by Ouida
‘Neither acetylene nor companies attract me.’
‘You are not of your time.’
‘No, I am not. Is it true that they dare to dream of touching these hills?’
‘Certainly. It is an admirable speculation. It will pay thirty per cent, perhaps forty. It is a Guthonic Syndicate.’
‘A Syndicate in this country is always Guthonic when it is not Candarian.’
‘Well, of course, those people have enterprise and money; we have neither.’
‘We have Mount Atys and its olive woods.’
‘Precisely; and so, as we cannot ourselves utilise what we have got, we sell or lease it to those who can.’
‘For three thousand years no one has felt any necessity to touch those hills; they belong to Isis and her son.’
‘Who are they?’ said Tyras. ‘It is going to be a big affair,’ he added. ‘Our dear father will get a lot of scrip. The Syndicate has not got fairly into saddle yet; but it will be a very big boom. The acetylene is only a beginning. There, are no end of schemes — a funicular railway, a seaside suburb, a sanatorium, of course an observatory on the top, a lot of marble-quarrying and timber-felling: the thing is only in embryo at present, but His Majesty is very keen about it.’
‘Do you mean that the King favours any speculation so monstrous?’
‘Lord, yes! He approves and appreciates anything which puts money in his pocket.’
‘But it will ruin the view of the bay!’
‘Do you think the King ever looks at the view?’
‘But Mount Atys is sacred ground—’
‘To you and a few sentimentalists; I believe Homer was the first of them!’
‘They might as well sell Mount Sinai!’
‘They will, no doubt, if His Majesty ever is made King of Jerusalem. The Hotel of the Cross and the Pension Judas will be very fashionable ‘; and Gavroche laughed till he coughed.
Othyris turned away in disgust. Was it possible this scheme existed? He continued to gaze at the dazzling white of the lofty cone rising above the purple and grey mosses of the pine and olive woods, clothing the hills where Ilia Illyris dwelt, the hills of Isis and of Atys.
The boat cut a swift path through the azure water. The fleet they had left was getting under weigh in the sparkling sunshine of the early morning, going on its errand of spinning an amity as brittle as spun glass, and weaving an alliance as friable as sugar. The war-ships were steaming towards the open sea, and the boat was rowed towards the harbour beneath the walls of the Soleia Palace, being received by the people with cheers. The many-coloured masses of the crowds on shore began to move, and unwind themselves, and little by little disappear, like bunches of flowers untied and thrown away into the dust.
‘All those numbers packed together to see ironclads weigh anchor! ‘thought Othyris, ‘and not a man amongst them, probably, to try and save Mount Atys.’
Without loss of time he instructed one of his most confidential servants to obtain all the information possible as to the projected purchase by the foreign Syndicate.
If the Helichrysum hills were sold by the City Corporation it was scarcely probable that the home of Illyris would be spared. Where the lumber-men make a clearing in a wood, the nests of the birds fall and the form of the hare is trodden underfoot. He knew that the owner of Aquilegia was a trader in the maritime quarter of Helios, dealing with the fruit brigs of the coast; a man who would be certain to part with the hillside property if a good offer were made to him. Othyris would before then have bought the little property, had he not feared the resentment of Illyris if he ever learned that he had become the tenant of a Gunderöde.
Aged and infirm as he was, Illyris would have found strength to leave any place embittered to him by an offered charity; and even had he means to buy the property, he might be driven out by expropriation. He had paid the rent ever since his return from exile, and had almost forgotten that he was not the owner of the place. It had never occurred to him to buy it, although Ilia, who desired to do so, put aside a certain proportion of the money made by her lace work, and saw the little pile of gold coins increase each year with pleasure. Every tree was dear to her, every little singing stream had its echo in her heart she knew where the earliest violets bloomed, where the hyacinths, like those of Wordsworth, seemed the blue of heaven fallen on earth, where the nightingales built their nests amongst the rotting leaves and drooping fritillaria, and where the striped toads made their summer homes under the ferns and took their winter sleep beneath the rocks. The love of those simple things is a passion with the soul which harbours it; a passion which has the purity of all impersonal emotion. To those who feel it, the heart seems to grow into the soil like the roots of some sensitive plant. To such as these no change is needed other than the changes given by the seasons, by the daybreak, and the sunset. Othyris knew that this was the passion of Ilia Illyris for the solitude of Aquilegia. Driven out from it, she would be lost and unhappy as a doe driven from its forest.
