by Ouida
‘I have read the history of our past and of yours,’ said Othyris. ‘You, sir, are the great hero of that epopee, and your sword, not his, cut the cords which bound Helianthus to the knees of the foreign ruler. Helianthus should have been yours, not his.’
The finely-formed hands of Illyris, the yellow-white of ivory, on which the veins stood out like ropes, closed with force on the arms of his chair.
‘Ay!’ he said bitterly; ‘she had been mine had I so willed, perhaps; but at what a cost, what a cost! The war of brethren for long years of strife; an endless duel between the sons of the same mother. They would have made me ruler after Argileion and Samaris. They would have put the purple on my shoulders here in Helios, yonder; but I was no traitor to my country; I left betrayal to Theodoric of Gunderöde.’
Othyris grew very white; what he heard now was no more than he had known before, than he had thought for himself in his boyhood; but it wounded him cruelly to hear it said by another, and that other the victim of the ingratitude of his race.
‘He would have had no victory but for me,’ said Illyris, ‘and he repaid me by captivity and exile. But that would have been of little matter if he had been true to the nation; but he was false to her! False as hell! If I had chosen,’ he muttered, ‘if I had chosen, Theodoric had never reigned in my country.’
‘I know it, sir,’ said Othyris.
Illyris looked at him in doubt and with harsh scrutiny.
‘You are of his blood. You enjoy the fruits of his perfidy.’
‘That is true,’ said Elim, with humility. ‘But I am not blind; I am not a sophist. My conscience is not to be bought.’
‘That which he betrayed were not merely men: it was the nation, it was the ‘ country,’ said Illyris, not heeding him. ‘Judas — Judas — Judas! He entered the land as a soldier of liberty; he reigned, he lived, he died, a king. What he did to me mattered nothing. I was but a human beast like himself. But the land was holy, and he betrayed it! The land had received him with hope as a virgin her bridegroom, and as a wedding gift he brought misery and bondage to the innocent who had trusted him.’
He had risen from his seat in the force of his passion; his voice regained almost the strength of its early maturity; his sunken eyes blazed, and his Olympian brows seemed clothed with thunder.
Othyris stood before him as a young and timid pilgrim may have stood before the Zeus, with the lightnings in flame about his head. He spoke no word; he dared offer no defence; he knew that every syllable of the reproach was true. Had he not said these same things in his own thoughts ever since the earliest years of the garbled lessons given him in the story of his race, and in the share it had played in the liberation of the country?
Theodoric had been a fine soldier; when he had cried to his troops, ‘Follow, follow, follow, children! ‘ they had gone headlong after the gleam of his naked sabre, and would have followed him into the jaws of hell itself. But ambition is like a solvent acid; in it all pure and precious qualities dissolve and disappear; and the joy of adding territory to territory, treasure to treasure, title to title, is as a crucible in which all other feelings are burnt up and perish; it is an appetite which has the passions of the miser, of the conqueror and of the lover, all fused into one.
‘If you like not to hear these truths of the man who bred you and yours why come you hither, young prince?’
‘They are truths, sir,’ said Elim wearily, ‘and I am tired of phrases and of falsehoods.’
The old hero looked at him with keen but not unkind gaze.
‘Come out from a Court, then, and dig for your daily bread. But you have been bred and begotten by tyrants. If you are the son of John of Gunderöde, you have the blood in you also of the tyrant Gregory.’
The face of Othyris flushed painfully.
‘My mother was a saint.’
‘She was a good and innocent woman, no doubt,’ said Illyris, more gently; ‘you do well to cherish her memory.’
Othyris was silent. A great and painful emotion held him mute.
The old man looked at him with searching keenness in his still, clear eyes. ‘What can bring you here?’ he muttered; ‘what link can there be between an Illyris and a Gunderöde?’
‘Sir,’ said Othyris, without resentment, ‘there is my reverence for you. It is sincere. May it not serve to atone in me for a birth which is no fault of mine?’
