T H E
P R I N C E S S
S O P H I A

E. F. BENSON
THOMAS NELSON AND
SONS

TO
MY DEAR FRIEND
CRITIC, SISTER
I AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATE
THIS BOOK
E. F. BENSON

CONTENTS.

THE PRINCESS SOPHIA.

INTRODUCTORY.

THE independent principality of Rhodopé lies, as everyone knows, on the wooded coast-line of Albania. Its territory, no greater than the area of the English counties palatine, is triangular in shape, the base of the triangle (a line some twenty miles long if measured as the crow flies, but more like a hundred if we follow the indentations and promontories of that superbly fertile land), being washed by the waters of the Adriatic. It is bounded on the south by the kingdom of Greece, and up to its northern border extends the benign rule of that most pitiful and Christian monarch the Sultan of Turkey.

Rhodopé preserved during the Græco-Turkish War of 1897 (I am almost ashamed to remind my readers of events so recent) a strict neutrality, though the offers made it by both one side and the other might well have been enough to turn a less level head than that of Prince Leonard, the ruling sovereign. For an Imperial Iradé, with promise of a definite Hatt (I think I have the terms correctly), arrived from the most Christian monarch, prospectively granting the cession of Corfu to the Prince, when Greece lay crushed beneath the heel of the Sultan, if only his beloved brother (so the Sultan was pleased to say) would join the cause of the imminently victorious Turks; while from the other side a cleverly worded sketch pictured the immense advantage it would be to Rhodopé if by an extension of its territory it was so arranged that the Upper Valley of the river Strypos—the Golden River, as it is not inaptly named—a plain of surpassing fertility, and odorous with the finest growths of tobacco, should pour its revenues into the coffers of the Prince.

Indeed, Prince Leonard, when these two propositions, which arrived almost simultaneously, were under his consideration, must have had a strong head not to have been overcome by the intoxication of one or the other prospect. He knew—and sober and bald politicians tell me that he did not overestimate the importance of his position (a malady most incident to autocrats)—that the balance of power, inevitably determining the result of the war, as he sided with Turkey or Greece, was in his hands; also he would have the singular pleasure of perhaps playing the deuce with that wonderfully harmonious comic opera the Concert of the Powers. A scribbled word from him would—and he was not too sanguine in so believing—give him Corfu if the envelope of his reply was addressed to Yildiz Kiosk, or, if to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Athens, the nicotic valley of the Upper Strypos.

A glance at the map is sufficient to show that the key of the crisis was assuredly his. If he allied himself with Greece, in a few hours his artillery could be coolly shelling the fortress of Janina, the slow, inevitable advance of the Turkish army down the defiles of the Melouna Pass would be checked, and their overwhelming superiority of numbers against a vastly inferior force would be neutralized. They could not possibly advance into Greek territory leaving so important a town as Janina in the hands of their enemy’s ally, and, indeed, the Sultan, with his world-famous frankness, had confessed as much in his letter. His Imperial Majesty might advance, if he pleased, through Thessaly; meantime Prince Leonard, with his very adequate force of Albanians, men of the mountain and the sea, and the best-drilled soldiers in the world, would be quietly eating their way eastward, and at the end the Turks would infallibly find themselves cut off in the enemy’s country. If, on the other hand, the Sultan directed his first advance against Rhodopé, the Greeks would stream through the eastern passes, attacking instead of defending, and again take him in the rear. Besides, to advance into Rhodopé much resembled an attempt to take a hornets’ nest by daylight. For a score of years Prince Leonard had lavished the revenues of the country on its army and navy; English and German officers had drilled his men into a perfect machine of war; the steel of the great workshops of the world had been perched in the mountainous and almost impregnable passes into the principality; French engineers had exalted his valleys, and brought low his hills, flinging down military roads east, west, north, and south—the whole kingdom, a man might say, had been forged into one cannon. Nor had the Prince neglected the defence of the sea-board, though from the Turk there was little to fear in this regard. The only two ports on that rocky coast—Mavromáti and Búlteck—have long been the admiration of nautical Europe, and Gibraltar itself might learn a lesson from the concealed galleries which defend these fire-belching jaws of death.

On the other hand, supposing he allied himself with Constantinople, the conclusion of the war, as it actually took place, was much easier of demonstration, and quite as inevitable as the Pons Asinorum. Greece had not the sinews to check the Turkish advance from the north-east. What, then, would be her plight if Prince Leonard’s armed cruisers battered Patras, and landed troops in the Peloponnese? A nut in a hinge, a shuttlecock between two battledores, were in a more enviable position.

But, as we have seen, Prince Leonard held entirely aloof. He was an autocrat, his will was subject to no controlling House, and he possessed not only absolute authority over his principality, but commanded—which is even better worth having—their complete devotion. What seemed right in his never seemed otherwise than right in theirs; it was through his glasses (the Prince is a little short-sighted) that his ministers regarded the political outlook; and when it was known that he had decided not to move in the matter, and his decision was communicated to his Government, they were lost in admiration at this unique example of princely prudence displayed in his resolve to remain neutral, just as they would have seen a splendid flash of the old crusading spirit if he had determined to side with the Greeks, or nodded their heads in silent approval of his marvellous insight into practical politics if he had joined the cause of the Crescent. The leader in the principal paper of Rhodopé—though not an official organ—printed in large type, commended in terms of the most extravagant praise the wisdom of their great Prince, who saw what so many less divinely-gifted rulers have failed to observe, that a nation’s first duty is to itself, and would not lightly plunge his people into the horrors of war. Yet, even as the first edition was cried through the streets, the staff of compositors were cheerfully making pie of another leading article, prematurely set up, which compared Prince Leonard to Cœur-de-Lion, and singled him out from the whole of apathetic Europe as the champion who embraced the cause of Christianity, as the only being to whom his religion was a reality, and who would not suffer the accursed race to make havoc of Greece.

This premature leader sufficiently indicated the reputed bias—if so well-balanced a mind can properly be said to have a bias—of the Prince. His private sympathies, it is true, were entirely on the side of the Greeks; he was twice related by marriage to their Royal Family, and he loved the people who were so largely of the same blood as his own inimitable Albanians—yet he would not take up the sword for them. The Rhodopé Courier had hit the nail on the head in its second leader: he did not wish to plunge his people into a war which must be expensive and might cost many lives, while, considered as a practical question, his acute mind, with the aid of a Blue-book, a few jotted figures, a meditative cigarette, soon revealed to him the fact that the Upper Valley of the Strypos would not nearly repay him for the inevitable outlay of a war. Moreover, the acquisition of this delightful piece of country was not without its drawbacks. It would, he saw, have to be garrisoned and fortified, for it lay open to any attack that might be made (though strictly against the Sultan’s orders, as the Armenian massacres had been) from Turkey. Just now he had but little money to spend in such large operations, for a reason that will appear, and though the Rhodopé Courier knew nothing of this reason, the main lines of its second leader were correct enough; war would be expensive both in lives and money, and there was no sufficient interest at stake.

The Prince’s reasons against espousing the cause of Turkey are easily and succinctly stated. He hated the Turks as warmly as he hated the devil, regarding the two as synonymous; and he looked on them and their deeds, their natures and their names with that quivering disgust with which a tired man about to get into bed sees some poisonous reptile coldly coiled in the sheets. He would as soon have allied himself with a tribe of cobras. And so Rhodopé remained neutral.

This short disquisition about the Græco-Turkish War may, I am afraid, appear out of place to those who follow me to the end of this historical tale; but it seems not so to me. In the first place, it will be found to have introduced the indulgent reader to the principality of Rhodopé, and the character of its eminent Prince, now in his middle age; in the second, it has rubbed up his memory about the Prince’s attitude with regard to the war, and given the true reason for a course of conduct which was so widely discussed and even so freely blamed; for it is true that the Prince was hurt, though not in his resolve, by the comments of the English Liberal press with which a news-cutting agency in the Strand has for years supplied him, and especially by a paper signed by a large majority of Liberal Members of Parliament. In the third place, it has led up to the one little sore place in his life, which contributed to his decision not to join his arms with those of Greece, indicated in his communication to the House under the question of expense. For three months before the war broke out, i.e., in December, 1896, he had paid at great sacrifice an enormous sum of money to his mother, the Princess Sophia, and temporarily, at least, the resources of his country were crippled. The Government had strongly approved his action in so doing, and sent him a message of affectionate sympathy and condolence when the reason was privately made known to them. For his mother’s debts were inexcusable; her jointure was ample to enable her to live as befitted her station, had it not been for the one life-long weakness of that enchanting woman: she was a gambler, hardened and inveterate.

It is difficult to estimate the value of a factor like this in its effect on any life, and when it has played so important a part in a career as it played in the case of Prince Leonard of Rhodopé, almost impossible. Certain it is that now in his middle age he sees little of his mother, for by his orders, when he ascended the throne on her abdication a score of years ago, she was forbidden ever again to set foot in Rhodopé, and the cares of State are so numerous and exigent to so conscientious a Prince that he leaves his country at the outside for a short month in the year, and sometimes not at all. Some ten days of this little holiday, it is true, he makes a rule of spending with his mother, the Princess Sophia, in her charming villa on the olive-clad hills above Monte Carlo; but one would think there could be no great intimacy between so diverse-minded a pair. But of this the reader will judge later. For the present it may be said that the Princess’s time is largely spent at the tables, while the Prince, on ascending the throne of Rhodopé, suppressed once and for all the gambling which at one time threatened to undermine the very foundations of the State. Never has reformer started on so Herculean a task, and, indeed, the work of building up was less arduous than the work of pulling down, for it was easier for him to make a nation of warriors out of his Albanians than it was to turn a medley of gamblers into sober-minded citizens, and disprove to them that lying creed which says that in chance alone do we find the charm and the lord of life. Some say he went too far in this hunting out of the worship of the false and fickle goddess of luck, and in the destruction of her groves or gambling-houses. Even the comparatively unexciting game of knuckle-bones, the lineal descendant, or you might say the living incarnation, of the old Greek astragali (and thus of archæological interest), he sternly suppressed. For this, however, there was another sufficient though somewhat quaint reason, since the son of one of the small farmers near Mavromáti, an idiot in all other respects, was so consummate a genius at the game that he had won the greater part of the copper currency of Rhodopé at it, and there was literally a penny famine. Here his idiocy came in, for his mental deficiency, backed by his native Albanian obstinacy or firmness, caused him to refuse to part with any of his copper, even though offered 10 per cent. extra on the franc. The Prince dealt with the question with his accustomed acumen. He allowed the poor boy to keep his copper, but made the game of knuckle-bones illegal. This acted in the way he had foreseen it would. The hoard of copper, a bulky sackful, could no longer grow; the charm of amassing was gone, and before long the idiot was obliging enough to take gold and silver in exchange.

But such radical measures, if they erred at all, erred on the right side. The abuse was radical; the cure must be radical too. Step by step the gambling-houses were put down, one by one the gamblers were induced to turn to a pursuit in which they could enrich themselves without impoverishing others; the love of gain which is so deeply enrooted in the peasant races of East Europe found a less sensational fruition, and Rhodopé was knit together into the principality it now is—a cannon, and yet a garden of the Lord.

