by Ouida
‘If only the people will trust me and be patient!’ thought Othyris.
When the evening papers announced that Soranis was about to resign, there was great agitation in all political spheres of action. It was unexpected. It alarmed all capitalists and speculators. To many it was unintelligible. Men were half the night in the streets. The cafés and restaurants buzzed like hives when the bees are swarming. The troops were, of course, kept confined to their barracks. Throngs of people stood through the short hours of the summer night in the Square of the Dioscuri before the palace of Othyris. But he made them no response to their enthusiasm, and neither came into the Square nor on to the balcony; they shouted till they were hoarse, but always in vain.
It was past midnight when the carriages of the royal sportsmen rolled with noise and dust over the marble pavements of the streets and crashed into the great court of the Soleia, followed by the carriages of the gentlemen who had accompanied the expedition, and by the brakes bearing the bleeding carcases of the grand beasts, stags, does, elands, wild boars, slaughtered for the princely pastime in the close season and in the breeding time.
The King, fatigued and drowsy, had only one desire, his bed. The heaviness of sleep and stupor made the news which awaited him appear the more intolerable, and he muttered in his throat oaths which chilled the blood of his gentlemen of the chamber. But he refused audience to any one; he left all action to the morning light; he threw himself on the narrow mattress of his camp bed, and dropped at once into a deep slumber in which both his body and his brain were stupefied by carnage, by brandy, by fatigue; no one dared disturb his august repose.
Beneath him, stretched on stone floors in the palace cellars, the grand forest creatures he had slain still dropped blood from their innocent mouths.
His son Elim did not sleep. He passed the chief part of the night revising the various manners in which he had already bequeathed his properties and provided for the consequences of his own death, for he was fully resolved not to live a day if, as he knew was probable, his promise to the people should not be carried out by the State.
His country should know, at least, that he had been no traitor. It was a point of honour to him, as it is to the man who has drawn the fatal lot which imposes suicide upon him; and, considering the refusal as inevitable, he prepared for it. Soranis and even Kantakuzene were more agitated than he. He was as calm as the Duc d’Enghien was on that fatal morning, when the young Bourbon’s chief anxiety was for the future of his dog. In the small hours of the morning messages came to Othyris that the King had returned, and that he had gone to his rest without receiving any Minister or even the Prefect of the Palace. No one dared arouse him.
‘It is certain, I imagine, that he will refuse,’ thought his son.
Othyris could not in honour have done any other thing than that which he had done. Yet in his own sight he seemed to have failed in his duty towards those who could not help themselves and whom he had bidden return to gods that he knew to be false. Men would praise him perhaps, praise his filial loyalty and his rejection of personal popularity; but though he knew he could not have done otherwise with self respect, yet he felt himself that he had failed, where one less scrupulous and more selfish might have taken fortune at the flood. Are there not moments in life when a lesser crime should be done to avoid a greater crime? Is there not many an instance, in the records of history, of evil having been boldly done, that good should come out from it?
It seemed to him impossible that any man living should bend the will of the King. Illyris, in the opinion of the King, was a republican who had been a rebel; the populace was a hydra-headed monster; the popular will was an insolence, a treason, a fever as contagious and dangerous as the plague, and to be stamped out like the rinderpest.
The dead and the living were to the ruler of Helianthus alike unpardonable, insupportable.
Othyris had given his word to the people in order to avoid a popular outbreak, a beginning of revolution which might be fraught with consequences incalculable; but as his word could only be kept if his father gave him the power to keep it, he had no hope that he should be able to do so.
There was only one way in which he could prove his sincerity to the people if he were denied the power to give them their will.
Death alone could speak for him in clear and certain tones. The people would not misjudge his motives, nor would the woman whom he loved.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE King rose late the next morning: his temper, always bad, was that of a fasting tiger; it was not improved by the news which awaited him, or by the black coffee and cognac with which he broke his fast. His olive skin grew duskier, his sullen eyes colder and more obscured; he was enraged with others for that delay in the conveyance of the intelligence to him which had been entirely due to his own fault in refusing to hear anything whatever. He cursed every one: the governor of the city, the commandant of the troops, the chief of the police, the central government, his Ministers, his household, and, of course, his second son beyond all others.
‘That I should have bred an anarchist!’ he thought, in fury; and he cursed his dead wife in her grave. —
The action of the populace was to him as unpardonable as a kick from the wheeler, or a jib from the leaders, is to the driver of a four-in-hand. His Ministers assured him that the present effervescence was as harmless as the froth of seltzer; but he had once seen a seltzer syphon explode.
Meanwhile the crowds increased with every ten minutes, and were fed by numbers of peasants from the outlying country, come in with the produce of their ground, who remained to see what might happen.
The Crown Prince was sent for by the King; to him, as to his father, the whole events of the previous day appeared diabolical; and neither of them could understand why the crowd had not been dispersed with bayonets or by an infantry volley. It was such a simple thing to do. What use was the governor of the city if he could not do it? As for Elim, they knew well that he was a second Egalité. Nothing that he could do surprised either of them.
