THE EDUCATION OF THE HEIR-APPARENT.
Prince Leonard early exhibited that same craving for diversion and
excitement which had made the childhood of his mother so full of
incident to her teachers. He could not, as she had done, request
reluctant tutors to elope with him, but he made their lives burdensome
by a scientific curiosity to observe their conduct under such trying
circumstances as the cold aspersion of unsuspected booby-traps. Indeed,
such was the continuous pressure of his animal spirits, and his greed of
adventure, that the gentlemen who held these brief appointments were as
precariously situated as engine-drivers the boilers of whose machines
might be expected momentarily to burst. He was an excellent rider, born
to the saddle, and at the age of eleven his handicap at golf was only
nine. He had a fanatical abhorrence of his lessons, and his natural
linguistic powers, and the royal birthright of memory, made whatever
intellectual task he was good enough to undertake extremely easy to him.
He had the fair skin and dark hair of his mother, and in the whole
realm of Rhodopé there was not a more lovable or so unmanageable a boy.
When he was just thirteen, he indulged in a series of escapades that
made Sophia take him seriously. The first of these was that he
challenged, fought with, and wrought havoc upon the pasty person of the
son of the Mayor of Amandos, an act undignified in one of his station,
and performed in a manner distressingly public. The two, stripped to
their shirts and trousers, had fought three rounds in the square in
front of the cathedral, while Sophia, with whom Leonard had been driving
to a public function, paid a call of condolence on the wife of the
Mayor, a victim to neuralgia. The Princess and she had been sitting in a
room overlooking the square, when the hubbub from outside, and shouts of
‘Go it, Prince Leonard! Three to one on the Prince!’ caused them
simultaneously to rise, and run in apprehensive haste to the window. The
carriage, which had waited in the street, was tenantless, the Prince’s
hat and sailor jacket were lying in the road, a crowd of street-boys
made an enthusiastic ring, and the heir-apparent to the throne had his
opponent’s head comfortably in chancery. The wife of the Mayor gazed but
for one moment, and then shrieking out, ‘The monster! he will kill my
child!’ rushed distractedly from the room. Sophia followed, and on the
stairs ran into the boy’s tutor, who, being totally unable to stop him
fighting, had very sensibly hastened to tell his mother. The Mayoress
bore her battered offspring away, and Sophia returned to the carriage
with Leonard.
‘Oh, mother, didn’t I give it him!’ cried the boy. ‘My knuckles are
quite sore with hitting his great head. He couldn’t have lasted another
round.’
‘Put on your jacket at once, Leonard,’ said his mother sternly. ‘You,
the Prince, fighting in the public street! I wonder you are not
ashamed!’
‘But I couldn’t help it,’ cried Leonard. ‘I had to fight him. He said
things about you.’
‘Don’t talk so loud, Leonard,’ said Sophia. ‘Tell me what he said.’
‘He said that you were the most notor--notorious--he always uses words a
yard long--the most notorious gambler in Rhodopé; so, of course, I said
he lied, and would he fight or take a licking? Indeed, he did both.’
His mother flushed with pleasure, but she sighed at the end.
‘I’m afraid he was near the mark, Lennie,’ she said.
‘But what is notorious?’ asked Leonard, ‘I didn’t know what he meant,
but, anyhow, it was calling you names.’
‘It means the most regular,’ said Sophia.
Leonard considered a moment with his head on one side.
‘That doesn’t sound very bad,’ he said; ‘but, anyhow, he had no business
to say so. No. I’m glad I fought him. Lord, how sore he will be!’
He smoothed his ruffled hair, and put his hat on.
‘I suppose it is true that you are at the club pretty often?’ he
continued. ‘Mother, will you take me there sometimes? I have never
been.’
Sophia felt suddenly serious and responsible.
‘No; never,’ she said with energy. ‘Promise me you will never go. I
certainly shall not take you there; it is no place for you.’
‘Then, some day I shall go without you,’ remarked Leonard.
Sophia was so anxious that he should not--why, it perhaps would have
puzzled her to say, except that she vaguely pictured his fresh young
face looking singularly out of place in that gas-lit assembly--that she
did her best to persuade him to promise that he would never set foot in
the club, but unavailingly. The more she urged, the more Leonard’s
desire to go increased.
‘And,’ as he remarked with candour, ‘I shan’t make a promise, because
then I should feel obliged to keep it.’
So at last she desisted, feeling she would have been wiser not to have
urged, and hoping that the boy would forget about it; for she would
sooner he fought the Mayor’s son than cut his gambling teeth, and,
indeed, the history of their quarrel had warmed her heart.
