by Ouida
Othyris was silent: Illyris sat silent also for a while, his white beard drooping on his breast.
‘Corvus! — buried by the State.’ he muttered again.
‘What come you hither for?’ he cried, as he recognised Othyris. ‘Why are you not behind the bier of the man your father honoured?’
‘I came to show you, sir, that I have nothing to do with what I hold to be a national disgrace.’
‘Corvus was a Minister of your House. Are none of you princes behind his corpse?’
‘I know not. I can but answer for myself.’
‘You are a Gunderöde! Corvus was your servant.’ ‘Not mine.’
‘Get you away from here. Go and join the Ministers of the Crown. Go and pray for Corvus’ soul.’
He laughed cruelly, terribly. All the eloquence which had once swayed the minds of the multitudes as a wind sways the sea waves had returned to him for a moment. Suddenly he paused.
‘You are the King’s son,’ he said abruptly. ‘Go, go, and tell your sire how Platon Illyris judges the knave he has delighted to honour.’
Then he beat his fist on the folio volume lying open on his knees, and a wave of ironical disdainful laughter passed over his features, illumining their apathy as lightning might play upon a corpse.’
‘Corvus buried by the State!’ he repeated yet again, and a deep scornful laughter shook his white beard, his bowed colossal frame.
‘I remember Corvus,’ he said, ‘as a youth. There were ten years between him and me. I had just raised my first regiment of volunteers on my own estates. He was with us in the early years. But he was useless as a soldier. His strength was in his tongue. Well, truly has it served him, that brazen, lying, boastful tongue — that skilful, crafty, flattering, and bullying tongue! It was his all, but he won the world with it.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Othyris, ‘and the insignia of the great Orders of the world lie on his coffin. But history will not honour him; and it will honour you.’
‘Who knows?’ muttered Illyris. ‘Is history the redresser of contemporary injustice, as we like to believe, or is it but the repeater of all the false judgments of that past which it often ignorantly chronicles and criticises? Who can tell? Clio is a great Muse, but I fear she only sees through a smoked lens. It is hard to learn the exact truth of a little incident which occurs a mile from our door. It must be harder still to judge with any accuracy the deeds and the men of ages long gone by. Probably, if they write of me in time to come, they will say that I was a headstrong fool, and Corvus a great and a wise man.’
‘They will say that, when they shall also say that Cæsar was a fool and Croesus a hero.’
‘You flatter me, young man. You give me honey to eat because I am in my second childhood.’
‘No, sir, my reverence for you is sincere. I should not have crossed your threshold were it not so.’
‘Well, well, I believe you,’ said Illyris, with some emotion; ‘though that you should feel this, is strange in a prince of the House of Gunderöde.’
‘Here I am not a prince; I am a neophyte.’
‘You have a pretty turn of speech. Almost too pretty. Honey — honey!’
‘May not truth be sweet sometimes, sir? Why should it always be bitter?’
Illyris smiled faintly.
‘Heed him not, child,’ he muttered to Ilia. ‘He has too deft a tongue.’
Then the old man’s head drooped. He was silent; his eyes closed; the intermittent strength of his extreme age gave way to the dreamy stupor of failing powers fatigued by momentary excitement.
‘It was so hot, so hot,’ he muttered; ‘it was the twentieth day of June; he was there; he had volunteered, but he did not fight. He never fought on any field. If he says that he did, he lies. My right line was breaking. We were hard pressed. I said to him, “Ride you to my son Gelon, and bid him come up with all his force, or the day may be lost.” He rode away, but he did not ride to Gelon. He said afterwards that he mistook the road. Gelon did not come. It was like Grouchy at Waterloo. And the sun was so hot, so hot! Men dropped dead: unwounded, sunstricken. Our line wavered — almost broke. Then I cried to them: “Rally, my children; rally. Be firm, and the day is won”; and they gave a great cheer, half dead though they were, and they followed me, and the sun went down, down, down; and the wheat was drenched in blood; and my son Constantine lay in the ripe corn, face downward, shot through the brain. But the day was ours.’ Then again he was mute, and the light died out of his eyes, and the stupor of senility crept back over his features.
