KOPHETUA THE THIRTEENTH

KOPHETUA
THE THIRTEENTH

BY

JULIAN CORBETT

AUTHOR OF "THE FALL OF ASGARD," "FOR GOD AND GOLD," ETC.

London
MACMILLAN & CO.
AND NEW YORK
1889

The right of translation is reserved

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I. ONEIRIA.

"I read that once in Affrica

A princely wight did raine,

Who had to name Kophetua,

As poets they did faine."

The outburst of political speculation which followed the Renaissance is well known to us by its remarkable literature. True it is that the greater part of it is long since dead and sleeps in peace, save where every now and then its ghosts are scared by a literary historian. But this obscurity only adds to its interest, and increases at once the charm, the safety, and the credit we may enjoy in discussing it. For the ordinary Englishman perhaps the only work of the class which is still really alive is the delightful political romance of Sir Thomas More. Yet to those who love the dustier shelves of libraries long ranks of its comrades will be not unfamiliar, standing guard as it were over the memory of an intellectual movement as vigorous and creative as any the world has seen.

It is to the more daring and fantastic of these works that this chapter in the history of philosophy owes its charm and freshness. So entrancing indeed are they that those double traitors to humanity, who not only write books, but write books about books, have led us to look upon these ponderous folios as the only mark the movement has left on history, and we are apt to forget that it also had its practical side. Yet that side not only had an existence, but it was even more romantic and fanciful than the other.

For many of the pregnant seeds from the tree of political knowledge, which the strong breath of the Renaissance was wafting over Europe, fell on good ground, where pedantry did not spring up and choke them. There were many cultivated earnest gentlemen of that time in whose chivalrous hearts they alighted, and whose imagination was so stirred with the new ideas, that they actually attempted to carry them into practice.

Coming as the movement did contemporaneously with the dayspring of colonial enterprise, it naturally suggested itself to these high-souled scholars to leave the corruption and oppression of the old countries which it was hopeless to reform, and sailing away with a little community of kindred souls in whom the new spirit breathed, to found in some distant land a colony, where a polity established in pure reason should grow to be a model to the world.

Many of these attempts were complete failures at once, nearly all were more or less short-lived, and by the end of the last century there was not one so prosperous as the African colony of Oneiria.

Lying as it did in that remote and little-known corner of the world which is watered by the Drâa and its tributaries, and is intersected by the spurs of the Anti-Atlas, it had been able to enjoy after its first struggle for existence the repose of a well-earned obscurity. There was no one who envied it anything, and consequently it had no enemy, nor even an importunate friend to seek its alliance and lead it into scrapes. The half savage Shelluhs, who sparsely occupied the country, were soon content to remain as tributaries under their own chiefs, in the more inaccessible parts of the mountains, and to leave the teeming valleys and table-lands to the newcomers.

Through the Canary Islands the colony kept up a small but regular trade with Western Europe. The exports were of a very mixed nature, but chiefly consisted of dates. As the country was practically self-supporting, the imports were comparatively simple. They were confined to books, works of art, and clothes of the latest mode.

For it was the pride of Oneiria, as with most other colonies of the time, that, notwithstanding its remote position, it floated on the surface of European opinion; and so freely did it indulge in this delicious conviction, that it is to be feared it grew but too often to an actual intemperance, and at the time of which I speak there is no doubt that Oneiria sometimes caricatured the fantasies of a fantastic age.

Internally Oneiria was almost as unruffled as in its foreign relations. The elaborate constitution of the original founder worked so smoothly and effectively that crime and even discontent seemed almost unknown. The most ingenious and conscientious politicians had long ago abandoned the hopeless struggle to extract a difference of opinion out of questions of the interior. This dearth of disagreement led to a serious famine in the political world, that had it not been for one recurrent topic, of which I shall have to speak more fully hereafter, politics must have completely perished of starvation.

It is not clear who the founder of the fortunate colony was. From an exaggerated niceness of honour, so characteristic of the age we call Elizabethan, he seems to have taken most ingenious precautions that his very name should be forgotten, lest it might appear that his experiment was a device to feed his personal vanity rather than the disinterested sacrifice it really was.

That he was an Englishman, who had considerably modified his national characteristics by extensive and sagacious travel, is almost certain. His followers were believed to have been recruited from amongst the hardy seafaring population of the coasts of Bohemia, though more recent conjecture points to the fact that London was the real parent of the colony, and it is suggested that by "Bohemia" the "Alsatia" of Whitefriars is really intended. However, as the whole of the evidence on the subject is contained in the following pages, it will be an advantage to allow the reader to judge for himself upon the whole case, and so avoid a tedious and possibly unfruitful discussion.

The fact in the early history of the colony most interesting for us is fortunately beyond dispute. Oneiria was, without a shadow of doubt, founded on the ruins of the kingdom of that Kophetua whose romantic love-story, probably a good deal perverted, is so familiar to us from the beautiful ballads of the "King and the Beggar-Maid." It was this which must have suggested to the founder his first steps towards oblivion when he ascended his new throne under the style of Kophetua II.

Were this fact not established from other sources, beyond all question there is ample evidence in the present story to support it. The ancient kingdom must have been dying, and not dead, at the time. We shall meet with constant traces of an older, ruder, and more Oriental civilisation underlying the scientific superstructure of the English knight.

The results were extremely curious, but perhaps the most interesting phenomenon to which this peculiar fact gave rise, was the extraordinary organisation and privileges of the beggar class, though it is possible that some of their wilder laws and customs were a direct importation from "Whitefriars."

It is a pity that no more is known on these points, but further inquiry is almost hopeless. The colony was entirely destroyed soon after the happy reign of Kophetua XIII. and his beloved Queen came peacefully to an end. There was but a day between their deaths, and so prostrated were the people by the sudden loss of both their idolised sovereigns, that they seem to have been able to offer no adequate resistance to a Jehad which, for some unknown cause, was preached against them amongst the neighbouring Mussulman tribes. It is probable that they had made some attempts to intervene for the protection of the last of the Berber Christians. A few of these highly interesting survivals are believed to have been still in existence at the end of the last century, in the remoter parts of the Atlas, and some may possibly have continued even later.

All, however, which we know for certain is that in one of those strange restless upheavals, so characteristic of the north of Africa, the Mussulman Berbers rose and flowed like a flood over what was once Oneiria. As suddenly as the colony had appeared, it disappeared from history; the country is now impenetrable to Europeans, and has not been visited since the destruction of the colony. Rohlfs, indeed, tells us that somewhere in the basin of the Drâa he saw amongst the distant hills what looked like the nave and tower of a church, and he further noticed that in this region the people had a much higher style of architecture, and otherwise seemed distinctly more civilised, than the tribes he was already familiar with. But no other traces of the colony have been met with, and its destruction must have been as complete as it was sudden.

Beyond what has already been related, all that is known or likely to be known of Oneiria is contained in the following pages, which deal with a romantic episode in the life of King Kophetua XIII. We must congratulate ourselves that even so much was preserved by the taste of a gentleman who visited the colony at the beginning of this century, and brought back with him the notes from which the present romance is taken. For romance it certainly is, and there seems no reason why we should deprive it of that title simply because it is also a record of historical occurrences.

CHAPTER II. HIS MAJESTY.

"From nature's lawes he did decline,

For sure he was not of my mind:

He cared not for women-kinde,

But did them all disdaine."

Kophetua was undoubtedly the handsomest man in his kingdom. The slightest suspicion of Moorish blood, incurred from a Spanish ancestress, had only added, as it were, a tropical richness to the beauty which he had inherited from the founder, and that was no small inheritance. It was part of the constitution that every king of Oneiria should be known by the name of Kophetua, but a grateful and imaginative people had been dissatisfied with the bald arithmetical distinctions which this law entailed. In the old fashion they had begun to speak of their sovereigns by surnames, till an unforeseen difficulty arose. After the death of the founder, his splendid sons succeeded him one after another with an alarming rapidity, due to the reckless exposure of their persons to the early Berber enemies of the State. Every brother was handsomer than the last, and obviously demanded a surname expressive of personal beauty. It was a characteristic so dazzling that the popular mind could not fix itself on any other of the family qualities, brilliant as they were. To a humorous people the monotony soon became ridiculous, and every one was relieved when, before two generations had passed away, it was found that every word in the Oneirian vocabulary in any way synonymous with "handsome" was already exhausted, and by tacit agreement the country fell back restfully upon the limitless resources of the ordinal numbers.

So our Kophetua was simply known as "Thirteenth." Yet it made a pretty name when you got used to it. It is a soft-sounding one as it stands, and was still prettier in the popular dialect. As the trade of the country was almost entirely with the Canaries, the common people counted in Spanish, and so by a diminutive of affection their King was known to them as "Trecenito."

