by Ouida
But for the first time in her life she was happy and proud, and could feel that her lord was content with her. For the first time her heart was closed to the woes of others. Possibly if she had gone into the ruined districts she might have been more painfully conscious of what was being suffered in them; but statistics and official returns do not touch the heart unless the heart be accompanied by a very vivid imagination, and the imagination is a sensitive plant which withers in palaces. She was happy, for the first time in her life, proud of her boy, and glad to see her husband so contented and so triumphant; her one duty had been to bear him an heir, and she had now done that duty after twelve years of a marriage almost as bad as barren. She was sorry, indeed, for the hunger of the south and the north whenever she thought about it; but intensely sorry she could not feel. The universe was concentrated for her in the little red wrinkled morsel of flesh, slobbering and slumbering in his cradle under draperies of Old English point. He was her baby, her heaven-born, her latest and sweetest treasure; but he was much more than this in her sight: he was the future king. For her the infant’s toothless, shapeless lips were touched by a sacred chrism.
‘You too — even you!’ thought Othyris, as he saw her absorption in the little heir: even she, good soul as she was, had been drawn into the vortex of selfish concentration.
He could say nothing to her, for anything he would have said in the sense of reproach for her selfishness would have sounded like disappointment and rancour.
Undoubtedly the cruelty of the lot of the many, the waste and self-indulgence in the lives of the few, were, when she thought of them, very painful and perplexing to her. She could not attempt to account for the anomaly satisfactorily; she accepted it as a sorrowful mystery — which it is not very difficult to do when the sorrowful mystery does not starve ourselves or our own children. That her own order was in any way the cause of such disparities she would have indignantly denied, and probably with justice. But, as a rule, she did not either generalise or analyse; she referred such painful problems to the omniscience of the All-Supreme.
Yet, alas! the Providence in whom she believed so humbly and devoutly was unkind to her; her little son was not more sacred to it than the starved babes in the famine districts; and whether fools or sages were his worshippers, both were unable to keep alive the little scion of the House of Gunderöde.
It has never been explained satisfactorily by either philosophers or pathologists why nature is such an anarchist that she allows royal babes to be subject to croup; it is clearly wrong in the divine ordering of things, and is a problem which must greatly trouble and confound the mind of the true royalist. But, unfortunately, the fact is that royal infants are not more respected by disease than those of the population of the slums, and it so happened that the poor little Prince of Helios died after an illness of a few hours, suffocated by this common malady like any common child, and the Crown Princess mourned him as any ordinary mother might have done. His name had scarcely been included in the rubric of the priesthood and the prayers of the nation, before it ceased to be anything more than an inscription upon a tomb. The poor little fellow died at five months old; the length of his names and the weight of his honours were powerless to keep him alive; he actually died of suffocation, just like any forlorn atom breathing its last on a bed of rags, despite the science and the efforts of all the physicians of the Court.
‘Poor mother! Poor mother!’ thought Othyris as he heard the tidings. How cruel was life — making the women lose what has cost them such pangs to bear and bring forth!
He who had felt the fetters which bound him to the throne lightened by the child’s birth, felt them return in all their might at his death. He was once more Heir-Presumptive to the throne of Helianthus. The shadow of the purple hung like a rain-cloud upon the horizon of his life.
A mortuary chapel of great beauty and riches was consecrated to the child’s memory, and his image in solid silver was enshrined in it as well as his silver coffin. Candles burned, and bells rang, and flowers bloomed above his tomb night and day, and innumerable young children of his age died of the poisoned milk of mothers employed in the factories of deadly trades. Yet neither his parents nor his grandfather would, by any stretch of imagination, have been able to conceive why the industrial classes are attracted by anarchistic doctrines!
King John was driving home, after a day’s shooting with two of his gentlemen, when about a mile off the city gate on the north shots were fired at him by three young men hiding behind a myrtle hedge on the roadside. All the shots missed him, and struck the boughs of an opposite plane-tree. The young men fired again, but two were seized in the act by the carabineers who rode close to the carriage; the third fled across the fields, and momentarily escaped, only to be captured later on, hidden in a disused water-tank.
The King returned to the Palace, and ate his dinner with an undiminished appetite. The youths were escorted by police and gendarmes to the city prison for malefactors, and the attempt becoming known, the evening journals hastily printed ‘specials’ and the Prefect and Syndic as hastily organised thanksgivings. The great cathedral bells rang, and the palace square was illuminated and thronged. The King, when he had finished his dinner, went out on to the balcony above the great portico, accompanied by the Crown Prince, and remained there for a quarter of an hour, his figure black against the light of the room behind him; standing bareheaded and making signs of acknowledgment with his right hand, the spark of a lighted cigar between his lips as usual.
The crowd cheered, and some of the women in it sobbed with hysteria; for an attempted assassination, like a death-bed repentance, sends up the value of a perfectly useless and uninteresting life, and floats it upwards to the empyrean, as a balloon on the mere cutting of ropes soars by the force of gas into the clouds and above them.
