‘But I was not jesting—I never jest when I am playing cards,’ he said. ‘Yes, let us play one game after the ball.’
The two danced with each other more than once during the evening, but for the most part Prince Petros was a model of sedulous gallantry to the official ladies of Rhodopé. The wife of the mayor, a stout, immovable lady, entirely lost her heart to him. Twice had he waltzed with her, or, rather, twice had he skipped round and round her, as a child may skip round a firmly-rooted tree. She, like the tree which is planted in the whirling earth, seemed to do little more than revolve on her axis once in twenty-four hours; but she enjoyed dancing, she said, very much, and it certainly made her very hot. Nor was he wanting here; he poured ices and exhilarating drinks down her capacious throat, as if to quench some wild internal conflagration, and the mayoress, so he told Sophia afterwards, had confided to him that she, too, was of princely line.
With the younger ladies he was no less successful. He was never tired of dancing, his steering was of so fine an order that it seemed an exhibition of luck, and the step of each of his partners he gaily asserted—as, indeed, he had shamelessly declared to the mayoress—suited his own exactly. He admired everything, and he flattered everybody, yet so adroitly that his partners only thought that they themselves were exceptionally enchanting that night. He told a young, æsthetically-dressed woman, the wife of the Prince’s aide-de-camp, that she reminded him of Whistler’s symphony in green, a title which his ready invention had coined on the spur of the moment, but which earned him a life-long gratitude, for Madame Elsprach had been secretly afraid that she had rather overdone it. In a word, when the ball was over, he felt that he had earned his game at bezique, and he got it.
Next morning he asked an audience of Prince Demetrius, and this was granted him. Armed with a permission from him, he inquired for Sophia, for they were soon to ride together. He found her in the garden, dressed for the ride, and alone.
‘Princess,’ he said, ‘I have come to pay you my stake. Will you accept it? Sophia, will you accept it?’
CHAPTER III.
MARRIAGE-BELLS AND SYSTEMS.
Prince Petros scarcely seemed to have overrated—though it was ever his habit to take a sufficiently rosy view of the verdict of the world on himself—the favourable impression he had made in those two days at Amandos. The officers whom he had met at the review admired his fine horsemanship no less than his amiability, for no man could be more agreeable without any suspicion of condescension than he. The ladies of the Court were entranced by the charm of his manners and the grace of his dancing. Sophia, as has been seen, was captive to the mastery of his bezique, and Prince Demetrius, a testimonial to the full as striking as any of these, had never snarled at him once. The fact of their betrothal was made known before the lapse of many days, and the news evoked bells, fireworks and universal approval.
Sophia’s acceptance of him delighted her father, and he would certainly have made himself odious had she refused him. He had no wish to see his daughter a second Queen Elizabeth, and the romance of such a figure in his eyes bore no comparison with the desired consummation of his hopes to see her a matron with a lusty and numerous progeny. His cousins he frankly looked upon in the light of obscene birds of prey, ready to batten on his own extinct line. Already, so it seemed to him, they were hopping hungrily about the steps of the throne of Rhodopé, but the news of Sophia’s betrothal scared them hurriedly away, and from afar they sent long congratulatory telegrams. Prince Demetrius smiled to himself when he thought how bitter must those honeyed words have been to their royal authors. The Grand Duke Nicholas, so he thought, alone acted in a self-respecting manner, for he sent no word.
As for the affianced husband, he was in a stupor of content. Thanks to his native amiability, to horsemanship nearly as native—for the Princes of Herzegovina were men almost born in the saddle—and to his carefully acquired skill at the cards, already the first and most difficult act of his ‘Empire of the East’ was finished. Had he been, in common with most gamblers, a victim to superstition, he might almost have been frightened at the ease of these first steps, and have taken such extreme favours of fortune with caution. But his own common-sense lulled him to security, and he played the assiduous suitor to perfection, and, indeed, it was no part he played.