by Ouida
CHAPTER XXIX
THE funeral of the late Crown Prince was a great spectacle, a military pageant of the first order; only that of the King could have surpassed it. The body was placed upon a gun-carriage, like a dead god upon his altar, and the princes, his brothers, with a galaxy of foreign princes, their relations, followed it; all of them in full uniform and mounted on splendid chargers. If the music played by the massed bands had not been so slow, so mournful, and so solemn, the procession might easily have been mistaken for a wedding march or a conqueror’s entry. The population of the capital was in the streets, dumb, sullen, yet magnetised by the grandeur of the show. In no city of the world has the populace the courage to display its disapproval by shutting its shutters before a pageant.
At that same hour another man was being carried to his end; carried a short journey from the mattress on which he had died to the dissecting table in the floor below in the great central hospital dedicated to St. Elizabeth. He had been a good man all his days, a worker in the docks; he had reared a large family with honesty and kindness; they had most of them emigrated at an age when they began to grow useful; two only were now alive, labouring men in the Western hemisphere; he had been long ill and out of work; he had suffered from tumour in the liver; he had been promised a cure at the great hospital; he had found only death. There was none to pay the fee which permits the removal of a body from the hospital; his wife was weeping miserably outside the gates; she could not buy the right to bury him; his remains were laid on the dissecting table, and the instruments of the students searched his inmost parts, traced the net-work of his veins, scooped out his brain, sawed his spine in sections. The sounds of the military music, the passing of the troops, the boom of the funeral guns, rolled through the operating-room from an adjacent street.
The contrasts of life are too sharp, and its disparities are too great.
At ten o’clock on the day following the funeral Othyris went to his first interview with his father; a meeting which both would have been equally willing to avoid had such avoidance been possible.
John of Gunderöde received him in the room in which he spent most of his indoor hours, surrounded by the modern substitutes for the thunderbolt of Zeus and the wand of Proteus. He was seated before his bureau on a revolving chair, and he wheeled round and faced his son, with a sign dismissing the attendant officials. His olive cheeks were pale and their flesh was flabby; his eyes were sullen and restless; in his teeth was the inevitable cigarette; he had rarely known embarrassment, but he knew it then.
Othyris felt none. He was cold, resentful, paying to the smallest iota all the deference demanded of him; but to the King this extreme ceremony seemed irony, although any lack of it would have appeared to him offence.
John of Gunderöde had never felt impatience before; but now he was totally powerless to undo this knot which fate had tied, to rid himself of the successor whom he hated, of the revolutionary whom he feared. Judging Othyris by himself, he opined that, now, being immediate heir to the throne, his son would cease to be a revolutionary, but would not for that reason cease to be a foe. He was convinced that Elim, impatient to reign, would use his popularity with the masses to dethrone himself.
The two men were in strong contrast. The King’s stout and stunted figure filled his revolving writing-chair without grace, his eyebrows were drawn together in a gloomy gravity, his skin was yellower than before; he had neglected to dye his hair, and patches of grey showed in it; his teeth were shut, and scarcely unclosed for speech; he looked like an adjutant, like a merchant, like the head of a department worried and incensed by matters offensive and odious which could not be altered or controlled.
His son stood before him in the full light from the windows, pale as the dead Adonis, fair as the Sun-god of the poets, tall, slender, calm, and cold; with a great weariness upon him, but with no weakness; a man who forgot nothing, and who, if he forgave, did so only because his own conception of duty made it incumbent on him.
His father understood that he himself had been in error in his estimate of one whom he had considered a visionary, an anarchist, a fool. He received an impression of his own incapacity to dominate his successor which was new and odious to him.
Force at the present moment was out of the question. Persuasion had never been one of the methods of the monarch. What he required in the heir to the Crown was a copy of himself, acquiescence in all his own views and acts; a will servilely copying his own will, and promising him for the future, when he should be no more, the continuation of his own influence, the development of his own projects and his own home and foreign policy.
To hope for this from Elim was to indulge in a baseless vision. There could be no continuity of action and opinion between him and a man who was in every way his opposite, who had no more similarity to his own absolutism than Vergniaud had to a Versaillais. If he died that day and Elim reigned in his stead he knew all that he had done would be undone: that the Guthonic alliance would be broken, that the military dominance would be at an end, that the network of policies which he had been at such pains to weave would be swept away like a cobweb, that the whole future of absolutism which he had built up under the cover of constitutionalism would be pushed down like a child’s sand castle. The country was ready to welcome such changes — setting aside its bureaucracy and some portion of its aristocracy. Of the existence of revolutionary feeling in the army itself he had been long aware. The rank and file were ready to throw down their arms at the first propitious moment.
