‘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.
Thereafter followed the opening of the new town-hall, and the luncheon by the mayor. Prince Demetrius did not propose to attend either of these functions; and, turning to ride home, he inquired of Prince Petros whether he would come with him or go to the town-hall and the tedious lunch with Sophia. The town-hall, he reminded him, was like every other town-hall, only newer, and the mayor’s luncheon would be similar, only perhaps a shade more so.
But the ring of his cri du cœur—‘Oh, let me go with her!’—pleased the old man, and he rode home satisfied.
Indeed, of late Sophia’s future had been something of an anxiety to him. In each individual case, it is true, he had so sympathized with the girl in her rejection of men who were superlatively eligible, except as husbands, that he had not had the conviction to ‘preach down her heart’; nor, he was aware, would his preaching have had the slightest effect. But he himself, as he guessed, was suffering from an incurable malady, of which the end, he hoped, would not be far distant; and it would have pleased him more than anything in the world which had power to please, to see Sophia married to some suitable husband, who was neither cad nor nincompoop. Prince Petros did not appear to him to be within measurable distance of either, and he was gratified to see that the rhadamanthine attitude which Sophia usually adopted to her wooers was here absent.
The two returned about five in the afternoon, after a reckless scamper over the rough country. The embarrassed lady and gentleman had been left far behind, unless, indeed, they had been wise, and returned home soberly by the road; but neither gave them even a passing thought. Sophia, with experiment in her mind, had mounted Prince Petros on a vicious cross-grained brute, and she knew that the horse’s seeming amenity that afternoon could not be natural to it. Petros had a seat; he had hands. In Sophia’s eyes there were few gifts of God more ennobling than these. The last mile up to the stable gates she had challenged him to race, following an old grass-grown track, intersected with hedges and fences; and Sophia, to her soul’s delight, had won. She had dismounted by the time he came up, and sitting on the horse-block, where she had made her first experiment in cigarettes ten years ago, breathless and triumphant at having beaten the jockey of the Austrian winner. He dismounted at the stable gate, and came up to her. A great braid of her black hair had escaped, and hung gloriously on the shoulder of her riding jacket; her face was flushed. She was divinely beautiful; and in a sudden spasm of admiration: