by Ouida
The traveller from a distant continent, which is called a new country, probably because it was old when Atlantis was submerged, went to dine at a restaurant which was modelled on the eating-places of that great Guthonic empire ruled by the Emperor Julius; the cooks were Guthonic, the waiters were Guthonic, even the wines, which were Hélianthine, were labelled by Guthonic names. The annexing of a nation usually begins with its bills of fare.
The stranger from overseas was curious, and questioned the attendant who brought him his coffee and cognac.
‘What was it,’ he asked, ‘that happened on the Field of Ares to-day, and made the public give such an enthusiastic reception to the King’s second son?’
‘There was an unfortunate incident during the march past, sir,’ replied the man, seeing that the amount of money left for him on the salver was generous.
‘I do not know details. Some country folks got across the line of the défilé; the Duke stopped his squadrons and occupied himself with the safety of the people and their beasts; the cavalry division was in consequence some minutes late; it made a break in the march past; it is said His Majesty was displeased at the breach of discipline.’
‘Perhaps he is jealous of his son’s greater popularity?’
‘The King is very popular, sir,’ said the waiter with discretion.
‘Is that so?’ said the visitor, incredulous. ‘The King is a very strict disciplinarian, they say?’
‘He is considered so: yes, sir.’
‘But would he have had his son see his subjects trampled to death before his eyes without an effort to save them?’
‘I believe, sir, His Majesty does not think anything of so much importance as military exactitude; and the persons who would have been run over were very low people — cowherds or swineherds, I believe.’
‘I understand why the nation prefers his son to himself,’ said the foreigner with a smile.
‘Oh, sir, I never said that the Duke was preferred!’
‘But he is so, my friend. What a difference there was in the cheering!’
The attendant took his fee off the salver and was discreetly silent.
‘I guess he is a fine fellow, that Duke,’ said the traveller, as he rose, took his cane and overcoat, and went out on to the broad white marble quay where the tamarisks and the magnolias showed the blue water between their trunks; that blue water which has been the Mare Magnum of two thousand years of history.
The waiter saw him go out with relief; this kind of conversation is dangerous in Helianthus, which is a free country.
The traveller might say what he chose, thought the man; it was a serious thing to interrupt and delay a march past, merely because some common folks might have been injured. It was quite natural that King John should be very angry, and report said that King John when angry was as unpleasant to encounter as the wild boar which was the emblem of his royal house.
The waiter, having imbibed bourgeois and conventional opinion as he imbibed heel-taps, admired this characteristic. It seemed to him truly imperial.
For in this world there would be no tyrants if there were no toadies.
CHAPTER II
THE people’s favourite, on reaching his own residence, changed his uniform for plain clothes, drank some soda water, and took his way, as the Ave Maria rang over the city from a thousand churches, chapels, and bell-towers, to the palace in which his royal father dwelt, and which was known as the Soleia.
The Soleia was a group of castles, halls, and temples, which were built round the great central edifice of which the dome glistened with gilded Oriental tiles, and could be seen many miles off from either the mountains or the sea. It was a wondrous unison of many styles and ages, beginning with the Byzantine; palace built on palace as beavers’ dwellings cluster on each other. In one of these resided the Crown Prince and Princess of Helianthus. It was thither that Othyris was bent.
‘Who knows,’ he thought, ‘what they may not have told her, and what fears are not agitating her good, kind, buckram-bound heart?’
He took a short path across the gardens of the Soleia to the portion of it occupied by his sister-in-law and his brother Theodoric, the heir to the throne.