When I think of its smiling valleys and multitude of renovating rivers, it often seems to me that Prince Leonard was certainly right in refusing to go to war even against the unspeakable Turk. Nature has printed in her boldest capitals her dictate to that happy kingdom not to concern itself with the quarrels of its neighbours, else why did she build those great ramparts of rocks on every side but one, where she has placed a rocky and hungry shore, a stern ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’ against any who should dare attempt to violate this mountain sanctuary? It cannot have been by a blind and purposeless stir of forces that she ranged north and south of Rhodopé those spear-heads of stone on which even the aspiring pine can fix no anchorage, and from which in winter the snow slips like a fallen coverlet down to the less violent slopes below. Surely some lesson was meant to be drawn from her disposition. And, indeed, Prince Leonard had set the seal on her policy of isolation, and it were an infirmity of purpose to go back on it; forts and batteries endorsed those impregnable rocks and guarded the passes, and it would be a regiment of steel who could win through. Nature’s lesson, too, is no less clearly inscribed on the fertile plains which the mountains guard, for the country is amply self-supporting. Broad pastures line the brimming rivers, and the alluvial soil yields its sixty-fold and hundred-fold in tobacco fields, and higher up in terraced vineyards of volcanic earth. The very cigarette you are smoking was born, I will be bold to say, in the fields of Prince Leonard, and only bears the stamp of Cairo to show where it was cut and enveloped and probably adulterated. Again, if you have never drunk the Château Vryssi of 1893, yellow seal, there is as yet no excuse for you to label this a sour world. A man might search for a month in Rhodopé, yet never find a beggar, nor even one to whom old age brought indigence. Conscription obliges every male to serve in the army for five years, and after that he can retire on a pension large enough to keep want from the door and till his fields, and he must live extravagantly or very idly who does not save his pension. Nor are the dwellers on the coast less fortunate; mullet and sole are legion in that sea, and in ten fathoms of water grow the sponges with which the faces of half Europe are daily made comparatively clean.

The towns are few in number; Mavromáti and Búlteck are the only ports, and, in consequence, the only places of consideration on the coast, Amandos, the capital, lying twelve miles inland, the only other city numbering ten thousand souls. For the rest the valleys are peopled with villages, each more clean and more like a box of toys than the last; and I have often, when travelling there, sitting in the little place of some such hamlet, with its church, its meeting-place, its barracks and its white-washed houses, momentarily expected that some paste-board door would open, and out would pour an operatic chorus of genuine shepherds and shepherdesses.

It was not always so. Twenty years ago each village would boast a score of gaming-houses, its hundred rich folk, and its five hundred poor ones. Even then few were beggars, owing to the immeasurable fertility of the land; but many were labourers on another’s ground who should have been lords of their own. And it is the events by which Prince Leonard came to the throne, and was enabled to rescue his kingdom from its imminent dissolution in the lifetime of his mother, the reigning Princess Sophia of Rhodopé, that this story tells.

CHAPTER I.
THE GIRL IS MOTHER TO THE WOMAN.

Princess Sophia’s father, the reigning Prince Leonard’s grandfather, was a man extraordinarily truculent in disposition, with a hand of iron under no velvet glove, and a temper frankly diabolical. His wife, the Grand Duchess Fedora, had died in giving birth to his only child, the Princess Sophia; and so long as the girl grew up strong and healthy, he had no thoughts of attempting to take to himself another partner. In this he acted contrarily to the bias of mankind, who would see in the education of a daughter the need of a mother’s hand. Not so thought Prince Demetrius. Had Sophia died, there would then be an undeniable necessity for marrying again, and so continuing his line, and disappointing the hopes of the cousin who stood next the throne, a man abhorrent to him; but as long as she lived, such a course appeared to him to be altogether outside the region of the vaguest consideration. Indeed, his first venture—though the word is scarcely apt for so chill a piece of business—had not been altogether fortunate. The Princess Fedora had been a mild and ailing woman, with weak and swimming blue eyes, of an uncertain manner, and of notable mediocrity, and the secret satisfaction which her husband at first used to feel in making her jump soon lost its edge when he saw how easily, how unintentionally even, the thing could be done. A voice raised ever so little, one raucous and guttural exclamation, though half stifled, was enough to make that poor lady skip or swoon. In fine, he got tired of her swoonings, and was in danger, when she died, of losing the keenness of his overbearing and furious temper from mere contact with one so grossly meek and of so contemptible a spirit, even as a sword that has often to cut cotton-wool is soon blunted.

But before long Sophia made him feel his own man again. She grew up with the foot of the roe-deer and the eye of the hawk, and her imperative craving for excitement in some form or other kept her father on incessant tenterhooks as to what she might choose to do next. By no means the earliest of her escapades was at the age of ten, when he found her sitting with the grooms in the stable-yard, cross-legged on the horse-block, and smoking a cigarette. Her current governess, an estimable and incompetent Frenchwoman, who could play more scales in a minute and speak more words in five different languages with absolute correctness of accent than any governess yet known to exist on this imperfect earth, was bedewing the corner of the yard with impotent tears while Her Royal Highness smoked, and indulged between the whiffs in shocking slang expressions to the English groom. At this prodigious moment her father came in from his ride, saw the governess cowering and wringing her hands in the corner, and the Hope of Rhodopé flicking the ash off her cigarette with the apparent mastery of habit. His face expressed no surprise, though he cast one furious glance at Mademoiselle Fifine, and dismounting from his horse, he walked to where his daughter was sitting. She had not seen him till he had well turned the corner into the yard, and knew that he must have observed her employment; and convinced of this, she had not resorted to what would have been the ordinary young lady’s pitiful subterfuge on such an extreme occasion, and either dropped her cigarette, or handed it behind her back to the groom. She was far too defiant and proud for such paltriness of conduct, and she smoked quietly on, a slight patter of fear in her heart, but outwardly calm.

Her father approached in silence, and as he drew near Sophia respectfully got up. Still in silence he sat down on the horse-block, and Sophia stood beside him. If he had only boxed her ears and called her a ‘dirty, vulgar little cat,’ she would have drawn a sigh of relief, but this silence was intolerably ominous. She was the first to break it.

‘I am smoking a cigarette, papa,’ she said frankly, ‘and I find it excellent.’

He did not look at her, but only took out his own cigarette-case and laid it by his side.

‘So I see,’ he said; ‘and when you have finished that, you shall have another. These, too, are excellent cigarettes; I have plenty of them.’

‘Thanks; you are very kind, but I think one will be enough,’ remarked Sophia.

‘It may be, but you will have another if it is not.’ Then turning to the stablemen: ‘Stop where you are, all of you,’ he said. ‘I wish you to see the Princess Sophia smoking till she has had enough.’

Sophia understood, and her small spirit was up in indignant revolt. Already she had had nearly enough, and the cigarette was yet only half consumed. Each puff became a more palpable pang. Meantime Mademoiselle Fifine had approached.

‘Oh, sir,’ she said tremulously, ‘Princess Sophia has been very naughty, and I could not stop her. But make her stop; perhaps she will obey you. If she smokes any more, she will die of it, for already she is growing very pale.’

The Prince turned to the distressed governess with a malign light in his eye.

‘As you say, you could not stop her,’ he said. ‘You had better get home and pack your boxes. I do not choose to retain the services of one who cannot govern my daughter. You a governess!’ he cried, his voice rising suddenly to a tone that the late Princess Fedora well knew. ‘Great and merciful God!’

Sophia turned to her father.

‘Papa,’ she said, ‘I must go; I do not feel very well.’

‘You shall stop exactly where you are,’ he replied. ‘If you choose to disgrace yourself, you shall do so in the way that I, and not you, prefer.’

‘If I stop here as you order me,’ she said, ‘will you promise not to send mademoiselle away? For indeed she did her best to stop me, but I have a stronger will than she.’

‘I shall send her away anyhow,’ he replied, ‘and as surely you shall stop here.’

The end was approaching; a paleness gathered on her cheek, and the meanness of the impending calamity appalled her.

‘Before all the stablemen?’ she pleaded. ‘Bob will laugh at me so.’

‘Most probably,’ said her father dryly; ‘and the others too. I shall not blame them.’

He sat tapping his boot with his riding-whip, not dreaming that he would be disobeyed, and Sophia suddenly saw her chance. Throwing away the end of her cigarette, she bolted round the corner of the stable like a ferreted rabbit, and plunged into the thick bushes which lined the road. Her father started up with an astonished oath, but he was too late, and he turned a gorgon face to the group of stablemen whom he had told to wait.

‘You set of idiotic deformities!’ he cried in a voice that would have made Fedora tremble for a fortnight. ‘How dare you stand there gaping! Get to your work, all of you! Never have I seen such a bandy-legged crew!’

Sophia meanwhile crouched, quivering with a sickly feeling of nausea, among the bushes. She was half afraid, half exultant at what she had done. What the consequence might be she scarcely dared to think; lifelong imprisonment in a dungeon seemed terribly possible. But she had revolted; she had asserted her independence, and gloried in the deed, like an early Christian martyr.

At the age of fourteen she proposed to her English tutor that he should elope with her, and that they should together seek an appointment in a circus. Failing his acceptance, she got him to teach her écarté. She was quickly fascinated with the game and its subtly compounded mixture of luck and skill. She insisted that he play her for counters, and her exultation at winning a hundred of these off him in the course of an hour expressed itself, as it subsequently appeared, prophetically.

‘When I grow up, Mr. Buckhurst,’ she said, ‘I shall be a gambler.’

And Mr. Buckhurst, counting out ten red and five white, thought it extremely probable that she would.

But the games of écarté came to the ears of the Prince, and after a thunderous dismissal of Mr. Buckhurst, he sent for his daughter.

‘I hear you are in the habit of playing écarté,’ he said. ‘To-night you shall play with me. But I do not play for counters, like Mr. Buckhurst; I play for francs.’

‘That will be even more delightful!’ exclaimed Sophia excitedly. ‘Mr. Buckhurst would not play me for francs. He said that gambling was not a proper employment for children. I am so glad you disagree with him. How delightful it will be to play for real money!’

‘You shall see. Perhaps losing is not so pleasant as winning.’

‘But it will surely be exciting,’ said Sophia.

The Prince dined at six, and after dinner he sent for his daughter.

‘I have twenty francs, and some pennies,’ she said, turning out her purse. ‘That will last a long time. I have been saving up, which is slow work; but perhaps in this way I shall soon get twenty more.’

‘Perhaps,’ said her father. ‘What were you saving up for?’

Sophia flushed a little.

‘A Christmas present for Bob,’ she said.

Prince Demetrius found no reply handy, and he cut for deal.

Now, the Prince was one of the first écarté players in Europe, and he had resolved to teach his daughter a lesson on the same lines as the lesson he had proposed to teach her in the stable-yard. He meant to go on playing till Sophia was shorn of all her twenty francs, and after that of all her pennies as well.

Sophia marked the king in the first hand, and turned it up in the second, securing the odd trick on each occasion. On the third deal her father held five small trumps, but only made the odd, Sophia holding knave and ten. On the fourth deal Sophia won the odd trick, and no king was marked, and her father pushed across to her four francs. The second game was but a repetition of the first, only Prince Demetrius in this case failed even to secure the odd. He growled out an oath as he gave Sophia five francs, and that observant young person recorded a silent vow that she personally would take her losings with the same calm demeanour as she certainly intended to cultivate when she was so fortunate as to win. But it was terribly exciting work to play for whole silver francs, and every fibre and nerve in that wholesome little body was stretched to play her best. The third game she also won, and remarked consolingly to the Prince:

‘You have had the worst of the cards, sir,’ a phrase she had picked up from the retired Buckhurst.

