THE PLAGUE-SPOT SPREADS.
A few days afterwards Princess Sophia herself started on her return to
Rhodopé. The _Felatrune_ was to meet her at Monte Carlo, but she crossed
France overland. Her original scheme had been to go by sea all the way,
but this saving of time caused by crossing the Continent gave her a
balance of eight days, which she proposed to spend on the Riviera, where
she lost a good deal of money.
Even in the few months of her absence, the change which had come over
her mountain kingdom was startling. The crowd of foreign visitors,
chiefly English, had never been so great, nor the season so brilliant.
November in Rhodopé is the month of months, clear, cool, and bracing,
with a sun of heavenly purity, and a wind just _frappé_ with the snows
which have fallen on the higher ranges of the Balkan. The air has a
sparkle as if of frost in it, a translucent brightness which in the
North we associate with the white rime of autumn mornings. To the
Princess, fresh from the damp gray of England, and the tawdry theatrical
brilliance of the Riviera, her home seemed an enchanted place, and for
once she was glad to get back.
The club had pushed the limits of its gardens and kiosques up the slopes
of the hills behind Amandos; bandstands and boulevards were loud with
the orchestra and gay with colour. Even Monte Carlo seemed to her empty
and depopulated in comparison. But the place was changed in other ways.
The discipline of the army was relaxed; a Bill had been introduced in
the House, and passed without opposition, which abolished conscription,
and though the people were as picturesque as ever, they were infinitely
more idle. The demands for provisions and wines consequent on the
ever-increasing hosts of foreigners who flocked to the town had made
living easier than ever. A man could work two days a week where he had
worked six a few years ago, and yet find his earnings undiminished. It
had been necessary to limit the number of members of the club, and in
consequence a hundred other gaming-houses had been started, and deep
into the hours of the night shepherds and sailors watched the
roulette-marbles, which rolled as unceasingly as the stars of heaven.
Sophia was almost frightened at the success of the era she had
inaugurated, and she was truly shocked at the deterioration which
counterbalanced the increased prosperity. She had still, even in her
forty-first year, a strong love of keen eyes and fit limbs; her
admiration for a fine rider still warred with her respect for a bold
player, and she saw to her dismay that a nation of gamblers tends to
lose its grip of the saddle. The Life Guards were a mockery of horsemen;
they were growing pale and fat, and when they received her on the quay
of Mavromáti, she was horrified to observe that they were sleepy-eyed
and unerect--a regiment of putty soldiers. She herself, who could still,
as in the days when Petros came a-courting, watch the tide of gold
ebbing and flowing on the green tables for hour after hour when she
should have been asleep, without suffering for it next morning, saw that
if the common folk sat up at roulette all night, their parade on the
following day lost its briskness. But her regret passed; the town was
full of amusing people, and she had a series of house-parties with her
from November until the New Year fêtes were over. She was well
entertained, and as she was one of those to whom boredom is a pain more
exquisite than earache, she found that so long as it was entirely
absent, her mind was distracted from the consideration of the
deteriorated physique of her people.
Leonard’s letters also were full of consolation. They were so crammed
with excruciating facts about mosques and minarets that Sophia was
wholly incapable of reading them, and put the interminable sheets into
her desk, gratefully feeling that her experiment was brimming with
success. His tutor, she was informed, had fallen ill of typhoid at
Cairo, and Leonard was purposing to spend a month up the Nile while he
was recovering, a trip which he told her was well likely to repay a
visit. The pyramids of Sakkarah which he had just seen were magnificent
beyond description. As she knew, the Great Step Pyramid was there, a
magnificent structure of the Sixth Dynasty, while closer at hand were
the great pyramids of Gizeh, the tombs of Cheops, Chephren, and
Mycerinus, or Menkau, as he was more properly called. Archæologists were
disagreed as to the date of the Sphinx; for himself, he was inclined to
side with Mariette ... and Sophia murmured, ‘Dear boy!’ and read no
further, merely glancing at the last of the sixteen sides he had written
her, which contained an account of a usaptiu figure he had just
purchased from a dealer, which he had every reason to believe was
genuine, and not imported from Manchester for the ignorant tourist.