Yet of all the line of Kophetuas he most deserved a more distinctive surname. Any one must have so agreed who could have seen him as he sat to-day in his library with a copy of Rousseau's Origin of Inequality dropped listlessly on his knees. It was an ideal book-room, in the style of the early French Renaissance. The whole palace indeed was designed in the same manner. It was the most eclectic style the founder could light upon, and everything in Oneiria was eclectic.

Ten panels opposite the ten windows were occupied by fine portraits of the ten successors of the founder. Trecenito's own had to hang on a screen. At either end of the long chamber was a magnificent fireplace reaching to the panelled ceiling. Not that a fireplace was ever necessary in the balmy air of Oneiria, but still, where the capital was situated, amongst the hills facing the Atlantic, it enjoyed a temperate climate, and with considerable discomfort fires could be endured on the coldest days. This discomfort every one was glad to undergo for the sake of the European atmosphere generated by the blazing logs. It was hot but refined, and that was everything to a well-bred Oneirian.

In a smaller panel above one of these sacred hearths was a picture of the first King Kophetua placing with love-lorn gesture the wondering beggar-maid upon his jewelled throne. It was a beautiful work, obviously by a dreamy and backward pupil of Perugino. By his childish colour, naïve composition, and vague expression of sentiment, the painter had unconsciously given a charm to the subject which the greatest of his contemporaries could never have achieved.

You turned from it with a sympathetic smile to look in vain down the long vista of books for the founder's portrait over the other hearth. Picture there was none. Even his features were forgotten, but where the painting should have been hung a splendid suit of armour of the later sixteenth century fashion. Morion, corselet, tassets, all were richly chased. Below hung a great pair of Cordovan boots armed with heavy gilded spurs. One gauntlet seemed to grasp a five-foot rapier with a great cup-guard and hilt-points of extravagant length, while in the other was placed a shell-dagger of the same design.

It was the very suit in which the heroic founder had stepped from his pinnace upon the burning sand, and claimed that land for his company "by right divine of inheritance from Adam," and somehow that trophy of arms always gave to Trecenito a vivid sense of the old knight's presence in the room, which no dead portrait could have conveyed. Indeed, it was not hard to fancy a grim face beneath the shadow of the peaked morion, as the gloom of evening fell and the firelight flickered. It was on this the king was gazing with his Rousseau on his knees. Surfeited with philosophy, he fell to musing on his ancestor till he saw beneath the morion the stern, burnt features, as he pictured them, with grey pointed beard and bristling moustache. He could not help contrasting the fancy with his own smooth, shaven face, and the old adventurous life with his own colourless existence.

"Turbo!" he cried, as, stung with the unhappy contrast, he started up and half unconsciously tore off a black patch which, after the custom of the time, adorned his cheek—"Turbo! I am a miserable man."

"So your majesty is continually hinting. May I die if I know why!"

With an air of well-feigned interest in his monarch's state of mind, the speaker rose from an elegant buhl writing-table, which would have been covered with official papers had there been any business for the King to transact with his Chancellor; but as usual there was none, and the table bore nothing weightier than a half-finished copy of Latin verses, perhaps quite heavy enough for its slender proportions, for the Chancellor was a poet by conviction rather than birth.

Indeed poetry could hardly have dwelt in a form so revolting. His face was distorted by two livid scars. One stretched across the lower part of his nose up to his right eye, which in healing it had drawn down so that it looked like a bloodhound's. The other ran across his mouth in such a way that it exposed his teeth on one side and gave to his face a snarling expression that was acutely unprepossessing. His shoulders, too, seemed in some way ill-matched, and he joined Kophetua at the founder's hearth with an ungainly limp which completed the picture of deformity he presented.

"No! may I die if I know why," repeated Turbo.

"Ah, you will not understand," said the King. "How can I be happy, how can I live according to nature, leading the life I do, without an annoyance, literally without an annoyance? How can I ever rival the knight," he went on, "with nothing to overcome, with nothing to stand in my way? I tell you I am a miserable man."

"If your majesty will have it so," answered Turbo, "I must of course agree."

"And why should you not in any case?" asked Kophetua a little testily. "Look at me. Here before you is practically the only sovereign in the civilised world who at this moment has not a revolution more or less developed in his dominions, while my disgracefully contented subjects will not—why, they will not even read the Jacobin paper we have been at the pains surreptitiously to start for them."

"No," said the Chancellor gravely, "I believe that only six copies were sold this week. There were two copies for you and me, one for the Queen-mother, and one for General Dolabella, who I am sure only lights his pipe with it. There was one went to the beggars for decorative purposes, it is said; and the sixth—let me see," he continued as he limped to his desk and took out a small memorandum on large official paper. "The sixth—ah! yes, that was a presentation copy to the Museum which I paid for myself."

"It is heart-breaking, absolutely heart-breaking," cried the King. "To what end have I spent all these years in the study of politics? To what end have you lavished your inestimable instruction on me, and sacrificed what should have been the most brilliant career in Europe in order to educate me for a throne? Is there a single writer on statecraft, from Plato to More, from Machiavelli to Voltaire, that I have not mastered from end to end, to say nothing of the knight's manuscript?"

"Indeed, sire," answered the Chancellor, "you have made yourself a most consummate statesman."

"No, Turbo," said the King, "be just. It is you that have made me so. Without you these books would have said not a word to me for all their wisdom. But to what end is it all, I say? Here I stand disgraced before the knight's armour, not because I will not or cannot do anything, but because there is nothing to do. I tell you, Turbo, I shrink with shame when I see his grave face look out at me from under the morion, and yet,"—he went on, pacing the room, with a noble look on his handsome face,—"he has no right to scorn me. I know that were there wrongs to right, I have will and power to right them, or at least the courage to die fighting for the same end to which his heroic life was sacrificed."

"Well, be comforted," said Turbo; "to-morrow you will have an annoyance. For to-morrow, I would remind you, comes your mother's last choice for you; at least, I imagine that is the intention. It will be very serious this time. Remember you have entered your thirtieth year, and if at the end of it you are not married——"

"By the constitution," broke in the King, "I shall cease to reign. I know it, and then they will elect you. I cannot help it. I shall dislike and despise this woman, as I do every other. Thank God, I have learnt your lesson well. How I should have been deceived had it not been for the wise misogyny which you, my dear instructor, were at such pains to teach me!"

As he spoke he stretched out his hand as though to lay it affectionately on his old governor's shoulder, when there was a sudden clash of steel overhead. With a start he looked up in time to catch the founder's long rapier as it fell, and in a moment he was standing with its great hilt in his outstretched hand and its point straight at the heart of Turbo, who started back in alarm.

Kophetua turned deadly pale, hardly daring to think what this ghostly warning might mean. As he felt the dusty hilt between his fingers it was as though the dead, war-worn hand of his ancestor were stretched up out of the grave to grasp his own: he stood almost expecting to hear a hollow voice from under the morion, and Turbo watched him with restless eyes.

Even as he held it the King knew the heavy weapon was tiring his arm. It was the last touch to his misery, and he dropped the point with a little nervous laugh.

"One would think," he said, in a voice that sounded very strange in the dead silence which followed the clash of steel,—"One would think the old knight discerned in you an enemy instead of my best and only friend."

The Chancellor laughed loud and hoarsely at the King's humour, but did not touch the weapon which his monarch laid down sorrowfully.

"The wire must have rusted away till it broke," said he.

"Exactly," said the King. "Yet it is a most remarkable occurrence." A short but awkward silence followed, till fortunately the chamberlain entered the room to inquire if the King desired to prepare for supper. So the colloquy of the two friends ended, and Turbo was left alone, gazing absently out of the window at the beggars before the palace gate, as one by one they rose from their crouching postures, stretched their cramped limbs, and wandered slowly away to their dens with the air of men conscientiously satisfied with a long day's work.

CHAPTER III. THE MARRIAGE QUESTION.

"The Lords they tooke it grievously,

The Commons cryed pitiously."

It has already been mentioned that there was one recurrent subject of discussion which saved Oneirian politics from entire extinction. This was the great marriage question.

The wise founder, anxious no doubt to perpetuate his race to the ends for which he had lived, and fully aware of the jeopardy to which his descendants would be exposed in the midst of savage Berber tribes, had made it an intrinsic part of the constitution that every king of Oneiria, before he reached the age of thirty, must marry the woman chosen for him by his people.

