by Ouida
‘Tell me, sir, what ought I to do in the years to come, should I live to see them?’ Othyris had said to him one day.
T am too old to counsel youth,’ answered Illyris. ‘The world of to-day is not mine; it is yours. All that the men of my time held sacred seems foolishness to those of yours. I cannot judge for your generation. I am out of its orbit. Can the dark and dreary Saturn judge of the green and sunlit earth?’
‘In truth, sir, has humanity altered much since the days of Plato or Pericles?’
T know not. It has altered much since mine. I am old, very old; I cannot judge for a young man. Your position is difficult, and may become more so; but I should not dare to say what road you should take out of it, or even if you should attempt to get out of it.’
‘Would you counsel me?’ said Othyris; he looked at Ilia.
She answered:
‘No. I do not even know my own generation. How can I judge anything for any one else?’
‘But were you myself, what would you do?’
She hesitated. She knew what she would do; she would surrender all things to be free. She looked at Illyris.
‘When you, sir, made your choice of life, did you doubt long? Or did you see your path clearly and at once?’
‘The stranger ruled in my land,’ replied Illyris. ‘It was easy in my day to see where duty pointed and honour and manhood led. There is no joy so great as a clear, straight road. This young lord’s road is neither. Do what he will, he will repent.’
Othyris smiled sorrowfully.
‘In doubt do nothing; so a statesman said. That is probably how my life will drift away; in doing nothing, changing nothing, desiring vaguely and uselessly, and aimlessly regretting.’
The still clear eyes of the nonagenarian looked at him with some compassion.
‘Enjoy your youth,’ he said. ‘Let men alone. They will not thank you if you suffer for them, nor are they worth it.’
‘I cannot enjoy,’ said Othyris with a certain passion in his voice, ‘and I have no youth, because I have never been free. I am like the planets; I cannot escape from my atmosphere and its pressure.’
‘Young man,’ said Illyris, ‘we in my days were not theorists; we acted. We followed our instincts; we did not analyse them. True, it was the day of great poets. But they were few, they must always be few; the rest of us lived our odes, we did not write them.’
You carved them on granite with your swords.’
Eh! Who reads what we wrote? History, you will say. But will the future care for history? The world cares but little now. A man’s lifetime of study is pressed into a dozen volumes. The volumes stand on shelves and librarians dust them. That is all.’
Sir, I want sympathy and you give me a stone.’
To want sympathy is in itself a sign of weakness. Learn to stand alone,’ said Illyris with some scorn; he had been a very strong man, needing neither counsellor nor comfort.
Ilia made a murmur of dissent and of deprecation.
We cannot give you bread, sir,’ she said to Elim, ‘because you must eat at other and higher tables than ours.’
Let me take the humblest place at yours,’ he murmured.
No,’ said Platon Illyris, and he struck his hands on the arms of his great chair. ‘You are a good youth, I think, but you are who you are. No Gunderûde breaks bread with an Illyris, either in fact or in metaphor. Get you hence.’
Go,’ said Ilia gently but with firmness.
Elim rose, bowed low and went. He had been given the wholesome bread which he never tasted anywhere but here; plain truth. It was bitter, yet welcome to a cloyed palate. Nowhere else in the whole crowded world would he have been thus dismissed; nowhere else would homage, respect, and welcome have been refused him. He went out under the silvery shadows of the giant olives where the cushats were cooing and the blackcaps were singing. Deep rest and fragrant silence lay like a benediction on the whole hillside. The only unrest there, was in his own soul.
Ilia and Illyris ate of the meal which Maïa had prepared; it was frugal but well-cooked; the linen was homespun but lavender-scented, the table had in its centre an old pottery dish filled with flowers. Ilia would have been quite willing that Othyris should have broken bread with them there, for false shame, born of the false standards of the world, had never touched her. She would have given him the best she had willingly, but she would not have been troubled by any fear lest that best should seem meagre to him.
