George III
His Majesty King George III stood gazing from a corridor window of the royal palace. For all practical purposes he was alone, and the equerries and others attendant on the sovereign presence flitted almost as remote in actuality as they figured to his mental vision. They were shadows, no more—little blots of bile, too minute to intercept his view of things, though collectively, as denoting a bodily condition, a source of irritation.
The corridor was very dim, and full of gusty flaws. It was night, and the rain beat upon the windows. Without, it was all a chaos of cavernous glooms and myriad-drawn threads of water, weaving cloud to earth in one inextricable bondage. The darkness lay upon the King’s heart like a tombstone. He cried to One in his agony to lift it, and bid the dead arise and come forth. He seemed to feel the cerements about his limbs, the headcloth binding and stupefying his brain. He talked incessantly to himself—prayers, expostulations, even blasphemies—though he did not know it. A fearful thought was haunting him persistently—the thought that his reason was once more succumbing to the illness which had seized and overwhelmed it in the fifth year of his reign. He gasped and shivered in the stress of that apprehension. Providence had then thought fit to restore him, after a few terrible weeks of possession; would not a renewed attack signify his proved unworthiness of Its favours, and his abandonment by It to the powers of darkness, this time for all eternity?
He uttered a sudden cry, and, sinking into a chair, covered his face with his hands. The storm screamed above him, dashing its torrents on the glass. Only that fragile glaze stood between him and the besieging horrors. In a minute, in a moment, they must be through, and he would be claimed by them and damned for evermore.
He fought kingly to rally his nerves. A crown! A monstrous destiny! Yes, but its divine virtues engendered like qualities in those meet and resolute to assume them. He had striven, he would strive, to honour, according to his lights, the trust reposed in him. The will was his, if the lights were Heaven’s. God might decree him a fool; He should never call him a coward.
He rose to his feet once more and looked pallidly from the window. The sky was full of countless faces, and all gibing and distorted. There was not one among them but was known to him, or had been, though he could not recall when or how. Statesmen, warriors, servants, kith and kin—torn this way and that, they mingled, a multitudinous galaxy of spectres, with the darkness, and hemmed him in, a wall of mowing visages.
To stand thus and gaze upon the throng was to drink the very utterness of despair. Had none a gentle look for him? Were all kings doomed so to realise their loneliness in the vast of time? No mercy for him; no hope, no love. How was it possible to love one so singly exalted, so isolated from all contact with the dear common human emotions? Was it not appalling to be a king!
Sudden through the dark, through the twisted faces, a light twinkled. He started, he stared, he drew a deep ecstatic breath. He thought he heard a voice saying “Arise, and come forth!” and he shook the bandage from his head and stood erect.
The light! O God, not one, but infinite! Like daisies opening upon a hill, they climbed that wall of darkness and spread from town to sky. And in their blossoming the faces were gone.
And then in a moment he saw and understood. The wind had fallen, the sky was full of stars: they laughed and twinkled above the twinkling city. He was looking from a window of St. James’s Palace across the Mall——
What had happened? What had been affecting him a moment ago? He breathed a prayer of fervid thanksgiving to Heaven for his quick emergence from that terrific shadow—called down by what? He believed he penetrated the cause. It was only yesterday that the pourparlers for his marriage had been begun; and was he so inhuman, or so superhuman, that, unlike all other men, he might experience no shock, no temporary unbalance of reason, in the immediate prospect of that tremendous change? Nay, was not the prospect more distracting for him than for most? seeing that no sentiment warmer than duty—duty to his people, duty to his succession—coloured its cold inevitability. He had heard of men, though bond-slaves to love, killing themselves in their inability to face that more lifelong bondage. What wonder that, in his case, a contract so based on policy should have terrified his reason in the thought?
Well—he was well now, he was well. The loveless lot of kings? That had been the chimera of a fancy momentarily diseased. No love for kings? He laughed softly to himself, and, crossing his arms on the sill, leaned down his face into them.
