Lady Blanche had no desire to make a mountain out of a molehill, but even when she surveyed her interview with Malakopf with the coolness and sobriety of 9 a.m., she still thought that it was clearly her business to make the matter known to her whom it principally concerned. Accordingly she sent a note to Sophia asking her for an audience on an affair of some importance, and this being granted, poured into the Princess’s amused and interested ear all that Malakopf had said. Blanche was a good narrator, with so admirable a memory that she had no call to draw on her imagination, and her account was both vivid and accurate, the rarest of combinations, and one for which we in vain look in the pages of histories.

Princess Sophia was far too well entertained by the farcical absurdity of the conspiracy to be really angry at present with her husband. Malakopf, however, less simple-witted and much older, was not so lightly dismissed. She knew the man to be cunning, and one whose investments might be considered{136} safe, and she fumed at the idea of a centipede conspiring against her.

‘But there is one point which perplexes me,’ she said to Blanche. ‘Petros and that creature are in league together, that is certain, and Petros, poor dear, I have no doubt whatever, thrones himself prospectively over Rhodopé. Really, I married a fool after all, and one of my requirements was that my husband should not be that. I shall get quite indignant with him if he does not drop this nonsense. But then where does Malakopf come in? It is quite certain that it is not worth his while to overturn me in order to set up Petros. Without doubt he means to step in himself; but where? He has mounted as high in Rhodopé as a subject can; he would not take so much trouble if he was to be nothing more.’

‘You must remember you have ever treated him like an insect, Princess,’ said Blanche. ‘Would not it be sufficient reward for him to overturn you?’

‘No, I think not,’ said Sophia. ‘The man loathes me, of course, and no doubt revenge would be an incentive. But I doubt revenge being his goal. Perhaps there are wheels within wheels. Petros is to overturn me, and he is to overturn Petros. The House of ?gina is to be a set of ninepins for a centipede!’

‘The worst of it is that it is almost impossible to find out more,’ said Blanche. ‘It was a lapful of luck that we know at all.’

‘It was clever of you, Blanche,’ said Sophia, ‘and{137} clever people are always lucky. About Petros—I shall give him one chance. I shall let fall a word which should be a warning to him, something very plain, yet meaningless to a good conscience, and then I shall have another talk with you, Blanche.’

Sophia glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, which had just jarred as a warning of its striking.

‘Good gracious! it is nearly twelve,’ she said. ‘I shall take a stroll in the direction—in the direction of the club. Thank you again, Blanche; how earnestly you know. You have been instructive as well as amusing. Really, Petros is very impertinent, now I think it over. I shall ask you to come here again in a day or two—or, stay, I am dining at the Legation on Friday; we will talk then, after dinner.’

The opportunity of giving a word of warning to Petros occurred that very evening. They had dined alone, which was unusual; and after dinner, which was still more unusual, the Prince had proposed a game of bezique. Sophia had intended to go to the club, but she changed her mind, and counter-ordered her carriage; for during dinner her husband had interested her, and this proposal of his was now become remarkable.

Never in his life had the Prince been more desirous to please, but never in his life, had he known all, had his efforts been more wildly misdirected and futile, for during the day Sophia’s amusement had given place to anger. In a conversation he had held with Malakopf that morning, that sagacious Minister,{138} conscious of a slight want of caution the night before, had laid great stress on two points.

‘I need not tell you, my dear Prince,’ he said, ‘how essential it is that the Princess should remain entirely unsuspicious. We have seen a great deal of each other lately, and I reluctantly propose that we do not meet quite so often for the future. Our intimacy might put someone on the look-out, and if you throw a bomb where people are looking, they will run away. That is my first point. The second point contains good news. Already there is a widely-spread discontent in the State at the unedifying conduct of your wife, or so it seems to people, and a large sympathy with your untiring exertion in the Assembly. Also, I know for certain that at present Princess Sophia reposes entire confidence in you. Let it be your business to maintain that unabated—more, to increase it.’

‘Who told you this?’ asked Petros.

‘One who knows her well—Lady Blanche Amesbury.’

‘Lady Blanche said she put entire confidence in me?’

‘I have the honour of telling you so,’ said Malakopf with impatience.

‘You seem to have had an intimate talk with Lady Blanche. She is a clever woman.’

‘And I am not without wits,’ said Malakopf, chuckling, ‘and our talk was more intimate than she knew. Indeed, she gave me all I wanted to know with the charming na?veté of a child.{139}’

Prince Petros was silent a moment; he did not feel entirely at ease about this interview, but his habit of obedience to Malakopf’s orders would not let him speak. At length, dismissing the subject, ‘Tell me how to maintain my wife’s confidence,’ he said.

