Mrs. Fitz Part 42

"Why, Schalk," he said, "I believe you are still harping on Clause Three."

"I have never reverted, sir, from my original view," said the Chancellor, "that under Clause Three the peasantry is getting far more than is good for it. I have always felt, sir, as you are aware, that this is a concession to the pestilential agrarian agitator, and I feel sure the First Chamber will proclaim this opinion also."

"Well, well, Schalk," said the King cheerfully, "is it not the function of the First Chamber to disagree with the Second, and what is the Little Father for except to soothe their quarrels by flattering both and agreeing with neither?"

"Your Majesty is pleased to speak in riddles," said the Chancellor, with gravity.

"What a cardinal you would have made, Schalk!" said his master. "But if you have really made up your mind about Clause Three, we must look at it again. I agree with you that it is not good for growing children to eat all the cake. We must keep a little for their elders, because they like cake too, it appears."

"Everyone is fond of cake," said the Chancellor sententiously, "but there is never quite enough to go round, unfortunately."

"That is a happy phrase of Schalk's," said the King, making the conversation general with his amused air; "'the pestilential agrarian agitator.' Have you that kind of animal in England?"

"We are infested with him, sir," said the member for the Uppingdon Division of Middles.h.i.+re, the owner of a modest thousand or so of acres.

"The people for the land, and the land for the people! The country reeks of it."

"It is the same everywhere," said the King. "A great world movement is upon us. The wise can detect the voice of the future in the cry of the people, but there are some who stuff wool in their ears, eh, Schalk?"

Ferdinand the Twelfth a.s.sumed a port of indulgent sagacity. This half-serious, half-bantering fragment of his discourse, and half a dozen in a similar tenor to which it was my privilege to listen, seemed to establish one fact clearly. It was that the King was not the slave of his ministers. He was a man with a keen outlook upon his time, deliberately unprogressive, not in response to the reactionary forces by which he was surrounded, but because he held that it was not good for the world to go too fast.

His article of faith was simple enough, and in his conduct he did not hesitate to embody it. He conceived it to be the highest good for every people to have a king; a wise, patient and beneficent law-giver to correct the excesses of faction; one to stand at the helm to steer the s.h.i.+p of state through troubled waters.

Whether his conception of the monarchical condition was right or wrong, he was able to enforce it with all the weight of his personality. He believed profoundly in the divine right. In the a.s.surance of his own infallibility he seemed to admit no limit to his own freedom of action.

He believed that the future of his country was in his hands. It was in order to conserve it that he had come to England in this singular and unexpected manner. Having chosen a Royal Consort for his only daughter, she whose act of revolt was but a manifestation of sovereignty carried to a higher power, he was prepared come what may to enforce his will.

All through this little history I have tried to show how comedy strove with tragedy as the play was unfolded. The spectators were never quite sure which way the cat would jump. Infinite opportunity for laughter was provided, but underneath this merriment lay that which was too deep for tears. Viewed upon the surface, the precipitation into our midst of such an elemental figure as Ferdinand the Twelfth was food for an inextinguishable jest, but the reverse of the medal must not be overlooked.

Every hour the King spent under our roof was a slow-drawn torture for Fitz and his wife. Holding the romantic belief that they were twin-souls whom destiny had linked irrevocably together, they were everything to one another. But running counter to this faith were those incalculable hereditary forces which the King with incomparable power and address was marshalling against it.

Now was the time for the Princess to yield. In his own person the King had come to demand of her that once and for all she should take up the burden of her heritage. If now she declined to heed, the days of the Monarchy were numbered.

It was only too clear to us onlookers that a terrible contest was being waged. In two or three brief days the Princess seemed worn to a shadow; the look of wildness was again in her eyes: her whole bearing confessed an overwhelming mental stress.

Fitz also suffered greatly. And his travail was not rendered less by the fact that Ferdinand did not scruple to make a personal appeal.

About the third night of his ordeal, Fitz accompanied me to my quarters over the stables.

"Arbuthnot," he said, sinking into a chair, "I have been thinking this thing out as well as I can with the help of Ferdinand, and he has made me see that my rights in the matter are not quite what I thought they were. I do not complain. He has talked to me as a father might to a son, and he has brought me to see that our position in the sight of G.o.d may not be quite what we judged it to be."

I was hardly prepared for such a speech on the lips of Fitz. That it should fall from them so simply gave me an enlarged idea of the forces that were being brought to bear upon him.

CHAPTER XXVI

A WALK IN THE GARDEN

In the last resort the issue lay with Sonia. Her husband had the wisdom to recognise that; although his own happiness was at stake, the matter was beyond the restricted sphere of the personal equation.

