by Ouida
His sons were all dead, and the oldest of his grandsons, Stephen, the King of Gelum, as his title was as heir to the throne, had reached fifty years of age; a man very impatient to reign, and grown very grey under the fret and fume of such long waiting.
‘Grand-grand-Gri-gris’ was the nickname that the numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the old Emperor gave him amongst themselves. They had a sincere veneration for him: he had laid by so much! He had so much to leave! As a ruler he had been niggard, but for his family he had stored up wealth untold. All the insurance companies of the two hemispheres watched his frail existence with as keen an anxiety as did his descendants, and when he coughed or took a chill, financiers quaked with fear, and his grandsons and great-grandsons thrilled with hope. All the Press of Europe agreed that the preservation of the nonagenarian’s existence was the greatest blessing that a merciful Deity could give to a reckless and too thankless mankind; that his existence was indeed the only rein by which the disorderly passions of the nations were held in check; so that his private virtues, like the public uses and greatness of him, will probably pass into a myth, indestructible by criticism, and growing more and more venerable with time.
Such legends die hard; and the legend of the Emperor Gregory’s invaluable services to the terrestrial globe is a very tough and tenacious one. Nothing, probably, will ever destroy it, except the publication of secret memoirs after his death; and there will be many and mighty persons interested to suppress these — sufficiently interested, perhaps, to succeed in burning them unpublished.
The national Press always said that the family affection so conspicuous in the imperial line was one of the holiest and most beautiful spectacles which the world could see; but the old Emperor knew better. He was attached to his vast progeny, but he was aware that most of them looked forward impatiently to his decease. ‘Leone XIII. is more fortunate than I,’ said the great Gregory bitterly once. ‘He has none of his blood, begotten of his loins, who are wishing him in his grave!’
However, he who without a qualm would consign thousands of the populations of his cities to the mines, or to the underground cells of fortresses, was weak of will in his family relations, and indulgent to his descendants. They were his; that sufficed to make them sacred to him; and his temper in private life was good-humoured and good-natured; he forgave much to his own blood, nothing to others.
If he had a preference for any one of the hundred and twenty - two descendants by whom he was blessed, he preferred Othyris, who never asked him for anything. All the others were always importuning for something, either for themselves or for their favourites, male or female. But Othyris had never even asked him for the ribbon of an Order for one of his gentlemen.
‘Cest un folly had the old Cæsar once said of Othyris to King John. ‘Mais ma foi! ‘est un fou fort distingué.’
‘Je vois la folie; je ne vois pas la distinction!’ muttered King John, too low for the Emperor’s aged ears to hear.
Othyris carried with him the presents and congratulations of his father and his family to this celebration of the Emperor’s ninety-seventh year. He occupied one of the finest suites of apartments in the imperial palace. He rode one of the finest chargers of the many fine horses which caracoled before and behind the carriage in which the aged sovereign drove through his capital. He wore his uniform of Colonel of the White Guards of the Septentriones and his Orders of the great Empire of the North. He was present at all the church services, the addresses, the sacraments, the banquets, the processions, the festivities; and that aged, bald, stooping, deaf, and purblind man, the centre of all this splendour and pageantry and acclamation, seemed to him a very piteous figure as the salvoes of artillery thundered, and the roar of applauding multitudes rolled through the air of the great city.
‘It is I who am wrong, perhaps, since everything which pleases others displeases me,’ thought Othyris.
The Father of his People!
The Nestor of Europe!
The Agamemnon of the North!
The Solomon of the Septentriones!
