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_UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME_
SIR GEORGE TRESSADY. _Mrs. Humphry Ward._
THE FARM OF THE DAGGER. _Eden Phillpotts._
THE EXPENSIVE MISS DU CANE. _S. Macnaughtan._
LADY ROSE’S DAUGHTER. _Mrs. Humphry Ward._
THE PROFESSOR ON THE CASE. _Jacques Futrelle._
LOVE AND THE SOUL HUNTERS. _John O. Hobbes._
THE SECRET OF THE LEAGUE. _Ernest Bramah._
VALERIE UPTON. _Miss A. D. Sedgwick._
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON. _H. G. Wells._
KATHARINE FRENSHAM. _Beatrice Harraden._
THE WAR OF THE CAROLINAS. _Meredith Nicholson._
HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE. _Mrs. Humphry Ward._
ROMANCE. _Joseph Conrad._
THE PRIMROSE PATH. _Mrs. Oliphant._
KIPPS. _H. G. Wells._
MARRIAGE OF WILLIAM ASHE. _Mrs. Humphry Ward._
THOMPSON’S PROGRESS. _C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne._
CYNTHIA’S WAY. _Mrs. A. Sidgwick._
RAFFLES. _E. W. Hornung._
FRENCH NAN. _Agnes & Egerton Castle._
THE FOOD OF THE GODS. _H. G. Wells._
MARCELLA. _Mrs. Humphry Ward._
SPRINGTIME. _H. C. Bailey._
MOONFLEET. _J. Meade Falkner._
WHITE FANG. _Jack London._
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM. _H. G. Wells._
ROBERT ELSMERE. _Mrs. Humphry Ward._
THE BATTLE OF THE STRONG. _Sir G. Parker._
THE AMERICAN PRISONER. _Eden Phillpotts._
FORTUNE OF CHRISTINA M‘NAB. _S. Macnaughtan._
THE AMERICAN. _Henry James._
SELAH HARRISON. _S. Macnaughtan._
A LAME DOG’S DIARY. _S. Macnaughtan._
_And Many Other Equally Popular
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NELSON’S LIBRARY.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: The princess swept by him with an air of ineffable
disdain.]
[Illustration:
THE
PRINCESS
SOPHIA
E. F. BENSON
THOMAS NELSON AND
SONS]
TO
MY DEAR FRIEND
CRITIC, SISTER
I AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATE
THIS BOOK
E. F. BENSON
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTORY 5
I. THE GIRL IS MOTHER TO THE WOMAN 17
II. A FOOL COMES TO RHODOPÉ 33
III. MARRIAGE-BELLS AND SYSTEMS 50
IV. THE LAST DAYS OF PRINCE DEMETRIUS 65
V. ENTER THE CENTIPEDE 72
VI. THE NEW MEMBER 93
VII. THE PRINCESS’S CLUB 107
VIII. PLOTS AND COUNTER-PLOTS 135
IX. THE PRINCESS RETURNS 167
X. THE PRINCESS IS VERY MUCH THERE 184
XI. A FOOL LEAVES RHODOPÉ 200
XII. THE EDUCATION OF THE HEIR-APPARENT 209
XIII. THE PLAGUE-SPOT SPREADS 239
XIV. BANG! 257
EPILOGUE 273
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.