by Ouida
Of course at his request the eccentric act was not chastised as it should have been; no request of such a guest could be refused. It was ill-judged amiability in the guest, thought the King and his generals. But Elim knew that it was not amiability at all, but some motive exceedingly different.
To him, at all times, these visits of his cousin were a painful, a hated, ordeal. He smarted under the concealed patronage, the too extreme praise, the highly coloured asseverations of family affection, the cruelly courteous expressions of admiration of an army in which deficiency was plainly more visible than excellence and perfection lagged hopelessly behind.
‘You cannot now deny the tact and the magnanimity of the Emperor,’ said the Crown Prince to his wife, who did not reply. She knew that the tact was always there, unless temper got the better of it; the magnanimity she did not see, but she dared not say so. To lay another under an obligation is sometimes a very sweet and subtle form of cruelty. Othyris would have preferred two years in a fortress, or any kind of military degradation, to being under an obligation to his imperial cousin. But no choice was given him; and the King took care that the pill should be made as bitter as it could be by the aloes and assafœtida of his own pharmacopoeia. Julius, however, enjoyed a favour in the sight of the people of Helios which he had never attained before; and the public having become aware that he had interceded to avert punishment from their favourite, cheered him with sincerity and enthusiasm for the first time as he drove to the station.
‘I believe they would receive me with cordiality if I conquered them,’ he thought, as the same vision which had floated before the mind of Elim, of himself, Julius Imperator, on a white charger, riding through the city of Helios at the head of his victorious army, beguiled his imagination as his train bore him to the north-west, homeward to his empire in time to hold a review of troops on the morrow on the sandy plains of his military capital, and preach a sermon in the afternoon in his lay capital, in a newly-built cathedral: a sermon of which the text was, ‘Blessed are the peace-makers, for of them is the kingdom of heaven.’
‘He is very clever, our Julius,’ thought the old Emperor Gregory, ruler of the Septentriones, when he read the telegraphed heads of that sermon. ‘He would be cleverer still, if he could only hold his tongue!’
But that was the one thing which Julius could not do. Nature had denied him the power of silence, or the appreciation of the truth that if speech is silver, silence is gold.
Julius, who was one of the multitude of the revered Gregory’s great-grandchildren, amused that shrewd nonagenarian infinitely. Gregory too had been a Zeus, but Gregory had taken his own supreme divinity more philosophically and less pompously. Gregory had always been before everything else a man of the world; and a man of the world never overloads colour, or enforces emphasis.
When Othyris also read the précis of that sermon in the newspapers he could willingly have taken his imperial cousin by the throat; there are services which make the sensitive smart more painfully than any outrage, and every syllable of that oration seemed to him to emphasise the pardon asked for by Julius for the offence on the Field of Ares.
CHAPTER IV
HELIANTHUS was a country with a glorious past history, and a present which did not satisfy those who remembered its past. It was assured by its rulers that it was free as air; the modern synonym for freedom is taxation, and of this form of liberty it certainly enjoyed its full share; of other forms it did not see much. Everything was taxed in it, from the owls’ nests on the roofs of the cabins to the unhappy asses which drew the wooden ploughs. In return, it received a great many compliments from foreign nations, and various visits from foreign sovereigns; possessed a nominally free Press, of which the freedom was duly tempered by fines and imprisonment; and enjoyed the enrolment of a vast rabble of its own sons, dressed up in clumsy uniforms; huge ships of copper, or steel, or aluminium, lying at anchor in its beautiful harbours; crowds of spies and gendarmes in every one of its towns; armed men at all its gates to see that no bunch of grass, or halffledged pullet, passed them without paying its dues; and innumerable prisons, fortresses in exterior and hells within, where strength and energy and vigour rotted into gibbering idiotcy, and young men grew aged in a year.
Helianthus had three generations earlier dreamed a fair and glittering dream of liberty, and had armed like a second Joan of Arc; but like Joan the fetters had been put on her limbs, and the smoke of the pyre had stifled her breath. Joan died; Helianthus did not die — she accepted the loss of her dream.