To calm these furious waters, to moderate these raging cyclones, seemed to Michael Soranis, when ushered into their presence, a task wholly beyond his strength. John of Gunderöde, in a suit of shepherd’s plaid tweed, with a red cashmere neckerchief wound about his throat — for he was hoarse from a chill taken in the woods whilst standing still awaiting the driven deer — was not Jupiter Tonans, nor even Louis Quatorze; and his son Theo was not the Black Prince, or Don John of Austria, but a redfaced, bullet-headed, angry, alarmed person, twisting bristling moustaches and breathing fiercely like a chained-up bull-dog. Yet such as they were, they carried fear and awe into the breast of the Prime Minister, who was not a Sully, a Bismarck, a Ricasoli, or a Richelieu, but a plausible and pliant opportunist who disliked absolutism and revolution equally, and was absolutely incapable of speaking unwelcome truths to his sovereign. A Minister ought not to be a courtier; but, unfortunately, the two words are too often synonymous.
Morally the spine of Soranis grew more supple, as physically it grew more rheumatic. Reactionism increases in an ageing statesman as crust on the ageing bottle of port wine. The loaves and fishes, which to his youth used to seem indifferent, become more indispensable to him as time goes on; and their abundance on his own table appears to him the correct measure of national prosperity, because it is the measure of his own personal success.
To Soranis, therefore, it was in all sincerity the most painful of missions to stand before these two angry gentlemen, and endeavour to pour the oil of deprecation on the raging waters of their wrath. He knew that he was only partially trusted by them; he knew that they always saw in him a halfhearted conservative and monarchists person of doubtful and debateable principles; they always remembered against him the years during which, as a doctor from the provinces, he had sat on the left benches. How persuade such hearers that the wish of the populace must be respected, without appearing to be still the tribune of the people? How excuse and uphold the action of
the King’s insubordinate son, without seeming to be the apologist of an anarchist, the partisan of a rebel? His naturally timid temper and his failing health rendered him incapable of such a dual task as the pacification of a furious monarch and of an excited populace. He left power with sore distress; he knew that at his age he could never return to it. When in office Corvus had, indeed, been much older than he himself now was; but Corvus had been made of brass and steel. Soranis was of far more fragile stuff. With intense pain and mortification he felt that he had nothing to do except to place his resignation in his sovereign’s hands; and the King, without any amenity of speech or manner, accepted it with a few unkind incisive words.
The aged statesman was bloodless, exhausted, out of breath, when he passed out of the Soleia.
‘Sir,’ he said feebly to Othyris, a few minutes later, ‘I found myself unable to recommend to His Majesty the ratification of your Royal Highness’s promise to the people of Helios. I could not reconcile it with my public duty nor with my private powers; I have therefore placed my resignation in His Majesty’s hands, as I had the honour to inform you that I should do. I have advised him to summon His Excellency Demetrius Kantakuzene.’
‘You have done well,’ said Othyris, ‘but do you believe that the King will send for Kantakuzene?’
‘His Majesty always acts constitutionally, sir.’
‘In form, perhaps, he does,’ thought Othyris, ‘but in spirit not often.’
‘Sir,’ said Soranis, greatly woebegone, ‘your royal father has upbraided me for the actual course of events. He used expressions which I felt were unjust, for I have always done what I believed to be my duty.’
‘I am sure that your Excellency has always acted for what you considered the interests of the country,’ replied Othyris; and he felt that he did the fallen Minister no more than justice. For Soranis was one of those public men who are neither hypocrites nor liars, but who deceive themselves into the belief that they serve their nation when they only serve themselves.
Soranis had, like many another successful politician, believed that his own measures were wholesome medicine for the maladies of the State; that his own ascendancy was the best of all paregorics, and his own administration at once a purge, a tonic, and an anodyne.
Humbly, wearily, almost tearfully, the ex-Premier took his leave; and Othyris, left alone, thought: ‘Kantakuzene if he be called will fail.’
To account for the sudden fall of Soranis it was reported in the official Press that he had suffered from a slight attack of cerebral paralysis. But no one believed it. Every one felt sure that the paralysis from which he suffered was the inability of a feeble politician to cope with an unexpected situation.
Early in the forenoon it was rumoured that the resignation of Soranis had been accepted, and that it was expected that the King would send for the leader of the Opposition. The news of the resignation, and the hope that Kantakuzene would be called to office, tended to soothe and pacify the people in the streets, and they waited without agitation and impatience for further intelligence.
They believed in Kantakuzene. He had stepped past them, and shut the doors of reform in their faces many a time, but he remained nevertheless their ideal reformer.
The courage of Kantakuzene was usually stimulated by difficulty, but the task now before him seemed to him greater than any man born of woman could bring to a successful issue. But he accepted the position, and brought to it all his acumen, finesse, and knowledge of men. That he should be summoned when the streets of Helios were full of agitated and excited people flattered his self-esteem and at the same time moved his patriotism, which had never been an artificial or insincere sentiment, and armed him at all points against the wrath of his sovereign. Kantakuzene was neither false nor dishonest; but his views, like those of most men who succeed, changed with his fortunes. It is natural that the man who has arrived at a political altitude should not think ill of a world which has allowed and assisted him to arrive. The sentiments of a successful man change imperceptibly with his success, but not necessarily insincerely. To the young lawyer, holding a brief for an insurgent, revolution seems a very different matter to that which it appears to him when he is a statesman who can consign troops to barracks or send them out with fixed bayonets to clear the streets. There is as much difference between the two stages of the same man’s life as there was between a goatherd on the slopes of Olympus and the Olympian Zeus throned upon the clouds.