His dead son could have been trusted never to allow that moment to arrive, but his actual heir would certainly hasten its advent. For the first time in his reign his astute and obstinate mind found itself baffled. In such difficulties the rulers of large armies and disposers of large exchequers are able to launch their nation into some racial feud or flattering conquest, and in the ferment and wrath thus excited make their peoples forget their hatred of compulsory service and bend their backs under the knapsack. But Helianthus could not be thus launched into oblivion and war-fever. Her allies kept her immovable; her finances were limited; her power to move alone was small, almost nil; in Europe her cannon would not be allowed to fire; in savage and distant States she had renounced her share in that butchery which is called the crusade of civilisation. Candor, since she had become Imperia, did not allow her friends to stop a ball or hold a wicket in the great game she played in the Dark Continent. Now and then she called to a crew of a Hélianthine battleship to come ashore and field for her on some barbaric coast or uncertain frontier; but this was very rarely, and neither navy nor army of Helianthus dared move without her.
All these thoughts passed through the King’s brain as he sat in that silence which was his constant refuge in any difficult moment.
In his successor he wanted a careful and exact continuance of his own work; in Elim he could only see the destroyer of it.
The interview was ceremonious, strictly confined to that which the moment demanded, with a rigid limitation on both sides to what was necessary and politic. By neither was there spoken a single superfluous word; between them there could not be either confidence or candour; they were enemies, and consanguinity only intensified antagonism.
The King felt less contempt for his son than before, but he felt also, more strongly, that between himself and Elim there could never be other than enmity of the most bitter kind. He had thought his second son a weak and dreamy enthusiast, but he recognised now that behind these ideals and phantasies which seemed so miserably absurd to himself, there was something of the iron of the Gunderöde temperament, as yet latent but existent, and likely to grow harder as youth passed. Whatever it might become, he knew that it would be inimical to himself, contrary to all his plans, his ambitions, his ruling power.
When he had intimated to Othyris that in his present position it would be necessary to renounce the friendships and preferences which had been notably his choice hitherto, his son had briefly replied that he could not be unfaithf
ul either to his friends or to his faiths; and the monarch had felt that he would have no power to make him so. ‘You must surely perceive the indecency of such sentiments in your changed position,’ he said with ill-restrained wrath.
‘I perceive, sire, the indecency of changing a principle merely because a situation has changed,’ replied Othyris. ‘I hope that I shall never be guilty of it.’
‘The heir to the throne cannot be a revolutionist!’
‘I have led no revolution, sire.’
‘Because you were arrested in time to prevent your doing so.’
‘Your Majesty has been misinformed. I attended a funeral; I assisted in a reparation; I did no more.’
‘The military court judged otherwise.’
‘I cannot help its incorrect opinions. Your Majesty did not deign to question me yourself.’
‘I do not consider that my prerogative extends to interference with the sentences of military tribunals, especially where a member of my family is the offender. You had every facility given you for defence. If you did not avail yourself of such facilities the fault was yours. Your replies offended your judges, who certainly would have been better pleased if they could have acquitted you.’
‘They did their duty doubtless as they saw it. I trust your Majesty will believe that I also did mine as I saw it.’
‘There was no question of duty in your case. There were only insubordination and offence.’
‘I regret that your Majesty sees my conduct in that light.’
The King gave utterance to a short, harsh sound, half laugh, half curse.
‘If I order you now to return to Hydaspe and fulfil the remainder of your sentence?’
‘I go, sir, of course, instantly.’
His father’s half-shut, gloomy, penetrating eyes looked at him in inquisitive scepticism. He was strongly tempted to take his son at his word and send him back to the saline marshes of the east coast. But his inclinations never ran away with his judgment or his passions with his prudence. His sense of what was best for himself was always his guiding consideration. He knew how his Cabinet, his Senate, his Chamber, his people in general would view such an action.
‘That is impossible now,’ he said curtly. ‘I regret that seclusion and solitude have not produced a greater change in your character and opinions. I hope that the great responsibilities which have devolved on you may produce more effect.’
With these words he intimated that the interview was over, and turning to his bureau put the acoustic tube to his ear.
There was a secret chamber which opened out of the King’s study. It had been made when that portion of the Soleia had been builded by the Byzantine emperors. The gyration of the panel, which was movable, was undiscoverable by any one to whom the secret was unknown; and it contained a hidden lock, of which the key had been handed down by Theodoric to his son, and by his son to his successor. An old monk of an Oriental monastery had given the secret and the key to Theodoric as price of the permission to his order to remain unmolested on their rocky eyrie on the northern mountains of Helianthus. Theodoric and the monk had long been dead, but the key had been transmitted to the reigning monarch; and the barefooted, unwashed, famished anchorites still paced their stony corridors, and lighted their bronze lamps, and intoned their wild litanies, in the recesses of the Rhætian alps.
The sea-front of the Soleia stood directly on the quay, without any intervening wall or garden. The window of the secret chamber was concealed from without; it was closed by a marble panel carved to correspond with the exterior carvings, and turned on a steel swivel of elaborate and ingenious workmanship. It was characteristic of the present King’s carefulness and prudence in all things great and small that he remembered to keep the mechanism in good order, and with his own hands oiled it twice or thrice a year, and moved it to prevent rust. The chamber within was square, small, lofty; all of stone; the signs of the Zodiac were sculptured on one of the walls; when the narrow aperture was open, the person within looked on the great marble quay which separated the palace from the sea.