Willingly would Othyris have given Illyris any part of the beauty of Ænothrea or any other of his estates; with gladness would he have offered him any choice of his lands and houses. But he dared not; he knew that to do so would be both useless and offensive; the old lion would couch on no alien lair.
On the morrow his agent gave him full information as to the impending purchase. The sale by the Municipality was decided on, and only the assent of the King was necessary; but there was no doubt of this, nor of its ratification by Parliament. The money for the payment was guaranteed by the great financier, Max Vreiheiden. Nothing could look more promising, at least on paper.
‘If there be no other means of saving the hills, I will bid over their heads,’ Othyris said to himself.
So long as the contract with the Corporation was not signed, so long as the shares were not on the market, he thought it might be possible to prevent the barter of this portion of the Hélianthine coast to foreign speculators.
His agents and his advisers were not of his opinion; the King, the Financier, and the Municipality offered to their eyes an invincible trio, to say nothing of the Ministers of the Treasury and of Public Works, who were greatly in favour of the project. Othyris listened to their arguments, but was not greatly impressed by them. It seemed to him that to save the glory of Mount Atys and its sea-washed slopes from defilement, was an act which would be both patriotic and aesthetic — a thing to be done, for the sake of the country and the city, even were there no private interests involved.
He had little knowledge of such speculations, of how to combat and to defeat them; but experience had already shown him more than once that most questions resolve themselves into a matter of money, and that the longest purse is the strongest combatant.
It was necessary to act at once and as privately as possible, for if his father intervened with a formal veto in protection of the foreign speculators, it would be difficult for him as a prince of the blood to pass over such a declaration of the royal will. He selected the most competent of his financial administrators, and set them to work to study and contravene the projects of the foreign Company and the intentions of the men most prominent in the matter. He was well served at all times, for he was a generous and just master; the secret was well kept and the counterplans were well laid. The amount required to oust the foreigners, and keep Vreiheiden neutral, was very large; but not larger than he could afford, for the wealth he had inherited from Basil was very great. Rumours that he was interfering to prevent the sale of that part of the coast were current, but they were vague; the City of Helios was indifferent who bought, so long as a buyer there was.
The chief danger of serious opposition lay with the King.
CHAPTER XVIII
SOME weeks later, as Othyris drew near the house of Platon Illyris in the warm afternoon, to his surprise and pleasure he saw Ilia come over the rough grass between the rose-bushes to meet him. She had never done so before. She seemed in haste, and her eyes looked wet with unfallen tears.
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‘Oh, sir! ‘she cried to him as she approached.
‘Will you not help us? Poor Janos is in great affliction. The guards have taken his son Philemon to prison for having sung the Hymn of Eos!’
The song was the national hymn of Helianthus; an ancient chant called by scholars the Hymn of Eos, and by the populace the Song of Sunrise. Its origin was lost in the mist of ages, but its memory was green in the hearts of the people. Under all foreign tyrannies it had been forbidden, but whenever freedom was regained its melody returned. It was to the sound of the Hymn of Eos that the War of Independence had been fought by the soldiers of Illyris, and the foreigner driven down into the sea and over the mountains. The grand old battle-song thrilled through the veins of the most sluggish and timid Hélianthine. Theodoric owed respect to it, and respected it; his son tolerated it; his grandson hated it, and persecuted it. He heard in it only the roar of revolution.
