CHAPTER IV.

A CANDID FRIENDSHIP.

In the morning no reference was made to the conversation of the evening before on the part either of Caerleon or of Cyril, although the latter found an ominous confirmation of his suspicions in the fact that his brother did not offer to change his plans in any way as a consequence of what had been said.

“He must really be smitten with the girl,” argued Cyril, mentally, “for if he wasn’t, he would take fright at the hints I gave him, and want to part company with these people at once. Well, it’s his own look-out. He ought to marry, and it’s very evident that he’ll marry whom he likes. This girl is not bad-looking, and it’s a strong point in her favour that the O’Malachy daren’t set foot on English ground. A decent veil can be drawn over his existence so long as he keeps out of the way. At any rate, it’s not my business to make a fuss, and if I did, Caerleon would probably go and propose at once. I’m glad I said what I did, for now he knows what he’s about. He can’t say that he’s been let in for anything blindfold, but I mean to be satisfied with that.”

Having decided on adopting the attitude of benevolent neutrality, Cyril accompanied his brother without a murmur to the post-office, and the telegram refusing Count Temeszy’s invitation was duly despatched. Returning towards the inn, they took their way through the Kurgarten, a desolate piece of ground adorned with a few straggling bushes and a good many dilapidated plaster statues, and here they found the O’Malachy family, occupying three of the paintless and rickety chairs arranged in a circle round the kiosk in which the waters of the medicinal spring were dispensed by an unattractive Hebe. The O’Malachy was sipping his morning tumbler of greenish and muddy-looking fluid with the air of a martyr, while his wife, in the most coquettish of Parisian morning costumes and hats, was communicating to her daughter her impressions of the few other health-seekers who patronised the Janoszwar waters, the majority of whom were the Hungarian Jewesses she regarded with such strong aversion. Nadia sat bolt upright beside her, silent and rebellious, her face, with its expression of enforced resignation, protesting, as clearly as her attitude, against her mother’s discourse and the delight she took in it. The contrast between the two figures--the one so markedly rigid and repellent, the other all that was graceful, pliant, and pleasing--was a sharp one, and Caerleon, as he approached, found himself wishing emphatically, although in silence, that Nadia could manage to avoid the contamination of her surroundings without holding herself so aggressively aloof from them. Cyril was less reticent.

“Good gracious! how sulky that girl looks,” he remarked. “Wretchedly bad form to listen to her mother’s talk with that face on. Such talk as it is, too! I wish we had Madame O’Malachy at some of the houses one goes to in London. Her conversational powers are lost out here.”

“Perhaps Miss O’Malachy finds the talk less edifying than it is lively,” said Caerleon, absently, trying to put himself in Nadia’s place, and to realise the disgust which the stream of scandal and innuendo in which her mother delighted must arouse in her.

“Don’t be a prig,” was the sole answer vouchsafed by Cyril; and they went on and greeted the O’Malachys, and annexed two unoccupied chairs near them, Caerleon contriving to place himself beside Nadia, Cyril beside her mother. Presently the O’Malachy finished his penance, and they rose and sauntered together towards the hotel.

“We have heard from my son this morning, my dear marquis,” said Madame O’Malachy to Caerleon. “He hopes to be with us to-morrow.”

“Does he intend to make a long stay here?”

“Alas, no! He is still mad on the subject of Thracia, and insists on going there almost immediately. What can he expect but defeat and ruin? But he shall not go into danger alone. There are mineral springs at Tatarjé, which the O’Malachy has been advised to visit, and we shall all accompany my poor misguided Louis. We may not be able to do much, but at any rate we shall be near him.”

“But if the country is in such a dangerous state, are you not afraid to visit it?” asked Caerleon.

“Afraid!” repeated Madame O’Malachy, high scorn in her tone. “My dear marquis, for what do you take us? We are accustomed to danger.”

“I should rather like to see Thracia,” remarked Caerleon, not very relevantly. “It must be a very interesting country.”