‘That is strange language on a Gunderöde’s tongue.’
‘Forget that I am a Gunderöde. Think of me as a neophyte, as a volunteer like those who followed your army.’
Illyris was moved, but he was incredulous.
‘Half a century and more has gone by since I had my army behind me. The bones of my legions lie fleshless in the ground. I am a cripple who scarce can move across this narrow room. Get you gone. You have the blood in you of Theodoric. I know not whether you mock me, or whether you speak in sincerity. Youth is honest sometimes, but what friendship can there be between myself and you? I believed in your great-grandsire’s word, and he lied to me and betrayed me. I fought with him, and he stabbed me in the back. He stole my bride, my love, my queen, my Helianthus. He violated her on what he called her nuptial bed. He called himself her choice when he was but her ravisher. He called himself the Perseus of her Andromeda, and he was but the Minotaur. Think you my own fate would have mattered to me could I but have seen my country free, as I had seen her in the dreams of my youth — as I had seen her in my visions across the smoke of battlefields and the flames of burning cities? Did ever I hesitate to risk my body for her? Her cause was holy to me. I lost for it all that men hold dear. Wealth and land and learning, the peace of the hearth, the love of woman, the joys of offspring, were all as naught to me beside my country. And he — he — Theodoric — rendered all my losses vain, all my life fruitless, all my aims empty and filled with ashes. What did he make of her? A vassal to himself; a waiter on the will of the great Powers; a victim of a mock plebiscite; a slave bound down under the drain of taxation, the hypocrisy of constitutionalism; a mere copy of the other kingdoms of the world. My own wrongs I would have forgiven to him unto seventy times seven; but the wrongs of my country — my country which was never his except by fraud and force — I would not forgive, though God Himself commanded!’
He breathed heavily, his eyes closed in exhaustion; the emotions and the wrongs of other years surged up in his memory and sapped his remaining strength; the torpor of great age succeeded the violence and eloquence aroused by the visit of the King’s son.
‘Sir,’ said the voice of a woman behind him, ‘leave him, I pray you, if indeed you came in sincerity. He will say no more to you to-day. Your presence will only anger and distress him uselessly.’
Othyris turned and saw her with surprise; he had supposed that the old man lived alone, and had not expected to find any other occupant of the hill house.
The beauty of her form and face, the repose and gravity of her manner, the seriousness and limpidity of her regard as her eyes met his, astonished him. It was not thus that women were wont to look at him.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he murmured; ‘I was not aware—’ He hesitated and coloured, moved to surprise and delight. In this young recluse of Aquilegia he recognised the Pallas Athene of the seashore, seen by moonlight a year earlier, on the occasion of his visit to the ruins of the Ivory Tower.
There was a moment’s silence between them, but the embarrassment was on his side, not hers.
‘You are one of the Princes? ‘she said, as he stood silent before her. ‘I heard some of your latest words to my great-grandfather. Why did you come here? It was unkind, ill-judged.’
‘Unkind!’ repeated Othyris. ‘Unkindness was the last thing in my heart. Ill-judged? Why so? What is done in respect and sincerity cannot offend.’
‘Sir, you brought the past with you, as a man brings his shadow. What can the past of your family be to Platon Illyris? Ask yourself.’
‘It is because I am conscious of all it means to him t
hat I am here.’
‘Why? You cannot atone for it.’
‘To atone is seldom given to us. We can only regret. I come in all sincerity and good faith to the greatest man of this country.’
‘Sir, there is an impassable gulf between him and “ you. It is filled by the blood of his countrymen, of his brethren, of his friends.’
‘I had no share in its making.’
‘No; not you, but yours.’
‘Lady, you are young to be so harsh.’
‘I am not harsh, nor is he. Why did you come here, sir? Could you expect welcome or obeisance from us?’
‘No; but I, even I, might expect justice.’
