Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  So he devoured his soul in silence, and the heavy intense heat grew more painful, and evening after evening the red, rayless ball of the sun sank down behind the rocky ridges of the interior, and another joyless and useless day was dead.

  Ilia was three hundred miles away, in the green, shadowy Helichrysum hills, where the streams ran fresh and cool throughout the longest day.

  At any other time Othyris might not have disliked this dreary solitude, since it would have given him time for study, for art, for philosophy; and he would have taken pleasure in putting on canvas the desolate, severe landscapes of this joyless province. But at the present moment the distance separating him from Aquilegia, his ignorance of what shape Ilia’s future might take, his fear that she might be molested or watched, the longing of a man in love to be near the object of his love, made his imprisonment, three hundred miles from Helios, almost as unbearable as if he had been sent to a convicts’ island in the distant sea which rolled away from those eastern shores of Helianthus to the still mysterious Orient. At times his obedience to his father’s commands seemed to him cowardly and unworthy; at others he felt that he could not in duty, in honour, give the nation an example of insubordination to a man who was the head of the State as well as his father. Kantakuzene had said rightly that the second son of the King was not a revolutionist any more than he was a reactionist. People who believe in any extreme are satisfied with their faith and with themselves; but Othyris had not such consolation. He would have thought that he had erred if he had rebelled; he feared that he was a coward because he obeyed.

  At times, indeed, he was tempted to escape. There was a close cordon of sentinels drawn round the great rocky pile of Hydaspe, but he believed that his gentlemen would assist him and his guards shut their eyes to his secret departure. But even in this, his own scruples stood like incorruptible gaolers in his path. His flight would entail degradation and punishment on those who rendered it possible; even if he himself succeeded in gaining his liberty, those who remained behind him would pay the price of it to one who never pardoned. Moreover, if he were to remain in the country, he would be speedily retaken; and if he were to leave the country what use would freedom be? He would be still farther from Aquilegia.

  There is no punishment so stupid or so stupefying as captivity. The strongest intellects feel its bitter narcotic dull their brain and corrode their energies. A man stays happily on a half-acre of ground when he stays on it by his own choice; but a principality is insupportable when the will of another forbids him to pass its confines.

  Othyris wrote to Ilia Illyris.

  It was an imprudence, but no man in love was ever prudent yet if his heart were tender and his years were few. Moreover, he felt in her that profound trust which was inspired by the limpid serenity of her regard, the character of her thoughts, and the traditions of her lineage. An Illyris might be betrayed, but never could betray.

  His letter was not answered, but it was not returned. That was the utmost he had hoped for when he wrote. After an interval he wrote again; he had never written in confidence before to any human being; it was a new and delightful outlet of his inmost thoughts. It was unwise, it was imprudent, it was dangerous; but it was for those reasons an irresistible temptation to lay bare his inmost self to the one mind which was capable of sympathy with him. That he received no reply did not surprise or chill his ardour; she could not have written to him without being something less than what he thought her, something lower than an Illyris should have been. He sent his letters by the common post, for if he had sent them by messengers he imagined that they would have been returned; she would have taken alarm at such a correspondence. He hoped that coming, like house swallows, noiselessly and familiarly, they would not cause her any apprehension. What is written enters the brain by the eyes, and perhaps penetrates more deeply than what is spoken and enters by the ears.

  The first of the letters which Ilia received from Othyris came from the town in the wallet of Janos with the bread and meat and other frugal fare. It had been given to him by a postman whom he had met on the shore. Ilia had no correspondence, as she had no friends except the nuns in the north, who never wrote, and the lace merchant who wrote only on the receipt of work. The first letter from Othyris caused her extreme surprise and emotion. It was impossible to read its pages without belief in its sincerity. There was no possible cause to doubt the veracity of its expressions; and in its humility there was a contrast to the position of the writer which could not fail to touch the reader. Whether she would or no, Ilia could not resist the conviction that he meant most absolutely all he said. The letters did not alarm her, because though eloquent they were restrained, though ardent they were timid, though impassioned they were reverent. They were the letters of a poet, not of a libertine. All that was best in him, all that was simplest, truest, most sensitive, most unhappy, was expressed in them; the dross of the world and its vanities and its passions was burned out of his soul as it spoke to hers; he was a man who loved her and was no more, no less. She felt that his devotion to her was great, but she was too ignorant of the world to be able to measure the greatness of it.

