The yacht put off as soon as they were on board, and after waiting on deck—Danae to the golden showers of fireworks—till the shore had faded to a blur of light, they went below. Supper was prepared for them, and on another table were candles and the bezique packs, put there by some thoughtful servant.
Sophia saw them, and her eyes grew bright and dim.
‘How kind they all are!’ she said. ‘They think of everything.’
Prince Petros had also seen.
‘Yes, a game of bezique would be pleasant after supper,’ he said; but Sophia, womanlike and unreasonable, felt a touch chilled.
In halcyon weather they hastened a south-westerly course, and the second day saw them gliding, under the cloud-cowled head of Etna, through the Straits of Messina. They made the straits by three in the afternoon, and dusk showed them the beacon of Stromboli lit on the starboard bow. It had been almost tacitly agreed that they were to go straight to Monte Carlo, or, as Sophia put it, that very pleasant place, somewhere on the Riviera, where you could play for small stakes without a raid from the police.
But soon after they had got free of the Straits, it became evident that the halcyon days were over, for a stiff gale was blowing, and as the yacht threw the knots over its quarter, the sea, which on leaving the Straits was choppy, grew frankly rough, and they pitched considerably to the head sea, even the bowsprit now and then dipping, and raising itself again with a little whiff of spray. They were sitting on the aft deck, and Sophia was feeling exhilarated by the leap and shock of the encountered waves.
‘Oh, Petros!’ she exclaimed, ‘is it not wild and splendid? I love the sea! And here we are, you and I only.’
She stopped suddenly, for Petros had left her; only a dark figure was scudding sideways to the companion ladder.
That evening her husband had a little soup in the privacy of his cabin, for the sea continued boisterous, and Sophia dined alone. It was exceedingly rough; the fiddles were on the table, and she had to make swoops and dashes at her food, and peck, as it were, at her glass. But though she ate with an excellent appetite (for the sea air always made her hungry), she had a clouded brow. She was sorry for Petros’ indisposition, but she felt not the slightest inclination to sit by his bedside, read to him, or remind him that his was only a transient agony. In fact, it was ridiculous that a man should be sea-sick, as ridiculous as that a man should not be able to ride; and as a matter so superficial as a man’s seat on a horse had been among the factors which attracted her to him, so she found that a matter so superficial as this failure of his internal mechanism to stand a rough sea was a factor on the other side. The whole affair, however, was so infinitesimal that she soon dismissed it from a mind that never indulged in that melancholy diversion self-analysis, and she played several games of Russian patience by herself, and obtained fresh light on the subject of the maliciousness of inanimate things.