All the wisdom of Socrates only brought him the cup of hemlock. Successful men know that; hence, so gradually that they are unconscious of the transformation, they become hard, cold, gluttonous, cynical, mercenary; their price is a very high one, but they have a price. Their ideals lie dead, as dead as the wild-flowers which they gathered in their childhood and threw down on the grass of paths which their feet will never tread again. But Kantakuzene did now and then look at the field-flowers, even as Disraeli did at the primroses. He was not absolutely disloyal to his early tenets; but he, like Disraeli, let them lie in abeyance.
Like most men who are not fanatics or visionaries he cared principally for his own interests; but after his own — a long way after — he did care for the interests of his country.
He knew that these were imperilled by the policy of the King and of the reactionary party which overweighted a poor nation with fiscal burdens, sacrificed all useful progress to military expenditure, and was the dupe of showy and useless alliances, which kept the tired people armed to the teeth and bowed down under the pack-saddle of a monstrous taxation. Office was naturally his goal for his own personal ambitions, but in addition to these for his sense that he understood the people better than his rivals, and could benefit them more.
When he received the summons of his sovereign he felt not only the elation of a politician flattered by being called to serve the Crown in a difficult crisis, but something also of the patriotism which is ready to confront a dangerous issue for sake of the country. The moment was critical. He knew that if the people became more excited and were refused the demand for the burial of Illyris in the city, their rage would become ungovernable, and, though they would be probably worsted eventually, they were certainly in the mood to face the troops; and it was possible that the troops might go over to the popular side. Kantakuzene knew that there was much secret disaffection in the barracks of Helios. If Othyris should cease to be neutral, and should come out into the streets and take their head, it was probable, thought the statesman, that there would be civil war of the most bitter kind — of the populace against the ruling power.
To avert this seemed to Kantakuzene his own supreme duty. The time had been when he would have welcomed such a conflict, and have done his best to conclude it in favour of the populace. But that time was past; he had been Prime Minister before now; he desired to be so again. To risk, instead, revolution beside a young man who was a poet rather than a politician, whose scruples were as many as the sands of the sea, and whose courage was constantly being checked by the hesitations of his conscience, never entered the mind of the deputy for Concordia.
There are transmigrations which are against nature. The revolutionist may develop into the Minister. The Minister never becomes again the revolutionist. So Kantakuzene, on receiving the summons from the King, hastened to the Soleia.
Kantakuzene was by instinct and early training a special pleader: he had been in early years remarked for the skill, the suavity, the courtesy, the persuasiveness of his speeches in the courts of justice. He had brought into political life that shrewd and subtle management of men which he had learned at the Bar.
A bourgeois, a notary’s son, a self-made man, there was a certain awe even for him in princes, a certain spell which magnetised him momentarily; but he was never ventre à terre before royalty, like Deliornis or Soranis; and when his momentary trepidation passed off, which it did soon, he was master of himself, and at times, as he was now, master of them.
He had not been a famous advocate without knowing how to
move his fellow-men by the mere charm and force of words. The King and the Crown Prince were indeed not susceptible to eloquence, but his adroit speech reached to the hidden sources of their secret fears, and conjured up before their dull minds that vision of the Red Spectre which haunts at night the pillows whereon crowned heads uneasy lie.
The populace was to them both but as a worm on which to set their heel; but Kantakuzene made them reluctantly realise that the worm might turn into a viper, nay, even into a python; and that the heel even of Achilles was vulnerable in the modern successors of Achilles. They were both clothed in the impenetrable armour of pride, or prejudice, of vanity, of caste, of ignorance; but the shafts of his ingenious and deferential words pierced the joints of their armour, and made the net-work of nerves beneath the armour thrill.
In the Alps, at certain seasons, a single shot fired may bring down an avalanche which may bury villages. Kantakuzene used the metaphor, and made them feel that the season was come, the avalanche above their heads, the atmosphere surcharged with danger of no common kind.
The heir to the throne would have dared all, would have fired the shot, though the avalanche had engulfed him; but the actual occupant of the throne was more moved by the impending danger: under his stolid and cold mask he was afraid of what might happen — he did not wish to go and live on his millions in a foreign country like a retired stockbroker; he knew well that the man who has reigned is on ceasing to reign dwarfed and crippled for the rest of his natural life.
He did not believe in the possibility of his own deposition, his own exile; but he could not altogether resist the impression of the alarm which Kantakuzene so skilfully suggested without ever giving it a shape which could offend. A vision rose before him of his son Elim chosen as President of a Hélianthine Republic, even as Henri d’Orleans, had he had more spirit for combat or less loyalty to his family, might have become president of his nation and master of her fate.