‘He speaks of Argileion? ‘said Othyris, under his breath, to Ilia Illyris.
‘No, of Samaris. It was at Samaris that Constantine, my grand-uncle, was killed. Argileion was fought in the autumn when the fields were bare; Samaris when the wheat was ripe.’
Othyris was silent. These great combats had in their ultimate issue placed his race upon the throne of Helianthus; and the hero who had gained these victories at such vast odds was left here, forgotten, unhonoured, unaided, allowed only on sufferance to end his last years on his native soil!
Othyris felt as though he stood knee-deep in that sea of blood which had dyed red the amber wheat of fifty summers gone. ‘It is terrible!’ he muttered.
‘Yes, it is terrible!’ said Ilia Illyris. ‘Terrible indeed that all that bloodshed, all that heroism, all those glorious hopes and dreams, should have had no other result, served no other ultimate end, than to crown an alien race on the Acropolis of Helios!’
Othyris grew red, then pale; stung by anger and by mortification. What other living creature would have dared to say such a thing as this in his presence?
But had he not said it to himself?
He looked at her, and saw that she was perfectly serene and indifferent to any effect which her words might have on him. Her head was slightly bent; her eyelids were drooping over the splendour of her eyes, as she looked down at the lace she was making; her hands continued their delicate evolutions.
Suddenly Illyris raised his head; his brain had cleared; the passing clouds had lifted.
‘Who followed?’ he asked.
Ilia arose and approached his chair.
‘Who followed what?’ she asked gently.
‘Who followed the coffin of Corvus? Not my veterans?’
She was silent; Othyris also.
‘Not my veterans?’
‘There are few living, very few, sir.’ she answered.
‘I know — Death has all my comrades: Death and Age. But those who still live? — they were not behind that traitor’s bier?’
She was silent. ‘Answer!’ said Illyris, striking his staff with violence upon the floor.
‘The few who still live were there, sir, — yes.’
‘They have lived too long, then — as I have done!
My men behind the bier of Corvus! Did the Apostles who were faithful follow the rotten corpse of Judas?’ ‘Perhaps, sir, they thought only of his early life. He was sincere once, was he not?’
‘Once! Because Iscariot was once an innocent child at his mother’s breast was he the less accursed? Maybe Corvus was sincere in his youth. I cannot answer for the hidden hearts of men. But, if it be so, that does but deepen the blackness of his sin. It is but a reason the more for every honest man to spit in scorn upon the earth of his grave. He took the oath of allegiance; he, a republican, a patriot, took the oath of allegiance to a monarchy; he sat in the parliaments of a monarchy; he crawled through crooked ways to popularity and power; he wore the badges and ribands of the sovereigns of Europe; he drove the youth of Helianthus to the African shambles that their blood might give him the purple dye of his own aggrandisement; he licked the dust before the path of kings; he cringed, he slobbered, he lied, he flattered, he struck Liberty in the throat, and he kissed the Gyges of the Guthones on both cheeks; — and you tell me he was sincere in his youth! You are fools! You are fools! Such a man is false whilst he is still an embryon in his mother’s womb! A traitor is vile even whilst h
e is still but a germ in an ovary!’
Then, once more, the fire faded from his eyes, his voice dropped into silence, and he fell back heavily and with exhaustion, into the chair from which he had momentarily risen. His countenance lost all illumination, all expression. The flame of the tired spirit, fanned by wrath into an instant’s light, flickered and died down. The intense emotions aroused in him by the remembrance of a traitor were succeeded by the dull gloom of age which recognises its own torpor and impotence, its own loneliness, its own inutility.
‘Go,’ said Ilia, in a low tone; ‘go; he likes to see you sometimes, but to-day you can only offend him and do him harm.’
Othyris hesitated, and stood an instant before the chair of Illyris.
