“It is for Europe to decide.” Maurice spoke with a curious hardness. “But if they nominate me Prince of Emathia, I shall accept it.”
“Oh, Maurice, after all? I thought perhaps——”
“You will bear me witness that I took this thing up because I thought it right, not from any yearning for a throne for ourselves or—the poor little chap. We started our enterprise at the wrong time, possibly, but that’s neither here nor there. If it was right before, it’s right now. And if there was no other reason, it has cost me too much for me to give it up without good cause. Zoe, will you take a message to Eirene for me? Give her my love, and ask how she is, and say I want her to come and sit with me as soon as she feels up to it.”
* * * * * * * *
With a madness which suggested that the gods had determined upon their destruction, the Roumi troops in Therma continued to devastate the city with fire and sword, until the small European detachments were hard put to it to hold their ground. More than this they were helpless to do until their reinforcements arrived, for the Admirals were loath to face the destruction of life and property which would be caused by a bombardment, and waited in grim impatience. Meanwhile, the newspapers of many nations at a safe distance asked, with piteous reiteration, Are we really in the twentieth century? Is Therma in Europe or in darkest Africa? Does the European Concert exist? and similar rhetorical questions which neither needed nor expected an answer. The British reinforcements were the first to arrive, but the Power most injured was Neustria, whose Vice-Consul, with all his family and staff, had been massacred at the beginning of the outbreak. Therefore the British troops were landed and held in reserve on the heights overlooking the city, until the arrival of the Neustrian fleet under command of an officer of impressive seniority, and the next day an ultimatum, in which the Magnagrecian Admiral concurred, was despatched to Jalal-ud-din. It demanded, among other things, that he should surrender for trial by an international commission those of his soldiers who had been concerned in the murder of Europeans, and embark the rest immediately for Czarigrad.
As soon as the terms of the ultimatum became known, Pannonia withdrew her ships promptly from the fleet threatening Therma, though her Ambassador continued to attend the meetings of his colleagues at Czarigrad, while Hercynia, in a more uncompromising spirit, retired from all participation in the Concert and its doings. These demonstrations of sympathy, it was imagined, stimulated Jalal-ud-din to reply that the Powers had themselves to thank for the behaviour of his troops, and need not look to him to get them out of their difficulties. After this, he translated his words into action, so it was asserted, by leading in person an overwhelming attack on the dilapidated remains of the British Consulate. The Powers had had their answer, and after an hour’s delay, to afford any peaceably disposed persons an opportunity of removing beyond the bounds of the city, they delivered their rejoinder in the form of a bombardment. When the cannonade from the ships ceased, the British force already on shore covered the landing of the other troops, and that evening the flags of four nationalities waved on the ruins which had once been the city walls, and their forces were only waiting for the subsidence of the flames to penetrate the blocked streets. The knell of Roumi domination in the two western vilayets of Emathia had sounded when Jalal-ud-din Pasha surrendered, with his surviving troops, to the Neustrian Admiral amid the ruins of his Konak.
The heaps of rubbish which had once been Therma were still smoking when Scythia flung another metaphorical bombshell into the ambassadorial conference at Czarigrad. The discussions of that august body were being carried on under difficulties, since there were lively apprehensions of an outburst of Moslem fury, roused by the course of events in Emathia, that would sweep away every Christian in the capital, but the solemn farce of suggesting and considering the names of candidates likely to be acceptable at once to the Grand Seignior, and to one and all of the Powers, must be continued at all costs. The mask was thrown off, however, when the Scythian Ambassador, without previous consultation with his colleagues, proposed Prince Maurice Theophanis as High Commissioner of Emathia. His wealth, and his comparative success in the brief experiment of administering Hagiamavra, were not forgotten, and much stress was laid upon the fact of his marriage with a lady of recognised imperial lineage and lofty connections. The other side of the case was presented by the Pannonian Ambassador, who could hardly find words in which to exhibit the absurdity of conferring such a distinction upon an upstart whose claims had never been scrutinised, far less established, and who had not only defied the Concert of Europe, but kept it at bay for months. However, since topsy-turviness was to be the order of the day, he would not pose as the one wise man in a world of fools, but would propose, in opposition to Prince Theophanis, a candidate whose claims were far superior, and his drawbacks no greater, in the person of Prince Romanos Christodoridi.
