Tales of two people

by Anthony Hope

I

THE Great Ones of the Earth do not come our way much down at Southam Parva. Our Member’s wife is an “Honourable,” and most of us, in referring to her, make express mention of that rank; moreover she comes very seldom. In the main our lot lies among the undistinguished, and our table of precedence is employed in determining the dividing lines between “Esquire,” “Mr,” and plain “John Jones”—a humble, though no doubt a subtle, inquiry into the gradations of Society. So I must confess to feeling a thrill when I read Mrs Thistleton’s invitation to dinner at the Manor. Thistleton is lord of the manor—by purchase, not by inheritance—and lives in the old house, proceeding every day to town, where he has a fine practice as a solicitor (Bowes, Thistleton, & Kent) in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Mrs Thistleton and the children (there are eight, ranging from Tom, nineteen, to Molly, seven, so that the practice needs to be fine), are, however, quite country folk. Indeed, Mrs Thistleton comes of a county family—in a county situated, I must not say judiciously but perhaps luckily, at the other end of England from ours; distance prevents cavil in such matters, and, practically speaking, Mrs Thistleton can say what she pleases about her parental stock, besides exhibiting some highly respectable coat-of-armoured silver to back her discreet vaunts. Mrs Thistleton is always discreet; indeed, she is, in my opinion, a woman of considerable talent, and the way in which she dealt with the Princess—with the problem of the Princess—confirmed the idea I had of her.

The mention of the Princess brings me back to the card of invitation, though I must add, in a minor digression, that the Thistletons are the only people in Southam Parva who employ printed cards of invitation—the rest of us would not get through a hundred in a lifetime, and therefore write notes. The invitation card, then, sent to me by Mrs Thistleton was headed as follows:—“To have the honour of meeting Her Royal Highness the Princess Vera of Boravia.” Subsequent knowledge taught me that the “Royal” was an embellishment of Mrs Thistleton’s—justifiable for aught I know, since the Princess had legitimate pretensions to the throne, though her immediate line was not at this time in occupation of it—but never employed by the Princess herself. However, I think Mrs Thistleton was quite right to do the thing handsomely, and I should have gone even without the “Royal,” so there was no real deception. All of us who were invited went: the Rector and his wife, the Doctor and his wife, old Mrs Marsfold (the Major-General had, unfortunately, died the year before), Miss Dunlop (of the Elms), and Charley Miles (of the Stock Exchange).

From what I have said already it will be evident that I am no authority, yet I feel safe in declaring that never was etiquette more elaborately observed at any party—I don’t care where. One of Thistleton’s clients was old Lord Ogleferry, and at Lord Ogleferry’s he had once met a real princess (I apologise to Princess Vera for stumbling, in my insular way, into this invidious distinction, but, after all, Boravia is not a first-class Power). Everything that Lord and Lady Ogleferry had done and caused to be done for the real—the British—princess, Thistleton and Mrs Thistleton did and caused to be done for Princess Vera; uncomfortable things some of them seemed to me to be, but Thistleton, over the wine after dinner, told us that they were perfectly correct. He also threw light on the Princess’s visit. She had come to him as a client, wishing him to recover for her, not, as Charley Miles flippantly whispered to me, the throne of Boravia by force of arms, but a considerable private fortune at present impounded—or sequestrated, as Thistleton preferred to call it—by the de facto monarch of Boravia. “It’s the case of the Orleans Princes over again,” Thistleton observed, as he plied a dignified toothpick in such decent obscurity as his napkin afforded. This parallel with the Orleans Princes impressed us much—without, perhaps, illuminating all of us in an equal degree; and we felt that Charley betrayed a mercantile attitude of mind when he asked briefly—

“What’s the figure?”

“Upwards of two million francs,” answered Thistleton.

I think we all wished we had pencil and paper; the Rector scribbled on the menu—I saw him do it—and got the translation approximately accurate. Imagination was left to play with the “upwards.”

“How much would you take for it—cash?” asked sceptical Charley.

“The matter is hardly as simple as that,” said Thistleton, with a slight frown; and he added gravely: “We mustn’t stay here any longer.”

So we went upstairs, where Her Royal Highness sat in state, and we all had a word with her. She spoke just a little English, with a pretty, outlandish accent, but was not at all at home in the language. When my turn came—and it came last—I ventured to reply to her first question in French, which I daresay was a gross breach of etiquette. None the less, she was visibly relieved; indeed she smiled for the first time and chatted away for a few minutes quite merrily. Then Thistleton terminated my audience. He used precisely this expression. “I’m afraid I must terminate your audience,” he said. Against any less impressive formula I might have rebelled; because I liked the Princess.

And what was she like? Very small, very slight, about half the size of bouncing Bessie Thistleton, though Bessie was not yet seventeen, and the Princess, as I suppose, nineteen or twenty. Her face was pale, rather thin, a pretty oval in shape; her nose was a trifle turned up, she had plentiful black hair and large dark eyes. In fact, she was a pretty timid little lady, sadly frightened of us all, and most of all of Mrs Thistleton. I don’t wonder at that; I’m rather frightened of Mrs Thistleton myself.

Before I went, I tried to get some more information out of my hostess, but mystery reigned. Mrs Thistleton would not tell me how the Princess had come to put her affairs in Thistleton’s hands, who had sent her to him, or how he was supposed to be going to get two million francs out of the de facto King of Boravia. All she said was that Her Royal Highness had graciously consented to pay them a visit of a very few days.

“Very few days indeed,” she repeated impressively.

“Of course,” I nodded with a sagacious air. Probably Her Royal Highness was due at Windsor the day after to-morrow; at any rate, that was the sort of impression Mrs Thistleton gave.

“I wonder if the money’s genuine!” said Charley Miles as we walked home.

“Is she genuine herself?” I asked.

“Well, there’s a girl corresponding to her description, anyhow. I went to the club to-day and looked her up. Ought to be Queen, too, if she ’ad ’er rights. (Here he was quoting). Oh yes, she’s all correct. But I wouldn’t care to say as much for the fortune. Wonder if old Thistleton’s taken it up on commission!”

“I hope she’ll get it. I liked the little thing, didn’t you, Charley?”

He cocked his hat rather more on one side and smiled; he is a good-natured young man, and no fool in his own business. “Yes, I did,” he answered. “And what the dickens must she have thought of us?”

I couldn’t reply to that, though I entertained the private opinion that I, at least, had made a good impression.

So much for the introduction of the Princess. And now comes, of necessity, a gap in my story; for the next day I went to Switzerland on my annual holiday, and was absent from Southam Parva for two full months. Not seeing the English papers during most of that period, I was unable to learn whether Her Royal Highness Princess Vera of Boravia had proceeded from the Manor House, Southam Parva, to the Castle, Windsor, or anywhere else.