BACK TO NEOPALIA.
BACK TO NEOPALIA.
‘I’m sure you’d like to have that horrible secret passage blocked up, Charley. It’s full of terrible memories.’
‘My dear Phroso, wall up the passage?’
‘We shan’t want it now,’ said she, with a laugh—and something else.
‘It’s true,’ I admitted, ‘that I intend, as far as possible, to rule by constitutional means in Neopalia. Still one never knows. My dearest, have you no romance?’
‘No,’ said Phroso shamelessly. ‘I’ve had enough romance. I want to live quietly; and I don’t want to push anyone over into that awful pool where poor Kortes fell.’
I stood looking at the boards under the staircase. Presently I knelt down and touched the spring. The boards rolled away, the passage gaped before us, and I put my arm round Phroso as I said:
‘Now heaven forbid that I should lay a modern sacrilegious hand on the secret of the Stefanopouloi! For the world makes many circles, Phroso—forward sometimes, sometimes back—and it is something to know that here, in Neopalia, we are ready, and that if any man attacks our sovereignty, why, let him look out for the secret of the Stefanopouloi! In certain moods, Phroso, I should be capable of coming back from the chasm—alone!’
So Phroso, on my entreaty, spared the passage; and even now, when the shades of middle age (a plague on ’em) are deepening, and the wild doings of the purchaser of Neopalia grow golden in distant memory, I like to walk to the end of the chasm and recall all that it has seen: the contests, the dark tricks, the sudden deaths, aye, to travel back from the fearful struggle of Kortes and Constantine on the flying bridge to that long-ago time when the Baron d’Ezonville was so lucky as to be set adrift in his shirt, while Stefan Stefanopoulos’s headless trunk was dashed into the dim water and One-eyed Alexander the Bard wrote the Chant of Death. Ah me, that was two hundred years ago!
Colston & Coy., Limited, Printers, Edinburgh.