These and many such titles and phrases were emblazoned or embroidered on the banners, and arches, and draperies which floated in the mild, pale air of the days of Pentecost. The crowds were intoxicated with that contagion of emotion which is at once as unreal and as violent as the forces of delirium; the hysterical passion of suggested feeling, which is at once as true and as false as the laughter or the tears of the drunkard. Women sobbed aloud; men dashed the tears of joy from their eyes; little children were lifted up in strong hands and bidden to bless this king of kings; frail ladies were trampled under foot, nervous minds moved restless limbs to unseemly antics, young girls swooned from emotion, aged people cried and danced in their temporary insanity, many younger people were pushed, bruised, kicked, even killed; the atmosphere was electric, intoxicating as brandy, teeming with the infusoria of disease, the infectiousness of lunacy, — there was no sense in it, no root in it, no veracity in it, no more than in the ravings of the sick in a typhoid ward; but it had all the violence of fever, and all its obstinacy.
‘If he has patience he will have his desires, and be a fetish too in his turn,’ thought Othyris, as he saw the dull and tired eyes of his uncle Stephen fixed upon the crowd, which was surging around and against the six white horses of the old Emperor’s glass coach: the coach which had been made a hundred and fifty years before, and whose beautiful panels represented the triumphs of Alexander. All things come to those who know how to wait; so at least the proverb affirms, but Stephen was tired of waiting. He was cowed and silenced by long habit and daily pressure, but by nature he was impatient, as the feeble of will often are, and all his life was crumbling away in this weary expectation, this chafing at long delay. Long waiting is good for no one. The sword rusts in the scabbard. The pearl grows yellow in the jewel-case. In his youth Stephen, King of Gelum, had been a man of some fair promise and of many good intentions; but desire deferred and impotence to act had left him sapless as a hollow tree, bitter as a withered lemon.
The Emperor was greatly fatigued by his public appearance; it was not until three days later that Othyris was summoned to his presence.
He was reclining in a large low chair; he was wrapped in a dressing-gown of velvet, lined with sable, for he was always cold, although his palace was kept at the temperature of a hothouse. On his knee was his favourite white cat, Blanchette. He had been a very handsome man in his youth and manhood, and his features, wasted, haggard and wrinkled by extreme old age, were still finely formed, and had a distant resemblance to the portraits and statues of him in an earlier time.
‘A quand la noce, Elim?’ asked the old man, with a senile chuckle.
Othyris knew to what he alluded, and intimated that no bridal bells were likely to ring for him.
‘Humph, humph, you mistake. They will not let you remain celibate,’ murmured his great-grandfather. ‘Wed Xenia. Wed Xenia. She is an appetising little morsel, and you need not be troubled about her; let her take the bit between her teeth; she will leave you alone.’
But he was still tired from the fatigues of his triumph, and his eyes were closing and his senses growing drowsy; and Blanchette stretched herself, somnolent also, on his knee, and closed her own sea-blue eyes.
Suddenly old Gregory roused himself and looked suspiciously at Othyris, who remained standing before his chair, not having been either dismissed or retained.
‘Look you, Elim,’ said the old Emperor, ‘if you take Xenia, I will dower her well. But in my will I shall leave you nothing; you are so rich through your uncle Basil.’
‘You will do me the greatest favour, sir,’ said Othyris; and he meant sincerely what he said. ‘I have too much as it is.’
‘I will leave you Blanchette,’ said the old man, stroking his cat’s snowy fur.
‘She shall be Blanchette la bienvenue. Only I cannot answer for the politeness to her of my dogs.’
Old Gregory looked at him sharply through his
glasses, and smiled grimly, showing the gold of his teeth.
‘Any other member of your family would have offered to kill every dog in Helios lest they should molest Blanchette! After all, perhaps I had better leave her to little Xenia.’
‘They have qualities in common, sir.’
The old man laughed, and his teeth rattled.
‘Blanchette is a democrat; Xenia is certainly not like her in that respect,’ he answered, stroking her. ‘But democrats are easily tamed by warm rooms, and cream, and ribbons on their breasts.’
He chuckled feebly; in his far away youth he had been of an acute and satirical humour, and he had often amused himself by playing with his enemies.
‘Blanchette,’ continued the old man, ‘Blanchette has no sense of her position. She is entirely indifferent to her privileges. I have even seen her in one of the inner courts sitting on a scullion’s shoulder: it is shocking, but true. You, Elim, resemble Blanchette.’
