Phroso: A Romance
CHAPTER I
A LONG THING ENDING IN POULOS
‘Quot homines tot sententiæ;’ so many men, so many fancies. My fancy was for an island. Perhaps boyhood’s glamour hung yet round sea-girt rocks, and ‘faery lands forlorn,’ still beckoned me; perhaps I felt that London was too full, the Highlands rather fuller, the Swiss mountains most insufferably crowded of them all. Money can buy company, and it can buy retirement. The latter service I asked now of the moderate wealth with which my poor cousin Tom’s death had endowed me. Everybody was good enough to suppose that I rejoiced at Tom’s death, whereas I was particularly sorry for it, and was not consoled even by the prospect of the island. My friends understood this wish for an island as little as they appreciated my feelings about poor Tom. Beatrice was most emphatic in declaring that ‘a horrid little island’ had no charms for her, and that she would never set foot in it. This declaration was rather annoying, because I had imagined myself, spending my honeymoon with Beatrice on the island; but life is not all honeymoon, and I decided to have the island none the less. Besides I was not to be married for a year. Mrs Kennett Hipgrave had insisted on this delay in order that we might be sure that we knew our own hearts. And as I may say without unfairness that Mrs Hipgrave was to a considerable degree responsible for the engagement – she asserted the fact herself with much pride – I thought that she had a right to some voice in the date of the marriage. Moreover the postponement just gave me the time to go over and settle affairs in the island.
For I had bought it. It cost me seven thousand five hundred and fifty pounds, rather a fancy price but I could not haggle with the old lord – half to be paid to the lord’s bankers in London, and the second half to him in Neopalia, when he delivered possession to me. The Turkish Government had sanctioned the sale, and I had agreed to pay a hundred pounds yearly as tribute. This sum I was entitled, in my turn, to levy on the inhabitants.
‘In fact, my dear lord,’ said old Mason to me when I called on him in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, ‘the whole affair is settled. I congratulate you on having got just what was your whim. You are over a hundred miles from the nearest land – Rhodes, you see.’ (He laid a map before me.) ‘You are off the steamship tracks; the Austrian Lloyds to Alexandria leave you far to the northeast. You are equally remote from any submarine cable; here on the southwest, from Alexandria to Candia, is the nearest. You will have to fetch your letters.’
‘I shouldn’t think of doing such a thing,’ said I indignantly.
‘Then you’ll only get them once in three months. Neopalia is extremely rugged and picturesque. It is nine miles long and five broad. It grows cotton, wine, oil and a little corn. The people are quite unsophisticated, but very good-hearted.’
‘And,’ said I, ‘there are only three hundred and seventy of them, all told. I really think I shall do very well there.’
‘I’ve no doubt you will. By the way, treat the old gentleman kindly. He’s terribly cut up at having to sell. “My dear island,” he writes, “is second to my dead son’s honour, and to nothing else.” His son, you know, Lord Wheatley, was a bad lot, a very bad lot indeed.’
‘He left a heap of unpaid debts, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, gambling debts. He spent his time knocking about Paris and London with his cousin Constantine – by no means an improving companion, if report speaks truly. And your money is to pay the debts, you know.’
‘Poor old chap,’ said I. I sympathised with him in the loss of his island.
‘Here’s the house, you see,’ said Mason, turning to the map and dismissing the sorrows of the old lord of Neopalia. ‘About the middle of the island, nearly a thousand feet above the sea. I’m afraid it’s a tumble-down old place, and will swallow a lot of money without looking much better for the dose. To put it into repair for the reception of the future Lady Wheatley would cost – ’
‘The future Lady Wheatley says she won’t go there on any account,’ I interrupted.
‘But, my very dear lord,’ cried he, aghast, ‘if she won’t – ’
‘She won’t, and there’s an end of it, Mr Mason. Well, good day. I’m to have possession in a month?’
‘In a month to the very day – on the 7th of May.’
‘All right; I shall be there to take it.’
Escaping from the legal quarter, I made my way to my sister’s house in Cavendish Square. She had a party, and I was bound to go by brotherly duty. As luck would have it, however, I was rewarded for my virtue (and if that’s not luck in this huddle-muddle world I don’t know what is); the Turkish Ambassador dropped in, and presently James came and took me up to him. My brother-in-law, James Cardew, is always anxious that I should know the right people. The Pasha received me with great kindness.
‘You are the purchaser of Neopalia, aren’t you?’ he asked, after a little conversation. ‘The matter came before me officially.’
‘I’m much obliged,’ said I, ‘for your ready consent to the transfer.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing to us. In fact our tribute, such as it is, will be safer. Well, I’m sure I hope you’ll settle in comfortably.’
‘Oh, I shall be all right. I know the Greeks very well, you see – been there a lot, and, of course, I talk the tongue, because I spent two years hunting antiquities in the Morea and some of the islands.’
The Pasha stroked his beard, as he observed in a calm tone:
‘The last time a Stefanopoulos tried to sell Neopalia, the people killed him, and turned the purchaser – he was a Frenchman, a Baron d’Ezonville – adrift in an open boat, with nothing on but his shirt’.
‘Good heavens! Was that recently?’
‘No; two hundred years ago. But it’s a conservative part of the world, you know.’ And his Excellency smiled.
‘They were described to me as good-hearted folk,’ said I; ‘unsophisticated, of course, but good-hearted.’
‘They think that the island is theirs, you see,’ he explained, ‘and that the lord has no business to sell it. They may be good-hearted, Lord Wheatley, but they are tenacious of their rights.’
‘But they can’t have any rights,’ I expostulated.
‘None at all,’ he assented. ‘But a man is never so tenacious of his rights as when he hasn’t any. However, autres temps autres mœurs; I don’t suppose you’ll have any trouble of that kind. Certainly I hope not, my dear lord.’
‘Surely your Government will see to that?’ I suggested.
His Excellency looked at me; then, although by nature a grave man, he gave a low humorous chuckle and regarded me with visible amusement.
‘Oh, of course, you can rely on that, Lord Wheatley,’ said he.
‘That is a diplomatic assurance, your Excellency?’ I ventured to suggest, with a smile.
‘It is unofficial,’ said he, ‘but as binding as if it were official. Our Governor in that district of the empire is a very active man – yes, a decidedly active man.’
The only result of this conversation was that when I was buying my sporting guns in St James’s Street the next day I purchased a couple of pairs of revolvers at the same time. It is well to be on the safe side, and, although I attached little importance to the by-gone outrage of which the Ambassador spoke, I did not suppose that the police service would be very efficient. In fact I thought it prudent to be ready for any trouble that the old-world notions of the Neopalians might occasion. But in my heart I meant to be very popular with them. For I cherished the generous design of paying the whole tribute out of my own pocket, and of disestablishing in Neopalia what seems to be the only institution in no danger of such treatment here – the tax-gatherer. If they understood that intention of mine, they would hardly be so short short-sighted as to set me adrift in my shirt like a second Baron d’Ezonville, or so unjust as to kill poor old Stefanopoulos as they had killed his ancestor. Besides, as I comforted myself by repeating, they were a good-hearted race; unsophisticated, of course, but thoroughly good-hearted.
My cousin,