The land is sadly changed in its physical and architectural features; the destruction of its forests, the drying up of its rivers, the appropriation by speculators of its torrents and lakes, the demolition of its castles and palaces, have in many parts made it featureless, shadeless, arid, the few green things which still keep life in them being ruthlessly gnawed, as they sprout, by the famished flocks of goats and sheep. But in many other portions of its legend-haunted soil it is beautiful still; in its limpid atmosphere, in the lovely colour of its mountains, in its ancient gardens, in its gorgeous sunsets, in its moonlit nights, in its roseate dawns, in its immemorial woods, melodious with the voice of the nightingale, something of the youth of the world still lingers, still awakes with the blossoms of spring. In harsh incongruity with it, incongruous as the scream of steam on its waters, as the buzz of machines in its plough-furrows, as the rush of electric cars down its ancient streets, is the House of Gunderöde, which has ruled over it for three generations.
Having helped to free the blood-mare from the lasso cast over her, her saviours put a halter in its stead upon her neck, and jumped upon her back with an agility so admirable that the rest of the nations applauded. A circus trick is often confused by the world with noble horsemanship.
The Gunderöde were chiefly, in their stock and in their temper, Guthonic. They were a northern race, partly through origin, and largely by marriage. Their character was the antithesis of that of the Hélianthine. Connubial unions had given them many mixed strains in their blood, but of pure Hélianthine blood they had not a drop.
They claimed descent from Orderic, a chief of the Huns. From the sixth to the ninth century they had been robber-barons; in the Middle Ages they had become lords and margraves of the south-east of Europe; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by craft and judgment and shrewd watching, by the seizing of opportunity, the making of alliances, and the seeking and forming of great marriages, they had increased their position to a petty sovereignty; a duchy at first, then a principality, then a kingdom, gradually strengthened and widened by the annexation of frontier towns, of ecclesiastical cities, of military bishoprics, of mountain strongholds, of hill and lake, of moor and fief.
The Gunderöde family were physically brave, of course (for in those times courage did not excite the surprise which it awakens nowadays!), but they were politic, wary, keen to amass, slow to relinquish; and these qualities obtained them more advancement than did their bravery. The sword of the Gunderödes had a cross for its hilt and a double edge to its blade; it served them equally well when they swore an oath as when they cut down a foe. The oaths were not always, nor were they often, kept; but the foe was always cleft through skull and crop.
In the hurly-burly of the Napoleonic wars they had been careful to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare. All things brought them harvest. They were careful, cautious, and cold. Although they had been always absolutists in action they had contrived to obtain a reputation for liberal principles. A wild boar, breaking a huge chain fastened round his loins, was their emblem. It pleased the popular fancy as an emblem of freedom. The boar sat square upon the throne; and, thinking it a pity that the chain should be of no use, had it picked up and soldered on to the limbs of some of the persons who had helped him to mount; there was thus no danger of their ever making him descend.
In the effigy of the wild boar it was true the animal was represented in the act of breaking his own chains; but the populace, paraphrasing Dante
, found that he broke them only to forge and rivet them the more firmly on others. In fact, by the time that the third generation occupied the Hélianthine throne, the Gunderödes had acquired the belief that they were its occupants by hereditary right, even as the up-stream wolf, as Mark Twain calls the astute beast of the fable, held the belief that the stream was his by divine right. The timid remonstrances of the nation were heard no more than were those of the lamb by the wolf.
The House of Gunderöde, once taking, always retained; the people of Helianthus understood too late what they had done when they had lent themselves to its fatal absorption of their birthright. The acquisition of supreme dominion had been so gradual that the people still did not entirely realise what they had lost. The outward forms of constitutional freedom were carefully preserved; the people did not perceive that the substance had disappeared out of their hold. One of the oddest facts about the last hundred years is the manner in which the populace everywhere has parted with its liberties, and been persuaded to imagine that it has increased them.
