One morning in the July of the next year Sophia and Petros were sitting at their half-past-twelve breakfast in the broad north veranda of the palace at Amandos. A big Persian rug was spread under the table, but otherwise the black-and-white marble floor was uncarpeted for coolness. To the west the awnings were down, but the whole long of the gallery towards the north was open to the breeze which pleasantly tempered the extreme warmth of the day. Over the town hung a blue haze of trembling heat, but the air was dry and invigorating, and though the thermometer registered a hundred degrees, not oppressive.

Coffee had just been served, and as the servants withdrew Sophia lit a cigarette.

‘About August, Petros,’ she said. ‘I want very much to go away the first week at latest, and I really see no reason why I should not.’

‘The House will not rise till September,’ said he.

‘Oh, the House, the House!’ cried she. ‘What does it matter what the House does? Let it fall down if it chooses! I have signed my name so often during the last month that if I go on I shall get writer’s cramp. What is writer’s cramp, by the way? And what do all my signatures amount to? Somebody has a concession for vine-growing, somebody is put in prison for a year, a firm is given leave to supply smokeless powder instead of Eley’s. I am sick of it all! I should like to turn RhodopÉ into a limited company, and have it run by Durand, or Spiers and Pond, and pay one of their barmaids so much a year to impersonate me. I want to go away for a month or two as soon as possible, and what is more, Petros, I am going.’

‘If you have settled that, why argue about the matter,’ said he, ‘or trouble to consult me?’

‘Well, I wanted to know your opinion as to whether it is really advisable for me to stop. At the same time, if I had thought you would really disagree with me, I should not have asked you. But the thing is done now. What do you think about it?’

Petros was silent a moment. He had a plan in his head, and he wished to play his cards to advantage.

‘Well, here is my opinion,’ he said at length, ‘You have asked for it, and you shall have it, though, as a rule, you don’t like being advised, and I don’t care about advising. You are reigning Princess of this country, and that delightful position——’

Sophia laughed.

‘I would sooner be a milkmaid,’ she said, ‘but such a thing is not possible.’

‘And that delightful position,’ continued Petros, with the irritating manner of a man unaware of an interruption, ‘has certain responsibilities attached to it. You cannot get rid of them except by sheer gross neglect of your duties, but to tell you the truth, they are not very onerous. One of them is that you should preserve the form, at any rate, of attending to the business of the House. I do not think you need really fear writer’s cramp from signing their resolutions, whatever writer’s cramp may be; I suppose it is the result of writing. But you must perform your simple duties——’

‘I have seen that in copper-plate hand in the copy-books I used to do when I was a child,’ remarked Sophia.

‘That is where I got it from. It seems to me very true, though a little stale. I do not interfere with you, as you very well know, and I am, of course, powerless to prevent you going away when you wish. But I think you will make a very great mistake if you go away now.’

‘Tant pis,’ said she. ‘Let us start on the last day of this month. And oh, Petros, there is a little place on the Riviera——’

Petros rose and walked about in seeming agitation for a moment or two. He was managing his cards beautifully. Then he turned sharply to her.

‘Go, then, Sophia,’ he said; ‘but I shall not come with you.’

Sophia stared.

‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘I promise never to refer to your system. And the sea is usually calm at this time of year.’

‘That is not the reason.’

‘What is it, then?’ she asked.

‘Because the mischief which your absence during a sitting of the House will entail will be sensibly lessened—I do not wish to overrate my position—if I remain here, and have the air of attending very sedulously to the affairs of the State. There are certain businesses of the kind which you have allowed me to transact for you before—the less important Bills, in fact; with your permission, I will attend to them again. We want a fresh strain of blood in the trooper’s horses, for instance; at any rate, I can go carefully into the expenses and business incidental to that. I know a little about horse-breeding; I may even be useful on that question. The Bill will come before the House in the second week in August. I can, at least, serve on a committee. Later, when the House rises, I will join you. How does my plan strike you?’

Sophia was touched.

‘It is good of you to suggest that, Petros,’ she said. ‘It would be absurd for me to refuse your offer. You will not be very dull here? No? And it won’t look odd, will it, if I go and you stop here? I have a horror of doing things that look odd.’