‘I do not caress scullions, sir, though doubtless many good youths may be found amongst them.’
‘In theory you do; in theory. My dear Elim, the deluge will come without you; there is no need for you to open the sluices and cut the dykes. Your new creeds are very old. Your ideas were held by all the eighteenth century philosophers, and with what end? The Bourbons were slain and exiled, but the stock returned.’
Othyris was silent. It was as useless to argue with this fossilised mind as to reason with the sculptures in the adjacent gallery; and in a measure the old man was right. Of what use was the indignation of a Voltaire? A Calas always exists somewhere or other, is always doomed to a scaffold. Of what use the dreams of a Vergniaud, the theories of the Salons of the Directoire, the visions of an André Chenier, the hopes and ideals of a René, of a Lamartine? They result in Louis Dix-huit, in Louis Philippe, in Louis Napoléon, in Grévy, Faure, Loubet. The blood and the brains of the idealists boil in the cauldron of suffering, congeal in the ice-caverns of death, and out of them there always arise the Philistine and the Prince.
‘Leave your revolutionary fancies and marry little Xenia.’ said the old monarch. ‘You will have many children, and she will send your dogs to the kennels. Xenia is only a saucy, over-grown, impudent child just now, but she has the making in her of a maîtresse femme. You want a maîtresse femme to take charge of you.’
‘And our children would be tuberculous and scrofulous as the children of the unions of first cousins always are.’ thought Othyris. ‘Pray, sir, excuse me.’ he said aloud. ‘Xenia must make the happiness of some worthier mortal. I am quite incapable of appreciating her.’
‘You mean to disappoint her father and yours?’ the old man asked, with some amusement.
‘I cannot enter into their views for my happiness.’
‘Why not?’
‘For many reasons, sir.’
‘Humph! I think you have only to obey in this matter.’
Othyris was silent; but his features were cold and did not promise an obedient temperament. The old man looked at him with eyes dim but shrewd.
‘Look you, Elim; your uncle is a poor creature, but your father is a hard man; he breaks what opposes him. Give way in this matter. Xenia is jolie à croquer; and if you do not care for her, let her have her head; she will know how to amuse herself.’
‘That is not my idea of marriage, sir.’
‘Yours is an alliance,’ said the old Emperor significantly.
Othyris was silent.
‘You have no will of your own; we can break it if you have. ‘ We can break it,’ he said, in a shrill screaming voice, being irritated by opposition; and he struck the floor with his crutch so sharply that Blanchette turned her round blue eyes on him in alarm and skipped down from his knees.
Othyris was still silent.
He was thinking of how many human wills had been broken, like dry canes in a north gale, by that cruel old man whose blood was in his own veins. He was thinking of the gangs of fettered prisoners driven across the barren plains through snow and storm; of the hordes of poor fanatic peasants exiled, scourged, starved, forced out into the frozen night, and left to perish unpitied under the stars of the extreme north; of genius, of ideality, of heroism, of self-sacrifice shut down under the casemates of fortresses; of pregnant women beaten with rods as ripe grain is threshed by flails, the young and generous blood running like the blood of steers and heifers in the conduits of shambles. Yes, they could break the will, no doubt, but only by breaking first the cord of life.
‘We can break you — break, break, break—’ said the old Emperor in a thin shrieking voice, and he choked in his sudden wrath, and coughed with a gasping, rasping noise in his throat, and rang his gold hand-bell noisily. Seychelles, who was always within hearing, hurried to the rescue; of all things the most to be dreaded was any excitement, any agitation, at the great age of the great monarch.
The marriage had been decided on between Xenia’s parents and John of Gunderöde; for no especial reason, and in the usual ignorance which moves royal races to do that which the owners of horses and dogs most carefully avoid, i.e. to breed in and in, to perpetually cross and recross the same stock.
His younger sister, the Princess Euphrosyne, was betrothed to the eldest son of Stephen, and it seemed to both families that the union between himself and Xenia would be everything which could be desired.
