"Roger, Roger!" cried Teresa in an anguish, as the sound of his footsteps died away--"Come back! Come back!"
And falling on her knees by the Queen"s side, she burst into wild weeping.
"If the King has gone for ever, my brother is gone too," she sobbed--"Oh, dearest Majesty, have you no heart?"
"None!" said the Queen with a strained smile, while the slow, hot tears began to fall from her aching eyes--"None! What heart I had is gone! It follows the King!"
CHAPTER x.x.xIV
ABDICATION
A great storm was gathering. The heavy purple clouds which had arisen in the west at sunset, when all that was mortal of Lotys had been sent forth to a lonely burial in the sea, had gradually spread over the whole sky, darkening in hue as they moved, and rolling together in huge opaque ma.s.ses, which presently began to close in and become denser as the night advanced. By and by a wild wind awoke, as it were, from the very cavities of ocean, and the waves began to hiss warnings all along the coast, and to rise higher and higher over each other"s shoulders as the gale steadily increased. Rene Ronsard, sitting in his cottage, feeble and somewhat ailing, heard the beginnings of the tempest with long-accustomed ears. He was depressed in spirit, yet not altogether solitary, for he had with him a kindly companion in Professor von Glauben. The Professor had been one of the many who had attended the strange funeral-pageant of the afternoon, not only out of interest in, and regret for, the fate of the woman whose unique character he had admired, and whose difficult position he had pitied; but also because he had suffered from an unpleasant presentiment to which he could give no name. If he could have described his forebodings at all, he would have said they were more or less connected with the King,--but how or why, he would not have been able to explain, save that since the death of Lotys, his Sovereign master had no longer looked the same man. Stricken as with a blight, and grown suddenly old, his manner and appearance were as of one devoured by a secret despair,--a corroding disease,--of which the end could only be disastrous. Overcome by the pain and distress of being the constant witness of a sorrow which he felt to the heart, yet could not relieve, the Professor, on returning from the scene of Lotys"s impressive funeral, had put ash.o.r.e on The Islands, instead of going back to the mainland. He had sought permission from the King to remain with Ronsard for the night,--and the permission had been readily, almost eagerly granted. The King, indeed, had seemed glad to be relieved of the too anxious solicitude of his physician, who, he knew, was well aware of the concealed agony of mind which tortured and well-nigh maddened him,--and the Professor, keenly observant, was equally conscious that, under the immediate circ.u.mstances, his attendance might seem more of an intrusion than a duty.
"De Launay was not far wrong when he prophesied danger for the King as the result of his beginning to think for himself;" he mused--"Yet it has come--this danger--in a different way to that in which we expected it! It is a bold move for the ruler of a country to make personal examination into the needs of his people,--but it is seldom that, while engaged in such a task, the ruler himself becomes ruled, by a stronger force than even his own temporal power!"
And now, sitting with old Rene Ronsard, by a fire which had been kindled on this somewhat chilly night for his better comfort, he was, despite the impression of sadness and disaster which hung upon his mind as darkly as the clouds were hanging in heaven, doing his best to rouse both himself and his companion to greater cheerfulness. The wind, shaking the lattice, and now and then screaming dismally under the door, did not inspire him to gaiety, but his thoughts were princ.i.p.ally for Ronsard, who was inclined to yield to an overpowering despondency.
"This will never do, Ronsard!" he said after a pause, during which he had noticed a tear or two steal slowly down the old man"s furrowed cheek; "What sort of a welcome will such a face as yours be to our Crown Princess Gloria? She will soon be here; think of it! And what a triumphant entry she will make, acclaimed by the whole nation!"
"I shall not be wanted in her life!" said Ronsard, slowly. "After all, I am nothing to her, and have no claim upon her. I found her, as a poor man may by chance find a rare jewel,--that the jewel is afterwards found worthy to be set in a king"s crown, is not the business of that same poor man. He who merely hews a diamond out of the mine, is not the maker of the diamond!"
"Gloria loves you!" said the Professor; "And she will love you always!"
Ronsard smiled faintly.
"My friend, I understand, and I accept the law of change!" he said. "To me, as to all, it must come! The old must die, and the young succeed them. As for me, I shall be glad to go--the sooner the better, I truly think, for then none will taunt my Gloria with the simple manner of her bringing up;--none will remember aught, save her exceeding beauty, or blame her that the sun and sea were her only known parents. And if we credit legend, hers is not the first birth of loveliness from the bosom of the waves!"
Here the wind, tearing round the rafters, rattled and roared for a s.p.a.ce like a demon threatening the whole construction of the house, and then went galloping away with a shriek among the pines down to the sh.o.r.e.
"A wild night!" said the Professor, with a slight shiver. "Alas! poor Lotys!--poor "Soul of an Ideal" as Sergius Thord called her,--her frail mortal tenement will soon be drawn down to the depths in such a storm as this!"
"I never saw her!" said Ronsard musingly; "Thord I have seen often.
Lotys was to me a name merely,--but I knew it was a name to conjure with--a name beloved of the People. Gloria longed to see her,--she had heard of her often."
"She was a psychological phenomenon," said the Professor slowly; "And I admit that her composition baffled me. No one have I ever seen at all like her. She was beautiful without any of the accepted essentials of beauty--and it is precisely such a woman as that who possesses the most dangerous fascination over men--not over boys--but over men. She had a loving, pa.s.sionate, feminine heart, with a masculine brain,--the two together are bound to const.i.tute what is called Genius. The only thing I cannot understand is the unexpected weakness she displayed in committing suicide. That I should never have thought of her. On the contrary, I should have imagined, knowing as much of her as I did, that the greater the sorrow, the greater the fight she would have made against it."
