“This will never do, Ronsard!” he said after a pause, during which he had noticed a tear or two steal slowly down the old man’s furrowed cheek; “What sort of a welcome will such a face as yours be to our Crown Princess Gloria? She will soon be here; think of it! And what a triumphant entry she will make, acclaimed by the whole nation!”
“I shall not be wanted in her life!” said Ronsard, slowly. “After all, I am nothing to her, and have no claim upon her. I found her, as a poor man may by chance find a rare jewel,—that the jewel is afterwards found worthy to be set in a king’s crown, is not the business of that same poor man. He who merely hews a diamond out of the mine, is not the maker of the diamond!”
“Gloria loves you!” said the Professor; “And she will love you always!”
Ronsard smiled faintly.
“My friend, I understand, and I accept the law of change!” he said. “To me, as to all, it must come! The old must die, and the young succeed them. As for me, I shall be glad to go—the sooner the better, I truly think, for then none will taunt my Gloria with the simple manner of her bringing up;—none will remember aught, save her exceeding beauty, or blame her that the sun and sea were her only known parents. And if we credit legend, hers is not the first birth of loveliness from the bosom of the waves!”
Here the wind, tearing round the rafters, rattled and roared for a space like a demon threatening the whole construction of the house, and then went galloping away with a shriek among the pines down to the shore.
“A wild night!” said the Professor, with a slight shiver. “Alas! poor Lotys!—poor ‘Soul of an Ideal’ as Sergius Thord called her,—her frail mortal tenement will soon be drawn down to the depths in such a storm as this!”
“I never saw her!” said Ronsard musingly; “Thord I have seen often. Lotys was to me a name merely,—but I knew it was a name to conjure with—a name beloved of the People. Gloria longed to see her,—she had heard of her often.”
“She was a psychological phenomenon,” said the Professor slowly; “And I admit that her composition baffled me. No one have I ever seen at all like her. She was beautiful without any of the accepted essentials of beauty—and it is precisely such a woman as that who possesses the most dangerous fascination over men—not over boys—but over men. She had a loving, passionate, feminine heart, with a masculine brain,—the two together are bound to constitute what is called Genius. The only thing I cannot understand is the unexpected weakness she displayed in committing suicide. That I should never have thought of her. On the contrary, I should have imagined, knowing as much of her as I did, that the greater the sorrow, the greater the fight she would have made against it.”
A silence fell between them, filled by the thundering noise of the wind.