“Then why wouldn’t you and Lord Cyrul come with us?” asked the O’Malachy.

“Oh no, my friend,” cried his wife, “that would never do. Have you forgotten the unsettled state of Thracia? Do you not remember that the people hate travellers, throw all kinds of vexatious restrictions in their way, seize every opportunity of insulting and injuring them? Our dear marquis must not come. The country is positively dangerous.”

“Is that intended as a reason for our not visiting it?” asked Caerleon. “Cyril, I think we’ll make a tour in Thracia.”

“Oh, all right,” said Cyril. “I hope your will is made, though as I am to be with you, it won’t much matter.”

“But you cannot intend this in earnest?” asked Madame O’Malachy, with a most ingenuous air of simplicity. “I tell you that it is absolutely dangerous to go to Thracia.”

“You are going the wrong way to keep our friends back, Barbara,” said the O’Malachy. “Do you not know that to hear that a place is dangerous makes ut their juty to visut ut?”

“But these English are so strange!” cried his wife, with artless amazement. “They write letters to their ‘Times’ to complain if the slightest inconvenience touches them at a hotel, or if a street-boy calls them a bad name, and yet they go to look for danger when it is unnecessary.”

“One of the contradictions of human nature,” remarked the O’Malachy, grimly, but when he and his wife and daughter had reached their own room, he returned to the subject: “I don’t know what you were driving at just now, Barbara. Were you really trying to turn the young fellers back, or not? Caerleon is a decent boy enough. Was your heart suddenly filled with compassion for um, or were you trying to make terms with your conscience?”

“That is it,” returned Madame O’Malachy, with a side-glance at her daughter. “I do not wish to have it on my conscience that I brought these young men into Thracia. It is not my affair.”

“Then whose is it?” asked Nadia.

“I say,” went on her mother, “that I have done all in my power to turn them back. _I_ have not led them on to their ruin. _I_ have not made myself disagreeable to my own family, and pleasant to them, that I might induce them to attach themselves to my company. When they get into trouble--into danger,” raising her voice as Nadia rose hurriedly and left the room, “their blood will not be on _my_ head.”

“How you women hate one another!” laughed the O’Malachy, softly.

Louis O’Malachy arrived the next day, a dark-browed, taciturn, broad-shouldered young man, about a year older than Nadia, moving with a peculiar stiffness, as though his movements had always been restrained by a tight uniform, or by the orders of a drill-sergeant. He took a great fancy to Cyril,--at least, his mother said that he had done so, and it was quite true that he lost no opportunity of seeking his company. Indeed, the brothers found it almost impossible to escape from him, for whenever they went out, he invariably made his appearance, and offered himself as their companion. This being the case, Madame O’Malachy, out of compassion for Caerleon, who found himself, as she phrased it, the unwelcome third in this devoted comradeship, fell into the habit of ordering Nadia to accompany her brother on all these occasions. To Caerleon himself she observed, with a cold-blooded frankness which reminded him of her daughter’s first interview with him, that to no one but an Englishman would she think of permitting the privilege of escorting Mdlle. O’Malachy in her walks, but she understood that in England it was only when young people were not allowed to meet freely that there was any fear that complications might arise. She made this remark in Nadia’s hearing, and the girl, who had resisted the proposal strenuously in private, yielded in sheer terror as to what her mother might proceed to say to Caerleon if she still hung back. She knew perfectly well that he divined her reason for coming, and pitied her for it, and the realisation plunged her into the depths of confusion and shame, sensations which were quite new to her. That she, who in her Scythian home had looked the whole world in the face, without a particle of fear, should now be trembling lest this Englishman, almost a stranger, should lay his finger on a quivering wound, made her abjectly miserable. It needed all Caerleon’s tact, all his careful insistence on the _rôle_ of friendly critic which he had adopted when they first met, to re-establish matters on a footing of any confidence between them. He succeeded in appearing so unconscious of anything wrong that she persuaded herself at last that he had not perceived the implication conveyed in her mother’s words, and after this she was at ease with him again, and they discussed social and political problems, illustrated from the experience of each, to their hearts’ content, while Cyril and Louis luxuriated in Balkan politics. Cyril was deeply interested in this young enthusiast, and not a little puzzled by him also. Louis was still intending to proceed to Thracia in a few days, in order to offer his services to M. Drakovics, but his utterances on the subject were not marked by the fiery fanaticism which might have been expected from him on the authority of his past record.

