A MAN OF MARK
BY
ANTHONY HOPE
AUTHOR OF "THE PRISONER OF ZENDA," "THE INDISCRETION OF THE DUCHESS,"
ETC.
1895
[Illustration: "_Stop!" I cried; "I shoot the first man who opens the
door_".--P 121]
"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds,"
--FRANCIS BACON.
CHAPTER I.
THE MOVEMENT AND THE MAN.
In the year 1884 the Republic of Aureataland was certainly not in a
flourishing condition. Although most happily situated (it lies on
the coast of South America, rather to the north--I mustn't be more
definite), and gifted with an extensive territory, nearly as big as
Yorkshire, it had yet failed to make that material progress which had
been hoped by its founders. It is true that the state was still in its
infancy, being an offshoot from another and larger realm, and having
obtained the boon of freedom and self-government only as recently as
1871, after a series of political convulsions of a violent character,
which may be studied with advantage in the well-known history of "The
Making of Aureataland," by a learned professor of the Jeremiah P.
Jecks University in the United States of America. This profound
historian is, beyond all question, accurate in attributing the chief
share in the national movement to the energy and ability of the
first President of Aureataland, his Excellency, President Marcus
W. Whittingham, a native of Virginia. Having enjoyed a personal
friendship (not, unhappily, extended to public affairs) with that
talented man, as will subsequently appear, I have great pleasure
in publicly indorsing the professor's eulogium. Not only did the
President bring Aureataland into being, but he molded her whole
constitution. "It was his genius" (as the professor observes with
propriety) "which was fired with the idea of creating a truly modern
state, instinct with the progressive spirit of the Anglo-Saxon race.
It was his genius which cast aside the worn-out traditions of European
dominion, and taught his fellow-citizens that they were, if not all by
birth, yet one and all by adoption, the sons of freedom." Any mistakes
in the execution of this fine conception must be set down to the fact
that the President's great powers were rather the happy gift of nature
than the result of culture. To this truth he was himself in no way
blind, and he was accustomed to attribute his want of a liberal
education to the social ruin brought upon his family by the American
Civil War, and to the dislocation thereby produced in his studies. As
the President was, when I had the honor of making his acquaintance
in the year 1880, fifty years old if he was a day, this explanation
hardly agrees with dates, unless it is to be supposed that the
President was still pursuing his education when the war began, being
then of the age of thirty-five, or thereabouts.
Starting under the auspices of such a gifted leader, and imbued with
so noble a zeal for progress, Aureataland was, at the beginning of her
history as a nation, the object of many fond and proud hopes. But in
spite of the blaze of glory in which her sun had risen (to be seen
duly reflected in the professor's work), her prosperity, as I have
said, was not maintained. The country was well suited for agriculture
and grazing, but the population--a very queer mixture of races--was
indolent, and more given to keeping holidays and festivals than
to honest labor. Most of them were unintelligent; those who were
intelligent made their living out of those who weren't, a method of
subsistence satisfactory to the individual, but adding little to the
aggregate of national wealth. Only two classes made fortunes of any
size, Government officials and bar-keepers, and even in their case the
wealth was not great, looked at by an English or American standard.
Production was slack, invention at a standstill, and taxation heavy. I
suppose the President's talents were more adapted to founding a
state in the shock and turmoil of war, than to the dull details of
administration; and although he was nominally assisted by a cabinet of
three ministers and an assembly comprising twenty-five members, it
was on his shoulders that the real work of government fell. On him,
therefore, the moral responsibility must also rest--a burden the
President bore with a cheerfulness and equanimity almost amounting to
unconsciousness.
I first set foot in Aureataland in March, 1880, when I was landed
on the beach by a boat from the steamer, at the capital town of
Whittingham. I was a young man, entering on my twenty-sixth year, and
full of pride at finding myself at so early an age sent out to fill
the responsible position of manager at our Aureataland branch. The
directors of the bank were then pursuing what may without unfairness
be called an adventurous policy, and, in response to the urgent
entreaties and glowing exhortations of the President, they had decided
on establishing a branch at Whittingham. I commanded a certain amount
of interest on the board, inasmuch as the chairman owed my father a
sum of money, too small to mention but too large to pay, and when, led
by the youthful itch for novelty, I applied for the post I succeeded
in obtaining my wish, at a salary of a hundred dollars a month. I
am sorry to say that in the course of a later business dealing the
balance of obligation shifted from the chairman to my father, an
unhappy event which deprived me of my hold on the company and
seriously influenced my conduct in later days. When I arrived in
Aureataland the bank had been open some six months, under the guidance
of Mr. Thomas Jones, a steady going old clerk, who was in future to
act as chief (and indeed only) cashier under my orders.
I found Whittingham a pleasant little city of about five thousand
inhabitants, picturesquely situated on a fine bay, at the spot where
the river Marcus debouched into the ocean. The town was largely
composed of Government buildings and hotels, but there was a street
of shops of no mean order, and a handsome square, called the "Piazza
1871," embellished with an equestrian statue of the President. Round
about this national monument were a large number of seats, and, hard
by, a _café_ and band stand. Here, I soon found, was the center of
life in the afternoons and evenings. Going along a fine avenue of
trees for half a mile or so, you came to the "Golden House," the
President's official residence, an imposing villa of white stone with
a gilt statue of Aureataland, a female figure sitting on a plowshare,
and holding a sword in the right hand, and a cornucopia in the left.
By her feet lay what was apparently a badly planed cannon ball; this,
I learned, was a nugget, and from its presence and the name of the
palace, I gathered that the president had once hoped to base the
prosperity of his young republic on the solid foundation of mineral
wealth. This hope had been long abandoned.
I have always hated hotels, so I lost no time in looking round for
lodgings suitable to my means, and was fortunate enough to obtain a
couple of rooms in the house occupied by a Catholic priest, Father
Jacques Bonchrétien. He was a very good fellow, and, though we did
not become intimate, I could always rely on his courtesy and friendly
services. Here I lived in great comfort at an expense of fifty dollars
a month, and I soon found that my spare fifty made me a well-to-do man
in Whittingham. Accordingly I had the _entrée_ of all the best houses,
including the Golden House, and a very pleasant little society we had;
occasional dances, frequent dinners, and plenty of lawn tennis and
billiards prevented me feeling the tedium I had somewhat feared, and
the young ladies of Whittingham did their best to solace my exile. As
for business, I found the bank doing a small business, but a tolerably
satisfactory one, and, if we made some bad debts, we got high interest
on the good ones, so that, one way or another, I managed to send home
pretty satisfactory reports, and time passed on quietly enough in
spite of certain manifestations of discontent among the population.
These disturbing phenomena were first brought prominently to my notice
at the time when I became involved in the fortunes of the Aureataland
national debt, and as all my story turns on this incident, it perhaps
is a fit subject for a new chapter.