‘A little bezique in the evening would do wonders with her,’ said Malakopf sententiously.

Thus it was that Prince Petros had proposed a game that evening, and Sophia accepted from curiosity. During dinner he had talked charmingly, and had related a number of amusing experiences shortly and with point. At each Sophia’s contempt rose bitter as bile in her throat. Behind her back he planned a revolution; before her face he paid court to the amenities of social life, he behaved with a studied naturalness and kindness. Knowing all she knew, these miserable little attentions seemed to her the very acme of meanness, and it was the desire of studying him further which made her counter-order the carriage that should have taken her to the club. This argued a very strong desire.

They stood by the open window drinking their coffee, while the groom of the chambers put out the table and packs of cards, and when the man had left the room, Petros gently thrust his arm through hers.

‘It seems so long since we have spent an evening quietly together, Sophia,’ he said. ‘To me, at least, it seems long. Sometimes I almost wish you had been a poor girl, not the Princess of Rhodopé, that{140} we had been able to live quietly together up in some little mountain home.’

Sophia for the moment was struck dumb. Surely there was never so immeasurable a hypocrite as this man! She could not answer, but since she wished him to continue, she gently pressed his arm with hers.

‘You have felt that too, dearest?’ he continued softly. ‘Sometimes, Sophia, I have thought you were a little weary of me. Now your sweet silence makes me know I was wrong; so forgive me, darling. Look at that lovely wash of moonlight over the town. It lies like a benediction over your land. It was just such a night—was it not?—when I first came here. I bless that day—I bless it every hour of my life.’

Sophia turned from him; the man produced in her a sense of physical sickness. She, who with all her faults had never lied—she, to whom falsehood was a dirty thing, as inconceivable as not washing, felt ill at his duplicity. She was angry at herself for letting him speak, and for a moment she was on the point of telling him she knew all. But her anger surged up again, she could not forgive him; he had chosen to act a crooked part, he must reap as he had sown. But she had promised herself to give him a word of warning; that he should have.

‘Come, Petros,’ she said at length, with an assumed lightness of manner, ‘bezique, bezique. Really, I don’t know that a cottage on the mountains would have suited me well, though it is charm{141}ing of you to suggest it; you would not have loved to find me thumbing a dirty pack of cards when I should have been mending your stockings. There is a great deal to be said for the position of the Princess of Rhodopé.’

He took her hand with charming courtesy and kissed it.

‘And who can say enough for the position of her husband?’ he asked.

They played a hand or two with the luck fairly divided, and Petros, who seemed to Sophia to have recaptured his skill, was a considerable winner at the end of an hour. But shortly after that he held a hand for which, as Sophia declared, the world was made. He had early in the game declared sequence six times, and then abandoned it; he had three beziques on the table and the fourth knave of diamonds. This card he drew in some eight tricks before the end, and still Sophia had not seen the corresponding queen. But Petros’s heart failed him; he scored the three beziques again with his extra knave, and immediately afterwards drew in the missing queen.

Sophia was aghast.

‘Four thousand five hundred gone to the dogs!’ she exclaimed, with contempt. ‘Really, Petros, you are beside yourself.’

‘It was a fault of generalship, I admit,’ said he.

Sophia looked at him very steadily. This was a good opening for what she had to say.

‘Indeed, Petros, you are no Napoleon,’ she said.{142} ‘You could never, never carve a kingdom for yourself.’

So Petros had his warning, and Sophia hardened her heart against him.

As Malakopf had suggested, the two conspirators saw somewhat less of each other for the next week or two, and more than once Sophia thought—and, to do her justice, hoped—that Petros must have taken her word of warning to heart. But his nauseating little tendernesses and solicitudes for her were not diminished, and she found him infinitely disgusting. He was acting a part, of that she was well assured, for he was not, she knew, a man to whom caresses are habitual, and their day had long since been over between them. What, then, could this recrudescence of an exhibition which had never been natural to him mean but that he wished to keep her ever surrounded with a tinsel counterfeit of love? And for what reason could he coin its tokens in such profusion, except that he wished her to rest assured of his unalterable devotion? The man was putrid.

Two days after this the Princess and her husband dined together at the English Legation. Lord Abbotsworthy, of course, took the Princess in, and on her other side sat Malakopf. As usual, he, figuratively speaking, licked the ground she trod on, and, as usual, she walked with her tip-tilted nose in the air, as if he had been a disagreeable smell. But during the course of dinner she let fall a few words which interested him, though she spoke to the{143} Minister, and not to him, but she intended the words for his ear, and he sucked them greedily in.