‘Not so odd, at any rate, as if we both went away,’ said Petros.

‘And much less odd than if I stopped here all August,’ remarked Sophia in self-defence. ‘It would be an imbecility.’

Sophia got up from the table, and went indoors to the nursery to see the adorable Leonard, the four-months-old baby. Petros’s arrangement seemed to her to be in every way admirable. Apart from the convenience of getting away when she wanted, it gave her the opportunity of getting away alone. She was fond of her husband, but constantly irritated by him. She had no idea of letting herself be schooled by him into dependence, to be taught the duty of royalty by him, and she never forgot that she was Princess of RhodopÉ, and he her husband. More than once had he attempted to point out to her his idea of what a wife’s attitude should be to her husband, and what a monarch’s attitude towards the people, and her retort had been not far to seek. She was autocrat of RhodopÉ, and she was not going to be taught by anybody.

Petros, she found, was not only master of the subtleties of bezique, he knew also the most refined secrets of irritating conversation. With all his varied gifts, he had the misfortune to be a pedant, a schoolmaster in private life, and, what is worse, to be quite unconscious of his pedantry. Sophia resented with every fibre in her nature his attempts to instruct her, to develop her mind, and, indeed, the chief result of his schooling had been to develop her impatience of him. Living with him was like living in a stuffy room with only high-backed chairs. He was for ever wanting her to sit up straight, and listen to improving conversation, whereas she wanted to lounge imperially by an open window. Something of the blood of generations of irresponsible rulers ran in her veins; the unbridled license of Eastern tyrants had mingled with the refinement of the student line of Florence to compound a subtle temperament. He had once alluded to some wise act of the Czar, wishing her to draw a lesson from it, but in a moment her nose was in the air.

‘The Romanoffs were feeding pigs when we were kings,’ she had said.

Her education, so to speak, had been the work of generations of ancestors, accomplished prenatally, and she owed more to them than to her tutors. It was Tamburlaine who had smoked a cigarette on the horse-block, and Lorenzo, more than her masters, who had given her that quick artistic perception that made the great singers of Europe love to sing to her accompaniment. The blood of the great Catherine was hers, too, and hers by inheritance the intolerance of rulers. ‘C’est mon plaisir’ was reason enough with her. Indeed, she needed a clever husband and a loyal people. The former she had got in a way, but his cleverness was more akin to cunning than to wisdom or broadness of vision. To trace the process of thought was to him as valuable as the conception itself, and it pleased him more to make an infinitesimal deduction correctly than to blunder splendidly. She was headstrong, and would never be small; he was a master of finesse, but could never be big. She was royal to her finger-tips, he was only the cadet of a family that happened to be reigning. Her second need—a large loyalty from her people—was more completely hers than he guessed. What she did was right, and how firmly the people of RhodopÉ held that creed he was to learn. The spirit preached from Potsdam had possession of their hearts.

Petros sat still on the veranda after she had left him, and smoked contentedly. If Sophia found him irritating, he at any rate bore the knowledge with equanimity. He had not looked for domestic bliss in his marriage; for he did not aim at domesticity, and he did not believe in bliss. But every day found him more thankful that he had married her, for he believed in ambition, especially when it was his own. RhodopÉ seemed to him more enviable than ever, and he fully intended to make a bid for it. RhodopÉ, he said to himself with sublime self-sufficiency as he was shaving, wanted a master; and he looked at his image in the glass. The very fact that Sophia had chosen to marry him amounted to a guarantee of his excellent qualities in the minds of her subjects; and he was quick enough to see how popular he was, and complacently shallow enough not to guess at the grand reason for his popularity. He was eminently possessed of the power to please, and when he found himself pleasing he not unnaturally referred it to his own power.

A further cause for gratification this morning lay in the fact that Sophia had been so willing to leave to deal with the affairs of the kingdom alone. She had closed with his offer as soon as it had been made, and, as this was the first real step that he had taken since his marriage in the prosecution of his aims, he was pleased that it should have gone forward without a stumble. He intended to use her absence to take several more steps in the same direction.