Two evenings afterwards she was sitting at her usual place on the right
of Pierre, playing roulette. She was enjoying a rare run of luck, and
her stakes were recklessly high. She had just placed the limit on a
single number, when, looking up, she saw opposite her a young girl
seated at the table watching the game with flushed and wide-eyed
interest. She turned to Blanche Amesbury, who was sitting next her.
‘Look at that pretty child opposite,’ she said. ‘But what a way to dress
a girl! She must be the daughter of that English brewer peer. What
refined types you meet among the bourgeois! How its dear little heart is
in the game! Yet it seems almost a shame to bring it here--this is no
place for children--but the _nouveaux riches_ are always horrible.
Why---- Oh, good gracious me! it’s Leonard.’
Leonard caught the sound of his name, and looked up for a fraction of a
second.
‘Oh, a moment--a moment!’ he cried. ‘Fourteen, fifteen---- Hurrah!
sixteen wins. Good old sixteen! I wish I had staked on a single number
instead of the half-dozen.’
He had been so absorbed in the game that for a moment he did not notice
his self-betrayal, nor the shout of laughter which followed; but now he
stood there in all the conscious shame of his girl’s dress. He blushed
up to the roots of his hair, and pushed his way confusedly out of the
room, forgetting even to take with him what he had won on the last roll.
Sophia tried to look grave and unconscious, but in a few seconds the
corners of her mouth broke down, and she leaned back in her chair with
peal after peal of laughter.
‘Oh, I could never have invented so divinely apt a punishment!’ she
cried. ‘Leonard detected in a girl’s dress, and before all the people!
Indeed, that is an instance of the fierce light that beats upon a
throne. Oh, how furious he will be! I wonder where he got his costume.
His hat--oh, my dear Blanche! his hat! It was like Covent Garden on a
summer’s morning--a cargo of flowers and nameless vegetables. Oh, I
cannot stop; I must go and rub the lesson in. He has a horror of making
himself ridiculous. Perhaps this will cure him for awhile.’
Sophia went straight back to the Palace, where the servants were all
agape to see her return so early, and to Leonard’s room. He had got
there only a moment before her, since she had taken the short-cut
through the private door in the Palace garden, and he was tearing the
detected finery from him. On his bed lay the hat, a perfect garden of
magenta roses and sage-green ribbons, and he was even then wrestling
with the hooks and eyes of the bodice. The boy stamped his foot angrily
when he saw her, and his cheeks were redder than the roses in his hat
and infinitely more healthy in tone.
‘Why did you make a fool of me, mother,’ he cried, ‘before all those
people? I shall never be able to go to the Casino again. It was brutal
of you, and I was enjoying myself so much.’
Sophia burst out laughing.
‘Dear Lennie, what a lovely hat!’ she cried. ‘Where did you get it? I
shall order one like it, and we will go driving together in them. Do
you propose to wear that dress always instead of your sailor clothes?
It is not very well cut. As for my making a fool of you, I think you are
more to blame than I. How could you do such a thing!’
‘It was your fault,’ cried he. ‘I had forgotten everything in the game.
Oh, these strings! I think the devil made them.’
‘And a fool tied them,’ said Sophia. ‘Here, let me do them for you. I
thought the dress did not fit very well, and no wonder, if you had your
shirt on under the bodice and your trousers under the skirt. And where
are your stays? It is all your fault, Leonard; I told you not to go to
the club.’
‘I hope you didn’t think I was going to obey you?’ said Leonard, with
singular contempt.
‘Anyhow, you thought fit to disobey me--oh, don’t wriggle so!--and you
have been very properly paid out for it. You are too young to gamble. My
poor boy! every shopkeeper in Rhodopé is laughing at you this moment,
and I’m sure I don’t wonder. For me, I have never been so nearly
hysterical; I was helpless with laughter. I told you you were too young
to gamble, and you would not take my word for it. You have been very
naughty and disobedient, and you made a thorough exhibition of
yourself--within three days to fight in the streets and to dress up as
Polly to go to the Casino. Oh, that hat! What a creation!’ and she began
to laugh again. ‘I thought you were one of the bourgeois.’
Leonard stepped out of the skirt, and pulled down his trousers, which he
had rolled up to the knees over his sturdy calves, and regarded his
mother critically.
‘I say, mother, you know you must have begun pretty young, too,’ he
said. ‘The earliest thing I can remember is being told you were the
finest gambler in Europe. I watched you playing to-night. You played
very quietly, and by your face a man could not tell whether you had won
or lost. Is that the _chic_ way to gamble?’
‘That is the only way to gamble,’ said she, forgetting for a moment the
moral lesson. ‘I have seen men and women tremble so that they could
scarcely pick up their winnings. Whatever you do, always keep quiet at
the tables. There is no such test of decent breeding.’