  His adoration might be a passing caprice; a passion inflamed by difficulty; the wilful insistance of a spoilt child of fate; but it was absolutely true.

  Ilia read the first of his letters once, twice, thrice, in the solitude of the lonely house; then she wound it about a stone and dropped it from her window into the open well which was immediately beneath, its marble copings overgrown by stone crop and violet roots, its depths never troubled save by the old bronze pail let down by a cord at dawn and twilight. The stone smote the water, and she knew that the letter would in a brief time be soaked, obliterated, destroyed; but words which could not die lived on in letters of fire in her remembrance. Each letter which he wrote her sank to the same watery grave. The peasants believed that the well went down, down, down to the very centre of the earth; it seemed to her that there could be no better keeper of his secret than that dark, still, mysterious silence of an unfathomed source.

  No vanity tempted her to keep his correspondence. The nature which is born free from vanity cannot be touched by it.

  Ilia had in her a great pride, the pride of race; but such pride excludes vanity, as the true heir excludes the bastard. Letter after letter as the weeks went on succeeded each other and passed to that safe and silent grave, although it hurt her somewhat as though she slew a living thing to consign those ardent, tender, faithful words to the dumb, unmeasured depths which mirrored the stars and the planets and the moon-rays, and sometimes were white with showers of acacia blossoms, and sometimes moved and muttered sullenly, as seismic forces troubled their subterranean springs, but which never gave back what was given to them: whether written word, or faded flower, dead dragon-fly, or dropped plume of wounded kestrel, or tears which fell from a woman’s eyes as she leaned over its moss-grown parapet.

  It never occurred to Ilia to send the letters back to Othyris. It would have seemed to her too harsh and thankless an act to the man by whom the gates or the House of the Immortals had been opened to the body of Platon Illyris. So his letters did Othyris this service, that gradually he became in her sight the writer of them rather than aught else; no longer only the King’s son, the descendant of Theodoric of Gunderöde, the hereditary enemy of the Illyris. In his presence she never forgot this; but in his letters she did. In them, one human heart spoke to another: that was all. The finest ruses of the studied seducer could not have served him better than did the simple, natural, and imprudent impulse which had moved him to write thus to her.

  Sentiment and sensuality were alike unknown to Ilia. Fear was a stranger to her temper. She was an Illyris. Something of the fire of Argileion, something of the steel of Samaris had entered into her blood; she would have gone to the stake without a visible tremor; she would have borne torture without a cry; she was brave with the bravery transmitted to her by great men; but, even as her young bosom was soft and flower-like, so her y
oung heart had its weakness; her affections were dormant, but they were alive; and as the bosom would fill with milk for the unborn child, so would the soul fill with the desire of unrealised joys. At her heart her youth was living as it was living in the light of her eyes, in the gloss of her hair, in the blue of her veins, in the roundness of her breasts: that sleeping youth which now awoke in her, tremulous, virgin, and afraid, but living. The well in which the letters of Elim were thrown was to her as the magic crystal in which the destiny of those who gazed therein was mirrored. She was afraid of what she saw, but she saw it. Their sentences seemed to stand out under the stars; their words seemed echoed from the deep waters down in the earth. When the nightingales came with the irises and the windflowers they seemed to sing of them and of nothing else.

