Mrs. Fitz Part 53

"There you are," cried John, with a wave of the hand. "Now, my friends, are you tempted to swim across?"

"I daresay we shall find a bridge," said Fitz, nonchalantly enough.

"They are all bound to be guarded by the enemy."

"May be," said the Man of Destiny imperturbably.

Away to the right, at the distance of a mile, was one of the smaller bridges into the city. It was a rickety, wooden structure, guarded by a gate with a turret, which had a quaintly mediaeval aspect. In front of the gate a bright c.o.ke fire was burning in a bucket, and sprawling around it in att.i.tudes which suggested varying phases of somnolence were a number of men in uniform.

A s.h.a.ggy, fierce-looking, finely-grown fellow rose to his feet and challenged us. Fitz replied promptly in his suavest and best Illyrian.

Not a word of the conversation that ensued was intelligible to me, but it was punctuated by the approving laughter of John and the guides, and was conducted on both sides with the highest good-humour.

Its conclusion at any rate was in keeping with this surmise. Fitz was seen to slip a piece of gold into a furtive palm; the pa.s.sword was whispered to him; and the gate was opened just far enough for each of us to pa.s.s through one at a time.

"If there is a more corrupt rogue than an Illyrian corporal of infantry," said John, "on the face of this fair earth, I am glad to say I have met him not."

"Evil practices breed an evil state," said the sententious Fitz. "If chaps have to whistle for their wages what can you expect?"

"Let us hope the custodians of the Castle will prove as susceptible," I observed, piously.

"Ah, there you have another sort of bird!" said Fitz.

There was a second gate on the city side of the bridge. This also was guarded by the soldiery, but the pa.s.sword given boldly got us through without a question. There were tall spikes set in a row on the top of the heavy and unwieldy gate. They were adorned with a row of human heads.

To me, I confess, these grisly mementoes brought a shudder.

"They appear to do things pleasantly at Blaenau," said Frederick.

"They can go one better than that, my son," said Fitz, "if they get the chance. I should advise each of you, in the case of emergency, to leave just one cartridge in his revolver."

To a married man, a father of a family, and a county member, with his left arm in a black silk handkerchief, who did not feel particularly secure in the saddle as he rode knee to knee across the bridge with his misguided friend the Chief Constable of Middleshire, the icy wind which saluted him from the mighty torrent swirling beneath, blew distinctly "thin." Somewhat bitterly he began to deplore that decree of fate which had bereft him of the use of a hand.

Through narrow, close-built streets, whose odours were decidedly unpleasant, we pa.s.sed unmolested until we came into the shadow of the Castle rock. In the faint light of the stars it towered a sheer and beetling pile.

Dismounting, we tied the horses to a fence. Fitz took a dark lantern from his saddle; and among a miscellaneous collection of articles with which he had the forethought to provide himself, was a coil of rope.

This it seemed was capable of adjustment into the form of a ladder; and our leader affirmed his intention of being the first man up the Castle wall. He proposed to affix this contrivance to the coping at the top in order that the others might climb up as easily and as expeditiously as possible.

There was nothing for it save to resign myself to stay with the two guides in the charge of the horses. It would have been a physical impossibility for a man bereft of the use of an arm to climb that sheer precipice.

Fitz's parting words of advice to me were characteristic.

"If," said he, "a sentry should come along, and want to know your business--I don't suppose he will, because they don't appear to have mounted a picket--knock out his brains at once, and make one of the guides put on his uniform and shoulder his gun and march up and down.

So long, old son."

The Man of Destiny was gone, perhaps for ever. As each of my comrades in arms climbed over the low fence in his wake I wished him good luck.

It seemed hardly a fighting chance that we should ever look on one another again.

They had left their cloaks behind, and these, together with my own, were thrown over the horses which had carried us so well. Tobacco is a great solace in seasons of tension, but the long-drawn suspense to which I had to submit soon became intolerable.

To a lover of the _aurea mediocritas_, a twentieth-century British paterfamilias confirmed in the comfortable security of a civil life, such a predicament was absurd. It was painful indeed to march hour after hour up and down the broken ground at the foot of the Castle rock. A pipe was in my teeth, otherwise I was signally exposed to the rigours of a long January night in Illyria. A b.l.o.o.d.y end was my perpetual contemplation. And I hardly dared to think what lay in store for my comrades, the faint hope of whose return it was my bounden duty to await.

There were moments in this season of poignant misery when I felt myself to be growing absolutely desperate. Why be ashamed to make the confession? The sensation of impotence was truly terrible. As the time pa.s.sed and not a sound was to be heard, G.o.d alone knew what was being transacted in that frowning eyrie under the cover of the night.

Like most of those who have the unlucky leaven of imagination in their clay, my instinctive optimism is often on its trial. While I marched up and down in the darkness, trying vainly to keep warm, waiting for that tardy dawn in which death lurked for us all, I would have laid long odds that the doom of the Princess was sealed already and that my comrades in arms would share it.

