“You must be tired, I am sure. I hope you will find your cabin comfortable. If there is anything you want, send your maid to row the steward. If he doesn’t understand, be sure you call to me. Understand that everything and everyone on board is here entirely for your convenience.”
For once Danaë was speechless. She seemed to have offended him in some way, and yet he only loaded her with fresh courtesies. Her impulse was to cover his hand with kisses, and entreat his forgiveness afresh, but happily she restrained herself in time. Passing the lighted deckhouse, she saw something that distracted her attention.
“Surely that was Petros, leaning against the door and talking to your officer?” she asked, turning on her husband eyes full of dismay.
“Why, yes,” he answered, surprised by her agitation. “It was he who told Kyrios Chalkiadi where I was, and brought him up to get me out of the dungeon, you know, and it seems it has made the island too hot to hold him. So I could hardly refuse him a passage to Therma when he asked for it, and he wants me to intercede for him with your brother and get him to take him back.”
“No doubt my brother will listen to you, lord, but I think friend Petros would be wise if he remained in his own place as he was told,” said Danaë drily, and Armitage wondered what she meant, and reflected that he had almost everything to learn about her still.
Prince Romanos justified his brother-in-law’s expectations by insisting on the bridal pair’s paying him a visit of some weeks when they reached Therma. It is true that it proved necessary for them to be married over again at the British Consulate, but it was also true that they arrived just in the nick of time to afford at once a much-needed distraction for the inhabitants of Therma, and an opportunity of showing civility to the foreign representatives. The arrangements outlined at Klaustra by Professor Panagiotis for getting the Prince out of his difficulties had not met with all the success that their ingenuity deserved. Pannonia and Scythia were intensely dissatisfied with the respective shares assigned to them in the railway project, and particularly with the fact that the most important portion of the proposed line, that from Klaustra to Therma, carrying with it the control of the historic harbour, was withheld from their hands, though had it been entrusted to either, the sky would have been rent by the protests of the other. Now they presented Notes almost daily, sometimes separately and sometimes together, drawing attention to the totally inadequate fulfilment of the Prince’s promises, while at the same time the popular orators in the Assembly were thundering against the surrender of so large a share in Emathian commerce and communication to the alien and the enemy. Nor was the dynastic question so easy of settlement as it had appeared. When Prince Romanos boldly announced at one and the same time his marriage with the heiress of Maxim Psicha, and the fact that she had been foully murdered some months before, no amount of splendour lavished upon her tomb, or of ostentatious provision for Janni as heir to the throne, could check the torrent of talk and scandal that arose. The general belief was that, for purposes of his own, the Prince had had his wife put out of the way—a slander which was not discouraged by the agents of the aggrieved Powers. Moreover, at the same time that the people tolerated the marriage because it promised at some future date to include Illyria within the Emathian boundaries, the Powers demanded assurances from Prince Romanos that he had no intention of taking any steps in that direction, so that he was hard put to it to satisfy their pressing inquiries without fettering himself with pledges that might prove inconvenient. Therma itself was also in a disturbed state. A certain low quarter of the city had become notorious for a series of mysterious murders, the perpetrators of which invariably escaped. The victims were chiefly foreigners, of such a class that their respective countries might have been imagined to be well rid of them, but their fate afforded the means of planting one more thorn in the pillow of the unhappy ruler of Emathia.
Thus, though it would have been Armitage’s last thought to allow himself to be used to bolster up the tottering throne of Prince Romanos, this was the purpose that he and his wife served. Much against his will, he was obliged to allow himself to be appointed—in virtue of his yacht and his relationship to the Prince—an honorary Admiral of the Emathian fleet, which consisted of two or three steam-launches, intended to prevent smuggling, which they failed most signally to do. In return, wearing the uniform of his new dignity, he entertained severally the members of the Assembly, the Consular body, the heads of the army, and selected burghers of the city, on board the yacht, and delighted the populace with illuminations and a firework display. Meanwhile Danaë wore European clothes all day long, had Janni with her whenever she was not out of doors, and found herself and her husband the cynosure of every eye and the attraction at every social gathering they could manage to attend. Armitage’s boyish face and grey hair made such a piquant contrast with the splendid beauty of his wife that it only needed the discovery that Lady Armitage was a child of nature from the islands to send Therma wild about them. The wife of the new British Consul-General who had succeeded Sir Frank Francis was herself newly married, and had a soul attuned to romance. The bride and bridegroom awoke in her a reminiscence of the Saracen maiden and Gilbert à Becket, and this in turn stirred vague memories of Pocahontas and the London locality supposed to be named after her. “La belle sauvage—” could anything be more appropriate? Mrs Wildsmith appreciated her discovery too well to keep it a secret. One whisper to her dearest friend, the wife of the Pannonian representative, and the nickname was public property throughout the foreign colony in Therma. As “la belle sauvage” Danaë was fêted to her heart’s content, and never dreamed of the truth.