The Assembly of RhodopÉ is peculiarly constituted. In all it numbers sixty members, of whom two-thirds enjoy hereditary seats, and one-third are elected by vote every three years. But there was in those days no sharp division into parties; no socialism as yet masqueraded in the streets under the very penetrable disguise of philanthropy; and those who had only small estates of their own had not yet begun to initiate Bills whereby larger holders should be deprived of their lands. On the other hand, even the hereditary voters were not all of blindly Conservative disposition, and the general tendency of politics was to be mildly progressive. The Prime Minister, elected by the House, was the President, and represented the monarch in his absence; but when the hereditary Prince or Princess was present, he took his seat in the body of the House. The Crown, however, possessed the power of deposing the Prime Minister and appointing a one at discretion. This prerogative had not since the great political crisis of 1793, and generally considered obsolete. But it had never been repealed, and nothing stood in the way of its being exercised should the Sovereign decide to do so.

Princess Sophia left on the first of August in the royal yacht Felatrune. Her departure had been made somewhat hurriedly, and she had given but scanty attention to the discussion of the management of the affairs of State in her absence. Prince Petros, however, insisted that he should be given some clear notion of how far he was to be considered Regent, and how far he was to telegraph for her instructions. He had made a copy on a sheet of foolscap of the Bills which would come before the House before it broke up in September, and she ran her eye quickly over them.

‘Tobacco, potatoes—potatoes, tobacco,’ she said; ‘there is nothing there that I cannot leave completely to you. I will write a short address to the House, if I have time, in which I nominate you as my Regent, and Malakopf will read it out to them. Here, I will do it now; give me a bit of paper.’

Sophia scribbled some half-dozen lines, signed them, and addressed the envelope to the Prime Minister, Malakopf.

‘I understand that I am to take your place in every way,’ said Petros, to whom she had not shown the note.

‘Yes, I have said that,’ said Sophia. ‘Don’t introduce a Bill for deposing me, you know; and if there is any unexpected crisis, let me know by telegraph. Of course there won’t be, for crises never happen in RhodopÉ, and the unexpected never happens anywhere. I have complete confidence in you, Petros. And don’t be terribly conscientious; if possible, let me not hear a word of these three-halfpenny concerns till you join me. I want an entire holiday.’

‘A holiday will do you good, dear Sophia,’ said he; ‘I am afraid the heat has tired you. In turn, let me ask you not to make the State bankrupt at Monte Carlo.’

‘It wants a man with a system to do that,’ laughed Sophia.

Petros and Leonard, an amazingly sunny infant, went down to MavromÁti to see the Princess off, and returned together to Amandos about six o’clock. Petros did not care for children, and the unconscious Leonard merely roused in him a sense of futile envy at the thought that the boy would some day be Prince of RhodopÉ, not merely the husband of its Princess. The Assembly met at three o’clock next day, and he spent a solitary but arduous evening going over very carefully a scheme he had in his mind. He was naturally a cautious man—a man with a system, as Sophia had said, but occasionally he would embark in a risky concern. His investments of all kinds, whether of money or brains, were either very safe or paid an enormous percentage.

The Prime Minister at this time was a man named Malakopf, originally no doubt of Russian birth, whose family had been settled in RhodopÉ for many generations. Russian he might or might not be; Jew he certainly was, and he had all the financial sagacity of that remarkable race. His probity, however, stood in great need of demonstration; and he was known to have been mixed up in a very lucrative but more than questionable transaction, some ten years before, on the Vienna Bourse. There had been a most unpleasant scene on this occasion between him and Prince Demetrius, who spoke his mind with singular frankness, and Malakopf’s affection for the reigning House of RhodopÉ was supposed to be of the most tepid temperature.

Sophia detested the man; with her habitual force of expression, she had said that to be in the room with him was like having tea with a centipede: one never knew where it would be next, and the prevalent impression was that it was crawling up one’s back. But Petros from the first had made much of him; he had often told his wife that so acute a financier was a goose who laid golden eggs for the State. It would be of the nature of suicide to strangle anything so intimately connected with the well-being of the principality. He might be like a centipede, socially speaking, if she would have it so; politically he was invaluable. Besides, he was a man with power; he could be a dangerous enemy, and it was always well to make friends with people who might be dangerous enemies.

