BERKELEY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UN»vewiw Of 
 
 CALIfOiTMIA 
 
 / Fc^Ui 
 
 Urpsi 
 
HELIANTHUS 
 
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
HELIANTHUS 
 
 A NOVEL 
 
 BY 
 
 OUIDA 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
 I 908 
 
Copyright in the United States of America^ 1908 
 
D339 
 
 ML 
 
 PUBLISHERS' NOTE 
 
 The unfinished novel contained in the following 
 pages is the last work of the gifted writer who was 
 so widely known during her lifetime under the nom 
 de plume of * Ouida.* Illness and other causes 
 retarded her in writing the story, which as a matter 
 of fact was planned and outlined some years ago, 
 and at her death it was found to be still incomplete. 
 Fortunately, however, the first twenty-nine chapters 
 had been set up in type as they were written ; and 
 as these chapters would clearly have constituted by 
 far the larger portion of the completed book, it has 
 been judged best to publish them, without alteration 
 or addition, exactly in the form in which they were 
 left by their author after having been revised by her 
 in proof. 
 
 February 1908. 
 
 683 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 The sun was setting over the sea of the west, and 
 its glow shone on the beautiful and classic city of 
 Helios, the capital of the ancient land of Helianthus. 
 In the long and stately streets, clouds of dust were 
 golden with the sad reflection of an unseen glory 
 which is, at such an hour, all that many thousands of 
 the dwellers in cities enjoy of the beauty of evening. 
 The thoroughfares of the capital were full of people, 
 and down the central street of all, so famous in 
 history, a cavalcade was passing, a military feast for 
 the eyes of a population which was not allowed many 
 other pleasures. On either side of the street, which 
 had been in great part widened, altered, modernised, 
 made monotonous and correct, white marble was the 
 chief architectural feature, and great white palaces 
 towered towards the clear sky, which was blue, deeply 
 blue, like the bells of the wild hyacinth. Striped 
 awnings, scarlet and white, the national colours, 
 stretched over the balconies ; there were flags droop- 
 ing from gilded flagstafl^s in most of the windows, 
 from most of the doorways ; the flowers which 
 had been cast down from above on to the pavement 
 were already trodden into the dust, and there was 
 
 (B B 
 
2 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 a curious odour of natural and artificial perfumes, of 
 burnt powder, of trampled roses, of hot flesh, equine 
 and human, steaming from the heat of the past day. 
 Porphyry pillars, galleries of gilded metal, of pierced 
 woodwork or of bronze arabesques, sculptured 
 porticoes, painted shrines, plate-glass shop-fronts, 
 hanging tapestries, frescoed frontages, shone in the 
 amber luminance of the early evening. The dull- 
 coloured clothing of a metropolitan crowd was largely 
 broken up by the deep yellows, the red purples, the 
 light blues, the dark crimsons, of the costumes of the 
 country, and of the seafaring, peoples, and by the 
 uniforms of the soldiery lining the edges of the 
 pavements ; great bursts of martial music enlivened 
 the air ; the brilliancy of sunset lent to the scene a 
 gaiety not its own. 
 
 Despite the passing of two thousand years 
 the capital of Helianthus was still a beautiful and 
 classic city, throned on its eternal hills, with the 
 semicircle of its shore washed by the Mare Magnum, 
 and the mountains on the opposite side of the 
 bay soaring to the clouds, and often capped by 
 snow until the month of May. Modernity, the 
 brutal and blundering Cyclops who misconceives 
 himself to be a fruitful and beneficent deity, had 
 struck his stupid blows at its temples, its domes, 
 its towers, its palaces, had strewn its soil with 
 shattered marbles, had felled its sacred laurel 
 groves, had sullied or silenced its falling or rushing 
 waters, had befouled with smoke its white marble 
 colonnades, its towering palm plumes, its odorous 
 gardens. Modernity had driven his steam-roller 
 over the narcissus, the hyacinth, the cheiranthus ; 
 and steam pistons throbbed where the doves of 
 
I HELIANTHUS 3 
 
 Aphrodite had nested. But the city was still noble 
 through the past, and unspeakably fair through those 
 portions of unviolated heritage which it retained ; 
 and its domes and minarets and bell - towers still 
 shone in the light of the sun or the moon against the 
 deep green of its cypress and cedar groves. 
 
 Many of its streets were still untouched ; its 
 women still carried their bronze jars to its fountains ; 
 its avenues of planes, and tulip-trees, and magnolias, 
 were not all destroyed, though defiled by the shriek- 
 ing tramway engines, the stinking automobiles, and 
 though their boughs were often cruelly hacked and 
 cut away to leave free passage for these modern 
 gods, the electric wire and the petrol car. Ever and 
 again, some porphyry basin whose waters gleamed 
 beneath the great green leafage of sycamores ; some 
 colossal figure of hero or of deity ; some silent stately 
 arcade, with the sea glistening beyond its arches ; 
 some sun-browned, mighty, crenelated wall ; some 
 vast palace with ogive windows, and gratings elabor- 
 ately wrought, and bronze doors in basso-relievo, 
 and deep overhanging roofs, and machicolated 
 towers ; these would recall all that Helios had been 
 in ages when its white oxen were sacrificed to gods 
 who are now remembered only in the nomenclature 
 of the constellations of the sky, and its poets, who 
 are still quoted by mankind, were crowned with the 
 wild olive and the laurel in its holy places. With 
 furious haste whole quarters had been torn down 
 and swept aside and replaced by the mindless, ignoble, 
 and monotonous constructions of the present time ; 
 but other quarters still remained where the native 
 population thronged together, gay in their poverty 
 and mirthful in their rags, although hunger lay 
 
4 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 down with them at night and arose with them in 
 the morning, continual companion of their working 
 hours. For a brief space on this festal day they 
 ceased from labour, and tried to forget their 
 starvation in the sight of their rulers and the 
 soldiery of this imperial and military spectacle. 
 
 The King had already passed, with his beloved 
 friend and nephew, one of those friends to be kissed 
 on both cheeks and watched with hand on hilt. It 
 was for the Emperor Julius that the military display 
 on the Field of Ares had been made that day, and 
 the Emperor Julius had said many sweet and gracious 
 things about it : what he had thought was another 
 matter, which concerned no one. 
 
 After the King, there had passed the Crown 
 Prince, with his cousin, the young son of the great 
 Julius, receiving the conventional cheers which are 
 given to those who are powerful but not beloved. 
 Then had followed a squadron of White Cuirassiers, 
 a dazzling regiment ; some companies of the Rhastian 
 Mountaineers, a popular corps, with the feathers of 
 the wild turkey in their hats ; some squadrons of 
 light cavalry on weedy and weary horses, not well- 
 groomed and still less well-fed, the small and slender 
 horses of the treeless plains of the south-east; and 
 some field-batteries not exceedingly smart in appear- 
 ance nor exact in movement, of which the gun- 
 carriages lumbered along, too heavy for their weakly 
 teams, whilst the metal of cannon and of caisson 
 was dusty and dull. After these tramped some 
 companies of infantry, very young soldiers, thin, 
 and small of stature, who wore ill-fitting uniforms 
 and were footsore and fatigued. No one cheered 
 these. 
 
I HELIANTHUS 5 
 
 Suddenly there was a movement of reviving 
 interest ; the ladies who had risen to leave the 
 balconies returned, and reseated themselves ; the 
 people pushed each other forward, and scrambled 
 to get out of the centre of the roadway, the guards 
 thrusting back some scores roughly and needlessly. 
 A half-squadron of Hussars came in sight, trotting 
 briskly with drawn swords ; behind them was an 
 open carriage with four horses and postillions in the 
 royal liveries, azure and silver. In the carriage was 
 a young man in uniform, who carried his hussar's 
 shako on his knee, and nodded familiarly with a 
 tired smile to the multitudes who cheered him. He 
 did not look up to the balconies and windows of the 
 palaces, although their occupants cast roses and lilies 
 down as he passed ; he looked at the populace 
 crowding the roadway. 
 
 He came and went in a cloud of sun-gilt dust, a 
 vehement and ardent roar of voices greeting him on 
 his way ; ladies above waved their handkerchiefs and 
 kissed the flowers they threw ; the people below 
 pushed and hurt each other in their efforts to get 
 nearer to him ; his carriage swept by in a storm of 
 applause and loud cries of ' Elim ! Elim ! Elim ! 
 Long live Prince Elim ! ' 
 
 * There goes one who is at heart with us,' said a 
 journalist of the city to a friend as they stood 
 together in the crowd. 
 
 ' No,' said the friend, who was wiser. * He is 
 with no one. He sees too clearly to find satisfaction 
 in modern politics. We cannot content him any 
 more than his own people do.' 
 
 The young prince passing at that moment recog- 
 nised the two speakers as writers on the Republican 
 
6 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 Press of Helios, and made them a friendly gesture 
 of his hand. 
 
 His father's police-spies, mingling with the throng 
 as mere citizens or operatives, saw the gesture and 
 noted it. 
 
 His carriage passed on, the horses fretting and 
 fuming at the pressure of the populace against their 
 flanks. 
 
 The people cried again : ' Elim ! Elim ! Elim ! 
 Long life to Elim ! ' 
 
 He bowed to the crowds with a smile which was 
 neither glad nor gay. He was thinking : ' They 
 would come out in the same numbers to see the pro- 
 cession of a travelling menagerie ; and if there were 
 a blue lion or a green tiger to be seen they would 
 cheer as warmly.' 
 
 He regretted that the crowds did come out, did 
 cheer. It dwarfed human nature in his eyes ; it 
 made him ashamed of his own countrymen. So, if 
 the statue of a god could think, would it feel towards 
 its worshippers, whether it were named Zeus, Buddha, 
 Christ, or Jehovah. 
 
 To the mind of the thinker there is no spectacle 
 more painful, more provocative of wonder and of 
 sadness, than the sight of the multitudes of a capital 
 city standing for hours in sun, or rain, or snow, 
 elbowing each other for a foremost place, breaking 
 down tree -tops, stone copings, marble pedestals, 
 bruising the bosoms of women and crushing the limbs 
 of children, in order to see a royal procession pass by 
 along familiar roadways. And this young prince 
 was a thinker, a philosophic thinker, although having 
 been born in the purple he had no right to be so. 
 For the first duty of a prince is never to allow his 
 
I HELIANTHUS 7 
 
 mind to stray outside the ring-fence of received and 
 conventional opinion ; he must never question the 
 superiority of his own order any more than the 
 serving-priest of Christian churches must question 
 the divinity of the Eucharist. If you do not believe 
 in yourself, who will believe in you ? 
 
 The young prince now passing between the two 
 lines of cheering people did not believe in himself, nor 
 in his order, nor in his family, nor in any superiority of 
 his or theirs. The enthusiasm of the crowds left him 
 cold, for he rightly regarded such enthusiasm as too 
 similar to the blind worship of trees and stones and 
 carven woods by barbaric races, to be worth anything 
 in the estimation of a reasonable being. It was fetish- 
 worship : nothing else. That he himself was the 
 fetish at the moment could not make the superstition 
 any more worthy in his sight. 
 
 Three thousand years earlier the people of Egypt 
 had thus clamoured in praise of their Pharaohs. 
 Where was the progress of the human race .'' Why 
 must humanity always have a fetish of some sort ? 
 Why ? It would perplex the wisest philosopher to 
 say. Bisons and buffaloes in a natural state of exist- 
 ence elect a monarch, we are told ; but they are said 
 to take the strongest, greatest, finest of the herd. 
 Men do not do this ; they cannot do it ; for a civilised 
 man, being a complicated creature, is apt to lack in 
 one thing in proportion to what he possesses in 
 another. If the successful fighter be selected by them, 
 as by the bison or buffalo, they get a Wellington who 
 becomes a failure in politics ; or if they take the 
 man of genius, they get a Lamartine or a Disraeli ; or 
 even if they obtain a Napoleon, power goes to their 
 Napoleon's head and all is red ruin. So, in fear of 
 
8 HELIANTHUS chap, 
 
 the unusual, they cling to the ordinary conventional 
 hereditary person, and endow him with imaginary 
 ^qualities, and hedge him about with symbols, and 
 functions, and office-holders, and make-belief of all 
 kinds. The bison and buffalo would not be satisfied 
 with this ; but man is, or at least the majority of 
 men are. 
 
 * Is that one of the King*s sons ? ' asked a foreigner 
 speaking ill the language of the country. 
 
 The artisan to whom he spoke understood the 
 question, despite the ugly accent of the stranger. 
 
 * Who are you, that you do not know Elim ? ' he 
 replied. 
 
 * Elim ? ' repeated the foreigner, not compre- 
 hending. 
 
 ' Prince Elim,' repeated the man. * Our Elim.' 
 
 * The Duke of Othyris/ added another working- 
 man. 
 
 ' Oh, to be sure,' said the stranger, * the Heir 
 Presumptive, is he not ? ' 
 
 * The most popular person in the country,' said an 
 idler, who had a carnation between his teeth. 
 
 ' He seems very popular indeed,' said the foreigner, 
 with interrogation in his tone. 
 
 ' All the family are,' said the idler with the carna- 
 tion drily ; then catching from under the white cap 
 of one who was dressed like a cook from a restaurant 
 a sharp glance, which seemed to him that of a spy in 
 disguise, he raised his hat and said reverently, * Christ 
 have them all in His keeping.' 
 
 The foreigner was touched. * And they say these 
 people are malcontents and revolutionaries ! ' he 
 murmured to a companion, as he stooped to pick up 
 a rose which had been thrown from a window to the 
 
, HELIANTHUS 9 
 
 carnage of the Duke of Othyris, and had missed its 
 
 ' The malcontents have muzzles on,' said his friend. 
 * Sixteen hundred men were clapped in prison before 
 the Emperor's arrival, and some thousands are con- 
 fined to their own houses/ 
 
 ' But it is a constitutional country ! ' protested 
 the traveller from overseas. 
 
 * Oh yes,' answered the other, ' on paper and in 
 theory ! ' 
 
 ' Circulate, circulate, circulate ! ' said the gen- 
 darmes, imitating their brethren of the larger capitals 
 of Europe, and enforcing their order with thrusts 
 from their elbows, or from the pommels of their 
 sabres, into the ribs or the chests of the people. 
 
 The glow from the western sky died down, the 
 shadows lengthened and crept upward to the zinc 
 roofs ; the balconies were emptied, the electric light 
 flashed suddenly down the whole street, and made 
 the faces of the multitude look hard, jaded, pallid, 
 dejected ; a dull silence fell on the populace, a silence 
 in which the rumbling of the tram-cars, readmitted 
 to movement after half-a-day's exclusion, sounded like 
 a caricature of the artillery which had passed down 
 there twenty minutes before. The tired children 
 cried, the hustled women sighed, the men who had 
 been knocked about by fists and sabres went sullenly 
 homeward, the wounded were carried into hospital ; 
 the festivities were over. 
 
 From the open windows of the palaces and hotels 
 arose a steam and scent of good things to eat and 
 good wines to drink, and spread itself through all the 
 length of the street, mingling with, and overpowering, 
 the odours of flowers, and powder, and hot human 
 
lo HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 and equine flesh. It made many of the poorer sight- 
 seers in the crowd feel hungry, more hungry than 
 ever ; and it made the little tired children cry louder 
 to go home. 
 
 ' The Romans gave bread as well as the Circus/ 
 thought EHm, Duke of Othyris, as his carriage turned 
 in at his palace gates. 'We are more economical. 
 We only give the Circus, and even that we run for 
 our own use.' 
 
 The sound of cheering in the distance rolled down 
 the soft air and sounded like repeated firing. 
 
 What were they cheering now ? Who ? Why ^ 
 At that instant the crowd gathered before his own 
 residence in the Square of the Dioscuri was cheering 
 himself; but that made the ovation seem no wiser 
 to him. 
 
 What was that clamour worth ? 
 
 Ten minutes earlier they had cheered his father 
 and his imperial cousin. They had cheered equally 
 the great artillery guns, and the sweating battery 
 horses, although they knew well enough that if 
 they themselves offended authority, the guns would 
 belch red death on to them, and the horses be driven, 
 under the slashing whip cord, over their fallen 
 bodies. 
 
 * O fools ! O fools ! ' he said to himself, as he who 
 pities humanity is always driven in sorrow, or in 
 anger, or in both, to say it. Panem et Circenses ! 
 It is always the old story. Cassar may use up their 
 bodies on his battlefields, and grind their souls to dust 
 under his tyrannies, if he give them the arena — even 
 without the bread. So long as he pleases their fancies, 
 or dazzles their eyes, they will cheer him ; and they 
 are pleased by so little, and dazzled by such tawdry 
 
I HELIANTHUS ii 
 
 tinsel ! Why did the people flock to see this very 
 paltry pageant ? Why did not the men go about 
 their work or their business, and the women shut 
 their windows ? No one could force them to turn 
 out in their thousands, and waste a whole day ; and 
 if they were not there to line the streets, and be 
 hustled by the police, Caesar might arrive at a juster 
 view of his own actual values and proportions. 
 There is much they cannot do ; but some things they 
 might do ; and to stay indoors on a day like this is 
 one of them. 
 
 The traveller from a distant continent, which is 
 called a new country, probably because it was old 
 when Atlantis was submerged, went to dine at a 
 restaurant which was modelled on the eating-places 
 of that great Guthonic empire ruled by the Emperor 
 Julius ; the cooks were Guthonic, the waiters were 
 Guthonic, even the wines, which were Helianthine, 
 were labelled by Guthonic names. The annexing of 
 a nation usually begins with its bills of fare. 
 
 The stranger from overseas was curious, and 
 questioned the attendant who brought him his coffee 
 and cognac. 
 
 ' What was it,' he asked, * that happened on the 
 Field of Ares to-day, and made the public give such 
 an enthusiastic reception to the King's second son ? ' 
 
 ' There was an unfortunate incident during the 
 march past, sir,' replied the man, seeing that the amount 
 of money left for him on the salver was generous. 
 ' I do not know details. Some country folks got 
 across the line of the defile ; the Duke stopped his 
 squadrons and occupied himself v/ith the safety of the 
 people and their beasts ; the cavalry division was in 
 consequence some minutes late ; it made a break in 
 
12 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 the march past ; it is said His Majesty was displeased 
 at the breach of discipline.' 
 
 'Perhaps he is jealous of his son's greater popu- 
 larity ? ' 
 
 * The King is very popular, sir,' said the waiter 
 with discretion. 
 
 ' Is that so ? ' said the visitor, incredulous. * The 
 King is a very strict disciplinarian, they say ? ' 
 
 * He is considered so : yes, sir.' 
 
 * But would he have had his son see his subjects 
 trampled to death before his eyes without an effort 
 to save them ? ' 
 
 * I believe, sir. His Majesty does not think any- 
 thing of so much importance as military exactitude ; 
 and the persons who would have been run over were 
 very low people — cowherds or swineherds, I believe.' 
 
 * I understand why the nation prefers his son to 
 himself,' said the foreigner with a smile. 
 
 ' Oh, sir, I never said that the Duke was pre- 
 ferred ! ' 
 
 * But he is so, my friend. What a difference 
 there was in the cheering ! ' 
 
 The attendant took his fee off the salver and was 
 discreetly silent. 
 
 ' I guess he is a fine fellow, that Duke,' said the 
 traveller, as he rose, took his cane and overcoat, and 
 went out on to the broad white marble quay where 
 the tamarisks and the magnolias showed the blue 
 water between their trunks ; that blue water which 
 has been the Mare Magnum of two thousand years 
 of history. 
 
 The waiter saw him go out with relief ; this kind 
 of conversation is dangerous in Helianthus, which is 
 a free country. 
 
I HELIANTHUS 13 
 
 The traveller might say what he chose, thought the 
 man ; it was a serious thing to interrupt and delay a 
 march past, merely because some common folks might 
 have been injured. It was quite natural that King 
 John should be very angry, and report said that 
 King John when angry was as unpleasant to encounter 
 as the wild boar which was the emblem of his royal 
 house. 
 
 The waiter, having imbibed bourgeois and con- 
 ventional opinion as he imbibed heel-taps, admired 
 this characteristic. It seemed to him truly imperial. 
 
 For in this world there would be no tyrants if 
 there were no toadies. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 The people's favourite, on reaching his own resi- 
 dence, changed his uniform for plain clothes, drank 
 some soda water, and took his way, as the Ave 
 Maria rang over the city from a thousand churches, 
 chapels, and bell -towers, to the palace in which 
 his royal father dwelt, and which was known as the 
 Soleia. 
 
 The Soleia was a group of castles, halls, and 
 temples, which were built round the great central 
 edifice of which the dome glistened with gilded 
 Oriental tiles, and could be seen many miles off 
 from either the mountains or the sea. It was a 
 wondrous unison of many styles and ages, beginning 
 with the Byzantine ; palace built on palace as beavers' 
 dwellings cluster on each other. In one of these 
 resided the Crown Prince and Princess of Helianthus. 
 It was thither that Othyris was bent. 
 
 * Who knows,' he thought, ' what they may not 
 have told her, and what fears are not agitating her 
 good, kind, buckram-bound heart ? ' 
 
 He took a short path across the gardens of the 
 Soleia to the portion of it occupied by his sister-in- 
 law and his brother Theodoric, the heir to the throne. 
 
 The Crown Prince was the only scion of a first 
 alliance contracted in early youth with a princess of a 
 
 14 
 
CHAP. II HELIANTHUS 15 
 
 small northern State now mediatised and merged in 
 a great Power. His mother had died in the third year 
 of her marriage, having reproduced in her son exactly 
 her own character, grafted on to that of John of 
 GunderOde, whose shrewd talents, however, were not 
 inherited ; for the Crown Prince was what would 
 have been called in an ordinary mortal, stupid. He had 
 the hopelessly unillumined and incorrigible dulness 
 which comes from a naturally narrow brain, budded on 
 the platitudes of conventional education and manured 
 by the heating phosphates of flattery. He had an 
 implicit belief in his knowledge and judgment, and 
 was completely satisfied as to his indispensable utility 
 to his nation. In appearance he was a tall, well-built, 
 spare, and very muscular man, red of hair and ruddy of 
 skin, rigid and stiff in movement ; his forehead was 
 low, his jaw was prominent ; he had little intelligence, 
 little comprehension ; he had immense belief in him- 
 self, in his family, in his caste ; he was religious, 
 chaste, absorbed in his duties ; to his soldiers he was 
 brutal, but that, he considered, was at once their 
 good and his own privilege. He had wedded a 
 cousin-german, a princess of a neighbouring empire ; 
 he had by her only two female children ; this was 
 the greatest chagrin of his life. Excellent as his 
 morality was, he could not suppress a sense of 
 pleasurable hope whenever his wife took cold. Being 
 a conscientious and religious person, he did not allow 
 his mind to dwell on the contingencies which might 
 arise out of a fatal illness ; but the sentiment of pleasur- 
 able expectation, whenever she coughed, was there. 
 
 The Crown Princess was by birth Guthonic, a 
 cousin-german of the great Julius. She was a 
 homely-looking woman of thirty-two years of age ; 
 
1 6 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 she had a plain face, pale blue eyes, and a high 
 colour ; she dressed with great simplicity on all 
 except State occasions, and had a kindly and simple 
 manner, which could, however, on occasion become 
 cold and dignified though always bland. 
 
 She was sitting by an open glass door, knitting 
 a stocking for a poor child ; she wore a gown of 
 grey stuff with a white linen collar and cuffs ; she 
 seemed to take pleasure in accentuating her own 
 homeliness and want of grace and of colour. She had 
 nothing to distinguish her from any good and homely 
 housewife in the northern kingdom whence she 
 came. Her brother-in-law loved her for her 
 sincerity, simplicity, and goodness ; and she was 
 attached to him by the law of contrast, and by her 
 gratitude for his unwavering regard and loyalty to 
 her. She looked troubled and anxious. The lady 
 who was with her withdrew at a sign from her as her 
 brother-in-law entered. 
 
 * Oh, my dear Elim ! ' she said as soon as her lady 
 had withdrawn. * What is this I hear ? You 
 caused a break in the march past ? Is it possible } 
 I have heard no details. Pray tell me all ! ' 
 
 He laughed irreverently. 
 
 * Yes. I am guilty of that monstrous crime. Some 
 peasants, Heaven knows how, got in the way of the 
 defi/e ; I had either to crush them or to stop my 
 squadrons. Who could hesitate ? ' 
 
 ' What a dreadful alternative ! ' said the Crown 
 Princess with agitation. 
 
 * I see nothing very dreadful about it. It is one of 
 those matters which only assume importance in the 
 eyes of a military martinet. The difference in time 
 was perhaps five minutes.' 
 
II HELIANTHUS 17 
 
 *But, as I understand it, you were leading the 
 Light Cavalry Division ? ' 
 
 * Yes/ 
 
 The Princess looked anxious. * It is a great 
 military offence.' 
 He laughed. 
 
 * If they cashier me, how happy I shall be ! If 
 they send me to a fortress I shall have time to 
 translate Tibullus, which I have always wished 
 to do.' 
 
 ' You are too flippant and reckless, Elim.' 
 
 ' I should have thought that you at least ' 
 
 he said, and paused, leaving the sentence unfinished. 
 
 ' You thought that I should approve your action, 
 as the people do ? Well, perhaps I do, in my heart. 
 I think you acted naturally, mercifully, heroically. 
 But being what you are, and where you were, it 
 was foolhardy ; and to — to my husband and to your 
 father, it appears an outrageous offence.' 
 
 'Because I offended the Deity of Discipline ! 
 Because I momentarily broke the order of the march 
 past ! La helle affaire I Why do they make me 
 dress up in uniform ? Why do they not leave me 
 in peace in my painting-room } I abhor soldiering ; 
 I abhor militarism. I am a man ; I am not a 
 machine. They may break me. They will not 
 bend me.' 
 
 ' I am sorry,' said the Crown Princess, and her 
 sad, plain, kind countenance was clouded. 
 
 ' Sorry that I did not sit still in my saddle like 
 a figure of wood, and see men and women and 
 cattle stamped and crushed under the rush of the 
 regiments I commanded ? My dear Gertrude, that 
 is very unlike you.' 
 
 c 
 
1 8 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 ' But it was not your affair. It was not the fitting 
 moment for compassion.' 
 
 ' You say that very feebly, and I hear the voice 
 of your husband speaking from your lips ! Do not 
 deny your own feehngs, and repeat like a parrot, my 
 dear sister ; such cruelty is unworthy of you.' 
 
 ' But ' said the Princess, and sighed, for she 
 
 had been born and brought up in the rigidity of a 
 military dominion, in the superstitions of a military 
 caste. For a soldier to leave the ranks, for a com- 
 manding officer to interrupt a military display, seemed 
 to her a violation of laws still more sacred than the 
 laws of nature or the dictates of mercy. * But you 
 caused a break in the march past, a pause in the 
 review, a breach in continuity, unexplained, inexcus- 
 able. Theo says that the Emperor smiled ! Imagine 
 what your father must have felt when he saw that 
 smile ! ' 
 
 * Julius is our pedagogue and our War-lord, as we 
 all know,' said Othyris with irritation. * But I think 
 we should not smart so easily under his smiles or his 
 frowns.' 
 
 The Crown Princess sighed. She did not love 
 Julius, who was her cousin both by marriage and by 
 consanguinity, but she knew that Julius was an un- 
 known quantity and potent factor in the future of 
 Helianthus and of Europe. No flippancy or ridicule 
 from Elim could alter that fact, or say what that 
 future would become. 
 
 ' My dear Gertrude,' said Othyris with some im- 
 patience, ' let us leave the subject. I may have done 
 what was wrong. At all events I did what my 
 conscience suggested to me in a moment when there 
 was no time for reflection. I imagine the herdsmen 
 
II HELIANTHUS 19 
 
 think that I did right as they go through the meadows 
 this evening.' 
 
 The Princess sighed. 
 
 * Yes ; oh yes, poor creatures ! But, my dear 
 EHm, reflect ; if you commanded a division in an 
 invading army you would be compelled to burn, to 
 pillage, to destroy, to commit what in peace would 
 be crimes, but in war become necessary and legitimate 
 actions, even admirable actions, however much to be 
 regretted. Well, a review is mimic war, and, like 
 what it mimics, it cannot have place or pause for 
 humanity.' 
 
 ' I shall not be obliged to burn, to pillage, to 
 destroy ; for I will never go out on any offensive 
 campaign.' 
 
 ' Oh, my dear ! You will have to go if you are 
 ordered.' 
 
 * Not at all. I can let them blow me from a gun, 
 or shut me up in a fortress.' 
 
 * Do not say such things, I entreat you ! ' said his 
 sister-in-law with a shudder. She knew that any 
 day the pleasure of Julius or of the financiers, or 
 the fear of internal troubles, might force the Helian- 
 thine government into war with some neighbour, a 
 war of attack of which no man living could foretell 
 the issue. 
 
 ' There are times when we must not listen to our 
 hearts, nor even to our ^consciences,' she added 
 timidly. ' There are times when duty requires us 
 to be even cruel, to be even sinful, when to be what 
 you call a machine is the sole supreme obligation 
 upon us.' 
 
 * A shocking creed ! It may be stretched to excuse 
 any crime.' 
 
20 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 * But to give way to every impulse may also 
 lead to any crime ? ' 
 
 * Not if the impulse be good, be impersonal. I 
 know very well what you mean. It is the theory of 
 all persons like your husband and like my father, who 
 place machinery before men, who value appearances 
 and are blind to facts, who think a button awry or 
 a tape untied more terrible than any catastrophe to 
 the populace.' 
 
 * A valve is a small thing ; but on its opening or 
 shutting correctly depends the safety of an express 
 train or of an ocean steamer.* 
 
 * Let us quit metaphors. They are unsatisfactory 
 in argument. Tell me plainly, Gertrude, would you 
 have had me gallop on at the head of my squadrons, 
 and see people — our people, for whose wellbeing my 
 family is responsible — crushed to pulp under my 
 troopers' chargers a few yards off me .'' ' 
 
 His sister-in-law hesitated ; over her homely, 
 melancholy features a wave of colour rose and 
 receded. 
 
 ' I am reluctant to say it ; but I think — yes, — I do 
 think at that moment you were not your own master 
 to move and to act. You were only an officer of the 
 King, entrusted with a high command.' 
 
 He turned away from the sofa on which she sat, 
 and paced the room with irritation. In the voice of 
 this good woman whom he loved and respected he 
 hated to hear the conventional gospel which had been 
 dinned into his ears ever since his long curls had 
 been cut off, on the day after his sixth birthday, and 
 he had been taken away from his toys and his nurses, 
 his dogs and his guinea-pigs, and given over into the 
 charge of a civil governor and a military tutor. 
 
II HELIANTHUS 21 
 
 ' What a monstrous theory for a gentle and kind 
 woman like you to hold ! ' he cried. 
 She answered with a sigh : 
 
 * There are times, my dear, when a man, above all 
 a prince, above all a soldier, does not belong to him- 
 self at all, but entirely to his duties, entirely to the 
 sovereign, to the State, to the army.' 
 
 He laughed a brief strident laugh which it hurt 
 her to hear. 
 
 * Unhappy man, and thrice unhappy prince ! 
 A soldier I am not,' he added : ' they dress me up 
 as one ; they do not make me one. How well I 
 know it, Gertrude, that religion of formula, that 
 doctrine of self-abasement, that negation of manhood, 
 that lifting up on high of an idol more cruel than the 
 serpent of brass, and more ludicrous than any black 
 wooden eyeless Madonna ! It has been preached to 
 me for over a score of years, and always in vain. 
 My mind rejects it ; my sense despises it ; my con- 
 science repulses it. It may take effect on others. It 
 takes none on me. I am a wild goat amongst sheared 
 sheep. You know it.' 
 
 The Crown Prihcess sighed. 
 
 She was a good woman ; warm of heart, con- 
 scientious in self-judgment, liberal of hand ; but, 
 good woman though she was, habit and caste had 
 encrusted her mind, as an object is encrusted in a 
 petrifying spring. 
 
 She loved Elim despite his heresies, and she owed 
 him much ; the debt of a solitary woman for sym- 
 pathy which can never be forgotten. He had been 
 only a boy when she had come to the Court of 
 Helianthus, the victim of a conventional union, of a 
 political alliance ; a shy, sad, and serious young 
 
22 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 woman, conscious of her want of beauty and her lack 
 of charm, reserved by nature and timid from habitual 
 restraint. The kindness and sweetness of the Queen, 
 and the good nature and good-will of Elim, had been 
 her consolation and support in what she had felt to 
 be a painful exile, an almost friendless solitude. The 
 beautiful Queen was dead ; but her memory remained, 
 as her life had been, a tie between her son and the 
 northern Princess. 
 
 * Do I worry you ? ' he said with compunction. 
 
 * You pay the penalty, my poor sister, of being the 
 only person in all the family who invites confidence. 
 Let us forget this little incident, and let us be glad 
 that the peasants and their lambs and milch-cows got 
 away with unbroken bones. How are Helene and 
 Olga ? May I see them ? ' 
 
 * They are at their studies, we must not disturb 
 them,* said the mother of the little girls. ' You may 
 pity me too, Elim. The pressure of the iron cylinder 
 rolls over my children also, and pushes them away 
 from me. But it must be so. It is necessary. It is 
 inevitable. It is in interests which rank higher than 
 my pleasure or my affection.' 
 
 * Poor victim of Juggernaut ! ' said Othyris with 
 a smile which was at once indulgent and ironical. 
 
 * What a beautiful evening ! Let us go for ten 
 minutes into the gardens and forget our harness.' 
 
 * Is there time ? ' she said anxiously, looking at the 
 little crystal ball of her watch ; her entire existence 
 was regulated by clock-work. * I fear there is not 
 time.' 
 
 * Oh yes ; time at least for a little stroll,' said 
 Othyris as he went out on to the terrace of rose- 
 granite, with balustrades of porphyry columns, 
 
II HELIANTHUS 23 
 
 which stretched before the windows. Beneath its 
 wide hemicircle of stairs, bordered by palms and 
 yuccas, stretched the flowers, the lawns, the ponds, 
 and statues, and fountains, of the southern side of the 
 royal gardens ; beyond these were masses of varied 
 foliage of ornamental trees ; and still beyond these 
 again, the shimmering silver of the sea, calm and 
 heaving gently underneath the violet sky in which a 
 young moon had risen. The city might have been a 
 thousand miles away for any suggestion that there 
 was of it, or any murmur of its restless crowds. On 
 a life-sized group of Aphrodite mourning the dead 
 Adonis, the clear soft light of the early summer evening 
 was shining ; the statue was of the period which is 
 called debased Greek art, but it was very beautiful 
 despite its epoch. 
 
 ' How like you are to the Adonis, Elim ! ' said the 
 Princess as they passed the group. 
 
 ' So my dear mother used to say. So my flatterers 
 still say.' 
 
 * I never flatter you, Elim.' 
 
 * Dear, you have the only flattery which is really 
 sweet and wholesome, which is true flower-made 
 honey that does not cloy : a too indulgent aff^ection. 
 Would to Heaven I were of marble like the Adonis, 
 or of petrified wood like your beloved husband ! ' 
 
 They went down the steps of one of the terraces 
 and walked on by an avenue of tulip-trees ; at its 
 end was a small classic temple looking out on to 
 the western sea, on which the after -glow of a 
 springtide day was still roseate. 
 
 * How we waste our time, how we lose our 
 summers ! ' said Othyris as he gazed across the sea, so 
 warm and bright in the light of the early eve. * We 
 
24 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 have only just come in from the dust of the Field of 
 Ares, and we must go and sit behind gold plate with 
 the evening light shut out that electric fuses may 
 burn.' 
 
 The Princess did not contradict him. How happy 
 she would have been walking with her two little girls 
 along a country lane, talking with them of field flowers 
 and hedge birds, and seeing the slow and pensive 
 twilight of her northern home steal softly over furrow 
 and hamlet and sheepfold ! 
 
 On the silver field of the serene water of the gulf 
 there was a vessel, dark in the luminous blue of the 
 early night. It was a fishing - vessel, and on a 
 wooden gallery in its bow a man was standing, 
 whilst other boatmen rowed. In his raised hand was 
 a long spear. The barque was moving swiftly, turning 
 now to leeward now to windward. 
 
 * They are chasing a sword-fish,' said Othyris. 
 ' We cannot see the fish, but they can. To think 
 that this chase has gone on for twenty centuries and 
 more, in precisely the same manner in these same 
 waters ! ' 
 
 The vessel glided out of the light into the shadow, 
 and the figure of the spear-thrower was lost in the 
 deeper blue of the shade ; there only remained visible 
 the two starboard oars dipping into and flashing with 
 the phosphorescent water. 
 
 * They do not often succeed in taking him,' said 
 Othyris. * He is diflicult to see even by day, kind 
 nature made him so blue. But the kindness of 
 nature is generally thwarted by the ingenuity of 
 man, by the devilry of mankind.' 
 
 * Poor Xiphias ! ' he added : * he is a soldier too 
 in his way, but he fights with the weapon which 
 
II HELIANTHUS 25 
 
 nature gave him, and he attacks bigger creatures than 
 himself. He is a chivalrous knight compared to the 
 war-makers of our time. I wish the fishermen would 
 leave him alone. Yet those men yonder are to be 
 excused. They are hungry, they have children as 
 hungry at home. But what do you say to our 
 sister Ottoline, who goes out with them for the sheer 
 pleasure of seeing the agonies of the poor gallant 
 Xiphias ? She has even learnt to throw the harpoon 
 herself!^ 
 
 ' There is nothing to excuse it. For, in her choice, 
 there is neither ignorance nor compulsion,* said the 
 Princess sadly, and looked at her watch by the light 
 of the moon. ' I fear I must go in, my dear ; there 
 will be only twenty minutes left for me to put on 
 my war-paint.' 
 
 ' I have a mind to stay here,' said Othyris gazing 
 wistfully at the sea. * What would happen if I failed 
 to appear ? ' 
 
 ' For goodness' sake do not have such freaks of 
 fancy,' said his sister-in-law in anxiety. ' You would 
 see the sun rise from the barred window of some 
 fortress.' 
 
 ' Because I did not show at a banquet ^ What an 
 idea ! ' 
 
 * But the Emperor is our guest, our cousin, our 
 ally ! ' 
 
 * Our suzerain,' said Othyris bitterly. 
 
 * Do not say such things, dear Elim,' murmured 
 his sister-in-law. * Here statues have ears, and trees 
 have tongues. Come, dear ; do come, to please me.' 
 
 Othyris looked with regret to the beauty of 
 the early night, to the phosphorescent sea, the violet 
 sky, the dark outline of the fishing-barque, the 
 
26 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 marble balustrades and statues pale and cool in the 
 shadow, then reluctantly accompanied her back 
 towards the palace by the avenue of tulip-trees. 
 
 ' If I were only the man with the lance on the 
 boat,' he said, * but without the penal obligation of 
 slaying the sword-fish ! * 
 
 * And do you not think the man with the lance 
 says or thinks, *' If I were only that great Prince 
 yonder amongst his roses " ? ' 
 
 * Perhaps he does, poor ignorant ! He does not 
 know that the Prince has not a moment to enjoy the 
 scent of the roses ! * 
 
 ' But, Elim,' said his sister-in-law with that timidity 
 which always characterised her utterance of any 
 opinion of her own, * do you not think that, as you 
 fill a position which you cannot change, and as you 
 may possibly be called to fill one still more trying 
 and arduous, it would be wiser, merely from a 
 common-sense point of view, to cease to struggle 
 against what you cannot possibly alter ? — neither you 
 nor any one who lives.' 
 
 He did not reply. His thoughts went farther 
 than he chose to say even to this good and loyal 
 woman. 
 
 ' Acquiescence is the hardest of all duties to any 
 one of your temperament,' she added. 'But if a 
 duty be not hard what merit is there in accepting its 
 yoke ? ' 
 
 ' I do not see either duty or merit in this instance ! ' 
 
 ' My dear Elim ! ' 
 
 ' I do not.' 
 
 ' Then where ? ' 
 
 ' Where shall I look for them ? Is that what 
 you would say ? What a pity I cannot find them 
 
II HELIANTHUS 27 
 
 as Theo does in regulation belts and regimental 
 buttons ! ' 
 
 ' Theo is conscientious/ said Theo's wife with 
 reproach. 
 
 * All disagreeable people are ! ' said Othyris with 
 a little laugh. 
 
 * I wish you would not laugh at Theo/ said Theo's 
 wife uneasily, with a little red spot in each thin cheek. 
 
 * // s^y prete ! ' said Othyris with careless way- 
 wardness. 
 
 * Oh, my dear Elim, hush 1 ' said Theo's wife in 
 distress. ' We must really go indoors,' she said 
 nervously. 'It is a pity, yes ; like you I should 
 willingly spend the evening here. But one has no 
 right to expect to be idle.' 
 
 * We are worse than idle ; we are actively mis- 
 chievous. Can there be a greater waste of time or 
 a more unpleasant form of ennui than a dinner of 
 sixteen courses for persons already over-fed ^ ' 
 
 She did not reply, but hurried back towards the 
 terrace ; such remarks almost seemed to her to suggest 
 softening of the brain ; to her a great dinner was a 
 function, like a church ceremony, or the opening of 
 a new session, or a royal baptism. 
 
 Othyris left the Soleia, as he had come there, by 
 a private gate which opened on a side street ; he was 
 unattended, and hoped to reach his own palace un- 
 recognised. But when he had passed through the 
 two other small streets lying between the Soleia and 
 his own residence he was seen by some of the people 
 standing about the principal road leading to the 
 Square of the Dioscuri, and a cheer was raised ; his 
 name was spoken ; others joined in the cheering ; soon 
 the applause grew deafening; men, women, and 
 
28 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 children ran thither from all parts, and the rough 
 rejoicings rose tumultuous like the cawing from a 
 rookery. 
 
 He was provoked with himself for his forgetful- 
 ness of the probability of such a demonstration. 
 There was nothing which he more greatly disliked, 
 and nothing which more incensed the King and his 
 elder brother. It was now impossible to avoid the 
 people ; they had recognised him. He saluted the 
 populace courteously, but signed to them to disperse. 
 In the noise from their lungs no speech of his could 
 be heard. He was vexed with himself for his own 
 heedlessness in coming on foot from the gardens to 
 his own house. He knew how intensely these evi- 
 dences of his own popularity offended and irritated 
 his father and his brothers ; that advantage was taken 
 of them by those jealous of him ; that exaggeration 
 was used by the socialistic and subversive journals 
 concerning them. 
 
 He had acted on an impulse of humanity that day 
 on the Field of Ares, and he would have done the 
 same thing if he had acted on reflection ; but he 
 knew that in the eyes of his family his action could 
 only seem like a studied attitude to please the people, 
 a politic bid for public favour. All his actions took 
 that complexion in their sight. 
 
 The numbers in the Square increased with every 
 second ; the municipal police, alarmed at a demon- 
 stration which they might have, but had not, foreseen, 
 endeavoured to push their way towards him ; he 
 himself was annoyed, for if anything would have 
 made him an enemy to the populace, it would have 
 been their methods of showing their enthusiasm for 
 himself. 
 
II HELIANTHUS 29 
 
 He motioned aside the guards when they at last 
 succeeded in reaching him ; communal guards with 
 their revolvers in their hands ready to use them and 
 happy to do so. 
 
 ' Put up your arms/ he said sharply. ' There 
 is no occasion for them.' 
 
 The multitude heard and cheered more lustily, 
 their voices pealing over the wide space, the shrill 
 outcries of the women sounding like the sound of 
 fifes, the chest notes of the stronger men like the roll 
 of drums. 
 
 Fact had already become legend, and the versions 
 of his recent action on the Field of Ares were rapidly 
 swelling into a Heraklean fable. 
 
 * EUm ! Elim ! Long life and Heaven's blessing 
 to Elim, the friend of the people ! ' they cried in 
 their rhythmical roar. 
 
 By signs to the crowd, and with a smile, he made 
 a path for himself towards his residence, the guards 
 closing in behind him, forbidden by him to do more. 
 Sundry of his gentlemen and some of the officers of 
 his division came out to meet him, elbowing their 
 way to release him. 
 
 The electric light was now lit and illumined the 
 palms, the statues, the parterres of flowers, the great 
 fountains, the agitated, many-coloured, dense throng 
 of the people. 
 
 ' Speak to us ! speak to us ! ' they shouted. * Speak 
 to us, Elim ! ' 
 
 He turned round before his own gates, and again 
 raised his hat to them. 
 
 * Not now, my friends,' he said. ' Thanks for 
 your good-will ; and good-night to you.' 
 
 The people murmured loudly and many swore 
 
30 HELIANTHUS chap, ii 
 
 in their wrath ; but the great bronze gates closed 
 behind him, and they could only shout, and wave 
 their caps, and trample on one another in the cold, 
 clear light shining on the steel tubes of the guards' 
 revolvers. One by one, little by little, they tired of 
 waiting, and dropped away into the streets leading 
 from the Square ; a few hundred remained to see their 
 idol pass in his carriage to the Soleia, to the banquet 
 given there for the Emperor of the Guthones. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Meanwhile Elim's father, John, King of Helianthus, 
 sat in his study and thought over the matter with 
 extreme offence and irritation. He was a short, 
 stout, well-made man of nearly sixty years of age; he 
 had a plain face, a dark skin, bristling iron-grey hair, 
 and a high narrow forehead with thick, straight eye- 
 brows. Under those straight, dark brows his eyes 
 looked out like two ever-vigilant vedettes ; they 
 were small grey eyes, pale in colour, half-hidden by 
 heavy lids ; the iris was touched by the inflamed 
 thread-like veins of the cornea ; but they were eyes 
 which left in the minds of those at whom they looked 
 sharply an indescribable impression of discomfort ; 
 they made the most simple and sincere of persons 
 feel embarrassed with an uneasy sense of being 
 detected and read through unpleasantly. For the 
 rest he was without distinction of any kind ; he 
 looked a gentleman, but of the wealthy bourgeois 
 type ; there was nothing of the patrician in him 
 except his fine hands and slender wrists ; he was 
 inclined to corpulence, and only overcame that royal 
 defect by active habits and his devotion to the 
 exercise of sport ; he smoked almost constantly, 
 indoors and out, for he knew the value of tobacco to 
 save speech. He was a person of few words ; words 
 
 31 
 
32 HEUANTHUS chap. 
 
 compromise oneself, silence embarrasses others — he 
 never compromised himself, but he frequently embar- 
 rassed others. 
 
 He ate largely, as most rulers of men do ; and he 
 drank with great moderation, at such times, at least, 
 as he was not in wrath ; then he drank brandy 
 copiously. After his mid-day meal he slept for 
 an hour ; then he transacted business and con- 
 versed with the Ministers of the moment ; then 
 he went out riding or driving, usually driving him- 
 self, with fine young thorough-bred horses, whose 
 nerves, under their shining over-groomed skin, 
 trembled when they saw him approach and take up 
 the ribbons. 
 
 He was an incongruous figure in the classic 
 palaces, the grand, silent, romantic gardens, the 
 majestic galleries, the tapestried corridors of his 
 many residences in Helianthus ; as incongruous as 
 a British sentry on duty on a palm terrace of 
 Benares. But he did not see it ; or rather, the 
 contrast, so far as he perceived it, seemed to him 
 entirely to his own advantage. 
 
 Outside his apartments, avenues of Crataegus and 
 paulownia, masses of roses and datura, fountains 
 shining through the glorious gloom of secular cedars, 
 wide lawns sloping down from sculptured marble 
 staircases, deep pools sleeping under water-lilies, the 
 golden and silver armour of fish glancing under the 
 arum and nenuphar leaves where sunrays touched the 
 water, statues which had been there in the same places 
 since first called into being by classic sculptors — all 
 offered their enchantment to his sight. But he never 
 looked at them, nor walked amidst them ; the 
 electric bells, the telephone tubes, the innumerable 
 
Ill HELIANTHUS 
 
 33 
 
 scientific devices and appliances disfiguring the 
 frescoed wall at the back of his writing-table, were 
 far more interesting in his sight. 
 
 John of Gunderode was not a man of great 
 abilities ; but he was a great egotist, which is a form 
 of talent, and he was exceedingly shrewd in all 
 questions which regarded his own advantage. As 
 his own advantage was often identical with that of 
 his kingdom, he was considered a patriotic monarch ; 
 but when his own advantage clashed with that of his 
 kingdom, the latter went to the wall, as in loyalty a 
 kingdom is bound to do. He had a sincere belief in 
 his own utility to the country : he was perfectly 
 honest in his conviction that his grip held it 
 together, that he was the keystone of its arch, the 
 mortar of its bastions. He took himself very 
 seriously. He believed in himself, which is the 
 surest mode of making others believe in you. Born 
 in a private station, he would have made an admir- 
 able artillery or infantry oflicer, or, perhaps, a still 
 better merchant or stockbroker ; that he impressed 
 many persons as being a potential Caesar was due 
 entirely to his own belief in his Caesarism. Called 
 to be the constitutional sovereign of a liberty-loving 
 and republican nation, he had made himself an autocrat 
 and the nation a servant. The alteration had been 
 gradual, and not violent, for he was a man who 
 could control his desires in his own interests. This 
 power of self-restraint was the conspicuous quality of 
 his race. 
 
 Nothing, now, would have given him greater 
 pleasure than to have had his son put under arrest 
 immediately on his return from the Field of Ares ; 
 nothing would have been more just or correct as he 
 
 D 
 
34 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 viewed justice and correction. But he hesitated to 
 carry out his views : he knew that his son was 
 popular, and that the populace of Helios might rise 
 in his defence. 
 
 So far as the King had nerves to suffer from, he 
 was nervous during any visit of the War-lord of the 
 Guthones. He was constantly apprehensive of some- 
 thing which might happen to disgrace his army or 
 his pohce in his guest's sight. This action of his 
 second son was such a heinous breach of military 
 etiquette as it would have been impossible ever to have 
 seen on the sandy plains where the hosts of Julius 
 manoeuvred. It was natural that all the sullen, savage 
 rage of which his reserved temper was capable, 
 growled within him like a muzzled mastiff's. If he 
 had followed his impulses, and his sense of duty, 
 EHm would have had short shrift. 
 
 To him the action of Othyris was the most 
 contemptible melodrama, as well as the most intoler- 
 able breach of discipline. That break of a few 
 minutes in the march past, of which Elim thought so 
 lightly, was to him a direct offence against military 
 etiquette and law. No punishment would have 
 seemed to him too severe for it, viewed from a 
 military standpoint. But that the abominable act 
 had pleased the people he was aware ; the rapturous 
 cheering with which his son had been greeted in the 
 streets had told him that ; and he doubted whether 
 public opinion, either in the country or outside it, 
 would go with him in heavy chastisement of an in- 
 fraction of discipline which had as its excuse the 
 sentimental plea of humanity. 
 
 The King was a strong man and in nothing 
 stronger than in his capability of taking into account 
 
Ill HELIANTHUS 35 
 
 the weight in public opinion of feelings which he 
 himself despised as absurd and hysterical vapours. 
 
 With him, in this distressing hour, were the 
 Commander-in-Chief of the Army, the War Minister, 
 and the Prefect of the Palace. 
 
 The theories and the temper of the first of these 
 officials. General Lipsahl, made him abhor such an 
 action as that of Othyris on the Field of Ares. It 
 was in his sight a treason to the flag, to the King, 
 to the dignity of the military calling. Who could 
 excuse it? No one who had any sense of duty. 
 At the same time, although the mind of Lipsahl was 
 like an armoured waggon, closed by iron shutters to 
 projectiles as to daylight, yet Kantakuzene, the 
 Prime Minister, had seen him for ten minutes, 
 secretly, and had said to him : 
 
 ' For God's sake remember this thing is popular ; 
 restrain the King from public blame of it.* 
 
 This was the evil which ensued from Helianthus 
 being nominally at least a constitutional State ; 
 monarch and Ministers had still sometimes to consider 
 popular feeling. 
 
 The ideal of Lipsahl was the adjacent Httle 
 kingdom of Barusia, where the guards arrested a 
 poodle for wearing national, i.e. revolutionary, 
 colours ; or the empire of the Septentriones, where one 
 soldier's life was esteemed worth the lives of one hun- 
 dred civilians. But he had the misfortune to be in 
 command of the army in a country in which certain 
 anti-military fictions were still necessarily maintained. 
 They were merely fictions ; yet he, like his royal 
 master, was obliged to pretend to consider them 
 realities, and, as such, to be influenced by them ! 
 He considered that the Duke of Othyris deserved 
 
36 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 punishment without bias or mercy, but he knew 
 that such punishment would arouse dangerous resent- 
 ment in the city and in many parts of the country. 
 He felt also that the national mind was so 
 feeble and so prejudiced that if an act were 
 humane it was considered laudable. No government 
 (as no war) could be conducted on humane principles ; 
 but the public everywhere, though in war it realises 
 this great truth, in peace ignores it, even considers it 
 horrible. 
 
 lonides Aracoeli, the War Minister, a civilian who 
 knew as much of war as a child of therapeutics, and 
 whose mind always trotted humbly after the superior 
 minds of his sovereign and of Lipsahl, and indeed 
 only existed to be their echo in the Chamber and 
 their instrument at the War Office, was perfectly 
 ready to do or to say whatever he might be told to 
 do or say. But in his innermost soul he hoped that 
 no severity would be used. For the civilian mind, 
 however indoctrinated by a warlike Press, remains 
 feminine, or at least appears feminine to the 
 military mind, which considers itself alone truly 
 masculine ; and the feminine mind is always captivated 
 by the sensational charm of such an altruistic action 
 as this folly on the Field of Ares. 
 
 There only remained the Prefect of the Palace, 
 Baron Zelia, the King's favourite and confidant, 
 if the monarch could be supposed to admit those 
 crutches of the feeble, either favourites or con- 
 fidants, into his robust and all -sufficing existence. 
 Baron Zelia ventured to say openly in a few well- 
 chosen and delicate words that the act on the 
 Field of Ares had pleased the people of Helios ; 
 that no doubt it merited censure in many ways, but 
 
Ill HELIANTHUS 37 
 
 that the people approved of it, and the approval of 
 the people should not be completely disregarded. 
 
 Why, the King wondered, was what was idiotic 
 always popular ? Who ever heard of a sound and 
 sensible action being so ? What was hysterical, high 
 flown, hyperbolic, always captivated the public fancy. 
 Why was his second son popular ^ Because he was a 
 visionary and a fool. Zelia affirmed that the absurd 
 and offensive action of his second son had been warmly 
 admired and applauded by the people ; there was no 
 doubt about that ; and though the people were no 
 more in his own sight than a herd of swine, he knew 
 that if the swine took to running amuck they might 
 carry with them him and his over the precipice. The 
 precipice was always there, dark, deep, unpleasant, 
 an ever-yawning tomb ; dynasties older, safer, 
 stronger than his, had been hurled into such a pit 
 before then. 
 
 In the King's character there was one supremely 
 useful trait : it was the power he possessed of 
 keeping back his anger and his appetites in subjection 
 to his interests. Whoever possesses that power is 
 sure, whether in private or in public life, of a con- 
 siderable measure of individual success. The King 
 had not a great character or great intelligence, but 
 what he had of either he kept well in hand ; even 
 his instincts of brutality and authority he could 
 subordinate to the demands of his interests. 
 
 The Emperor of the Guthones, his sister's 
 son, was the one person for whom the King 
 entertained a sincere envy and admiration. Julius 
 had a manner of telling his army that he expected 
 it to massacre its fellow-countrymen, whenever 
 desired, which rivalled the finest times of mediaeval 
 
38 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 despotism. He had a felicitous familiarity in his 
 relations with the Deity, coupled with a reverential 
 admiration of himself and of his own acts, his own 
 speeches, his own talents and policies, which John of 
 Gunderode admired respectfully, though the stolid 
 common-sense of his own temper prevented him from 
 equalling them. To rise to those supreme heights 
 of self- adoration it is needful to have more than one 
 grain de folie in one's moral and mental composition, 
 and the King had no grains de folie in his composi- 
 tion ; he was entirely practical and sensible. 
 
 Soldiers, police, and the Deity, were the three forces 
 on which both sovereigns relied to keep themselves 
 in power, and their peoples quiet ; but John of Gun- 
 derode felt that his nephew was the finer artist of 
 the two in his ability to take so very seriously the last 
 of the trio. 
 
 King John certainly believed in a Providence in 
 that vague manner in which most men of the world 
 believe in that which they do not take the trouble 
 to think about, but which is considered a generally 
 received and wholly respectable tradition of consider- 
 able utility at certain moments. But to the Emperor 
 of the Guthones his God was a continual presence, 
 like that, in a banking or mercantile house of business, 
 of the venerable senior partner who leaves every 
 initiative to the junior partner, but is always to be 
 relied on for a signature at the necessary moment, 
 and is eminently precious as a quotable authority. 
 
 The two views were as dissimilar as are those of 
 a suspicious man and of a confident child. Yet at 
 the back of each of their minds there was one 
 common thought. The Deity to each of them was 
 of great use in impressing the masses and upholding 
 
in HELIANTHUS 39 
 
 the crown ; and if either of them should go to war, 
 the Divine name would be held in front of them like 
 a shield, and make all carnage and looting, and 
 burning and torturing, which the wars might involve, 
 seem necessary, justifiable, and even benevolent 
 measures, to which no one could be opposed except 
 * cranks.' 
 
 The family of Julius, the Lillienstauffen, had 
 been in their origin, like the Gunderode, lords of 
 a small feudal Ref, high set on stony hills above 
 morass and plain, whence they had descended to 
 kidnap travellers and pilgrims, and wreck convoys 
 and mule-trains. Like the Gunderode, they had 
 progressed from one rank to another, and turned all 
 their neighbours' misfortunes to their own account, 
 until they had become first margraves, then princes, 
 then kings, then emperors, distancing the Gunde- 
 rode, and finally ruling over an immense and powerfiil 
 conglomeration of States which regarded the head of 
 the House as their suzerain, or, as Julius preferred 
 to phrase it, * Supreme Envoy of God.' 
 
 ' I and God,' said Julius ; King John was con- 
 tented only to say 'I.' In his shrewd and practical 
 mind he had an impression that the addition weakened 
 the royal or imperial claim to infallibility. In his 
 own discourses he always kept the Deity far away in 
 the background, as a vague and indefinite potentiality 
 completely eclipsed by its vice-regents, the monarchs. 
 But he nevertheless admired the manner in which 
 Julius flourished his God in the face of Christian 
 and Paynim, whilst instructing his soldiers that their 
 most sacred duty would be to swill the conduits of 
 the capital with the national blood, if he, Julius, 
 should ever order them so to do. 
 
40 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 Like all truly great men Julius did not allow his 
 partnership with Providence to prevent his devoting 
 the most minute attention to details, such as the 
 length of his grenadiers' hair, the device on his 
 fusiliers' buttons, the colour of a stripe, the quality 
 of a stuff, or the changes in the cut of a tunic. He 
 would get up before dark to sketch a design for 
 a sleeve-cuif ; and would consign a guardsman to 
 arrest who had a speck on his pipe-clay. Thus it 
 was with a gaze terrible as Medusa's, and searching 
 as a microscopic lens, that he had that day sat on his 
 war-horse and inspected his uncle's forces. 
 
 His tongue was glib in compliment and con- 
 gratulation, but his hawk's eyes were merciless in the 
 detection of defects in that military machine which 
 in his estimation only existed to be at once the play- 
 thing and the thunderbolt of monarchs. 
 
 King John knew that his own machine was far 
 from faultless, despite the pains with which he had 
 consecrated his life to its dressage and dominance. 
 The people of Helianthus were not a race to give 
 full satisfaction to a martinet ; they could not be 
 made perfectly rigid, passive, accurate puppets of 
 iron and clock-work. Their blood was hot, their 
 tempers were unsuited to compulsion ; their limbs 
 were graceful often, but seldom strong ; their natural 
 movements were careless, easy, indolent ; they drank 
 when they were thirsty, unbuttoned their jackets 
 when they were hot, fell out of line when anything 
 tempted them on the march ; the best amongst them 
 never looked * smart ' in the martinet's sense of the 
 word. 
 
 ' It is not an army ; it is a rabble in uniform,* 
 thought Julius, as he sat on his charger beside the 
 
Ill HELIANTHUS 41 
 
 flagstaff. If I threw a few thousand of my iron-sides 
 against it, they would double it up like a pancake ! ' 
 
 He had seen it often, and he had always found it 
 the same, and John of Gunderode guessed the un- 
 spoken thought. 
 
 The King had done his best : he had spared no 
 brutality, he had shown no clemency, he had punished 
 with unexampled severity every lightest breach of 
 discipline ; he had cashiered generals for the smallest 
 indulgence and the most trivial insubordination ; he 
 had confirmed the death-sentences of courts-martial, 
 and had spurned the wretched mothers and wives 
 who knelt at his feet to implore mercy for the 
 condemned ; he had never yielded for an instant to 
 any weakness, and had never spared either himself 
 or others in his effort to crush all manhood out of 
 three hundred thousand men. Most of his rank 
 and file were peasants : youngsters who had been 
 poorly fed from their cradles ; they were slight of 
 muscle, of build, of stamina ; they bore ill the 
 weight of their accoutrements, the constraint of 
 their uniforms, the confinement of their barracks ; 
 they were children of the valleys and the mountains, 
 used to run with bare feet through the thyme and 
 the wild sage, and pipe on their cut reeds, as their 
 forefathers had done in the days when Pan was god 
 of the woodland world. As modern eyes view 
 soldiers, these conscripts, even after three years 
 under arms, matched ill with the muscular, bearded, 
 Herculean human-engines of war, fed on strong beer 
 and fat meat, who were commanded by the Emperor 
 of the Guthones. 
 
 Julius, in speech most flattering, yet always made 
 King John feel that his artillery was six months behind 
 
42 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 the last invention in ordnance, that his biggest foot 
 guards were short of stature, that his smartest regi- 
 ments straggled a little in their march past ; that, 
 when his grenadiers tramped by in line, some man's 
 tip of nose, or tip of boot, was sure to be an inch in 
 advance of the rest. Some cavalry horse unlike his 
 fellows in shape or size or colour or breed, some gap 
 in the order of battery following battery, some young 
 trooper visibly uneasy and awkward in his saddle, 
 some driver letting his team buck or his wheels 
 lock — some error, offence, or imperfection, there 
 always was. 
 
 The keen gaze of his visitor noted, he knew, every 
 sign of such irregularity ; trifles in the sight of an 
 ignorant civilian, but unpardonable offences in the 
 sight of a military monarch. In such hours John of 
 Gunder5de suffered acutely. Therefore, that a break 
 in the march past should have occurred in the pres- 
 ence of Julius, was an unendurable humiliation to him 
 in his own eyes. 
 
 The Guthones were a northerly people ; they were 
 a beer-filled people ; they were a people who had for 
 many generations always been drilled from their 
 cradles ; their land had for many centuries been cut 
 up into tiny principalities, but each of these little 
 pieces had been ruled with a rod of iron ; they were 
 used to live with their feet in the stocks and their 
 necks in steel collars. They submitted to be the 
 living pegs of a perpetual game of kriegspiel without 
 protest, and they scarcely grumbled when their 
 masters broke their ribs to teach them to stand 
 straight. These are of course the model subjects of 
 a State, the ideal plebs^ the true chair a canon ; but 
 they do not exist everywhere. 
 
Ill HELIANTHUS 43 
 
 The King, who had a great deal of Guthonic 
 blood in him, spent his life in the effort to make the 
 Helianthines resemble the Guthones. But he might 
 as well have tried to make a greyhound a bulldog. 
 The fair shores of Helianthus had been desired, 
 attacked, ravaged, seized, laid desolate, scores of times 
 ever since the ponderous galleys of Asiatic foes had 
 first been driven through the waters of the Mare Mag- 
 num by slaves chained to the oars. The King knew 
 that they would be so desired, so attacked, again and 
 again, in the centuries to come, and that by no one else 
 were they so likely to be desired and attacked as by 
 this young man, his well-beloved nephew, who kissed 
 him on both cheeks, and, profiting by an affectionate 
 intimacy, studied and espied every thin armour-plate 
 in his navy, every ill-buttoned tunic in his army. 
 
 There was no security in the future. What the 
 world calls peace is but a suspension of hostilities, a 
 jealous watching of wild beasts. King John knew, as 
 his nephew knew, that the army of Helianthus would 
 not be able to stand against an invasion of the 
 Guthones ; that, if unsupported, its young battalions, 
 ill-fed and with no naturally martial instincts, would 
 immediately, however commanded or however incited, 
 give way before the brawny and beer-filled iron- 
 sides of Julius. It was one of those anxieties of which 
 no man can speak, which put into words would seem 
 to disgrace the speaker. But it was in the King's 
 mind at all times. Who could be sure that a turn 
 in the wheel of fortune might not give to Julius 
 the excuse, the opportunity, the pretext which he 
 craved ? 
 
 For the King did not believe as solidly as 
 he would have wished to do in the future in- 
 
44 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 dependence of Helianthus. The national unity 
 of the Helianthines was more a phrase than 
 a fact. A running stream between two villages, 
 a crest of hills between two comrriunes, was 
 enough to make each the enemy of the other in a 
 blood-feud lasting for centuries. At the first scream 
 of hostile shells it was probable that the national 
 solidarity, which existed chiefly on paper and in 
 oratory, would fall in pieces like an unbound faggot. 
 King John felt that if Julius himself did not live to 
 carry out his desire, some scion of his would sooner or 
 later send his ironclads into the Mare Magnum and 
 his armies over the mountains of Rhastia, and the 
 classic land would become a mere southern portion 
 of the Guthonic realm. True, socialism in an acute 
 form mined the Guthonic empire, but its militarism 
 was stronger ; the vanity and strength of the Guthonic 
 people would always, or at least for a long time to 
 come, be unable to resist the national instinct towards 
 war and conquest, and the geographical position of 
 Helianthus offered it as the first victim. 
 
 * Our War-lord exacts no tribute as yet. Let us 
 be grateful ! ' thought Othyris, who was chafed and 
 irritated in an unspeakable degree by those annual 
 visits, ostensibly of friendship and family sentiment, 
 in reality of inspection and criticism. He always 
 saw, in imagination, his cousin riding on a snow- 
 white charger down the central street of Helios at 
 the head of victorious troops. 
 
 But that time had not then arrived. 
 
 The Emperor Julius stood by one of the windows 
 of the apartments allotted to him in the Soleia, and 
 smoked, and gazed over the sea, and felt with im- 
 patience that the time was not even near. 
 
Ill HELIANTHUS 45 
 
 His balconies overhung the marble terraces and 
 stairs facing the western sea ; beneath them was 
 the safe and sheltered harbour in which his yacht 
 was anchored and pleasure-boats awaited his choice. 
 The air was odorous with the scent of orange and 
 lemon flowers, and of the great white cups of mag- 
 nolias; deep-toned bells were chiming ; rose-coloured 
 clouds floated in the sky ; the tread of a sentinel 
 pacing the pavement beneath was the only discordant 
 sound, but to him it had no discord — it was the 
 welcome sound which accompanied his whole life, 
 sleeping or waking, the assurance that his guardian 
 angel in uniform was watching over him, the armed 
 shape that his Heavenly Father's protection of him 
 assumed. He saw no absurdity in this ; it was to 
 him quite natural ; he had the same belief in his 
 especial favour by Heaven as Mahomet had ; he did 
 not reason, he believed ; in himself first, and then 
 in the Deity as the creator and defender of himself. 
 
 But Heaven, favourable to him in so much, 
 denied him the Mare Magnum. 
 
 In his few minutes of solitary reflection he looked 
 over those beautiful waters, violet in some lights, 
 azure in others, a malachite green or a dusky peacock- 
 purple, farther away. Why did Providence deny 
 him that sea ? What a harbour it would be for his 
 battleships ! What an open portal to the conquest 
 of Asia and of Africa ! What an outlet to his 
 legions and to the commerce of his empire ! 
 
 For there is always commerce in the dreams and 
 ambitions of the modern monarch. The Cassar of 
 the twentieth century, even in his most romantic 
 visions, always wears the grocer's apron, holds the 
 draper's rule, loads the cattle-ship and the coal-truck ; 
 
46 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 his flag flies from a grain-elevator, his trumpet sounds 
 from a co-operative store ; be he as martial as he 
 may, he cannot escape the mercantile taint of his 
 time. 
 
 On each of his annual or biannual visits — which 
 Elim called the * inspections of the War-lord ' — Julius 
 envied the possession of the Mare Magnum with all the 
 keenness of his appetite and ambitions ; and no year 
 brought him nearer its conquest. It would not have 
 been difficult for him to take it ; to sweep down with 
 the molten iron of his mobilised forces over the 
 mountains on the north, whilst his fleet steamed into 
 the Helianthine waters and shut the sea -gates on 
 Helios. He would have had no fear of the result 
 if — if Europe could have been trusted to remain 
 neutral. But he could not trust Europe so far. Nay, 
 he was certain that she would stop him in the 
 defiles of the northern Alps, as a great Power had 
 once been stopped within reach of Stamboul. Europe 
 was not ripe for a single dominant master. She had 
 no individual love for the King of Helianthus, but 
 he was a stop-gap, a buffer, a safety-valve. She had 
 no desire for a single conquering hero, for a second 
 parterre des rois disarmed and made ridiculous at a 
 second Tilsit. The condition of the nations is bad ; 
 but a single autocrat, even such a vice-regent of 
 Christ as Julius Imperator, would be, Europe thinks, 
 infinitely worse. 
 
 So, impotent to realise his vast ambitions, yet 
 hovering over them as the hawk over the pigeon's 
 cote, Julius came every year or two to visit his relative 
 and ally, and to look with longing eyes and futile 
 wishes over the luminous waters whence, ever since 
 the days of Homer and of Hesiod, many a fleet of 
 
Ill HELIANTHUS 47 
 
 fable and of history has sailed away into the golden 
 glory of the setting sun, or issued with swelling 
 canvas from out the rosy dusk of dawn. Who could 
 say that some time might not come when Europe, 
 exhausted, over-burdened, or grown indifferent, might 
 not let the hawk loosen the hasp of the pigeon-cote 
 with his beak ? 
 
 It is said that a monarch, being asked who he 
 would be, if he could choose, replied : ' If I were not 
 myself, I would be my nephew Julius.' But Julius 
 was not greatly to be envied ; the torment of an 
 insatiable and unrealisable ambition was like a per- 
 petual fire in his blood ; he wanted worlds to conquer ; 
 he wanted the chariot of the sun to take him to the 
 capture of new solar systems. 
 
 When the earth is mapped out on a papier-mdche 
 globe for the use of schools, and travelling tickets 
 to go round it are things of daily life, it has ceased 
 to be a sphere sufficient for great ambitions. A great 
 ambition requires the immeasurable, requires a 
 vague distance of golden vapour which can give it a 
 horizon, and allure it with a mirage. The earth was 
 too small a sphere for Julius, and, unwisely, he had 
 hampered himself in the use of such space and oppor- 
 tunity as it offered, by having called himself publicly 
 and often an apostle of peace. He had a fine engine 
 of war at his elbow, but he had told mankind that he 
 loved them too well to use it, which was a superfluous 
 and paralysing assertion. 
 
 True, it is possible to eat your own words, if you 
 have a good digestion and good teeth ; but it is 
 better not to have any words which require eating. 
 It is better not to compare yourself with Christ, if 
 you are desirous of behaving like Attila. 
 
48 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 Julius turned from the balcony with an impatient 
 sigh, and flung his cigar into the magnolia grove 
 which faced it ; his attendants hastened to make his 
 evening toilette, and array him in the glittering 
 uniform of that Helianthine regiment of Cuirassiers 
 of which he was the Honorary Colonel. 
 
 Helianthus was not for him. Not yet, at least ; 
 not yet, he thought, as the Helianthine Orders were 
 fastened on his breast. All things come to those 
 who know how to wait, says the proverb. Alas, no ! 
 not all things. Only one thing is certain, — death. 
 Of that no one will cheat us, whether we be 
 emperors or beggars ; and the omnipotent Julius 
 sighed. 
 
 A little later, after dinner that evening, he solved the 
 problem of the treatment due to the offender on the 
 Field of Ares. In a quarter of an hour's chat with his 
 uncle in the smoking-room, with that tact and grace 
 which characterised him when he chose to call them 
 to his aid, he entreated as a favour to himself that 
 nothing should be said or done regarding his cousin's 
 breach of discipline. 
 
 ' One must not blame an error of the heart,' he 
 said ; and he combined with true diplomatic skill the 
 pleasure of interceding for a man to whom such 
 intercession would be very bitter, and of conveying in 
 honeyed phrase his sense that the classic Helianthus 
 had many a lesson still to learn from the juvenile 
 empire of the Guthones. In the art of presenting a 
 rose for the buttonhole with a pin carefully adjusted 
 to prick the skin under the buttonhole, Julius of 
 LillienstaufFen had no superior. His rose was always 
 sweet ; his pin was always sharp. 
 
 Of course at his request the eccentric act was not 
 
Ill HELT ANTHUS 49 
 
 chastised as it should have been ; no request of such 
 a guest could be refused. It was ill-judged amia- 
 bility in the guest, thought the King and his generals. 
 But Elim knew that it was not amiability at all, but 
 some motive exceedingly different. 
 
 To him, at all times, these visits of his cousin 
 were a painful, a hated, ordeal. He smarted under 
 the concealed patronage, the too extreme praise, the 
 highly coloured asseverations of family affection, 
 the cruelly courteous expressions of admiration of an 
 army in which deficiency was plainly more visible than 
 excellence and perfection lagged hopelessly behind. 
 
