'My dear boy! what do you suppose? Malteios is President of Herakleion. Of course, we don't mention such things. But he knows it all very well, and winks at it—perforce. Our understanding with Malteios is entirely satisfactory, entirely. He is on very wholesome terms of friendly respect to us.'
Julian rarely pronounced himself; he did so now.
'If I were an islander—that is, one of a subject race—I don't think I should be very well content to forgo my liberty in exchange for underhand compensation from an employer whose tactics it suited to conciliate my natural dissatisfaction.'
'What a ridiculous phrase. And what ridiculous sentiments you occasionally give vent to. No, no, the present arrangement is as satisfactory as we can hope to make it, always excepting that one flaw, that we ought not to allow islanders in large numbers to live upon the mainland.'
They turned in between the two white lodges of the country house, and rode up the drive between the tall, pungent, untidy trees of eucalyptus. The house, one-storied, low, and covered with wistaria and bougainvillea, glimmered white in the uncertain light. The shutters were flung back and the open windows gaped, oblong and black, at regular intervals on the upper floor. On the ground level, a broad veranda stretched right along the front of the house, and high French windows, opening on to this, yellow with light, gave access to the downstairs rooms.
'Holà!' Mr Davenant called in a loud voice.
'Malista, Kyrie,' a man's voice answered, and a servant in the white fustanelle of the Islands, with black puttees wound round his legs, and red shoes with turned-up toes and enormous rosettes on the tip, came running to hold the horses.
'They have taken Vassili's brother, Kyrie,' he said as Mr Davenant gave him the reins.
Julian was already in the drawing-room, among the chintz-covered sofas, loaded little tables, and ubiquitous gilt chairs. Four fat columns, painted to represent lapis-lazuli, divided the room into two halves, and from their Corinthian capitals issued flames made of red tinsel and painted gray smoke, which dispersed itself realistically over the ceiling.
He stood in the window, absently looking out into the garden across the veranda, where the dinner table was laid for six. Pots of oleander and agapanthus stood along the edge of the veranda, between the fat white columns, with gaps between them through which one might pass out into the garden, and beyond them in the garden proper the fruit gleamed on the lemon-trees, and, somewhere, the sea whispered in the dusk. The night was calm and hot with the serenity of established summer weather, the stars big and steady like sequins in the summer sky. The spirit of such serenity does not brood over England, where to-day's pretence of summer will be broken by the fresh laughter of to-morrow's shower. The rose must fall to pieces in the height of its beauty beneath the fingers of sudden and capricious storm. But here the lemons hung, swollen and heavily pendulous, among the metallic green of their leaves, awaiting the accomplished end of their existence, the deepening of their gold, the fuller curve of their ripened luxuriance, with the complacency of certainty; fruit, not for the whim of the elements, but progressing throughout the year steadfastly towards the hand and the basket of the picker. Here and there the overburdened stem would snap, and the oblong ball of greenish-gold would fall with a soft and melancholy thud, like a sigh of regret, upon the ground beneath the tree; would roll a little way, and then be still. The little grove stretched in ordered lines and spaces, from the veranda, where the windows of the house threw rectangles of yellow light on to the ground in the blackness, to the bottom of the garden, where the sea washed indolently against the rocks.