Sophia’s nose had gone in the air at this.

‘My family is not accustomed to make friends with centipedes,’ she had said. ‘But, of course, you can do as you please, Petros.’

To-day Prince Petros sought him in his private room off one of the lobbies of the House. He was a bent, withered little man, but nimble in movement, and there was a shifty brightness in his eye. He got up at the Prince’s entry, and bowed low to him.

‘An unexpected pleasure, your Highness,’ he said. ‘Indeed, I was told that Princess Sophia left MavromÁti yesterday, and I had supposed you had not yet returned. I am shamefully ill-posted in the news of our Court, but I have some transactions of great moment on hand, which must be my excuse.’

Now Malakopf knew that Petros had returned to RhodopÉ, and Petros knew that he knew it. Thus comment was needless.

‘My wife left yesterday,’ said he, ‘but, as you see, I am already back again. The Princess was in need of a holiday. State affairs’—he spoke with slow emphasis, and looked Malakopf full in the face—‘State affairs have tired her terribly this summer. She has been head over ears in work.’

No shadow of a smile came over the Prime Minister’s face.

‘Indeed, it must be so,’ he answered. ‘Never a moment’s relaxation or amusement! An iron will!’

But Prince Petros was satisfied; he was sure Malakopf had completely understood him.

‘I came to talk to you on an important matter,’ said the Prince, taking a seat. ‘Naturally, my wife and I could not both be absent during the sitting of the House, and she gave me to understand that she was sending you a document, which she wished to be communicated to the Assembly, conferring on me—so I took her meaning to be—powers which amount—which really amount—to a Regency during her absence.’

Malakopf, though he was not naturally slow, appeared to take some moments before he grasped what the Prince had said. He fixed his eye on the window so long, without stirring a muscle, that the Prince spoke again.

‘No doubt you have seen the document,’ he said, with a little nervousness. ‘From the few words the Princess let fall to me on the subject, I gathered—wrongly perhaps—that such was the purport of it.’ At last the Prime Minister turned briskly in his chair.

‘That, I think, we may consider to be the purport of it,’ he said. ‘And I don’t suppose that the Princess Sophia has ever taken a more prudent and far-sighted determination. Indeed, it might be even more far-sighted than she supposes.’

The Prince knew that he was, so to speak, skating on ice which might prove to be thin. Malakopf knew it equally well, and he applauded inwardly and derisively the other’s caution.

‘You flatter me,’ said the Prince; and Malakopf silently but sincerely agreed with him. But he let no palpable pause precede his answer.

‘Flattery,’ he said, ‘is the unwilling tribute of a wise man to his inferior, or a fool to his superior. Dear Prince, how can I flatter you? For you are our beloved Princess’s husband, and indeed I have glimmerings of sense. But let us approach the point with more particularity. We must consider—must we not?—what will be your proper place in the Assembly. You represent the Princess Sophia, and as her representative you take the chair whenever you are present. But here the legal point comes in: you have no seat—an anomaly as I have always felt—in the Assembly at all. How would it be, then, if you absented yourself to-day, and that I, after reading the Princess’s message, proposed a resolution that during her absence you should be, ex officio, a Member of the House? Then you would have a seat there, and your position after that, as her representative, would make you President.’ He paused a moment, and with a look amazingly frank, ‘We understand each other, do we not?’ he almost whispered, and he approached as near to a chuckle as his prudence allowed.

‘You are admirably lucid,’ said Petros, returning his gaze.

‘And you, too,’ thought Malakopf; but he did not say so, and ceased chuckling.

‘Let us, then, act thus,’ he continued: ‘this afternoon I will take the vote of the House on the matter. It is almost unnecessary for me to send you the report, for there can be only one conclusion. However, by six o’clock I will let you know what has happened, for the matter of form merely—an official communication, my dear Prince, an official communication. Things must be done in order.’

Prince Petros rose.

