Mrs. Fitz

CHAPTER III

THE CASE FOR THE PROSECUTION

"I know, Mrs. Catesby, I'm not much of a chap," said Brasset, "but what's a feller to do? I did drop a hint to Fitz, you know."

"Fitz!!" The art of the littérateur can only render a scorn so sublime by two marks of exclamation.

"What did Fitz say?" I ventured to inquire.

"Scowled like blazes," said Brasset, miserably. "Thought the cross-grained, three-cornered devil would eat me. Beg pardon, Mrs. Catesby."

The noble Master subsided into his glass of beer in the most lamentably ineffectual manner.

I cleared my voice in the consciousness that I had an uncle a judge.

"Brasset," said I, "will you kindly inform the court what are the specific grounds of complaint against this much-maligned and unfortunate – er – female?"

"Don't make yourself ridiculous, Odo!"

"Odo, you know perfectly well!"

It was a dead heat between Mrs. Arbuthnot and the Great Lady.

"Order, order," said I, sternly. "This scene belongs to Brasset. Now, Brasset, answer the question, and then perhaps something may be done."

It was not to be, however. The nephew of my uncle failed lamentably to exact obedience to the chair.

"My dear Odo," said Mary Catesby, in what I can only describe as her Albert Hall manner, with her voice going right up to the top like a flag going up a pole, "do you mean to tell me– ?"

"That you don't know how Mrs. Fitz has been carrying on!" the Madam chipped in with really wonderful cleverness.

"I don't, upon oath," said I, solemnly. "You appear to forget that I have been giving my time to the nation during this abominable autumn session."

"So he has, poor dear," said the partner of my joys.

"Like a good citizen," said Mary Catesby, most august of Primrose Dames.

"Thank you, Mary, I deserve it. But am I to understand that Mrs. Fitz has flung her cap over the mill, or that she has taken to riding astride, or is it that she continues to affect that scarlet coat which last season hastened the end of the Dowager?"

"No, Arbuthnot." It was the voice of Brasset, vibrating with such deep emotion that it can only be compared to the Marche Funèbre performed upon a cathedral organ. "But it was only by God's mercy that last Tuesday morning she didn't override Challenger."

"Allah is great," said I.

"Upon my solemn word of honour," said the noble Master, speaking from the depths, "she was within two inches of the old gal's stern."

"Parkins," said a voice from the breakfast table, "bring another glass of beer for his lordship."

To be perfectly frank, liquid sustenance was no longer a vital necessity to the noble Master. He was already rosy with indignation at the sudden memory of his wrongs. Only one thing can induce Brasset to display even a normal amount of spirit. That is the welfare of the sacred charges over which he presides for the public weal. He will suffer you to punch his head, to tread on his toe, or to call him names, and as likely as not he will apologise sweetly for any inconvenience you may have incurred in the process. But if you belittle the Crackanthorpe Hounds or in any way endanger the humblest member of the Fitzwilliam strain, woe unto you. You transform Brasset into a veritable man of blood and iron. He is invested with pathos and dignity. The lightnings of heaven flash from beneath his long-lashed orbs; and from his somewhat narrow chest there is bodied forth a far richer vocabulary than the general inefficiency of his appearance can possibly warrant hi any conceivable circumstances.

Mere feminine clamour was silenced by Brasset transformed. His blue eyes glowed, his cheeks grew rosier, each particular hair of his perfectly charming little blond moustache – trimmed by Truefitt once a fortnight – stood up on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine. In lieu of pink abasement was tawny denunciation.

"I'll admit, Arbuthnot," said the Man of Blood and Iron, "I looked at the woman as no man ought to look at a lady."

"Didn't you say 'damn,' Lord Brasset?" piped a demure seeker after knowledge.

"I may have done, Mrs. Arbuthnot, I admit I may have done."

"I think that ought to go down on the depositions," said I, with an approximation to the manner of my uncle, the judge, that was very tolerable for an amateur.

"I honour you for it, Lord Brasset. Don't you, Mary?"

"Endeavour not to embarrass the witness," said I. "Go on, Brasset."

"Brasset, here's your beer," said Jodey, rising from the table and personally handing the Burton brew with vast solemnity.

