[Illustration: THE HOMAGE WAS DULY PAID]
TALES OF TWO
PEOPLE
BY
ANTHONY HOPE
AUTHOR OF “THE DOLLY DIALOGUES,” “THE KING’S MIRROR,” ETC.
WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY A. H. BUCKLAND
SECOND EDITION
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
_First Published in book form_ _September 1907_
_Second Edition_ _September 1907_
CONTENTS
PAGE
HELENA’S PATH 1
MRS THISTLETON’S PRINCESS 102
THE NECESSARY RESOURCES 129
MISS GLADWIN’S CHANCE 149
THE PRINCE CONSORT 174
WHAT WAS EXPECTED OF MISS CONSTANTINE 183
SLIM-FINGERED JIM 207
THE GREY FROCK 220
FOREORDAINED 234
PRUDENCE AND THE BISHOP 245
THE OPENED DOOR 253
LOVE’S LOGIC 258
LA MORT À LA MODE 267
THE RIDDLE OF COUNTESS RUNA 275
THE LADY AND THE FLAGON 288
THE DUKE’S ALLOTMENT 310
HELENA’S PATH
CHAPTER I
AMBROSE, LORD LYNBOROUGH
Common opinion said that Lord Lynborough ought never to have had a
peerage and forty thousand a year; he ought to have had a pound a week
and a back bedroom in Bloomsbury. Then he would have become an eminent
man; as it was, he turned out only a singularly erratic individual.
So much for common opinion. Let no more be heard of its dull utilitarian
judgments! There are plenty of eminent men--at the moment, it is
believed, no less than seventy Cabinet and ex-Cabinet Ministers (or
thereabouts)--to say nothing of Bishops, Judges, and the British
Academy--and all this in a nook of the world! (And the world too is a
point!) Lynborough was something much more uncommon; it is not, however,
quite easy to say what. Let the question be postponed; perhaps the story
itself will answer it.
He started life--or was started in it--in a series of surroundings of
unimpeachable orthodoxy--Eton, Christ Church, the Grenadier Guards. He
left each of these schools of mental culture and bodily discipline, not
under a cloud--that metaphor would be ludicrously inept--but in an
explosion. That, having been thus shot out of the first, he managed to
enter the second--that, having been shot out of the second, he walked
placidly into the third--that, having been shot out of the third, he
suffered no apparent damage from his repeated propulsions--these are
matters explicable only by a secret knowledge of British institutions.
His father was strong, his mother came of stock even stronger; he
himself--Ambrose Caverly as he then was--was very popular, and
extraordinarily handsome in his unusual outlandish style.
His father being still alive--and, though devoted to him, by now
apprehensive of his doings--his means were for the next few years
limited. Yet he contrived to employ himself. He took a soup-kitchen and
ran it; he took a yacht and sank it; he took a public-house, ruined it,
and got himself severely fined for watering the beer in the Temperance
interest. This injustice rankled in him deeply, and seems to have
permanently influenced his development. For a time he forsook the
world and joined a sect of persons who called themselves
“Theophilanthropists”--and surely no man could call himself much more
than that? Returning to mundane affairs, he refused to pay his rates,
stood for Parliament in the Socialist interest, and, being defeated,
declared himself a practical follower of Count Tolstoy. His father
advising a short holiday, he went off and narrowly escaped being shot
somewhere in the Balkans, owing to his having taken too keen an interest
in local politics. (He ought to have been shot; he was clear--and even
vehement--on that point in a letter which he wrote to _The Times_.) Then
he sent for Leonard Stabb, disappeared in company with that gentleman,
and was no more seen for some years.
He could always send for Stabb, so faithful was that learned student’s
affection for him. A few years Ambrose Caverly’s senior, Stabb had
emerged late and painfully from a humble origin and a local grammar
school, had gone up to Oxford as a non-collegiate man, had gained a
first-class and a fellowship, and had settled down to a life of
research. Early in his career he became known by the sobriquet of
“Cromlech Stabb”--even his unlearned friends would call him “Cromlech”
oftener than by any other name. His elaborate monograph on cromlechs had
earned him the title; subsequently he extended his researches to other
relics of ancient religions--or ancient forms of religion, as he always
preferred to put it; “there being,” he would add, with the simplicity of
erudition beaming through his spectacles on any auditor, orthodox or
other, “of course, only one religion.” He was a very large stout man;
his spectacles were large too. He was very strong, but by no means
mobile. Ambrose’s father regarded Stabb’s companionship as a certain
safeguard to his heir. The validity of this idea is doubtful. Students
have so much curiosity--and so many diverse scenes and various types of
humanity can minister to that appetite of the mind.
