Half choked with his fury, Thord looked at him with fixed and glassy eyes. He was jealous of death!—jealous that death should of itself seem to reunite Lotys and the man she had loved more closely together! Standing erect by the purple pall that covered the one woman of the world to them both, the King looked ‘every inch a king,’—the incarnation of pride, love, resolve and courage. With a sudden wild-beast cry, Thord sprang at him and caught his arm with one hand, the pistol grasped in the other.
“Too near!” he gasped; “You shall not stand too near her!—you shall not die so close to her!—you shall not have the barest chance of resting where she sleeps!”
He fell back, as the King’s calm eyes regarded him steadfastly, imperiously, almost commandingly, without a trace of fear. He trembled.
“Do not look so!” he muttered; “I cannot kill you!—not if you look so!—”
Raising the pistol, he took apparent aim. The King stood unmoved, only murmuring softly to himself: ‘On the other side of Death, my Lotys!—On the other side!’
There was a loud report, a crash in his ears—then—as he staggered back, stunned by the shock, he saw that he was untouched, unhurt. Thord had turned the pistol against his own breast, and reeling backward, with a last supreme effort, dragged his sinking body to the vessel’s edge.
“God save your Majesty!” he cried wildly; “Tell Lotys I did it myself! God knows that is true!”
The wild waves, clambering up over the deck rushed at him, and an enormous foam-crested billow, higher and stronger than all the rest, beat at the mast of the vessel and snapped it in twain. It came down, dragging the sail with it in a tangle of cordage, and with that sail the name of ‘Lotys’ inscribed upon it was whirled furiously out to sea. The body of the vessel, now netted in a mass of ropes and rigging, began to roll helplessly in the trough of the waves, and the corpse of Thord, sinking under it as it plunged, was swept away like a leaf in the storm! Gone, his wild heart and wilder brain!—gone his restless ambition,—gone his unsatisfied love—his fierce passions, his glimmerings of a noble nature which if trained and guided, might have worked to noblest ends. Like many would-be leaders of men, he could not lead himself—like many who seek to control law, and revolutionise the world, he had been unable to master his own desperate soul. He was not the first,—he will not be the last,—who for purely personal ends has sought to ‘serve the People’! The disinterested, the impersonal and unselfish Leader has yet to come,—and if he ever does come, it is more than probable that those for whom he gives his life, will be the first to crucify his soul, and cry ‘Thou hast a devil!’
Death was now sole commander of the ocean that night! And the King of a mere little earth-country, realised to the full that he stood irrevocably face to face with the last great Enemy of Empires. Yet never had he looked more truly imperial,—never more superbly the incarnation of life! A mighty exultation began to stir within him—a consciousness that he, despite all the terrors of the grave, would still come forth the conqueror! The waves, leaping at him, were friends, not foes,—the moon shedding ghostly glamours on the watery wilderness, smiled as though she knew that he would soon be a partaker in the secrets of all Nature, and solve the mystery of existence,—there was a singing in his ears as of voices triumphant, which swelled with the passion of a mighty anthem,—and with the quietest mind and calmest brain he found himself musing on life and death as if he were already a witness apart, of their strange phenomena. Thord’s appearance on the same ship in which he and Lotys were passengers, seemed to him quite simple and natural,—Thord’s death moved him to a certain grave compassion,—but the whole swift circumstance had been so dreamlike, that he had no time to think of it, or regret it,—and the only active consciousness his mind held was that he and Lotys were journeying to ‘the other side’;—that ‘other side’ which he now felt so near and sure, that he could almost declare he saw the living presence of the woman he loved arisen from the dead and standing near him!
The ocean widened out interminably, and he saw, looking ahead, a great heap of gigantic billows, leaping, sparkling, tossing, climbing over each other in the fitful light of the moon, like huge sea-monsters waiting to devour and engulf him. He smiled as he felt the yielding craft on which he stood swirl towards those breakers, and begin to part asunder,—so would he have smiled on a battlefield facing his foes, and fronted with fiery cannon! The glory of Empire,—the splendour of Sovereignty,—the pride and panoply of Temporal Power! How infinitely trivial seemed all these compared with the mighty force of a resistless love! How slight the boasted ‘supremacy’ of man with his laws and creeds, matched against the wrath of the conflicting sea,—the sure and swift approach of inexorable Death! Under the depths of the ocean which this ruler of a kingdom traversed for the last time, lay a lost Continent,—fallen dynasties—forgotten civilisations, wonderful and endless—kings and queens and heroes once famous—and now as blotted out of memory as though they had never been!