by Ouida
In terms of setting, aristocratic characters and the slightly controversial (for the times) theme of liberalisation, this novel is classic Ouida. The view at the time that this was a highly political novel is somewhat lost today, but the story is well written and shows little decline in Ouida’s skills as an author, despite coming at the end of her career. As an unfinished novel, it can be left to the reader to choose Prince Elim’s fate.
The first edition’s title page
CONTENTS
PUBLISHERS’ NOTE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
A late portrait of Ouida by Visconde Georgio, 1904
PUBLISHERS’ NOTE
THE unfinished novel contained in the following pages is the last work of the gifted writer who was so widely known during her lifetime under the nom de plume of ‘Ouida.’ Illness and other causes retarded her in writing the story, which as a matter of fact was planned and outlined some years ago, and at her death it was found to be still incomplete. Fortunately, however, the first twenty-nine chapters had been set up in type as they were written; and as these chapters would clearly have constituted by far the larger portion of the completed book, it has been judged best to publish them, without alteration or addition, exactly in the form in which they were left by their author after having been revised by her in proof.
February 1908.
CHAPTER I
THE sun was setting over the sea of the west, and its glow shone on the beautiful and classic city of Helios, the capital of the ancient land of Helianthus.
In the long and stately streets, clouds of dust were golden with the sad reflection of an unseen glory which is, at such an hour, all that many thousands of the dwellers in cities enjoy of the beauty of evening. The thoroughfares of the capital were full of people, and down the central street of all, so famous in history, a cavalcade was passing, a military feast for the eyes of a population which was not allowed many other pleasures. On either side of the street, which had been in great part widened, altered, modernised, made monotonous and correct, white marble was the chief architectural feature, and great white palaces towered towards the clear sky, which was blue, deeply blue, like the bells of the wild hyacinth. Striped awnings, scarlet and white, the national colours, stretched over the balconies; there were flags drooping from gilded flagstaffs in most of the windows, from most of the doorways; the flowers which had been cast down from above on to the pavement were already trodden into the dust, and there was a curious odour of natural and artificial perfumes, of burnt powder, of trampled roses, of hot flesh, equine and human, steaming from the heat of the past day. Porphyry pillars, galleries of gilded metal, of pierced woodwork or of bronze arabesques, sculptured porticoes, painted shrines, plate-glass shop-fronts, hanging tapestries, frescoed frontages, shone in the amber luminance of the early evening. The dull-coloured clothing of a metropolitan crowd was largely broken up by the deep yellows, the red purples, the light blues, the dark crimsons, of the costumes of the country, and of the seafaring, peoples, and by the uniforms of the soldiery lining the edges of the pavements; great bursts of martial music enlivened the air; the brilliancy of sunset lent to the scene a gaiety not its own.
Despite the passing of two thousand years the capital of Helianthus was still a beautiful and classic city, throned on its eternal hills, with the semicircle of its shore washed by the Mare Magnum, and the mountains on the opposite side of the bay soaring to the clouds, and often capped by snow until the month of May. Modernity, the brutal and blundering Cyclops who misconceives himself to be a fruitful and beneficent deity, had struck his stupid blows at its temples, its domes, its towers, its palaces, had strewn its soil with shattered marbles, had felled its sacred laurel groves, had sullied or silenced its falling or rushing waters, had befouled with smoke its white marble colonnades, its towering palm plumes, its odorous gardens. Modernity had driven his steam-roller over the narcissus, the hyacinth, the cheiranthus; and steam pistons throbbed where the doves of Aphrodite had nested. But the city was still noble through the past, and unspeakably fair through those portions of un violated heritage which it retained; and its domes and minarets and bell - towers still shone in the light of the sun or the moon against the deep green of its cypress and cedar groves.
Many of its streets were still untouched; its women still carried their bronze jars to its fountains; its avenues of planes, and tulip-trees, and magnolias, were not all destroyed, though defiled by the shrieking tramway engines, the stinking automobiles, and though their boughs were often cruelly hacked and cut away to leave free passage for these modern gods, the electric wire and the petrol car. Ever and again, some porphyry basin whose waters gleamed beneath the great green leafage of sycamores; some colossal figure of hero or of deity; some silent stately arcade, with the sea glistening beyond its arches; some sun-browned, mighty, crenelated wall; some vast palace with ogive windows, and gratings elaborately wrought, and bronze doors in basso-relievo, and deep overhanging roofs, and machicolated towers; these would recall all that Helios had been in ages when its white oxen were sacrificed to gods who are now remembered only in the nomenclature of the constellations of the sky, and its poets, who are still quoted by mankind, were crowned with the wild olive and the laurel in its holy places. With furious haste whole quarters had been torn down and swept aside and replaced by the mindless, ignoble, and monotonous constructions of the present time; but other quarters still remained where the native population thronged together, gay in their poverty and mirthful in their rags, although hunger lay down with them at night and arose with them in the morning, continual companion of their working hours. For a brief space on this festal day they ceased from labour, and tried to forget their starvation in the sight of their rulers and the soldiery of this imperial and military spectacle.