  She was calmer, stronger, more self-controlled than most women of her years. She had dwelt within reach of the frost of a great lone soul, and it had chilled her youth in her; she had been led to see as an old man, alone with his memories, had seen a world unworthy of and ungrateful to him.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  OTHYRIS had been in solitude with the serried ranks of the stone hills between him and the world of men during six weary months, when the most unlooked-for stroke of fate opened the gates of his prison and called him back to life. Relays of mounted messengers, for there was no telegraph from any place to this remote spot, brought him an order from his father to come to the capital at once with all speed: his eldest brother was dangerously ill with angina.

  Theo ill! Othyris could not credit it. Theo, the concentration of robust, self-satisfied, brutal and arrogant manhood, brought down to the same level as the beggar starved by the roadside, a conscript slain by a sunstroke on a march, a miner suffocated by the noxious fumes of a gas! It was incredible. Rigid as a suit of armour, all-sufficient to himself as a deity, unbending as a rod of iron, as sure of his own wisdom as a high priest of his, full of blood, of health, of authority, of food and wine, and muscular force — Theo, who believed in doctors as prophets, who had his residences deluged by disinfectants, who had always been sure that any one who was ill was so through his or her own fault, — Theo, whose health and strength were as great as those of prize-bull on a pasture, had contracted a fatal malady: that of the angina.

  How he had contracted it, neither he nor his physicians and surgeons could tell. He remembered that a fly had flown down his throat as he had ridden through the home woods of one of his country-places to a slaughter of wild boars. The fly might possibly have brought the infection from some sick plebeian throat. Why would not common people all go into hospitals when they felt that anything was the matter with them? There they were safe out of the way of others, and were useful to the Faculty as studies in corpore vili! When he went home he could not eat any dinner; he felt a brackish, nauseous taste in his mouth; his throat was hoarse and uncomfortable; he had a difficulty in swallowing. The Court physicians looked very grave. In the morning, to the consternation of his wife, his doctors, and his household, the disease had fully declared itself; he was very ill; his father was informed; he became at once grotesque and piteous; and death, which lends dignity and pathos to the most humble of creatures, stripped him bare of all his pompous greatness; the butchered steer for which he had felt no compassion had gained from death more sorrowful nobility than he. At sunrise on the third day the great bell of St. Athanasius, tolling in long solemn notes, told the city of Helios that the heir to the throne was no more.

  His wife, who had been sacrificed to his tyrannies for fourteen sunless and imprisoned years, wept for him tears which she sincerely believed to be those of a sincere sorrow.

  His little daughters, who had never heard his step without fear, or been summoned to his presence without apprehension, seeing their mother’s woe, were moved to an innocent and unconscious hypocrisy, and did not dare to whisper even to each other that a load as of lead was lifted off their childish souls.

  The shops were closed; the muffled bells tolled; the nobility and the bourgeoisie wore mourning; the nation made believe that it was intensely shocked, intensely grieved, and mute out of fear; but at its heart it was glad, and beyond all the populace was glad, that the heir to the throne was now the man it loved.

  The one mourner who felt as much regret as his stolid egotism could permit him to feel at any time was the King. Theo could have been trusted to continue all the traditions of the House of Gunderôde; Theo would never have yielded to maudlin sentiment or have stooped to popular dictation.

  Theo would have always slept booted and spurred. Under him, Helianthus would have been a careful copy in miniature of the great Guthonic empire, all its natural instincts stamped out of it, all its youth weighted with musket and haversack, all its free speech silenced, all its gaiety eclipsed, all its energies crushed under one order, ‘obey.’

  When John of Gunderöde realised that his second son was now unavoidably designated as his own immediate successor, he cursed the crookedness and crabbedness which makes circumstance jeer at mortals, and the undesired always become the inevitable. All his rigour, all his severity, all his acuteness, all his unmercifulness could not give him the power to shape and control the futurity of events.