‘You must teach me,’ said Leonard insidiously. ‘We might play for--for
counters at first, quietly, at home.’
‘That would be very amusing,’ remarked his mother, ‘and roulette for two
would certainly be a novelty; but I don’t want you to grow up a gambler,
Leonard.’
‘Yet to-night I found it very entertaining; and did not you grow up a
gambler?’ said he. ‘Also, it seemed to me easy, which is an advantage.’
‘Easy! There is no such word. There is good luck and bad luck; that is
all the vocabulary.’
‘When did you first begin playing?’ asked he.
‘When I was too young.’
‘Then, I expect that was a very long time ago,’ said the boy; ‘for I do
not see how you can begin too early;’ and with this the conversation
closed. Sophia, as may have been detected, could never have been
predestined to attain to eminence as a disciplinarian, and Leonard’s
tutors, like her own, proved about equally inefficient in managing him.
One after another were surveyed by the boy, and judged wanting. One
could not ride, another could not shoot, a third wore spectacles, and
topped his drives with unique regularity; but one and all joined hands
in this, that they were totally unable to make him learn except when he
chose to learn, or to exercise the slightest discipline over him out of
lesson hours, and very little in.
Sophia soon grew considerably exercised about the boy. She had begun to
see that the atmosphere of the Palace of Amandos was not entirely
wholesome. He was not disciplined in any way, which she considered the
worst preparation for a lad who would one day be an autocratic
Sovereign. She compared the escapades of her own youth with his, and had
to confess that she, at any rate, had been a little in awe of her
father. She had often revolted, but with an uneasy feeling that
consequences might follow, and thus disobedience had its drawbacks.
Leonard, on the other hand, disobeyed her whistling, with his tongue in
his cheek, and to him disobedience never seemed to bring with it any
drawbacks at all. By the time she saw him next she would have forgotten
about the incident, or if she remembered it, and began a little homily,
Leonard would shut his eyes, turn down the corners of his mouth, and,
with an air inexpressibly comic, say, ‘Let us pray.’ Once she had
instructed Mr. Lanthony, the tutor with the spectacles, not without much
inward misgiving, to use the cane to Leonard next time punishment was
necessary, and, such an occasion occurring within an hour of the edict,
Leonard had thrown a copy of Magnall’s Questions at Mr. Lanthony’s face
when he produced the cane with so much precision that his spectacles
were dashed into a thousand fragments, and his eyes gushed out with
involuntary water. His mother had not told the boy that the proposed
caning was consonant to her orders, and Leonard came to her in much
indignation.
‘Mother,’ he cried, ‘you couldn’t guess what has happened if you tried a
hundred times: that old giglamps said he would cane me this
morning--me!’ and he tapped his waistcoat.
‘I am convinced you deserved it,’ said his mother calmly.
‘And I am convinced that his spectacles will never be fit to see through
again,’ retorted Leonard, angry at finding her so unsympathetic.
‘Leonard, what have you done?’ she said.
‘I threw Magnall’s Questions at him hard,’ he said; ‘and thus his
spectacles are not worth anything now.’
‘You wicked boy!’ cried his mother. ‘It was I who told Mr. Lanthony to
cane you. You are very naughty and mischievous, and you must go and beg
Mr. Lanthony’s pardon, and take your caning like a man; and your
pocket-money shall be stopped to pay for his spectacles.’
Down went the corners of Leonard’s mouth.
‘Oh, dear!’ he sighed; ‘let us pray; but get it over quick.’
In effect Mr. Lanthony had to do without the apology, and Prince Leonard
without his caning; but the tutor had an interview with Sophia, and,
after tendering his resignation, ventured to offer a word of advice.
‘I should lose no time in sending him to Eton,’ he said.
‘Who is Eton?’ asked his mother.
Mr. Lanthony was frankly horrified.
‘Eton is a school, your Royal Highness,’ he replied; ‘in fact, it is
_the_ school. It seems strange to an Englishman to find even in Rhodopé
that Eton is unknown; but “Non cuivis attingit adire Corinthum.”’
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Sophia politely.
‘I merely said Eton was a school,’ said Mr. Lanthony.
‘I think I have heard of it, now I consider,’ said Sophia. ‘It is near
Windsor, is it not? What does one do? Shall I take a house for him, or
will he live in London, and go down for an hour or two every day?’
‘That will not be necessary,’ replied Mr. Lanthony. ‘The house, on the
other hand, will take him;’ and he sketched to the Princess the main
features of a public school.
