servant. They had each a horse, or rather a sturdy mountain cob, animals more surefooted than a cat, wise, strong, and steady. They left the Legation by the stable-gate, so as to avoid the possibility of being seen by anyone from the houses in the square, and in a moment the white tumult of the driven snow had swallowed them up.

The confusion of the elements was incredible; the snow, driven almost horizontally by the wind, was more like a solid sheet than an infinity of flakes. Beneath the shelter of houses, they made their way quickly out of the town, though not without danger, for the tiles on the windward side of the roofs, where the snow could not lie, were starting up like disturbed game, and would be shot with a rattle half-way across the street, burying themselves with a silent plunge in the snow, and once half a chimney fell not three yards in front of Blanche.

It was not till they left the last houses behind that they realized the full uproar of the heavens, and in ten minutes, for all that could be seen, they might have been at Amandos or Mavromáti. They could discern nothing, except a few yards of white ground on each side; they passed lumps and hummocks of snow to the right hand and the left, which might have been houses, or buried flocks of sheep, or hedgerows. But Yanni, with the aid of a compass and a long pole, which from time to time he thrust forward beyond his pony to guard against slipping into a drift, led them cannily on. In an hour or so they could tell he was on the right track, for the ground began rapidly to decline, and on their left they passed from time to time a fallen tree, or a group of wind-tormented pines, which must be the outliers of the forest. Soon the screaming of the wind was overscored by a hoarser note, and in ten minutes more they came down to the river, yellow and swollen beyond recognition, a furlong breadth of maddened foam, peopled with trees, house-beams, débris of huts and now and then some dead animal--sheep, pig, or goat--all twisting and whirling down with a ghastly sort of gaiety in a veritable dance of death.

A steep bank of snow led to the river-side, on which lay the bridle-path they must now find and follow, and Yanni dismounted to probe about for it. Once he slipped up to the neck in a drift, and when Blanche and the groom dragged him out, he shook his head in grave self-reproof.

‘I doubt my mother bore a fool,’ he said.

But before long they found it, and once found, it was easily possible to follow the path, for it lay notably level on that hillside of snow.

About four of the afternoon, when the faint glimmer of day was turning into a more palpable darkness, a change, at first hardly perceptible, began to come over the tumult of the weather. The wind blew only in sudden squalls and sonorous gusts, with intervals of quiet; the falling snow grew thinner and finer, and though they were rapidly descending, the cold grew more exquisite and piercing. The ponies’ feet, instead of plunging noiselessly into the fallen stuff, made each step through a crisp upper crust of frozen snow. By five the sky was clear and the wind dead, and an innumerable host of large and frosty stars began to glimmer like half-lit lamps in a vault of velvet. As the intenser darkness of night came on they burned ever more luminously, and every foot of the country, lying white polished and shining, caught and reflected their brightness. Eastwards the sky was gray with the approach of moonrise, and even before the full circle topped the hills to the east, it was as if day but now succeeded to night rather than night to day.

Before seven they had joined the main-road from Mavromáti below and beyond the intervening forest. The air was of an exceeding clearness, and crisp with frost, and not five miles away twinkled the lights of the port, and the various fingers of the lighthouse. Behind them, a black blot in the moonlight, rose the forest, shoulder over shoulder; to their right brawled the swollen stream, but all was as still and as frozen as an Arctic day.

Not till then, when, morally speaking, their journey was over, did Lady Blanche realize how acute her anxiety had been.

‘Oh, William!’ she exclaimed to the groom, with a sudden, half-hysterical laugh, ‘we shall soon be there.’

‘Yes, my lady,’ replied that iron-faced functionary, and he brushed a little frill of icicles from his hair and eyebrows.

The night was windless and deadly cold, but the beauty of it was beyond compare. On all sides stretched acre on acre of frozen snow, rounded and billowy, but every outline was etched with the crispness of the frost. The sound of their ponies’ going was like a biting of toast; other noise there was none, except the crashing thunder of the broken surges on the shore. As they drew nearer, these ever became the more stupendous, till the ear was filled with their booming, as with the roar of a train in a tunnel. Soon it was possible to detect above the increasing riot the scream of the pebbly beach continually dragged down to the jaws of one wave, only to be vomited up afresh by the next, and her anxieties again began to lie heavy on Lady Blanche. Her part was done; in another hour the telegraph would twitch her message across to Corfu; but how would it be possible for any yacht to win through those mountainous billows? Down on the sea-board the snowfall had been less deep, and before eight they had entered the streets, all dumb and silent, and the telegram summoning Sophia at once had been despatched.

