Mrs. Fitz

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 bloody 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 passed and not a sound was to be heard, God 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 damned.

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, ignoble as it is. Life meant too much. The least of my thoughts should have been dedicated to that high and noble 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 password 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 passed 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 noble 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. God 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 pass, 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!"

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE CREATURES OF PERRAULT

Half paralysed as were the physical senses, there was a magic in the words. Involuntarily, scarcely knowing what I did, I helped to unloose the horses. I saw others climb into their saddles; with a little friendly help I got into mine.

In the growing light of the dawn, we started at a gentle pace towards the old and quaint and many-gabled city. Yet it was still too dark to see who precisely was of our company. We came to the bridge, and halted while Fitz gave the password at the gate. Suspicious eyes were cast upon him, but they let us through.

At the farther gate Fitz gave the password again. There was a little delay, in the course of which Fitz spoke in a jovial manner with the corporal of infantry. Finally another gold piece changed owners, and then we were allowed to pass on to the open country.

Without having to fire a shot, we had got clear of the city. As yet I knew nothing of what had happened during the hours of my suspense, but I was able to make out in the dim light that two of another sex had augmented our company. One riding by the side of Fitz had a familiar outline; the other, an unknown lady, was accommodated somewhat insecurely in front of the saddle of Joseph Jocelyn De Vere.

As we turned towards the mountain road there came the booming of a gun across the turbulent water of the Maravina.

"They are awake at last," said a gruff voice at my elbow. The Chief Constable seemed very weary and very grim.

Hard and straight we rode through the comparatively easy country to the inn at the head of the pass of Ryhgo. We had to be content with a change of horses here; there was not time to allow of anything else beyond a cup of spiced wine.

In broad daylight the pass of Ryhgo was shorn of many of its terrors. But as we rode above the lake the path was so narrow and its turns so sharp that care was still necessary. Happily the wind was now dead.

Even now I was hardly in a state to realise what had occurred. The strain upon my mind was still acute; my faculties seemed to have got out of control.

"We had wonderful luck." The voice of the Chief Constable sounded remote and meaningless. "It was a devil of a climb up that rock, and I'll lay odds that we should never have got to the top at all, if Fitz hadn't remembered a secret stairway that led right into the heart of the place. Either the burghers of Blaenau had forgotten all about it or they didn't know of its existence. But Fitz remembered it all right as soon as he happened to see the hole in the rock. When we got in, it was as black as the tomb, except for Fitz's lantern.

"It was a poisonous journey up an interminable flight of winding stone steps. It took us quite an hour to come to the end. And then we found ourselves confronted by a door of solid oak, which was three parts rotten. It took us another hour to cut through that, and Fitz's lantern went out and we had to keep striking matches. I shall never forget that hour in the dark until my dying day. And when we got through that infernal door at last, where do you suppose we found ourselves?"

"I cannot say," I said, dreamily, with a vague eye upon the black waters of the lake below.

"Behind the tapestry of the King's bedroom. A marvellous piece of luck! It is a strange providence that watches over some things. And there we waited in the darkness, with our hands on our weapons, while Fitz made his way to the Princess, and he brought her and her woman to us, and we got clear away without disturbing a soul."

"A wonderful and an incredible story!"

I began to have a fear that I might pitch from my horse. But we got through the fell pass of Ryhgo at last, and by three o'clock that afternoon were in the presence of food and shelter and security in the hostelry a mile beyond the frontier. Thereupon a mute prayer passed up to heaven from the still shuddering soul of a married man, a father of a family, and a county member.

The unknown lady whom Jodey had borne so gallantly upon his saddle through the perilous mountain passes was none other than the Countess Etta von Zweidelheim, that lover of Schubert, that charming interpreter of Schumann who had made herself responsible for the statement that our memorable evening at the Embassy was "petter than Offenbach."

Even when she was lifted cold, hungry and desperately fatigued from the saddle of her cavalier, she was inclined to laugh; and we were able to raise among us a sort of hollow echo of her mirth when we observed the solemnity with which my relation by marriage escorted her to the stove and chafed her bloodless hands to restore the circulation.

The somewhat formal, perhaps slightly embarrassed nature of our laughter did not fail, even in these circumstances, of its customary appeal to her Royal Highness. Her own, however, unloosed a thousand memories which I shall carry to the grave, and perhaps beyond.

"Aha, les Anglais!" There was a maternal indulgence in the gaunt eyes. "Très bons enfants!" Her voice was low, canorous, quaintly caressing. "Très bons enfants!"

Suddenly she turned and gave both her hands to me. Lightly my lips touched the frozen fingers. For an instant my eyes were upon the strange pallor of her face; and then they met in a kind of challenge the sunken brilliancy which gave it life.

"The creatures of Perrault, ma'am," I said, rather hysterically.

THE END

notes

1

In the opinion of Mrs. Josiah P. Perkins this passage fully guarantees the author's total ignorance of a very great proposition.