As befitted her mood, the queen had retired to a bleak castle, partly in ruins and surrounded for miles by barren cacti. Bats lurked in its turrets, and the wind claimed its ancient towers for its own. The nation had risen in arms, and when rumors of battle reached their retreat nothing would do but that Aida's youngest son, a boy of fifteen, must sally forth to join his brothers on the field. In vain did his mother plead; he was obdurate. Finally with trembling fingers she fastened the armor on his stripling limbs, kissed him, and let him go. After that the queen of tragedy haunted the edge of the battlefield like a vampire, until they brought her baby boy in dying upon his shield. Then her already tottering reason gave way, and she went stark mad. A few hours later, when they placed the fair, slender body in the sepulchre, his mother was a raving maniac.
All the tragedies of her life were babbled forth in the drivel of the insane. One night, under cover of a storm, she escaped from her keepers. The next morning they found her body in the well, but, whether blinded by the rain, she had stumbled over the curbing and been plunged by accident into the pit, or had sought to drown her troubles in the Lethean waters of suicide, they did not know.
Couriers carried the news of the queen's death to the king. It stirred the remnant of feeling left in him, but his last hold on life was gone. Scarce had the messengers ceased speaking when the guard from the watch tower broke in to say that the legions were advancing on the citadel. Then a captain came to report that his soldiers had been bribed by the enemy. Hated by his own followers, with half-hearted officers who knew they were on the losing side, with fear written on every countenance, Akish realized that he had lost, before the enemy had raised a spear.
"At least we'll die with harness on our back," and he motioned for an attendant to get down his armor from the wall, and, as the boys' hands shook, he kicked him for a coward, and stooped and fastened the straps himself. He ordered his chariot, and when seated on high, the gates were thrown back. Like a bull who charges the toreadors, he glanced over the plain, which, as far as the eye could see, was alive with plumed warriors. His whip sang out over the heads of the horses, and, undaunted to the end, he plunged into the maelstrom to his death.
(THE END.)