A similar history to that of the Hélianthines can be told of other peoples. Reigning races resemble planets: some are still nebulous and scarcely formed, bathed in the effulgence of a rising sun; others are exhausted and chill, growing dim in their twilight; others again are at their perihelion, most glorious to behold; but the manner of formation and increase of them all is identical.
If a sceptical mind inquires doubtfully why the planets were created at all, such a mind no doubt belongs to an anarchist and not to an astronomer.
The first Gunderöde who had been called King of Helianthus (he had never been crowned, nor have his descendants) had been the famous Theodoric, invariably called the Liberator, of whom the effigies in bronze, or marble, or stone, stand thick as pebbles on a beach all over the land. His successor had been his son Theodoric II, a nonentity though a martinet. The third in succession was the present ruler, John Orderic, who had ascended the throne at five-and-twenty years old, and had found the seat to his liking. He had not the wonderful protean abilities of his nephew Julius, which enabled the latter to be a despot and to seem a dilettante, to garrotte a nation and to play the violin, to telephone the order for a massacre and to model the shape of a fusee-box: that kind of activity was not in John of Gunderöde, who was as incapable of versatility as a wooden nutmeg. He even, indeed, viewed with contempt these kaleidoscopic qualities in his nephew; and remained cold when the War-lord of the Guthones sang, fiddled, painted, modelled, wrote an oratorio, or designed a uniform, to the admiration of a wondering world.
But he was a shrewd, keen, selfish, cautious ruler and reader of men. Sentiment never interfered in him with judgment, and no instinct of kindness ever weakened his wisdom. He was exceedingly strong in many things; in nothing stronger than in never being drawn into giving his reasons. Whoever gives his reasons, gives a hostage to his adversaries. He acted; and let others waste their time, if they chose, in conjectures as to why his acts took such a shape instead of such another. This spared him much time, and saved him from ever contradicting himself. It was thus that he made a gramme of brains do the work of an ounce, and a very ordinary personage appear a statesman and a diplomatist.
The brain, moreover, grows keener by being incessantly sharpened on the grindstone of selfinterest and suspicion; and by the time he was forty years old he had become an able tactician and an unerring observer. Had he been born in private life he would have been respected by his neighbours, secret but severe in his business transactions, harsh but faithful as a husband, cold but careful as a father; he would have gone unloved through life, but in death would have been regretted by his bankers if cursed by his clerks.
In the exalted position which he filled, his worst qualities were cultured and strengthened, and his better qualities early perished of atrophy, under the stifling compost which makes the hotbeds of Courts.
The Chinese, it is said, put a child into a vase of pottery and keep him in it until he is a man; in consequence his limbs and body never grow bigger than the pot which confines them. The pot into which a monarch is put is not seen, and does not imprison his body, only his mind; and in old times his jester was privileged to come and shake bells, and tell truths, over the pot. But there are no jesters of that kind now; there are only newspapers to do the fooling, and if any truth is told by them they are forthwith prosecuted for libel. Actions for lèse-majesté are very frequent in Helianthus; months and even years of imprisonment punish any plain speaking about distinguished persons, so that the Press of the country never by any chance ventures to blame the House of Gunderöde.
A little girl once said to another: ‘What do you think God is like?’— ‘Like my papa,’ replied the other without hesitation. ‘Like my papa, you mean.’ said the first, with indignant conviction. It is probable that every monarch has in his mind’s eye a Deity fashioned, not like his sire, but after his own likeness, or rather that which he imagines is his likeness. This Deity is more or less real, more or less near, more or less to be admired or dreaded, according to the temperament of the sovereign he protects. Some go so far as to believe that they have received an exequatur from the Most High in the same way as they give one to their clergy. It is these rulers who believe in the crime of lèse-majesté and imprison professors, caricaturists, comic singers, and workmen for the treason of satire or laughter. Others do not go so far as this; they have doubts about their own celestial origin and appointment; they imagine that what they call Providence is a kind of Chief Constable, and consider themselves as appointed his sub-inspectors; but they, also, believe in lèse-majestê as the policeman believes in tip-cat and hooligans; like tip-cat and hooligans it must be put down at all costs.