‘Yes, it sounds nice,’ she said vaguely; ‘but he is, as you know, so
high-spirited. Will they try to cane him there? I tremble to think what
will happen--dear me! your eye _is_ bad, Mr. Lanthony--if the headmaster
tries to cane him.’
Mr. Lanthony gave the ghost of a smile. His mouth was untouched by
Magnall’s Questions.
‘I don’t think you need consider that, your Royal Highness,’ he
said--‘at least, you need not be uneasy for the headmaster; nor, indeed,
for the Prince--the birch is quite harmless.’
‘The birch!’ cried Sophia. ‘How terrible it sounds!’
‘It is of no consequence,’ said Mr. Lanthony gravely; and the pain of
Magnall’s Questions grew sensibly less.
‘Well, we must ask Leonard,’ said his mother. ‘Supposing he refuses to
go? What are we to do then? I don’t think either of us has much
influence with him, you know.’
But Leonard, when appealed to, was considerably taken with the idea;
there would be a lot of boys to play with, and he wanted to go to
England.
‘I expect it’s more fun with heaps of other boys than with one old muff
at a time,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’ll be an Eton boy.’
When Sophia had made up her mind to a thing, she was not slow to put it
into execution. She wrote an exceedingly kind and condescending letter
to the headmaster, giving him to understand that she was prepared to
confer this priceless boon on Eton at Mr. Lanthony’s recommendation;
but that gentleman, to whom she read it, advised another tone. The
headmaster was radically-minded, and would not be likely to be dazzled
at the prospect; she could put it more simply. Indeed, perhaps it would
be better if he wrote himself to a housemaster he knew there, asking if
he could by any means secure a vacancy in his house for a boy aged
fourteen, or if he knew of anyone else who had a vacancy. All this
sounded terribly democratic to the Princess; but, having failed so
signally herself with Leonard, she was desirous that other more
practised hands should take the reins from her, and she would, so she
expressed herself with a little acidity, go down on her knees before all
the masters in Christendom if this were the more proper attitude to
take.
It was finally arranged that Leonard should enter the school in April,
and Sophia threw herself with zest into the scheme. She conferred on his
housemaster the Second Order of the Bronze Cross, and sent him the key
to a private cipher, by means of which he could daily communicate with
her. She asked whether £1,000 pocket-money a term would be sufficient to
supply her boy with school requisites, and whether she should open an
account for him at the Eton and Windsor Bank. She hoped they would all
remember--perhaps he would be so good as to speak to his colleagues
about it--how exceedingly high-spirited the Prince was, and how little
discipline he had yet received. Finally, she drove the unfortunate man
to the verge of imbecility by saying that she hoped they allowed no
roulette _at all_ in the school, and only vingt-et-un at moderate
points. Mr. Lanthony had already left for England before this unhappy
series of letters was despatched, or some of them might have been
averted.
Leonard left for England at the end of March, and it was in a way an
immense relief to his mother when he had gone, for she felt strangely
responsible for his education. She had made up her mind that he was to
be a good ruler, and she saw clearly that Rhodopé was no place for him
yet. Her own popularity had redeemed, so far, her reign from failure,
but she was candid enough to allow that she might have let her sphere
border more nearly on usefulness. Prince Petros’s mad attempt had been
an unexampled piece of luck; it had given her an _éclat_ she could
scarcely have won otherwise, so also had her institution of the club.
She had founded it to supply amusement to herself; she found that she
had given occupation to her people. But already she foresaw that in the
course of years the morals of the people would deteriorate, the hardy
mountain folk would become people of the asphalt, of the gaslight. As
long as the club continued to act as a star for the enjoyment of
health-questing moths, so long, no doubt, would the Budget of Rhodopé be
a pattern to other more puritanically constituted States; but the
surplus on the Budget would be paid for in other ways. She saw the sheep
of Rhodopé without their shepherds; she saw the vineyards without their
vine-diggers; she dimly forecast the army destitute of privates, and
peopled only with honorary colonels. She had the grace to shudder at the
logical outcome of the era she had instituted, only she could not in her
own person break the chain of circumstance on which it hung. Amandos
without the club! She starved at the thought. It had been bad enough
before; now, when the days there had actually ceased to be tedious,
owing to the diversions supplied by her roulette, with what a cold
shuddering of the spirit she saw herself shorn of that which made life
tolerable! But that chain of circumstances should be broken by her son.
She had endowed him with the gambling blood, but that was inevitable; at
least she was now making an effort whereby the hereditary instinct
should not come to fruition. She had sent him to England, that home of
three-penny points; she had expressed herself most clearly to his
housemaster at Eton on the question of roulette. She could not have done
more, and her conscience approved her.
