The Goddess Of Love Read online

  He had nearly said ‘lovely’ and then bit back the word at the last moment.

  Corena’s eyes widened.

  “You will – take me? Oh – thank you – thank you! How can I – tell you how – grateful I am?”

  “I assure you it is against both my instinct and my wish to travel alone,” Lord Warburton said as if he felt that he must assert himself.

  “I promise you I will be as little trouble as possible,” Corena said humbly. “Shall I go – away now?”

  “I think it might be a mistake,” Lord Warburton replied, “when you have been unconscious for so long to move about too soon and also the ship is still rolling.”

  Corena waited, her eyes on his face, until he added a little reluctantly,

  “You can stay here. I shall be going out myself in a little while to take some exercise.”

  “Thank you – thank you – very much, my Lord.”

  There was silence until Lord Warburton remarked,

  “I have the idea that you might like to look at my bookshelves.”

  Corena answered simply,

  “I would love to – but I was too nervous to ask you if I might.”

  “They are at your disposal.”

  She flashed him a radiant smile, then rose and, moving slowly in order to keep her balance, she reached the bookcase and knelt down in front of it.

  She was aware as she did so that Lord Warburton was watching her.

  When she saw the books, she knew that there were some ‘old friends’ and others she had been wanting to read for a long time.

  She saw a book of the plays of Sophocles that contained his play, Ajax.

  She opened it and was at once so immersed in reading one of her favourite passages that she started as Lord Warburton spoke.

  She found that he had moved without her being aware of it and was standing just behind her.

  “What do you find so interesting?” he enquired.

  As if he had been her father asking the question, she replied,

  “I was reading what I think is appropriate to what is happening to us,

  Let the dawn ride in

  On silver horses lighting up the sky.

  The winds abate and leave the groaning sea

  To sleep awhile.”

  Her voice was very musical as she translated the words into English.

  She was in fact almost reciting from memory rather than following the lines with her eyes.

  There was a short silence.

  Then Lord Warburton asked incredulously,

  “Are you telling me that you can read the book you are holding in your hand?”

  “I have read it before, my Lord, with my father.”

  “It seems extraordinary, Miss Melville! I have never met a young woman who is interested in Sophocles, let alone able to read what he had written!”

  “I have told you that I have Greek blood in my veins,” Corena replied, “so perhaps it is easier for me than for somebody who is wholly English.”

  Lord Warburton sat down in a chair just beside her and then he said,

  “Because you have Greek blood in you, which I have too, do you think that is the reason why we are drawn to Greece and why it interests us more than any other country in Europe?”

  He was assuming that Corena felt the same way that he did, but it did not seem strange.

  “What interests us,” she replied, “is not the Greece of today – or the people who now call themselves Greek.”

  She thought of Mr. Thespidos as she spoke and shivered before she added,

  “The Greeks we are talking about are those who brought something new to the world when it was least expecting it.”

  Lord Warburton did not speak, but she knew that he was listening as she continued,

  “It was Greek philosophy that influenced the Greek-speaking Fathers of the Church and gave us Christianity as we know it.”

  Still Lord Warburton did not speak and she went on,

  “I am told that all the images of Buddha in the Far East can be traced back to portraits of Alexander, who was believed in the Eastern Provinces to be Apollo incarnate.”

  She made an expressive gesture with her hands as she said,

  “Think what we owe to the Greeks at the beginning of civilisation as we know it and the beginning of rational thought.”

  She felt that Lord Warburton made a little sound of agreement, but actually it was one of surprise before she finished,

  “Papa always said that they built the most beautiful Temples in carved marble with a delicacy of strength that has never been surpassed!”

  Her voice was almost rapturous as she added,

  “But what is more important is that they set in motion the questing mind that refused to believe that there are any bounds to reason.”

  As Corena said the last words, it was as if she was sounding a trumpet call.

  Then, as she gazed at Lord Warburton, she realised that he was staring at her as if in sheer disbelief.

  Quite suddenly she felt shy and a little abashed as if she had shown off in front of him and it had been the wrong thing to do.

  Then to her surprise he bent forward in his chair to ask harshly,

  “Who taught you all that? Who told you to say it to me?”

  Her eyes widened and seemed to fill her whole face.

  “I-I don’t know – what you – mean.”

  “I think you do!” Lord Warburton said. “You have been told that I am interested in Greece and somebody has instructed you how to talk about it.”

  “That is not – true.”

  She put back the book of Sophocles on the shelf and said,

  “I must apologise – for boring your Lordship. It would be best if I returned – to my cabin.”

  She would have risen to her feet, but Lord Warburton put out his hand to prevent her from doing so.

  “Stay where you are,” he said. “I want to know more about you and to make up my mind if you are genuine or simply play-acting.”

  Because it sounded so ridiculous, Corena laughed.

