Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli

by Marie Corelli

  He had of course been called handsome in his childhood, — what heir to a Throne ever lived that was not beautiful, to his nurse at least? — and in his early youth he had been grossly flattered for his cleverness as well as his good looks. Every small attempt at witticism, — every poor joke he could invent, adapt or repeat, was laughed at approvingly in a chorus of admiration by smirking human creatures, male and female, who bowed and bobbed up and down before the lad like strange dolphins disporting themselves on dry land. Whereat he grew to despise the dolphins, and no wonder. When he was about seventeen or eighteen he began to ask odd questions of one of his preceptors, a learned and ceremonious personage who, considering the extent of his certificated wisdom, was yet so singularly servile of habit and disposition that he might have won a success on the stage as Chief Toady in a burlesque of Court life. He was a pale, thin old man, with a wizened face set well back amid wisps of white hair, and a scraggy throat which asserted its working muscles visibly whenever he spoke, laughed or took food. His way of shaking hands expressed his moral flabbiness in the general dampness, looseness and limpness of the act, — not that he often shook hands with his pupil, for though that pupil was only a boy made of ordinary flesh and blood like other boys, he was nevertheless heir to a Throne, and in strict etiquette even friendly liberties were not to be too frequently taken with such an Exalted little bit of humanity. The lad himself, however, had a certain mischievous delight in making him perform this courtesy, and being young and vigorous, would often squeeze the old gentleman’s hesitating fingers in his strong clasp so energetically as to cause him the severest pain. Student of many philosophies as he was, the worthy pedagogue would have cried out, or sworn profane oaths in his agony, had it been any other than the ‘Heir-Apparent’ who thus made him wince with torture, — but as matters stood, he merely smiled — and bore it. The young rascal of a prince smiled too, — taking note of his obsequious hypocrisy, which served an inquiring mind with quite as good a field for logical speculation as any problem in Euclid. And he went on with his questions, — questions, which if not puzzling, were at least irritating enough to have secured him a rap on the knuckles from his tutor’s cane, had he been a grocer’s lad instead of the eldest son of a Royal house.

  “Professor,” he said on one occasion, “What is man?”

  “Man,” replied the professor sedately, “is an intelligent and reasoning being, evolved by natural processes of creation into his present condition of supremacy.”

  “What is Supremacy?”

  “The state of being above, or superior to, the rest of the animal creation.”

  “And is he so superior?”

  “He is generally so admitted.”

  “Is my father a man?”

  “Assuredly! The question is superfluous.”

  “What makes him a King?”

  “Royal birth and the hereditary right to his great position.”

  “Then if man is in a condition of supremacy over the rest of creation, a king is more than a man if he is allowed to rule men?”

  “Sir, pardon me! — a king is not more than a man, but men choose him as their ruler because he is worthy.”

  “In what way is he worthy? Simply because he is born as I am, heir to a throne?”

  “Precisely.”

  “He might be an idiot or a cripple, a fool or a coward, — he would still be King?”

  “Most indubitably.”

  “So that if he were a madman, he would continue to hold supremacy over a nation, though his groom might be sane?”

  “Your Royal Highness pursues the question with an unwise flippancy;” — remonstrated the professor with a pained, forced smile. “If an idiot or a madman were unfortunately born to a throne, a regency would be appointed to control state affairs, but the heir would, in spite of natural incapability, remain the lawful king.”

  “A strange sovereignty!” said the young prince carelessly. “And a still stranger patience in the people who would tolerate it! Yet over all men, — kings, madmen, and idiots alike, — there is another ruling force, called God?”

  “There is a force,” admitted the professor dubiously— “But in the present forward state of things it would not be safe to attempt to explain the nature of that force, and for the benefit of the illiterate masses we call it God. A national worship of something superior to themselves has always been proved politic and necessary for the people. I have not at any time resolved myself as to why it should be so; but so it is.”

  “Then man, despite his ‘supremacy’ must have something more supreme than himself to keep him in order, if it be only a fetish wherewith to tickle his imagination?” suggested the prince with a touch of satire,— “Even kings must bow, or pretend to bow, to the King of kings?”

  “Sir, you have expressed the fact with felicity;” replied the professor gravely— “His Majesty, your august father, attends public worship with punctilious regularity, and you are accustomed to accompany him. It is a rule which you will find necessary to keep in practice, as an example to your subjects when you are called upon to reign.”

  The young man raised his eyebrows deprecatingly, with a slight ironical smile, and dropped the subject. But the learned professor as in duty bound, reported the conversation to his pupil’s father; with the additional observation that he feared, he very humbly and respectfully feared, that the developing mind of the prince appeared undesirably disposed towards discursive philosophies, which were wholly unnecessary for the position he was destined to occupy. Whereupon the King took his son to task on the subject with a mingling of kindness and humour.