An hour later this strange pair were still at the game. The lesson Prince Demetrius had determined to give his daughter was still unlearned, for by her on the table glittered three gold napoleons, and some seventeen francs in silver. She had enjoyed a most surprising run of luck, and what was still more surprising to her father, she had played throughout a safe and sober game, the very essence and spirit of scientific success. Several times she had elected to play on a hand which, as he saw when she played it, justified itself clearly indeed to the adept, but held dazzling improbabilities to the beginner, with a change of two cards, or perhaps one. At other times her bolder front had reason to back it. Once, for instance, the Prince turned up the king, and proposed for cards. She, with a moderate hand, refused, since the odd trick would give him the game, and her chance of saving it lay in that. As luck would have it, he had on this occasion held four small clubs and one diamond, the same being trumps. She had held two diamonds, a fair hand of hearts, and won all the tricks. The consequence of all this was that at the end of an hour the thought of the lesson he should give her had yielded place in the Prince’s mind to an increased feeling of respect for his daughter, so proficient was her play, though only a beginner, and to the adept’s joy in the game considered as a game and unconcerned with moralities.

Nine o’clock came, and an hour after the Princess’s bedtime. But when a raw-boned governess appeared at the door, and stood patiently waiting, the Prince presently answered her with so tigerish a snarl, and so strong an expression of his feelings toward her—Sophia had just marked the king—that that lady retired to her bedroom in precipitate confusion, and remembered him in her prayers. The pile by the Princess had grown to a matter of eighty francs; the Prince had made more than one bad mistake, and instead of teaching his daughter a lesson, he had caused an unfounded suspicion to arise in her mind that he was only a player of the second order.

Alas for the moral cause! That evening, which he had designed to be so salutary a piece of education, was in reality the direct ancestor of the profuse gaming-tables in the State of Rhodopé, and the threatener of its entire ruin as a nation. Not only did Sophia become convinced that games at cards were more entrancing than any other adventure, even than trying to elope with a reluctant English tutor, but several times during the game her father had exclaimed: ‘You have the luck of the devil, Sophia!’ and such an opinion from so expert a judge could not fail to produce a deep impression on her, and fill her with wild hopes. Indeed, the truth of it, to give the devil his due, was blatantly obvious. Doubtful cards prospered in her hand, good cards exacted the full tale of their merit, and what seemed impossible winners sometimes leaped in at the end, established and trick-winning. Even Prince Demetrius, who knew more than most men of the favours of the fickle jade, was impressed by the decisions of Fortune. It seemed idle to struggle, and when on the stroke of midnight he rose from the table, leaving Sophia with a balance of a hundred and seventeen francs, he almost regretted that they had not played for larger stakes, for the winner ever commanded his respect. His daughter gathered up her money with carefully assumed carelessness, but inward exultation.

‘You had the worst of the cards throughout, papa,’ she observed again.

‘I had,’ he said, then paused, and the gambler within him leaped to the surface. ‘Oh, Sophia,’ he said, ‘with such a run of luck, and, to do you justice, your own intuition, translated into terms of roulette, you would in a year make a fortune at Monte Carlo sufficient to buy the Ionian Isles.’

Her face lit up as the face of some village genius might light up one receipt of a favourable opinion from a publisher about his manuscript poems.

‘Oh, papa,’ she cried, ‘how splendid! Will you take me there?’

And thus the moral lesson fled shrieking from the room.

It was not only at the cards that a sort of spell seemed to shower blessings on the girl; in that crisp and invigorating air she grew up to tall and stately development, and the breezes of the mountains and the perfume of flowers lent her their beauty. Other cosmetics she had none, and when her maid pressed on her curlers for the hair, and washes for the face, and dentrifices for her milk-white teeth, she threw the obnoxious aids behind the grate. The superlative mildness of her mother seemed to have cancelled with the ferocious temper of her father, and to have produced in their daughter a winning yet imperial graciousness that touched the heart of the people. It was her joy to scamper over the country on her Hungarian horse, or to divide the waters of the Adriatic with a plunge as of some quick-diving bird from the rocks, or in the harvesttime she would wield a scythe in the fields, and laugh to see how the other girls, daughters of the farmers, and inured to toil, would vainly strive to keep pace with her fallen swathes. Yet it was with a wonderful dignity that she received her father’s guests, and she was royal to her finger-tips.

But most of all she loved the hour when the lamps were lit, and the curtains drawn, and she and her father, or she and some visitor to the Court, sat down and played écarté or picquet. Sometimes a baccarat-table would be made up, and that was even more enchanting, for she loved the decision of pure chance, and bowed to it with the unwavering devotion of the thoroughbred and single-hearted gambler. They were no longer simple francs which were pushed across the table; bright gold pieces scurried to and fro in breathless alternation, and she loved to think of the miner who delved sweating in the earth, and the gold-dust carried in boxes oversea, to supply the sinews of her amusement.

The fame of her beauty and the charm of the girl, without which beauty is a mask and a cipher, had gone out widely into the world, and already, while she was not yet seventeen, royal blood and more than regal dulness were kneeling at her feet. It was the frankness of her refusal, her sheer astonishment at the unsuccessful, that kept others aloof. To marry seemed to her an inconceivable thing. She had not yet met her match either in the gallop or in rubicon bezique, a game which occupied her greatly for a year or two; and to pass a lifetime with a man who could not keep up with her in a scamper across country, or who would be a mere whipped puppy in her ruthless hands at the cards, was outside the bounds of possibility. Some of these unfortunate suitors were strangely, almost comically, below the mark. They fell off their horses in the afternoon, and were perpetually plunged in the swollen waters of the rubicon in the evening. To pretend even to wear the guise of sympathy for their inane misfortunes was a histrionic feat of which she was hopelessly incapable.

English travellers who have visited Rhodopé have always found themselves greatly at home there, for the character of the two nations is marvellously alike. To those of Rhodopé no less than to us has been given a sublime self-sufficiency, moved only to a smiling and wondering tolerance at the screams of France or the telegrams of incomprehensible Emperors. The insular position of England accounts for this trait in our case, and the walls of mountains round Rhodopé—as inviolable as the sea—in the other. Both nations are profoundly tenacious rather than assertive, both have a certain habit of stalking along to fulfil an immutable destiny, an attitude which is characteristic of the races of the North and shrewdly aggravating to those of the South. The inhabitants of Rhodopé are neither to be driven nor to be led: they go their own way with an almost sublime consciousness of the futility of every other way, or, when they choose, stand as still as trees planted by the waterside. It is unnecessary to remind the reader how closely their royal line is related to our own, and thus it has come about from community of blood no less than of nature that many of the Court appointments are held by English-speaking folk, English also is the language of diplomacy there, a unique phenomenon.

From her seventeenth to her twentieth year Sophia lived much in the society of the English, and her greatest friend at this time was Lady Blanche Amesbury, only daughter of the Marquis of Abbotsworthy, who held the post of English Minister at the Court of Prince Demetrius. The two were in many ways much alike: both loved to be in the saddle or the sea all day, and community of tastes brought about a real friendship. It was to Blanche that the Princess confided the deficiencies of the Grand Duke Nicholas, a youth of about twenty-three, who was then being put through his pre-matrimonial paces at Amandos. He was hopelessly in love with his cousin Sophia, and the latter was prepared to give him a fair trial. Indeed, the wooing of the Princess Sophia was not unlike the fairy stories in which princesses sit at the top of hills of glass calmly ready to wed whoever can ride a horse up to their side.

‘I do not require much,’ said this candid young lady to Blanche, as they sat waiting for Nicholas to go out riding with them. ‘The man who marries me must be passably good-looking. My cousin Nicholas is more than that—indeed, I suppose he might be called handsome—and he must do one or two things well. He must either ride very well, or talk very well, or play cards very well, or if he only plays roulette and games of that kind, he must lose very well. Voilà tout!’

Blanche considered a moment.

‘We shall see about his riding this afternoon,’ she said. ‘As far as his talking goes, I am afraid he will not do on that count. And this evening, no doubt, you will see how he plays. But there are other things—he is very rich; that is a good thing.’

‘How can you think me so mercenary!’ cried the Princess. ‘Besides, I have the luck of the devil—papa has told me so more than once—and so I shall win enough at cards to keep my head above water. Here he is! Really he looks quite distinguished!’

The riding question was soon settled, for the Grand Duke put his toes out and his heels in, and sawed the autumn air with a sharp elbow. And Sophia shook her head to Blanche as they came in.

‘There is but one more chance,’ she said.

She and her cousin played rubicon bezique that night, and at first Sophia thought that after all he might do. He played quickly, and marked treble bezique in the first game, which raised him in her estimation. But, oh Heaven! the humiliation which followed! He showed a miser’s greed for his tale of tens and aces; he haggled over mere francs, refusing to toss double or quits in napoleons; he preferred to make certain of a small score rather than risk a large one; he let out incidentally that he could not swim (‘Without any sense of shame, my dear Blanche, without any sense of shame,’ said the Princess next day); and finally, after four games, he said he was sure she was tired of bezique (meaning that he was), kissed her hand, offered her his own, coupled with his heart.

His visit was curtailed, and he left two days afterwards. Prince Demetrius gloomily threatened his daughter with the prospect of being an old maid all her life, but she only put her pretty nose in the air, and said ‘Hoots!’—a word she had picked up from Blanche, and thought very expressive of certain shades of feeling.

CHAPTER II.
A FOOL COMES TO RHODOPÉ.

Till the time she was twenty-one Princess Sophia lived quietly enough at Amandos, paying visits occasionally abroad, but passing a full ten months of the year in Rhodopé. Though she was often bored, she was usually employed, for Prince Demetrius’ health had now for a year or two been failing, and many of the lesser cares of state devolved on his daughter. It must be confessed that during her father’s lifetime she discharged these duties admirably, and has not always had the credit for this, for the complete neglect of all her duties when she herself was on the throne has effaced the memory of these earlier years. She presided over the National Assembly—except on the comparatively few occasions when her father was present—with a wonderful great dignity and grace, and while listening to their debates and considering their resolutions with all the care that they deserved, she never let the autocratic power wielded by the Crown seem to pass from her control or grow effete. More than once she used her power of veto, more than once she insisted on a measure thrown out only by a narrow number of votes being put into effect. But never—and in this she showed the true and right understanding of autocratic government—did she reverse the decision of a substantial majority.

But what the poor girl went through, what agonies of boredom, what screaming tortures of ennui, what clenching of jaws which ached for a yawn, what twitching of limbs which longed for the saddle, that august body never guessed. The language of Rhodopé contains no such expression as ‘local jurisdiction’ or ‘county council,’ and all questions which can be thought to bear in the minutest way upon the interests of the country are solemnly brought before the House.