He controlled with difficulty his rising anger; the humility with which he had come hither had been sincere, even extreme in its sincerity; but long habit and the perpetual usage of daily life, the deference of the world and of all its classes to him and his, had made him unconsciously expect consideration, even gratitude, in return.
‘Justice,’ she repeated slowly. How often is it invoked and invoked in vain! If royal races were, once or twice in the world’s history, denied it, could they complain? Is not the bread of injustice eaten beside millions of poor men’s cold hearths, all the year long, throughout the earth?
‘He would not be unjust even to you,’ she said with a movement of the hand towards the now motionless form of her relative. ‘You are not to blame for the accident of your birth, for the treacherous blood that you inherit. But stay down yonder in your rose-gardens. You have nothing to do with us. I am a working woman, and he is an old, very old man, well-nigh dead, and utterly forgotten.’
She passed out before him to the entrance and laid her right hand upon the door still standing open.
‘Go, sir,’ she said, and she pointed with her left hand to the path beneath the olive-trees. She was wholly unconscious of it, but the simplicity and the dignity of her attitude and gesture moved him to an amazed and intense admiration. The red reflection of the sun, then sinking into the sea amidst grand pomp of evening clouds, shone on the clear cold beauty of her face, its pure outline, its fair colour, its soft and thick dark hair, wound about her head in massive braids.
‘What a beautiful woman!’ he thought, ‘what a beautiful woman!’ and, still in all sincerity, but spurred by the longing to see more of her beauty, and to conquer her coldness, he drew back a moment on the threshold, and met once more the calm gaze of her meditative eyes.
‘I am of the reigning House of Gunderôde, that House which is condemned and despised by you, and I dare offer no appeal against your sentence. But I am your great-grandfather’s most devoted disciple; and I trust that time will honour me by giving me his confidence and yours.’
He bowed very low, as he had done to Platon Illyris, and went across the threshold of the outer hall, on to the rough grass-land without. She did not reply, but she closed the door as though to shut out his presence, and went within, calling the dog to her side.
Othyris retraced his steps to the city.
There was a great dinner that evening, followed by a Court ball, and he was barely in time to be in his place at the banquet. It was his office to lead the cotillion at the ball; but its gay pranks and jests and figures jarred on him, and he sighed for the cool and fragrant silence of the woods of Aquilegia.
‘In other times,’ he thought, ‘princes kept fools to jest for them; now we must play the fool ourselves from morn till night!’
CHAPTER XIII
IT was at an engagement near a hamlet called Turk that the army of Illyris, which had been weakened by great privations and exhausted by a long campaign in an already ravaged and burnt province, was defeated by the troops led by the first Theodoric; and with his horse killed under him, his strength sapped by long famine, and the few veterans of his guard dead or worn out around him, Illyris was taken prisoner by an overwhelming force.
When he was taken into the tent of Theodoric, the latter, who owed to him his entrance into Helianthus, came to meet him with both hands outstretched.
‘My old and honoured comrade,’ he said, in a tone of apology, ‘the fortunes of war change.’
Illyris, standing erect in his great height above the short, broad, stout figure of the head of the House of Gunderöde, put his hands behind his back, and beneath his eagle’s gaze the eyes of Theodoric fell.
‘The fortunes of war, yes,’ said Illyris, ‘but the laws of honour do not.’
Theodoric understood. His dark skin grew pale. He felt poor, and small, and mean, before this man who had driven the foreigner from the land and asked no reward, who had given away a kingdom and was poor as Belissarius.
He offered but a feeble resistance when his Ministers urged on him that the captivity of Platon Illyris was a necessary condition for the pacification of the nation.
The fortress of Constantine received the liberator of Helianthus.
His imprisonment was made as honourable and as little onerous as imprisonment can ever be, but the cage to the lion is agony, and whether it be a few yards more or less wide matters not to the king of the desert.
From north to south, from east to west, the Hélianthine people raged and fretted, and demanded the freedom of their hero; but he was not restored to them. There were already on their newly-won liberties the bonds which accompany an accepted government; and already they were powerless to break them asunder.