To the present King this national song was so odious, that if, on driving through one of the populous quarters, he heard the lilt of it from some unknown singer, working at leather, or deal, or cloth, or sewing-machine, within some unseen attic or cellar, his comfort for the day was gone, and the head of the secret police had a severe worrying. It was in deference to this antipathy on his part that the two Legislative Houses had, in the second year of his reign, passed a law decreeing the singing of the patriotic ode illegal; a misdemeanour punishable by imprisonment varying from two days to a twelvemonth.
Now, as it appears to be an axiom in political life that, although governments may change, the laws made by them must not do so, the fine melody of the Hymn of Eos remained a forbidden thing in the Code with fines proportionate in degree. The law had not succeeded in suppressing the chant; but it had caused much widespread misery, as the offence was almost always only committed by young and poor men, students, operatives, labourers, peasants, and even school children, so that many through this law began their lives in the dock and the prison. Those who condemned the offenders told them that they had only their own wicked obstinacy to thank; that it was perfectly easy to abstain from singing a song; that to be forbidden to sing it involved no hardship; that there were fifty thousand other songs on which no ban was laid. But this kind of argument has never availed yet to move human nature; and it did not avail in Helianthus.
There was always some one chanting somewhere the forbidden hymn, in field, or vineyard, or sheep-fold, in garret, or work-yard, or cobbler’s den; always some one to be brought up for judgment.
Whenever a Liberal Ministry came into office it was supposed by the populace that this law would be repealed. But it never was so. The royal influence was too strong and the office-holders too timid; and the Press continued to record arrests for the heinous and grave offence, just as when the reactionary party prevailed. He who makes the songs of a nation makes its history, it has been said; but this song, having been often one of the makers of the history of a nation, was now considered but a gallows bird. The song, however, was in the hearts of the people, and rose often to their lips. No petitions were so often thrown into the carriage of Othyris, flung up to his balconies, or lifted to the level of his saddle, as those of parents, or sisters, or betrothed, of youngsters who had been condemned for this offence. None caused him greater pain. His position debarred him from showing his sympathy with those condemned, and power to abrogate their sentences he did not possess. When a pale and desperate woman tore her way through a throng and clung frantically to his stirrup leather to plead to him for her boy, who had been arrested for shouting the revolutionary chorus as he had walked with some comrades through the vines in the moonlight, or had sat drinking a lemonade at a tavern door with some lads come out like himself from the hell of a furnace or of an engine-room, he could do nothing for her; for what use were words? The boys had broken the law. The law was unjust, idiotic, senseless, cruel; but it had become the law. He, the son of the Defender of the Law, could not take their part.
‘Only for that! ‘he said now to Ilia. ‘Where was he?’
‘On the shore down yonder, gathering seaweed. He was singing the song as he worked, thinking no harm. He is only seventeen.’
‘I am very sorry.’
‘That is of little use, sir. Release him. He is so young, and the offence is surely a very little one.’
‘Release him? I? Believe me, if I had any power, that song might be sung from end to end of the country.’
‘Some power you must have. With you as with the Popes it is only non possumus when you wish.’
‘I have none, in the sense which you suppose. I cannot interfere in any matter lying within the jurisdiction of the law.’
A look of incredulity and contempt passed over her face and wounded him, like spoken scorn from one esteemed.
‘Sir, you know as well as I do that, indirectly if not immediately, your family influences, however and wherever it chooses, the course of public justice.’
A flush rose to his face of anger and mortification.
‘That is a very grave accusation,’ he said. ‘I think you do not realise how grave it is.’
‘It is grave, no doubt. But if you care for truth you cannot deny it.’
‘It is not truth. It is an exaggeration, even if it be not a libel. We cannot, and do not, touch the course of civil law. The power of the King himself stops at the doors of the public tribunals.’
‘These are mere phrases,’ she said with contemptuous indifference; ‘you would not use them to my great-grandfather.’