His next letter gave a most exhaustive historical account of the temple
of Karnak, and a description of the tombs of the kings, which he urged
his mother to see. In a few days she could get across to Port Said, and
a week afterwards they would be standing together lost in wonder at the
monuments of the Pharaohs. It was a liberal education, he said, to visit
Egypt; already in a few weeks he had learned more than his three years
at Eton had taught him. As a series, indeed, the letters really
resembled pages of a guide-book, so conscientious were they and so
unreadable. The next letter, after an interval of some six weeks, was
merely dated s.s. _Ammon_; but it described the holy city of Benares,
where there is a golden statue of Buddha twenty-five feet tall, the
alligators in the Hooghly, and the methods of the manufacturing of
filigree work. This was all as it should be, and Sophia’s belief in her
experiment became a creed with her. It no longer an experiment; it was
an assured success.
The spring passed into summer, and summer into autumn, and still Sophia
was deluged with floods of categorical information. Leonard had been
away a year, and the tutor, having successfully battled with typhoid in
Egypt, had unfortunately fallen a victim to yellow fever in the West
Indies. Leonard duly reported this to his mother, but declined
altogether to have another tutor. While the first lived he had
continually been tied in one place by his ailments, and he proposed to
do the rest of his journeying alone. He was now in Boston, U.S.A., where
there was a remarkably fine statue of George Washington; his mother
would doubtless recollect that this eminent statesman (one of the
brightest men the Western continent had ever produced) was notably
truthful. In fact, the story of his childhood, etc. He was now going an
excursion among some Indian tribes, and he hoped in his next to give
some account of wigwams, Yosemite, and squaws.
Sophia could not understand it. Was the boy going to grow up a pedant?
She almost preferred that he should be a gambler.
The Princess left Rhodopé that year in November, twelve months after
Leonard’s departure. Her _soi-disant_ visits to her relatives were
unusually protracted, for the tables constantly backed her luck, and it
was already May, the almond blossoms were over and the House was
sitting, when she returned to Amandos. She was beginning to get very
stout, but she found consolation for this in the advice of her doctor,
who recommended her a month at Carlsbad in the summer. That month
lengthened itself to six weeks, and on her arrival in Rhodopé again in
the autumn her neglect of her duties became more edifying than ever. For
one reason or another the visitors to the capital were much diminished
in this year; the death of her aunt, the Princess Olga, had thrown the
Court into mourning for a month, and time hung terribly on her hands.
It was during this enforced absence from the club, in obedience to
etiquette, but meaningless to her--for her aunt was one of the most
sour-tempered women God ever made, and mourning for her death was of a
farcical nature--that the Princess, in an excess of ennui, began those
practices which have been censured so severely, and which even the
indulgent historian must stigmatize as undignified. Night after night
she would steal out from one of the private doors of the palace, and,
disguised as well as might be like a widow, with a pair of spectacles, a
bombazine jacket, and a thick veil, make her way to one of the numerous
gaming-houses which held out their signs in every street in Amandos. For
fear she should be recognised, she dared not go to her own club, where
it would be certain she would meet someone she knew, and who knew her
well enough to pierce her somewhat transparent disguise; and for the
same reason she would not go to any of the houses frequented by the
upper class of her people. Instead, she would skulk along unfrequented
thoroughfares and narrow streets until she came to some sorry
restaurant, over which there would be a low, dingy room, ill ventilated,
and thick with the acrid fumes of inferior tobacco, and there she would
play perhaps for hours, in stakes limited to ten or twelve francs. In
this she would do violence to her better nature, for often the
roulette-boards were as pitiable as that which had so roused her anger
against Leonard, thus showing that they were contraband, and not
supplied by the Government monopoly; but gambling had become a necessity
to her, and she would have played with any wretch, however depraved, on
any board, however infamous. The pathos of the situation lay in the fact
that she was constantly recognised, but her loyal people, sympathizing
with her in being deprived of her games at the club, owing to this
meaningless etiquette, never gave a sign that they knew her. Certainly,
also, there was a curious attraction to her in the very squalor of the
surroundings. To be elbowed by hairy sailors, to be smothered in musk by
the wives of smaller tradesmen, excited her by its strange incongruity.
Lombroso, so she told herself, would certainly have diagnosed her
practices as belonging to one who showed the early stages of
egalo-megalomania, or some such mental deformation, but, as she also
told herself, nothing could matter less than what Lombroso said.