To this latter category John of Gunderöde inclined from the bias of his temperament. He was a man of much good common-sense, and his Deity was a nebulous personality, vague, remote, not needing much consideration, a useful figure to carry in procession, as a black Virgin or a waxen Jesus is carried round a town on great occasions such as a visitation of cholera, or a famine. That he was guided by the Most High when he made war, sent socialists to a penitentiary, escaped a pistol shot, or prevented a popular measure from becoming law, he did not believe, as his nephew Julius believed it of himself; he did not think himself the Elder Brother of Christ, and the administrator of Providence, as Julius believed himself to be. Deity was to him a quantité négligeable, exceedingly négligeable. Cromwell, in his famous exhortation, placed his God first, and his gunpowder second. John of Gunderöde reversed the order of the precedence. The casting of his cannon was of more importance to him than the celebration of a Te Deum or a Hosanna; his mind was narrow but robust.
Second only to the political successes of his reign was the interest possessed for him by the fluctuations of his investments. A potentate has lately said with considerable naïveté that the prestige of his order has diminished in these later years; he might have said that it is not possible for any one man to be at once a Cæsar Imperator, a Grand Monarque, and an impassioned investor in Preference Shares.
At present the nations in general do not realise that the anointed sovereigns of the world have swords at their sides and cannon at their command, and crowns and sceptres, orbs and miniver, in their wardrobes, but keep in their hands the Share List as their favourite reading: when the nations do realise this, ‘prestige’ will drop lower still, and crowns will cease to be quoted at par.
At an early age the present King of Helianthus had been wedded by his father to a princess of a small northern kingdom; a plain, dull, uninteresting young woman who gave birth to a son, or, as the journalists said, to a Crown Prince, and then, with her usual discretion, retired into the grave, leaving her place to be filled by a lovelier successor, a granddaughter of the famous aged Emperor Gregory, who was called the Nestor of Europe, the ruler of that enormous empire of which the huge penumbra overshadows two quarters of the globe.
She was an exceedingly beautiful woman, with an infinite grace
of form and bearing, and a wistful melancholy in her eyes, which were of the colour of the northern seas in summer. In ten sad years this patient victim of policy had borne King John four sons and two daughters: Elim, Duke of Othyris; Alexis, Prince of Tyras; Constantine, Duke of Esthonia; Frederic, Count of Idumæa; and two daughters, Ottoline and Euphrosyne, the former married to a Lillienstauffen, the latter betrothed to her cousin, a great-grandson of the Emperor Gregory.
On the hard granite of the King’s irresponsive, sullen, unkind temperament, the Queen’s sensitive and timid nature had been thrown as a hind is thrown on a rock to be grallocked. Fear came into her lovely startled eyes whenever she heard his step or his voice, as into the eyes of the doe when she sees the steel gleam of the death-tubes shine above the heather. Her own family knew that she was extremely unhappy; but no imperial or royal family can interfere in the unhappiness which may ensue from one of its State alliances; the only anxiety and effort of the family is to prevent any publicity of the fact that the union is discord, and this was easy in her case, for she shrank from all publicity herself. ‘Faut ensorceler ton homme, ma’petite! Ouf! tu es belle.’’ said old Gregory to her once; but he knew that no living woman could move by a hair’s breadth the temper of John of Gunderöde any more than a moonbeam can melt a stone. That the King was not more unkind than he was to her, was due to the great respect he felt for the aged tyrant of the Septentriones, and to the residence in the country of one of her brothers, the Grand Duke Basil. Her first-born, so like her physically and morally, had for her sake as well as for his own been dear to her brother, a celibate, a connoisseur, a fine musician, a profound scholar, a prey to the melancholy of desires which nothing earthly could satisfy, and of ill-health which could be mitigated by care and by climate, but never be cured. The greater part of Elim’s early youth was spent with his uncle Basil in the palaces which the Grand Duke had purchased in his sister’s adopted country — that Helianthus so dear to all Hellenists and Latinists for its incomparable traditions, its art, its literature, its history.