  The death of his heir-apparent was a greater blow to the King than any he had ever suffered except the enforced disarmament of his carefully prepared expedition for war in the Dark Continent. He could have trusted Theo implicitly to move on his own lines, to govern with his own measures, to follow his own example in all ways. With Theo the jagged bit would have pressed firmer on the sensitive mouth of the blood-mare, and the knotted whip would have cut wounds unceasingly on the nervous, trembling, and highly-bred creature. Theo would have walked in the steps of his father, and being without even his father’s measure of intelligence would have known no law but force. Under Theo, Helianthus would have been flogged on the road to Guthonic measures, Guthonic despotism, Guthonic brutality, and the strange Guthonic mixture of science and superstition and militarism would have been forced down the throat of the nation as a veterinary thrusts a medicine down the throat of a mare. The Guthonic empire had been the idol and ideal of the dead prince. But dead he was, in the prime of his early manhood; and in his place stood Elim.

  Never in all his life before had John of Gunderöde realised his own helplessness before the sledgehammer of accident and the chances of mortality. His stubborn and unbending spirit realised for once its own impotency and incapacity. He could not save his eldest born from the darkness of the tomb, and he could not alter the succession to the throne. His olive cheek grew greyer, his cold eyes harder, he smoked unceasingly, he scarcely ever spoke, and when he did he growled like an angry mastiff. For three days he scarcely ate; and in place of his burgundies and bordeaux he drank brandy. Every one has his own way of mourning; this was his. On the fourth evening he took up the menu card of his dinner and said the cook was a fool. On the fifth day he resumed his usual manner of life. But in his silent soul, tight shut as a bivalve on a rock, there was a bitter fury of regret, a sombre rage of useless sorrow.

  Hydaspe was at a distance of over twenty hours from the capital; the railway only went half the way, and the rest of the journey was made by relays of horses. When Othyris reached Helios he was met by the tidings that his brother was dead. What he had most dreaded had come to pass. He himself was heir-apparent to the throne.

  He covered his face with his hands, and great tears forced themselves through his fingers. His sorrow was not for Theo, but for himself; the burden of a power he abhorred seemed to lie on him like a rock rolled on to the breast of a living man. If only the little child had lived! As he drove to his residence a murmur of delight and of respectful welcome rose from the crowds in the streets as they recognised his equipage, although the blinds were drawn. The cheers were checked immediately by the city guards, but the joy was in the hearts of the people. Their darling was now some day to be their ruler.

  ‘He will reign over us.’ they thought, ‘and then th
ere will be no more men to poke us in the ribs and drag us off to prison.’ They, like the populace of every nation, imagined that a sovereign could do as he chose, and knew nothing of the innumerable threads which bind him like Gulliver. There was a dense crowd gathered in the Square of the Dioscuri, and although the people could not see Othyris as his carriage passed rapidly between the gates of his palace, all the force of the guards of Helios could not prevent a great muffled shout of welcome rolling down the air and reaching him in his chamber.

  ‘They care for me, they believe in me,’ he thought. ‘Alas, poor people! What more power to serve them shall I ever have than a gilded puppet on a carnival car!’

  He could not feel regret for Theo; he knew that Theo, as ruler, would have treated the people of Helianthus as a brute treats a timid colt or a sickly wife. Theo had prided himself on his hardness and recklessness, and nothing could have broken his backbone of steel except the grip of that skeleton-king who makes all other kings lie low as paupers.

  Othyris sorrowed for himself, on whose life fell the crushing glacier of impending power; he sorrowed for the nation who would look to him for so much and to whom he could give so little; he sorrowed for the love of his life, more distant from him in his freedom and what the world deemed splendour than she had been in his captivity and solitude.

  The great bell of the Cathedral tolled with its deep brazen tongue, and all the chimes of churches and chapels resounded in echo, proclaiming the death of one for whom all the land of Helianthus was supposed to mourn as a mother the loss of her first-born. Ilia heard the swell of the great threnody as it rose upwards from the city below, joining the booming of the surf upon the shore.