Meantime, throughout the length and breadth of Europe her reputation had
gone abroad. Her great _coup_, now eleven years ago, which had steadied
the tottering House of Ægina, had taken hold on the popular imagination,
and the boldness and dash of the move had raised up in real hosts those
unknown admirers which so many of those who act in public secretly and
mistakenly suppose are theirs. That return from Corfu, triumphant over a
riotous and wrecking sea, the cross-country sledge journey, the arrival
in the nick of time, the hopeless and utter defeat of her husband and
the acuter Malakopf, her rapturous welcome by the people, were all
things to enkindle the blood in an age in which diplomatic papers are
sufficient to set the world blazing. She was a picturesque figure, and
an unpicturesque epoch has always this saving grace, that it delights in
picturesque figures when they do appear. However much we may live
environed by gray and green, a vivider tint is ever applauded. Again,
she was admirably posed. To the eye of Europe she went stake in hand
from the roulette-board to the rescue of her House, and having saved her
House, went back to where the ball was still rolling and won. She had
dash and brilliance and beauty, she was neither prude nor puritan.
Indeed, she seemed one of those to whom success comes as if by
birthright.
But with the instinct of a true gambler, she called her own success a
run of luck. Sooner or later, unless her line staked on another colour,
it would go against them, and her resolution to reform took the shape of
reforming, or rather putting on the other colour, her son, Prince
Leonard. She was determined, at the sacrifice of her natural desire, to
see him but seldom; he should be a stranger to the tables of Rhodopé and
the Riviera; he should play cricket and polo and hockey--whatever that
was--instead of bezique and baccarat. She was herself so warm an admirer
of the open air, that she felt she was not starving him. Had she not
been a Princess, she would have chosen to be a man and a dweller in the
mountains. Horses and dogs, a keen eye, and an obedient hand, were
admirable things, and good enough for anybody.
For the next few years Leonard did not set foot in Rhodopé at all, and
he saw his mother occasionally only, in her short and scarce visits to
England. At Eton the high spirit which his mother had feared would be a
source of possible danger to the head had shown itself reasonable, and
in the course of one painful interview between the two, of which the
cause was tobacco, and the end the birch, no books had been thrown. He
did the minimum of work required with cheerfulness, if not zest, and,
far more important, he was immensely popular with his fellows. He grew
tall and strong on the banks of the Thames. At the age of sixteen he got
into the eleven, and in the match against Harrow cracked the enamelled
face of the clock at Lord’s off a half-volley just outside his
leg-stump. He also indulged in various other amusements, which as yet
had not come to light, but which appeared in damning concourse very
shortly indeed before he left.
One morning in July he went into his room after twelve to change for
cricket. On the table were two letters--one from his mother, who told
him that she was on her way to England, and would arrive at the end of
the month. She would stay a few days in London, and if Eton had broken
up he had better come to her there. It was long since she had been in
London, and they would see the sights together, from the Westminster
Aquarium to the Tower of London, and from Madame Tussaud’s even to the
Zoological Gardens and the Adelphi Theatre. There was no harm, she said,
in a little gaiety, and she did not wish to cut Leonard off from all
amusements. The other letter was from a groom of some training stables,
and it interested him far more, for it gave the best possible account of
Muley Moloch, a horse which Leonard was backing heavily for the Eclipse
Stakes at Sandown. Accordingly at the end of the half Leonard went up to
London to join his mother. She had taken a great suite of rooms at the
Hôtel Métropole, with a private entrance, where she lived under her
usual incognito of the Countess of Ægina.
Leonard arrived late in the evening, and found her with a few friends
playing baccarat. His mother threw down her cards when he entered.
‘Dearest Leonard!’ she cried; ‘but I should scarcely have known you. How
you have grown, and how you have improved! I am so delighted to see you
again! Have you dined?’
Indeed, any mother might have been proud of him. He had grown up tall,
well-looking, and with an extraordinary frankness and charm of manner.
Though he was still but seventeen, he looked almost a man, and Princess
Sophia felt how wise she had been to send him to school.
‘I have dined,’ he said, after being introduced to his mother’s guests.
‘And if you will let me, mother, I will join you in your game.
Baccarat, is it not? A good game.’
‘Oh, Leonard, what business have you to know that!’ cried his mother. ‘I
particularly asked that no baccarat should be allowed at Eton.’
Leonard laughed.
‘It is strictly prohibited,’ he said; ‘every boy at Eton will tell you
so. Do not blame the masters. Will you lend me some money, mother?’
Though the Princess would have preferred that he should not play at all,
she had the consolation of that he played well. His face was a mask of
good breeding, not an eyelash betrayed emotion, and he looked gravely
amused whether he won or lost.
