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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 assented 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 altitudes 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 title?"

"It will be the simplest thing out. You can always buy a title in Illyria, like you can here. The old circus man has made a fortune and purchased a title 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 Brasset, and Jodey, of course. We shall be quite a family party, and it ought to be tremendous fun."

"Won't Brasset 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 Brasset, 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 title, 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.

"Nobody 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 damned 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.

Eight o'clock is the hour at which we dine in the Crackanthorpe country. It is the established custom for regular followers of that distinguished pack to be extremely hungry at that hour. As the presentation timepiece chimed the hour from the drawing-room chimneypiece, there was a full muster of Mrs. Arbuthnot's dinner guests: the Vicar and his wife, looking rather pinched and formal, their invariable attitude towards public life, yet the Vicar wearing a somewhat worldly pair of shoes of patent leather and equally worldly mauve socks and rather short trousers; Miss Laura Glendinning, our local Diana, who looked horse and talked horse and who would doubtless have eaten horse had it been in the menu; my charming little friend, the relict of Josiah P. Perkins of Brownville, Mass.; the noble Master enveloped in a sartorial masterpiece and a frown of perplexity; his aide-de-camp, Joseph Jocelyn De Vere Vane-Anstruther enveloped ditto, but leaning up not ungracefully against a corner of the chimneypiece with his hands in his pockets, not looking at anybody, not speaking to anybody, but with a covert gaze fixed upon the drawing-room door in quest of early information in regard to Ferdinand the Twelfth.

In the middle of the salon the august Mrs. Catesby discussed the Minority Report with the Vicar of the parish and Prison Reform with the Chief Constable, whilst I, sharing the largest and most comfortable sofa with Mrs. Nevil Fitzwaren, had to answer a succession of sympathetic inquiries in regard to my arm.

"A mere scratch," everybody was assured. "Lucky it wasn't worse. Fact is, those taxis are rather dangerous."

The presentation timepiece chimed a quarter past eight. The proprietor of the Viennese circus and his faithful acolyte were yet to seek. Romantic figures as they doubtless were – at least, there was the authority of the hostess that such was their nature – the manner in which they were obstructing the serious business of life was hard to condone.

Mrs. Josiah P. Perkins came up to our sofa. She gave a demure, down-looking glance at the lady seated by my side, who was decidedly piano, which of course was as it should be, and made the plaintive confession, "I am so hungry. I wouldn't mind the hind leg off that satinwood table."

"You have full permission to have it," said I.

"Oh, no," said Mrs. Josiah P. Perkins, "it would spoil the suite. But hardly any breakfast, a sandwich at the Top Covert, in which there was hardly any hog, one cup of tea at the Vicarage, and you know what that is, and now – oh dear! – "

In these harrowing circumstances I conceived it to be my duty to find out what was toward. I yielded my place to Mrs. Josiah P. Perkins, and as she collapsed into it, I heard her say, "I suppose if you once get a cinch on circuses you make a regular pile right soon?"

But as I made to go forth in search of Ferdinand the Twelfth, lo and behold! that monarch came in with his minister. He was wearing no orders, there was nothing to enhance or to distort his personality, but it struck me that his bearing had a simple majesty beyond that of any person I had ever seen.

"Make our apologies, milady," he said in a low voice, which was yet quite audible to most in the room, since upon his entrance the conversation had been suspended automatically. "That mad Dutchman is waving his torch over the powder keg, and we had forgotten the time."

And then, with the greatest simplicity and good-nature, he started to make a tour of the room, shaking each man by the hand heartily, saying "Very pleased to meet you, sir," and bowing to each lady in turn with smiling gravity. He then gave the hostess his arm.

At the table I had Mrs. Catesby on my right hand, Mrs. Josiah P. Perkins on my left.

"What a lovely man!" said Charybdis on the left.

"I don't believe," said Scylla, "that he has any connection with a circus whatever."

"He is Mrs. Fitz's father, anyhow."

"What is his name?"

"Count Zhygny, but titles are cheap in Illyria."

"It is a noble head," said the Great Lady.

"Objective criticism is proverbially unsafe," I hazarded. "His daughter has a noble face."

"He is just bully." Charybdis was waxing enthusiastic. "Quite Bawston."