"I may have damned her eyes," proceeded the witness, "or I mayn't have done. You see, she was within two inches of the old gal, and I may have lost my head for a bit. I'll admit that no man ought to damn the eyes of a lady. Mind, I don't say I did. And yet I don't say I didn't. It all happened before you could say 'knife,' and I'll admit I was rattled."

"The witness admits he was rattled," said I.

"So would you have been, old son," the witness continued magniloquently. "Within two inches, upon my oath."

"Were there reprisals on the part of the lady whose eyes you had damned in a moment of mental duress?"

"Rather. She damned mine in Dutch."

Sensation.

"How did you know it was Dutch, Lord Brasset?" piped a seeker of knowledge.

"By the behaviour of the hounds, Mrs. Arbuthnot."

"How did they behave?"

"The beggars bolted."

Sensation.

"My aunt!" said the occupant of the breakfast table with solemn irrelevance.

"So would you," said the noble Master. "I never heard anything like it. In my opinion there is no language like Dutch when it comes to cursing. And then, before I could blink, up went her hand, and she gave me one over the head with her crop."

Sensation.

"Upon my solemn word of honour. I don't mind showing the mark to anybody."

"Where is it, Lord Brasset?"

Mrs. Arbuthnot rose from her chair in the ecstatic pursuit of first-hand information. Her eyes were wide and glowing like those of her small daughter, Miss Lucinda, when she hears the story of "The Three Bears."

"Show me the scar, Reggie," said a Minerva-like voice.

"Let's see it, Brasset," said the occupant of the breakfast table, kicking over a piece of Chippendale of the best period and incidentally breaking the back of it.

The somewhat melodramatic investigations of a thick layer of Rowland's Macassar oil and a thin layer of fair hair disclosed an unmistakable weal immediately above the left temple of the noble martyr in the cause of public duty.

"If it don't beat cockfighting!" said Jodey in a tone of undisguised admiration.

"If it hadn't been for the rim of my cap," said the noble martyr in response to the public enthusiasm, "it must have laid my head clean open."

"In my opinion," said Mary Catesby, speaking ex cathedra, "that woman is a perfect devil. Reggie, if you only show firmness you can count upon support. They may stand that sort of thing in a Continental circus, but we don't stand it in the Crackanthorpe Hunt."

"Firmness, Brasset," said I, anxious, like all the world, to echo the oracle.

The little blond moustache was subjected to inhuman treatment.

"It's all very well, you know, but what's the use of being firm with a person who is just as firm as yourself?"

The Great Lady snorted.

"For three years, Reggie, you have filled a difficult office passably well. Don't let a little thing like this be your undoing."

"All very well, Mrs. Catesby, but I can't hit her over the head, can I?"

"No, but what about Fitz?" said a voice from the breakfast table.

"Ye-es, I hadn't thought of that."

"And I shouldn't think of it if I were you," said I, cordially. "Fitz with all his errors is a heftier chap than you are, my son."

Brasset's jaw dropped doubtfully – it is quite a good jaw, by the way.

"Practise the left a bit, Brasset," was the advice of the breakfast table. "I know a chap in Jermyn Street who has had lessons from Burns. We might trot up and see him after lunch. Bring a Bradshaw, Parkins. And I think we had better send a wire."

"I wasn't so bad with my left when I was up at Trinity," said Brasset.

Mrs. Arbuthnot shuddered audibly. She has long been an out-and-out admirer of the noble Master's nose. Certainly its contour has great elegance and refinement.

"Brasset," said I, "let me urge you not to listen to evil communications. If you were Burns himself you would do well to play very lightly with Fitz. He was my fag at school, and although sometimes there was occasion to visit him with an ash plant or a toasting fork in the manner prescribed by the house regulations at that ancient seat of learning, I shouldn't advise you or anybody else to undertake a scheme of personal chastisement."

"Certainly not, Reggie," said Mary Catesby, in response to Mrs. Arbuthnot's imploring gaze. "Odo is perfectly right. Besides, you must behave like a gentleman. It is the woman with whom you must deal."

"Well, I can't hit her, can I?" said Brasset, plaintively.

"If a cove's wife hit me over the head with a crop," said the voice of youth, "I should want to hit the cove that had the wife that hit me, and so would Odo. I see there's a train at two-fifteen gets to town at five."