Occasional rumours about Ambrose Caverly reached his native shores; he
was heard of in Morocco, located in Spain, familiar in North and in
South America. Once he was not heard of for a year; his father and
friends concluded that he must be dead--or in prison. Happily the latter
explanation proved correct. Once more he and the law had come to
loggerheads; when he emerged from confinement he swore never to employ
on his own account an instrument so hateful.
“A gentleman should fight his own battles, Cromlech,” he cried to his
friend. “I did no more than put a bullet in his arm--in a fair
encounter--and he let me go to prison!”
“Monstrous!” Stabb agreed with a smile. He had passed the year in a
dirty little inn by the prison gate--among scoundrels, but fortunately
in the vicinity of some mounds distinctly prehistoric.
Old Lord Lynborough’s death occurred suddenly and unexpectedly, at a
moment when Ambrose and his companion could not be found. They were
somewhere in Peru--Stabb among the Incas, Ambrose probably in less
ancient company. It was six months before the news reached them.
“I must go home and take up my responsibilities, Cromlech,” said the new
Lord Lynborough.
“You really think you’d better?” queried Stabb doubtfully.
“It was my father’s wish.”
“Oh, well----! But you’ll be thought odd over there, Ambrose.”
“Odd? I odd? What the deuce is there odd about me, Cromlech?”
“Everything.” The investigator stuck his cheroot back in his mouth.
Lynborough considered dispassionately--as he fain would hope. “I don’t
see it.”
That was the difficulty. Stabb was well aware of it. A man who is odd,
and knows it, may be proud, but he will be careful; he may swagger, but
he will take precautions. Lynborough had no idea that he was odd; he
followed his nature--in all its impulses and in all its whims--with
equal fidelity and simplicity. This is not to say that he was never
amused at himself; every intelligent observer is amused at himself
pretty often; but he did not doubt merely because he was amused. He took
his entertainment over his own doings as a bonus life offered. A great
sincerity of action and of feeling was his predominant characteristic.
“Besides, if I’m odd,” he went on with a laugh, “it won’t be noticed.
I’m going to bury myself at Scarsmoor for a couple of years at least.
I’m thinking of writing an autobiography. You’ll come with me,
Cromlech?”
“I must be totally undisturbed,” Stabb stipulated. “I’ve a great deal of
material to get into shape.”
“There’ll be nobody there but myself--and a secretary, I daresay.”
“A secretary? What’s that for?”
“To write the book, of course.”
“Oh, I see,” said Stabb, smiling in a slow fat fashion. “You won’t write
your autobiography yourself?”
“Not unless I find it very engrossing.”
“Well, I’ll come,” said Stabb.
So home they came--an unusual-looking pair--Stabb with his towering
bulky frame, his big goggles, his huge head with its scanty black locks
encircling a face like a harvest moon--Lynborough, tall, too, but lean
as a lath, with tiny feet and hands, a rare elegance of carriage, a
crown of chestnut hair, a long straight nose, a waving moustache, a chin
pointed like a needle and scarcely thickened to the eye by the
close-cropped, short, pointed beard he wore. His bright hazel eyes
gleamed out from his face with an attractive restlessness that caught
away a stranger’s first attention even from the rare beauty of the lines
of his head and face; it was regularity over-refined, sharpened almost
to an outline of itself. But his appearance tempted him to no excesses
of costume; he had always despised that facile path to a barren
eccentricity. On every occasion he wore what all men of breeding were
wearing, yet invested the prescribed costume with the individuality of
his character: this, it seems, is as near as the secret of dressing well
can be tracked.
His manner was not always deemed so free from affectation; it was,
perhaps, a little more self-conscious; it was touched with a foreign
courtliness, and he employed, on occasions of any ceremony or in
intercourse with ladies, a certain formality of speech; it was said of
him by an observant woman that he seemed to be thinking in a language
more ornate and picturesque than his tongue employed. He was content to
say the apt thing, not striving after wit; he was more prone to hide a
joke than to tell it; he would ignore a victory and laugh at a defeat;
yet he followed up the one and never sat down under the other, unless it
were inflicted by one he loved. He liked to puzzle, but took no
conscious pains to amuse.
Thus he returned to his “responsibilities.” Cromlech Stabb was wondering
what that dignified word would prove to describe.