The key, which was very small, the King carried in a locket containing a miniature of his first wife, the bride of his boyhood. No one, not even her son, had ever asked him to open that locket; every one knew that its original had been a homely, unlovely person, with the ruddy skin, the short-sighted eyes, the high cheekbones, the large teeth, of the Guthonic physiognomy. There were many portraits of her in the palaces and castles occupied by the Gunderöde, and their original had been lying for over thirty years under the lead and cedar and silver of her triple coffin, never remembered by her husband or her son, or by the people who had acclaimed her on her bridal.
According to the custom of his House the King had confided the fact of the existence of the retreat to the Crown Prince, so that it should be known by his successor in case of his own sudden death. But he had never shown the Crown Prince more than the key and the trick of the panel; the less any one of his sons knew, the better; he did not even exempt the devotion of Theo from that conclusion. It was also characteristic of him that in all the years during which he had been aware of the existence of this closet, no man or woman had ever heard of it from him, or seen him enter or leave it. This was the strength of the King: he was sufficient to himself.
The secret had gone to the grave with Theo; it should, by precedent, be passed on to the new Crown Prince; the monarch was bound to have one living holder of the knowledge in case of his own sudden death by disease or assassination. But John of Gunderöde, as he stood in the dim cell-like chamber, said to himself that he would not part with that secret to his present heir; it should sooner die with himself. Why not? It was only a matter of personal security; a refuge in case of personal danger; it had no importance to the nation, or interest for the State; it was as wholly his own property as the signet-ring on his finger. Elim should live and reign, if circumstance allowed, without that knowledge. There was so much that he was obliged to reveal to his heir; to allow, to share, to confide, so sorely against his own will. This, at least, he could withhold. Some day, to have thus withheld it would perchance be useful.
This power of unswerving reticence was the King’s great strength, a strength which made up for what was limited and ordinary in his intelligence. ‘Keep your tongue behind your teeth,’ says the Hélianthine proverb, ‘and you are master of men.’
Helianthus, he considered, would be too small a realm to hold both him and Elim. All unshared knowledge is power of a sort; he kept what he had got.
He looked through the aperture out on to the scene beneath. The southern quay of the city was immediately below, with its marble walls and piers, its long graceful jetty running out into the blue water, its basins where the royal craft of all kinds was anchored, the offing crowded by vessels of his own and other nations, lying at anchor; some for defence, some for pleasure, most of them for trade.
The beauty of the scene was great; the gleaming marbles, the hyacinth blue skies, the waters — here the colours of a dove’s throat, there of a kingfisher’s wings; here green as an arum leaf, and there white as an arum flower — the heaven-pointing masts and the many-hued canvas of the shipping, and across the bay the peaks and slopes of the Mount Atys range, all made up a picture of radiant charm, charged with many august memories of the past. But the King was not a man to think of such things as these, or note their meaning. He looked as the surveyor, as the engineer, looks; and in his trained soldier’s eyes measured, studied, appraised.
A shot from that secret place, from a sure hand, noiseless and smokeless, would take certain death down into a crowd passing along the broad white paven quay. No, he thought, his son should not know of that chamber. He closed the aperture, and left the cell: the panel fell back into its place, its hinges hidden and its lines united under the carven wreaths of leaf and blossom. He was a practical man; having decided that silence was the better part he kept silence, and dismissed the subject from his mind.
It was a very orderly mind
; it resembled a well-arranged medicine-chest; every separate drug was labelled and ready for use, and if it contained some poisons it was only because poison is as necessary, and sometimes as useful, and even as healing, as is the sedative or the tonic. Above all, he was wise in this: he never left his medicine-chest unlocked.
The King had been greatly incensed by the demonstrations of joy at the return of Othyris. He considered that the city and the nation ought to be dumb and paralysed by woe. The loss of such a prince as Theo seemed to him only equalled in history by the death of Marcellus; a not appropriate parallel. All his dominant and imperious temper was in revolt at the subjugation of his will by circumstances over which he had no control. He was accustomed to alter, to bend, to undo, to build up, the circumstances of his own life, and the lives of others, with success and without interference. He could ill stoop to receive the blows of an undesired fate, the opposition of an antagonistic character. Within his own realm he was supreme; and the limitations enforced on him outside it were sufficient annoyance to his arrogant temper without internecine or family feud.
The mere casual germ of an ordinary disease had been enough to alter and reverse all his plans, his intentions, and his arbitrary will. Before it he had been as helpless as a pauper in a poorhouse. He felt rage rather than grief that he should be thus abased to the level of the ordinary sons of men.
One thought alone was prominent in his angry mind: Elim must never reign.
The Short Story Collections
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