‘Pray let me ask you,’ he said, ‘to throw over your other engagements to-night, and dine with me alone. You shall tell me then how the House received the proposal.’

‘I am infinitely honoured,’ said Malakopf, bowing again; and the Prince took his departure.

Left alone, Malakopf lit a cigarette, but instead of attending to business, seemed lost in evil meditation. At length he drew some papers towards him, and gave one ghost of a laugh.

‘There is a depth of shallowness,’ he said, to himself, ‘about that man, which to my frail mind is unplumbable.’

Malakopf dined with the Prince that evening, and before they went in to dinner made the most favourable report on the way that his proposition had been received in the House.

‘I first read out the Princess Sophia’s communication,’ he said. ‘It was known that Her Royal Highness had left for Monte——had left for a few visits to her relations, and the House requested me to record to you their sympathy with the Princess’s reason for taking a holiday, and hoped that a few weeks’ relaxation would recuperate her.’

‘I will convey the sympathy of the House to her,’ murmured Prince Petros.

Malakopf bowed.

‘I next brought forward the proposal that you should be entitled to a seat in the House in the Princess’s absence. It was carried, of course, unanimously—I may say with acclamation. Indeed, I have never,’ said he, drawing his hand over his chin—‘I have never seen so great an enthusiasm in our House.’

‘I will do my best to merit the honour you have conferred on me,’ said the Prince, checking his exultation.

The two dined alone, but with great state and magnificence. Both men wore their orders; on the sideboard was displayed the gold plate belonging to the Sovereign, and during dinner the royal band played a selection of ravishing airs from the gallery. The Prime Minister, Petros knew, liked magnificence, but what he did not know was that on this occasion he saw through it. Malakopf was something of a gourmand and much of a gourmet. He ate somewhat largely and very intelligently. The turtle soup was excellent, the chaudfroid of quails a marvel of art (he would have liked to congratulate the chef), and he nearly wept with joy over the haunch of roe-deer braised À la Savarin. Finally the bottle of ChÂteau Vryssi (1832) which he drank with his dessert was almost an awe to him. He was near to feeling a sense of unworthiness, but so far overcame it as to be able to drink a second bottle.

Petros knew well the Prime Minister’s weakness for fine food, and thought that if a good dinner would not earn the man’s gratitude, and so indirectly his help, nothing would. In this he was right. Had it been possible for Malakopf to feel himself under an obligation to anybody, he would have been disposed to fall in with the wishes of a man who had fed him well. But the ore of his nature, if milled, would have been found to contain not the smallest assay of gratitude. Not only had Nature not compounded him with a grain of it, but in the mixing she had used a clean spoon, one which had never had gratitude measured in it; he was wholly incapable of such a feeling. All he knew was that he would certainly dine with the Prince as often as he was invited—even indicate, ever so lightly, that he was ready to come again.

Dinner over, the two sat in the south veranda, where they drank coffee and smoked. Malakopf, habitually cautious, was perhaps moved to an unwonted boldness by that noble grape of which he had drunk so freely; but after he had unloosed his tongue to speak the first words on the subject which was in the minds of both of them, he knew he had done right, and that the Prince would be a tool in his hands.

‘It is a thousand pities,’ he said, ‘that the Princess is so delicate. With all my loyalty, all my unwavering devotion to our royal line, of which I need not remind you, I have sometimes nearly caught myself wishing that Prince Demetrius had had a son, a man of iron like himself, who was equal to the strain and stress of State affairs. The Princess—God bless her!—has often reminded me of that fable of the sword which was worn out by use—she will not abide in the scabbard. Indeed, how you persuaded her to take this little holiday, my dear Prince Petros, I cannot conceive—a miracle of successful diplomacy.’

‘We must encourage her to be put in the scabbard sometimes,’ said the Prince; ‘and, indeed, she felt herself tired out; it required but little persuasion on my part to make her go. Her weakness, not my strength, was the giver of my little victory.’

Malakopf shook his head.

‘You underrate your powers, Prince Petros,’ he said. ‘It was always the same with the Princess; she is all zeal for whatever she has in hand. I have even seen her once or twice here in the palace playing some trivial game at the cards with the ardour—all the ardour, so I thought—with which she follows our debates. And with what act! You would have thought she really cared for the romances of the little pasteboard pieces in which her guests of less sterling fibre found their amusement. She plays still, I believe?’