The Crown Prince was the only scion of a first alliance contracted in early youth with a princess of a small northern State now mediatised and merged in a great Power. His mother had died in the third year of her marriage, having reproduced in her son exactly her own character, grafted on to that of John of Gunderöde, whose shrewd talents, however, were not inherited; for the Crown Prince was what would have been called in an ordinary mortal, stupid. He had the hopelessly unillumined and incorrigible dulness which comes from a naturally narrow brain, budded on the platitudes of conventional education and manured by the heating phosphates of flattery. He had an implicit belief in his knowledge and judgment, and was completely satisfied as to his indispensable utility to his nation. In appearance he was a tall, well-built, spare, and very muscular man, red of hair and ruddy of skin, rigid and stiff in movement; his forehead was low, his jaw was prominent; he had little intelligence, little comprehension; he had immense belief in himself, in his family, in his caste; he was religious, chaste, absorbed in his duties; to his soldiers he was brutal, but that, he considered, was at once their good and his own privilege. He had wedded a cousin-german, a princess of a neighbouring empire; he had by her only two female children; this was the greatest chagrin of his life. Excellent as his morality was, he could not suppress a sense of pleasurable hope whenever his wife took cold. Being a conscientious and religious person, he did not allow his mind to dwell on the contingencies which might arise out of a fatal illness; but the sentiment of pleasurable expectation, whenever she coughed, was there.
The Crown Princess was by birth Guthonic, a cousin-german of the great Julius. She was a homely-looking woman of thirty-two years of age; she had a plain face, pale blue eyes, and a high colour; she dressed with great simplicity on all except State occasions, and had a kindly and simple manner, which could, however, on occasion become cold and dignified though always bland.
She was sitting by an open glass door, knitting a stocking for a poor child; she wore a gown of grey stuff with a white linen collar and cuffs; she seemed to take pleasure in accentuating her own homeliness and want of grace and of colour. She had nothing to distinguish her from any good and homely housewife in the northern kingdom whence she came. Her brother-in-law loved her for her sincerity, simplicity, and goodness; and she was attached to him by the law of contrast, and by her gratitude for his unwavering regard and loyalty to her. She looked troubled and anxious. The lady who was with her withdrew at a sign from her as her brother-in-law entered.
‘Oh, my dear Elim!’ she said as soon as her lady had withdrawn. ‘What is this I hear? You caused a break in the march past? Is it possible? I have heard no details. Pray tell me all!’
He laughed irreverently.
‘Yes. I am guilty of that monstrous crime. Some peasants, Heaven knows how, got in the way of the défilé; I had either to crush them or to stop my squadrons. Who could hesitate?’
‘What a dreadful alternative!’ said the Crown Princess with agitation.
‘I see nothing very dreadful about it. It is one of those matters which only assume importance in the eyes of a military martinet. The difference in time was perhaps five minutes.’
‘But, as I understand it, you were leading the Light Cavalry Division?’
‘Yes.’
The Princess looked anxious. ‘It is a great military offence.’
He laughed.
‘If they cashier me, how happy I shall be! If they send me to a fortress I shall have time to translate Tibullus, which I have always wished to do.’
‘You are too flippant and reckless, Elim.’
‘I should have thought that you at least—’ he said, and paused, leaving the sentence unfinished.
‘You thought that I should approve your action, as the people do? Well, perhaps I do, in my he
art. I think you acted naturally, mercifully, heroically. But being what you are, and where you were, it was foolhardy; and to — to my husband and to your father, it appears an outrageous offence.’
‘Because I offended the Deity of Discipline! Because I momentarily broke the order of the march past! La belle affaire! Why do they make me dress up in uniform? Why do they not leave me in peace in my painting-room? I abhor soldiering; I abhor militarism. I am a man; I am not a machine. They may break me. They will not bend me.’
‘I am sorry,’ said the Crown Princess, and her sad, plain, kind countenance was clouded.
‘Sorry that I did not sit still in my saddle like a figure of wood, and see men and women and cattle stamped and crushed under the rush of the regiments I commanded? My dear Gertrude, that is very unlike you.’
‘But it was not your affair. It was not the fitting moment for compassion.’
‘You say that very feebly, and I hear the voice of your husband speaking from your lips! Do not deny your own feelings, and repeat like a parrot, my dear sister; such cruelty is unworthy of you.’