‘My dear Blanche,’ she cried in despair, after a five hours’ sitting one afternoon, ‘unless I die of it, I shall go stark mad. I have had to-day to give a casting-vote as to whether the second book of Euclid shall be included in the third standard of schools. What do I know of third standards? And, indeed, I know as little of Euclid. On the top of that it appeared that Yanni Tsimovak wished to grow vines on his twopenny estate instead of tobacco. To this, too, I had to give my serious consideration. It would be a bad precedent, said one, and would seem to point to the fact that the cultivation of tobacco was going out. This would be deplorable, for it yields higher profits than the growth of vines. “Then why does Yanni Tsimovak prefer vines?”—I asked them that, they did not know. Nor did I know, nor do I care. And who under the sun is Yanni Tsimovak—he sounds like a patent medicine—and what is his tobacco to me? Yes, tea, please, and three lumps of sugar.’

‘Not three, Sophy,’ objected the other. ‘You are getting stout, or you soon will.’

‘Blanche, another word, and I eat the whole contents of the sugar-basin, lump by lump. And Prince Petros comes this evening!’

‘He won a fortune at Homburg last year,’ remarked Blanche.

‘Fortunate man! Why can’t I go to Homburg, and win a fortune, instead of including the second book of Euclid in the third standard? Why should he play roulette, and I wrestle with the Assembly over the affairs of a patent medicine? I hate medicine.’

‘“Uneasy lies the head——”’ began Blanche.

‘But I don’t wear a crown,’ cried Sophia, upsetting her tea; ‘and if you bore me with any more of your odious quotations from your absurd Shakespeare, I shall scream.’

She rang the bell for another cup, as her own was broken. ‘And to-morrow, what a programme!’ she sighed. ‘There is a review in the morning. Well, I don’t mind that; but afterwards I have to open the new town-hall, and go to the mayor’s lunch afterwards, which will last hours, when I be on the hills. An inconceivable man, Blanche—like a wet toad; and his wife beggars the imagination. She will wear a velvet dress like a sofa-cover, and a string of coral, rather short of beads, on black elastic round her neck. Her face will grow red and shiny during lunch, she will eat till a proper person would burst, and she will confide in me afterwards that she, too, is a descendant of princes. She may be a descendant of the four major prophets for all I care! And then—oh, I know so well—I shall feel it laid upon me to tell her that Methuselah is my lineal grandfather, and she will say, “Indeed, your Royal Highness!” and not see that I am making fun of her. She won’t see it—she will never see anything as long as she lives; and I shall want to shake her till her coral necklace bursts and runs all over the floor. Give me a bun with sugar on the top.’

Now, Prince Petros, who was the second son of the reigning Duke of Herzegovina, and was expected at Amandos that night, was a young man altogether unlike the most of those who had tried and failed to touch the Princess’s heart or win her hand. He came of a strangely mixed race, which it would be kind to call cosmopolitan, and cruel to call mongrel, one grandmother being a Jewess, another a Greek, while his mother was English and of obscure origin. But Princess Sophia, as she had told Mr. Buckhurst when she tried to induce him to elope with her, had enough pedigree for two. Furthermore, he had ridden his own horse to the winning-post in the Austrian Derby, and won a fortune at Homburg, and was universally allowed to be excellent company. Indeed, the Princess on the hill of glass could hear the thunderings of the horse-hoofs growing nearer. The world also knew of him as a very ambitious man, and the world’s opinion, as so often happens, was entirely true. He was quite prepared to fall in love with the Princess Sophia, and he was equally determined to marry her. The husband of the reigning Princess of Rhodopé, so he thought, had the right to be considered a very enviable man, and provided he was moderately clever, and as ambitious as himself, should bid fair to hold the theatre of the world intent on a piece which it was in his power to produce. The piece should be heroic and magnificent, and should have all the characters but one left out, but that one was to play the title-rôle. The name he had not certainly decided on, but ‘The Emperor of the East’ gave an idea of its scope. From this it will be seen that Prince Petros, with all his horsemanship, and ambition and luck at the cards, had also all the makings of an exceedingly foolish man.

Dinner that night passed off pleasantly enough. Prince Petros sat next Sophia; the English Minister, Lady Blanche, and Madame Amygdale, a celebrated French singer of the variety stage, who steered between propriety and riskiness with a skill worthy the helmsman of a racing yacht, were the only other guests besides the ladies and gentlemen in waiting. The Amygdale devoted herself to the entertainment of Prince Demetrius with such success that he laughed seven times during dinner, and did not swear once. Prince Petros was an essentially conceited man; but as his conceit took the subtle form of self-depreciation, it passed unchallenged for the time. He told them that the man who had ridden second to him at Vienna was a far better horseman than himself, and that he was only a beginner at bezique, but was most anxious to learn more of the game under the tutelage of Princess Sophia.

For a beginner, so it appeared after dinner, he was certainly a very notable performer. At any period of the game he could have told you without hesitation or error not only how many kings, aces, queens, and knaves were still left in, but how many small trumps, an important factor at the close of the game, as beginners are apt to discover. He tossed for napoleons, and lost every time; he acquiesced in and welcomed any raising of the stakes, saying that he was about to propose it himself. Before the first game was over, Princess Sophia knew she had met her match—at the cards, at least.

‘You are far better than I,’ she said, with her habitual frankness. ‘With ordinary luck, I could scarcely give you a decently fought game. Cut, please.’

‘I am a beginner merely,’ murmured the Prince, thereby betraying his foolishness, for he had said that often enough for mere modesty.

The second game showed his quality still better. Trumps were most unkindly against him, and about the middle of the game he threw them to the winds, and escaped the rubicon by a continual scorning of kings and aces.

‘I could not have got sequence, as it turned out,’ he said apologetically at the end. ‘You had already shown me three queens, and the fourth you took in two tricks later.’

‘Tell me how you knew that,’ asked Sophia.

‘It was the only card you could have had any reason for holding up,’ he said. ‘Any other card you might safely have shown me, but this you held till the end of the game.’

Princess Sophia beamed at him.

‘I will play with you till it shall be you who says you have had enough. Oh, I love the cards!’ she cried in a sort of ecstasy, gathering up her hand.

‘The sun shall first be quenched,’ said Petros.

It was the month of June, and the earliest daylight stealing into the room about four of the morning saw a quaint sight. In an armchair sat Princess Sophia’s lady-in-waiting, fast asleep with mouth wide open, and snoring stertorously, and on a divan near the window lay Prince Petros’s gentleman-in-waiting, with his face on his hand, sleeping like a tired child. The candles on the table by which the two played had already once been replenished, and as the light of morning grew clearer they were again burned to their sockets. A large silver ash-tray by the Prince’s side was heaped with a pyramid of ends of cigarettes, two empty siphons stood on the floor, and two trays with the débris of supper stood on a side-table. It had been a hot night, and the curtains were undrawn over the open windows. Every now and then a footman in scarlet livery, with eyelids, like La Giaconda’s, a little weary, looked in through the open door and stole away again. Outside, the garden was still dreaming under its blanket of dew-laden gossamer webs; a hundred feet below slept the red roofs of the town; and the birds had not yet begun to tune their voices for the day.

Just before the sun rose, Prince Petros cut to Sophia.

‘Shall I extinguish the candles?’ he asked; ‘it is already light enough to play without. How delicious the morning air is!’

‘If you will be so kind,’ said Sophia, dealing. ‘For the twenty-first time you have cut exactly eighteen cards.’

An hour later it was broad day; the birds were awake, and the footman was asleep. The Prince still looked fresh enough, but his chin (he had arrived too late to shave before dinner) was dark with his twenty-four hours’ beard; but Sophia looked as fresh and brilliant as a child glowing from its morning bath. A little excitement burned in her beautiful eyes, and her breath came slightly quicker than its wont. But the risen sun, still cool and invigorating, shone searchingly on the smooth white skin of her half-turned face as if to find some ravage wrought by this unnatural night, and confessed its impotence. She was radiant, an embodiment of the goddess of the morning, and, looking up, Prince Petros was fairly blinded with her. He hesitated—it was towards the end of the game—failed to count the remaining tricks, and she put down in turn the three and the four beziques.

‘Admirable,’ he said; ‘I made a bad mistake. I have paid for it. Yes, you rubicon me as well. Yet, believe me, I have not played so rotten a card for years.’

‘You are very modest,’ said she, ‘for you said you were only a beginner. Yet I like modesty in a man.’

‘I am more fortunate than I deserve,’ said he.

Once or twice during the next game he passed his hand over his chin, and frowned. At last he could bear it no more, and at the end of the game, ‘If you will excuse me,’ he said, ‘for ten minutes—it shall not be more, I swear to you—I will get shaved, if my idle scoundrel of a valet has not gone to bed, then I will return to you. I am no sight for the morning. But you—you look like morning itself,’ and again he gazed at her.

She met his eye, then dropped her own, and played with the cards a moment. Then she rose, and breaking out into a laugh:

‘I am beaten,’ she said, ‘and I retract my words. Oh, Prince, I would play with you till the crack of Judgment; but if I stop for ten minutes I shall be asleep. Let us make a bargain; you want to stop for ten minutes, and for me that is impossible. We will yield to each other, and thus there is no yielding. Let us both agree to stop.’

‘I have no wish but yours,’ said he. ‘And indeed an hour or two of sleep would be refreshing. I travelled all yesterday.’

Sophia stretched herself gracefully, like a fawn that is stiff with lying down. Then she looked round the room, and broke into a little suppressed bubble of laughter.

‘Look, oh, look!’ she whispered. ‘There is your gentleman and there is my lady. Let us go quietly, ever so quietly, to our rooms, and what will be their embarrassment and dismay when they awake! We ride at ten to see the review. Will you join us? It would interest you, I think. You will see some fine horses and some fine horsemen.’

‘And you—you will be there?’ he asked.

‘Surely. Now come away on tiptoe.’

The party in the house met again at ten to ride to the review on the occasion of the Prince Demetrius’s birthday. The gentleman of Prince Petros and the lady of Princess Sophia seemed strangely ill at ease with each other, for they had awoke simultaneously; but the two bezique players, riding one on each side of the Prince, were in the best of spirits. Never, so it seemed to Sophia, had a night involved so little waste of time; for, being a sound and lengthy sleeper by nature, each morning presented her with a dismaying expenditure of eight and a half blank and unfruitful hours. Never, so thought her father, had she shown so charming a gaiety, and the cause of it, so he concluded, rode on his right hand. As for Prince Petros, he saw ambition already nearly ripe for the attempted plucking; and to do him justice, it was at this moment Sophia herself, the charm and delicious freshness of her, the wit and happy gaiety of her, that he coveted, and not her kingdom.

To right and left of them stretched fields of tobacco in full flower, and vineyards promising a marvellous harvest. By the side of the road was a grassy ride, and the three cantered gently past the far-famed plots. To their right, steeply terraced up to prevent a grain of that soil of gold slipping away in the autumn rains, rose the enclosure of the Château Vryssi—land as valuable as the streets of the City of London. On the left, a liberal ten acres of ground, stood the volcanic patch which nurtured the vines of the Clos Royal grape, brought, so it was said, by the first Albanian emigrants from the vineyard of Omar. Further down the hill the vineyards gave place to the culture of tobacco; and the Prince pointed out in turn to his admiring guest the birthplace and nursery of the Eastern Gem, the Joy of the Harem, and the darker-leaved Prince Seracour. The last of these stretched down to the river-bank, and from there a noble stone bridge rose in a stately span across the foaming water, and gave them access to the level parade-ground.