‘Sir.’ he said, in a low tone, ‘I sent no condolence to the house of Corvus; I sent no representative to his funeral, or laurel to lay upon his tomb. I consider that my father had no greater enemy than this man who called himself his most devoted servant, and who perhaps believed himself to be so. No one ever widened the breach between the throne and the people with more evil success than Corvus.’
Illyris made him no reply; he did not seem to hear; his thoughts were far away in the greatness of his past.
‘Why will he not believe in me? Why should I be here except in sincerity and in respect?’ said Othyris, turning to Ilia Illyris.
‘It is not you whom he mistrusts. It is your race.’ she replied.
‘Then he is unjust!’
‘He is old!’ she said, with a sigh.
CHAPTER XVI
OTHYRIS followed Ilia across the small flagged entrance into the opposite room, which was a counterpart of the one occupied by Platon Illyris.
On a table stood the pillow and cushion on which she made her lace; a brown jug, holding field flowers; a small antique bronze which had been found buried deep in the soil when a great olive had been uprooted in a storm, a figure representing Narcissus; some volumes of old books, companions to those in the other chamber; nothing else.
To him it seemed wonderful to see a woman of her beauty and high intelligence cheerfully executing the humblest kind of work, and leading a life entirely monotonous and lonely. ‘How Gertrude would admire her,’ he thought; but he knew that to bring her and his sister-in-law into contact was as impossible as to bring the stars of Cassiopeia into the constellation of Perseus. They were divided for ever by those barriers which are at once the most impassable and the most purely illusory; those that mankind has constructed for its own bondage, the barriers of caste and of custom.
‘May I see some of your lace?’ he asked with hesitation, fearful of offending her.
‘Oh yes,’ — she opened an old olive-wood cabinet and took out a cobweb of fine threads with lilies and grasses worked on it; the beautiful old pillow lace of other centuries admirably revived.
‘It is beautiful indeed! ‘he exclaimed, and gazed on it with the appreciation and comprehension of a connoisseur. It was beautiful as the Ivory Tower had been; beautiful as every work of art must be, into which enter the mind, the devotion, the selfsacrifice, the spirituality, of its creator. It was a little filmy thing, light as air, fragile as a dew-ball in the grass; a rough touch could have destroyed” it in a second of time; but it had true art in it as surely as have the Taj Mahal, the Mona Lisa, the belfry of Giotto, the verse of Shelley, the Hermes of the Vatican.
‘I wish my sister-in-law, the Crown Princess, could see this,’ he added. ‘She is a great lover of lace. Might I take it to her? She would know how to appreciate it.’
‘It is not for private sale, sir,’ she said curtly; and she put back the lace into its cupboard.
‘I did not intend to offend you,’ he said with patience and humility. ‘I merely wished to give my sister-in-law a great pleasure; for such work as yours is extremely rare.’
But he felt that his purpose had been divined, and its disguise rudely brushed aside. It was quite true that the Crown Princess was a collector and judge of hand-made laces; but he knew that it would not have been for her sake that he would have desired to purchase that exquisite fairies’ web for some fabulous price.
‘Surely,’ he added—’ surely you do not create all this beauty only to put it away in a shut drawer?’
‘Oh no,’ she said coldly, ‘it is all bespoken by a lace merchant of the north. Whenever I complete a piece it goes to him. I would ask you, sir,’ she added, a faint colour rising over her face, ‘never to speak of this to my great-grandfather; he is not aware of it; he would not understand. But it would certainly displease him that a descendant of his, an Illyris, should take money from a tradesman. He thinks that his own means are enough for everything, but they are not. It is necessary to add to them.’
‘I understand,’ said Othyris. ‘At his great age men do not easily learn new lessons, and his pride was always great.’
‘Justly so.’
‘Justly; yes, indeed.’
‘He might have ruled this country, had he chosen.’ Othyris smiled slightly, but his face flushed.
‘I believe that he could,’ he answered. ‘History will acknowledge that he could, and that he did not do so from the noblest of all motives: the reluctance to cause and carry on civil war. But is it generous to say this to me?’