Brasset's eyes are as softly, translucently blue as those of Miss Lucinda, but in them was the light of battle. He no longer tugged at his upper lip, but stroked it gently. To those conversant with these mysteries this portent was sinister.

"Is Genée on at the Empire?" said he.

"Parkins knows," said Jodey.

Parkins did know.

"Yes, my lord," said that peerless factotum, "she is."

In parenthesis, I ought to mention that Parkins is the pièce de resistance of our modest establishment. Not only is he highly accomplished in all the polite arts practised by man, but also he is a walking compendium of exact information.

"How's this?" said Jodey, proceeding to read aloud the telegram he had composed with studious care. "Dine self and pal Romano's 7.30. Empire afterwards. Book three stalls in centre."

"Wouldn't the side be better?" said Brasset. "Then you are out of the draught."

Before this important correction could be made Mary Catesby lifted up her voice in all its natural majesty.

"Reginald Philip Horatio," said the most august of her sex, "as one who dressed dolls and composed hymns with your poor dear mother before she made her imprudent marriage, I forbid you absolutely to fight with such a man as Nevil Fitzwaren. It is not seemly, it is not Christian, and Nevil Fitzwaren is a far more powerful man than yourself."

"Science will beat brute force at any hour of the day or night," was the opinion of the breakfast table.

Mrs. Catesby fixed the breakfast table with her invincible north eye.

"Joseph, pray hold your tongue. This is very wrong advice you are giving to a man who is rather older and quite as foolish as yourself."

The Bayard of the breakfast table rebutted the indictment.

"The advice is sound enough," said he. "My pal in Jermyn Street has won no end of pots as a middle-weight, and he'll soon have a go at the heavies now he's taken to supping at the Savoy. He'll put Brasset all right. He's as clever as daylight, a pupil of Burns. I tell you what, Mrs. C., if Brasset leads off with a left and a right and follows up with a half-arm hook on the point, in my opinion he'll have a walk over."

"Reggie, I forbid you absolutely," said the early collaborator with the noble Master's mother. "It is so uncivilised; besides, if Nevil Fitzwaren happened to be the first to lead off with a half-arm hook on the point, we should probably require a new Master. And that would be so awkward. It was always a maxim of my dear father's that foxes were the only things that profited by a change of mastership in the middle of December."

"Your dear father was right, Mary," said I, gravely.

"Dear father was infallible. But seriously, Reggie, if anything happened to you we should really have nobody to take the hounds now that for some obscure reason they have made Odo a member of Parliament."

"If a cove's wife hit me," came the refrain from the breakfast table in a kind of drone, "I should want to hit the cove that had the wife that hit me. See that this wire is sent, Parkins, and tell Kelly that I am running up to town by the 2.15 and shall stay the night."

"Jodey, don't be a fool," said I. "Brasset, I want to say this. I hope you are listening, Mary, and you too, Irene. Where Fitz and his wife are concerned, we have all got to play lightly."

I summoned all the earnestness of which I am capable. Even Mary Catesby was impressed by such an air of conviction.

"I fail to see," said she, "why we should be so especially considerate of the feelings of the Fitzwarens, when they are the last to consider the feelings of others."

"You can take it from me, Mary, that Fitz and his wife are not to be judged altogether by ordinary standards. They are extraordinary people."

"Tell me what you mean by the term extraordinary?" said my inquisitorial spouse.

"Does it really require explanation, mon enfant?"

"It means," said the plain-spoken Mary, "that Nevil Fitzwaren is an extraordinarily reckless and dissolute type of fellow, and that Mrs. Nevil is an extraordinarily unpleasant type of woman."

I am the first to admit that that ineffectual thing, the mere human male, is not of the calibre openly to dissent from a considered judgment of the Great Lady. But to the amazement of men and doubtless of gods, for once in a way her opinion was publicly challenged.

You could have heard a pin drop in the room when the occupant of the breakfast table took up the gage.

"Fitz is a bad hat." Joseph Jocelyn De Vere removed the pipe from his lips. "Everybody knows it. But Mrs. Fitz is a thousand times too good for the cove that's married her."

Such an expression of opinion left his sister open-mouthed. Mary Catesby lowered her chin and her eyelashes at an indiscretion so portentous.