CHAPTER XXV.
A CONTESTED ELECTION.
If Pannonia imagined that Maurice’s failure to secure a unanimous nomination would lead to the withdrawal of his candidature, events proved her to be mistaken. The present anomalous system of government by an International Commission was not to be perpetuated until in pure weariness Europe agreed to the partition of Emathia between her and her great rival. Since neither party would withdraw its candidate, the British Ambassador displayed the impatience and ignorance of the rules of the diplomatic game characteristic of his nation by proposing that the matter should be referred to the Emathians themselves for decision. The naïveté and rashness of the suggestion brought Scythia and Pannonia together in opposition to it, but in the absence of Hercynia the other three Powers had a clear majority. There was no excuse for foreign interference, since neither of the candidates belonged to a reigning house, and the election of delegates could be supervised by the European officers of the Gendarmerie already at work. Moreover, the Emathians had already shown their capacity for representative institutions by the way in which, under the noses of their rulers but without their knowledge, they had elected delegates to the informal assembly held at Bashi Konak under cover of the Prince of Dardania’s Pan-Balkanic Games. The protest of the two Powers which considered themselves specially interested, and aggrieved, was therefore overruled, and a stern warning addressed to the various Balkan states, which were one and all thrilling with indignation at this new development of affairs, by which they were threatened with a rival instead of the acquisition of territory they had demanded. The Dardanian attitude alone remained perfectly correct, the Prince managing to restrain the activities of his warlike subjects, even while he allowed their tongues to wag. The question of Illyria was still in abeyance, for there was no thought of complicating the problems already clustering thick in the path of the new state by adding to it an inaccessible highland largely peopled by irreconcilable Moslems. At present the Illyrians were loudly putting forward their claim to enjoy a republic of their own, but they would soon forsake words in favour of aggressions on the territory of their more civilised neighbours, and then Prince Alexis intended to act as the mandatory of the European Congress which must be held for the final settlement of Balkan affairs. If he once had the opportunity of getting a footing in Illyria, there were innumerable precedents and solid facts which made it extremely unlikely that he would ever be turned out.
Therma was now once more the cynosure of European eyes, for here the delegates from the whole of Emathia were to meet for the purpose of choosing their Prince. The city was rising like a phœnix from its ashes, since the engineers of the four occupying Powers, seconded by an army of labourers from all the eastern Mediterranean, had hardly waited for the ruins to cool before they were at work upon the new Therma. It was highly superior to the old Therma, of course,—in sanitation if not in picturesqueness,—and the poorer fugitives who returned to it wandered about disconsolately, unable to find rest for the soles of their feet. Everything was so wide and clean and highly whitewashed, and when they tried to erect their little huts and lean-tos, in which they might have felt comfortable, in the spaces which were one day to be public gardens, or clinging to the skirts of the great new houses, unsympathetic soldiers came and cleared them away, sweeping off the owners and their belongings to be disinfected. Therma was to become the model city of the Egean, but its former inhabitants could hardly be expected to appreciate the change. The people who did appreciate it were the sightseers of the Old and New Worlds, who flocked to it with enthusiasm, charmed with the cosmopolitan population, the passing to and fro of soldiers of four armies, the presence of the great warships lying in the harbour, and an occasional glimpse of the diplomatists of European reputation who were assisting at the birth of the new state. All these people lived in tents at first, then crowded into the newly erected houses before the plaster was even dry, and concealing deficiencies with precious carpets and Eastern draperies bought from the faithful Moslems who were shaking from their feet the dust of the faithless city and escaping to more rigidly orthodox shores, held festivities as polyglot and almost as unrestrained as those that follow a gold rush.