Suppose they misunderstand me?--What matter!--Let the nation rise against me an" it will, so that I may, before I die, prove myself worthy of the mere gift of manhood! To-day"--and, rising from his chair, he advanced a step or two and faced the sea and sky with an unconscious gesture of invocation; "To-day shall be the first day of my real monarchy! To-day I begin to reign! The past is past,--for eighteen long years as prince and heir to the throne I trifled away my time among the follies of the hour, and laughed at the easy purchase I could make of the a.s.sumed "honour" of men and women; and I enjoyed the liberty and license of my position. Since then, for three years I have been the prisoner of my Parliament,--but now--now, and for the rest of the time granted to me on earth, I will live my life in the belief that its riddle must surely meet with G.o.d"s own explanation. To me it has become evident that the laws of Nature make for Truth and Justice; while the laws of man are framed on deception and injustice. The two sets of laws contend one against the other, and the finite, after foolish and vain struggle, succ.u.mbs to the infinite,--better therefore, to begin with the infinite Order than strive with the finite Chaos! I, a mere earthly sovereign, rank myself on the side of the Infinite,--and will work for Truth and Justice with the revolving of Its giant wheel! My people have seen me crowned,--but my real Coronation is to-day--when I crown myself with my own resolve!"
His eyes flashed in the sunshine;--a rose shook its pink petals on the ground at his feet. In one of the many pleasure-boats skimming across the sea, a man was singing; and the words he sang floated distinctly along on the landward wind.
"Let me be thine, O love, But for an hour! I yield my heart and soul Into thy power,--Let me be thine, O Love of mine, But for an hour!"
The King listened, and a faint shadow darkened the proud light on his face.
""But for an hour!"" he said half aloud--"Yes,--it would be enough! No woman"s love lasts longer!"
CHAPTER III
A NATION OR A CHURCH?
An approaching step echoing on the marble terrace warned him that he was no longer alone. He reseated himself at his writing-table, and feigned to be deeply engrossed in perusing various doc.u.ments, but a ready smile greeted the intruder as soon as he perceived who it was,--one Sir Roger de Launay, his favourite equerry and intimate personal friend.
"Time"s up, is it, Roger?" he queried lightly,--then as the equerry bowed in respectful silence--"And yet I have scarcely glanced at these papers! All the same, I have not been idle--I have been thinking."
Sir Roger de Launay, a tall handsome man, with an indefinable air of mingled good-nature and la.s.situde about him which suggested the possibility of his politely urging even Death itself not to be so much of a bore about its business, smiled doubtfully. "Is it a wise procedure, Sir?" he enquired--"Conducive to comfort I mean?"
The King laughed.
"No--I cannot say that it is! But thought is a tonic which sometimes restores a man"s enfeebled self-respect. I was beginning to lose that particular condition of health and sanity, Roger!--my self-respect was becoming a flaccid muscle--a withering nerve;--but a little thought-exercise has convinced me that my mental sinews are yet on the whole strong!"
Sir Roger offered no reply. His eyes expressed a certain languid wonderment; but duty being paramount with him, and his immediate errand being to remind his sovereign of an appointment then about due, he began to collect the writing materials scattered about on the table and put them together for convenient removal. The smile on the King"s face deepened as he watched him.
"You do not answer me, De Launay,"--he resumed, "You think perhaps that I am talking in parables, and that my mind has been persuaded into a metaphysical and rambling condition by an hour"s contemplation of the sunlight on the sea! But come now!--have you not yourself felt a longing to break loose from the trammels of conventional routine,--to be set free from the slavery of answering another"s beck and call,--to be something more than my attendant and friend----"
"Sir, more than your friend I have never desired to be!" said Sir Roger, simply.