Early on the morning of the 30th came the Princess’s reply. ‘I am just going on board. We start at once. It will be rather rough,’ it said, and no more; and all that day Blanche watched in a fever of impatience for a sight of the newly-christened _Revenge_. In fair weather it was a crossing of not more than six hours, but who could say how many in such a sea? She consulted with Yanni as to the possible means of return to Amandos, for this frost would render the road impassable to carriages, however zealous had been the work of the men Lord Abbotsworthy had sent out, and he said that riding was the only mode of passage. Lady Blanche was seated at her window in the sitting-room of the Hôtel Royal while the old keeper talked to her, and looking out idly into the street, she saw two children playing together on the frozen and compacted snow. One had a board, to which he had tied a string; the other sat on it, and was easily pulled along. Suddenly she applied the suggestion, and with dismay at her own stupidity.

‘Oh, Yanni!’ she cried, ‘I am a fool, and you another! A sledge!’

But a sledge was an unknown conveyance in Rhodopé, and Blanche hired a light cart. She had the wheels taken off, and two wooden runners, shod with steel, fitted on to its springs. The superintendence of this carpentering served to fill in the hours of that awful day of waiting; but when night fell there was still no signal of a ship. The wind had again risen to hurricane force, maddening still more the maddened sea, and a threat of a further fall of snow was abroad. The stars in their courses seemed to fight against Sophia.

The meeting of the Assembly was fixed for half-past three the next afternoon. Allowing for a long speech from Prince Petros, and the possibility of opposition contrary to the Constitution of Rhodopé, by six o’clock to-morrow afternoon at latest Sophia must be at Amandos. How she would choose to act Blanche could not guess, but that she was content to leave to the Princess. Her part was to get Sophia there. Outside the note of the gale would rise and fall again octave over octave, like the hootings of some infernal siren, but as yet there was neither more snow nor thaw. But the crash of the breakers grew ever hungrier and more splitting, and still the _Revenge_ came not.

She could not bring herself to go to bed, but sat listening in a horrible dread for she scarcely knew what. But when across the mingled bellowings of the storm she heard a gun fired out at sea, she sprang up with a palpitating heart and a gasp for breath, knowing that it was this which she had feared. Running to the window, she saw a rocket shoot up in a line of flame, like a match struck in the dark, and a minute afterwards the report of it followed. She rang the bell hastily and told Yanni to come with her along the pier out to the lighthouse at the end.

It was now only a little before midnight, and the moon plunged and sped through a rack of flying clouds, like a woman distraught, now naked, now clad in blowing vapours. The wind came straight off the sea, piercingly cold, and full of spray and blown sand, while over the frozen carpet of snow in the street wisps of brown seaweed and pebbles from the beach scudded and bowled along like little people in a panic. On the pier itself the force of the wind was more tremendous, and they had to make a slanting tack as they walked, zigzagging to and fro, and leaning against the gale as against a wall. Once and again the signal of distress came from the sea, and round the house where the lifeboat was kept they could see a throng of men growing and increasing, and the light of lanterns tossed up and down in the stinging air. Then from the sea shot up another rocket, and a cold blue light burned steadily for some seconds or so, and in that glare Blanche made out the three masts of a sailing-ship, and a flood of relief welled in her heart.

‘Oh, thank God!’ she cried, ‘it is not she!’ And next moment ‘Oh, poor folk! poor folk!’ she said; and Yanni crossed himself and muttered a prayer for their safety.

There was a coastguard station at the end of the pier, and she asked for the officer in command, giving her name, and saying that a steamer called the _Revenge_ was expected, which had on board some friends of Lord Abbotsworthy. It had started from Corfu early that morning. Then, remembering that no communication with Amandos was possible, and that though the men would, in case of the necessity for rescue, do their best, though there were only a crew of the hated Turks on board--yet the knowledge that Sophia was there could not but be an incentive to heroisms--she told all.