When their repast was ended Illyris went back to his book-room and seated himself again in his great black chair; the window was open, early roses nodded between the iron grating, the pure mountain air blew through the room, birds sang in the myrtle bushes and in the fresh early leafage of the poplar trees.
Ilia brought him his Eastern water-pipe.
‘Sir.’ she said with hesitation, ‘why are you so stern to the King’s son? He has a great reverence for you, and surely he is not guilty of the sins of his race?’
‘Perhaps not,’ answered Illyris, ‘but he cannot wash their blood out of his veins, — nor that of the tyrant of the North. He is sincere, I believe,’ he added, ‘but he has nothing to do with us. He must go whither his birth calls him. Between him and us there can be no amity.’
‘Might he not one day realise your own dreams for Helianthus?’
Illyris laughed bitterly, with the bitterness of one who jests at his own expense.
‘Child, my dreams were fair and fond, but they were illusions. I did not reckon with the meanness of men, with the sordidness of their ambitions, with the dwarfing and deadening of modern feeling, with the corruption which putrifies all public life. Fool that I was! — I dreamt of an ideal State, and I drenched my mother-earth with blood, for what? For what? That her sons might-sink under a weight of arms, and her children sicken and die for want of bread! God forgive me my blindness! Fool, oh fool that I was!’
‘But you drove out the foreigner?’ ‘Ay! — and the Gunderöde and their tax-officers and their drill-sergeants reign in his place! What good have I done to the people? I have not even given them liberty. If they forget that I ever lived, have I the right to blame them?’
His head sank on his breast, and a great sigh escaped him. He had driven out the stranger — yes, — but was Helianthus happier or freer? Was not her liberty a myth? Was she not fed on steel, and the scanty cones of the maize? Did not the children come to the birth only to toil as soon as they could crawl? The foreign sentinel was no more at the gates, but the foreign usurer was within them. What had been gained? His victories had been great; his country had been to him as a fair woman, bound a slave in a mart, and set free by his sword. But what was she now? Prostituted to the Jew, or famished in the alien’s factories, or starved and sunburnt in the mortgaged fields! His long life, his endless sacrifices, were as naught.
CHAPTER XV
THE funeral of Domitian Corvus was passing through Helios; a funeral provided at the cost of the State, imposing, long, stately, with troops keeping the streets, and crowds driven back by carabineers, women fainting, children crushed, barriers breaking, clubs crowded, flags at half-mast, — no accompaniment or attribute of dignity being wanting. It was really a pity that Corvus had not eyes to see it from his bier, for it would have rejoiced his arrogant and selfadmiring soul, and have assured him that he had been really that ancient Roman whom in life he had delighted to be called.
The golden tassels of the pall were held by eight Ministers of the Crown of past and present administrations, several of whom had at times been his enemies; and heartily as they had often cursed him, they had never done so with more intensity than they now cursed him under their breath, as they, all men past middle age, plodded under the burning sun, on the heated granite of the paven streets, up to the Cathedral of St. Athanasius, where Corvus, who had been an avowed freethinker all his life, was most appropriately to be interred with all the grandest ceremonial of the Church.