The King extended his hand with impulsive quickness, and Sir Roger as he clasped it, bent low and touched it with his lips. There was no parasitical homage in the act, for De Launay loved his sovereign with a love little known at courts; loyally, faithfully, and without a particle of self-seeking. He had long recognized the n.o.bility, truth and courage which graced and tempered the disposition of the master he served, and knew him to be one, if not the only, monarch in the world likely to confer some lasting benefit on his people by his reign.
"I tell you," pursued the King, "that there is something in the mortal composition of every man which is beyond mortality, something which clamours to be heard, and seen, and proved. We may call it conscience, intellect, spirit or soul, and attribute its existence, to G.o.d, as a spark of the Divine Essence, but whatever it is, it is in every one of us; and there comes a moment in life when it must flame out, or be quenched forever. That moment has come to me, Roger,--that something in me must have its way!"
"Your Majesty no doubt desires the impossible!"--said Sir Roger with a smile, "All men do,--even kings!"
""Even kings!"" echoed the monarch--"You may well say "even" kings! What are kings? Simply the most wronged and miserable men on earth! I do not myself put in a special claim for pity. My realm is small, and my people are, for aught I can learn or am told of them, contented. But other sovereigns who are my friends and neighbours, live, as it were, under the dagger"s point,--with dynamite at their feet and pistols at their heads,--all for no fault of their own, but for the faults of a system which they did not formulate. Conspirators on the threshold--poison in the air,--as in Russia, for example!--where is the joy or the pride of being a King nowadays?"
"Talking of poison," said Sir Roger blandly, as he placed the last doc.u.ment of those he had collected, neatly in a leather case and strapped it--"Your Majesty may perhaps feel inclined to defer giving the promised audience to Monsignor Del Fords of the Society of Jesus?"
"By Heaven, I had forgotten him!" and the King rose. "This is what you came to remind me of, Roger? He is here?"
De Launay bowed an a.s.sent.
"Well! We have kept a messenger of Mother Church waiting our pleasure,--and not for the first time in the annals of history! But why do you a.s.sociate his name with poison?"
"Really, Sir, the connection is inexplicable,--unless it be the memory of a religious lesson-book given to me in my childhood. It was an ill.u.s.trated treasure, and one picture showed me the Almighty in the character of an old gentleman seated placidly on a cloud, smiling;--while on the earth below, a priest, exactly resembling this Del Fortis, poured a spoonful of something,--poison--or it might have been boiling lead--down the throat of a heretic. I remember it impressed me very much with the goodness of G.o.d."
He maintained a whimsical gravity as he spoke, and the King laughed.
"De Launay, you are incorrigible! Come!--we will go within and see this Del Fortis, and you shall remain present during the audience. That will give you a chance to improve your present impression of him.
I understand he is a very brilliant and leading member of his Order,--likely to be the next Vicar-General. I know his errand,--the papers concerning his business are there--," and he waved his hand towards the leather case Sir Roger had just fastened--"Bring them with you!"
Sir Roger obeyed, and the King, stepping forth from the pavilion, walked slowly along the terrace, watching the sparkling sea, the flowering orange-trees lifting their slender tufts of exquisitely scented bloom against the clear blue of the sky, the birds skimming lightly from point to point of foliage, and the white-sailed yachts dipping gracefully as the ocean rose and fell with every wild sweet breath of the scented wind. Pausing a moment, he presently took out a field-gla.s.s and looked through it at one of the finest and fairest of these pleasure-vessels, which, as he surveyed it, suddenly swung round, and began to scud away westward.
"The Prince is on board?" he asked.
"Yes, Sir," replied De Launay--"His Royal Highness intends sailing as far as The Islands, and remaining there till sunset."
"Alone, as usual?"
"As usual, Sir, alone, save for his captain and crew."
The King walked on in silence for a minute. Then he paused abruptly.
"I do not like it, De Launay!"--he said decisively--"I do not like his abnormal love of solitude. Books are all very well--poetry is in its way excellent,--music, as we are told "hath charms"--but the boy broods too much, and stays away too much from Court. What woman attracts him?"
