Ronsard shook his head.
"You? No, my friend! You will not! You will remain to welcome Gloria--to tell her that I loved her to the last!--that I did my best!"
He seemed to have grown young in an instant,--his eyes flashed with alertness and vigour, and instead of an old decaying man, full of cares and despondencies, he seemed like a bold adventurer, before whom a new land of promise opens. Von Glauben looked at him, and in a moment made up his mind. He turned to the coral-fisher.
"What think you truly of the night, my friend? Is it for life or death we go?"
"Death! Certain death!" answered the man; "It is madness to set sail in such a storm as this!"
"You are married, no doubt? And little ones eat your earnings? Ach so!
Then you shall not be asked to go with us. Ronsard, I am ready! I can pull an oar and manage a sail, and I am not afraid of death by drowning!
For Gloria"s sake, let me go with you!"
"For Gloria"s sake, stay here!" cried Ronsard; and with an abrupt movement he escaped Von Glauben"s hold, and ran with all the speed of a boy out of the cottage into the garden beyond.
Von Glauben rushed after him, but found himself in the thicket of pines, trapped and hemmed in by the darkness of their stems and branches.
The wind was so fierce and strong, that he could scarcely keep his feet,--every now and again the moon flew out of a great cloud-pinnacle and glared on the scene, but not with sufficient clearness to show him his way. Yet he knew the place well--often had he and Gloria trodden that path down to the sea, and yet to-night it seemed all unfamiliar.
How the sea roared! Like a thousand lions clamouring for prey! Against the rocks the rising billows hissed and screamed, rattling backward among stones and sh.e.l.ls with the grinding noise of artillery wagons being hastily dragged off a lost field of battle.
"Ronsard!" he called as loudly as he could, and again "Ronsard!" but his voice, big and stentorian though it was, made but the feeblest wail in the loud shriek of the wind. Yet he stumbled on and on, and by slow and difficult degrees found his way down to the foot of the high rocks which formed a pinnacled wall between him and the sea,--the rocks he had so often climbed with Gloria, and of which she had sung in such matchless tones of triumph and tenderness.
Here, by the sea.
My King crown"d me!
Wild ocean sang for my Coronation, With the jubilant voice of a mighty nation!
The memory of this song came back to his ears in a ringing echo, amid the howling of the boisterous wind, which now blew harder and harder, scattering ma.s.ses of blown froth from the waves in his face, with flying sand and light sh.e.l.ls, and torn-up weed. Scarcely able to stand against it, he paused to get his breath, realising that it would be worse than useless to climb the rocks in the teeth of such a gale, or try to reach the old accustomed winding way down to the sh.o.r.e. He endeavoured to collect his scattered wits;--if the ceaseless onslaught of the storm would only have allowed him to think coherently, he fancied he might have found another and easier path to lead him in the direction whither Ronsard, in his mad, but heroic impulse, had gone. But the gale was so terrific, and the booming of the great waves on the other side of the rocky barrier so awful, that it seemed as if the water must be rolling in like a solid wall, bent on breaking down the coast, and grinding it to powder. His heart ached heavily;--tears rose to his eyes.
"What a grain of dust I am in this world of storm!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed; "Here I stand,--a strong man, utterly useless! Powerless to save the life I would die to serve! But maybe the story is not true!--the man can easily have been mistaken! Surely the King would not give up all for the sake of one woman"s love!"
But though he said this to himself, he knew that such things have been; indeed, that they are common enough throughout all history. He had not studied humanity to so little purpose as not to be aware that there are certain phases of the pa.s.sion of love which make havoc of a man"s wisest and best intentions; and that even as Marc Antony lost all for Cleopatra"s smile, and Harry the Eighth upset a Church for a woman"s whim, so in modern days the same old story repeats itself; and no matter how great and famous the position of a king or an emperor, he may yet court and obtain his own ruin and disaster, ay, lose his very Throne for love;--deeming it well lost!
Restless, miserable and troubled by the confusion of his thoughts, which seemed to run wild with the wild wind and the thundering sea, the unhappy Professor retraced his steps to the cottage, hoping against hope that Ronsard, physically unable to cope with the storm, would have returned, baffled in his reckless attempt to put forth a boat to sea.