 * You cannot now deny the tact and the mag- 
 nanimity of the Emperor,' said the Crown Prince to his 
 wife, who did not reply. She knew that the tact was 
 always there, unless temper got the better of it ; the 
 magnanimity she did not see, but she dared not say so. 
 To lay another under an obligation is sometimes a 
 very sweet and subtle form of cruelty. Othyris 
 would have preferred two years in a fortress, or any 
 kind of military degradation, to being under an 
 obligation to his imperial cousin. But no choice was 
 given him ; and the King took care that the pill should 
 be made as bitter as it could be by the aloes and 
 assafoetida of his own pharmacopoeia. Julius, how- 
 ever, enjoyed a favour in the sight of the people of 
 Helios which he had never attained before ; and the 
 public having become aware that he had interceded 
 to avert punishment from their favourite, cheered 
 him with sincerity and enthusiasm for the first time 
 as he drove to the station. 
 
 ' I believe they would receive me with cordiality 
 if I conquered them,' he thought, as the same vision 
 which had floated before the mind of Elim, of himself, 
 
 E 
 
50 HELIANTHUS chap, iii 
 
 Julius Imperator, on a white charger, riding through 
 the city of Helios at the head of his victorious army, 
 beguiled his imagination as his train bore him to the 
 north-west, homeward to his empire in time to hold 
 a review of troops on the morrow on the sandy plains 
 of his military capital, and preach a sermon in the 
 afternoon in his lay capital, in a newly-built cathedral : 
 a sermon of which the text was, * Blessed are the 
 peace-makers, for of them is the kingdom of 
 heaven.' 
 
 * He is very clever, our Julius,' thought the old 
 Emperor Gregory, ruler of the Septentriones, when 
 he read the telegraphed heads of that sermon. ' He 
 would be cleverer still, if he could only hold his 
 tongue 1 ' 
 
 But that was the one thing which Julius could not 
 do. Nature had denied him the power of silence, or 
 the appreciation of the truth that if speech is silver, 
 silence is gold. 
 
 Julius, who was one of the multitude of the revered 
 Gregory's great-grandchildren, amused that shrewd 
 nonagenarian infinitely. Gregory too had been a 
 Zeus, but Gregory had taken his own supreme 
 divinity more philosophically and less pompously. 
 Gregory had always been before everything else a 
 man of the world ; and a man of the world never 
 overloads colour, or enforces emphasis. 
 
 When Othyris also read the precis of that sermon 
 in the newspapers he could willingly have taken his 
 imperial cousin by the throat ; there are services 
 which make the sensitive smart more painfully than 
 any outrage, and every syllable of that oration seemed 
 to him to emphasise the pardon asked for by Julius 
 for the offence on the Field of Ares. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 Helianthus was a country with a glorious past 
 history, and a present which did not satisfy those 
 who remembered its past. It was assured by its 
 rulers that it was free as air ; the modern synonym 
 for freedom is taxation, and of this form of liberty it 
 certainly enjoyed its full share ; of other forms it did 
 not see much. Everything was taxed in it, from 
 the owls' nests on the roofs of the cabins to the 
 unhappy asses which drew the wooden ploughs. In 
 return, it received a great many compliments from 
 foreign nations, and various visits from foreign 
 sovereigns ; possessed a nominally free Press, of 
 which the freedom was duly tempered by fines and 
 imprisonment ; and enjoyed the enrolment of a vast 
 rabble of its own sons, dressed up in clumsy uniforms ; 
 huge ships of copper, or steel, or aluminium, lying at 
 anchor in its beautiful harbours ; crowds of spies and 
 gendarmes in every one of its towns ; armed men at 
 all its gates to see that no bunch of grass, or half- 
 fledged pullet, passed them without paying its dues ; 
 and innumerable prisons, fortresses in exterior and 
 hells within, where strength and energy and vigour 
 rotted into gibbering idiotcy, and young men grev/ 
 aged in a year. 
 
 Helianthus had three generations earlier dreamed a 
 51 
 
52 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 fair and glittering dream of liberty, and had armed like 
 a second Joan of Arc ; but like Joan the fetters had 
 been put on her limbs, and the smoke of the pyre 
 had stifled her breath. Joan died ; Helianthus did 
 not die — she accepted the loss of her dream. 
 
 The land is sadly changed in its physical and 
 architectural features ; the destruction of its forests, 
 the drying up of its rivers, the appropriation by 
 speculators of its torrents and lakes, the demoli- 
 tion of its castles and palaces, have in many parts 
 made it featureless, shadeless, arid, the few green 
 things which still keep life in them being ruth- 
 lessly gnawed, as they sprout, by the famished flocks 
 of goats and sheep. But in many other portions 
 of its legend- haunted soil it is beautiful still ; in its 
 limpid atmosphere, in the lovely colour of its moun- 
 tains, in its ancient gardens, in its gorgeous sunsets, 
 in its moonlit nights, in its roseate dawns, in its 
 immemorial woods, melodious with the voice of the 
 nightingale, something of the youth of the world 
 still lingers, still awakes with the blossoms of spring. 
 In harsh incongruity with it, incongruous as the 
 scream of steam on its waters, as the buzz of machines 
 in its plough-furrows, as the rush of electric cars 
 down its ancient streets, is the House of GunderOde, 
 which has ruled over it for three generations. 
 
 Having helped to free the blood-mare from the 
 lasso cast over her, her saviours put a halter in its 
 stead upon her neck, and jumped upon her back 
 with an agility so admirable that the rest of the 
 nations applauded. A circus trick is often confused 
 by the world with noble horsemanship. 
 
 The GunderOde were chiefly, in their stock and in 
 their temper, Guthonic. They were a northern race, 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 
 
 53 
 
 partly through origin, and largely by marriage. 
 Their character was the antithesis of that of the 
 Helianthine. Connubial unions had given them 
 many mixed strains in their blood, but of pure 
 Hehanthine blood they had not a drop. 
 
 They claimed descent from Orderic, a chief of the 
 Huns. From the sixth to the ninth century they had 
 been robber-barons ; in the Middle Ages they had 
 become lords and margraves of the south-east of 
 Europe ; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by 
 craft and judgment and shrewd watching, by the 
 seizing of opportunity, the making of alliances, and 
 the seeking and forming of great marriages, they had 
 increased their position to a petty sovereignty ; a 
 duchy at first, then a principality, then a kingdom, 
 gradually strengthened and widened by the annexation 
 of frontier towns, of ecclesiastical cities, of military 
 bishoprics, of mountain strongholds, of hill and lake, 
 of moor and fief. 
 
 The GunderCde family were physically brave, of 
 course (for in those times courage did not excite the 
 surprise which it awakens nowadays !), but they were 
 politic, wary, keen to amass, slow to relinquish ; and 
 these qualities obtained them more advancement than 
 did their bravery. The sword of the Gunderodes 
 had a cross for its hilt and a double edge to its blade ; 
 it served them equally well when they swore an oath 
 as when they cut down a foe. The oaths were not 
 always, nor were they often, kept ; but the foe was 
 always cleft through skull and crop. 
 
 In the hurly-burly of the Napoleonic wars they 
 had been careful to hunt with the hounds and run 
 with the hare. All things brought them harvest. 
 They were careful, cautious, and cold. Although 
 
54 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 they had been always absolutists in action they had 
 contrived to obtain a reputation for liberal principles. 
 A wild boar, breaking a huge chain fastened round 
 his loins, was their emblem. It pleased the popular 
 fancy as an emblem of freedom. The boar sat square 
 upon the throne ; and, thinking it a pity that the 
 chain should be of no use, had it picked up and 
 soldered on to the limbs of some of the persons who 
 had helped him to mount ; there was thus no danger 
 of their ever making him descend. 
 
 In the effigy of the wild boar it was true the 
 animal was represented in the act of breaking his 
 own chains ; but the populace, paraphrasing Dante, 
 found that he broke them only to forge and rivet them 
 the more firmly on others. In fact, by the time that 
 the third generation occupied the Helianthine throne, 
 the GunderOdes had acquired the belief that they 
 were its occupants by hereditary right, even as the 
 up-stream wolf, as Mark Twain calls the astute 
 beast of the fable, held the belief that the stream 
 was his by divine right. The timid remonstrances 
 of the nation were heard no more than were those of 
 the lamb by the wolf. 
 
 The House of Gunderode, once taking, always 
 retained ; the people of Helianthus understood 
 too late what they had done when they had lent 
 themselves to its fatal absorption of their birthright. 
 The acquisition of supreme dominion had been so 
 gradual that the people still did not entirely realise what 
 they had lost. The outward forms of constitutional 
 freedom were carefully preserved ; the people did 
 not perceive that the substance had disappeared out 
 of their hold. One of the oddest facts about the 
 last hundred years is the manner in which the popu- 
 
IV HELIANTHUS SS 
 
 lace everywhere has parted with its liberties, and been 
 persuaded to imagine that it has increased them. 
 
 A similar history to that of the Helianthines can 
 be told of other peoples. Reigning races resemble 
 planets : some are still nebulous and scarcely formed, 
 bathed in the effulgence of a rising sun ; others are 
 exhausted and chill, growing dim in their twilight ; 
 others again are at their perihelion, most glorious to 
 behold ; but the manner of formation and increase 
 of them all is identical. 
 
 If a sceptical mind inquires doubtfully why the 
 planets were created at all, such a mind no doubt 
 belongs to an anarchist and not to an astronomer. 
 
 The first Gunderode who had been called King of 
 Helianthus (he had never been crowned, nor have his 
 descendants) had been the famous Theodoric, invari- 
 ably called the Liberator, of whom the effigies in 
 bronze, or marble, or stone, stand thick as pebbles on 
 a beach all over the land. His successor had been 
 his son Theodoric II., a nonentity though a martinet. 
 The third in succession was the present ruler, John 
 Orderic, who had ascended the throne at five-and- 
 twenty years old, and had found the seat to his 
 liking. He had not the wonderful protean abilities 
 of his nephew Julius, which enabled the latter to be 
 a despot and to seem a dilettante, to garrotte a nation 
 and to play the violin, to telephone the order for a 
 massacre and to model the shape of a fusee-box : 
 that kind of activity was not in John of Gunderode, 
 who was as incapable of versatility as a wooden 
 nutmeg. He even, indeed, viewed with contempt 
 these kaleidoscopic qualities in his nephew ; and 
 remained cold when the War-lord of the Guthones 
 sang, fiddled, painted, modelled, wrote an oratorio. 
 
56 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 or designed a uniform, to the admiration of a wonder- 
 ing world. 
 
 But he was a shrewd, keen, selfish, cautious ruler and 
 reader of men. Sentiment never interfered in him with 
 judgment, and no instinct of kindness ever weakened 
 his wisdom. He was exceedingly strong in many- 
 things ; in nothing stronger than in never being 
 drawn into giving his reasons. Whoever gives his 
 reasons, gives a hostage to his adversaries. He 
 acted ; and let others waste their time, if they chose, 
 in conjectures as to why his acts took such a shape 
 instead of such another. This spared him much 
 time, and saved him from ever contradicting himself. 
 It was thus that he made a gramme of brains do the 
 work of an ounce, and a very ordinary personage 
 appear a statesman and a diplomatist. 
 
 The brain, moreover, grows keener by being 
 incessantly sharpened on the grindstone of self- 
 interest and suspicion ; and by the time he was 
 forty years old he had become an able tactician 
 and an unerring observer. Had he been born in 
 private life he would have been respected by his 
 neighbours, secret but severe in his business trans- 
 actions, harsh but faithful as a husband, cold but 
 careful as a father ; he would have gone unloved 
 through life, but in death would have been regretted 
 by his bankers if cursed by his clerks. 
 
 In the exalted position which he filled, his worst 
 qualities were cultured and strengthened, and his 
 better qualities early perished of atrophy, under 
 the stifling compost which makes the hotbeds of 
 Courts. 
 
 The Chinese, it is said, put a child into a vase of 
 pottery and keep him in it until he is a man ; in 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 57 
 
 consequence his limbs and body never grow bigger 
 than the pot which confines them. The pot into 
 which a monarch is put is not seen, and does not 
 imprison his body, only his mind ; and in old times 
 his jester was privileged to come and shake bells, and 
 tell truths, over the pot. But there are no jesters of 
 that kind now ; there are only newspapers to do the 
 fooling, and if any truth is told by them they are 
 forthwith prosecuted for libel. Actions for tese- 
 majeste are very frequent in Helianthus ; months 
 and even years of imprisonment punish any plain 
 speaking about distinguished persons, so that the 
 Press of the country never by any chance ventures to 
 blame the House of Gunderode. 
 
 A little girl once said to another : * What do you 
 think God is like } * * Like my papa,' replied the 
 other without hesitation. ' Like my papa, you 
 mean,' said the first, with indignant conviction. It 
 is probable that every monarch has in his mind's eye 
 a Deity fashioned, not like his sire, but after his own 
 likeness, or rather that which he imagines is his like- 
 ness. This Deity is more or less real, more or less 
 near, more or less to be admired or dreaded, accord- 
 ing to the temperament of the sovereign he protects. 
 Some go so far as to believe that they have received 
 an exequatur from the Most High in the same way as 
 they give one to their clergy. It is these rulers who 
 believe in the crime of lese-majestd and imprison 
 professors, caricaturists, comic singers, and workmen 
 for the treason of satire or laughter. Others do not 
 go so far as this ; they have doubts about their own 
 celestial origin and appointment ; they imagine that 
 what they call Providence is a kind of Chief Con- 
 stable, and consider themselves as appointed his sub- 
 
58 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 inspectors ; but they, also, believe in lese-majeste as 
 the policeman believes in tip-cat and hooligans ; like 
 tip-cat and hooligans it must be put down at all costs. 
 
 To this latter category John of Gunderode inclined 
 from the bias of his temperament. He was a man of 
 much good common-sense, and his Deity was a nebu- 
 lous personality, vague, remote, not needing much 
 consideration, a useful figure to carry in procession, 
 as a black Virgin or a waxen Jesus is carried round a 
 town on great occasions such as a visitation of cholera, 
 or a famine. That he was guided by the Most High 
 when he made war, sent socialists to a penitentiary, 
 escaped a pistol shot, or prevented a popular measure 
 from becoming law, he did not believe, as his nephew 
 Julius believed it of himself ; he did not think himself 
 the Elder Brother of Christ, and the administrator of 
 Providence, as Julius believed himself to be. Deity 
 was to him a quantite ndgligeahle^ exceedingly ndgUge- 
 ahle. Cromwell, in his famous exhortation, placed 
 his God first, and his gunpowder second. John of 
 Gunder5de reversed the order of the precedence. 
 The casting of his cannon was of more importance 
 to him than the celebration of a Te Deum or a 
 Hosanna ; his mind was narrow but robust. 
 
 Second only to the political successes of his reign 
 was the interest possessed for him by the fluctuations 
 of his investments. A potentate has lately said with 
 considerable naivete that the prestige of his order 
 has diminished in these later years ; he might have 
 said that it is not possible for any one man to be at 
 once a Caesar Imperator, a Grand Monarque, and an 
 impassioned investor in Preference Shares. 
 
 At present the nations in general do not realise 
 that the anointed sovereigns of the world have 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 
 
 59 
 
 swords at their sides and cannon at their command, 
 and crowns and sceptres, orbs and miniver, in their 
 wardrobes, but keep in their hands the Share List as 
 their favourite reading : when the nations do realise 
 this, ' prestige ' will drop lower still, and crowns will 
 cease to be quoted at par. 
 
 At an early age the present King of Helianthus 
 had been wedded by his father to a princess of a small 
 northern kingdom ; a plain, dull, uninteresting young 
 woman who gave birth to a son, or, as the jour- 
 naUsts said, to a Crown Prince, and then, with her 
 usual discretion, retired into the grave, leaving her 
 place to be filled by a lovelier successor, a grand- 
 daughter of the famous aged Emperor Gregory, who 
 was called the Nestor of Europe, the ruler of that 
 enormous empire of which the huge penumbra over- 
 shadows two quarters of the globe. 
 
 She was an exceedingly beautiful woman, with 
 an infinite grace of form and bearing, and a wistful 
 melancholy in her eyes, which were of the colour of 
 the northern seas in summer. In ten sad years this 
 patient victim of policy had borne King John four sons 
 and two daughters : Elim, Duke of Othyris ; Alexis, 
 Prince of Tyras ; Constantine, Duke of Esthonia ; 
 Frederic, Count of Idumasa ; and two daughters, 
 Ottoline and Euphrosyne, the former married to a 
 Lillienstauifen, the latter betrothed to her cousin, a 
 great-grandson of the Emperor Gregory. 
 
 On the hard granite of the King's irresponsive, 
 sullen, unkind temperament, the Queen's sensitive and 
 timid nature had been thrown as a hind is thrown on 
 a rock to be grallocked. Fear came into her lovely 
 startled eyes whenever she heard his step or his voice, as 
 into the eyes of the doe when she sees the steel gleam 
 
«o HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 of the death-tubes shine above the heather. Her own 
 family knew that she was extremely unhappy ; but 
 no imperial or royal family can interfere in the 
 un happiness which may ensue from one of its State 
 alliances ; the only anxiety and effort of the family is 
 to prevent any publicity of the fact that the union 
 is discord, and this was easy in her case, for she shrank 
 from all publicity herself. * Faut ensorceler ton homme^ 
 ma 'petite I Ouf I tu es belle !^ said old Gregory to 
 her once ; but he knew that no living woman could 
 move by a hair's breadth the temper of John "of 
 Gunderode any more than a moonbeam can melt a 
 stone. That the King was not more unkind than he 
 was to her, was due to the great respect he felt for 
 the aged tyrant of the Septentriones, and to the 
 residence in the country of one of her brothers, the 
 Grand Duke Basil. Her first-born, so like her 
 physically and morally, had for her sake as well as for 
 his own been dear to her brother, a celibate, a con- 
 noisseur, a fine musician, a profound scholar, a prey 
 to the melancholy of desires which nothing earthly 
 could satisfy, and of ill-health which could be miti- 
 gated by care and by climate, but never be cured. The 
 greater part of Elim's early youth was spent with his 
 uncle Basil in the palaces which the Grand Duke had 
 purchased in his sister's adopted country — that Helian- 
 thus so dear to all Hellenists and Latinists for its 
 incomparable traditions, its art, its literature, its 
 history. 
 
 The boy, extremely impressionable in feeling, was 
 strongly resistant to alien mental influence. Nothing 
 could be done with him intellectually when he did 
 not choose. They could make him unhappy, but 
 they could not make him receptive. To some kinds 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 6i 
 
 of influence he was very open, but to many he was; 
 adamant. This power of passive, but unyielding 
 resistance had preserved his originality. 
 
 To his uncle Basil, with his scholar's reverence 
 for the past and his satirist's contempt for the 
 present, his brother-in-law of GunderOde was an 
 intolerably false note in that classic harmony which 
 had been called, for two thousand years, Helianthus ; 
 a false note, like a motor-car on the plain of 
 Thebes, a cyclist under the palms of Nile, a con- 
 script on guard on the Capitol, a policeman in 
 front of York Minster, an American tourist smoking 
 where the lions still roam amongst the ruins of 
 Palmyra ; like any one or any thing discordant, in- 
 congruous, irritating, commonplace, intolerable ;. 
 absolutely intolerable as the ruler of a State which 
 was steeped in classic and poetic memories, and was. 
 in its atmosphere, in its legends, in its genius, in its 
 landscapes, full of a spiritual and melancholy beauty. 
 
 ' Heavens and earth, he is as incongruous here as. 
 a kepi set on the head of an Apollo ! ' thought the 
 Grand Duke. But of what he thought and of what 
 he felt concerning his sister's husband he never 
 spoke. 
 
 Between Elim and his father there had been always, 
 a great antagonism. As a child he had a very sensitive 
 musical ear, and the shrieking of fifes and the beating 
 of drums were a torture to him ; he would run off 
 and hide anywhere he could, away from the squeak 
 of the bugle, and cover his ears with his hands 
 whenever he heard regiments marching past the 
 palace, or merely a company going to change 
 guard. His governor, by the King's order, showed 
 no mercy to this Instinct ; and frequently the: 
 
62 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 boy was taken to the Field of Ares, or to one 
 of the barrack-yards, simply to punish his tym- 
 panum for its sensitiveness and give his nerves 
 cruel suffering. To his father's taste, the shrill 
 fife and the sullen drum gave the only melody 
 worth hearing. When his wife timidly urged in 
 Elim's excuse, that the child Wolfgang Mozart 
 had shown a similar sensibility, the monarch looked 
 at her with astonishment. What was Mozart ? A 
 Kapellmeister ! Mozart had never been even a drum- 
 major ! 
 
 When Elim was ten years old a sea -eagle was 
 brought one day to the Palace, and caged on one of 
 the terraces overlooking the sea. It had a wounded 
 wing and had been captured when resting on the 
 mast of a fishing-coble. The imprisonment and 
 immobility of the grand bird tortured the little 
 Prince every day that he went into the gardens. 
 To see its closed eyes, its drooped pinions, its 
 ruffled and lustreless plumage, its wretched restless 
 movements at times in its narrow prison, followed 
 by long hours when it sat motionless in stupor 
 and despair, so wrought upon his nerves that it 
 became almost an illness to him. In vain did his 
 tutors punish, and his mother try to reason with him. 
 
 ' Set him free,' he said in an anguish of sym- 
 pathy. ' Set him free. Shut me up in his place. 
 But set him free.' 
 
 The Queen, who knew that her best-beloved son 
 had inherited that impulse of tenderness and pity 
 from herself, was at last so moved by the distress of 
 the child, and that of the bird, that she ventured to 
 i)eg for the freedom of the eagle of her husband. 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 63 
 
 The broken wing had healed, flight would, she urged, 
 be possible, and a painful sight would be spared to 
 a sensitive little soul. 
 
 The King seldom granted any request of hers : 
 her wishes always appeared to him sentimental fancies 
 which were best nipped in the bud ; everything seemed 
 sentimental in his sight which was not connected with 
 finance or with the army. She had no influence 
 whatever on him ; her delicacy of beauty, physical and 
 moral, was no more to him than the rose hues of the 
 dianthus — no more than the gemmae are to the rocks 
 on which the sea waves cast them. Her intercession 
 was therefore seldom successful, her gentle voice was 
 seldom listened to ; but to her surprise he this time 
 acceded to her wish. 
 
 * But make this condition with your boy,' he 
 said to her. * He is idle, they tell me, and back- 
 ward. Let him learn the first book of the ///W by 
 heart in the Latin translation. When he can recite 
 it, the bird shall be set free.' 
 
 Elim, who was certainly backward, gave him- 
 self to the task as he had never done to any 
 other through fear of punishment or promise of 
 pleasure. He learned the allotted verse with a 
 stubborn devotion to its difficult text which his 
 tutors had never seen in him, and in much less tim.e 
 than they had expected. With a rapidity which 
 seemed incredible to them, and a perfect accuracy of 
 quantity and of accent, he committed to memory 
 the long sonorous lines, and declaimed them to his 
 preceptor, standing with his hands behind his back, 
 and the sun in his face, on the sea-terrace where the 
 bird was caged beneath a spreading plane-tree. 
 
 His parents were present ; his mother's eyes were 
 
64 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 filled with tears of delight and pride ; his father 
 stood with his eternal cigarette between his lips, and 
 listened with critical coldness and in harsh readiness 
 to discover a flaw in word or measure ; he had come 
 in from shooting, and his gun was lying across a 
 garden chair by his side. But Elim made no mistake. 
 Whilst he recited the verse his eyes were fixed on 
 the dark, motionless, pining form of the imprisoned 
 eagle. Its ransom depended on himself; he made 
 no fault of memory or quantity. When he had 
 spoken the last line he stood silent, breathless, red 
 as a rose, with hope and expectation. 
 
 ' It was well said, was it not ? ' his mother mur- 
 mured timidly to her husband. 
 
 The King nodded. 
 
 * Open the eagle's cage,' he said to one of his 
 gentlemen. 
 
 The child sprang forward and kissed his father's 
 hand in a rapture of joy and gratitude. 
 
 * No sentiment ! ' said the sovereign, putting him 
 aside with some impatience. He disliked all emotion 
 and all demonstration. 
 
 One of the gentlemen of the household had 
 made believe to open the door of the cage, but in 
 reality a gardener had executed the order ; it was 
 done not without danger, for the bird, realising its 
 liberty, might have used its strength of beak or claws. 
 
 They stood together and watched, the sovereigns 
 in front, the boy by their side, the courtiers behind. 
 The ecstasy and expectation on Elim's fair face were 
 like those on the face of a young seraph in a Fra 
 Angelico fresco ; his lips were parted, his breath 
 came fast and loud, he trembled in every nerve 
 with his great joy. 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 65 
 
 The door of the cage was drawn open ; the men 
 retreated ; for some moments the bird did not seem 
 to see that anything had happened ; he sat, a 
 miserable heap of dull tarnished feathers, his head 
 sunk into his neck. Then, slowly, he seemed to be- 
 come aware of more air, of more light, of something 
 unusual ; he shook his plumage, his wings began 
 to thrill and move and open, his head was lifted, 
 his eyes gazed at his comrade the sun in the blue 
 summer heavens. 
 
 The Queen thought of the eagle in the story of 
 Dostoiewsky, the eagle that the prisoners in Siberia 
 set free, and watched, winging his way over the 
 snowy steppes in that freedom which was for ever 
 denied to themselves. 
 
 ' Dear child ! ' she murmured, and laid her hand 
 on Elim's golden head. 
 
 The bird paused a moment on the threshold 
 of his prison, then with expanded wings sailed, 
 slowly and majestically, over the marble parapet of 
 the terrace, out into the air and above the sea. 
 
 Elim stood transfixed and transfigured by ecstasy 
 as his gaze followed the flight of the captive he had 
 set free. 
 
 The King also followed the flight of the bird 
 with his eyes. His gun, lying across the chair, was 
 loaded ; he took it, and raised it to his shoulder, 
 aimed at the eagle rising higher and higher and 
 higher into the blue ether, and fired. 
 
 The shot rang sharp and hard through the 
 morning stillness. Another followed it. The eagle 
 dropped dead into the sea. John of Gunderode 
 gave his breech-loader to one of his attendants. 
 
 Elim, his eyes wide open in horror, swayed 
 
 F 
 
66 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 blindly to and fro, then fell back insensible into his 
 mother's trembling arms. 
 
 ' Little idiot ! ' said his father, with contempt. 
 He had not meant to do anything especially unkind ; 
 he had followed that insane impulse of the sportsman 
 to kill everything that flies, which, in its continual 
 indulgence, becomes a form of dementia. 
 
 The courtiers, the ladies, the preceptors, joined in 
 a chorus of wondering admiration : what sight, 
 what precision, what wonderful accuracy of aim ! 
 
 The Crown Prince gave the big boy's guffaw of 
 enjoyment. The younger children screamed shrilly 
 with delight and danced in glee. 
 
 For several weeks Elim's life was despaired of ; 
 meningitis in its worst shape pressed its red-hot iron 
 gauntlet on his brain and spine ; the devotion of 
 his mother saved him. 
 
 From that morning his soul was filled with the 
 most unconquerable distrust of every act and word 
 of his father's ; and a sombre and mutual dislike grew 
 up between them as between the betrayed and the 
 betrayer. It grew with growth, and each felt for the 
 other an unchangeable and deeply-rooted aversion. 
 
 After twenty years of an exemplary life, during 
 which she had never known a moment's free will, or 
 been allowed a moment's individual action, the fair 
 Queen had died, as a flower without light or air 
 fades away and perishes. 
 
 'No one wants me any more,' she said, with 
 a patient smile. Her eldest and best-beloved son 
 threw his arms about her with passionate tenderness 
 as though he would dispute her with death itself, 
 for there was an exquisite sympathy between them. 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 67 
 
 * I shall want you all my life, my darling mother ! ' 
 
 Her wasted, transparent hand rested fondly on 
 his hair. * Oh, my love, you will have so many 
 other ties.' 
 
 'Perhaps so, perhaps not,' said Elim. 'None 
 will or can be to me what you have been, my dearest 
 and best ! ' 
 
 He had given to her the most devoted affection 
 and sympathy, and his indignation at his father's 
 treatment of her had been only the more intense 
 and embittered because it had perforce been shut up 
 in his own breast. 
 
 Elim grew up to a beautiful adolescence, and a 
 manhood of great promise for the future, should he 
 ever reign ; he resembled the Adonis of the Soleia 
 in form and feature, and was remarkable for grace 
 and charm rather than for masculine force. His 
 health was good, or, at least, he never gratified any 
 of the Court physicians by complaining of it ; his 
 constitution was sound, but he sufi-ered from the chief 
 of modern diseases, ennui ; and it is the procreator 
 of many others. It always seemed to him that he 
 had been born to be the victim of captivity like any 
 unhappy animal who comes out of its mother's 
 womb in the cage of a menagerie, and passes infancy 
 and youth behind those bars, and is supposed by 
 fools to know no other life and to want no other, 
 because of any other he has only instinct and no . 
 experience to tell him, 
 
 That he could never be induced to see that his own 
 order was a thing apart, a species made of different 
 clay to the general, was an exasperation to all his 
 relatives. Princes, although in felt hats and ulsters, 
 
68 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 ought to feel themselves altogether apart from the 
 crowds similarly clad on a highway, a race-course, or 
 a skating-ground. This sense of his own electness 
 was altogether missing in him ; and his want of it 
 was an affront to those who had the most profound 
 belief that they were pure gold, and every one else 
 copper, or tin, or nickel. 
 
 The diversions of his brother Tyras were chiefly 
 such as a decent street-sweeper or stone -breaker 
 would be ashamed of, but they did not offend 
 the family as greatly as the opinions and practices 
 of Othyris. Privilege covered them ; whereas 
 Othyris tore privilege to tatters. He hated 
 the men who bent their backs in two as they 
 were received by him ; he hated the women who 
 dropped before him curtsies so low that they seemed 
 to sink into the carpet. The supple spine, the 
 pliable knees, seemed to him to degrade humanity in 
 their persons. He was popular with the nation, 
 but the Court was unanimous in its dislike of him. 
 The Court saw its vested interests, its shibboleths, 
 its salaries, its actual existence, menaced by him ; 
 and except in a few women he had no friends in 
 his father^s palaces or even in his own. Every one 
 whose interests were rooted in Court favour. Court 
 honours. Court pomps and vanities, dignities and 
 perquisites, knowing that he was near enough in 
 the line of succession to make his advent to the 
 throne a serious possibility, could not but view with 
 horror and with terror the eventuality of a reign in 
 which they would all, figuratively speaking, be put 
 on rations of black bread, if they were not bundled 
 neck and crop out of their Holy of Holies into 
 ordinary and undecorated life. 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 69 
 
 When he had been a mere youth they had thought 
 that his eccentricities would wear smooth with time ; 
 but year after year passed, and he did not abandon 
 his early opinions as most men do ; he did not wash 
 in the Jordan of conventionality and become cleansed. 
 When the Court contemplated all that such a king 
 would mean to them, they felt that even such a 
 saintly woman as Princess Gertrude ought to be 
 divorced, as the Creole sinner Josephine had been, for 
 the sake of the public weal. 
 
 ' Mine is a vie manquee^ thought Othyris often. 
 ' I am of what is called royal birth, and I have no 
 belief in royalty. I am a revolutionist at heart, but 
 loyalty to my family forbids me to be so in action. 
 I am an artist in instinct and appreciation, but I have 
 not the artistes power to create, and to absorb himself 
 in his creations. All my sympathies are with the 
 poor and the weak, and I am forced to live with 
 the rich and the strong. I abhor war and militarism, 
 and I am made, perforce, a Colonel of Cuirassiers and 
 a General of a Division. I know not what my 
 end may be, but I shall probably say, like my uncle 
 Basil, " I have loved justice and hated iniquity, 
 wherefore now I die in exile." ' 
 
 The Grand Duke Basil also hated the military type 
 and hated militarism. His constitution had been 
 ruined by its discipline, and his youth embittered by 
 its rigours. But he was too honourable a man to per- 
 mit himself to prejudice the son against the father. 
 Elim never heard from him a disparaging word of 
 either the King or the King's measures ; but the influ- 
 ence of the intellectual atmosphere which surrounded 
 him in his uncle's house inevitably gave its colour and 
 its bias to his mind, which had all the receptivity of 
 
70 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 youth with the quick apprehension natural to talent, 
 and an inborn tendency to resist conventional ideas. 
 The King's aversion to his brother-in-law was as 
 great as that of the Grand Duke to him ; but in the 
 monarch every sentiment was subordinate to the 
 organ of acquisitiveness ; and he loved the fortune 
 of Basil if he detested his person. Therefore the 
 smooth ice of a chill, impeccable courtesy covered 
 their relations at all times, and, through his uncle's 
 wishes and influence, Elim enjoyed a measure of 
 repose and of freedom which otherwise would never 
 have been his portion. In the beautiful solitudes of 
 ^nothrea — his uncle's favourite sojourn — he could 
 forget that he was a prince and be the poet, the 
 artist, the dreamer, which nature had made him. 
 
 Basil, the King thought, emasculated the character 
 of a youth already only too susceptible to all senti- 
 mental follies and heresies ; but if Paris were well 
 worth the sacrifice of a mass, according to the 
 Bearnais, the vast fortune of his brother-in-law 
 would, he considered, be well worth that of a 
 foolish young man ; and he was led the more easily 
 to this conclusion by what he knew of the extreme 
 uncertainty of the life of the Grand Duke, who 
 had cardiac affections of the most dangerous kind, 
 and might die at any moment — as, in fact, he did die, 
 suddenly, as he strolled amongst his roses one summer 
 day, when Elim was twenty years old. Everything 
 he possessed in Helianthus, all his great estates and 
 the chief bulk of his personalty, was bequeathed to 
 his nephew, and rendered him one of the richest 
 princes of Europe. 
 
 Othyris was considered by his family to encourage 
 the most subversive projects upon his lands, and 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 71 
 
 at the same time to keep up the most antiquated 
 absurdities. Worse still, he had even desired and 
 asked the King's permission to refuse the grant 
 made to him on the Civil List by the nation in common 
 with the other princes. When he urged that he did 
 not require such an addition to his wealth, the explana- 
 tion seemed as bad as the intention which prompted 
 it. Who had ever heard in empire, kingdom, or 
 principality of a royal person who declined the 
 people's money ? He was not permitted by his 
 father to have his way in this, and could only relieve 
 his conscience by spending all of it in public works 
 or private charity, so that the money went indirectly 
 back to the nation which gave it : a most senseless 
 and demoralising proceeding, according to his 
 relatives, who always considered all provisions made 
 for them by the State miserably mean and wholly 
 inferior to their merits. 
 
 It also made his family very angry that Othyris 
 would never take any precautions for his own safety. 
 He went about in town or country, on foot or on 
 horseback, or on his mail phaeton, like any private 
 gentleman. His indifference to danger, or his con- 
 fidence in his popularity, seemed a reflection on the 
 fears of his family in surrounding themselves with 
 so many precautions. 
 
 He left the motor-cars and the bicycles to his 
 brothers ; they seemed to him to profane the marble 
 dust and the herb-scented moors of Helianthus. He 
 loved his horses ; and like Lord Byron he loved to 
 ride in the brilHant moonlight along the silent sands, 
 or over the fragrant plains, with nothing beside him 
 but the shadows of himself and of his steed, and the 
 scent of the sea or the perfume of the wild thyme in 
 
72 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 his nostrils. His stables were full of the fleetest and 
 finest horses in Europe ; but he took no pleasure in 
 the stupid and barbaric pastime of racing. To see a 
 colt or a filly flogged along a course, with streaming 
 sides and smoking nostrils, was to him a hateful sight. 
 To enhance the interest of the struggle by putting 
 money on it, as you add cayenne to your soup, seemed 
 to him an avowal that you were moved by the basest 
 of appetites ; he esteemed more highly the punters at 
 Monte Carlo than the members of the Jockey Clubs. 
 
 ' You were born without the gambling instinct, 
 but you can acquire it. People do not like opium 
 when they begin it,' said Tyras to him once. But 
 the acquisition did not seem to him desirable ; and he 
 remained aloof from the Turf as from the narcotic. 
 
 There was racing all over Helianthus : there had 
 been racing of all kinds in the land for over two 
 thousand years, and the ruins of many a great hippo- 
 drome towered on lonely wastes and amidst crowded 
 streets, in witness of the national pastime and its 
 universal fascination. Elim's dislike to it, and his 
 refusal ever to enter a horse for a race, or to keep a 
 racing-stable, was one of the few unpopular traits 
 in his character. 
 
 ' Go against a nation's best interests, and as likely 
 as not it will lick your feet,' his uncle Basil had said 
 once to him. * But oppose its amusements and its 
 appetites, and it will gibbet you.' 
 
 ' I will take the risk,' said Elim. ' At least, I shall 
 not oppose them ; but I shall not share them.' 
 
 The King did not interfere in this matter ; he 
 felt obliged to attend the great races of the 
 year for the sake of popularity, but he had a good 
 deal of common-sense about certain things, and he 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 73 
 
 considered the Turf guilty of the deterioration of the 
 equine race, by the substitution of mere speed for 
 staying power. Races could do nothing to improve 
 the breeds of cavalry horses ; he would have revived 
 the massive destrier of Philippe Auguste and of 
 Barbarossa had he been able. 
 
 So Othyris, unmolested in this matter, used his 
 horses only for exercise ; and, although he rode far 
 and fast, never brought them back distressed or in a 
 lather. What he especially enjoyed was to escape 
 from the gentlemen riding after him, and get out by 
 himself into the solitudes of the more distant country, 
 taking his chance of the banded robbers whose 
 exploits still gave a dramatic colour to the thickets of 
 oleanders and pomegranates by the sea shores, and to 
 the ilex and olive woods of the more remote hillsides. 
 
 ' Your lonely rides are very dangerous,' his elder 
 brother said to him one day. 
 
 * Yes, perhaps,' said Othyris. ' But not much 
 more dangerous than to get into an electric tram-car, 
 or to walk across the lines of light railways ; and how 
 much more agreeable ! Besides, the brigands would 
 not hurt me ; they would know I should be worth 
 money ; they would even, perhaps, leave me my clothes 
 and give me smoked kid and smuggled cigars. But 
 the trains and the trams are democratic institutions : 
 they would crush me as impartially as they crush 
 counterjumpers or bankers' clerks.' 
 
 ' You always jest,' grumbled Theo. He himself 
 never jested : it was said that he had never even 
 played in his nursery days except with tin soldiers. 
 
 Between him and Othyris militarism was built up 
 like a stone wall. 
 
 No conscript, sweating in a forced march under 
 
74 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 the weight of arms and knapsack, hated the military 
 service as the second son of the King hated and 
 despised it. He wrote some poems which were called 
 * Dum spiro^ suspiro ' ; they were sent anonymously 
 to an independent journal, and caused much wonder 
 and comment ; they caused, too, the sequestration of 
 the newspaper at the issue of the fifth poem. As he 
 kept his own confidence, nobody betrayed him, and 
 when the editor received a bank-note for double the 
 amount of the fine imposed on him, he was too wise 
 to try to find out who was the sender. 
 
 Not less burdensome than the military obligations 
 was the possibility that any day, any year, he might 
 be called to occupy the throne. The Crown Prince 
 was a sportsman, untiring and reckless ; there was 
 always the chance of some violence cutting short his 
 life, for he was brave to fool-hardiness. When he 
 did think of this very possible contingency, the Heir- 
 Presumptive to the crown shrank as from a far greater 
 calamity than death. 
 
 Othyris had no dreams or vanities to console him. 
 He knew that kings who refuse to accept the illusions 
 which surround them from their birth are of all 
 mortals the most miserable ; that for them, beyond all 
 men, to issue from the web of existing circumstance 
 is impossible. 
 
 He would have renounced his place in the succession 
 without hesitation, had not the man who would come 
 after him been a worthless scamp. Who could, with 
 any conscience or sense of human responsibility, 
 deliver a nation into such hands as those of Tyras } 
 His own, he knew, were weak, but at least they were 
 clean. He did not believe that he would be able to do 
 any good if he became king, because vested interests 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 75 
 
 would be stronger than he. Ministers would thwart, 
 courtiers conspire, women intrigue ; when he would 
 desire to bless he would be forced to curse ; between 
 him and the people there would be always the mis- 
 representations of the Press, or that gross flattery 
 which defiles more than its abuse. He had no 
 illusions ; he was no Hercules that he would be 
 able to slay the Hydra ; instead, the Hydra would 
 stifle him in feigning to embrace him. Yet he felt 
 that he could not in common courage and decency 
 pass the crown to such a one as the man whose nick- 
 name was Gavroche. Nor could he ever do as he 
 would have liked to do, should he ever succeed to 
 the throne — abolish the constitution and the monarchy, 
 and change the country into a republic based not on 
 transatlantic but on ancient precedent. His brothers 
 would most certainly take up arms against him in 
 such an event ; there would be civil war in the 
 streets, and in the provinces the land would be 
 delivered over to all the furies. To let Hell loose 
 in such a manner would not be a thing to be thought 
 of for a moment. Therefore if called to the succession 
 he would be compelled by circumstance to enter, and 
 remain in, the groove which he abhorred, to sacrifice 
 his existence to formula, to ceremony, to vain pomp, 
 and to silly shibboleth. A friend had once said to 
 him, *■ Make your personality felt.' But he knew, 
 he who had been born and reared in a Court, that 
 around every prince, every monarch, there are in- 
 fluences far stronger than his own, which paralyse his 
 influence, intercept its action, and transmute its power 
 into impotence wherever, however, it may cross and 
 menace established claims, precedents, rights, privi- 
 leges, conventionalities, and customs. 
 
76 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 He knew that the Ministers who would kneel to 
 him would be his masters, that their shadows would 
 be always between him and the people ; that, change 
 them as he might, they would be of the same eternal 
 type : their religion, office ; their evangel, a tax-paper. 
 He would be no more able to alter the poverty, the 
 injustice, the agonies of human life in his kingdom 
 than any peasant who dragged bare limbs over 
 scorched sods in the wake of the ploughshare. 
 Individual charity he might give, individual lots he 
 might alleviate ; but to the vast mass of hopeless 
 misery he would be able to give no comfort. The 
 great engines of torture, the great grindstones of 
 pressure, militarism, commerce, taxation, cheap labour, 
 the dropsy of capital, the exploitation of misery ; all 
 these, and all the ills which they engender, he 
 would be no more able to touch than if he were a 
 stevedore labouring in the hold of a steamship in the 
 harbour. The makers of phrases, the grinders of 
 souls, the drivers of hunger, would always be stronger 
 than he. They would leave his multitudes in the 
 death-pits, on the battlefields, in the dens of the 
 sweaters, in the black tunnels of the mines, in the 
 stricken, blighted fields, in the huts without light, or 
 fire, or food ; and he would be powerless to rescue 
 those who would be called his people. 
 
 The contrast between a monarch's semblance of 
 dominion and his absolute impotence in reality, seemed 
 to him the most cruel and cynical antithesis the world 
 contained. His father was content with the only real 
 power which royalty confers on royalty — the power of 
 gathering riches, and placing them in safety out of 
 reach of evil chance ; but he would not be so content. 
 Nor would the lesser privileges of authority satisfy 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 77 
 
 him without the power to alter laws, to divide capital, 
 to reconstruct society, to humanise criminal punish- 
 ment, to guide the people to the light as it was visible 
 to him ; and what king could do aught of this ? 
 Nay, in modern life, could Krishna, or Christ, or 
 Mahomet, do it ? 
 
 Even in the affairs of daily life he was constantly 
 met and checked by an absolute powerlessness to do 
 what he desired for the welfare of the people. 
 Money he could give, and did give ; but there are 
 evils and sorrows which money, magician though it 
 be, cannot cure. If you give money you create a 
 proletariate amongst the poor, and a crowd of toadies 
 amongst those whose god it is ; and you can only 
 give ; you cannot ensure, or even control, the effects 
 of your gift. He knew that well. He could alleviate 
 physical ills indeed, but he could not alter moral ills. 
 He could not follow the course of his gifts any more 
 than a florist can follow the fate of flowers he cuts 
 and sends away to strangers. There was no Poor 
 Law in the country to diminish, however feebly, the 
 suffering of the poor. There was only the tax of 
 the State on the youth of the State : the hateful and 
 almost universal law of conscription which seized 
 from two to three years from the life of nearly every 
 young man born in the kingdom. He felt this 
 most acutely when the lads on his own estates were 
 taken ; be could not save them, he could not 
 ask for any exemption for them ; and they who 
 believed in his omnipotence supposed that he would 
 not help them because he thought the blood-tax just 
 and righteous. He loathed it, but he could no more 
 change it than he could have moved the range of the 
 Rhsetian Mountains. If ever he reigned, would the 
 
78 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 political parties permit him to abolish compulsory 
 military service ? He had no hope of it. The 
 populace would have rejoiced if the weight of arms 
 had been lifted off their sons' shoulders ; but the 
 ruling classes would never have allowed a voluntary 
 and paid force to be substituted for the conscripts so 
 numerous, and, by comparison, so cheap. Europe 
 has swept her youth into the dragon's maw of 
 militarism and is not inclined to let them escape. 
 War is the plaything of governments. They are not 
 likely to give it up merely because the playthings get 
 broken. 
 
 The favourite place of his uncle Basil had been the 
 great estate called ^nothrea, which lay on the south- 
 west coast of Helianthus and which was as nearly an 
 earthly paradise as nature and art, land and sea, un- 
 limited wealth and perfect taste, could make it. Its 
 views were incomparable, its treasures were endless, 
 its gardens were dreams of loveliness ; and from its 
 terraces the Mare Magimm was seen to unroll its 
 mighty waters, an azure plain when summer smiled, 
 a chaos of storm and wind and mountainous waves, 
 and vessels tossed to and fro like cockle-shells in its 
 mad riot, when the clouds touched its purple. 
 
 Othyris loved the place with an artist's passion 
 for its beauty, and with the gratitude for its solitude 
 of one who would willingly have been a recluse if life 
 had so permitted. He would gladly have exiled 
 himself for ever to ^Enothrea and there have dwelt, 
 leaving the clash and clangour of the world to others. 
 
 There are so many of these beautiful places, lying 
 in the lap of the world like jewels on a woman's 
 breast, and how seldom — how little — do those who 
 possess them care for them ! They may care for them 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 79 
 
 with the pride of possession, care with the vanity of 
 wealth, care with the sense of the owner's omnipo- 
 tence, with the appreciation of cultivated taste, with the 
 power and pomp of hospitality ; but care for them 
 with the love of the heart for the home they do not, 
 for they leave them frequently ; when forced to stay 
 in them they are soon aweary ; all their glories for 
 the sight, all their treasures for the mind, soon pall 
 on them. If it were not for the charm of sport 
 which their coverts offer, their owners would not sleep 
 as often as they do beneath their roofs ! They 
 prefer the express-trains, the transatlantic steamers, 
 the fashionable spa, the crowded hotel, the gorgeous 
 gambling-place, and even other people's roof-trees 
 to their own ! And the grand houses are left to 
 solitude and servants, sometimes even are let to 
 strangers, sometimes are opened to entertain royalty 
 and provide some great prince with whatever sport 
 he likes the best ; and that is all, until, perchance, 
 some day the owner of one of them is embarrassed 
 in his affairs, and sells — last ignominy of all ! 
 
 ^nothrea was safe from such a fate ; but it was, 
 perforce, visited too little by its lord, who would so 
 willingly have passed all his days under its roof. 
 The chain of the social, military, filial duties which 
 bound Othyris to a routine so hateful to him rendered 
 most of his time as heavy to him as the daily labour 
 of any poor man could be. Even when on his 
 estates he had seldom the luxury of solitude, and as 
 he regarded these vast properties as what Tyras 
 called in ridicule une charge d'dmes^ the welfare of 
 them was to him a grave preoccupation. 
 
 Une charge d'dmes ! Well, was it not so } 
 Was not the sole excuse for power and possession 
 
8o HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 the use of them in behalf of those who had neither ? 
 His family thought such a view of rank and pro- 
 perty a monstrous compound of communism and 
 conceit, but his conscience held to it. 
 
 Only he could do so little which satisfied himself ; 
 he was always stopped in his actions by some of the 
 wire fences of law or usage, some of the immovable 
 rocks of prejudice or regulation. One day as he walked 
 down one of the beautiful avenues at ^nothrea, an 
 avenue of great ilex-trees which met in impenetrable 
 darkness overhead and were bordered by those 
 humble and hardy flowers which he cherished more 
 than all the glories of horticulture, he came across a boy 
 who was employed on the estate. He was a pretty lad, 
 with an innocent face and a classic form ; the tears 
 were falling down his cheeks, and as he stood aside 
 bareheaded to let Othyris pass a sob heaved his 
 chest. 
 
 ' Why, my boy, what ails you ? ' asked Elim, 
 knowing the lad by name and sight. * Come, 
 Eusebius, do not be shy of me ; tell me your 
 sorrow.' 
 
 The boy looked up wistfully. 
 
 ' Sir, oh, sir,' he murmured, ' I drew a bad 
 number yesterday. I must serve ! ' 
 
 * Ah ! Is that your trouble ? ' said Othyris, under- 
 standing only too well. The boy was bound to go 
 to military service ; very few, indeed, in the rigour 
 of his father's reign, escaped the iron yoke of con- 
 scription. 
 
 ' Alas ! my poor child, I can do nothing for you. 
 It is the law. You must obey it.' 
 
 Eusebius looked up timidly, his cheeks wet with 
 tears. 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 8i 
 
 * Oh, sir, oh, my gracious lord,' he murmured, 
 * could you not say a word for me ? The others — 
 my brothers — are all so little. They earn nothing, 
 and my father has been ten months helpless since he 
 broke his arm, the bones do not join well ' 
 
 Then frightened at having dared to speak so 
 much, he broke down into uncontrollable weeping, 
 and covered his face with his hands. 
 
 ' I know, I know ! ' said Elim. He knew only too 
 well these sorrows that were all over the land, that 
 overshadowed the lives of the young from their 
 birth, and made bitter as gall the rough, black bread 
 eaten by the hearths of the poor. 
 
 ' Oh, sir, your Highness is so mighty in power. If 
 
 only — if only ' murmured the boy, trembling in 
 
 every limb with hope and fear. To him it seemed if 
 only the lord of ^nothrea would speak but a word, 
 they would let him stay in his little home amongst 
 the wide green fields and fragrant woodlands where 
 he had been born. 
 
 But Othyris knew otherwise. ' They found you 
 healthy and well made ^ ' he said. * They have 
 passed you as fitted for service ? ' 
 ' Yes, sir.' 
 
 ' Then, my lad, no power of mine can do anything 
 for you.' And he thought bitterly : ' It is the best 
 fruit that is first plucked ; it is the soundest lamb 
 that is sent first to the slaughter ! ' 
 
 * Believe me, my boy,' he said with great gentle- 
 ness, ' if it were possible for me to help you, I would 
 do so unasked. But in some things I am entirely 
 powerless, and this is one of them. What I can do 
 is to see that your family does not suffer in your 
 absence, and that your wages are paid to your father 
 
 G 
 
82 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 during your absence on military service as though 
 you were still in these gardens. That is all I can do. 
 For the rest, take courage, my child. When you 
 come back your place will await you.' 
 
 Then he went on his way down the avenue, and 
 his heart was heavy for the weeping lad. Could he 
 have had his way none of this young flesh would 
 have been eaten by the dragon of war. 
 
 He knew how the enforced military service took 
 the elasticity out of youth as the slip and chain cow 
 the young dog ; how it made coarse and harsh and 
 evil those whom it did not make miserable ; how as it 
 hardened the hands and callosities on the feet, so it 
 blunted the sensibilities, killed the individuality, and 
 reduced the man to a machine. 
 
 This boy was good, simple, dutiful, affectionate, 
 ignorant of much of the vice and the sin of cities. 
 He would go to the barracks, to the camp, to the 
 chamber with its rows of straw or of sacking for 
 beds, to the drinking booth and the brothel ; and the 
 long forced marches, and the constant gnawing of 
 hunger, and the dreary empty hours without either 
 work or play, and the coarse and brutal bullying of 
 corporal and of comrade, would be his portion for ten 
 long seasons and would make him weary and sullen, 
 and he would get drunk whenever he could. 
 
 There was no help for it. Othyris might have 
 tried to bear the world upon his shoulders with as 
 much chance of success as to change the military 
 tyrannies of Europe. 
 
 But as he walked through the soft green shadows 
 of the avenue he seemed to hear the dragging of the 
 young tired feet through the dust over the stones, the 
 heaving of the strained lungs under the heavy leathern 
 
IV HELIANTHUS 83 
 
 belts, the pressure of the blood on the valves of the 
 heart in the panting march in the noonday sun ; — for 
 many a long year the sons of Helianthus had gone 
 thus over its earth, under its hills, beside its waters, 
 and none had pitied them. The weakest had always 
 dropped out of line, and sunk down on the soil, and 
 swooned or died there. 
 
 Who had cared ? No one, except the wolves and 
 wild dogs who had stolen over the sand-hills, or 
 through the cistus bushes, and waited. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 His Excellency Alexander Deliornis, Minister 
 of Grace and Justice in Helianthus, had been in early- 
 life a rag-merchant. He had made a considerable 
 fortune in that unsavoury trade, and had entered on 
 the not much cleaner trade of politics as one of the 
 conservative deputies of his native seaport town, in 
 whose harbours innumerable crafts, of all kinds of 
 construction and degrees of tonnage, and coming 
 from all manner of countries, brought to his yards 
 the rags of innumerable filthy multitudes which, 
 when Helianthus was healthy and medical science 
 was out of work, could always afford to its professors 
 the germs of diseases wherewith to create a useful and 
 profitable scare. Deliornis and the medical scientists 
 had had many transactions ; his warehouses, become 
 in later years vast buildings on the quays, were not 
 dear to the goddess Hygeia ; they had not a sweet 
 fragrance as of the rose ; indeed they stank in the 
 nostrils of the city, and of those who landed and 
 embarked at its port. Hygeia frowned on them ; 
 but the high priests of science hurried to the rescue 
 with sulphates and sublimates, and they and Deliornis 
 agreed that the rags were, if not inodorous, innocuous. 
 The rags stank on undisturbed, and the useful 
 process of turning them into gold continued un- 
 
 84 
 
CHAP. V HELIANTHUS 85 
 
 molested ; Science, and the Municipality, and 
 Deliornis were all satisfied ; and if Hygeia con- 
 tinued to pout, well, she is, we know, but a minor 
 divinity, and Pluto dislikes her, because she thins 
 the crowds that pass the Styx. 
 
 Now, the priests and augurs of Mammon are 
 numerous in the Senate and Chamber of Helianthus ; 
 they may be said to swarm there, like flies in a 
 sugar-barrel ; they are to be found even in under- 
 secretaryships of State, and now and then one or 
 other of them becomes a full-blown Minister, being 
 given, of course, some Department of which he knows 
 absolutely nothing, this condition being an essential 
 rule in the formation of all modern governments. 
 Therefore when Deliornis went to the Chamber, he 
 found on the benches of his party various friends 
 of his friends, and they pushed him with zeal and 
 kindness up the rungs of the ladder of political 
 success ; for the manner in which he had behaved about 
 his warehouses had shown that he possessed the 
 making of an ideal public servant. He was intelli- 
 gent, supple, pliant in form, tenacious in fact, adroit 
 in speech, unburdened by prejudice or principle. He 
 mounted easily from minor to major positions, and, 
 whenever the aristocratic and conservative party was 
 in power, it could not afford to pass him over with 
 neglect. Delicate nostrils quivered sometimes, 
 detecting the smell of the rags on his gold-laced 
 coat ; but that, of course, was mere fancy on the 
 part of fastidious people who did not appreciate 
 industry. 
 
 Deliornis was King John's ideal of a Minister, and 
 the odour of the rag warehouse did not irritate the 
 royal nostrils as it did those of some fastidious persons. 
 
86 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 who believed that it could not be got rid of by means 
 of wearing a broad sash ribbon across the chest, or a 
 collar like a prize dog's at the throat. To the 
 King, Deliornis appeared absolutely devoted to the 
 royal House ; without any initiative, or opinions, 
 except such as were suggested from above, i.e. by 
 Providence, by Princes, or by the Conservative Press 
 — a triad which is always working in common for the 
 general good of nations and humanity. He was 
 a fluent speaker, an adroit eater of his own words 
 when desirable, and no one was better able to 
 float a scheme for public works, or an addition 
 to the public debt, and persuade an unwilling 
 and sullen Chamber to vote a measure unwelcome 
 to the country, but dear to the Palace and the 
 Bourse. 
 
 Deliornis, his personality masked by the nam.es of 
 relatives, had placed much of his gold obtained from 
 rags in international, or national, companies, for the 
 most part manufacturers of destructive engines or of 
 destructive chemicals. Before his present elevation 
 to the rank of a Cabinet Minister, he had been 
 Under-Secretary for Naval Afi^airs ; and as the present 
 Minister of Marine was a cousin of his own, they 
 could, with pleasant agreement, furnish largely all kinds 
 of murderous substances to the fleet ; and, indeed, the 
 cousin, being a man of talent, provided the maritime 
 ports and dockyard depots so largely with these that 
 there would be no space for his successors, when they 
 came, to stick in a single shell. New inventions were, 
 indeed, spoken of, which were being discussed and 
 perfected ; but, if it eventually became necessary to 
 adopt them, the present enormous stores could 
 always be sold to small and distant nations, and fresh 
 
V HELIANTHUS 87 
 
 purchases made in the name of the Helianthine 
 people ; for this is statecraft as understood in the 
 present days by professional politicians. To buy 
 and sell at a profit has passed from the tradesman's 
 desk to the statesman's portfolio, as the first of all 
 commandments. 
 
 The cousin, also, having begun life as a clerk at 
 a county court at a town in a hill district, and 
 from that office having advanced to a chair of 
 political economy at an university, knew consider- 
 ably less about the water and the vessels which float 
 thereon than any crab which sits in a rock-pool and 
 sees the white sails, and the black smoke, pass in the 
 distance. Therefore in the true spirit of a monarchical 
 democracy he was considered of all men eligible as 
 a Minister of Marine ; and the battleships built 
 under his orders and auspices were certain to topple 
 head over heels at the first squall at sea, and sink 
 like a stone ; as well-behaved battleships, with a due 
 consciousness of the anxiety of their constructors to 
 begin building anew, always do in all oceans, seas, 
 shoals, and channels, in both hemispheres. The 
 shark, the octopus, the narwhal, amongst whose 
 pleasant company their unhappy crews descend in the 
 twilight of deep salt-water, are children in the art of 
 acquisition compared to the dual entity of Cabinet 
 Minister and public contractor. 
 
 Something of these methods was undoubtedly 
 known to King John, though not all, nor even a 
 tenth part ; for no monarch, dwelling as monarchs do 
 in hothouses, seeing only the prize plants admitted 
 there, can match in shrewdness a hard-headed trades- 
 man, accustomed to contend with all sorts and con- 
 ditions of people, and possessing a smart tongue, 
 
88 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 a pliant spine, and a brain accustomed to deals and 
 markets and all the variations of speculation. The 
 shrewdness of the tradesman is not the finesse of the 
 statesman, and is apt to resemble the bull in the china- 
 shop when it gets among delicate questions and intri- 
 cate diplomacies ; but in its own interests and in 
 its own sphere it always remains the master of 
 men who, whatever else may be their faults, have the 
 hampering scruples of gentlemen. 
 
 The commercial man, the buyer and seller, the 
 speculator on 'Change, the manufacturer, the intelligent 
 dealer in skins, or manures, or chemicals, cannot make 
 a safe diplomatist towards the middle, or close, of a 
 life spent in other pursuits. Between the professional 
 or commercial mind and manner, and the diplomatic 
 mind and manner, there flow vast impassable streams 
 of rose-water and aromatic vinegar. 
 
 But a successful Minister he can make ; we see 
 him on the ministerial benches of all the Parliaments 
 of the world, and he has one superiority over better- 
 bred men : he takes to flunkey ism as naturally as 
 ducks to water. His spine, long bent before rich 
 men, doubles in two before a royal presence ; and 
 for this attribute he is admitted to palaces. For this 
 reason Deliornis had become ?i persona grata at the 
 Soleia ; he agreed with everything, he professed to 
 see profound reason in what was foolishness, and 
 profound insight in what was oblique vision ; he 
 was really penetrated by gratitude when he was 
 treated with cordiality by his Princes, and felt a 
 thrill of pride run down his spine whenever the royal 
 hand touched his own in greeting or valediction. 
 In the Palace he was considered to be of a right 
 and reverend spirit, of remarkably good manners 
 
V HELIANTHUS 89 
 
 considering his origin, and of a docile and humble 
 temper, infinitely rare, and as infinitely becoming. 
 
 Before the year was aged and its first frosts were 
 felt on the wide Guthonic plains. King John went, as 
 in etiquette bound, to return the visit of his nephew 
 Julius, with a pomp and a costliness which contrasted 
 unpleasantly, in the minds of those persons who were 
 hard to please, with the necessity which the Exchequer 
 was under, of grinding the souls and bodies of the 
 general public between the mill-stones of fiscal 
 extortion. A royal progress is still a very costly 
 thing, although no cloth of gold and pourpoint of satin 
 and collar of lace and corselet of jewels are worn, 
 although all the stately and decorative figures of old 
 are represented by figures totally undistinguishable, 
 when travelling, from commercial clerks or shop- 
 assistants out for a holiday at any seaside or riverside 
 haunt. John of Gunderode, in a drab-coloured great- 
 coat and a tweed travelling-cap, walked through the 
 banks of palms and flowers with which the railway 
 station of the northern line was decorated, and over 
 the carpet which it is etiquette to spread wherever 
 royal feet may tread ; said a few words ungraciously 
 with his Ministers, with the Prefect, the Syndic, and 
 other big officials ; then gave them two fingers in 
 farewell, and stepped into his saloon-carriage, accom- 
 panied by his son Idumasa, and lighted a huge 
 cheroot. 
 
 Every device which modern luxury could devise 
 had been lavished on the royal train. Its upholstery 
 was fit for a young beauty's boudoir, well-known 
 artists had painted its panels with charming groups, 
 sculptors had designed its caryatides and its ceilings, 
 
90 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 its temperature was carefully regulated, and its atmo- 
 sphere was delicately tinted to a soft rose hue ; and 
 King John smoked and slept and snored, and 
 ate and drank, and was borne through meridional 
 and central Europe as swiftly and agreeably as 
 though he were a necromancer sailing through the 
 air on a magic carpet. 
 
 His Excellency Alexander Deliornis had been 
 chosen to accompany the King on this official visit, 
 and he was exceedingly elated ; he would, he knew, 
 get some great Order from the Emperor, and the 
 visit would set him firmly in his ministerial saddle, 
 on which he felt at times the unsteadiness of a man 
 who has been sent to the riding-school too late in life. 
 The Prime Minister, Kantakuzene, ought to have 
 gone, and ought to have got the Order, but his 
 republican antecedents made him a person dis- 
 agreeable to the Emperor of the Guthones ; whereas 
 Deliornis, although he had sold rags, had never 
 shown any tenderness to the classes by whom rags 
 are worn. Like their rags, they stank in his nostrils. 
 
 With a stephanotis in his buttonhole, and a grati- 
 fied smile upon his round, red, full face, the chiffonnier 
 en groSy as Tyras called him, awaited his sovereign on 
 the station platform, and followed him with nimble 
 humility into the royal carriage. These are the hours 
 in a politician's life which compensate to him for all 
 the brow-beating in Parliament, the heckling in the 
 Cabinet, the endless stream of applicants pouring in 
 and out of his antechamber, the turning of his coat 
 in the sight of the public, the incessant existence of 
 attack and retreat, of defence and defiance, of assevera- 
 tion and apology, which make up a political career in 
 Helianthus. 
 
V HELIANTHUS 91 
 
 Probably no one enjoys ministerial greatness so 
 thoroughly as an arrive who has been very low down 
 in the social scale. All the fuss and form and cere- 
 mony attendant on it bore the aristocrat, ojfFend the 
 taste of the gentleman, but delight the newly arrived ; 
 the bowing magistrates, the robed and gilded mayors, 
 the staring crowds, the resounding bands, the verbose 
 greetings, the decorated platforms, the gigantic feasts, 
 — all these enchant the man who has risen from the 
 office-stool to the Cabinet Council ; to no other is the 
 red carpet so roseate, or the broad breast-ribbon so 
 dear, or the roar of the cheering such heavenly music. 
 
 The royal train had cost some three million of 
 francs ; each voyage which itmade cost another million ; 
 and King John's visit to the empire of his nephew 
 would cost several further millions ; and both in his 
 own country and in that of Julius, bundles of cut grass 
 and a handful of hens' eggs were taxed at all the 
 town gates, and both peoples paid a hearth tax, though 
 many of their hearths were cold. What had the cost 
 of his train, and the tax at the gates, or the tax on 
 the hearths, to do one with another, each of these 
 potentates would have asked in amazement if any one 
 had had the hardihood to draw in his hearing such an 
 insufferable comparison. 
 
 But from the insolence of such parallels monarchs 
 are carefully screened. 
 
 Royal visits have this disadvantage, that if for 
 any cause — a hostile Press, a political rancour, or 
 an individual apprehension on the part of the guest 
 — the exchange of these courtesies be considered un- 
 wise or ill-timed, their abandonment causes friction, 
 and creates bad feelings between the nations involved,, 
 even as cards not returned, or invitations not accepted. 
 
92 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 make enemies in society of those who hitherto have 
 been on terms of amity. It is easy to produce anger ; 
 it is difficult to allay it ; and to efface the recollection 
 of it is almost impossible, even with that giddy thing 
 — a national susceptibility. The kisses of Henry and 
 Francis on the Field of the Cloth of Gold were soon 
 forgotten ; the loss of Calais and the day of Pavia 
 rankled in Tudor and in Valois souls through 
 centuries. 
 
 The emotions of nations are like mercury in a 
 glass tube : they rise and fall with incredible 
 rapidity. Both finance and journalism want the 
 quicksilver to dance up and down, or their own 
 occupation would be gone ; so the cold hand or the 
 hot hand presses the tube by turns. Every one 
 wants the temperature which suits himself, and very 
 naturally does his best to produce it. 
 
 King John slept and smoked, lunched and dined, 
 bathed and dressed, and was whirled through provinces 
 and countries with scarcely perceptible movement 
 though lightning-like rapidity. Now and then he 
 looked out of a window, and saw long lines of dark for- 
 lorn figures stooping over dark stony lands, or groups 
 of factories under clouds of black and lurid smoke, 
 or sluggish grey canals with barges creeping slowly 
 through their slime ; but they had no interest 
 for him. The only sight which interested him 
 was when in a railway siding, waiting for his train 
 to pass, he saw a military train close packed with 
 soldiers and horses, or a crowd of conscripts huddled 
 together on a station platform, or a squadron of 
 cavalry trotting smartly over the dust of a country 
 road. 
 
 They were the soldiers, the horses, the con- 
 
V HELIANTHUS 93 
 
 scripts, the cavalry, of the various States which 
 acknowledged the suzerainty of his beloved nephew 
 and ally — the nephew of whom he was never sure, 
 the ally who would one day swallow up him and his, 
 if it were possible to do so, by the one law of which 
 he would be unable to dispute the justice : the law of 
 superior strength. 
 
 When the monarch entered into the especial 
 dominions of the Lillienstauffen he found the deepest 
 interest in every mile of the iron way. It was his 
 ideal, this State, or conglomeration of States, in which 
 militarism was the law of national life, and mere babes 
 were drilled in the infant schools. It was a model 
 country in his eyes ; its stations were all designed to 
 be used for defence if needed ; its churches were all 
 loopholed to be used for artillery if wanted ; lines of 
 circumvallation and fortification cut across its woods 
 and pastures, and surrounded its old historic towns ; 
 in all its cities, large and small, there were the blare 
 of trumpets, the beat of drums, the clash of arms, 
 the roll of caissons ; the empire of Julius was, 
 before all else, a military country. A cursory glance 
 showed that fact even to any civilian ; to a military 
 scientist like John of GunderOde it revealed its 
 imposing preparations for war in a thousand ways. 
 
 Its roads were all made to serve for the passage 
 of troops ; its bridges over rail and river were all 
 built for military use ; in every little village there 
 were drilling, and trumpeting, and butt shooting ; 
 every factory, mill, and warehouse, every group of 
 farm buildings and school tenements, had its possible 
 utility in war marked upon ordnance maps. He 
 knew that on the frontiers of the Guthonic empire 
 every preparation for offensive and defensive warfare 
 
94 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 was carefully made, and he viewed with admiration 
 the immense barracks, and the gigantic fortifica- 
 tions, which studded the land like couchant herds of 
 mammoths. 
 
 Many admirers praised Julius for his self-denial in 
 keeping his sword sheathed, and his armed host in 
 unmobilised peacefulness ; but, in truth, he did not 
 go to war because he was not by any means sure of 
 his allies, or certain that his friends would not at the 
 first opportunity become his enemies. Indeed of the 
 latter fact he was quite sure, and it was for that 
 which he prepared. 
 
 No dominions in the world were so exclusively 
 dedicated to the possibilities of war as those of 
 Julius. Everything, and every creature, in it was 
 consecrated to preparations for success abroad and at 
 home against foreign foes or native agitators. The 
 nation ate, slept, worked, lived, in a coat of mail, like 
 a man-at-arms of old. 
 
 It was thus that the King would have made 
 Helianthus had he but had his way and an un- 
 restricted exchequer. He would have known how 
 to value and to use a dominion like this of his 
 nephew, a nation which allowed itself to be kept ready 
 equipped for war aggression of any kind, and motion- 
 less under all maltreatment by its ruler, like the set 
 of tin soldiers which lie side by side in their wooden 
 box till they are taken out and put in line by the hand 
 which disposes of them. 
 
 Helianthus was, on the contrary, a country full of 
 legend ; of self-will, of vague remembrance of a great 
 past, remote but glorious ; of irritated discontent with 
 the meagre results of its recent achievements ; it 
 liked its shirt-sleeves, its songs, its bare feet on the 
 
V HELIANTHUS 95 
 
 hot turf, its dagger in its sash, its free chatter on the 
 stone bench, its wild dance, when the empty stomach 
 jumped in the air and the hunger of it was forgotten 
 in caper and caress, as the maidens gambolled in the 
 shadows like fawns and kids, while the moon shone 
 down between the vine leaves. The Helianthines 
 were the last people in the world to please a 
 monarch soaked in, and encrusted by, militarism as 
 a salted fish is saturated with brine. He could not 
 run a poker down their backs ; he could not make 
 them mute, rigid, mechanical, tight-buttoned, belted, 
 gloved, booted, with eyes fixed, and feet moved like 
 clock-work ; they were only awkward and gro- 
 tesque in that drilled state ; put the wild goat in 
 harness, where are its mountain agility and grace ? 
 
 At the capital city of his empire, Julius, in the 
 uniform of the 6th Helianthine Cuirassiers (for to 
 wear each other's uniforms is a delicate mutual com- 
 pliment, invented by themselves, which sovereigns 
 never neglect to observe), met him at the central 
 station, and embraced him on both cheeks, and 
 greeted with equal effusion the young Count 
 of Idumaea, whilst his tallest and stoutest giants in 
 towering fur shakoes and glittering corselets made 
 a double living palisade between which his guests 
 passed to their carriages. John of Gunderode had 
 been unable to show him any such giants as those, and 
 Julius was as proud of them as, in the nursery, a child 
 is proud of having a bigger Noah's ark or taller 
 rocking-horse than any that a small child-visitor 
 possesses at home. 
 
 He also shook hands cordially with Deliornis, on 
 whose breast he knew that he would have to place on 
 the morrow the great Order of the Eland. The rags 
 
96 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 of the Minister's past stank in the nostrils of Julius ; 
 but he ignored them with admirable philosophy. 
 Deliornis was a useful creature to him at the head of 
 foreign affairs in Helios. 
 
 ' My beloved uncle and revered ally,' Julius called 
 his guest at the banquet-table of that day ; but he took 
 care that the entire course of his revered ally's visit 
 should be a sequence of carefully calculated mortifica- 
 tions. The thorns were all masked by the roses, but 
 they were sharp. The King felt, as his reverential 
 nephew intended him to feel, that there are alliances 
 which closely resemble vassalage, and that Helianthus 
 would never be permitted to become wholly inde- 
 pendent of the empire of the Guthones. 
 
 He was shown, moreover, how, beside this 
 wonderfully accurate military machinery, so perfect 
 in all its parts, so polished in all its intricacies, so 
 entirely under command, so unfailingly ready in any 
 season and at every hour, his own army, which he had 
 left behind him between the mountains of Rhastia and 
 the Mare Magnum, was but an awkward, rusty, 
 bruised, and halting engine, uncertain in movement 
 and possibly incapable in emergency. 
 
 The ropes of fresh laurel swung from one electric 
 lamp to another ; the national colours and the national 
 flowers of the two nations were displayed everywhere, 
 from triumphal arches to buttonholes ; there was all 
 that fictitious enthusiasm which is so easily begotten 
 by the suggestion of the Press and the pressure of the 
 police ; martial music resounded everywhere, and 
 the preachers, who are never mute in the land of the 
 Guthones, preached militant discourses from Christian 
 texts. All was love and unity, readiness for war and 
 solidarity in menace ; and the newspapers of the 
 
V HELIANTHUS 97 
 
 world were jubilantly excited, or mournfully envious, 
 according to their geographical situation. 
 
 Why serious persons of mature age, and with the 
 cares of public affairs upon them, should be supposed 
 to require amusements and decorations half-childish, 
 half- barbaric ; why they should be supposed to be 
 pleased by gilt pennons, artificial wreaths, clusters of 
 lights imitating bunches of grapes, or statues of plaster 
 draped in silks and satins, it would be difficult for 
 any one to explain ; but these things are the inevitable 
 accompaniment of all visits by the ruler of one 
 country to the capital of another, just as the sale of 
 cheap toys and gingerbread is the accompaniment of 
 every village fair. 
 
