by Ouida
‘My friends,’ said Othyris, ‘you and I have come doubtless on the same errand, in the same feelings, — honour for the great man who has left us. What is that you would do? What is it that you desire?’
‘To take his body to the House of the Immortals,’ shouted a hundred speakers; all the men who were foremost and nearest, and the shriller voices of the women and children and youths, echoed the cry: ‘To the House of the Immortals!’
‘What were you about to do to obtain your end?’
A clamour of innumerable voices rose in chorus; in the confusion of sound he could distinguish their threats to seize the bier and bear it through the city, and before the palace of the Soleia demand from the King the burial of Illyris beside Theodoric. He knew that if they carried out their threat his father would only reply by the bayonets or the musketry of his troops. John of Gunderöde would not parley with his populace. It was a perilous moment; they were in a perilous mood. When an idea possesses a crowd, it is obstinate with the obstinacy of the insane. It was very probable that if Othyris thwarted them in their present mood they would turn their fury upon him. He was one against a multitude; he was unarmed; they might seize him as a hostage or they might slay him as a scapegoat. No one can ever say what form the delirium of a mass of people may not take.
But Othyris felt that their actual mood must be dominated or there would be bloodshed in Helios. He raised his hand to ask for silence, and little by little the loud tumultuous cries died down. Swaying and pressing around the rock on which he stood, the people waited to hear him speak.
‘My friends.’ he said to them, ‘your desire is natural and just. Do not imperil its fulfilment by violence or haste. Do not go upward to the house where he dwelt, for there are only women, who would be alarmed. First, obtain the certainty that you may lay his body in the Pantheon of Helios; then come hither to fetch it. If you begin with riot and clamour, you will fail in your demand, and you will prove yourselves unworthy of your self-imposed mission.’
An angry hissing protest followed on his words. They were in no mood for reason. They were in the mood for revolution; and Othyris knew that his father would no more treat with them or argue with them than a huntsman with his hounds. If they could not be induced to go to their homes quietly there could be no issue except insurrection. He had never before seen an angry mob, for he had always been welcomed everywhere with a sincere and often an enthusiastic attachment. It is an ugly and a formidable spectacle at all times. The strong smell from their unwashed flesh and their unclean clothes tainted the fresh mountain air, stifled the odours of the flowers and grasses. ‘O humanity! what a dread beast you are!’ he thought, as all must do who see it in its nakedness, stripped of hypocritical pretence and the cover of courtesy. But such as it was he had to deal with it and dominate it, or hundreds of them would go up to the house of Ilia and would profane the peace and solemnity of death. He looked down on the inflamed faces of the men, the nude breasts of the women, the tangled hair and menacing eyes of the youths, the laurel boughs broken and dust-covered, the little children alarmed and clinging to their mothers’ skirts; he could hear the trampling on the rocky road of many others not as yet in sight; the frightened birds flew out from the foliage, the clear brooks ran across the road, over the soiled, bare feet, and, touching human flesh, became defiled. ‘People of Helios!’ said Othyris, and his voice was far-reaching as the note of a clarion. ‘People of Helios, hearken to me. You must go back to your homes in peace and decency, or I can be with you in nothing. It is wrong and impious to make a great hero’s death a moment for disorder and riot. You can accomplish nothing by brawling. The tomb of Illyris ought to be made where the great men of Helianthus lie—’
‘Was Theodoric a Hélianthine?’ a man called from the crowd.
‘No; he was not,’ Othyris answered calmly. ‘But that is beside this question. Illyris was a pure-bred Hélianthine, and you desire that he should have his sepulchre made in the mausoleum of the country. Well, go back to your homes, and I promise that you shall have your desire; but I will do nothing for menace or insult.’
The multitude was silent. The courage of his speech and the calmness and dignity of his bearing impressed them. But one voice shouted from the close-pressed throng:
‘You promise, you say! You are a prince. Who can trust princes?’
