by Ouida
The boy, extremely impressionable in feeling, was strongly resistant to alien mental influence. Nothing could be done with him intellectually when he did not choose. They could make him unhappy, but they could not make him receptive. To some kinds of influence he was very open, but to many he was; adamant. This power of passive, but unyielding resistance had preserved his originality.
To his uncle Basil, with his scholar’s reverence for the past and his satirist’s contempt for the present, his brother-in-law of Gunderöde was an intolerably false note in that classic harmony which had been called, for two thousand years, Helianthus; a false note, like a motor-car on the plain of’ Thebes, a cyclist under the palms of Nile, a conscript on guard on the Capitol, a policeman in front of York Minster, an American tourist smoking where the lions still roam amongst the ruins of Palmyra; like any one or any thing discordant, incongruous, irritating, commonplace, intolerable; absolutely intolerable as the ruler of a State which was steeped in classic and poetic memories, and was in its atmosphere, in its legends, in its genius, in its landscapes, full of a spiritual and melancholy beauty. ‘Heavens and earth, he is as incongruous here as a kepi set on the head of an Apollo!’ thought the Grand Duke. But of what he thought and of what he felt concerning his sister’s husband he never spoke.
Between Elim and his father there had been always, a great antagonism. As a child he had a very sensitive musical ear, and the shrieking of fifes and the beating of drums were a torture to him; he would run off and hide anywhere he could, away from the squeak of the bugle, and cover his ears with his hands whenever he heard regiments marching past the palace, or merely a company going to change guard. His governor, by the King’s order, showed no mercy to this instinct; and frequently the; boy was taken to the Field of Ares, or to one of the barrack-yards, simply to punish his tympanum for its sensitiveness and give his nerves cruel suffering. To his father’s taste, the shrill fife and the sullen drum gave the only melody worth hearing. When his wife timidly urged in Elim’s excuse, that the child Wolfgang Mozart had shown a similar sensibility, the monarch looked at her with astonishment. What was Mozart? A Kapellmeister! Mozart had never been even a drum-major!
When Elim was ten years old a sea-eagle was brought one day to the Palace, and caged on one of the terraces overlooking the sea. It had a wounded wing and had been captured when resting on the mast of a fishing-coble. The imprisonment and immobility of the grand bird tortured the little Prince every day that he went into the gardens. To see its closed eyes, its drooped pinions, its ruffled and lustreless plumage, its wretched restless movements at times in its narrow prison, followed by long hours when it sat motionless in stupor and despair, so wrought upon his nerves that it became almost an illness to him. In vain did his tutors punish, and his mother try to reason with him.
‘Set him free,’ he said in an anguish of sympathy. ‘Set him free. Shut me up in his place. But set him free.’
The Queen, who knew that her best-beloved son had inherited that impulse of tenderness and pity from herself, was at last so moved by the distress of the child, and that of the bird, that she ventured to beg for the freedom of the eagle of her husband.
The broken wing had healed, flight would, she urged, be possible, and a painful sight would be spared to a sensitive little soul.
The King seldom granted any request of hers: her wishes always appeared to him sentimental fancies which were best nipped in the bud; everything seemed sentimental in his sight which was not connected with finance or with the army. She had no influence whatever on him; her delicacy of beauty, physical and moral, was no more to him than the rose hues of the dianthus — no more than the gemmæ are to the rocks on which the sea waves cast them. Her intercession was therefore seldom successful, her gentle voice was seldom listened to; but to her surprise he this time acceded to her wish.
‘But make this condition with your boy,’ he said to her. ‘He is idle, they tell me, and backward. Let him learn the first book of the Iliad by heart in the Latin translation. When he can recite it, the bird shall be set free.’
Elim, who was certainly backward, gave himself to the task as he had never done to any other through fear of punishment or promise of pleasure. He learned the allotted verse with a stubborn devotion to its difficult text which his tutors had never seen in him, and in much less time than they had expected. With a rapidity which seemed incredible to them, and a perfect accuracy of quantity and of accent, he committed to memory the long sonorous lines, and declaimed them to his preceptor, standing with his hands behind his back, and the sun in his face, on the sea-terrace where the bird was caged beneath a spreading plane-tree.
His parents were present; his mother’s eyes were filled with tears of delight and pride; his father stood with his eternal cigarette between his lips, and listened with critical coldness and in harsh readiness to discover a flaw in word or measure; he had come in from shooting, and his gun was lying across a garden chair by his side. But Elim made no mistake. Whilst he recited the verse his eyes were fixed on the dark, motionless, pining form of the imprisoned eagle. Its ransom depended on himself; he made no fault of memory or quantity. When he had spoken the last line he stood silent, breathless, red as a rose, with hope and expectation.
‘It was well said, was it not? ‘his mother murmured timidly to her husband.
The King nodded.
‘Open the eagle’s cage,’ he said to one of his gentlemen.
The child sprang forward and kissed his father’s hand in a rapture of joy and gratitude.
‘No sentiment!’ said the sovereign, putting him aside with some impatience. He disliked all emotion and all demonstration.
