‘And I am not without wits,’ said Malakopf, chuckling, ‘and our talk was more intimate than she knew. Indeed, she gave me all I wanted to know with the charming naïveté of a child.’
Prince Petros was silent a moment; he did not feel entirely at ease about this interview, but his habit of obedience to Malakopf’s orders would not let him speak. At length, dismissing the subject, ‘Tell me how to maintain my wife’s confidence,’ he said.
‘A little bezique in the evening would do wonders with her,’ said Malakopf sententiously.
Thus it was that Prince Petros had proposed a game that evening, and Sophia accepted from curiosity. During dinner he had talked charmingly, and had related a number of amusing experiences shortly and with point. At each Sophia’s contempt rose bitter as bile in her throat. Behind her back he planned a revolution; before her face he paid court to the amenities of social life, he behaved with a studied naturalness and kindness. Knowing all she knew, these miserable little attentions seemed to her the very acme of meanness, and it was the desire of studying him further which made her counter-order the carriage that should have taken her to the club. This argued a very strong desire.
They stood by the open window drinking their coffee, while the groom of the chambers put out the table and packs of cards, and when the man had left the room, Petros gently thrust his arm through hers.
‘It seems so long since we have spent an evening quietly together, Sophia,’ he said. ‘To me, at least, it seems long. Sometimes I almost wish you had been a poor girl, not the Princess of Rhodopé, that we had been able to live quietly together up in some little mountain home.’
Sophia for the moment was struck dumb. Surely there was never so immeasurable a hypocrite as this man! She could not answer, but since she wished him to continue, she gently pressed his arm with hers.
‘You have felt that too, dearest?’ he continued softly. ‘Sometimes, Sophia, I have thought you were a little weary of me. Now your sweet silence makes me know I was wrong; so forgive me, darling. Look at that lovely wash of moonlight over the town. It lies like a benediction over your land. It was just such a night—was it not?—when I first came here. I bless that day—I bless it every hour of my life.’
Sophia turned from him; the man produced in her a sense of physical sickness. She, who with all her faults had never lied—she, to whom falsehood was a dirty thing, as inconceivable as not washing, felt ill at his duplicity. She was angry at herself for letting him speak, and for a moment she was on the point of telling him she knew all. But her anger surged up again, she could not forgive him; he had chosen to act a crooked part, he must reap as he had sown. But she had promised herself to give him a word of warning; that he should have.
‘Come, Petros,’ she said at length, with an assumed lightness of manner, ‘bezique, bezique. Really, I don’t know that a cottage on the mountains would have suited me well, though it is charming of you to suggest it; you would not have loved to find me thumbing a dirty pack of cards when I should have been mending your stockings. There is a great deal to be said for the position of the Princess of Rhodopé.’