‘I shall not leave Rhodopé till October this year,’ so Malakopf heard her say, ‘but when I do go, I shall be away three months at the least. Petros is so admirable, he manages affairs much better than I do, and it really gives him something to do. Moreover, I have the completest confidence in him, and his speeches, I believe, are considered most sensible. I shall spend Christmas in England, I think, with my cousin. England is often delightful at Christmas, and I don’t suppose I shall be back here till half-way through January. The yacht? Oh yes; I love the sea, as you know. I shall go in the yacht. Poor Petros is sea-sick—think how absurd!’

Malakopf found much to interest him in this speech. The Princess’s long absence was ideal to his wishes; even to the most loyal of her subjects a three months’ sojourn abroad would appear protracted, a trial to their belief in her unwavering devotion to their welfare. And never before, in his recollection, had the monarch been absent on the occasion of the great royal fête on New Year’s Day, when the Princess always gave an immense dance to all those who had signed their names in her book, and a great banquet in the Guildhall to the humbler citizens of Rhodopé. There, just before midnight, she went with all her guests, and took her stand in silence under the clock, while the great assemblage waited, finger on lip and glass in hand, for the New Year to strike. As soon as the twelve{144} great shocks had proclaimed another year, she drank prosperity to them all, and broke her glass, so that no one again might drink from it. She herself then mingled with the crowd, and spoke a few words to everyone she came across. Her wonderful memory made it easy for her to recognise hundreds whom she had never consciously seen except on this night, and a word of inquiry after son or daughter made many hearts beat proudly.

Likewise, if the Princess was away for December, the duty of proroguing Parliament would fall on Petros. The Assembly always rose from its autumn Session the week before Christmas, but it was not formally prorogued till the afternoon of the last day of December. On that day all Members attended in Court dress, and from the throne the Princess made a speech, thanking them for their labours in the past year. As representative of her, Petros would speak from her seat, and Malakopf made a mental note that a somewhat telling scene might be planned for this occasion, and that Petros also would see a great opportunity.

They left the dining-room, foreign fashion, all together, each man giving his arm to the woman he had taken in, and as the Princess no longer objected even to the taste of smoke, there was no segregation of men when they reached the drawing-room. But after a few words with one and another of the guests, she beckoned to Lady Blanche, and the two sat down in a corner of the drawing-room somewhat apart from the others.{145}

Malakopf had an uneasy moment when he saw this, but already in his own mind he had advanced matters so far that it did not matter much what the Princess did, and running rapidly over his conversation with Lady Blanche, he found no tangible cause for disquietude.

‘Blanche,’ said Sophia, speaking in English, ‘I have made my plans. You have to help me, so please be very intelligent.’

‘What has happened?’ asked Blanche.

‘I have given Petros his warning, and that is over. His silence made me sure that he knew what I meant. I told him he was no Napoleon, to carve himself a kingdom. But his odious little attentions to me, which I imagine are performed at Malakopf’s bidding, continue, and I think he has made up his mind not to take warning. Tant pis, for I do not give him another chance. You will hardly believe it, but the other night, only, he made crawly little sentimental speeches to me, though we have done with that sort of thing long ago. He said he wished we had been a poor couple in a cottage, and he kissed my hand. The flesh of me crept.’

‘That looks like Malakopf,’ said Blanche.

‘Well, enough of Petros,’ went on Sophia. ‘To-night I talked rather loud to your father, so that Malakopf could hear. I told him I should leave Rhodopé in October, and not come back till the middle of January.’

‘But the New Year fête?’ asked Blanche.

‘Well, I deceived your father. I expect I shall{146} be in Amandos before then; to speak more exactly, I expect to be back on December the thirty-first. However, that shall be seen. Now, before I go, I shall give you the cipher which I use with Petros, and I want to be accurately informed day by day how things are going. I will tell your father that I shall be in correspondence with you, and ask him to send off your telegrams direct from the Legation, for Malakopf is cunning enough to suspect something if he finds you constantly sending despatches to me. Indeed, he looked a little suspicious just now, when he saw me sit down and talk to you.’

‘It is too dangerous,’ said Blanche. ‘Dear Sophia, don’t go away for so long; anything may happen in so long an absence.’

‘It will be your business to warn me,’ said the Princess. ‘I have laid my plan carefully. You must learn as much as you can about the Prince’s and Malakopf’s little schemes, and I will return at a word from you. I shall not go to England for Christmas, as I told your father, but be much nearer home. By Christmas, indeed, I think I shall be at Corfu, so that I can get back here in a few hours. Conveniently enough, the Empress has asked me to stay with her there, and she will be incognito, and so, of course, shall I. The sailors of the Felatrune alone will know I am here, and I can rely on absolute silence. Oh, it will be as exciting as a run of luck!’ she cried.

