Fitz, too, had all our pity. The strain of true grandeur at the heart of the man, which all that was superficial could not efface, had asserted itself in this season of anguish. A lesser nature might have taken steps to relieve his wife of the torment of his presence. But in the watches of the night he had referred the question, and now, come what must, he would meet his fate.
There was reason to believe that he had already thrown his weight in the scale on the side of Ferdinand. He had stopped short of self-immolation, it was true; he had placed another interpretation on the Voice; but it seemed to me, his friend, that his whole bearing was a piece of altruistic heroism which could have had few parallels.
"Ferdinand is right," he said as we kept vigil in my quarters. "The interests of a great people are of more account than a chap like me. I know it, and Sonia knows it too."
The words were torn from him. It was curious how this contained and self-reliant spirit yearned for the sanction that it was in the power of a sympathetic understanding to bestow. If he dealt himself a mortal wound he must have a friend at his side. If he had superhuman strength, at least he had human weakness. Men of valour are proud as a rule. Fitz in the hour of his passion had a humility, a craving for the countenance of his fellows that I could only do my best to render in a humble way. The walk of mediocrity saves us from many things, but I suppose there are seasons in the lives of some who wear its badge when we would willingly forgo its comfortable consciousness of immunity for some diviner gift.
It was as though my unhappy friend was bleeding, perhaps to death, and I knew not how to stanch his wound.
Neither of us sought our beds that night, but sat and smoked hour after hour, in silence for the most part, beside a dead fire. He wished me to be near him, almost as a dumb animal yearns for those who show a sympathetic understanding of its pain, even if they are powerless to make it less.
As thus we sat together my mind envisaged the chequered career of my companion in all its phases. I recalled him in his first pair of trousers at his private school; I recalled him as my fag in that larger cosmogony in which afterwards we dwelt together. As his senior, in those days I had unconsciously regarded him as less than myself. But this night, as I sat with him, consumed with pity for the tragic wreck of his fortunes, I realised that he was one whose life was passed on a higher, more significant plane than mine could ever occupy.
It was good to feel that I had nothing with which to reproach myself in regard to my attitude towards him in those distant days. His fits of depression, his outbursts of devilry, his dislike of games, the streak of fatalism that was in him, his impatience of all authority, had exposed him to many hardships. But I was glad to think that I need not accuse myself of imperfect sympathy towards this fantastically odd, yet high and enduring spirit.
Thursday came and passed in gloom. Even Ferdinand, that heart of steel, was feeling the poignancy of the crisis. Throughout the day Sonia did not appear. But in the evening Irene sat with her in her room.
"If I were she," she declared to me later, with tearful defiance, "I would not go back—that is, unless they accepted my husband as their future king."