“Broken, I think,” he said, as Armitage touched his right arm, and Wylie confirmed the opinion.
“Well, better than a leg,” said Maurice feebly. “You’d have had to leave me here if it had been that.”
“Nonsense, we’d have rigged you up a cacolet, and carried you on a baggage-mule,” said Wylie, examining into the extent of the injury by the light of the vestas which Armitage struck. “You may think yourself jolly lucky if this is all that’s wrong with you, Smith. I can manufacture some splints and strap it up, but if it had been an elbow, or a compound fracture of any sort, it would have been beyond me. Now, can you get to the camp if we help you along?”
Maurice set his teeth, and submitted to be helped up and supported as far as the tents, where Zoe, much to her indignation, was ruthlessly ordered to rest for an hour or so, on the ground of having gone through quite enough already. In vain she recalled her possession of First Aid certificates, Wylie was adamant, and even the ungrateful Maurice entreated her to go and lie down and not make a fuss. When she was called, in the early morning, the arm was set, and Maurice, though pale and in considerable pain, was quite ready to start. Wylie gave up his horse to him and walked at his side, and Zoe was mounted, as had been arranged, on the mule. What the guards thought of the additions to the party no one knew, for they asked no questions and made no remarks, and all went smoothly. There was one disagreeable moment during the day, when a peripatetic police official, travelling with an escort, was encountered. He accepted with enthusiasm the assurance that Maurice and Zoe were the two famous Europeans whose capture and detention by brigands had produced such a stir, and immediately afterwards declared his intention of arresting them for travelling in the interior of the country without a passport. Asked what he intended to do with them, he replied that it was his duty to conduct them immediately to the nearest port, whereupon he was assured that they were going thither as fast as they could. To this he rejoined that he felt it right to escort them there, and as his room, and that of his ragged regiment, was infinitely to be preferred to his company, it was clear that an attempt must be made to overcome his sense of duty. The means of doing this was simple, but expensive, and to the last it was doubtful whether his affection for the travellers would not lead him to attach himself to them as long as they had anything left that commended itself to his fancy. They succeeded in freeing themselves from him, however, and the rest of the return journey was as uneventful as that from the coast had been. Maurice bore the travelling well, and he and Zoe took unfeigned delight in the open-air life after four weeks within stone walls.
The only person who was not satisfied was Wylie. He had accomplished the object to which all his efforts had been bent, he had the society of his friends again, but the reality was not equal to the anticipation. Zoe and he were not close comrades, as they had been in the early days of their captivity. Sometimes he tried to look at the fact from a common-sense point of view, deciding that Maurice’s accident was enough to account for the change, but at other times he told himself bitterly that it was all his own fault for forgetting the note-books. Of course, Zoe must think that he was utterly and wilfully indifferent to the things that interested her. It was so unfair, too, for though, like most men of his type, he had little fancy for any woman with whom he had to do “mixing herself up with writing,” he was sure that Zoe could not have discovered this. He had acquiesced in the jesting, matter-of-fact way in which she chose to allude to her literary efforts, and had even congratulated himself that the taste could not be very deep-rooted. And now this wretched story of hers was coming between them, he was sure of it. When she rode for an hour in silence, and had to be recalled to her present surroundings with a start, he knew she was living in that world of hers in which he had no part. It did not affect his feelings towards her. If she chose to write novels all day and every day, he would accept the fact, and prize the results, however little he could enter into them, because they were hers, but the sense of aloofness came from her side. As she had put it to herself after their parting in the forest, she had been learning to do without him, and with her mind preoccupied with her story, she had found it easy.
CHAPTER XXII.
UNDER COVER OF DARKNESS.
“I am so dreadfully worried about Maurice,” said Zoe, meeting Wylie in the courtyard of the Professor’s villa at Kallimeri, to which they had come immediately on reaching Therma by sea from Myriaki.
“Why, is the arm worse? I thought that Greek doctor was too complimentary to my surgery. Shall I ride in and find a European surgeon and bring him out?”
“No, I don’t think it’s that. I can’t help fancying Maurice must have got a touch of fever the night we lay off the harbour. He is worrying about Eirene, and says that he feels she’s in some great danger. That sort of thing is so unlike Maurice—thought-transference and things of that kind, I mean—and I think he must be ill. He talks of going into Therma himself and insisting on seeing her, and you know the doctor said he was to keep perfectly quiet. I suppose they may be carrying Eirene off to Scythia, but I don’t see how he knows about it. At any rate I’m sure he’s not fit to go and contend with all the obstacles they would put in his way at the Scythian Consulate.”
“Well, I’m not exactly a favoured visitor there myself, and it’s pretty clear that Armitage isn’t either, since they have sent back his pictures without even undoing them.”