‘An omen!’ she cried—‘a magnificent omen! Success to the club of Amandos! Pierre, I wish my stake had been a hundredfold what it was!’
Then, recollecting ceremony, she bowed to the crowds which had followed them into the room, and stood there while the table was opened.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said, with a wonderful dignity of manner, ‘I declare this room formally opened. There is no need for me to remind you how ancient and venerable is the practice of gambling. Cultivate, let me beg you, a calm demeanour at the tables, and bow your heads cheerfully and obediently to the decision of pure chance. Long may the club supply to you a little pleasurable excitement, and may Luck ever favour the deserving!’
Again bowing, amid a tumult of applause, she and the high officials who had attended her left the room, and no sooner were they out than there was a positive scramble for the places. Members of the Assembly, fishermen from the coast, tradesmen of the town, wild shepherdfolk from the hills, jostled and pushed together to secure a place.
Sophia, in the hall outside, heard the noise with rapture.
‘This will be a success, gentlemen,’ she said; ‘let us congratulate ourselves.’
The Royal Party took a hasty luncheon, without speeches, on the terrace outside, and as soon as she had drunk her coffee Sophia visited each of the rooms in turn, all of which were crowded with eager gamblers. In each she had seen that there was a chair on the croupier’s right with a crown, and her initial embroidered on it, and in each room she now took her seat and played a few stakes. She was watched with eager and admiring eyes, for, as usual, she played with a splendid recklessness and the most imperturbable demeanour, doubling and redoubling her stake after she had lost, and placing it here, there, anywhere that took her fancy. Her luck was extraordinarily good, and her dash and boldness were suitably rewarded. The people, in whose nature, as Malakopf had suspected, there lurked an innate love of gambling, were charmed and lost in wonder. She had given them a characteristic style, and until some twenty years ago, when the casino at Amandos was turned into an asylum for decayed and idiotic old gentlemen, there was nowhere in the world where you could see such glorious ventures and such desperate punting as in the building that Princess Sophia opened on this sunny first of May.
The gambling instinct spread like some medieval plague over the country. Shepherds coming to Amandos with their sheep for market would rush from their careful bargainings to the reckless chances of the table. A whole column of the Amandos Herald was devoted to the record of the same (just as in the Times we have a column of Money Market), analyzing a run of luck, or giving the total sum a man would have gained who had continued to back a certain six numbers from 10.30 to 11.30.
The manufacture of roulette-boards, which Sophia, with a far-reaching prudence, had made a Government monopoly, bid fair to become a valuable revenue. They were plain, but very well made, and the enormous quantities in which they were supplied enabled her to sell them at a price which put them within everybody’s reach. She also instituted an Order of the Zero, the first grade of which was to be conferred only on European princes of blood royal; but the second was the reward of continuous and orthodox play, and was conferred on the recommendation of Pierre.
The restaurant accommodation in the casino was soon found to be totally inadequate, and the plot of ground immediately adjoining the club garden was bought at a fancy price by a native speculator, and on it was run up with breathless speed an immense hotel and restaurant. From foreign countries people flocked in shoals to the new Temple of Chance, at first from curiosity, but later from delight in its charms, and found that the fame of its magnificence, the beauty of the scenery, and the invigorating quality of the mountain air had been done scant justice to. Eminent physicians, who knew that the body is reached through the subtle gateways of the mind, no less than the mind through the subtle gateways of the body, and that for many bad health is the direct result of being bored, recommended, honestly and wisely, a month at Rhodopé for anæmic and nerve-ridden people. Success scarcely ever failed to attend on the cure when the case was properly diagnosed; for the air itself was a tonic of divine prescription, and the mind was not, as in so many of those unspeakable mountain resorts, left to rot and breed disease, but was intelligently entertained at the casino. The English people above all flocked to Amandos, for, as they said, the folk are not like foreigners, one would really take them for English; and when they of Albion take up this attitude, it is pretty certain that the place will be popular among their compatriots. Their insular aloofness fell from them like scales in Rhodopé—it was as good as being at home. And with the English came a Church of England chaplain, hip-baths, one most hazardous golf-links on the mountain side, and another on the sandy fore-shore of Mavromáti, and the ties were complete.