But the little home was silent and deserted. There was the old man"s empty chair;--the clock against the wall ticked the minutes away with a comfortable persistence which was aggravating to the nerves; the fire was still bright. Before entering, Von Glauben looked up and down everywhere outside, but there was no sign of any living creature.
Nothing remained for him to do but to resign himself pa.s.sively to whatsoever calamity the Omnipotent Forces above him chose to inflict,--and utterly weary, baffled and helpless, he sank into Ronsard"s vacant chair, unconscious that tears were rolling down his face from the excess of his anxiety and exhaustion. The shrieking of the wind, the occasional glare of the moonlight through the rattling lattice windows, and the apparent rocking of the very rafters above him thrilled him into new and ever recurring sensations of fear--yet he was no coward, and had often prided himself on having "nerves of steel and sinews of iron." Presently, he began to see quaint faces and figures in the glowing embers of the fire; old sc.r.a.ps of song and legend haunted him; fragments of Heine, mixed up with long-winded philosophical phrases of Schopenhauer, began to make absurd contradictions and glaring contrasts in his mind, while he listened to the awful noises of the storm; and the steady ticking of the clock on the wall worried him to such an almost childish degree, that had he not thought how often he had seen Gloria winding up that clock and setting it to the right hour, he could almost have torn it down and broken it to pieces. By and by, however, tired Nature had her way, and utterly heavy and worn out in mind and body, and weary of the disturbed and incoherent thoughts in his brain, he lay back and closed his eyes. He would rest a little while, he said to himself, and "wait." And so he gradually fell asleep, and in his sleep wrote, so he imagined, a whole eloquent chapter of his "Political History of Hunger" in which he described Sergius Thord as a despot, who, after proving false to the cause of the People, and grinding them down by unlimited taxation such as no Government had ever before inflicted, seized the rightful king of the country, and sent him away to be drowned in company with a woman of the People, whose body was fastened to his by ropes and iron chains, in the fashion of "Les Noyades" of Nantes. And he thought that the King rejoiced in his doom, and said strange words like those of the poet who sang of a similar story:
"For never a man like me Shall die like me till the whole world dies, I shall drown with her, laughing for love, and she Mix with me, touching me, lips and eyes!"
Meanwhile, Ronsard, true to the instinct within him, had fulfilled his intention and had put out to sea. The fisherman who had brought the tidings which had moved him to this desperate act, was too much of a hero in himself to let the old man venture forth alone,--and so, following him down to the sh.o.r.e, had, despite all commands and entreaties to the contrary, insisted on going with him. The sailing skiff he owned was a strong boat, stoutly built,--and at first it seemed as if their efforts to ride the mountainous billows would be crowned with success. Old Rene had a true genius for the management of a sail; his watchfulness never flagged:--his strenuous exertions would have done credit to a man less than half his age. With delicate precision he guided the ropes, as a jockey might have guided the reins of a racehorse, and the vessel rose and fell lightly over the great waves, with such ease and rapidity, that the man who accompanied him and took the helm, an experienced sailor himself, began to feel confident that after all the voyage might not be altogether futile.
"The sea may be calmer further out from land!" he shouted to Rene, who nodded a quiet aquiescence, while he kept his eyes earnestly fixed on the horizon, which the occasional brightness of the moon showed up like a line of fretted silver. Everywhere he scanned the waves for a glimpse of the fatal vessel bearing Death--and perhaps Life--on board; but over the whole expanse of the undulating hills and valleys of wild water, there was no speck of a boat to be seen save their own. They swept on and on, the wind aiding them with savage violence--when suddenly the man at the helm shouted excitedly:
"Ronsard! See yonder! There she sails!"
With an exclamation of joy, Ronsard sprang up, and looking, saw within what seemed an apparently short distance, the drifting funeral-barque he sought. So far she seemed intact; her sails were bellying out full to the wind, and she was rising and plunging bravely over the great breakers, which rolled on in interminable array, one over the other,--with rugged foam-crests that sprang like fountains to the sky.
A five or ten minutes" run with the wind would surely bring them alongside,--and Ronsard turned with an eager will to his work once more.
