Tales of two people

“Or will you stay and lunch with me to-day? And you might even pay homage again – say to-morrow – or – or some day in the week.”

“Lunch, most certainly. That commits me to nothing. Homage, Marchesa, is quite another matter.”

“Your chivalry is turning to bargaining, Lord Lynborough.”

“It was never anything else,” he answered. “Homage is rendered in payment – that’s why one says ‘Whereas.’ ” His keen eager eyes of hazel raised once more the flood of subdued crimson in her face. “For every recognition of a right of mine, I will pay you homage according to the form prescribed for St John Baptist’s Feast.”

“Of what other rights do you ask recognition?”

“There might be the right of welcoming you at Scarsmoor to-morrow?”

She made him a little curtsey. “It is accorded – on the prescribed terms, my lord.”

“That will do for the twenty-fifth. There might be the right of escorting you home from Scarsmoor by the path called – Helena’s?”

“On the prescribed terms it is your lordship’s.”

“What then of the right to see you daily, and day by day?”

“If your leisure serves, my lord, I will endeavour to adjust mine – so long as we both remain at Fillby. But so that the homage is paid!”

“But if you go away?”

“I’m bound to tell you of my whereabouts only on St John Baptist’s Feast.”

“The right to know it on other days – would that be recognised in return for a homage, Marchesa?”

“One homage for so many letters?”

“I had sooner there were no letters – and daily homages.”

“You take too many obligations – and too lightly.”

“For every one I gain the recognition of a right.”

“The richer you grow in rights then, the harder you must work!”

“I would have so many rights accorded me as to be no better than a slave!” cried Lynborough. “Yet, if I have not one, still I have nothing.”

She spoke no word, but looked at him long and searchingly. She was not nervous now, but proud. Her look bade him weigh words; they had passed beyond the borders of merriment, beyond the bandying of challenges. Yet her eyes carried no prohibition; it was a warning only. She interposed no conventional check, no plea for time. She laid on him the responsibility for his speech; let him remember that he owed her homage.

They grew curious and restless on the lawn; the private audience lasted long, the homage took much time in paying.

“A marvellous thing has come to me,” said Lynborough, speaking slower than his wont, “and with it a great courage. I have seen my dream. This morning I came here not knowing whether I should see it. I don’t speak of the face of my dream-image only, though I could speak till next St John’s Day upon that. I speak to a soul. I think our souls have known one another longer, ay, and better than our faces.”

“Yes, I think it is so,” she said quietly. “Yet who can tell so soon?”

“There’s a great gladness upon me because my dream came true.”

“Who can tell so soon?” she asked again. “It’s strange to speak of it.”

“It may be that some day – yes, some day soon – in return for the homage of my lips on your hand, I would ask the recognition of my lips’ right on your cheek.”

She came up to him and laid her hand on his arm. “Suffer me a little while, my lord,” she said. “You’ve swept into my life like a whirlwind; you would carry me by assault as though I were a rebellious city. Am I to be won before ever I am wooed?”

“You sha’n’t lack wooing,” he said quickly. “Yet haven’t I wooed you already – as well in my quarrel as in my homage, in our strife as in the end of it?”

“I think so, yes. Yet suffer me a little still.”

“If you doubt – ” he cried.

“I don’t think I doubt. I linger.” She gave her hand into his. “It’s strange, but I cannot doubt.”

Lynborough sank again upon his knee and paid his homage. As he rose, she bent ever so slightly towards him; delicately he kissed her cheek.

“I pray you,” she whispered, “use gently what you took with that.”

“Here’s a heart to my heart, and a spirit to my spirit – and a glad venture to us both!”

“Come on to the lawn now, but tell them nothing.”

“Save that I have paid my homage, and received the recognition of my right?”

“That, if you will – and that your path is to be – henceforward – Helena’s.”

“I hope to have no need to travel far on the Feast of St John!” cried Lynborough.

They went out on the lawn. Nothing was asked, and nothing told, that day. In truth there appeared to be no need. For it seems as though Love were not always invisible, nor the twang of his bow so faint as to elude the ear. With joyous blood his glad wounds are red, and who will may tell the sufferers. Sympathy too lends insight; your fellow-sufferer knows your plight first. There were fellow-sufferers on the lawn that day – to whom, as to all good lovers, here’s Godspeed!

She went with him in the afternoon through the gardens, over the sunk fence, across the meadows, till they came to the path. On it they walked together.

“So is your right recognised, my lord,” she said.

“We will walk together on Helena’s Path,” he answered, “until it leads us – still together – to the Boundless Sea.”

MRS THISTLETON’S PRINCESS

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.