Phroso Part 3

He turned and led the way up the street. We followed, the people making a lane for us and still regarding us with stony stares. Denny gave expression to my feelings as well as his own;

'It can hardly be described as an ovation,' he observed.

'Surly brutes!' muttered Hogvardt.

'It is not the way to receive his lordship,' agreed Watkins, more in sorrow than in anger. Watkins had very high ideas of the deference due to his lordship.

The fat innkeeper walked ahead; I quickened my pace and overtook him.

'The people don't seem very pleased to see me,' I remarked.

He shook his head, but made no answer. Then he stopped before a substantial house. We followed him in, and he led us upstairs to a large room. It overlooked the street, but, somewhat to my surprise, the windows were heavily barred. The door also was ma.s.sive and had large bolts inside and outside.

'You take good care of your houses, my friend,' said Denny with a laugh.

'We like to keep what we have, in Neopalia,' said he.

I asked him if he would provide us with a meal, and, a.s.senting gruffly, he left us alone. The food was some time in coming, and we stood at the window, peering through our prison bars. Our high spirits were dashed by the unfriendly reception; my island should have been more gracious; it was so beautiful.

'However it's a better welcome than we should have got two hundred years ago,' I said with a laugh, trying to make the best of the matter.

Dinner, which the landlord himself brought in, cheered us again, and we lingered over it till dusk began to fall, discussing whether I ought to visit the lord, or whether, seeing that he had not come to receive me, my dignity did not demand that I should await his visit; and it was on this latter course that we finally decided.

'But he'll hardly come to-night,' said Denny, jumping up. 'I wonder if there are any decent beds here!'

Hogvardt and Watkins had, by my directions, sat down with us; the former was now smoking his pipe at the window, while Watkins was busy overhauling our luggage. We had brought light bags, the rods, guns, and other smaller articles. The rest was in the yacht. Hearing beds mentioned, Watkins shook his head in dismal presage, saying,

'We had better sleep on board, my lord.'

'Not I! What, leave the island now we've got here? No, Watkins!'

'Very good, my lord,' said Watkins impa.s.sively.

A sudden call came from Hogvardt, and I joined him at the window.

The scene outside was indeed remarkable. In the narrow paved street, gloomy now in the failing light, there must have been fifty or sixty men standing in a circle, surrounded by an outer fringe of women and children; and in the centre stood our landlord, his burly figure swaying to and fro as he poured out a low-voiced but vehement harangue. Sometimes he pointed towards us, oftener along the ascending road that led to the interior. I could not hear a word he said, but presently all his auditors raised their hands towards heaven. I saw that some of the hands held guns, some clubs, some knives; and all the men cried with furious energy, '_Nai, Nai._ Yes, yes!' Then the whole body--and the greater part of the grown men on the island must have been present--started off in compact array up the road, the innkeeper at their head. By his side walked another man whom I had not noticed before; he wore an ordinary suit of tweeds, but carried himself with an a.s.sumption of much dignity; his face I could not see.

'Well, what's the meaning of that?' I exclaimed, looking down on the street, empty again save for groups of white-clothed women, who talked eagerly to one another, gesticulating and pointing now towards our inn, now towards where the men had gone.

'Perhaps it's their Parliament,' suggested Denny; 'or perhaps they've repented of their rudeness and are going to erect a triumphal arch.'

These conjectures, being obviously ironical, did not a.s.sist the matter, although they amused their author.

'Anyhow,' said I, 'I should like to investigate the thing. Suppose we go for a stroll?'

The proposal was accepted at once. We put on our hats, took sticks, and prepared to go. Then I glanced at the luggage.

'Since I was so foolish as to waste my money on revolvers--?' said I, with an inquiring glance at Hogvardt.

'The evening air will not hurt them,' said he; and we each stowed a revolver in our pockets. We felt, I think, rather ashamed of our timidity, but the Neopalians certainly looked rough customers. Leading the way to the door I turned the handle; the door did not open. I pulled hard at it. Then I looked at my companions.

'Queer,' said Denny, and he began to whistle.

Hogvardt got the little lantern, which he always had handy, and carefully inspected the door.

'Locked,' he announced, 'and bolted top and bottom. A solid door too!'

and he struck it with his fist. Then he crossed to the window and looked at the bars; and finally he said to me, 'I don't think we can have our walk, my lord.'

Well, I burst out laughing. The thing was too absurd. Under cover of our animated talk the landlord must have bolted us in. The bars made the window no use. A skilled burglar might have beaten those bolts, and a battering ram would, no doubt, have smashed the door; we had neither burglar nor ram.

'We're caught, my boy,' said Denny, 'nicely caught! But what's the game?'

I had asked myself that question already, but had found no answer. To tell the truth, I was wondering whether Neopalia was going to turn out as conservative a country as the Turkish Amba.s.sador had hinted. It was Watkins who suggested an answer.

'I imagine, my lord,' said he, 'that the natives' (Watkins always called the Neopalians 'natives') 'have gone to speak to the gentleman who sold the island to your lordship.'

'Gad,' said Denny, 'I hope it'll be a pleasant interview!'

Hogvardt's broad good-humoured face had a.s.sumed an anxious look. He knew something about the people of these islands; so did I.

'Trouble, is it?' I asked him.

'I'm afraid so,' he answered, and then we turned to the window again, except Denny, who wasted some energy and made a useless din by battering at the door till we beseeched him to let it alone.

There in the room we sat for nearly two hours. Darkness fell; the women had ceased their gossiping, but still stood about the street and in the doorways of their houses. It was nine o'clock before matters showed any progress. Then came shouts from the road above us, the flash of torches, the tread of men's feet in a quick triumphant march.

Next the stalwart figures of the picturesque fellows, with their white kilts gleaming through the darkness, came again into sight, seeming wilder and more imposing in the alternating glare and gloom of the torches and the deepening night. The man in tweeds was no longer visible. Our innkeeper was alone in front. And all, as they marched, sang loudly a rude barbarous sort of chant, repeating it again and again; while the women and children, crowding out to meet the men, caught up the refrain in shrill voices, till the whole air seemed full of it. So martial and inspiring was the rude tune that our feet began to beat in time with it, and I felt the blood quicken in my veins. I have tried to put the words of it into English, in a shape as rough, I fear, as the rough original. Here it is:

'Ours is the land!

Death to the hand That filches the land!

Dead is that hand, Ours is the land!

'Forever we hold it, Dead's he that sold it!

Ours is the land, Dead is the hand!'

Again and again they hurled forth the defiant words, until at last they stopped opposite the inn with one final long-drawn shout of savage triumph.

'Well, this is a go,' said Denny, drawing a long breath. 'What are the beggars up to?'

'What have they been up to?' I asked; for I could not doubt that the song we had heard had been chanted over a dead Stefanopoulos two hundred years before. At this age of the world the idea seemed absurd, preposterous, horrible. But there was no law nearer than Rhodes, and there only Turk's law. The sole law here was the law of the Stefanopouloi, and if that law lost its force by the crime of the hand which should wield it, why, strange things might happen even to-day in Neopalia. And we were caught in the inn like rats in a trap.

'I don't see,' remarked old Hogvardt, laying a hand on my shoulder, 'any harm in loading our revolvers, my lord.'

I did not see any harm in it either, and we all followed Hogvardt's advice, and also filled our pockets with cartridges. I was determined--I think we were all determined--not to be bullied by these islanders and their skull-and-crossbones ditty.

A quarter of an hour pa.s.sed; then there came a knock at the door, while the bolts shot back.

'I shall go out,' said I, springing to my feet.