The Princess Sophia

by E. F. Benson

Mr. Lanthony gave the ghost of a smile. His mouth was untouched by Magnall’s Questions.

‘I don’t think you need consider that, your Royal Highness,’ he said—‘at least, you need not be uneasy for the headmaster; nor, indeed, for the Prince—the birch is quite harmless.’

‘The birch!’ cried Sophia. ‘How terrible it sounds!’

‘It is of no consequence,’ said Mr. Lanthony gravely; and the pain of Magnall’s Questions grew sensibly less.

‘Well, we must ask Leonard,’ said his mother. ‘Supposing he refuses to go? What are we to do then? I don’t think either of us has much influence with him, you know.’

But Leonard, when appealed to, was considerably taken with the idea; there would be a lot of boys to play with, and he wanted to go to England.

‘I expect it’s more fun with heaps of other boys than with one old muff at a time,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’ll be an Eton boy.’

When Sophia had made up her mind to a thing, she was not slow to put it into execution. She wrote an exceedingly kind and condescending letter to the headmaster, giving him to understand that she was prepared to confer this priceless boon on Eton at Mr. Lanthony’s recommendation; but that gentleman, to whom she read it, advised another tone. The headmaster was radically-minded, and would not be likely to be dazzled at the prospect; she could put it more simply. Indeed, perhaps it would be better if he wrote himself to a housemaster he knew there, asking if he could by any means secure a vacancy in his house for a boy aged fourteen, or if he knew of anyone else who had a vacancy. All this sounded terribly democratic to the Princess; but, having failed so signally herself with Leonard, she was desirous that other more practised hands should take the reins from her, and she would, so she expressed herself with a little acidity, go down on her knees before all the masters in Christendom if this were the more proper attitude to take.

It was finally arranged that Leonard should enter the school in April, and Sophia threw herself with zest into the scheme. She conferred on his housemaster the Second Order of the Bronze Cross, and sent him the key to a private cipher, by means of which he could daily communicate with her. She asked whether £1,000 pocket-money a term would be sufficient to supply her boy with school requisites, and whether she should open an account for him at the Eton and Windsor Bank. She hoped they would all remember—perhaps he would be so good as to speak to his colleagues about it—how exceedingly high-spirited the Prince was, and how little discipline he had yet received. Finally, she drove the unfortunate man to the verge of imbecility by saying that she hoped they allowed no roulette at all in the school, and only vingt-et-un at moderate points. Mr. Lanthony had already left for England before this unhappy series of letters was despatched, or some of them might have been averted.

Leonard left for England at the end of March, and it was in a way an immense relief to his mother when he had gone, for she felt strangely responsible for his education. She had made up her mind that he was to be a good ruler, and she saw clearly that Rhodopé was no place for him yet. Her own popularity had redeemed, so far, her reign from failure, but she was candid enough to allow that she might have let her sphere border more nearly on usefulness. Prince Petros’s mad attempt had been an unexampled piece of luck; it had given her an éclat she could scarcely have won otherwise, so also had her institution of the club. She had founded it to supply amusement to herself; she found that she had given occupation to her people. But already she foresaw that in the course of years the morals of the people would deteriorate, the hardy mountain folk would become people of the asphalt, of the gaslight. As long as the club continued to act as a star for the enjoyment of health-questing moths, so long, no doubt, would the Budget of Rhodopé be a pattern to other more puritanically constituted States; but the surplus on the Budget would be paid for in other ways. She saw the sheep of Rhodopé without their shepherds; she saw the vineyards without their vine-diggers; she dimly forecast the army destitute of privates, and peopled only with honorary colonels. She had the grace to shudder at the logical outcome of the era she had instituted, only she could not in her own person break the chain of circumstance on which it hung. Amandos without the club! She starved at the thought. It had been bad enough before; now, when the days there had actually ceased to be tedious, owing to the diversions supplied by her roulette, with what a cold shuddering of the spirit she saw herself shorn of that which made life tolerable! But that chain of circumstances should be broken by her son. She had endowed him with the gambling blood, but that was inevitable; at least she was now making an effort whereby the hereditary instinct should not come to fruition. She had sent him to England, that home of three-penny points; she had expressed herself most clearly to his housemaster at Eton on the question of roulette. She could not have done more, and her conscience approved her.