The Princess Sophia

by E. F. Benson

Now, the Prince was one of the first écarté players in Europe, and he had resolved to teach his daughter a lesson on the same lines as the lesson he had proposed to teach her in the stable-yard. He meant to go on playing till Sophia was shorn of all her twenty francs, and after that of all her pennies as well.

Sophia marked the king in the first hand, and turned it up in the second, securing the odd trick on each occasion. On the third deal her father held five small trumps, but only made the odd, Sophia holding knave and ten. On the fourth deal Sophia won the odd trick, and no king was marked, and her father pushed across to her four francs. The second game was but a repetition of the first, only Prince Demetrius in this case failed even to secure the odd. He growled out an oath as he gave Sophia five francs, and that observant young person recorded a silent vow that she personally would take her losings with the same calm demeanour as she certainly intended to cultivate when she was so fortunate as to win. But it was terribly exciting work to play for whole silver francs, and every fibre and nerve in that wholesome little body was stretched to play her best. The third game she also won, and remarked consolingly to the Prince:

‘You have had the worst of the cards, sir,’ a phrase she had picked up from the retired Buckhurst.

An hour later this strange pair were still at the game. The lesson Prince Demetrius had determined to give his daughter was still unlearned, for by her on the table glittered three gold napoleons, and some seventeen francs in silver. She had enjoyed a most surprising run of luck, and what was still more surprising to her father, she had played throughout a safe and sober game, the very essence and spirit of scientific success. Several times she had elected to play on a hand which, as he saw when she played it, justified itself clearly indeed to the adept, but held dazzling improbabilities to the beginner, with a change of two cards, or perhaps one. At other times her bolder front had reason to back it. Once, for instance, the Prince turned up the king, and proposed for cards. She, with a moderate hand, refused, since the odd trick would give him the game, and her chance of saving it lay in that. As luck would have it, he had on this occasion held four small clubs and one diamond, the same being trumps. She had held two diamonds, a fair hand of hearts, and won all the tricks. The consequence of all this was that at the end of an hour the thought of the lesson he should give her had yielded place in the Prince’s mind to an increased feeling of respect for his daughter, so proficient was her play, though only a beginner, and to the adept’s joy in the game considered as a game and unconcerned with moralities.

Nine o’clock came, and an hour after the Princess’s bedtime. But when a raw-boned governess appeared at the door, and stood patiently waiting, the Prince presently answered her with so tigerish a snarl, and so strong an expression of his feelings toward her—Sophia had just marked the king—that that lady retired to her bedroom in precipitate confusion, and remembered him in her prayers. The pile by the Princess had grown to a matter of eighty francs; the Prince had made more than one bad mistake, and instead of teaching his daughter a lesson, he had caused an unfounded suspicion to arise in her mind that he was only a player of the second order.

Alas for the moral cause! That evening, which he had designed to be so salutary a piece of education, was in reality the direct ancestor of the profuse gaming-tables in the State of Rhodopé, and the threatener of its entire ruin as a nation. Not only did Sophia become convinced that games at cards were more entrancing than any other adventure, even than trying to elope with a reluctant English tutor, but several times during the game her father had exclaimed: ‘You have the luck of the devil, Sophia!’ and such an opinion from so expert a judge could not fail to produce a deep impression on her, and fill her with wild hopes. Indeed, the truth of it, to give the devil his due, was blatantly obvious. Doubtful cards prospered in her hand, good cards exacted the full tale of their merit, and what seemed impossible winners sometimes leaped in at the end, established and trick-winning. Even Prince Demetrius, who knew more than most men of the favours of the fickle jade, was impressed by the decisions of Fortune. It seemed idle to struggle, and when on the stroke of midnight he rose from the table, leaving Sophia with a balance of a hundred and seventeen francs, he almost regretted that they had not played for larger stakes, for the winner ever commanded his respect. His daughter gathered up her money with carefully assumed carelessness, but inward exultation.

‘You had the worst of the cards throughout, papa,’ she observed again.

‘I had,’ he said, then paused, and the gambler within him leaped to the surface. ‘Oh, Sophia,’ he said, ‘with such a run of luck, and, to do you justice, your own intuition, translated into terms of roulette, you would in a year make a fortune at Monte Carlo sufficient to buy the Ionian Isles.’

Her face lit up as the face of some village genius might light up one receipt of a favourable opinion from a publisher about his manuscript poems.

‘Oh, papa,’ she cried, ‘how splendid! Will you take me there?’