 The prisons are filled with suspected people 
 crammed into them as a measure of precaution. In 
 the poor quarters there are hunger, darkness, sickness, 
 famine, misery. The thieves laugh at the law and 
 pillage the crowds ; the substratum of the city is still 
 filth, famine, iniquity, vice, suffering ; but the tinsel 
 and the gilding and the banners, and the clusters of 
 electric lights, are all there, and are all that visitors 
 and the reporters see. The beautiful horses prance 
 and plunge ; the postillions crack their ribboned 
 whips ; the massed bands play, the bells vibrate 
 in the air, the cannon boom, and the Powers that 
 Be are delighted, like little boys on a roundabout, 
 with all the noise and stir, and gaudy colour, and 
 gilded pasteboard. And if they want a deeper note 
 in the comic opera, is not the Archbishop of the 
 City there to assure them that they have immortal 
 souls, and are the anointed Vice-Regents of Christ ? 
 
 Whether the scene be in Gallia, or Guthonia, or 
 Candor, or Helianthus, or the empire of the Septen- 
 
 H 
 
98 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 triones, the spectacle is always the same ; more splendid 
 in some, more tawdry in others ; more cordial or more 
 conventional ; more based on friendship here, or more 
 moved there by fear ; but in substance it is always the 
 same. It serves to dazzle the people ; to daunt 
 them also by the military display which always 
 accompanies it ; and to warn the guest. * See, my 
 beloved brother-monarch,' says each of those who 
 prepare the spectacle, * I can be the best of friends, 
 but I can be also the nastiest of foes.' And each 
 royal visitor, smiling, kissing, making pretty speeches, 
 understands what the welcome to him means. 
 
 But uneasy lies the head which wears a crown 
 overshadowed by the superior size of another crown ; 
 and when night fell, John of Gunderode slept ill, 
 although he had the honour of reposing on the same 
 couch which had once been pressed by the revered 
 limbs of the great Gunther of Lillienstauffen, famous 
 as the Ruler of the Iron Hand. 
 
 The iron entered into the soul of King John with 
 everything he saw and heard in the Guthonic capital. 
 The perfection of all routine ; the precision of every 
 movement; the exactitude of every detail; the matchless 
 manner in which all the interests of the nation were 
 subordinated to the military interest ; the perpetual 
 saluting ; the manner of course with which the officer 
 treated the civilian as a mixture of ape and ass, 
 jostled him off the curbstone, kicked him off the 
 tram-car, upset him off a chair at a cafe, and spitted 
 him with a sword as a naturalist runs a pin through 
 an insect — all this was hopelessly unattainable in 
 Helianthus. The way in which Julius swept 
 through the street-crowds on his motor-car as 
 Juggernaut rolls over prostrate multitudes could not 
 
V HELIANTHUS 99 
 
 have been imitated by his uncle in Helios, where the 
 people, timid and submissive in much, had in 
 them old instincts of free and heroic races which it 
 was dangerous to risk arousing. The aspect of the 
 capital of Julius, which resembled a huge brick 
 barracks, lent itself to an admixture of prison and 
 exercising-ground to which the capital of Helianthus 
 could no more attain than a flower-garden can 
 look like a penitentiary. The very light in Helios 
 laughed like a saucy child, smiled like a happy maiden ; 
 whereas the capital of the Guthones was a vast mass 
 of stone and brick and iron, with cold mists sweeping 
 over it from distant seas that were frozen half the year 
 and from plains surrounding it which were scorched 
 like deserts the other half ; and its population was 
 armed and drilled and thrashed and put in irons when- 
 ever their rulers desired. But it was the ideal State 
 of John of GunderOde, and he laboured incessantly 
 to make his own realm resemble it ; but he had inferior 
 material to work on, and he felt the inferiority bitterly. 
 The Helianthines had been a polished, learned, and 
 artistic race when the Guthones had been little more 
 than orang-utangs in their fir forests and their airy 
 plains, wearing the skins of wild beasts they killed and 
 eating their flesh ; but now the former was a worn-out 
 race in the eyes of the man who ruled over them, and 
 the latter were in his esteem the perfection of drilled, 
 armed, and scientifically-educated humanity. But he 
 could no more make a Helianthine into a Guthone 
 than he could make a lyre-bird into a barn-door fowl ; 
 and the impossibility made him savage. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 On his return to his capital, King John, inspired by 
 his nephew, sent the Crown Prince on a visit of State 
 to a part of his dominions named in the pages of 
 Herodotus, as in the columns of Baedeker ; the most 
 ancient, poetic, unaltered, and lovely of all the various 
 outlying portions of Helianthus. It consists of a 
 hundred isles, or more : some large, some small, some 
 inhabited, some left solely to the birds of sea and 
 land, to the hares, the wild cats, the squirrels, the 
 moles, the porcupines ; some few are rocky and 
 barren crags, but almost all are densely wooded 
 and extremely beautiful and romantic. To scholars 
 they are known by their ancient name, the Isles of 
 Adonis, and in much they remain untouched since 
 the days of the worship of Aphrodite. They form a 
 series of sentinels between the mainland and the open 
 sea ; but they also constitute a danger to the country, 
 because they are coveted by all neighbouring nations 
 and have been captured and retaken many a time since 
 the Persian, the Carthaginian, the Ottoman fleets sailed 
 through their channels. The visit to them of the 
 Heir- Apparent was a State visit, designed to show the 
 interest which the Crown and Cabinet took in these 
 outlying but precious possessions. But there were 
 two motives beneath this : one was the desire to know 
 
CHAP. VI HELIANTHUS loi 
 
 in what degree, for defence or defiance, they were 
 already prepared ; the other was to ascertain their 
 possible value for speculation. The first mission, 
 open and announced, was that of the Heir- Apparent ; 
 the second, only spoken of sub rosa^ was that of the 
 Minister of Marine who accompanied him ; the 
 Minister who was a cousin of Deliornis. Theo had 
 a militant soul, not a commercial one ; and he was, 
 after his own narrow and vain fashion, an honest 
 man. The King was more modern than he in this 
 respect. 
 
 Elim, who knew well these waters and these isles, 
 would have been far more popular and decorative, 
 had he been sent on such an errand. But the King 
 knew the affection which the maritime population 
 everywhere in Helianthus felt for his second son, who 
 loved the sea and seafaring men, and admired these 
 islanders, who were at once so classic and so 
 primitive. 
 
 To give them such a chance of offering their 
 favourite a public ovation was the last thing in the 
 monarch's thoughts. He knew that Theo was 
 disliked ; was ungracious, stiff-necked, and harsh ; 
 but as he himself was so likewise, he did not perceive 
 the mischief these defects might do. Monarchs and 
 princes who were amiable and smiling on public 
 occasions, seemed to him like cabmen who should 
 give their horses sugar instead of the whip. The 
 passage in history which seemed to him the most 
 discreditable was that which records how Louis 
 Quatorze took off his plumed hat to his gardener. 
 Theo was not likely to err by any similar excess of 
 urbanity. 
 
 The Crown Prince, therefore, was not the man for 
 
I02 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 this kind of errand ; he was not gracious or good- 
 natured ; his personality was not attractive ; he had 
 his father's harsh and hard expression, and the general 
 aspect of a major of an infantry regiment ; he put 
 more militarism into a frock coat and a tall hat than 
 any other man into a full-dress uniform. 
 
 The archipelago was little altered since the days 
 when the altars of Venus had risen amongst the 
 myrtle and oleanders. It was a feast of beauty for 
 the eyes, of perfume for the nostrils ; the islets seemed 
 to float on the waves as swans' nests on the sedges ; 
 the rose of dawn bathed them in its warmth and 
 light ; a poet should have reigned there, a Catullus 
 or a Shelley should have dreamed his life away in its 
 paradise ; on their rocks and in their shallows the 
 sea-flowers of the dianthus and the gemmae shone 
 like jewels, and the white flowers of the acacias 
 dropped into the white surf of its breakers. To 
 change the sparkling sand into coal dust and slag ; 
 to fell the acacias, the laburnums, the araucarias, the 
 ilexes to feed the ever-open maws of factory furnaces ; 
 to make the heavy columns of black smoke obscure 
 the atmosphere and hide from view the radiant 
 horizon — this seemed to the Crown Prince and those 
 of his views and epoch an utilitarian work of the 
 first and most worthy order. It would take much 
 time, no doubt, and an enormous expenditure of 
 money, but then what a noble work it would be — 
 almost equal to the black country of Candor or to 
 the oil regions of the great vast West ! The isles 
 were an ode of Anacreon ; they should become a 
 conspicuous feature in the Share List. 
 
 The Crown Prince saw a great mercantile centre 
 planted like a Buddha amongst avarice, amid its own 
 
VI HELIANTHUS 103 
 
 clouds of dust and smoke ; and the trees would burn 
 in the ovens, and the waters be oily and greasy and 
 black, and the people would sweat and suffer just as 
 in the most prosperous regions of the new world. 
 Theo, though a prince, was extremely modern ; for 
 he was a man of his time. He cared nothing for the 
 flamingo poised like a rose and white lily amongst 
 the reeds ; or for the honeysuckle and clematis 
 throwing graceful sprays from tree to tree ; or for the 
 radiant fish darting through the translucent waters of 
 the rock-pools ; or for the nude and gleeful children 
 leaping through the foam, and plunging headlong 
 down the roaring breakers. Here was a multitude 
 of islets, which artists admired and historians talked 
 of, but which otherwise had no more value than the 
 mesembryanthemum on its ledge of surf-washed rock. 
 What could be more patriotic than to change it into 
 an ocean Manchester, a nautical Pittsburg ? He was 
 by no means an imaginative man, but as his steam- 
 pinnace raced between the isles, he instinctively began 
 to compose the opening lines of a prospectus. 
 
 Elim would have been in a congenial atmosphere in 
 these isles ; he would have been far more intelligent, 
 far more sympathetic, far more distinguished ; but a 
 second son has not the same prestige as the Heir- 
 Apparent, and his already widespread popularity, 
 joined as it was to his extreme and unorthodox 
 opinions, made him unsafe in the King's estimation. 
 Who knew what he would not say to the people of 
 the Isles, well-known as those people had been for 
 many ages for their maritime daring, for their in- 
 subordinate disposition, and, of later times, for their 
 conspicuous part in the War of Independence ? Theo, 
 on the contrary, stamped out free and individual 
 
I04 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 opinions wherever he went, as a mastiff may stamp 
 on glow-worms. 
 
 For the King had not wanted an Anacreontic or 
 Tibullian ode ; he had wanted a report for a parlia- 
 mentary committee, a cut-and-dried array of figures 
 for a future Board of Green Cloth, and these he 
 obtained from his Heir-Apparent, though it hurt the 
 conscience of the Crown Prince to limit himself to 
 arithmetic, and nautical mathematics, and statements 
 of soundings, and statistics of exports, without ex- 
 pressing the sense of shame which he felt that any 
 part of his father's dominions should be in so morally 
 benighted yet singularly contented a state. 
 
 King John, when it was expedient, could dismiss 
 morality as an unimportant item. To his eldest son 
 morality always ranked before anything else — except 
 indeed privilege, and the Brahminic holiness of his 
 caste. 
 
 But he was sent to cement unity, and to uphold 
 prestige, with an imposing escort of men-of-war. 
 The cost to the country of the cruise would be con- 
 siderable, but no one thought about that ; even if the 
 expenditure were large, it would be easily covered by 
 an extra fraction upon hemp or flax, or upon corn or 
 maize or other article of food chiefly used by the poor. 
 Additional taxation was easy in Helianthus to those 
 who imposed the taxes ; it was based, as indeed it is in 
 all countries, on two simple rules : where the shoe 
 pinches already, pinch again, and squeeze those 
 throats which are already safely aphonic. A great 
 deal may be added to the Exchequer by adhering 
 to these simple rules ; there is no disturbance, and 
 the superior classes are left unruffled. And in all 
 countries it is these classes which most require to be 
 
VI HELIANTHUS 105 
 
 conciliated ; the classes which a government cannot 
 shoot, cannot put in the lock-up, cannot charge with 
 seditious conduct, cannot send to pick oakum or 
 make wooden pegs, but which, on the other hand, can, 
 rising from their dinner-tables and feeling pleasantly- 
 warmed with good wines, turn out the Ministry. 
 
 So the Crown Prince sped on his way, quite sure 
 that the bill for his wanderings would be paid with- 
 out any unseemly squabbling over it in cither House ; 
 and Tyras drew caricatures of him as droll as any- 
 thing ever drawn by Caran d'Ache. Meantime 
 Europe discussed excitedly the probabilities that a 
 cession of some of the isles was intended to some 
 other Power, or else that some other isles lying 
 outside the archipelago were to be annexed and 
 included in it ; or else that it was intended to cede 
 the whole archipelago to an international syndi- 
 cate, which would work the mines, fell the forests, 
 clear the flowery wilderness, build towns of corrugated 
 iron, make heaps of slag and cinders where now orchids 
 bloomed and wild camel ias towered, and do the general 
 work of international syndicates everywhere. 
 
 The Crown Prince, however, did not go upon 
 such an errand, though the vision of such a syndicate 
 for the future certainly floated seductively before 
 the minds of the King and his Ministers. He went 
 harmlessly on an errand of what is called in vulgar 
 English, brag : a perfectly natural and innocent 
 flourish of trumpets in the name and the interests of 
 the nation, such as good and patriotic princes are 
 sent upon by their government in all States of the 
 world, gathering popularity and sowing prestige. 
 
 He took his departure from the harbour of Helios 
 with much display of bunting, roar of powder, applause 
 
io6 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 of loafing crowds ; he was on board the largest royal 
 steam-yacht, and was accompanied by various ships of 
 war, from the huge and hideous Polyphemus to the 
 last new miniature destroyer, Hecate. 
 
 The Hundred Isles — the Isles of Adonis — were in 
 the south-eastern waters of the Mare Magnum, and 
 their population was Oriental in its habits rather than 
 European ; the Argonauts must have threaded their 
 labyrinth, and Theseus have sailed on their waters ; the 
 Liberalia must have been held on their golden sands, 
 and the Floralia under their clematis-hung trees. It 
 was a shocking blemish to the State in Theo's eyes 
 that there should be such a set of semi-savages on 
 the coast of Helianthus. That they were admirably 
 made, classically graceful, naturally gay as young 
 dogs, and as good-natured, and that they had probably 
 retained unchanged the morals and the manners of 
 twice a thousand years before, was nothing in the 
 estimation of their royal visitor, except a lamentable 
 survival of indecent paganism. They revolted him, 
 as did nude statues in the galleries of the Soleia 
 or the museums of the city. 
 
 The people of the Hundred Isles certainly did not 
 lend themselves very harmoniously to the spectacle ; on 
 most of the beautiflil, sea-rocked, separate worlds of 
 fruit and flower and fern, of silver sand, and deep, soft, 
 shadows, and red rocks, and creeks changeful in hue 
 as opals, the people were half- barbaric, wholly classic 
 still, mirthful, wild, and ignorant of all outside their 
 isolated homes ; lithe, handsome, brown, half-naked, 
 as little fed as clothed, but well-grown and healthy 
 from the freshness of the air, the freedom of their 
 lives, and the tonic of the salt water in which half 
 their time was spent. The inhabitants of the Isles 
 
VI HELIANTHUS 107 
 
 could never be thoroughly broken in to military 
 discipline. Their youths were sent by force to the 
 navy, where they made brave sailors, but were 
 restive under coercion, and passed half their time 
 in chains. 
 
 These semi-nude, amphibious sons of the surf and 
 the sand were a race that shocked Theo in his inner- 
 most feelings of propriety and correctness. But an 
 official posse of decorators had preceded him, as the 
 upholsterer and the florist and the manager prepare a 
 royal box at the Opera House before some great gala 
 visit of crowned heads. Persons from the larger isles, 
 which were somewhat more civilised, were temporarily 
 deported to the smaller isles to leaven their barbarism ; 
 deputations were formed on the approved modern 
 model, addresses composed and presented, presents 
 prepared and received, the leaven from the mainland 
 was sedulously worked into the original, oceanic, 
 primitive conditions ; great care was taken that the 
 young mothers with children at boldly-bared breasts, 
 that the little lads and lasses dancing naked in the 
 surf, that the men leaping and wrestling like statues 
 of pale bronze, unchanged in shape and habit since 
 the days of Phidias, should be kept to the green 
 gloom of their native woods, and all, or almost all, 
 that the Crown Prince should see should be the 
 orthodox broad-cloth, the modern trouser, the silk 
 hat, the shaven chin, the starched shirt, the national 
 flag, the striped marquee, the consecrated red carpet, — 
 everything, indeed, that royal personages seem to 
 create with their breath wherever they go, as the 
 insignia of civilisation, and will expect to find ready 
 for them likewise in the moon if a flying machine 
 ever take them there. 
 
io8 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 Of the true Isles and life of the Islanders 
 Theo was allowed to see but little. But 
 what he did really see for himself, with his 
 sharp soldier's eyes, and without instruction from 
 any one, in addition to the heathenish habits which 
 horrified him, was that the Hundred Isles were almost 
 utterly defenceless : that they constituted an ever- 
 open gate, through which any enemy could pass into 
 the home waters of Helianthus, and assail her fertile 
 and accessible southern mainland, which had scarcely 
 changed since two thousand years before. 
 
 Of course a portion of the fleet always guarded 
 this channel, where the last of the isles marked the 
 juncture of the archipelago with the high seas. 
 But Theo had a soldier's incredulity as to the use 
 and power of a fleet, unsupported by land forces, to 
 protect a country from invasion ; and he concluded 
 at once that what was needed was a line of sea-walls, 
 and strong additional fortifications at intervals, in 
 various places, heavily armoured and armed, which 
 should be able to prevent any seizure by a coup de main 
 of the most distant Isles. He came also to the con- 
 clusion that all the maps and plans of the archipelago 
 already existing in the War Office and the Admiralty 
 in Helios were defective and misleading. He returned 
 to the capital with the determination to make the 
 nation spend many millions on the necessary works 
 of survey and defence ; and the King was never averse 
 to expenditure, if he himself were not asked to con- 
 tribute to it. 
 
 The fortifications of the archipelago became im- 
 mediately the burning question of the day. All the 
 military and conservative party sided with the Crown 
 Prince, and of course all the radical and socialistic 
 
yi HELIANTHUS 109 
 
 party rushed into opposition of the project ; neither 
 party wasting either time or trouble in looking into 
 the question as it stood on its own merits. This is 
 the characteristic modern fashion of dealing with all 
 public problems ; and it has at least simplicity to 
 recommend it. Does X. favour a project ? That is 
 enough. X.X. immediately goes against it, tooth 
 and nail. Does X. oppose it ? Then, incontinently, 
 X.X. proclaims that it is the one measure imperatively 
 necessary to the national existence. This is called, 
 in monarchies, ' Government by Parliamentary Repre- 
 sentation,' and in republics is entitled * Government 
 by the Will of the People.' Both these names sound 
 nicely ; but what they describe is not quite so nice as 
 to be entirely satisfactory to students of modern 
 history. Nor will they be so to the Gibbons, 
 Tocquevilies, and Rankes of the future, who may 
 very possibly irreverently call it government by 
 interest, caste, temper, envy, greed, hatred, and all 
 uncharitableness ; government, indeed, by the purse 
 and the passions of humanity, instead of by its reason 
 and its justice. 
 
 The project of the fortifications had one result 
 which was good, and one result which was either 
 good or bad according to the views of those who 
 judged it. The first was that the scheme occupied 
 the Crown Prince to the temporary exclusion of all 
 other interests ; the second was that it made the 
 Ministry unpopular. Theo ceased temporarily to 
 worry the life out of his aides-de-camp and his 
 tormented colonels, and his poor soldiers slept in 
 comfort for a time in their barracks, their dormitories 
 being for once in a while undisturbed by bugle-calls 
 of alarm in the small hours of the night ; and the 
 
no HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 Ministry, being forced, to please the King, to prepare 
 and put forward plans which proposed the expendi- 
 ture of several trillions of francs, to be necessarily 
 followed by additional taxation, played its best cards 
 into the hands of vigilant and merciless opponents, 
 and lost them. For the best card of the Prime 
 Minister, Kantakuzene, was that which, though in 
 part mere policy, was also in part a genuine desire 
 in him to better the conditions and lighten the 
 burdens of the poor of his nation. The general 
 belief that he was sincere in this had made him 
 popular with the people, even with those sections 
 which condemned him as a turn -coat, and con- 
 sidered that, in view of his earlier life and pro- 
 fessions of faith, he should never have become a 
 Minister of the Crown. But when he and his 
 Cabinet fathered so monstrous a proposal of ex- 
 penditure as the sea and island fortifications, his best 
 friends were aghast, and his defeat was assured. 
 
 Viewed merely from a technical point of view, the 
 project was sound. In an epoch when fair-faced Peace 
 sinks under the weight of her armour, and scowls like 
 a Medusa at her neighbours, it is undoubtedly wise for 
 a nation to arm everywhere and in every way. No 
 one can be the first to disarm, under penalty of being 
 the first to fall ; or, at least, such is the opinion alike 
 of soldiers and of sages, and of those youngest sons of 
 Athena, newspaper correspondents. 
 
 There was also not a doubt that the sea-washed 
 chain of the Hundred Isles was, as it had been for so 
 many centuries, one of the fairest and most attractive 
 portions of the globe, and as a possession was desired 
 by all. Hitherto, indeed, precisely because it was 
 coveted by all, it had been safe from any one ravisher 
 
VI 
 
 HELIANTHUS iii 
 
 in especial. They all cried ' Hands off ! ' to each 
 other ; and it was felt that the terrible bugbear and 
 Jack -in -the -Box, called an European war, would 
 inevitably follow any attempt on the part of any 
 single Power to trouble the peace of the HeHanthine 
 Archipelago. But who could say how long this 
 suspension of hostilities might last ? 
 
 ' 1 am always reluctant to give any expression of 
 my views on subjects which are before Parliament,' 
 said Othyris to a friend, who pressed him to give his 
 opinion on the matter, 'and this is in especial my 
 eldest brother's project. But I fear that we are doing 
 what every nation does at this time of the world's 
 history — trusting for defence to money, stone, metal, 
 and projectiles, whilst we enfeeble the temper and 
 the spirit of the people without whom those defences 
 are useless. It is impossible that you can incessantly 
 hustle and worry and unnerve a populace with in- 
 numerable by-laws, fines, threats, and taxes, and 
 leave them a spirited and dauntless community. 
 The tyrannical minutiae of modern government, 
 of municipal activity, of poHce supervision, of 
 medical regulations, of house-to-house espionage, 
 of perpetual interrogation, investigation, and inter- 
 ference, must cow a populace ; its effect is the same 
 on men as that of the muzzle on dogs. Until now 
 the population of the Isles has been let alone in 
 a great measure. They have been allowed to rule 
 themselves to a large extent, taxation and conscrip- 
 tion apart. They are primitive, not ungentle, but 
 wild and little touched by the life and laws of the 
 mainland. They form the best asgis to the archi- 
 pelago. I do not think they will willingly be shut 
 up within sea-walls and fortresses, or easily be forced 
 
112 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 to congregate in little walled coast towns. Their 
 origin is, I believe, Phoenician. They are children 
 of the sun, and the waves, and the storm. They 
 shout and chant as they ride the white horses of the 
 surf. They dive down to the coral reefs, and climb 
 the stems of the palms to the crowns. They would 
 fight till the sea ran red against invading foes ; but 
 shut up behind mortised blocks of stone they will 
 grow either sullen and savage, or anasmic and tuber- 
 culous. My brother sees his fortifications and 
 nothing else ; but the men who come behind him, to 
 carry out his plans, see their mills, their mines, their 
 million-volt power-stations, their huge barracks full 
 of workers grinding gold for them ; and as behind the 
 soldier struts the engineer, so behind the engineer 
 stalks the syndicate, and the archipelago will become 
 what Bombay has become — one vast factory. My 
 brother is entirely sincere, he is perfectly single- 
 minded ; he would no more carry two minds than 
 he would wear two sabres. But those behind him 
 are neither simple-minded nor single-minded, and they 
 use him to their own ends. They have one sole 
 intention — to make money ; and he is one of the 
 mints in which they coin it. He has no idea what- 
 ever that he is being used as a mere tool by pro- 
 jectors, contractors, financiers, and all the rest of the 
 gang : he honestly believes that he is doing a 
 patriotic act, and endeavouring to strengthen the 
 country where she is weakest and most vulnerable. 
 He looks forward to an honest and useful expenditure 
 of subscriptions voluntarily given by the nation. He 
 does not as yet imagine, and (if he ever comes to 
 know it) he will never admit, that he will be only 
 made the decorative handle to a gigantic job.' 
 
VI HELIANTHUS 113 
 
 The Crown Prince was, indeed, primarily occupied 
 with the moral side of the question, being a person 
 to whom moral questions were, as they were to his 
 cousin Julius, directly delegated by Heavenly Powers 
 for observation and enforcement upon the nation. 
 But almost equally precious and important to him 
 was the necessity of losing no time in putting in a 
 state of defence these romantic isles and islets which 
 ran out into the open sea like children racing in the 
 waves. He really scarcely knew which was the more 
 horrible of the two, the open sensuality of the people^ 
 or the open peril of these undefended and scattered 
 places on which they dwelt. He, indeed, on his 
 return to the capital, did not any longer conceal the 
 horror which he had felt at the moral condition of 
 the Islands ; however discreetly it had been veiled 
 from him, he had seen much which seemed to him 
 the nudest paganism. 
 
 'Their sexual intercourse is often promiscuous, 
 he said, in an awed whisper of horror, when he returned 
 to the capital. 
 
 * And our houses of ill-fame,' said Othyris, * what 
 are they ? ' 
 
 Theo did not reply. 
 
 There were many offences in his generation, in his 
 country, in his barracks, in his military colleges, which 
 he could neither alter nor chastise, and which he 
 preferred to ignore. 
 
 The greatest martinet must be content to ignore 
 sometimes ; he cannot always be sitting on court- 
 martial. 
 
 Whitewash, religion, and legal marriage appeared 
 to him to be urgently required in these sea-rocked 
 nests of immorality. The long, low, wooden houses. 
 
114 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 thatched with sea-rushes, and covered by creepers, 
 were hotbeds of vice and of sin in his eyes. Square 
 sanitary dwelHngs, built of brick and stuccoed, roofed 
 by tiles or slates, with fireproof floors, patent 
 kitcheners, sinks, safes, and water-pipes, with the sur- 
 rounding trees well cleared away on all sides of each 
 habitation, would make of the Island-population who 
 should inhabit them a wholly different kind of people. 
 It would take time ; no doubt it would take time ; 
 but such changes were absolutely necessary. The people 
 would rebel, no doubt ; had they not rebelled in Helios 
 when the rookeries of the old quarters had been 
 broken up and cleared away ? Was not, unto this 
 very day, the law of decency, which forbade the bathing 
 in the sea at Helios of persons without bathing-clothes, 
 resisted violently by many people, even by people 
 who were otherwise respectable ^ 
 
 The advice of Herbert Spencer, ' Govern me as 
 little as you can,' was the opposite of Theo's rule 
 of conduct and of wisdom. To govern the public in 
 every small matter, in every insignificant trifle, was 
 his ideal of good government. He had once with 
 his own august lips ordered a cottager to turn a cat 
 and her kittens ofl^ a child's bed one day when he had 
 looked in at a cottage doorway as he waited for a 
 village smith to replace a lost nail in one of his 
 horse's shoes. 
 
 * Cats are subject to many contagious diseases, 
 contact with them is most perilous,' he had observed ; 
 and, terrible to relate, the cottager, who did not know 
 who the visitor was, had bawled at him : ' The child 
 and the cat have slept together five mortal years, and 
 you gentry had better not come meddling here ' — 
 a reply which led to a domiciliary visit from the 
 
VI HELIANTHUS 115 
 
 police of the nearest station, and the ejection of the 
 man by his employer from the farm on which he 
 worked. 
 
 Theo certainly had intended no such results to the 
 family when he made his remark about the ante- 
 hygienic properties of the feline race ; and he had 
 never given another thought to either the cat or its 
 owner after he had bidden one of his gentlemen 
 acquaint the Syndic of the district that a certain 
 labourer in a certain place appeared to be a person who 
 required some admonition in regard to his want of 
 respect and of cleanHness. But a hint to an official 
 mind against a man who is of no account and is 
 always in arrears with his hearth-tax, is like a hot 
 cigar-end thrown into a heap of dry maize stalks. It 
 flames alight and consumes everything the flame can 
 reach, until there is nothing left except a little charred 
 ash on a burnt piece of ground. 
 
 Theo never gave another thought to the insolent 
 cottager, but his suggestion to the Syndic bore fruit. 
 
 A man does not like interference in his own 
 house. 
 
 A man is rough with his tongue. 
 
 A man is slow in paying the sum called, so 
 sympathetically, the hearth-tax. 
 
 A man harbours the subversive and intolerable 
 belief that on his own mud floor, between his four 
 wattled walls, he is master. 
 
 To the official or bureaucratic mind all these 
 beliefs are of a damnable iniquity, seed of all poison 
 and peril. They are, to that mind, the root of all 
 evil, and to hunt them down and stamp them 
 out is a religious duty, as the burning of heretics 
 was to the Inquisition. 
 
1 1 6 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 * Kill the cat,' said his wife. ' She's been our 
 curse.' 
 
 * No,' said the man, * she is a good cat. She has 
 fed with us, and she shall starve with us, since starve 
 we must.' 
 
 * She will get mice for herself,' said the wife. 
 
 * Not here,' said the man. * Mice run away from 
 a cold hearth and an empty platter. They are just 
 like human- folks.' 
 
 The cat found mice in the fields, but the man did 
 not find work there. The farmers were shy of a 
 labourer who had been visited by the police from the 
 town, and who had incurred the displeasure of a high 
 personage. The country round was sparsely popu- 
 lated ; the land was poor, the landowners were poor, 
 the harvests were poor ; it was a part of the eastern 
 provinces. There were at all times more workers on 
 the soil than there was work to give them. More- 
 over, when you can only do a humble kind of work, 
 which many can do as well as you and many others 
 can do better, you can create no demand for yourself, 
 you are quickly replaced, no one wants you. If you 
 are pushed out of the one groove in which you have 
 always run, you will be as helpless as an engine 
 lying on its side at the bottom of an embankment. 
 This man, out of work, grew desperate. He begged 
 on the roads. He even threatened those he met. 
 His wife was in her seventh month with her fourth 
 child. The owner of the cottage turned them out 
 of it, and kept the little furniture they had in the 
 place for rent which was overdue. Misery never 
 visits you by herself : she always brings a tribe of 
 followers. 
 
 They slept under stacks of cut wood on a moor. 
 
VI HELIANTHUS 117 
 
 This was vagabondage according to the law. The 
 man was taken up by the rural guards, who had 
 a black cross against his name. The woman was 
 left half-dead, with a still-born babe ; her couch 
 was the rough turf. The little children wandered 
 over the moor to try and find something to eat on 
 bush or briar. They lost themselves, and were dis- 
 covered by a shepherd days afterwards, their bodies 
 and limbs cleaned of their flesh by birds of prey. 
 When the man was let out of prison he had no longer 
 either wife or children ; he had neither home nor 
 work ; he lost his mind and became violent ; the 
 authorities had him removed to a lunatic asylum. 
 What becomes of poor friendless men who pass such 
 gates no one ever knows; all that is certain is that 
 they leave all hope behind them, and are as com- 
 pletely blotted out from memory as the dead who 
 lie nameless under sand or sod. 
 
 It was, perhaps, almost an excessive punishment 
 for having been rude to a prince about a cat. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 It is an established theory with royalties that their 
 families must always be in movement, circulating like 
 the gold at a roulette table. Accordingly, in the 
 early spring of the following year, another royal train 
 was running across one of the most northern and 
 mountainous provinces of Helianthus ; a region over- 
 shadowed by the range of the Rhaetian Alps, and 
 swept by their storms and snows. A line of railway 
 had been driven across it, up its slopes, along its 
 ravines, under its forests, through its gorges, and 
 was a part of the direct route which led to the 
 old Emperor Gregory's dominions, where the aged 
 Cassar's ninety -seventh birthday was about to be 
 celebrated with all the pomp and rejoicing possible 
 on such occasions. 
 
 It was a dangerous line, because the strength of 
 the floods in winter, the frequency of landslips on the 
 hills, the suddenness with which huge rocks were 
 loosened by snow melting in spring and were 
 hurled down on to the metal rails, all combined with 
 the boisterousness of the rivers, and the ferocity of 
 the hill-population, to render the passage of a royal 
 train at all times a thing to be environed with constant 
 and minute precautions. The people living in the 
 desolate villages, in huts which clung to the stone 
 
 ii8 
 
CHAP. VII HELIANTHUS 119 
 
 ledges of the rocks like swallows' nests, or in moss- 
 grown lairs under the pine woods like wolves, had 
 been known, in their hatred of the railway, to roll 
 great blocks of gneiss across the rails, or to fire their 
 rude carbines at the engine-driver or the passengers. 
 Therefore when a train carried members of the 
 imperial family to the Gunderode, or members of 
 the Gunderode family to their imperial relatives, the 
 whole permanent way was alive with officials and 
 workmen on the watch for danger. 
 
 ' Are we worth all that ? ' said Othyris, who was, 
 with his brother Gavroche, the object of this train's 
 especial journey, as he saw guards and operatives 
 patrolling the lofty bridges and the narrow ledges of 
 one of the mountain gorges through which they 
 passed. * If all this be necessary to save us from an 
 accident, why is it not done every day ? The life of 
 any other passenger is worth as much to him as ours 
 to us.' 
 
 * But it is to the nation that ours is so precious ! ' 
 said Tyras, with his worst grin. 
 
 ' Pshaw ! ' said Othyris. 
 
 ' The dear stupid ass of a nation ! ' said Gavroche. 
 * It is so sweet of it to set our lives so high above its 
 own ! And it is very comfortable to journey along 
 like this, with thousands of guardian angels on the 
 look out for us, like the English poet's little cherub 
 that sits up aloft to watch over the life of poor 
 Jack.' 
 
 * But there is no cherub for poor Jack when he 
 goes by this line ; and if he crashes into petroleum 
 waggons, or gets buried under boulders, or is crushed 
 into pulp by a goods train, who cares ? ' 
 
 * Why do you want to be crushed ? ' 
 
I20 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 * I do not want to be crushed, but neither do the 
 travellers of every day in ordinary trains ; and if 
 these precautions are needed for us, similar precautions 
 should be taken for them. And they are not taken.* 
 
 *Of course they are not taken. Where would 
 the shareholders' dividends be ? This is a superb 
 line in its engineering, but the promoters went bank- 
 rupt, you remember, and Max Vreiheiden got it for 
 next to nothing. It is he who runs it, and he is not 
 the sort of man to keep the guardian angels all along 
 the road for everyday travellers.' 
 
 ' Yes : every mile of the line is being sentinelled, 
 sounded, looked over, strengthened, cleared, guarded 
 for us — for us alone. Look at those men running 
 along that ledge ; there is scarcely space for a cat 
 to pass safely ; a slip of the foot, and one of them 
 will be hurled into the torrent ; yet they are risking 
 their lives for us — at how much a day, I wonder ? 
 Enough to buy a maize loaf, a curd cheese, and a 
 little tobacco ? ' 
 
 * That is their business ! I have heard that 
 when this line was made, a good many hundreds 
 of workmen were killed in making it ; so the 
 droves of slaves were killed in building the Pyra- 
 mids. Only we call them "operatives," to sound 
 pretty, and make believe that theirs is all free labour. 
 Of course I know the injustice of the thing as well as 
 you do, only I approve of it, and I like to have all 
 these ants running about, above there, to tap the rocks 
 and make sure that a loose one won't come toppling 
 down in our path. They are a kind of visible Pro- 
 vidence, which is comfortable to ourselves and re- 
 assuring to the insurance offices. Even the clergy 
 think that Providence is not quite to be trusted 
 
VII HELIANTHUS 121 
 
 alone ! Well, you don't quarrel with that, do you ? 
 It's privilege.' 
 
 * I quarrel with all privilege.' 
 
 ' O Lord ! Privilege is the rock of ages. If 
 that went, where should we be ^ ' 
 
 'Wherever our qualities and our deserts would 
 put us.' 
 
 Tyras gave a dissentient grunt. He had an un- 
 comfortable impression that his own qualities and 
 deserts would not, alone, entitle him to a glass of 
 absinthe. He had no great opinion of his own order ; 
 but it seemed to him cutting your own throat, if you 
 were a prince yourself, to assume that a prince could 
 possibly be judged by his merits. 
 
 Tyras was too intelligent, and too cynically frank, 
 not to confess his own worthlessness ; but that know- 
 ledge did not hinder him from the most devout 
 persuasion that any filth he indulged in was an honour 
 to those whom it bespattered, and, alas, for the 
 baseness of human nature, no one contradicted this 
 beUef. 
 
 * On triche la haut ! ' murmured a gentleman who 
 was once watching the play at a private roulette table 
 where Gavroche was raking his gains in largely ; but 
 the glances, the frowns, the signs of other persons, 
 immediately made this too candid person conscious 
 that all that is seen must not be said : that, in the 
 words of the old maxim, ' Toute veriti riest pas 
 bonne a dire' It was an understood thing in all the 
 good society of Europe that the Prince of Tyras must 
 always be allowed to win at play. 
 
 ' This train is altogether new,' said Othyris, look- 
 ing up at its ceiling, painted with the story of Europa. 
 ' It must have cost half a million of fi-ancs.' 
 
122 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 * I dare say. Max knows where his bread is 
 buttered. He means the King to make him a duke. 
 Fifteen years ago he was a clerk in one of the public 
 pawn-shops. It was there that he got to know where 
 the shoe pinched on people's feet. He lent little 
 sums out on pawn-tickets ; when they were not paid 
 up in time he took the tickets ; that was how he 
 made his first money ; sometimes he used to get 
 things worth a great deal for a few copper bits he had 
 lent on them. He's rather a pleasant fellow, but that 
 is how he began.' 
 
 ' Does he lend to you ^ ' said Othyris curtly. 
 
 * No ; he loses to me at cards,' said Tyras, with 
 one of his suggestive grins. 
 
 * In your own house ? ' 
 
 * Not yet,' said Gavroche, who appreciated the 
 question. *Theo has him to lunch to-day. But 
 Theo's motives are immaculate. He wants to float 
 the great Fortification Loan.' 
 
 ' There is one comfort,' said Othyris, * Herr Vrei- 
 heiden will undoubtedly, eventually, rook you both.' 
 
 ' Oh, he'll take it out of us certainly,' replied Tyras 
 light-heartedly ; * and out of the country too ! ' 
 
 The train made a sound like a death-rattle as it 
 ran across one of the lofty bridges of the line which 
 were triumphs of engineering science ; beneath it 
 roared the deep, green, foaming waters of a river 
 which, happily for its virgin beauty, was too far from 
 the haunts of men for even engineers to dream of 
 violating it for the use of cities or the purposes of 
 electricity. 
 
 Tyras sauntered into the next compartment to 
 get a drink ; Othyris was left alone with his own 
 thoughts and the view of the sombre landscape and 
 
VII HELIANTHUS 123 
 
 the furious tumbling waters. His meditations were 
 as dark as the pine-clothed mountains shutting out 
 the sky. He loathed the egotism of his caste, and 
 he was forced to accept its protection and its pro- 
 visions. He envied an angler, standing bare-legged 
 on a boulder of rock in the midst of the eddying 
 emerald current. 
 
 The Fortification Loan was taken up by Max Vrei- 
 heiden, and Max Vreiheiden was lunching with Theo ! 
 Theo, who was supposed to be an honest man and to 
 keep his hands clean ! 
 
 Max Vreiheiden had seen the light in a poor 
 quarter of the capital of the Guthonic Empire. A 
 mutilation of three fingers of his left hand had spared 
 him the military ordeal. As a boy he had sold daily 
 journals, cheap sweetmeats, wooden toys, or anything 
 else which any one would entrust to him. If he were 
 not always honest in his petty trading, he had at 
 least the adroitness to remember and observe the 
 one necessary commandment * Thou shalt not be found 
 out ' ; he was punctual, zealous, intelligent, obedient, 
 silent ; he had a wonderful capacity for figures, and 
 could do the most complicated sums in his brain. In 
 a word, he was of the stuff of which the modern 
 world makes its leaders ; he would eat any amount 
 of dirt in the service of anybody, provided that the 
 dirt was the washings of a gold-pan. Such a youth 
 is sure to make his way to the front ; more slowly 
 in Europe than in the Americas, but still surely. 
 Before he was thirty-five he was a Colossus of the 
 money-market ; owned provinces, mines, kingdoms, 
 diamond-fields, pearl-fisheries, and many newspapers ; 
 had tens of thousands of Chinese, of negroes, of 
 Kaffirs, of coolies, under his law, in conditions which 
 
124 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 were slavery in all except name, and something still 
 worse than slavery ; and meantime had his health 
 drunk at the banquets of Corporations, and his hand 
 shaken by sovereigns. * My Max could buy all 
 their crowns,' said his little old mother ; and they 
 knew it. 
 
 Theo was an honest man, as Gavroche had said ; 
 he had up to the date of his inspection of the Isles 
 of Adonis never been touched by that form of 
 covetousness and unscrupulousness which makes the 
 speculator, whether the speculation be a cocoanut at 
 a fair-raffle or a gigantic scheme on the Exchanges of 
 the world. His mind and character were narrow, 
 hard, unreceptive, cramped by prejudice and by 
 privilege, but honourable in their own dull fashion. 
 Yet for the first time some virus of the modern 
 disease of acquisitiveness was instilled into him when 
 he heard and read the prospectus of Max Vreiheiden 
 concerning the Hundred Isles. 
 
 He believed sincerely that his patriotism alone 
 moved him in his desire to see the archipelago 
 fortified, and that his decency and enlightenment 
 alone inspired schemes for the civilisation of the 
 picturesque and scandalous Islanders. But he was 
 unconsciously tempted by the golden bait hung out 
 to him. Like most heirs to thrones, the demands 
 on him were much in excess of his means of ex- 
 penditure. Economical as both he and his wife 
 were, they were almost painfully harassed by the 
 tenuity of their resources ; and to make ends meet 
 was as hard to them at times as to any village shop- 
 keeper or shoemaker. 
 
 So Max Vreiheiden lunched with them on this 
 day. And the Crown Princess, who knew all about 
 
VII HELIANTHUS 12 j 
 
 him, was not pleased ; although she smiled, as she 
 was ordered to do, and exchanged reminiscences 
 with him of their mutual country, which was once 
 defined by a royal lady, exiled to it by her marriage, 
 as a land of fir-trees and potatoes. 
 
 Othyris was roused from his thoughts by the 
 shrill voice of Gavroche. 
 
 ' And our venerable Gregory ? Has he not 
 enjoyed life ninety odd years ? And have not all 
 the good physicians been busy all the world over 
 in brewing serum to put sap into his worn-out 
 trunk ? Oh, my good Elim, so long as we can buy 
 men at their own price they will always make life 
 pleasant to us/ 
 
 * Perhaps : but if we be of the type which does not 
 care to buy, or will not stoop to buy them ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, then, we are irreconcilables,' said Tyras, with 
 his little thin uncanny laugh ; ' then we are doomed to 
 have a bad time of it from our cradles. There is 
 nothing so diverting as le marM aux hommes^ and 
 most amusing of all is the persuasion of men that 
 they remain incorruptible, when one has just paid for 
 them body and soul ! But if, like you, we are irre- 
 concilables, who don't see the fun of the fair, of 
 course it is all lost upon us.' 
 
 * In that sense I am, I confess, an irreconcilable. 
 The baseness of my fellow-creatures does not amuse 
 me.' 
 
 * Then you lose the best part of the eternal Comedie 
 Humaine' 
 
 ' 1 see but little comedy, for over it all — there is 
 death.' 
 
 * Eh, that is the biggest joke of the whole ! All 
 the pother and bother, the cheating and intriguing, 
 
126 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 the lying and the toadying, the scrimmage and the 
 scoundrelism of it all, only to end in a handful of 
 ashes, or a shell of wood, after a tale of years not 
 so long as an elephant's when he is allowed to live 
 out his natural life. To see men taking ground- 
 leases for nine hundred and ninety years when their 
 own measure is at most fourscore, is there any droller 
 farce than that ? Or the fellow who begins life as a 
 labourer, or a clerk, and by sharpness and gambling 
 in stocks gets to be owner of millions before he is 
 thirty-five, and dies at forty of an aneurism from 
 over-strain, just as he is beginning to lick his lips and 
 enjoy himself ? What is that if not the most delicious 
 comedy one can see ? * 
 
 * My dear Gavroche,' said Othyris, * whether a 
 theatre amuses one or not, depends more on one's own 
 mood than on the stage one watches. It is so with 
 the theatre of life. It diverts you. It saddens me. 
 You have, I admit, the better part.' 
 
 ' And yet your liver is sound and mine is 
 spavined ! ' said Tyras enviously. * By all the rules 
 of physiology it is you who should laugh and I who 
 should weep.' 
 
 * Do you think pity is only born of a bad digestion? 
 It is the pity I feel for men which makes me unable 
 to grin as you do at the sight of their struggles. The 
 other day, at a social congress in the city of London, 
 a speaker gave it as his deliberate opinion that the 
 increase of wages had only led to the increase of 
 drunkenness. Is that not a fact to make even you 
 serious ? To me it seems that nothing more sad was 
 ever said. It is true,' he added, with an inflection in 
 his voice which Gavroche understood, * that it is 
 perhaps still more sad, as it is certainly less excusable, 
 
VII HELIANTHUS 127 
 
 when a gentleman burns up his viscera with alcohol 
 and kills his brains with absinthe.' 
 ' Damn you ! ' said Tyras. 
 
 * Damn me, certainly, if it please you to do so. 
 But why damn yourself ? ' 
 
 * I enjoy myself. I wallow in the mud ; lots of 
 creatures like to do that ; we have as much right to 
 our mud as you have to your spring-water.' 
 
 * What we have a " right " to is very questionable. 
 The rough in the crowd and the prince in the carriage 
 both think they have a right to be maintained by the 
 ratepayers, but I doubt it in either case.' 
 
 * Oh, we know you do ; you're an anarchist ! ' 
 
 * I am an anarchist if it be one to find the world 
 in a most disreputable state of carnage and confusion. 
 But I fear I am not even an anarchist, for I do not 
 believe in the heaven-compelling powers of revolvers, 
 or in the goddess Justitia being carried in a bomb. 
 What I do understand, however, is why poor, 
 desperate, and foolish men do think so, especially 
 when they see un grand de la terre like the Prince of 
 Tyras wallowing in the mud, which he prefers to 
 spring-water.' 
 
 * Damn you ! ' said Gavroche a second time. 
 
 ' You are such an imbecile,' he added. * You 
 have everything you can desire. You are not a 
 Hercules, but you have sound health. You are so 
 good-looking that the women would go mad about 
 you if you were a peasant. You have immense 
 riches, and can do what you like with them. You 
 have talents which are very nearly genius. Yet you 
 enjoy nothing, because you have Hamlet's disease in 
 you : the craze to set a wrong world right, and turn 
 a whirligig of lunatics into an academy of philosophers. 
 
128 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 What the deuce does the world matter to you ? You 
 did not make it. Why don't you amuse yourself, 
 and let other men go hang as they please ? ' 
 
 * Why did Hamlet trouble himself about other 
 people's sins ? He was not responsible for them.' 
 
 * Nor are you responsible for the country's mis- 
 government, if it be misgoverned. If you were king 
 to-morrow what could you do to make it better 
 governed ? Nothing. The whole thing is cut and 
 dried, and unalterable. You have too much brain to 
 believe you could change it. You could not put a 
 fowl into every pot as Henri Quatre wished to do. 
 You could only go on in the groove in which others 
 have gone before you.' 
 
 * I am well aware of it ! And then you wonder 
 that I am rebellious against fate ? ' 
 
 * I wonder why you kick against the pricks instead 
 of taking the goods the gods give you. Hamlet 
 could have been as happy as a grig if he had liked. 
 But he was Hamlet — unfortunately for himself.' 
 
 Othyris smiled. 
 
 * O cursed spite, 
 That ever I was born to set it right ! 
 
 * I assure you I have not Hamlet's belief ; I do not 
 think I was born to any such high end or aim. But, 
 as I told you, what makes you grin makes me sigh ; 
 just as you like brandy and I like hock. There is 
 no accounting for the diversity of tastes, my dear 
 Gavroche. However, I do not think I am like Ham- 
 let. My disease, if it be one, is of a different kind. 
 What weighs on me is the sense of an immense 
 responsibility and of an equally great impotence.' 
 
 * Enjoy yourself! ' 
 
VII HELIANTHUS 
 
 129 
 
 Othyris was silent. 
 
 * But what will you do when you reign, if you 
 reign ? ' Tyras said, seriously for once. * A liberal 
 king is a contradiction in terms. A king or an emperor 
 cannot be liberal, because to preserve himself, and what 
 are called the institutions which go with him, he must 
 sanction the shooting and imprisoning of persons who 
 would upset him and the institutions. If you are 
 ever king, either you will have to abolish yourself and 
 disappear, or drop down into the comfortable self- 
 admiration and self-acceptance in which your ancestors 
 have been content to dwell with so much complacency. 
 One or the other you must do.' 
 
 * Do you suppose that the problem you propose 
 as a novelty has not teen the torment of my soul ever 
 since I could think the thoughts of a man at all ? ' 
 said Othyris, with some impatience. * There is one 
 consolation. Theo's life is a better one than mine.' 
 
 ' Physically, perhaps, but he is hated by the people. 
 He is more likely to have a bullet put in him than 
 you are. I wouldn't count too much on his out- 
 living me, if I were you. Besides, you know, with 
 your views, it is absolutely immoral in you to wish 
 him to live. When he gets into saddle, won't he 
 use the spurs ! The good horse Populus will bleed 
 from both flanks when Theo sits astride on its back.' 
 
 Othyris was silent. He knew it only too well. 
 Theo had all his father's hardness and cruelty, with- 
 out his father's cool and shrewd intuitions. 
 
 * Enjoy yourself!' said Tyras, for a second time. 
 ' You may worry yourself into tuberculosis, but you 
 will not make anybody or anything any better. 
 Enjoy yourself 
 
 But to Othyris the power of enjoyment was pressed 
 
I30 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 out of him by the weight and weariness of his 
 position. 
 
 At the frontier Tyras left the royal train to go 
 westward across Europe to that capital of Gallia which 
 was the centre of his chief delights, and where he was 
 known by a petit nom more suggestive than compli- 
 mentary, in society more amusing than correct. 
 Othyris continued his journey northward ; he was 
 sent to represent his father and his family at the cele- 
 bration of the ninety-seventh birthday of the Emperor 
 Gregory at the greatest city of the great empire of the 
 Septentriones, where frost still held ice-bound all the 
 rivers, and icicles hung from all the roofs, whilst in 
 Helianthus the warmth and the sunshine of early 
 spring was flooding the land with light, and filling 
 the saddest soul with that hopefulness which is born 
 with the renascence of the earth. 
 
 He went, unwillingly, on a mission in all ways 
 distasteful to him ; he disliked show, pomp, crowds, 
 publicity ; and he went with especial reluctance, 
 for a parental desire to make him wed his young 
 cousin Xenia was being urged into a formal betrothal. 
 
 The vast empire of the Septentriones, over which 
 the Emperor Gregory ruled in undisputed autocracy, 
 was at once Oriental and barbaric, stretching from the 
 ice of frozen seas to the hot sands of parching plains. 
 It was a giant with ponderous mace and mailed fist, 
 and it was a cripple with frost-bitten feet and empty 
 belly ; it was ruled by the whip and the sabre ; and 
 when tens of thousands died of famine on its lands, it 
 let them die : they mattered less than the murrained 
 fields of wheat. 
 
 Old Gregory had led an elegant, a joyous, and 
 an accomplished life ; he had been a patron of 
 
VII HELIANTHUS 131 
 
 the arts, a procreator of many children, a free liver, 
 an amiable gentleman, popular wherever he was 
 seen, with a suave smile and a gracious phrase for 
 all, especially for those who were not his subjects. 
 
 His life had been long, prosperous, and little 
 troubled. He was compared by preachers and publi- 
 cists to Solomon in all his glory and wisdom ; and if 
 his mind were rather that of the houlevardier^ this 
 condescension in him was only the more affable. 
 He was now crystallised by extreme age into 
 legendary virtue and wisdom, and all the nations 
 vied in doing him honour and admiring his 
 longevity. Longevity, which in the poor is an 
 annoying impertinence, seems in the rich and the 
 royal a kind of condescending talent. His throne 
 was planted on a solid bed of gun-metal, set round 
 with half a million bayonets. Zeus himself could 
 never have been more completely aloof from mortal 
 struggles. Revolution offended him because it 
 was rude, because it was silly, because it was 
 impertinent ; but it was too far away from him really 
 to matter. Blood had run like water in his chief cities 
 many a time ; gangs of young men had been carried 
 in irons out to exile and captivity ; women had been 
 beaten with rods ; unarmed crowds had been mown 
 down by grape-shot, and driven before bayonets ; 
 but all these things had not disturbed him greatly : 
 nay, the sound of the cannonades had seldom even 
 reached his arm-chair at the opera, his tribune at the 
 law meeting, his supper-table, his slumber in a 
 woman's arms. Revolution annoyed him as the 
 grinding of a barrel-organ or the quarrelling of cats 
 may annoy a gentleman sitting in his library reading 
 Horace : no more. 
 
132 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 But now the Emperor was very old ; old as 
 Nestor, old as Priam, old as Lear ; his swollen legs 
 had long refused to move ; his chin was sunk upon 
 his breast ; his false teeth rattled and moved when he 
 spoke ; his eyes were very dim, and his skull was as 
 bald as a new-born babe's. Four attendants carried 
 him in a chair contrived with the utmost ingenuity to 
 make his helplessness as little visible as possible. 
 Ninety-seven long years stretched behind him ; and 
 their length had left him little taste or understanding 
 for anything except the pleasures of the table and 
 the amassing of gold, with some little relish still for 
 the adroitness and innuendo of the wit of the Paris 
 boulevards. 
 
 The Emperor's chief interest, now, was his white 
 Persian cat, Blanchette, and his sole counsellor was 
 his favourite physician, Seychelles. Wars and rumours 
 of wars had long lost their meaning for him ; he was 
 even indifferent to the state of the Bourses ; the 
 state of his own pulse alone concerned him. When 
 he was wheeled into the room where his Council of 
 State awaited him, he sat with his chin on his chest, 
 sniffing the odorous blossom placed in his buttonhole ; 
 but he neither knew nor cared what decisions were 
 taken round the table. 
 
 His sons were all dead, and the oldest of his 
 grandsons, Stephen, the King of Gelum, as his title 
 was as heir to the throne, had reached fifty years of 
 age ; a man very impatient to reign, and grown very 
 grey under the fret and fume of such long waiting. 
 
 * Grand-grand-Gri-gris ' was the nickname that 
 the numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren 
 of the old Emperor gave him amongst themselves. 
 They had a sincere veneration for him : he had laid 
 
VII HELIANTHUS 133 
 
 by so much ! He had so much to leave ! As a 
 ruler he had been niggard, but for his family he had 
 stored up wealth untold. All the insurance companies 
 of the two hemispheres watched his frail existence 
 with as keen an anxiety as did his descendants, and 
 when he coughed or took a chill, financiers quaked 
 with fear, and his grandsons and great-grand- 
 sons thrilled with hope. All the Press of Europe 
 agreed that the preservation of the nonagenarian's 
 existence was the greatest blessing that a merciful 
 Deity could give to a reckless and too thankless man- 
 kind ; that his existence was indeed the only rein by 
 which the disorderly passions of the nations were held 
 in check ; so that his private virtues, like the public 
 uses and greatness of him, will probably pass into a 
 myth, indestructible by criticism, and growing more 
 and more venerable with time. 
 
 Such legends die hard ; and the legend of the 
 Emperor Gregory's invaluable services to the terrestrial 
 globe is a very tough and tenacious one. Nothing, 
 probably, will ever destroy it, except the publication 
 of secret memoirs after his death ; and there will be 
 many and mighty persons interested to suppress 
 these — sufficiently interested, perhaps, to succeed in 
 burning them unpublished. 
 
 The national Press always said that the family 
 affection so conspicuous in the imperial line was one 
 of the holiest and most beautiful spectacles which 
 the world could see ; but the old Emperor knew 
 better. He was attached to his vast progeny, but he 
 was aware that most of them looked forward im- 
 patiently to his decease. 
 
 ' Leone XIII. is more fortunate than I,' said the 
 great Gregory bitterly once. ' He has none of his 
 
134 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 blood, begotten of his loins, who are wishing him 
 in his grave ! ' 
 
 However, he who without a qualm would consign 
 thousands of the populations of his cities to the mines, 
 or to the underground cells of fortresses, was weak 
 of will in his family relations, and indulgent to his 
 descendants. They were his ; that sufficed to make 
 them sacred to him ; and his temper in private life 
 was good-humoured and good-natured ; he forgave 
 much to his own blood, nothing to others. 
 
 If he had a preference for any one of the hundred 
 and twenty -two descendants by whom he was 
 blessed, he preferred Othyris, who never asked him 
 for anything. All the others were always importun- 
 ing for something, either for themselves or for their 
 favourites, male or female. But Othyris had never 
 even asked him for the ribbon of an Order for one 
 of his gentlemen. 
 
 * Cest un fou^ had the old Cassar once said of 
 Othyris to King John. ' Mais ma foi I cest un fou 
 fort distinguS.' 
 
 ' Je vols la folie ; je ne vols pas la distinction ! ' 
 muttered King John, too low for the Emperor^s aged 
 ears to hear. 
 
 Othyris carried with him the presents and congratu- 
 lations of his father and his family to this celebration 
 of the Emperor's ninety-seventh year. He occupied 
 one of the finest suites of apartments in the imperial 
 palace. He rode one of the finest chargers of the 
 many fine horses which caracoled before and behind 
 the carriage in which the aged sovereign drove 
 through his capital. He wore his uniform of Colonel 
 of the White Guards of the Septentriones and his 
 Orders of the great Empire of the North. He was 
 
VII HELIANTHUS 135 
 
 present at all the church services, the addresses, the 
 sacraments, the banquets, the processions, the festi- 
 vities ; and that aged, bald, stooping, deaf, and 
 purblind man, the centre of all this splendour and 
 pageantry and acclamation, seemed to him a very 
 piteous figure as the salvoes of artillery thundered, 
 and the roar of applauding multitudes rolled through 
 the air of the great city. 
 
 ' It is I who am wrong, perhaps, since everything 
 which pleases others displeases me,' thought Othyris. 
 
 The Father of his People ! 
 
 The Nestor of Europe ! 
 
 The Agamemnon of the North ! 
 
 The Solomon of the Septentriones ! 
 
 These and many such titles and phrases were 
 emblazoned or embroidered on the banners, and 
 arches, and draperies which floated in the mild, pale 
 air of the days of Pentecost. The crowds were 
 intoxicated with that contagion of emotion which is 
 at once as unreal and as violent as the forces of 
 delirium ; the hysterical passion of suggested feeling, 
 which is at once as true and as false as the laughter 
 or the tears of the drunkard. Women sobbed aloud ; 
 men dashed the tears of joy from their eyes ; little 
 children were lifted up in strong hands and bidden 
 to bless this king of kings ; frail ladies were trampled 
 under foot, nervous minds moved restless limbs to 
 unseemly antics, young girls swooned from emotion, 
 aged people cried and danced in their temporary 
 insanity, many younger people were pushed, bruised, 
 kicked, even killed ; the atmosphere was electric, 
 intoxicating as brandy, teeming with the infusoria of 
 disease, the infectiousness of lunacy, — there was no 
 sense in it, no root in it, no veracity in it, no more 
 
136 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 than in the ravings of the sick in a typhoid ward ; but 
 it had all the violence of fever, and all its obstinacy. 
 
 * If he has patience he will have his desires, and be 
 a fetish too in his turn,' thought Othyris, as he saw 
 the dull and tired eyes of his uncle Stephen fixed 
 upon the crowd, which was surging around and 
 against the six white horses of the old Emperor's 
 glass coach : the coach which had been made a 
 hundred and fifty years before, and whose beautiful 
 panels represented the triumphs of Alexander. All 
 things come to those who know how to wait ; so at 
 least the proverb affirms, but Stephen was tired of 
 waiting. He was cowed and silenced by long habit and 
 daily pressure, but by nature he was impatient, as the 
 feeble of will often are, and all his life was crumbling 
 away in this weary expectation, this chafing at long 
 delay. Long waiting is good for no one. The 
 sword rusts in the scabbard. The pearl grows yellow 
 in the jewel-case. In his youth Stephen, King of 
 Gelum, had been a man of some fair promise and of 
 many good intentions ; but desire deferred and impo- 
 tence to act had left him sapless as a hollow tree, 
 bitter as a withered lemon. 
 
 The Emperor was greatly fatigued by his public 
 appearance ; it was not until three days later that 
 Othyris was summoned to his presence. 
 
 He was reclining in a large low chair ; he was 
 wrapped in a dressing-gown of velvet, lined with 
 sable, for he was always cold, although his palace 
 was kept at the temperature of a hothouse. On 
 his knee was his favourite white cat, Blanchette. 
 He had been a very handsome man in his youth and 
 manhood, and his features, wasted, haggard and 
 wrinkled by extreme old age, were still finely formed, 
 
VII HELIANTHUS 137 
 
 and had a distant resemblance to the portraits and 
 statues of him in an earlier time. 
 
 ' A quand la noce^ Elim ? ' asked the old man, 
 with a senile chuckle. 
 
 Othyris knew to what he alluded, and intimated 
 that no bridal bells were likely to ring for him. 
 
 * Humph, humph, you mistake. They will not 
 let you remain celibate,* murmured his great-grand- 
 father. ' Wed Xenia. Wed Xenia. She is an 
 appetising little morsel, and you need not be troubled 
 about her ; let her take the bit between her teeth ; 
 she will leave you alone.' 
 
 But he was still tired from the fatigues of his 
 triumph, and his eyes were closing and his senses 
 growing drowsy ; and Blanchette stretched herself, 
 somnolent also, on his knee, and closed her own 
 sea-blue eyes. 
 
 Suddenly old Gregory roused himself and looked 
 suspiciously at Othyris, who remained standing 
 before his chair, not having been either dismissed or 
 retained. 
 
 * Look you, Elim,' said the old Emperor, * if 
 you take Xenia, I will dower her well. But in my 
 will I shall leave you nothing ; you are so rich 
 through your uncle Basil.' 
 
 ' You will do me the greatest favour, sir,' said 
 Othyris ; and he meant sincerely what he said. ' I 
 have too much as it is.' 
 
 * I will leave you Blanchette,' said the old man, 
 stroking his cat's snowy fur. 
 
 ' She shall be Blanchette la btenvenue. Only I 
 cannot answer for the politeness to her of my 
 dogs.' 
 
 Old Gregory looked at him sharply through his 
 
138 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 glasses, and smiled grimly, showing the gold of his 
 teeth. 
 
 * Any other member of your family would have 
 offered to kill every dog in Helios lest they should 
 molest Blanchette ! After all, perhaps I had better 
 leave her to little Xenia.' 
 
 * They have qualities in common, sir.' 
 The old man laughed, and his teeth rattled. 
 
 * Blanchette is a democrat ; Xenia is certainly not 
 like her in that respect,' he answered, stroking her. 
 *But democrats are easily tamed by warm rooms, 
 and cream, and ribbons on their breasts.' 
 
 He chuckled feebly ; in his far away youth he 
 had been of an acute and satirical humour, and 
 he had often amused himself by playing with his 
 enemies. 
 
 * Blanchette,' continued the old man, ' Blanchette 
 has no sense of her position. She is entirely in- 
 different to her privileges. I have even seen her in 
 one of the inner courts sitting on a scullion's 
 shoulder : it is shocking, but true. You, Elim, 
 resemble Blanchette.' 
 
 ' I do not caress scullions, sir, though doubtless 
 many good youths may be found amongst them.* 
 
 * In theory you do ; in theory. My dear Elim, 
 the deluge will come without you ; there is no need 
 for you to open the sluices and cut the dykes. Your 
 new creeds are very old. Your ideas were held by all 
 the eighteenth century philosophers, and with what 
 end ^ The Bourbons were slain and exiled, but the 
 stock returned.' 
 
 Othyris was silent. It was as useless to argue 
 with this fossilised mind as to reason with the 
 sculptures in the adjacent gallery ; and in a measure 
 
VII HELIANTHUS 139 
 
 the old man was right. Of what use was the 
 indignation of a Voltaire ? A Calas always exists 
 somewhere or other, is always doomed to a scaffold. 
 Of what use the dreams of a Vergniaud, the theories 
 of the Salons of the Directoire, the visions of an 
 Andre Chenier, the hopes and ideals of a Rene, of 
 a Lamartine ? They result in Louis Dix-huit, in 
 Louis Philippe, in Louis Napoleon, in Grevy, Faure, 
 Loubet. The blood and the brains of the idealists 
 boil in the cauldron of suffering, congeal in the ice- 
 caverns of death, and out of them there always 
 arise the Philistine and the Prince. 
 
 * Leave your revolutionary fancies and marry 
 little Xenia,' said the old monarch. ' You will have 
 many children, and she will send your dogs to the 
 kennels. Xenia is only a saucy, over-grown, im- 
 pudent child just nov/, but she has the making in 
 her of a maitresse femme. You want a maitresse 
 femme to take charge of you.' 
 
 * And our children would be tuberculous and 
 scrofulous as the children of the unions of first 
 cousins always are,' thought Othyris. * Pray, sir, 
 excuse me,' he said aloud. * Xenia must make the 
 happiness of some worthier mortal. I am quite 
 incapable of appreciating her.' 
 
 * You mean to disappoint her father and yours ? ' 
 the old man asked, with some amusement. 
 
 * I cannot enter into their views for my happi- 
 ness.' 
 
 ' Why not } ' 
 
 * For many reasons, sir.' 
 
 * Humph ! I think you have only to obey in this 
 matter.' 
 
 Othyris was silent ; but his features were cold 
 
I40 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 and did not promise an obedient temperament. The 
 old man looked at him with eyes dim but shrewd. 
 
 ' Look you, Elim ; your uncle is a poor creature, 
 but your father is a hard man ; he breaks what 
 opposes him. Give way in this matter. Xenia is 
 jolie a croquer ; and if you do not care for her, let her 
 have her head ; she will know how to amuse herself.* 
 
 * That is not my idea of marriage, sir.' 
 
 * Yours is an alliance,' said the old Emperor 
 significantly. 
 
 Othyris was silent. 
 
 * You have no will of your own ; we can break it 
 if you have. " We can break it,' he said, in a shrill 
 screaming voice, being irritated by opposition ; and 
 he struck the floor with his crutch so sharply that 
 Blanchette turned her round blue eyes on him in 
 alarm and skipped down from his knees. 
 
 Othyris was still silent. 
 
 He was thinking of how many human wills had 
 been broken, like dry canes in a north gale, by that 
 cruel old man whose blood was in his own veins. 
 He was thinking of the gangs of fettered prisoners 
 driven across the barren plains through snow and 
 storm ; of the hordes of poor fanatic peasants 
 exiled, scourged, starved, forced out into the frozen 
 night, and left to perish unpitied under the stars 
 of the extreme north ; of genius, of ideality, of 
 heroism, of self-sacrifice shut down under the case- 
 mates of fortresses ; of pregnant women beaten with 
 rods as ripe grain is threshed by flails, the young 
 and generous blood running like the blood of steers 
 and heifers in the conduits of shambles. Yes, they 
 could break the will, no doubt, but only by breaking 
 first the cord of life. 
 
VII HELIANTHUS 141 
 
 * We can break you — break, break, break ' said 
 
 the old Emperor in a thin shrieking voice, and he 
 choked in his sudden wrath, and coughed with a 
 gasping, rasping noise in his throat, and rang his 
 gold hand-bell noisily. Seychelles, who was always 
 within hearing, hurried to the rescue ; of all things 
 the most to be dreaded was any excitement, any 
 agitation, at the great age of the great monarch. 
 
 The marriage had been decided on between 
 Xenia's parents and John of GunderOde ; for no 
 especial reason, and in the usual ignorance which 
 moves royal races to do that which the owners of 
 horses and dogs most carefully avoid, i.e. to breed in 
 and in, to perpetually cross and recross the same 
 stock. 
 
 His younger sister, the Princess Euphrosyne, was 
 betrothed to the eldest son of Stephen, and it seemed 
 to both families that the union between himself 
 and Xenia would be everything which could be 
 desired. 
 
 Sooner, he thought, would he take one of the 
 fisher -girls of the sea villages of the Helian thine 
 coast, with their virginal grace, their goddess-like 
 strength and simplicity, their calm and chaste regard, 
 so like to that of the busts of Artemis. 
 Maitresse femme ! 
 
 Yes : little Xenia would be that perhaps in time, 
 but she would first be many other things as well. 
 The sentinels at the palace gates could not keep out 
 the atmosphere of the century. 
 
 A little later he joined in the gardens his many 
 cousins, sons and daughters of the heir to the throne, 
 who were playing lawn-tennis in the midst of an 
 admiring circle of lords and ladies in waiting, tutors, 
 
142 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 governesses, and the other small fry of a great Court. 
 Xenia was amongst them, sixteen years old, using 
 her racket with skill and decision, as like the Loulou 
 of Gyp as one cherry is like another ; for the 
 tendencies of modern generations penetrate alike the 
 palace and the hovel, subtle as gases, invisible and 
 irresistible as electricity, corroding as acids, blighting 
 youth even whilst it stimulates it, as the heat of the 
 compost forces the flower and withers it. 
 
 * Savez-vous^ beau cousin^ vous etes mon futur ? ' 
 she said, with impudent challenge in her bright, bold 
 green-grey eyes ; eyes like the ice of her northern 
 seas. 
 
 * Vraiment ? J' en doute ! ' he answered curtly. 
 
 ^ On Va dkide ! ' she said gaily ; but there was an 
 angry gleam in her impertinent, saucy, malicious gaze. 
 
 He did not answer, but sent the ball flying across 
 the net. She was wholly unattractive to him ; she 
 was even repulsive ; this half-grown girl, this demie^ 
 vierge, with her bold, hard gaze, her cynical pro- 
 vocative smile, her boyish, abrupt address ; the Loulou 
 of Gyp, though an Imperial Highness. 
 
 On the morrow he had an interview, which was 
 painful to both, with his uncle Stephen. He stated 
 courteously but inflexibly his resolution not to marry 
 his young cousin ; indeed, not to marry at all. He 
 made the statement as politely as the nature of it 
 allowed, but of necessity it wounded and ofi^ended 
 his relative. Stephen was by no means an unamiable 
 man, but he was one with whom circumstance had 
 always been at variance : he had a wife who ruled 
 him, and an old man who treated him contumeliously, 
 a heritage which escaped him like a mirage, and 
 a numerous family of which all the members gave 
 
VII HELIANTHUS 143 
 
 him constant anxiety. He was the kind of man who, 
 whether he be king or cobbler, is every one's prey ; he 
 was kind, peevish, lavish, niggard, uncertain, un- 
 happy ; his courtiers pillaged him, his wife ridiculed 
 him, his children tormented him, his grandfather 
 terrorised him. He was the ruler that was to be ; 
 meantime every one ruled him. 
 
 He pulled off his blue glasses nervously, and 
 beat a tattoo with them on the blotting-pad on 
 the writing-table. The issue of the conversation 
 was full of anxiety for him. He knew John of 
 GunderOde in every smallest detail of his character. 
 He knew that although a thing might be of no 
 importance whatsoever, yet if the King had 
 once decided on that thing he would never let it 
 go, or alter his decision, even if it should cost a 
 million times its value. He knew that his brother- 
 in-law had the tenacity of the ferret, joined to that 
 obstinate vanity which the human animal alone 
 possesses. There was no crevice of that close-shut 
 mind into which Stephen had not peered ; for he had 
 loved his sister, and had studied profoundly the man 
 who had made her unhappiness. In addition, he had 
 studied his brother-in-law with the keen and harassing 
 interest which the debtor takes in the creditor. He 
 had himself been^lways poor in comparison with the 
 immensity of his obligatory expenditure, and John 
 of Gunderode had often rescued him from embarrass- 
 ments ; but he knew very well that the motive of 
 the rescue had not been one of friendship or kindness, 
 but of that shrewd and unerring self-interest which 
 the King brought into every act, private and public, 
 of his career. And now if this creditor were denied 
 the hand of Xenia, which he coveted for his son 
 
144 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 because it was well known that the old monarch 
 would dower her magnificently, the sufferer would 
 be Xenia's unhappy father. 
 
 He did not personally care about this marriage ; 
 but his grandfather had desired it, and to dispute the 
 will of the old Emperor seemed to him a Titanic 
 scaling of heaven, certain to draw down chastisement ; 
 his brother-in-law also desired it, and King John 
 was not an agreeable person to thwart. Moreover, 
 it is never flattering to a parent to hear that alliance 
 with his daughter is undesired. He imagined that 
 he saw the illicit influence of the lawless loves of 
 Othyris in this withdrawal of his nephew ; and that 
 supposition tended to make him more offended than 
 he might otherwise have been. 
 
 * Surely you owe the King, your father, obedience ? ' 
 he said feebly, and with what little dignity he possessed. 
 
