Phroso. Anthony Hope

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       Anthony Hope

      Phroso

      A Romance

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664561770

Table of Contents

       CHAPTER I A LONG THING ENDING IN POULOS

       CHAPTER II A CONSERVATIVE COUNTRY

       CHAPTER III THE FEVER OF NEOPALIA

       CHAPTER IV A RAID AND A RAIDER

       CHAPTER V THE COTTAGE ON THE HILL

       CHAPTER VI THE POEM OF ONE-EYED ALEXANDER

       CHAPTER VII THE SECRET OF THE STEFANOPOULOI

       CHAPTER VIII A KNIFE AT A ROPE

       CHAPTER IX HATS OFF TO ST TRYPHON!

       CHAPTER X THE JUSTICE OF THE ISLAND

       CHAPTER XI THE LAST CARD

       CHAPTER XII LAW AND ORDER

       CHAPTER XIII THE SMILES OF MOURAKI PASHA

       CHAPTER XIV A STROKE IN THE GAME

       CHAPTER XV A STRANGE ESCAPE

       CHAPTER XVI AN UNFINISHED LETTER

       CHAPTER XVII IN THE JAWS OF THE TRAP

       CHAPTER XVIII THE UNKNOWN FRIEND

       CHAPTER XIX THE ARMENIAN DOG!

       CHAPTER XX A PUBLIC PROMISE

       CHAPTER XXI A WORD OF VARIOUS MEANINGS

       CHAPTER XXII ONE MORE RUN

       CHAPTER XXIII THE ISLAND IN A CALM

CHAPTER I

       A LONG THING ENDING IN POULOS

       Table of Contents

      ‘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