At other times she would even dine at the restaurants below, with a
secret gusto for the abominable food, and the sort of joy a miser must
feel, to know that in the palace her French chef was in the middle of
his inimitable alchemy, changing for her the raw material of his craft
into an artist’s dream. The daily risk of detection she ran at the hands
of her own servants even amused her, and she liked to see the blank,
masklike wonder of their faces when she told them that she would have
dinner at a quarter to eleven, little knowing that they were perfectly
aware what she was going to do in the interval. To her, gambling had
become as imperative as a dipsomaniac’s cravings, and the death of her
sour aunt made it a necessity to her to indulge her passion, as she
thought, secretly. It interested her also to find how much the secrecy
and squalor of these adventures resembled those of her remote cousin the
Empress Catherine of Russia. How strange a thing is heredity!
But the month of mourning passed, and she resumed her seat in the club.
Letters from Leonard still reached her, but she scarcely read them; and
though she loved the lad, and no sight would have been so welcome to her
as his face, yet she determined to keep him abroad as long as possible.
He had been away two years, and he would now be just twenty. He should
come back to Amandos to celebrate his twenty-first birthday, but if she
had her way, not a day before that.
Again the winter passed, again the seemingly interminable tedium of
business was suspended on the last day of December; again she thanked
her Ministers for their services to the country during the past year;
and as soon as the New Year festivities were over, she was off on the
new _Felatrune_, a yacht she had built with her winnings of the past
twelve months, for Monte Carlo. There her presence had become so regular
and assiduous, that the urbane manager had named one of the new rooms
the Princess’s Salon. She had a beautiful villa on the hills above the
town, which was generally full of guests; and while she was there this
room was reserved, unless she sent a message that she would not play
that day, for herself and her friends, but such days were few. It was
built at an angle of the Casino, and a little private lawn stretched
down in front of it to a terrace overlooking the sea. Crocuses, narcissi
and daffodils were sown all over the grass, and in the early spring it
used to look like a foreground of one of Fra Angelico’s pictures. Inside
the room was divinely appointed, but less like Fra Angelico’s pictures.
It was walled with crimson satin, and had a moulded gilt arabesque along
the top; the floor was of parqueted oak, with thick Persian rugs; on the
mantelpiece was a bronze doré clock by Vernier, which told the hours
unceasingly. On the right of the croupier’s place the Empress’s chair of
walnut wood, with little Sèvres plaques let into the arms; on the back
was inlaid her monogram underneath her crown.
The party with her was often enough to fill the room, for her house was
usually full of the orthodox; but when there was a place or so vacant,
the Princess would often stroll round the public rooms, and if she saw
there an acquaintance who played well, that is, high and with the
calmness of conviction, she would invite him to join her table. As a
rule her party would meet at her room for an hour or two before dinner,
adjourn again till half-past nine or so, and then continue the game till
two or three in the morning. Sometimes, when the roulette proved more
than usually exciting, and luck adorably capricious, it would be
prolonged to a later hour; and as the nights got shorter, it was no rare
thing for them to see morning break in thin lines of red on the eastern
horizon, and the dim dark change to an ethereal gray before they left
the Casino for the Princess’s villa.
For many weeks Sophia had had no word of any kind from Leonard, but as
his last letter had that he was going to shoot bears (_Ursa major_) in
the Rockies, she concluded, with all the enviable calm of a mind which
never knew anxiety, that where _Ursa major_ is plentiful, there also
postal arrangements are correspondingly scarce. Thus his continued
silence was scarcely noticeable to her, and, at any rate, she was so
happily constituted that no fear that bears had devoured him ever
occurred to her. When he came back from shooting bears, no doubt he
would write to her.
The month of April this year had been peculiarly seasonable; the lucid
atmosphere of summer had come, but not its heats; the freshness of
spring remained, but its armoury of squalls was spent, and seldom in her
life had the Princess enjoyed a more delectable score of days. Her
Ministers at Rhodopé, she was pleased to observe, at length entirely
understood her, and the completeness with which they indulged her
intolerance of State affairs was worthy of the Regency of Petros. She
was still, as in the days of her girlhood, a fervent lover of the sea,
and no morning failed to see her scudding up and down the coast in her
little cutter, and with the same regularity an hour before her déjeuner
she would be put ashore opposite her little tent on the beach, and have
a long swim before luncheon. No watering-place bather was she; her
bathing was no affair of a ducking of the head, a few random strokes,
and a bubbling cry. With a boat a hundred yards behind her, she would
swim out not less than half a mile from shore, rest a little, floating
with arms out-stretched in the rocking cradle of the waves, and then
head back for the shore. This exercise and the bracing water kept her
young, and while those only half her age would find but a rotten world
welcoming them to their lunch, after watching the dawn from the little
red room, hers was a brisk step, a feeling of slight well-earned
fatigue, a joyous elasticity of spirit, and the appetite of a youth.