"The Fitzwarens," said that great authority, "are a very old family, and Nevil has the education, if not the instincts, of a gentleman, but as for this circus rider he has brought from Vienna, she has neither the birth, the education nor the instincts of a lady."

This tremendous pronouncement would have put most people out of action at once. But here was a man of mettle.

"She's tophole," said that Bayard. "I've never seen her equal. If you ask my opinion there's not a chap in the Hunt who is fit to open a gate for Mrs. Fitz."

The young fellow had fairly got the bit between his teeth and no mistake.

"One doesn't ask your opinion, Joseph," said Mary Catesby, with a bluntness that would have felled a bullock. "Why should one, pray? I know no person less fitted to express an opinion on any subject."

"I've followed her line anyhow, and I've been proud to follow it. She can ride cunning, too, mind you. I've never seen her equal anywhere, and don't suppose I ever shall."

"No one questions her riding. She was born and bred in a circus. But a more unmitigated female bounder never jumped through a hoop in pink tights."

It was below the belt, and not only Jodey but Brasset, who, inefficient as he is in most things, is unmistakably a sportsman of the first class, also felt it to be so.

"Mrs. Fitz has foreign ways," said the noble Master, "but she can be as nice as anybody when she likes. I've known her be awfully civil."

"She is not without charm," said I, feeling that it was up to me to play up a bit.

"She's it," said Jodey. "She's the sort of woman that would make a chap – "

"Shoot himself," chirruped the noble Master.

Disgust and indignation are mild terms to apply to Mrs. Catesby's wrath.

"Pair of boobies! You are as bad as he is, Reggie. But it was always so like your poor mother to take things lying down."

"Oh, come now, Mrs. Catesby, haven't I said all along that she had no right to hit me over the head with her crop?"

"The safest place in which to hit you, anyway." The Great Lady was in peril of losing her temper.

The question of Mrs. Fitz was a very vexed one in the Crackanthorpe Hunt. It had already divided that proud institution into two sections: i.e. the thick and thin supporters of that lady and those who would not have her at any price. It need excite no remark in the minds of the judicious that the male followers of the Hunt, almost to a man, admired, as much as they dared in the circumstances, a very remarkable personality; while its feminine patrons, with a unanimity quite without precedent in that august body, were conspiring to humiliate, as deeply as it lay in their power, a personage who had set three counties by the ears.

The Great Lady proceeded to temper her wrath with some extremely dignified pathos.

"It is a mystery to me," said she, "how men who call themselves gentlemen can attempt to defend a creature who offered a public affront to the Duke and dear Evelyn."

"I presume you mean the affair of the bazaar?" said I.

"I do; a lamentable fracas. Dear Evelyn never left her bed for a fortnight."

"Dear me! Are we to understand that actual physical violence was offered to her Grace?"

"Don't be childish, Odo! I was present and saw everything, and I can answer for it that no such thing as violence was used."

"Then why did the great lady take to her bed?"

"Through sheer vexation. And really one doesn't wonder. It was nothing less than a public insult."

"Tell me, Mary, precisely in three words what did happen at the bazaar. All the world agrees that it was a desperate affair, yet nobody seems to know exactly what it was that occurred."

Mrs. Catesby enveloped herself in that mantle of high diplomacy that she is pleased so often to assume.

"No, my dear Odo, I don't think it would be kind to the Duke and dear Evelyn to say actually what did occur. To my mind it is not a thing to be spoken of, but I may tell you this – it has been mentioned at Windsor!"

It was clear from the Great Lady's demeanour that at this announcement we were all expected to cross ourselves. Only Mrs. Arbuthnot did so, however.

"Oh, Mary!" The china-blue eyes swam with ecstasy.

"If you wish to convey to us, my dear Mary," said I, "that a royal commission has been appointed to inquire into the subject, all experience tends to teach that there will be less prospect than ever of finding out what did happen at the bazaar."

"Tell us what really did happen at the bazaar, Mrs. Catesby," said Brasset. "I am sorry I wasn't there."

"No, Reggie, I am much too fond of dear Evelyn to disclose the truth to a living soul. But I may tell you this: the incident was far worse than has been reported."

"I understand," said I, solemnly lying, at the instance of the histrionic sense, "that Windsor earnestly desired that the incident, whatever it was, should be minimised as much as possible."

