That was a quaint song—and a true one! She will not weep!”
Then he went over in memory the various scenes of his life—brilliant, useless, and without results—when he was Heir-Apparent;—he thought of his two young sons, Rupert and Cyprian, who were as indifferent to him as young foals to their sire,—and anon, his mind turned more tenderly to his eldest-born, Prince Humphry, and the fair girl he had so boldly wedded,—the happy twain, who, returning homeward, would find the Throne ready for their occupancy, and a whole nation waiting to welcome them.
“God bless them both!” he said aloud, lifting his calm eyes to the wild heavens—“They have the one shield and buckler against all misfortune—Love! And I thank God that I have not the sin upon my conscience of having broken that shield away from them; or of having forced their young lives asunder! Wiser than I, they took their own way and kept it!—may they so keep it always!”
Then a thought of ‘the People’ came to him—the People who had latterly taken to idolising him, and making of him a hero greater than any monarch whose deeds have ever been glorified since history began.
“They will forget!” he said—“Nowadays Nations have short memories! Battles and conquests, defeats and victories pass over the national mind as rapidly and changefully as the clouds are flying over the sky to-night!—the People remember neither their disgraces nor their triumphs in the life of individual Self which absorbs each little unit. Their idolatry of one monarch quickly changes to their idolatry of another! I shall perhaps be regretted for six months as my father was—and then—consigned with my ancestors to oblivion! Nothing so beautiful or so gladdening to the heart of a Monarch as the love of his People!—but—at the same time—nothing so changeable or uncertain as such love!—nothing so purely temporal! And nothing so desperately sad, so irremediably tragic as the death of kings!”
Rapidly he reviewed the situation—the new Ministry, the new Government members were elected—and business would begin again immediately after the Crown Prince’s return. All the reforms he had been prepared to carry out, would be effected,—and then would come the new King’s Coronation. What a dazzling picture of resplendent beauty would be seen in Gloria, robed and crowned! His heart beat rapidly at the mere contemplation of it. For himself he had no thought—save to realise that the strange manner of his disappearance from his kingdom would probably only awaken a sense of resentment in ‘society,’ and a vague superstition among the masses, who would for a long time cling to the belief that he was not dead, but that like King Arthur he had only gone to the ‘island valley of Avillion’ to “heal him of his grievous wound,”—from which deep vale of rest he would return, rejoicing in his strength again. Sergius Thord would know the truth—for to Sergius Thord he had written the truth. And the letter would reach him this very night—this night of his last earthly voyage.
“When his great sorrow has abated,” he said, “he too will forget! He has all his work to do—all his career to make—and he will make it well and nobly! Even for his sake, and for his future, it is well that I am gone—for if he ever came to know,—if he were to guess even remotely, through Zouche’s ravings, or some other means, the reason why Lotys killed herself, he would hate me,—and with justice! He loves the People—he will serve their Cause better than I!”
The moon stared whitely out of a cloud just then,—and to his amazement and awe, he suddenly perceived the black shadow of a man lifting itself slowly, slowly from the hold of the ship, like a massive bulk, or ghost in the gloom. Unable to imagine what this might be, or how any other human creature save himself would venture to sail with the dead on a voyage whose end could be but destruction, he advanced a step towards that looming shape, and started back with a cry, as he recognised the very man he had been thinking of—Sergius Thord!
“Sergius!” he cried aghast.
“King!” and Thord looked scarcely human in the pale fleeting moonbeams, as he too stared in half-maddened wonder at the face and form of a companion on this dread journey such as he had never expected to see. “What do you here in the midst of the sea and the storm? You should be at home!—playing the fool in your Palace!—giving audiences on your throne!—you—you have no right to die with Lotys, whom I loved!”