She drank wine but sparingly, and in spite of her increasing stoutness,
she was still a woman to whom the eyes of men were drawn as steel to the
magnet, and none bore her years with half so good a grace as she.
But the early days of May brought straight the balance of imperfection
of this world and its weather. A stifling sirocco blew day after day out
of the south, bringing with it, you would have said, all the scorching
of the Libyan Desert and all the moisture of the sea it passed over. For
five days it blew without intermission, and on the morning of the fifth
the heat was rendered doubly intolerable by a great bank of ominous
clouds which spread eastwards over the sky at right angles to the
current of the wind. These were fat and fleecy, like blankets, and like
blanketed fever patients were those that stifled beneath them. Princess
Sophia alone was a shining exception to the rest of the limp world; she
had much enjoyed her buffeting with a gray and angry sea, and she
received her guests who collected in the drawing-room before lunch with
all her vivacious cordiality. Princess Aline of Luxemburg was one of
these, Prince Victor of Strelitz another; the rest were mainly English,
and all were gamblers of the most honourable order.
‘You call it a terrible day, Aline!’ cried the Princess. ‘My dear, what
do you know of the day? It may be delightful, for all you know. If I had
stayed in my bedroom as long as you, I should be dead by now. You
slept, or tried to sleep, till eleven.’
‘How do you know that?’ asked Princess Aline.
‘How? Because I was in the cutter--a very rough sea this morning--and it
so happened that my opera-glass was on the house. I saw a blind go up; I
knew it was the blind of your room. I looked at the time, and it was
eleven. Oh, why was I not a detective? What a series of simple and acute
deductions!’
‘Do you consider it a pleasant day, Sophia?’ asked her cousin, Prince
Victor.
‘Dear Victor, to me every day is a pleasant day, except in Rhodopé. How
is it possible to be more happy than I am? I have an admirable
digestion. Yes; is lunch ready? Let us come in. I have luck at the
cards. I slept for six hours like a tired child, as Shelley says. I have
swum a mile. I had no letters to worry me this morning, and my nation
has no history. Happy is the Princess whose nation has no history!’
‘The club, is not that history?’ asked Lady Blanche, who was of the
party.
‘A chapter only--a paragraph only. It cannot make history alone, and
positively nothing else has happened in Rhodopé for thirty years.’
‘Something nearly happened once,’ remarked Blanche.
‘Yes, dear Blanche, and you proved yourself my best and only friend, and
my worst enemy. Oh, I am not ungrateful; you know that. But think: if
only I had been deposed eighteen years ago, what garnered happiness had
been mine by now!’
The Princess’s admirable English, as usual, provoked a laugh, but she
scarcely paused to join in it herself.
‘Only think: for eighteen years I should have been a free woman--one of
those happy individuals whose luncheon-parties and whose tea-parties are
not recorded in the daily papers! Great Heaven! to be recorded in the
daily papers makes the happiness of some women. Yes, Blanche, but for
you I should have been one who does as she chooses. What nonsense is
that which we are told of free-will! For my class there is no such
thing. We do not wish or want or desire to go to lunch with the Mayor,
yet we go. On the other hand, Mayors are inevitable. What is supposed to
happen when free-will is opposed to that which is inevitable? Does no
one know? How ignorant!’
‘Be truthful, Sophia,’ said Princess Aline, ‘and tell me when last you
went to lunch with an inevitable Mayor.’
‘You are getting personal, Aline,’ said the other.
‘We will draw our conclusions, then.’
‘Dear Aline, draw what you like; the principle is the same. If I have
not been to lunch with a Mayor for as long as you choose to suppose, I
have vanquished the inevitable. If any of you had been in my place, you
would have lunched with the Mayor once every week-day, and twice on
Sundays.’
‘A day of rest,’ observed Blanche.
‘Yes, you would have slept afterwards,’ said Sophia. ‘Ouf! but it is
hot. The house is abominable on a day like this.’
After lunch they broke up again, Princess Aline announcing without shame
that she intended to lie on her bed and sleep, if possible, till tea.