Corvus had been many things in his day, and his day had been l
ong, for he was eighty-nine years of age when he died. He had been a red-hot revolutionist, a conspirator against all powers and authorities, an exile without bread or tobacco, a refugee in foreign garrets and wine-houses, a hidden and hunted man in the cellars of Helios, until, on the death of King Theodoric, a general amnesty for political offenders having been proclaimed, Illyris alone excluded, he returned to his native country, found work as a lawyer, got himself elected deputy, took the oath of allegiance to the Gunderöde, and sat for many long sessions as an extreme Radical. He made himself feared both in the Chambers and outside them; he had led a turbulent, violent, scandalous life, but he rose step by step, and began to loom large before the eyes of men; he had no single scruple of any sort to drag him backward; he possessed a domineering, overbearing, insolent temper, which struck like an iron mace upon the fears of his fellow-men; he used this mace without mercy; he was sunk to his throat in scandals of every sort, but he came out of them, as out of a mud bath, only the stronger. He was covered with filth from head to foot; but he shook it off into the gutter, threw it in his enemies’ eyes, and passed on victorious. From a revolutionary deputy he became a radical Minister, and, once a Minister, he slipped his skin as easily as snakes slip theirs in springtime, and became a reactionist of the first water; and when disturbances occurred during his premiership he used the mitrailleuse and the musketry volley with as much firmness and ferocity as though he had been all his life an absolutist. He obtained all the highest decorations of Europe, hobnobbed with emperors, and was regarded by a large party as the saviour of Helianthus; that he had plunged her into disastrous wars, seduced her with injurious ambitions, led her blindfold to the brink of bankruptcy, filled her prisons with her young men, and cultivated corruption upon her soil as a plant whose rank poison was the most fragrant of perfumes, — these things mattered not at all to his apostles and his adorers. He was the great Corvus, and when a strong wave of national indignation had at last swept him away into private life, his partisans had rabidly defended his name, and his southern retreat had become a place of pilgrimage for the faithful. And now he was being buried with all the honours of the State.
King John in council with his Ministers had decided that the State could do no less for the remains of this its most faithful servant. King John had always admired him, and had supported him, often to the injury of the Crown and country.
Domitian Corvus had been the only Minister of strength and will who had been ever wholly acceptable to the King. In this old man the King had recognised a craft so cunning, a force so pitiless, a brain so utterly unscrupulous, that he could not but admire them; and found his master in the science of human nature. When the scandals due to financial speculation, corruption, and dishonesty became so discreditable to Corvus and his family, and so flagrant that they could no longer be concealed, and when even the very elastic moralities of the Hélianthine nation would endure him no more in power, his fall had been sincerely mourned by his royal master. True, Corvus had been very old when he had at last been driven into private life; but age had never diminished his infinite resources, his relentless cruelty, or his consummate cunning. There was not his equal in the ranks of those politicians from whom the Crown had to select its public servants. Personally, the King did not attach any great blame to corruption. History was full of it. Even Scipio Africanus did not escape its reproach.
The strongest man is a weak one without money; naturally a strong man uses his strength to get money where and how he can. The King was rather disposed to blame Corvus for not having taken more; for not having enriched himself so that there could not have been room in his career for debts, and seizures, and similar blotches and blemishes, which are really only excusable in feeble men. It should surely be only simpletons who let their bills be protested, their womenkind be sued by tradespeople, their artistic collections sold at auction. When Corvus had excused himself for having neglected his own affairs because he had been so absorbed in the affairs of the nation, the excuse seemed to the monarch the only puerile speech he had ever heard from his great Minister.
The public in a measure held the same opinion as the King, and considered his errors of venality to be pardonable in Corvus, even as history regards those of Verulam.
Although Corvus had disappeared from public life under a quagmire of scandal, there had always been the possibility of his resurrection even at eighty odd years of age. At his death, therefore, all the other Ministers, both in and out of office, felt unspeakably relieved that the old rogue was nailed down in a triple coffin, and would be buried under a weight of marble, never more to reappear. Meantime they all wore black, looked sad and inconsolable, and spoke with reverence of this dear colleague of their manhood, the honoured master of their youth. Therefore, of course, they had been obliged to be the first to consider a public funeral a fitting homage to the great departed.
‘The damned old brute,’ thought Kantakuzene, ‘he was the strongest of us all. He never had a qualm. He never had a scruple. He struck hard — and he never missed. He minded exposure nomore than a model minds it in the studio. He cared no more when the nation cursed him than Richelieu cared when the people cursed the Robe Rouge. He was strong, amazingly strong.’
Kantakuzene, as he toiled under the weight of the coffin, sighed, for he himself was not very strong; he was only exceedingly subtle and shrewd, talented, eloquent, and adroit.