One of the gentlemen of the household had made believe to open the door of the cage, but in reality a gardener had executed the order; it was done not without danger, for the bird, realising its liberty, might have used its strength of beak or claws.
They stood together and watched, the sovereigns in front, the boy by their side, the courtiers behind. The ecstasy and expectation on Elim’s fair face were like those on the face of a young seraph in a Fra Angelico fresco; his lips were parted, his breath came fast and loud, he trembled in every nerve with his great joy.
The door of the cage was drawn open; the men retreated; for some moments the bird did not seem to see that anything had happened; he sat, a miserable heap of dull tarnished feathers, his head sunk into his neck. Then, slowly, he seemed to become aware of more air, of more light, of something unusual; he shook his plumage, his wings began to thrill and move and open, his head was lifted, his eyes gazed at his comrade the sun in the blue summer heavens.
The Queen thought of the eagle in the story of Dostoiewsky, the eagle that the prisoners in Siberia set free, and watched, winging his way over the snowy steppes in that freedom which was for ever denied to themselves.
‘Dear child! ‘she murmured, and laid her hand on Elim’s golden head.
The bird paused a moment on the threshold of his prison, then with expanded wings sailed, slowly and majestically, over the marble parapet of the terrace, out into the air and above the sea.
Elim stood transfixed and transfigured by ecstasy as his gaze followed the flight of the captive he had set free.
The King also followed the flight of the bird with his eyes. His gun, lying across the chair, was loaded; he took it, and raised it to his shoulder, aimed at the eagle rising higher and higher and higher into the blue ether, and fired.
The shot rang sharp and hard through the morning stillness. Another followed it. The eagle dropped dead into the sea. John of Gunderöde gave his breech-loader to one of his attendants.
Elim, his eyes wide open in horror, swayed blindly to and fro, then fell back insensible into his mother’s trembling arms.
‘Little idiot!’ said his father, with contempt. He had not meant to do anything especially unkind; he had followed that insane impulse of the sportsman to kill everything that flies, which, in its continual indulgence, becomes a form
of dementia.
The courtiers, the ladies, the preceptors, joined in a chorus of wondering admiration: what sight, what precision, what wonderful accuracy of aim!
The Crown Prince gave the big boy’s guffaw of enjoyment. The younger children screamed shrilly with delight and danced in glee.
For several weeks Elim’s life was despaired of; meningitis in its worst shape pressed its red-hot iron gauntlet on his brain and spine; the devotion of his mother saved him.
From that morning his soul was filled with the most unconquerable distrust of every act and word of his father’s; and a sombre and mutual dislike grew up between them as between the betrayed and the betrayer. It grew with growth, and each felt for the other an unchangeable and deeply-rooted aversion.
After twenty years of an exemplary life, during which she had never known a moment’s free will, or been allowed a moment’s individual action, the fair Queen had died, as a flower without light or air fades away and perishes.
‘No one wants me any more,’ she said, with a patient smile. Her eldest and best-beloved son threw his arms about her with passionate tenderness as though he would dispute her with death itself, for there was an exquisite sympathy between them.
‘I shall want you all my life, my darling mother!’
Her wasted, transparent hand rested fondly on his hair. ‘Oh, my love, you will have so many other ties.’
‘Perhaps so, perhaps not,’ said Elim. ‘None will or can be to me what you have been, my dearest and best!’
He had given to her the most devoted affection and sympathy, and his indignation at his father’s treatment of her had been only the more intense and embittered because it had perforce been shut up in his own breast.
Elim grew up to a beautiful adolescence, and a manhood of great promise for the future, should he ever reign; he resembled the Adonis of the Soleia in form and feature, and was remarkable for grace and charm rather than for masculine force. His health was good, or, at least, he never gratified any of the Court physicians by complaining of it; his constitution was sound, but he suffered from the chief of modern diseases, ennui; and it is the procreator of many others. It always seemed to him that he had been born to be the victim of captivity like any unhappy animal who comes out of its mother’s womb in the cage of a menagerie, and passes infancy and youth behind those bars, and is supposed by fools to know no other life and to want no other, because of any other he has only instinct and no experience to tell him.
That he could never be induced to see that his own order was a thing apart, a species made of different clay to the general, was an exasperation to all his relatives. Princes, although in felt hats and ulsters, ought to feel themselves altogether apart from the crowds similarly clad on a highway, a race-course, or a skating-ground. This sense of his own electness was altogether missing in him; and his want of it was an affront to those who had the most profound belief that they were pure gold, and every one else copper, or tin, or nickel.
The diversions of his brother Tyras were chiefly such as a decent street-sweeper or stone-breaker would be ashamed of, but they did not offend the family as greatly as the opinions and practices of Othyris. Privilege covered them; whereas Othyris tore privilege to tatters. He hated the men who bent their backs in two as they were received by him; he hated the women who dropped before him curtsies so low that they seemed to sink into the carpet. The supple spine, the pliable knees, seemed to him to degrade humanity in their persons. He was popular with the nation, but the Court was unanimous in its dislike of him. The Court saw its vested interests, its shibboleths, its salaries, its actual existence, menaced by him; and except in a few women he had no friends in his father’s palaces or even in his own. Every one whose interests were rooted in Court favour, Court honours, Court pomps and vanities, dignities and perquisites, knowing that he was near enough in the line of succession to make his advent to the throne a serious possibility, could not but view with horror and with terror the eventuality of a reign in which they would all, figuratively speaking, be put on rations of black bread, if they were not bundled neck and crop out of their Holy of Holies into ordinary and undecorated life.