 Othyris replied : 
 
 * I owe the King, my father, obedience, un- 
 doubtedly in much ; as a soldier, as a son, as a 
 subject ; but only in some matters, not in all. 
 Marriage or celibacy are matters of private life, of 
 personal choice. My father's rights stop short of 
 my private Hfe, of my personal choice.* 
 
 ' I cannot admit that,' said his uncle nervously, 
 and in alarm ; ' you would introduce rebellion into 
 the sacred arx of the family.' 
 
 ' There is one thing more sacred than the family. 
 It is self-respect,' replied Othyris. 
 
 * You would imply ' 
 
 * Nothing that is offensive. I merely mean that 
 self-respect cannot exist where there is not liberty of 
 opinion and of action in personal matters.' 
 
 * Liberty ! The catchword of the canaille ! ' 
 
VII HELIANTHUS 145 
 
 * Sometimes. But nevertheless the finest word in 
 human language.* 
 
 Stephen looked at him with curiosity through his 
 blue glasses. 
 
 * They accredit you with subversive opinions. 
 Where did you get their infection ? ' 
 
 Othyris smiled slightly. 
 
 ' Of my opinions I can say truly that they are my 
 own, borrowed from no man.' 
 
 ' There is nothing more dangerous/ said his uncle, 
 with irritable impatience. 
 
 'Why so.?' 
 
 * Because — because — the person who trusts and 
 glories in his own powers of judgment, defies authority 
 and breaks loose from tradition. He becomes a law 
 unto himself.' 
 
 ' Exactly.' 
 
 ' You think that permissible .? ' 
 ' I think it inevitable if a man, whatever be his 
 station, have any respect for himself.' 
 ' You would destroy religion ! ' 
 
 * I would destroy superstitions and priesthoods.' 
 
 ' You would destroy faith, law, order ! It is 
 anarchy ! anarchy and chaos ! ' said Stephen, with a 
 nervous thrill of horror which shook his whole feeble 
 person. * I would trust no daughter of mine to you. 
 Time will temper your folly, no doubt, and show 
 you the error of your ways ; but I would not risk 
 the future of my child in such an experiment. Can 
 you be the son of my beloved sister, of my dear 
 and faultless Feodorowna .? ' 
 
 Othyris bowed his head reverently at his mother's 
 name. 
 
 * Then,' he said, after a pause, * since we are both 
 
 L 
 
146 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 of accord, my dear uncle, that I am wholly unworthy 
 of my cousin's hand, we will discuss and disagree no 
 more. I am always your devoted servant and 
 nephew ; and we are both agreed that I could not 
 either deserve, or properly fill, any nearer relation to 
 you.' 
 
 Poor Stephen felt that he had blundered stupidly 
 in giving Othyris a chance of withdrawal. What, 
 too, would his wife say .'' She also was not easy to 
 reconcile to any departure from her accepted plans. 
 The proposed alliance for her youngest daughter 
 pleased her : she considered, as every one did, that 
 Elim would in all probability succeed eventually to 
 the throne of Helianthus. 
 
 ' But your father } ' he said, with vacillation 
 and fear. He was keenly afraid of his brother-in- 
 law, in whose coiFers lay many of his own signatures. 
 
 ' When you and I are of accord,' said Othyris, 
 * my father, however displeased or regretful he may 
 be, will be powerless.' 
 
 * Of accord ! You and I are of accord in 
 nothing ! ' 
 
 ' In opinion, no ; but concerning my unworthiness 
 of my cousin Xenia's hand, yes.' 
 
 The unfortunate King of Gelum felt that he had 
 been checkmated, and that further argument was 
 useless. The younger man had been the more astute. 
 
 Othyris went to his sleeping -carriage in the 
 imperial train, which was to take him to the south- 
 east frontier, well content with the issue of the 
 interview. 
 
 As the train bore him towards the frontier, 
 he looked at the still frozen plains over which 
 it passed, the snow-laden leaden skies, the miser- 
 
vir HELIANTHUS 147 
 
 able cabins blocked up and blotted out by the 
 winter's drifts, the starved cattle with bones piercing 
 through their hides, the wretched horses trying to 
 scrape their way to buried roots or mosses or to 
 break the ice of frozen pools and ditches, the 
 peasants dragging driftwood over the snow or 
 digging paths to their churches ; and the sharp 
 brutal contrast of this misery with the splendour of 
 the scenes from which he had come, hurt him as with 
 some physical pain. Ninety-seven years of his great- 
 grandfather's life had been passed without the peace 
 and pleasure of the Father of his People having been 
 for an hour disturbed by this contrast, or his con- 
 science ever having been awakened by the know- 
 ledge of the ocean of misery rolling over these 
 plains. ' God forgive us ! ' thought Othyris ; and 
 then even that thought seemed to him a blasphemy. 
 Who could believe in the goodness of a God by whom 
 such contrasts had been created between man and 
 man ? 
 
 He returned home by sea, his father having given 
 him the mission of a complimentary visit to the Otto- 
 man ruler who was at that moment harrying, burning, 
 pillaging, massacring, in an adjacent Christian semi- 
 Asiatic state, wholly undisturbed by the Christian 
 potentates of the civilised West. His own yacht and 
 two war-vessels awaited him at a southern port. His 
 visit to the Oriental potentate was felicitously con- 
 cluded, and his homeward voyage was beautiful 
 across the dark foaming inland sea, and past the 
 cypress woods, the ancient monasteries, the minarets 
 iine as lace and lofty as fountains, towards the 
 famous city, lying like a half-moon on the edge of 
 the waters : the city which had been his birthplace. 
 
148 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 His schooner, with the frigates which formed her 
 escort on this visit of ceremonial, wound through 
 the narrow channels of the passage which was as a 
 bone amongst dogs to the western Powers, and, 
 entering on the Mare Magnum, in due time he saw 
 the long blue line of the Helianthine hills. 
 
 * My country ! ' he murmured, with that pride of 
 possession and humility of filial love, between which 
 the patriot's affection is divided. But then, he 
 thought, was it in truth his country ^ Were hybrids, 
 such as he and his, truly the sons of any land, with 
 any right to say * My race, my tongue, my country ? * 
 Was not the poorest peasant born on that earth, 
 under these olive-trees, by that sea, or on those hills, 
 more really a son of the soil than he, mongrel that 
 he was, with the blood of many nationalities in him, 
 bred in and in, but cross-bred ? 
 
 Helios was before him, like a silver cup lying in 
 the lap of the calm waters. It was beautiful as a city 
 in a mirage seen by a dying man. But there, on the 
 sea-terraces of the Soleia, paced armed sentinels ; on 
 the quays rode armed carabineers ; in the streets and 
 lanes city guards hunted beggars and children and 
 dogs ; at the gates waited weary and dusty cattle, 
 horses, mules, with their peasant drivers blocked in a 
 mass, one on another, whilst the Octroi officials ran- 
 sacked, weighed, cursed and bullied ; in the dreary 
 factories, with their long lines of windows, multitudes 
 toiled in the joyless, monotonous, mechanical toil with 
 which modern inventions have cursed the workman ; 
 in the fortress, with its glorious angel trumpeting to 
 the skies, were a hundred brazen mouths of cannon 
 turned night and day on to the crowded quarters 
 whence revolution might raise her Medusa's head ; 
 
VII HELIANTHUS 149 
 
 and in its arsenals were closely packed millions on 
 millions of cases of ammunition of the newest and 
 the deadliest sort. Was not Helios in all her beauty 
 like a fair woman with a cancer in her womb ? 
 
 He was aroused from his meditations by the 
 approach towards his yacht of three barges, occupied 
 by a deputation of welcome from the municipality of 
 the city. Syndic, assessors, councillors, and notabilities 
 were crowded on board them in one of those servile, 
 useless, and senseless ceremonies which dog the steps 
 and poison the lives of princes, and degrade the citizens 
 concerned in them into panders, parrots, and puppets. 
 
 ' I am going back to my harness,' thought 
 Othyris, as he saw the scarlet and gold robes of the 
 Mayor, gorgeous in the sunlight of the gangway. 
 ' Must you come out to meet me with the bit and the 
 bridle ? O garrulous and servile fools ! Cannot you 
 spend your time in the innumerable duties which call 
 to you in vain.? Go, take your robes, and your 
 scarves, and your vellum, and your froth, and your 
 platitudes, and your protestations elsewhere. Be 
 men, not crawling sycophants ! ' 
 
 He received them with coldness and visible 
 impatience ; he replied to their address briefly and 
 with weariness ; his own gentlemen were surprised and 
 disquieted, but the deputation did not perceive that 
 they were unwelcome ; they were surrounded by the 
 clouds of their own incense, giddy with the gazes of 
 their own self-adoration ! Servility is, to the servile, 
 a self-engendered gas which intoxicates. They were 
 enamoured of their own abasement as women are of 
 their own petty vanities. They found delight and 
 honour even in their own humiliation. 
 
 His father and his brothers took this form of 
 
I50 HELIANTHUS chap, vii 
 
 sycophancy seriously, as a meet attitude on the part 
 of the public and a correct obeisance to themselves. 
 But Othyris could not do so. To his temperament 
 and opinions, his own manhood was lowered by the 
 abasement of theirs. A common humanity made him 
 feel himself degraded by their miserable servility. 
 They were men well-to-do in the world, well fed, 
 well clothed, well housed, well educated, as education 
 is considered in modern life ; they had no excuse for 
 their own self-chosen degradation, for the wretched 
 self-imposed prostration which they sought with such 
 avidity. It hurt the dignity of his own self-respect 
 to see theirs so debased ; but their hides were so 
 thick, their vision so oblique, their paltry pride so 
 obtuse, that they could not even be taught what self- 
 respect meant. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 On the night of Elim's return from his mission, 
 which was the eve of the Feast of the Ascension, 
 a roar as of thunder, but sounding duller and 
 slower as it smote the ear, startled the sleeping 
 population of Helios. An ancient building had 
 suddenly collapsed, none knew from what cause ; 
 there was no visible reason for its end ; the air was 
 calm, the waves were peaceful ; it had lived its life 
 and fell, with no visible sign of decay or of age upon 
 it. It had stood there for twelve centuries, having 
 been erected during the Byzantine rule of the country. 
 The Ivory Tower, or the Lily Tower, as it was called 
 by the populace, was one of the most famous and 
 poetic possessions of the city, standing conspicuously 
 on the north-west shore of the Bay of Helios. It 
 looked like one of the porcelain towers of China, 
 for it was made of bricks enamelled white ; its form 
 had the elegance of the minaret ; at its base was the 
 sea, in its rear a wood of cypress and of laurels. 
 
 The coast of Helianthus is never more beautiful 
 than by night. On this night of the Ascension the 
 city, until a late hour, was a crescent of artificial 
 light. The watch-towers were crowned by cressets 
 of fires. The quays and bridges were outlined with 
 lamps, and, on the hills, many a village and villa 
 
 151 
 
152 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 glowed with points aflame, which heralded the advent 
 of a religious feast in that union of pagan and Christian 
 superstitions which formed the country's creed. But 
 where the Ivory Tower had stood, and had worn its 
 diadem of flame on all such nights as this, there 
 was darkness, and the only light came from the 
 moon-rays shining on a great heap of dust and ashes, 
 which covered the rocks and shelved down into the 
 sea, like a huge grave, nameless and naked. Time 
 would bring to cover it the short, sweet grass, the 
 wild strawberry plant, the bramble and the dog-rose, 
 the creeping thistle, the sweet-scented myrtle, the 
 mosses, the daisies, the gold of the charlock and 
 ragwort ; but it was now only a mountain of dust. 
 
 * Is that all ? ' said the King, when he heard the 
 cause of the sound which had disturbed his slumbers. 
 * I was afraid it was the powder magazine.' 
 
 To have lost even a few caissons of melinite 
 would have seemed to him a much greater calamity 
 than the ruin of any monument of art or relic of 
 antiquity. 
 
 The Ivory Tower had been a thing of beauty, 
 its whiteness growing warm in the golden glow of 
 sunrise, its lofty and slender grace saluted by returning 
 mariners throughout twelve centuries, its sonorous 
 chimes resounding through summer silence, and re- 
 buking winter storm. It had been kept in repair for 
 no other reason than its extreme beauty, or what the 
 artistic world called beauty ; a great waste of money 
 in the eyes of the monarch. For it had been an 
 entirely useless thing, in the estimation of the ruler 
 of Helianthus ; it had never been used as a granary, 
 as a signal station, as an observatory, nor even as a 
 Christian house of prayer. 
 
VIII HELIANTHUS 153 
 
 Late in the evening following on its fall, Othyris 
 went by sea to view the ruins. During the day, the 
 beach was crowded by throngs of townspeople, visiting 
 the site of the disaster, who would have given him 
 no peace had he gone there by daylight ; even by 
 night it was necessary to go very late to avoid 
 being mobbed by the people. 
 
 The sky was lustrous with that radiance which 
 the King would have considered so inferior to that of 
 a searchlight. The moon was at the full, and Jove 
 and Saturn were low on the southern horizon, but 
 Antares and Arcturus shone, higher in the heavens, 
 in all their solar splendour and their menacing 
 mystery. 
 
 ' Happy those simple souls to whom the stars and 
 planets are only lamps to steer by, hung up by the 
 hand of God,' thought Othyris, as a fishing-boat 
 passed him leaning low down in the trough of the 
 phosphorescent water. 
 
 When he went ashore with one of his gentlemen, 
 he felt as if he stood by the grave of a friend. The 
 vast pile of ruined bricks and shattered enamels 
 covered a wide area of the rocks, and the base was 
 washed by the white, moonlit, rippling surge. 
 
 * If let alone,' he thought, * in half a century the 
 ruin will be a green hill. Nature will have clothed 
 it. Let us leave it alone.' 
 
 The light from the round, golden moon was 
 strong ; it shone on the face and form of a woman 
 who was standing on a strip of beach which had been 
 left untouched by the fallen materials. She was 
 clothed in black, and wore a black veil upon her 
 head, after the manner of the women of the populace ; 
 she was young, and her profile was like that of the 
 
154 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 Athene ; as she gazed upward it looked pure and 
 clear as a cameo ; the nose straight, the upper lip 
 short, the eyelashes long, the throat white and fine as 
 in sculpture. 
 
 * I have never seen her,* thought Othyris. ' She 
 is dressed like a woman of the people ; but her face 
 and her form are those of a goddess.' 
 
 She did not notice him ; she was absorbed in the 
 spectacle of the ruin before her. 
 
 * Oh, the pity of it ! ' she murmured, and her eyes 
 were full of tears. 
 
 Othyris uncovered his head. 
 
 * The pity of it, indeed.! ' he said. 
 
 She started, astonished to find any one so near, and 
 her exclamation overheard ; she drew her veil more 
 closely so as to conceal her features, and turned to 
 leave the spot. 
 
 * I come, Janos ! * she cried to a man in a rowing- 
 boat below. 
 
 ' Let me not drive you away,' murmured Othyris. 
 * We have a common sorrow.' 
 
 But she did not answer or look back ; she went 
 on swiftly, noiselessly, with gliding grace along the 
 strip of beach to where the boat waited in the 
 surf. 
 
 ' Shall I make inquiries, sir ? ' murmured the 
 courtier who accompanied Othyris. He had been 
 before then sent on errands of identification. 
 
 * No, no, on no account whatever,' said Othyris 
 quickly. The little boat with the woman and the 
 peasant was being sculled into deeper water, going 
 outward and westward ; it made a black shadow 
 on the silvery spaces of the moonlit sea for a while, 
 then passed away into shadow and distance, and was 
 
VIII HELIANTHUS 155 
 
 lost to sight. Was she the diva loca of the ruined 
 shrine driven out into exile? The fancy pleased 
 Othyris. 
 
 He took out the little sketch-book of silver point 
 which he always carried with him, and drew her 
 profile from memory by the light of the moon. 
 
 Her memory haunted Othyris, brief as had been 
 the passage of her swift and silent steps over the 
 smooth sea-sand. He smiled at his own preoccupa- 
 tion : truly, she had looked like a goddess drawn 
 out from her sanctuary and not deigning longer to 
 remain on earth. 
 
 ' I am a fanciful fool,' he said to himself ; but was 
 it not better to feed on such fancies than to be 
 drugged with absinthe, or to be drunk with war.^* 
 At least his fancies harmed no one, and cost nothing 
 to the lives and to the savings of the nation. 
 
 She had gone away across the moonlit water into 
 the shadows where the sea was dark ; it was fitting 
 that a divinity whose altars were in ruins should so 
 pass away from the sight of a mere mortal ! 
 
 * I think, sir, that the man who was rowing is a 
 peasant of the Helichrysum hills, whom I have seen 
 in the market,' murmured Sir Pandarus, behind him 
 on the beach. Othyris silenced him with a gesture. 
 
 Officious readiness in others to wait on his less 
 noble desires had always aroused in him a strong 
 disgust. 
 
 * That the fox eats the dove is bad enough,' he 
 said once ; * but that lesser beasts should track and 
 trap the doves, and bring them as offerings to the 
 fox, is much worse.' 
 
 Othyris did not forget the casta diva of the 
 
156 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 moonlit eve before the ruins of the Ivory Tower ; 
 probably because she was the only woman who had 
 ever eluded him. She was also of a wholly different 
 type from any he had ever seen, and he had believed 
 that he had seen every variety of class and breeding, 
 of form and feature, in the sex. He could not assign 
 her rank with any certainty. She had possessed 
 the bearing of a patrician, the simplicity of a 
 peasant, the placid grace of a goddess, the shyness of 
 a startled nymph. She had fled from him over the 
 sands like any Daphne from the Sun-god. 
 
 He realised Montaigne's truism, ' elks nous battent 
 mieux en fuyant comme les Scythes' He spent 
 hours in the endeavour to record the vision of her, 
 but he never succeeded in contenting himself. There 
 were many hundreds of women in Helios who wore 
 that severe nun-like costume, with the black veil, 
 which at will could so successfully conceal the 
 features. The lowest female classes were gay 
 with colour as a butterfly or a tulip ; but the 
 industrial classes, the grades between the populace 
 and the middle classes, invariably wore the black 
 veil and the black skirt, as she had done, and under 
 the protection of that sombre garb could pass un- 
 molested from one end to the other of the city. Yet 
 he did not think that she belonged to that class ; the 
 uncovered hand which had drawn together the folds 
 of the veil was of fine and delicate shape, and the 
 outline of her profile and throat had the purity of 
 a classic cameo. 
 
 But he knew that there were many old families, 
 once patrician but now poor and obscure, who dwelt 
 in the small coast-towns or in the recesses of the hills 
 above ; families of ancient lineage, of proud traditions, 
 
VIII HELIANTHUS 157 
 
 of strong prejudices, of uncomplaining poverty. She 
 must, he thought, belong to one of those, and have 
 been drawn out of her privacy by the loss of the 
 Ivory Tower, which was so great a calamity to those 
 who loved the old heroic past of Helianthus. Othyris 
 knew nothing of those families, but he had always 
 felt a great respect for them, beggared as they had 
 been by the War of Independence, faithful to their 
 traditions and irreconcilable with what was to them 
 a foreign monarchy, content to live in obscurity and 
 penury, and unpurchasable by place or money ; they 
 were the last remnant of the old republican and 
 patriotic substratum of the country. 
 
 Again and again he felt tempted to set some of 
 the many panderers to his caprices on her quest ; 
 but he never took the decisive step. He felt as 
 though it would be profanity. The likeness he had 
 drawn of her from memory, her face and throat 
 alone bathed in a flood of moonlight, seemed to say 
 to him, ' Let me be. I have given you an ideal. Is 
 not that much in this world ? ' 
 
 It stood on an ebony easel, and he had fresh 
 flowers set before it as on an altar. A sentimental 
 folly, he knew, or so at least it would have seemed 
 to other men ; but was it not of such fancies that 
 the grace and charm of the most innocent affections 
 were made ? 
 
 To Othyris, who had been satiated by affections 
 far from innocent, there was an infinite attraction in 
 this illusive and spiritual beauty. 
 
 ' That is a beautiful head,' said Gavroche, one day. 
 
 * Who is the original ^ ' 
 
 * It is a Helianthine divinity,' replied Othyris. 
 
 * It is a diva ignota. I know not her name.' 
 
158 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 Tyras for once did not grin with his usual satyr's 
 smile. 
 
 * Whoever she is, she is too good for mortal 
 embraces,' he said. * What a fine artist you might 
 be if you chose, Elim ; and how well you keep your 
 own counsel ! My secrets slip out when I am drunk.' 
 
 There was, of course, an immediate agitation in 
 the city for the rebuilding of the Ivory Tower. There 
 are always numbers of people who are ready to profit 
 in various ways by a public calamity. 
 
 * It can never be rebuilt,' said Othyris, to those 
 who approached him on the subject. 
 
 Every one was astonished at such an impression in 
 a lover of the arts ; that he should say so surprised 
 even his father. 
 
 * What do you mean ? Why cannot it be rebuilt } ' 
 he asked. * Do you mean that the foundations have 
 subsided ? That the rocks are unsound ? ' 
 
 * No, sir,' replied his son. 
 
 ' What do you mean, then .? ' 
 
 ' I mean that there is no longer amongst men the 
 mental or moral power to produce such a thing. 
 There is no longer the reverence, the patience, or the 
 devotion necessary.' 
 
 The King twirled his moustaches with unutterable 
 contempt. 
 
 * I supposed you meant some practical obstacle ! 
 If the resources of modern invention are not equal to 
 renew the constructions of ignorant ages, progress is 
 vain.' 
 
 ' It is vain indeed, sir,' said his son. 
 This seemed so preposterous to his father that he 
 had scarcely patience to continue the conversation. 
 
vrri HELIANTHUS 159 
 
 * Vain — vain ? ' he muttered angrily. * With the 
 immense resources of modern mechanical and hydraulic 
 power it would certainly be very easy to ' 
 
 He left the sentence, as he left most of his 
 phrases, to complete itself in the superior eloquence 
 of silence. 
 
 * Something would no doubt be erected in five 
 years, in ten, in twenty,' replied Othyris. ' But it would 
 not be that which we have lost. The Ivory Tower 
 of Isma was one of the artistic marvels of the world ; 
 a hundred and seventy years were occupied in the 
 building of it ; that is proved by the Coptic manu- 
 scripts of the Ismaian monastery.' 
 
 His father by a puff of smoke indicated the value 
 of such statements in his sight. 
 
 ' Because all the materials were brought by rowers, 
 in galleys, and were carried up on slaves' shoulders, 
 as the bricks were for the Pharaohs' Pyramids,' said 
 the King, with the profound contempt which he felt 
 for such primitive means. * A hundred or more 
 steam-tugs would bring all the substances to be used, 
 to-day, direct from the quarries or the foundries by 
 water ; and high-pressure engines would at once raise 
 them into position.' 
 
 Othyris was silent. 
 
 * That is, if it be worth while to rebuild a mere 
 belfry ? ' added his father. ' The public seem to 
 desire some newer kind of erection. I have sug- 
 gested a lighthouse.' 
 
 * With an electric lantern, revolving behind red 
 glass .? ' 
 
 * Precisely,' said the monarch, who approved the 
 suggestion, but was suspicious of the sarcastic tone 
 in which it was uttered. 
 
i6o HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 *Your wishes, sir, will of course be law to the 
 Committee,' said Othyris. 
 
 * Humph ! ' said the King. * You are not on it ^ ' 
 
 * No, sir, I declined to be so.' 
 ' Why ? ' 
 
 * Because I should be unquestionably in a minority ; 
 a minority perhaps of one.' 
 
 * Because you would oppose those who will be 
 representative of my views ^ ' 
 
 ' It is because I could not venture to do so, sir, 
 and because I could not either dissemble my own 
 views, that I have requested them not to place my 
 name on the Committee. I ventured to do this 
 without referring so small a matter to your Majesty.' 
 
 ' If I order you to assume the chairmanship of 
 the Committee ? ' he said, after a pause. 
 
 * I must no doubt obey ; but I would entreat 
 your Majesty not to place me in the painful position 
 of being compelled to dissent publicly from views 
 which are known to be favoured by yourself.' 
 
 The King made a guttural exclamation, rendered 
 unintelligible by his teeth being closed on his cigarette. 
 He lighted a fresh one, and dismissed his son and 
 the subject. 
 
 He would have had great pleasure in placing 
 Elim in that or any other difficult position, but he 
 felt that the finesse and the obstinacy of his son 
 would be more than a match for his own ; they had 
 been so before then. 
 
 He felt that Elim's deference and obedience 
 went just so far as Elim's own convictions went of what 
 was due from him, and incumbent upon him, and 
 went no farther ; and that any attempt at coercion 
 would always and irrevocably fail. Elim was a fool 
 
VIII 
 
 HELIANTHUS i6i 
 
 in many ways, his father thought, but there was grit 
 in him. 
 
 It was this in Othyris which beyond all other 
 things incensed the King ; this deference in form and 
 tone, coupled with opposition in reality. He had 
 rarely been able to accuse his second son of any want 
 of deference either in manner or in act ; yet he was 
 always conscious of an actual independence of judg- 
 ment which entirely escaped him. 
 
 ' It was the training of that beast Basil which 
 made him like this,' he thought now, as Othyris 
 withdrew. He had never disliked any one more 
 than his brother-in-law Basil, who had, he thought, 
 thwarted and irritated him throughout life, and after 
 death still annoyed him perpetually through that vast 
 fortune, which by its bequest made its present pos- 
 sessor so largely independent of him. 
 
 He had not patience to pursue the subject with 
 his son ; but when the Minister of Fine Arts next 
 had audience with him, and ventured to speak of the 
 matter, he suggested to that harassed and bewildered 
 official that an iron lighthouse should be erected in 
 place of the perished tower. 
 
 * If you try to renew the past you will please 
 nobody,' he said ; and in this he was correct. ' Be 
 frankly utilitarian ; you will at least please utilitarians. 
 The tower was a beautiful thing, or at least people 
 said so, but it was absolutely useless. Replace it by 
 something without beauty, but useful.' 
 
 The Minister of Fine Arts felt that he himself 
 and his Department must be equally useless in the 
 estimation of his sovereign. 
 
 M 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 A FEW days later Othyris had to preside at a 
 charity meeting in Helios for the relief of the 
 famine and general distress in the country. To speak 
 in public was always disagreeable to him ; and this 
 kind of gathering never found any favour in his sight. 
 He disbelieved in its efficiency as a means of doing 
 good, and he thought the boastful philanthropy 
 which set it on foot rather more discreditable than 
 no philanthropy at all. He knew that most of those 
 present would go to see himself; would offer their 
 donations because they desired to look well in his 
 sight ; and that nine-tenths of the crowd gathered 
 there would care no more for the sufferings of the 
 dying and the dead by hunger, cold, and misery, 
 than a gourmet cares for the sufferings of the craw- 
 fish or the turtle which give him his patties and his 
 soup at dinner. 
 
 ' It is waste of words, waste of breath, waste of 
 wrath,' he thought, as he rose to speak, and he knew 
 that what he was about to say would be hateful to 
 his hearers. 
 
 ' Gentlemen,' said Othyris, after the usual greetings 
 of courtesy, the statistics of lives and deaths, and the 
 calculation of required monies, and the necessary 
 accompaniment of conventional phrases without 
 
 162 
 
CHAP. IX HELIANTHUS 163 
 
 which no public meeting would be orthodox or even 
 possible, — * Gentlemen, what can be said of these 
 modern civilisations of which modern language 
 boasts so greatly ? The world is rich, exceedingly 
 rich ; for waste, for pomp, for display, for self- 
 indulgence, for armaments of all kinds, millions, 
 billions, trillions, are always accumulating, always 
 forthcoming. Yet men and women and children are 
 found dead of hunger in every land, from the snow 
 plains of the Septentriones to our own classic hills of 
 Helianthus, from the crowded cities of Europe to 
 the rice-fields of the East and the gold-fields of the 
 West. What progress can be alleged whilst famine 
 stalks through every quarter of the globe ? Whilst 
 you and I eat rich food three times a day, and rare 
 birds and beasts are paid their weight in bullion that 
 they may pass into our kitchens, human beings, 
 ofttimes through no fault of their own, sufl?er the 
 torture of hunger through days and weeks and 
 months, then drop down and die, worn out by the 
 unequal struggle. 
 
 ' You will reply that this is inevitable ; that it is 
 the fault of no person and of no system ; that it is 
 the natural result of laws beyond men's control, that 
 the successful wax fat, and the obscure perish for 
 want of what they have not had luck, or talent, or 
 perhaps dishonesty enough, to gain. 
 
 * Gentlemen, it is in this reply, the usual, the 
 orthodox, the stereotyped reply of both the capitalist 
 and the political economist, that the condemnation 
 of modern civilisation lies. Civilisation has solved 
 no one of the problems of life. It has overfed the 
 minority ; it has underfed the majority ; and a large 
 proportion it has not fed at all. 
 
1 64 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 * Victor Hugo, in one of his sonorous but fallacious 
 phrases, has said : " He who opens a school closes a 
 prison." This sounds well and means nothing. The 
 ill-digested and desultory education of the day is the 
 recruiting sergeant of the gaols. That education is 
 alone healthy and profitable which tends to make 
 the human creature do well what necessity and cir- 
 cumstances require him to do at all. But although 
 the technical schools may, perhaps, do this techni- 
 cally, general education, early education, do nothing 
 of the kind ; morally, the education of the schools is 
 neutral where it is not mischievous. 
 
 ' In a great nation overseas, where the government 
 is nominally democratic, where education is general 
 and enforced, and where every child can read and 
 write, lynch law is the frequent redresser of injuries, 
 and mobs burn accused persons alive and without 
 trial : what has education done for humanity in that 
 great nation ? You will say that there good food 
 has been of no use, for the lynching mobs are for the 
 most part recruited from well-fed persons ; but they 
 drink still more than they eat — and drink, the curse 
 of man, is in one form or another almost universal 
 in that hemisphere. In all the nations of our own 
 hemisphere drinking and hunger reign side by side. 
 Called absinthe, or beer, or brandy, or wine, or 
 gin, or what it may, it fills with its worshippers 
 the clubs, the music halls, the cafes, the cellars, the 
 public-houses, the boulevards. Of what use is civil- 
 isation } It does not turn away one man in a million 
 from the threshold of the drinking shops. The 
 children's bread is given away to buy the poison of 
 chemically prepared toxines for their fathers and, 
 alas, too often for their mothers also. 
 
IX HELIANTHUS 165 
 
 ' There is a country well known to us all, lying 
 on cool northerly waters, great in story, strong in 
 enterprise, foremost in commerce ; she was a mere 
 barbarian when Helianthus was the glory of the arts 
 and the Venus Victrix of the then known world ; 
 now she is far greater than we are. Yet in her 
 metropolis, the largest and the richest of the world, 
 miles on miles of streets are occupied by what in her 
 language are called gin -palaces ; crowded every 
 night of the year by half-mad throngs of men and 
 women of the people, insane with drink and spend- 
 ing their last coin upon it. Yet she presumes to 
 send out her religious envoys to convert the 
 heathen ! 
 
 * Gentlemen, there are other cancers in the 
 body politic of which it would take many hours to 
 make the diagnosis. Take one only : the deadly 
 trades. Many trades exist, enrich the manufacturer, 
 and contribute to the comfort or the luxury of 
 society, in the pursuit of which the man or woman 
 employed in them dies almost certainly before 
 reaching his or her thirty-fifth year. Reflect upon 
 this fact. Do you seriously think that the capitalists 
 who make their fortune by trades which cause this 
 mortality amongst the workers are really so greatly 
 superior to the Helianthine of two thousand years 
 ago, who killed a slave to feed the fish of his 
 piscina ? 
 
 * You murmur ? Well, sirs, reflect instead. 
 
 ' In the course of last year I visited our classic 
 and romantic island of Philyra, daughter of Oceanus, 
 nourished on sun and sea and burning lava, as she 
 has been from all time. I saw the chief sulphur 
 mines of the isle. I need not remind you, sirs, of 
 
1 66 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 the many and precious uses to which sulphur is put ; 
 or that the sulphur of Philyra is esteemed the best in 
 the world. Has it ever occurred to you to ask how 
 that sulphur is obtained ? It is chiefly obtained 
 through the labour of young children, whose eyes 
 smart and grow blind under the stinging irritation of 
 the mineral they carry up and down the ladders all 
 day long. Was it worse, gentlemen, to sell for slaves 
 the fair-haired children of the conquered barbarians 
 here in the market-place of Helios ? I doubt it. 
 These children are slaves ; they cannot escape from 
 their lot ; they are as helpless as their sisters sold 
 for a trifle to follow their foreign buyer into the 
 cities of other lands to gain money for him by their 
 suffering and debasement. All these young and 
 innocent lives are mercilessly sacrificed to the in- 
 terests of others. One can do no more for them 
 than for slaves ; they are slaves in all except the 
 name. What faces one ? A vested interest ; the 
 force of commerce ; the might of trade. 
 
 * Sulphur is of great utility — of more utility than 
 such children's lives. It must be procured in the 
 cheapest way possible. The cheapest way is to use 
 children. What can I do to save them .? Nothing. 
 Nothing more than I can do to stop the seismic 
 convulsions in the bowels of the earth. I may call 
 meetings, upbraid their employers, rebuke their 
 parents, call on the Press to rouse the public. What 
 use is what I do ? It is none. Regulations are 
 made, leading articles are written, ladies weep, 
 orators declaim, and then it all — the misery of it — 
 goes back into the same groove. Trades must not 
 be interfered with ; commerce must not be ham- 
 pered ; sulphur must not be made dear. 
 
IX HELIANTHUS 167 
 
 * It is one of the chief supports of the trade of 
 Helianthus. Brigs and merchantmen carry it out of 
 our ports all over the world. It has innumerable 
 uses, immeasurable values ; and the children — who 
 have no value, for there are so many of them — 
 the children must pass and perish. Gentlemen, 
 what is a civilisation worth in which such things 
 are possible, are indeed of habitual occurrence, of 
 accepted usage ? Sirs, I doubt greatly whether the 
 greatest criminal amongst us is the criminal who 
 meets his fate in the prisoner's dock, and not the 
 rich and prosperous person who, seated in his arm- 
 chair, signs his cheques with his gold pen, eats and 
 drinks, and enjoys and praises this world as the 
 most admirable issue of the intellect of man and of 
 the will of God. 
 
 * It is impossible for the governing classes to have 
 influence on the governed, because our morality (or 
 the self-interest which we substitute for it) is a mass 
 of contradictions, a chaotic jumble of anomalies. 
 We condemn murder ; but we deify war. We kill 
 the criminal who poisons one person ; we do not 
 touch the manufacturer who poisons many workmen. 
 We condemn theft ; but we approve annexation. 
 We punish a carter cruel to his horse ; we applaud 
 a general who kills two hundred thousand horses. 
 We imprison the drover who wounds a bullock ; we 
 decorate the contractor who tortures on land and sea 
 a million of cattle. We abhor alcohol in the throats 
 of the poor ; we find it a perfume in the mouths of 
 the rich. We worship education ; and we leave 
 children to be prostituted in brothels and worked to 
 death in mines. We imprison the cut-purse ; we 
 honour and decorate the usurer. We have no clear 
 
i68 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 knowledge or consistent treatment of crime. When 
 it is naked and isolated, we punish it savagely ; when 
 it is cloaked, and goes in well-armed companies, we 
 do not dare to touch it ; we take off our hats to it, 
 we seat it in our banqueting-halls. 
 
 ' You will say that this has always been so in all 
 ages. Perhaps that is the reason why crime has 
 always been general. 
 
 * It is impossible for the masses to be impressed by 
 rulers and teachers who, whatever their theories, do 
 in practice show that crime is, in their code, no crime 
 at all if it be large enough and successful enough to 
 dominate its generation. The multitude does not 
 reason, but it perceives, if slowly ; it feels, if dully ; 
 it is stirred, if obscurely ; and is guided by conclusions 
 which it draws bv blind instinct, as the mollusc sucks 
 in sea -water and sun-light. It is unconsciously 
 penetrated by a sense of the untruth and the 
 hypocrisy of the morality which is preached to it, 
 and of the laws which are laid down for it. For that 
 reason the one has little influence on it, and the other 
 has little awe for it ; and after thousands of years of 
 various kinds of successive civilisations and of con- 
 tradictory religions, we see that the political and 
 social forces of the world are absolutely impotent, 
 either to prevent crimes, or to lead criminals back to 
 virtue. The fault lies more with the rulers than 
 with the ruled.' 
 
 A dead silence followed on his concluding words. 
 They were all thinking : * If he should ever be king, 
 good Lord, deliver us ! ' 
 
 His speech grated on the nerves of his hearers ; 
 for the most part, they felt that it was unjust to be 
 summoned by a chairman who was a prince of the 
 
IX 
 
 HELIANTHUS 169 
 
 reigning House, and then be made to listen to a 
 discourse worthy of a Liebknecht or a Karl Marx. 
 
 The enunciation of such opinions made a lively 
 sensation in Helios, and caused a great scandal in 
 society. Nothing is so dangerous or so detested as 
 an attack on vested interests. All the superior 
 classes, all the users of gold pens, all the comfortable 
 and complacent persons to whom civilisation was a 
 Bona Dea, mother of prosperity, of invention, of 
 luxury and of good government, felt themselves out- 
 raged in their most sacred sentiments. 
 
 A cancer in the milk-white breast of their god- 
 dess ! What blasphemy ! 
 
 Any other orator than a son of the King would 
 have been howled down into silence at the first 
 word. 
 
 On ne preche quaux convents, Othyris knew that. 
 He knew that respect for his rank alone restrained 
 his hearers from comments far from complimentary 
 to him ; he read their astonishment and their dis- 
 approbation on their features, beneath the surface- 
 smiles of courteous urbanity ; he was well aware 
 what inane self-complacency he had troubled and 
 startled. 
 
 The reports by stenographers of this speech, 
 which so entirely offended all prosperity and affronted 
 privilege, were by superior order withdrawn from 
 publication in the Press, and a few common- 
 place words were substituted for it in all reports of 
 the meeting. 
 
 The suppression made the Ministry nervous. They 
 did not care to offend a person who was so nearly 
 in direct succession to the throne ; but the actual 
 occupant of the throne had crossed out heavily with 
 
lyo HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 a red pencil the proofs of the speech when submitted 
 to him and had ordered its entire suppression ; and 
 no resistance was possible. 
 
 * That you suppressed my speech was a matter of 
 course/ said Othyris, when he next met Michael 
 Soranisj who had succeeded Kantakuzene as Prime 
 Minister when the latter was defeated over the 
 scheme for the fortification of the Hundred Isles. 
 * But I think you should not have put other words 
 into my mouth. Mon verre est petit^ mats je hois 
 dans mon verre.^ 
 
 * But your Royal Highness makes others drink, 
 alas ! ' murmured with a sigh the harassed politician. 
 
 * Do I make others drink ? ' wondered Othyris, as 
 he passed onward across the great courtyard of the 
 House of Deputies. He did not think so. It is 
 very hard to make others drink, unless they have 
 a taste for the draught you offer, and in that case 
 they get it without you. 
 
 The Crown Prince was, of course, greatly 
 scandalised at the speech. * It is a direct incitement 
 to the poor to plunder the rich,' he said with horror. 
 ' What would he propose instead of the labour of the 
 poor if that were abolished } Everything is done 
 which can be done to diminish the evil effects of the 
 deadly trades ; the trades themselves must exist ; no 
 children anywhere are forced to work at them. If 
 the parents send them, that is not the fault of the 
 masters or of the overseers. What would he 
 substitute instead of the children ? The commerce 
 of the world cannot be stopped because some 
 suffer.' 
 
 No one should say that rich men stole ; they 
 accumulate. Even so, Governments do not ever 
 
IX HELIANTHUS 171 
 
 steal ; they annex. Everything is excused when it 
 is en groSy or en bloc : you kill one man, you go to 
 the scaffold or the hulks ; you kill fifty thousand 
 men, you are decorated, pensioned, honoured, deified. 
 Certainly you do ; what could be more right and 
 proper ^ The whole question lies in your quantities. 
 The whole matter is one of degree. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 In the autumn of the year, King John was 
 suddenly taken ill, for almost the first time in his 
 life, except when he had suffered from an occasional 
 surfeit of the pleasures of the table with its con- 
 sequent indigestion. He had contracted a slight 
 cold in paying an unexpected night-visit to rouse 
 up a distant garrison, and with the chill of it upon 
 him had gone to a monster battue, where he had 
 slaughtered the birds and beasts driven past him till 
 his arms ached. The dense autumn woods were 
 damp and vaporous, and in them his cold was in- 
 creased, so that it became bronchitis. He was never 
 in any danger, but the mere idea of his malady caused 
 depression in the Exchanges of Europe ; why, it 
 would probably have puzzled the stockholders and 
 the publicists to say, for if he had died, his eldest son 
 would have succeeded him peaceably, and would have 
 continued to govern on precisely the same lines, 
 with the placid and resolute composure of a man who 
 knows that Heaven keeps his powder dry for him. 
 
 Ignorant people imagine that the law having settled 
 that the King never dies, it cannot be a matter of 
 great concern who is, or who has ceased to be, the 
 King ; since, if the personality change, the office 
 remains unchanged. Even courtiers admit this, 
 
 172 
 
CHAP. X HELIANTHUS 173 
 
 since they say, * The King is dead ; long live the 
 King ! ' 
 
 Fortunately the next day all the newspapers of 
 Europe were able to print in capital letters the happy 
 fact that the attack was not dangerous, since King John 
 had been able to eat some spoonfuls of chicken puree. 
 His kingdom was intensely interesting to all the other 
 Powers, because each of them wanted it ; and it had an 
 equal interest for politicians as for speculators, because 
 its geographical position and its trimming policy 
 made it an unknown quantity in the possible event 
 of a great war ; politicians and speculators both being 
 keenly aware that Treaties of Alliance, like all other 
 contracts, hold good only until some penknife makes 
 a slit in them, and are inviolable only until one 
 or other of the contracting parties tears them up and 
 dances on their pieces. 
 
 The Crown Prince was assiduous in his attendance 
 at his father's bedside. Like every person conscious 
 of considerable superiority in himself to all others, he 
 could not but be sensible that life in denying him the 
 highest opportunities was unjust. He would not 
 have believed in himself as he did, if he had not 
 believed that he alone was destined to govern 
 Helianthus with that force and firmness which the 
 mingled idiocy and wickedness of its inarticulate 
 multitudes required. But he had an extreme respect 
 for his father. 
 
 His father, he considered, was an admirable ruler ; 
 although in the recesses of his mind, Theo could not 
 but be conscious that he himself would be a still 
 better one. 
 
 His father did yield sometimes ; Theo knew that 
 he himself would never yield, on any question what- 
 
174 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 soever, or to any adviser ever born of man. If 
 any one had ever presumed to point out to him as 
 a deterrent the fate of Louis XVI., he would have 
 replied that Louis would have lived and died at the 
 Tuileries or Versailles if he had only known how to 
 use the guillotine properly on his subjects, instead of 
 waiting till his subjects used it on him ; which perhaps 
 is true, for if he had been quicker than the nation in 
 making the axe his ally, there would probably have 
 been no Terror, no Consulate, no Empire. Theo put 
 away from him as whispers of the devil those irre- 
 pressible desires to be himself the ruler which assailed 
 him, and obtruded themselves on the reverential 
 sorrow with which he heard that the lobe of his 
 father^s left lung was inflamed as well as the left 
 bronchial tube. Slightly, only very slightly, the 
 physicians affirmed, so slightly indeed that the in- 
 flammation was almost imperceptible ; perhaps even 
 totally imperceptible, thought the nurse, whose 
 experience in hospital wards had made her sceptical 
 of medical assertions. 
 
 Four nights were passed by the Crown Prince, 
 fully dressed, in a chamber adjoining the King's. 
 He was respectfully assured that such a vigil was not 
 necessary, but he was a man who would never allow 
 his duty to be dictated to him even by so infallible 
 a pope as a doctor. During that semi-slumber, that 
 mixture of confused dreams and congested reflections 
 which accompany such vigils, he could not but see 
 as in a vision the country as it would be when it 
 should have passed under his own rule — a country 
 shaved, cropped, drilled, put in irons, fed by rule, 
 lodged by order, made clean by Act of Parliament, 
 kept virtuous by regulations, with an inexorable 
 
X HELIANTHUS 175 
 
 hygiene and an inoculated virtue ; its foremost 
 privilege and duty being to carry the musket, its 
 second being to pay all taxes with humble alacrity 
 on the days ordained. 
 
 Theo of Gunderode never doubted his own 
 infallibility, his own semi-divinity, his own absolute 
 preciousness to the nation which, without him and 
 his, would, he was certain, be lost in a whirlpool of 
 blood and a chaos of infidelity. It never came 
 within his mental vision to suppose that he was an 
 ordinary man with less than the usual allowance of 
 brain and more than the usual allowance of 
 obstinacy, whose life or whose death was entirely 
 immaterial to the world except so far as the fables 
 and falsehoods of other men's follies had lifted him 
 up into unreal values. 
 
 Such stupidity is, indeed, not without its uses to 
 persons of exalted station, as it prevents them from 
 ever doubting their own suitability for such exalta- 
 tion. No shadow or shred of such a doubt had ever 
 visited the mind of the Crown Prince ; a mind made 
 of stout impenetrable stuiF, as minds which are com- 
 fortable to their possessors always are. He was as 
 honestly convinced of his own utility and indis- 
 pensability to his country as a mother is convinced 
 of hers to the foetus she carries in her womb. The 
 country could only live, breathe, have its being, 
 through him and his family ; remove himself and 
 his family, where would the country be.^^ Broken 
 up under some foreign rule, no doubt, or swamped 
 in socialism under his brother Elim. He himself 
 was the only possible Vice-Regent of God in He- 
 lianthus. Doubtless he overrated his own qualities ; 
 and in his own estimate called obstinacy firmness, 
 
176 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 ignorance wisdom, fool-hardiness courage, stupidity 
 superiority, brutality virility, and so on, even as 
 ordinary mortals baptize their defects as excellences. 
 But this could only be proved when he came to the 
 throne, and so long as he lived there would certainly 
 be always one person to whom it would never be 
 proven, namely, himself. 
 
 Whilst he kept his vigils, and persuaded himself 
 that he was absorbed in his anxiety and apprehension, 
 his brother Othyris was haunted by a different kind 
 of disquietude. If his father died, he himself would 
 be next heir to the throne. The present illness 
 brought this possibility home to him with startling 
 force. 
 
 Therefore, if in the innermost soul of the Crown 
 Prince there was a lurking, secret sense of disappoint- 
 ment when King John got well enough to eat some 
 roast pheasant instead of chicken broth, Othyris 
 was, without any mingled feelings, unfeignedly 
 glad ; and a great apprehension was lifted off 
 his mind when his father went for his first drive 
 in the avenues of the public park, showing a com- 
 plete convalescence by the size of his cheroot. The 
 people cheered the King as he passed (for in every 
 crowd there are always many who are good-natured, 
 and many more who are snobs) ; and the sovereign 
 thought to himself : ' They know what they would 
 have lost if I had died.* To him it seemed natural 
 and fitting that they should be grateful to himself, 
 his physicians, and Providence for the favour of his 
 recovery. 
 
 There was a Thanksgiving Service in honour of 
 his recovery at the Cathedral ; that great and 
 famous building which had been in its earliest years 
 
X HELIANTHUS 177 
 
 a temple of Zeus, and in its present composite archi- 
 tecture was Classic, Byzantine, Renaissance, holding 
 a score of various and opposing styles in its mighty 
 rambling mass, and sending forth its sonorous chimes 
 over the city at its feet. The celebration was impos- 
 ing in the mingled religious, secular, and military 
 pomp and ceremony which characterised it. All the 
 princes of the reigning House were, of course, pre- 
 sent ; troops were massed in large numbers in the 
 cathedral square ; the great bell of solid silver, only 
 heard on supreme occasions, sent its sweet, deep notes 
 into the springtide ; and a considerable number of 
 persons, chiefly women and children, were crushed 
 and suffocated between the barricades covered with 
 crimson cloth, and the lines of armed soldiery and 
 police. This is the human sacrifice which is as 
 essential to the success of a modern triumph as 
 decapitated heads rolling on the grass are necessary 
 to the feasts of savage and misguided nations. 
 
 The monarch, standing before the high altar, with 
 his hand on his sword hilt, and the sunlight falling 
 down from the golden dome on to the bald crown of 
 his head, was an inharmonious central figure ; but all 
 countries are used to that kind of incongruity. 
 Even Caesar's cranium did not wholly suit the laurel 
 wreath. 
 
 * What is in his mind } ' wondered Othyris, as he 
 stood a step behind his father, before that grand and 
 glittering altar. * Gratitude ? Faith ? Desire to 
 deserve renewed health .^^ Sentiment, tender and 
 touching, of the city's rejoicing .? Belief in the Deity 
 to whom thanks and praise are being offered in his 
 name by those lovely voices of the youthful choristers 
 and the vox humana of the noble organ ? ' No : not 
 
178 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 any one of these emotions was likely to be felt by 
 John of Gunderode. He was probably chafing at 
 the length of the service, and feeling the impatience 
 for food and drink of a hungry convalescent. 
 
 The King drove home behind his beautiful white 
 horses, holding his plumed casque on his knees, and 
 bending his head to the people with more cordiality 
 than usual. The enthusiasm of the population 
 pleased him, and the vast crowds, kept in place by 
 the soldiery, were guarantee to him that he could go 
 to war when he pleased. For a war was the desire 
 of his soul. 
 
 In these days a country which has not a war on 
 its hands is considered to be either numerically or 
 financially weak ; probably both. King John had 
 reigned thirty years and had sent his troops nowhere ; 
 he had acquired no territory ; he had utilised none 
 of the raw material which had been gathered and 
 drilled so perseveringly, except, indeed, once when an 
 expedition to a desert country had been planned and 
 executed by the ambitious old Minister, Domitian 
 Corvus, and had ended in the decimation of the 
 Helianthine battalions by a ruler uncivilised and un- 
 christian — a period of sad humiliation to the nation 
 and the monarch. Ever since that painful period the 
 King had no desire in his soul more strong and 
 more difficult of realisation than his wish for war ; 
 he would have been quite ready to send his troops 
 to be cut to pieces in aid of one of his allies ; but 
 Europe was at peace — that is, was armed to the teeth, 
 but afraid to move. The only campaign which 
 offered itself was one in alliance with Candor, in 
 barbaric lands. 
 
 The great and ancient kingdom of Candor, which 
 
X HELIANTHUS 179 
 
 had of late years called herself Imperia, because she 
 thought it sounded finer in the ears of mankind 
 and was told that it was philologically more correct, 
 was a great friend to the newly-made kingdom of 
 Helianthus. She did not call herself an ally, because, 
 whilst friendship engages to nothing, alliance com- 
 promises and may want a sword drawn ; and Candor's 
 sword was always in use for herself alone, un- 
 sheathed, all the world over, preceding and protect- 
 ing her commerce and her religion. Candor liked 
 to keep her hands free ; and to that wisdom she 
 owed her eminence and vast extension. No doubt, 
 to be every nation's ally, as Julius was, comes to much 
 the same thing in the end ; but the policy of Candor 
 (otherwise Imperia) was the wiser : no Power could 
 say that Candor had deceived it, for she never 
 promised anything. 
 
 Her sovereign and princes paid flattering visits to 
 other countries, her fleets did the same ; her ambas- 
 sadors were doubly discreet, because they were careful 
 not to know the language of any country to which 
 they were accredited ; she was always ready to 
 lend out of her great riches, if the security given 
 were good ; and her banks were the most solid in all 
 the world. But her sword she would not draw in 
 international complications ; it was essentially a 
 domestic instrument, and was generally only used 
 on black, brown, and yellow bodies, which of course 
 are not counted as true war-game any more than in 
 sport rabbits are counted as tigers. At the present 
 moment Candor was pushing on Helianthus to what 
 she called expansion ; ordinary mortals call it con- 
 quest. The synonym is not new ; it was in use in the 
 time of the Caesars. King John thought expansion 
 
i8o HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 an admirable term, and an admirable thing ; and he 
 did not perceive that whilst it was really so to the 
 florid health, the full-blooded strength, the plethora 
 of wealth, the masterful temper, and the energetic 
 force of Candor herself, it was to the Helianthine 
 realm and people, with their scanty resources, their 
 insufficient population, and their enormous taxation, 
 as injurious as blood-letting to a weak constitution. 
 King John had visited hospitals to little purpose, for 
 he had not learned to see the difference between 
 robust health and anaemia. To him war always 
 appeared a sanitary phlebotomy ; so, in despite of all 
 precedent and good sense, he prepared to go to 
 war or, as Candor called it, to colonise, to civilise, to 
 open new markets, to change sandy wastes into rich 
 cornfields. 
 
 There was great activity in the ports, and the 
 depots, and the barrack-yards ; the railway trains 
 were full of recruits and men of the reserve 
 huddled together like cattle in trucks ; there was 
 much speech-making on platforms, and spouting of 
 vain-glorious periods ; and contractors were jubilant, 
 getting rid of all their inferior goods at most superior 
 prices. Helianthus, who had so much to learn and 
 was frequently being boxed on the ears for her 
 ignorance by her big sisters, was as a whole flattered 
 by the idea that she could go a-colonising with her 
 flag flying, as in the country districts her boys and 
 girls went a-maying with their posies tied to poles. 
 The enterprise was not to a great degree popular, 
 but it was trumpeted by the Press, praised in the 
 clubs, and held up to national admiration by fluent 
 orators both in and out of Parliament and Senate. 
 The King even sacrificed several days of blackcock 
 
X HELIANTHUS i8i 
 
 and wild turkey shooting to contribute his quota to 
 the national enthusiasm, and to do his part in offering 
 to the public the alcohol of a boastful vanity. He 
 received in the throne-room a deputation of senators, 
 deputies, and personages ; he wore full-dress uniform, 
 his grandest Orders, and a jewelled sabre ; and he 
 fully believed that he was doing his highest duty to 
 the nation and the world in sacrificing himself thus 
 in autumn days, when blackcock and wild turkeys 
 might have been falling like rain before his breech- 
 loader. He congratulated the deputation, the 
 country, and himself, on the martial temper which 
 (according to him) was growing up amongst the 
 younger men ; and predicted that, under the favour- 
 ing benignity of Providence, the Helianthines would 
 become stronger and more powerful with every 
 decade, and rise to true greatness in the history of 
 modern nations. Great ! — what is the meaning of 
 the adjective in the mouths of monarchs, of princes, 
 and of statesmen ? A docile populace, pleased to 
 beget sons for the slaughter ; ready to starve on its 
 own hearths in order that the policy of its leaders 
 may be victorious abroad ; veteran soldiers willing to 
 leave their occupations and families to take up arms, 
 and meekly accepting neglect and starvation on 
 their return to their homes ; the flag flying in every 
 far-away distant sphere, that the sweater may thrive 
 and the goldbroker gorge ; the active army a sub- 
 missive servant, equally ready to ravage a dark 
 continent abroad, or to gag liberty at home ; the 
 navy, a mighty tool always at hand to blockade, and 
 bombard, and burn on any shore, wherever the 
 potential traders at home require new marts, or a 
 rival Power has gained a footing ; an exchequer 
 
1 82 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 deep as the deep sea, into which fools pour their 
 earnings meekly and trustfully, and the spendthrift 
 State plunges ravenous hands unpunished — this is 
 for a country to be great as modern monarchs and 
 their ministers construe greatness. Should Helian- 
 thus be behind her sister -nations in this kind of 
 greatness ? Forbid it. Heaven ! 
 
 ' More whipped-cream flavoured with cura^oa,* 
 whispered Tyras ; and Othyris wondered in secret : 
 
 * Does he really believe what he says ? He lies 
 like truth/ 
 
 It is true that the power of self-delusion is 
 enormous ; and men in high places are saturated 
 with it as the drinker with a drug. 
 
 The Crown Prince alone listened with a devout 
 belief and admiration ; he would say just such things 
 himself in future years. Great ? Doubtless the 
 country would be great — under himself. Great ! 
 The word seemed to boom through the air, thrice 
 repeated as it had been in the sovereign's harsh, 
 rasping, authoritative tones. 
 
 Othyris heard in it the grinding roll of cannon 
 wheels, the tramp of young men going to their 
 death, the crash of exploding shells, the rattle of 
 emptying money-bags, the moans of widowed women, 
 of fatherless children. 
 
 King John put off his uniform, and Orders, and 
 jewelled sabre, dressed himself in a morning suit of 
 tweed, and sat down to his noonday breakfast. 
 His conscience was satisfied, and his vanity, which 
 mattered more, was pleased. To speak well was not 
 a talent by any means natural to him. In learning 
 to speak in public he had contended with many 
 personal defects ; a confused articulation, a slowness 
 
X HELIANTHUS 183 
 
 of utterance, a halting memory, a tendency to 
 stammer ; but he had vanquished these impediments, 
 although he could not alter the unmelodious tones 
 of his voice, which he had, however, disciplined into 
 a certain imperiousness befitting his position, at least 
 in his own eyes and in those of his courtiers. He 
 was gratified at the consciousness that he had spoken 
 well, and that his speech was being telegraphed to 
 the four quarters of the globe. It gave him the 
 sense of being a great monarch ; of being one of 
 those who make the fine weather and the sunshine 
 of the world. Also, as far as an ardent desire could 
 be felt in his phlegmatic breast, he wished to try his 
 troops in real war, as a boy, having played with toy 
 soldiers till he is tired, longs to be at more serious 
 pastimes with powder and shot. And as scientific 
 professors make their experiments, as it is said, in 
 corpore vili^ so he was glad to make his first 
 trial of the capacity of his army on the inferior 
 opponents of barbaric nations. For in the recesses of 
 his soul he was not sure of his troops ; and being a 
 shrewd and capable person he was aware that his 
 commissariat was by no means to be trusted in the 
 all-important ofiice of supplies. 
 
 But alas for the illusions of international friend- 
 ships, Candor (alias Imperia) changed her mind, be- 
 cause she had changed her administration. Moreover 
 Gallia set up her back and showed her teeth, like the 
 fiery creature she is, and the new government in the 
 great realm of Candor was not disposed to irritate 
 her. Gallia was her foe, and Helianthus was her 
 friend ; but nations, like individuals, must throw 
 over their friends sometimes, so Candor threw over 
 the Helianthines. Her diplomatists caused them to 
 
1 84 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 understand that the moment had not yet arrived 
 when they could go a-conquering as their villagers 
 went a-maying ; that it would be wiser to furl the 
 flags and untie the posies. Helianthus obeyed, la 
 mort dans V dme. She was not strong enough 
 to stand alone, and to go by herself into the 
 sandy wastes of the land of ruby mines and tsetse- 
 flies. 
 
 The King was bitterly enraged, painfully morti- 
 fied ; and he could show neither rage nor mortification. 
 He could shoot blackcock and wild turkeys, indeed, 
 all day long and every day ; but there are hours of 
 chagrin and humiliation when even the gun fails to 
 console the sportsman. 
 
 The ships were unloading ; the trains were taking 
 the regiments back to their home-quarters ; the 
 flags were being rolled up and put on stands like 
 umbrellas ; the hundreds and thousands of mules and 
 pack-saddles collected were being sold at a tenth part of 
 their cost ; the barracks were hearing only the every- 
 day squeak of the bugles. The influential organs of 
 the Press put Bellona back in a drawer and set up in 
 her stead her rival Pax ; even as the cheap toy- 
 sellers packed up all their little military playthings, 
 and instead sold ducks and geese, or cats and mice. 
 Only the contractors, although disappointed, were 
 consoled ; because if the stores which they had so 
 profusely provided rotted uselessly in the warehouses 
 of the State, the State had already paid for them at 
 ten times their value. 
 
 They would not have the hoped-for pleasure of 
 supplying for two or three years, to an entire army, 
 musty flour, mouldy rice, ilex berries for coffee, 
 chemicals for liquors, and all the other luxuries of 
 
X HELIANTHUS 185 
 
 civilisation ; but in a smaller way they always did 
 a good business in these things with the com- 
 missariat. 
 
 The abandonment of her conquering (alias colo- 
 nising) projects gave a bad blow beneath the belt 
 to Helianthine credit, and sent her stocks down on 
 the Exchanges of her neighbours. She had con- 
 tracted large war loans for which she would have 
 to pay heavily for probably many years to come. 
 Financiers were unkind to her, and made her feel 
 her want of capital and of independence. Her 
 military men were disappointed and sullen. The 
 increase in her taxation had no equivalent in flattered 
 national vanity. She had not even the loot of a 
 barbaric palace, or a captive dusky king with a huge 
 belly and a prehensile jaw, to show in her cities 
 to her populace. Gallia mocked her with unkind 
 raillery, and Candor promised her better luck next 
 time. Helianthus realised the bitter wisdom of the 
 prayer, * Save me from my friends, dear God ; from 
 my enemies I can defend myself.' 
 
 The uncivilised monarch who had escaped the 
 blessings of civilisation at the cannon's mouth, sent to 
 Helios some living lions and ostriches as a present 
 to the ruler of Helianthus, some ivory, ebony, and 
 uncut gems ; but these humble offerings have not 
 about them the glory and glamour of booty, and 
 gave no pleasure to the GunderGde or the populace. 
 They would have been visited by delighted multi- 
 tudes if they had been brought in cages and cases by 
 returning and victorious troop-ships ; but as mere 
 signs of a grateful barbarian's relief at having escaped 
 invasion and education, they lacked interest ; and the 
 lions roared and raged in impotent wretchedness, and 
 
1 86 HELIANTHUS chap, x 
 
 the ostriches rubbed their plumes off against the bars 
 of their cages almost disregarded. 
 
 * Why, whether in our pleasure or our pain, are 
 the poor beasts and birds always sacrificed ? ' thought 
 Othyris. It is a question which many have asked 
 before him, but to which none have ever had any 
 reply. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 Great news was at this period being circulated 
 throughout Helianthus. 
 
 The Crown Princess was pregnant after a sterility 
 of ten years ! Medical men certified the fact. 
 Journalists glorified it. Ministers went on missions 
 of announcement ; ambassadors came on errands of 
 felicitation. The successful advent of the fifth month 
 was proclaimed to an expectant and a delighted 
 people ; or a people ordered to be delighted, as they 
 were ordered to be virtuous, by Act of Parliament.. 
 Personally Princess Gertrude, a modest, retiring and 
 reserved person, suffered horribly from this publicity. 
 It offended and tortured every innermost fibre of her 
 womanhood. The congratulations of the President 
 of the Council were as painful to her as the bulletins 
 of the Court physicians. But she did not demur to 
 any of it for one moment : it was all part of her 
 duty to endure this exposure. 
 
 If she envied the charcoal-seller in her black den 
 the privacy which that den afforded her to pass 
 through her pregnancy and travail in peace, she 
 never said so. She bore this part of her punishment 
 as mutely and meekly as she had borne the rest ; she: 
 had gone through this ordeal twice before. If only 
 her reward might be at last to bring forth a male child I 
 
 187 
 
1 88 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 This desire, strong in almost every woman, was in 
 her intense ; she longed to be the mother of a monarch, 
 and she sighed to have removed from her what she 
 felt was a reproach. She scarcely dared to hope for 
 the gratification of her desire. Both King John and 
 her husband did not conceal their contemptuous con- 
 viction that she would be incapable of bearing a son ; 
 that when the nine moons should have run their 
 course, another little female creature would bleat in a 
 world where even female royalty does not count as 
 much as male. 
 
 The Crown Prince himself felt that he had not 
 deserved such an unaccountable slight from a Deity 
 whom he had always served zealously, and in whose 
 honour he would with pleasure have cheerfully burnt 
 ten thousand unbelievers, if burning had still been in 
 vogue. 
 
 If only this time Heaven would vouchsafe to give 
 the throne an heir ! It was extraordinary, inscrut- 
 able, and sorely trying to the strongest religious 
 faith, that whilst male infants wailed and squirmed 
 by the million in the dwellings of the poor all 
 the world over, kicked their cold little feet on 
 rotten straw, and sucked with dry, hungry lips at 
 empty breasts, a Prince, most orthodox, most 
 impeccable, the central pillar of the constitution, 
 should have been blessed by no son in a dozen 
 years of wedlock. 
 
 ' Ah ! the poor soul ! ' thought Madame Ogier, 
 the Gallian ambassadress, looking at Princess Gertrude 
 at a Court ceremony. * If she were only a grocer's 
 wife, she could go away, and unlace her stays, and 
 lie down. But as it is she is just Hke the poor 
 horses they use at home to tread out wheat in the 
 
XI HELIANTHUS 189 
 
 farmyards : she is under the whip, and she must go 
 round and round, and round and round.' 
 
 Often had she watched those horses, for she had 
 an uncle a small farmer in a central Gallian province, 
 where the young horses are driven in a circle half- 
 frantic, rearing and kicking, to thrash out the 
 ripened corn under their unshod hoofs. 
 
 * The lines of great folks are not laid in pleasant 
 places, as little ones think,' the good lady who 
 represented Gallia at the Helianthine Court said to 
 her daughter. ' We envy them when we see them a 
 long way off ; but we mistake, my dear, we mistake.' 
 
 Madame Ogier herself was middle-aged ; she was 
 stout ; she was short of breath ; her diamond tiara 
 made her head ache ; her ample bosom, displayed 
 under its pearls, made her feel embarrassed ; the 
 obligations of etiquette worried her ; she sighed for 
 the time when there had been no other palace in their 
 own lives than the Palace of Justice at home, and 
 when she had herself superintended the savoury 
 cooking of the darne de satimon and the entrecote h la 
 Bordelaise for the dinner of her young and hungry 
 advocate. In the odd, topsy-turvy, half-reactionary 
 and half-revolutionary society of the capital cities 
 of our time we may so often see the prototypes of 
 Madame Ogier — excellent women, devoted helpmates 
 in the earlier stages of their lords' careers ; mere 
 hobbles on the foot in their men's later position ; con- 
 scious that they are so, yet tenacious of their marital 
 and social rights, wearing their sparkling jewels with 
 heavy head and heart at imperial and royal balls, 
 disfiguring the present and overshadowing the future 
 of their brilliant partners, living witnesses of the 
 angular and melancholy issues of monogamy. 
 
190 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 * I was of use to you once, Ferdinand ! ' this poor 
 lady said, in a rare moment of emotion, on a New 
 Year's morning in Helios, to her beloved lord. 
 
 * Ah yes, my love, and you are so always,' said 
 Ogier, with cordial kindness and admirable false- 
 hood. 
 
 She shook her head sadly ; she was not deceived, 
 and she mourned for the little house of twenty-five 
 years before at Passy. 
 
 Meanwhile, whether pitied or envied, the poor 
 Crown Princess bore her burden, and in due time was 
 actually blessed by a male child. 
 
 It was a great occasion at the Palace of the Soleia. 
 The President of the Council, the President of the 
 Senate, the Prime Minister, the leader of the Opposi- 
 tion and other notabilities were gathered together in 
 one of the vast tapestried and frescoed salons, with 
 the electric lamps shining above their heads — some 
 of these bald, some white, some grey, some dyed, 
 but all deferentially bent in a listening and humble 
 attitude for the news which another quarter of 
 an hour must bring ; so at least a gynecologist, 
 summoned there from Candor for the momentous 
 occasion, had assured them. Now and then one or 
 other of them murmured a sentence, or strove to 
 conceal a yawn ; but no conversation could be kept 
 up at such a juncture. 
 
 Suddenly the double doors were thrown open by 
 gentlemen-lackeys, and the Crown Prince entered, 
 taller, stiiFer, redder than ever, more than ever with 
 the port of a Hercules bearing the world upon his 
 shoulders. As the eminent persons waiting there 
 humbly bent to the ground before him, he announced, 
 in pompous tones of unspeakable elation, that a prince 
 
XI HELIANTHUS 191 
 
 had been born to the nation, a son to him, an heir to 
 the throne. With a certain condescension, added as 
 a courteous colophon, he alluded to the hand of a 
 merciful Creator in the auspicious event, and then he 
 had a sound as of intoning in his voice. 
 
 Without, in the early evening, bells began to ring, 
 cannon to fire, bands to play, bonfires to be lit on the 
 hills around, the solemn, vision-haunted, god-forsaken 
 hills of Helios ; and the people, with that fatal sus- 
 ceptibility and receptivity which throws a multitude 
 into the dangerous magic of suggestivism, began to 
 shout, to sing, to cheer, to rejoice for they knew not 
 what, and gathered in uproarious thousands before 
 the gates of the Soleia. 
 
 In answer to those outcries the short, stout, stiff 
 figure of the King, and the spare, erect, stiff figure 
 of the Crown Prince, appeared together upon the 
 balcony above the great entrance, the light from the 
 open windows behind them ; the crowd yelled its 
 congratulations as the banner of the royal House 
 swayed to and fro. 
 
 The Municipality presented a gold and tortoise- 
 shell cradle ; the Provincial Council a perambulator 
 in ivory and rare woods ; illuminated addresses were 
 sent up from hundreds of mayors and prefects ; and 
 a golden bowl, set round with pearls of price, for bread 
 and milk, was offered by the Senate. 
 
 The King considered all these gifts as witnesses to 
 his own popularity, and as so many gilded nails driven 
 into the dais of his throne to strengthen it. The 
 Crown Prince scarcely went so far as that ; he took 
 them as a right. 
 
 A little later the most splendid pomp, and the most 
 extravagant expenditure, attended the infant's baptism 
 
192 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 in the Cathedral of St. Athanasius. He was named 
 John Theodoric, and received the title of Prince of 
 Helios. He was made colonel of a regiment of 
 Guards and military governor of a province. The 
 usual amnesty was granted in honour of his birth to 
 condemned persons whose offences were not too 
 flagrant, although no one, if put to it, could have 
 explained the logic of so odd a connection as that 
 between the birth of a babe and the national prisons 
 and reformatories. An atom of flesh is born into the 
 world, different in no way from all other flesh except 
 in the superstitions and imaginations of men. This 
 event is accompanied by the pardon of several thou- 
 sands of incarcerated persons, and the cancelling of 
 tens of thousands of punitive sentences and fines. 
 Now it is clear that if the incarcerations were just, 
 and just the fines, they should not be altered ; if un- 
 just, that they should not have to wait to be redressed 
 for the incident of an infant's birth. The usage 
 makes a farce of law, and puppets of a magistracy. 
 But the populace is never logical, and is easily moved 
 to mawkish sentiment ; nor does it dislike to see 
 justice in motley, and the gravity of law tricked out 
 in cap and bells. 
 
 The winter, usually so mild in Helianthus, had 
 become of great severity at this time. The mountain 
 ranges were covered with snow, the plains were swept 
 by icy and fierce winds, the blue sea was grey and 
 sullen and murderous. So rare was such a season in 
 this country that people were unprepared for it, both 
 in the towns and in the provinces ; neither their 
 houses nor their clothes were made to resist its sharp- 
 ness ; the angry waters swallowed up the slender, 
 shell-like fishing boats, and the frozen hills and vales 
 
XI HELIANTHUS 193 
 
 killed the lambs, the kids, the calves, the sheep, and 
 the troops of wild young hares were famished on the 
 frozen plains. Many human lives were also lost 
 through the unfamiliar visitation. Men and women 
 and children were found dead beneath churchyard 
 walls, on ancient temple steps, on solitary shores, in 
 lonely wattle huts, even in the lanes of cities with 
 the cold electric -light shed on them. Cold, un- 
 usually prolonged, had already injured the olive and 
 the orange harvest. Corn was taxed so highly that 
 it was out of the reach of tens of thousands, and 
 the chief bulk of it was shut up in huge granaries 
 belonging to syndicates who would not sell, know- 
 ing it would go up higher and higher in price 
 as the people suffered more. Children lay dead 
 in the fireless cabins, mere heaps of bones and 
 yellow skin. Feeble throngs, hollow of eye and 
 cheek, and burnt up with fever, collected before the 
 communal palaces in their Httle towns, clamouring 
 for food, and got enough for two out of two score. 
 The bright yellow discs of the coltsfoot and the 
 celandine filled the ditches in the opening of the year, 
 and amidst them lay dead bodies killed by hunger or 
 from indigestion through eating balls of clay. 
 
 There were numerous subscriptions, headed by 
 the donations of the king and closed by those of 
 his tradesmen, as a child's procession of Noah's 
 Ark animals is headed by the elephant and closed 
 by the rabbit. Large sums of money passed through 
 many hands and many channels, although not much 
 of it reached its destination ; and throughout the 
 more northern provinces, and in the mountainous 
 districts, the people lay fleshless and stark on the 
 roads and in the barren fields. 
 
194 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 The people should have been reconciled to their 
 fate, no doubt, in thinking of the tortoise-shell and 
 gold cradle, of the pearls, and furs, and laces, and 
 lawns given to the new-born prince ; but, alas, 
 they were so ignorant that they did not know 
 of them, and so had not even this consolation. 
 Many of them did not even know that the Prince 
 of Helios had been born, so that the agony of 
 their empty bellies and gnawing bowels was not 
 even alleviated by the national joy. In the far 
 mountains by the lonely lakes, on the solitary plains 
 of the interior, the population was sparse and widely 
 scattered ; the news of the new-born Gunderode did 
 not reach these through any channel until such time 
 as their priest included his hallowed name in public 
 prayer. 
 
 Amidst all this flutter and flurry in honour of her 
 son, poor Princess Gertrude pressed the small red 
 crumpled face of her babe to her bosom, of which 
 the milk was denied to him, and regretted that she 
 was not a woman of the people, free to do with her 
 offspring as she chose : the wife of a weaver, of a 
 cobbler, of a tailor, of some worker in sulphur mine 
 or mariner in sailing-brig, only not forced to yield up 
 her little son to an alien breast and to the arms of 
 hirelings. 
 