‘He is a born gambler. It is in the blood, you know,’ she said under her
breath to her cousin, the Duchess of Winchester, who was sitting next to
her, and the Duchess thought she detected pride and not regret alone in
her voice.
Mother and son, as arranged, went out the next days to see the sights of
London. To the Princess it seemed to have grown sadder and foggier since
she had seen it last. Their expeditions were mostly made on foot, for
the Princess loved the bustle and stir of the streets, and more than
once they made the top of an omnibus their observatory.
‘There are plenty of people, certainly,’ she said one day to Leonard, as
they swayed and rolled up Baker Street; ‘and I love crowds. But observe
their infinite sadness of demeanour. What a load of responsibility
seems to rest on the least and meanest shoulders! Look at that baker
there! If he was in Rhodopé I would make him Court undertaker. To what
genuine melancholy is he the prey! If I was responsible for the whole
creation, I should not be so sad. And they all walk so fast, as if they
were going to catch the dying words of a near and dear relative, and
would only just get there in time. After all, I am glad I am a
Southerner. We may not be so good, but we are certainly gayer. And it is
certainly good to be gay.’
They stopped at the corner where Madame Tussaud’s red exhibition stood,
and Leonard, who for some minutes had been with difficulty restraining
his laughter, suddenly burst out into a great shout of amusement.
‘England, at any rate, has not made you sad at present,’ said the
Princess. ‘What is the matter, Leonard?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ said the lad; ‘at least, you will soon know.’
She paid their entrance-money--Leonard tossed his mother who should pay
for both, and won--and began the tour of the room. Suddenly the Princess
gave a little exclamation of horrified surprise, and rapidly turned up
No. 27 in the catalogue. What met her indignant eye was this:
‘_The gambling Princess Sophia._--Princess Sophia of Rhodopé, though
only just forty, is surely the most rankly notorious crowned head of
Europe. She spends the greater part of every day in the club she has
started at the capital, Amandos, and the era of gambling she has
introduced is rapidly undermining the physique and morale of her little
kingdom. She has confined her old Prime Minister, Malakopf, a financier
of European reputation, to a life-long imprisonment for some imaginary
plot against the throne; and her husband, Prince Petros of Herzegovina,
she has divorced and banished from the principality of Rhodopé. He is
described by those who knew him as a man of charming manner and quick
insight. The Princess has a violent temper and is growing very stout.
Her only son, Prince Leonard, is at school at Eton.’
The room was almost empty, and Leonard put no bounds to his amusement.
He stamped and choked, his mouth was full of laughter.
‘Oh, oh!’ he cried, ‘it is too funny! And, mother, I hear they are
thinking of sending you to the Chamber of Horrors. I stayed in London
last long leave and saw it. Oh, oh, the Chamber of Horrors, with
murderers and Phœnix Park tragedians and people who have their throats
cut in their baths. Oh, I shall burst!’
Sophia turned icily from him, read the description of herself through
again in the catalogue, and then examined the figure. It was seated in
the most realistic pose in front of a small green-cloth table. One hand
held three or four playing-cards, the other was clutched on a heap of
counterfeit coins. It represented her in full evening dress, with the
Order of the Silver Cross and the Salamander on her shoulder, both
faultlessly executed. Her dress was of white brocade, and it might have
been copied by Worth himself, so she thought, from the gown which she
had worn on the night of her memorable and unexpected home-coming. The
pasty, formless fingers glittered with immense glass jewels; she wore a
tiara of diamonds, and a copy in some cheap and tawdry material of the
Rhodopé pearls.
But it was the presentment of the face that most appalled the Princess.
The likeness was unmistakable, yet it was the most prodigious parody.
She herself was pleasantly furnished with flesh, the waxwork bulged with
fatness. Her own black eyes, with their long lashes, became wicked lakes
of darkness, her fine-lipped mouth was moulded into evil and monstrous
curves. Avarice sat enthroned in her greedy expression and in the
clutching hand.
The Princess examined it with scrupulous care, then turned with a
petrified face to Leonard, who was wiping his eyes. Every now and then a
fresh gust of laughter shook him, and he held his aching ribs for fear
they should burst. Sophia watched him a moment with malignity; it seemed
yet doubtful whether she would run her parasol through the face of the
waxwork, or box his ears; but by degrees the infection of his merriment
caught her, and sitting down by him on a crimson-covered ottoman, she
gave way to peal after peal of laughter. He had been on the verge of
recovery, but they mutually infected one another, and in a few moments
were equally lost to all power of speech, and could only point feebly
and shakingly, as they shook and rolled on the sofa, at the greedy and
clutching figure of the waxwork. A few more people had come into the
gallery, and were attracted by this convulsed couple, but, with the
supercilious contempt with which the English regard merriment in which
they do not share, passed them by. Close at hand, however, sat the
figure of the gambling Princess, and one by one they glanced back
furtively to the real one on the crimson ottoman. There could be no
mistaking, even in the convulsions of her laughter, the prototype of the
figure.