‘But—’ said the Princess, and sighed, for she had been born and brought up in the rigidity of a military dominion, in the superstitions of a military caste. For a soldier to leave the ranks, for a commanding officer to interrupt a military display, seemed to her a violation of laws still more sacred than the laws of nature or the dictates of mercy. ‘But you caused a break in the march past, a pause in the review, a breach in continuity, unexplained, inexcusable. Theo says that the Emperor smiled! Imagine what your father must have felt when he saw that smile!’
‘Julius is our pedagogue and our War-lord, as we all know,’ said Othyris with irritation. ‘But I think we should not smart so easily under his smiles or his frowns.’
The Crown Princess sighed. She did not love Julius, who was her cousin both by marriage and by consanguinity, but she knew that Julius was an unknown quantity and potent factor in the future of Helianthus and of Europe. No flippancy or ridicule from Elim could alter that fact, or say what that future would become.
‘My dear Gertrude,’ said Othyris with some impatience, ‘let us leave the subject. I may have done what was wrong. At all events I did what my conscience suggested to me in a moment when there was no time for reflection. I imagine the herdsmen think that I did right as they go through the meadows this evening.’
The Princess sighed.
‘Yes; oh yes, poor creatures! But, my dear Elim, reflect; if you commanded a division in an invading army you would be compelled to burn, to pillage, to destroy, to commit what in peace would be crimes, but in war become necessary and legitimate actions, even admirable actions, however much to be regretted. Well, a review is mimic war, and, like what it mimics, it cannot have place or pause for humanity.’
‘I shall not be obliged to burn, to pillage, to destroy; for I will never go out on any offensive campaign.’
‘Oh, my dear! You will have to go if you are ordered.’
‘Not at all. I can let them blow me from a gun, or shut me up in a fortress.’
‘Do not say such things, I entreat you!’ said his sister-in-law with a shudder. She knew that any day the pleasure of Julius or of the financiers, or the fear of internal troubles, might force the Hélianthine government into war with some neighbour, a war of attack of which no man living could foretell the issue.
‘There are times when we must not listen to our hearts, nor even to our consciences,’ she added timidly. ‘There are times when duty requires us to be even cruel, to be even sinful, when to be what you call a machine is the sole supreme obligation upon us.’
‘A shocking creed! It may be stretched to excuse any crime.’
‘But to give way to every impulse may also lead to any crime?’
‘Not if the impulse be good, be impersonal. I know very well what you mean. It is the theory of all persons like your husband and like my father, who place machinery before men, who value appearances and are blind to facts, who think a button awry or a tape untied more terrible than any catastrophe to the populace.’
‘A valve is a small thing; but on its opening or shutting correctly depends the safety of an express train or of an ocean steamer.’
‘Let us quit metaphors. They are unsatisfactory in argument. Tell me plainly, Gertrude, would you have had me gallop on at the head of my squadrons, and see people — our people, for whose wellbeing my family is responsible — crushed to pulp under my troopers’ chargers a few yards off me?’
His sister-in-law hesitated; over her homely, melancholy features a wave of colour rose and receded.
‘I am reluctant to say it; but I think — yes, — I do think at that moment you were not your own master to move and to act. You were only an officer of the King, entrusted with a high command.’
He turned away from the sofa on which she sat, and paced the room with irritation. In the voice of this good woman whom he loved and respected he hated to hear the conventional gospel which had been dinned into his ears ever since his long curls had been cut off, on the day after his sixth birthday, and he had been taken away from his toys and his nurses, his dogs and his guinea-pigs, and given over into the charge of a civil governor and a military tutor.
‘What a monstrous theory for a gentle and kind woman like you to hold!’ he cried.
She answered with a sigh:
‘There are times, my dear, when a man, above all a prince, above all a soldier, does not belong to himself at all, but entirely to his duties, entirely to the sovereign, to the State, to the army.’
He laughed a brief strident laugh which it hurt her to hear.