The morning papers described and illustrated the scene by the plane-tree, writing with enthusiasm of the wonderful self-possession of the King, and sold largely. They also stated that the populace had tried to lynch the criminals on the way to the prison, which was quite untrue; and that there had been discovered indisputable evidence of an extensive international conspiracy, which was not true either, but was a communique: a lie of the police, not of the Press.
The lads were said to be dangerous anarchists; and, as usual, it was stated that an electrical thrill of horror had galvanised the whole of the universe.
John of Gunderöde himself took the matter calmly but very seriously, and expected every one to do the same; and his private cypher and his private wires worked incessantly for several days.
The Red Spectre always haunts the beds and the brains of sovereigns. The roar of the cheering crowds is so terribly similar to the roar of a revolted population; the press of the multitudes through the streets to see a State procession so painfully suggests what the stress and haste would be to see a fugitive monarch, a burning palace, an improvised scaffold. The guffaw of a grinning mob differs so little in its expression from the howl of a crowd that is cursing and clamouring for blood. The monarchs may give their coachmen or their postillions, or their footmen on the footboard, revolvers in each pocket; they may brave ridicule by mounting gendarmes on bicycles behind them; they may wear coats of mail under their cambric shirts; they may have ton weights of iron chains, and rows of dark cells in their prisons under the sea level, where no ray of daylight ever comes, ready for their foes when captured. But all these precautions cannot rid them of the Red Spectre; of the ever-present personal fear of assassination which chills their blood even in the warmth of a summer garden, of a friend’s embrace, or of a bridal bed.
It was this fear which gave to the eyes of John of Gunderöde that strange expression of menace, of apprehension, of painful expectancy, and of scared vision, which made men doubt whether he had in fact the stolid bull-dog courage which was always attributed to him, and which was a characteristic of his race. In reality he had it; he was naturally brave, with a cynical, cool courage, hard and unsympathetic, l
ike all his other faculties. But when the fear of assassination has once entered into a man it never leaves him; it lies down with him at night, and gets up with him in the morning, like an incurable disease. It looks out from his regard always en vedette, always apprehensive, always glancing to right and to left like the regard of the oft-hunted stag. John of Gunderöde knew that this look had passed into his own eyes, reflex of a haunting thought in his brain; and to conceal it he kept his eyelids half closed, or used a double eyeglass, for which his sight had no need.
It is remarkable that the great ones of the earth, when they escape from a danger, always praise the Deity as having watched over and guided them out of it; but when they fall a victim to a revolver, or a dagger, or a bomb, they are never said by their families to have been deserted, or punished, by their Heavenly Father; the most that is said then, is that the ways of God are mysterious and inscrutable. So, as the three youths had all and each of them missed the anointed of their land, every one in the Court circle and out of it was loud in their admiration of the conspicuous intervention of Deity. It was the Almighty Power which had made the lads’ sight fail, and their hands tremble, at the critical moment, and the bullets fail to find their billets.
‘It would have been better,’ said Othyris, ‘if the Almighty Power had intervened to prevent the lads’ purchase of the pistols.’
‘What a dreadful thing to say!’ cried the Crown Princess, to whom he made the remark. She was a religious person; her early training had been Evangelical, and she really saw the finger of Providence distinctly in the fact that all three bullets had hit the plane-tree instead of reaching her father-in-law.
‘It seems to me an indisputable fact,’ replied Othyris.
‘You would say, then,’ she continued, ‘that Christ should have prevented Lazarus dying, instead of raising him from the tomb?’
‘I imagine it would have been kinder to Lazarus,’ said Othyris.
She was still more shocked.
‘It is so sad,’ she murmured, ‘so grievously sad, that you are so Voltairean!’
Othyris laughed.
‘Oh, surely I am of a later date than Voltaire? And I am not so meritorious as he,’ he added. ‘I have not yet saved my Calas.’
‘Perhaps you will feel it your duty to save these three assassins?’
‘If there were a chance that I could do so, I would try to save them from a violent death.’
‘You cannot speak seriously.’
‘I do, indeed. Should I jest on such a subject?’
‘On what grounds would you save them?’
‘On many. That they are young; that they were deluded; that they had hitherto borne good characters; that their shots all missed their mark; that no harm was done; and, beyond all, that a ruler should always be merciful and magnanimous.’
‘But it is owing to the country to set an example.’
‘Oh, the poor country! We owe it so many things that we never pay to it! Surely an example of clemency is the highest example that can be set?’
‘Clemency is a great virtue, no doubt,’ said his sister-in-law, sorely troubled in her ethics, as good women often are. ‘And I am sure your father would be inclined to exercise it.’
Othyris was silent. He thought that when his father should show clemency the marble lions on the quay would walk.
‘If he were sure that it would be understood,’ she added. ‘Not misinterpreted. The people are so apt to take kindness as meaning fear.’
‘The people are not often tried in that way. We are always à cheval on our rights, using them as the Cossacks their knouts. The King would be the last man to lay down his knout.’
‘The King will do nothing in the matter himself. He will follow what his Ministers advise, and what the judges of his Courts may decide; he will allow the law to take its course, that is all he will do; he will exercise no personal power, he will give no personal opinion.’