Soon Princess Sophia observed this, and with a sudden accession of
dignity hurried Leonard off.
‘Let me show you the way to the Chamber of Horrors,’ he said, in a voice
vibrating with suppressed laughter, ‘so that you will know where to look
for yourself next year.’
They could give but a superficial attention to that temple of classical
criminals. Sophia longed to go back to her own figure, which exercised a
strange fascination over her. She wanted to see the manager, to have him
to dinner, to hail him as the first humorist in Europe. Then she
protested that it was monstrous that she should have to pay to see an
exhibition in which she herself was so leading an attraction. She was
half inclined to demand her money back at the door, had it not been for
the treat she had enjoyed in seeing herself as others, or, at any rate,
that strict moralist who wrote the account of the figure, saw her. The
Monument, the Zoological Gardens, the Underground Railway, even a most
remarkable play at one of the West End theatres, where two ignoble
gentlemen cut through a pack to see who should marry an heiress, both
turning up sevens and then kings, had a touch of bathos after Madame
Tussaud’s; and Leonard and Sophia went back there more than once and
found the joke remained of that superlative order which is only enhanced
by repetition. The Princess, even in her middle life, retained a
youthful passion for being amused, but never, so she thought, had she
made a better investment in joy than with those shillings she paid to
the doorkeeper at the waxwork show.
She remained in England all August and September, and in the third week
of that month Leonard went back to Eton. Sophia, who wished to see the
place, paid him a visit there, and made herself remarkably popular by
securing for the school the promise of an extra week in the next summer
holidays, in honour of her visit. In eight weeks Leonard would be easily
repaid for his four days’ journey to Rhodopé, and she intended him to
come home, for the first time since he went to Eton. _Femme propose._
She was to leave England about the middle of October, and a week before
she should have started she was back in London again from a round of
visits. One morning she found on her breakfast-table a letter with the
Eton postmark on it, but not addressed in Leonard’s hand. She opened it
without apprehension, and read the following statement in the
headmaster’s neat and scholarly handwriting:
/* NIND ‘YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, */
‘Little did I think when we had the honour so short a time ago of
welcoming your Royal Highness to Eton that it would be my painful
duty to write this letter to you. Your son, Prince Leonard, was
found last week to have visited the Windsor races, where he was
seen smoking and talking to a successful jockey, whose equestrian
skill, so it appeared, had been the means of winning your son a
considerable sum of money. This offence could not, of course, be
passed over, and it was my duty to visit it on him in the most
severe manner--in short, I gave him a flogging. But he refused,
apparently, to take the warning to heart, and yesterday evening his
housemaster, going into his room, found him, with several other
boys, engaged in a game of roulette. This was more particularly
heinous, since I well remember how warmly your Royal Highness urged
on us not to allow roulette in the school. I therefore beg to
advise your Royal Highness to remove Prince Leonard at once from
Eton, to save him the disgrace, which must otherwise be inevitable,
of being expelled. The roulette-board I send to you to-day by
parcel post. I must add that Prince Leonard was most anxious to
have it understood that he had persuaded the others to play, in
spite of their unwillingness.’
Sophia did as she was advised, and instantly telegraphed to the
headmaster, saying that she intended to remove her son at once from
Eton. She was exceedingly annoyed at what had occurred, and felt quite
angry with Leonard. She had expressly desired him not to play roulette;
it was very tiresome to be disobeyed like this. She had hoped that he
would have learned obedience at school. As for his removal from Eton, it
was most inconvenient; she was at her wits’ end to know what to do with
him. It would hardly be possible, at his age, to send him to Harrow;
besides, she believed that Harrow boys always fought with Eton boys, and
wore swallow-tail coats in the morning, which would never do. That the
headmaster of Harrow would not be infinitely delighted at his entering
there did not for a moment occur to her.
Her annoyance was very materially increased by the arrival of the
roulette-board. It was a villainous piece of construction, faulty in
carpentering, odiously coloured with the crudest and most violent tints;
and it contained two zeros. She had, as the reader will have gathered,
no moral objection at all to gambling, but her horror of not doing the
thing properly was vital and ineradicable. In a fit of anger she smashed
it into bits and threw the pieces on to the fire.
Later in the day Leonard arrived, completely himself.