A silence fell between them, filled by the thundering noise of the wind.
"Where is Thord?" asked Ronsard presently.
"I do not know. The last I saw of him was on board the vessel that bore her coffin;--he was laying flowers on the deck. He was not, I think, in any of the smaller boats that accompanied it; he must have returned with the crowd on sh.o.r.e. He has his duties as Deputy for the city now, we must remember!"
Ronsard"s eyes flashed with a glimmer of satire in the firelight.
"If it had not been for Lotys, he would not be a Deputy, or anything else,--save perchance a Communist or an Anarchist!" he said; "he used to be one of the fiercest malcontents in all the country when I first came here. Many and many is the time I have heard him threaten to kill the King!"
"Ah!" said the Professor meaningly, the while he bent his eyes on the flickering fire.
Again a silence fell. The wind roared and screamed around the building, and in the pauses of the gale, the minutes seemed weighted with a strange dread. Every tick of the clock sounded heavy and long, even to the equable-minded Professor. The storm outside was growing louder and even louder, and his thoughts, despite himself, turned to the ocean-wildernesses over which Prince Humphry"s home-returning vessel must be now on its way--while that other solitary barque, unhelmed and unmanned, whose sail bore the name of "Lotys" was also voyaging, but in a darker direction, down to death and oblivion, carrying with it, as he feared, all the love and heart of a King! Suddenly a loud knocking at the door startled them; and as Ronsard rose from his chair, amazed at the noise and Von Glauben did the same with more alacrity, a man with wind blown hair and excited gestures burst into the little room.
"Ronsard!" he cried; "The King--the King!"
He paused, gasping for breath. Ronsard looked at him wonderingly. His clothes were saturated with sea-water,--his face was pale--and his eyes expressed some fear that his tongue seemed incapable of uttering. He was one of the coral-fishers of the coast, and Ronsard knew him well.
"What ails you, man?" he asked; "What say you of the King?"
Holding the door of the cottage open with some difficulty, the coral-fisher pointed to the sky overhead. It was flecked with great ma.s.ses of white cloud, through which the moon appeared to roll rapidly like a ball of yellow fire. The wind howled furiously, and the pines in the near distance could be seen bending to and fro like reeds in its breath, while the roar of the sea beyond the rocks was fierce and deafening.
"It is all storm!" cried the man, excitedly; "The billows are running mountains high!--there is no chance for him!"
"No chance for whom?" demanded Von Glauben, impatiently; "What would you tell us? Speak plainly!"
"It was the King!" said the coral-fisher again, trying to express himself more collectedly--"I saw his face lit up by the after-glow of the sky--white--white as the foam on the wave! Listen! When the body of the woman Lotys was borne away on that vessel, a man came to me out of the thickest of the crowd (I was on one of the furthest quays)--and offered me a purse of gold to take him out to sea--and to steer him in such a way that we should meet the funeral barque just as she was cut adrift and sent forth to be wrecked in the ocean. I did not know him then. He kept his face hidden,--he spoke low, and he was evidently in trouble. I thought he was a lover of the dead woman, and sought perhaps to comfort himself by looking at her coffin for the last time. So I consented to do what he asked. I had my sailing skiff, and we went at once. The wind was strong; we sailed swiftly--and at the appointed place--" He paused to take breath. Ronsard seized him by the arm.
"Quick! Go on--what next?"
"At the appointed place when the vessel stopped,--when her ropes were cut and she afterwards sprang out to sea, I, by his orders, ran my skiff close beside her as she came,--and before I knew how it happened, my pa.s.senger sprang aboard her--Ay!--with a spring as light and sure as the flight of a bird! "Farewell!" he said, and flung me the promised gold; "May all be prosperous with you and yours!" And then the wind swooped down and bore the ship a mile or more ere I could follow it; but the strong light in the west fell full upon the man"s face--and I saw--I knew it was the King!"
"Gott in Himmel! May you for ever be confounded and mistaken!" exclaimed Von Glauben,--"I left the King in his own grounds but an hour before I myself started to witness this accursed sea-funeral!"
"I say it was the King!" repeated the man emphatically. "I would swear it was the King! And the vessel going out to meet the storm tonight, holds the living, as well as the dead!"
With a sudden movement, as active as it was decided, old Ronsard went to a corner in the room and drew out a thick coil of rope with an iron hook at the end, and slinging it round his waist with the alert quickness of youth, made for the open door.
"Where is your skiff?" he demanded.
"Ash.o.r.e down yonder;" answered the coral-fisher; "But you--what are you going to do? You cannot sail her in such a night as this!"
"I will adventure!" said Ronsard. "If, as you say, it was the King, I will save him if he can be saved! Once a King"s life was nothing to me; now it is something! The tide veers round these Islands, and the vessel on which they have placed the body of Lotys, can scarcely drift away from the circle till morning, unless the waves are too strong for it--"
"They are too strong!" cried the coral-fisher; "Ronsard, believe me!
There is no rain to soften or abate the wind--and the sea grows greater with every breath of the rising gale!"
"I care nothing!" replied Ronsard; "Let be! If you are afraid, I will go alone!"
At these words, the Professor suddenly awoke to the situation.
"What would you attempt, Ronsard?" he exclaimed; "You can do nothing!
You are weak and ailing!--there is no force in you to combat with the elements on such a night as this--"
"There _is_ force!" said Ronsard; "The force of my thirst for atonement!
Let me be, for G.o.d"s sake! Let me do something useful in my life!--let me try to save the King! If I die, so much the better."
"Then I will go with you!" said Von Glauben, desperately.