For five long years Illyris saw the sun rise and set over the Hélianthine sea from the casements of the fortress of Constantine. Then his sentence was changed to exile, and secretly, lest the sight of him and the memory of him should excite the populace, he was conveyed to a steam vessel in the Bay of Helios, which was bound for a northern kingdom — a vessel chartered by the government of Theodoric on condition that she should put into no port betwixt Helios and her destination. The people would willingly have freed Illyris at any cost; but they could neither see him nor speak with him; they had no one to lead them; they were like a rudderless boat; and already in the country there was that dominance of financial and commercial interests, that weight of personal egotism, that stream of blinding ambitions, which go with governments as vapours with a distillery.
So the Gunderöde reigned, and Illyris passed away.
When the young scions of the House of Gunderöde had been taught the history of the country their House reigned over, the name of Illyris had been at once blessed and cursed by those who had arranged and expunged and modified narratives of the War of Independence for their instruction, giving all the glory of the liberation from foreign occupation to Theodoric. Before he was fifteen years old, Othyris had rectified the omissions of his text-books, and made of Illyris his hero; but Tyras had never been enough interested in the past to do so.
‘Whoever plucked the pear we have eaten it,’ he sagely reflected; and the eating seemed to him the principal exploit, as it seemed to the world in general.
No one could write or speak of the War of Independence without speaking of Illyris. But the government had striven to the uttermost to efface his name. In the public schools it was dwelt on as slightly as was possible by preceptors docile to those who appointed and could promote or dismiss them; and in this matter the clerical joined hands with the lay teachers. The aged men who had been his contemporaries and his comrades became fewer and fewer with every year; and a period which is neither near enough to possess the selfish interests of the present, nor far enough away to have gained the venerable patina of time, is easily pushed aside. It is like a painting which has neither the freshness of modernity nor the mellowness of age. It is too well known, yet not known well enough.
For a part of his life after the accession of Theodoric Illyris had been perforce an exile; but in the latter part of the reign of Theodoric’s son and successor he was allowed to return, or rather his unauthorised return to his country was neither permitted nor prohibited, but tacitly allowed, by a government which ignored his existence except when its minions collected his hearth-tax. He live
d outside the south gate of the city, on a hillside covered with olive orchards and forests, whence a large part of the southern bay of Helios was visible, and the glories of sunrise seemed with every daybreak to be the new birth of the world. The place was called Aquilegia, from the quantities of wild columbines which grew beneath its trees; a temple with Ionian columns which was still standing in its higher woods had been in other ages consecrated to the worship of Isis and her son.
In this solitary place he dwelt, the world forgetting, by the world forgot, and was now over ninety years of age. He had been amongst the first and foremost of the popular leaders to deliver his country from a foreign yoke, and he had lived to see that the only form of liberty ever awarded to men is an exchange of tyrannies. The pack-saddle is shifted from the mule’s back, only for the sack of coals to be placed on it instead; the burden alters in kind and in name, not in weight.
This knowledge, and the pains in old wounds which ever and again reminded him of the battlefields of his manhood, were all that his glorious past had brought to him. Few pilgrims ever came there to do him homage. The name of Platon Illyris was certainly venerated by republicans, by revolutionaries, by all students of history; but it was scarcely more than a tradition to the actual generation; it was far away, like the name of Tell or of Washington; men have no time in these days to worship the gods of other years. Moreover, although they held his name in great reverence, Illyris held their opinions and actions in no respect whatever. He had little sympathy with the new order of revolutionary feeling. Socialism and Collectivism had little virility or value in his sight. His keen mind discerned the tyranny which they would evolve. His robust and independent theories had been as different from theirs as a lion at large on the plains of the east is unlike a lion caged in a den of a city. Therefore few of them had ever come twice to Aquilegia, or cared to sustain twice the caustic and fiery sarcasm which rent their false logic to ribbons, the martial and manly temper which despised their gospel of communism and assassination.