 But for the first time in her life she was 
 happy and proud, and could feel that her lord was 
 content with her. For the first time her heart was 
 closed to the woes of others. Possibly if she had 
 gone into the ruined districts she might have been 
 more painfully conscious of what was being suffered 
 in them ; but statistics and official returns do not 
 touch the heart unless the heart be accompanied by a 
 
xr HELIANTHUS 195 
 
 very vivid imagination, and the imagination is a 
 sensitive plant which withers in palaces. She was 
 happy, for the first time in her life, proud of her 
 boy, and glad to see her husband so contented and so 
 triumphant ; her one duty had been to bear him an 
 heir, and she had now done that duty after twelve 
 years of a marriage almost as bad as barren. She 
 was sorry, indeed, for the hunger of the south and 
 the north whenever she thought about it ; but 
 intensely sorry she could not feel. The universe 
 was concentrated for her in the little red wrinkled 
 morsel of flesh, slobbering and slumbering in his 
 cradle under draperies of Old English point. He 
 was her baby, her heaven-born, her latest and 
 sweetest treasure ; but he was much more than this 
 in her sight : he was the future king. For her the 
 infant's toothless, shapeless lips were touched by a 
 sacred chrism. 
 
 ' You too — even you ! ' thought Othyris, as he 
 saw her absorption in the little heir : even she, good 
 soul as she was, had been drawn into the vortex of 
 selfish concentration. 
 
 He could say nothing to her, for anything he 
 would have said in the sense of reproach for her 
 selfishness would have sounded like disappointment 
 and rancour. 
 
 Undoubtedly the cruelty of the lot of the many, 
 the waste and self-indulgence in the lives of the few, 
 were, when she thought of them, very painful and 
 perplexing to her. She could not attempt to account 
 for the anomaly satisfactorily ; she accepted it as a 
 sorrowful mystery — which it is not very difficult to 
 do when the sorrowful mystery does not starve our- 
 selves or our own children. That her own order was 
 
i^e HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 in any way the cause of such disparities she would 
 have indignantly denied, and probably with justice. 
 But, as a rule, she did not either generalise or 
 analyse; she referred such painful problems to the 
 omniscience of the All-Supreme. 
 
 Yet, alas ! the Providence in whom she believed so 
 humbly and devoutly was unkind to her ; her little 
 son was not more sacred to it than the starved babes 
 in the famine districts ; and whether fools or sages 
 were his worshippers, both were unable to keep alive 
 the little scion of the House of GunderOde. 
 
 It has never been explained satisfactorily by either 
 philosophers or pathologists why nature is such an 
 anarchist that she allows royal babes to be subject to 
 croup ; it is clearly wrong in the divine ordering of 
 things, and is a problem which must greatly trouble 
 and confound the mind of the true royalist. But, 
 unfortunately, the fact is that royal infants are not 
 more respected by disease than those of the popula- 
 tion of the slums, and it so happened that the poor 
 little Prince of Helios died after an illness of a few 
 hours, suffocated by this common malady like any 
 common child, and the Crown Princess mourned him 
 as any ordinary mother might have done. His name 
 had scarcely been included in the rubric of the priest- 
 hood and the prayers of the nation, before it ceased to 
 be anything more than an inscription upon a tomb. 
 The poor little fellow died at five months old ; the 
 length of his names and the weight of his honours 
 were powerless to keep him alive ; he actually died of 
 suffocation, just like any forlorn atom breathing its 
 last on a bed of rags, despite the science and the 
 efforts of all the physicians of the Court. 
 
 * Poor mother ! Poor mother ! ' thought Othyris 
 
XI HELIANTHUS 197 
 
 as he heard the tidings. How cruel was life — making 
 the women lose what has cost them such pangs to bear 
 and bring forth ! 
 
 He who had felt the fetters which bound him to 
 the throne lightened by the child's birth, felt them 
 return in all their might at his death. He was once 
 more Heir-Presumptive to the throne of Helianthus. 
 The shadow of the purple hung like a rain-cloud 
 upon the horizon of his life. 
 
 A mortuary chapel of great beauty and riches was 
 consecrated to the child's memory, and his image in 
 solid silver was enshrined in it as well as his silver 
 coffin. Candles burned, and bells rang, and flowers 
 bloomed above his tomb night and day, and innumer- 
 able young children of his age died of the poisoned 
 milk of mothers employed in the factories of deadly 
 trades. Yet neither his parents nor his grandfather 
 would, by any stretch of imagination, have been able 
 to conceive why the industrial classes are attracted 
 by anarchistic doctrines ! 
 
 King John was driving home, after a day's 
 shooting with two of his gentlemen, when about a 
 mile off the city gate on the north shots were 
 fired at him by three young men hiding behind a 
 myrtle hedge on the roadside. All the shots missed 
 him, and struck the boughs of an opposite plane- 
 tree. The young men fired again, but two were 
 seized in the act by the carabineers who rode close to 
 the carriage ; the third fled across the fields, and 
 momentarily escaped, only to be captured later on, 
 hidden in a disused water-tank. 
 
 The King returned to the Palace, and ate his dinner 
 with an undiminished appetite. The youths were 
 
198 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 escorted by police and gendarmes to the city prison 
 for malefactors, and the attempt becoming known, 
 the evening journals hastily printed 'specials' and 
 the Prefect and Syndic as hastily organised thanks- 
 givings. The great cathedral bells rang, and the 
 palace square was illuminated and thronged. The 
 King, when he had finished his dinner, went out 
 on to the balcony above the great portico, accom- 
 panied by the Crown Prince, and remained there for 
 a quarter of an hour, his figure black against the 
 light of the room behind him ; standing bareheaded 
 and making signs of acknowledgment with his right 
 hand, the spark of a lighted cigar between his lips 
 as usual. 
 
 The crowd cheered, and some of the women in 
 it sobbed with hysteria ; for an attempted assassina- 
 tion, like a death-bed repentance, sends up the value 
 of a perfectly useless and uninteresting life, and floats 
 it upwards to the empyrean, as a balloon on the mere 
 cutting of ropes soars by the force of gas into the 
 clouds and above them. 
 
 The morning papers described and illustrated 
 the scene by the plane-tree, writing with enthusiasm 
 of the wonderful self-possession of the King, and 
 sold largely. They also stated that the populace had 
 tried to lynch the criminals on the way to the 
 prison, which was quite untrue ; and that there had 
 been discovered indisputable evidence of an extensive 
 international conspiracy, which was not true either, 
 but was a communique : a lie of the police, not of 
 the Press. 
 
 The lads were said to be dangerous anarchists ; 
 and, as usual, it was stated that an electrical thrill of 
 horror had galvanised the whole of the universe. 
 
XI HELIANTHUS 199 
 
 John of Gunderode himself took the matter calmly 
 but very seriously, and expected every one to do the 
 same ; and his private cypher and his private wires 
 worked incessantly for several days. 
 
 The Red Spectre always haunts the beds and the 
 brains of sovereigns. The roar of the cheering 
 crowds is so terribly similar to the roar of a revolted 
 population ; the press of the multitudes through the 
 streets to see a State procession so painfully suggests 
 what the stress and haste would be to see a fugitive 
 monarch, a burning palace, an improvised scaffold. 
 The guffaw of a grinning mob differs so little in its 
 expression from the howl of a crowd that is cursing 
 and clamouring for blood. The monarchs may give 
 their coachmen or their postillions, or their footmen 
 on the footboard, revolvers in each pocket ; they 
 may brave ridicule by mounting gendarmes on 
 bicycles behind them ; they may wear coats of mail 
 under their cambric shirts ; they may have ton 
 weights of iron chains, and rows of dark cells in 
 their prisons under the sea level, where no ray of 
 daylight ever comes, ready for their foes when 
 captured. But all these precautions cannot rid them 
 of the Red Spectre ; of the ever-present personal 
 fear of assassination which chills their blood even in 
 the warmth of a summer garden, of a friend's 
 embrace, or of a bridal bed. 
 
 It was this fear which gave to the eyes of John of 
 GunderOde that strange expression of menace, of 
 apprehension, of painful expectancy, and of scared 
 vision, which made men doubt whether he had in 
 fact the stolid bull -dog courage which was always 
 attributed to him, and which was a characteristic 
 of his race. In reality he had it ; he was naturally 
 
200 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 brave, with a cynical, cool courage, hard and un- 
 sympathetic, like all his other faculties. But when 
 the fear of assassination has once entered into a man 
 it never leaves him ; it lies down with him at night, 
 and gets up with him in the morning, like an incur- 
 able disease. It looks out from his regard always 
 en vedette^ always apprehensive, always glancing to 
 right and to left like the regard of the oft-hunted 
 stag. John of Gunderode knew that this look had 
 passed into his own eyes, reflex of a haunting thought 
 in his brain ; and to conceal it he kept his eyelids 
 half closed, or used a double eyeglass, for which his 
 sight had no need. 
 
 It is remarkable that the great ones of the earth, 
 when they escape from a danger, always praise the 
 Deity as having watched over and guided them out 
 of it ; but when they fall a victim to a revolver, or 
 a dagger, or a bomb, they are never said by their 
 families to have been deserted, or punished, by their 
 Heavenly Father ; the most that is said then, is that 
 the ways of God are mysterious and inscrutable. So, 
 as the three youths had all and each of them missed 
 the anointed of their land, every one in the Court 
 circle and out of it was loud in their admiration of 
 the conspicuous intervention of Deity. It was the 
 Almighty Power which had made the lads' sight fail, 
 and their hands tremble, at the critical moment, and 
 the bullets fail to find their billets. 
 
 * It would have been better,* said Othyris, * if the 
 Almighty Power had intervened to prevent the lads' 
 purchase of the pistols.' 
 
 * What a dreadful thing to say ! ' cried the Crown 
 Princess, to whom he made the remark. She was 
 a religious person ; her early training had been 
 
XI HELIANTHUS 2oi 
 
 Evangelical, and she really saw the finger of Pro- 
 vidence distinctly in the fact that all three bullets 
 had hit the plane-tree instead of reaching her father- 
 in-law. 
 
 * It seems to me an indisputable fact,' replied 
 Othyris. 
 
 * You would say, then,* she continued, ' that 
 Christ should have prevented Lazarus dying, instead 
 of raising him from the tomb ? * 
 
 ' I imagine it would have been kinder to Lazarus,' 
 said Othyris. 
 
 She was still more shocked. 
 
 * It is so sad,' she murmured, ' so grievously sad, 
 that you are so Voltairean ! ' 
 
 Othyris laughed. 
 
 ' Oh, surely I am of a later date than Voltaire ^ 
 And I am not so meritorious as he,' he added. * I 
 have not yet saved my Calas.' 
 
 * Perhaps you will feel it your duty to save these 
 three assassins ? ' 
 
 'If there were a chance that I could do so, I 
 would try to save them from a violent death.' 
 
 * You cannot speak seriously.' 
 
 ' I do, indeed. Should I jest on such a subject ? ' 
 
 * On what grounds would you save them } ' 
 
 * On many. That they are young ; that they 
 were deluded ; that they had hitherto borne good 
 characters ; that their shots all missed their mark ; 
 that no harm was done ; and, beyond all, that a ruler 
 should always be merciful and magnanimous.' 
 
 * But it is owing to the country to set an example.' 
 ' Oh, the poor country ! We owe it so many 
 
 things that we never pay to it ! Surely an example 
 of clemency is the highest example that can be set ? ' 
 
202 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 ' Clemency is a great virtue, no doubt/ said his 
 sister-in-law, sorely troubled in her ethics, as good 
 women often are. *And I am sure your father 
 would be inclined to exercise it.* 
 
 Othyris was silent. He thought that when his 
 father should show clemency the marble lions on 
 the quay would walk. 
 
 * If he were sure that it would be understood,' 
 she added. *Not misinterpreted. The people are 
 so apt to take kindness as meaning fear.' 
 
 * The people are not often tried in that way. We 
 are always a cheval on our rights, using them as the 
 Cos'sacks their knouts. The King would be the last 
 man to lay down his knout.' 
 
 * The King will do nothing in the matter himself. 
 He will follow what his Ministers advise, and what 
 the judges of his Courts may decide ; he will allow 
 the law to take its course, that is all he will do ; he 
 will exercise no personal power, he will give no 
 personal opinion.' 
 
 * But it is precisely in such a matter as this that he 
 could use his personal influence usefully and well. 
 He is the oiFended person, he was the intended 
 victim ; he would possess an absolute right to be as 
 merciful as his wishes might lead him to be. In 
 these matters, with people in general, the common 
 law is inexorable. It does not allow the person 
 injured to save the injurer, or the intending injurer, 
 from legal punishment. It is one of the most caustic 
 satires on Christian nations that no man may forgive 
 his own injuries if once the law has got hold of them ; 
 that no man is allowed to rescue his enemies from 
 the sentence passed on them by others. But the 
 King has this advantage over all other men, that he 
 
XI HELIANTHUS 203 
 
 can, if he please, pardon and set free his foes. He 
 can use his prerogative to annul the capital sentence 
 of the law. True, in general usage, this right is 
 exercised on his behalf by the Minister of Justice ; 
 but he can at any time exercise it himself; and 
 what time would be so fitting as this, when the 
 accused (who will be to-morrow the condemned) 
 have been guilty of a personal offence against himself, 
 and are scarcely more than mere boys in years ? 1 
 am quite sure that such an act would be not only 
 generous but most politic, most wise. It would go 
 to the heart of the people of Helianthus.* 
 
 The Crown Princess sighed and dropped stitches 
 in her stocking. 
 
 ' What you say is most touching, and in a 
 measure quite true, but, my dear EUm, it is not by 
 the heart that a sovereign can rule ; it is by the 
 head. It is sometimes more salutary (even in the 
 end more merciful) to inspire terror than affection. 
 The populace may applaud a romantic benevolence ; 
 but what they obey is, alas, that which they fear.' 
 
 * He is called the father of his people ! ' said 
 Othyris bitterly. 
 
 ' Fathers must chasten,' said his sister-in-law. 
 
 ' But fathers do not slay their sons ! In the 
 power to exercise mercy, there seems to me to lie 
 the supreme privilege of royalty ; but no one in our 
 day uses it. The Code is the only Holy Writ.' 
 
 ' The Code is the supreme law of the country ! ' 
 said his sister-in-law. 
 
 'No doubt, and perhaps the judges could not 
 give any other verdict, the law being what it is ; 
 but it . is precisely in such a case that the royal 
 prerogative of mercy might be exercised ; that 
 
204 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 " Go, and sin no more," might be said by the head 
 of the State/ 
 
 She sighed again, and her needles clicked nervously 
 in the silence. She was by nature full of kind and 
 tender instincts, but these had been steeped in an 
 atmosphere of conventionality and absolutism till 
 they were dry and stiff, the life crushed out of 
 them under the pressure, like flowers in a hortus 
 siccus. 
 
 Othyris looked at her with some derision, and 
 some compassion, and with a sense of infinite sadness. 
 Herself, she would not have hurt a fly, or have ever 
 avenged the cruellest wound ; but she had been so 
 trained and so saturated with prejudice, that she 
 could see only justice in a judicial murder, and only 
 strength and right in an inexorable vengeance. 
 What use was it to argue with one whose mind was 
 closed to argument as a battened-down port-hole is 
 closed to the surging of the sea-waves ? Hundreds 
 of times had he renewed such discussions with her, 
 only to be met by that calm resistance of a narrow 
 obstinacy which regarded itself as a religious duty. 
 
 ' Look at me and answer me, Gertrude,' he said 
 after long silence. ' Do you seriously believe that it 
 is either right, or necessary, or wise, to kill, in cold 
 blood, three youths under twenty years of age for 
 an abortive attem.pt which did no harm to any one or 
 anything ? ' 
 
 She raised her head and looked at him. 
 
 ' It is a question of State which it does not 
 become me to discuss or to decide. Nor does it 
 become you, my dear brother-in-law. Remember, 
 Elim, if you make yourself the apologist of your 
 father's enemies there are many who will remark 
 
XI HELIANTHUS 205 
 
 that his death would have left only one other life 
 between you and the throne/ 
 
 A hot flush of indignation rose over his face. 
 
 ' You ! ' he exclaimed. ' You can say this horrible 
 thing to me, or think it ^ ' 
 
 * I neither say nor think it, dear Elim. I say 
 that there are many who will attribute base motives 
 to your defence of the anarchists who attempted 
 your father's life. It is not the part of a son, it is 
 not the part of a prince, to defend such persons. 
 They have their own legal defenders. Leave them 
 to those.' 
 
 ' You, a religious woman, half a saint, do not 
 believe in the supreme obligation of acting according 
 to one's convictions whatever construction may be 
 put on those ? You do not believe that the exercise 
 of mercy is the most divine attribute of a human 
 character ? ' 
 
 * It is not either you or I who can exercise it 
 in this instance, and neither you nor I can be entitled 
 to criticise the actions of one whose first subjects we 
 both are, and to whose measures we are both bound 
 to give an implicit and unquestioning respect.' 
 
 ' Respect a brutal vengeance ,? Where are the 
 precepts of your religion ? ' 
 
 * Hush ! Hush ! You distress me unspeakably. 
 You should not even think such things in the solitude 
 of your chamber.' 
 
 ' If I must neither think nor act, if my utterances 
 on their behalf would only confirm and hasten the 
 death-warrant of those unhappy boys, I will leave the 
 country, in order that I may not hear the weeping 
 of their mothers, and the sound of the quicklime 
 being thrown on their young bodies.' 
 
2o6 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 ' To leave the kingdom you must have your 
 father's consent, both as your king and your com- 
 manding officer/ 
 
 ' I am a slave, then ! ' 
 
 ' Acquiescence in duty is not slavery.' 
 
 ' I decline to see duty where you see it. What 
 you call duty is a mere fetish to which you sacrifice 
 and slay all your best instincts, all your most humane 
 impulses, all your upright honesty of purpose, all the 
 sensitive feelers of your conscience.' 
 
 ^ I do not think so,' said his sister-in-law calmly ; 
 and she moved her knitting needles in and out with 
 even measure ; she had been disturbed and troubled 
 for a moment by his arguments, but she had now 
 regained her placid and unquestioning belief in the 
 dogma perpetually taught to her from her cradle. 
 
 * You ought to pity these boys as you pity mis- 
 guided children.' 
 
 ' Of course one pities them, in a sense. One 
 pities all guilty persons. But one must be careful 
 not to allow one's compassion to blind one's sense of 
 right and wrong.' 
 
 ' Hate the sin and love the sinner. Is not that 
 what one ought to do ? ' 
 
 Princess Gertrude shuddered. 
 
 ' Love a regicide ? — oh, my dear Elim ! Christ 
 Himself would not enjoin that.' 
 
 * Why is a regicide worse than any other 
 murderer ? ' 
 
 * Pray, if you think such things, do not say them 
 to me.' 
 
 * Well, tell me why ? Argue with me — do not 
 muzzle me ! ' 
 
 But she was obstinately mute. The subject 
 
XI HELIANTHUS 207 
 
 seemed to her too horrible, too blasphemous, too 
 diabolical, to be discussed in speech. That the son 
 of a king should think the assassination of a king a 
 crime on the same level as the murder of a shoeblack 
 or a shepherd, appeared to her impious. 
 
 ' Really, I cannot listen to you when you are in 
 such terrible moods as this,* she said nervously. ' A 
 king is the Lord's Anointed ! His person is 
 sacred.' 
 
 ' Indeed } ' said Othyris, with sarcastic incredulity. 
 ' Then it ought also to be invulnerable. A sovereign 
 ought not even to have the heel of Achilles. But he 
 has.' 
 
 She was silent ; she dared not blame Providence 
 for not having made monarchs bullet-proof. Yet 
 she could not either assert that they were so. It was 
 one of those mysteries which she was accustomed to 
 put away in the innermost chambers of her mind, in 
 faith and fear, there unexamined to await the will of 
 the Most High for explanation. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 Almost the only person in Helios whom Elini, 
 Duke of Othyris, counted as his friend was, para- 
 doxically enough, the editor of a small newspaper of 
 pronounced republican sympathies. Ednor was a 
 scholar and a liberty-loving enthusiast ; on both of 
 which accounts his lot in Helios was an unhappy 
 one. He wrote all the articles for his little journal 
 himself, and the views which were expressed in its 
 columns frequently earned for him the imposition 
 of heavy fines and even occasional periods of im- 
 prisonment or exile. When he was fortunate enough 
 to have his freedom, he lived in a garret in the 
 poorest and lowest quarter of the town ; and there 
 Othyris used to visit him as frequently as he could 
 manage to do so without attracting attention. 
 
 On one of these visits, in the summer after the 
 fall of the Ivory Tower, Ednor happened to mention 
 that he had just been to see Platon Illyris, the old 
 hero who had freed Helianthus from the foreign 
 yoke half a century before, but whose glorious 
 victories in the War of Independence his former 
 comrade-in-arms, the first Theodoric, had basely 
 utilised, at the psychological moment, to seize the 
 vacant throne for the House of GunderOde. To 
 Ednor's great astonishment Othyris appeared not to 
 
 208 
 
CHAP. XII HELIANTHUS 209 
 
 be aware of the fact that Illyrls was now living in 
 obscurity and retirement close to Helios. 
 
 ' Is it possible, sir,' he asked Othyris, * that you 
 did not know it ? ' 
 
 * No, I never had a hint of it.* 
 
 * The police know it : have known it for years.' 
 ' And my father, I suppose ? ' 
 
 ' No doubt the King must always have been aware 
 of it.' 
 
 Othyris sprang to his feet, speaking with a 
 determination he rarely displayed. 
 
 ' I will go and see Platon Illyris to-morrow ; he 
 is the greatest man that Helianthus ever possessed.' 
 
 * His greatness dates from very long ago.' 
 
 * So does Homer's,' said Othyris, with irritation. 
 Who was there in the present generation worthy to 
 hold a lantern to light the steps of the old hero of 
 Argileion and of Samaris ? 
 
 That he himself should have been ignorant of the 
 presence in the country of such a man seemed to 
 him almost criminal in its affront to a mighty 
 past. 
 
 * Sir,' said Ednor, with hesitation, * your royal 
 father is very adverse to your liberal opinions, to 
 your protection of liberal thinkers, to your avowed 
 antagonism to the existing institutions (to use the 
 newspaper phrase) ; he will remember (if you forget) 
 that Platon Illyris was put in chains by your grand- 
 sire, the late sovereign, Theodoric. For you, sir, to 
 visit him — will it be prudent ^ ' 
 
 ' That is not a question I ask myself.' 
 ' No ; but when others are involved, might you 
 not ask it ? ' 
 
 Othyris was surprised. 
 
2IO HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 ' How could my visit hurt him ? It might be 
 held to compromise me, but not him/ 
 
 * I fear that it would do both, sir.* 
 
 Othyris rose with some impatience ; when contra- 
 dicted he was apt to remember that he was a prince. 
 
 * My father, the King, holds what views he thinks 
 right. I hold mine. Had I dreamed that the hero 
 of Argileion was dwelling near Helios, he should not 
 have waited so long for the little I can do to show 
 him my profound respect.' 
 
 Ednor sighed and desisted from argument. 
 
 Such a visit seemed to him a great imprudence, 
 certain to cause great risk of troublous entanglements, 
 but he saw that to attempt to dissuade Othyris from 
 it would be waste of words. The utmost he could 
 hope to do would be to endeavour to have this im- 
 prudence kept secret, or, at the least, minimised. 
 
 Othyris bade his friend adieu and descended the 
 break-neck staircase rapidly ; he said to himself, 
 ' What is worth doing at all, is best done quickly ' ; 
 and he went out into the street, where the amber light 
 of a summer afternoon was shining on the uneven 
 stones, the moss-grown walls, the many-coloured rags. 
 He was free from all serious engagements. Women 
 were awaiting him at more than one afternoon recep- 
 tion, and longing for the presence of * k hel Elim' 
 ^ r Altesse frise^ ' /<? 'Due dore^ ^ le Prince charmant' ; 
 but the disappointment he would inflict on these fair 
 creatures did not touch him greatly. 
 
 That afternoon, by a rare chance, he found him- 
 self free and alone. So fortunate a coincidence 
 might not, he knew, occur again for weeks. He 
 took it as it offered ; and hastened to leave the 
 quarter he was in, which was the poorest and lowest. 
 
XII HELIANTHUS 211 
 
 the Montmarte and the Marais, of Helios, and go 
 out by the north gate towards the slopes of the 
 Helichrysum hills, the spurs of the great mountain 
 range called Mount Atys. A few persons recog- 
 nised him, and uncovered their heads as he passed ; 
 but for the greater part of the way he was left un- 
 noticed, much to his satisfaction. It never occurred 
 to the majority that this pedestrian could possibly be 
 a prince. The people never easily understand that 
 those who can ride or drive at pleasure may possibly 
 prefer to walk. Those who are deprived of all 
 luxury can never comprehend that luxury may become 
 monotonous and tiresome. 
 
 Most of the dwellers in these streets were engaged 
 in their various daily labours, but the old dark houses 
 with grated windows and iron -plated doors were 
 gay with many -coloured rags and climbing plants 
 blossoming over their balconies ; mediaeval lanthorns 
 swung on chains from their walls, and storks were 
 building their nests on the roofs ; beautiful olive- 
 skinned children rolled in play with merry dogs on 
 the uneven stones, and old men and women slept on 
 the steps of churches which had once been classic 
 temples ; and, ever and again (the singer unseen), 
 some soft sweet voice was heard, falling down 
 through the air, as a nightingale's, in showers of 
 liquid sound. In these quarters the King's second 
 son was well known, but few recognised him as he 
 went rapidly and alone up the steep, uneven, paven 
 highway which led to the lower slopes of Mount 
 Atys. 
 
 Once outside the barrier of the town, with its 
 high grey walls and its great entrance-gate, called 
 the Gate of Olives, the soft and radiant landscape 
 
212 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 without broke full upon his sight, the terraces of 
 the olive plantations rising one above each other in 
 lofty tiers, their sad, silver-grey foliage relieved at 
 frequent intervals by the white blossoms of the wild 
 peach- and pear-trees. The day was brilliant, and its 
 full beauty faced him as he passed the guards of 
 the town, the customs -officials, and the soldiers 
 standing sentinel under the portcullis of the city 
 gates, who all hastened in eager obsequiousness to 
 salute him and to present arms. Once beyond these 
 huge Cyclopean walls and ponderous iron doors, he 
 was alone with the rural solitudes, which on this 
 side of the town were not marred by any modern 
 agriculture or vulgarity-exhaling suburban erections. 
 
 The grass of the fields grew close up to the city 
 bastions, and the rivulets ran down from the woods to 
 fill their moat. Othyris drew in with a deep breath 
 the aromatic air which blew freshly from the mountains 
 and valleys of the alps of Atys, and thought that he 
 was much better here than in the perfumed and 
 crowded drawing-rooms of the great ladies of Helios, 
 flattered and wooed by honeyed lying lips, and bound 
 to lie sweetly to the liars in return. It was rarely at 
 this season that he could escape thus into the solitude 
 and freshness of the country, and the escape was the 
 more delightful to him from its rarity, and its vague 
 forbidden flavour of the ecole buissonniere. 
 
 In an aged pear-tree by the roadside two golden 
 orioles were at work on a half-made nest among the 
 white clusters of the blossoms ; he paused and 
 watched them, then went on his way the happier for 
 the sight. 
 
 The olive woods needed little culture. There were 
 no labourers under the trees. Peasants were few and 
 
XII HELIANTHUS 213 
 
 far between upon these hills. The sylvan solitudes 
 were in perfect repose. The murmur of the sea was 
 audible in the stillness, but the sea was unseen. In 
 the distance, thrusting their grand heads into the 
 white cirrus clouds, were the high crests of the snow 
 mountains, blue as sapphires, spiritual and glorious as 
 the dream-palaces which poets visit in their sleep. 
 
 A narrow footpath wound upward for several miles 
 between the trees and the great boulders of granite 
 and marble, and led to the district which was known 
 as Aquilegia. The way was strange to Othyris, 
 and he met no one ; but he had been carefully 
 directed by Ednor ; and at a certain point indicated, 
 where an old moss-grown conduit covered a water- 
 spring, which trickled down and crossed the hill-road, 
 he came in sight of a low white house, with two 
 cedars of Lebanon towering behind it, and with a 
 group of black poplars interrupting the growth of the 
 olive-trees. He stood still and looked at it with 
 emotion. 
 
 To him it looked scarcely more than a cattle-shed, 
 this little, obscure dwelling, which sheltered the 
 greatest life in Helianthus, whilst he and his were 
 lodged in the grand palaces, the mighty castles, the 
 villas, the parks, the gardens, to which they had no 
 more title than the hunter to the condor's nest, the 
 angler to the beaver's dam ! 
 
 Othyris stood still a few moments, looking up at 
 the vast, straight stems of the cedars, sentinels set by 
 nature over the grave of a buried genius. Then he 
 went forward, and upward, until he came upon the 
 clear space of rough grass which stretched before the 
 house. He saw no one ; but the door of the house 
 stood open, and he heard the sound of some one 
 
214 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 unseen on the other side of the house, drawing up a 
 bucket from a well. 
 
 He hesitated a few moments, wondering if he 
 should offend : the sins of his forefathers felt like 
 lead upon his spirit. In whose name, by what title, 
 did he venture there ? 
 
 It was a square house, chiefly built of the blocks 
 of marble of a ruined temple, and ennobled by a fine 
 and ancient frieze along its frontage, representing the 
 history of the Golden Fleece. There was no garden ; 
 but on the rough grass surrounding the house there 
 grew many rose-bushes and myrtle-bushes ; the 
 rest of the hillside was a forest of olives — olives old, 
 unpruned, with great gnarled trunks, beneath which 
 the flowers of spring delighted to live sheltered and 
 to blossom unmolested. 
 
 There were here and there between them some 
 gigantic oaks and some aged laurels. Between the 
 dark grey olive wood and the pale grey olive foliage, 
 the sea, visible from this height, sparkled in sunshine 
 and fumed in storm, the semicircle of the dazzling 
 city curving in sight on the eastern side of the 
 bay. 
 
 A very large dog of the Ulmer breed, lying on 
 the threshold, rose and advanced with an angry growl 
 and a deep rolling bay. 
 
 Othyris put out his hand. 
 
 * Good dog, I come in true faith.' 
 
 A voice, from the casement immediately above, 
 called to the dog. 
 
 * Ajax, Ajax, be quiet ! ' 
 
 The dog looked up to some invisible speaker, 
 obeyed and was silent, standing on the watch, half- 
 reassured, half-doubtful. 
 
XII HELIANTHUS 215 
 
 ' Ajax, be friends with me/ said Othyris. ' I am 
 a friend of your race.' 
 
 The great dog allowed himself to be caressed. 
 
 Othyris looked up to the narrow aperture above, 
 which had a sculptured coping and an iron grating ; 
 ivy and the Madonna's herb hung all about it, so that 
 it was partially concealed by them. He could not 
 see the speaker who had called to Ajax, and the 
 dwelling seemed deserted ; it had no sign of life 
 except the great dog and the innumerable swallows 
 flying in and out of its verdure, above its roof, and 
 between the trees around it. 
 
 It was solitary and solemn, as befitted the tomb of 
 a great renown which men had slighted and forgotten. 
 lUyris, like Isis, who had been worshipped there, had 
 no place in the world of living men ; the fires which 
 had burned on so many altars for him were cold as 
 those which had flamed for her. 
 
 Othyris, receiving no further opposition from the 
 dog, ventured across the marble step of the entrance. 
 He found himself in a small, stone-paved passage, 
 with a square window, which opened on to the myrtle- 
 bushes and the unclipt roses. An inner door to the 
 left, also open, showed him a room lined and filled 
 with books ; in a great black leather chair an old 
 man was seated, a large volume on his knee. 
 Othyris knew that he must see before him Plat on 
 Illyris. 
 
 He crossed the threshold, and bowed low, very 
 low, before that mighty figure. 
 
 * What do you want here, whoever you are ? ' 
 asked the occupant of the chamber, in a voice still 
 deep and firm. 
 
 ' I wished to see Platon Illyris,' said Othyris. 
 
2i6 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 ' Indeed ! ' said the old man, with a sceptical irony 
 in his tone. ' And who may you be that wants to see 
 dead men ? * 
 
 Othyris hesitated ; he knew that the name of 
 his House stunk in the nostrils of Illyris. But to 
 lie or prevaricate to the old hero was repugnant to 
 him ; it seemed unworthy. He hesitated a moment 
 longer, then said : 
 
 *Sir, I am the second son of the King. I am 
 Elim of Gunder5de. Men call me the Duke of 
 Othyris.* 
 
 The face of Illyris grew stern and dark ; his 
 broad brows contracted ; his stooping form rose 
 erect in his chair. 
 
 * Young prince,' he said harshly, * you do ill to 
 dig dead men out of their graves. I am in mine. 
 Let me be.* 
 
 ' No. Let me speak with you a little while.* 
 
 * Wherefore ? A son of your House can be nought 
 to me except an usurper, a tyrant, a stranger.* 
 
 ' That I understand. To you, it must of necessity 
 seem so. It was not to build up our throne that 
 you gave your blood and your brethren.* 
 
 The old man looked at him with the keenness of 
 Dther days lighting up his eyes. 
 
 * Such words are strange in your mouth. You 
 are the great-grandson of the traitor Theodoric* 
 
 Othyris coloured and winced at the words, but he 
 did not resent them. 
 
 A tremor of remembrance and rage passed through 
 the old man*s large and bony frame. He made a 
 movement of both hands, as of one who pushes 
 away some unclean and clinging thing. 
 
 * You are Princes in Helianthus,* he said harshly, 
 
XII HELIANTHUS 217 
 
 ' let that content you. Do not grudge me a runlet 
 of cold water, a stone cell, a book, the air of the 
 hills. Get you gone, young man. Go back to your 
 purple and fine linen.' 
 
 * Sir,* said Othyris, ' if those things satisfied me, 
 should I be here ? ' 
 
 * Who knows ? Idlers go to gape at a sick and 
 sightless lion in his cage. I was a lion once, but 
 your great-grandsire's nets were stronger than was 
 my strength. Get you gone.* 
 
 But Othyris lingered, standing before the vener- 
 able figure with the folio volume open on its knees. 
 
 He had come, humbly, as a scholar and disciple, 
 when he might have come with pomp and power ; he 
 had come as a suppliant, when he might have come 
 in authority ; he had come with his heart in his 
 hand, strongly moved and voluntarily putting aside 
 his high estate ; — and he was received as an intruder 
 who had broken in where he had no right to enter. 
 He controlled his irritation and mortification with 
 difficulty ; keeping always before him, as check upon 
 his anger, his strong sense of the great wrongs done 
 by those of his blood to Platon Illyris, and to the 
 nation for which the aged hero had fought and 
 suffered. 
 
 * If he struck me,* he thought, * he would be 
 within his rights.' So it seemed to him. 
 
 A tame dove flew in over the myrtles and settled 
 on the shoulder of Illyris, fluttering her wings and 
 cooing softly. 
 
 * If I wrung this creature*s neck I should be a 
 traitor,* said the old man. * The dove of Helianthus 
 flew thus to your great - grandsire, and he first 
 caressed, then choked her.* 
 
21 8 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 * Sir,' said Othyris, * I have said I abhor the 
 crimes of my race. Is it fair, then, to reproach me 
 with them ? The worst was done long before my 
 birth. In what is done now, I have no more voice 
 than that bird on your shoulder.' 
 
 ' You are of the hawk's brood. There is a Gallic 
 proverb : On chasse de race.^ 
 
 * Many were traitors as well as he, were they not } ' 
 he answered. ' The nation was not true to itself. 
 Were nations true to themselves could any man ever 
 enslave them } ' 
 
 Platon Illyris struck his clenched hand on the 
 marble of the window-seat beside him. 
 
 * Where had there been a nation here except for 
 me } And your grandsire repaid me with a cell in 
 the fortress of Constantine.' 
 
 ' Sir, I know,' said Othyris, with profound 
 humility. ' It was the blackest of all the crimes of 
 that time, because the most ungrateful. But visit it 
 not on me. I burn with shame for it. I come 
 hither to ask your pardon for it. It should cling 
 like the shirt of Nessus to my race. I do not see 
 these things as my relatives see them. I have thought 
 for myself, and I cannot go, unless you say that you 
 forgive my people.' 
 
 * And if I said it, what would the falsehood profit 
 you } ' 
 
 ' What does a blessing profit } It is a breath, an 
 idea, a murmur, a nothing ; yet it may change 
 remorse to peace.' 
 
 * There is no remorse to change where there has 
 been success.' 
 
 *Sir, how can you tell .f^ The death -bed of 
 Theodoric of GunderOde was visited by many ghosts. 
 
XII HELIANTHUS 219 
 
 I have heard old servants relate how, in the dead of 
 night, unable to rest for the phantoms of his own 
 thoughts and fears, he wandered sleepless and scared 
 down the cypress alleys of Soleia, crying on dead men 
 to pardon him, and on hell to spare him.' 
 
 Illyris was silent. His mind was far away in 
 memories long untouched by any call to recollection. 
 
 * I have read the history of our past and of yours,' 
 said Othyris. * You, sir, are the great hero of that 
 epopee, and your sword, not his, cut the cords which 
 bound Helianthus to the knees of the foreign ruler. 
 Helianthus should have been yours, not his.' 
 
 The finely-formed hands of Illyris, the yellow- 
 white of ivory, on which the veins stood out like 
 ropes, closed with force on the arms of his chair. 
 
 * Ay ! ' he said bitterly ; ' she had been mine had 
 I so willed, perhaps ; but at what a cost, what a cost ! 
 The war of brethren for long years of strife ; an 
 endless duel between the sons of the same mother. 
 They would have made me ruler after Argileion and 
 Samaris. They would have put the purple on my 
 shoulders here in Helios, yonder ; but I was no 
 traitor to my country ; I left betrayal to Theodoric 
 of Gunderode.' 
 
 Othyris grew very white ; what he heard now 
 was no more than he had known before, than he had 
 thought for himself in his boyhood ; but it wounded 
 him cruelly to hear it said by another, and that other 
 the victim of the ingratitude of his race. 
 
 * He would have had no victory but for me,' said 
 Illyris, ' and he repaid me by captivity and exile. 
 But that would have been of little matter if he had 
 been true to the nation ; but he was false to her ! 
 False as hell ! If I had chosen,' he muttered, * if I 
 
220 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 had chosen, Theodoric had never reigned in my 
 country/ 
 
 * I know it, sir,' said Othyris. 
 
 lUyris looked at him in doubt and with harsh 
 scrutiny. 
 
 * You arc of his blood. You enjoy the fruits of 
 his perfidy.' 
 
 ' That is true,' said EUm, with humility. * But I 
 am not blind ; I am not a sophist. My conscience 
 is not to be bought.' 
 
 * That which he betrayed were not merely men : 
 it was the nation, it was the ' country,' said Illyris, 
 not heeding him. * Judas — Judas — ^Judas ! He 
 entered the land as a soldier of liberty ; he reigned, 
 he lived, he died, a king. What he did to me 
 mattered nothing. I was but a human beast like 
 himself. But the land was holy, and he betrayed it ! 
 The land had received him with hope as a virgin her 
 bridegroom, and as a wedding gift he brought misery 
 and bondage to the innocent who had trusted him.' 
 
 He had risen from his seat in the force of his 
 passion ; his voice regained almost the strength of 
 its early maturity ; his sunken eyes blazed, and his 
 Olympian brows seemed clothed with thunder. 
 
 Othyris stood before him as a young and timid 
 pilgrim may have stood before the Zeus, with the 
 lightnings in flame about his head. He spoke no 
 word ; he dared offer no defence ; he knew that 
 every syllable of the reproach was true. Had he not 
 said these same things in his own thoughts ever since 
 the earliest years of the garbled lessons given him in 
 the story of his race, and in the share it had played 
 in the liberation of the country ? 
 
 Theodoric had been a fine soldier ; when he had 
 
XII HELIANTHUS 221 
 
 cried to his troops, ' Follow, follow, follow, children ! ' 
 they had gone headlong after the gleam of his naked 
 sabre, and would have followed him into the jaws of 
 hell itself. But ambition is like a solvent acid ; in it 
 all pure and precious qualities dissolve and disappear ; 
 and the joy of adding territory to territory, treasure 
 to treasure, title to title, is as a crucible in which all 
 other feelings are burnt up and perish ; it is an 
 appetite which has the passions of the miser, of the 
 conqueror and of the lover, all fused into one. 
 
 * If you like not to hear these truths of the man 
 who bred you and yours why come you hither, young 
 prince ? ' 
 
 * They are truths, sir,' said Elim wearily, * and I 
 am tired of phrases and of falsehoods.' 
 
 The old hero looked at him with keen but not 
 unkind gaze. 
 
 ' Come out from a Court, then, and dig for your 
 daily bread. But you have been bred and begotten 
 by tyrants. If you are the son of John of GunderOde, 
 you have the blood in you also of the tyrant Gregory.' 
 
 The face of Othyris flushed painfully. 
 
 * My mother was a saint.' 
 
 * She was a good and innocent woman, no doubt,' 
 said Illyris, more gently ; * you do well to cherish her 
 memory.' 
 
 Othyris was silent. A great and painful emotion 
 held him mute. 
 
 The old man looked at him with searching keen- 
 ness in his still, clear eyes. * What can bring you 
 here ? ' he muttered ; * what link can there be between 
 an Illyris and a Gunderode ? ' 
 
 ' Sir,' said Othyris, without resentment, * there is 
 my reverence for you. It is sincere. May it not 
 
222 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 serve to atone in me for a birth which is no fault of 
 mine ? ' 
 
 'That is strange language on a Gunderode's 
 tongue.' 
 
 ' Forget that I am a Gunderode. Think of me as 
 a neophyte, as a volunteer like those who followed 
 your army.' 
 
 Illyris was moved, but he was incredulous. 
 
 ' Half a century and more has gone by since I had 
 my army behind me. The bones of my legions lie 
 fleshless in the ground. I am a cripple who scarce 
 can move across this narrow room. Get you gone. 
 You have the blood in you of Theodoric. I know 
 not whether you mock me, or whether you speak in 
 sincerity. Youth is honest sometimes, but what 
 friendship can there be between myself and you ^ I 
 believed in your great-grandsire's word, and he lied 
 to me and betrayed me. I fought with him, and he 
 stabbed me in the back. He stole my bride, my 
 love, my queen, my Helianthus. He violated her 
 on what he called her nuptial bed. He called him- 
 self her choice when he was but her ravisher. He 
 called himself the Perseus of her Andromeda, and he 
 was but the Minotaur. Think you my own fate 
 would have mattered to me could I but have seen my 
 country free, as I had seen her in the dreams of my 
 youth — as I had seen her in my visions across the 
 smoke of battlefields and the flames of burning cities ? 
 Did ever I hesitate to risk my body for her ? Her 
 cause was holy to me. I lost for it all that men hold 
 dear. Wealth and land and learning, the peace of 
 the hearth, the love of woman, the joys of offspring, 
 were all as naught to me beside my country. And 
 he — he — Theodoric — rendered all my losses vain, all 
 
XII HELIANTHUS 223 
 
 my life fruitless, all my aims empty and filled with 
 ashes. What did he make of her ? A vassal to 
 himself ; a waiter on the will of the great Powers ; a 
 victim of a mock plebiscite ; a slave bound down 
 under the drain of taxation, the hypocrisy of consti- 
 tutionalism ; a mere copy of the other kingdoms of 
 the world. My own wrongs I would have forgiven 
 to him unto seventy times seven ; but the wrongs of 
 my country — my country which was never his except 
 by fraud and force — I would not forgive, though 
 God Himself commanded ! ' 
 
 He breathed heavily, his eyes closed in exhaustion ; 
 the emotions and the wrongs of other years surged 
 up in his memory and sapped his remaining strength ; 
 the torpor of great age succeeded the violence and 
 eloquence aroused by the visit of the King's son. 
 
 *Sir,' said the voice of a woman behind him, 
 'leave him, I pray you, if indeed you came in 
 sincerity. He will say no more to you to-day. Your 
 presence will only anger and distress him uselessly.' 
 
 Othyris turned and saw her with surprise ; he had 
 supposed that the old man lived alone, and had not 
 expected to find any other occupant of the hill house. 
 
 The beauty of her form and face, the repose and 
 gravity of her manner, the seriousness and limpidity 
 of her regard as her eyes met his, astonished him. 
 It was not thus that women were wont to look at 
 him. 
 
 * I beg your pardon,' he murmured ; * I was not 
 
 aware ' He hesitated and coloured, moved to 
 
 surprise and delight. In this young recluse of 
 Aquilegia he recognised the Pallas Athene of the sea- 
 shore, seen by moonlight a year earlier, on the 
 occasion of his visit to the ruins of the Ivory Tower. 
 
224 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 There was a moment's silence between them, but 
 the embarrassment was on his side, not hers. 
 
 ' You are one of the Princes ? ' she said, as he stood 
 silent before her. 'I heard some of your latest words 
 to my great-grandfather. Why did you come here ? 
 It was unkind, ill-judged.' 
 
 * Unkind ! ' repeated Othyris. ' Unkindness was 
 the last thing in my heart. Ill-judged.? Why 
 so.f^ What is done in respect and sincerity cannot 
 offend.' 
 
 *Sir, you brought the past with you, as a man 
 brings his shadow. What can the past of your family 
 be to Platon Illyris ? Ask yourself.' 
 
 * It is because I am conscious of all it means to him 
 that I am here.' 
 
 * Why ^ You cannot atone for it.' 
 
 * To atone is seldom given to us. We can only 
 regret. I come in all sincerity and good faith to the 
 greatest man of this country.' 
 
 * Sir, there is an impassable gulf between him and ^ 
 you. It is filled by the blood of his countrymen, of 
 his brethren, of his friends.' 
 
 * I had no share in its making.' 
 
 * No ; not you, but yours.' 
 
 * Lady, you are young to be so harsh.' 
 
 * I am not harsh, nor is he. Why did you come 
 here, sir ? Could you expect welcome or obeisance 
 from us ? ' 
 
 * No ; but I, even I, might expect justice.' 
 
 He controlled with difficulty his rising anger ; the 
 humility with which he had come hither had been 
 sincere, even extreme in its sincerity ; but long habit 
 and the perpetual usage of daily life, the deference of 
 the world and of all its classes to him and his, had 
 
XII HELIANTHUS 225 
 
 made him unconsciously expect consideration, even 
 gratitude, in return. 
 
 'Justice,' she repeated slowly. How often is it 
 invoked and invoked in vain ! If royal races were, 
 once or twice in the world's history, denied it, could 
 they complain ? Is not the bread of injustice eaten 
 beside millions of poor men's cold hearths, all the 
 year long, throughout the earth ? 
 
 ' He would not be unjust even to you/ she said 
 with a movement of the hand towards the now 
 motionless form of her relative. 'You are not to 
 blame for the accident of your birth, for the 
 treacherous blood that you inherit. But stay down 
 yonder in your rose-gardens. You have nothing to 
 do with us. I am a working woman, and he is an 
 old, very old man, well-nigh dead, and utterly 
 forgotten.' 
 
 She passed out before him to the entrance and 
 laid her right hand upon the door still standing 
 open. 
 
 * Go, sir,* she said, and she pointed with her left 
 hand to the path beneath the olive-trees. She was 
 wholly unconscious of it, but the simplicity and the 
 dignity of her attitude and gesture moved him to an 
 amazed and intense admiration. The red reflection 
 of the sun, then sinking into the sea amidst grand 
 pomp of evening clouds, shone on the clear cold 
 beauty of her face, its pure outline, its fair colour, 
 its soft and thick dark hair, wound about her head 
 in massive braids. 
 
 * What a beautiful woman ! ' he thought, * what 
 a beautiful woman ! ' and, still in all sincerity, but 
 spurred by the longing to see more of her beauty, 
 
 I and to conquer her coldness, he drew back a moment 
 
226 HELIANTHUS chap, xii 
 
 on the threshold, and met once more the calm gaze 
 of her meditative eyes. 
 
 * I am of the reigning House of Gunde- 
 r5de, that House which is condemned and despised 
 by you, and 1 dare offer no appeal against your 
 sentence. But I am your great-grandfather's most 
 devoted disciple ; and I trust that time will honour 
 me by giving me his confidence and yours.' 
 
 He bowed very low, as he had done to Platon 
 Illy r is, and went across the threshold of the outer 
 hall, on to the rough grass-land without. She did not 
 reply, but she closed the door as though to shut out 
 his presence, and went within, calling the dog to her 
 side. 
 
 Othyris retraced his steps to the city. 
 
 There was a great dinner that evening, followed 
 by a Court ball, and he was barely in time to be in his 
 place at the banquet. It was his office to lead the 
 cotillion at the ball ; but its gay pranks and jests 
 and figures jarred on him, and he sighed for the 
 cool and fragrant silence of the woods of Aquilegia. 
 
 ' In other times,' he thought, * princes kept fools 
 to jest for them ; now we must play the fool ourselves 
 from morn till night ! ' 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 It was at an engagement near a hamlet called Turk 
 that the army of Illyris, which had been weakened 
 by great privations and exhausted by a long cam- 
 paign in an already ravaged and burnt province, was 
 defeated by the troops led by the first Theodoric ; 
 and with his horse killed under him, his strength 
 sapped by long famine, and the few veterans of his 
 guard dead or worn out around him, Illyris was 
 taken prisoner by an overwhelming force. 
 
 When he was taken into the tent of Theodoric, 
 the latter, who owed to him his entrance into 
 Helianthus, came to meet him with both hands 
 outstretched. 
 
 ' My old and honoured comrade,* he said, in 
 a tone of apology, * the fortunes of war change.' 
 
 Illyris, standing erect in his great height above 
 the short, broad, stout figure of the head of the 
 House of GunderOde, put his hands behind his back, 
 and beneath his eagle's gaze the eyes of Theodoric 
 fell. 
 
 * The fortunes of war, yes,' said Illyris, * but the 
 laws of honour do not.' 
 
 Theodoric understood. His dark skin grew pale. 
 He felt poor, and small, and mean, before this man 
 who had driven the foreigner from the land and 
 
 227 
 
228 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 asked no reward, who had given away a kingdom 
 and was poor as Belissarius. 
 
 He offered but a feeble resistance when his 
 Ministers urged on him that the captivity of Platon 
 Illyris was a necessary condition for the pacification 
 of the nation. 
 
 The fortress of Constantine received the liberator 
 of Helianthus. 
 
 His imprisonment was made as honourable and as 
 little onerous as imprisonment can ever be, but the 
 cage to the lion is agony, and whether it be a few 
 yards more or less wide matters not to the king of 
 the desert. 
 
 From north to south, from east to west, the 
 Helianthine people raged and fretted, and demanded 
 the freedom of their hero ; but he was not restored 
 to them. There were already on their newly-won 
 liberties the bonds which accompany an accepted 
 government ; and already they were powerless to 
 break them asunder. 
 
 For five long years Illyris saw the sun rise and 
 set over the Helianthine sea from the casements of 
 the fortress of Constantine. Then his sentence 
 was changed to exile, and secretly, lest the sight of 
 him and the memory of him should excite the 
 populace, he was conveyed to a steam vessel in the 
 Bay of Helios, which was bound for a northern 
 kingdom — a vessel chartered by the government of 
 Theodoric on condition that she should put into no 
 port betwixt Helios and her destination. The people 
 would willingly have freed Illyris at any cost ; but 
 they could neither see him nor speak with him ; they 
 had no one to lead them ; they were like a rudderless 
 boat ; and already in the country there was that 
 
XIII HELIANTHUS 229 
 
 dominance of financial and commercial interests, 
 that weight of personal egotism, that stream of 
 blinding ambitions, which go with governments as 
 vapours with a distillery. 
 
 So the Gunderode reigned, and Illyris passed 
 away. 
 
 When the young scions of the House of Gun- 
 derode had been taught the history of the country 
 their House reigned over, the name of Illyris had 
 been at once blessed and cursed by those who had 
 arranged and expunged and modified narratives 
 of the War of Independence for their instruction, 
 giving all the glory of the liberation from foreign 
 occupation to Theodoric. Before he was fifteen 
 years old, Othyris had rectified the omissions of his 
 text-books, and made of Illyris his hero ; but Tyras 
 had never been enough interested in the past to 
 do so. 
 
 * Whoever plucked the pear we have eaten it,' 
 he sagely reflected ; and the eating seemed to him 
 the principal exploit, as it seemed to the world in 
 general. 
 
 No one could write or speak of the War of 
 Independence without speaking of Illyris. But the 
 government had striven to the uttermost to efl^ace 
 his name. In the public schools it was dwelt on as 
 slightly as was possible by preceptors docile to those 
 who appointed and could promote or dismiss them ; 
 and in this matter the clerical joined hands with the 
 lay teachers. The aged men who had been his 
 contemporaries and his comrades became fewer and 
 fewer with every year ; and a period which is neither 
 near enough to possess the selfish interests of the 
 present, nor far enough away to have gained the 
 
230 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 venerable patina of time, is easily pushed aside. It 
 is like a painting which has neither the freshness of 
 modernity nor the mellowness of age. It is too 
 well known, yet not known well enough. 
 
 For a part of his life after the accession of 
 Theodoric Illyris had been perforce an exile ; but in 
 the latter part of the reign of Theodoric's son and 
 successor he was allowed to return, or rather his 
 unauthorised return to his country was neither per- 
 mitted nor prohibited, but tacitly allowed, by a 
 government which ignored his existence except when 
 its minions collected his hearth -tax. He lived 
 outside the south gate of the city, on a hillside 
 covered with olive orchards and forests, whence a 
 large part of the southern bay of Helios was 
 visible, and the glories of sunrise seemed with 
 every daybreak to be the new birth of the 
 world. The place was called Aquilegia, from the 
 quantities of wild columbines which grew beneath its 
 trees ; a temple with Ionian columns which was still 
 standing in its higher woods had been in other ages 
 consecrated to the worship of Isis and her son. 
 
 In this solitary place he dwelt, the world forgetting, 
 by the world forgot, and was now over ninety years 
 of age. He had been amongst the first and foremost 
 of the popular leaders to deliver his country from a 
 foreign yoke, and he had lived to see that the only 
 form of liberty ever awarded to men is an exchange 
 of tyrannies. The pack-saddle is shifted from the 
 mule's back, only for the sack of coals to be placed 
 on it instead ; the burden alters in kind and in name, 
 not in weight. 
 
 This knowledge, and the pains in old wounds 
 which ever and again reminded him of the battlefields 
 
XIII HELIANTHUS 231 
 
 of his manhood, were all that his glorious past had 
 brought to him. Few pilgrims ever came there to 
 do him homage. The name of Platon lUyris was 
 certainly venerated by republicans, by revolutionaries^ 
 by all students of history ; but it was scarcely more 
 than a tradition to the actual generation ; it was far 
 away, like the name of Tell or of Washington ; men 
 have no time in these days to worship the gods of 
 other years. Moreover, although they held his name 
 in great reverence, Illyris held their opinions and 
 actions in no respect whatever. He had little 
 sympathy with the new order of revolutionary 
 feeling. Socialism and Collectivism had little virility 
 or value in his sight. His keen mind discerned the 
 tyranny which they would evolve. His robust and 
 independent theories had been as different from theirs 
 as a lion at large on the plains of the east is unlike 
 a lion caged in a den of a city. Therefore few of 
 them had ever come twice to Aquilegia, or cared to 
 sustain twice the caustic and fiery sarcasm which 
 rent their false logic to ribbons, the martial and 
 manly temper which despised their gospel of com- 
 munism and assassination. 
 
 Old age is always disagreeable to early manhood, 
 which despises it because it is old age ; but when it 
 has a sunset glory behind it of a splendour of achieve- 
 ment which the mists of calumny or the night of 
 death cannot darken, then, of necessity, it is ex- 
 tremely and unspeakably offensive to young men, 
 especially to a generation which has achieved 
 nothing. 
 
 Ednor indeed came there with the reverence of a 
 disciple and the sympathy of a scholar, but Ednor 
 was not often free to do what he chose. So, 
 
232 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 gradually, an absolute solitude had been the lot of 
 the hero of the War of Independence ; but it was 
 not lamented by him ; he preferred the minds of 
 great writers long dead to those of the doctrinaires 
 and the nihilists of modern thought. He had 
 become used to his loneliness, and valued it. 
 Loneliness, if melancholy, is at least not irritating. 
 The mind of a people is shallow. It soon forgets. 
 For years the Helianthines cherished the name 
 and adored the acts of their hero ; but all public 
 evidence of their gratitude being unwelcome to 
 those who ruled over them, and even being re- 
 pressed with severity, they ceased to dare show what 
 they felt, and as his own generation passed away his 
 hold on the memory of the nation became slighter. 
 To the generation which was that of Othyris the 
 great patriot had become Httle more than a tradition; 
 and, like Othyris, it had ceased to remember that he 
 was still a living man. 
 
 Scrupulous and stern in his estimate of the 
 obligations of honour, Illyris preserved an absolute 
 neutrality on all public matters. He never went 
 outside the olive groves and cedar shadows of 
 Aquilegia ; and the few who visited him in that 
 soHtude found him inexorable in his resolve to have 
 nothing to do with revolutionary politics. 
 
 * When a man is as old as I am, his name is but 
 a pricked bladder ; even the peas have dropped out 
 of it,' he said to those who urged him to let them use 
 his name. He knew that he had liberated his country 
 once ; but that, through the treachery of another, 
 and the unwisdom perchance of himself, neither he 
 nor Helianthus were free — scarcely freer, except in 
 semblance, than when the foreigner had ruled there. 
 
XIII HELIANTHUS 233 
 
 The only companion of the old hero in his retreat 
 in Aquilegia was the grand-daughter of one of his 
 three dead sons. Many influences had combined to 
 make her what she was, and the silence and stately 
 gloom of her birthplace — the old northern city on 
 the grey dull waters — had been to her what 
 the darkness of a sunless chamber is to the 
 gladiolus ; it had bleached the rose-colour from the 
 calyx. She had never known the joyousness of 
 youth. Laughter had seldom parted her beautiful 
 serious lips. She was not sad, but she was never gay. 
 She was what Athene, made mortal, might have been. 
 She had been born in a northern country, on a 
 northern sea ; a country of vast plains white with 
 level frozen snow through long winters, and green 
 with rich grass and covered by sleek herds and by 
 fat flocks in spring and summer, with many-coloured 
 barges drifting slowly along streams and through 
 canals, and beautiful ancient cities with architecture 
 fine and delicate as the lace-work for which their 
 women were famous, and bell towers making music 
 morn and eve over the gabled roofs and moss-grown 
 walls. There she had spent a peaceful but lonesome 
 childhood in a town full of mediaeval legend, art, and 
 history. 
 
 She had much of the beauty of a fine and classic 
 statue : its harmony of line, its justness of proportion, 
 its purity of colour. One could have fancied she was 
 a Greek goddess imbued with life ; there was some- 
 thing in her aloof from ordinary existence, from 
 general humanity ; something which was not arro- 
 gance, and was still less shyness ; an immutable 
 serenity which never varied, a disdain which was 
 unconscious, even when it was unkind. 
 
234 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 She had dwelt with poverty, but she had been 
 nourished on great thoughts, and she had in her 
 veins the blood of an ancient and heroic race. 
 
 Her mother had been a woman of that northern 
 city on the cold grey sea ; the daughter of an 
 artisan, a worker in brass and steel ; she had been 
 married for her beauty and her piety by the son of 
 Gelon Illyris, who, when exiled by the Gunderode, 
 had gained his living as a gunsmith in the dim old 
 Gothic seaport town which was hers by birth. She 
 had died in the early years of her wedded life, and 
 her daughter had never known her ; she grew up, 
 alone with her father, who was heartbroken by the 
 loss of his wife in her youth. She had been educated 
 by the nuns of a solemn mediaeval refuge which stood 
 on the edge of one of the dark and sluggish canals 
 of the old streets. Here she had learned to make 
 the beautiful lace which her mother had made before 
 her, and here she had learned other feminine arts and 
 crafts, and a power of reticence and silence not common 
 to youth. From her father she had learned the 
 Helianthine tongue, the Helianthine history, the 
 Helianthine classics, and had conceived for them 
 an impassioned reverence. By him, also, she had 
 been taught to hold in awe and honour the great 
 hero from whose blood they sprang. 
 
 * Let us go to him, father ; let us go,* she urged 
 many a time. But the son of Gelon was a tired and 
 sorrowful man ; his heart was in his wife's grave ; he 
 had never seen the great hero of his race, and 
 Helianthus seemed to him far off, very far off, lying 
 in the warm southern light, washed by the waves of 
 the Mare Magnum. 
 
 * You can go to him, child, when I die, 
 
XIII HELIANTHUS 235 
 
 should he be living then/ he said to her, knowing 
 that he had in him the pains of a mortal disease ; 
 and when he did die, which was in her sixteenth year, 
 she went straightway from his grave to a southward- 
 bound vessel loading in the docks. She did not 
 know whether the hero of her race was living or 
 dead ; but Helianthus was surely there, in that 
 odorous warmth, that amber light, that fragrance as 
 of dew-wet roses, of which the Helianthine poets had 
 written in so many different ages. She was drawn 
 by it as the young fledged bird is drawn off the nest 
 by the charm of the balmy air, the smile of the sun- 
 beams dancing. 
 
 So one day Platon Illyris, standing in his doorway, 
 leaning on his great olive-wood stick, saw a young 
 girl, dusty and travel-stained, and clothed in black, 
 come up his grass-grown path between the untrimmed 
 rose-bushes. 
 
 She paused within a few yards of the threshold, 
 and was silent, being afraid. 
 
 * Who are you ? ' he asked her, in no gentle tones, 
 for he was intolerant of trespassers. 
 
 She put back the veil from her head. 
 
 * I am Ilia Illyris.' 
 
 * Who do you say ? ' 
 
 * I am Ilia Illyris.' 
 
 ' The grandchild of Gelon ^ ' 
 
 ^ Yes.' 
 
 A wave of emotion passed over his stern features 
 as a shadow may flit for a moment over a marble 
 bust. 
 
 ' Why do you come hither ^ ' he asked. 
 
 * I came to see the hero of Argileion and 
 Samaris.' 
 
236 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 A faint smile came on his cold, stern face. They 
 were his greatest battles. 
 
 * Is your father dead ^ ' he asked. 
 *Yes.' 
 
 * You have no one ? ' 
 
 * No one.' 
 
 * You cannot stay here.' 
 
 * That must be as you will, sir.' 
 
 He was silent ; the submission, immediate and 
 unquestioning, softened him. He called to his 
 woman-servant : 
 
 * Maia ! Come hither.' 
 
 The servant answered his call — a strong, tall, 
 bronzed figure, in the costume of the country, with 
 the sad, patient eyes of a mare in the yoke of a plough. 
 
 * I am here, master,' she answered. 
 
 * Take this child within,' he said to her. ' Cleanse 
 her from the dust, and give her food. Let her rest. 
 I will see her later.' 
 
 ' Come,' said the woman Mai'a, showing no sur- 
 prise, asking no questions. 
 
 Ilia also said nothing, but stooped and kissed the 
 earth ; the earth of her fathers. Then she went in- 
 doors in silence with Mai'a. 
 
 Maia asked her no questions. Whatever the 
 master did was well done, and beyond dispute. Thus 
 the maiden from the north came to dwell at Aqui- 
 legia. 
 
 Here in this spot, beautiful by nature and sad 
 from solitude. Ilia passed seven years of her youth, 
 joylessly, as youth usually reckons joy, but not 
 unhappily ; in a profound calm, an unbroken peace- 
 fulness, but also in an unbroken monotony ; and 
 monotony, a couch of roses to age, is often a bed of 
 
XIII HELIANTHUS 237 
 
 nettles to youth. She could not even be certain 
 that she was welcome ; sometimes she thought that 
 she was only tolerated, as the storks were upon the 
 roof. 
 
 The years were marked by the coming and going 
 of those storks, of the herons, of the swallows, of 
 the nightingales, of the thrushes, of the quails. 
 There was little else to mark time, except the suc- 
 cession of the wild flowers, from the January 
 celandine to the December snapdragon. The dis- 
 tance was not much more than three miles downward 
 through the olives to the seaward road, leading on 
 the left to the beach and on the right to the south 
 gate of Helios, called the Gate of Olives ; but the 
 city might have been a hundred miles distant for 
 aught that Illyris or Ilia had to do with it. Their 
 one woman-servant went to its market when needful. 
 Letters of friends there were none for either of 
 them. Now and then Ilia finished some of the 
 fine lace of which the art had been taught her in 
 childhood by the nuns, sent it to a merchant of 
 the north, and received its price. Twice a year 
 she drew her slender income from the bank, went 
 into the city, and bought for herself a black or a 
 white gown. That was all. The rest of her time 
 was passed in attending to household matters, and in 
 study ; grave studies in the learned volumes, chiefly 
 Greek and Latin, by which the house was filled ; for 
 the library of Illyris had been saved by a friend when 
 he had been first imprisoned and exiled : the friend 
 was dead, but the books had been safely carried to 
 Aquilegia when Illyris had first arrived there. 
 
 Platon Illyris never interfered with her. He 
 oftentimes seemed not even to perceive her presence ; 
 
238 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 and he was certainly unconscious of all he owed to 
 her for the cleanliness and comfort which sweetened 
 his latest years. At other times, but these were 
 rare, he spoke to her of his far-away past ; and then 
 his eyes would flash and darken, and his voice grow 
 stronger, and the fires of his spirit awaken, and the 
 days of the past live again for him. 
 
 Ilia had no knowledge of luxury and pleasure, 
 and had no need of that to which she was a stranger. 
 When she could see the sun rise and set above the 
 sea, hear the nightingale's song in the myrtle thickets, 
 breathe fresh, pure air, study the great thoughts of 
 the mighty dead, and watch the succession of the 
 wild flowers, she was content. 
 
 Illyris had possessed a profound knowledge of his 
 fellow-men. No weakness or fault of theirs had 
 ever escaped him. He had used them, and cast 
 them aside as he did a notched sword. But of 
 women he had never had any knowledge. He had 
 the Oriental view of them — that they were made to 
 amuse, and to conceive, and to nourish ; nothing 
 else ; which is indeed the view taken by Nature 
 herself. He did not therefore perceive that Ilia was 
 of a finer mould, a firmer texture, than her sex in 
 general. But she pleased his taste ; he liked to see 
 that one of his own blood was living in the fulness 
 of youth and of beauty ; her step was soft, her 
 movements were noiseless, her voice was melodious 
 and low, her face and form were those of the female 
 divinities once worshipped in Helianthus, whose 
 lineaments were still seen in many a mask and bust 
 turned up in the soil of the woods of Mount Atys 
 by charcoal-burners and mushroom-seekers. 
 
 The veins of Illyris had been chilled by deep 
 
XIII HELIANTHUS 239 
 
 wrongs and long solitude, and affections were far 
 away from him — as far away as the days of his 
 great battles ; yet he was glad to see Ilia beneath 
 his roof, to know that she belonged to him. He 
 was not unkind, but he was not kind; he thought 
 little about her ; sometimes he was interested in her 
 studies of the ancient literature of Helianthus, and 
 gave her the aid of his own great knowledge. But 
 at other times he would tell her rudely that women 
 should not occupy themselves with learning. She 
 never contradicted him ; she waited patiently until 
 a gentler mood had come to him, and he was again 
 disposed to assist her philological or historical studies. 
 
 But she was happier thus than she would have 
 been in the noise and turmoil of any of the cities of 
 men. Her temperament was that of the recluse ; 
 the stir and struggle, the sights and sounds of the 
 world were distressing and odious to her ; even the 
 old, still, darksome cities of her mother's land were 
 too populous for her ; their chimes too noisy, and 
 their roofs too close ; their air too full of voices, and 
 their hearths too near each other. She wanted vast 
 solitudes, great silences, deep shade, wide waters ; 
 the vicinity of crowds hurt her hke the touch of 
 caustic ; she had the soul in her of her people of an 
 earlier time who had dwelt in lonely temples and 
 served the altars of forest gods. 
 
 To Ilia, departure from Aquilegia would have 
 been like the exile from Acadia to Evangeline, Hke 
 the banishment to Danubian darkness to Ovid. She 
 had nothing in her of the modern temper — nothing of 
 its restlessness, its feverish discontent, its appetite 
 for tumult and for change ; she asked of life only 
 repose, isolation, and the near presence of wild 
 
240 HELIANTHUS chap, xiii 
 
 nature ; she could live on the scantiest and plainest 
 food, but she could not exist in an air breathed 
 by drunken crowds. The solitude, the silence, the 
 sanctity and majesty of these everlasting hills were 
 dear to her ; the calmness, the stillness, the deep 
 shadows, the clear lights, the sunsets beyond the 
 distant sea, the silvery foliage overhanging the marble 
 walls, the sense of nearness to a great past from 
 which she herself had sprung, to a race which, asons 
 earlier, had been her race, whose glories were 
 imperishable in human memory so long as human 
 lives endured, — all these rendered her home in the 
 olive groves of these classic hills dear to her as no 
 other spot on earth could ever be. Her love for it 
 was the strongest love she ever yet had known. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 The visit of Othyris to Aquilegia was soon repeated, 
 and little by little lUyris almost ceased to remember 
 that his disciple was a GunderOde, the great-grandson 
 of Theodoric. He only saw in him a young man of 
 extreme intelligence, of high culture, and of original 
 opinions ; one, also, who had as much humility as 
 capacity. He forgot that this scholar might one day 
 reign ; or if he did remember it, he only strove the 
 more to strengthen in him all the views and prin- 
 ciples which made Othyris averse to all that other 
 men of his rank considered to be their religion and 
 their right. 
 
 * What would you have him do if ever he be called 
 to the throne ? ' Ilia asked timidly one day after the 
 departure of Othyris. 
 
 * Refuse it,' said Platon Illyris. 
 
 ' Would that remove his responsibility ? ' she said, 
 apprehensive of appearing rash and rude. * If we 
 drop a burden do we not still remain bound to 
 account for it ? ' 
 
 Illyris was silent a little while. 
 
 'You think for yourself. That is well. I 
 admit that it is well. You are bold. You are an 
 Illyris,* he said. * When there are two evils be- 
 twixt which a man must choose, he can but take the 
 
 241 R 
 
242 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 lesser. He is not a god to change the face of the 
 world.' 
 
 ' But, as king, could he not do some good ^ ' 
 
 Platon Illyris smiled grimly. 
 
 * The strongest swimmer in a stream stronger 
 than himself is swept away on it. There is a putrid 
 and pestiferous current always circling round every 
 throne of which no occupant of it can escape the 
 miasma. Carolus Magnus himself, were he reigning 
 to-day, could not resist the sycophant, the politician, 
 the financier, the pressure of the Press.' 
 
 ^ Might the Duke of Othyris not create a republic 
 and lead it .? ' 
 
 *He might perhaps if occasion served ; but that 
 would be to turn traitor to his own race. A man of 
 honour could not do that. Noblesse oblige ; and it is 
 an inexorable obligation with loyal characters. His 
 is loyal. He is not strong, but he is sincere.' 
 
 ' Then what future will he have } ' 
 
 * Who can say ^ I doubt me he will end ill. Men 
 do not love an honest man, whether prince or peasant. 
 But get you to your household work, child. These 
 questions are not for women.' 
 
 He regarded her as veterans two thousand years 
 before in Helianthus had regarded their females. He 
 looked after her as without protest she silently left 
 his chamber. For the first time her beauty, her 
 grace, her dignity were apparent to him ; for the 
 first time he perceived that she was no mere spinner 
 at the distaff, or housewife in a dwelling-place. 
 She was an Illyris ; she was not as other women 
 were. 
 
 Did she dream dreams of a future in which this 
 young man and she might have a mutual part } Did 
 
XIV HELIANTHUS 243 
 
 she see in herself a purer Eudocia, a more unselfish 
 Irene, a Joan of Arc victorious and beloved ? 
 
 Who could tell the thoughts of a mind divided 
 at once by virginal unconsciousness of its own instincts 
 and by the force inherited from a martial race ? 
 Memories of the springtime of human life, of the 
 awakening of the soul and the senses, were far away 
 from Illyris, so far, so very far, and covered with the 
 fallen leaves of so many passionless and joyless years, 
 yet they arose in his mind now. 
 
 ' I am no fit guardian of youth, of a maiden^s 
 youth,' he thought. ' I am so old, so old ! An aged 
 hound, toothless, and chained, and feared by none, 
 although once he kept all at bay.* 
 
 And the heart of the hero of Argileion and 
 Samaris was as a stone heavy in his breast. 
 
 Seeing that he was in sorrow Ajax came to him, 
 and laid his head on the knees of his master and 
 friend. 
 
 ' Ajax,' said Illyris, as he laid his hand on the dog's 
 head, * ask not of the gods to live long, my friend. 
 Age is but an unkinder death ; conscious of itself 
 and powerless to rise. Readers of history weep for 
 Germanicus, for Marcellus, for John of Austria, 
 for Gaston de Foix — O fools ! Thrice happy were 
 those youths ! ' 
 
 * Elim of Gunderode is a theorist, an idealist,' he 
 would say to Ilia. * It is not with theories, nor with 
 ideals, that men are governed. It is by the sword, 
 by the fist ; by the force of the brain, not by its fancies. 
 His mind is rich in imagination, but it is poor in will- 
 power. To act strongly he must be strongly excited ; 
 when the excitement passes his will drops like a burnt- 
 
244 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 out match. It is volition rather than intellect which 
 makes the man who rules others succeed in being 
 accepted and obeyed by them. This young prince 
 does not believe in his own powers ; therefore men 
 will never long believe in him. He is full of doubts 
 and scruples ; how should he enforce his will upon 
 others ? He has no will ! He is too undecided to 
 govern men. Indecision is an intellectual defect ; it 
 accompanies acute perception, it belongs to philo- 
 sophic doubt, but it paralyses action. The student 
 may be undecided, indeed should be, for he sees all 
 the facts of a question, and is not called on to turn 
 theory into fact ; but the leader of men must know 
 what he wishes, what he intends, what he rules, and 
 must never waver in his determination and his choice.' 
 
