Mrs. Fitz Part 44

"Come," he said in his tone of natural decision, "let us go and have a bath and get ready for breakfast."

While the King continued to discourse amiably with his daughter we made our escape.

In the privacy of my room over the stables we removed the cartridges from the revolver.

Fitz handed the weapon to me. "Keep it," he said, "as a memento of Ferdinand the Twelfth. I should have crossed the river if Sonia had not heard my call."

Fitz shivered; but in his haggard face I thought that reason was still enthroned.

CHAPTER XXVII

PROVIDES A LITTLE FEMININE DIVERSION

At the breakfast table, Mrs. Arbuthnot was moved to inquire of our distinguished guest whether he would care to meet some of our friends and neighbours at dinner. His _incognito_ should be preserved rigidly; and perhaps a few fresh faces would serve to lighten the tedium of his stay in our midst. The King a.s.sented to the proposal with his usual hearty good-humour.

Personally I was deeply grateful to Mrs. Arbuthnot for having had the inspiration to make it. I was prepared to welcome anything that would withdraw me from the perilous alt.i.tudes upon which I had been walking throughout the night. I might be said to yearn for anything that could re-attach me to the humbler plane of men and things, in whose familiarity lay mental security.

After breakfast, however, when I came to discuss this apparently innocent proposal with Mrs. Arbuthnot, it was clear that something lurked behind it.

"I have got a little plan, you know," said she, with a plaintive, childlike air. "They have all been so uppish with me lately that I have thought of a little plan of scoring them off properly."

"By asking them to meet royalty and giving them an excellent dinner?"

"There shall be nothing wrong with the dinner," said Mrs. Arbuthnot, "but it ought to be very amusing. I shall drive round to Mary's at once and ask her to forgive the short notice, but Sonia's father has unexpectedly turned up and, much against our will, we are having to entertain him."

"Where is the jest? The bald and painful truth is seldom amusing."

"Goose! As they are all convinced that Sonia was formerly a circus rider in Vienna, what can be more natural than that her father is the proprietor of the circus?"

"True, madam. But how will you explain away his t.i.tle?"

"It will be the simplest thing out. You can always buy a t.i.tle in Illyria, like you can here. The old circus man has made a fortune and purchased a t.i.tle accordingly."

I confessed that that had a fairly plausible sound.

"They will swallow it, see if they don't," said Mrs. Arbuthnot, giving an ever freer rein to her invention. "And the old circus man is really too funny, and if Mary Catesby and Laura Glendinning and George and the Vicar and Mrs. Vicar, and that pushing little American would like to see for themselves, we shall be very glad for them to dine here to-morrow evening. And," concluded Mrs. Arbuthnot, in a tone in which childlike conviction and a natural love of mischief were excellently blended, "just see if they don't, that's all!"

"But why, my child? I confess that I cannot see any particular charm in such an entertainment."

"They will come, if only to score us off afterwards, you goose. You don't know them as well as I do."

I confessed that I did not.

Mrs. Arbuthnot lost no time in driving round to her friends, and returned in high glee with them all in her net.

"What did I say!" she declaimed triumphantly. "I called first on Mary.

I knew, if I persuaded her, the rest would be easy. Well, you know her little way. She read me a terrible lecture about the duties of my position. As the wife of the member, my responsibilities were simply enormous. Not on any account would she sit down at the same table as Mrs. Fitz. But I drew such a fancy portrait of the old circus man and of his friend the ring-master, who was almost as funny as himself, that I got her to consent. So she and George are coming."

"Mischievous monkey!"

"Then I went on to the Vicarage. The Vicar had no engagement, but he hummed and hawed, until I told him Mary was coming, so he is coming too, and he is going to bring Lavinia. Then there will be Laura and the little American and Reggie Bra.s.set, and Jodey, of course. We shall be quite a family party, and it ought to be tremendous fun."

"Won't Bra.s.set and Jodey be rather flies in your ointment? Don't they know your guilty secret?"

"I shall tell them all about it, of course, and they will help us to carry it off. And I mean to ask Colonel Coverdale to come too. He will like to meet the King, and we must persuade him not to give us away."

I was in no mood to give free play to whatever I may have in the way of a sense of humour. But Mrs. Arbuthnot's scheme, doubtful as it was on the score of morality, had at least the merit of diverting the current of my thoughts into another channel. It certainly did something to lessen the tension.

Mrs. Arbuthnot laid her plans with considerable precaution. She had a long and extremely animated conversation over the telephone with the Chief Constable. I could almost hear the great man growl and chuckle as she expounded her wicked design. But in the end he was unable to resist her and he was in her net as well. Jodey and Bra.s.set, of course, were only too eager to lend a hand, and both agreed with her "that they all deserved to be scored off properly." Personally, the workings of the "scoring-off" process were a little too much for my enfeebled mental system, but I was informed peremptorily that I always was a dull dog.

Determined to leave nothing to chance, Mrs. Arbuthnot even went to the length of taking Fitz into her confidence.

"You know, Nevil," she said, engagingly, "how they have behaved to Sonia and what they have said about her behind her back."

"What have they said?" Fitz's indifference bordered upon the sublime.

"Why, don't you know?" Mrs. Arbuthnot transfixed the Man of Destiny with starlike orbs. "Don't you know that when Laura Glendinning found out that Sonia rides just as straight as she does and that she looks much smarter, it made her frightfully jealous?"

"Did it indeed!" grunted the Man of Destiny.

"And can you believe, Nevil,"--the starlike orbs grew ever rounder and more luminous--"she circulated the story that dear Sonia was a circus rider from Vienna!"

"Oh, really!" Fitz concealed a yawn in a rather perfunctory manner.

"And, what is more, she got everybody to believe it."

Fitz's boredom was dissembled with a smile of twelve-horse-power politeness.

"And so, to score them off," said Mrs. Arbuthnot, rising to pleasantly histrionic heights, "I have invited the ringleaders to dinner to-night to meet the circus rider's father, the proprietor of the circus, who has made a fortune out of his show and has bought himself a t.i.tle, as, of course, you can in Illyria. And Baron von Schalk is the ringmaster of his circus."

The Man of Destiny guffawed with languid inefficiency and declared that the plot was like a comic opera. In my private ear he recorded an opinion subsequently to which it would be hardly kind to give publicity.

"n.o.body but a woman would have thought of it," he said. "If it turns out to be funny, so be it, but I must say it looks like spoiling a good meal--you've got a top-hole cook, old son--and making things d.a.m.ned uncomfortable for everybody."

I adjured Fitz, who, like myself, was evidently in no mood to appreciate refined humour, to wait and see.

Lieutenant-Colonel John Chalmers Coverdale, C.M.G., late of His Majesty's Carabineers, was the first to arrive.

"Sailing rather near the wind, aren't you?" was his greeting to his hostess, who in her best gown was a ravishing example of picturesque demureness.

"I think it will go all right," said she. "Mary Catesby and George will be too killing."

Certainly, when that august matron arrived she was very _grande dame_ and honest George five feet three inches of meticulous good breeding.

They greeted Fitz and his wife with a distant reverence. Ferdinand the Twelfth and his famous minister had not yet appeared upon the scene.

Most of their day had been spent upon the much-debated Clause Three of the Illyrian Land Bill.