  “Do not turn philosopher!” he said— “For philosophy will not so much content you with life, as with death! Philosophy will chill your best impulses and most generous enthusiasms, — it will make you over-cautious and doubtful of your friends, — it will cause you to be indifferent to women in the plural, but it will hand you over, a weak and helpless victim to the one woman, — when she comes, — as she is bound to come. There is no one so hopelessly insane as a philosopher in love! Love women, but not a woman!”

  “In so doing I should follow the wisest of examples, — yours, Sir!” replied the prince with a familiarity more tender than audacious, for his father was a man of fine presence and fascinating manner, and knew well the extent of his power to charm and subjugate the fairer sex,— “But I have a fancy that love, — if it exists anywhere outside the dreams of the poets, — is unknown to kings.”

  The monarch bent his brows frowningly, and his eyes were full of a deep and bitter melancholy.

  “You mistake!” he said slowly— “Love, — and by that name I mean a wholly different thing from Passion, — comes to kings as to commoners, — but whereas the commoner may win it if he can, the king must reject it. But it comes, — and leaves a blank in the proudest life when it goes!”

  He turned away abruptly, and the conversation was not again resumed. But when he died, those who prepared his body for burial, found a gold chain round his neck, holding the small medallion portrait of a woman, and a curl of soft fair hair. Needless to say the portrait was not that of the late Queen-Consort, who had died some years before her Royal spouse, nor was the hair hers, — but when they brought the relic to the new King, he laid it back with his own hands on his father’s lifeless breast, and let it go into the grave with him. For, being no longer the crowned Servant of the State, he had the right as a mere dead man, to the possession of his love-secret.

  So at least thought his son and successor, who at times was given to wondering whether if, like his father, he had such a secret he would be able to keep it as closely and as well. He thought not. It would be scarcely worth while. It can only be the greatest love that is always silent, — and in the greatest, — that is, the ideal and self-renouncing love, — he did not believe; though in his own life’s experience he had been given a proof that such love is possible to women, if not to men. When he was about twenty, he had loved, or had imagined he loved, a
girl, — a pretty creature, who did not know him as a prince at all, but simply as a college student. He used to walk with her hand in hand through the fields by the river, and gather wild flowers for her to wear in her little white bodice. She had shy soft eyes, and a timid, yet trusting look, full of tenderness and pathos. Moved by a romantic sense of honour and chivalry, he promised to marry her, and thereupon wrote an impulsive letter to his father informing him of his intention. Of course he was summoned home from college at once, — he was reminded of his high destiny — of the Throne that would be his if he lived to occupy it, — of the great and serious responsibilities awaiting him, — and of how impossible it was that the Heir-Apparent to the Crown should marry a commoner.

  “Why not?” he cried passionately— “If she be good and true she is as fit to be a queen as any woman royally born! She is a queen already in her own right!”

  But while he was being argued with and controlled by all the authorities concerned in king’s business, his little sweetheart herself put an end to the matter. Her parents told her all unpreparedly, and with no doubt unnecessary harshness, the real position of the college lad with whom she had wandered in the fields so confidingly; and in the bewilderment of her poor little broken heart and puzzled brain, she gave herself to the river by whose flowering banks she had sworn her maiden vows, — though she knew it not, — to her future King; and so, drowning her life and love together, made a piteous exit from all difficulty. Before she went forth to die, she wrote a farewell to her Royal lover, posting the letter herself on her way to the river, and, by the merest chance he received it without a spy’s intervention. It was but one line, scrawled in a round youthful hand, and blotted with many tears.

  “Sir — my love! — forgive me!”

  It would be unwise to say what that little scrap of ill-formed writing cost the heir to a throne when he heard how she had died, — or how he raged and swore and wept. It was the first Wrong forced on him as Right, by the laws of the realm; and he was young and generous and honest, and not hardened to those laws then. Their iniquity and godlessness appeared to him in plain ugly colours undisguised. Since that time he had perforce fallen into the habit and routine of his predecessors, though he was not altogether so ‘constitutional’ a sovereign as his father had been. He had something of the spirit of one who had occupied his throne five hundred years before him; when strength and valour and wit and boldness, gave more kings to the world than came by heritage. He did unconventional things now and then; to the grief of flunkeys, and the alarm of Court parasites. But his kingdom was of the South, where hot blood is recognized and excused, and fiery temper more admired than censured, and where, — so far as social matters went, — his word, whether kind, cold, or capricious, was sufficient to lead in any direction that large flock of the silly sheep of fashion who only exist to eat, and to be eaten. Sometimes he longed to throw himself back into bygone centuries and stand as his earliest ancestor stood, sword in hand, on a height overlooking the battle-field, watching the swaying rush of combat, — the glitter of spears and axes — the sharp flight of arrows — the tossing banners, the grinding chariots, the flying dust and carnage of men! There was something to fight for in those days, — there was no careful binding up of wounds, — no provision for the sick or the mutilated, — nothing, nothing, but ‘Victory or Death!’ How much grander, how much finer the old fierce ways of war than now, when any soldier wounded, may write the details of his bayonet-scratch or bullet-hole to the cheap press, and the surgeon prys about with Rontgen-ray paraphernalia and scalpel, to discover how much or how little escape from dissolution a man’s soul has had in the shock of contest with his foe! Of a truth these are paltry days! — and paltry days breed paltry men. Afraid of sickness, afraid of death, afraid of poverty, afraid of offences, afraid to think, afraid to speak, Man in the present era of his boasted ‘progress’ resembles nothing so much as a whipped child, — cowering under the outstretched arm of Heaven and waiting in whimpering terror for the next fall of the scourge. And it is on this point especially, that the monarch who takes part in this unhesitating chronicle of certain thoughts and movements hidden out of sight, — yet deeply felt in the under-silences of the time, — may claim to be unconventional; — he was afraid of nothing, — not even of himself as King!