 * Tell me, sir, what ought I to do in the years to 
 come, should I live to see them ? * Othyris had said 
 to him one day. 
 
 *I am too old to counsel youth,* answered Illyris. 
 * The world of to-day is not mine ; it is yours. All 
 that the men of my time held sacred seems foolish- 
 ness to those of yours. I cannot judge for your 
 generation. I am out of its orbit. Can the dark 
 and dreary Saturn judge of the green and sunlit 
 earth ? ' 
 
 * In truth, sir, has humanity altered much since 
 the days of Plato or Pericles ? ' 
 
 'I know not. It has altered much since mine. I 
 am old, very old ; I cannot judge for a young man. 
 Your position is difficult, and may become more so ; 
 but I should not dare to say what road you should 
 take out of it, or even if you should attempt to get 
 out of it/ 
 
XIV HELIANTHUS 245 
 
 * Would you counsel me ? ' said Othyris ; he 
 looked at Ilia. 
 
 She answered : 
 
 * No. I do not even know my own generation. 
 How can I judge anything for any one else ? ' 
 
 ' But were you myself, what would you do ? * 
 She hesitated. She knew what she would do ; 
 
 she would surrender all things to be free. She looked 
 
 at Illyris. 
 
 * When you, sir, made your choice of life, did you 
 doubt long ? Or did you see your path clearly and 
 at once ? ' 
 
 *The stranger ruled in my land,' replied Illyris. 
 * It was easy in my day to see where duty pointed 
 and honour and manhood led. There is no joy so 
 great as a clear, straight road. This young lord's 
 road is neither. Do what he will, he will repent.' 
 
 Othyris smiled sorrowfully. 
 
 * In doubt do nothing ; so a statesman said. That 
 is probably how my life will drift away ; in doing 
 nothing, changing nothing, desiring vaguely and use- 
 lessly, and aimlessly regretting.' 
 
 The still clear eyes of the nonagenarian looked at 
 him with some compassion. 
 
 ' Enjoy your youth,' he said. * Let men alone. 
 They will not thank you if you suffer for them, nor 
 are they worth it.' 
 
 ' I cannot enjoy,' said Othyris with a certain 
 passion in his voice, ' and I have no youth, because 
 I have never been free. I am like the planets ; I 
 cannot escape from my atmosphere and its pressure.' 
 
 * Young man,' said Illyris, * we in my days were 
 not theorists ; we acted. We followed our instincts ; 
 we did not analyse them. True, it was the day of 
 
246 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 great poets. But they were few, they must always be 
 few ; the rest of us lived our odes, we did not write 
 them.' 
 
 ' You carved them on granite with your swords.' 
 ' Eh ! Who reads what we wrote ? History, you 
 will say. But will the future care for history ? The 
 world cares but little now. A man's lifetime of study 
 is pressed into a dozen volumes. The volumes stand 
 on shelves and librarians dust them. That is all.' 
 
 * Sir, I want sympathy and you give me a stone.' 
 
 * To want sympathy is in itself a sign of weakness. 
 Learn to stand alone,' said Illyris with some scorn ; he 
 had been a very strong man, needing neither coun- 
 sellor nor comfort. 
 
 Ilia made a murmur of dissent and of deprecation. 
 
 * We cannot give you bread, sir,' she said to Elim, 
 ' because you must eat at other and higher tables than 
 ours.' 
 
 * Let me take the humblest place at yours,' he 
 murmured. 
 
 ' No,' said Platon Illyris, and he struck his hands 
 on the arms of his great chair. *You are a good 
 youth, I think, but you are who you are. No 
 Gunder5de breaks bread with an Illyris, either in fact 
 or in metaphor. Get you hence.' 
 
 ' Go,' said Ilia gently but with firmness. 
 
 Elim rose, bowed low and went. He had been 
 given the wholesome bread which he never tasted 
 anywhere but here ; plain truth. It was bitter, yet 
 welcome to a cloyed palate. Nowhere else in the 
 whole crowded world would he have been thus dis- 
 missed ; nowhere else would homage, respect, and 
 welcome have been refused him. He went out under 
 the silvery shadows of the giant olives where the 
 
XIV HELIANTHUS 247 
 
 cushats were cooing and the blackcaps were singing. 
 Deep rest and fragrant silence lay like a benediction 
 on the whole hillside. The only unrest there, was 
 in his own soul. 
 
 Ilia and Illyris ate of the meal which Maia had 
 prepared ; it was frugal but well-cooked ; the linen 
 was homespun but lavender-scented, the table had in 
 its centre an old pottery dish filled with flowers. Ilia 
 would have been quite willing that Othyris should 
 have broken bread with them there, for false shame, 
 born of the false standards of the world, had never 
 touched her. She would have given him the best 
 she had willingly, but she would not have been 
 troubled by any fear lest that best should seem meagre 
 to him. 
 
 When their repast was ended Illyris went back to 
 his book-room and seated himself again in his great 
 black chair ; the window was open, early roses 
 nodded between the iron grating, the pure mountain 
 air blew through the room, birds sang in the myrtle 
 bushes and in the fresh early leafage of the poplar 
 trees. 
 
 Ilia brought him his Eastern water-pipe. 
 
 ' Sir,' she said with hesitation, *why are you so stern 
 to the King's son ? He has a great reverence for you, 
 and surely he is not guilty of the sins of his race ? ' 
 
 ' Perhaps not,' answered Illyris, ' but he cannot 
 wash their blood out of his veins, — nor that of the 
 tyrant of the North. He is sincere, I believe,' he 
 added, ' but he has nothing to do with us. He must 
 go whither his birth calls him. Between him and us 
 there can be no amity.' 
 
 * Might he not one day realise your own dreams 
 for Helianthus ? ' 
 
248 HELIANTHUS chap, xiv 
 
 Illyris laughed bitterly, with the bitterness of one 
 who jests at his own expense. 
 
 * Child, my dreams were fair and fond, but they 
 were illusions. I did not reckon with the meanness 
 of men, with the sordidness of their ambitions, with 
 the dwarfing and deadening of modern feeling, with 
 the corruption which putrifies all public life. Fool 
 that I was ! — I dreamt of an ideal State, and I 
 drenched my mother-earth with blood, for what.^^ 
 For what ? That her sons might sink under a weight 
 of arms, and her children sicken and die for want of 
 bread ! God forgive me my blindness ! Fool, oh 
 fool that I was ! ' 
 
 ' But you drove out the foreigner ? * 
 
 * Ay ! — and the GunderOde and their tax-officers 
 and their drill-sergeants reign in his place ! What 
 good have I done to the people ? I have not even 
 given them liberty. If they forget that I ever lived, 
 have I the right to blame them ? ' 
 
 His head sank on his breast, and a great sigh 
 escaped him. He had driven out the stranger — yes, 
 — but was Helianthus happier or freer ? Was not 
 her liberty a myth ? Was she not fed on steel, and 
 the scanty cones of the maize ? Did not the children 
 come to the birth only to toil as soon as they could 
 crawl ? The foreign sentinel was no more at the 
 gates, but the foreign usurer was within them. What 
 had been gained ^ His victories had been great ; his 
 country had been to him as a fair woman, bound a 
 slave in a mart, and set free by his sword. But what 
 was she now ? Prostituted to the Jew, or famished 
 in the alien's factories, or starved and sunburnt in the 
 mortgaged fields ! His long life, his endless sacrifices, 
 were as naught. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 The funeral of Domitian Corvus was passing 
 through Helios ; a funeral provided at the cost of the 
 State, imposing, long, stately, with troops keeping the 
 streets, and crowds driven back by carabineers, women 
 fainting, children crushed, barriers breaking, clubs 
 crowded, flags at half-mast, — no accompaniment or 
 attribute of dignity being wanting. It was really a 
 pity that Corvus had not eyes to see it from his bier, 
 for it would have rejoiced his arrogant and self- 
 admiring soul, and have assured him that he had been 
 really that ancient Roman whom in life he had 
 delighted to be called. 
 
 The golden tassels of the pall were held by 
 eight Ministers of the Crown of past and present 
 administrations, several of whom had at times been 
 his enemies ; and heartily as they had often cursed 
 him, they had never done so with more intensity than 
 they now cursed him under their breath, as they, all 
 men past middle age, plodded under the burning sun, 
 on the heated granite of the paven streets, up to the 
 Cathedral of St. Athanasius, where Corvus, who had 
 been an avowed freethinker all his life, was most 
 appropriately to be interred with all the grandest 
 ceremonial of the Church. 
 
 Corvus had been many things in his day, and his 
 249 
 
250 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 day had been long, for he was eighty-nine years 
 of age when he died. He had been a red-hot 
 revolutionist, a conspirator against all powers and 
 authorities, an exile without bread or tobacco, a 
 refugee in foreign garrets and wine-houses, a hidden 
 and hunted man in the cellars of Helios, until, on 
 the death of King Theodoric, a general amnesty for 
 political offenders having been proclaimed, Illyris 
 alone excluded, he returned to his native country, 
 found work as a lawyer, got himself elected deputy, 
 took the oath of allegiance to the Gunderode, and 
 sat for many long sessions as an extreme Radical. 
 He made himself feared both in the Chambers and out- 
 side them ; he had led a turbulent, violent, scandalous 
 life, but he rose step by step, and began to loom 
 large before the eyes of men ; he had no single 
 scruple of any sort to drag him backward ; he pos- 
 sessed a domineering, overbearing, insolent temper, 
 which struck like an iron mace upon the fears of his 
 fellow-men ; he used this mace without mercy ; he 
 was sunk to his throat in scandals of every sort, but 
 he came out of them, as out of a mud bath, only the 
 stronger. He was covered with filth from head to 
 foot ; but he shook it off into the gutter, threw it in 
 his enemies' eyes, and passed on victorious. From a 
 revolutionary deputy he became a radical Minister, 
 and, once a Minister, he slipped his skin as easily as 
 snakes slip theirs in springtime, and became a 
 reactionist of the first water ; and when disturbances 
 occurred during his premiership he used the mitrail- 
 leuse and the musketry volley with as much firmness 
 and ferocity as though he had been all his life an 
 absolutist. He obtained all the highest decorations 
 of Europe, hobnobbed with emperors, and was re- 
 
XV HELIANTHUS 
 
 251 
 
 garded by a large party as the saviour of Helianthus ; 
 that he had plunged her into disastrous wars, seduced 
 her with injurious ambitions, led her blindfold to the, 
 brink of bankruptcy, filled her prisons with her young 
 men, and cultivated corruption upon her soil as a 
 plant whose rank poison was the most fragrant of 
 perfumes, — these things mattered not at all to his 
 apostles and his adorers. He was the great Corvus, 
 and when a strong wave of national indignation had 
 at last swept him away into private life, his partisans 
 had rabidly defended his name, and his southern 
 retreat had become a place of pilgrimage for the 
 faithful. And now he was being buried with all the 
 honours of the State. 
 
 King John in council with his Ministers had decided 
 that the State could do no less for the remains of this 
 its most faithful servant. King John had always 
 admired him, and had supported him, often to the 
 injury of the Crown and country. 
 
 Domitian Corvus had been the only Minister of 
 strength and will who had been ever wholly accept- 
 able to the King. In this old man the King had 
 recognised a craft so cunning, a force so pitiless, a 
 brain so utterly unscrupulous, that he could not but 
 admire them ; and found his master in the science of 
 human nature. When the scandals due to financial 
 speculation, corruption, and dishonesty became so 
 discreditable to Corvus and his family, and so 
 flagrant that they could no longer be concealed, and 
 when even the very elastic moraUties of the Helian- 
 thine nation would endure him no more in power, 
 his fall had been sincerely mourned by his royal 
 master. True, Corvus had been very old when he 
 had at last been driven into private life ; but age had 
 
252 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 never diminished his infinite resources, his relentless 
 cruelty, or his consummate cunning. There was not 
 his equal in the ranks of those politicians from whom 
 the Crown had to select its public servants. Person- 
 ally, the King did not attach any great blame to 
 corruption. History was full of it. Even Scipio 
 Africanus did not escape its reproach. 
 
 The strongest man is a weak one without money ; 
 naturally a strong man uses his strength to get money 
 where and how he can. The King was rather dis- 
 posed to blame Corvus for not having taken more ; 
 for not having enriched himself so that there could 
 not have been room in his career for debts, and 
 seizures, and similar blotches and blemishes, which 
 are really only excusable in feeble men. It should 
 surely be only simpletons who let their bills be pro- 
 tested, their womenkind be sued by tradespeople, 
 their artistic collections sold at auction. When 
 Corvus had excused himself for having neglected his 
 own affairs because he had been so absorbed in the 
 affairs of the nation, the excuse seemed to the 
 monarch the only puerile speech he had ever heard 
 from his great Minister. 
 
 The public in a measure held the same opinion as 
 the King, and considered his errors of venality to be 
 pardonable in Corvus, even as history regards those 
 of Verulam. 
 
 Although Corvus had disappeared from public life 
 under a quagmire of scandal, there had always been 
 the possibility of his resurrection even at eighty odd 
 years of age. At his death, therefore, all the other 
 Ministers, both in and out of office, felt unspeakably 
 relieved that the old rogue was nailed down in a 
 triple coffin, and would be buried under a weight of 
 
XV HELIANTHUS 255 
 
 marble, never more to reappear. Meantime they all 
 wore black, looked sad and inconsolable, and spoke 
 with reverence of this dear colleague of their man- 
 hood, the honoured master of their youth. There- 
 fore, of course, they had been obliged to be the first 
 to consider a public funeral a fitting homage to the 
 great departed. 
 
 * The damned old brute,' thought Kantakuzene,. 
 *he was the strongest of us all. He never had a 
 qualm. He never had a scruple. He struck hard 
 — and he never missed. He minded exposure no 
 more than a model minds it in the studio. He cared 
 no more when the nation cursed him than Richelieu 
 cared when the people cursed the Robe Rouge. He 
 was strong, amazingly strong.' 
 
 Kantakuzene, as he toiled under the weight of the 
 coffin, sighed, for he himself was not very strong ; 
 he was only exceedingly subtle and shrewd, talented, 
 eloquent, and adroit. 
 
 He had indeed that kind of strength which con- 
 sists in knowing where one's own weakness lies, and 
 also he had no superior in the useful talent of making 
 black look white, and a mere expediency appear a 
 patriotic ability ; but the merciless strength which 
 had made Corvus hesitate at no enormity, no betrayal, 
 no change of front, and no acceptance of iniquity — 
 this he had not, and therefore he knew that he would 
 never equal Corvus in the estimate of other men. 
 
 The clang of the brazen kettle-drum echoes 
 farther, and its sound lasts longer, than the melody 
 of the flute. 
 
 Othyris was moved to a hot indignation and an 
 acute sense of shame for his nation and his family as 
 he heard the fine bands of the King's Foot Guards 
 
254 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 playing the Dead March from SauU which came to 
 his ear from the distance as he went up the steep 
 road outside the Gate of Olives on his way to 
 Aquilegia. 
 
 ' They shall know there that I have no share in 
 the glorification of a scoundrel,' he thought. 
 
 From the time of his early boyhood, when he had 
 put his hands behind his back one day at the Soleia 
 to avoid touching the hand of Corvus, who was 
 then a Minister of the Crown, he had abhorred the 
 conduct, public or private, of that politician. 
 
 The man had begun life a red-hot revolutionary, 
 and had passed the last thirty years of his existence as 
 an absolutist. He had abjured in age every principle 
 which he had held in youth. He had in later years 
 filled the prisons of Helianthus with young men who 
 had merely held the same political creed as he had 
 himself professed at the same age as theirs. He had 
 played Judas to his country's Christ. When war had 
 served the purpose of his Cabinet he had sent tens 
 of thousands of lads to the shambles for no gain, no 
 reason, no purpose, except that it was in the interests 
 of his own retention of office to do so. His old age — 
 cruel, venal, crafty, shameless, strong — had gone down 
 in dishonour and dishonesty ; yet he was being borne 
 to his last home with pomp and with applause ! Too 
 many men had feared him, too many had been com- 
 promised by him, too many now felt uneasily that 
 their letters and their signatures were locked up in 
 those boxes which would henceforth be the property 
 either of his heirs or of the government, for any one 
 of influence in Helianthus to oppose the deference 
 paid to his remains. 
 
 The world thinks the woman's prostitution of 
 
XV HELIANTHUS 255 
 
 beauty a greater sin than the man's prostitution of 
 intellect, but it is not so. Of the two, the prostitu- 
 tion of the mind is more far-reaching, more profound, 
 and more evil in its effects on others, than the sale of 
 mere physical charms : the woman sells herself alone, 
 the man often sells his generation, his country, and 
 his disciples, with himself. History redresses the false 
 balance, — so it is said. But how can we be sure of 
 that which we shall not see ? For it is not contem- 
 porary history which dares to tell the truth. 
 
 From the path on the hillside leading to Aqui- 
 legia, Othyris saw in the distance the long line of the 
 funeral procession passing along one of the great 
 marble quays towards the Cathedral : afar off it 
 looked as small as a regiment of ants. He paused a 
 moment, and thought : 
 
 ' Illyris in obscurity and poverty ; Corvus in 
 pomp and fame ! How little is the land worthy of 
 her freedom ! She forgets the hero, and admires the 
 knave ! How little are nations worthy of service 
 and of sacrifice ! They feed the wolf off silver, and 
 leave the watch-dogs famished on the stones.* 
 
 With a sadder heart he took his way upward to 
 the lowly home of the victor of Argileion and 
 Samaris, leaving the celebration of the triumph of 
 Corvus behind him in the city which had forgotten 
 Illyris. 
 
 Illyris had grown used to his occasional visits ; 
 and if he did not welcome, did not reject them. 
 Their discourse was usually on impersonal subjects, 
 themes which were of equal interest to them both as 
 scholars and philologists, students of history and of 
 mankind : he who had made so large a portion of 
 the past history of Helianthus, and he by whom the 
 
256 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 future history of Helianthus might be made, met on 
 the neutral ground of mutual love for the country, 
 for its language, its traditions, its people. 
 
 * He is a hybrid,' said Illyris once in his absence ; 
 ' more Guthonic than aught else ; but, as far as his 
 looks and his mind go, he might be a pure-bred 
 Helianthine/ 
 
 Illyris could give no higher praise. 
 
 This day Illyris sat erect in his great chair of 
 ebony and black leather ; his eyes were wide open and 
 ablaze with light, a scornful wrath was on his 
 features ; and his hands struck with rage a folio 
 volume of which the yellow ribbed pages were opened 
 on his knee. 
 
 ' Corvus ! — buried by the State ! ' he cried, his 
 white beard trembling with his wrath and his disdain ; 
 and he laughed long and loud, a terrible ironical 
 laughter, scorching as caustic. 
 
 Othyris was silent : Illyris sat silent also for a 
 while, his white beard drooping on his breast. 
 
 * Corvus ! — buried by the State,' he muttered 
 again. 
 
 * What come you hither for ? ' he cried, as he 
 recognised Othyris. ' Why are you not behind the 
 bier of the man your father honoured ? ' 
 
 *- 1 came to show you, sir, that I have nothing to 
 do with what I hold to be a national disgrace.' 
 
 * Corvus was a Minister of your House. Are 
 none of you princes behind his corpse ? ' 
 
 ' I know not. I can but answer for myself.' 
 
 * You are a Gunderode ! Corvus was your 
 servant.' 
 
 * Not mine.' 
 
 'Get you away from here. Go and join the 
 
XV HELIANTHUS 257 
 
 Ministers of the Crown. Go and pray for Corvus' 
 soul/ 
 
 He laughed cruelly, terribly. All the eloquence 
 which had once swayed the minds of the multitudes 
 as a wind sways the sea waves had returned to him 
 for a moment. Suddenly he paused. 
 
 * You are the King's son,' he said abruptly. * Go, 
 go, and tell your sire how Platon lUyris judges the 
 knave he has delighted to honour.' 
 
 Then he beat his fist on the folio volume lying open 
 on his knees, and a wave of ironical disdainful laughter 
 passed over his features, illumining their apathy as 
 lightning might play upon a corpse. 
 
 ' Corvus buried by the State ! ' he repeated yet 
 again, and a deep scornful laughter shook his white 
 beard, his bowed colossal frame. 
 
 ' I remember Corvus,' he said, ' as a youth. There 
 were ten years between him and me. I had just 
 raised my first regiment of volunteers on my own 
 estates. He was with us in the early years. But he 
 was useless as a soldier. His strength was in his 
 tongue. Well, truly has it served him, that brazen, 
 lying, boastful tongue — that skilful, crafty, flattering, 
 and bullying tongue ! It was his all, but he won the 
 world with it.' 
 
 * Yes, sir,' said Othyris, ' and the insignia of the 
 great Orders of the world lie on his coffin. But 
 history will not honour him ; and it will honour 
 you.' 
 
 * Who knows ? ' muttered Illyris. * Is history the 
 redresser of contemporary injustice, as we like to 
 believe, or is it but the repeater of all the false judg- 
 ments of that past which it often ignorantly chronicles 
 and criticises .? Who can tell ^ Clio is a great Muse, 
 
 s 
 
258 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 but I fear she only sees through a smoked lens. It 
 is hard to learn the exact truth of a little incident 
 which occurs a mile from our door. It must be 
 harder still to judge with any accuracy the deeds and 
 the men of ages long gone by. Probably, if they 
 write of me in time to come, they will say that I was 
 a headstrong fool, and Corvus a great and a wise 
 man.' 
 
 ' They will say that, when they shall also say that 
 Cassar was a fool and Croesus a hero.' 
 
 * You flatter me, young man. You give me 
 honey to eat because I am in my second childhood.' 
 
 *No, sir, my reverence for you is sincere. I 
 should not have crossed your threshold were it not 
 so.' 
 
 * Well, well, I believe you,' said Illyris, with some 
 emotion ; ' though that you should feel this, is strange 
 in a prince of the House of GunderCde.' 
 
 * Here I am not a prince ; I am a neophyte.' 
 
 ' You have a pretty turn of speech. Almost too 
 pretty. Honey — honey ! ' 
 
 * May not truth be sweet sometimes, sir ? Why 
 should it always be bitter ? ' 
 
 Illyris smiled faintly. 
 
 * Heed him not, child,' he muttered to Ilia. * He 
 has too deft a tongue.' 
 
 Then the old man's head drooped. He was 
 silent ; his eyes closed ; the intermittent strength of 
 his extreme age gave way to the dreamy stupor of 
 failing powers fatigued by momentary excitement. 
 
 ' It was so hot, so hot,' he muttered ; ^ it was the 
 twentieth day of June ; he was there ; he had volun- 
 teered, but he did not fight. He never fought on 
 any field. If he says that he did, he lies. My right 
 
XV HELIANTHUS 259 
 
 line was breaking. We were hard pressed. I said 
 to him, *' Ride you to my son Gelon, and bid him 
 come up with all his force, or the day may be lost." 
 He rode away, but he did not ride to Gelon. He said 
 afterwards that he mistook the road. Gelon did not 
 come. It was like Grouchy at Waterloo. And the 
 sun was so hot, so hot ! Men dropped dead : un- 
 wounded, sunstricken. Our line wavered — almost 
 broke. Then I cried to them : " Rally, my children ; 
 rally. Be firm, and the day is won " ; and they gave 
 a great cheer, half dead though they were, and 
 they followed me, and the sun went down, down, 
 down ; and the wheat was drenched in blood ; and 
 my son Constantine lay in the ripe corn, face down- 
 ward, shot through the brain. But the day was ours.' 
 Then again he was mute, and the light died out 
 of his eyes, and the stupor of senility crept back over 
 his features. 
 
 * He speaks of Argileion ? ' said Othyris, under his 
 breath, to Ilia Illyris. 
 
 * No, of Samaris. It was at Samaris that Con- 
 stantine, my grand-uncle, was killed. Argileion was 
 fought in the autumn when the fields were bare ; 
 Samaris when the wheat was ripe.* 
 
 Othyris was silent. These great combats had in 
 their ultimate issue placed his race upon the throne 
 of Helianthus ; and the hero who had gained these 
 victories at such vast odds was left here, forgotten, 
 unhonoured, unaided, allowed only on sufferance to 
 end his last years on his native soil ! 
 
 Othyris felt as though he stood knee-deep in that 
 sea of blood which had dyed red the amber wheat 
 of fifty summers gone. 
 
 ' It is terrible ! ' he muttered. 
 
26o HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 ' Yes, it is terrible ! ' said Ilia Illyris. ' Terrible 
 indeed that all that bloodshed, all that heroism, all 
 those glorious hopes and dreams, should have had no 
 other result, served no other ultimate end, than to 
 crown an alien race on the Acropolis of Helios ! * 
 
 Othyris grew red, then pale ; stung by anger and 
 by mortification. What other living creature would 
 have dared to say such a thing as this in his 
 presence ? 
 
 But had he not said it to himself ? 
 
 He looked at her, and saw that she was perfectly 
 serene and indifferent to any effect which her words 
 might have on him. Her head was slightly bent ; her 
 eyelids were drooping over the splendour of her 
 eyes, as she looked down at the lace she was making ; 
 her hands continued their delicate evolutions. 
 
 Suddenly Illyris raised his head ; his brain had 
 cleared ; the passing clouds had lifted. 
 
 ' Who followed ? ' he asked. 
 
 Ilia arose and approached his chair. 
 
 * Who followed what ? ' she asked gently. 
 'Who followed the coffin of Corvus .f" Not my 
 
 veterans ? ' 
 
 She was silent ; Othyris also. 
 
 ' Not my veterans ? * 
 
 ' There are few living, very few, sir,' she answered. 
 
 ' I know — Death has all my comrades : Death 
 and Age. But those who still live ^ — they were not 
 behind that traitor's bier ? ' 
 
 She was silent. 
 
 ' Answer ! ' said Illyris, striking his staff with 
 violence upon the floor. 
 
 * The few who still live were there, sir, — yes.' 
 
 * They have lived too long, then — as I have done ! 
 
XV HELIANTHUS 261 
 
 My men behind the bier of Corvus ! Did the 
 Apostles who were faithful follow the rotten corpse 
 of Judas ? * 
 
 ' Perhaps, sir, they thought only of his early 
 life. He was sincere once, was he not ? * 
 
 * Once ! Because Iscariot was once an innocent 
 child at his mother's breast was he the less accursed ? 
 Maybe Corvus was sincere in his youth. I cannot 
 answer for the hidden hearts of men. But, if it be 
 so, that does but deepen the blackness of his sin. It 
 is but a reason the more for every honest man to 
 spit in scorn upon the earth of his grave. He took 
 the oath of allegiance ; he, a republican, a patriot, 
 took the oath of allegiance to a monarchy ; he sat in 
 the parliaments of a monarchy ; he crawled through 
 crooked ways to popularity and power ; he wore the 
 badges and ribands of the sovereigns of Europe ; he 
 drove the youth of Helianthus to the African 
 shambles that their blood might give him the purple 
 dye of his own aggrandisement ; he licked the dust 
 before the path of kings ; he cringed, he slobbered, 
 he lied, he flattered, he struck Liberty in the throat, 
 and he kissed the Gyges of the Guthones on both 
 cheeks ; — and you tell me he was sincere in his youth ! 
 You are fools ! You are fools ! Such a man is 
 false whilst he is still an embryon in his mother's 
 womb ! A traitor is vile even whilst he is still but 
 a germ in an ovary ! ' 
 
 Then, once more, the fire faded from his eyes, his 
 voice dropped into silence, and he fell back heavily 
 and with exhaustion, into the chair from which he 
 had momentarily risen. His countenance lost all 
 illumination, all expression. The flame of the tired 
 spirit, fanned by wrath into an instant's light, 
 
262 HELIANTHUS chap, xv 
 
 flickered and died down. The intense emotions 
 aroused in him by the remembrance of a traitor were 
 succeeded by the dull gloom of age which recognises 
 its own torpor and impotence, its own loneliness, its 
 own inutility. 
 
 ' Go,' said Ilia, in a low tone ; * go ; he likes to see 
 you sometimes, but to-day you can only offend him 
 and do him harm.' 
 
 Othyris hesitated, and stood an instant before the 
 chair of Illyris. 
 
 *Sir,' he said, in a low tone, ' I sent no condolence 
 to the house of Corvus ; I sent no representative to 
 his funeral, or laurel to lay upon his tomb. I 
 consider that my father had no greater enemy than 
 this man who called himself his most devoted 
 servant, and who perhaps believed himself to be so. 
 No one ever widened the breach between the throne 
 and the people with more evil success than Corvus.' 
 
 Illyris made him no reply ; he did not seem to 
 hear ; his thoughts were far away in the greatness of 
 his past. 
 
 * Why will he not believe in me ? Why 
 should I be here except in sincerity and in respect .? ' 
 said Othyris, turning to IHa Illyris. 
 
 ' It is not you whom he mistrusts. It is your 
 race,' she replied. 
 
 * Then he is unjust ! ' 
 
 ' He is old ! ' she said, with a sigh. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 Othyris followed Ilia across the small flagged 
 entrance into the opposite room, which was a 
 counterpart of the one occupied by Platon Illyris. 
 
 On a table stood the pillow and cushion on which 
 she made her lace ; a brown jug, holding field flowers ; 
 a small antique bronze which had been found buried 
 deep in the soil when a great olive had been uprooted 
 in a storm, a figure representing Narcissus ; some 
 volumes of old books, companions to those in the 
 other chamber ; nothing else. 
 
 To him it seemed wonderful to see a woman of 
 her beauty and high intelligence cheerfully executing 
 the humblest kind of work, and leading a life entirely 
 monotonous and lonely. * How Gertrude would 
 admire her,' he thought ; but he knew that to bring 
 her and his sister-in-law into contact was as impossible 
 as to bring the stars of Cassiopeia into the constella- 
 tion of Perseus. They were divided for ever by 
 those barriers which are at once the most impassable 
 and the most purely illusory ; those that mankind 
 has constructed for its own bondage, the barriers 
 of caste and of custom. 
 
 * May I see some of your lace ? ' he asked with 
 hesitation, fearful of offending her. 
 
 * Oh yes,' — she opened an old olive-wood cabinet 
 
 263 
 
264 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 and took out a cobweb of fine threads with lilies and 
 grasses worked on it ; the beautiful old pillow lace 
 of other centuries admirably revived. 
 
 ' It is beautiful indeed ! * he exclaimed, and gazed 
 on it with the appreciation and comprehension of a 
 connoisseur. It was beautiful as the Ivory Tower 
 had been ; beautiful as every work of art must be, 
 into which enter the mind, the devotion, the self- 
 sacrifice, the spirituality, of its creator. It was a 
 little filmy thing, light as air, fragile as a dew-ball 
 in the grass ; a rough touch could have destroyed' 
 it in a second of time ; but it had true art in it as 
 surely as have the Taj Mahal, the Mona Lisa, the 
 belfry of Giotto, the verse of Shelley, the Hermes 
 of the Vatican. 
 
 ' I wish my sister-in-law, the Crown Princess, 
 could see this,* he added. ' She is a great lover of 
 lace. Might I take it to her ? She would know how 
 to appreciate it.' 
 
 * It is not for private sale, sir,' she said curtly ; 
 and she put back the lace into its cupboard. 
 
 ' I did not intend to offend you,' he said with 
 patience and humility. * I merely wished to give my 
 sister-in-law a great pleasure ; for such work as 
 yours is extremely rare.' 
 
 But he felt that his purpose had been divined, 
 and its disguise rudely brushed aside. It was 
 quite true that the Crown Princess was a collector 
 and judge of hand-made laces ; but he knew that it 
 would not have been for her sake that he would have 
 desired to purchase that exquisite fairies' web for 
 some fabulous price. 
 
 * Surely,' he added — ' surely you do not create all 
 this beauty only to put it away in a shut drawer ? ' 
 
XVI HELIANTHUS 265 
 
 * Oh no,* she said coldly, * it is all bespoken by a 
 lace merchant of the north. Whenever I complete a 
 piece it goes to him. I would ask you, sir,' she added, 
 a faint colour rising over her face, ' never to speak of 
 this to my great-grandfather ; he is not aware of it ; 
 he would not understand. But it would certainly 
 displease him that a descendant of his, an Illyris, 
 should take money from a tradesman. He thinks 
 that his own means are enough for everything, but 
 they are not. It is necessary to add to them.' 
 
 ' I understand,' said Othyris. * At his great age 
 men do not easily learn new lessons, and his pride 
 was always great.' 
 
 * Justly so.' 
 
 * Justly ; yes, indeed.' 
 
 * He might have ruled this country, had he chosen.' 
 Othyris smiled slightly, but his face flushed. 
 
 ' I beHeve that he could,' he answered. * History 
 will acknowledge that he could, and that he did not 
 do so from the noblest of all motives : the reluctance 
 to cause and carry on civil war. But is it generous 
 to say this to me ? ' 
 
 * There is neither generosity nor meanness in the 
 statement of a fact. All that was done in that remote 
 time has long passed into history.' 
 
 ' A history of which all the nobility is with your 
 race ; all the ingratitude with mine.' 
 
 She was silent ; to deny the obvious, to excuse the 
 heroic, was not in the character of this daughter of 
 heroes. 
 
 Othyris was wounded ; and he was angered with 
 himself for being so. He loathed the whole period 
 of that troubled time in which his great-grandsire 
 had beaten out a crown of gold and iron in the 
 
266 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 furnace of war ; a crown which would never have 
 been his, or his descendants', if Platon Illyris had so 
 willed. 
 
 Whenever he passed the great sepulchre, called in 
 Helios the House of the Immortals, with its peristyle 
 of marble and porphyry and its dome of glittering 
 gilded tileSj which covered the remains of Theodoric 
 of Gunderode and which from a cypress- crowned 
 eminence dominated the city, he looked away from 
 it and felt neither reverence nor gratitude to this 
 memory so near to him which was already swelling 
 into legend. All that Ilia had said had been 
 true ; but it was its truth which hurt him. If Platon 
 Illyris had chosen, once upon a time, the Gunderode 
 had never reigned beside the Mare Magnum, nor 
 been laid to rest in the Helianthine Pantheon. 
 
 The voice of Ilia roused him, clear as the sound of 
 a silver bell, but cold as a flake of snow. 
 
 ' Sir, you will pardon me if I leave you. I have 
 my household duties.' 
 
 * If my sister-in-law, the Crown Princess, would 
 receive you, would you allow me to take you to 
 her? 
 
 ' No, I would not.' 
 
 The words were ungracious but the tone was 
 gentle. 
 
 ' She is a good woman.' 
 
 * I have always heard so.' 
 ' Well, then — why ? ' 
 
 ' You must know I would not pass the threshold 
 of a Gunderode.' 
 
 * It is you who are prejudiced.' 
 
 * Consistency is not prejudice.' 
 
 * You need a female friend.' 
 
XVI HELIANTHUS 267 
 
 ' If I did, I should not seek one in a palace. But 
 I do not.' 
 
 * The Princess can be a very warm friend.* 
 
 * She could not be so to me, nor I to her.' 
 ' Wherefore ? ' 
 
 ' You must know very well. I do not think that 
 you should even speak of such a thing.' 
 
 He did know ; he knew that it was impossible to 
 bring together these two women who were so far 
 asunder through every circumstance and feeling of 
 their lives, every sentiment, habit, tradition, and 
 belief The prejudices of his relative might, he 
 thought, have been vanquished, for he had gained 
 her goodwill ; but the more stubborn resistance of 
 the daughter of Illyris would be unconquerable ; she 
 would have thought herself unworthy to bear the 
 great name of her people if she had ever crossed the 
 threshold of the residence of any member of the 
 reigning family. 
 
 * You may be sure of my absolute discretion as 
 regards your beautiful j)oin^ cT aiguille^ answered 
 Othyris. ' But I wish you would transfer your 
 favours from this northern trader to my sister-in- 
 law.' 
 
 * The Crown Princess can purchase it from the 
 trader, sir.' 
 
 ' May I take her the address of the merchant } ' 
 She hesitated a moment, then wrote a name and 
 address on a slip of paper and gave it to him. He 
 thanked her ; then still lingered, loth to leave the 
 subject or the place. 
 
 * Is not such fine work as that very trying to the 
 eyes } ' he said. * I have always heard that it is,' 
 
 * I do not find it so ; however, it is perhaps 
 
268 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 because I only work about two hours in the early 
 morning ; rarely afterwards.' 
 
 * But would it not be more agreeable to you to 
 give your creations direct into the hands of apprecia- 
 tive persons than to let them go through those of 
 mere tradesmen to any buyer ? ' 
 
 * No : the one would mean patronage ; the other 
 is independence.* 
 
 He saw what she meant and respected her mean- 
 ing. 
 
 * I only regret,' he said, * that you will not do me 
 the honour to treat me as a friend.' 
 
 ' There can be no friendship between one of your 
 House and one of mine,' she answered. 
 
 He did not urge the point, nor did he resent the 
 equality on which she placed their families. It was 
 refreshing to him to meet with any one by whom his 
 rank was ignored ; it was like a draught of spring 
 water to one satiated by a surfeit of sweet champagne. 
 But he saw that his pleasure or displeasure were 
 things quite indifferent to her. 
 
 When he passed out into the narrow, vaulted, 
 stone passage, the door of the old man's study was 
 closed. He did not endeavour to go in again, 
 but went out into the open air where the sunlight 
 fell through the grey traceries of the olive leaves, and 
 the doves were cooing in the great gnarled branches 
 above. 
 
 * You who have so much,' said the voice of his 
 conscience to him, ' cannot you leave this wild dove 
 alone on her olive branch ? ' 
 
 But his heart, rebellious, answered : * What have 
 I ? Nothing ; since I have nothing that contents 
 me.' 
 
XVI HELIANTHUS 269 
 
 Ilia Illyris was the only woman on earth who 
 could, in all sincerity and unconsciousness, have 
 treated his rank as a thing indifferent to her. Her 
 complete isolation from the world, and ignorance of 
 its values and its habits ; the disdain which she 
 inherited for all the distinctions of position, and all 
 the simulacrum of royalty and power, made her 
 omission of all the deference which others showed 
 him, and the simplicity and familiarity of her inter- 
 course with him, entirely natural and indeed inevit- 
 able. It was as welcome to him as was to the weary 
 wayfarer a draught of the clear spring water which 
 flowed under the parsley and cresses of the rivulets 
 of Mount Atys. 
 
 Who could surpass the Illyris in their traditions ? 
 Her pride was not in herself, but in those whose 
 name she bore. 
 
 As the companionship of Ednor was agreeable 
 to Othyris as the breeze and smell of the sea are 
 agreeable after hours spent in a crowded ball-room, 
 so the little house of Illyris was a refuge to him from 
 the Court and from the world, as a shady moss- 
 grown nook in a woodland is to the harried deer. 
 
 Ilia Illyris showed Othyris no disrespect, but she 
 showed him no deference. Usually, wherever he 
 appeared, women were in a flutter of expectation and 
 displayed their charms as pedlars their wares. Her 
 stillness, her calmness, the unvarying simplicity of 
 her manner, and the occasional severity of her words, 
 were a fascination to him strong in proportion to its 
 novelty. She might have been a woman of the 
 Homeric age. He had asked for her friendship at 
 first sight ; but when six months had passed he 
 could not flatter himself that he had obtained it. 
 
270 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 Had he deserved it? He could not, to be sincere 
 with himself, think so. Weighed by her standards, 
 his life seemed to him frivolous, unproductive, 
 selfish. Besides, he saw that he was to her always 
 the descendant of the man who had betrayed and 
 imprisoned Platon Illyris. 
 
 To the temper of Ilia Illyris, treachery was the 
 one unpardonable sin ; tainting for centuries, genera- 
 tion after generation, unpardonable, unforgettable, 
 eldest-born of hell, — of that hell which men have 
 created for themselves. The crime of the GunderOde 
 seemed to her an offence against the nation still 
 more than against her race. Racial feud is dark and 
 strong and deathless in the national character of this 
 country, still barbaric in so much, and classic in so 
 much, and mingled with so many alien elements 
 brought into it by its conquered, and by its con- 
 querors ; by those whom it had dragged at the 
 chariot wheels of its triumphs, and by those who had 
 overrun its soil and destroyed its civilisation. 
 
 But what wounded and stung Othyris was that 
 he made no way with her as a man ; as a prince he 
 was quite willing to abdicate all rights of rank, he 
 was satisfied to come there as any scholar might have 
 gone to any teacher ; but he was mortified to find 
 that his own individuality, when it had laid aside all 
 adventitious claimxS of place or privilege, should seem 
 so little welcome to her. She was more cordial to 
 Janos, the peasant who dwelt in a hut near them and 
 did such rough work as the woman Ma'la could 
 not do indoors and out ; a shaggy, bearded figure 
 like a faun, clothed in goatskin in winter and in 
 summer almost nude. 
 
 'She has the name of Rhea Silvia,* he thought. 
 
XVI HELIANTHUS 271 
 
 * She should bear a Romulus in her womb, who would 
 be eponymous to an eternal city.* 
 
 Her entire unlikeness to all others of her sex 
 fascinated Othyris ; he could no more have spoken 
 to her lightly than he could have struck the statue 
 of Astarte in the face. Before her, he was subdued 
 into submission, and took pleasure in the mysterious 
 and novel timidity he felt ; but away from her he 
 felt a restless vexation at his own subjection and 
 rage. 
 
 ' I am like some awkward, blushing Cymon, of the 
 cattle-stall and the ploughshare ! ' he thought with 
 anger. She was a beautiful woman, but she might 
 have been made, he thought, of ivory, or marble, or 
 silver, like that wondrous statue of Astarte which had 
 once been throned upon these hills, and of which the 
 traditions remained in the pages of Helicarnassus. 
 She seemed absolutely detached from modern life, 
 wholly insensible to the influence of others, entirely 
 callous also to the pain or the offence her words 
 might cause. Yet he could not feel that such speech 
 was rudeness in her, or was intended to wound ; it 
 was the direct and simple expression of her thoughts, 
 and what she had said was true. Any denial of its 
 truth would have died on his lips if he had tried to 
 utter it. 
 
 Again and again Othyris had said to himself : * Is 
 this the only result of that mighty and glorious epos 
 — that we are here ? * What greater bathos could 
 there be than this, that the resurrection of a nation, 
 the ideals of its youth, the sacrifices of its women, the 
 high and burning hopes of its patriots, should have 
 had as their only result the paltry, fulsome, and useless 
 ceremonials of a royal Court, the corruptions and con- 
 
272 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 ventionalities of a modern government, the tyrannies 
 of taxation and contravention, the endless waste of an 
 insatiable exchequer, the slavery of military conscrip- 
 tion, the comedy and the formulas of parliaments ? 
 
 The thunders had rolled along the mountains, the 
 volcanic flames had leaped, the winds of the storms 
 had swept through the air, the glorious sunrise had 
 shone forth from the darkness, and the day had 
 dawned — and for what issue ? Oh ridiculus tnus ! 
 Ilia and Illyris could not feel the paltriness of the 
 issue in contrast to the splendour of the effort more 
 acutely than he himself felt it. 
 
 * It is not wholly our fault/ he said with hesita- 
 tion to Ilia one day. ' Do not think that I say so 
 because I am a son of the King. Our race is akin 
 to Helianthus, not in harmony with its past or its 
 present. But were we other than we are, I doubt if 
 we could alter the national character or the corrup- 
 tion which has become the marrow of the bones of 
 the people. Helianthus has been too long soaked in 
 the poisonous vapours of tyranny, and bribery, and 
 untruth and all their congeners, to wash in a Jordan 
 of political morality and become clean. The disease 
 has entered the innermost cells of the people's flesh 
 and of their brain ; the greatest ruler, the holiest 
 saint, could do nothing to cut it out ; it will live on 
 them as long as the nation lives. Can you ever 
 obtain a plain answer to a direct question ? Can any 
 one buy the commonest thing without an effort 
 being made to cheat in the matter of its price } Do 
 you know anything of the conduct of elections, 
 municipal, political, or ecclesiastical .f* Is it possible 
 for a man or a woman to enter any career, or to 
 advance in any, without underhand methods and dis- 
 
XVI HELIANTHUS 273 
 
 honest craft ? Can a mere teacher in a village school 
 be given the place without pressure and influence 
 indirect and often injurious to the public interests? 
 You here in your woodland solitude know and see 
 nothing of the sea of mud in which the Hellanthine 
 public life has its being. Were my father Solomon 
 or Antoninus he could do little or nothing. Were 
 we all demi-gods or angels we could not strive 
 against the national debauchery of the national 
 conscience.' 
 
 Ilia was silent ; she could not contradict, she 
 would not assent ; but she realised that beyond the 
 trees and rocks and torrents of her dwelling-place 
 there were many things of which she had no know- 
 ledge. Even the great and virile intellect of her 
 only relative was dimmed by the passage of many 
 years and the effect of long isolation, so that perhaps 
 it knew little of that modern life with which he had 
 never any contact. Janos and his fellows were 
 much what their forefathers had been two thousand 
 years before, and even their religion, though it bore 
 another name, was identical in superstition and in 
 symbol with that of the days of Pan. 
 
 Ilia lived out of the world of men ; she realised 
 that she might be unable to judge it. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 The Helianthlne fleet was anchored in the bay, 
 that beautiful and romantic Bay of Helios which has 
 been renowned through a score of centuries for the 
 many sea-fights which have dyed its blue waters red 
 with carnage ever since the days when the temples 
 of Poseidon, newly built with freshly-quarried marbles, 
 had crowned the semicircle of its mountainous coast. 
 King John kept his navy, as all sovereigns keep theirs, 
 nowadays, as a visiting-card to be left on neighbours, 
 near or far, and sent about the seas of the world to 
 produce amity, or threaten enmity, as might happen 
 to be necessary. It is an expensive visiting-card, 
 but as the nation pays the price of it, a sovereign 
 and a government need not concern themselves 
 about its cost. It is also sometimes a cumbrous card, 
 when it happens now and then that its errand is 
 repented of when it has already had time to weigh 
 anchors and get up steam. But as an innocuous way 
 of making yourself disagreeable to some, or amiable 
 to others, without binding yourself by treaties, it has 
 no equal ; and if the cost of sending it about is vast, 
 well — it is the taxpayer who suffers, and he is scarcely 
 aware of what he pays, since it is all comprised in the 
 Naval Estimates, with which the taxpayer does not often 
 occupy himself, considering them the affair of experts. 
 
 274 
 
CHAP. XVII HELIANTHUS 275 
 
 The festive display of the Helianthine fleet closely 
 resembled a hostile demonstration, as its ironclads lay 
 on the dancing waters of a glad azure sea. The 
 huge, ugly metal hulls were in line, one after another, 
 as near shore as they could dare to approach ; and 
 their gigantic guns bellowed defiance across the bay, 
 as though the whole of mankind were their foes. 
 
 Othyris, as he looked at these great grey monsters, 
 lying motionless on the water, their ugliness only 
 accentuated by the festoons of coloured bunting hung 
 from mast and funnel, seemed to see as in a vision 
 the first naval war of the future in that lovely bay of 
 Helios : the new steel and aluminium war-ships heel- 
 ing over, exploding, sinking, going down in whirlpools 
 of blood-stained water, churning the bodies of dead 
 and dying men in the agitated foam, whilst some 
 other victorious fleet rode triumphant on the waves 
 of the Mare Magnum, firing in derisive exultation 
 over the abyss in which his country's honour had 
 perished ! 
 
 But he alone was a prey to such melancholy fore- 
 bodings ; every one else was rejoicijig and proud, 
 for at this moment the sea-monsters were on a peace- 
 ful errand bent. The fleet was nominally commanded 
 by the young Duke of Esthonia, virtually by an old 
 sea-dog admiral ; and the walls of the city, the beach, 
 the bastions, the docks, the piers, the olive-clothed 
 hills, were all crowded with an interested and admir- 
 ing crowd, assembled to wish the squadron good- 
 speed on its cruise. It was going this time to visit 
 the adjacent country of Gallia, by way of proving 
 the truth of the adage that the love of one neighbour 
 often springs from the hatred of another ; for the 
 diplomacy of Helianthus at that moment was to 
 
276 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 ascertain her value to others without ticketing herself 
 with any definite price, and to utilise the good-will 
 of her allies in order to scare into dumbness and 
 numbness those who were always ready to dismember 
 her. For Helianthus to be friendly in a sweet and 
 cordial way to Gallia, was to make the price of 
 Helianthus go up to Gallia's foes. 
 
 The Finance Minister and the Chambers of the 
 Empire of the Guthones had at the beginning of 
 the session put a tax upon Helianthine honey, which 
 was the best in the world, and upon the fleece of the 
 Helianthine flocks, which were equally famous — both 
 flocks and bees were nourished on the thyme-covered 
 hills of which classic poets had sung ; and the 
 imposition of two such duties seemed but a poor 
 return for the constant and costly state of prepared 
 readiness for war in which the Helianthine people 
 had been kept by their rulers to please the Emperor 
 Julius. It was thought well to remind these Guthonic 
 ingrates that neither Helianthus nor Gallia was a 
 quantity that could with impunity be neglected in the 
 calculations of the Julian diplomacy ; that, after all, 
 Gallia and Helianthus were kindred, so said philo- 
 logists, if like other kith and kin they had often 
 quarrelled and fought. 
 
 So the great ships lay like resting whales on the 
 heaving swell of the Mare Magnum, ready to get 
 under weigh ; whilst Gallia, who did not mistake 
 the motives for which she was to be visited, was busy 
 embellishing one of her chief ports, painting her 
 lamp-posts, cleaning her revolving lights, hanging 
 up the colours of Helianthus with her own, burnish- 
 ing her ordnance, holystoning her decks, getting 
 ready reviews, illuminations and banquets, and 
 
XVII HELIANTHUS 277 
 
 preparing to do the honours graciously, though 
 keeping her weather-eye open. The naval pageant, 
 the banquets, the presents, would cost her a vast 
 deal of money ; but in republics as in monarchies. 
 Chambers vote and Ministers spend happily and easily 
 moneys which are not their own. The country of 
 Gallia was a republic ; and a republic on the frontier 
 of a monarchy is like a factory of dynamite established 
 close to the house of a gentleman who is afraid of a 
 popgun. It is true that this republic was almost 
 indistinguishable from a monarchy, having a huge 
 standing army, a very expensive fleet, a most corrupt 
 plutocracy, a Press entirely owned by financiers, a 
 number of worrying, fidgetting, and irritating by- 
 laws, a most oppressive taxation, and everything else 
 as like a monarchy as could be. 
 
 Still a republic it was ; and, although its chief 
 magistrate was a respectable manufacturer of woollen 
 stuff^s, who did his best to look as like a king as he 
 could by means of stars and crosses on his chest, 
 outriders before his carriage, bloody battues in his 
 parks, public appearances in opera-boxes and at 
 race meetings, and absolute inaccessibility to any 
 plebeian, still, a king he was not ; and therefore, 
 to a king, he was an uncomfortable neighbour, and 
 the republic over which he presided was a painfully 
 unknown quantity — an x which disturbed all the cal- 
 culations of hereditary potentates, whether consti- 
 tutional or absolute, whether sprung up like mush- 
 rooms from the germs on battlefields, or embedded 
 like fossils in the sandstone of ages. All the emperors 
 and kings caressed the excellent wool -merchant, 
 treated him as if he were one of themselves, and to 
 their astonishment found him a very good shot. But 
 
278 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 they were always exceedingly nervous about him, and 
 thought him a terrible example to the wool-merchants 
 of their own dominions. The Powers could have 
 paired themselves off, whether for dance or duel, 
 quite comfortably if Gallia and her wool-merchant 
 had not existed ; but Gallia was always there, to give 
 herself airs as the terra incommoda^ or to offer herself 
 in alliance, no one of them was ever sure where or 
 to whom. 
 
 The sovereign of Helianthus, like all his brothers 
 in the purple, was always convinced that Gallia 
 was conspiring against himself. She was not, 
 because she was chiefly governed by her trading and 
 speculating classes, who loved money and hated con- 
 spiracies. But this King John did not believe was any 
 security against her restless passions and her ambi- 
 tious instincts, which even the great syndicates might 
 any day be unable to control. Gallia was a blood- 
 mare who might take her head and bolt at any 
 moment, without warning, and carry her respectable 
 wool-merchant to an Armageddon, as helpless as was 
 ever John Gilpin. 
 
 Therefore, since such was the custom of his 
 brother-potentates, he sent the finest vessels of his 
 navy to pay a visit to the southern ports of Gallia, 
 and his favourite son to hobnob amicably with the 
 excellent wool-stapler, whilst Helianthine and Gallian 
 blue-jackets would get drunk together in the streets 
 in fraternal affection — -affection which would not pre- 
 vent their blowing each other into shreds the very 
 next day if they should be so ordered to do by their 
 respective rulers. For sailors, like soldiers, have no 
 politics. 
 
 The great vessels were weighing anchor and 
 
XVII HELIANTHUS 279 
 
 departing on their mission of fraternal love and 
 enormous expenditure ; Othyris and Gavroche re- 
 turned to the shore in a long - boat rowed by 
 sailors. 
 
 ' What good do you suppose this will do ? ' said 
 Othyris to Tyras, who, like himself, had been com- 
 pelled by the etiquette of his family to bid Esthonia 
 adieu and bon voyage on the deck of the great flag- 
 ship, the Polyphemus. 
 
 Gavroche, who had painfully dragged his lazy 
 length up and down the companion-way, gave his 
 little hollow laugh, which had the sound of a tubercu- 
 lous cough joined to a Mephistophelian chuckle. 
 
 * It will benefit our brother's babies : the wool- 
 stapler will send them cartloads of toys and bonbons. 
 I do not see any other particular object in the expedi- 
 tion/ 
 
 ' It will cost as much as would feed the eastern 
 provinces for three months/ 
 
 * The eastern provinces do not enter into the 
 haute politique of our father.' 
 
 ' Their lads are undersized,' said Othyris bitterly. 
 * They count little in the drill-serjeants' eyes.' 
 
 The eastern provinces were the crippled children 
 of Helianthus. They were in large districts mere 
 sandy wastes, almost Oriental in their barrenness ; 
 dry, searching winds swept them in spring, and their 
 water-sources dried up by Pentecost ; whilst in winter, 
 oftentimes, their streams overflowed vast districts, 
 and their tilled lands were turned into stagnant lakes. 
 Ruins of aqueducts and reservoirs showed what 
 colossal, and doubtless efficient, works had existed to 
 rectify the faults and abuses of nature in remote 
 times, of which the very dates were forgotten. But, 
 
28o HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 now, there was no attempt made on the part of the 
 State to aid a sickly and helpless peasantry in its con- 
 test with overwhelming forces, and the east was the 
 spavined mare in the stable of John of GunderCde. 
 Its districts knew no royal smile, they received no 
 Ministerial visits ; they were seldom spoken of in 
 the Chambers, and never provided for in any Budget. 
 The tax-collector remembered them : no one else, 
 except the military authorities, who took away a 
 certain percentage of their lean and tired youngsters, 
 who were scarcely good enough for the cannon's 
 maw. 
 
 As the long-boat bearing Othyris and Gavroche 
 sped across the stretch of calm blue water, freshened 
 by a light southerly breeze, the range of the Mount 
 Atys peaks and crags faced them, with the noon- 
 day sun illumining the snow which lingered on the 
 summits. As the distance narrowed between them 
 and the land, Othyris could distinguish the lines of 
 the Helichrysum hills, and through his glass saw the 
 olive woods of their lower slopes, and the whiteness 
 of the broad, smooth, sandy beach below. He 
 could even see the threads of the many water-courses ; 
 the gleam of the marble strata ; the warm hues of 
 the porphyry cliffs ; and discerned even a speck 
 which he thought was the dwelling-house of lUyris. 
 
 How willingly would he have lived there himself ; 
 the world forgetting, by the world forgot ! 
 
 Happy were those who dwelt, in such seclusion ! 
 
 * What do you see over there ? ' said Gavroche, 
 raising his own glass in curiosity. 
 
 ' I see Mount Atys,' said Othyris tranquilly. 
 ' Look ! — that peak with the snow still on it and the 
 clouds upon its side.' 
 
XVII HELIANTHUS 281 
 
 Gavroche yawned, seeing nothing of interest. 
 
 * The Municipality is selling the Helichrysum hills 
 to an Acetylene Company/ he said, with relish. ' I 
 can put you on the thing, if you like.' 
 
 * Neither acetylene nor companies attract me.' 
 ' You are not of your time.' 
 
 * No, I am not. Is it true that they dare to dream 
 of touching these hills ? ' 
 
 ' Certainly. It is an admirable speculation. It 
 will pay thirty per cent, perhaps forty. It is a 
 Guthonic Syndicate.' 
 
 ^ A Syndicate in this country is always Guthonic 
 when it is not Candarian.' 
 
 ' Well, of course, those people have enterprise and 
 money ; we have neither.' 
 
 * We have Mount Atys and its olive woods.' 
 
 * Precisely ; and so, as we cannot ourselves utilise 
 what we have got, we sell or lease it to those who 
 can.' 
 
 'For three thousand years no one has felt any 
 necessity to touch those hills ; they belong to Isis and 
 her son.' 
 
 * Who are they ^ ' said Tyras. * It is going to be a 
 big affair,' he added. * Our dear father will get a lot 
 of scrip. The Syndicate has not got fairly into saddle 
 yet ; but it will be a very big boom. The acetylene 
 is only a beginning. There are no end of schemes — 
 a funicular railway, a seaside suburb, a sanatorium, 
 of course an observatory on the top, a lot of marble- 
 quarrying and timber-felling : the thing is only in 
 embryo at present, but His Majesty is very keen 
 about it.' 
 
 * Do you mean that the King favours any specula- 
 tion so monstrous ? ' 
 
2 82 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 ' Lord, yes ! He approves and appreciates any- 
 thing which puts money in his pocket/ 
 
 * But it will ruin the view of the bay ! * 
 
 * Do you think the King ever looks at the 
 view ? ' 
 
 ' But Mount Atys is sacred ground ' 
 
 ' To you and a few sentimentalists ; I believe 
 Homer was the first of them ! ' 
 
 * They might as well sell Mount Sinai ! ' 
 
 'They will, no doubt, if His Majesty ever is 
 made King of Jerusalem. The Hotel of the Cross 
 and the Pension Judas will be very fashionable ' ; 
 and Gavroche laughed till he coughed. 
 
 Othyris turned away in disgust. Was it possible 
 this scheme existed ^ He continued to gaze at the 
 dazzling white of the lofty cone rising above the 
 purple and grey mosses of the pine and olive woods, 
 clothing the hills where Ilia Illyris dwelt, the hills of 
 Isis and of Atys. 
 
 The boat cut a swift path through the azure 
 water. The fleet they had left was getting under 
 weigh in the sparkling sunshine of the early morning, 
 going on its errand of spinning an amity as brittle as 
 spun glass, and weaving an alliance as friable as sugar. 
 The war-ships were steaming towards the open sea, 
 and the boat was rowed towards the harbour beneath 
 the walls of the Soleia Palace, being received by the 
 people with cheers. The many-coloured masses of 
 the crowds on shore began to move, and unwind 
 themselves, and little by little disappear, like 
 bunches of flowers untied and thrown away into 
 the dust. 
 
 * All those numbers packed together to see iron- 
 clads weigh anchor ! ' thought Othyris, * and not a 
 
XVII HELIANTHUS 283 
 
 man amongst them, probably, to try and save Mount 
 Atys.' 
 
 Without loss of time he instructed one of his 
 most confidential servants to obtain all the informa- 
 tion possible as to the projected purchase by the 
 foreign Syndicate. 
 
 If the Helichrysum hills were sold by the City 
 Corporation it was scarcely probable that the home 
 of Illyris would be spared. Where the lumber-men 
 make a clearing in a wood, the nests of the birds fall 
 and the form of the hare is trodden underfoot. He 
 knew that the owner of Aquilegia was a trader in the 
 maritime quarter of Helios, dealing with the fruit 
 brigs of the coast ; a man who would be certain to 
 part with the hillside property if a good offer were 
 made to him. Othyris would before then have bought 
 the little property, had he not feared the resentment 
 of Illyris if he ever learned that he had become the 
 tenant of a GunderOde. 
 
 Aged and infirm as he was, Illyris would have 
 found strength to leave any place embittered to him 
 by an offered charity ; and even had he means to buy 
 the property, he might be driven out by expropria- 
 tion. He had paid the rent ever since his return from 
 exile, and had almost forgotten that he was not the 
 owner of the place. It had never occurred to him to 
 buy it, although Ilia, who desired to do so, put aside 
 a certain proportion of the money made by her lace 
 work, and saw the little pile of gold coins increase 
 each year with pleasure. Every tree was dear to her, 
 every little singing stream had its echo in her heart ;. 
 she knew where the earliest violets bloomed, where 
 the hyacinths, like those of Wordsworth, seemed the 
 blue of heaven fallen on earth, where the nightin- 
 
284 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 gales built their nests amongst the rotting leaves and 
 drooping fritillaria, and where the striped toads made 
 their summer homes under the ferns and took their 
 winter sleep beneath the rocks. The love of those 
 simple things is a passion with the soul which 
 harbours it ; a passion which has the purity of all 
 impersonal emotion. To those who feel it, the 
 heart seems to grow into the soil like the roots of 
 some sensitive plant. To such as these no change is 
 needed other than the changes given by the seasons, 
 by the daybreak, and the sunset. Othyris knew that 
 this was the passion of Ilia Illyris for the solitude of 
 Aquilegia. Driven out from it, she would be lost 
 and unhappy as a doe driven from its forest. 
 
 Willingly would Othyris have given Illyris any 
 part of the beauty of ^nothrea or any other of his 
 estates ; with gladness would he have offered him 
 any choice of his lands and houses. But he dared 
 not ; he knew that to do so would be both useless 
 and offensive ; the old lion would couch on no alien 
 lair. 
 
 On the morrow his agent gave him full informa- 
 tion as to the impending purchase. The sale by the 
 Municipality was decided on, and only the assent of 
 the King was necessary ; but there was no doubt 
 of this, nor of its ratification by Parliament. The 
 money for the payment was guaranteed by the great 
 financier. Max Vreiheiden. Nothing could look 
 more promising, at least on paper. 
 
 ' If there be no other means of saving the hills, I 
 will bid over their heads,' Othyris said to himself. 
 
 So long as the contract with the Corporation was 
 not signed, so long as the shares were not on the 
 market, he thought it might be possible to prevent 
 
XVII HELIANTHUS 285 
 
 the barter of this portion of the Helianthine coast 
 to foreign speculators. 
 
 His agents and his advisers were not of his 
 opinion ; the King, the Financier, and the Munici- 
 pality offered to their eyes an invincible trio, to say 
 nothing of the Ministers of the Treasury and of 
 Public Works, who were greatly in favour of the 
 project. Othyris listened to their arguments, but 
 was not greatly impressed by them. It seemed to 
 him that to save the glory of Mount Atys and its 
 sea-washed slopes from defilement, was an act which 
 would be both patriotic and aesthetic — a thing to be 
 done, for the sake of the country and the city, even 
 were there no private interests involved. 
 
 He had little knowledge of such speculations, of 
 how to combat and to defeat them ; but experience 
 had already shown him more than once that most 
 questions resolve themselves into a matter of money, 
 and that the longest purse is the strongest combatant. 
 
 It was necessary to act at once and as privately as 
 possible, for if his father intervened with a formal 
 veto in protection of the foreign speculators, it 
 would be difficult for him as a prince of the blood to 
 pass over such a declaration of the royal will. He 
 selected the most competent of his financial adminis- 
 trators, and set them to work to study and con- 
 travene the projects of the foreign Company and the 
 intentions of the men most prominent in the matter. 
 He was well served at all times, for he was a generous 
 and just master ; the secret was well kept and the 
 counterplans were well laid. The amount required 
 to oust the foreigners, and keep Vreiheiden neutral, 
 was very large ; but not larger than he could afford, 
 for the wealth he had inherited from Basil was very 
 
286 HELIANTHUS chap, xvii 
 
 great. Rumours that he was interfering to prevent 
 the sale of that part of the coast were current, but 
 they were vague ; the City of Helios was indifferent 
 who bought, so long as a buyer there was. 
 
 The chief danger of serious opposition lay with 
 the King. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 Some weeks later, as Othyris drew near the house of 
 Platon Illyris in the warm afternoon, to his surprise 
 and pleasure he saw Ilia come over the rough grass 
 between the rose-bushes to meet him. She had 
 never done so before. She seemed in haste, and her 
 eyes looked wet with unfallen tears. 
 
 * Oh, sir ! * she cried to him as she approached. 
 * Will you not help us ? Poor Janos is in great 
 affliction. The guards have taken his son Philemon 
 to prison for having sung the Hymn of Eos ! ' 
 
 The song was the national hymn of Helianthus ; 
 an ancient chant called by scholars the Hymn of 
 Eos, and by the populace the Song of Sunrise. 
 Its origin was lost in the mist of ages, but its 
 memory was green in the hearts of the people. 
 Under all foreign tyrannies it had been forbidden, 
 but whenever freedom was regained its melody 
 returned. It was to the sound of the Hymn of Eos 
 that the War of Independence had been fought by 
 the soldiers of Illyris, and the foreigner driven down 
 into the sea and over the mountains. The grand old 
 battle-song thrilled through the veins of the most 
 sluggish and timid Helianthine. Theodoric owed 
 respect to it, and respected it ; his son tolerated it ; 
 
 287 
 
288 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 his grandson hated it, and persecuted it. He heard 
 in it only the roar of revolution. 
 
 To the present King this national song was so 
 odious, that if, on driving through one of the populous 
 quarters, he heard the lilt of it from some unknown 
 singer, working at leather, or deal, or cloth, or 
 sewing-machine, within some unseen attic or cellar, 
 his comfort for the day was gone, and the head of 
 the secret police had a severe worrying. It was in 
 deference to this antipathy on his part that the two 
 Legislative Houses had, in the second year of his 
 reign, passed a law decreeing the singing of the 
 patriotic ode illegal ; a misdemeanour punishable by 
 imprisonment varying from two days to a twelve- 
 month. 
 
 Now, as it appears to be an axiom in political 
 Hfe that, although governments may change, the 
 laws made by them must not do so, the fine melody 
 of the Hymn of Eos remained a forbidden thing 
 in the Code with fines proportionate in degree. The 
 law had not succeeded in suppressing the chant ; but 
 it had caused much widespread misery, as the offence 
 was almost always only committed by young and 
 poor men, students, operatives, labourers, peasants, 
 and even school children, so that many through this 
 law began their lives in the dock and the prison. 
 Those who condemned the offenders told them 
 that they had only their own wicked obstinacy to 
 thank ; that it was perfectly easy to abstain from 
 singing a song ; that to be forbidden to sing it 
 involved no hardship ; that there were fifty thousand 
 other songs on which no ban was laid. But this 
 kind of argument has never availed yet to move 
 human nature ; and it did not avail in Helianthus. 
 
XVIII HELIANTHUS 289 
 
 There was always some one chanting somewhere the 
 forbidden hymn, in field, or vineyard, or sheep-fold, 
 in garret, or work-yard, or cobbler's den ; always 
 some one to be brought up for judgment. 
 
 Whenever a Liberal Ministry came into office 
 it was supposed by the populace that this law 
 would be repealed. But it never was so. The 
 royal influence was too strong and the office-holders 
 too timid ; and the Press continued to record arrests 
 for the heinous and grave offence, just as when the 
 reactionary party prevailed. He who makes the 
 songs of a nation makes its history, it has been 
 said ; but this song, having been often one of the 
 makers of the history of a nation, was now considered 
 but a gallows bird. The song, however, was in the 
 hearts of the people, and rose often to their lips. 
 No petitions were so often thrown into the carriage 
 of Othyris, flung up to his balconies, or lifted to the 
 level of his saddle, as those of parents, or sisters, or 
 betrothed, of youngsters who had been condemned 
 for this offence. None caused him greater pain. 
 His position debarred him from showing his sympathy 
 with those condemned, and power to abrogate their 
 sentences he did not possess. When a pale and 
 desperate woman tore her way through a throng and 
 clung frantically to his stirrup leather to plead to 
 him for her boy, who had been arrested for shouting 
 the revolutionary chorus as he had walked with some 
 comrades through the vines in the moonlight, or had 
 sat drinking a lemonade at a tavern door with some 
 lads come out like himself from the hell of a furnace 
 or of an engine-room, he could do nothing for her ; 
 for what use were words? The boys had broken 
 the law. The law was unjust, idiotic, senseless, 
 
 u 
 
290 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 cruel ; but it had become the law. He, the son 
 of the Defender of the Law, could not take their 
 part. 
 
 ' Only for that ! ' he said now to Ilia. * Where 
 was he ? ' 
 
 * On the shore down yonder, gathering seaweed. 
 He was singing the song as he worked, thinking no 
 harm. He is only seventeen.' 
 
 * I am very sorry.' 
 
 ' That is of little use, sir. Release him. He is 
 so young, and the oifence is surely a very little 
 one.' 
 
 * Release him ? I ? Believe me, if I had any 
 power, that song might be sung from end to end of 
 the country.' 
 
 * Some power you must have. With you as with 
 the Popes it is only non possumus when you wish.' 
 
 ' I have none, in the sense which you suppose. I 
 cannot interfere in any matter lying within the 
 jurisdiction of the law.' 
 
 A look of incredulity and contempt passed over 
 her face and wounded him, like spoken scorn from 
 one esteemed. 
 
 ' Sir, you know as well as I do that, indirectly if 
 not immediately, your family influences, however and 
 wherever it chooses, the course of public justice.' 
 
 A flush rose to his face of anger and morti- 
 fication. 
 
 * That is a very grave accusation,' he said. * I 
 think you do not realise how grave it is.' 
 
 ' It is grave, no doubt. But if you care for truth 
 you cannot deny it.' 
 
 * It is not truth. It is an exaggeration, even if it 
 be not a libel. We cannot, and do not, touch the 
 
XVIII HELIANTHUS 291 
 
 course of civil law. The power of the King himself 
 stops at the doors of the public tribunals/ 
 
 * These are mere phrases,' she said with con- 
 temptuous indiiFerence ; * you would not use them 
 to my great-grandfather/ 
 
 ' He would not say to me what you say. Men 
 keep within some measure of moderation in reproach 
 and censure/ 
 
 ' I think he would certainly say to you that if you 
 look into your conscience you will see there that 
 it is not unjust.* 
 
 * It is exaggerated ; and as regards myself it is 
 entirely untrue.' 
 
 * That may be.* 
 
 Her tone had a doubt in it, an unspoken in- 
 credulity, which wounded him. He could not say 
 on his honour that the privileges of the Crown were 
 never strained. There passed through his mind 
 many memories which told his conscience that she 
 was not altogether wrong ; memories of acts with 
 which he had nothing to do, which he had possessed 
 no more power to prevent than to prevent the 
 revolving of the moons of Saturn, but by which 
 members of his family had turned aside the course of 
 public equity as an engineer turns aside the course 
 of a stream. The engineer sits unseen in his office, 
 and has no weapon but his pen and his mathematical 
 instruments ; but it is by him, through him, that the 
 merry babbling of the water through the flags and 
 cresses is arrested, and the birds on its banks left 
 athirst. 
 
 He remembered Corvus, who had been saved 
 again and again from certain exposure and probable 
 condemnation in the tribunals, because he had been 
 
292 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 in his sovereign's sight a heaven-born Minister, a 
 kneeling lion holding up on mighty shoulders the 
 throne and all its pomp and prestige. He re- 
 membered a colleague of Corvus, Noevius, who had 
 died in office, heavy with years and honours and riches, 
 though again and again the public voice and the public 
 prints had proved against him the appropriation of 
 funds, the sale of places and contracts, the most un- 
 blushing nepotism and venality in patronage, the 
 selection for high emprises of favoured incapables. 
 
 He remembered the Baron Anthemis, an aide-de- 
 camp of the Crown Prince, who had killed with a 
 sabre-thrust a citizen who had jostled him on the 
 pavement of a narrow street in Helios, and who had 
 been found guiltless by the courts, both civil and 
 military, and was still taking his ease on the 
 boulevards of the city. He remembered the Countess 
 Corianthus, who had been guilty of forgery to the 
 amount of several millions of francs, but who was a 
 Lady of the Bedchamber to Princess Gertrude, and 
 was never brought to justice, but merely endured an 
 agreeable exile, her husband being sent on a 
 diplomatic mission to a great empire, where she 
 shone as the most brilliant of ambassadresses. He 
 remembered another great lady, the Duchess Daubrio, 
 who, when her husband had been Minister of 
 War, had stolen and sold to a foreign Power plans 
 of mobilisation and' fortification — a despicable 
 betrayal for which she had never been troubled 
 in any way. He remembered Colonel Vislauer, 
 commanding a regiment of Foot Guards, who 
 had caused three of his men, for a trifling ofl^ence 
 against discipline, to be stripped and stretched face 
 downward on the stones of the barrack-yard whilst 
 
XVIII HELIANTHUS 293 
 
 he kicked them in the ribs with his jack-boots. 
 No action of any kind was ever taken against 
 Colonel Vislauer for this brutal crime, because he 
 was an officer highly esteemed by the King, and 
 admired by the Emperor Julius. 
 