Formerly the Parliament had taken the greatest interest in its legislative work. Each proposal was debated at length, and with considerable intelligence. In process of time, however, all this changed. The founder had elaborated a system of taxation, something on the lines of that afterwards described by Harrington in his Oceana, whereby it was made by a natural development self-extinguishing. An unhappy result of the contrivance was perhaps unforeseen by the founder, but it soon appeared that as the central fund increased and the annual taxes dwindled, it was more and more difficult to get members to attend the sessions.

Before the colony was a hundred years old taxes were declared unnecessary, and at an end for ever. By an inherent elasticity the central fund grew with the growth of the people, and even began to afford a surplus to be distributed amongst the beggars. There was no need any longer to vote money. No reform of the perfected laws was possible. Parliament became an agreeable club, to which the members when once elected belonged by tacit consent for life. Sessions were, however, still held, where the more imaginative deputies debated the sublime and eternal principles of government, and pointed out to each other, with never fading satisfaction, how divinely the Oneirian statute-book embodied that quintessential spirit of justice which their heated rhapsodies had distilled.

As for their business, it was almost entirely formal, consisting chiefly in the periodical endorsement of the King's choice from among their own number of the great state officers. It will then be easily understood how jealously they valued their last live prerogative of choosing the King's bride. As a matter of fact, of course, she was always selected by the high officers of state, and the Parliament ratified the choice; but this ratification could not be said to be a mere form, for as late as the beginning of the century the House had absolutely refused to endorse the ministers' choice, because the lady presented to them was not sufficiently beautiful.

Since then greater care had been exercised in the preliminary selection, and the attendant ceremonial considerably elaborated. The bride-elect was now presented to the full House, dressed with every care and splendour which was in any way calculated to enhance her attractions, and after question put and carried, the decision of the House was sealed by the Speaker imprinting a kiss upon the lips of the chosen beauty as she knelt before the chair. Thereupon he raised her up, and pronounced her election in this poetic form, "Reign, beautiful princess, crowned with a people's kiss."

Since the introduction of the new coronation ceremony the office of Speaker had become extremely popular. He was elected annually by virtue of the original constitution and party feeling on the marriage question, began once more to run very high, as the election was always decided on strictly party lines in relation to this single topic.

It will be easy, then, to picture the condition of political circles at the time of which we are now speaking. For some eight years the King had been seen to reject beauty after beauty without reason given, to the acute disappointment of successive Speakers. But now the period had arrived when he must absolutely marry within the year and the excitement over the approaching election to the chair had reached an almost alarming intensity.

The body politic was divided into two main parties, the Kallists, who professed that beauty should be the sole ground on which the queen should be chosen, and the Agathists, who would have the selection determined by moral worth alone. Such at least was said to be the distinction when intelligent foreigners asked for information. Possibly it was actually so once, but now the principles of the two parties so overlapped that the only real question between them was who should elect the Speaker.

It should perhaps be mentioned that there was a third party styling themselves the Kallikagathists. They were a well-meaning offshoot of the Agathists, who, fondly believing that two distinct policies still existed, thought to produce unity by adopting both. So far it had been a failure, and though the party had the names of many superior persons upon it, it was little regarded.

The Court was divided into corresponding groups, and what further complicated political relations was that the heads of the separate palace circles were regarded as the leaders of the Parliamentary parties, although of course their aims were widely different. In the House the occupation of the chair filled the whole political horizon. In the palace that was a matter of complete indifference, and the whole struggle was to see whose introduction would eventually be made acceptable to the King. Thus between the leaders and their followers there existed no more real connection than there did between the professed opinions of the respective parties and their actual aims, and it may be doubted whether any country in Europe had been so entirely successful in elaborating a party system by which it was impossible for any question to be decided on its merits.

The system can only be described as chaotic. Every trace of the original landmarks had disappeared, and yet a good Kallist would rather be called anything than an Agathist, unless perhaps it were a Kallikagathist. An Agathist regarded a Kallist as a frivolous person of low moral tone, while, in the eyes of a Kallist, an Agathist was a detestable outcome of the Puritan taint in the old settlers, a shallow pretender to an impossible standard of virtue. A Kallist who could invent a new way of saying an Agathist was a prig became a marked personality in the House, while a young Agathist who succeeded in inventing a fresh figure to express his contempt for a cynic might at once pose as a coming man.

Cynicism was certainly the prevailing tone of the Kallist salons. There you might hear of a young girl who had hurried for an hour's relaxation from the sickbed of a brother, or a genial old gentleman who had spent his day in extricating a poor relation from a debtor's prison, giving it as their perfected conviction that no excellence could be credited with existence which you could not see. On the other hand, the atmosphere of Agathist gatherings was decidedly one of moral platitude, where elaborately dressed men and daintily rouged women prattled in polished phrase of the nothingness of exteriors, and the all-sufficiency of truth and goodness. It is certainly remarkable that a similar condition of society has appeared nowhere else, and it is these unique politico-social phenomena which constitute Oneiria's chief claim to find an adequate historian.

At present the Kallists were in the ascendant. With Turbo at their head they were naturally more than a match for the opposition, whose fortunes at court were intrusted to the Queen-mother. The Chancellor was certainly the strongest statesman who had appeared in the colony since its foundation, while the Queen Margaret was fitted for her position rather by disposition than political ability. She was the daughter of a German officer of noble birth who, having entered the service of Spain, rose to be Governor of the Canaries. From him she inherited all the homely simplicity so characteristic of the family relations of his nation. Otherwise she was not without shrewdness and a certain power of resistance, which enabled her to oppose the splendid abilities of the Chancellor as well, perhaps, as any one in the kingdom. It was whispered that there were other reasons why these two naturally found themselves in opposite camps, reasons that were known to none but themselves.

There would have been little doubt that the report was well founded in the mind of any one who could have seen the Chancellor as he stood at the window watching the beggars. Ten minutes after the King had left there was a sound on his ear of a woman's tread in the ante-chamber, and a gentle rustle of a silk dress upon the polished boards. Turbo started and looked towards the door. It began to open, and as quickly he turned to the window again.

"That will do," said a soft voice full of quiet dignity. "You need not stay. I wish to be alone, and shall remain here till suppertime. Attend me then."

The heavy door closed, and the Chancellor looked round to see the Queen-mother advancing into the room. She was a handsome woman of not more than fifty, with a spare, stately figure. In her powder and rouge and the modish gown she had just assumed for the evening she looked little more than half her age. At least so thought the Chancellor; and, as the fitful firelight lit up her queenly form, she looked to him almost as beautiful as though a quarter of a century had not passed since first they met.

"If your majesty would be alone," said Turbo, with a profound bow, "I pray your leave to retire."

"I would be alone with you, Chancellor," the Queen answered. "I wish to speak with you."

"And your majesty denied me the pleasure of waiting on you?" said the Chancellor, with a smile that made his snarl more hideously apparent.

"Yes," the Queen replied; "because I have that to say which I would have no one hear; and, besides, there are other reasons why none should know of our interview."

"Your majesty interests me strangely," said the Chancellor.

"I wish to speak to you about my son," said the Queen, with a slight tremor in her voice. She drew towards the founder's hearth, and sat down in a great chair that was almost a throne, and, at the same time, motioned the Chancellor to a seat opposite to her.

"Be seated," she said, with the same hesitation as before; "I want to converse with you as an old friend."

She looked at Turbo wistfully, as though to see some softening of his snarl, but he avoided her glance with another profound bow in acknowledgment of her condescension; and the Queen's heart sank as she felt her mission was almost hopeless.

CHAPTER IV. THE QUEEN-MOTHER.

"Disdaine no whit, O lady deere,

But pity now thy servant here."

For a while they sat in silence looking into the fire. Indeed it was hard for the Queen-mother to know how to begin. Let it be said at once frankly, she and Turbo had loved each other. It was long ago now, and far away—in fair Castile,—when he was the brilliant and accomplished young secretary of her father. He was no mere clerk, but a youth of noble family, an aspirant to the great offices of the state, who had taken the post to learn the business of administration.

Thus there was no reason why he should not openly show his adoration for his chief's beautiful daughter, or why she should seek to hide her love for him. Daily they met, and daily his passion grew. He loved her with all the ardour of which his hot Spanish blood was capable, so that it maddened him to see how cold and calm was her northern heart, loving as it was, beside the fever that consumed him.

Yet he was happy in the knowledge of her love, and all went well till one night her father entertained an officer to whom he had taken a liking. He was a man of brilliant wit, but known as a greedy duellist. Yet Margaret was amused, and laughed and talked gaily with him till he departed. Turbo accompanied him to a tavern hard by for a parting cup. The place was full of gentlemen, many of whom the officer knew. They fell to talking, then to boasting, till in an evil hour the man vaunted his new conquest, and let fall a little light word with Margaret's name. In a moment he had the lie and a stinging blow on the mouth from Turbo's glove.

