The Heritage

“It is Colonel Wylie, isn’t it? I say, I beg your pardon if I’ve made a mistake.” The speaker’s boyish tones grew doubtful as he looked at the grey hair and hollow cheeks of the fellow-passenger to whom he spoke, but the sunken eyes, peculiarly blue in contrast with the leaden complexion, reassured him. “It is you, Wylie, after all. But what have you been doing to yourself?”

“Spending five years in the Nile swamps. I don’t wonder you didn’t know me. I came face to face with myself in a big mirror on the hotel stairs at Cairo, and got a shock--wondered who the poor devil was with the cadaverous countenance.”

“Miss Teffany knew you at once.”

“Now that’s what I call really flattering. I can’t be so absolutely unrecognisable if she knew me.”

“Did you guess she was on board?”

“Saw her come on deck before you did.”

“But you haven’t spoken to her.” There was wonder in the younger man’s voice.

“How was I to know that she would recognise me? And when you found her out, I hadn’t the heart to disturb you.”

“She sent me to fetch you to her now, though.”

Wylie laughed at the faint sigh that accompanied the words. “Rough on you,” he said. “Well, you’re not changed at any rate--not a day older. Come, don’t let us keep her waiting.”

They crossed the deck towards a lady in a noticeably well-cut tweed travelling-coat and hat, who sat alone, protected by the presence at a little distance of an elderly maid of the most rigid type of respectability. She looked up eagerly, almost anxiously, as Wylie approached, but the blue eyes met hers with curiosity rather than interest. The seven years since their last meeting had worked no such doleful change in Zoe Teffany as in the man who had once loved her; she had worn well, as women say of one another. She was a woman not to be passed over, alert, keenly interested in life, though an occasional fugitive look of wistfulness betrayed that life had not brought her all she had once confidently expected from it. She shook hands heartily with Wylie.

“Now I really believe in this adventure,” she said. “With you our old party is complete.”

“Your brother and his wife are here?” asked Wylie.

“No, I am to meet them when I land. But have they told you nothing of their plans?”

“Nothing. I was lounging about on the Riviera, desperately dull, when your brother’s letter reached me. He merely said that things were moving in Emathia, and reminded me of my old promise to back him up. It was only a joke at the time, but as I am forbidden the tropics, and can’t face an English spring, it seemed good enough now, so here I am.”

His glance forbade her to pity him, and Zoe looked hastily away. “Then you have a great deal to learn,” she said, making room for him beside her. “Lord Armitage, if you will bring that deck-chair closer, we can talk without being overheard.”

“_Lord_ Armitage?” asked Wylie.

“Oh, you didn’t know?” groaned the bearer of the title. “Second cousin three times removed dies to bother me, and leaves me the family honours--me, if you please. I have to chuck my work, and buy pictures instead of making them, and if I go into a studio, there’s no hope of getting the old chaff, for the fellows hang on my words with bated breath, because I’m a patron of art! So that’s why I’m here.”

“You will be the Byron of Emathian independence,” said Zoe encouragingly. “Think of the halo of respectability that the presence of an English nobleman and his yacht will throw over our proceedings!”

Something in Armitage’s face warned Wylie that aspirations less abstract than a yearning for Emathian independence had drawn him into the adventure, and he smiled grimly to himself. Zoe looked a little hurt.

“You are laughing at our having to begin again from the very beginning,” she said. “Seven years does seem a long time to waste, I suppose--especially as when we saw you last we were full of golden anticipations, thinking that in a few months Maurice and Eirene would at any rate be on their way to a throne. The blow fell the very same day, you know.”

“You think your brother should have decided differently?”

“Never for one moment. But I am not sure that Eirene doesn’t--sometimes. It was really very galling to see Professor Panagiotis fling himself heart and soul into the cause of the rival claimant, the instant Maurice had refused his terms.”

“It doesn’t seem to have done the rival claimant much good, so far.”

“Ah, but that’s because they had a violent quarrel just two years ago. Prince Christodoridi swore that the Professor was only working for his own advantage all along, and the Professor declares that the Prince has shown the blackest ingratitude.”

“And the thieves having fallen out, the honest man comes by his own? Or is it a case of everything coming to him who knows how to wait?”

