Mrs. Fitz Part 39

CHAPTER XXIV

HIS ILLYRIAN MAJESTY FERDINAND THE TWELTFH

His Majesty had not arrived, and the dinner was spoiling.

"No news of the King?" I asked, keeping well in the background, for I had no wish for Mrs. Arbuthnot to observe my condition prematurely.

"Nevil said in his telegram that he would be here about a quarter past seven, and it is now five minutes past nine," said Mrs. Arbuthnot tearfully.

"Five-and-twenty minutes to nine, _mon enfant_, according to Greenwich," said I, as rea.s.suringly as the circ.u.mstances permitted.

"Your clock is wrong by half an hour. But there has been a bad accident at Blankhampton. Would they come by Blankhampton? If they did, that would be bound to delay them."

"Oh dear!" said Mrs. Arbuthnot. "If anything has happened to the King!

And oh, Sonia dear, how late you are!" she added reproachfully. "I was getting so horribly nervous about you. And you not here to present me or anything! But now you've come it is all right. Just be a dear and have a look at the table before you go up to dress."

The Princess, however, had scarcely had time to yield to Mrs.

Arbuthnot's suggestion, and I was in the act of walking upstairs in a state of uncomfortable anxiety in regard to the operation of changing my clothes, when from the vicinity of the hall door there came the sounds of fresh arrivals. I hurried to it, to be greeted immediately by the voice of Fitz.

"Rather late," he said with that air of languor which afflicted him on great occasions. "Line blocked at Blankhampton. Devil of a smash.

Tiresome cross-country journey, but we've turned up at last."

"Safe and sound, I hope?"

"Right as rain."

As we walked together down the front steps to the open door of the car that stood at the bottom in the darkness, I was conscious that my pulse was a thought too rapid for a tacit subscriber to the theory of democracy. I held the door while an enormous figure of a man disengaged himself slowly, and not without difficulty, from the interior.

I made a somewhat lower bow than the Englishman in general permits himself. A smiling and subtle visage, at once handsome and venerable, was promptly turned upon me, and I found myself exchanging a cordial and powerful grip of the hand.

Ferdinand the Twelfth ascended the front steps in the charge of his son-in-law, while I held the door for the second occupant of the car to alight. I made an obeisance only a shade less in depth than the one I had bestowed upon the Sovereign. Baron von Schalk was small and dapper, with a face full of intelligence and not unlike that of a bird of prey. As we exchanged bows, it seemed that every line of it, and there were many, was eloquent of power.

"I hope the journey has not tired his Majesty?" I ventured to say. "It must have been very tedious."

Baron von Schalk smiled pa.s.sively, made a deep guttural noise and answered in very tolerable English, "On the contrary, most interesting.

The King never tires himself."

At the top of the steps, framed in a glow of soft light from within, were Mrs. Arbuthnot and the Princess. Standing side by side, they appeared to be vying with one another in the depth and grace of their curtseys. No sooner had the King ascended to them than he took a hand of each in his own and led them into the hall, as though they had been a pair of his small grandchildren. There was a spontaneity about the action which was charming.

Half an hour later we were a.s.sembled in the drawing-room. The King promptly offered his arm to his hostess, and led the way in the direction of her unfortunate meal. His daughter placed her hand very lightly upon the arm of the Chancellor, directing an arch look over her shoulder at me as she did so, as if she would say, "There is no help for it!"

Fitz and I, walking side by side, brought up the rear of the procession. The Man of Destiny had a very fell visage.

"What have you done to your arm?" he asked.

"Got smashed up in a taxi this afternoon."

"Where?"

"Oxford Street, I believe."

"What were you doing there?"

"The Princess had important business in town, and I went with her."

"Important business in town! She never said a word to me about it.

Was she in the accident too?"

"Yes, but luckily she didn't get a scratch. And of course this is only a slight superficial wound."

The slight superficial wound did its best to contradict me by throbbing vilely.

Ferdinand the Twelfth sat on the right of his hostess, his Chancellor on her left. It is the due, I think, of our recent and temporarily imported culinary artist, lately in the service of a n.o.bleman, to say that he had done extremely well in trying circ.u.mstances. There is no sauce like hunger, of course, but it was observed that the King ate heartily, and, although verging upon the statutory term of human life, seemed not one penny the worse for his long and trying journey.