All efforts of the young secretary's friends to save him from his quixotic folly were in vain. He would listen to no explanation. He would receive no apology. The least he could do, it seemed to him, to show himself worthy of his treasured love, was to chastise the man who had breathed ever so faintly on his mistress's name.

They fought on horseback, with pistols and swords. It was all the youth's friends could do in order to equalise the chances. Yet the affair was little better than murder. The first shot hit Turbo in the knee, the second tore across his lips. Half choking with blood he fell on with his sword; but no sooner were they engaged than a fearful gash across the face blinded him. In the agony of the moment he checked his rearing horse sharply, and the frantic animal fell over on the top of him.

For months he lay in the hospital almost between life and death. Every day came flowers and a little loving note from Margaret, overflowing with pity and gratitude. It made him bear his terrible suffering with a gay heart to see how much his courage had won him. His chief came constantly to his bedside, and spoke to him as a son-in-law; but ere he was fully recovered, and clear of the pestilential air of the hospital, he was taken with the small-pox. Another terrible period of waiting and suffering ensued, and by the time he was able to leave the hospital, Margaret and her father had sailed for the Canaries.

Without a moment's delay he followed them, and at length the longed-for moment was to come, when he should hold his love in his arms once more. She burst into the room with a glad cry when they told her he was come, but no sooner did she set eyes on his mangled form than she stopped transfixed with horror, and with a terrible scream fell to the ground.

The shock threw her into a dangerous illness, and when she recovered nothing more was said of a marriage. Turbo accepted his fate, but with a bitterness that poisoned his whole nature. His love was no less than before, and it was only by the nursing of a bitter contempt for its object, and all the daughters of Eve, that he could make his life endurable.

And yet he could not tear himself from her side. The months went by, and still he remained at his old post, and when Margaret left to become Queen of Oneiria, he accepted the place which Kophetua XII.—the present king's father—offered him out of admiration for his abilities, and pity for his miserable story.

When the young prince was born, so great was the esteem in which Turbo was held, that he was appointed his governor; and as soon as the boy was old enough to be out of the nurse's hands, Turbo began to win a surprising influence over him. So great was the affection that grew up between the ill-assorted pair, that when the king died it was found that Turbo was named guardian in the will, and it was from this post that he had been elevated to the chancellorship as soon as the boy came of age.

With such a pricking memory in her mind it is not to be wondered at that the poor Queen sat looking long into the fire before she spoke; especially as all her own, and, what was more, all her son's happiness seemed to hang on the result of the interview.

"Do you mean to thwart me again, Chancellor?" she said at last abruptly.

"I trust I have never willingly thwarted your majesty in anything," he answered.

"Nay, I cry a truce on courtly fictions," said the Queen, a little impatiently. "Let us be frank for once."

"As your majesty pleases," answered the Chancellor, without the least unbending.

"To-morrow the Marquis de Tricotrin will arrive with his daughter. You know?" began the unhappy Queen.

"I have heard so unofficially."

"And you know why she is coming?"

"I have permitted myself to hazard a guess."

"Then what do you mean to do?"

"Like your majesty, my duty, modified by circumstances."

"What do you mean?"

"Merely that as heretofore I shall advise his majesty on the whole circumstances of the case, if and when I am consulted."

"Chancellor," cried the Queen impatiently, "I have urged you to be frank. To what end is all this? I have come a long way to you, will you not make one step to meet me? Well," she continued, as the Chancellor made no reply, "I at least can be open. I ask you, do you mean to make my son refuse again?"

"Really your majesty flatters me. The King will use his own discretion."

"No, he will use yours. Do you think I do not know why it is that girl after girl has come hither in vain. In every way they were fitted to be his queen, and he refused even to be kind to one. It was you that made him do it. He gives not a thought to me. It is you that are all in all to him. His whole soul is but a little bit of yours. You have absorbed him, you have taken him all from me."

"I assure your majesty," said the Chancellor imperturbably, "we do not ever discuss the subject together. It is entirely his own inclination that guides him."

"You say that," said the Queen, with increasing agitation. "You say that, and if it is true it is worse than I thought. You have taught him, like yourself, to hate women. That is why he speaks of them as he does. But still you can undo your work. If not for my sake or for his, at least for the country's you should administer the antidote. If you have poisoned, it is you alone who can cure. See the pass we have come to. What will happen if he is not married this year? He will lose his kingdom; but that is a little thing to what I am losing. Cannot you understand what it is for me to see the ruin of my one son's life, to see his soul starving for want of a woman's love, to long unsatisfied to see his great nature ripened with a husband's and a father's joys, to hold his children on my knee, and know once more the holiest love a woman ever feels? Think, think what you do, and hold your hand before it is too late. You cannot be all stone. If you have one tender spot left give him back to me. Turbo, in the name of our old love, give him back to me!"

She leaned forward towards him, her hands outstretched with a pleading gesture that was inexpressibly touching and tender. But Turbo remained immovable, save that his snarl grew more cruel. It was more than she could bear. She felt her eyes filling with tears, and she bowed her head in her hands. There was a silence between them for a minute, and then Turbo's cold voice spoke unchanged.

"By what right," said he, "do you conjure me by our old love? You, who threw me away like a soiled glove."

"I have no right," she murmured, without looking up. "It was a great sin, and none can know how I have suffered for it. But the crime was not his. At least you may have mercy on him."

"And what right have you," he continued as coldly as ever, "to crave mercy for him? Did you show any to me? What is he to you that I was not a thousandfold? When did he ever love you more than his dogs? and I have burned for you like a fire! What devotion has he ever shown you? and I crawled to you like a slave! What has he ever sacrificed for you? and I gave more than my life for a little piece of your honour. How will you find reward for me, if to him you would give so much?"

"You know not," she answered piteously, "you cannot know, what he is to me. All you say is true, yet God has made him more to me than all the world. Turbo, he is my son, my only child, and you will not understand."

"Nor will you understand what I have felt," answered Turbo. "Yet I will tell you, Gretchen; try and conceive it. Think what I was when I crawled hither in your train to be a thing of loathing to every woman in the Court, and all because I had been too jealous of your honour. Think what a sweet reward of chivalry it was to lick up the crumbs you threw me to ease your tormenting conscience. I know what it cost you to invite me here. I know how you detested the sight of me. You did it as a penance, and I saw you saying, as you shuddered by me, 'God will forgive my sin, because I cast my broken meats to this Lazarus, and suffer my dogs to lick his sores.'"

He paused a little, looking down on the crouching form without pity, while she shrank and sobbed with her hands before her face.

"And whose silent voice was this?" he pursued. "It was my love that spoke. It was she who once had met me with a blush of mantling delight; it was she whose soft form I had clasped unresisting in my arms; it was her heart that had beaten warm and fast against mine; it was her lips that had drunk my kisses like sweet wine. You—you, who knew best how my heart could feel, what think you was in it then? But I bore it all uncomplaining, because I could not conceive of life away from you. I bore it and waited for some solace to come."

"But why do you say all this?" the Queen broke in as he stopped again. "What good can it do to gall your wounds and mine like this?"

"Listen, Gretchen. I will tell you all now you have driven me to begin. I say I waited for a solace to come. It was weary, hopeless work, but the solace came at last. I had won your husband's esteem. He believed the fine sentiments I always had ready for his ear. I believed them once myself. He did not see I was changed, and gave me his boy to make a man of. Then I saw in my grasp a thing to sweeten the bitterness of my life. I used to look at my charge, and see him beautiful as the daylight. I knew he would grow up a man that women would look on and love helplessly; and it was I—I, who was to make him worthy of their love! Can you not see what sweet solace there was for me there? 'They shall love him,' I said, 'they shall love him, but he shall never return their love. I will show him what they are. He shall know from his childhood what I learnt too late.' I swore they should never rejoice in the love of such a man as I would make him. I pictured them longing for him and eating their hearts. Was it not a gentle solace?"

"It was revenge!" she cried bitterly; "it was unmanly revenge!"

"Call it what you will," he continued; "perhaps you are right, I do not pretend to be anything but what I am. Yet I had another motive for what I did, and perhaps I am not wholly bad."

"No, no, Turbo," she said eagerly, as though his words gave her a hope to clutch at. "God knows you are not that."