Prince Petros had been prepared to find a large body of fine and well-drilled men; but schooled as he was to the surprises of the tables, he could scarce his exclamations of delight as regiment after regiment wheeled, saluted, and passed. Not a man of the 1st Infantry was under six feet in height, and not one but would have done credit to the crack regiment of any nation. With what a crisp ripple the ranks of firm-footed men, fit, weather-tanned, moving mechanically, yet individually, swung past! And this array, it must be remembered, was then but a half of the tale Rhodopé could to-day put into the field; yet how great a multiple of those who would have appeared on parade ten years later, had there been a parade at such a time! Like the Queen of Sheba, Prince Petros had no spirit left in him at the end; he was enchanted at what he had seen, and with Sophia, intoxicated.

Thereafter followed the opening of the new town-hall, and the luncheon by the mayor. Prince Demetrius did not propose to attend either of these functions; and, turning to ride home, he inquired of Prince Petros whether he would come with him or go to the town-hall and the tedious lunch with Sophia. The town-hall, he reminded him, was like every other town-hall, only newer, and the mayor’s luncheon would be similar, only perhaps a shade more so.

But the ring of his cri du cœur—‘Oh, let me go with her!’—pleased the old man, and he rode home satisfied.

Indeed, of late Sophia’s future had been something of an anxiety to him. In each individual case, it is true, he had so sympathized with the girl in her rejection of men who were superlatively eligible, except as husbands, that he had not had the conviction to ‘preach down her heart’; nor, he was aware, would his preaching have had the slightest effect. But he himself, as he guessed, was suffering from an incurable malady, of which the end, he hoped, would not be far distant; and it would have pleased him more than anything in the world which had power to please, to see Sophia married to some suitable husband, who was neither cad nor nincompoop. Prince Petros did not appear to him to be within measurable distance of either, and he was gratified to see that the rhadamanthine attitude which Sophia usually adopted to her wooers was here absent.

The two returned about five in the afternoon, after a reckless scamper over the rough country. The embarrassed lady and gentleman had been left far behind, unless, indeed, they had been wise, and returned home soberly by the road; but neither gave them even a passing thought. Sophia, with experiment in her mind, had mounted Prince Petros on a vicious cross-grained brute, and she knew that the horse’s seeming amenity that afternoon could not be natural to it. Petros had a seat; he had hands. In Sophia’s eyes there were few gifts of God more ennobling than these. The last mile up to the stable gates she had challenged him to race, following an old grass-grown track, intersected with hedges and fences; and Sophia, to her soul’s delight, had won. She had dismounted by the time he came up, and sitting on the horse-block, where she had made her first experiment in cigarettes ten years ago, breathless and triumphant at having beaten the jockey of the Austrian winner. He dismounted at the stable gate, and came up to her. A great braid of her black hair had escaped, and hung gloriously on the shoulder of her riding jacket; her face was flushed. She was divinely beautiful; and in a sudden spasm of admiration:

‘Ah, you are enchanting!’ he cried, and the discreet groom led their horses away.

Sophia no longer doubted that she had found the companion of her life. The Prince had thundered up the hill of glass, and all the lore of fairy-tales made him hers. Personally she was attracted by him, by his slim, straight person, his dark, animated face, the languor of indolence and movement which cloaked his athleticism, his apt and ready conversation, and, above all—for she was something of an observer—by a certain indulgence of expression, habitual to him, which she did not wholly understand, but which suggested that the pursuits at which he so excelled were no more than toys to him. Moreover, it is charming to charm; the charmer usually feels kindly—out of her generosity—to the enslaved, and his involuntary cry, ‘Ah, you are enchanting!’ was delicious to her.

After dinner this pretty game of love-making had to yield place to the sterner and more serious duties of life, and the cards again occupied their undivided attention. Prince Petros acknowledged to an acquaintance with the rules of vingt-et-un, and all the varieties of that charming game, which he said he had sometimes played at home with his sisters. The betting was high, the guests of the evening were amusing, and disposed to be well amused; the Guards’ band in the gallery of the ballroom next door was playing delightfully, and Luck was in her most capricious mood. Later on the Prince gave a dance, and Sophia was only waiting for the announcement of the arrival of the first guests to leave the table and perform the much less congenial duty of receiving them.

Eleven struck, and a footman came to tell her that the first carriage was already coming up to the portico. Sophia was just at the end of her deal; the Prince was sitting on her right. He had lost once and gained once at rouge et noir. She held the pack ready to give him his third and last card.

‘For the last, Prince, and then I must go,’ she said. ‘No limit to the stake, if you wish.’

‘I stake all I possess and am on noir,’ said he gravely.

‘You have lost,’ said Sophia, laughing. ‘It is a heart.’

‘Then have I won?’ he said in a low voice, looking at her.

She stood still a moment (the others had heard his stake, though not his last reply), and a faint flush spread over her face.

‘I was but jesting, and I will not beggar you,’ she said. ‘Now, alas! I must go. Oh for half an hour more! But, Prince, I think there will be time for one short game at bezique when the ball is over.’

‘But I was not jesting—I never jest when I am playing cards,’ he said. ‘Yes, let us play one game after the ball.’

The two danced with each other more than once during the evening, but for the most part Prince Petros was a model of sedulous gallantry to the official ladies of Rhodopé. The wife of the mayor, a stout, immovable lady, entirely lost her heart to him. Twice had he waltzed with her, or, rather, twice had he skipped round and round her, as a child may skip round a firmly-rooted tree. She, like the tree which is planted in the whirling earth, seemed to do little more than revolve on her axis once in twenty-four hours; but she enjoyed dancing, she said, very much, and it certainly made her very hot. Nor was he wanting here; he poured ices and exhilarating drinks down her capacious throat, as if to quench some wild internal conflagration, and the mayoress, so he told Sophia afterwards, had confided to him that she, too, was of princely line.

With the younger ladies he was no less successful. He was never tired of dancing, his steering was of so fine an order that it seemed an exhibition of luck, and the step of each of his partners he gaily asserted—as, indeed, he had shamelessly declared to the mayoress—suited his own exactly. He admired everything, and he flattered everybody, yet so adroitly that his partners only thought that they themselves were exceptionally enchanting that night. He told a young, æsthetically-dressed woman, the wife of the Prince’s aide-de-camp, that she reminded him of Whistler’s symphony in green, a title which his ready invention had coined on the spur of the moment, but which earned him a life-long gratitude, for Madame Elsprach had been secretly afraid that she had rather overdone it. In a word, when the ball was over, he felt that he had earned his game at bezique, and he got it.

Next morning he asked an audience of Prince Demetrius, and this was granted him. Armed with a permission from him, he inquired for Sophia, for they were soon to ride together. He found her in the garden, dressed for the ride, and alone.

‘Princess,’ he said, ‘I have come to pay you my stake. Will you accept it? Sophia, will you accept it?’

‘Yes, Petros,’ she replied.

CHAPTER III.
MARRIAGE-BELLS AND SYSTEMS.

Prince Petros scarcely seemed to have overrated—though it was ever his habit to take a sufficiently rosy view of the verdict of the world on himself—the favourable impression he had made in those two days at Amandos. The officers whom he had met at the review admired his fine horsemanship no less than his amiability, for no man could be more agreeable without any suspicion of condescension than he. The ladies of the Court were entranced by the charm of his manners and the grace of his dancing. Sophia, as has been seen, was captive to the mastery of his bezique, and Prince Demetrius, a testimonial to the full as striking as any of these, had never snarled at him once. The fact of their betrothal was made known before the lapse of many days, and the news evoked bells, fireworks and universal approval.

Sophia’s acceptance of him delighted her father, and he would certainly have made himself odious had she refused him. He had no wish to see his daughter a second Queen Elizabeth, and the romance of such a figure in his eyes bore no comparison with the desired consummation of his hopes to see her a matron with a lusty and numerous progeny. His cousins he frankly looked upon in the light of obscene birds of prey, ready to batten on his own extinct line. Already, so it seemed to him, they were hopping hungrily about the steps of the throne of Rhodopé, but the news of Sophia’s betrothal scared them hurriedly away, and from afar they sent long congratulatory telegrams. Prince Demetrius smiled to himself when he thought how bitter must those honeyed words have been to their royal authors. The Grand Duke Nicholas, so he thought, alone acted in a self-respecting manner, for he sent no word.

As for the affianced husband, he was in a stupor of content. Thanks to his native amiability, to horsemanship nearly as native—for the Princes of Herzegovina were men almost born in the saddle—and to his carefully acquired skill at the cards, already the first and most difficult act of his ‘Empire of the East’ was finished. Had he been, in common with most gamblers, a victim to superstition, he might almost have been frightened at the ease of these first steps, and have taken such extreme favours of fortune with caution. But his own common-sense lulled him to security, and he played the assiduous suitor to perfection, and, indeed, it was no part he played.

Princess Sophia alone, and she hardly consciously, was a little afraid of what she had done. During the days that followed, and especially when the Prince had departed on a hurried visit home, and she was left alone with her reflections, the thought that she was so soon to marry him, to be indissolubly his, came to her with a shock as if of sudden awakening. Two days’ intercourse, followed by a single word, had changed the whole course of her life; and though she had always taken it as a matter of certainty that she would some time marry, yet the imminence of it, the particulars of it and the ease with which the Fates had woven for her, hit her like a douche of chilly water. An attractive person, a fine horseman, a good card-player, these had been her formulated requirements exhaustively stated, and they were fully satisfied; the measure had been pressed down, and it ran over. He was all these superlatively, and though she had never been of the make to indulge in maidens’ fancies, in daydreams of tenor voices and faultless coiffures, yet she wondered if there was not something missing. Her rank necessarily limited the number of eligible suitors; in this she acquiesced fully, for she accepted the disabilities of being royal, and assuredly none so eligible as Petros had yet presented himself. But the illimitable choice of suitable helpmeets granted to the middle classes seemed to her in this month before her wedding to have something in its favour. Not that she repented her decision: she would have accepted him again and yet again, and yet a little inward voice said to her, ‘Is this all?’

The wedding was to be hurried on, and its celebration was fixed for the first possible day of July. Prince Petros had an ample fortune for himself, and it was not to be thought of that anyone but her father should make settlement on the Princess of Rhodopé. All that the old man wished was that there should be no delay.

‘I have been an unconscionable time living,’ he said one day to his daughter, ‘and I do not intend to be an unconscionable time dying. Besides, it is much easier when one is not in very good health to die than to live, and I have always wished to save myself trouble. So I propose to die pretty soon. I should like to see a grandson, Sophia, but that is all I want.’

Sophia started.

‘A grandson!’ she said. ‘That will make me a mother. How very ridiculous!’

‘Well, if you choose to look at it like that, I hope you will be ridiculous as soon as possible, and more than once. I think you have got a good husband; he is not a fool or a cad. That means a great deal. Nothing really matters besides that.’

‘I do not care for fools and cads,’ remarked Sophia.

‘I knew that, and that is why I was afraid you would not marry at all; for it is a sad truth that most men are one or the other, and many both. Your poor dear mother was a fool, Sophia,’ he added, with a touch of what might be called tenderness.

There was silence for a moment, and then Prince Demetrius went on:

‘Petros will save you a great deal of troublesome detail,’ he said, ‘just as you have of late saved it me. He loves to be popular, and I think he likes a parade of power. Let him have his fill of it. There is a great deal of tiresome business in the working of the state of Rhodopé, about school boards and potatoes—you well know the kind of thing. He will take all that off your hands, and at the same time win golden opinions for himself, and enjoy his little triumphs. In fact, it will add to the absurd veneration—for it is absurd—in which we are held by the people if you make yourself, when you are on the throne, rather more scarce than I have done. Let your appearances be something to be remembered; do not let the people get used to you.’