And then instantly a dream came to him. The stars of the sky—first one, then another, then dripping streams of them—descended from their high places and, enshrining themselves in crystal, became the lamps of the city. Faster and faster they poured, until he was treading a very milky-way of radiance. He could hardly see his path for the brightness as he walked—for, yes, he was walking! Half dazzled, with the glowing smile of all things reflected on his face, he pushed his way through the golden mist. It was jewelled and spangled everywhere with glittering thoughts; one might hardly know it for the London of one’s daily experience. He remembered when he had first encountered this transformation—he, a serious, well-intentioned young prince, resolute, in his sober, unimaginative way, to justify his election before the face of Heaven—and how of a sudden some spirit exquisite beyond conception had usurped in him the place of duty.
No, not usurped, but sanctified. Self-fulfilled through love, his debt to Heaven and his country would find him tenfold strengthened in its discharge.
Yet he walked like a thief, conscious through all the transcendent glow of a half-guilty rapture, glorying, though fearfully, in the thought of the treasure whose shrine he had desecrated to possess. He had never dreamed at one time of such a thing. It had come to him in a single moment how he, bred and educated under the severest maternal discipline, “cabin’d, cribbed, confined” within the narrowest limits of orthodoxy, was still not excluded from the destinies which Love creates. Why should he be? A King, and denied the prerogative of his meanest subject?
His way did not lie far through that garden of lamps; but others were incessantly crossing and obstructing it. These shadows worried him: he seemed to know so many of them, yet the instant he thought to identify one it would fade and disappear. Along Pall Mall, across St. James’s Square, into Charles Street, and thence towards the glare and bustle of the Market—throughout the whole short route it was always the same. Thicker and thicker they came, hurrying across his path, until at length he could hardly force his way through the press. Their insistence, their air of urgency, amazed and troubled him; yet, possessed of a stubborn will, he would not be gainsaid. He knew the goal of his wild desires, and inch by inch he fought his way to attain it.
And then in a moment he was standing before the door, and he saw that it was closed and dark. The whole house was lightless, the window-panes were broken, there was no sign of life in all the empty place.
With a gasp he stepped back into the kennel. What did it mean? Had he all this time been dreaming a dream, never realising its unreality, of a little Quaker bird whose song had once filled his soul with a passion for possession? Had there ever been for him a “Nanny,” a large-eyed, lovely child, who had captivated him with her sweet looks and words, and been lost somewhere in the gulfs of the dead past? For whom, then, if not for him? He could remember her pretty ways; the very tones of her young voice when she first called him “Friend,” and choked over the whispered daring. And what then—what thereafter? Surely no dream?
Of a sudden he became aware that the throng was all about him again—faces, a wall of white, mowing faces such as he had seen in the clouds. There were hundreds there, each one somehow known to him, and all congregated without relation to the sequence of time. Time?—Merciful God! It had ceased to exist for him; and now in a moment he remembered. What could have driven him to seek Nanny on the eve of his own wedding? He had forgotten that. He was to be married, he was to give the people a Queen and a succession, and Nanny had long been made to disappear from the path to that tremendous end. Months ago had it been, or years and years? It was all one to him in the terror of his utter loneliness. These faces! If they could arise and crowd upon him so confusedly, so irrelatively, why not Nanny’s amongst them? He wanted her, and they were crushing forward to withhold, to intercept him. She was there within all the time, and they had taken this cruel means to blind him to the truth. They were moving, they were sweeping upon him like a rushing wind; with a cry he turned, and beat with frantic hands upon the closed door——
A quick step came down the corridor, and a formal, stiff-lipped gentleman paused beside the King.
“What are you doing, sir?” he said. “You must please to control yourself.”
His Majesty turned, clutching his hand above his wild eyes. He was not standing and sobbing, a young emotional prince, before Nanny’s house in the street off the old Market; he had not come from St. James’s Palace at all. He was standing in the dark corridor at Windsor Castle, beating with feeble fingers on the storm-thrashed casement—an old, old mad and weary man, age-long forgetting and forgotten by all the world.
“You must not thump the window like that, sir,” said Willis, the cold-eyed doctor in attendance, “or you will cut your hands. What is it you need?”
The tears dropped from the old King’s eyes. He shook his head, muttering and mumbling.
“I was thinking,” he said, “I was thinking. I need very little—only a new suit of clothes. But they must be black—black, in memory of George the Third.”