“An enthusiast?” said Cyril to himself. “He’s no more an enthusiast than I am, and that’s putting it pretty strong. A plotter he may be. If he’s a patriot, he’s one of his father’s stamp, the dynamite and dagger school. And yet only an enthusiast would have taken such a step as to throw up his commission in the Scythian army for the sake of joining the Thracians. But what is he doing here? If he means to go to Thracia, why not hurry on there at once? It’s not like an enthusiast to stick for days doing nothing at Janoszwar. Perhaps he hopes to enlist Caerleon and me as volunteers. Perhaps he doesn’t like Caerleon’s dangling after his sister. Can that be it?”

He thought of the contemptuous sniff with which Louis had more than once manifested his opinion of the way in which Caerleon gravitated inevitably to Nadia’s side when they took their walks, but otherwise there was nothing to show that he disapproved of the intimacy. He might not welcome it, but he was not actively hostile; by no word nor action would he influence the result in either direction.

“Is he a philosopher or a blackmailer?” soliloquised Cyril. “Or does he only think Caerleon is a fool? I know men often are amused when any one falls in love with their sisters, and I can’t say that I wonder at it myself in this case. What Caerleon can find to like in that sulky girl I can’t imagine, but he really seems to be hooked this time.”

Whatever Caerleon’s inducement might be, he went on his way calmly, heeding neither Cyril’s lack of sympathy nor young O’Malachy’s scoffs, for he had now fully made up his mind about Nadia. At first he had been alternately attracted and repelled by her, but the repulsion had gradually faded before the attraction. The girl was so transparently honest, so sincere in her earnest intolerance, so unconventional in the way in which she persisted in testing everything by the standards of right and wrong, instead of those of custom and fashion, that the man who had turned in disgust from the artificiality of the frivolous or emancipated girls he had met in troops in London could not but hail her as a kindred spirit. It is true that she offended his taste and outraged his views of propriety twenty times a day by her decided utterances, but now that he knew what prompted these remarks he could honour the intention if he could not appreciate the result. And besides, she was softening, he was sure, under the influence of her friendship with him--he could not mistake the change; and it was seldom indeed that she addressed him nowadays with the abruptness which he had mentally stigmatised as _farouche_ on his first meeting with her. In the society of her own family, however, this change was not visible, and she was still rigid, severe, uncompromisingly plain of speech. In his character of candid friend, Caerleon felt it to be his duty to take her to task occasionally on this subject.

“I wish,” he said to her one day with some trepidation, for he had suffered more than once in his self-imposed task of smoothing down the angles of this young lady’s disposition, “that you could think it right to leave off apologising when you have said anything unpleasant. You have quite dropped it with me, you know, but you keep it up with my brother and your own people.”

“But you told me that it was worse to you than the rude things I had said,” objected Nadia, “and it is not so with the rest.”

“No, indeed, they enjoy it,” said Caerleon, “and that is just why I hate it. Can’t you see that your brother and mine think it a good joke to stir you up to say rude things, just for the pleasure of hearing you apologise with a jerk the next minute?”

“Yes, I see it,” she answered; “but that makes it all the better discipline for me.”

“Not for me,” said Caerleon. “I think your system ought to take some account of other people’s feelings.”

“But surely,” she said, “if I give pleasure to my brother and yours by acting in this way, I am considering other people’s feelings in doing it?”

