Several similar meetings followed in quick succession, and began to make themselves felt. Turbo made his peace with the King, and was continued in office in order that Mlle de Tricotrin's sin might not be blazoned to the world. The whole affair, in fact, was hushed up, and the Chancellor left free to work his tools.
As the day for the meeting of Parliament drew near, Kophetua began to be aware that every one was taking an unaccountable interest in his marriage. Petitions came up from the country. Gentlemen and ladies of both parties, whether Kallist or Agathist, seemed to want to talk of nothing else. Every subject he started in the Council seemed to transform itself into the same haunting shape.
Parliament met, and General Dolabella, amidst indescribable excitement, was elected Speaker according to the original arrangement on which M. de Tricotrin's coalition was founded. Then the pressure redoubled. The Kallikagathists joined with quiet dignity the general movement, and were heard to say, with an air of noble patronage, that it was at last a great fact. In tones of reserved intensity, so characteristic of the inflexible bigotry of those who believe they are nothing if not open-minded, the Kallikagathist party assured themselves that further resistance from the King was impossible. The party of order, the party of moderation, the party of intelligence, had triumphed at last. At length, by the unostentatious use of reason and common-sense, they had drawn the extremists together, and a coalition was standing before the King demanding his marriage with the lady who embodied the principles of everybody and everything. It was no longer the voice of party that spoke. It was the harmonious flood in which the voice of party was drowned. It was the holy voice of compromise.
At last things came to a crisis. An address was moved urging the King to marry the woman of the people's choice. A lengthened debate took place, but only upon its wording. The Kallist amendments, dictated by Turbo, were almost indecent in their plain speaking. A coaxing and apologetic obscurity was the tone of those which the Queen-mother approved for the Agathists. Eventually the spirit of compromise, which presided over the assembly in the person of its new Speaker, triumphed over every difficulty, and the address was passed in a form which was a masterpiece of inconsistency. Kallist violence and Agathist weakness were there in glaring contrast. The insolence of the one was only enhanced by its proximity to the servility of the other. Nothing could have been better calculated to offend the King or impress him with a sense of the perplexity of his position and the malicious origin of the cross-bred coalition which confronted him.
At no time was Kophetua a man to bear pressure patiently if he was conscious of it, and his present state of mind was one of universal defiance. The shock which Mlle de Tricotrin's heartless perfidy had produced upon him had been at least as acute as Turbo imagined. Till he had quarrelled with her at Count Kora's rout he hardly knew how much she had been to him. Till then he had not recognised how he craved for a woman to love, and how nearly she was fitted to satisfy his hunger. He began to see how dull his life would be again without her. The one imploring look she had given him as she passed beneath his window had turned his contempt into pity. The beauty, the tenderness, the self-abasing resignation of that lovely vision had done its work, and at last a great resistless love had filled every chamber of his soul.
Then fell, sudden as the hand of death, the crushing revelation of her guilt. It was as though he had gathered the luscious fruit of the Tree of Life and found it ashes between his teeth. The first shock past, he turned, as men will in such a case, to find comfort in the light of another's eyes. He turned to Penelophon, where he saw the very antithesis of her in whom he was deceived. The passion that was aroused in him must find a resting-place. So violently did his noble nature revolt from its fallen idol that it was only in the opposite extreme of womanhood it felt it could be at peace.
Prepared to risk all, he was going forth to seek her when they told him she was gone. At first none could say whither, but soon there were some who whispered she had run away to the strolling players, and were careful that the whisper should reach Kophetua's ears. Such folk had an evil reputation enough in Oneiria, and in his despair the heart-broken King cried out that she was as bad as the rest. There was now none good; no, not one. There was nothing in life but loneliness, and no weapon to battle with it but defiance.
He laughed to himself to think how wasted were the efforts he felt pressing about him, how utterly they mistook him to think he would bend to force. He laughed till he wearied of the sport, and the last stroke angered him. The address he saw as a ridiculous insult, and was resolved to have no more. Once or twice before, when he had been over-worried on the marriage question, he had made an end by a simple manœuvre, and he was determined to repeat it now.
So when General Dolabella attended with a deputation to receive the King's answer to the address of his faithful Parliament, there was no one to receive him but the Chancellor. Turbo briefly announced that the King had left that morning for his hunting-tower in the mountains, and handed Mr. Speaker an order for the prorogation of the House.