Mrs. Fitz Part 14

"Gentlemen," said he, "I ask you to drink the health of the Crown Princess of Illyria. May G.o.d defend the right! With the toast, I beg to be allowed to couple the name of our friend and neighbour, Mr. Nevil Fitzwaren."

The toast was honoured in due form.

"Thank you, gentlemen." Fitz's reply was made with touching simplicity. "G.o.d _will_ defend the right. He always does. But I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for standing by me to see that I get fair play. It's good to be born an Englishman."

"Hear, hear; quite so," said the Chief Constable.

Out of the corner of one rueful eye, however, the head of our constabulary favoured me with a glance that was at once whimsical and lugubrious. The thought was ever present in that official breast that the slightest hitch in a decidedly precarious adventure would be fraught for all concerned in it with consequences which he did not care to contemplate.

CHAPTER IX

ON THE EVE

A calm inquiry into the case rendered it inconceivable that two pillars of the Const.i.tution should commit themselves irrevocably to a scheme of action whose true sphere was the boards of a playhouse or the pages of a lurid romance. By what lapse of the reason had they permitted themselves to drift into a position so ludicrous yet so eminently dangerous? Possibly it was right for irresponsible youth; possibly it was right for men of temperament like the heroic Fitz; but for Lieutenant-Colonel John Chalmers Coverdale, C.M.G., late of His Majesty's Carabineers, and Odo Arbuthnot, Member of Parliament for the Uppingdon Division of Middleshire, it was confessedly an egregious folly.

We were both past the age when such a scheme would have appealed to our high spirits as a superior sort of "rag." Once embarked upon it, who should say whither it might lead? It was impossible to foretell the course of such an adventure. Two such devotees of law and order did well to entertain misgivings, even with the winecup in their hands.

As far as the other side of the picture was concerned, Fitz was fully ent.i.tled to regard himself as a much-injured man. It is true that in the first instance he had taken the liberty of contracting a morganatic marriage with a princess in the direct line of succession of a reigning house. But in a country like ours, where the freedom of the subject and the right of the individual to shape his own destiny form the keystone of the arch upon which the fabric of society is raised, it was impossible not to sympathise keenly with Fitz. All freeborn Englishmen could not fail to resent the intervention of an irresponsible third party, who was recklessly determined to violate a tie that had the sanction of G.o.d.

Over our cigars, when the servants had left the room, the orders for the morrow were discussed.

"I hope, Fitzwaren," said the Chief Constable, "that you fully realise the extreme gravity of your undertaking. A single error of judgment, a single slip in your mode of procedure, and we are certain to find ourselves very badly landed indeed. Personally, I hope very much that you will leave lethal weapons out of the case. If we carry them we run up against the law; and not only will they prejudice our cause but there is no saying to what they may lead."

"I should like," said I, "to identify myself with these remarks of Coverdale's. I concur entirely."

Fitz removed the cigar from his lips and leaned back in his chair. He seemed to be pondering deeply.

"I respect the opinion of both of you," he said, speaking with a good deal of deliberation after a pause that was somewhat lengthy. "You are quite right in one sense, but in the most important sense of all I am sure you are wrong. I should like everybody who is going into this business to understand clearly that it is most likely to prove extremely serious. We must take every reasonable precaution, because the moment we enter von Arlenberg's house we carry our lives in our hands. I know these Illyrians; as soon as they understand our game they will use no ceremony. Law or no law, they will shoot us like dogs if they think it is necessary. And I can a.s.sure you they will think it is necessary, unless we get them with their hands up."

"I don't like lethal weapons," said the Chief Constable.

"I don't like them either," said Fitz, "but if we are to come through with this business, we shall be compelled to carry them." Suddenly his voice sank. "The truth is, this game is so dangerous, that I don't urge anybody to take part in it. Let any man who thinks the cause is good enough follow me with a loaded revolver in his right-hand trouser pocket; and let any man who doesn't keep out of it and I shall be the last to blame him."

In the language there may not have been persuasiveness, but there was a good deal in the tone. Fitz's manner was that of a leader of others; of one who foresaw the risks he incurred; who embraced them deliberately; who having once formed his plan stuck to it whatever it might entail.

Coverdale had seen service in Zululand, the Transvaal, and in Eygpt; Bra.s.set and I had borne a humble share in the recent transactions in South Africa; yet in an unconscious way we were all susceptible to the play of a powerful will and a magnetic personality. Cynics may say it was the wine that turned the scale--the juice of the grape is the fount of many a hardy resolution--but I prefer to think it was the quality of Fitz himself. Retreat at the eleventh hour might have been construed as dishonourable, but men like Coverdale had no need to be fantastically nice upon the point of honour. It was, I think, that Fitz carried conviction. His was the inestimable gift of rising with his theme. Heaven knew! the enterprise was foolhardy, but the man himself was a good one to follow.