The Great Lady addressed herself in grim earnest to the serious business of life, and I am bound to say – although doubtless I am the wrong person to insist on the fact – that it was worthy of all the attention that was paid to it. We were twenty-five minutes late at the post, as Jodey had complained bitterly to his hostess, but the distinguished chef lately in the service of a nobleman had fairly excelled himself. Good-humour, nay, even cordiality, reigned all along the line.

"Are those pearls real?" said an imperious whisper from the right.

"I am not a judge of precious stones," I admitted, "although in the process of time I think I shall be."

"One can't believe they are real. If they are, they must be priceless. What a wonderful head that man has! And who, pray, is the other?"

"Herr Brouss is his name. The circus-ring is his vocation."

"I once met a distinguished foreigner, a Baron Somebody, a great politician who looked exactly like that. It was at Spa or one of those foreign watering-places. By the way, Odo, what did the other man mean by 'the mad Dutchman is waving his torch over the powder keg'? I see in the paper this morning that relations are strained between Germany and Illyria.

"It is one of those cryptic phrases to which we have not the key."

"What a delicious entrée! This is coals of fire with a vengeance. I hope you are not living beyond your means."

"Try the madeira – I see our excellent Vicar has discovered it. I am wondering, Mary, whether I could win a little support again in high places, as an out-and-out opponent of socialism in any shape or form."

"I will make no rash promises, Odo" – the Great Lady took a wary sip of the paternal vintage – "but I will speak to dear Evelyn if you wish, although you certainly don't deserve to be forgiven."

"I hope you will assure her that no one has a profounder veneration for a poor but deserving class."

In spite of the fact that Fitz and his wife remained silent and preoccupied, the progress of the feast was marked by a temperate gaiety. The hostess was on the crest of the wave. She made no attempt to veil an almost indecent sense of triumph. Precisely why she should have harboured it I cannot say, but she betrayed all the outward and visible signs of that emotion. There was a light in her eye, there was a piquancy about her discourse, there was a deferential archness in her attitude towards the high personages by whom she was surrounded, which communicated themselves to the whole table. In response to her sallies the reverberations of the royal laughter were loud and long.

"Toppin' good sort, ain't he?" said my relation by marriage in a moment of expansion to Miss Laura Glendinning.

"Who is a toppin' good sort?" said that literal Diana.

"Why, the King, of course."

"I have never met him," said Diana.

"Where, pray, did you meet him, Joseph?" was the severe inquiry of the Great Lady over the brim of her madeira.

"In the paddock at Newmarket," said the young fellow, making a brilliant recovery.

"Fathead!" said the noble Master in a whisper of indulgent languor. "You nearly blewed it then."

The royal laughter continued to reverberate.

"I suppose he began life as a clown?" said the Great Lady.

"Nearly all these circus chaps do, don't they?" said Jodey, who nearly suffered misfortune in a too strenuous desire to preserve his gravity.

"Or as a bare-back rider," said I, taking up the parable.

"One would certainly say a clown," said the Great Lady. "Dear me, what manners!"

The port wine had appeared and had been duly dispensed. At this precise moment Ferdinand the Twelfth was giving the table-cloth a peremptory tap. He rose, glass in hand.

"Ladies and gentlemen, my good friends," said he. "I haf one toast to propose. We will drink, if you please, to the health of le bon roi Edouard. God bless him!"

Upon the Chief Constable's extremely prompt initiative the company did not hesitate to follow the Circus Proprietor's lead.

"The King! God bless him!"

This incident, which the Circus Proprietor had invested with such authority that it seemed perfectly in order, nearly led to the undoing of Jodey and his noble friend. Overborne by the emotion of the moment, they indulged in a little side show of their own. The toast of le bon roi Edouard having been honoured in form the rest of the company sat down at once, but our two sportsmen remained upon their feet. Filling up their glasses, they turned towards the illustrious guest and repeated the solemn formula:

"The King. God bless him!"

"Sit down, you asses," said the Chief Constable in a truculent undertone.

Nevertheless, the proprietor of the circus bowed to them and smiled paternally.

"One shouldn't look for too much," said the Vicar, "but I think the old fellow is a bit of a sportsman."

"Not at all a bad fellow," said honest George, expansively. "Not at all a bad fellow. Not at all a bad fellow."

However, a subtle fear lay within the breast of a married man, a father of a family, and a county member, lest our excellent Vicar had spoken in excess of his knowledge. I foresaw that the ordeal by fire was coming. When the ladies left the room desperation urged me to bestow a pointed hint upon the Church.

