For the next ten days Rhodopé was a pandemonium of conflicting theory, and no half-dozen folk could agree as to the authorship of this incredible Bill. Some said that Sophia had gone mad, and was no longer fit to be the ruler of the country; some that Petros had tamed her haughty spirit, and that she was wax in his hands; some that things would explain themselves on the 31st. But all these divergent lines pulled to one resultant: it was impossible that the Bill should become law. It was a universally-allowed truth that, if the Bill was voted on, it must be opposed, and that the voice of the people must challenge the command of the Crown. Would Sophia accept such an affront? If she did accept it, what would follow? If she did not accept it, what would follow? The old Constitution in any case could not stand, and at this conclusion men bit their nails, and wondered what the new Constitution would be.
But there was yet another party—the ‘Extreme Loyalists,’ as they were ironically termed—who were{168} faithful to Sophia. They were few in number, but fanatically sure of their own orthodoxy. There must be, they said, another explanation; it was not within the bounds of possibility that Sophia had originated this scheme, or was in any way responsible for its execution. These, when asked for any explanation that could hold water, would not commit themselves; some silently held Malakopf responsible, some Prince Petros; others, who had seen the wife of the Mayor of Amandos lose a hundred francs with a very bad grace at the tables, were ready to affirm that she, being born from princely blood, had secret schemes on the throne of Rhodopé. This last explanation was considered to be in indifferent taste; men did not just now desire jokes about the future of the monarchy.
But no crisis of feverish excitement could stay the passage of hours. Christmas Day, with its sequence of festas, was a mockery of merriment, and still there came no sign from those in authority, no word that could in any way allay the rising fever of the people. More than once crowds collected outside the Palace, and shouted for Prince Petros to speak to them. Once he appeared at the window and bowed to them, but shook his head, and those who saw him said he was pale and haggard and unshaved, and the mob dispersed in silence, feeling that perhaps there was a deeper tragedy than they knew. How unlike his gay and gallant figure was that mournful, dishevelled apparition! They would have been even more puzzled if they had been able{169} to see him a moment after turn to Malakopf, who was sitting with him, and ask with a sprightly air, ‘Didn’t I do that well?’
Up till the 28th the serenity of the weather corresponded but ill with the tempest of the political outlook, but on that morning it seemed that even the elements were drawn into the vortex of the storm. A morning of sultry and unseasonable heat, thick like a blanket, ushered in a wailing wind from the east, but in some higher current of the air a rack of thunder-clouds, black and ominous, stole up from behind Corfu, and before evening had spread slowly and impenetrably over the sky. The heat of the morning had given place to a bitter and freezing cold, a cold which pierced the marrow and congealed the vital forces. But the east wind had dropped, and, a portent to behold, flash after flash of remote lightning lit up the gathering darkness of an Arctic night. About midnight the storm burst in a blinding hurricane of sleet and snow, and all the artillery of heaven thundered above it. At Amandos snow was as much a foreigner as thunder; often in summer the great hilltops round were cloaked in thunder-clouds or smouldered with lightning, yet no cloud obscured the brightness of the heaven from the valley. Again, in winter these same hilltops wore white mantles for four months, yet a genial sun, bright and invigorating, shone ever on the town. To lie beneath this double portent was an ominous thing, and the people, tuned to superstition by their new education at the tables, shook their heads, and{170} prophesied a revolution of elements more intimate to them than snow or thunder.
An even livelier disquietude possessed Lady Blanche. The morning of the 29th it were an abuse of language to call a morning at all. The darkness, peopled by nothing but snowflakes and the maddened scream of the wind, seemed more palpable by the faint, sick glimmer of the day than it had been at night. All the forenoon the hurricane waxed ever fiercer, and, like drums, it was possible to hear, amid the shrill clamour of the wind, the booming of the great surges driven on the Cape of Mavromáti, a dozen miles away. Lady Blanche determined to telegraph to the Princess that should leave Corfu at once, even anticipating her arrival by a day rather than risk the danger of arriving an hour too late; but her fears were irremediable, the telegraph-wires to Mavromáti were down, Amandos was cut off from all the world.
Then she would have sent a messenger to Mavromáti with her message, but that too was impossible. Who could hope to pass alive through the forest in which the road lay, where the pines were falling like ninepins and snapping under the snow like matches? Noon came, unmarked except by the clock, and her anxiety grew irrepressible. Outside the Legation windows lay the square of the town, which had been so gay for Sophia’s wedding; to-day it might have been a rural scene in Spitzbergen, so completely had the snow denuded it of its evidences of civilization. A desert of white drifts was all her view; one could{171} scarce believe that a row of houses ran north and south from their door, that a hundred yards away rose the cathedral, or that fifty paces to the left were the steps of the Assembly, which in two days would meet—for what? Yet it was necessary, no less, that Princess Sophia should be here in forty-eight hours, and it was this problem of how it was possible that she should get here that Blanche, crushing her temples in her hands, set herself to solve.
She must get here, so much was certain; that, at any rate, was a fixed point in this awful vagueness. The Adriatic boomed its shipwrecking denial; twelve miles of tree-strewn, snow-drifted forest lay between Mavromáti and Amandos. How, how, and yet again, how?