Prince Victor, less honest, took a large chair in the veranda, and
pretended to read; but before long the book fell heavily to the ground,
and he snored without restraint. The others, with the exception of
Sophia and Blanche, said they were going to write letters, and the
Princess laughed at them.
‘Aline is the only honest one of you all,’ she said, ‘and Blanche and I
are the only people awake. Blanche, I ordered the horses for half-past
two; we will leave these shameless people. The view from the hills under
this great pall of cloud will be magnificent. See how near and distinct
everything has become! The wind has gone down; we shall have thunder. I
always win when it thunders.’
As Sophia had said, the wind had ceased, and the air hung as heavy as a
pall over the mountain-side. The noise of the sea filled the air, but
the waves no longer broke; a great thunderous, oily swell swept up to
the shore, and poured its volumes of water ponderously on the beach. Far
out to sea an ocean-going steamer was ploughing its way eastwards, and
as the swell caught and lifted her, they could see now the whole deck
slanted perilously towards them, and now she would be but a black line
in the trough of the sea. Overhead a mottled floor of cloud obscured
the sky, so lowering that it seemed almost within a stone’s-throw. The
olive-trees on the slope were unruffled by wind, and the very leaves of
the trees hung drooping as if sleeping uneasily. The horses were as if
tired by a long gallop, though they had not been out of the stables
except for exercising, and went heavily. Their riders alone seemed
unaffected by the weather, and their talk turned, as was not uncommon,
on the tables.
‘There seem to be rather fewer people here than usual,’ said the
Princess. ‘A few years ago May was always crowded.’
‘And now Amandos is crowded,’ remarked Lady Blanche.
‘Yes. How delightful not to be at Amandos! Blanche, I have sometimes
wondered--usually on Sunday evenings--whether it was really a good thing
for Rhodopé when I started the club. Of course, the wealth of the
country is enormously increased, but after all, has one not sacrificed
something else--the spirit of the land, the spirit of the mountains, and
the great out-of-doors?’
‘If you think so, restore it.’
‘I cannot,’ said Sophia--‘I simply cannot; Rhodopé without the tables
would be impossible to me. Oh, Blanche, why did you save my throne? I
almost wish I had received a polite note from Petros saying that the
Assembly had dethroned my House. Yet it was a great stroke, and I have
seldom been so excited as I was during that sledge-drive up from
Mavromáti, when we did not know if we should be in time. Dear me, how
splendidly punctual I was on that day! What a thunderstorm we had in
Corfu when I set out! The day was not unlike this afternoon.’
Blanche laughed.
‘Abdicate, then,’ she said. ‘Send for Prince Leonard to seat himself on
your throne.’
‘Ah, if he would only come! But I think he would be no better than I. He
was expelled from Eton, or rather I withdrew him, as you know, for
playing roulette.’
‘Do you think his travels may not have cured him?’ asked Lady Blanche.
‘How can one cure a passion? It is incurable. You may repress it, but it
is always there. True, I hope it is so much repressed that it will not
break out. Perhaps you may even call it cured. But what self-respecting
young man would banish himself to Rhodopé, especially one who has the
instinct for play, if there was no club?’
‘When will he be back?’ asked Blanche.
‘I don’t know. I have not heard from him for weeks. He was to shoot
bears, I think he said. It seems hardly worth while to go to America to
do that. Look how magnificent the view is! It was worth our while to
come.’
They got back about five o’clock, and after tea drove down to the
Casino. The rooms were very empty, and a restless, unsettled atmosphere
was abroad. Over the sea from time to time came blinks of remote
lightning, and rumblings of thunder, like the sound of a gong very far
away. Even roulette somehow seemed monotonous, in such poor spirits were
the Princess’s guests, and it was a relief to her when dinner-time came,
for there was no such tonic to the mind as dinner.
As they dined, the storm moved nearer, and while they drank their coffee
on the terrace, they watched a continuous play of violet-coloured
lightning southwards over the sea, and the noise of the thunder began to
overscore the hoarse voice of the swell on the beach below. A few drops
of rain, warm and large, splashed down on the terrace like sudden frogs,
and the tension of the atmosphere grew unbearable. Even Sophia felt it.
‘Something is going to happen,’ she cried, as they entered the Casino
doors--‘something is going to happen fit for the lightning to look at
and the thunder to listen to. I am excited! I am delightfully excited!’