"Perhaps, Vicar," I said, plaintively, "if you joined the ladies? Not at all a bad fellow, you know, not at all a bad fellow, but perhaps not – er – altogether – don't you know!"

"None the worse for that," said the hardest riding parson in three counties, filling up his glass with composure and with cordiality. "If you think the old buffer can appreciate a yarn, I will tell that old one of my Uncle Jackson's. It is rather a chestnut these days, but perhaps he mayn't have heard it."

The clerical effort was by no means vieux jeu. And it is only just to the Church to mention that the style of the raconteur compared very favourably with that he affected in his vocation. Ferdinand the Twelfth guffawed heartily, and replied with a couple of masterpieces that brought the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty. I am afraid there was only one cheek, however, in which the emblem in question was able to find sanctuary, and truth compels me to assert that it was neither that of the Church nor the Police.

For nearly an hour by the clock the bottle was circulated and we were royally entertained. Ferdinand had had a rich and various experience of life. Much had he seen and done; he had made and unmade history; he was of the world, he loved it and he courted it; no personality had emerged upon the European chequer-board during the past half-century of whom he could not discourse out of a full and intimate knowledge. If it pleased him, he could pull aside the curtain and disclose the showman making the puppets dance in the political theatre.

He spoke with immense gusto; his zest of life was magnificent, and somewhat strangely there was nothing cynical or ignoble about his point of view. For the best part of an hour he held the least wise of us in thrall. He had an abundance, an overplus of nature, and subtle and Jesuitical – for want of a happier word – as he doubtless was, there was something humane and great-hearted about him as a man.

He gave away the great ones of the earth, showing them in their habit as they dwelt. He made them neither less nor more than they were. Naught was set down in malice, but his anecdotes mostly had a Rabelaisian tang which sprang from a prodigality of nature. He was a great and not unbeneficent force who drained the cup of life to the lees, smacked his lips heartily, and demanded more. His philosophy seemed to be to fear God but not to scruple to use to the full all the noble and infinite gifts of your inheritance. His rule of conduct, however, was not, to measure men by their strength but by their weakness. "Every man has his blind spot," he said, apropos of Bismarck. "Find it and he is yours."

Such a crowded hour of wisdom, wit and historic revelation was an experience that even a dullard was not likely to forget. George Catesby and the Vicar alone were unacquainted with the identity of our guest, and as far as they were concerned the cat was more or less out of the bag.

When we joined the ladies we found that card-tables had been set out. Mrs. Arbuthnot and Coverdale engaged Mrs. Catesby and the King. No one watching the play could fail to be amused by the Circus Proprietor's caustic but good-humoured reflections upon the performance of his partner. The Great Lady bore it all, however, with a stoical humility. To my surprise, she cut in for a second rubber, and her demeanour made it clear to Jodey, who disdained games like "britch" and preferred to watch the royal partie, "that she smelt a rat."

"I expect the show has pretty well given itself away by now," he said in an aside to his host, "but anyhow they have been scored off properly."

The mystery of "scoring off" was still too much for my inadequate mental processes. But I gathered that there was a consensus of opinion among persons of a more vivid intellectual cast that such indeed was the case.

"We sha'n't half pull her leg, I don't think" – in the exuberance of the hour the young fellow relapsed into a semi-lyrical music-hall comedy vein – "about the old circus johnny who drank a health unto his Majesty. I only wish old Alec had been there, that's all."

"A digger, madame, a digger," said the Circus Proprietor in a tone of humorous expostulation, "when you haf not a treek!"

The Great Lady accepted the reproof with Christian meekness.

It was not until hard upon midnight that the departing guest was sped in divers chariots; the Church in the identical "one-hoss shay" of inimitable and pious memory. "So many thanks, Mrs. Arbuthnot, for a really memorable evening," said the Church, with a wave of a somewhat unclerical bowler.

Plutocracy in the little person of Mrs. Josiah P. Perkins had a Daimler of sixty horse power. She gave a lift to a less fortunate sister in the person of Miss Laura Glendinning. The Great Lady and the excellent George, "a good vintage sound but dull," as I have heard him described by a friend and neighbour, had recourse to a medium of travel of twelve horse power only, as became the representatives of our sorely impoverished land-owning class.

"Such a success, my dear!" said the Great Lady, bestowing her parting blessing. "But," in a voice of mystery, "I shall insist upon the whole thing being cleared up."