"And yet," he went on, without interruption, "I think I am as bad as a man can be; perhaps a woman might be worse. You try to think as well of me as you can. It is only natural. I owe you no thanks for it; for it was you alone that made me what I am. It has been wisely said that no one can act from a wholly bad motive. That is all I mean. I loved the boy a little—as much indeed as I can love anything again—and perhaps I thought to save him from what I had suffered. To love a woman was my curse. Perhaps I strove a little to bless him with such a wisdom as would save him from that. That is what I have done for your son, Gretchen; and now, when I turn over the pages of my miserable life, there is at least one pleasant chapter where I may linger."

She saw it was hopeless now, and rose to her feet. The one ray of light was gone again, but before she dismissed him she longed to know one thing. So she drew up her stately figure and faced him with the courage of a woman who felt she was being punished beyond her crime. He was a coward to her now.

"Is that all you have to say to me, Chancellor?" she said, looking straight in his face.

"It was your majesty who sought the interview," he replied. "It can end when you wish."

"Is there nothing you have kept back? Have you not one blow in reserve?" He did not answer, so she went on, "I ask because you tell me that you have taught my son to look on women as the basest creatures of God. I, his mother, am the type in your eyes. Have you told him this too?"

"Does your majesty insist on an answer?"

"I insist on nothing. I am powerless to do so. I only thought you would not be coward enough to add this new torment to my punishment."

"I am only what your majesty has made me."

"Then God help us both," she said, checking an angry outburst that was on her lips. "You may retire."

Her attempt had failed. It was her first thought when he was gone, as she sank into her chair again. She had failed, and only added to her load the terrible uncertainty whether her son had been told of her crime. Yet she knew she had gained something which she least expected to find. Till now she had pitied her old lover, and that had prevented her giving way to open hostility. She had stood in awe of him, too, but now it seemed different. He was a pitiless and craven bully. Why should she feel for him, who had no spark of sympathy for her? He was a thing to despise and not to fear. So when they entered to announce the supper-hour, she rose up calmly, knowing she had found a new courage for the struggle before her.

CHAPTER V. MADEMOISELLE DE TRICOTRIN.

"The ladies took it heavily."

The excitement produced by the arrival of the Marquis de Tricotrin and his daughter at the Court of Oneiria was only to be expected. It was perfectly understood that the King must marry within the year, and it would hardly describe the situation to say that the chances of Mademoiselle de Tricotrin were discussed with greater animation than those of any previous candidate for the "crown of kisses." For her case was regarded as a certainty. But that only made the excitement to see her more intense, and, perhaps, no royal ball in Oneiria was ever so brilliantly attended as that at which the lady was to make her début the day following her arrival at the capital.

It was a scene that it is difficult for us even to imagine. Costume in Oneiria was as yet entirely untainted by revolutionary ideas. Rumours of the new fashions had indeed reached the country, but they had been ignored as the ridiculous affectations of low-bred fanatics. The fantastic modes of the century were in the heyday of their glory, and indeed had reached a degree of extravagance which it was natural to look for in so advanced and elegant a court as that of Kophetua XIII. In no other spot on earth perhaps could you have seen the vulgar handiwork of Nature so completely effaced as in his ballroom to-night.

Under mountains of powdered curls, and forests of ribbons, in which crouched large tropical birds, the women limped on tiny, high-heeled shoes, as though their exquisite refinement could not endure the comparatively crude ideas of their Creator; every characteristic of their humanity was distorted or obliterated past all recognition with yard-long stomachers, high-peaked stays, and hoops that mocked at Heaven; and the men pursued them in every extravagance, with patch and powder and paint, with stiff full skirts and grotesque headgear, as though refinement were only to be found in effeminacy. It was a living garden of artificial flowers, where the natural blossoms on figured satins seemed to deride the unnatural bloom on disfigured faces.

Still it was a brilliant kaleidoscopic scene as the rooms filled up, and coteries fell into groups to chat till the King appeared. For there was an immense deal of gossip to be got through. On the question of the hour nobody knew anything, and every one had something to tell. General Dolabella was completely invested the moment he entered the rooms, and a lisping fire was at once opened on him to compel him to surrender his authoritative information.

For of course the General knew all about it. He was a minister, uniting in his own person the offices of Commander-in-chief and Director of Public Worship. It was said to have been the last act of the founder to bring together these two portfolios. He looked upon the standing army and the Church as the two great enemies of personal liberty, and it is supposed his idea was that no one man would ever be able to develop both to a dangerous degree of efficiency; or, as others conjectured, he hoped by drawing the two departments into close proximity to increase the chance of friction between them. In this the arrangement was very successful, though it certainly led to some extraordinary results.

General Dolabella had held his place for many years, and was regarded successful administrator. He was a man of two sides, as he often said himself, and perhaps his success was due to that. It was undoubtedly this gift which had won him the confidence of the Kallikagathist party and placed him at its head. It had procured him, besides, advantages such as few enjoy. Though a married man, with a growing family, he was a professed misogynist. It was the tone which the King gave to the Court, and the General was nothing if not fashionable. He spoke of his marriage as an imprudence of his youth. But it did not stand in his way. His wife, of whom it must be said he stood a little in awe, was so entirely deceived by the tone of his conversation, that she never interfered with his little flirtations, and it must be confessed he had not a few. There was hardly a woman at Court whom he had not loved in his time. To an ordinary man it would have been difficult to reconcile such tastes with the character of a professed misogynist, but the dually constituted General was not an ordinary man. He from the first made it his mission to convert the women of the Court to the creed professed by the men, beginning with the prettiest as being probably the most dangerous heretics. If he had not as yet made many converts, he had succeeded in vastly amusing himself and his little friends, and it was with the satisfied smile of a popular cavalier that the General received the broadside of questions his fair besiegers delivered.

"I protest, you should have declared war in proper form," said the gallant warrior, as he balanced himself on his tight satin shoes, with his elbows squeezed closely in to his pinched waist, and his white hands, half hidden in lace, toying mincingly before him with his cane. "This procedure is extremely uncanonical. Had you sent me a trumpet to blow a formal citation I should have been prepared for you. But where was ever a woman," he added, with the sweetest smile, "who would not take a mean advantage if she could?"

"You are a vastly provoking man, General," said one of his oldest experiments. "You know all about them, and could tell us if you chose."

"May I die," answered the Minister, "if I know more than yourselves."

"But we know nothing," they cried, in excited chorus.

"Well, then," said Dolabella, with an air of pity, "I suppose I must tell you what I have heard, or your poor little hearts will ache with curiosity."

"Dear General!" they responded, like a choir.

"You must know then, to begin with," he said, "the Marquis is an émigré. Some two or three years past, having imbibed the principles without the practice of the Revolution, he was obliged to leave his country. At first, it is said, he went to England, and then, on the advice of the doctors, he came to the Canaries."

"But what about the daughter?" asked the ladies. "Is she a Girondist or a Jacobin, or whatever they are?"

"I know no more," answered the General; "except that a long correspondence between the Queen-mother and the Spanish Governor has resulted in an invitation."

"Then it is an Agathist nomination," said the ladies, prepared to make up their minds accordingly.

"I really cannot say," replied the Minister, "without breach of confidence. But see, here comes his majesty. How well he looks!"

Everybody turned to see the King enter the ballroom with his mother. As they passed down the room people remarked that she seemed pale and weary, but that the King never looked better. It was always an excitement to both girls and mothers to try and get a bow all to themselves on these occasions. There was a saying amongst them in Oneiria that where there is a bachelor there is hope. And, besides, whatever may have been his motives, Turbo had been entirely successful in his education of the Prince. He had grown to have a manner with women which, combined with his personal beauty and the additional advantage of a crown, was irresistible. In public it was one of extreme deference and courtesy, which, as he was never tired of hinting in the most delicately chosen phrases, arose from the duty he owed to himself, and not because the objects of his attentions in any way deserved them. But it was when alone with a woman that he shone the brightest. Then his deferential manner was spiced with a charming effrontery. It never went as far as disrespect, and yet it was so unlike his ordinary demeanour, that each delighted victim thought he reserved it for herself alone. So it came about as Turbo had promised himself, and many a girl looked eagerly that night for one kind glance before her new rival should appear.

It was the subject of considerable remark that the guests of the evening had not yet arrived. The women put it down to an elaborate toilet, and consoled themselves with the prospect of something really fine, and possibly new; though there was very little chance of that, seeing how advanced and instructed the Court of Oneiria considered itself. The men said it was a mere woman's trick to make a sensation.

It was not till the King had taken his seat on the daïs, and the Chamberlain had cleared before him a wide space in the rustling throng for the opening dance, that a loud voice from the top of the broad oak steps, which descended to the ballroom, announced: "The Marquis and Mademoiselle de Tricotrin."