 Othyris was powerless to alter these abuses.. 
 There would be always * Hctors to clear the market- 
 place and put their necks beneath the curule chair,' 
 as in the Claudian days. These remembrances, and 
 others like them, thronged on his mind under the 
 sting of her words. 
 
 Direct, avowed, conspicuous interference there was 
 none ; but indirect influence there was continually, 
 acting like that atmospheric pressure which is at once 
 invisible and irresistible. 
 
 She saw that he was humiliated and distressed, but 
 she was not moved to pity. 
 
 ' Why,' she said — * why, sir, should it be only the 
 worthless and the exalted who are so protected ? 
 Why will you not help Philemon ? ' 
 
 * I have told you — I have no power,' said Othyris 
 with anger and impatience of her unkindness. 
 * Your poor lad Philemon is not a dishonest Minister, 
 or a military favourite, or a Court beauty, that he 
 should be saved from an unpleasant punishment, 
 nor am I one of those who can stop the law in its 
 strides. Were it known that I felt any interest in 
 the son of Janos it would do him far more harm 
 than good.' 
 
 * Why ? ' she asked incredulous. 
 
 'Because I am a "suspect" myself,' said Othyris 
 with irritation. ' Every action of mine is subject to 
 suspicion. By my family I am considered a Philippe 
 Egalite in embryo.' 
 
294 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 * Egalite lived and died basely.' 
 
 ' I do not think my life is base ; my death 
 certainly shall not be/ 
 
 * You cannot tell/ 
 
 ' Oh, pardon me ; so much at least any human 
 being may be sure of ; he cannot know what death 
 he will meet, but he can know in what temper he 
 will meet it/ 
 
 * Whilst you philosophise, Philemon, poor child, 
 is in prison/ 
 
 'You are very harsh to me/ 
 
 ' Why should I not be ? You have everything the 
 world can give. You do not need any indulgence/ 
 
 ' Do you think material possessions can compensate 
 for the unrest of the mind, for the captivity of the 
 spirit ? ' 
 
 * I can understand that to some temperaments they 
 do not compensate ; but your sorrows seem fictitious 
 to me, beside the reality of the woes that I have 
 seen.' 
 
 At that moment the peasant Janos rushed through 
 the olive trees, and fell at the feet of Othyris ; he 
 was a rude, wild, hairy figure, with great black eyes, 
 now burning with pain and wet with tears ; his breast 
 was bare ; his skin was bronzed brown, his beard 
 long and unkempt. 
 
 * My lord, my lord ! ' he cried. * They say you 
 are one of those who reign. Oh, hear, and be 
 merciful, my lord ! They have taken my boy, my 
 first-born son ; he was singing down on the shore, 
 as he filled a creel with seaweed ; the song is 
 forbidden, they say — I do not know. How can 
 singing a song be a crime ? They have taken him 
 into the city, into their prison. I have been there ; 
 
XVIII HELIANTHUS 295 
 
 they will not open to me, nor let him out. You 
 who are great, and full of power, make them open. 
 Give me back my boy ! ' 
 
 Othyris was profoundly affected. 
 
 * Get up, good man,' he said with gentleness. * I 
 am grieved ; but, alas, I am as powerless as you 
 are.' 
 
 ' Set him free ; set him free ! * cried Janos, who 
 did not rise, but kept his brown toil-worn hands 
 clasped round the knees of the man whom he believed 
 was omnipotent. ' He was sixteen last day of all the 
 Saints. Only sixteen, my lord ! a little lad who 
 should be at play, and he works like an ox at the 
 mill, to aid me, and get bread for his brothers. Only 
 singing a song ! — God in Heaven ! the same old song 
 that was sung by the men who followed the Great 
 Man when he drove the strangers into the sea.' 
 
 His hands relaxed their hold, he rolled upon the 
 turf in the hysterical anguish of the southern peasant, 
 tearing madly at his matted auburn hair, shrieking 
 like a butchered ram whose throat is gashed by the 
 knife. 
 
 * You might have spared me this,' said Othyris to 
 Ilia lUyris. * Believe me, I need no pressure.* 
 
 ' I did not know that he was near.' 
 
 She bent over the writhing body of the peasant. 
 
 * Janos, arise,' she said as she touched his shoulder. 
 ' You can hear me ? You hurt yourself and me, my 
 friend. The Duke of Othyris is sorry for you and 
 for the boy.' 
 
 Janos was calmed by her touch and her voice, as 
 an infuriated animal is touched by those of one whom 
 he loves and is accustomed to obey. He did not 
 rise from the ground, but he ceased to rave, and 
 
296 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 writhe, and tear his hair and beard ; he lay face 
 downward on the grass, trembhng and sobbing 
 bitterly. Othyris stood near him, moved to a great 
 and painful pity. 
 
 To those who are accustomed, by breeding and 
 through pride, to restrain in themselves the outward 
 expression of all emotion, a violent and ungoverned 
 display of strong feeling always appears to the heart- 
 less indecent, to the merciful most piteous. Unveiled 
 emotion always appears an offence to those accus- 
 tomed to the restraints of a polished society. 
 
 * I feel wholly with you, Janos,* he said. * Rise, 
 my poor man, and take courage. If there be any 
 way in which I can help you I will take it. Are you 
 sure your son went quietly with the town guards ? 
 If he struggled * 
 
 * No doubt he struggled. No doubt he rebelled. 
 He is a youth with a man's heart/ said Ilia Illyris with 
 some disdain. * Do not even the timid fawn and 
 sheep rebel, when they are being dragged to the 
 shambles ? ' 
 
 Janos staggered up to his feet. 
 
 * Did he rebel ? I know not, my lord. No one 
 was there. As they passed through the city gate he 
 saw Damon, the son of Orestes, who is a comrade of 
 his, and he cried aloud to him of what had chanced. 
 ** Tell father,'' he cried — " tell father they take me to 
 prison for singing the Song of Sunrise," and 
 Damon, the son of Orestes, came up hither to me, 
 fast as a dog may run, and he said : *' They are taking 
 him down to the city prison. Philemon will not 
 sleep at home to-night, nor many nights to come.'* 
 And that is all that Damon, the son of Orestes, knew, 
 and all that I know.' 
 
xvin HELIANTHUS 297 
 
 Then he threw up his arms to heaven, and wailed 
 aloud ; a dark, wild, most sorrowful, most terrible 
 figure, standing in the clear green sunlight beneath 
 the trees. 
 
 ' I will do what I can,' said Othyris. 
 
 * Go, Janos,* said Ilia. * You hear what hope is 
 given you. I will come and speak with your wife 
 before the sun is down.' 
 
 ' Will he be back this night ? ' said Janos, the 
 great sobs breaking his words. 
 
 * There is no hope of that, my poor friend,' said 
 Othyris. * The law is quick to take, and very slow 
 to loose.' 
 
 ' When — when — ' gasped Janos — ' when, oh my 
 lord.?' 
 
 ' I cannot tell ; I can promise nothing. I possess 
 no power. But what I can I will do. Go now. 
 You will hear from me.' 
 
 The accent of authority, which was natural to 
 Othyris when wearied or opposed, asserted itself 
 through the kindness and compassion of his tone. 
 It cowed and silenced the peasant ; he ceased to 
 importune, he tried to restrain his grief; he ceased 
 to wail and scream ; with despair upon his face he 
 slunk away between the great trunks of the olives ; 
 he did not dare even to pray any more. 
 
 * He is a poor, rude creature, sir,' said Ilia. * He 
 is not a courtier ! ' 
 
 * He is distraught,' said Othyris ; ' and you, lady, 
 are unkind.' 
 
 The colour rose into her cheeks. 
 
 * I was wrong,' she said ; ' I should have thanked 
 you. You were good to him.' 
 
 Othyris bowed to her, and took his leave in silence. 
 
298 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 He was wounded by what seemed to him her injustice 
 and unkindness. 
 
 Ilia remained out of doors by that old well where 
 she had spoken with him ; she sat down upon its 
 marble ledge, which was broad and solid as a bench 
 and carved with the acanthus leaf so dear to classic 
 stone-workers. She was vaguely startled by the in- 
 fluence which she dimly perceived that she possessed 
 over Othyris. Some slight comprehension of the 
 intense restraint which he must put upon himself to 
 submit to her disregard of all the formalities and 
 deference to which he was by habit accustomed, 
 and by his birth entitled, dawned on her ; and 
 for the first time she asked herself why he did so. 
 Was it not, she thought, because he was sincerely 
 weary of the conventionalities and hypocrisies of 
 etiquette ? 
 
 This explanation seemed to her simple and natural ; 
 and she could not, from her ignorance of the world, 
 measure in any degree the vast power which she must 
 exercise over him to make him subdued to such 
 renunciation of his claims to respect, such submission 
 to her continual ironies and censure, her complete 
 indifference to his rank. But for the first time, that 
 morning, some perception of all which she ignored, 
 and which he renounced, dawned on her ; and the 
 dignity and forbearance of his attitude under the 
 provocation which she perpetually gave, claimed her 
 admiration and moved her to a certain penitence. 
 Birth, and the whimsical caprices of men, gave him 
 the authority and the rank he held ; it was the fault 
 of the world, not of himself. 
 
 She sat under the olives, whilst the swallows flew 
 to and from their nests under the eaves of her house, 
 
XVIII HELIANTHUS 299 
 
 and a greater sympathy stirred in her towards the 
 son of the King than she had ever felt before. He 
 was to her only Elim of GunderOde, but to all the 
 world he was one of the Princes of Helianthus, be- 
 fore whose coming crowds acclaimed, and trumpets 
 sounded, and sentinels saluted, and in whom all the 
 servility of the human race recognised un grand de 
 la terre, 
 
 * Ilia ! * called the voice of Platon Illyris from the 
 study window. 
 
 She rose and went. 
 
 'So they have taken the son of Janos to their 
 prison because he sang the Song of Eos ! ' said Illyris 
 as she entered. * Heavens and Earth ! But for that 
 hymn what were the country to-day } A geographical 
 expression ! A loose shaft of arrows that any hand 
 could break ! Ah, child, if you had heard the people 
 sing that song in the days of my youth ! It roused 
 them as one man from the mountains to the sea. We 
 who were scholars called it the Hymn of Eos ; but the 
 people called it the Song of Sunrise. It is so old, 
 so old, that mighty hymn. Men say it was written 
 by Pindar. That is mere conjecture. But what is 
 sure is that its strophes were sung when the armies 
 of the Medes and Persians were driven out of 
 Helianthus, and the tyranny of the Asiatics ended 
 then and for ever.* 
 
 The Song of Eos ! 
 
 Across the long dark space of joyless years Illyris 
 saw the rosy morns and golden eves of his early 
 manhood, when he, and the brothers and friends of 
 his heart, had gone through the seeding grass of 
 summer, or along the edge of the blue sea, chanting 
 its chorus in triumphant defiance. 
 
300 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 The Song of Eos ! 
 
 How often had the grandeur of its strophe and 
 ante-strophe rolled like thunder above the ranks of 
 his young soldiers, urging them on to combat and to 
 victory as though the Divine Twins rode on their 
 milk-white steeds and called to them aloud, as in the 
 great strife of yore. 
 
 And now the classic battle-chant was a forbidden 
 thing, an oiFence, a misdemeanour, a breach of 
 common law ! 
 
 Platon lUyris struck his tremulous hand upon the 
 wooden arm of his chair. God of Battles ! For 
 what had they fought, he and his ? For what had 
 they died, all the brave and beautiful youths of the 
 years of the liberation ? 
 
 O cruel cynic that men call Fate ! O grinning 
 satirist that men call Time ! 
 
 ' If I had known, if I had foreseen this rule of the 
 Gunderode,' he muttered, * I would have left the 
 stranger in the land, I would have left the foreigner 
 in her palaces, and the alien flag on her towers ; and 
 I would have bought a sailing vessel and sailed far 
 away from her shores, and left to their choice a 
 bloodless and spineless people, who, having achieved 
 freedom, knew not how to hold it in their nerveless 
 hands ! ' 
 
 The land had been to him as a fair woman enslaved 
 and fettered. He had given all his life to her service, 
 and had set her free, and had put in her hands the 
 golden fruit and flowers of liberty ; and she, she had 
 thrown down the fruit in the dust, and had stretched 
 out her wrists to the fetters ! Wise in their genera- 
 tion had been the men who had never fought, the 
 men who had never dreamed, the men who never 
 
xvrii HELIANTHUS 301 
 
 pitied, or strove, or desired ; but sat in their dens 
 like the spiders, and spun their webs, and devoured 
 their prey, and waxed fat, leaving others to toil and 
 to suffer, and the great salt sea of human tears to 
 roll on from pole to pole ! 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 On leaving Aquilegia, Othyris took his way to 
 the annex of the Soleia Palace, used as a pied- 
 h-terre by Tyras, who happened at this time to be 
 spending a few days in Helios. It was never 
 for very long that Gavroche honoured Helios or 
 Helianthus ; he was generally to be found in the 
 pleasure places of other countries, where he felt freer, 
 and was not worried by any obligations to conduct 
 himself occasionally with decency. Othyris found 
 him in his bath-room, having been groomed by his 
 valet and wrapped in robes of silken stuffs, and left, 
 by his command, to sleep an hour or two before 
 being dressed for the evening. Without, it was still 
 a light and lovely evening, with the rays of the sun 
 still rising like an array of spears above the horizon 
 of the sea. 
 
 But in the rooms of Tyras all was shuttered and 
 perfumed and hot. Tyras had never looked at a 
 sunset in his life. He was lying on his back on a 
 soft couch ; he was always tired ; he was a Hercules 
 in his build, but he was an utter wreck in his con- 
 stitution. At seven -and -twenty he was a ruin, 
 wholly in body and partly in mind. 
 
 Othyris looked at him with his usual contempt ; 
 302 
 
CHAP. XIX HELIANTHUS 303 
 
 and the prostrate figure stretched itself with lazy 
 ennui. 
 
 He was not pleased to see his brother enter ; 
 but he had never dared to keep out Othyris, for 
 whom he had the sullen respect and the unwilling 
 submission of the debtor to the creditor. 
 
 * What the devil can you want at this hour ? ' he 
 muttered, with the straw of a strong drink between 
 his teeth. 
 
 ' I do not come for pleasure, you may be sure,* 
 said Othyris. 
 
 ' Have any of them been to you ? * said Gavroche, 
 meaning his creditors. 
 
 ' No. You are not drunk, I think,' said Elim, * at 
 least not so drunk as not to be able to understand. 
 Sit up, and hear me.' 
 
 ' I will hear you,' said Tyras, ' but damn me if I 
 will sit up. What is it you come to say ? ' 
 
 * Listen, and comprehend. You will see the 
 Minister of Justice, Deliornis, at the Palace 
 to-night. You must take him aside, and tell him 
 that the youth whose name is written on this paper 
 has been arrested and imprisoned for singing a for- 
 bidden song ; that he must let out this lad by such 
 means and on such counts as he may judge fittest ; 
 but that the boy is innocent and must be restored to 
 his parents, who are poor peasants dwelling on Mount 
 Atys, without being marked or injured for life by a 
 penal sentence or by a longer imprisonment, or by 
 any punishment of any kind. You hear ? ' 
 
 * You want chestnuts taken out of the fire. Why 
 do you not speak to Rags yourself ? ' 
 
 ' I never speak to the man whom you call Rags ; 
 and any interference of mine would only damage 
 
304 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 this lad ; they would be sure he was an anarchist 
 and an atheist if I tried to save him. You are 
 orthodox and royalist ! Certainly your protection 
 will be injurious to him in another way, but he is a 
 peasant, not a citizen, and so that kind of indecent 
 calumny will not hurt him much, as he will always 
 remain in ignorance of it.' 
 
 * Deliornis is very rough on all the revolutionary 
 scum ; he will be a mule to move.' 
 
 ' My dear Gavroche ! When a monarchical mule 
 is touched by a prince's whip he moves at once, 
 obediently ; indeed he can never trot fast enough ! 
 Besides the Minister can take his information, and 
 satisfy his conservative conscience. This is what 
 you have got to do ; and you are not to name me 
 in the matter.* 
 
 Tyras raised his head from the cushions, and 
 looked at his brother with glassy, insolent, mocking 
 eyes in which there danced a hundred little devils of 
 vile suspicions and lubricities which he did not dare 
 embody in words. 
 
 ' There is the boy's name,' said Othyris, as he put 
 a slip of paper on a marble table beside the bath. 
 * Take it with you to the Palace, or you will forget 
 the name. The boy was arrested on the seashore 
 beneath Mount Atys yesterday, Thursday, in the 
 forenoon. Put out of your head all impudent and 
 unclean suppositions. There is no place for them 
 in this case. The youth is a harmless and ignorant 
 little peasant. What he sang was the Song of Eos. 
 That song may be very abhorrent to Deliornis, but 
 it is written in the hearts of the whole populace 
 of this country.' 
 
 * And your motive ; what is it ? ' 
 
XIX HELIANTHUS 
 
 305 
 
 * It is not one which you could understand. 
 Abstract justice would be as unintelligible to you as 
 is voluntary sobriety/ 
 
 Gavroche laughed a little, lazily. He always 
 appreciated his brother's epigrammatic phrases. 
 
 ' What will you give me ? * he asked. * Every 
 affair comes to that.* 
 
 *When one negotiates with those who are pur- 
 chasable, yes. I am quite prepared to pay you and 
 to pay your politician. Every favour obtained from 
 an incorruptible Minister must be paid twice over : 
 to the intermediary, and to the incorruptible.' 
 
 Tyras laughed again, relishing the reply. 
 
 * You amuse me ! What will Deliornis want 
 beyond the honour of conversing confidentially with 
 me in the sight of society ? Nothing, I should think. 
 It will give him such immense pleasure. I am a 
 slightly damaged peach, perhaps, but I am a prize 
 peach, and I am still in the basket.' 
 
 * What will you want ^ ' said Othyris. * Say at 
 once. I must leave you in Ryq minutes.' 
 
 * Give me Coscyra.' 
 
 ' I admire your modesty.' 
 
 Coscyra was one of the finest estates in the 
 possession of Othyris. 
 
 * Give me Coscyra,' repeated Gavroche. 
 
 * No. No one of my estates ever goes out of 
 my ownership.' 
 
 *You think the people on them a charge 
 d'dmes ! ' 
 
 * Never mind what I think. They do not change 
 hands. What I will do if you get this poor lad's 
 freedom is to have all the paper you have given to 
 Reuben Muntze bought up by my agents and 
 
 X 
 
3o6 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 destroyed. Muntze is the most dangerous of all 
 your Jews.' 
 
 * But that will not give me any money ! ' 
 
 ' No, but it will save you a good deal. Have 
 you ever calculated the interest you pay all these 
 men ? ' 
 
 ' No ; it runs on ' 
 
 * Precisely. It does run on ; and the longer it 
 runs on the worse for you. Bankrupt princes, my 
 dear Gavroche, have been seen in this world.' 
 
 ' Yes ; but they are always sure of a good dinner 
 with American nouveaux riches ! ' said Gavroche 
 with a chuckle. ' If Uncle Basil had left me what 
 he left you ' 
 
 ' A score of Basils would not have saved you from 
 yourself.' 
 
 Gavroche, who was no fool, knew that this was 
 true ; and for once he was silenced. 
 
 * Well,' said Othyris, * do you accept .'^ ' 
 
 ' You will set me free of Muntze altogether } ' 
 
 * I will set you free of all your existing obligations 
 to him. I dare say you will try to make others to- 
 morrow. But I shall hope to prevent that.' 
 
 Tyras hesitated ; he would have preferred money 
 down ; but Muntze was the most intrusive, the 
 most ill-bred, the most odious of all his creditors. 
 He had got the money-lender made a baron, and 
 decorated ; but Muntze was always importuning 
 and never satisfied ; he was always wanting unattain- 
 able things : election to patrician clubs inexorably 
 shut in his face ; entrance to houses where the hall- 
 porters would have closed the doors against him ; 
 presentations to men who would sooner have sat 
 down to dinner with a sweep; invitations to race- 
 
XIX HELIANTHUS 307 
 
 meetings, to yachting-matches, to the drawing-rooms 
 of great ladies, to the dressing-rooms of great 
 actresses. For Muntze was ambitious of social success, 
 and did not quite correctly estimate social require- 
 ments ; was loud in his dress, profuse in his jewellery, 
 self-assertive in his manners, and had not the humility 
 and amiability which alone can excuse the pretentions 
 of the novus homo to be received in high places ; he 
 did not even know how to lose at cards to his social 
 superiors with tact. There was no doubt, thought 
 Tyras, he was the most painful kind of creditor under 
 the sun. 
 
 ' I accept,' he said sullenly. * Will you put it in 
 writing } * 
 
 * No, I will not,' replied Othyris. ' When the 
 young man is given back to his parents, I will do 
 what I have said. You know me.' 
 
 ' Au revoir^ done ; ce soir chez Tapa^ said Tyras, 
 perceiving that he could make no better terms. 
 
 His brother knew that he would do his best to 
 get the release of Philemon from Deliornis, for 
 Gavroche, when he had his own interests to serve, 
 and his brain was clear of alcohol, was an exceedingly 
 intelligent and acute negotiator. 
 
 Left alone, he now finished his iced drink agree- 
 ably to himself, and turned the matter with which 
 he was entrusted over in his mind. Gavroche when 
 he liked could be an enjUeur ; he had when he chose 
 a fascination in his drowsy regard, and in the slight, 
 mocking smile of his thin lips, which bewildered 
 many, attracted many, and dominated not a few, 
 though some, and those timid women and honest men, 
 shrank from it. 
 
 The generosity of Othyris did not cause him any 
 
3o8 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 surprise because he was used to such liberality ; but 
 he thought that his brother must set great store on 
 this youth for some reason unrevealed. There were 
 hundreds of men and boys arrested every year for 
 singing that song. Why did one out of the many 
 interest Elim so greatly ? That, however, he re- 
 flected, would not be difficult to discover, for here 
 was the boy's name, Philemon, son of Janos Odiskia, 
 who was a labourer in the olive woods of Aquilegia, 
 a district of the Helichrysum hills. Though Tyras 
 habitually drenched his brains with brandy, he was 
 shrewd, and did not make the mistake of judging 
 others by himself He did not suspect that anything 
 disreputable was the cause of his brother's action, 
 but he reasoned that the motive must be strong, 
 exceedingly strong. 
 
 * I will get over Deliornis, and then I will find it 
 all out,' he said to himself. He liked finding out 
 what was concealed, and was clever at it, when his 
 indolence, and his caprice, and his inconstancy, did 
 not make him weary of a chase before he had got 
 fairly on the scent in it. The same thing never 
 attracted or occupied him for long ; not even his 
 own interests. 
 
 ' You would have had more power than any of us 
 if you had not burned up your brains with brandy 
 and impaired your volition with morphine,' Othyris 
 had said to him one day. 
 
 * The river would be dry land if it were not 
 water,' said Tyras. * Have you nothing more novel 
 to say than that ? A patron once told me in Paris 
 that all his workmen died before thirty-five of drink 
 of some sort. Why should I be more virtuous than 
 a man in a blouse } ' 
 
XIX HELIANTHUS 309 
 
 * There are a great many reasons with which I 
 will not trouble you, because they would not weigh 
 with you/ 
 
 * And there are a great many reasons with which 
 they would trouble me, if I were not irreclaimable. 
 The King sent me a tour in the northern provinces 
 when you were in Asia — oh-he ! I promise you he 
 won't send me on another.' 
 
 He laughed his short, weak sardonic laugh of 
 which diseased lungs were the feeble bellows, but 
 which had a faint, far-ofF echo of childish mirth in 
 it which made his brother's heart ache, recalling 
 other days. 
 
 Gavroche had not been mistaken when he had 
 counted securely on the complacency and compliance 
 of the Minister in such a small matter as the arrest 
 of a poor peasant. Deliornis would have opened 
 wide the door of the fullest penitentiary in Helianthus 
 to enjoy that delightful quarter of an hour in which 
 the Prince of Tyras sat beside him in a recess, put- 
 ting his hand familiarly on his shoulder and saying, 
 * Voyez donc^ mon cher? To be called * mon cher ' by 
 a prince of the blood, Deliornis would cheerfully have 
 passed a decree declaring that all prisons of every 
 kind should be abolished ! Kantakuzene stiffened 
 his back sometimes ; Deliornis never. The former 
 had the irritating qualities of a man who has studied 
 back history and his contemporaries ; the latter had 
 that delightful inferiority which comes from the total 
 absence of early education. Kantakuzene occasionally 
 was overborne by his own intellect into showing that 
 he did not greatly estimate that of royal personages ; 
 Deliornis never showed this, because he never felt it, 
 — never felt anything in the presence of his monarch 
 
3 TO HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 except the humility and the timidity which the 
 tradesman feels before a patrician customer. 
 
 Deliornis attributed the worst motives possible to 
 his prince's interest in the young peasant, but that 
 did not prevent him from obeying the wishes of 
 Tyras. He would have trodden on all laws and 
 all justice if any one of the royal family had 
 desired it ; and he consented as readily to set the 
 lad free without examination of the charge made 
 against him, as he would have consented to put him 
 in prison without any charge at all if invited to do so 
 by the same personage. 
 
 Of necessity, he said that the law must take its 
 course ; that his personal interference with a question 
 of the police was utterly out of the question ; that no 
 personal pressure could ever be exercised, etc. etc. ; and 
 with equal discretion Gavroche assured him that he 
 would never dream of his going out of the proper 
 course of ministerial etiquette to oblige himself; that 
 all he asked was clemency for the offence, if offence 
 there were. But each of them knew very well, when 
 their conversation ended, that Philemon, son of Janos, 
 would be outside the gates of the gaol on the morrow, 
 simply because the Prince of Tyras wished it. ^Au 
 bon entendeur salut I ' 
 
 That evening the fastidious people, who could not 
 see in a rag -merchant a heaven-born statesman, 
 observed with disapproval and curiosity that the Prince 
 of Tyras, who was quite sober, looked like a gentle- 
 man, and wore that air of amiable condescension which 
 he could put on when he liked, conversed long and 
 seriously with Deliornis in a flower-filled alcove of 
 one of the least frequented of the Palace drawing- 
 rooms. No one could hear what passed, but the long 
 
XIX HELIANTHUS 311 
 
 conversation gave rise to many comments and con- 
 jectures on the part of the guests of the Court. 
 
 On the morrow Othyris received a note signed 
 ' Gavroche ' : 
 
 * // was all a mistake of the Carabineers. The usual 
 fault : too much zeal in the public service. So touching I 
 
 The youthy not later than to-morrow^ will be restored to 
 the bosom of his family., with compensation. Now rid 
 me of Reuben.' 
 
 Greatly to the chagrin of Baron Muntze all the 
 signatures of the Prince of Tyras were withdrawn 
 from his hold, the amounts for which they had been 
 given being paid to him with full interest. A caution 
 was at the same time conveyed to him that if he lent 
 again to the Prince of Tyras he would be likely to 
 get into trouble in high places. 
 
 * Damn me, I ought not to spy on Elim after that ! * 
 thought Gavroche, in an emotion of genuine gratitude 
 to his brother ; and the mystery of his brother's 
 interest in the youth who had been arrested was 
 left unpenetrated by him for the moment, through 
 one of those intermittent impulses of honour which 
 now and then illumined the sodden darkness of his 
 soul. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 On the following day, towards sunset, the boy 
 Philemon stood again on the mud floor of the little 
 home so dear to him ; he was embraced, kissed, wept 
 over, received as one risen from the dead. 
 
 What had happened to him ? He knew no more 
 than a young dog why he had been seized and 
 chained up, then unchained and let loose. 
 
 ' They took me/ he said to his parents, when their 
 clamours and caresses grew a little quieter. * They 
 came down on the beach and said I was singing the 
 song ; yes, I was singing the song as I raked up the 
 weed. They used me roughly and swore at me. 
 They tied my arms behind me. They took me down 
 to a guard-house by the Gate of Olives ; and, when it 
 was dark, to that gaol which stands by the church of 
 Our Lady of Tears, the gaol that is all black and 
 dreadful, and they put me in a stone cell, and there 
 was no light ; I was frightened. I screamed. Two 
 guards came in and beat me, and they chained me 
 to the floor. I had had nothing to eat. They 
 brought me some water, but they held it in a pail to 
 my mouth to drink, and most of it was spilled over. 
 They left me some bread, but I could not eat. They 
 left me alone a long, long time. They came in hours 
 and hours after ; I suppose it was night ; it was all 
 
 312 
 
CHAP. XX HELIANTHUS 313 
 
 dark. They had lanterns. *'Ah, you are dainty, 
 are you, gallows bird ? " they said when they saw the 
 bread uneaten ; and they kicked and cuffed me. 
 Then they went out and left me in the dark. I do 
 not know how long it was before they came again. 
 They took me out in the morning light. There was 
 bright full sun in the passages. My head swam. 
 They took me to a man sitting at a desk, all buttoned 
 up with epaulettes on his shoulders. He said to me, 
 " You may go. It was a mistake." And he wrote 
 in a big book. ** Take him outside and let him go," 
 he said to the guards. " Here, you boy, say nothing ; 
 say only it was a mistake." And he gave me three 
 gold pieces. Here they are.* 
 
 His mother and brothers and sisters crowded to 
 look ; they had never seen gold. But his father 
 said : 
 
 *You should not have taken them. They had 
 beaten you. Why did you take their money ? Give 
 them to me. I will ask the Great Man.' 
 
 So he always called Platon Illyris. Philemon gave 
 them. 
 
 * I took them because I was afraid. I shall always 
 be afraid * 
 
 His voice was very low, his eyes were haggard, 
 his limbs trembled with fever. His youth had gone 
 out of him ; it was unlikely that it would ever return. 
 Beat a young dog brutally ; he will never be the same 
 dog again. 
 
 Janos went up to the house of Illyris ; they already 
 knew of the boy's arrival. When he had told his 
 son's story he showed the gold which he held in his 
 hand. 
 
 ' Sir,' he said to Illyris, ' the Master of the gaol 
 
314 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 gave Philemon these three pieces. Should he keep 
 them ? ' 
 
 * No/ said Illyris. * Give them to me/ 
 Janos gave them. 
 
 * Child, bring me the little coffer,' said Illyris. 
 Ilia brought it ; a small and rusty box of iron, 
 
 very strong, found many years before in the earth 
 beneath the roots of an olive-tree blown down in a 
 storm ; it was probably many centuries old. 
 
 Illyris opened it, took out three pieces of the same 
 value, and gave them to Janos, taking those of the 
 gaol in their stead. 
 
 Then at his table he wrote in his fine bold 
 characters, a little tremulous from age : 
 
 * If these three gold pieces are intended as the measure 
 of your equity they are too much: if they are intended 
 as the measure of your iniquity they are too little.' 
 
 Then he signed his name Platon Illyris, put the 
 paper and the coins under cover, and sealed them. 
 
 * Send Maia with this to the gaol, and bid her see 
 that they give it to the governor,' he said to Ilia. 
 ' Let her go the first thing in the morning.' 
 
 * Is it the King's son who has set Philemon free ? ' 
 asked Janos. 
 
 ' Ay, they can bind and loose,' said Illyris 
 bitterly. 
 
 * Should we not thank him, sir } ' Ilia said with 
 hesitation as Janos went away. 
 
 * Thank whom } ' 
 
 * The Duke of Othyris. It must be he who has 
 caused the boy to be liberated.' 
 
 * Doubtless. Princes always say they have no 
 
XX HELIANTHUS 315 
 
 power, but they can bind and loose, as I said, at their 
 pleasure ! ' 
 
 * But at least when they act justly do they not 
 deserve some gratitude like other men ? ' 
 
 ' Their debt to Helianthus is as wide and as deep 
 as the sea ; if one of them pay a trifle back, by some 
 little act which costs him nothing, have the children 
 of Helianthus any right or call to be thankful ? 
 That is unworthy reasoning for a daughter of my 
 race.' 
 
 ' Might not Janos go and watch for the Prince at 
 the gates ? ' 
 
 ^ Who would open the gates to Janos ? You are 
 mad/ 
 
 ' 1 believe those gates always stand open/ 
 
 * They may. There are guards behind them.' 
 
 ' But when princes do well should they not meet 
 with gratitude ^ Would you not write a word for 
 Janos, sir ? ' 
 
 * I ? Write to a Gunderode ! You are mad, 
 child.' 
 
 ' Will you allow me to write ? ' 
 
 * I forbid you most absolutely.' 
 
 She did not disobey. But obedience was painful 
 to her. It seemed to her that they must appear 
 barbarians in the eyes of Othyris. Sleep did not 
 come to her until a late hour of the night ; she was 
 thinking what she could do to show that she was not 
 insensible to the act of the King's son. Before 
 the sun was visible upon the horizon, and the mists 
 were still heavy and cold on all the dark slopes of 
 the mountain, she went into the woods and gathered 
 the bells of the fritillaria and the cups of the narcissus 
 poeticus which were at that season growing thickly 
 
3i6 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 under the mosses in all the olive woods, and fringed 
 them with some young sprays of olives, and tied 
 them with a plaited band of grass. She gave them 
 to the woman Maia to whom, overnight, had been 
 given the sealed packet for the governor of the 
 gaol. 
 
 * When you are in the city,' she said to the woman, 
 * go first to the gaol and leave that packet as the 
 Master told you to do. Then go to the house of the 
 Duke of Othyris. It is in the Square of the Dioscuri. 
 The gates always stand wide open. It has great 
 groups of date palms before it. Watch until you see 
 him come out of the courtyard, if you watch all day 
 long. Then go to him, give him these wild flowers, 
 and say, " She with whom I live thanks you." Only 
 those words. No others.' 
 
 The woman repeated the words three times to 
 make sure of her remembrance of them ; then went 
 on her way through the trees. She was a grave, 
 worn, strong woman ; she had seen many troubles 
 in her life, and had neither curiosity nor garrulous- 
 ness. Seven hours passed before she returned. 
 
 Ilia went and sat down and waited for her, where 
 the water tumbled down over the rocks and a turn 
 in the hill-path showed the shining sea and the distant 
 and glittering domes of the city. 
 
 She was disturbed, and the natural repose of her 
 temperament was broken by a vague anxiety and 
 unrest. Perhaps she had done wrong.? she asked 
 herself. 
 
 The dark figure of Maia came in sight, black in 
 the white light ; erect, although not young, she 
 carried on her head a burden of useful necessary 
 articles which she had bought in the city. 
 
XX HELIANTHUS 317 
 
 * You saw him ? ' asked Ilia, as she rose and went 
 to meet her messenger. 
 
 * I saw him,' the woman answered. 
 
 * What passed ? ' 
 
 ^That which you commanded should pass. I 
 waited long. The young man came out of his 
 palace. I made a sign to him. He knew me. He 
 beckoned me to him. I said to him '' She whom I 
 serve thanks you." His face grew bright. He took 
 the flowers, and he turned back and went within. 
 He would have given me money, but I put it away. 
 It was all done in a moment. There were many 
 people staring, and the guards of the street looked 
 angry.' 
 
 ' You did well,' said Ilia. * Good Maia, go in and 
 take your rest.' 
 
 Ilia remained there alone, looking down through 
 the radiance of the noonday light, outward to the sea 
 with its wide semicircle of golden coast and purple 
 mountain. 
 
 ' I must say what I have done,' she thought. 
 
 There was no sound in the still noontide, except 
 that of a woodpecker striking his beak on the trunk 
 of an oak. The silence and the radiance of the early 
 spring-day were like a benediction. She rose with 
 regret as the Ave Maria rang far down below, and 
 she retraced her steps to the house. 
 
 She entered the presence of Illyris. 
 
 * Sir,' she said, * you will be angered, but I sent 
 word by a message, by Maia, that I thanked the son 
 of the King for the freedom of Philemon.' 
 
 The face of Illyris grew very dark, like a storm 
 which lowers in the hills. 
 
 * I have suffered many things,' he said harshly ; 
 
31 8 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 * but never before in my long life have I been dis- 
 obeyed.' 
 
 ' Never have I dared to disobey you before,' said 
 Ilia ; ' but I could not let a Gunderode believe that 
 the Illyris were ingrates.' 
 
 ' What matter what a GunderOde may think ! ' 
 said Illyris with scorn. * You did wrong. But you 
 inherit my temper. I cannot blame you for your 
 heritage.' 
 
 He looked at her with a keen and searching 
 gaze. 
 
 ' This young man pleases you ^ ' he added with 
 suspicion. 
 
 * I am sorry for him, sir.' 
 'Wherefore.?' 
 
 ' Because he is, by nature, just ; and he is in a 
 position wherein he cannot be just in action ; he 
 strives to do what good he can, but he knows that 
 the utmost he can do is but a drop of clear water in 
 a sea of mud.' 
 
 ' Whence got he his scruples ? ' 
 
 ' I know not.' 
 
 * Is not he the son of Gregory's grand-daughter 
 by the grandson of Theodoric? What blood has 
 he in his veins other than that of traitors to the 
 people, traitors and tyrants ? I must be in my 
 dotage indeed when my word ceases to be law in 
 my own house ! ' 
 
 *I grieve to have offended you, sir ; but I could 
 do no less.' 
 
 'You did ill' 
 
 She did not defend herself. She too thought she 
 had done wrong in one sense, although right in 
 another. 
 
XX HELIANTHUS 319 
 
 lUyris was silent, his eyes resting on her. She 
 was calm and grave, with no embarrassment under 
 his scrutiny. As was her habit, she had spoken in 
 simple sincerity. 
 
 'You may go to your room,' said Illyris. He 
 turned to the table beside him, and wrote a few 
 lines to the second son of the King, the great- 
 grandson of Theodoric : 
 
 ' Young man^ you have done a good action in restor- 
 ing a child to his parents^ and in saving an innocent 
 from the 'pollution of prisons. Tou mean well^ and I 
 have no doubt of your good faith ^ but do not come here 
 any more. Between Gunderode and Illyris there is a 
 gulf which can never be passed.^ 
 
 Then he signed and sealed the letter, and on the 
 following day he sent it down to the palace in the 
 Square of the Dioscuri. 
 
 To Ilia he did not speak of it. It had never been 
 his habit to confide in women or to consult with 
 them. 
 
 He trusted their affections, but he never trusted 
 their intelligence. 
 
 For the first time her future troubled him with 
 a sad sense of his own impotence. From want he 
 could secure her ; absolute need she would never 
 know ; but beyond this he could not ensure her peace 
 or safety. She was alone ; and she was not of a 
 temperament to make friendships easily or find 
 interests in new spheres. She had too much of the 
 granite and the steel of the Illyris in her. 
 
 Illyris felt that he had failed in his duty in his 
 neglect of her ; and yet what could he have done } 
 
320 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 She had inherited his strength ; he could only leave 
 her to herself. 
 
 * Will you live on here when I am dead, Ilia .? ' 
 he asked her. 
 
 * Yes/ she answered, * always.' 
 
 She did not say, as others would have done, * Do 
 not speak of death,* because she knew that death 
 stood beside his chair and beside his bed, and said, 
 
 * I am near,' every hour of the day and night. 
 Neither he nor she used empty conventional phrases. 
 
 * But you may change your state,' he said to her ; 
 
 * you may marry.' 
 
 * That is not likely,' she answered. 
 ' Why ? You are young.' 
 
 * It is not likely,' she repeated. * It would not 
 suit me, I think. I wed Aquilegia,' she added. 
 
 * Aquilegia is neither yours nor mine.' 
 
 * I put away little sums as I can, and I hope to 
 save enough to buy it some day.' 
 
 *That is well. May Pallas Athene watch over 
 you ! You are wiser than most women.' 
 
 The price of Aquilegia, the house, the fields, the 
 olives and the poplars, was small. It was but a 
 hundred of the broad crowns of Helianthus ; those 
 gold coins which had so deeply offended the national 
 feeling of the people when they had been first issued 
 bearing the arms and the efHgy of Theodoric. 
 
 * It is like him,' said Othyris to himself, when he 
 read those lines from the hero of the War of In- 
 dependence. 
 
 He was not offended. He understood. He did 
 not resent even the manner of address. He con- 
 sidered that Platon Illyris had the right to say what- 
 
XX HELIANTHUS 321 
 
 ever he chose to any Gunderode. He knew that it 
 would be best that he should go there no more. But 
 he looked at a few wild wood-blossoms set in an old 
 silver goblet on a table in his studio, and thought, 
 ' Whatever betide I must go sometimes where those 
 flowers grew/ 
 
 Not yet ; for he would seem to the peasants to go 
 there to receive their guerdon of gratitude, and to 
 Illyris would appear to go in contempt of the power 
 of a man so old to enforce his will. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 Othyris had been by sea to his estate of ^nothrea, 
 and was returning thence on board his sailing-yacht, 
 when a small boat with a lateen sail bore down 
 towards the royal schooner, and a man within it held 
 up one of his oars in a gesture of appeal. Othyris, 
 standing on deck, saw the signal, and caused his 
 yacht to slacken speed and await the little craft. 
 The fisherman, who alone occupied the boat, came to 
 the schooner's side and held up a letter. 
 
 * Take it and bring it hither,' commanded Othyris ; 
 and when he received it, he found it was a note in the 
 cypher which Ednor used in writing to him. He 
 had the boatmen dismissed with a handful of silver, 
 and went down into his cabin to decipher the message, 
 which was very brief. It told him that Platon Illyris 
 had died on the previous day, and that Ednor was 
 perforce leaving Helios to avoid arrest for an article 
 in his journal on the life and death of the hero, for 
 which his personal seizure was now ordered by the 
 State. He had known that the yacht was expected 
 to return that day, and had sent one of his fisher 
 friends to watch for its appearance in the ofHng. 
 
 Othyris read the message with emotion. The 
 grave could not give more complete oblivion to that 
 great life than men in old age had given to it ; yet its 
 
 322 
 
CHAP. XXI HELIANTHUS 323 
 
 end in such isolation, in such ingratitude, hurt him. 
 His return to the city was made as rapidly as was 
 possible ; but when he reached the harbour of the 
 Soleia it was noon on the following day, and the 
 journal conducted by Ednor had taken the tidings of 
 the death of Illyris amongst the populace ; the news- 
 papers of the noble and commercial classes did not 
 vouchsafe a line to his memory, nor even announce 
 his decease. It was through him that they were 
 living there in peace without a foreign occupation to 
 harass and despoil them, but it had long ago been de- 
 cided for them that all their gratitude was due alone 
 to the now reigning House of Gunderode. 
 
 When Othyris landed he drove rapidly to his palace, 
 changed his yachting clothes for those of mourning, 
 and entered a closed carriage, of which he drew down 
 the blinds. He took no one of his gentlemen with 
 him. The horses were driven by his order towards 
 Aquilegia. He had no clear plan or definite intention 
 in his mind ; his impulse was to go to Ilia ; she was 
 desolate indeed ; probably, he thought, she would not 
 accept any protection or counsel from him, but he 
 would at least offer them. He passed unnoticed 
 through the city ; his carriage was undistinguishable 
 from any other gentleman's brougham, and he saw 
 no signs of any especial movement in the streets. 
 The dead hero had belonged to an almost forgotten 
 past. The memory of a populace is evanescent as 
 the dew of the daybreak. But as he drew near the 
 poor quarters which led towards the Gate of Olives, 
 these narrow, ancient thoroughfares seemed to be 
 unusually hushed whilst unusually thronged by people. 
 The doors and windows of the old, lofty, lowering 
 stone houses were for the most part closed, and 
 
324 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 their inhabitants were in the narrow, paven roads ; 
 but their usual noisy cries, and rough altercations, 
 and bursts of song, and shrill oaths, were all stilled ; 
 the people were very quiet, and they were moving, 
 as by one accord, towards the lofty marble gate, 
 which had seen the passing of the triumphs and 
 the funerals of two thousand years before. There 
 were more street guards than usual in the lanes 
 and roads ; they did not interfere, but they were 
 in threes and fours together, and looked sullen, 
 suspicious, ready to use their arms on the first 
 excuse. 
 
 Othyris understood without questioning any one. 
 The people were going to honour the dead body of 
 Platon lllyris in whatever way they might be able 
 to do so. 
 
 The news of the death of lllyris had awakened the 
 dormant memories of the populace. His life had 
 belonged to a past generation ; his memory had been 
 faint in the thoughts of the living multitudes ; that 
 he was near them in a still breathing presence had 
 never been realised. But with one of those great 
 waves of nervous feeling which move the multitudes 
 of men in cities, as the ocean is moved by subter- 
 ranean forces, the plebs of Helios had been stirred 
 by Ednor's article on the dying hero into a sudden 
 consciousness of its own ingratitude, and of the claims 
 on it of its long-neglected deliverer. 
 
 In the noble and commercial quarters of the city 
 there was no agitation ; only annoyance and a vague 
 fear, the sense of an unwelcome ghost arisen and 
 intrusive. But in the poor quarters stretching 
 towards the west, and down to the port, the awaken- 
 ing was general and repentant. The name of lllyris 
 
XXI HELIANTHUS 325 
 
 ran like a fiery messenger through the crowds, 
 almost as in the years of their grandsires* youth. 
 
 Into their pale blood, dulled by the monotony of 
 modern toil, some warmth of an earlier spirit 
 entered ; into the heavy hopelessness and sullen 
 covetousness, which grow together in the breast of 
 the sons of labour, there arose some purer, finer 
 recollection and desire. It was far away from them, 
 that epopee of their grandsires, and the fruits of its 
 heroism had been reaped by others than themselves, 
 but some reflection from the glow of its heroism fell 
 on them and illumined the narrow chambers of their 
 joyless and sunless souls. From them to others who 
 felt less, and who understood nothing, the electrical 
 current of sympathy ran as the magnetism of evil 
 or of good always flows through the unconscious- 
 ness of crowds. Thousands and tens of thousands 
 were thrilled from head to foot, wept, moved, echoed, 
 strove, pressed onward and upward, scarcely know- 
 ing why, but crying ' lUyris ! Illyris ! * as the crowds 
 in all ages shout Adonai or Barabbas, as the 
 suggestionism of numbers makes them do. Women 
 dishevelled and bare-bosomed ; children thrown down, 
 crushed ; struggling youths and maidens madly wav- 
 ing boughs of laurel, as in the Daphnephoria of old ; 
 the bronzed, half-nude porters and stevedores of the 
 quays ; fishers, and mariners, and boatmen from the 
 harbours ; the workers from factory, and engine- 
 room, and cellar ; the pluckers of pelts, the makers of 
 chemicals, the marble-workers, the bird-snarers, the 
 rag-pickers, the sea-weed gleaners, the carpet-weavers, 
 the killers and cleaners of fish ; all the innumerable 
 divisions of the great, weary, hungry classes, who 
 thronged together between the centre of the city and 
 
326 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 the Gate of Olives, in swarms like the conies of the 
 sand plains, — all these with one impulsion pushed 
 against each other in their upward way, and, now 
 breaking their silence, shouted as with one voice : 
 
 * To the Pantheon ! To the House of the 
 Immortals ! Bury him by Theodoric ! ' 
 
 In ever-increasing numbers, and now with deafen- 
 ing cries, they struggled, like a shoal of fish pushing 
 through a weir, up the road which led towards the 
 olive orchards of Aquilegia. The police did not 
 interfere, but they were reinforced by detachments 
 of carabineers, mounted, with their arms shining in 
 the sun. 
 
 There joined the crowd from other quarters of the 
 town students, artists, artisans of a higher class, and 
 also the unemployed, — those unemployed by choice, 
 and those in enforced idleness through misadventure, 
 all the gabies and all the loiterers who come out into 
 the streets when there is anything to see or hear in 
 them ; but the multitude remained, in its vast 
 majority, essentially of the populace. 
 
 Othyris had got out of his carriage before the 
 first stragglers had arrived at the foot of the ascent 
 to Aquilegia, and had taken the familiar path which 
 wound up amongst the olive-trees, — the precipitous 
 bridle-path which he had taken on his first visit 
 to Illyris ; he hoped to reach the house before the 
 crowds from the town could do so. He was out of 
 the sight of the throngs, who were still at the base of 
 the hill, but the sound of their shrill outcries reached 
 him as he mounted the mule-track between the great 
 trees ; he could even distinguish the words, * To the 
 House of the Immortals ! To the House of the 
 Immortals ! ' 
 
XXI HELIANTHUS 327 
 
 ' Surely,' he thought, ' if any should lie in that 
 House, he has supreme right to do so/ 
 
 The atmosphere was glorious with light and 
 warmth ; the deep-blue skies seen between the boughs, 
 the golden shafts of sunlight, the shimmering silver 
 of the vault of olive leaves, the shining marble and 
 jasper and porphyry dust beneath his feet, the emerald 
 lizards, the brilliant ruby gladiolus, the bright gold 
 of the tansy discs, were all dazzling in the radiance 
 of morning ; but for once his soul was without 
 response ; he was harassed by regret, by doubt, by 
 apprehension. 
 
 Would the noonday pass without bloodshed ? 
 
 Would his father's government be tolerant of this 
 gathering ? 
 
 Would the demand for the burial be granted ? 
 
 And I ha Illyris ? What would she do ? 
 
 The sounds of the shouting people, low down at 
 the foot of the hills, were borne to his ear through the 
 sweet sylvan silence. He hastened onward, hoping 
 to see her, to be able to warn her in time to keep 
 the bier within the house, and thus to avoid 
 all which might appear collusion with the public 
 demonstration. But as the mule-path took a sharp 
 narrow bend to the right, he saw, on another curve 
 above, under the olives, a coffin borne on the shoulders 
 of Janos and of five labouring men, and behind it the 
 veiled figure of a woman. His heart stood still with 
 emotion. It was the figure of a solitary mourner 
 coming slowly down the side of Mount Atys with 
 all that remained to her on earth of relative or 
 friend. 
 
 If she went downward another mile, he knew that 
 she would inevitably meet the people of Helios as 
 
328 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 they ascended. At any cost of repulse or offence 
 he felt that he must for her own sake arrest her 
 on her dangerous path. He went out from the 
 shade of the great- trees and with uncovered head 
 approached her, raising his hand in a gesture, which 
 made the bearers of the dead body pause, the bier 
 resting on their shoulders. 
 
 She paused also ; he could not see her face, not 
 even her eyes, through the black gauze. 
 
 * Even in such an hour as this ! ' she said, as if to 
 herself, in wonder and repugnance ; even in such an 
 hour could he not leave her alone ! 
 
 Othyris, with his head uncovered, stood reverently 
 by the side of the coffin. 
 
 * Go back,' he said to her, * go back, I entreat 
 you. There are thousands of people coming up the 
 hill. They come in all honour and reverence, but 
 there are rough men and coarse women amongst 
 them ; many have come up from the docks and the 
 lowest quarters, and their excitement is increasing 
 every moment. Go back, whilst there is time.' 
 
 She did not move ; she only imperfectly under- 
 stood his meaning ; she heard the sounds like the 
 swell of the angry sea, which came from the foot of 
 the hill, but she did not know that it was the mutter- 
 ing of human voices which blent with the familiar 
 murmur of the breakers on the shore below. The 
 bearers lowered the coffin gently to the ground, and 
 stood, bareheaded, listening. 
 
 ' Is it the people of Helios who at last remember 
 him, do you say ? ' she said, with a great calmness in 
 her voice. * It is late ; too late ! ' 
 
 ' It is too late indeed,' said Othyris with emotion. 
 
 * They cannot hinder his going to his last rest. 
 
XXI HELIANTHUS 329 
 
 Let me pass, sir, I only take him to the graveyard of 
 the poor,' 
 
 ' They would take him to the Pantheon/ 
 
 * That would surely be his right ? ' 
 
 * Undoubtedly, but the matter will not pass 
 without conflict, trouble, perhaps bloodshed. The 
 crowd is honest and penitent, but it is rough. 
 There will be scenes unfit for you, unseemly for his 
 memory. Go back to the house, I entreat you.' 
 
 ' Why ^ I do not fear the people of my father's 
 city.' 
 
 'They will not harm you by intention. As .their 
 mood is now, they would die for you, but you do 
 not know what a perilous and inflammable thing is 
 a mob. I fear, also, they will not be allowed to 
 return peacefully to the city. I mean that they will 
 not be permitted to bear this coflin to the mausoleum, 
 as they wish to do. There will be, I fear, collision 
 and conflict between them and those in authority.' 
 
 * With your father's communal guards, with your 
 father's troops ? ' 
 
 ' With the guards of the city, with the troops of 
 the State.' 
 
 ' I understand. The Gunderode will fear him, 
 even dead ! They will find him, even dead, too 
 great ; as the corpse of the Guise seemed to the 
 Valois ! Janos, go onward.' 
 
 The labourers bent down, and raised the cofiin to 
 their shoulders. 
 
 ' Wait ! Wait, for pity's sake,' cried Othyris, 
 despairing to move her by any reasoning. ' He who 
 lies hidden from us in that shell lived forty years in 
 silence and obscurity to avoid all danger of strife and 
 bloodshed which might have arisen from the magic 
 
330 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 of his name. Do not risk those dangers now over 
 his dead body. He would bid you not run the risk 
 of insurrection and military intervention. 
 
 * 1 do not speak to you of any peril you yourself 
 may run/ he continued, after vainly waiting for some 
 answer or some sign. * I know that personal fear 
 would not weigh with you for an instant. But he 
 would be the first to stand between the people and 
 their impulses, could he now arise from the dead. I 
 can imagine no greater grief to him than for his 
 name to become the cause of strife.* 
 
 She was silent. 
 
 On the lips of any other speaker the words would 
 have touched her heart and convinced her. On his 
 they had a taint of self-interest, of authority, of that 
 menace of the power of the State which had never 
 been heard by Illyris with tolerance or obedience, and 
 against which all the principles of those she had loved 
 had been arrayed. 
 
 ' Lady,' said Othyris, with great emotion in his 
 voice, * no one ever lived who had more reverence 
 for the dead than I. You cannot doubt my entire 
 good faith, or the sincerity of my counsels. I entreat 
 you not to make this sacred bier a cause of strife 
 and bloodshed, the beginning of civil war. I will 
 answer to you and to the people of Helios that the 
 uttermost shall be done to obtain for his memory 
 due honour, and for his tomb a fitting place. But, 
 in his name, I implore you not to lend yourself to 
 what will degenerate into party odium, not to em- 
 bitter this solemn hour with fratricidal hatreds. If 
 his dead lips could speak, he would surely say to 
 you : " Go back, my daughter ; go back." ' 
 
 She listened ; her head drooped, the veil shadowing 
 
XXI HELIANTHUS 331 
 
 her features ; the accent of his voice went to her 
 heart ; she felt his sincerity, she felt his wisdom ; she 
 was conscious that to resist his counsel was to be 
 headstrong, unwise, unworthy. 
 
 ' Take up the coffin,' she said to the men who 
 had brought it there. ' Let us return to the house, 
 and await nightfall.' 
 
 They obeyed her without a word. 
 
 Othyris bowed very low before her, as people 
 bowed to him. 
 
 * I thank you,' he said humbly. * I will now go 
 and speak to the people, and hear their wishes.' 
 
 The bearers and their sacred burden remounted 
 the narrow, rocky path under the great olives, Ilia 
 Illyris walking beside them. Othyris descended the 
 hill in the direction of the ascending mob of people ; 
 the confused shrill clamour of whose voices and the 
 louder chorus of the Hymn of Eos rose upward from 
 the lower slopes and from the beach. 
 
 He was wholly uncertain of his own power to 
 control or to persuade them ; he was well aware that 
 in their present enthusiastic and enraged temper they 
 might see in him only an enemy, only a scion of 
 Theodoric of GunderOde. He could not tell what 
 their mood might be, or what reception even to 
 ferocity they might not give him. 
 
 But all he thought of was Ilia's safety, and the 
 necessity of saving the city from insurrection. The 
 popular temper was like melinite ; a spark might 
 cause a ruin incalculable and irremediable. 
 
 A few minutes brought him within sight of the 
 earliest stragglers of the throng ; they recognised 
 his tall and slender form as he came down through 
 the silvery olive foliage. 
 
332 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 ' Elim ! Elim ! ' cried the foremost men. * Elim ! 
 Give him his rightful place of burial ! Let him lie 
 by Theodoric ! * 
 
 They pressed forward to reach the King's son, who 
 in their eyes was all-powerful, in whom they were 
 disposed to trust, but in whom, nevertheless, they 
 could not feel sure that they had an ally or a 
 protector. 
 
 He was well known and was beloved in those poor 
 quarters whence came these throngs of working- 
 people, and by the shore which sent forth the 
 stevedores, the porters, the boatmen, the stokers, the 
 fishermen ; but they could not be sure how far they 
 had his support in the temerity of their demand on 
 the Crown. 
 
 He was always their protector and friend, but 
 they could not be sure if they could rely on his 
 assistance against his father ; and of the King's 
 antagonism and refusal they could have no doubt. 
 
 He was only one man against many thousands, but 
 as he came towards them, out of the deep shade of 
 the trees, he awed them. In his serenity, his com- 
 posure, his simplicity, he appealed to their respect ; 
 and by that difference from themselves which was in 
 him he forced from them a not unwilling admiration, 
 a vague consciousness of superiority. 
 
 He uncovered his head as he approached them, 
 and they cheered him. They knew that there was 
 great courage in his action. 
 
 He mounted a boulder of rock by the roadside 
 which made a natural rostrum, and stood there a 
 little above them. As far as they could be seen for 
 the trees the people were in great numbers, and the 
 sound of the footsteps of the ascending masses 
 
XXI HELIANTHUS ^33 
 
 answered the sound of the sea dashing angrily on the 
 beach far below. 
 
 * My friends,' said Othyris, ' you and I have come 
 doubtless on the same errand, in the same feelings, — 
 honour for the great man who has left us. What is 
 that you would do ? What is it that you desire ? ' 
 
 'To take his body to the House of the 
 Immortals,' shouted a hundred speakers ; all the men 
 who were foremost and nearest, and the shriller voices 
 of the women and children and youths, echoed the 
 cry : * To the House of the Immortals ! ' 
 
 ' What were you about to do to obtain your end ^ ' 
 
 A clamour of innumerable voices rose in chorus ; 
 in the confusion of sound he could distinguish their 
 threats to seize the bier and bear it through the city, 
 and before the palace of the Soleia demand from the 
 King the burial of lUyris beside Theodoric. He 
 knew that if they carried out their threat his father 
 would only reply by the bayonets or the musketry of 
 his troops. John of GunderOde would not parley 
 with his populace. It was a perilous moment ; they 
 were in a perilous mood. When an idea possesses a 
 crowd, it is obstinate with the obstinacy of the insane. 
 It was very probable that if Othyris thwarted them 
 in their present mood they would turn their fury 
 upon him. He was one against a multitude ; he 
 was unarmed ; they might seize him as a hostage 
 or they might slay him as a scapegoat. No one 
 can ever say what form the delirium of a mass of 
 people may not take. 
 
 But Othyris felt that their actual mood must be 
 dominated or there would be bloodshed in Helios. 
 He raised his hand to ask for silence, and little by 
 little the loud tumultuous cries died down. Swaying 
 
334 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 and pressing around the rock on which he stood, 
 the people waited to hear him speak. 
 
 * My friends,' he said to them, ' your desire is 
 natural and just. Do not imperil its fulfilment by 
 violence or haste. Do not go upward to the house 
 where he dwelt, for there are only women, who 
 would be alarmed. First, obtain the certainty that 
 you may lay his body in the Pantheon of HeHos ; 
 then come hither to fetch it. If you begin with riot 
 and clamour, you will fail in your demand, and you 
 will prove yourselves unworthy of your self-imposed 
 mission.' 
 
 An angry hissing protest followed on his words. 
 They were in no mood for reason. They were in 
 the mood for revolution ; and Othyris knew that his 
 father would no more treat with them or argue with 
 them than a huntsman with his hounds. If they could 
 not be induced to go to their homes quietly there 
 could be no issue except insurrection. He had never 
 before seen an angry mob, for he had always been 
 welcomed everywhere with a sincere and often an 
 enthusiastic attachment. It is an ugly and a formid- 
 able spectacle at all times. The strong smell from 
 their unwashed flesh and their unclean clothes tainted 
 the fresh mountain air, stifled the odours of the flowers 
 and grasses. ' O humanity ! what a dread beast you 
 are ! ' he thought, as all must do who see it in its 
 nakedness, stripped of hypocritical pretence and the 
 cover of courtesy. But such as it was he had to 
 deal with it and dominate it, or hundreds of them 
 would go up to the house of Ilia and would profane 
 the peace and solemnity of death. He looked down 
 on the inflamed faces of the men, the nude breasts of 
 the women, the tangled hair and menacing eyes of the 
 
XXI HELIANTHUS 335 
 
 youths, the laurel boughs broken and dust-covered, 
 the little children alarmed and clinging to their 
 mothers' skirts ; he could hear the trampling on the 
 rocky road of many others not as yet in sight ; the 
 frightened birds flew out from the foliage, the clear 
 brooks ran across the road, over the soiled, bare feet, 
 and, touching human flesh, became defiled. 
 
 ' People of Helios ! ' said Othyris, and his voice 
 was far-reaching as the note of a clarion. ' People 
 of Helios, hearken to me. You must go back to 
 your homes in peace and decency, or I can be with 
 you in nothing. It is wrong and impious to make a 
 great hero's death a moment for disorder and riot. 
 You can accomplish nothing by brawling. The tomb 
 of Illyris ought to be made where the great men of 
 Helianthus lie ' 
 
 ' Was Theodoric a Helianthine ^ ' a man called 
 from the crowd. 
 
 * No ; he was not,' Othyris answered calmly. 
 * But that is beside this question. Illyris was a 
 pure-bred Helianthine, and you desire that he should 
 have his sepulchre made in the mausoleum of the 
 country. Well, go back to your homes, and I 
 promise that you shall have your desire ; but I will 
 do nothing for menace or insult.' 
 
 The multitude was silent. The courage of his 
 speech and the calmness and dignity of his bearing 
 impressed them. But one voice shouted from the 
 close-pressed throng : 
 
 * You promise, you say ! You are a prince. 
 Who can trust princes ^ " 
 
 * You may trust me/ said Othyris coldly. * I give 
 you my word that the body of Platon Illyris shall lie 
 in the House of the Immortals.' 
 
22^6 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 * The word of a Gunderode ! ' said an angry, rude 
 voice from an unseen speaker. 
 
 Othyris coloured with pain rather than offence. 
 
 * The word of a gentleman/ he said briefly. 
 The people cheered him. 
 
 * The word of an honest man/ said one of their 
 leaders. ' We will trust him, friends. If he fail us, 
 we can chastise.' 
 
 * He will not fail,' said a woman. 
 
 A man who was a worker in metal and had a fine 
 countenance and a lofty stature shouted in a clear 
 resounding voice : 
 
 * Let us trust him. If he fail us he shall answer 
 to us. And whether by peace or by force Illyris 
 shall lie with Theodoric' 
 
 * It shall be so,' said Othyris. ' Now go, my 
 friends, to your homes. So you will best do his will. 
 He lived in solitude and obscurity for forty years 
 rather than cause disunion amongst his countrymen. 
 If the State forgot him, you also, his people, his 
 children, remembered too Httle.' 
 
 The conscience of the throng was moved, its 
 remorse was stirred, its regrets were stung to the 
 quick ; the men and the youths were silent, and the 
 sobs of some women were audible in the stillness. 
 
 * Go to your homes,' said Othyris. ' We will 
 meet soon again.' 
 
 Then he descended from the stone platform, 
 and uncovered his head in farewell to the multitude. 
 
 A loud, long, echoing cheer rose from the ranks 
 of the populace. They had faith in him. 
 
 They pressed around him ; they were curious, 
 grateful, excited, awed ; they wanted to see him 
 close, to feel his clothes, to touch his hand, to see 
 
XXI HELIANTHUS 337 
 
 him face to face ; they were dangerous out of the 
 excess of their enthusiasm, for they were unwilHng to 
 let him go. 
 
 * Come with us ! Come with us ! ' they shouted ; 
 they wanted to take him down in triumph into 
 Helios. 
 
 But he knew that if he were seen with them all 
 possible chance of gaining the realisation of their 
 wish would be destroyed. It was impossible that he 
 should enter the city as the companion and the 
 leader of this mob. 
 
 * Fall back. Leave me free/ he said to them. * If 
 you detain me, if you hamper me, you will render it 
 impossible for me to obtain you the fulfilment of 
 your wish. My friend,' he added, turning to the 
 man who had said ' Let us trust him,' * you have 
 influence over them, keep them back. Leave me 
 free. Otherwise I can do nothing. Nor will I, by 
 any force which they can use, go down into Helios in 
 their company.' 
 
 There was a savage, sullen muttering of chagrin 
 and of offence in the people nearest to him. They 
 were oifended, and they were conscious that they could 
 by brute force make their offence felt. 
 
 * People of Helios,' said Othyris, * you can kill me 
 if you like ; I am unarmed, and you are many in 
 numbers. But you cannot make me do what I do 
 not choose to do, or what I think unworthy. Let 
 me pass.' 
 
 * Let him pass,' said the man who had said * Let 
 us trust him.' The people hesitated ; Othyris took 
 advantage of that hesitation ; he shook off the hand 
 laid upon him, and with tranquillity and dignity 
 passed through them to the woods on the opposite 
 
 z 
 
338 HELIANTHUS chap, xxi 
 
 side of the road. Thence there ran a by-path, con- 
 cealed by the darkness of the deep shade, which led 
 down towards the shore ; Janos had one day shown 
 him that woodland way. He was at once lost to 
 the sight of the crowd in the dark foliage of the 
 close-growing trees. 
 
 ' If he fail us, we shall know how to avenge it,* 
 said the man from the docks once more. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 
 The official spies and professional informers, with 
 whom Helios, like all modern cities, was infested, had 
 of course, as soon as these events happened, informed 
 the authorities of what had occurred and of what 
 was menaced. The troops were immediately confined 
 to barracks ; the guns of the fortresses turned upon 
 the town ; the sentinels doubled, and all those pre- 
 cautions taken which render a successful insurrection 
 almost an impossibility in any modern and monarchi- 
 cal country. 
 
 The demonstration had taken the Government by 
 surprise and found them unprepared ; and the alarm 
 bells of telegraph and telephone were ringing franti- 
 cally wherever the governing forces of civil and 
 military control were located. But the people were 
 peaceable, though enthusiastic and excited ; and the 
 Ministry decided that they should not be interfered 
 with, so long as no revolutionary cries were heard 
 and no revolutionary emblems displayed. 
 
 Michael Soranis, who had succeeded Kantakuzene 
 when the latter was defeated over the Crown Prince's 
 scheme for the fortification of the Hundred Isles, 
 was still Prime Minister. As a politician he was 
 considered eminently safe, and slow, and sure ; he 
 had been often in office when the monarch or the 
 
 339 
 
340 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 country had been desirous of quiet and sleep. He 
 was adroit, conciliatory, plausible, with no stiffness of 
 backbone, or disagreeable stability of principle, about 
 him. It was hard on such a Minister to be con- 
 fronted with a dilemma so difficult, an obstinacy so 
 painful. Soranis was essentially an opportunist ; he 
 had been a physician in early life, and knew how 
 to sooth excited pulses, lower high temperatures, 
 persuade to painful cures, and amiably divert diseased 
 fancies ; but this position required strength, and he 
 was not strong. 
 
 He had entered the arena of politics on the 
 buck-jumping galloway of Radicalism; but it had been 
 always unsuited to his taste and powers, and he had 
 for many years seated himself more comfortably on 
 the park-hack of Liberal Conservatism. He liked 
 to amble smoothly over the tan, in the circus of high 
 office, with the diamond stars due to successful 
 equestrianism on his breast. 
 
 This affair, which was a great disturbance, almost 
 an insurrection, troubled him greatly. It was 
 unexpected, inconvenient, dangerous, and most ill- 
 timed. Like many active political events it had 
 sprung out of a mustard-seed fallen in a gutter, and 
 might be big with confusion and convulsion. It was 
 a water-spout in a clear sky. It was a heat-wave in 
 a cool land. It was a falHng mast on a winning 
 schooner. It was a squirming black squib in a 
 bather's sunny creek. It was any imaginable 
 torment which could upset the desirable, and create 
 the perilous. Go which way it would, end how it 
 might, it would cause him to be assailed equally 
 by hostile and by friendly groups in the Chamber. 
 It was a ball of pins with all the points set outward. 
 
XXII HELIANTHUS 341 
 
 Let him take it and hold it as he would, he must 
 inevitably be pricked by it. He would almost 
 certainly please none by his treatment of it. He 
 would quite certainly offend either the King or the 
 nation. 
 
 Like all successful men Soranis had many enemies. 
 He knew that these would all eagerly seize on this 
 incident as on a dead cat to throw at him. True, the 
 Chambers were not then sitting ; it was the brief 
 recess of Pentecost ; but time intensifies maHce, as it 
 adds to the bitterness of the brandy in which peach 
 kernels are steeped. He knew that his enemies 
 would not let a single point against him rest, or lose 
 by waiting. What also complicated his responsibility 
 was that the King and the Crown Prince were away 
 shooting, having left the city at dawn for one of the 
 royal forests in the hills. 
 
 He felt that the position was a cruel and unjust 
 one for a politician who had never failed to trim 
 his course with the most skilful and scientific naviga- 
 tion. The terrible mixture of the Danish Hamlet 
 and the English Henry the Fifth which seemed to 
 him united in the person of Othyris appeared to him 
 more perilous to himself and his Cabinet than any 
 number of anarchical conspiracies. He admired 
 Othyris ; he recognised the charm, the talent, the 
 courage, the altruism of the King's second son ; but 
 he felt that a revolutionary prince was a sore difficulty 
 in the path of a Minister of the Crown, who only 
 asked of fate to be all things to all men. 
 
 All Soranis had desired and tried to bring about 
 had been that peace external and internal should last 
 his time and let him die in office ; that the nation 
 should be quiet and orderly, reasonable and pliable, 
 
342 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 should never be noisy or quarrelsome and create 
 embarrassments, either at home or abroad. This 
 was, he thought, the least the Helianthines could 
 do in return for his own admirable government ; a 
 beautiful buoy of cork floating serenely on an oiled 
 sea. Yet, behold them ! Up in arms, and baying 
 like the brutes they really were ; with no gratitude 
 for the smooth years of subsidised commerce and 
 increased national debt which he himself had given 
 them ! The throne, the army, the navy, the ex- 
 chequer, the police, the church, had always been 
 kept by him in respect and prosperity, following 
 each other in harmonious sequence like the Corinthian 
 columns of a temple portico ; and these ignorant and 
 yelling crowds, who knew nothing of the beauties of 
 political architecture, were endeavouring to resus- 
 citate the memory of a forgotten patriot whose shade 
 was as much to be dreaded by authority as the ghost 
 of Hamlet's father by Hamlet's step-father ! 
 
 Soranis felt that he had neither the years nor the 
 temper to cope with such a position, and, as though 
 the question in itself was not thorny and difficult 
 enough, there was added to it the extreme embarrass- 
 ment of the entrance into it of the King's second 
 son. 
 
 The Minister was no stranger to the permanent 
 differences existing between the father and the son. 
 More than once these had strained all his tact and 
 persuasiveness to the utmost in the effort to prevent 
 the friction from becoming visible to others ; and a per- 
 verse fate seemed to accumulate causes and reasons 
 for their divergence. To him, as to the royal family, 
 the perversity of Elim seemed diabolical. 
 
 Born to the most enviable fate that the heart of 
 
XXII HELIANTHUS 343 
 
 man could desire, why could he not be content with 
 it ? To Soranis, son of a provincial apothecary, and 
 a struggling professional man himself in early man- 
 hood, it seemed monstrous that a prince could be 
 dissatisfied with his lot. Therefore, when Othyris 
 said to him, * I have given my word to the people 
 that lllyris shall be buried in the Pantheon,' nothing 
 but the extreme reverence for rank of a democrat 
 who has been converted to reactionism could have 
 restrained him from a choleric and irreverent im- 
 precation. 
 
 Instead of such a natural ebullition of temper, 
 he said, nervously, and with a sigh : 
 
 ' I fear, sir, that your Royal Highness did not 
 realise, did not consider sufficiently, the extreme 
 embarrassment which such a promise on your part 
 would cause to the government.' 
 
 *I did not think of the government, certainly,* 
 said Othyris. 
 
 * Nor of His Majesty,' said Soranis, timidly and 
 tentatively. 
 
 * Where does my father come into this question.?' 
 said Othyris. 
 
 Soranis made a little deprecatory murmur of pro- 
 test. 
 
 Where, he thought, did His Majesty not enter, 
 all-pervading essence of will and conscience as he 
 was ? Who should or would be concerned in the 
 question of a burial in the House of Immortals, if 
 not the monarch who considered his grandsire the 
 first of all immortals ? 
 
 Othyris knew well that to the King the demand 
 for the interment of lllyris under the same dome with 
 Theodoric would appear a blasphemy, a treason, an 
 
344 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 unspeakable infamy ; but he did not intend to discuss 
 that side of the subject. He waited a while for some 
 more complete reply from Soranis. Failing to receive 
 one, he said : 
 
 ' Your Excellency cannot fail, I imagine, to per- 
 ceive the stringent necessity which exists that the 
 warrant of my word shall be made good by all the 
 powers responsible for law and order } * 
 
 ' No doubt, sir, no doubt,' murmured Soranis, but 
 with no great firmness of tone. * No doubt your 
 Royal Highness must be supported.' 
 
 In his own mind he saw vividly two pictures : the 
 one of a crowd which would comprehend no argu- 
 ments except cannon ; the other of a monarch who 
 would neither understand nor endure any arguments 
 whatever. He himself was between Scylla and 
 Charybdis. 
 
 ' You can only support me,' replied Othyris, * by 
 carrying out my promise to the people.' 
 