In the crisis of his fate it has always seemed to me that Fitz displayed the inherent n.o.bility of his character. Once the King, with immense force and cogency, had revealed the situation in its true aspect, his son-in-law, without abating a single claim to his wife's consideration, yet refrained from unduly exercising the prerogative conferred upon him by their spiritual affinity.

It was wise and right that Fitz should detach himself as far as possible from the conflict that was being waged between father and daughter. But, although he did what lay in his power to simplify the issue, he could not banish the image of himself from his wife's heart.

He furnished the motive power of her existence. Emotion held the master-key to her nature. In any conflict between love and duty, love could hardly fail to win.

Fitz suffered intensely as the struggle went on. He even threw out a hint to me that he might be tempted to take a certain step to help his wife to a possible solution of the problem.

"The longer this goes on," he said to me in the small hours of the morning, "the more clearly I realise that Sonia's place is with her own people. I have been blind, and I have been mad, and I owe it to Ferdinand that I have been able to see myself in my true relation to the issue in which fate has involved us. It is six years since I first saw Sonia on the terrace of the Castle at Blaenau. I was travelling about the world trying to find ease for my soul. I knew that she was unhappy, and she knew that I was, but we were young and not afraid. We met continually, for I had the _entree_ to the Castle as the grandson of the Elector of Gracow, whose daughter married my grandfather, George Fitzwaren of tragic memory.

"We used to sit out on the Castle terrace, Sonia and I, night after night, watching the stars in their courses, while her father dragooned his parliament and hoodwinked his people. She was lonely, outcast and unloved; there was none to whom she could speak her thoughts; she was oppressed with the sense of her destiny.

"She said that when she first met me she wondered where she had seen me before. She said that my presence haunted her like a half-remembered vision, until it began to merge itself into her dreams of a former existence and a happier state. And as she said this, her voice grew strangely familiar. For me it unlocked the doors of memory. It was like the faint, far-off music you can hear sometimes, the music of the wind in winter sweeping across infinite, illimitable s.p.a.ce.

"She allowed me to kiss her, and we knew then we held the key to the riddle of existence. We were twin-souls made one again, and together we would go through all time and all eternity.

"But I think we are beginning now to realise that the sense of oneness is alien to the human state, and that the hour is at hand when we must separate and go out again into the night of ages alone."

In a condition of desolation the unhappy man rocked his meagre body to and fro as thus he spoke.

"If it will really help her," he said, "I think I shall put an end to my present life. At least, I shall ask Ferdinand to do it, for I doubt whether any man in the true enjoyment of his reason has really the power to do it for himself. And yet, perhaps one ought not to say that. So much can be done by prayer."

"Surely it is contrary to the will of G.o.d?" I said with a kind of horror.

"It is, undoubtedly," said Fitz, "as regards humanity at large. But it sometimes happens, you know, that one among us plays the game up so high that he gets a special decree. I almost think, Arbuthnot, that I have heard the Voice--and if I have, my unhappy Sonia will be able to go back to her people for a term, and I shall ask you, as my oldest friend, a man whom my instincts tell me to trust, to accept the charge of my little daughter."

To one poised delicately upon the plane of reason such a speech could not fail to be shocking. But it was so sincere, so reasoned, the holder of these views was so entirely the captain of his soul, that his words, as he uttered them, seemed to derive a kind of sanction which as I commit them to paper they do not appear to possess.

The counsel of one man to another does not amount to much in those cases where the subject-matter of their discussion has been already referred to the High Court. But I felt that I should be unfaithful to the elements that formed my own nature, acutely conscious as I was of their imperfect development, if I did not seek to give them some sort of an expression at such a moment as this.

"Fitz," I said, "I can claim no right to address you, except as a younger brother. You belong to a higher order of things; your life is more developed than mine, but I ask you in the name of G.o.d to refrain from the step you contemplate, unless you are absolutely convinced, beyond any possibility of error, that there is no other way out."

The unhappy man made no reply. His face had begun to seem unrecognisable.

I rose involuntarily from the chair in which I sat.

"Let us walk in the garden," I said.

The suggestion appeared to shape itself on my lips, regardless of the will's volition. It was, perhaps, a recovered fragment of man's heritage floating downwards from the past.

I opened the door and we went downstairs into the garden. It was the middle of the night; what there was of the moon was almost wholly obscured; the air was mild with the purity of recent rain. Up and down the wet lawns we walked, bareheaded and in our slippered feet.

Suddenly lights flashed upon us out of the shrubbery.

"It is all right," I called. "Do not disturb us. Go into another part of the grounds."

The voice seemed unlike my own, but the watchers obeyed it.

Nature exhorted us as we walked in the garden. Her purity, her calm, the incommunicable magic of her s.p.a.ciousness, the thrall of her splendour entered our veins. We were her children, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone. The mighty Mother spoke to us.