He spoke English with an agreeable fluency. Not only did he know this country very well indeed, but we gathered that he was accustomed to find it pleasant. Seen across a dinner-table it was clear that his portraits had not in the least exaggerated his natural picturesqueness.

It was a n.o.ble, leonine head, a thing of power and virility, framed with a mane of white hair. His eyes were heavy-lidded, but deep-seeing and almost uncomfortably direct and penetrating in their gaze; yet where one might have expected calculation and cold detachment there was an impenetrable veil of kindliness which served to obscure the elemental forces which must have lurked beneath.

There were tomatoes among the _hors-d'oeuvres_, and there were tomatoes in the soup. When the Victor of Rodova made a significant departure from the custom of our land by smacking his lips and astonishing the impa.s.sive Parkins by saying, "Make my compliments to de _chef_ upon his _consomme_; I will haf more," his hostess hoisted the ensign of the rose, and her Royal Highness beamed upon her.

"There, Irene! what did I not tell you, my child?" she exclaimed triumphantly.

"Oliver has a devil of a twist upon him, evidently," murmured the son-in-law of Ferdinand the Twelfth, in an aside to his host of such deplorable ba.n.a.lity that an apology is offered for its appearance in these pages. "I wish it would choke the old swine."

"On the contrary, he seems a quite kindly and paternal old gentleman."

"Ha, you don't know him!"

I admitted that I did not and that I looked forward to our better acquaintance.

The hostess and her humble coadjutor in the things of this life felt it to be a supreme moment in the progress of the feast when the royal lips were brought to the brink of the paternal madeira which had reached us so opportunely, if so illicitly, from Doughty Bridge, Yorks. But our suspense was resolved at once. The Victor of Rodova raised his gla.s.s to his hostess with the most benignant glance in the world, and for the second time Mrs. Arbuthnot hoisted the ensign of the rose.

Certainly the royal expansion had a charm that was all its own. Being called for the first time to my present exalted plane of social intercourse, I had had no opportunity of observing anything quite like it, other than in the manners of Fitz and his wife which had proved such a scandal to our neighbourhood. But the Victor of Rodova was so spontaneous in his actions and so unstudied in his gestures, and he appeared to wear his heart on his sleeve with such a childlike facility, that to one nurtured in our insular mode of self-repression it was as good as a play to be in his company.

One thing was clear. From the first it was plain that Mrs. Arbuthnot had achieved a great personal triumph. And in the particular circ.u.mstances of the case I am constrained to append the courtier-like phrase, "nor was it to be wondered at." Speaking out of a moderately full knowledge of the subject in all its chameleon-like range of vicissitude, from grave to gay, from lively to severe, in gowns by Worth, in frocks by Paquin, in costumes by Redfern, in nondescript creations by "the woman who makes things for Mama," I had never seen the subject in question keyed up to quite this degree of allure. Mrs.

Arbuthnot was magnificent.

The King beamed upon her and she beamed upon the King. More than once he pledged her in the paternal madeira; and before the modest feast had run its course Fitz gave me a stealthy kick on the shin.

"Tell her to keep her door locked to-night," he said in one of his sinister asides.

The bluntness of the words was most uncomfortable, but there was no reason to doubt their sincerity. It was a piece of advice at which one so incorrigibly _bourgeois_ as its recipient might have taken offence.

That he did not do so should be counted to him, upon due reflection, as the expression of some remote strain of a more azure tint!

"I know the King's majesty only too well," said the son-in-law of Ferdinand the Twelfth.

When the ladies had left us, the King talked in the friendliest manner and always with that engaging simplicity that was so unstudied and so charming. He was curious to know what I had done to my arm, and when I told him he inquired minutely as to the nature of the wound, and gave me advice as to its treatment. This piece of consideration recalled the magazine article I had lately studied. Here seemed a practical ill.u.s.tration of the fact that in a literal sense he was the father of his people.

"You must show it to me to-morrow," he said. "And I will give you some ointment I always carry, made by my own chemist to my own prescription.

Schalk laughs at my chemistry, but that's because he's jealous. I will apply it for you, and in three days you will see the difference. What are you laughing at, Schalk?"