Sophia looked up.

‘Yes, I never thought of that; that will be a great advantage. Petros can constantly take my place in the Assembly, and I hope he will enjoy it more than I have done. He can see to the tobacco and potato bills during the day, and play cards in the evening. He likes detail—he told me so. He says it is only by great attention to details that anyone arrives at great results.’

‘Oh, he said that, did he?’ remarked her father, and then rejected the idea that had leaped unbidden into his mind, as out of the question. He little knew how nearly true Prince Petros’s words would prove.

Within a month from their betrothal the wedding was celebrated. Royal personages flocked from all countries to Rhodopé, and the ports of Mavromáti and Búlteck were gay with the flags of all nations. The palace at Amandos, as well as the shooting-boxes on the hills above, were filled with guests, and the odour of the wedding bake-meats was in the air. Prince Demetrius was a miracle of courtesy to his visitors, thereby doing a violence to his normal nature. But he was so uncommonly pleased at the event, that this subversion of his habits may be forgiven him. Prince Petros played his part—if indeed such a term can be applied to a gratification so sincere—to admiration, and the more open-minded of those whom Prince Demetrius had alluded to as birds of prey confessed that so amiable a paragon had no more than his deserts.

The entertainment, both of the visitors of the Prince and of the native populace, endorsed the reputation for hospitality which Rhodopé has always enjoyed. Down the sides of the square in which stood the cathedral where the wedding was to be celebrated ran immense tables at which all comers were feasted. Oxen were roasted whole in the market-place, and the cellars of the Prince poured out, like the opened sluices of a river in flood, the garnered sunshine of summers long past. Magnificent, too, were the presents of the bride and bridegroom. There were ropes of pearls, some like misty moons, some pink, some black, and of extraordinary lustre; two diamond tiaras, in the centre of one of which blazed the famous ‘Blue Wonder,’ a stone from Golconda of priceless worth; a necklace of opals set in diamonds; a ruby brooch of unmatched depth of colour, each stone being of the true pigeon’s blood; eighteen gold shoe-horns, on each of which was the Princess’s monogram and a crown in diamonds; a bezique-box of chrysoprase, with hinges and lock of gold (this was from the bridegroom to the bride); four beautiful bicycles; eight complete Louis Seize tea services, with cups of royal blue Sèvres; five gold-fitted tea-baskets for four people; and a perfect grove of gold-handled umbrellas, among which lay gold-mounted dressing-cases, like boulders in a pine-wood, and enough antique candlesticks to illuminate the whole kingdom. More curious still was a roulette-board, of which the marble was a sapphire, and all the numbers set in precious stones, and (for the folk of Rhodopé knew their beloved Princess’s tastes, and were anxious to give her presents which would certainly be useful to her) two thousand packs of picquet cards, a gift from the Board-school children of Amandos.

The cathedral—that small but exquisite building, built, it is said, on the designs of Prince Djem—was not sufficient to seat more than the invited guests of Prince Demetrius and the chief officials of the State; but outside tiers and tiers of benches had been erected in the streets, and immense wedge-shaped stands on the flat roofs of the municipal buildings which line the square. The enthusiasm was prodigious; long before the head of the procession reached the square, the shouting from the folk who lined the route from the Palace was like the roar of the sea, and when the Guards and the first of the royal carriages appeared, the people rose like one man, and every throat was loud with the Rhodopé National Anthem. Never had Prince Petros worn a more engaging smile than when, from his fine black charger, he acknowledged right and left the thunder of their welcome; never had Sophia looked more graciously magnificent than when she bowed from the carriage containing her and Prince Demetrius. The maddening music of the shouts touched her heart, and the bet that she had made with the Princess Charlotte of Roumania, that they would not reach the square under an hour from the time they left the Palace, was, even though she had won, completely effaced from her mind, and Princess Charlotte never paid.

The two left Amandos the evening after the wedding for their honeymoon, which they were to spend on Prince Demetrius’s yacht, cruising in the Mediterranean. The twelve miles of road down to Mavromáti was illuminated with Oriental gorgeousness, and a continuous torchlight procession of runners, picturesquely clothed in the national costume, accompanied them down to the sea. Every half-mile there was a fresh relay of a hundred, who ran with them their appointed course, and then, throwing their torches in the air by way of salute, gave way to the next. The port was one blaze of coloured light, and the yacht Felatrune a ship from Fairyland. Sophia, warm-hearted and impulsive, was greatly affected by the enthusiasm of the people; it was for her they had made the darkness many-coloured; it was the wishes for her happiness that turned the wonted silence of night into a chorus of sound. Once during the drive down she had touched Petros on the arm.

‘It is for me they have done this, these dear folk,’ she said.

‘Yes, darling, for us,’ said Petros; and Sophia thought, but without resentment, that there was just a touch of correction in his voice.

‘Yes, for us,’ she repeated; and her emotion almost made her feel she loved him, for the inward voice which had queried ‘Is this all?’ was answered by, ‘Is this not enough?’

The yacht put off as soon as they were on board, and after waiting on deck—Danae to the golden showers of fireworks—till the shore had faded to a blur of light, they went below. Supper was prepared for them, and on another table were candles and the bezique packs, put there by some thoughtful servant.

Sophia saw them, and her eyes grew bright and dim.

‘How kind they all are!’ she said. ‘They think of everything.’

Prince Petros had also seen.

‘Yes, a game of bezique would be pleasant after supper,’ he said; but Sophia, womanlike and unreasonable, felt a touch chilled.

In halcyon weather they hastened a south-westerly course, and the second day saw them gliding, under the cloud-cowled head of Etna, through the Straits of Messina. They made the straits by three in the afternoon, and dusk showed them the beacon of Stromboli lit on the starboard bow. It had been almost tacitly agreed that they were to go straight to Monte Carlo, or, as Sophia put it, that very pleasant place, somewhere on the Riviera, where you could play for small stakes without a raid from the police.

But soon after they had got free of the Straits, it became evident that the halcyon days were over, for a stiff gale was blowing, and as the yacht threw the knots over its quarter, the sea, which on leaving the Straits was choppy, grew frankly rough, and they pitched considerably to the head sea, even the bowsprit now and then dipping, and raising itself again with a little whiff of spray. They were sitting on the aft deck, and Sophia was feeling exhilarated by the leap and shock of the encountered waves.

‘Oh, Petros!’ she exclaimed, ‘is it not wild and splendid? I love the sea! And here we are, you and I only.’

She stopped suddenly, for Petros had left her; only a dark figure was scudding sideways to the companion ladder.

That evening her husband had a little soup in the privacy of his cabin, for the sea continued boisterous, and Sophia dined alone. It was exceedingly rough; the fiddles were on the table, and she had to make swoops and dashes at her food, and peck, as it were, at her glass. But though she ate with an excellent appetite (for the sea air always made her hungry), she had a clouded brow. She was sorry for Petros’ indisposition, but she felt not the slightest inclination to sit by his bedside, read to him, or remind him that his was only a transient agony. In fact, it was ridiculous that a man should be sea-sick, as ridiculous as that a man should not be able to ride; and as a matter so superficial as a man’s seat on a horse had been among the factors which attracted her to him, so she found that a matter so superficial as this failure of his internal mechanism to stand a rough sea was a factor on the other side. The whole affair, however, was so infinitesimal that she soon dismissed it from a mind that never indulged in that melancholy diversion self-analysis, and she played several games of Russian patience by herself, and obtained fresh light on the subject of the maliciousness of inanimate things.

The yacht arrived at ‘that very pleasant place on the Riviera’ two days after, and the newly-married pair spent a very interesting fortnight there. One thing alone troubled Sophia, and that was the discovery that her husband played on a finely elaborated and seemingly successful system, involving all sorts of abstruse sums in multiplication. Now, this to her was a shock, for she was of the type of gambler which, for want of a better word, we may call the romantic. Primarily she played for the sake of the play, and it was not the winning of money which she enjoyed so much as the winning in the abstract. The whole charm of the thing to her lay in that rolling marble the momentum of which no one knew, not even the croupier who set it going. She backed her luck, another unknown agent, against the immutable and incalculable laws of gravity and friction, and though she had all the gambler’s fine superstitions, and would back a run of luck, and never lay a sou on No. 13, it was the utter uncertainty of the thing which fascinated her.

She almost felt that Petros ought to have made a clean breast of it before he married her, classing it among those confessions which many men may have to make before they take a girl to share their lives, and she was a little hurt he had not done so. Eventually she decided one day to talk the matter over with him.

‘Yes; I was surprised, and—shall I say it?—a little disappointed, dear,’ she said, ‘when I found out that you had a system. Why did you not tell me? Well, never mind. When a game depends on its uncertainty, any subtraction from that surely subtracts from its charm. Suppose anyone invented an infallible system——’

Petros frowned, for he was just multiplying one hundred and seventy-three by fourteen, and dividing it by seventeen, a calculation often incidental to the system in question.

‘Mine is infallible,’ he interrupted rather sharply.

‘Yet you lost heavily all the morning, did you not?’

‘I shall win heavily all the evening, you will see;’ and he made a note of some figures.

‘Oh, Petros, leave the calculation alone a minute,’ she said, ‘and listen to me. I don’t think of roulette as a means of livelihood.’

Petros laughed.

‘That is just as well, dear Sophia,’ he said, ‘for you would not exactly have paid your way since you have been here.’

‘Oh, hear me out,’ she replied. ‘It is the excitement I love it for. I do not think of Monte Carlo as a sort of Stock Exchange, where the acute make money and the stupid lose it. A system reduces it to just that—a sort of Stock Exchange without any bulls and bears, whatever they are.’

‘I prefer to win,’ said Petros.

‘Yes; so do I, but I would not promise never to go to the tables if the croupier gave me an annuity to keep away.’

‘It depends on the size of the annuity.’

‘Ah, then, that is exactly where we differ,’ said she, rising. ‘I should be no happier for an annuity, nor, indeed, would you, but I am a great deal happier for a little excitement. It is a lovely afternoon. What a wonderful colour the sea is! Let us go to the tables.’

Petros won largely that afternoon, and the system justified itself as far as it is possible for a system to be justified. But the charm of him considered merely as a gambler, as a man who had made a fortune at Homburg, had terribly faded in Sophia’s eyes; indeed, to win money at the tables on a system seemed to her slightly sordid, a kind of trade, and the money thus won, she imagined, would have a kind of stuffy smell about it. The feeling she knew was unreasonable, and she did not defend it; but she never fell into the error of reasoning about a conviction, and concluding that she was made so and her husband otherwise, she dismissed the matter as far as possible from her mind.

She herself on the last day that they were there had one of those runs of luck which occur once in a lifetime. Four times she staked a hundred napoleons on one number, and twice out of the four times, incredible to state, won. Then she played on the colour for half an hour, and lost scarcely once out of ten times, and, to crown all, backed the bank for the last hour and cleared as much again. Petros was aghast; he himself would never have backed one number, and to do so four times seemed to him either imbecile or criminal, and he could not say to himself that Sophia was imbecile. It materially added to his annoyance to see her win twice, while the sordid and infallible system was losing on an average fifty francs an hour—a monotonous and inglorious form of adventure. He felt warmly on the subject, and as they were rowed across to the yacht that night addressed a remark to Sophia which keenly resented.