Sooner, he thought, would he take one of the fisher-girls of the sea villages of the Hélianthine coast, with their virginal grace, their goddess-like strength and simplicity, their calm and chaste regard, so like to that of the busts of Artemis.
Maîtresse femme!
Yes: little Xenia would be that perhaps in time, but she would first be many other things as well. The sentinels at the palace gates could not keep out the atmosphere of the century.
A little later he joined in the gardens his many cousins, sons and daughters of the heir to the throne, who were playing lawn-tennis in the midst of an admiring circle of lords and ladies in waiting, tutors, governesses, and the other small fry of a great Court. Xenia was amongst them, sixteen years old, using her racket with skill and decision, as like the Loulou of Gyp as one cherry is like another; for the tendencies of modern generations penetrate alike the palace and the hovel, subtle as gases, invisible and irresistible as electricity, corroding as acids, blighting youth even whilst it stimulates it, as the heat of the compost forces the flower and withers it.
‘Savèz-vous, beau cousin, vous êtes mon futur? ‘ she said, with impudent challenge in her bright, bold green-grey eyes; eyes like the ice of her northern seas.
‘Vraiment? fen doute!’ he answered curtly. ‘On Va décidé!’ she said gaily; but there was an angry gleam in her impertinent, saucy, malicious gaze.
He did not answer, but sent the ball flying across the net. She was wholly unattractive to him; she was even repulsive; this half-grown girl, this demie-vierge, with her bold, hard gaze, her cynical provocative smile, her boyish, abrupt address; the Loulou of Gyp, though an Imperial Highness.
On the morrow he had an interview, which was painful to both, with his uncle Stephen. He stated courteously but inflexibly his resolution not to marry his young cousin; indeed, not to marry at all. He made the statement as politely as the nature of it allowed, but of necessity it wounded and offended his relative. Stephen was by no means an unamiable man, but he was one with whom circumstance had always been at variance: he had a wife who ruled him, and an old man who treated him contumeliously, a heritage which escaped him like a mirage, and a numerous family of which all the members gave him constant anxiety. He was the kind of man who, whether he be king or cobbler, is every one’s prey; he was kind, peevish, lavish, niggard, uncertain, unhappy; his courtiers pillaged him, his wife ridiculed him, his children tormented him, his grandfather terrorised him. He was the ruler that was to be; meantime every one ruled him.
He pulled off his blue glasses nervously, and beat a tattoo with them on the blotting-pad on the writing-table. The issue of the conve
rsation was full of anxiety for him. He knew John of Gunderöde in every smallest detail of his character. He knew that although a thing might be of no importance whatsoever, yet if the King had once decided on that thing he would never let it go, or alter his decision, even if it should cost a million times its value. He knew that his brother-in-law had the tenacity of the ferret, joined to that obstinate vanity which the human animal alone possesses. There was no crevice of that close-shut mind into which Stephen had not peered; for he had loved his sister, and had studied profoundly the man who had made her unhappiness. In addition, he had studied his brother-in-law with the keen and harassing interest which the debtor takes in the creditor. He had himself been always poor in comparison with the immensity of his obligatory expenditure, and John of Gunderöde had often rescued him from embarrassments; but he knew very well that the motive of the rescue had not been one of friendship or kindness, but of that shrewd and unerring self-interest which the King brought into every act, private and public, of his career. And now if this creditor were denied the hand of Xenia, which he coveted for his son because it was well known that the old monarch would dower her magnificently, the sufferer would be Xenia’s unhappy father.
He did not personally care about this marriage; but his grandfather had desired it, and to dispute the will of the old Emperor seemed to him a Titanic scaling of heaven, certain to draw down chastisement; his brother-in-law also desired it, and King John was not an agreeable person to thwart. Moreover, it is never flattering to a parent to hear that alliance with his daughter is undesired. He imagined that he saw the illicit influence of the lawless loves of Othyris in this withdrawal of his nephew; and that supposition tended to make him more offended than he might otherwise have been.