‘There is neither generosity nor meanness in the statement of a fact. All that was done in that remote time has long passed into history.’
‘A history of which all the nobility is with your race; all the ingratitude with mine.’
She was silent; to deny the obvious, to excuse the heroic, was not in the character of this daughter of heroes.
Othyris was wounded; and he was angered with himself for being so. He loathed the whole period of that troubled time in which his great-grandsire had beaten out a crown of gold and iron in the furnace of war; a crown which would never have been his, or his descendants’, if Platon Illyris had so willed.
Whenever he passed the great sepulchre, called in Helios the House of the Immortals, with its peristyle of marble and porphyry and its dome of glittering gilded tiles, which covered the remains of Theodoric of Gunderöde and which from a cypress-crowned eminence dominated the city, he looked away from it and felt neither reverence nor gratitude to this memory so near to him which was already swelling into legend. All that Ilia had said had been true; but it was its truth which hurt him. If Platon Illyris had chosen, once upon a time, the Gunderöde had never reigned beside the Mare Magnum, nor been laid to rest in the Hélianthine Pantheon.
The voice of Ilia roused him, clear as the sound of a silver bell, but cold as a flake of snow.
‘Sir, you will pardon me if I leave you. I have my household duties.’
‘If my sister-in-law, the Crown Princess, would receive you, would you allow me to take you to her?
‘No, I would not.’
The words were ungracious but the tone was gentle.
‘She is a good woman.’
‘I have always heard so.’
‘Well, then — why?’
‘You must know I would not pass the threshold of a Gunderöde.’
‘It is you who are prejudiced.’
‘Consistency is not prejudice.’
‘You need a female friend.’
‘If I did, I should not seek one in a palace. But I do not.’
‘The Princess can be a very warm friend.’
‘She could not be so to me, nor I to her.’
‘Wherefore?’
‘You must know very well. I do not think that you should even speak of such a thing.’
He did know; he knew that it was impossible to bring together these two women who were so far asunder through every circumstance and feeling of their lives, every sentiment, habit, tradition, and belief. The prejudices of his relative might, he thought, have been vanquished, for he had gained her goodwill; but the more stubborn resistance of the daughter of Illyris would be unconquerable; she would have thought herself unworthy to bear the great name of her people if
she had ever crossed the threshold of the residence of any member of the reigning family.
‘You may be sure of my absolute discretion as regards your beautiful point d’aiguille,’ answered Othyris. ‘But I wish you would transfer your favours from this northern trader to my sister-in-law.’
‘The Crown Princess can purchase it from the trader, sir.’
‘May I take her the address of the merchant?’
She hesitated a moment, then wrote a name and address on a slip of paper and gave it to him. He thanked her; then still lingered, loth to leave the subject or the place.
‘Is not such fine work as that very trying to the eyes?’ he said. ‘I have always heard that it is,’
‘I do not find it so; however, it is perhaps because I only work about two hours in the early morning; rarely afterwards.’
‘But would it not be more agreeable to you to give your creations direct into the hands of appreciative persons than to let them go through those of mere tradesmen to any buyer?’
‘No: the one would mean patronage; the other is independence.’
He saw what she meant and respected her meaning. —
‘I only regret,’ he said, ‘that you will not do me the honour to treat me as a friend.’
‘There can be no friendship between one of your House and one of mine,’ she answered.
He did not urge the point, nor did he resent the equality on which she placed their families. It was refreshing to him to meet with any one by whom his rank was ignored; it was like a draught of spring water to one satiated by a surfeit of sweet champagne. But he saw that his pleasure or displeasure were things quite indifferent to her.
When he passed out into the narrow, vaulted, stone passage, the door of the old man’s study was closed. He did not endeavour to go in again, but went out into the open air where the sunlight fell through the grey traceries of the olive leaves, and the doves were cooing in the great gnarled branches above.
‘You who have so much,’ said the voice of his conscience to him, ‘cannot you leave this wild dove alone on her olive branch?’
But his heart, rebellious, answered: ‘What have I? Nothing; since I have nothing that contents me.’