‘I would as soon think of backing one number,’ he said, ‘as of robbing my father.’

‘And I would as soon think of playing on a system’ returned Sophia, with spirit, ‘as of sea-sick.’

CHAPTER IV.
THE LAST DAYS OF PRINCE DEMETRIUS.

Prince Demetrius was not destined to see the fulfilment of his remoter hope, and to take a grandchild on his knee. In the September of this year, directly after the return of Sophia and her husband, he underwent an operation for tumour, and in November it was found that there was a recrudescence of the malady. A portion of the growth was removed by the forceps and sent for examination to Professor Virchow at Berlin, who reported unfavourably on it. The growth, it appeared on examination, was malignant, and the professor feared that there was no doubt that it was cancerous. He wrote at length to the Prince’s medical adviser, stating that life might perhaps be prolonged by a second operation, but that the reappearance of the disease so short a time after the first operation indicated that the knife could not effect a permanent cure. It was advisable, so he thought, to acquaint Princess Sophia with the true state of the case, and let the patient decide whether he would undergo a second operation or not. To one in his state of health this would be risky, if not positively dangerous—in fact, the case was exactly one of those when it was right that the patient should decide.

The Prince’s doctor did as the pathologist suggested, and consulted Princess Sophia. She was perfectly clear that it was better to tell her father, and then leave the decision with him. Stricken as she was, for she had a strong personal affection for her father independent of the natural tie of relationship, she offered to tell him herself of the professor’s report, and the doctor gladly accepted her proposal.

It was one of the Prince’s good days on which she went to acquaint him with his condition, and the exceeding pain which he had suffered for more than a week was sensibly less. For a great part of this period he had been kept as far as possible under the dulling influence of morphia; but he had slept a natural sleep the night before, and had awoke his own man.

Outside the day was typically autumnal; the great groves of chestnuts, which stretched down from the lawn to the river, were in the short blaze of their gaudy liveries, and a coolness ineffably brisk and bracing was in the air. There had been a slight frost during the night, already the more brilliant of the leaves were falling, and the sweet odour of cleanliness came in through the open windows. The Princess, as she walked slowly from the room where she had breakfasted to her father’s bedroom, was touched in a way that hitherto had been unknown to her, with the terrible thoughtlessness of inanimate things. This shedding of the russet foliage was but a simulated tragedy; next spring the trees would again be green and luxuriant as if no winter had ever interrupted their perennial vigour; winter to them was but a time for sleep, a renovation of their life, while to the puny sons of men no spring restored the ravages of time past. She looked out over the inimitable freshness of the land as she waited to know if her father could receive her, and the sense of contrast between the infinitesimal limits of humanity and its infinite possibilities caused her eyes to fill with tears. How momentous and trivial a thing was life!

Yes, he would see her at once; and she entered.

Prince Demetrius was in a humour at which imagination might boggle. He had enjoyed a good night; his pain was relieved, and he had reverted to his own diabolical temper.

Sophia stood for a moment in the doorway, hidden from the bed where her father lay by a screen, her nerves shrinking from that which lay before her, and steeling herself to go in. A voice from the bed, with an extraordinary degree of acidity in it, helped her to make the effort needed.

‘I should have thought à priori,’ remarked Prince Demetrius, ‘that a door must either be shut or open, but you, Sophia, seem to have grasped the subtlety of touch which is necessary to the leaving of it neither one nor the other. Please decide which you intend to do, and for God’s sake do it.’

She drew a long breath, shut the door, and came to the bedside.

‘Good-morning, father,’ she said. ‘They told me you had a very good night. I am so glad;’ and she kissed him on the forehead.

‘The worst of a good night,’ remarked her father, ‘is that you do not know it is good until it is over. The pleasure of it is as unreal as the pain of a regret. Personally I never regret anything. Fools regret, and even a knave can repent.’

Sophia stood there silent; the burden of what she had to say took from her the power of initiating trivialities; but her father went on, rasping like a file.

‘When a thing is done, it is done, and things for the most part do not produce any consequences at all, though people who have addled their brains with trivial thinking tell us that they do. Moralists and philosophers are the most shallow people in the world, for argument is ever less sound than conviction. This morning, Sophia, you look as if you were inclined to argue. Please don’t do that, or, if you must argue—I know it may happen to any of us—please go and argue in the passage, where I can’t hear you.’

Sophia sat down by the bedside.

‘I am not come to argue,’ she said; ‘but, father, I am come to talk. I am come to tell you something.’

‘Tell it, then,’ said Demetrius, with the composure of a tree.

‘It is this: I have a report from Berlin, and a question to ask you—— ’ and she stopped.

‘The message first, the question afterwards,’ said Prince Demetrius, and his composure seemed quite unshaken.

‘Professor Virchow has sent a most unfavourable report; your malady is malignant——’ and she stopped again.

‘Why the devil not say cancer, and have done with it?’ asked that man of iron.

‘You are right. And the question I have to ask you is whether you will have another operation or not. They say it is for you to decide. It will be dangerous, but it will, if successful, prolong your life a little.’

Prince Demetrius turned slightly in bed to look at Sophia, for her voice was unsteady.

‘Then it is the silliest question I ever heard,’ he said. ‘Of course I shall have nothing of the sort done. Blow your nose, Sophia, and don’t cry. If you allude to the subject again, I shall send you out of the room. Tell the doctors this only, that if ever they ask me anything so absurd again, I shall dispense with their services. The matter is closed. And now, if you have nothing to do, we will play écarté, please. Napoleon points, and a hundred francs on the game. Do you remember playing with me for the first time when you were a little girl? You played well even then; now you are nearly as good as I am.’

From that day the Prince grew rapidly worse, and he suffered much. For many hours in the day he was under morphia, but a small interval only would elapse between the passing off of the of the narcotic and the return of pain. But in these intervals he was powerfully lucid and incisive.

‘It is this,’ he said once—‘this mockery of life which the medical fools thought I might wish to be prolonged. A man must have a singularly low opinion of consciousness if he thinks this is worth having. It is a bore, an awful bore, Sophia, and reminds me of waiting at a station for one’s train, which is the most inglorious way I know of passing the time.’

‘Would you care that I should read you the news?’ Sophia would ask sometimes.

‘Certainly not,’ he answered. ‘At last I feel irresponsible. Nobody can do anything which concerns me, except to leave the door open when I prefer it shut. Really, if one has to be somewhere, to be on a death-bed is one of the very best places. Nothing can touch one; it is like getting out of a tunnel full of jarring noises.’

He raised himself in bed a little.

‘I wish I had been your child, Sophia,’ he said, ‘and that is really all I want. I have lived quite long enough on my own account. There, don’t cry. I shall have another half-hour, I suppose, before the disgusting pain returns, so let us play picquet. We shall have time for one partie, and then I shall send you away.’

But death was merciful, and came quicker than the doctors had anticipated, and on the first of January the Princess Sophia was proclaimed hereditary monarch of the realm of Rhodopé.

CHAPTER V.
ENTER THE CENTIPEDE.

One morning in the July of the next year Sophia and Petros were sitting at their half-past-twelve breakfast in the broad north veranda of the palace at Amandos. A big Persian rug was spread under the table, but otherwise the black-and-white marble floor was uncarpeted for coolness. To the west the awnings were down, but the whole long of the gallery towards the north was open to the breeze which pleasantly tempered the extreme warmth of the day. Over the town hung a blue haze of trembling heat, but the air was dry and invigorating, and though the thermometer registered a hundred degrees, not oppressive.

Coffee had just been served, and as the servants withdrew Sophia lit a cigarette.

‘About August, Petros,’ she said. ‘I want very much to go away the first week at latest, and I really see no reason why I should not.’

‘The House will not rise till September,’ said he.

‘Oh, the House, the House!’ cried she. ‘What does it matter what the House does? Let it fall down if it chooses! I have signed my name so often during the last month that if I go on I shall get writer’s cramp. What is writer’s cramp, by the way? And what do all my signatures amount to? Somebody has a concession for vine-growing, somebody is put in prison for a year, a firm is given leave to supply smokeless powder instead of Eley’s. I am sick of it all! I should like to turn Rhodopé into a limited company, and have it run by Durand, or Spiers and Pond, and pay one of their barmaids so much a year to impersonate me. I want to go away for a month or two as soon as possible, and what is more, Petros, I am going.’

‘If you have settled that, why argue about the matter,’ said he, ‘or trouble to consult me?’

‘Well, I wanted to know your opinion as to whether it is really advisable for me to stop. At the same time, if I had thought you would really disagree with me, I should not have asked you. But the thing is done now. What do you think about it?’

Petros was silent a moment. He had a plan in his head, and he wished to play his cards to advantage.

‘Well, here is my opinion,’ he said at length, ‘You have asked for it, and you shall have it, though, as a rule, you don’t like being advised, and I don’t care about advising. You are reigning Princess of this country, and that delightful position——’

Sophia laughed.

‘I would sooner be a milkmaid,’ she said, ‘but such a thing is not possible.’

‘And that delightful position,’ continued Petros, with the irritating manner of a man unaware of an interruption, ‘has certain responsibilities attached to it. You cannot get rid of them except by sheer gross neglect of your duties, but to tell you the truth, they are not very onerous. One of them is that you should preserve the form, at any rate, of attending to the business of the House. I do not think you need really fear writer’s cramp from signing their resolutions, whatever writer’s cramp may be; I suppose it is the result of writing. But you must perform your simple duties——’

‘I have seen that in copper-plate hand in the copy-books I used to do when I was a child,’ remarked Sophia.

‘That is where I got it from. It seems to me very true, though a little stale. I do not interfere with you, as you very well know, and I am, of course, powerless to prevent you going away when you wish. But I think you will make a very great mistake if you go away now.’

‘Tant pis,’ said she. ‘Let us start on the last day of this month. And oh, Petros, there is a little place on the Riviera——’

Petros rose and walked about in seeming agitation for a moment or two. He was managing his cards beautifully. Then he turned sharply to her.

‘Go, then, Sophia,’ he said; ‘but I shall not come with you.’

Sophia stared.

‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘I promise never to refer to your system. And the sea is usually calm at this time of year.’

‘That is not the reason.’

‘What is it, then?’ she asked.

‘Because the mischief which your absence during a sitting of the House will entail will be sensibly lessened—I do not wish to overrate my position—if I remain here, and have the air of attending very sedulously to the affairs of the State. There are certain businesses of the kind which you have allowed me to transact for you before—the less important Bills, in fact; with your permission, I will attend to them again. We want a fresh strain of blood in the trooper’s horses, for instance; at any rate, I can go carefully into the expenses and business incidental to that. I know a little about horse-breeding; I may even be useful on that question. The Bill will come before the House in the second week in August. I can, at least, serve on a committee. Later, when the House rises, I will join you. How does my plan strike you?’

Sophia was touched.

‘It is good of you to suggest that, Petros,’ she said. ‘It would be absurd for me to refuse your offer. You will not be very dull here? No? And it won’t look odd, will it, if I go and you stop here? I have a horror of doing things that look odd.’

‘Not so odd, at any rate, as if we both went away,’ said Petros.