The bait was gobbled, hook and all.

"How did you come to hear that, Odo? Even I was not told that."

"Who told you that, Odo?" Mrs. Arbuthnot twittered breathlessly.

"There was a rumour the other day in the House."

"The idle gossip of the lobbies," the Great Lady was moved to affirm.

But we were straying away from the point. And the point was, in what manner was public decency to mark its sense of outrage at the conduct of Mrs. Fitz?

CHAPTER IV

THE MIDDLE COURSE

Although so many conflicting rumours were abroad as to the unparalleled affront that had been offered to the Strawberry Leaf – some accounts had it that "dear Evelyn" had been called "a cat" within the hearing of the Mayor and other civic dignitaries of Middleham, while others were pleased to affirm that she had had her ears boxed before the eyes of the horrified reporter for the Advertiser– there was the implicit word of Brasset that he had been subjected not only to unchaste expressions in a foreign tongue, but had actually been in receipt of physical violence in his honourable endeavour to uphold the dignity and the discipline of the Crackanthorpe Hunt.

I hope and believe I am a lenient judge of the offences of others – fellow-occupants of our local bench delight to tell me so – but even I was so imbued with the spirit of the meeting as to allow that some kind of official notice ought to be taken of the outrageous conduct of Mrs. Nevil Fitzwaren. From the first hour of her appearance among us, a short fifteen months ago, she had gathered the storm-clouds of controversy about her. Almost as soon as she appeared out cubbing she became the most discussed person in the shire. Her ways were unmistakably foreign and "unconventional"; and certainly, in the saddle and out of it, her personality can only be described as a little overpowering.

In the beginning it may have been Fitz himself who contributed as much as anything to the notoriety of his continental wife. Five years before, the only surviving son of a disreputable father had let the house of his ancestors in a state of gross disrepair, together with the paternal acres, to a City magnate, and betook himself, Heaven alone knew where. Wise people, however, were more than willing that the President of the Destinies should retain the sole and exclusive possession of this information. Nobody had the least desire to know where Fitz the Younger, unmistakable scion of a somewhat deplorable dynasty, was to be found, except, perhaps, a few London tradesmen, who, if wise men, would be sparing of their tears. They might have been hit so much harder than proved to be the case. Wherever Fitz had gone, those who knew most of him, and the stock from which he sprang, devoutly hoped that there he would stay.

For five years we knew him not. And then one fine September afternoon he turned up at the Grange with a motor car and a French chauffeur and a foreign wife. It may not seem kind to say so, but in the interests of this strange but ower-true tale, it is well to state clearly that his return was highly disconcerting to all sections of the community. His name was still an offence in the ears of an obsequious and by no means over-censorious countryside. Rural England is astonishingly lenient "to Squoire and his relations," but Master Nevil had proved too stiff a proposition even for its forbearance.

Howbeit, Fitz had hardly been a week at his ancestral home with his foreign wife and his motor car when there began to be signs of a rise in Fitzwaren stock. It was bruited abroad that he was paying his debts, fulfilling long-neglected obligations, that he had given up the bowl, and that, in a word, he was doing his best to clear a pretty black record. Indeed, the upward tendency of the Fitzwaren stock was so well maintained, that it was decided by the Committee for the Maintenance of the Public Decency that the august Mrs. Catesby should call on his wife and so pave the way for the entente. After all, the Fitzwarens were the Fitzwarens, and our revered Vicar – the hardest riding parson in five counties – clinched the matter with the most apposite quotation from Holy Writ in which he has ever indulged.

The august Mrs. Catesby bore the olive branch in the form of a couple of pieces of pasteboard to the Grange in due course; Mrs. Arbuthnot, the Vicar's wife, Laura Glendinning, and the rank and file of the custodians of the public decency followed suit; and such an atmosphere of the best type of Christian magnanimity prevailed, that it was quite on the tapis that "dear Evelyn" herself, the Perpetual President and Past Grand Mistress of this strenuous society, would shoot a card at the Grange. To show that this is not the idle gossip of an empty tale, there is Mrs. Catesby's own declaration, made in Mrs. Arbuthnot's own drawing-room in the presence of Laura Glendinning and the Vicar's wife, "that had Mrs. Fitz only been presented she was in a position to know that dear Evelyn would have called upon her."