‘But it is precisely in such a matter as this that he could use his personal influence usefully and well. He is the offended person, he was the intended victim; he would possess an absolute right to be as merciful as his wishes might lead him to be. In these matters, with people in general, the common law is inexorable. It does not allow the person injured to save the injurer, or the intending injurer, from legal punishment. It is one of the most caustic satires on Christian nations that no man may forgive his own injuries if once the law has got hold of them; that no man is allowed to rescue his enemies from the sentence passed on them by others. But the King has this advantage over all other men, that he can, if he please, pardon and set free his foes. He can use his prerogative to annul the capital sentence of the law. True, in general usage, this right is exercised on his behalf by the Minister of Justice; but he can at any time exercise it himself; and what time would be so fitting as this, when the accused (who will be to-morrow the condemned) have been guilty of a personal offence against himself, and are scarcely more than mere boys in years? I am quite sure that such an act would be not only generous but most politic, most wise. It would go to the heart of the people of Helianthus.’
The Crown Princess sighed and dropped stitches in her stocking.
‘What you say is most touching, and in a measure quite true, but, my dear Elim, it is not by the heart that a sovereign can rule; it is by the head. It is sometimes more salutary (even in the end more merciful) to inspire terror than affection. The populace may applaud a romantic benevolence; but what they obey is, alas, that which they fear.’
‘He is called the father of his people! ‘said Othyris bitterly.
‘Fathers must chasten,’ said his sister-in-law.
‘But fathers do not slay their sons! In the power to exercise mercy, there seems to me to lie the supreme privilege of royalty; but no one in our day uses it. The Code is the only Holy Writ.’
‘The Code is the supreme law of the country!’ said his sister-in-law.
‘No doubt, and perhaps the judges could not give any other verdict, the law being what it is; but it is precisely in such a case that the royal prerogative of mercy might be exercised; that “Go, and sin no more,” might be said by the head of the State.’
She sighed again, and her needles clicked nervously in the silence. She was by nature full of kind and tender instincts, but these had been steeped in an atmosphere of conventionality and absolutism till they were dry and stiff, the life crushed out of them under the pressure, like flowers in a hortus siccus.
Othyris looked at her with some derision, and some compassion, and with a sense of infinite sadness. Herself, she would not have hurt a fly, or have ever avenged the cruellest wound; but she had been so trained and so saturated with’ prejudice, that she could see only justice in a judicial murder, and only strength and right in an inexorable vengeance. What use was it to argue with one whose mind was closed to argument as a battened-down port-hole is closed to the surging of the sea-waves? Hundreds of times had he renewed such discussions with her, only to be met by that calm resistance of a narrow obstinacy which regarded itself as a religious duty.
‘Look at me and answer me, Gertrude,’ he said after long silence. ‘Do you seriously believe that it is either right, or necessary, or wise, to kill, in cold blood, three youths under twenty years of age for an abortive attempt which did no harm to any one or anything?’
She raised her head and looked at him. ‘It is a question of State which it does not become me to discuss or to decide. Nor does it become you, my dear brother-in-law. Remember, Elim, if you make yourself the apologist of your father’s enemies there are many who will remark that his death would have left only one other life between you and the throne.’
A hot flush of indignation rose over his face.
‘You!’ he exclaimed. ‘You can say this horrible thing to me, or think it?’
‘I neither say nor think it, dear Elim. I say that there are many who will attribute base motives to your defence of the anarchists who attempted your father’s life. It is not
the part of a son, it is not the part of a prince, to defend such persons. They have their own legal defenders. Leave them to those.’
‘You, a religious woman, half a saint, do not believe in the supreme obligation of acting according to one’s convictions whatever construction may be put on those? You do not believe that the exercise of mercy is the most divine attribute of a human character?’
‘It is not either you or I who can exercise it in this instance, and neither you nor I can be entitled to criticise the actions of one whose first subjects we both are, and to whose measures we are both bound to give an implicit and unquestioning respect.’
‘Respect a brutal vengeance? Where are the precepts of your religion?’
‘Hush! Hush! You distress me unspeakably. You should not even think such things in the solitude of your chamber.’
‘If I must neither think nor act, if my utterances on their behalf would only confirm and hasten the death-warrant of those unhappy boys, I will leave the country, in order that I may not hear the weeping of their mothers, and the sound of the quicklime being thrown on their young bodies.’
‘To leave the kingdom you must have your father’s consent, both as your king and your commanding officer.’
‘I am a slave, then!’
‘Acquiescence in duty is not slavery.’
‘I decline to see duty where you see it. What you call duty is a mere fetish to which you sacrifice and slay all your best instincts, all your most humane impulses, all your upright honesty of purpose, all the sensitive feelers of your conscience.’
‘I do not think so,’ said his sister-in-law calmly; and she moved her knitting needles in and out with even measure; she had been disturbed and troubled for a moment by his arguments, but she had now regained her placid and unquestioning belief in the dogma perpetually taught to her from her cradle.
‘You ought to pity these boys as you pity misguided children.’
‘Of course one pities them, in a sense. One pities all guilty persons. But one must be careful not to allow one’s compassion to blind one’s sense of right and wrong.’