Sir Roger"s eyes opened wide as the King turned suddenly round upon him with this question.
"Woman, Sir? I know of none. The Prince is but twenty----"
"At twenty," said the King,--"boys love--the wrong girl. At thirty they marry--the wrong woman. At forty they meet the only true and fitting soul"s companion,--and cry for the moon till the end! My son is in the first stage, or I am much mistaken,--he loves--the wrong girl!"
He walked on,--and De Launay followed, with a vague sense of amus.e.m.e.nt and disquietude in his mind. What had come to his Royal master, he wondered? His ordinary manner had changed somewhat,--he spoke with less than the customary formality, and there was an expression of freedom and authority, combined with a touch of defiance in his face, that was altogether new to the observation of the faithful equerry.
Arrived at the palace, and pa.s.sing through one of the long and s.p.a.cious painted corridors, lit by richly coloured mullioned windows from end to end, the King came face to face with a lady-in-waiting carrying a large cl.u.s.ter of Madonna lilies. She drew aside, with a deep reverence, to allow him to pa.s.s; but he stopped a moment, looking at the great gorgeous white flowers faint with fragrance, and at the slight retiring figure of the woman who held them.
"Are these for the chapel, Madame?" he asked.
"No, Sir! For the Queen."
"For the Queen!" A quick sigh escaped him. He still stood, caught by a sudden abstraction, looking at the dazzling whiteness of the snowy blooms, and thinking how fittingly they would companion his beautiful, cold, pure Queen Consort, who had never from her marriage day uttered a word of love to him, or given him a glance of tenderness. Their rich odours crept into his warm blood, and the bitter old sense of unfulfilled longing, longing for affection, for comprehension, for all that he had not possessed in his otherwise brilliant life, vexed and sickened him. He turned away abruptly, and the lady-in-waiting, having curtsied once more profoundly, pa.s.sed on with her glistening sheaf of bloom and disappeared vision-like in a gleam of azure light falling through one of the further and higher cas.e.m.e.nts. The King watched her disappear, the meditative line of sadness still puckering his brow, then, followed by his equerry, he entered a small private audience chamber, where Sir Roger de Launay notified an attendant gentleman usher that his Majesty was ready to receive Monsignor Del Fortis.
During the brief interval occupied in waiting for his visitor"s approach, the King selected certain papers from those which Sir Roger had brought from the garden pavilion and placed them in order on the table.
"For the past six months," he said "I have had this Jesuit"s name before me, and have been in twenty minds a month about granting or refusing what his Society demands. The matter has been discussed in the Press, too, with the usual pros and cons of hesitation, but it is the People I am thinking of, the People! and I am just now in the humour to satisfy a Nation rather than a Church!"
De Launay said nothing. His opinion was not asked.
"It is a case in which the temporal overbalances the spiritual,"
continued the King--"Which plainly proves that the spiritual must be lacking in some essential point somewhere. For if the spiritual were always truly of G.o.d, then would it always be the strongest. The question which brings Monsignor Del Fortis here as special emissary of the Vicar-General of the Society of Jesus, is simply this: Whether or no a certain site in a particularly fertile tract of land belonging chiefly to the Crown, shall be granted to the Jesuits for the purpose of building thereon a church and monastery with schools attached. It seems a reasonable request, set forth with an apparently religious intention.
Yet more than forty pet.i.tions have been sent in to me from the inhabitants of the towns and villages adjacent to the lands, imploring me to refuse the concession. By my faith, they plead as eloquently as though asking deliverance from the plague! It is a curious dilemma. If I grant the people"s request I anger the priests; if I satisfy the priests I anger the people."
"You mentioned a discussion in the Press, Sir--" hinted Sir Roger.
"Oh, the Press is like a weatherc.o.c.k--it turns whichever way the wind of speculation blows. One day it is "for," another "against." In this particular case it is diplomatically indifferent, except in one or two cases where papal money has found its way into the newspaper offices."