Over the heads of the monstrous waves, rising with their hills, sinking in their valleys, he guided the few yielding planks that were between him and destruction, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the straining sail to the ferocious wind, and ever keeping his eyes fixed on the vessel which was the object of his search,--the sole aim and end of his reckless voyage, and which seemed now to recede, and then to almost disappear, the more earnestly he strove to reach it.
"To save the King!" he muttered--"To save--not to kill! For Gloria"s sake!--to save the King!"
A capricious gust from the beating wings of the storm swooped down upon him sideways, as he twisted the ropes and tugged at them in a herculean effort to balance the plunging boat and keep her upright,--and in the loud serpent-like hiss of the waves around him, he did not hear his companion"s wild warning cry--a cry of despair and farewell in one! A toppling dark-green ma.s.s of water, moving on sh.o.r.eward, lifted itself quite suddenly, as it were, to its full height, as though to stare at the puny human creatures who thus had dared to oppose the fury of the elements, and then, leaping forward like a devouring monster, broke over their frail skiff, sweeping the sail off like a strip of ribbon, snapping the mast and rolling over and over them with a thousand heads of foam that, spouting upwards, again fell into dark cavernous deeps, covering and dragging down everything on the surface with a tumult and roar! It pa.s.sed on thundering,--but left a blank behind it. Skiff and men had vanished,--and not a trace of the wreck floated on the angry waves!
For one blinding second, Ronsard, buffeting the wild waves, saw the face of Gloria,--that best-beloved fair face,--angelic, pitying, loving to the last,--shine on him like a star in the darkness!--the next he was whelmed into the silence of the million dead worlds beneath the sea!
So at last he paid his life"s full debt. So, at last his atonement was fulfilled. If it was true,--as he had in an unguarded moment confessed,--that he had once killed a King, then the resistless Law of Compensation had worked its way with him,--inasmuch as he had been forced to render up what he cherished most,--the love of Gloria,--to the son of a King, and had ended his days in an effort to save the life of a King! For the rest, whatever the real nature of his long-hidden secret,--whatever the extent of the torture he had suffered in his conscience, his earthly punishment was over; and the story of his past crime would never be known to the living world of men. One sinner,--one sufferer among many millions, he was but a floating straw on the vast whirlpools of Time,--and whether he prayed for pardon and obtained it, whether he had worked out his own salvation or had lost it, may not be known of him, or of any of us, till G.o.d makes up the sum of life, in which perchance none of even the smallest numerals shall be found missing!
Wilder grew the night, and more tempestuous the sea, while the sky became a mountainous landscape of black and white clouds fitfully illumined by the moon, which appeared to run over their fleecy pinnacles and sable plains like some scared white creature pursued by invisible foes: The vessel on which the corpse of Lotys lay, palled in purple, and decked with flowers, flew over the waves, to all seeming with the same hunted rapidity as the moon rushed through the heavens,--and so far, though her masts bent reed-like in the wind, and her sails strained at their cordage, she had come to no harm. Tossed about as she was, rudderless and solitary, there was something almost miraculous in the way she had weathered a storm in which many a well-guided ship must inevitably have gone down. The purple pall with its heavy fringe of gold, that shrouded the coffin she carried, was drenched through and through by the sea, and the flowers on the deck were beaten and drowned in the salt spray that dashed over them.
But amid all the ruined blossoms of earth, by the side of the dead, and full-fronted to the tempest, stood one living man, for whom life had no charm, and death no terror--the King! What had been reported of him was true--he had resigned his Throne and left his kingdom for the sake of adventuring forth on this great voyage of Discovery,--this swift and stormy sail with Lotys to the Land of the Unknown! Whether it was a madness, or a sick dream that fevered his blood, he knew not--but once the woman he loved was dead, every hope, every ambition in him died too--and he felt himself to be a mere corpse of clay, unwillingly dragged about by a pa.s.sionate soul that longed, and strove, and fought in its sh.e.l.l for larger freedom. All his life, so to speak, save for the last few months, he had been a prisoner;--he had never, as he had himself declared, known the sweetness of liberty;--but for the sake of Lotys,--had she lived,--he would have been content to still wear the chains of monarchy, and would have endeavoured to accomplish such good as he might, and make such reforms as could possibly benefit his country. But, after all, it is only a "possibility "that any reforms will avail to satisfy any people long; and he was philosopher and student enough to know that whatsoever good one may endeavour to do for the wider happiness and satisfaction of the mult.i.tude, they are as likely as not to turn and cry out--"Thy good is our evil! Thy love to us is but thine own serving!"--and so turn and rend their best benefactors.