Every eye was turned to them in a moment as they came down the steps, and in another the whole assembly, oblivious of etiquette, was frankly staring at them. Such a sensation had never been known at Court before within the memory of the oldest Chamberlain. They had looked for a woman like themselves, with hoops wider, waist longer, and head-dress more extravagant, perhaps, than their own. That would not have surprised them considering that she was fresh from Europe, although they seriously doubted whether even a Frenchwoman could go further than themselves. But for this they were quite unprepared. It took away their breath. Above a beautiful face, unrouged, and without a single patch, they saw, instead of a powdered and feathered mountain, a soft mass of flowing, almost dishevelled, warm brown hair. But her dress! That was stranger still. Whatever they might have thought of the rest, this was intolerable. It was nothing but a simple robe of the softest primrose silk, which clung about her perfect figure voluptuously, and frankly expressed every graceful movement of her limbs. Close beneath her breast it was girdled by a golden cord, leaving her arms and shoulders bare. Otherwise it was unconfined, and yet so fashioned as to drape her closely in simple, natural folds. It was, in a word, the beautiful but extravagantly classic costume of the Revolution.

When she saw the ordeal before her, her colour heightened, and she shrank closer to her father's arm, but she recovered directly, and advanced down the lane they instinctively made for her, with the easy complacency of one who knows she is the best dressed woman in the room. Her father looked as proud as his daughter to see their wonder. He was a tall, spare man, with an affectation of Spartan austerity in his face and dress, and he smiled contemptuously on the rouged and bepatched men about him, as with his lovely daughter on his arm he advanced towards the King.

There was certainly a titter as they passed, for the wits were not to be easily cowed, and whispered smart things to their fair neighbours. The ladies, who had no wits to whisper to them, passed judgment for themselves, without, of course, forgetting that they were in the presence of a political event.

"La! what a ridiculous object," said a Kallist lady, with a golden pheasant perching on her wig.

"I protest it is not decent," sniffed a widow of Agathist views and a damaged reputation.

"It is vastly too pronounced to be either elegant or seemly," was the opinion of a superior person's lady, with a turn for aphorism, and a Kallikagathist salon.

But the only question after all was, What would the King think? On tiptoe they watched her reach the daïs, and with a perfect grace salute his hand. A few words passed between them; the King smiled as though thoroughly amused; then, to the utter confusion of the cavillers, they saw him give her his hand to open the ball, and many a sinking heart was compelled to confess to itself that Mademoiselle de Tricotrin, in her first stride, had come nearer the throne than any previous candidate in her whole course.

The King was certainly delighted, and he still wore a smile of complete amusement as he took his place with her for the minuet. As the dance proceeded his delight only became more obvious. And no wonder. There are many beautiful sights under heaven, but none more beautiful than the vision which filled the eyes of the enchanted King. He had never seen a thing like that before. It was as though the very spirit of Nature had taken shape before him. In her the formal bric-à-brac postures, to which he had been accustomed, became transformed with the grace of a poising bird. From one bewitching attitude to another she seemed to float like a soft bright feather playing in a summer wind. Every movement was living with the freedom which her yielding costume allowed. With the grace of the wind-bent reeds her white arms moved in ever-flowing harmony. Now it was to draw the soft silken folds across her daintily, as with one tiny foot advanced she paused in the fitful measures of the dance; and now to raise her little hand to meet the King's with a magic motion, which seemed to waft her towards him. With each new figure the enchantment increased. In the voluptuous movement and the throb of the tinkling music she grew excited, and seemed to forget herself like a child at play. Her ripe lips were parted, her cheeks softly flushed, and her wide blue eyes were filled with an artless look of baby delight.

The whole patched and powdered throng crowded round to see, as close as the hoops would allow. Soon each man and woman was as fascinated as the King. Even the voice of envy was hushed, and some one said afterwards that more than one gentleman who was regarded as a likely nomination for the Parliamentary chair was distinctly seen to smack his lips, a report perhaps which was quite unfounded, and arose merely out of the undisguised admiration depicted on every face.

Yes, on every face, both of man and woman, except the one which the Marquis de Tricotrin alone in all the room was scanning narrowly. Behind the King's empty chair Turbo supported himself, watching the scene uneasily. The Marquis marked with concern and quiet determination the horrible snarl he wore.

"She is dancing, step by step, step by step, right into his heart," said Turbo to himself, his words falling unconsciously in time with the fiddlers, "and the fools made a lane for her to come to the throne—like a queen. It was ominous, but I hardly thought him so unstable. The simpleton is actually taking pains with his dancing."

His lips moved. M. de Tricotrin could hear nothing, but somehow he smiled quietly to himself. It was at that moment that Turbo looked up to see what the Marquis thought of it. Their eyes met, and with the readiness of old diplomatists they advanced frankly to each other.

"Permit me, Marquis," said Turbo, smiling as nearly as he could, "to trespass so far on really sacred grounds as to observe that your daughter is charming."

"You must positively allow me, Chancellor," said the Marquis, "to tell her what you say, at the risk of turning her head. It will be of inestimable help to her. She really knows nothing, and is quite afraid of her gaucheries."

"Indeed," answered Turbo, "and she seemed so instructed! It only shows how rich an inheritance it is of itself to be the child of a man like you, who knows everything."

"Nay, Chancellor," said the Marquis, with a bow, "you flatter me monstrously. My knowledge is not what you think, but since you so frankly declare yourself my friend, I will confess to a pretty trick of guessing many things I have no means of knowing."

The dance ended, and with it their conversation. It had not been long, but for those two it was enough to bring about a mutual understanding. Each took it as a declaration of war, and began at once to look for vantage-points.

Before the end of the evening the King had danced another minuet with Mademoiselle de Tricotrin. She performed with even greater grace and abandon than before, and her success was complete. The ball of course was a failure. It had promised exceedingly well, but then a great misfortune had befallen it. There had been one woman present who far outshone the rest. Nothing can be much more disastrous to a ball than that. The nice women could not help feeling humbled, the others were full of envy. As for the men, they were inattentive, preoccupied, and discontented. For them it was an evening of disillusionment. Mademoiselle de Tricotrin's radiance killed the prettiest face in the room. It was impossible for them to disguise, even by the most desperate attempts at gallantry, that the whole time they were thinking of the new beauty. The women were pardonably resentful. Under these circumstances gallantry is apt to lose much of its flavour, and the number of silent couples was phenomenal.

Mademoiselle de Tricotrin left early, pleading fatigue. The King followed almost immediately, and then the ball collapsed. Every one was glad to get away. For the women life was a blank till they had a gown like Mademoiselle de Tricotrin's. They had no interest in anything but how to procure one with the utmost speed. No one seemed to doubt for a moment that a complete change was to come over the Court, and the De Tricotrins were to lead the fashion. Every man with any pretensions to style went away registering a determination to suborn the Marquis's valet; and as the two strangers were carried to their lodging in the neighbourhood of the palace, perhaps there was no Oneirian so happy as the Queen-mother.

"Well, my child?" said the Marquis interrogatively to his daughter, as soon as they were alone.

"He is just the kind of man I expected to find," answered Mademoiselle de Tricotrin dreamily, as she leant back in her chair and clasped her hands behind her head.

"Then you will manage it?"

"I cannot tell, sir."

"But why not? Let me tell you, my child, I am pleased with you. You never looked prettier. I am certain we shall succeed. Why, the King was simply fascinated."

"Yes," she answered, a little wearily, "I know he was, but that goes a very little way with a man like him."

CHAPTER VI. THE KING'S COUNCILLORS.

"And now he seeks which way to proove,

How he his fancie might remoove."

Monsieur de Tricotrin was right. The King had been fascinated. That was clear. It was the talk of every breakfast-table in Oneiria. And Mlle de Tricotrin was right too. It made very little difference to the King, except to amuse him; but this was not so clear to the breakfast-tables.

Amused Kophetua certainly was. It was highly entertaining to see how clever the little woman was. He quite laughed to himself to think how great an impression she had made on him, and he looked forward with a fresh pleasure to playing with a toy of such exquisite ingenuity, without giving a thought to the danger of the pastime. The mere fact that he was charmed he considered quite a sufficient safeguard. It was only a proof that she was a deeper cheat than the rest, and therefore more contemptible. And yet, somehow, this morning the wiles of women did not appear quite so detestable; he found himself wondering if there were not something to be said for them, when they could produce so delightful a result. He was sitting in the library pretending to transact business with Turbo and Dolabella, when his train of thought brought him for the twentieth time that morning to this same point, and with a half-unconscious desire for protection against what he knew to be a dangerous heresy, he addressed himself to his friends.

"What a charming woman Mlle de Tricotrin would be," he said, "to any one who could not see through her!"