‘And much less odd than if I stopped here all August,’ remarked Sophia in self-defence. ‘It would be an imbecility.’

Sophia got up from the table, and went indoors to the nursery to see the adorable Leonard, the four-months-old baby. Petros’s arrangement seemed to her to be in every way admirable. Apart from the convenience of getting away when she wanted, it gave her the opportunity of getting away alone. She was fond of her husband, but constantly irritated by him. She had no idea of letting herself be schooled by him into dependence, to be taught the duty of royalty by him, and she never forgot that she was Princess of Rhodopé, and he her husband. More than once had he attempted to point out to her his idea of what a wife’s attitude should be to her husband, and what a monarch’s attitude towards the people, and her retort had been not far to seek. She was autocrat of Rhodopé, and she was not going to be taught by anybody.

Petros, she found, was not only master of the subtleties of bezique, he knew also the most refined secrets of irritating conversation. With all his varied gifts, he had the misfortune to be a pedant, a schoolmaster in private life, and, what is worse, to be quite unconscious of his pedantry. Sophia resented with every fibre in her nature his attempts to instruct her, to develop her mind, and, indeed, the chief result of his schooling had been to develop her impatience of him. Living with him was like living in a stuffy room with only high-backed chairs. He was for ever wanting her to sit up straight, and listen to improving conversation, whereas she wanted to lounge imperially by an open window. Something of the blood of generations of irresponsible rulers ran in her veins; the unbridled license of Eastern tyrants had mingled with the refinement of the student line of Florence to compound a subtle temperament. He had once alluded to some wise act of the Czar, wishing her to draw a lesson from it, but in a moment her nose was in the air.

‘The Romanoffs were feeding pigs when we were kings,’ she had said.

Her education, so to speak, had been the work of generations of ancestors, accomplished prenatally, and she owed more to them than to her tutors. It was Tamburlaine who had smoked a cigarette on the horse-block, and Lorenzo, more than her masters, who had given her that quick artistic perception that made the great singers of Europe love to sing to her accompaniment. The blood of the great Catherine was hers, too, and hers by inheritance the intolerance of rulers. ‘C’est mon plaisir’ was reason enough with her. Indeed, she needed a clever husband and a loyal people. The former she had got in a way, but his cleverness was more akin to cunning than to wisdom or broadness of vision. To trace the process of thought was to him as valuable as the conception itself, and it pleased him more to make an infinitesimal deduction correctly than to blunder splendidly. She was headstrong, and would never be small; he was a master of finesse, but could never be big. She was royal to her finger-tips, he was only the cadet of a family that happened to be reigning. Her second need—a large loyalty from her people—was more completely hers than he guessed. What she did was right, and how firmly the people of Rhodopé held that creed he was to learn. The spirit preached from Potsdam had possession of their hearts.

Petros sat still on the veranda after she had left him, and smoked contentedly. If Sophia found him irritating, he at any rate bore the knowledge with equanimity. He had not looked for domestic bliss in his marriage; for he did not aim at domesticity, and he did not believe in bliss. But every day found him more thankful that he had married her, for he believed in ambition, especially when it was his own. Rhodopé seemed to him more enviable than ever, and he fully intended to make a bid for it. Rhodopé, he said to himself with sublime self-sufficiency as he was shaving, wanted a master; and he looked at his image in the glass. The very fact that Sophia had chosen to marry him amounted to a guarantee of his excellent qualities in the minds of her subjects; and he was quick enough to see how popular he was, and complacently shallow enough not to guess at the grand reason for his popularity. He was eminently possessed of the power to please, and when he found himself pleasing he not unnaturally referred it to his own power.

A further cause for gratification this morning lay in the fact that Sophia had been so willing to leave to deal with the affairs of the kingdom alone. She had closed with his offer as soon as it had been made, and, as this was the first real step that he had taken since his marriage in the prosecution of his aims, he was pleased that it should have gone forward without a stumble. He intended to use her absence to take several more steps in the same direction.

The Assembly of Rhodopé is peculiarly constituted. In all it numbers sixty members, of whom two-thirds enjoy hereditary seats, and one-third are elected by vote every three years. But there was in those days no sharp division into parties; no socialism as yet masqueraded in the streets under the very penetrable disguise of philanthropy; and those who had only small estates of their own had not yet begun to initiate Bills whereby larger holders should be deprived of their lands. On the other hand, even the hereditary voters were not all of blindly Conservative disposition, and the general tendency of politics was to be mildly progressive. The Prime Minister, elected by the House, was the President, and represented the monarch in his absence; but when the hereditary Prince or Princess was present, he took his seat in the body of the House. The Crown, however, possessed the power of deposing the Prime Minister and appointing a one at discretion. This prerogative had not since the great political crisis of 1793, and generally considered obsolete. But it had never been repealed, and nothing stood in the way of its being exercised should the Sovereign decide to do so.

Princess Sophia left on the first of August in the royal yacht Felatrune. Her departure had been made somewhat hurriedly, and she had given but scanty attention to the discussion of the management of the affairs of State in her absence. Prince Petros, however, insisted that he should be given some clear notion of how far he was to be considered Regent, and how far he was to telegraph for her instructions. He had made a copy on a sheet of foolscap of the Bills which would come before the House before it broke up in September, and she ran her eye quickly over them.

‘Tobacco, potatoes—potatoes, tobacco,’ she said; ‘there is nothing there that I cannot leave completely to you. I will write a short address to the House, if I have time, in which I nominate you as my Regent, and Malakopf will read it out to them. Here, I will do it now; give me a bit of paper.’

Sophia scribbled some half-dozen lines, signed them, and addressed the envelope to the Prime Minister, Malakopf.

‘I understand that I am to take your place in every way,’ said Petros, to whom she had not shown the note.

‘Yes, I have said that,’ said Sophia. ‘Don’t introduce a Bill for deposing me, you know; and if there is any unexpected crisis, let me know by telegraph. Of course there won’t be, for crises never happen in Rhodopé, and the unexpected never happens anywhere. I have complete confidence in you, Petros. And don’t be terribly conscientious; if possible, let me not hear a word of these three-halfpenny concerns till you join me. I want an entire holiday.’

‘A holiday will do you good, dear Sophia,’ said he; ‘I am afraid the heat has tired you. In turn, let me ask you not to make the State bankrupt at Monte Carlo.’

‘It wants a man with a system to do that,’ laughed Sophia.

Petros and Leonard, an amazingly sunny infant, went down to Mavromáti to see the Princess off, and returned together to Amandos about six o’clock. Petros did not care for children, and the unconscious Leonard merely roused in him a sense of futile envy at the thought that the boy would some day be Prince of Rhodopé, not merely the husband of its Princess. The Assembly met at three o’clock next day, and he spent a solitary but arduous evening going over very carefully a scheme he had in his mind. He was naturally a cautious man—a man with a system, as Sophia had said, but occasionally he would embark in a risky concern. His investments of all kinds, whether of money or brains, were either very safe or paid an enormous percentage.

The Prime Minister at this time was a man named Malakopf, originally no doubt of Russian birth, whose family had been settled in Rhodopé for many generations. Russian he might or might not be; Jew he certainly was, and he had all the financial sagacity of that remarkable race. His probity, however, stood in great need of demonstration; and he was known to have been mixed up in a very lucrative but more than questionable transaction, some ten years before, on the Vienna Bourse. There had been a most unpleasant scene on this occasion between him and Prince Demetrius, who spoke his mind with singular frankness, and Malakopf’s affection for the reigning House of Rhodopé was supposed to be of the most tepid temperature.

Sophia detested the man; with her habitual force of expression, she had said that to be in the room with him was like having tea with a centipede: one never knew where it would be next, and the prevalent impression was that it was crawling up one’s back. But Petros from the first had made much of him; he had often told his wife that so acute a financier was a goose who laid golden eggs for the State. It would be of the nature of suicide to strangle anything so intimately connected with the well-being of the principality. He might be like a centipede, socially speaking, if she would have it so; politically he was invaluable. Besides, he was a man with power; he could be a dangerous enemy, and it was always well to make friends with people who might be dangerous enemies.

Sophia’s nose had gone in the air at this.

‘My family is not accustomed to make friends with centipedes,’ she had said. ‘But, of course, you can do as you please, Petros.’

To-day Prince Petros sought him in his private room off one of the lobbies of the House. He was a bent, withered little man, but nimble in movement, and there was a shifty brightness in his eye. He got up at the Prince’s entry, and bowed low to him.

‘An unexpected pleasure, your Highness,’ he said. ‘Indeed, I was told that Princess Sophia left Mavromáti yesterday, and I had supposed you had not yet returned. I am shamefully ill-posted in the news of our Court, but I have some transactions of great moment on hand, which must be my excuse.’

Now Malakopf knew that Petros had returned to Rhodopé, and Petros knew that he knew it. Thus comment was needless.

‘My wife left yesterday,’ said he, ‘but, as you see, I am already back again. The Princess was in need of a holiday. State affairs’—he spoke with slow emphasis, and looked Malakopf full in the face—‘State affairs have tired her terribly this summer. She has been head over ears in work.’

No shadow of a smile came over the Prime Minister’s face.

‘Indeed, it must be so,’ he answered. ‘Never a moment’s relaxation or amusement! An iron will!’

But Prince Petros was satisfied; he was sure Malakopf had completely understood him.

‘I came to talk to you on an important matter,’ said the Prince, taking a seat. ‘Naturally, my wife and I could not both be absent during the sitting of the House, and she gave me to understand that she was sending you a document, which she wished to be communicated to the Assembly, conferring on me—so I took her meaning to be—powers which amount—which really amount—to a Regency during her absence.’

Malakopf, though he was not naturally slow, appeared to take some moments before he grasped what the Prince had said. He fixed his eye on the window so long, without stirring a muscle, that the Prince spoke again.

‘No doubt you have seen the document,’ he said, with a little nervousness. ‘From the few words the Princess let fall to me on the subject, I gathered—wrongly perhaps—that such was the purport of it.’ At last the Prime Minister turned briskly in his chair.

‘That, I think, we may consider to be the purport of it,’ he said. ‘And I don’t suppose that the Princess Sophia has ever taken a more prudent and far-sighted determination. Indeed, it might be even more far-sighted than she supposes.’

The Prince knew that he was, so to speak, skating on ice which might prove to be thin. Malakopf knew it equally well, and he applauded inwardly and derisively the other’s caution.

‘You flatter me,’ said the Prince; and Malakopf silently but sincerely agreed with him. But he let no palpable pause precede his answer.

‘Flattery,’ he said, ‘is the unwilling tribute of a wise man to his inferior, or a fool to his superior. Dear Prince, how can I flatter you? For you are our beloved Princess’s husband, and indeed I have glimmerings of sense. But let us approach the point with more particularity. We must consider—must we not?—what will be your proper place in the Assembly. You represent the Princess Sophia, and as her representative you take the chair whenever you are present. But here the legal point comes in: you have no seat—an anomaly as I have always felt—in the Assembly at all. How would it be, then, if you absented yourself to-day, and that I, after reading the Princess’s message, proposed a resolution that during her absence you should be, ex officio, a Member of the House? Then you would have a seat there, and your position after that, as her representative, would make you President.’ He paused a moment, and with a look amazingly frank, ‘We understand each other, do we not?’ he almost whispered, and he approached as near to a chuckle as his prudence allowed.