Her voice as she asked the question was not particularly cheerful, but Caerleon treasured up the remark in his memory as the first approach to a joke that he had ever heard Nadia utter.

“Wouldn’t it be equally good discipline,” he said, “to stop before saying the rude things, and try to say something pleasant instead?”

“But that would not be true.” Nadia regarded him with absolute horror. “Come what may, I must be true.”

“It’s rather presumptuous of me to quote texts to you,” said Caerleon, “but isn’t there something about ‘speaking the truth in love’?”

“Why should it be presumptuous of you to quote texts to me?” she asked, quickly.

“Well, you see,” he answered, with some hesitation, “I don’t live by rule, as you do. I haven’t a system of self-discipline, or anything of that sort.”

“You think I am proud--conceited?” she said. “You think I set myself up upon a pedestal? Ah no, Lord Caerleon, I entreat you, do not think that. God knows how very weak and feeble I am, how continually I discover in myself that horrible temptation to insincerity. Since I have known you, it has beset me even more than before. Because I know that you are listening, I am perpetually tempted to let things pass, to join for politeness’ sake in conversation that I know is wrong. You cannot tell what it costs me to speak out, and you try to make it harder for me.”

“Indeed I don’t wish to do that,” said Caerleon, touched by the illogical reproach of her last sentence. “I only want to ask you whether you couldn’t make your protests mentally, and not aloud. I never like to hear a girl speak to her mother as you do. Can’t you make some allowance for her? She must have had a hard life--and bad training, perhaps. There may be more excuse for her than we think.”

“I wish I knew it, then!” cried Nadia. “You have not seen as much of her as I have; you cannot know her as I do. She delights in intrigue for its own sake. It gives her an artistic pleasure to do a thing in a roundabout way instead of straight. Do you not see that it is far worse for me to realise this than it can be for you? You cannot tell what torture it was for me to find out, when I first came here from home--from my godmother’s--that my mother would never tell the truth if a falsehood were possible. I felt that I must stand against her influence, or I might grow like her.”

“I don’t fancy you would,” said Caerleon; “but of course, as you say, you are a better judge of your own circumstances than I am. I suppose you feel the same with reference to your brother. It seems as though you had scarcely a civil word for him.”

“He has not many for me,” said Nadia, drily. “No, I do not like Louis. He is not good.”

“Not like him!” cried Caerleon. “But he is your brother.”

“I hope I love him,” said Nadia, meditatively. “I should not like anything bad to happen to him. To do him good--to save his soul--I would die, oh, how willingly! But I cannot like him.”

“But wouldn’t you be better able to do him good if you did like him?” asked Caerleon. Nadia considered for a moment.

“I can’t help it. One cannot like a person who one knows is not good. You yourself, if Milord Cyril were to become false, to break his faith, you could not like him any longer.”

“I see what you mean, but I’m afraid I should have a sneaking fondness for the poor old chap still,” said Caerleon. “But has your brother done anything, that you should talk of him in this way?”

“I do not _know_,” was the reply. “I only guess. They tell me nothing. But I have found out enough to be sure about him.”

“And what is that?” asked Caerleon, incautiously. Nadia drew herself up.

“That I cannot tell you, Lord Caerleon. If you had now any interest in Thracia, or were likely to be at all affected by my brother’s doings, I might tell you what I believe to be the truth, but you cannot expect me to gratify mere curiosity.”

“I beg your pardon, I’m sure,” said Caerleon, taken aback by this outburst. “Pray don’t think that I want to know anything you don’t wish to tell me.”

“Please forgive me,” said Nadia. “I was rude again. Only I am afraid of telling you what I ought not, and I don’t wish to be disloyal, even to my family.”

“I quite understand,” said Caerleon, although at the very moment he was reflecting that the ins and outs of a woman’s mind were beyond the wit of man to penetrate. “But tell me what you mean by saying _if_ I had any interest in Thracia? I remember that on the day I met you first you told me you were sorry when I declined the crown. Why was it?”