A man should strive in some sort to figure as a hero when he comes to the purple patches in his own history. But if a profuse fear of the immediate future in combination with a lively horror of the present are compatible with that degree, so be it. Throughout those hours of inaction I suffered the torments of the d.a.m.ned.

Again and again I strained nervously to catch a footfall, and each time I did so Fitz's sinister injunction was in my ears. I recognised its wisdom, but what a counsel for a respectable law-abiding Englishman!

Conceive the husband of Mrs. Arbuthnot, the father of Miss Lucinda, the sensitive product of a settled state of society, lying in wait to knock out the brains of a fellow creature on hardly any pretext at all!

Prudence is not without a tenderness for those who court her; at least a liberal supply of tobacco was in my pouch. In a state of sheer desperation I smoked away the intolerable hours, and even had tobacco to share with the guides who placidly awaited the dawn in the lee of the horses.

These were rugged, silent, contained men. I had not a word of their language whatever it was, and I think it was a kind of Milesian _argot_. But there was an air of torpid responsibility about them.

They were honest peasants, calm, unimaginative, faithful.

The hour of five was told from half a dozen steeples of the capital.

In less than three short hours the fate of us all would be sealed. My mind went back to Middleshire and I could have wept for vexation.

Everything was so happy and comfortable there. If Mrs. Arbuthnot did not see eye to eye with me in all things, an occasional discreet diversity of opinion merely added piquancy to double harness.

Yes, life and all that pertained to it was very dear to me. It is proper, of course, to maintain a becoming reticence about that indissoluble core of egoism that lies at the heart of us all. But during these unspeakable hours I could not dissemble it. Why had it pleased fate to project this ill-starred creature, one altogether outside the circle of my interests, one alien in birth, in race, in fortune, into the quiet backwater of my years! Was there not a wantonness in shattering such a comfortable hedonism in this cruel, meaningless, irresponsible way?

What man can be a hero to his autobiographer! By all the rules of the game I ought to have been bathed in a kind of moral limelight as I walked my miserable beat throughout that cursed Illyrian night. It should be the easiest thing in the world to present a picture of stoical disdain for Dame Fortune and her fantasies.

But the blunt truth is before me, ign.o.ble as it is. Life meant too much. The least of my thoughts should have been dedicated to that high and n.o.ble mission which had lured me from my happy home in an English county. I should have had my mind wholly concentrated on the fate of the royal lady and on that of those stout fellows who had come so far and who had endured so much that they might serve her.

Well, I will not deny that in a measure my thoughts were for them. But I did not dare to speculate on what had happened to them; their fate was too big with tragic possibilities. Yet ever uppermost within me was a sore vexation. I did not want in the least to die, and I was determined not to do so. Unhappily Fitz had not given me the pa.s.sword which in the last resort might take me across the bridge; I could not communicate with the guides; I was a stranger in a strange land.

Six o'clock was told from the steeples of the city, but there was not a sound from the Castle rock. Despair gripped me by the heart. The Princess was dead and my friends had been unable to make their way out of the fortress they had had the incredible foolhardiness to enter.

But until daylight came I must wait at my post; yea, if I could contrive it, longer than that it behoved me to remain.

Already the sleeping city was beginning to stir uneasily. Distant sounds proceeded from it; within ten paces of our horses a farmer's wagon had pa.s.sed along the road. Figures began to emerge from the darkness and to re-enter it. Doubtless they were workmen going to their toil. The icy blasts from the river congealed my blood.

Half-past six told from the steeples; housemaids in pink print dresses were lighting the fires at Dympsfield House.

I began to scourge my brain for a plan of escape in broad daylight from this accursed place, in case Fitz did not return. But even my mind was numbed, and it was under the dominion of two clear facts: I did not know a word of the Illyrian tongue, and I knew nothing of the habits and customs of the country.

The row of heads upon the city gate occupied a chamber to themselves in the halls of my imagination. In whatever direction I turned my thoughts, there was that grisly frieze before my eyes. Presently I made the discovery that I had bitten the stem of my pipe clean through.

It was now seven o'clock and I had yielded up all hope of Fitz. So tragedy after all was to be the end of these wild oscillations which had begun with broad farce. The unhappy "circus rider from Vienna" had been done to death by the people for whom she had given all. Not only had they rejected her sacrifice but they had requited it with brutal treachery. And the n.o.ble man who had loved her, and those brave fellows who had dared everything to serve her, regardless of lives they valued as highly as I did my own, had perished in her cause.

Rage and horror began to rise up within me. G.o.d in heaven, was this the end of our adventure? It was a quarter past seven; the whole city was astir.

The dawn was coming. There were a few faint streaks of grey already above the Castle rock. Numbed and helpless I strained my eyes upwards to that sinister pile. Cold in body, faint in spirit, I knew not what to do, nor which way to turn. And then, before I could realise what had come to pa.s.s, there was a surge of dark and stealthy figures, there was a hand on my shoulder and a low voice was in my ears.

"The horses! The horses!"