The King had already passed, with his beloved friend and nephew, one of those friends to be kissed on both cheeks and watched with hand on hilt. It was for the Emperor Julius that the military display on the Field of Ares had been made that day, and the Emperor Julius had said many sweet and gracious things about it: what he had thought was another matter, which concerned no one.
After the King, there had passed the Crown Prince, with his cousin, the young son of the great Julius, receiving the conventional cheers which are given to those who are powerful but not beloved. Then had followed a squadron of White Cuirassiers, a dazzling regiment; some companies of the Rhætian Mountaineers, a popular corps, with the feathers of the wild turkey in their hats; some squadrons of light cavalry on weedy and weary horses, not well-groomed and still less well-fed, the small and slender horses of the treeless plains of the south-east; and some field-batteries not exceedingly smart in appearance nor exact in movement, of which the gun-carriages lumbered along, too heavy for their weakly teams, whilst the metal of cannon and of caisson was dusty and dull. After these tramped some companies of infantry, very young soldiers, thin, and small of stature, who wore ill-fitting uniforms and were footsore and fatigued. No one cheered these.
Suddenly there was a movement of reviving interest; the ladies who had risen to leave the balconies returned, and reseated themselves; the people pushed each other forward, and scrambled to get out of the centre of the roadway, the
guards thrusting back some scores roughly and needlessly. A half-squadron of Hussars came in sight, trotting briskly with drawn swords; behind them was an open carriage with four horses and postillions in the royal liveries, azure and silver. In the carriage was a young man in uniform, who carried his hussar’s shako on his knee, and nodded familiarly with a tired smile to the multitudes who cheered him. He did not look up to the balconies and windows of the palaces, although their occupants cast roses and lilies down as he passed; he looked at the populace crowding the roadway.
He came and went in a cloud of sun-gilt dust, a vehement and ardent roar of voices greeting him on his way; ladies above waved their handkerchiefs and kissed the flowers they threw; the people below pushed and hurt each other in their efforts to get nearer to him; his carriage swept by in a storm of applause and loud cries of ‘Elim! Elim! Elim! Long live Prince Elim!’
‘There goes one who is at heart with us,’ said a journalist of the city to a friend as they stood together in the crowd.
‘No,’ said the friend, who was wiser. ‘He is with no one. He sees too clearly to find satisfaction in modern politics. We cannot content him any more than his own people do.’
The young prince passing at that moment recognised the two speakers as writers on the Republican Press of Helios, and made them a friendly gesture of his hand.
His father’s police-spies, mingling with the throng as mere citizens or operatives, saw the gesture and noted it.
His carriage passed on, the horses fretting and fuming at the pressure of the populace against their flanks.
The people cried again: ‘Elim! Elim! Elim! Long life to Elim!’
He bowed to the crowds with a smile which was neither glad nor gay. He was thinking: ‘They would come out in the same numbers to see the procession of a travelling menagerie; and if there were a blue lion or a green tiger to be seen they would cheer as warmly.’
He regretted that the crowds did come out, did cheer. It dwarfed human nature in his eyes; it made him ashamed of his own countrymen. So, if the statue of a god could think, would it feel towards its worshippers, whether it were named Zeus, Buddha, Christ, or Jehovah.
To the mind of the thinker there is no spectacle more painful, more provocative of wonder and of sadness, than the sight of the multitudes of a capital city standing for hours in sun, or rain, or snow, elbowing each other for a foremost place, breaking down tree-tops, stone copings, marble pedestals, bruising the bosoms of women and crushing the limbs of children, in order to see a royal procession pass by along familiar roadways. And this young prince was a thinker, a philosophic thinker, although having been born in the purple he had no right to be so. For the first duty of a prince is never to allow his mind to stray outside the ring-fence of received and conventional opinion; he must never question the superiority of his own order any more than the serving-priest of Christian churches must question the divinity of the Eucharist. If you do not believe in yourself, who will believe in you?
The young prince now passing between the two lines of cheering people did not believe in himself, nor in his order, nor in his family, nor in any superiority of his or theirs. The enthusiasm of the crowds left him cold, for he rightly regarded such enthusiasm as too similar to the blind worship of trees and stones and carven woods by barbaric races, to be worth anything in the estimation of a reasonable being. It was fetish-worship: nothing else. That he himself was the fetish at the moment could not make the superstition any more worthy in his sight.
