“Maurice, you would contentedly lie down and let Eirene trample on you! She is—no, I won’t say it.”
“It’s awfully hard on you, I know,” said Maurice. “I wish you could dissociate yourself from me in some way.”
“As if I would ever give away your case! Why, it’s mine as much as yours. No, we will stick to each other, Maurice, if all the Eirenes in the world turn against us. I shall set to work on a novel at once—making it up in my mind, of course. I have never been able to find time to get to work absolutely undisturbed before. And you will frame a plan for governing Emathia, no doubt. Dear boy, keep up heart!”
The tears were in Zoe’s eyes as she spoke, and her cheerful voice shook. Maurice patted her on the shoulder.
“All right, Zoe. Papa Athanasios will look after me, you may be sure. Don’t get dismal. Wylie will be here before long, trust him. And don’t think too hardly of Eirene.”
“Always Eirene!” Zoe stamped her foot as Maurice was led away. He turned and nodded gaily to her, and a curious thought came into her mind. “Could it be?” she asked of herself. “Shall I suggest it to Maurice? No, it would be worse for him if it turned out not to be true. I wish it might be that, for his sake—and hers and mine, too, for the matter of that. But I don’t believe she could do it.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
“SPLENDIDE MENDAX.”
It seemed to Zoe that, save for the fact that Maurice’s place of confinement was called a dungeon and hers a cell, the change in the state of affairs pressed rather more hardly on her than on him. Her new room was very small, very dirty, absolutely devoid of furniture, and almost destitute of light, a small grated aperture just under the ceiling offering the only approach to a window. Moreover, Maurice had the friendly Papa Athanasios to look after him, while the old woman who acted as Zoe’s gaoler seemed positively to gloat over her humiliation. This attitude was in itself a challenge, and before Zoe had been in her new quarters half an hour she had bullied old Marigo into providing a broom and fetching her rug and other possessions from the room she had occupied with Eirene. The cell looked much less hopeless when a certain amount of the dust of ages had been removed, the rug spread on the stone divan, and Zoe’s few clothes neatly rolled up as cushions. In the homely work of tidying up, moreover, she wore off some of her indignation against Eirene, and was able to turn her mind to other subjects. Her words to Maurice had not been idle, or designed merely to console him. The idea for a story had come into her mind, and was working itself out all the more vividly for her removal during the past month from her usual surroundings and pursuits. It was going to be splendid, she felt, with the curious leaping of heart which the self-development of a new theme always caused in her. If only she had her note-books at hand! But since they were not to be had, she must work more carefully than usual, more by rule and line, so as to be able to reproduce the story from memory when she regained her freedom. The whitewashed walls of her cell offered a ready-made tablet for memoranda, and a rusty nail she had discovered in the course of her sweepings would serve as a stylus. In marked contrast with the excitement of the morning, she passed a quiet and perfectly happy afternoon absorbed in blocking out her chapters, raising horrible suspicions in the mind of her gaoler, who could only imagine that the mysterious signs on the wall were some kind of sorcery directed against the welfare of the monastery.
The next morning Zoe was at work again as soon as she had put her room tidy, and it was with unconcealed impatience that she found herself summoned by old Marigo to follow her. “Come, O girl, quickly!” she could understand this, at any rate, though neither now nor at any other time could she extract any rational information from the wardress, as Maurice called her. Following her down the steep time-worn stairs, she found Eirene, escorted by M. Kirileff, awaiting her in the courtyard, and she was not too much engrossed with her story to derive some pleasure from noticing that Eirene looked pale and ill at ease. It was M. Kirileff who spoke, after receiving an imperious gesture.
“Her Royal Highness is anxious even now to save you from the penalty due to your brother’s obstinacy,” he said. “If you choose to sign the confession I have drawn out, you will be permitted to attend her to Therma, and she will graciously see that you are sent home from there.”