“With Lotys whom you loved!” echoed the King; “You loved her—true! But I loved her more!”
“You lie!” said Thord, furiously; “No man—no King,—no Emperor of all the world, could ever have loved Lotys as I loved her! These great waves waiting to devour us—dead and living together—are not more insatiate in their passion for us than I in my passion for Lotys! I loved her!—and when she scorned me—when she rejected me,—when she openly confessed that she loved you—the King—what remained for her but death! Death, rather than dishonour at your Royal hands, Sir!” And he laughed fiercely—a laugh with the ring of madness in it. “I rescued her as a child from starvation and misery—and so I may say I gave her her life. What I gave, I took again—I had the right to take it! I would not see her shamed by you—dishonoured by you—branded by you!—I did the only thing left to me to save her from you—I killed her!”
With a loud cry the King, no longer so much king as man, with every passion roused, sprang at him.
“You killed her? Oh, treacherous devil! They said she killed herself!”
“Hands off!” cried Thord, suddenly pointing a pistol at him; “I will shoot you as readily as I shot her if you touch me! She killed herself you think? Oh, yes—in a strange way! Her last words were: ‘Say I did it myself! Tell the King I did it myself!’ A lie! All women are fond of lying. But her lie was to protect Me! Her last thought was for my defence,—not yours! Her last wish was to save Me, not you!—King though you are—lover though you craved to be! I say I murdered her! This is my Day of Fate,—the day on which it seems that Heaven itself has drawn lots with me to kill a King! Why did I ever relax my hate of you? It was inborn in me—a part of me,—my very life, the utmost portion of my work! I called you friend;—I curse myself that I ever did so!—for from the first you were my enemy—my rival in the love of Lotys! What did I care for the People? What did you? We were both at one in the love of the same woman! And now I am here to die with her alone! Alone, I say—do you hear me? I will be alone with her to the last—you shall not share with us in our sea burial! I will die beside her,—all, all alone!—and drift out with her to the darkness of the grave, to meet my fate with her—always with her,—whether her spirit lead me to Hell or to Heaven!”
His insensate frenzy was so desperate, so terrible, that by its very force the strange mental composure of the King became intensified. Quietly folding his arms, he took his stand by the coffin of the dead in silence. The dashing spray that leaped at the masts of the vessel,—the wind that scooped up the billows into higher and higher pinnacles of emerald green, might have been soundless and powerless, for all he seemed to hear or to heed.
“Why are you with us?” cried Thord again—“How came you on this ship, where I thought I had hidden myself alone with her, voyaging to Death? Could you not have left her to me?—you who have a throne and kingdom—I, to whom she was all my life!”
“I came—as you have come”—answered the King—“to die with her—or rather not to die, but to find Life with her! She loved me!”
With a savage curse, Thord raised the pistol he held. The King looked him full in the eyes.
“Take good aim, Sergius!” he said tranquilly—“For here between us lies Lotys—the silent witness of your deed! Go hence, if you must, with two murders on your soul! There is no escape from death for either you or me, take it how we may;—and I care not at all how I meet it, whether at your hands or in the waves of the sea! Give me the same death you gave to Lotys! I ask no better end! For so at least shall we meet more quickly!”