‘You may trust me,’ said Othyris coldly. ‘I give you my word that the body of Platon Illyris shall lie in the House of the Immortals.’
‘The word of a Gunderöde!’ said an angry, rude voice from an unseen speaker.
Othyris coloured with pain rather than offence.
‘The word of a gentleman,’ he said briefly.
The people cheered him.
‘The word of an honest man,’ said one of their leaders. ‘We will trust him, friends. If he fail us, we can chastise.’
‘He will not fail,’ said a woman.
A man who was a worker in metal and had a fine countenance and a lofty stature shouted in a clear resounding voice:
‘Let us trust him. If he fail us he shall answer to us. And whether by peace or by force Illyris shall lie with Theodoric.’
‘It shall be so,’ said Othyris. ‘Now go, my friends, to your homes. So you will best do his will. He lived in solitude and obscurity for forty years rather than cause disunion amongst his countrymen. If the State forgot him, you also, his people, his children, remembered too little.’
The conscience of the throng was moved, its remorse was stirred, its regrets were stung to the quick; the men and the youths were silent, and the sobs of some women were audible in the stillness.
‘Go to your homes,’ said Othyris. ‘We will meet soon again.’
Then he descended from the stone platform, and uncovered his head in farewell to the multitude.
A loud, long, echoing cheer rose from the ranks of the populace. They had faith in him.
They pressed around him; they were curious, grateful, excited, awed; they wanted to see him close, to feel his clothes, to touch his hand, to see him face to face; they were dangerous out of the excess of their enthusiasm, for they were unwilling to let him go.
‘Come with us! Come with us!’ they shouted; they wanted to take him down in triumph into Helios.
But he knew that if he were seen with them all possible chance of gaining the realisation of their wish would be destroyed. It was impossible that he should enter the city as the companion and the leader of this mob.
‘Fall back. Leave me free,’ he said to them. ‘If you detain me, if you hamper me, you will render it impossible for me to obtain you the fulfilment of your wish. My friend,’ he added, turning to the man who had said ‘Let us trust him,”you have influence over them, keep them back. Leave me free. Otherwise I can do nothing. Nor will I, by any force which they can use, go down into Helios in their company.’
There was a savage, sullen muttering of chagrin and of offence in the people nearest to him. They were offended, and they were conscious that they could by brute force make their offence felt.
‘People of Helios,’ said Othyris, ‘you can kill me if you like; I am unarmed, and you are many in numbers. But you cannot make me do what I do not choose to do, or what I think unworthy. Let me pass.’
‘Let him pass,’ said the man who had said ‘Let us trust him.’ The people hesitated; Othyris took advantage of that hesitation; he shook off the hand laid upon him, and with tranquillity and dignity passed through them to the woods on the opposite side of the road. Thence there ran a by-path, concealed by the darkness of the deep shade, which led down towards the shore; Janos had one day shown him that woodland way. He was at once lost to the sight of the crowd in the dark foliage of the close-growing trees.
‘If he fail us, we shall know how to avenge it.’ said the man from the docks once more.
CHAPTER XXII
THE official spies and professional informers, with whom Helios, like all modern cities, was infested, had of course, as soon as these eve
nts happened, informed the authorities of what had occurred and of what was menaced. The troops were immediately confined to barracks; the guns of the fortresses turned upon the town; the sentinels doubled, and all those precautions taken which render a successful insurrection almost an impossibility in any modern and monarchical country.
The demonstration had taken the Government by surprise and found them unprepared; and the alarm bells of telegraph and telephone were ringing frantically wherever the governing forces of civil and military control were located. But the people were peaceable, though enthusiastic and excited; and the Ministry decided that they should not be interfered with, so long as no revolutionary cries were heard and no revolutionary emblems displayed.