‘Unhappy man, and thrice unhappy prince! A soldier I am not,’ he added: ‘they dress me up as one; they do not make me one. How well I know it, Gertrude, that religion of formula, that doctrine of self-abasement, that negation of manhood, that lifting up on high of an idol more cruel than the serpent of brass, and more ludicrous than any black wooden eyeless Madonna! It has been preached to’ me for over a score of years, and always in vain. My mind rejects it; my sense despises it; my conscience repulses it. It may take effect on others. It takes none on me. I am a wild goat amongst sheared sheep. You know it.’
The Crown Princess sighed.
She was a good woman; warm of heart, conscientious in self-judgment, liberal of hand; but, good woman though she was, habit and caste had encrusted her mind, as an object is encrusted in a petrifying spring.
She loved Elim despite his heresies, and she owed him much; the debt of a solitary woman for sympathy which can never be forgotten. He had been only a boy when she had come to the Court of Helianthus, the victim of a conventional union, of a political alliance; a shy, sad, and serious young woman, conscious of her want of beauty and her lack of charm, reserved by nature and timid from habitual restraint. The kindness and sweetness of the Queen, and the good nature and good-will of Elim, had been her consolation and support in what she had felt to be a painful exile, an almost friendless solitude. The beautiful Queen was dead; but her memory remained, as her life had been, a tie between her son and the northern Princess.
‘Do I worry you? ‘he said with compunction. ‘You pay the penalty, my poor sister, of being the only person in all the family who invites confidence. Let us forget this little incident, and let us be glad that the peasants and their lambs and milch-cows got away with unbroken bones. How are Hélène and Olga? May I see them?’
‘They are at their studies, we must not disturb them,’ said the mother of the little girls. ‘You may pity me too, Elim. The pressure of the iron cylinder rolls over my children also, and pushes them away from me. But it must be so. It is necessary. It is inevitable. It is in interests which rank higher than my pleasure or my affection.’
‘Poor victim of Juggernaut!’ said Othyris with a smile which was at once indulgent and ironical. ‘What a beautiful evening! Let us go for ten minutes into the gardens and forget our harness.’
‘Is there time?’ she said
anxiously, looking at the little crystal ball of her watch; her entire existence was regulated by clock-work. ‘I fear there is not time.’
‘Oh yes; time at least for a little stroll,’ said Othyris as he went out on to the terrace of rose-granite, with balustrades of porphyry columns, which stretched before the windows. Beneath its wide hemicircle of stairs, bordered by palms and yuccas, stretched the flowers, the lawns, the ponds, and statues, and fountains, of the southern side of the royal gardens; beyond these were masses of varied foliage of ornamental trees; and still beyond these again, the shimmering silver of the sea, calm and heaving gently underneath the violet sky in which a young moon had risen. The city might have been a thousand miles away for any suggestion that there was of it, or any murmur of its restless crowds. On a life-sized group of Aphrodite mourning the dead Adonis, the clear soft light of the early summer evening was shining; the statue was of the period which is called debased Greek art, but it was very beautiful despite its epoch.
‘How like you are to the Adonis, Elim!’ said the Princess as they passed the group.
‘So my dear mother used to say. So my flatterers still say.’
‘I never flatter you, Elim.’
‘Dear, you have the only flattery which is really sweet and wholesome, which is true flower-made honey that does not cloy: a too indulgent affection. Would to Heaven I were of marble like the Adonis, or of petrified wood like your beloved husband!’ They went down the steps of one of the terraces and walked on by an avenue of tulip-trees; at its end was a small classic temple looking out on to the western sea, on which the after-glow of a springtide day was still roseate.
‘How we waste our time, how we lose our summers!’ said Othyris as he gazed across the sea, so warm and bright in the light of the early eve. ‘We have only just come in from the dust of the Field of Ares, and we must go and sit behind gold plate with the evening light shut out that electric fuses may burn.’
The Princess did not contradict him. How happy she would have been walking with her two little girls along a country lane, talking with them of field flowers and hedge birds, and seeing the slow and pensive twilight of her northern home steal softly over furrow and hamlet and sheepfold!