‘Surely. Why should she not?’ asked Blanche, with a disarming frankness.
‘Rumour had reached me,’ said Malakopf, ‘that she was not altogether pleased that the Prince should do so much, that she felt that she was a little thrust into the background. I hardly knew whether to credit it or not, and your information has relieved me indescribably. But if one looks closely, there was some colour for the idea. Indeed, I had supposed that some such desire to be as prominent as her husband had prompted her to take this very new step of making a casino in Amandos.’
Blanche detected a slight change of tone in his voice, and would have laid odds at that moment that he had just invented these rumours himself. But she answered without a pause:
‘It is very ingenious to connect the building of the casino with that, so ingenious that it certainly ought to be true. I cannot say; it never occurred to me before. About those rumours—surely more than that has reached you——’
Malakopf glanced round to see that no one was within hearing. He thought that he was getting valuable information out of Lady Blanche; she, on the other hand, was sure that she was getting it out of him.
‘Yes; I have heard more than that,’ he said, drawing his chair closer to hers.
Blanche nodded. She felt no touch of shame for what she was doing, for she was loyalty incarnate to Sophia and ruthless to any who were not.
‘You, too, have heard perhaps that in certain quarters it is thought that Prince Petros is standing on tiptoe to reach the throne?’ she asked. ‘You have heard that in certain quarters such an attempt is likely to be widely supported? What are we to make of such things? There cannot be any truth in them.’
‘You speak frankly,’ said Malakopf, ‘and I will follow your example. I have heard, it is true, bitter complaints against the Princess Sophia, and my loyalty has compelled me to listen to them, so as—so as to be on my guard; but it has often been hard work to control my indignation when I listened. I have heard her Civil List, and the way she spends it, bitterly contrasted with the money spent on education and on the poor. What is one to say to such things? I am all loyalty to our beloved Princess, yet put yourself in the place of those who say these things and be candid. Is there not a grain of truth in the accusation?’
Malakopf spoke eagerly, for he wanted to get out of Blanche what she had heard, and, forgetting his manners again, leaned forward and lit a cigarette at a candle standing close to her, enveloping her face in a cloud of smoke. Blanche observed this. The man was certainly in earnest about something.