The month of April this year had been peculiarly seasonable; the lucid atmosphere of summer had come, but not its heats; the freshness of spring remained, but its armoury of squalls was spent, and seldom in her life had the Princess enjoyed a more delectable score of days. Her Ministers at Rhodopé, she was pleased to observe, at length entirely understood her, and the completeness with which they indulged her intolerance of State affairs was worthy of the Regency of Petros. She was still, as in the days of her girlhood, a fervent lover of the sea, and no morning failed to see her scudding up and down the coast in her little cutter, and with the same regularity an hour before her déjeuner she would be put ashore opposite her little tent on the beach, and have a long swim before luncheon. No watering-place bather was she; her bathing was no affair of a ducking of the head, a few random strokes, and a bubbling cry. With a boat a hundred yards behind her, she would swim out not less than half a mile from shore, rest a little, floating with arms out-stretched in the rocking cradle of the waves, and then head back for the shore. This exercise and the bracing water kept her young, and while those only half her age would find but a rotten world welcoming them to their lunch, after watching the dawn from the little red room, hers was a brisk step, a feeling of slight well-earned fatigue, a joyous elasticity of spirit, and the appetite of a youth. She drank wine but sparingly, and in spite of her increasing stoutness, she was still a woman to whom the eyes of men were drawn as steel to the magnet, and none bore her years with half so good a grace as she.
But the early days of May brought straight the balance of imperfection of this world and its weather. A stifling sirocco blew day after day out of the south, bringing with it, you would have said, all the scorching of the Libyan Desert and all the moisture of the sea it passed over. For five days it blew without intermission, and on the morning of the fifth the heat was rendered doubly intolerable by a great bank of ominous clouds which spread eastwards over the sky at right angles to the current of the wind. These were fat and fleecy, like blankets, and like blanketed fever patients were those that stifled beneath them. Princess Sophia alone was a shining exception to the rest of the limp world; she had much enjoyed her buffeting with a gray and angry sea, and she received her guests who collected in the drawing-room before lunch with all her vivacious cordiality. Princess Aline of Luxemburg was one of these, Prince Victor of Strelitz another; the rest were mainly English, and all were gamblers of the most honourable order.
‘You call it a terrible day, Aline!’ cried the Princess. ‘My dear, what do you know of the day? It may be delightful, for all you know. If I had stayed in my bedroom as long as you, I should be dead by now. You slept, or tried to sleep, till eleven.’
‘How do you know that?’ asked Princess Aline.
‘How? Because I was in the cutter—a very rough sea this morning—and it so happened that my opera-glass was on the house. I saw a blind go up; I knew it was the blind of your room. I looked at the time, and it was eleven. Oh, why was I not a detective? What a series of simple and acute deductions!’
‘Do you consider it a pleasant day, Sophia?’ asked her cousin, Prince Victor.
‘Dear Victor, to me every day is a pleasant day, except in Rhodopé. How is it possible to be more happy than I am? I have an admirable digestion. Yes; is lunch ready? Let us come in. I have luck at the cards. I slept for six hours like a tired child, as Shelley says. I have swum a mile. I had no letters to worry me this morning, and my nation has no history. Happy is the Princess whose nation has no history!’
‘The club, is not that history?’ asked Lady Blanche, who was of the party.
‘A chapter only—a paragraph only. It cannot make history alone, and positively nothing else has happened in Rhodopé for thirty years.’
‘Something nearly happened once,’ remarked Blanche.