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.