"Yes, yes. Such an old dear."

"Well, our friend Mrs. Fitz happens to be his only child, the Heiress Apparent to the throne of Illyria. What have you to say to that?"

For the moment Mrs. Arbuthnot had nothing at all to say, but she looked as though a feather would have knocked her over.

"It is a small world, isn't it, _mon enfant_?"

"It really is the oddest thing out!" Mrs. Arbuthnot's feminine organisation was quite tense. "It doesn't surprise me, and yet it is really too queer."

"Ridiculously queer that humdrum people like us should be entertaining royalties unawares."

"Not nearly so queer as that she should have married Nevil Fitzwaren.

How did she come to marry him?"

"They are twin-souls who lived in Babylon three thousand years ago."

"That is merely silly."

"My authority is her Royal Highness."

"Fancy the Crown Princess of Illyria running off with a man like Fitz!"

"There is reason to suppose that he makes her happy."

"Why, one day she will be Queen of Illyria!"

"She may be or she may not."

"Well, I can't believe it anyway! There is no proof."

"There is no proof beyond herself. And I confess that to me she carries conviction."

For an instant Mrs. Arbuthnot knitted her brows in the process of thought. She then concurred with a perplexed little sigh.

"But how dreadfully awkward it will be," she said in a kind of rapture, "for poor dear Mary Catesby!"

CHAPTER XIX

HER ROYAL HIGHNESS RECEIVES A LETTER

Pledged to secrecy, Mrs. Arbuthnot earned a meed of praise for her behaviour during a crowded and glorious epoch. If you entertain the Crown Princess of an active and potent monarchy it is reasonable to expect that things will happen.

Things did happen in some profusion during the sojourn of her Royal Highness at Dympsfield House. Owing to the course taken by events which I shall have presently to narrate, that sojourn was prolonged indefinitely. The resources of our modest establishment were taxed to the uttermost, but throughout a really trying period it is due to Mrs.

Arbuthnot to say that she was a model of tact, discretion, and natural goodness.

She would have been unworthy the name of woman--a t.i.tle not without pretensions to honour, as sociologists inform us--had she not literally burned to communicate her knowledge of the true ident.i.ty of "the circus rider from Vienna." But some compensation was culled from the fact that her co-workers in the cause of the Public Decency grew increasingly lofty in their point of view. Even the promptings of a healthy human curiosity would not permit Mrs. Catesby to eat at our board in order that she might see for herself. Mournfully that woman of an unblemished virtue shook her head over us.

"It was not kind to dear Evelyn. It was right, of course, to sympathise with the Fitzwarens in their misfortune. But the place was old, and George understood that it was covered by insurance. And fortunately all the pictures that were worth anything--and some that were not--had been saved. But to take them under one's wing as we had done was quixotic and bound to give offence. Besides, that kind of person would be quite in her element at the village inn, the Coach and Horses."

Nevertheless, Mrs. Arbuthnot bore every reproof with a stoical fort.i.tude. What it cost her "not to give away the show," to indulge in the phrase of Joseph Jocelyn De Vere, it would be idle to estimate.

But she was true to the oath she had sworn on the night of the great revelation. Not to a living soul did she yield her secret.

To Jodey himself what he was pleased to call "the royal visit" was a matter for undiluted joy. It is true that he was turned out of his bedroom, the best in the house, which commands an unrivalled view of Knollington Gorse, and had to be content with humbler quarters; but our Bayard was so perfectly _au courant_ with all that had happened, even unto the presence of the four men in plain clothes in the shrubbery, that the situation was much to his taste.

When the Princess was not herself present, it pleased him to treat the whole thing as a matter for somewhat laborious satire.

"Ain't you got a bit o' red carpet and an awning for the front steps, Mops? And why don't Odo sport his order at dinner? Can't see the use, myself, in having an order if you don't sport it for royalty. Must put your best leg first. Buck up a bit, old gal, else her Royal 'Ighness will think you haven't been used to it. Anyhow, you must tell Parkins to be d.a.m.n careful how he decants that '63."

In the presence of Mrs. Fitz, however, the demeanour of my relation by marriage was not unlike that of a linesman standing at attention on a field day. His deportment was so fearfully correct in every detail; his attire so extraordinarily nice--he discarded gay waistcoats and brilliant neckties as being hardly "the thing"--his hair was groomed so marvellously, and he was so overpoweringly polite that it was a source of wonder how the young fellow contrived to maintain the standard he had prescribed for himself.