Of the Princess’s courage to face, if need be, the final storm, the trumpet of the Archangel, Blanche had no doubt. Yet what sane skipper would put to sea in such a madness of the heavens? A telegram must be sent to tell Sophia that all the powers of hell must not hinder her return. The telegram had to be sent. Who could be trusted to go to Mavromáti, and not turn back, saying that the mission was beyond all possibility? Instantly the solution struck her—she would go herself. Lord Abbotsworthy dozing after lunch; she broke in on his slumbers.
‘Oh, father,’ she said, ‘there is not time to explain, but take my word for it. Unless Sophia—unless the Princess—is here before that forged Bill of hers comes before the House on the thirty-first,{172} she is no more Princess of Rhodopé. She, her line, her country, are at stake. She is at Corfu—ah! do not ask me how I know, but I know she is—with the Empress, ready to return. Come she must.’
Lord Abbotsworthy held up a listening hand.
‘Boom! boom!’ he said; ‘that is the Adriatic. But you are so unexpected, Blanche. Dear me, how sleepy I am! Princess Sophia may be at Corfu, or the Falkland Islands; it is all one. Why should she come? In any case, she cannot.’
The Minister was still struggling with the drowsiness that snow brings, and regarded Blanche’s voice more as the imaginings of a political nightmare than the tones of his child.
‘Oh, you don’t understand!’ she cried. ‘But I know all about this wicked Bill. It is an invention of Malakopf and that husband of Sophia’s. I am in communication with the Princess. Well, the wires are down between here and Mavromáti, and I am going there to tell her to come back at once.’
Lord Abbotsworthy was by this time sufficiently awake to understand that Blanche was in earnest.
‘My dear child, you can’t go,’ he said. ‘But a man might get through. Shall I telegraph to the Foreign Office? Oh, I forget, the wires are down.’
He rose and went to the window.
‘It is impossible,’ he said; ‘the drifts will be deeper than a man’s height through the forests.’
‘I know,’ said Blanche, ‘but one could follow the river till one came out on to the lower plain. There{173} will probably be less snow there. And I must go myself. I must see Sophia before she comes to Amandos; it is her crown to her.’
Lord Abbotsworthy looked at Blanche approvingly. His diplomatic calm never left him.
‘You are not the first woman of your race who has shown a man’s pluck,’ he said. ‘Well, you shall have your way. There is a bridle-path by the river, is there not? Take two men with you—Yanni, and the English groom, who will see to the horses. Yanni can find his way anywhere, even at Waterloo Junction. Meantime, Blanche, if this is likely to be a question of an hour or two losing or winning everything, I will send out some men to clear the path for the Princess’s return. I take your word for the whole matter, and I will not delay you by asking questions. I assume that I can do nothing, or else you would have told me what I could do.’
‘Oh, father, that is good of you!’ she cried. ‘Let them do all they can to make the carriage-road passable by Wednesday morning; one can go quicker that way. I will send for Yanni.’
In half an hour they were off. Lord Abbotsworthy’s head-keeper, a shrewd greyhound of an Albanian, who knew the forests as a man knows his house, had said that it would be possible to make a way along the bridle-path by the river, thus avoiding the delay and danger of falling or fallen trees, and the groom took the order with the bland imperturbability of an English servant. They had each a horse, or rather a sturdy mountain cob,{174} animals more surefooted than a cat, wise, strong, and steady. They left the Legation by the stable-gate, so as to avoid the possibility of being seen by anyone from the houses in the square, and in a moment the white tumult of the driven snow had swallowed them up.
The confusion of the elements was incredible; the snow, driven almost horizontally by the wind, was more like a solid sheet than an infinity of flakes. Beneath the shelter of houses, they made their way quickly out of the town, though not without danger, for the tiles on the windward side of the roofs, where the snow could not lie, were starting up like disturbed game, and would be shot with a rattle half-way across the street, burying themselves with a silent plunge in the snow, and once half a chimney fell not three yards in front of Blanche.
It was not till they left the last houses behind that they realized the full uproar of the heavens, and in ten minutes, for all that could be seen, they might have been at Amandos or Mavromáti. They could discern nothing, except a few yards of white ground on each side; they passed lumps and hummocks of snow to the right hand and the left, which might have been houses, or buried flocks of sheep, or hedgerows. But Yanni, with the aid of a compass and a long pole, which from time to time he thrust forward beyond his pony to guard against slipping into a drift, led them cannily on. In an hour or so they could tell he was on the right track, for the ground began rapidly to decline, and on their left{175} they passed from time to time a fallen tree, or a group of wind-tormented pines, which must be the outliers of the forest. Soon the screaming of the wind was overscored by a hoarser note, and in ten minutes more they came down to the river, yellow and swollen beyond recognition, a furlong breadth of maddened foam, peopled with trees, house-beams, débris of huts and now and then some dead animal—sheep, pig, or goat—all twisting and whirling down with a ghastly sort of gaiety in a veritable dance of death.
A steep bank of snow led to the river-side, on which lay the bridle-path they must now find and follow, and Yanni dismounted to probe about for it. Once he slipped up to the neck in a drift, and when Blanche and the groom dragged him out, he shook his head in grave self-reproof.
‘I doubt my mother bore a fool,’ he said.
But before............