It was no wonder that her head was a little turned, and that the quiet and hard work of Klaustra began to look less attractive. Prince Romanos had sent urgent invitations to his Theophanis rivals to be present at the series of festivities which were to celebrate at once his sister’s marriage and the anniversary of his own election, and it would have been natural enough for the Armitages to return with the Wylies when they went back. But Princess Theophanis was ill, and her husband would not leave her, so that the visit was postponed for the present, and Danaë took full advantage of her respite. She learned to drive quite contentedly in a carriage, which had frightened her horribly at first, and to endure with equanimity the scandalous spectacle of men and women dancing together. She never tried to sit at her husband’s feet or kiss his hand nowadays; instead, she claimed little services from him, and treated him occasionally with a parade of indifference which seemed delightfully wicked to herself and secretly amused him. She ran riot in the matter of clothes. At first she was content to ask Mrs Wildsmith’s help in selecting the least startling of the terrible ready-made German monstrosities which filled the “European” shops of Therma, and to let Armitage design her evening gowns. But beautiful as these last might be to the artistic eye, they were not conspicuously chic or “smart,” and these two qualities, as she was now aware, comprised the whole duty of woman with regard to dress. At last fortune placed it in her power to gratify her supremest aspirations after these elusive qualities. Just before a great ball at the British Consulate, the wife of the Pannonian Consul-General was obliged to go into slight mourning, and could not wear the gown she had ordered from Vindobona for the purpose. She showed Danaë the gown and lamented its cost, and Danaë, too unsophisticated to feel any delicacy in the matter, promptly offered to buy it. The sum asked staggered her, accustomed as she was to regard her allowance as boundless wealth, and in fact it allowed Mme. Melchthal a comfortable commission, but she paid it, and the coveted garment passed into her possession.
To say that she created a sensation when she appeared at the ball would be a mild term. The gown was of vivid emerald-green satin, with a cuirass of glittering sequins of the same colour. It had long hanging sleeves of gold gauze, and a fringed golden sash about the hips. On a plump, fair-haired woman like Mme. Melchthal it would have looked striking; on Danaë it was melodramatic, almost sinister. She saw the look of dismay in her husband’s eyes as she took off her cloak, and it spurred her to shock him still further. For the first time she tried to dance, which she did as badly as might have been expected, and having found a partner who spoke Greek, she talked and laughed—and both her voice and her laugh were louder than conventional custom prescribes. Prince Romanos, who held strongly to the opinion that a young dynasty could not be too careful of the strictness of its etiquette, watched her gloomily, and at length broke up the gathering at an unprecedentedly early hour by offering her his arm and leaving the ballroom, followed by Armitage and the suite. On the way home Danaë sulked undisguisedly. Her magnificent gown, the wonderful coiffure devised by the new Vindobonese maid who had superseded the old woman she had brought from Strio—with the strip of golden gauze twisted in and out of the blue-black locks—was all this to be wasted on a bare hour’s enjoyment? Arrived at the Palace, her brother escorted her punctiliously to the suite of rooms allotted to her and Armitage, and entered for a moment. Pure bravado impelled Danaë to throw off her cloak and display the offending gown again. To her intense astonishment, her husband quietly replaced it. Prince Romanos laughed, not pleasantly.
“You are beginning to see what comes of marrying a beauty of the harem!” he said. “Well, I did my best to warn you. But I do not propose to have my family made the laughing-stock of Europe. If you had been remaining here, Lady Danaë, I should have recommended your husband to engage for you some elderly lady who would have taught you to behave with the propriety in which you are totally deficient, but happily it is not necessary.”