The yell of mingled rage and grief which arose from the people at these words rendered it impossible for the speaker to proceed with his oration for some minutes; but at last he succeeded in restoring comparative silence, broken only by the sobs of the women. What now remained for Thracia? he demanded. She had lost her place among the nations; she could not protect the stranger who had come at her call to assist her. But at least she could avenge his death, both on the traitors who had sprung from her own soil and on the perfidious nation which had stooped to use such instruments to further its shameful ends. With this object in view let her proceed without an hour’s delay to the election of another king, and who could be better fitted for the post than the illustrious Prince who had been raised up by Providence to help her in her utmost need, and who had striven side by side with her own sons for the rescue of Carlino? That Prince, he went on, checking by an imperative gesture the protest which Prince Otto Georg sprang forward to make, had shrunk once already from accepting the throne, owing to a sensitive modesty which did him all honour, but this was no time for holding back. Thracia appealed to him to accept the place left vacant by the man who had been moved by its very difficulties to undertake it,—would the German hang behind where the Englishman had pressed forward? Let the Prince make his decision, knowing, as he did, that his election would be hailed with delight by the country, and welcomed by all Europe with the exception of Scythia, and let him devote his life to the avenging of Caerleon’s murder.
Prince Otto Georg yielded. In after days he complained that he had been carried away by the fervid rhetoric of M. Drakovics and the frenzied enthusiasm of the people; but he accepted the throne in the excitement of the moment, although with a slight mental reservation respecting the last clause of the Premier’s invitation, and the proviso that his election should be approved by the Powers. About this condition there proved to be little difficulty. The Roumi envoy, who had been on his way to attend Caerleon’s coronation when the rebellion broke out, had discreetly remained upon the frontier in order to see to which side victory would ultimately incline, and the Premier hastened to obtain his good offices as an intermediary with Czarigrad. M. Drakovics had already closed the post-offices throughout the country in the name of the public safety, and forbidden the issue of passports to foreign newspaper correspondents, so that Thracian affairs were enveloped in the most profound mystery, while secret messages flashed about among the Powers. Prince Otto Georg’s elevation to the throne seemed to commend itself to every one as an excellent solution of the Thracian difficulty. Pannonia and the house of Schwarzwald-Molzau welcomed the election as a set-off to the rebuff sustained by their joint diplomacy in the matter of Princess Ottilie’s marriage, while the authorities of Prince Otto’s own country were not sorry to find in it a way of escape from the intricate international questions involved in his unauthorised connection with the suppression of the revolt. Even Scythia, whether because she judged it well to remain for a time in the background after the failure of the conspiracy, or because, having given in her approval to Prince Otto Georg’s candidature two years ago, she considered that it would appear inconsistent to draw back now, offered no objection to his accepting the crown, while bright visions of a Scythian princess seated beside him on the Thracian throne at some future date began to float before the eyes of the Pavelsburg authorities. M. Drakovics hurried back to Bellaviste in triumph, and the new King was crowned the very next day, with the regalia prepared for his murdered predecessor. The palace was still filled with the traces of the devastating fight which had been waged within its walls, and the chapel of St Peter itself had not escaped scathless, while the people who looked on at the ceremony had scarcely a cheer to spare for their new sovereign, since their thoughts were all with Carlino. But as though to give point to the words with which M. Drakovics had ushered in the new reign, the guns which announced the accession of King Otto Georg thundered forth also the knell of the traitors who had conspired against Caerleon.
CHAPTER XXII.
A KING WITHOUT A CROWN.
Banished from Scythia, Princess Soudaroff and Nadia turned their faces southwards, and after a hurried winter journey across Central Europe and a more leisurely one through Spain, found themselves at Cadiz and on board the yacht Anna Karénina. The Princess had acted with her usual impulsiveness in deciding on the way in which she would spend her winter, and she was a little startled when she found herself in command of a ship, the crew of which, with one exception, was entirely English. She had no experience of yachting whatever, and her ignorance made her fall an easy prey to the captain, an ancient mariner endowed with as many wiles as those popularly attributed to the heathen Chinee. Like his late Majesty King George III., however, this gentleman “gloried in the name of Briton,” and considered that all foreigners were constitutionally afflicted with a more or less mild form of insanity. It was both right and advisable to humour their fancies, especially when they were sufficiently wealthy to hire a large yacht for the winter; but it was also necessary to guide them gently in the direction in which they ought to go, and to restrain their natural eccentricities by the moral influence of a stronger mind.
On the very day that the Princess first came on board, the captain asserted his independence by refusing to receive his orders through the courier, a useful and important individual whom Prince Soudaroff had chosen to accompany the ladies on their travels, and protect them from extortion by the way, since if he did cheat them right and left himself he would take good care that no one else should have the opportunity of doing so. The Princess, in her kindness of heart, recognised at once that it was only natural that the captain should dislike to take orders from Alessandro, and accorded him the privilege of seeing her whenever he found it necessary, thus yielding herself as a helpless slave to a most unbending autocrat. Not that Captain Binks was rude or overbearing—far from it. The commander of a Cunarder could not have been more accommodating and urbane; but it was evident that he must know more about the winds and currents and shoals of the Mediterranean than his employer, and when some conjunction of these natural objects interfered to prevent anything that the Princess was anxious to do, it certainly could not be considered the fault of Captain Binks. This being the case, it was not, perhaps, a just punishment which overtook the old sailor when, after a short cruise in which he had regulated the ladies’ trips on shore in regular man-of-war fashion, the yacht was run into by a lumbering collier as she lay at anchor outside the Grand Harbour of Valetta on the night after arriving in sight of Malta. It had been Captain Binks’s intention to take the Anna Karénina into the harbour by daylight, thereby exhibiting to all and sundry both her beauties and his own seamanship, and then to grant the Princess the day in which to make her pilgrimage to St Paul’s Bay and back while he took stores on board; but now the spars and bulwarks were so much damaged as to render necessary a stay of a week or more in the island.
It must be confessed that this accident gave keen pleasure to Nadia, who was not a favourite with Captain Binks; but the Princess failed to perceive either his uplifting or his fall, for she was absorbed, as usual, in schemes of kindness for the benefit of those about her. She was acquainted with the histories of all the crew by this time, knew how many children each man had, and who had aged parents to support, and it was her delight to write letters home for them in her formal foreign hand with its queer twirls and flourishes, while Nadia, longing to be of some use or help to some one, stood shyly aloof, and wondered how her godmother managed to take so much interest in the affairs of all these strangers. In one of the Princess’s pleasures, however, Nadia’s interest was as deep as that of her godmother, for the person involved had been connected with herself at one of the crises of her life. It was on the day that they sailed from Cadiz, before they had been on board more than a few hours, that the Princess came into Nadia’s cabin with a face radiant with delight.
“Who do you think is the carpenter on this ship, my child?” she asked.
“I don’t know, Marraine,” said Nadia, looking up puzzled. “Some relation of the English coachman you had once?”
“No; it is not an Englishman—it is a Scythian.”
“One of our own people? or a Bibelist? The Oudenist cabinetmaker you visited in the hospital, perhaps?”