  “I promise your Lordship that while I spoke – without thinking, it is the way my father and I talk together when he is at home. I forgot for the moment that I was with a stranger who – might not – understand.”

  “I do understand,” Lord Warburton contradicted. “At the same time it surprises me that you should speak like that, unless you have been very well rehearsed.”

  He seemed to add the last words as an afterthought.

  It flashed through Corena’s mind that he was deliberately trying to be sceptical and suspected her of intriguing to deceive him.

  To a certain extent that was true, but not in the way he suspected.

  His books, if nothing else, told her how knowledgeable he was.

  How interesting she thought it would be if she could talk to him naturally without there being a barrier between them.

  It was a barrier erected by his resentment of her having been smuggled aboard and her fear of what Mr. Thespidos would do when they arrived at Crisa.

  For a moment she put the idea away from her mind and, trying to speak lightly, she said,

  “If your Lordship would ever condescend to visit our house, which is in a way a faint echo of yours – I think you would be surprised.”

  “Why?” Lord Warburton enquired.

  “Because you would see the antiques that my father has collected over the years – and would find a great many bookshelves filled, as yours are, with the history of the Greeks.”

  “I hope when I return to England,” Lord Warburton replied, “that I may have the pleasure of calling on you.”

  “And I hope that Papa and I – might see your treasures!” Corena said impulsively.

  As she spoke an icy hand seemed to clutch at her heart as she remembered that if her father came home Lord Warburton would have to stay behind.

  Once again Mr. Thespidos was menacing her like a great black evil bird of prey.

  She l
ooked at Lord Warburton, seeing him not as a handsome man sitting back comfortably in an armchair, but being tortured by Mr. Thespidos.

  He and his confederates, being both avaricious and unscrupulous, would try to extract information from him by any means.

  The idea was horrifying, but she told herself firmly that she must think of nothing except saving her father.

  He was in Mr. Thespidos’s power and the only way she could save him was to do as that evil man had told her to do and exchange one prisoner for another.

  For a moment she wanted to scream because it was so horrifying.

  Then she heard Lord Warburton saying in a very different tone of voice,

  “Who has upset you? Why are you so frightened?”

  She wanted to tell him the truth, but Mr. Thespidos had warned her that if she did so she would sign her father’s death warrant.

  “I-I am just – afraid,” she said quickly, “that by the time we arrive in Greece Papa will be worse – and I will not be able to – look after him.”

  What she said sounded reasonable, but Lord Warburton’s acute perception told him that there was something worse wrong and what she said did not ring true.

  To test her he quoted in Greek some words from Sophocles’s play Ajax, which she had just replaced in the bookcase,

  “Great Sun,

  Pull up your golden-harnessed horses

  Over my native land and tell this story

  Of death and ruin to my aged father – ”

  He thought as he spoke that if Corena was play-acting, as he suspected, and had been taught certain lines to impress him, then it was unlikely that she would know the whole passage or understand what he had just quoted.

  As he finished, he realised that she was looking at him with an expression of fear that could not have been assumed.

  “Why did you say – that? Why did you – quote those lines?” she asked a little incoherently. “Do you feel – instinctively that – Papa is d-dead?”

  The way she spoke was so agitated that Lord Warburton put out his hand to reassure her.

  “No, of course not,” he said. “I was just testing you to see if you understood what I was saying.”

  “But – why did you choose those particular lines. Why did they – come to your mind?” she asked.

  Then, as if she was afraid to say anything more, she rose to her feet and moved away from him.

  She opened one of the windows that looked onto the deck.

  She stood staring out at the sea with its white-covered waves, but she could see only her father’s face, feeling that he was calling to her and needing her help.

  Lord Warburton watched her.

  He thought that the sun on her hair and her clear-cut profile as she raised her eyes to the sky were lovelier than anything he had ever seen or imagined he might find.

  Yet his cold logical mind told him that there was something wrong.

  There was something incongruous in her story, apart from the fact of her having stowed away on board and being so proficient in the language that meant so much to him.

  It flashed through his mind that perhaps she was not real.

  She was a superhuman being who, like the Gods themselves, had come down from the heights to bewilder poor mortals.

  Then he could hear Charles laughing at him and teasing him for being imaginative.

  He would say with a twinkle in his eye that, of course, Miss Melville was a perfectly ordinary young woman.

  It was just that she had had a classical education and there was an obvious explanation, he would suggest, for her presence.

  It was doubtful, Lord Warburton reflected, that she had thought out these dramatics by herself.

  Whoever had brought her aboard certainly had a hand in it.

  He had not forgotten that his chef had thought the men to be Greek.

  They at least would have appreciated her looks and the fact that she resembled, however much he tried to doubt it, the statues of Aphrodite.

  Statues that were to be found not only in the museums of the world but in his own house.

  The whole story was just too clever to be true.