‘Ah, I see,’ said Blanche, ‘you mean that you{147} expect Malakopf will make the scene on the day the Assembly is prorogued?’

‘That seems to me a Heaven-sent opportunity for him,’ remarked Sophia. ‘Yet perhaps Satan were the more appropriate derivative.’

Blanche burst out laughing—every now and then Sophia, in spite of her great knowledge of English, would use a sentence of a style hopelessly pompous, thinking to utter a crowning colloquialism—and her laugh closed the conversation. Sophia rose, and, with mock resentment in her voice, ‘I had more to say to you,’ she remarked, ‘but I will not be laughed at. But I have told you all that is really important, and with you it is not necessary to say things twice. Dear Blanche, is it true that Lord Abbotsworthy has hired Pierre and a roulette-board for this evening? How touching an attention! A mark of true hospitality.’

‘Pierre is waiting for your Highness,’ said Blanche, seeing that Malakopf had drawn near them. ‘Will you go to the card-room?’

Thus it came about that Sophia was not unaware of the conspiracy which was on foot against her. She had given her husband fair warning, and since he persisted in his childish policy of surrounding her with a hundred lover-like attentions, she thought it excusable and wise to have a policy too. Sometimes she was almost stirred to pity at the futility of his efforts to blind her, while her own seeming security was so illegible to him. She accentuated, if possible, her distaste of State affairs. Half of the{148} twenty-four hours she spent at the tables of club; she yawned behind her hand at the most important and confidential communications of her Ministers; she was even less civil than usual (and her civility to Malakopf was never remarkable) to her Prime Minister. It is true that she had the easier part to play, for while Petros fished up little attentions and an affectionate demeanour to her, as a man draws water from a deep well, with an effort, she had but to let her natural inclinations, her distaste of Malakopf, her taste for play, her ennui at infinitesimal State concerns go unreined.

The effect of all this was that the conferences between her husband and the Prime Minister lapsed into their former frequency, and not a day passed but they were closeted together. Even the astuter Malakopf, lulled into security by the Princess’s negligence of State matters, no longer went through the formality of asking for her when he wished to confer with the Crown. Yet the situation was more critical than she knew. Already there was a party in the House almost hostile to her, for the sedulity with which she kept her seat in the club, when should have been in the Council Chamber, though successful in its object, namely, that of giving increased confidence to the two main actors in the conspiracy, had had a certain effect in alienating from her many of her more sober-minded deputies. They saw with pain her unreasonable passion for the cards and her total neglect of the duties of a reigning monarch. They saw with silent sympathy{149} the heroic efforts of the Prince to cover the deficiencies of his wife. Himself well equipped as a debater, he was primed and loaded by Malakopf, and his contributions to the debates were an edification. Yet the Princess played her part with consummate skill, and she trusted to the loyalty of the people to back her up when the great scene came. Her yawns were the picture of realistic art, her intolerance of Malakopf a triumph of sincerity. Thereby the caution of the Prime Minister was slowly and insidiously relaxed, and the four years he had originally given to the dynasty were much abbreviated in his mind; for in its sinister depths he was revolving a new and startling idea, suggested to him by the Princess’s absence. In itself it was so simple that he almost distrusted it; but as the days went on it grew more and more seductive.

August cooled into September, and the day of the Princess’s departure for her necessary holiday was fixed for October 7. It was tacitly understood between her and Petros that the Prince would not accompany her, and such had been the success of his Regency the year before that now Sophia begged him never to send her anything referring, however remotely, to State matters.

‘I am sick of the sceptre!’ she said to him the day before she left; ‘and you, Petros, are still rather fond of it. Oh, you remind me so much of a child dressing up in Court finery; when it comes to put the finery on in earnest, how bored it is! And you, Petros, if ever you held the sceptre in your{150} own name, you would find it a bad companion of your days and nights. Sometimes I am almost tempted to abdicate this throne of Rhodopé, yet what sort of private person should I make? I am a Princess of royal blood; I cannot help it; and the burden will be with me always.’

‘How can you say such things, dearest!’ said Petros, with well-simulated warmth. ‘It is an idle modesty that makes you seem to be ignorant of the adoration with which your subjects—I the humblest—regard you. Which of them, think you, would not willingly die for you? True, you could never be a private person, any more than a farmer’s wife could be a queen, though she thinks she could.’

‘Well, therein I am better than the farmer’s wife,’ sighed Sophia. ‘She thinks she could be me; I know I could not be her. But let me have a good holiday, Petros; don’t send me anything to sign or to consider. Consider everything yourself, and sign what you please; and get through all the business you possibly can, so that there will not be so much next Session.’

‘You must give me more explicit instructions, dear,’ said the Prince. ‘It is not likely that any measure of great imp............