Michael Soranis, who had succeeded Kantakuzene when the latter was defeated over the Crown Prince’s scheme for the fortification of the Hundred Isles, was still Prime Minister. As a politician he was considered eminently safe, and slow, and sure; he had been often in office when the monarch or the country had been desirous of quiet and sleep. He was adroit, conciliatory, plausible, with no stiffness of backbone, or disagreeable stability of principle, about him. It was hard on such a Minister to be confronted with a dilemma so difficult, an obstinacy so painful. Soranis was essentially an opportunist; he had been a physician in early life, and knew how to sooth excited pulses, lower high temperatures, persuade to painful cures, and amiably divert diseased fancies; but this position required strength, and he was not strong.
He had entered the arena of politics on the buck-jumping galloway of Radicalism; but it had been always unsuited to his taste and powers, and he had for many years seated himself more comfortably on the park-hack of Liberal Conservatism. He liked to amble smoothly over the tan, in the circus of high office, with the diamond stars due to successful equestrianism on his breast.
This affair, which was a great disturbance, almost an insurrection, troubled him greatly. It was unexpected, inconvenient, dangerous, and most ill-timed. Like many active political events it had sprung out of a mustard-seed fallen in a gutter, and might be big with confusion and convulsion. It was a water-spout in a clear sky. It was a heat-wave in a cool land. It was a falling mast on a winning schooner. It was a squirming black squib in a bather’s sunny creek. It was any imaginable torment which could upset the desirable, and create the perilous. Go which way it would, end how it might, it would cause him to be assailed equally by hostile and by friendly groups in the Chamber. It was a ball of pins with all the points set outward.
Let him take it and hold it as he would, he must inevitably be pricked by it. He would almost certainly please none by his treatment of it. He would quite certainly offend either the King or the nation.
Like all successful men Soranis had many enemies. He knew that these would all eagerly seize on this incident as on a dead cat to throw at him. True, the Chambers were not then sitting; it was the brief recess of Pentecost; but time intensifies malice, as it adds to the bitterness of the brandy in which peach kernels are steeped. He knew that his enemies would not let a single point against him rest, or lose by waiting. What also complicated his responsibility was that the King and the Crown Prince were away shooting, having left the city at dawn for one of the royal forests in the hills.
He felt that the position was a cruel and unjust one for ‘a politician who had never failed to trim his course with the most skilful and scientific navigation. The terrible mixture of the Danish Hamlet and the English Henry the Fifth which seemed to him united in the person of Othyris appeared to him more perilous to himself and his Cabinet than any number of anarchical conspiracies. He admired Othyris; he recognised the charm, the talent, the courage, the altruism of the King’s second son; but he felt that a revolutionary prince was a sore difficulty in the path of a Minister of the Crown, who only asked of fate to be all things to all men.
All Soranis had desired and tried to bring about had been that peace external and internal should last his time and let him die in office; that the nation should be quiet and orderly, reasonable and pliable, should never be noisy or quarrelsome and create embarrassments, either at home or abroad. This was, he thought, the least the Hélianthines could do in return for his own admirable government; a beautiful buoy of cork floating serenely on an oiled sea. Yet, behold them! Up in arms, and baying like the brutes they really were; with no gratitude for the smooth years of subsidised commerce and increased national debt which he himself had given them! The throne, the army, the navy, the exchequer, the police, the church, had always been kept by him in respect and prosperity, following each other in harmonious sequence like the Corinthian columns of a temple portico; and these ignorant and yelling crowds, who knew nothing of the beauties of political architecture, were endeavouring to resuscitate the memory of a forgotten patriot whose shade was as much to be dreaded by authority as the ghost of Hamlet’s father by Hamlet’s step-father!
Soranis felt that he had neither the years nor the temper to cope with such a position, and, as though the question in itself was not thorny and difficult enough, there was added to it the extreme embarrassment of the entrance into it of the King’s second son.
The Minister was no stranger to the permanent differences existing between the father and the son. More than once these had strained all his tact and persuasiveness to the utmost in the effort to prevent the friction from becoming visible to others; and a perverse fate seemed to accumulate causes and reasons for their divergence. To him, as to the royal family, the perversity of Elim seemed diabolical.
