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.