With the loss of Lotys, he lost the one mainspring of faith and enthusiasm which would have helped him to match himself against his destiny and do battle with it. A great weariness seized upon him,--a longing for some wider scope of action than such futile work as that of governing, or attempting to govern, a handful of units whose momentary Order was bound, in a certain period of time to lapse into Disorder--then into Order again, and so on till the end of all.
Hence his resolve to sail the seas with Lotys to that "other side of Death" of which she had spoken,--that "other side" which an inward instinct told him was not Death, but Life! He could not of himself a.n.a.lyse the emotions which moved him. He could not take the measure of his grief; it was too wide and too painful. He might have said with Heine: "Go, prepare me a bier of strong wood, longer than the bridge at Mayence, and bring twelve giants stronger than the vigorous St.
Christopher of Cologne Cathedral on the Rhine;--they will carry the coffin and fling it in the sea,--so large a coffin needs a large grave!
Would you know why the bier must be so long and large? With myself, I lay there at the same time all my love and my sorrow!"
Sovereignty,--a throne,--a kingdom,--even an Empire--seemed poor without love to grace them. Had he never known the pure ideal pa.s.sion, he would still have missed it;--but having known it--having felt its power environing him day and night with a holy and spiritual tenderness, he could not but follow it when it was withdrawn--follow it, ay, even into the realms of blackest night! Like the "Pilgrim of Love," delineated by one of the greatest painters in the world, he recked nothing of the darkness closing in,--of the pain and bewilderment of the road, which could only lead to interminable, inexplicable mystery;--he felt the hand of the great Angel upon him--the Angel of Love whom alone he cared to serve,--and if Love"s way led to Death, why then Death would be surely as sweet as Love! A great and almost divine calm had taken possession of him from the moment he had fulfilled his intention of boarding the ship which carried away from him all that was mortal of the woman he had secretly idolised. The wild turbulence of Nature around him had only intensified his perfect content. He had pleased himself by taking care of the sleeping Lotys--such tender care! He had tried to shield her coffin from the onslaughts of the fierce waves; he had protected many of the funeral flowers from destruction, and had lifted the gold fringe of the purple pall many and many a time out of the drenching spray cast over it. There was a strange delight in doing this. Lotys knew! That was his chief reflection. And "on the other side of Death," as she had said, they would meet--and to that "other side" they were sailing together with all the speed Heaven"s own forces could give to their journey. Oh, that "other side"! What brightness, what peace, what glory, what mutual comprehension, what deep and perfect and undisturbed love would be found there! He smiled as he watched the swollen and angry sea,--the rising billows shouldering each other and bearing each other down;--how much grander, how much more spiritual and near to G.o.d, he thought, was this conflict of the elements, than the petty wars of men!--their desires of conquest, their greed of gold, their thirst for temporal power!
"My Lotys!" he said aloud; "You knew the world! You knew the littleness of worldly ambition! You knew that there is only one thing worth living and dying for, and that is Love! Your heart was all love, my Lotys!
Deprived of love for yourself, you gave all you had to those who needed it, and when you found my love for you might do me harm in the People"s honour, you sacrificed your life! Alas, my Lotys! If you could but have realised that through you, and the love of you, I a King, who had long missed my vocation, could alone be truly worthy of sovereignty!"
He laid his hand on her coffin with a tender touch, as though to soothe its quiet occupant.
"My beloved!" he said, "We shall meet very soon!--very soon now! "on the other side of death"--and G.o.d will understand,--and be pitiful!"