It was a period of anxiety, yet it was not without its interest. In a very short time Mrs. Arbuthnot had divined the _raison d'etre_ of the four men in the park, but this did nothing to impair her sense of hospitality. Fitz did not favour us with much of his company except in the evening. During the day his energies were absorbed with the arrangements for the rebuilding of the Grange, and, as I gathered, with further provisions for the safety of his wife. All the same, limited as was the time at his disposal, it was our privilege to watch him sustain the domestic character.

Whatever the incongruity of their fortunes, it was clear that Fitz and his wife had a genuine devotion for one another. And in spite of their apartness and the idea they conveyed of living entirely to themselves without reference to the lives of humbler mortals, each seemed to possess a quality worthy to inspire it. In a measure I was privileged to share their confidence during the time they stayed under our roof; and it was characteristic of them both that at heart they had a rather charming and childlike frankness. Each of them revealed unexpected qualities.

I think I am ent.i.tled to say that I never shared the hostility they seemed to arouse in others. All his life long Fitz, as far as I had known him, had been condemned to play the part of the black sheep.

Partly it may have been due to his habit of refusing to go with the tide; of his declared hatred of any kind of a majority. He had always been a law unto himself, and had given a very free rein to his personality. To me he had ever stood revealed as one capable of anything; of the greatest good or of the greatest evil; and to behold him now in the domestic circle, in close affinity with the magnetic being in whom the whole of his life was centred, was to find him endowed with a charm and a fascination which had no place in the nature of the Nevil Fitzwaren that was seen by the eyes of the world.

To me there was something beautiful and also a little pathetic in the relationship which seemed to exist between these two diverse souls.

Their implicit faith in the rightness of each other, their sense of adequacy, was a very rare thing. So many of the ign.o.ble things of life, questions of material expediency, of shallow prejudice, of partial judgment, they seemed to have ruled out altogether. And this could not have been otherwise if one reflected that a veritable kingdom of this world was the price that had been paid for this true fellowship.

My previous encounters with Mrs. Fitz had been of a somewhat trying nature. But on the domestic hearth she was much less formidable. The impetuous arrogance which had proved so disconcerting to everybody was not so much in evidence. Her charm seemed to become rarefied as it grew more humane. The childlike directness of her point of view began to emerge more and more and to enhance her fascination; indeed, her way of looking at things became a perpetual delight to such sophisticated minds as ours.

Her total inability to take us seriously was quite piquant. Our England and all that was in it amused her vastly. She would compare it to an enchanted land in one of Perrault's fairy-tales. But our code of life, our manners and customs, our ideals, our mechanical contrivances and, above all, our solemnity concerning them, never failed to appeal to her sense of humour.

It was my especial pleasure to converse with her after dinner. I should not say that the art of conversation was her strong point, and it was not until she had been a week in our midst that I was able to come to anything approaching close quarters with her. But it was worth making the effort to get past the barrier that was unconsciously erected by her air of disillusion, of patient, plaintive tolerance.

There was a quaint definiteness about her ideas. Touching all questions that had real significance her thinking seemed to have been done for her generations ago. All that lay outside the life of the emotions was to her the wearisome iteration of a const.i.tutional practice, a necessary but somewhat painful part of the order of things.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about her was her humility. The pomp of kingship was to her the hollowest of all chimeras. It merely resolved itself into the guardianship of a profoundly ignorant, an undeveloped and an extremely thankless proletariat. "_Helas!_ poor souls, they don't know what is good," was a phrase she used with a maternal sigh. The divine right of kings was part and parcel of the cosmic order; a fact as pregnant and inviolable as the presence of the sun and the planets in the firmament. To be called to the state of kingship was an extremely honourable condition, "but you had always to be praying." It was also honourable and not so irksome to be an unregarded unit of the proletariat.

I am not sure, but I incline to the belief, that the fact that I had a seat in the House enabled her to support my curiosity with more tolerance than she might have done had I been without some sort of official sanction. She regarded me as a chosen servant of _le bon roi Edouard_; either my own personal grace or that of my kindred had commended itself to the guardian of the state.

"Are not," said I, "the members of the Illyrian Parliament elected by the people?"

"Yes, my father gave the people the franchise in 1890, and the n.o.bles have never forgiven him. So now the people choose their sixty deputies out of a list he draws up for their guidance; the lords of the land choose another sixty from among themselves; and then, as so often happens, if the two Chambers cannot agree, the King gives advice."

"The King of Illyria has heavy duties!"

"My father loves hard work."

"Are you troubled, ma'am, with a democratic movement in Illyria, as all the rest of Europe appears to be at the present time?"

The gesture of her Royal Highness was one of pity.

"_Helas_, poor souls!"