He had indeed that kind of strength which consists in knowing where one’s own weakness lies, and also he had no superior in the useful talent of making black look white, and a mere expediency appear a patriotic ability; but the merciless strength which had made Corvus hesitate at no enormity, no betrayal, no change of front, and no acceptance of iniquity — this he had not, and therefore he knew that he would never equal Corvus in the estimate of other men.
The clang of the brazen kettle-drum echoes farther, and its sound lasts longer, than the melody of the flute.
Othyris was moved to a hot indignation and an acute sense of shame for his nation and his family as he heard the fine bands of the King’s Foot Guards playing the Dead March from Saul which came to his ear from the distance as he went up the steep road outside the Gate of Olives on his way to Aquilegia.
‘They shall know there that I have no share in the glorification of a scoundrel.’ he thought.
From the time of his early boyhood, when he had put his hands behind his back one day at the Soleia to avoid touching the hand of Corvus, who was then a Minister of the Crown, he had abhorred the conduct, public or private, of that politician.
The man had begun life a red-hot revolutionary, and had passed the last thirty years of his existence as an absolutist. He had abjured in age every principle which he had held in youth. He had in later years filled the prisons of Helianthus with young men who had merely held the same political creed as he had himself professed at the same age as theirs. He had played Judas to his country’s Christ. When war had served the purpose of his Cabinet he had sent tens of thousands of lads to the shambles for no gain, no reason, no purpose, except that it was in the interests of his own retention of office to do so. His old age — cruel, venal, crafty, shameless, strong — had gone down in dishonour and dishonesty; yet he was being borne to his last home with pomp and with applause! Too many men had feared him, too many had been compromised by him, too many now felt uneasily that their letters and their signatures were locked up in those boxes which would henceforth be the property either of his heirs or of the government, for any one of influence in Helianthus to oppose the deference paid to his remains.
The world thinks the woman’s prostitution of beauty a greater sin than the man’s prostitution of intellect, but it is not so. Of the two, the prostitution of the mind is more far-reaching, more profound, and more evil in its effects on others, than the sale of mere physical charms: the woman sells herself alone, the man often sells his generation, his country, and his disciples, with himself. History redresses the false balance, — so it is said. But how
can we be sure of that which we shall not see? For it is not contemporary history which dares to tell the truth.
From the path on the hillside leading to Aquilegia, Othyris saw in the distance the long line of the funeral procession passing along one of the great marble quays towards the Cathedral: afar off it looked as small as a regiment of ants. He paused a moment, and thought:
‘Illyris in obscurity and poverty; Corvus in pomp and fame! How little is the land worthy of her freedom! She forgets the hero, and admires the knave! How little are nations worthy of service and of sacrifice! They feed the wolf off silver, and leave the watch-dogs famished on the stones.’
With a sadder heart he took his way upward to the lowly home of the victor of Argileion and Samaris, leaving the celebration of the triumph of Corvus behind him in the city which had forgotten Illyris.
Illyris had grown used to his occasional visits; and if he did not welcome, did not reject them. Their discourse was usually on impersonal subjects, themes which were of equal interest to them both as scholars and philologists, students of history and of mankind: he who had made so large a portion of the past history of Helianthus, and he by whom the future history of Helianthus might be made, met on the neutral ground of mutual love for the country, for its language, its traditions, its people.
‘He is a hybrid.’ said Illyris once in his absence; ‘more Guthonic than aught else; but, as far as his looks and his mind go, he might be a pure-bred Hélianthine.’
Illyris could give no higher praise.
This day Illyris sat erect in his great chair of ebony and black leather; his eyes were wide open and ablaze with light, a scornful wrath was on his features; and his hands struck with rage a folio volume of which the yellow ribbed pages were opened on his knee.
‘Corvus! — buried by the State! ‘he cried, his white beard trembling with his wrath and his disdain; and he laughed long and loud, a terrible ironical laughter, scorching as caustic.