The storm now seemed to be at its height. The monstrous waves, as they arose to combat the frail vessel in her swift career, made a bellowing clamour, and once or twice the ship reeled and staggered, as though about to lurch forward and go under. But the King felt no fear,--no horror of his approaching fate. He watched the wild scene with interest, even with appreciation,--as an artist or painter might watch the changes in a landscape which he purposes immortalising. His past life appeared to him like a picture in a magic crystal,--blurred and uncertain,--a mist of shapes without decided meaning or colour. He thought of the beautiful cold Queen, his wife,--and wondered whether she would weep for his loss.
"Not she!"--and he almost smiled at the idea--"Perhaps there will be a ballad written about it--and she will listen, unchanged, unmoved--as she listened that night when her minstrels sang:
"We shall drift along till we both grow old Looking back on the days that have pa.s.sed us by, When "what might have been," can no longer be, When I lost you and you lost me!"
That was a quaint song--and a true one! She will not weep!"
Then he went over in memory the various scenes of his life--brilliant, useless, and without results--when he was Heir-Apparent;--he thought of his two young sons, Rupert and Cyprian, who were as indifferent to him as young foals to their sire,--and anon, his mind turned more tenderly to his eldest-born, Prince Humphry, and the fair girl he had so boldly wedded,--the happy twain, who, returning homeward, would find the Throne ready for their occupancy, and a whole nation waiting to welcome them.
"G.o.d bless them both!" he said aloud, lifting his calm eyes to the wild heavens--"They have the one shield and buckler against all misfortune--Love! And I thank G.o.d that I have not the sin upon my conscience of having broken that shield away from them; or of having forced their young lives asunder! Wiser than I, they took their own way and kept it!--may they so keep it always!"
Then a thought of "the People" came to him--the People who had latterly taken to idolising him, and making of him a hero greater than any monarch whose deeds have ever been glorified since history began.
"They will forget!" he said--"Nowadays Nations have short memories!
Battles and conquests, defeats and victories pa.s.s over the national mind as rapidly and changefully as the clouds are flying over the sky to-night!--the People remember neither their disgraces nor their triumphs in the life of individual Self which absorbs each little unit.
Their idolatry of one monarch quickly changes to their idolatry of another! I shall perhaps be regretted for six months as my father was--and then--consigned with my ancestors to oblivion! Nothing so beautiful or so gladdening to the heart of a Monarch as the love of his People!--but--at the same time--nothing so changeable or uncertain as such love!--nothing so purely temporal! And nothing so desperately sad, so irremediably tragic as the death of kings!"
Rapidly he reviewed the situation--the new Ministry, the new Government members were elected--and business would begin again immediately after the Crown Prince"s return. All the reforms he had been prepared to carry out, would be effected,--and then would come the new King"s Coronation.
What a dazzling picture of resplendent beauty would be seen in Gloria, robed and crowned! His heart beat rapidly at the mere contemplation of it. For himself he had no thought--save to realise that the strange manner of his disappearance from his kingdom would probably only awaken a sense of resentment in "society," and a vague superst.i.tion among the ma.s.ses, who would for a long time cling to the belief that he was not dead, but that like King Arthur he had only gone to the "island valley of Avillion" to "heal him of his grievous wound,"--from which deep vale of rest he would return, rejoicing in his strength again. Sergius Thord would know the truth--for to Sergius Thord he had written the truth.
And the letter would reach him this very night--this night of his last earthly voyage.
"When his great sorrow has abated," he said, "he too will forget! He has all his work to do--all his career to make--and he will make it well and n.o.bly! Even for his sake, and for his future, it is well that I am gone--for if he ever came to know,--if he were to guess even remotely, through Zouche"s ravings, or some other means, the reason why Lotys killed herself, he would hate me,--and with justice! He loves the People--he will serve their Cause better than I!"
The moon stared whitely out of a cloud just then,--and to his amazement and awe, he suddenly perceived the black shadow of a man lifting itself slowly, slowly from the hold of the ship, like a ma.s.sive bulk, or ghost in the gloom. Unable to imagine what this might be, or how any other human creature save himself would venture to sail with the dead on a voyage whose end could be but destruction, he advanced a step towards that looming shape, and started back with a cry, as he recognised the very man he had been thinking of--Sergius Thord!