Prince Petros had not the patience to continue this elaborate farce. Malakopf had fully intended that the first step of importance should be taken by the other, and the wraith of a smile hovered round his mouth as Petros spoke again.

‘She plays still, as you say,’ he replied; ‘and, as you know, she has gone to Monte Carlo, and her royal relations are the tables. The affairs of the State, as you also know, are nothing to her. I fully believe, though, that if she had stopped here she would have suffered in health through pure boredom. But that which is so insignificant to her is very dear to me. I want to see RhodopÉ a great power, and no buffer State. I want——’

He stopped abruptly, got out of his seat, and began walking up and down.

‘Your Highness wants——?’ suggested Malakopf, insinuatingly, and as softly as a thought.

‘I want RhodopÉ to be a nation,’ broke out the Prince. ‘Look at our material!’ (‘Already he says “our,”’ thought Malakopf.) ‘Did you ever see finer men than these troops? Look at our coast, and show me the fleet that could effect a landing. Have you seen Gibraltar? You have seen BÚlteck, and that is two Gibraltars! Look at our boundaries! Whose is the army that could invade RhodopÉ? England herself is not more definitely marked out by Nature to be a great power than we. We are of one race with the Albanian, the flower of the Greek as well as the Turkish troops—completely careless of death, and with no thought but their country. Once set me in a great position here, and you shall see what I will make of RhodopÉ’. If I were the humblest Member of the Chamber I could act, but now I am bound with chains of lead. My hands are tied; I can do nothing; and my wife spends her money and her time and her thoughts at Monte Carlo. I am no more than the lacquey who stands in her ante-chamber—less even, for he is useful in his way; I alone am a cipher. Oh, Malakopf, it is pitiable, man—it is pitiable!’

The Prince stood before him, his hands opened out by his side, his handsome mobile face suffused with excitement. Malakopf put one leg over the other, and suppressed a sigh of content. He had not dared to hope for speaking so plain as this. There was no need for any more diplomatic dancing.

‘Yet you have obtained one step to-day,’ he said; ‘you have a seat in the House. That may well be considered—how do you say it?—the thin end of the wedge.’

‘Yes, and when my wife returns out comes the wedge,’ replied the Prince. ‘And out come I. Oh, Lord!’

‘Not necessarily,’ said the Prime Minister.

The Prince sat down.

‘Explain yourself; I do not understand,’ he said. Malakopf flicked the ash off his cigar. He was so completely master of the situation, that he did not intend to be hurried.

‘It is true that your seat is only temporary at present,’ he said; ‘but one way and another, dear Prince Petros, I have managed to become a somewhat influential person in the State——’

‘So I always tell my wife,’ said the Prince with extraordinary unwisdom, thinking to please the centipede.

‘I am infinitely grateful for your good word,’ replied the other. ‘But I did not mean that I had any influence in the eyes of the Princess—and, to speak to you with a frankness that will nearly equal your own, I do not care to have. But with my considerable wealth, and the extent of my estate, not to mention a certain personal influence I have with a large party in the Assembly—an influence which it would be false modesty in me to underrate, I could, I think, manage to secure you a permanent seat.’

‘Take another cigar,’ said the Prince. ‘Will you do this for me?’

Malakopf smiled. The juxtaposition of the offer of a cigar and this request suggested, fantastically enough, a bribe.

‘I do not say it would be easy to manage,’ he replied. ‘It might be a troublesome affair, and, to speak plainly’—here he laid his hand on the Prince’s knee, and looked him suddenly in the face—‘what am I to get by it?’

‘Yet you said this afternoon that my not having a seat in the Senate was an anomaly.’

‘I endorse what I said. But is it expedient for me personally to attempt to do away with that anomaly?’

‘I will make it worth your while,’ said the Prince in a low voice.

‘That is enough, my dear Prince,’ he said.

‘Here is a light for you,’ said Prince Petros; and his hand shook as he held the match in the windless air.