‘How could you be so stupid and disobedient!’ cried the Princess. ‘And,
Leonard, to play with that roulette-board is a disgrace.’
Leonard looked up in surprise.
‘How have you seen it? Where is it?’ he asked.
‘It is at present in ash in the grate, and its finer particles are
contributing to the London fog,’ said the Princess, with some asperity.
‘In fact, I threw it into the fire. The headmaster sent it me.’
‘I thought we might have had a game together this evening,’ said
Leonard, seating himself. ‘What was the good of burning it? Besides, it
was mine. Oh, mother’--and his handsome face flushed with a sudden fresh
eagerness--‘you never saw such a run of luck as I had last night! I
staked three times on thirteen, and won twice!’
‘On thirteen! Good gracious,’ cried the Princess, ‘it is madness,
Leonard! No wonder your housemaster came in and discovered you. Dear me,
I remember horrifying your poor foolish father so much at Monte Carlo by
backing single numbers. He had a system. Thank Heaven, you did not get
caught playing on a system! The disgrace would have been double. I am
spared that.’
Sophia pulled herself up sharp, for she was aware that her instinct had
taken the reins from the serious spirit with which she had intended to
handle Leonard. The little homily she had prepared had merged into the
never-ending discussion on the subject of number thirteen.
‘But I am very much shocked and distressed at all this, Leonard,’ she
went on. ‘You have ruined and cut short your school career, and
disgraced your name.’
Leonard’s eyes began to twinkle.
‘How about Madame Tussaud’s?’ he asked. ‘I am not the first.’
‘That is beside the point,’ said Sophia, and when the boy laughed
outright: ‘At any rate, it is no good talking of that. Oh, but it was
very funny! Well, Leonard, I do not mean to send you to the other public
school--what is it called?--Harrow. Also, I do not intend you to come
and live idly at Rhodopé.’
‘No, that would be rather too slow after England,’ remarked Leonard.
‘Well, what do you want to do? Can’t you suggest anything?’ asked the
Princess, with some impatience.
‘I should like to stay in England, or travel, perhaps. Yes; why
shouldn’t I travel?’
‘I think that is the best thing you could do,’ said the Princess, ‘and I
am glad you suggested it. But I shall have to get you a tutor; it will
be a great expense. I suppose you will go round the world. We will go to
some agent to-morrow--I suppose there are agents for such things--and
see how they are done.’
As usual, the Princess put her purpose into effect without loss of time.
She advertised for a travelling tutor, and for three days made the life
of Thomas Cook and Sons but a parody of existence. She went to the
docks, and inspected large numbers of ocean liners, and at length fixed
upon a vessel of the Peninsular and Oriental line, which would take him
as far as Egypt. There he would spend a few weeks, go on to India,
thence to Australia, and back over America. She had a personal interview
with the captain of the vessel, and insisted on all the games provided
for the use of passengers being turned out, so that she might assure
herself that no game of hazard was played on board. But as the entire
stock of entertainment consisted of some inglorious little rope-rings,
which were to be thrown into buckets, she felt no further anxiety on
this score. It puzzled her to understand how people could find amusement
in this, but the captain assured her that they did.
She saw Leonard off on a drizzly November morning. He was to be away at
the least for two years, and she parted from him with some emotion. But
the conviction that she was doing the wisest thing for him was a large
consolation. To let him go back to Rhodopé with all his inherited
instincts of gambling would be a dangerous experiment, for she was firm
in her resolve that he should prove a good and useful man, a ruler who
might be able to grapple with the insidious gambling disease which had
spread so direfully through the country, for she felt herself unable,
morally incapable, of dealing with it. Personally, she could not face
the idea of Amandos shorn of its club, and how should she, the priestess
of the goddess, recant? She was determined to give Leonard the best
chance possible. He should live on vessels where only rings were
provided for entertainment, and when he landed he should shoot animals,
and see mosques and wigwams, and other tedious and exotic objects.
She had engaged for him a tutor who inspired her with confidence. He had
a lofty, commanding forehead, with high, knobby temples and a pedantic
and instructive manner. He kept accounts in a book, and money in a
purse. She herself had tried to teach him picquet, and was delighted to
observe that he seemed almost incapable of understanding the ordinary
value of cards, though he was said to be a fine classical scholar. He
said he thought games of chance were irrational amusements, and though
in sheer loyalty she was bound to attempt to convince him they were not,
she was delighted to find that she failed egregiously. And next day
Sophia saw the s.s. _Valetta_ start from Tilbury, bearing Prince
Leonard, his tutor, and the little rope-rings out into the siren-haunted
mists of the mouth of the Thames.