All the same, when we adjourned our meeting with the compact that we should a.s.semble at Middleham railway station on the morrow in time to catch the 3.30 to London, I went home in a state of depression. Were I to have been hanged at c.o.c.k-crow I could not have found my bed more unsympathetic. Most of the night I lay awake in a state of the most unworthy apprehension. The very intangibility of the business of the morrow seemed to make it a nightmare. Had it been a duel, or a definite pitting of one known force against another, it would have seemed less uncomfortable, less sinister. As it was, we did not know precisely to what we stood committed. The thing might prove merely farcical. On the contrary, it might involve battle, murder and sudden death.

A dozen times in the dismal darkness the question was put, by what chain of events had a mildly egoistical hedonist, the husband of a charming lady, the father of a merry blue-eyed daughter, with a reasonable competence and an ambition to excel at golf, come to imperil all these delectable things? Merely at the beck of a wild-living profligate who felt he had been wronged.

Stated as bluntly as this in the high court of reason the whole thing seemed absurd. There was so much to lose and so little to gain. The scheme was preposterous. Nevil Fitzwaren might certainly be the victim of an injustice, but what of Miss Lucinda and her mama? True, Coverdale was also a party to the scheme; but he was by nature adventurous, a seeker after something fresh. To be sure he imperilled his billet, but he was understood to have private means.

"Odo Arbuthnot," said the thin voice of reason at three o'clock in the morning, "you must withdraw from this incredibly foolish and reprehensible proceeding."

Howbeit, the voice of reason never sways us entirely. Accordingly I made a particularly feeble breakfast, wrote a letter to my grandmother in Bolton Street, sped the Madam, looking supremely gay and engaging, on the way to her fond parents at Doughty Bridge, Yorks, read the immortal story of "The Three Bears" to Miss Lucinda for the thousand and first time, carefully overhauled the six-chambered weapon which a professional criminal had yet to put to the test, and in a miserable frame of mind sat down to luncheon in the company of my relation by marriage.

It may be that the holy state of wedlock makes cowards of us all.

Joseph Jocelyn De Vere Vane-Anstruther was certainly not embarra.s.sed by such qualms as these. He was even more serenely magnificent than usual in a suit of grey tweeds aggressively checked and a waistcoat that was conducting a violent quarrel with a Zingari necktie; while his air of hopeful enjoyment of life as it was and as it was going to be, provoked some rather pregnant reflections upon the crime of homicide.

"O'Mulligan's wired. Mad keen. A regular nut."

The well of English undefiled grows more copious with the process of ages. By what mysterious alchemy the quality of mad keenness transforms its possessor into "a regular nut" I was too low-spirited to elucidate.

"Fitz is a game bird, ain't he?" Flamboyant youth heartily poured half a bottle of Worcestershire sauce over its cutlet. "Didn't think he had it in him. Merely shows how you can be deceived."

I groaned in spirit, but plucked up the courage to take a dismal nibble at a piece of toast.

"That chap Coverdale is a bit of a funkstick. Made himself rather an a.s.s about those firearms."

I a.s.sented feebly.

"Bet you a pony they want our photographs for the _Morning Mirror_."

I rose from the table and took a turn in the kitchen garden. When your heart is fairly in your boots, the society of your peers has its drawbacks.

At half-past two, punctual to the minute, the toot of the car was heard at the hall door. Miss Lucinda received a parting salute and an illicit box of chocolates which consoled her immensely for the temporary loss--permanent perhaps in the case of one--of both her parents.

I confess to being one of those weak mortals who on a journey is invariably accompanied by the consciousness of having left something undone or having omitted to pack some unremembered but quite indispensable necessary. Three-fourths of the way to the station I was haunted with this feeling in a more acute form than usual, and then quite suddenly, with a spasm of perverse joy, it occurred to me that I had left the burglar's foe in its secret receptacle.

"Thank G.o.d for that!" was the pious hyperbole which ascended to heaven.

At the station we were not the first to arrive on the scene, although there was a full quarter of an hour in hand. Fitz in a fur overcoat of some pretensions bore a look of collected importance which was quite in keeping with the _role_ he had to fill.

"Tickets are taken," said he, "and carriage reserved for five."

In front of the bookstall a yellow newsbill displayed the contents of a London evening paper, issued at noon. "The Attempt on the Life of the King of Illyria. Latest Details."

"Clumsy fools," said the son-in-law of Ferdinand the Twelfth, gloomily.

"They seem to have bungled the business badly, but they bungle everything in Illyria."

"His Excellency, the Amba.s.sador, would appear to be an exception to the general rule."

Fitz bestowed upon me a murderous glower.

Bra.s.set arrived full five minutes in advance of the London express.

Pink and cherubic, his recent perplexity had yielded to an omnipresent look of peace. His well-groomed air suggested that he took a simple pleasure in being alive.

The question, however, for the four conspirators a.s.sembled on the Middleham platform was, what had happened to the Chief Constable? Was it conceivable that the n.o.ble Brutus had left us in the lurch?

Remembering my own travail of the spirit, which still endured, it seemed most natural and becoming to my partial judgment, that one so wise had repented of his folly at the eleventh hour.

Howbeit, my lips were sealed upon these illicit thoughts. Fitz himself suspected no treachery. He ushered us into the reserved compartment with immense dignity, and retained the left-hand corner seat, with the back to the engine, for the missing warrior.

"Coverdale is cutting it fine," I ventured to remark.