It was not always so. Twenty years ago each village would boast a score of gaming-houses, its hundred rich folk, and its five hundred poor ones. Even then few were beggars, owing to the immeasurable fertility of the land; but many were labourers on another’s ground who should have been lords of their own. And it is the events by which Prince Leonard came to the throne, and was enabled to rescue his kingdom from its imminent dissolution in the lifetime of his mother, the reigning Princess Sophia of Rhodopé, that this story tells.
CHAPTER I.
THE GIRL IS MOTHER TO THE WOMAN.
Princess Sophia’s father, the reigning Prince Leonard’s grandfather, was a man extraordinarily truculent in disposition, with a hand of iron under no velvet glove, and a temper frankly diabolical. His wife, the Grand Duchess Fedora, had died in giving birth to his only child, the Princess Sophia; and so long as the girl grew up strong and healthy, he had no thoughts of attempting to take to himself another partner. In this he acted contrarily to the bias of mankind, who would see in the education of a daughter the need of a mother’s hand. Not so thought Prince Demetrius. Had Sophia died, there would then be an undeniable necessity for marrying again, and so continuing his line, and disappointing the hopes of the cousin who stood next the throne, a man abhorrent to him; but as long as she lived, such a course appeared to him to be altogether outside the region of the vaguest consideration. Indeed, his first venture—though the word is scarcely apt for so chill a piece of business—had not been altogether fortunate. The Princess Fedora had been a mild and ailing woman, with weak and swimming blue eyes, of an uncertain manner, and of notable mediocrity, and the secret satisfaction which her husband at first used to feel in making her jump soon lost its edge when he saw how easily, how unintentionally even, the thing could be done. A voice raised ever so little, one raucous and guttural exclamation, though half stifled, was enough to make that poor lady skip or swoon. In fine, he got tired of her swoonings, and was in danger, when she died, of losing the keenness of his overbearing and furious temper from mere contact with one so grossly meek and of so contemptible a spirit, even as a sword that has often to cut cotton-wool is soon blunted.
But before long Sophia made him feel his own man again. She grew up with the foot of the roe-deer and the eye of the hawk, and her imperative craving for excitement in some form or other kept her father on incessant tenterhooks as to what she might choose to do next. By no means the earliest of her escapades was at the age of ten, when he found her sitting with the grooms in the stable-yard, cross-legged on the horse-block, and smoking a cigarette. Her current governess, an estimable and incompetent Frenchwoman, who could play more scales in a minute and speak more words in five different languages with absolute correctness of accent than any governess yet known to exist on this imperfect earth, was bedewing the corner of the yard with impotent tears while Her Royal Highness smoked, and indulged between the whiffs in shocking slang expressions to the English groom. At this prodigious moment her father came in from his ride, saw the governess cowering and wringing her hands in the corner, and the Hope of Rhodopé flicking the ash off her cigarette with the apparent mastery of habit. His face expressed no surprise, though he cast one furious glance at Mademoiselle Fifine, and dismounting from his horse, he walked to where his daughter was sitting. She had not seen him till he had well turned the corner into the yard, and knew that he must have observed her employment; and convinced of this, she had not resorted to what would have been the ordinary young lady’s pitiful subterfuge on such an extreme occasion, and either dropped her cigarette, or handed it behind her back to the groom. She was far too defiant and proud for such paltriness of conduct, and she smoked quietly on, a slight patter of fear in her heart, but outwardly calm.
Her father approached in silence, and as he drew near Sophia respectfully got up. Still in silence he sat down on the horse-block, and Sophia stood beside him. If he had only boxed her ears and called her a ‘dirty, vulgar little cat,’ she would have drawn a sigh of relief, but this silence was intolerably ominous. She was the first to break it.
‘I am smoking a cigarette, papa,’ she said frankly, ‘and I find it excellent.’
He did not look at her, but only took out his own cigarette-case and laid it by his side.
‘So I see,’ he said; ‘and when you have finished that, you shall have another. These, too, are excellent cigarettes; I have plenty of them.’
‘Thanks; you are very kind, but I think one will be enough,’ remarked Sophia.
‘It may be, but you will have another if it is not.’ Then turning to the stablemen: ‘Stop where you are, all of you,’ he said. ‘I wish you to see the Princess Sophia smoking till she has had enough.’