  Her father ill in Greece, the beautiful girl who resembled a Goddess and who spoke Ancient Greek smuggled aboard the yacht of the one man in a million who would really appreciate her.

  It flashed through Lord Warburton’s mind that they were travelling together without a chaperone.

  Perhaps Sir Priam would appear at the end of the voyage and would not be ill and not in need of his daughter’s care and attention.

  Instead he would be an irate father demanding at the point of a loaded pistol that, having ruined her reputation, he must now make reparation by marrying her.

  This was certainly a possibility and yet when he looked at Corena it was impossible to think that she would be a party to such a plot.

  At the same time she was genuinely afraid.

  Yet being so very observant he thought that it was not a fear that a young girl would feel because her father might be dying.

  It was something deeper, more fundamental and more threatening to her personally.

  These ideas racing through his mind stimulated him and he felt excited by the problem in the same way as when there was a statue waiting for him to discover it.

  Just as Lord Warburton’s interest was aroused by a new gadget for his yacht, this puzzle was making his mind work like a well-oiled machine.

  He was determined to discover the truth about Miss Melville and he thought that it might not be very difficult.

  Few women, he thought without conceit, found it hard to resist him.

  In fact the boot was usually on the other foot and he more often resisted them than they him.

  All he had to do was apply new tactics to the problem and unravel the truth as if it was an ancient relic many feet down beneath the surface.

  Corena stood at the window gazing out at the horizon, hoping perhaps that she would find beyond it what she was seeking.

  Lord Warburton went to her side.

  “Suppose we start again?” he said in his most beguiling voice. “First of all, Miss Melville, I think you should tell me your Christian name.”

  “It is ‘Corena’.”

  “Greek!” Lord Warburton exclaimed. “A ‘maiden’, which, of course, is what you are.”

  She looked at him for a moment, then turned her face away again and wondered why he was interested.

  “My name is ‘Orion’,” he said, “which I feel needs no explanation.”

  “No, of course not, but I expect, like Papa, you found it a difficult name at school.”

  Lord Warburton laughed.

  “That would certainly have been true had I not been prosaic enough to use my other name, which is ‘George’.”

  Corena laughed.

  “That certainly does not suit you as a student of Ancient Greece.”

  “Now that we are introduced properly,” Lord Warburton said, “and we can talk of the Greece we love without feeling embarrassed or questioning our reason for it.”

  “You were – questioning it – not me!”

  “That is true,” he agreed, “but you must admit that the situation we are both in is rather strange.”

  “Not if you read the – stories of the – ancient Gods!”

  He laughed.

  “Of course you are right, Corena, and the Gods have special privileges, which makes me feel that I can call you by your real name.”

  It flashed through Corena’s mind that they were in a way like two Greek Gods journeying homeward after a visit to a place where no one had understood them.

  Because she thought that he would appreciate her thoughts, she quoted from Pindar, who had written so many odes celebrating victories in the Greek Games,

  “Where are things of the day?

  What are we? What are we but

  The shadow of a dream?”

  She spoke as if she challenged Lord Warburton and with hardly a pause h
e replied with the next line of the poem,

  “We are all shadows,

  But when the shining comes from the hands of the God,

  Then the heavenly light falls on men

  And life is all sweetness – ”

  As he spoke the beautiful words in his deep voice, the sun seemed to illuminate them both with the light that came only from Greece.

  Corena turned to look at him.

  As their eyes met, she felt as if they were speaking in the ‘honeyed tongues’ of Olympus.

  There were no more problems or difficulties for together they were above them all.

  She had the odd feeling that Lord Warburton was thinking exactly the same thing.

  There was no reason to be afraid because they were one person and there was nothing to divide them.

  Then, as the ship rolled a little more deeply, she put out her hand to hold onto the window ledge and came back to reality.

  She was not a Goddess linked to a God called Orion, but a girl caught up in a wicked plot to capture a very rich man as a prisoner in exchange for her father’s life.

  Once again she was aware of Mr. Thespidos hovering menacingly in the background.

  So that it was difficult for her to think of anything but his evilness and her father helpless in his hands.

  Then, as she felt despairingly that she was alone, that there was no one to help her and that she too was a prisoner of Mr. Thespidos, she heard Lord Warburton say,

  “Tell me what is troubling you and trust me. I swear you will not regret it.”

  *

  When Corena went down to change for dinner, she felt almost ashamed that the day had been so happy.

  Except for a few frightened moments when the truth forced itself upon her consciousness, she felt as if she was in a golden dream.

  She was well aware that Lord Warburton had set out to assuage her fears.

  He wanted to make her feel that she could trust him with the secret of what was upsetting her and that he could solve all her problems.

  Because it was easier to swim with the tide than against it, she had allowed herself to be beguiled into talking with him as she might have talked with her father.

  They spoke of the Gods and Goddesses, who she often thought were more real and familiar to her than young people of her own generation.