‘He would not say to me what you say. Men keep within some measure of moderation in reproach and censure.’
‘I think he would certainly say to you that if you look into your conscience you will see there that it is not unjust.’
‘It is exaggerated; and as regards myself it is entirely untrue.’
‘That may be.’
Her tone had a doubt in it, an unspoken incredulity, which wounded him. He could not say on his honour that the privileges of the Crown were never strained. There passed through his mind many memories which told his conscience that she was not altogether wrong; memories of acts with which he had nothing to do, which he had possessed no more power to prevent than to prevent the revolving of the moons of Saturn, but by which members of his family had turned aside the course of public equity as an engineer turns aside the course of a stream. The engineer sits unseen in his office, and has no weapon but his pen and his mathematical instruments; but it is by him, through him, that the merry babbling of the water through the flags and cresses is arrested, and the birds on its banks left athirst.
He remembered Corvus, who had been saved again and again from certain exposure and probable condemnation in the tribunals, because he had been in his sovereign’s sight a heaven-born Minister, a kneeling lion holding up on mighty shoulders the throne and all its pomp and prestige. He remembered a colleague of Corvus, Noevius, who had died in office, heavy with years and honours and riches, though again and again the public voice and the public prints had proved against him the appropriation of funds, the sale of places and contracts, the most unblushing nepotism and venality in patronage, the selection for high emprises of favoured incapables.
He remembered the Baron Anthémis, an aide-decamp of the Crown Prince, who had killed with a sabre-thrust a citizen who had jostled him on the pavement of a narrow street in Helios, and who had been found guiltless by the courts, both civil and military, and was still taking his ease on the boulevards of the city. He remembered the Countess Corianthus, who had been guilty of forgery to the amount of several millions of francs, but who was a Lady of the Bedchamber to Princess Gertrude, and was never brought to justice, but merely endured an agreeable exile, her husband being sent on a diplomatic mission to a great empire, where she shone as the most brilliant of ambassadresses. He remembered another great lady, the Duchess Daubrio, who, when her husband had been Minister of War, had stolen and sold to a foreign Power plans of mobilisation and’ fortification — a despicabl
e betrayal for which she had never been troubled in any way. He remembered Colonel Vislauer, commanding a regiment of Foot Guards, who had caused three of his men, for a trifling offence against discipline, to be stripped and stretched face downward on the stones of the barrack-yard whilst he kicked them in the ribs with his jack-boots. No action of any kind was ever taken against Colonel Vislauer for this brutal crime, because he was an officer highly esteemed by the King, and admired by the Emperor Julius.
Othyris was powerless to alter these abuses. There would be always ‘lictors to clear the marketplace and put their necks beneath the curule chair.’ as in the Claudian days. These remembrances, and others like them, thronged on his mind under the sting of her words.
Direct, avowed, conspicuous interference there was none; but indirect influence there was continually, acting like that atmospheric pressure which is at once invisible and irresistible.
She saw that he was humiliated and distressed, but she was not moved to pity.
‘Why.’ she said— ‘why, sir, should it be only the worthless and the exalted who are so protected? Why will you not help Philemon?’
‘I have told you — I have no power.’ said Othyris with anger and impatience of her unkindness. ‘Your poor lad Philemon is not a dishonest Minister, or a military favourite, or a Court beauty, that he should be saved from an unpleasant punishment, nor am I one of those who can stop the law in its strides. Were it known that I felt any interest in the son of Janos it would do him far more harm than good.’ —
‘Why? ‘she asked incredulous.
‘Because I am a “suspect” myself.’ said Othyris with irritation. ‘Every action of mine is subject to suspicion. By my family I am considered a Philippe Egalité in embryo.’
‘Egalité lived and died basely.’
‘I do not think my life is base; my death certainly shall not be.’
‘You cannot tell.’
‘Oh, pardon me; so much at least any human being may be sure of; he cannot know what death he will meet, but he can know in what temper he will meet it.’