  CHAPTER II. — MAJESTY CONSIDERS AND RESOLVES

  The little episode of his first love, combined with his ungovernable fury and despair at its tragic conclusion, had of course the natural result common in such a case, to the fate of all who are destined to occupy thrones. A marriage was ‘arranged’ for him; and pressing reasons of state were urged for the quick enforcement and carrying out of the ‘arrangement.’ The daughter of a neighbouring potentate was elected to the honour of his alliance, — a beautiful girl with a pale, cold clear-cut face and brilliant eyes, whose smile penetrated the soul with an icy chill, and whose very movement, noiseless and graceful as it was, reminded one irresistibly of slowly drifting snow. She was attended to the altar, as he was, by all the ministers and plenipotentiaries of state that could possibly be gathered together from the four quarters of the globe as witnesses to the immolation of two young human lives on the grim sacrificial stone of a Dynasty; and both prince and princess accepted their fate with mutually silent and civil resignation. Their portraits, set facing each other with a silly smile, or taken in a linked arm-in-arm attitude against a palatial canvas background, appeared in every paper published throughout the world, and every scribbler on the Press took special pains to inform the easily deluded public that the Royal union thus consummated was ‘a romantic love-match.’ For the People still have heart and conscience, — the People, taken in the rough lump of humanity, still believe in love, in faith, in the dear sweetness of home affections. The politicians who make capital out of popular emotion, know this well enough, — and are careful to play the tune of their own personal interest upon the gamut of National Sentiment in every stump oration. For how terrible it would be if the People of any land learned to judge their preachers and teachers by the lines of fact alone! Inasmuch as fact would convincingly prove to them that their leaders prospered and grew rich, while they stayed poor; and they might take to puzzling out reasons for this inadequacy which would inevitably cause trouble. For this, and divers other motives politic, the rosy veil of sentiment is always delicately flung more or less over every new move on the national debating-ground, — and whether marriageable princes and princesses love or loathe each other, still, when they come to wed, the words ‘romantic love-match’ must be thrown in by an obliging Press in order to satisfy the tender scruples of a people who would certainly not abide the thought of a Royal marriage contracted in mutual aversion. Thus much soundness and right principle there is at least, in what some superfine persons call the ‘common’ folk, — the folk whose innermost sense of truth and straightforwardness, not even the proudest statesman dare outrage.

  But with what unuttered and unutterable scorn the youthful victims of the Royal pairing accepted the newspaper-assurances of the devoted tenderness they entertained for each other! With what wearied impatience both prince and princess received the ‘Wedding Odes’ and ‘Epithalamiums,’ written by first-class and no-class versifiers for the occasion! What shoals of these were cast aside unread, to occupy the darkest dingiest corner of one of the Royal ‘refuse’ libraries! The writers of such things expected great honours, no doubt, each and every man-jack of them, — but apart from the fact that the greatest literature has always lived without any official recognition or endowment from kings, — being in itself the supremest sovereignty, — poets and rhymesters alike never seem to realize that no one is, or can be, so sickened by an ‘Ode’ as the man or woman to whom it is written!

  The brilliant marriage ceremony concluded, the august bride and bridegroom took their departure, amid frantically cheering crowds, for a stately castle standing high among the mountains, a truly magnificent pile, which had been placed at their disposal for the ‘hon
eymoon’ by one of the wealthiest of the King’s subjects, — and there, as soon as equerries, grooms-in-waiting, flunkeys, and every other sort of indoor and outdoor retainer would consent to leave them alone together, the Royal wife came to her Royal husband, and asked to be allowed to speak a few words on the subject of their marriage, ‘for the first and last time,’ said she, with a straight glance from the cold moonlight mystery of her eyes. Beautiful at all times, her beauty was doubly enhanced by the regal attitude and expression she unconsciously assumed as she made the request, and the prince, critically studying her form and features, could not but regard himself as in some respects rather particularly favoured by the political and social machinery which had succeeded in persuading so fair a creature to resign herself to the doubtful destiny of a throne. She had laid aside her magnificent bridal-robes of ivory satin and cloth-of-gold, — and appeared before him in loose draperies of floating white, with her rich hair unbound and rippling to her knees.