“Because I thought you ought to have accepted it,” returned Nadia. Then, fearing that her tone had been slightly dictatorial, she added, hastily, “I mean that if I had been in your place I should have accepted it.”

“But you thought so--you, a Scythian in politics?” asked Caerleon.

“I thought I had told you that our circle--my godmother’s--are not necessarily Scythian in politics,” said Nadia. “We desire to take the side of justice, of right. I am certain that if Scythia were to enter on an unrighteous war, Count Wratisloff would lift up his voice against it at once. And so we desired for Thracia only the man who would be most likely to rule it well.”

“Then you think I ought to have accepted the crown?” said Caerleon again. She caught him up quickly.

“I cannot judge for you. Only your own conscience can do that. But I have always been taught never to refuse work that offered itself unsought, unless it would interfere with other work on which one was already engaged, and even then one should consider carefully which was the more important of the two. You know best where your responsibilities would have been greatest--in Thracia, or at home in England. Wherever there was most to do, there your work lay, I think. And you might have done so much for Thracia!”

“But would you have had me go there against my father’s express wish?” asked Caerleon, indignantly. “If you will allow me to have had a conscience at all in the matter, I believe it pointed distinctly to staying at home as the right thing for me to do.”

“That made a difference,” assented Nadia. “I cannot judge of your circumstances for you, as I have said, but I was sorry at the time that you refused the crown, and I am sorry still that you are not King of Thracia now. You might do so much good there.”

A little annoyed by her persistence, Caerleon walked on beside her in silence for a while. They had left Cyril and Louis far behind, and were following a path which presently crossed the main road cut through the mountains. At ordinary times the road was almost as lonely as the rocky paths, but on this occasion a band of men were visible in the distance, coming from the direction of the plain.

“It must be some of the Thracian harvesters,” said Nadia. “When their own harvest is ended, numbers of them cross into Hungary and hire themselves out to help the farmers, for the corn ripens later here. I suppose they are returning home with their wages, now that the harvest is over.”

As they walked on, they gained a closer view of the Thracians, a body of tall, lithe, dark-skinned men, tired and footsore, wearing ragged clothes that had once been gaily coloured, shirts that had once been white, and great leather boots. They slackened their pace as they approached the strangers, and one man, who seemed to be the leader of the party, addressed Nadia in broken German.

“Oh, the poor things!” she said, turning to Caerleon. “This has been a terribly bad year for them. The rain and the floods have injured the corn so much that there was scarcely any harvest. They have only earned enough to keep them while at work, and they have nothing to buy food with on their journey home. I wish I could give them something, but I have no money,” and she exhibited an empty purse as she spoke.

“Poor beggars!” said Caerleon. “Give them this, Miss O’Malachy,” and he turned a handful of loose coin out of his pocket and poured it into Nadia’s hand. She gave it to the man, who was profuse in his gratitude, and rapidly reckoning up the value of the money, said that it would be enough to feed himself and his companions until they reached their homes. Turning over the coins in his hand as if to assure himself of their reality, he came upon an English shilling, and looked at it in a puzzled way.

“Tell him that it’s all right, and that he can get it changed in the first big town he comes to,” said Caerleon to Nadia; but when she interpreted the words to the man, he scouted the idea that there was anything wrong about the coin. They liked English things, he said, and he would make a hole in the shilling and wear it in memory of the gracious lady who had given it to him.

“Oh, but it was not mine,” said Nadia, hastily. “You must thank Lord Caerleon.”

“Lor’ Carlin’?” repeated the man, puzzled. Then, as Nadia pointed to Caerleon, his faced beamed with delight. “Not Carlino? the English Prince Carlino?”

“Yes,” said Nadia. “Prince and king are the only titles they understand,” she added, to Caerleon, who was suffering agonies of embarrassment at the moment, for the man went down on his knees before him, and kissed his hand and laid it on his head. Then, before Caerleon could protest, he had risen, and was beckoning frantically to his companions, calling out to them in an unknown tongue.