The general started. He happened to have a piece of business that morning, but he was absent, and had made little progress: and now Kophetua's voice suddenly awoke him to the mortifying fact that, with a view of ascertaining the value of a living which was under his consideration, he was unconsciously looking out "Tricotrin" in the army list. Turbo did not start at all. He had been watching the King, and expecting the remark for the last hour.

"Yes, she is certainly very pretty," said the General, with a confusion which was not bettered by his feeling immediately that he ought to have said something else.

"That is assuredly the case, sire," said Turbo, looking hard at the disconcerted General. "It is very fortunate we can all see through women so easily."

"But she is clever, isn't she, General?" said the King, with a smile of amusement.

"Well, your majesty," replied the General, regaining his composure, "she might deceive more than a tiro, but to us it was evident from the first."

"Ah!" said Turbo, with more than his ordinary sneer, "I knew what the General would be thinking when she shrank on her father's arm. It was very clumsy."

"Positively disgusting," cried the General, with great relief.

At this moment a chamberlain announced that the Marquis de Tricotrin was at the palace, and awaited General Dolabella's leisure.

"I ventured last night," explained Dolabella hurriedly, "to ask him to see the gardens; we were discussing a little question of tactics which I thought we might elucidate there at our leisure."

"And was his daughter coming with him?" asked the King, with affected unconcern.

"That is what is so annoying," the General answered. "You see he asked if he might bring her, and what could I say? It will be hopeless to settle the point this morning."

"Not at all, General," said Turbo maliciously; "you could not have a better master in tactics than Mlle de Tricotrin."

"Yes," laughed the King, "you had better go at once. I excuse your further attendance."

"What a child our General is!" said the King when he was gone. "Now tell me what you thought of her, Turbo. It always amuses me."

So Turbo told the King what he wanted the King to think. He was never more trenchant or merciless; but the more he reviled, the more clearly there came before the King's eyes the beautiful face and the baby look it wore when she seemed to forget herself in the dance. Whether it was this, or whether it was that Turbo was more brutal than usual, it matters little, but the King was not amused. The Chancellor's coarse satire seemed particularly distasteful. He began to wish he had not started the subject. At last as he listened he noticed the founder's rapier was still lying on the table between them. That increased his discomfort. He looked up into the shadows under the morion, and then at his watch. It was time for his morning walk, and he descended by his private stair into the gardens.

There was a long and trim grass alley where he was accustomed to take the air, and, plunged as he was in thought, he turned into it mechanically almost before he knew. The sound of women's voices aroused him, and he looked up to see a sight which convinced him that General Dolabella's point in tactics was likely to be thoroughly discussed that morning after all. For from the end of the alley he saw his mother and Mlle de Tricotrin approaching. They were talking, but were too far for him to hear what they said, yet not so far but that he could see that the beauty looked if possible more beautiful than last night.

She was dressed in the same kind of soft high-girdled gown, in strange contrast with the Queen-mother's stiff brocades. Her face glowed with freshness like a flower, and she seemed in the King's eyes more natural than Nature itself, or at least than it was permitted to be in the gardens of the Palace. For there Nature was generously assisted, not merely with the trim clipping and rectilinear planting of our old English gardens. In Oneiria they had advanced a long way beyond the ideas which the old knight brought with him: the inorganic kingdoms had been called in to supply the poverty of the organic, and vases and statues were there without number. As though to show Nature what a mistake she had committed, the vases were made to look like shrubs and the shrubs like vases, and the long-legged statues seemed always in a gale of wind, while the trees looked as though a hurricane could not stir their rigidity. It is then little to be wondered at that Mlle de Tricotrin, in the midst of such surroundings, sustained the impression she had originally produced in the King's mind.

She greeted him charmingly, so charmingly indeed, that he a little lost his presence of mind, and in trying to recover his composure he found himself kissing the Queen-mother affectionately. It was difficult to say how it happened, unless it was that she looked so happy and motherly that morning. When it was over he was sufficiently himself again to notice that Mlle de Tricotrin was gazing at him with a look of admiration he had not noticed before; and it disturbed his balance once more that she did not lower her blue eyes when he caught her looking at him, but continued to watch him from under her long dark lashes while he made her his compliments.

"It is fortunate we met," said the Queen-mother, when the first few words were over. "I wanted to go in. It is too hot for me here. We were trying to find Monsieur de Tricotrin; but you can take my place now, Kophetua."

Kophetua did not think it at all fortunate. In fact he was getting a little afraid of Mlle de Tricotrin. She had a disturbing effect upon him, but he could hardly refuse, especially since the Queen-mother withdrew as she spoke and left them in the alley alone.

They were some time in finding the Marquis. In fact the Marquis had seen everything from a terrace behind the trees, and had no intention of allowing himself to be found too soon. So the poor General, with rueful countenance, had to listen at painful length to certain invaluable military opinions which the Marquis had acquired at second-hand. The King's conversation was certainly more pleasant. He soon regained his composure as they strolled along, and began to talk.

"I am sure, sire," she said, after they had admired the garden a little, "you must be the one perfectly happy man in the world. Till yesterday," she added, with something like a sigh, "I thought there was not even one."

"And why do you think I am that one, mademoiselle?" asked the King.

"Because you have everything, sire."

"But you forget I am a King."

"No, sire. I remember it. I know kings should be the unhappiest men in the world while those they govern are so unhappy. In France a prince like you would be miserable, but it is different here where every one is so happy and none are oppressed, or poor, or wicked."

"And do you think that should make me happy, mademoiselle?"

"Yes, sire, I know it must. Had my ancestors handed me down a kingdom like yours, which they had purged of every evil, I should worship them every day."

"And do you think that nothing more is needed—that it is enough to contemplate the happiness of my subjects?"

"Yes, sire, it is the highest happiness."

"Can you not think there may be something else a man may crave for, something still higher?"

"Is there something else?" she said looking up at him sympathetically.

He paused before he answered. He did not like the way she was drawing him immediately to tell her his inmost thoughts; yet it was so pleasant—this strange, sympathetic power of the beautiful woman at his side, who was so frank and unaffected. It was somehow like talking to a man, and yet so widely different. He knew his next reply would place them on closer terms than he had ever been with a woman before. He hesitated, and then took the plunge.

"I will tell you," he said, speaking with an earnestness which surprised him, and which he could not prevent. "That something else which is highest of all is to contemplate happiness, which you have wrought yourself. What is it to me that my people are contented, rich, and unoppressed? It is not my work. I could not even make them otherwise if I tried. It is my ancestors who have done it all. Without a thought for those who were to come after they laid law to law, and ordinance to ordinance, till the whole was perfect. They tore up every weed, they smoothed down every roughness in their unthinking greed of well-doing. They strove unceasing to perfect their own nobility and gave no heed to me. See in what fetters they have bound my soul. All my life I have striven and denied myself that I might grow up a statesman in fact as well as name; that I might be a physician to my people, to detect and cure the most secret maladies that seize on nations, and stretch out my arm in such wide-reaching strokes as men see wondering, and say, 'There is a king of men.' But you are a woman," he said, suddenly dropping his inspired tone to one of no little bitterness, "and cannot understand what it is for a man to feel thus."

"Indeed, indeed, I understand," she cried, "and from my heart I pity you. I know what you would say. You who rise up and feel your strength to make a garden of the wilderness and see the work is done. I know all you mean. It was what the great voice of the wind said to me, when it had borne our galleon into port so bravely and roared out through the naked spars as we lay at anchor: 'See what a power is in me, but my work is done. You give no heed to the might that is going by, and I must pass on and consume my strength without an end.'"

The King looked at her in wonder. It was a woman that spoke, but they were the words of more than a man. She understood all that he meant; nay, much that he had hardly grasped before. He was more disturbed than ever, and it was with difficulty he steadied his voice to speak.

"Then you can understand, mademoiselle," he said quite softly, "that I am perfectly miserable rather than perfectly happy?"

"Yes, sire," she said; "but such sorrow as yours is a better thing than other men's happiness."

"Yet it is none the less hard to bear."

"True; but it is also the easier to change to gladness."

"I do not understand; what do you mean?"

"There is a remedy so simple that I hardly dare to tell your majesty. I have presumed too far in all this—yet forgive me, sire, if when I heard such words as yours, I forgot that I spoke with a king."

"Nay, tell me all. I desire to know."

"It is then, sire," she said, looking down almost shyly, and speaking with some hesitation,—"it is, when the great things are done, to do the little things that are left undone. It is not given to all to do deeds that sound to the ends of the earth, but there are little things that a great man may do greatly so that they shall ring in the furthest heights of heaven."

"What things are those? I do not understand."