When he had been a mere youth they had thought that his eccentricities would wear smooth with time; but year after year passed, and he did not abandon his early opinions as most men do; he did not wash in the Jordan of conventionality and become cleansed. When the Court contemplated all that such a king would mean to them, they felt that even such a saintly woman as Princess Gertrude ought to be divorced, as the Creole sinner Josephine had been, for the sake of the public weal.
‘Mine is a vie manquée,’ thought Othyris often. ‘I am of what is called royal birth, and I have no belief in royalty. I am a revolutionist at heart, but loyalty to my family forbids me to be so in action. I am an artist in instinct and appreciation, but I have not the artist’s power to create, and to absorb himself in his creations. All my sympathies are with the poor and the weak, and I am forced to live with the rich and the strong. I abhor war and militarism, and I am made, perforce, a Colonel of Cuirassiers and a General of a Division. I know not what my end may be, but I shall probably say, like my uncle Basil, “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, wherefore now I die in exile.”’
The Grand Duke Basil also hated the military type and hated militarism. His constitution had been ruined by its discipline, and his youth embittered by its rigours. But he was too honourable a man to permit himself to prejudice the son against the father. Elim never heard from him a disparaging word of either the King or the King’s measures; but the influence of the intellectual atmosphere which surrounded him in his uncle’s house inevitably gave its colour and its bias to his mind, which had all the receptivity of youth with the quick apprehension natural to talent, and an inborn tendency to resist conventional ideas. The King’s aversion to his brother-in-law was as great as that of the Grand Duke to him; but in the monarch every sentiment was subordinate to the organ of acquisitiveness; and he loved the fortune of Basil if he detested his person. Therefore the smooth ice of a chill, impeccable courtesy covered their relations at all times, and, through his uncle’s wishes and influence, Elim enjoyed a measure of repose and of freedom which otherwise would never have been his portion. In the beautiful solitudes of Ænothrea — his uncle’s favourite sojourn — he could forget that he was a prince and be the poet, the artist, the dreamer, which nature had made him.
Basil, the King thought, emasculated the character of a youth already only too susceptible to all sentimental follies and heresies; but if Paris were well worth the sacrifice of a mass, according to the Béarnais, the vast fortune of his brother-in-law would, he considered, be well worth that of a foolish young man; and he was led the more easily to this conclusion by what he knew of the extreme uncertainty of the life of the Grand Duke, who had cardiac affections of the most dangerous kind, and might die at any moment — as, in fact, he did die, suddenly, as he strolled amongst his roses one summer day, when Elim was twenty years old. Everything he possessed in Helianthus, all his great estates and the chief bulk of his personalty, was bequeathed to his nephew, and rendered him one of the richest princes of Europe.
Othyris was considered by his family to encourage the most subversive projects upon his lands, and at the same time to keep up the most antiquated absurdities. Worse still, he had even desired and asked the King’s permission to refuse the grant made to him on the Civil List by the nation in common with the other princes. When he urged that he did not require such an addition to his wealth, the explanation seemed as bad as the intention which prompted it. Who had ever heard in empire, kingdom, or principality of a royal person who declined the people’s money? He was not permitted by his father to have his way in this, and could only relieve his conscience by spending all of it in public works or private charity, so that the money went indirectly back to the nation which gave it: a most senseless and demoralising proceeding, according to his relatives, who always considered all provisions made
for them by the State miserably mean and wholly inferior to their merits.
It also made his family very angry that Othyris would never take any precautions for his own safety. He went about in town or country, on foot or on horseback, or on his mail phaeton, like any private gentleman. His indifference to danger, or his confidence in his popularity, seemed a reflection on the fears of his family in surrounding themselves with so many precautions.
He left the motor-cars and the bicycles to his brothers; they seemed to him to profane the marble dust and the herb-scented moors of Helianthus. He loved his horses; and like Lord Byron he loved to ride in the brilliant moonlight along the silent sands, or over the fragrant plains, with nothing beside him but the shadows of himself and of his steed, and the scent of the sea or the perfume of the wild thyme in his nostrils. His stables were full of the fleetest and finest horses in Europe; but he took no pleasure in the stupid and barbaric pastime of racing. To see a colt or a filly flogged along a course, with streaming sides and smoking nostrils, was to him a hateful sight. To enhance the interest of the struggle by putting money on it, as you add cayenne to your soup, seemed to him an avowal that you were moved by the basest of appetites; he esteemed more highly the punters at Monte Carlo than the members of the Jockey Clubs.
‘You were born without the gambling instinct, but you can acquire it. People do not like opium when they begin it,’ said Tyras to him once. But the acquisition did not seem to him desirable; and he remained aloof from the Turf as from the narcotic.