“Both, I think,” said Zoe, laughing. “Eirene would certainly tell you that Maurice knows how to wait only too well. Of course, it was hard on her--the way their marriage fell flat, I mean. The Scythian Court simply ignored the whole thing, and all her other royal acquaintances followed their example. She just dropped out, and it was as if she didn’t exist. Well, you know, she had begun at Stone Acton by being very much on her dignity--expecting royal honours, in fact. The people round were tremendously interested at first, but they very soon began to ask what sort of a Princess this could be, who was never noticed by any of our own royalties. They bored her, too,--I don’t wonder at that; they have often bored me,--and she snubbed them, and gave a great deal of offence. And then there came the Romance of the Long-Lost Uncle.”

“This is thrilling,” said Wylie. “Princess Eirene’s uncle?”

“No, ours--our cousin, at least; a very very distant cousin. His name was Teffany-Wise, and he was descended from the daughter of Prosper Teffany, a younger son who emigrated from Penteffan to the West Indies about the end of the seventeenth century. I met him in Jamaica when I went round the world, and I wrote home that he looked ineffably old, and capable of any wickedness. He had a sort of inscrutable parchment-like face, you know. I always thought he made his money by slave-trading, but Maurice says its palmy days were over long before his time, unless he was as old as the Wandering Jew, and that he was probably only a speculator in Chicago slum tenements. At any rate, there he was, immensely rich, without a relation nearer than ourselves, and frightfully excited over the newspaper accounts of our Emathian adventures. You see, if the royalties ignored Maurice, the journalists didn’t, and he let himself be interviewed pretty often, because he thought it was only due to Eirene to make her position perfectly clear. It seemed that Mr Teffany-Wise had always had an ambition to use his money in restoring the fortunes of the family, but until he heard about us he didn’t know who there was left. So he talked to me, and then suddenly sailed for home, and descended on Stone Acton in a shower of gold, and supplied Eirene with the object in life she wanted.”

“And that was----?”

“To hustle Maurice into putting himself forward publicly as a candidate for the throne of Emathia. He was determined not to move until he received an invitation, and she was determined he should. She has made a sort of religion of the Theophanis claims since the Long-Lost Uncle appeared. Why, she has turned the library at Stone Acton into a regular throne-room, with crimson hangings--imperial purple, you know--and two gilded chairs on a daïs under a canopy. Oh, it mayn’t seem very dreadful to you, but you don’t know Stone Acton. It was always such a sensible house! And she has been having the most extraordinary people there--refugees and conspirators and so on--till the neighbourhood was scandalised. That was Mr Teffany-Wise’s doing. He saw that there was no hope of Professor Panagiotis and the Emathian Greeks for the present, so he turned boldly to the Slav party--the Thracian Committees and their followers--and bid for their support.”

“Backing his offer with hard cash, I presume?” said Wylie. “That explains the increased activity and boldness of the Emathian insurgents this last year or two. But the Roumis mean business now. I suppose your long-lost relative has no objection to being morally guilty of a massacre or two?”

“He thought they were unavoidable but disagreeable incidents--useful, too, since they would stir the indignation of Europe.”

“Well, so far as I can see, he is likely to be gratified. And has his game been worth the candle?”

“I believe he thought so. At any rate, the national sentiment is much more strongly developed than when we were in Emathia. Then the reformers talked of uniting with Thracia or Mœsia or Morea, according to their tastes, but now they are all inclining to the thought of an Emathian nation. Most of them would like a republic, of course, but they know the Powers would never hear of that, and Maurice’s refusal to bind himself body and soul to the Greeks pleased them. So before Mr Teffany-Wise died, he had practically got things settled.”

“Oh, he is dead, then?”

“Yes; he insisted on interviewing the Committees and leaders of bands for himself, and inspecting their work, and they passed him on from one to another all through the disturbed districts. It was winter, and he was chased by the Roumis, and the hardships were too much for him. Of course you think I’m a brute to talk like this, but I can’t forgive that man. He has spoilt Maurice’s life.”

“If your brother is what I remember him, it would be difficult for any one to do that,” said Wylie.

“No one could, except through Eirene. But you must expect to see Maurice a good deal changed. It isn’t either comfortable or dignified for a man to have to go through life as a drag on his wife’s wheel.”

“Then I gather that your sister-in-law has not changed?”