Three thousand years earlier the people of Egypt had thus clamoured in praise of their Pharaohs. Where was the progress of the human race? Why must humanity always have a fetish of some sort? Why? It would perplex the wisest philosopher to say. Bisons and buffaloes in a natural state of existence elect a monarch, we are told; but they are said to take the strongest, greatest, finest of the herd. Men do not do this; they cannot do it; for a civilised man, being a complicated creature, is apt to lack in one thing in proportion to what he possesses in another. If the successful fighter be selected by them, as by the bison or buffalo, they get a Wellington who becomes a failure in politics; or if they take the man of genius, they get a Lamartine or a Disraeli; or even if they obtain a Napoleon, power goes to their Napoleon’s head and all is red ruin. So, in fear of the unusual, they cling to the ordinary conventional hereditary person, and endow him with imaginary equalities, and hedge him about with symbols, and functions, and office-holders, and make-belief of all kinds. The bison and buffalo would not be satisfied with this; but man is, or at least the majority of men are.
‘Is that one of the King’s sons?’ asked a foreigner speaking ill the language of the country.
The artisan to whom he spoke understood the question, despite the ugly accent of the stranger.
‘Who are you, that you do not know Elim?’ he replied.
‘Elim?’ repeated the foreigner, not comprehending.
‘Prince Elim,’ repeated the man. ‘Our Elim.’
‘The Duke of Othyris,’ added another workingman.
‘Oh, to be sure,’ said the stranger, ‘the Heir Presumptive, is he not?’
‘The most popular person in the country,’ said an idler, who had a carnation between his teeth.
‘He seems very popular indeed,’ said the foreigner, with interrogation in his tone.
‘All the family are,’ said the idler with the carnation drily; then catching from under the white cap of one who was dressed like a cook from a restaurant a sharp glance, which seemed to him that of a spy in disguise, he raised his hat and said reverently, ‘Christ have them all in His keeping.’
The foreigner was touched. ‘And they say these people are malcontents and revolutionaries!’ he murmured to a companion, as he stooped to pick up a rose which had been thrown from a window to the carriage of the Duke of Othyris, and had missed its goal.
‘The malcontents have muzzles on,’ said his friend.
‘Sixteen hundred men were clapped in prison before the Emperor’s arrival, and some thousands are confined to their own houses.’
‘But it is a constitutional country!’ protested the traveller from overseas.
‘Oh yes,’ answered the other, ‘on paper and in theory!’
‘Circulate, circulate, circulate!’ said the gendarmes, imitating their brethren of the larger capitals of Europe, and enforcing their order with thrusts from their elbows, or from the pommels of their sabres, into the ribs or the chests of the people.
The glow from the western sky died down, the shadows lengthened and crept upward to the zinc roofs; the balconies were emptied, the electric light flashed suddenly down the whole street, and made the faces of the multitude look hard, jaded, pallid, dejected; a dull silence fell on the populace, a silence in which the rumbling of the tram-cars, readmitted to movement after half-a-day’s exclusion, sounded like a caricature of the artillery which had passed down there twenty minutes before. The tired children cried, the hustled women sighed, the men who had been knocked about by fists and sabres went sullenly homeward, the wounded were carried into hospital; the festivities were over.
From the open windows of the palaces and hotels arose a steam and scent of good things to eat and good wines to drink, and spread itself through all the length of the street, mingling with, and overpowering, the odours of flowers, and powder, and hot human and equine flesh. It made many of the poorer sightseers in the crowd feel hungry, more hungry than ever; and it made the little tired children cry louder to go home.
‘The Romans gave bread as well as the Circus,’ thought Elim, Duke of Othyris, as his carriage turned in at his palace gates. ‘We are more economical. We only give the Circus, and even that we run for our own use.’
The sound of cheering in the distance rolled down the soft air and sounded like repeated firing.
What were they cheering now? Who? Why? At that instant the crowd gathered before his own residence in the Square of the Dioscuri was cheering himself; but that made the ovation seem no wiser
to him.
What was that clamour worth?
Ten minutes earlier they had cheered his father and his imperial cousin. They had cheered equally the great artillery guns, and the sweating battery horses, although they knew well enough that if they themselves offended authority, the guns would belch red death on to them, and the horses be driven, under the slashing whip cord, over their fallen bodies.
‘O fools! O fools!’ he said to himself, as he who pities humanity is always driven in sorrow, or in anger, or in both, to say it. Panem et Circenses! It is always the old story. Cæsar may use up their bodies on his battlefields, and grind their souls to dust under his tyrannies, if he give them the arena — even without the bread. So long as he pleases their fancies, or dazzles their eyes, they will cheer him; and they are pleased by so little, and dazzled by such tawdry tinsel! Why did the people flock to see this very paltry pageant? Why did not the men go about their work or their business, and the women shut their windows? No one could force them to turn out in their thousands, and waste a whole day; and if they were not there to line the streets, and be hustled by the police, Caesar might arrive at a juster view of his own actual values and proportions. There is much they cannot do; but some things they might do; and to stay indoors on a day like this is one of them.