Читать книгу The Princess Sophia - E F Benson - Страница 5

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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.