"Perhaps I speak foolishly, yet I feel so strongly, that a man like you would be sure to find them if you sought."

"But where—where am I to seek?"

"Amongst your people. If you were to go down to them so that they might not know you, you would find wrongs to right, wrongs that are little in the eyes of man but great before Heaven. Then you would know in your heart that the greatest acts are those which are done with the loftiest purpose and by the greatest soul."

"You would have me a very Haroun-al-Raschid," he said, with a laugh, for he felt that their talk was getting dangerously elevated, and he was ashamed of his weakness in letting it go so far.

"And why not?" she answered, smiling, as though her mood had changed with his. "What monarch had a happier life or left a happier memory behind him? and it is for the little things that he is remembered. But I see my father," she added, "I need detain your majesty no longer."

With the prettiest curtsey in the world she left him, and Kophetua returned to his apartments with his peace of mind considerably disturbed. The whole day he was the prey of the most conflicting thoughts, but above all to the humiliating conviction that he had been saying to this bewitching Frenchwoman things which he had never breathed in his life to any one but Turbo, his bosom friend. The idea she had suggested was fascinating enough. It would be very pleasant to try, and to tell her of his success afterwards; and at all events an excitement of any kind would be good for him, and serve to get her out of his mind a little.

Which of these considerations weighed most with him perhaps he hardly knew himself. He made and unmade his mind fifty times before nightfall; but still it is certain that as the moon rose Trecenito found himself stealing out of the private entrance of his gardens with his hair dishevelled and unpowdered, and his person concealed with a wide slouch hat, and a voluminous cloak or burnouse which he used on his hunting expeditions.

CHAPTER VII. THE LIBERTIES OF ST. LAZARUS.

"He saw a beggar all in gray."

It has been said already that the beggar class in Oneiria enjoyed peculiar and extensive privileges. It was a factor in the Oneirian polity, that one would hardly have expected to find, and its existence would be hard to explain were it not for a passage in a memoir, which the founder left behind him, as an exposition of the motives which led him to adopt some of the more unusual provisions of the constitution. The style is no less crabbed and tortuous than it is usual to find at the time, but it is none the less interesting as giving us a glimpse into the old knight's habit of thought.

"Forasmuch," it runs, "as the riches of this world have been bestowed on us, not for each man's ease and delight, which is the seedbed of sloth and gluttony, but rather for the perfecting of our natures by charity and almsgiving, whereby we are made partakers of all Christian virtue; so at the first I was shrewdly exercised how this medicine should be furnished for men's souls in a state where none should want. The [missing word] which fears at last brought me to draw into one body all the useless and most outlandish of my people, to whom all manner of work should be forbidden, that a guild of beggars might be made, to be a receptacle for all that was imperfectable in the community, whereby, as it appeared to me, I could make such men, as were otherwise useless and noxious to the state, useful citizens in respect that they would serve as a whetstone to the virtue of the rest, and, as it were, lay up for my garden a dung-heap or midden, which though itself is stinking and full of corruption, yet being dug in in season, bringeth up a plenteous growth of most sweet flowers and wholesome herbs."

The dung-heap commenced on these philosophical lines grew amazingly, and on the whole to the general health and cleanliness. Everything that had gone bad in the state drained into it by a natural process, and the resulting mass of human garbage which had collected at the time of which we are speaking thoroughly deserved the evil reputation it had earned. Yet no one thought of interfering with it. A quarter of the city and a secluded valley into which it sloped away had been assigned to the guild by the founder, and as long as it did not exceed its boundaries it was allowed to go on gathering, festering and growing. A certain number of the beggars were permitted to exercise their profession at the palace gates, otherwise it was all kept out of sight. Private people congratulated themselves on the excellent social drainage it afforded, and lived as if they did not know of its existence. They avoided the subject, gave their annual alms, and enjoyed the virtue so purchased till the time came round for laying in another stock. As for the government, it behaved in much the same way as the citizens. Every year it handed its donation from the central fund to the "Emperor" of the guild, as he was called, and suffered him to make and administer his own laws within the liberties without any inquiry or interference. It was whispered that some of these laws were of the most barbarous kind, and when people remembered what a conglomeration of nationalities, both savage and civilised, the guild represented, they, as a rule, changed the conversation, as if they were afraid to think what loathsome poisons might have been produced by the fermenting together of so much heterogeneous matter.

It was only natural then that Kophetua should wend his way to the beggars' quarter. It had been instituted by the founder for the increase of virtue, and he determined to seek in the reeking dung-heap for the elements to make fertile the soul he felt so barren within him. Moreover, as soon as the idea suggested itself, he began to see very clearly that the dung-heap had grown to a great wrong that was worthy of his best efforts to put right. He even confessed to himself that he had been aware of this for a long time, but either from cowardice or indolence he had refused to allow his dreaming to stiffen into a purpose. He always dismissed the idea almost before it was conceived, and fell back again into his old colourless life with its never-changing round of banalities and affectation. With each relapse his selfishness and cynicism grew more hard. It only wanted one great effort to stir his barren soul, and one brave grapple with sin and hideousness, to make all his heroism spring up in a harvest of golden grain. He knew that well enough in his better moments, yet he dreamed the dream and awoke, and was selfish and cynical and indolent still.

But now he was aroused at last. He was ashamed to think whose voice it was that had awakened him. He wished it had been any other. Still, he strode on under the shadow of the houses with a lighter heart than he had known for many years. And yet it was not without misgiving that he plunged into the liberties of St. Lazarus, as the beggars' quarter was called. It had an evil name, and his life had been so smooth that except in the chase he had never known what danger was. Strange tales were told of what had befallen men who had unwarily entered the quarter, and it was with a beating heart that he passed the great "Beggars' Gate."

He was no sooner past the barrier, however, than he saw before him a sight which drove everything else from his mind. Hurrying up the street in front of him was an ungainly, limping figure, which it was impossible to mistake. That gait could be none but Turbo's. What could it mean? Where could he be going? Kophetua drew closer under the shadow of the houses and followed.

Turn after turn the Chancellor took till he seemed to be seeking the very bowels of the liberty, and Kophetua began to feel it would be hard to find his way out again. Every now and then they passed a beggar, but the King only drew his hat more closely down and hurried on. At last Turbo stopped at a little door in what seemed the wall of a court or garden, and after looking round stealthily to see if he were followed he entered. Kophetua walked quickly to the door, which the Chancellor had carefully closed after him. Once there, he knew he had made no mistake, and understood at last the strange interest his Chancellor always took in the beggars at the palace gate.

"Nay, my pretty lump of foulness, do not avoid me," he heard Turbo's mocking voice say; "I have found you alone this time, and you must come perforce."

"Stand back! stand back!" gasped a woman's voice; "I will cry out and alarm them."

"You dare not, foul sweetheart," said Turbo; "you know too well the penalty when one of you is found with one of us. Nay, do not struggle so. There's no escape to-night."

There was a low choking cry of horror, and Kophetua burst open the door. At first he saw no one. He found himself in a little court behind a dilapidated house. Across the end where he stood ran a verandah in deep shadow. The noise of his entrance had hushed every sound. He could see nothing nor hear anything but his beating heart, when suddenly he was aware that a dark shadow had glided out of the verandah and had slipped by him through the door. Then in the far end he heard a low moan, and saw as he approached what seemed a heap of dirty rags lying in a corner, but he knew directly it was the lifeless form of a woman.

She did not move when he touched her, so he carried her out and laid her down in the bright moonlight to see what ailed her. Very tenderly he rested her head on his knee and bent over the motionless form to feel for life in it.

It was not without disgust that he did so, for it was only a beggar-girl he could see now, and she was no cleaner than her kind. Her face and hands were covered with dirt, her thick dark hair was matted and unkempt, and the rags that covered her were filthy beyond description. Yet her face looked so pale and careworn and delicate that he forgot all her foulness in his pity, and tried his best to revive her.

At last she sighed deeply, and opened her eyes. They were large and dark and trustful, and they looked straight up into his with a strange wonder; so long and earnestly did she gaze at him with her far-off look, that he felt a sort of fascination coming over him, and began to think how every one said the beggars were half of them witches. It was a great relief to see a dreamy smile lighting up her wan face. She stretched up her hands to him, and then dropped them as though she was too weak or too happy for anything but to lie as she was.

"Are you the great God?" she whispered, "or only an angel?"

"Lie still, child, a little," he said tenderly; "I am only human like yourself."

"Only a man!" she whispered with increasing wonder in her great dark eyes. "I thought I was dead and lay in God's lap. They say I shall, some day when my misery is done; but if you are a man, He will be too beautiful for me. Let me lie here a little where I am and dream again."