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{210} 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{211} 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.{212}

‘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{213} 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{214} 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{215} 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{216} 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{217} 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,{218} 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{219} 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.{220}

‘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{221} 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{222} 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{223} 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............