Born to the most enviable fate that the heart of man could desire, why could he not be content with it? To Soranis, son of a provincial apothecary, and a struggling professional man himself in early manhood, it seemed monstrous that a prince could be dissatisfied with his lot. Therefore, when Othyris said to him, ‘I have given my word to the people that Illyris shall be buried in the Pantheon.’ nothing but the extreme reverence for rank of a democrat who has been converted to reactionism could have restrained him from a choleric and irreverent imprecation.
Instead of such a natural ebullition of temper, he said, nervously, and with a sigh:
‘I fear, sir, that your Royal Highness did not realise, did not consider sufficiently, the extreme embarrassment which such a promise on your part would cause to the government.’
‘I did not think of the government, certainly,’ said Othyris.
‘Nor of His Majesty,’ said Soranis, timidly and tentatively.
‘Where does my father come into this question?’ said Othyris.
Soranis made a little deprecatory murmur of protest.
Where, he thought, did His Majesty not enter, all-pervading essence of will and conscience as he was? Who should or would be concerned in the question of a burial in the House of Immortals, if not the monarch who considered his grandsire the first of all immortals?
Othyris knew well that to the King the demand for the interment of Illyris under the same dome with Theodoric would appear a blasphemy, a treason, an unspeakable infamy; but he did not intend to discuss that side of the subject. He waited a while for some more complete reply from Soranis. Failing to receive one, he said:
‘Your Excellency cannot fail, I imagine, to perceive the stringent necessity which exists that the warrant of my word shall be made good by all the powers responsible for law and order?’
‘No doubt, sir, no doubt,’ murmured Soranis, but with no great firmness of tone. ‘No doubt your Royal Highness must be supported.’
In his own mind he saw vividly two pictures: the one of a crowd which would comprehend no arguments except cannon; the other of a monarch who would neither understand nor endure any arguments whatever. He himself was between Scylla and Charybdis.
‘You can only support me,’ replied Othyris, ‘by carrying out my promise to the people.’
Soranis nervously balanced a paper-knife on his finger. ‘Would it not have been possible, sir, for you to — to — have avoided the incident altogether?’
&n
bsp; ‘I did not wish to avoid it. I sought it. But it is quite useless to discuss this part of the question now. What has been done cannot be altered.’
‘May I ask, sir, did the mob seem to you to be getting beyond the control of the police?’ ‘The ‘people were orderly and reasonable,’ said Othyris, with emphasis; he resented the epithet of mob. ‘The police did not interest or occupy me at all.’
The Minister drew himself up a little stiffly. To touch with irreverence these guardians of the State is, in the eyes of a Minister, to use a chasuble and a reliquary as a cigar-box and a spittoon; the priests of the altars of authority would burn the sacrilegious profaners if they dared.
‘The civil-servants of order risk their lives, sir,’ he said coldly.
‘They are armed to the teeth,’ said Othyris as coldly.
‘I lament, sir,’ murmured Soranis with reproach, ‘that you do not recognise all that government owes to them.’
‘I beg your Excellency,’ said Elim with impatience, ‘ not to let us waste time in discussing the virtues of your agents de sureté. I come to you to know if you will keep the pledge which I gave to the people of this city in the name of the State. You will not, I imagine, be willing to dishonour my word.’
‘Pray, sir, consider,’ said Soranis in agitation.
‘As I understand from yourself and from others present, you have assured the citizens of Helios that the body of Platon Illyris shall be buried with public honours in the Pantheon?’
‘Precisely.’
‘You are of opinion, sir, that you avoided a revolt and persuaded them to disperse quietly by making this promise?’
‘I repeat, I told them that, if they would go to their homes without disturbance, their wishes as regards the dead man should be respected and carried out; and though they had certainly no cause to trust me, being who I am, they were good enough to have faith in my word and to separate tranquilly. It is absolutely certain that the government must ratify my promise, or disgrace me so utterly in my own sight, and that of the country’s, that I would not live a day under the weight of such opprobrium.’