“This is too much,” said Caerleon to Nadia. “I shall tell them that you gave them the money after all.”

“But that would not be true,” responded Nadia, in her matter-of-fact way; and Caerleon was forced to allow his hand to be kissed by each of the men in turn, the leader closing the ceremony by going through it himself a second time, saying earnestly in his barbarous German--

“Ah, why did not your Highness come to Thracia?”

“There!” said Nadia, when they had gone on their way, followed by the blessings of the Thracians, “think how much you might have done for these poor men if you had been king. The whole country is desolate, or only half cultivated. It needs draining, improving, farming on proper methods. You Englishmen all understand farming, don’t you? You could teach them just the things they ought to learn, and introduce English implements. And then, you could also enforce temperance legislation. The people drink dreadfully, rich and poor alike, and there is no Government control of the liquor traffic. It would be virgin soil, the ideal spot for testing all the schemes. You could try as many experiments as you liked, even if you did not insist on total prohibition at once.”

“I’m afraid I should experiment myself off the throne in no time,” said Caerleon, laughing, but Nadia glanced at him without a smile.

“Better to fall through doing right than to succeed through doing wrong,” she said.

“You are oracular to-day,” said Caerleon, but this made her angry, and she told him that as he did not like the way she talked, she would not talk at all,--a decision to which she adhered persistently, so that they returned to the hotel in silence. Her petulance was the more provoking in that this was their last day at Janoszwar, and that on the morrow the O’Malachy family would start on their journey to Thracia, while Cyril and Caerleon continued their walking-tour. It was their intention first to visit a number of ruined castles and other objects of interest out of the beaten track, and then to rejoin their friends at Witska, a mountain village celebrated for a medicinal spring, and situated exactly on the Thracian frontier. Just at the last moment Louis O’Malachy volunteered to accompany them on their tramp, and as they could not very well refuse his offer they accepted it, although neither of them anticipated much pleasure from his society.

“He must be up to something,” soliloquised Cyril; “but what can it be? I suppose we have merely to await developments; but meanwhile, to avoid any risk of accident, I will get Miss O’Malachy to do a little piece of business for me.”

This piece of business was merely the posting of the letter of introduction to M. Drakovics which Mrs Sadleir had intrusted to Cyril; but he had an idea that Louis might wish, for some reason of his own, to intercept the missive if he knew of its existence, or even saw it posted, for he could not rid himself of the notion that the taciturn young patriot had other ends in view than that of furthering the independence of Thracia. Acting on this resolution, he succeeded in finding Nadia alone, and gave the letter into her charge, to be posted as soon as possible after her arrival on Thracian soil, adding at a venture that it might prove to have an important effect on the after-history of Europe. He saw at once that she understood what he meant, and that she sympathised with his object, for her face lighted up.

“I see. I will be most careful. I thank you for trusting me--for letting me help, Lord Cyril.”

“What a fanatic the girl is!” said Cyril to himself, as he went his way; but he entertained a comfortable conviction that it was rather safer to trust a fanatic than a cynic, and he felt secure as to the fate of Mrs Sadleir’s letter, and the note he had written to accompany it. An hour later he left Janoszwar with Caerleon and Louis, and they began a tour for which none of them cared much, except to count the days until it should come to an end. Caerleon missed his talks with Nadia, Cyril was anxious to get to Witska and see whether the letter had produced any effect on M. Drakovics, and Louis displayed an eagerness to reach Thracia, and enlist in the patriot army, which was rather inconsistent with his having come on the tour at all. In consequence, they clung most carefully to the route they had laid down previously, and no one suggested digressions even when the most famous ruins or inviting landscapes were found to lie just a few hours’ march off the road. On the very day they had fixed they reached Witska, a picturesque little town with rocky streets, and whitewashed houses clinging to the steep hillside, and found it filled with numbers of men from the plains in their holiday attire.