‘Captain Hatsopoulo,’ she said, ‘the _Revenge_ is none other than the _Felatrune_. Princess Sophia is on board, and little Prince Leonard; the whole hopes of the House of Ægina are there. There is a foul plot against her--this Bill, in fact, which you may have heard of. I can tell you no more. But she must be in Amandos to-morrow--she must! she must! Ah, it is already to-morrow--she must be there this afternoon.’

The ship which had made signals of distress had by now come close into shore, and already the lifeboat was out. They had quickly got a rope out to her, for she was already breaking up, and the work of rescue was going on. Blanche had gone into the house of the coastguard station, for an inward necessity for being near prevented her from going back to the hotel, and she sat by the fire in a room they prepared for her, waiting. In another hour came news that the crew of the vessel had all been saved, but the ship lost. Not long after this she fell into an uneasy doze, and dreamed that the kingdom of Rhodopé was a bright little round thing, like a roulette-marble. She and Sophia had gone out for a walk together, and Sophia had dropped it, and now she and the Princess were hunting for it in the snow. Others were hunting for it, too. Gray, uncanny shapes like wolves trotted incessantly about; some were like Malakopf, some reminded her of Prince Petros, others had terrible whiskers and green eyes; others, again, were more in the semblance of fiends unimaginably horrible, and they all scratched and nosed in the snow for the little bright marble. Then she slept more deeply, and a dreamless slumber succeeded to these uneasy visions.

It was already day when she awoke; the faithful Yanni was stretched out on the floor beside her chair asleep, and it was Captain Hatsopoulo’s entrance that had roused her. She started at once into the full possession of her faculties, and sprang up.

‘Ah! I no longer hear the wind,’ she cried. ‘Well, captain, what is it?’

‘The _Revenge_ has been sighted,’ he said. ‘You can see her out of this window.’

Far out over the waste of tossing water there heaved up and sank again the masts and bulwarks of a steamer. Captain Hatsopoulo took Blanche to where the great telescope stood.

‘Watch her as she rises to a wave,’ he said. ‘There! that is none other than the _Felatrune_. You can see her colours. The Princess is flying her own flag! God save the Princess!’ he cried.

‘God save her!’ echoed Blanche; ‘and confound the tricks of her enemies!’

The _Revenge_ was steering an easterly course from Corfu, and about ten of the morning she came opposite Mavromáti, still some miles out to sea. They saw her swing this way and that, now labouring low in the trough of the waves, now poised on the top, and for the next hour watched her still nearing them, her masts striking wildly right and left across a space of some ninety degrees, so that it made Blanche feel qualms of nausea only to see her. On shore, opposite the landing stage where she would put in, was drawn up the sledge, ready to start at a moment’s notice; and opposite, on the other side of the harbour, the lifeboat was launched with its crew, in case she could not make the harbour mouth, and was driven ashore. The port of Mavromáti faced almost north, and the gale from the north-west had raised a terrific cross-sea. As she drew nearer, they could see that she had changed her course a point or two northwards, to allow space enough so that she should not be carried against the south pier by the huge billows that swept across the entrance. Already she had slackened steam, and made almost imperceptible way towards them. Then came a minute of awful suspense as she moved close up to the harbour mouth, so perilously near to the wall of broken water which dashed over the end of the south pier that the spray of it hid her for a moment; the next she was beyond the breakers, and safe.

Blanche was already half-way across the harbour to meet her, and before the yacht had come to anchor she was over the side and in Sophia’s arms.

‘Ah, you are not much too soon, dearest Sophia!’ she cried, ‘I have waited here all night. Quick! come ashore; and the sledge is ready.’

‘Is there room in it for a box?’ she asked. ‘I do not want to appear before the Assembly in travelling clothes.’

‘Yes, yes, there is room,’ cried the other. ‘You shall dress at the Legation. Come--only come!’

‘Petros will be surprised to see me,’ remarked the Princess. ‘As we go, you shall tell me everything.’