 Soranis nervously balanced a paper-knife on his 
 finger. 
 
 ' Would it not have been possible, sir, for you to 
 — to — have avoided the incident altogether .? ' 
 
 ' I did not wish to avoid it. I sought it. But it 
 is quite useless to discuss this part of the question 
 now. What has been done cannot be altered.' 
 
 * May I ask, sir, did the mob seem to you to be 
 getting beyond the control of the police? ' 
 
 ' The people were orderly and reasonable,' said 
 Othyris, with emphasis ; he resented the epithet of 
 mob. * The police did not interest or occupy me 
 at all.' 
 
 The Minister drew himself up a little stiffly. To 
 touch with irreverence these guardians of the State is, 
 
xxri HELIANTHUS 
 
 345 
 
 in the eyes of a Minister, to use a chasuble and a 
 reliquary as a cigar-box and a spittoon ; the priests 
 of the altars of authority would burn the sacrilegious 
 profaners if they dared. 
 
 * The civil-servants of order risk their lives, sir,* 
 he said coldly. 
 
 ' They are armed to the teeth,' said Othyris as 
 coldly. 
 
 * I lament, sir,* murmured Soranis with reproach, 
 
 * that you do not recognise all that government owes 
 to them.' 
 
 * I beg your Excellency,' said Elim with impatience, 
 ' not to let us waste time in discussing the virtues of 
 your agents de suretL I come to you to know if you 
 will keep the pledge which I gave to the people of 
 this city in the name of the State. You will not, I 
 imagine, be willing to dishonour my word.' 
 
 * Pray, sir, consider,' said Soranis in agitation. 
 
 * As I understand from yourself and from others 
 present, you have assured the citizens of Helios that 
 the body of Platon Illyris shall be buried with public 
 honours in the Pantheon } ' 
 
 ' Precisely.' 
 
 *You are of opinion, sir, that you avoided a 
 revolt and persuaded them to disperse quietly by 
 making this promise } ' 
 
 * I repeat, I told them that, if they would go to 
 their homes without disturbance, their wishes as 
 regards the dead man should be respected and carried 
 out ; and though they had certainly no cause to trust 
 me, being who I am, they were good enough to have 
 faith in my word and to separate tranquilly. It is 
 absolutely certain that the government must ratify 
 my promise, or disgrace me so utterly in my own 
 
346 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 sight, and that of the country's, that I would not live 
 a day under the weight of such opprobrium/ 
 
 * Pray, sir, pray 1 ' said Soranis, with a feeble, im- 
 ploring gesture of his hands. ' You forget, sir, you 
 most unfortunately forget, that not your Royal 
 Highness, nor myself, nor my colleagues, are free 
 agents ; the only supreme arbiter in this, as in all 
 matters, is His Majesty the King.' 
 
 *You exaggerate my father's power, which you 
 seem to forget is not absolute ; it happily stops short 
 of enforcing any man living into the business of 
 tricking a nation.' 
 
 ' But, sir — but, sir — pardon me, you had no title 
 to give that promise ; it is invalid ; it is no more 
 than a minor's signature to a donation.' 
 
 ' It is invalid if the government do not ratify it ; 
 that is, I alone am impotent to enforce your fulfil- 
 ment of it. I am as impotent as the minor to whom 
 you compare me. But there is one thing of which I 
 am master, and that is my own life. I will not live 
 as a liar in the sight of a multitude that trusted 
 me. Let the body of Platon Illyris be laid in state 
 in the Pantheon, and let his tomb be made there. It 
 is nothing strange or wrong. He will but have his 
 rightful place, here in the heart of Helios, beside the 
 man to whom he gave a kingdom. What is it for 
 you to do ? Nothing. But if it be as hard as to 
 move mountains, and to dry up seas, you will do it. 
 I tell you I will not break my faith with the people 
 of Helios.' 
 
 ' Sir, sir,' muttered the unhappy Minister, * you 
 ask of me impossibilities, you expect miracles ; you 
 must know that His Majesty, your father, will never 
 allow the bones of the revolutionary Illyris to be laid 
 
XXII HELIANTHUS 347 
 
 by the hallowed dust of the Great Theodoric. It is 
 out of all question. To speak of such a project even 
 to His Majesty would be an outrage ! ' 
 
 Othyris passed over the protest, as too puerile to 
 call for refutation. 
 
 * It is for your Excellency to make His Majesty 
 the King understand that the will of the people in 
 this matter must be done. You will only have to 
 show the Red Spectre. My father does not love the 
 Red Spectre.' 
 
 ' He has never quailed before its apparition, sir ! ' 
 
 * No ^ Are you sure ? ' 
 
 Soranis met the eyes of his visitor and did not 
 support their inquiry very steadily. 
 
 * It is impossible. It is impossible,* he said in 
 ever-increasing agitation. * Set my devotion to your 
 House to any other test, sir ! ' 
 
 *This, and no other,' replied Othyris. 'In 
 twenty-four hours' time let the body of Platon Illyris 
 lie under the dome of the mausoleum.' 
 
 Soranis shook like a leaf. 
 
 ' If this young man ever be king ! ' he thought ; he 
 felt that if that ever came to pass, such Ministries as 
 that of the Soranian would be things of the past. 
 
 ' His Majesty is shooting at Rodonthe,' said 
 Soranis helplessly. 
 
 ' Send to him there.' 
 
 * I dare not, sir, I dare not ! * 
 ' It is your duty.' 
 
 ' Sir, His Majesty will not be disturbed by any 
 Minister when he is engaged in the chase.' 
 
 *A Minister must disregard such orders when 
 there is question of the public weal.' 
 
 But Soranis was not a man to place the public 
 
348 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 weal first and the royal will second. When he ate 
 the breast of a pheasant shot by a sovereign it seemed 
 to him of more exquisite flavour than that of 
 ordinary pheasants ; and no doubt the public thought 
 so too, for poulterers found it answer their purpose 
 to ticket game exposed for sale in their shops, ' Shot 
 by H.M. the King/ The nobility smiled ; the 
 populace laughed ; but the middle classes purchased 
 and ate. We know that in all lands the middle 
 classes are the backbone, the spinal marrow, the 
 moral and mental medulla of the nation ; but the 
 spine is a little too ready to bend. Soranis, born of 
 them, kept their soul though he rose above their 
 class and changed his shape. 
 
 * Why not see His Majesty yourself, sir ? ' he 
 said nervously. * Your eloquence * 
 
 * My eloquence,' said Othyris, * would but act as 
 an irritant. My father and I are not friends.* 
 
 Soranis gave a gesture of entreaty and pain. 
 ' Then what a task you set me, sir ! ' 
 
 * Let me hear from you at my own residence,' 
 said Othyris, tired of argument ; then, humbly 
 accompanied by the Minister into the open air, he 
 took his leave. 
 
 Soranis returned to his library and threw himself 
 into a deep chair, a limp, quivering, silent, helpless 
 little figure, his grey head bowed upon his hands. 
 He had not the slightest intention of going to Ro- 
 donthe ; no one ever disturbed the King when shoot- 
 ing. He loved power, he loved dignities, he loved the 
 indulgence of nepotism, the pleasures of patronage ; 
 he loved his Court dress, the insignia of great orders ; 
 he loved the deputations at railway stations, and the 
 banquets in municipal halls ; he loved the panegyrics 
 
XXII HELIANTHUS 349 
 
 of the home newspapers and the applause of the 
 foreign Press ; he loved the famihar intercourse with 
 sovereigns, the smiles of royal women, the luxury of 
 special trains, the whole atmosphere of homage of 
 success, of ambition gratified and of far heights 
 scaled, of lucrative investments made easy by early 
 knowledge of coming events ; and all these pleasures, 
 the crown of life, were imperilled for him by a mad 
 young man and a crazy crowd ! Soranis, for the 
 first time in his career, felt that the uncertainty of 
 circumstance, and the pressure of accident, are unjust 
 factors in the careers of successful and self-made 
 men. 
 
 Soranis was a great believer in soporifics, politically 
 called trimming ; he was always the advocate of 
 middle courses, of safe concessions, of slow and 
 careful steering of the ship of the State. The events 
 of the morning as he understood them in outline 
 troubled him infinitely, and the part which the Heir- 
 Presumptive to the throne had taken troubled him still 
 more. It would be impossible for the government 
 to disown the act of a prince of the blood ; and it 
 seemed to him quite as impossible that the govern- 
 ment should ratify it or that the monarch should 
 condone it. A solution of the dilemma would have 
 been possible to an extremely reactionist, or to a 
 frankly revolutionary Ministry ; but to his, which 
 was a see-saw between the two, and pre-eminently 
 conciliatory, the difficulty was overwhelming. 
 
 Obsequious though Soranis was to Othyris, nothing 
 would induce him to send a messenger to Rodonthe ; 
 and Othyris hesitated to send one himself, knowing 
 that any direct communication from himself could 
 only embitter and prejudice the cause he had under- 
 
350 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 taken to support. There was nothing to be done but 
 to await the return of the monarch from Rodonthe ; 
 and no one knew when this would take place. 
 
 Soranis came to the palace of Othyris two hours 
 later after a painful period of indecision and distress. 
 
 * I have decided, sir/ said Soranis with dejection 
 and a nervous movement of his thin small hands, 
 ' that I cannot take upon myself the task which you, 
 sir, have allotted to me. I cannot in conscience 
 recommend His Majesty to take such a course as the 
 admittance of the remains of an Illyris to the 
 Pantheon of this city. I dare not, sir, even broach 
 such a subject to the King. I am unequal to all 
 which would ensue, did I do so. I am old, I am 
 unwell ; I am wholly unable, sir, to go through such 
 trying scenes as must ensue on such a demand. 
 When I have audience with His Majesty I shall 
 merely tender my resignation on the score of my 
 health and my inability to cope with the present 
 situation, and advise him to send for His Excellency 
 Demetrius Kantakuzene, to whom such a mission as 
 your Royal Highness has confided to me will 
 probably appear at once sympathetic, and of a piece 
 with his opinions and interests.' 
 
 He paused, coughing to hide his emotion, for he 
 suffered acutely. 
 
 Adieu^ veau^ vache^ cochon^ couvde ! He was 
 more to be pitied than the girl of the fable, for he 
 had possessed the eggs and the chickens, had killed 
 the fat pigs and pickled them, and had cow and 
 calf in his byre. He had enjoyed all the charms of 
 office, and might have done so for years to come, but 
 for the quixotic folly of a headstrong young man. 
 
 *You have decided wisely, I think,' replied 
 
XXII HELIANTHUS 351 
 
 Othyris coldly. ' But in this manner much time will 
 be lost, and time in this matter is all important. 
 Send Kantakuzene unofficially to me to-night.' 
 
 ' What, sir ? ' murmured Soranis aghast. ' To see 
 you — before being summoned by the Crown ! Such 
 a step would be wholly without precedent, wholly 
 unconstitutional. ' 
 
 ' Oh, I do not mind being unconstitutional ! ' 
 said Elim, with the smile which his elder brother 
 found so impertinent. * The Constitution is a 
 rickety fabric and does not impress me ! ' 
 
 ' Oh, sir,* exclaimed Soranis, * I entreat your Royal 
 Highness to weigh what you say ! ' 
 
 * And I entreat your Excellency to waste no more 
 time,' said Othyris with impatience and authority. 
 ' If you desire and intend to resign as soon as my 
 father returns, I beg of you, in some way or another, 
 to send this, with my message to the deputy for 
 Concordia.' 
 
 He held out a slender key which he had taken 
 out of his waistcoat pocket. 
 
 * Give him this pass-key. The trustiest of my 
 friends will meet him and bring him to me. You 
 will not go to him personally, no doubt. But your 
 Excellency must send some safe and confidential 
 person to him, for he must be here before my father's 
 return from Rodonthe. I pray your Excellency to 
 lose no time. Do not force me to remind you that 
 my honour is pledged to the people of Helios.' 
 
 Soranis was like a tortured animal held immovable 
 to endure electrical shocks. 
 
 ' I entreat your Royal Highness to reflect that you 
 may some day be called on by Providence to rule 
 over this realm ! ' he murmured feebly. 
 
352 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 * God forbid that day should ever dawn ! ' said 
 Othyris. ' It is, I think, improbable that wild boars 
 will have killed both my father and my brother this 
 morning at Rodonthe ! * 
 
 * Oh, sir ! How is it possible to jest ? * ejaculated 
 Soranis. Was it possible that a scion of a reigning 
 house could speak thus of his august relatives ? 
 
 Othyris rose with that sterner and colder look 
 upon his face which men feared in the rare moments 
 that it came there. 
 
 *Your Excellency will pardon me if I deprive 
 myself of the pleasure of your presence. But in this 
 matter there is not a moment to be lost. Beg 
 Kantakuzene to come here by the garden gates at the 
 north side of this house as long before my father's 
 return as possible.' 
 
 Soranis felt dominated and cowed ; he was not 
 brave, either morally or physically ; and although 
 he had no doubt that there was some lesion in the 
 brain of this headstrong prince, yet that conviction 
 only made him the more anxious to escape from the 
 presence of Othyris. He took a formal and a 
 humble leave, and went, taking the garden-key with 
 him ; a sad and mortified man, conscious that he 
 might have gone on smoothly and pleasantly through 
 various sessions, trotting round the ring in the circus 
 of office, if Platon Illyris had died, as he should in 
 the course of nature have died, some thirty or forty 
 years earlier on some foreign strand of exile. The 
 great Theodoric, the contemporary of Illyris, had 
 died of a surfeit of oysters and red burgundy when 
 only fifty years of age. 
 
 Providence takes so little account of men's 
 appetites and digestions ! It does not, indeed, seem 
 
XXII HELIANTHUS 353 
 
 even to have ever reckoned with them as what they 
 are, the chief factors in the disposal of human 
 affairs. 
 
 In the course of an hour the garden pass-key 
 was duly conveyed to the deputy for Concordia, 
 who came to the postern gate of the gardens of 
 Othyris, entered the gardens unseen, and took his 
 way, with strict care for secrecy, to the private apart- 
 ments of the King's second son. Kantakuzene felt 
 considerable curiosity as to the reason for his unofficial 
 summons. He attributed it, however, to the events 
 of the day, which he had himself followed with keen 
 interest and considerable apprehension ; knowing 
 well that it is easier to excite a crowd than it is to 
 control it, to set a ball rolling down a slope than to 
 stop it. 
 
 Even as he was ushered into the presence of 
 Othyris, he heard the people gathered in the Square 
 of the Dioscuri calling on the name of Elim, and 
 making that shrill clamour which in Helianthus does 
 service both as felicitation and as menace, as a shout 
 of homage and a threat of vengeance. 
 
 Kantakuzene was carefully on his guard before 
 this unexpected summons. He did not conceal his 
 mingled admiration and disapprobation of what had 
 taken place at Aquilegia ; it had perhaps saved the 
 city from riot, but it had created a most difficult 
 position for the government and the monarch. 
 
 Kantakuzene did not lack courage, and when he 
 thought that it was necessary to speak the truth 
 he did so. When he found that Othyris desired 
 him to go to the King, he said frankly : — 
 
 'It would be impossible, sir. Nor would His 
 Majesty receive me in such a capacity. He could 
 
 2 A 
 
354 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 not possibly do so. You seem to forget that I am 
 the leader of the Opposition.' 
 
 'You cannot approach him unless you are 
 summoned ^ ' 
 
 ' I cannot, of course, sir.' 
 
 * Not to save the city from bloodshed ? ' 
 
 ' Such a breach of etiquette would save nothing, 
 sir.' 
 
 Othyris was silent. He saw that Kantakuzene 
 was right. 
 
 ' What is to be done, then .? ' he asked. ' My 
 promise must be kept in twenty-four hours. Half 
 that time has already passed. I would write to the 
 King, but he would not read any letter from me.' 
 
 * Why, sir, did you take so brief a period ? ' 
 
 ' The people were unwilling even to give me so 
 much as that. They desired to obtain the body of 
 lUyris then and there, and carry it down into the 
 city and up to the Pantheon. You must know what 
 would have taken place if they had done so.' 
 
 ' But you, sir, would not have been responsible. 
 The responsibility lay with those in power, whose 
 duty it was to preserve order.' 
 
 ' And how is order always preserved ? Round 
 the coffin of the man who gained a kingdom for my 
 race, the blood of his fellow-people would have run 
 like water, unarmed crowds would have been cut 
 down like grass.' 
 
 ' The guilt, sir, would not have been yours.' 
 
 * Thirty years ago, would you not have done 
 as I did ? ' 
 
 * Perhaps, sir. Youth is rash.' 
 
 * And age and success are selfish.' 
 
 ' I admire the nobility of your action, sir ; but 
 
XXII HELIANTHUS 2S5 
 
 meanwhile the position you have created is most 
 strained, most dangerous. Do you believe that His 
 Majesty, your father, will allow the people to take 
 Illyris to the Pantheon ? * 
 
 * No ; I do not.' 
 
 * Then you are prepared to throw your life away 
 to produce no result ^ ' 
 
 * I shall certainly keep my word in one manner 
 or the other to the people of Helios.* 
 
 Kantakuzene was silent. 
 
 ' My father fears revolution,' added Othyris. 
 
 * But he unfortunately believes in the superior strength 
 of repression.' 
 
 Kantakuzene thought, what he could not say, 
 that the death of his second son would be more 
 welcome than his life to the ruler of Helianthus. 
 
 ' Was it necessary, sir, to give such a pledge, to 
 go to such extremes ? ' he said. ' Could you not 
 have persuaded the people to disperse and return to 
 their homes ? ' 
 
 * No, I could not have done so/ replied Elim. 
 
 * Nor did I seek to do so. They gave a tardy 
 remembrance to the greatest man the country has 
 ever owned, and their conscience led them aright. 
 What ! A public burial with national honours to 
 Domitian Corvus and the hero of Argileion and of 
 Samaris shoved under the earth in a graveyard of the 
 poor ! The instinct of the people was entirely right.' 
 
 Kantakuzene was silent. 
 
 He could not deny ; he dared not agree. Morally, 
 Othyris had every argument on his side ; in practical 
 politics he was hopelessly wrong. He had en- 
 couraged the populace to coerce the Crown. 
 
 To Kantakuzene, who had been Prime Minister 
 
3S6 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 before, and intended to be so again, the offence 
 seemed very great. He admired it ; he understood 
 it ; his sympathies were even aroused by it ; but he 
 condemned it. In a mere demagogue it might have 
 been praised ; but in a son of the King it was a 
 grave offence. 
 
 Honour is a fine steed on which to excite the 
 plaudits of a crowd; but Honour generally meets 
 with rough and stony roads and has poison put in 
 his drinking-water. 
 
 Kantakuzene knew that a sharp and short 
 repression by troops of the crowds would have been 
 less dangerous to the peace and polity of the country 
 than was the encouragement to rebellion given by this 
 alliance with the people of the King's second son. 
 
 *You were with the people in the days of your 
 youth, I am aware,' said Elim. ' Even now it is the 
 people whom you represent, and in whose cause your 
 eloquence is often heard. It is for the sake of the 
 people, not for mine, that you must urge my father 
 to accede to their just desire. If he refuse, there 
 will be civil war in the streets in Helianthus.' 
 
 * No doubt,' thought Kantakuzene, as he remained 
 silent ; * and if you have tenacity of purpose, and 
 audacity and resolve and egotism enough, it is quite 
 possible that you may make Helianthus a republic 
 and yourself its head.' 
 
 * You must warn my father,' said Othyris, * no 
 one else will do so.' 
 
 * If His Majesty summon me, I will do my best 
 to convince him of the danger of insurrection/ 
 replied Kantakuzene. ' If he do not, it will be 
 impossible for me to go to the Soleia.' 
 
 * That is understood,' said Othyris. * In that 
 
XXII HELIANTHUS 357 
 
 event there will be bloodshed. Nothing will avert 
 it.* And he rose and gave his hand to Kantakuzene. 
 
 He was tired and anxious to be alone. 
 
 Kantakuzene returned to his own residence, which 
 was close by ; the throngs in the Square of the 
 Dioscuri were still calling on the name of Elim. 
 Kantakuzene was of a temperament which is happiest 
 in perilous events, in difficult crises, in the excitement 
 and the responsibility of complicated intrigues and 
 obligations ; he was constitutionally courageous, he 
 loved to wrestle with men and throw them. Usually, 
 he did throw them ; and he had seldom had a fall 
 himself. 
 
 But his present mission was an anxiety, even a 
 terror to him ; he did not see his way clearly. Such 
 a mission as Othyris had given him was wholly out of 
 order, and to advise the King to open the gates of 
 the House of the Immortals to Platon Illyris seemed 
 to him a task of which the issue might very probably 
 be to close on himself the gates of public life for ever 
 and aye. He was relieved when he heard at his own 
 house that the King had not returned from Rodonthe. 
 The respite gave him time to reflect and to prepare 
 for any event. 
 
 He was aware that as a Radical leader he could not 
 himself accept office if he were forced to oppose the 
 desire of the people. Yet, even to him, the entrance 
 of the bier of Illyris into the burial-place of the 
 Immortals appeared an offence to the reigning House 
 which it would be impossible for the head of that 
 House to condone. 
 
 * If only the people will trust me and be patient ! * 
 thought Othyris. 
 
 When the evening papers announced that Soranis 
 
358 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 was about to resign, there was great agitation in 
 all political spheres of action. It was unexpected. 
 It alarmed all capitalists and speculators. To many 
 it was unintelligible. Men were half the night in 
 the streets. The cafes and restaurants buzzed like 
 hives when the bees are swarming. The troops 
 were, of course, kept confined to their barracks. 
 Throngs of people stood through the short hours of 
 the summer night in the Square of the Dioscuri 
 before the palace of Othyris. But he made them no 
 response to their enthusiasm, and neither came into 
 the Square nor on to the balcony ; they shouted till 
 they were hoarse, but always in vain. 
 
 It was past midnight when the carriages of the 
 royal sportsmen rolled with noise and dust over the 
 marble pavements of the streets and crashed into the 
 great court of the Soleia, followed by the carriages of 
 the gentlemen who had accompanied the expedition, 
 and by the brakes bearing the bleeding carcases of 
 the grand beasts, stags, does, elands, wild boars, 
 slaughtered for the princely pastime in the close 
 season and in the breeding time. 
 
 The King, fatigued and drowsy, had only one 
 desire, his bed. The heaviness of sleep and stupor 
 made the news which awaited him appear the more 
 intolerable, and he muttered in his throat oaths which 
 chilled the blood of his gentlemen of the chamber. 
 But he refused audience to any one ; he left all action 
 to the morning light ; he threw himself on the 
 narrow mattress of his camp bed, and dropped at 
 once into a deep slumber in which both his body and 
 his brain were stupefied by carnage, by brandy, by 
 fatigue ; no one dared disturb his august repose. 
 
 Beneath him, stretched on stone floors in the 
 
XXII HELIANTHUS 359 
 
 palace cellars, the grand forest creatures he had slain 
 still dropped blood from their innocent mouths. 
 
 His son Elim did not sleep. He passed the chief 
 part of the night revising the various manners in 
 which he had already bequeathed his properties and 
 provided for the consequences of his own death, for 
 he was fully resolved not to live a day if, as he 
 knew was probable, his promise to the people should 
 not be carried out by the State. 
 
 His country should know, at least, that he had 
 been no traitor. It was a point of honour to him, 
 as it is to the man who has drawn the fatal lot which 
 imposes suicide upon him ; and, considering the 
 refusal as inevitable, he prepared for it. Soranis 
 and even Kantakuzene were more agitated than he. 
 He was as calm as the Due d'Enghien was on that 
 fatal morning, when the young Bourbon's chief 
 anxiety was for the future of his dog. In the small 
 hours of the morning messages came to Othyris that 
 the King had returned, and that he had gone to his 
 rest without receiving any Minister or even the 
 Prefect of the Palace. No one dared arouse him. 
 
 ' It is certain, I imagine, that he will refuse,' 
 thought his son. 
 
 Othyris could not in honour have done any other 
 thing than that which he had done. Yet in his own 
 sight he seemed to have failed in his duty towards 
 those who could not help themselves and whom he 
 had bidden return to gods that he knew to be false. 
 Men would praise him perhaps, praise his filial 
 loyalty and his rejection of personal popularity ; but 
 though he knew he could not have done otherwise 
 with self respect, yet he felt himself that he had 
 failed, where one less scrupulous and more selfish 
 
36o HELIANTHUS chap, xxii 
 
 might have taken fortune at the flood. Are there 
 not moments in life when a lesser crime should be 
 done to avoid a greater crime ? Is there not many 
 an instance, in the records of history, of evil having 
 been boldly done, that good should come out 
 from it ? 
 
 It seemed to him impossible that any man living 
 should bend the will of the King. Illyris, in the 
 opinion of the King, was a republican who had been 
 a rebel ; the populace was a hydra-headed monster ; 
 the popular will was an insolence, a treason, a fever 
 as contagious and dangerous as the plague, and to 
 be stamped out like the rinderpest. 
 
 The dead and the living were to the ruler of 
 Helianthus alike unpardonable, insupportable. 
 
 Othyris had given his word to the people in order 
 to avoid a popular outbreak, a beginning of revolution 
 which might be fraught with consequences incalcul- 
 able ; but as his word could only be kept if his 
 father gave him the power to keep it, he had no hope 
 that he should be able to do so. 
 
 There was only one way in which he could prove 
 his sincerity to the people if he were denied the 
 power to give them their will. 
 
 Death alone could speak for him in clear and 
 certain tones. The people would not misjudge his 
 motives, nor would the woman whom he loved. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 The King rose late the next morning : his temper, 
 always bad, was that of a fasting tiger ; it was not 
 improved by the news which awaited him, or by the 
 black coffee and cognac with which he broke his 
 fast. His olive skin grew duskier, his sullen eyes 
 colder and more obscured ; he was enraged with 
 others for that delay in the conveyance of the 
 intelligence to him which had been entirely due to 
 his own fault in refusing to hear anything whatever. 
 He cursed every one : the governor of the city, the 
 commandant of the troops, the chief of the police, 
 the central government, his Ministers, his household, 
 and, of course, his second son beyond all others. 
 
 ' That I should have bred an anarchist ! ' he 
 thought, in fury ; and he cursed his dead wife in her 
 grave. 
 
 The action of the populace was to him as un- 
 pardonable as a kick from the wheeler, or a jib from 
 the leaders, is to the driver of a four-in-hand. His 
 Ministers assured him that the present effervescence 
 was as harmless as the froth of seltzer ; but he had 
 once seen a seltzer syphon explode. 
 
 Meanwhile the crowds increased with every ten 
 minutes, and were fed by numbers of peasants from 
 the outlying country, come in with the produce of 
 
 361 
 
362 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 their ground, who remained to see what might 
 happen. 
 
 The Crown Prince was sent for by the King ; to 
 him, as to his father, the whole events of the previous 
 day appeared diabolical ; and neither of them could 
 understand why the crowd had not been dispersed 
 with bayonets or by an infantry volley. It was such 
 a simple thing to do. What use was the governor 
 of the city if he could not do it .'' As for Elim, they 
 knew well that he was a second Egalite. Nothing 
 that he could do surprised either of them. 
 
 To calm these furious waters, to moderate 
 these raging cyclones, seemed to Michael Soranis, 
 when ushered into their presence, a task wholly 
 beyond his strength. John of Gunderode, in a suit 
 of shepherd's plaid tweed, with a red cashmere 
 neckerchief wound about his throat — for he was 
 hoarse from a chill taken in the woods whilst standing 
 still awaiting the driven deer — was not Jupiter Tonans, 
 nor even Louis Quatorze ; and his son Theo was not 
 the Black Prince, or Don John of Austria, but a red- 
 faced, bullet-headed, angry, alarmed person, twisting 
 bristling moustaches and breathing fiercely like a 
 chained-up bull-dog. Yet such as they were, they 
 carried fear and awe into the breast of the Prime 
 Minister, who was not a Sully, a Bismarck, a 
 Ricasoli, or a Richelieu, but a plausible and pliant 
 opportunist who disliked absolutism and revolution 
 equally, and was absolutely incapable of speaking 
 unwelcome truths to his sovereign. A Minister 
 ought not to be a courtier ; but, unfortunately, the 
 two words are too often synonymous. 
 
 Morally the spine of Soranis grew more supple, 
 as physically it grew more rheumatic. Reactionism 
 
XXIII HELIANTHUS 363 
 
 increases in an ageing statesman as crust on the 
 ageing bottle of port wine. The loaves and fishes, 
 which to his youth used to seem indifferent, become 
 more indispensable to him as time goes on ; and 
 their abundance on his own table appears to him the 
 correct measure of national prosperity, because it is 
 the measure of his own personal success. 
 
 To Soranis, therefore, it was in all sincerity the 
 most painful of missions to stand before these two 
 angry gentlemen, and endeavour to pour the oil of 
 deprecation on the raging waters of their wrath. 
 He knew that he was only partially trusted by 
 them ; he knew that they always saw in him a half- 
 hearted conservative and monarchist, a person of doubt- 
 ful and debateable principles ; they always remem- 
 bered against him the years during which, as a doctor 
 from the provinces, he had sat on the left benches. 
 How persuade such hearers that the wish of the 
 populace must be respected, without appearing to be 
 still the tribune of the people ? How excuse and 
 uphold the action of the King's insubordinate son, 
 without seeming to be the apologist of an anarchist, 
 the partisan of a rebel ? His naturally timid temper 
 and his failing health rendered him incapable of such 
 a dual task as the pacification of a furious monarch 
 and of an excited populace. He left power with 
 sore distress ; he knew that at his age he could 
 never return to it. When in ofHce Corvus had, 
 indeed, been much older than he himself now was ; 
 but Corvus had been made of brass and steel. 
 Soranis was of far more fragile stuff. With intense 
 pain and mortification he felt that he had nothing to 
 do except to place his resignation in his sovereign's 
 hands ; and the King, without any amenity of speech 
 
364 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 or manner, accepted it with a few unkind incisive 
 words. 
 
 The aged statesman was bloodless, exhausted, out 
 of breath, when he passed out of the Soleia. 
 
 ' Sir,' he said feebly to Othyris, a few minutes 
 later, ' I found myself unable to recommend to His 
 Majesty the ratification of your Royal Highnesses 
 promise to the people of Helios. I could not 
 reconcile it with my public duty nor with my 
 private powers ; I have therefore placed my resigna- 
 tion in His Majesty's hands, as I had the honour to 
 inform you that I should do. I have advised him to 
 summon His Excellency Demetrius Kantakuzene.' 
 
 ' You have done well,' said Othyris, * but do you 
 believe that the King will send for Kantakuzene ? ' 
 
 ' His Majesty always acts constitutionally, sir.' 
 
 'In form, perhaps, he does,' thought Othyris, 
 * but in spirit not often.' 
 
 * Sir,' said Soranis, greatly woebegone, ' your royal 
 father has upbraided me for the actual course of 
 events. He used expressions which I felt were 
 unjust, for I have always done what I believed to be 
 my duty.* 
 
 * I am sure that your Excellency has always acted 
 for what you considered the interests of the country,' 
 replied Othyris ; and he felt that he did the fallen 
 Minister no more than justice. For Soranis was 
 one of those public men who are neither hypocrites 
 nor liars, but who deceive themselves into the belief 
 that they serve their nation when they only serve 
 themselves. 
 
 Soranis had, like many another successful politician, 
 believed that his own measures were wholesome 
 medicine for the maladies of the State ; that his own 
 
XXIII HELIANTHUS 365 
 
 ascendancy was the best of all paregorics, and his 
 own administration at once a purge, a tonic, and an 
 anodyne. 
 
 Humbly, wearily, almost tearfully, the ex-Premier 
 took his leave ; and Othyris, left alone, thought : 
 * Kantakuzene if he be called will fail.' 
 
 To account for the sudden fall of Soranis it was 
 reported in the official Press that he had suffered 
 from a slight attack of cerebral paralysis. But no 
 one believed it. Every one felt sure that the 
 paralysis from which he suffered was the inability of 
 a feeble politician to cope with an unexpected situation. 
 
 Early in the forenoon it was rumoured that the 
 resignation of Soranis had been accepted, and that it 
 was expected that the King would send for the 
 leader of the Opposition. The news of the resigna- 
 tion, and the hope that Kantakuzene would be called 
 to office, tended to soothe and pacify the people in 
 the streets, and they waited without agitation and im- 
 patience for further intelligence. 
 
 They believed in Kantakuzene. He had stepped 
 past them, and shut the doors of reform in their 
 faces many a time, but he remained nevertheless their 
 ideal reformer. 
 
 The courage of Kantakuzene was usually stimu- 
 lated by difficulty, but the task now before him 
 seemed to him greater than any man born of woman 
 could bring to a successful issue. But he accepted the 
 position, and brought to it all his acumen, finesse, and 
 knowledge of men. That he should be summoned 
 when the streets of Helios were full of agitated and 
 excited people flattered his self-esteem and at the 
 same time moved his patriotism, which had never 
 been an artificial or insincere sentiment, and armed 
 
366 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 him at all points against the wrath of his sovereign. 
 Kantakuzene was neither false nor dishonest ; but 
 his views, like those of most men who succeed, 
 changed with his fortunes. It is natural that the 
 man who has arrived at a political altitude should not 
 think ill of a world which has allowed and assisted him 
 to arrive. The sentiments of a successful man change 
 imperceptibly with his success, but not necessarily in- 
 sincerely. To the young lawyer, holding a brief for 
 an insurgent, revolution seems a very different matter 
 to that which it appears to him when he is a states- 
 m.an who can consign troops to barracks or send 
 them out with fixed bayonets to clear the streets. 
 There is as much difference between the two stages 
 of the same man's life as there was between a goat- 
 herd on the slopes of Olympus and the Olympian 
 Zeus throned upon the clouds. 
 
 All the wisdom of Socrates only brought him the 
 cup of hemlock. Successful men know that ; hence, 
 so gradually that they are unconscious of the trans- 
 formation, they become hard, cold, gluttonous, 
 cynical, mercenary ; their price is a very high one, 
 but they have a price. Their ideals lie dead, as 
 dead as the wild-flowers which they gathered in their 
 childhood and threw down on the grass of paths 
 which their feet will never tread again. But Kanta- 
 kuzene did now and then look at the field-flowers, 
 even as Disraeli did at the primroses. He was not 
 absolutely disloyal to his early tenets ; but he, like 
 Disraeli, let them lie in abeyance. 
 
 Like most men who are not fanatics or visionaries 
 he cared principally for his own interests ; but after 
 his own — a long way after — he did care for the interests 
 of his country. 
 
XXIII HELIANTHUS 367 
 
 He knew that these were imperilled by the policy 
 of the King and of the reactionary party which over- 
 weighted a poor nation with fiscal burdens, sacrificed 
 all useful progress to military expenditure, and was 
 the dupe of showy and useless alliances, which kept 
 the tired people armed to the teeth and bowed down 
 under the pack-saddle of a monstrous taxation. Office 
 was naturally his goal for his own personal ambi- 
 tions, but in addition to these for his sense that he 
 understood the people better than his rivals, and 
 could benefit them more. 
 
 When he received the summons of his sovereign 
 he felt not only the elation of a politician flattered by 
 being called to serve the Crown in a difficult crisis, 
 but something also of the patriotism which is ready 
 to confront a dangerous issue for sake of the country. 
 The moment was critical. He knew that if the 
 people became more excited and were refused the 
 demand for the burial of Illyris in the city, their 
 rage would become ungovernable, and, though they 
 would be probably worsted eventually, they were 
 certainly in the mood to face the troops ; and it was 
 possible that the troops might go over to the popular 
 side. Kantakuzene knew that there was much secret 
 disaffection in the barracks of Helios. If Othyris 
 should cease to be neutral, and should come out into the 
 streets and take their head, it was probable, thought 
 the statesman, that there would be civil war of the 
 most bitter kind — of the populace against the ruling 
 power. 
 
 To avert this seemed to Kantakuzene his own 
 supreme duty. The time had been when he would 
 have welcomed such a conflict, and have done his 
 best to conclude it in favour of the populace. But 
 
368 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 that time was past ; he had been Prime Minister 
 before now ; he desired to be so again. To risk, 
 instead, revolution beside a young man who was a 
 poet rather than a poHtician, whose scruples were as 
 many as the sands of the sea, and whose courage 
 was constantly being checked by the hesitations of 
 his conscience, never entered the mind of the deputy 
 for Concordia. 
 
 There are transmigrations which are against nature. 
 The revolutionist may develop into the Minister. 
 The Minister never becomes again the revolutionist. 
 So Kantakuzene, on receiving the summons from 
 the King, hastened to the Soleia. 
 
 Kantakuzene was by instinct and early training a 
 special pleader : he had been in early years remarked 
 for the skill, the suavity, the courtesy, the persuasive- 
 ness of his speeches in the courts of justice. He had 
 brought into political life that shrewd and subtle 
 management of men which he had learned at the 
 Bar. 
 
 A bourgeois, a notary's son, a self-made man, 
 there was a certain awe even for him in princes, a 
 certain spell which magnetised him momentarily ; 
 but he was never ventre a terre before royalty, like 
 Deliornis or Soranis ; and when his momentary trepi- 
 dation passed off, which it did soon, he was master of 
 himself, and at times, as he was now, master of 
 them. 
 
 He had not been a famous advocate without 
 knowing how to move his fellow-men by the mere 
 charm and force of words. The King and the Crown 
 Prince were indeed not susceptible to eloquence, but 
 his adroit speech reached to the hidden sources of 
 their secret fears, and conjured up before their dull 
 
XXIII HELIANTHUS 369 
 
 minds that vision of the Red Spectre which haunts 
 at night the pillows whereon crowned heads uneasy 
 lie. 
 
 The populace was to them both but as a worm on 
 which to set their heel ; but Kantakuzene made them 
 reluctantly realise that the worm might turn into a 
 viper, nay, even into a python ; and that the heel 
 even of Achilles was vulnerable in the modern suc- 
 cessors of Achilles. They were both clothed in the 
 impenetrable armour of pride, or prejudice, of vanity, 
 of caste, of ignorance ; but the shafts of his ingenious 
 and deferential words pierced the joints of their 
 armour, and made the net-work of nerves beneath 
 the armour thrill. 
 
 In the Alps, at certain seasons, a single shot fired 
 may bring down an avalanche which may bury 
 villages. Kantakuzene used the metaphor, and made 
 them feel that the season was come, the avalanche 
 above their heads, the atmosphere surcharged with 
 danger of no common kind. 
 
 The heir to the throne would have dared all, 
 would have fired the shot, though the avalanche had 
 engulfed him ; but the actual occupant of the throne 
 was more moved by the impending danger : under his 
 stolid and cold mask he was afraid of what might 
 happen — he did not wish to go and live on his 
 millions in a foreign country like a retired stock- 
 broker ; he knew well that the man who has reigned 
 is on ceasing to reign dwarfed and crippled for the 
 rest of his natural life. 
 
 He did not believe in the possibility of his own 
 deposition, his own exile ; but he could not altogether 
 resist the impression of the alarm which Kantakuzene 
 so skilfully suggested without ever giving it a shape 
 
 2 B 
 
370 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 which could offend. A vision rose before him of 
 his son EHm chosen as President of a Helianthine 
 Republic, even as Henri d'Orleans, had he had more 
 spirit for combat or less loyalty to his family, might 
 have become president of his nation and master of 
 her fate. 
 
 Willingly, and with fierce pleasure in his slow 
 veins, would the King have arrested his son, have 
 called out the troops, have raked the streets with 
 musketry fire, and blocked the squares with cannon ; 
 but the serum of fear was infiltrated into his veins 
 by an accomplished adept in mental therapeutics ; 
 and Kantakuzene, with his flute-like voice and per- 
 suasive speech, was, momentarily at least, his master. 
 Jealousy and^ fear, two doubtful counsellors, made the 
 King estimate the popularity of his second son as a 
 far more potent factor than it actually was. He 
 attributed to Elim projects and ambitions which Elim 
 had never harboured, and which were indeed wholly 
 alien to his temperament. A mind which sees every 
 side of each question, which is doubtful of the wisdom 
 of any step, which is divided between emotions and 
 opinions, between censure and sympathy, is not a 
 mind to conceive and execute hardy and daring 
 schemes of self-aggrandisement : such a mind, as it 
 shrinks from decision, is un tempted by lust of power, 
 since in all power all action must be swift, sharp, 
 unhesitating, and certain of itself. 
 
 Othyris would have been fully as reluctant to 
 head a republic as he would have been unwilling to 
 reign ; he abhorred responsibility, and had no belief 
 in his own wisdom to sustain him under it. This is 
 not the temperament of ambitious agitators. But the 
 King had never had either the inclination or capacity 
 
XXIII HELIANTHUS 
 
 371 
 
 to study and understand his son's character, and to 
 his narrow and angular intelligence the intricacies and 
 scruples of such a character were not even conceivable ; 
 he only saw in the nation's favourite a rebel in public 
 life and a rival in private life. The King was afraid ; 
 he was in the power of a son whom he had threatened, 
 ridiculed, coerced, hated ever since the day that he 
 had shot the eagle to wound the tender heart of a 
 child. He was afraid — afraid of exposure, of scandal, 
 of losing before the sight of men that reputation of 
 cleanliness and of chastity which he had maintained 
 so carefully throughout his life. 
 
 Kantakuzene attributed the evident irresolution, 
 which had succeeded the dogged obstinacy and 
 impenetrability of the King's attitude, to that dread 
 of the Red Spectre of which Othyris had spoken ; a 
 spectre which haunts the sleep and dominates the 
 waking thoughts of all potentates. * He is afraid,' 
 he thought. ' Will he yield to fear ? ' 
 
 Kantakuzene was not a vain man ; his self-esteem 
 never obscured his judgment ; therefore he did not 
 attribute to his own persuasion the gradual change 
 which he perceived come over the King's countenance 
 and attitude. John of GunderOde rose out of his 
 chair and paced the carpet with steps which indicated 
 an uneasy mind ; his sullen features had on them a 
 transient expression of anxiety ; he smoked feverishly, 
 throwing aside his cigarettes scarcely consumed ; his 
 hands were thrust into his trousers pockets, his eyes 
 were veiled under their heavy lids. The Crown 
 Prince looked at him furtively in astonishment, not 
 daring to speak. 
 
 Kantakuzene thought, * Is it possible that he is 
 wavering ? Is it possible that he is afraid ? ' There 
 
372 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 were hesitation and indecision indicated in the move- 
 ments of the monarch. 
 
 Precisely as the chimes and clocks of the city- 
 sounded the second hour of the day, Demetrius 
 Kantakuzene was ushered into the presence of Othyris. 
 Othyris laid down the volume he read, and the 
 cigarette he smoked ; he was tranquil ; he seemed 
 even indifferent 
 
 ' Your Excellency is punctual. Has the struggle 
 been hard ? ' 
 
 He saw that it had been hard. The countenance 
 of the Minister was worn, pallid, harassed, drawn. 
 
 His voice was almost inaudible, and his breath 
 was drawn in quick gasps as he answered : 
 
 *I have had the honour, sir, to be ordered to 
 convey to the public the news that His Majesty the 
 King graciously consents to honour the body of 
 Platon Illyris with sepulture in the Pantheon, called 
 by the populace the " House of the Immortals." ' 
 
 * I congratulate you,' he said to Kantakuzene. 
 
 * You have won a bloodless victory where defeat 
 would have cost much bloodshed.' 
 
 * Sir,' said Kantakuzene, ' thank God that your 
 life is not to be thrown away in its youth. Your 
 motives would never have been understood or your 
 sacrifices appreciated.' 
 
 * That would not have mattered,' replied Othyris. 
 
 * What would have mattered is that there would have 
 been civil war in Helios.' 
 
 Kantakuzene sighed, as an overstrained horse 
 sighs when reaching the summit of a hill of stones, 
 its sinews swollen and its lungs choked, resting with- 
 out rest. 
 
XXIII HELIANTHUS 373 
 
 He had won this battle in the privacy of the King's 
 closet; but all the other battles with party, with 
 opposition, with colleagues, with supporters, with the 
 Senate and the Press, with the committees and the 
 constituencies, were all yet to be fought. To Othyris 
 the matter seemed at an end ; but to the politician 
 the endless coil of difficulties appeared as yet scarcely 
 touched, and although he was victorious, he thought, 
 like Wellington, that victory was the next saddest 
 thing to a defeat. 
 
 * What made him yield ? ' asked Othyris. 
 
 ' I cannot tell, sir.' 
 
 Kantakuzene was too adroit to couple fear with 
 the royal name. Othyris thought it was dread of the 
 Red Spectre ; he never supposed that it was dread of 
 himself. The motive, however, did not matter ; what 
 was of import was that the desire of the people was 
 granted. He scarcely gave a thought to the fact that 
 his own life had been spared. 
 
 Kantakuzene, though only Prime Minister-elect, 
 had acted with promptitude and temerity. He 
 had given orders that, so long as the multitudes 
 remained only harmlessly excited, they should not be 
 molested, but that upon the slightest sign of disturb- 
 ance or menace the repression should be severe. 
 The people, however, gave no excuse for such 
 severity. They were gratified, grateful, orderly, 
 though effervescent and emotional, and crowded 
 together in the streets chanting with tears and 
 smiles their national songs, and shouting that for 
 once unchastised Hymn of Eos, which had roused 
 their fathers' fathers in dungeon and cell, on the 
 benches of galleys, and by the cold hearths of rural 
 cabins. 
 
374 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 By the unconscious obedience to that magnetic 
 current which moves a crowd, the bulk of the people 
 had come towards and into the square in which 
 the residence of Othyris was situated, and were 
 shouting his name before its long and imposing 
 frontage of pale fawn-coloured marble. 
 
 His gentlemen, sorely disquieted, conversed to- 
 gether in troubled tones. Othyris was alone in his 
 studio, where no one of them ever dared to follow him 
 except by his command. Through the long perspec- 
 tive of rooms which opened one out of another, they 
 could see the lights glittering in the Square, and the 
 sound of the people's outcries echoed to them 
 through the open windows of the last salon. Would 
 the crowd disperse quietly, they wondered, if no 
 answer were vouchsafed to it ^ The gates stood wide 
 open, as usual ; the porter with his gilded stick, and 
 the two sentries, the only guardians of the building, 
 would be easily overpowered if the mob should 
 become angry ; within the palace there was a crowd 
 of servants, but these would be of no use for defence. 
 The courtiers grew nervous as the cries of the citizens 
 became more insistent. 
 
 Like the Scots of old they agreed that some one 
 should bell the cat, should enter their master's atelier^ 
 and give the alarm ; but no one of them cared to 
 accept that office. Every few minutes one or other 
 of them walked through the rooms and looked from 
 behind the draperies of one of the windows on to the 
 piazza below. In the centre of it was the vast 
 fountain, a work of the sixteenth century, placed 
 between the statues of the Dioscuri ; dolphins and 
 sea-horses plunging ; adolescents astride on them, 
 laughing ; towering columns of water shooting 
 
XXIII HELIANTHUS 375 
 
 upwards, turning in the air, falling downwards in 
 torrents of foam. In the electric light directed on 
 it, its marbles and its waters were one mass of silver. 
 Around it, and filling the whole square, were the 
 many-coloured and motley representatives of the 
 various arts, and crafts, and labours, and degrees of 
 industry and poverty which made up the democracy 
 of Helios. They entirely filled the great space ; on 
 two sides were palaces used for public offices ; at the 
 opposite end to that of Othyris there were public 
 gardens with dense tall trees and palms of untold age. 
 The populace made that hoarse ominous sound, like 
 that of a sullen sea, which is its habitual note both in 
 joy and in rage. But ever and again above the 
 clamour there rose a clearer call : it was the call on 
 the name of Elim by the people who loved him. 
 
 The gentlemen, who one by one gazed down on 
 the spectacle from behind the curtains, were alarmed 
 and impressed ; the numbers of the crowd increased 
 with every moment as new-comers poured in through 
 the various streets which led to it. 
 
 The cries grew more turbulent, the press more 
 feverish ; the chanting of the Hymn of Eos was 
 crossed by the refrain of the Gallian hymn of revolu- 
 tion and the translated strophes of northern odes to 
 Labour and to Anarchy. They were in that mood 
 when, if the will and the power to direct them be 
 there, such throngs can be led to any excesses, to any 
 crimes, through a sea of blood. 
 
 The courtiers consulted together ; Othyris must be 
 told, they again agreed, but by whom ? 
 
 * He must hear them in his studio,' said one of the 
 gentlemen. ' If he choose to come out to them he 
 will do so.* 
 
376 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 In their own thoughts they all blamed him deeply 
 for his encouragement of the demands of the people, 
 who, in their estimation, were but the mere tools of 
 the socialists. 
 
 As they whispered together, and the shouts of the 
 throngs echoed through the great, silent, lighted suite 
 of apartments, the door which opened into the corridor 
 leading to his study was pushed back, and Othyris 
 himself came towards them. They were surprised to 
 see how pale and agitated his countenance was, for 
 they knew that the traditional courage of the royal 
 House was in no member of it greater than in him- 
 self. But with a firm step he passed by them, saluted 
 them by a courteous gesture, and went through the 
 rooms to those end windows which looked on the 
 piazza. 
 
 The windows opened on to a large balcony. He 
 passed out on to it, and stood looking down upon 
 the populace. He was recognised at once, and 
 greeted with the passionate warmth of a southern 
 people. He waited a little while for the first vehe- 
 mence of their welcome to spend itself, then he 
 advanced to the marble balustrade and held up his 
 hand. In the comparative silence which ensued his 
 voice reached clear and unwavering to the strained 
 ears of the expectant throngs. He could have done 
 - with them in that moment whatever he had chosen. 
 
 ' My friends,' he said to them, * I thank you for 
 your kindness, but no honour is due to me ; I myself 
 was powerless. Take your gratitude whither it is due : 
 to one who, possessing the power, had also the will 
 to do that which you wished — our sovereign lord the 
 King.' 
 
 It was loyalty, it was filial duty, it was the fealty 
 
XXIII HELIANTHUS 377 
 
 of a gentleman to his race ; but it was not what the 
 people desired or expected. An angry murmur rose 
 from their restless ranks. 
 
 ' I have no other bidding for you, my friends. If 
 you believe that you owe me anything, obey me now/ 
 he said, and stood still a moment to see what effect 
 his words had on them. He felt as if he betrayed 
 them. He felt untrue to his own faiths, and to their 
 faith in him. But what other course was open to 
 him ? He could not lead them to the siege of the 
 Soleia. 
 
 A brawny giant from the docks, naked to the 
 waist, with a red cap on his black poll, shouted back 
 to him : 
 
 * To hell with John of GunderCde ! It is you we 
 want ! * 
 
 * You ! You I You ! We want you ! ' the 
 whole multitude echoed as with one voice. But 
 already Othyris had gone back into the room, and 
 they saw him no more ; nor did he return to the 
 balcony, though with impassioned entreaties and 
 imprecations they implored him to come out to them 
 once more. 
 
 Two agents of police, supple and strong as 
 pythons, had glided through the closely-pressed 
 ranks and seized the man of the docks and dragged 
 him away out of sight, with an action so rapid and 
 noiseless that the people scarcely realised what had 
 been done, and had neither time nor chance for 
 rescue. 
 
 When Kantakuzene congratulated him with 
 warmth and gratitude on his answer to the populace, 
 Othyris received his compliments with great coldness. 
 
 ' Surely I could have done nothing else ? ' he said 
 
378 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 with curt disdain. *You would not have had me 
 lead them to the siege of the Arsenal or the sack of 
 the Soleia ? * 
 
 The Minister thought, but did not say, that it 
 was precisely these things which many would have 
 expected from a prince in open antagonism with the 
 Crown. 
 
 He himself was not a little astonished at the 
 inertia, as he considered it, of a young man who was 
 avowedly a malcontent, and, as all knew, on ill terms 
 with his royal father. 
 
 ' He has had his opportunity,' he thought, * and 
 he has thrown it away ; it will not come back again. 
 Blood would have run like water, of course ; but it is 
 just possible that if he had put himself at the head of 
 the people he might have made himself master of the 
 city and the throne. The King grows more unpopular 
 every year, and the army is mined by socialism. We 
 could not be perfectly sure of its obedience in any 
 serious conflict with the populace.' 
 
 And Kantakuzene, who had a pleasant sense of 
 humour, laughed a little to himself as he imagined 
 his august master, as he might have seen him, hurrying 
 out in travelling-cap and mackintosh, by a side door 
 of the palace, in the grey of dawn or in the dead of 
 night, and getting on board a steamship to go where 
 his millions were safely awaiting him over the seas. 
 The Crown Prince, he thought, would have stayed 
 and would have fought like a bull-terrier to the end 
 in such an event. 
 
 As it was, the demonstration ended harmlessly ; 
 on the morrow the people returned peaceably to their 
 work. They were only partly satisfied, but reckoned 
 that half a loaf was better than no bread, and to have 
 
XXIII HELIANTHUS 379 
 
 had their will in one thing argued well to them for 
 the future. 
 
 The person who gained most by the events was 
 the person to whom they had seemed most threaten- 
 ing. Kantakuzene became once more as popular with 
 the masses as he had always been in the days of his 
 early manhood. To his influence the people attributed 
 their victory, and to his influence the bourgeoisie 
 attributed the peaceful issue of a dangerous move- 
 ment. Only the King and the Crown Prince, who 
 had always disliked, now hated him ; he had forced 
 royalty into concessions to the popular will. 
 
 The authorities were still in great alarm. The 
 troops were still confined to barracks. The number 
 of guards in plain clothes with revolvers hidden was 
 very large. But the elaborate military precautions 
 taken were in a great measure concealed, and that 
 portion of the people which had been concerned in the 
 demonstration of the previous days was too elated to 
 be alarmed or to take umbrage at such precautions 
 against itself as it perceived. They were proud of 
 their own victory, with that thoughtless, inflated, 
 dangerous conceit which in all ages and in all climes 
 throws the flehs into the arms of its antagonists at 
 the critical moments when calmness and self-restraint 
 might give it a chance of victory. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 The homage of the pubRc to Platon lUyris on the 
 morrow was without pomp, or parade, or miHtary 
 spectacle, but its simphcity made its grandeur, and 
 the crowds which followed the bier from the hillside 
 and the seashore across the city to the mausoleum 
 were worthy of his memory. There was no music, 
 there were no troops, there were no cannon, no 
 priests, no banners, no muffled drums, no war-horses 
 slowly pacing under plumed riders and broidered 
 saddle-cloths : there were only the people of Helios, 
 in thousands and tens of thousands, following the 
 plain deal coffin in dead silence, for the Hymn of 
 Eos had been again forbidden by special proclamation, 
 and the people would have no other. 
 
 From far and near, from maritime village and 
 mountain hamlet, the men and women of Helianthus 
 flocked in masses through the gates, and swelled the 
 populace of the various quarters of the town ; a 
 torrent of multicoloured hues, of silent but impassioned 
 life, choking down in silence in their throats the for- 
 bidden chant which rose to the lips of all. 
 
 The troops were shut up in their barracks ready 
 for any emergency ; strong forces of guards, and 
 police, and mounted carabineers, were drawn up along 
 the line of route ; the gates and the windows of the 
 
 380 
 
CHAP. XXIV HELIANTHUS 381 
 
 palaces of the aristocracy and the plutocracy were all 
 closed, but in no sign of respect, only out of a great 
 fear. 
 
 As the funeral passed through the Square of the 
 Dioscuri under the lofty palms, by the falling foun- 
 tains, Othyris rode out of the courtyard of his 
 palace and placed himself beside the bier ; he was in 
 full uniform ; he wore crape upon his arm ; the sun 
 shone on the fairness of his face and hair. 
 
 An immense shout of welcome and applause 
 greeted the courage of his act. 
 
 He checked the tumultuous cheering with a gesture, 
 entreating and commanding silence ; then rode on 
 beside the coffin at a slow pace, the smothered out- 
 cries of homage and admiration rolling down the air 
 like the hoarse mutterings of a storm. The solemnity 
 of the errand on which they went, the impression of 
 awe and repentance which was on the souls of the 
 masses that day alone restrained the populace of 
 Helios from proclaiming their will to have him as 
 their lord, to be ruled by him and by him alone. 
 
 The palace of Kantakuzene was but a few dozen 
 yards distant from the Square of the Dioscuri. The 
 dense crowds passed under its walls. From a case- 
 ment, hidden by growing plants climbing over its 
 grating, Kantakuzene looked out on the throng and 
 saw the solitary rider on the black horse. 
 
 * Good heavens, what imprudence ! ' he murmured. 
 * If I had dreamed of it, I would have kept him in by 
 force ! ' 
 
 In his horror and apprehension the sweat of fear 
 and of amaze stood in chill drops upon his forehead. 
 Never, he knew, never would John of GunderOde 
 pardon either Elim or himself. 
 
382 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 The bier and the rider beside it passed out of 
 sight down the street, soon hidden by the projecting 
 balconies, and sculptures, and lamp-irons of its 
 ancient houses. The crowds continued long to tramp 
 through the street, until the last stragglers had passed. 
 There is no sound so ominous as the passing of a 
 multitude. As he heard it, Kantakuzene bowed his 
 head on his hands and sighed wearily. This demon- 
 stration might close peacefully, or it might end in 
 bloodshed ; but whatever might be its issue he knew 
 that the germs of a great peril were in it. All the 
 citizens of Helios seemed to be massed along the route 
 of the funeral procession, and the whole working 
 population of the city was abroad ; at the windows 
 of their dwellings only the aged and the very young, 
 left at home, looked out in impatient enthusiasm ; 
 the white marble dust rose in the air in dense clouds, 
 the tread of the many thousands of feet was like the 
 marching of an army. From the Gate of Olives to 
 the opposite hill on which the mausoleum stood was 
 a distance of three miles and more ; there was not a 
 foot of it which was not occupied. Such movements 
 have, as a rule, but little worth ; populous cities send 
 forth their masses to welcome a despot, to cheer a 
 general, to gape at a bridegroom, to applaud the 
 legions who return from an unjust war. But these 
 multitudes were repentant ; they were as sons who 
 mourned a father they had long neglected ; there 
 were spontaneity, sincerity, remorse, in their souls, 
 and their hearts beat in the unison of a passionate, if 
 an evanescent, adoration of a dead god. 
 
 It was towards the close of the warm and fragrant 
 afternoon that Ilia Illyris sat beside the stone well 
 
XXIV HELIANTHUS 383 
 
 amongst the columbines and roses wondering how 
 the day had gone ; whether peace or strife had been 
 the escort of the plain pinewood coffin which had 
 been borne away from Aquilegia at daybreak by the 
 people of Helios. Janos had not returned. 
 
 She looked up as she heard a step on the dry 
 grass of the path which led up to her house and she 
 saw Othyris. 
 
 He had changed his clothes in the city, and had 
 come thither as soon as he had been able to free him- 
 self from the enthusiasm of the crowds, when the 
 bronze gates of the House of the Immortals had 
 closed again, after having opened to receive the 
 coffin of Illyris. 
 
 He stood in the shadows of the boughs at a little 
 distance from her ; his head was uncovered, he looked 
 pale and tired, for he had eaten nothing all day ; his 
 ears were deaf with the noise of the crowds, his eyes 
 were hot and dry with the dust of the streets ; but 
 he was proud of the tidings which he brought her, 
 glad that he could prove to her his own sincerity 
 and good faith. 
 
 * All has passed well and with order,' he said to 
 her. * I went with the people to the mausoleum. 
 He lies with the great men of Helianthus ; the 
 greatest of them all.' 
 
 His voice was low and broken from fatigue and 
 from emotion. 
 
 She rose and went towards him in the warm 
 amber light of the late sunset with a sweet and 
 gracious look upon her face, and she put out her 
 hand to him with a gesture of which queens might 
 have envied the dignity and the grace. 
 
 * I thank you, sir,' she said, in a softer tone than 
 
384 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 he had ever heard from her. * I did you injustice ; I 
 ask your pardon.' 
 
 Othyris bowed very low and touched her hand 
 timidly with his hps as though she were his suzerain 
 and he a vassal. He did not speak. All words 
 appeared to him too poor, too trivial. 
 
 'I thank you, sir,' she said again. 'You have 
 done a noble action.' 
 
 She sat down again on the old marble seat against 
 the wall of the house as he remained standing ; his 
 emotion was great, and he was afraid lest by a word 
 too warm, a glance too ardent, he might scare away, 
 like a frightened bird, her first movement of con- 
 fidence and sympathy. 
 
 * You know the English poet's line,' she said : 
 * " After lifes fitful fever he sleeps welir That 
 Platon Illyris sleeps well, in honoured sepulchre, and 
 in sight of the people, is due to you, to you alone. 
 I thank you ; I thank you infinitely.' 
 
 * The Pantheon was his right. The instinct of 
 the people told them that.' 
 
 ' Yes ; but they could have had no power to 
 impose their will upon the Crown had it not been 
 for you.' 
 
 He could not contradict what was obvious. 
 
 * I hope it has not caused dissension between you 
 and your father } ' 
 
 ' There is seldom anything else between the King 
 and myself 
 
 * Who induced the King to yield } ' 
 
 * Kantakuzene.' 
 
 * Kantakuzene ! A renegade ! A turn-coat ! A 
 man all things to all men ! ' 
 
 * A successful politician — yes.' 
 
XXIV HELIANTHUS 385 
 
 ' Is it true that you said you would not live un- 
 less your promise to the people were kept by the 
 Crown ? ' 
 
 * Who told you that ? ' 
 
 ' Janos went down into the city, and he heard It 
 there/ 
 
 * I cannot tell how any one could know it. It was 
 said only to Kantakuzene.' 
 
 ' But it is true ? ' 
 
 *Yes, it is true. How could I have lived dis- 
 credited and dishonoured in your sight, and in the 
 sight of my nation ? ' 
 
 A radiance of admiration, of sympathy, and of 
 comprehension lightened her face. 
 
 * You should have been an lUyris ! ' she said, in 
 that pride of race which is so far above mere vanity 
 or egotism. 
 
 Othyris smiled involuntarily. No other woman 
 would have spoken of her race as greater than his 
 own. 
 
 * Would that I had been ! * he murmured. * I 
 should be nearer to you.* 
 
 He regretted the last words as soon as he had 
 uttered them, for they chilled and alarmed her, though 
 she took no notice of them ; but the warmer, more 
 sympathetic, more intimate manner she had hitherto 
 shown was frozen back into her usual reserve. 
 
 'She thinks I take advantage of her gratitude,' 
 he reflected ; and he regretted having thus alarmed 
 her. 
 
 They were both silent. The sun shone on the 
 old cream-hued marble of the house wall, the green 
 trails of the Madonna's herb growing in its fissures, 
 the silvery leaves of the olives, the fair classic 
 
 2 c 
 
386 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 profile of Ilia lUyris and the sombre black folds of 
 her gown. Othyris stood and looked at her with all 
 his soul speaking in his eyes ; but her eyes were 
 looking downward on the rough grass at her feet and 
 she did not see, because she did not wish to see, what 
 his would have told her. 
 
 She was distressed though she did not show any 
 distress. She was divided between her gratitude to 
 him and her fear of him — gratitude for his acts, fear 
 of his passion. What he had done appealed to her 
 in the strongest way ; to her sympathy, to her family 
 pride, to her admiration of heroic and patriotic con- 
 duct ; but she was afraid of the feeling for herself 
 which it was impossible to ignore, even though it 
 had been as yet scarcely crystallised into words. 
 
 The GunderOde had ever been fatal to the lUyris. 
 He who had been carried to his grave in the Pan- 
 theon had rued the day when he had trusted in the 
 monarch by whose side he now lay in the community 
 of death. All her heart went out to the young man 
 who stood before her, for his devotion to the dead, 
 for his courage in great peril, for his loyalty to his 
 word and to the people ; but in his relations to 
 herself she doubted him, she shrank from him, she 
 feared him, she saw in him only the treachery of his 
 family to hers. 
 
 She rose from the seat under the house wall, and 
 moved towards the archway of the entrance. 
 
 ' Believe me, sir,' she said in a low tone, her eyes 
 still looking away from him, ' I feel most deeply, 
 most gratefully, all that you have done for the sake 
 of the dead and in the defence of the populace ; I 
 admire your actions, I respect them, I honour them ; 
 but, as I have told you before now, there can be no 
 
XXIV HELIANTHUS 387 
 
 friendship between you and me. Even for you to 
 come here, now that he is no more with me, is not 
 possible. There is a gulf that must ever yawn 
 between us. You have done your utmost to atone 
 for your grandsire's crimes ; but they were written 
 in blood, the blood of the people, and the blood of 
 my fathers. Nothing can wash them out — for me. 
 You regret them, but you cannot efface them by any 
 courage or nobility of your own. I have said so to 
 you many times.' 
 
 ' You have,' said Othyris, and his colour changed 
 from red to white, and white to red, in the intensity 
 of his emotions and his indignation. ' But you have 
 no right to make the living bear the burden of the 
 faults of the dead. If you honour my actions in the 
 last two days, you must at least respect me. You 
 cannot admire a man's conduct, and despise himself.' 
 
 * I have never said that I despised you. All your 
 public conduct would impose respect on any one. 
 Had it not done so, he would never have received 
 you here. But between you and me there can never 
 be any friendship, any intimacy. If the past were 
 not set between us, the present would render it 
 impossible. I am poor, alone, and of no account. I 
 cannot receive you here now that my great-grand- 
 father is dead.' 
 
 ' Why .? ' 
 
 ' Why .? Is it necessary to say ? ' 
 
 * I see no reason. You attach no importance to 
 royalty or to rank, therefore why set them as a 
 barrier between you and one who, equally with 
 yourself, sets no store on them ? ' 
 
 * I attach no weight to them ; but the world 
 attaches much. You are what you are ; it cannot 
 
388 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 be altered. And I, being what I am, cannot, I 
 repeat, receive you here.' 
 
 ' You mean that you will not ? ' 
 
 ' Well, put it so. I will not.' 
 
 * You are cruel — and ' 
 
 He was about to say * ungrateful,' but his gener- 
 osity kept the reproach unspoken. She answered 
 the unuttered thought. 
 
 * Oh, no,' she murmured, and the melody of her 
 voice faltered. * I am not cruel, nor am I thankless. 
 If the nation have honoured him at the last it is due 
 to you, to you alone. If I believed still in the God 
 of my childish prayers, I would pray for you day and 
 night. But you are what you are : you are a son of 
 the King ; you are Elim of GunderOde ; there are 
 only two lives between you and the throne. I am 
 poor and alone, though I have enough for my house 
 and for my bread. You must see, sir, that there can 
 be no friendship between us. If you persist in 
 coming here you will drive me away from the only 
 place that I can regard as home.' 
 
 There was a pathetic supplication in her voice 
 from which the coldness and the pride had passed 
 away, and in her eyes there was a mist as of unshed 
 tears. He saw that she spoke in entire sincerity, and 
 not without pain to herself ; he was touched, but he 
 was not convinced ; his anger was disarmed, but his 
 desire was only increased. He felt that he could not, 
 at such a moment of bereavement, say all that it was 
 upon his lips to say, but he did not for a moment 
 accept her decision and her dismissal. It was upon 
 his lips to cry to her : * I love you ! I love you ! I 
 will give up everything for your sake ! ' But he 
 held his peace. She was alone. 
 
XXIV HELIANTHUS 389 
 
 He had profaned love too often to be willing to 
 speak of it in the same breath with her name. He 
 scarcely dared to let his thoughts dwell on it, for the 
 family of the Illyris had been already too deeply 
 wronged by his own House for him to dream of 
 further wrong ; and what else, save wrong, could love 
 if offered from him to her be deemed ? 
 
 He had been received at that house by the hero 
 of Argileion and Samaris with forgiveness for the 
 offences of his race, and had come thither in frank 
 good faith. Every law of honour and of conscience 
 forbade him to abuse the reception given to him by 
 one, once so great, and in old age so utterly helpless, 
 as had been Platon Illyris. 
 
 Receiving no reply or promise from him she said, 
 almost in supplication : 
 
 ' Sir — sir — surely you must see for yourself that 
 you must never come here now that he can no 
 longer receive you ^ Your visits were to him. They 
 must cease now he is no more.' 
 
 He was silent and mortified. Here was the only 
 place where his presence was not welcome, his remem- 
 brance coveted, his visit received with gratitude, 
 pride, and emotion. 
 
 * Why are you so harsh to me ? ' he said, after 
 waiting in vain to hear some softening word. 
 
 * Harsh ! * she said with some impatience. ' There 
 is no question of harshness or kindness that I am 
 aware. It is obvious that you have no reason to 
 come now that he can neither hear you nor speak to 
 you.' 
 
 ' It was not wholly for him,' murmured Elim, and 
 the hesitation and timidity of a boy of eighteen came 
 over him, and he paused in confusion. 
 
390 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 ' Can I be of no use to you in any way ? ' he 
 added, humbly, fearing he had offended her. 
 
 * None, sir,' she answered. ^ You can only do us 
 harm.* 
 
 * That is a cruel answer. Some power at least I 
 have.' 
 
 ' You have too much power. You are one of the 
 elect of the earth. You must see that now he is no 
 more you must not cross this threshold.' 
 
 * Why .? Whatever power I possess is but your 
 humblest servant. Whatever you might bid me do, 
 I would do.' 
 
 ' I bid you go, and not return. Obey me since 
 you have promised to obey.' 
 
 ' Why .? Why should we be strangers to each 
 other ? Why live as though we were enemies ? ' 
 
 * Because your race and mine can have no 
 bond of friendship. He told you so, again and 
 again.' 
 
 ' Why am I to suffer for the sins, or the falseness, 
 of my forefathers ? The crime against Illyris was the 
 crime of Theodoric alone.' 
 
 * It lies on you. It lies on every member of your 
 House.' 
 
 * Had the nation no share in it ? ' said Othyris 
 with reproach. ' If the people had been true to their 
 liberator, my family would have been powerless 
 against him.' 
 
 ' That may be true,' she said slowly. * But can a 
 dog defend his master if the dog has been chained 
 and muzzled ? Helianthus was that dog. Who 
 chained him ? Who muzzled him ? ' 
 
 Othyris was silent. To reason with her was 
 useless ; to tempt, to persuade, to entreat her were 
 
XXIV HELIANTHUS 391 
 
 equally in vain ; unless her own heart turned traitor 
 to her creed no other assailant would move her. 
 
 She looked at him with her clear, calm, meditative 
 eyes, and there was no emotion in them ; no timidity 
 — none of the fear of a virginal passion. She was 
 always the goddess of those classic groves, aloof from 
 all mortal weakness. 
 
 ' Go ! ' she said to him, not harshly but with 
 firmness. ' Go, sir. You have many duties, many 
 interests, many friends. Forget Aquilegia. Remem- 
 ber only that you have done a noble action in defence 
 of a great memory. Your own conscience should be 
 enough reward. Farewell.' 
 
 She would not have been human had she been 
 wholly insensible to the power she possessed ; but 
 she was without vanity, she was unspoiled by contact 
 with other women, and her antagonism to the reigning 
 race was far stronger in her than any personal feeling. 
 She hated their past : she hated their present. 
 
 A great offence rose up in Othyris for a moment ; 
 caste, usage, privilege, consciousness of pure purpose, 
 and inherited instincts of command, all flushed his 
 veins with anger, and made him for one instant ready 
 to turn his back on her for ever : to leave her to any 
 fate, to tear his adoration of her out of his heart and 
 memory. Was it possible that any woman could 
 dare speak so to him, a Prince of Helianthus ? 
 
 She did not even look at him or wait to see the 
 effect of her words. She went up the narrow wooden 
 stairs in the light of the morning, opened the door of 
 her chamber, and went within. She did not draw the 
 bolt, for she knew that he would not follow her. 
 He held her in too high esteem. He was too true a 
 gentleman. 
 
392 
 
 HELIANTHUS chap, xxiv 
 
 He was very pale and his breath came fast and 
 painfully ; he had been dismissed and wounded ; he 
 felt lower than the lowest of the naked men crawling 
 through the surf below on the shore, with the creels 
 of rotted seaweed on their bowed backs. 
 
 A woman's unkindness penetrates, hurts, rankles, 
 festers in the heart of a man, as no outrage from one 
 of his own sex can do ; and Ilia was the one living 
 being out of the whole multitudes of earth who had 
 the power to wound Othyris ! 
 
 Ilia that evening sat at the barred casement of her 
 chamber and looked at the moon, nearly at its full 
 rise beyond the olive-trees. The solitude and the 
 solemnity of death were still in the silence of the 
 house. The sense of a vanished presence, of some- 
 thing for ever lost and gone, were in the quiet place ; 
 the scent of the old books blent with the odour of the 
 wild-flowers ; if men spared the place, the books 
 would last and the flowers bloom through centuries ; 
 lUyris alone was gone, never to return. 
 
 A great sense of loneliness was upon her. She had 
 leaned on his wisdom as on a staff which would never 
 fail ; and now the staff was broken. 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 
 When Othyris reached his palace that evening he 
 found himself under arrest, and confined to his 
 rooms. He was not surprised. Arrest had been a 
 frequent punishment, received by him for lesser 
 offences than his had been that day. The guard had 
 been doubled round his palace, and the troops were 
 still confined to barracks. 
 
 The governor of the city and other great 
 functionaries, civil and military, were perpetually 
 exchanging consultations with each other and passing 
 to and from the Soleia. 
 
 One Ministry had fallen ; another had not yet 
 been formed ; it was such an interregnum as the 
 King would willingly have had continued indefinitely, 
 since it left him sole lord and arbiter of current 
 events, within the limits of that Constitution which 
 galled and fretted him so sorely in the free exercise 
 of his will. 
 
 That under his rule, during his reign, a popular 
 victory such as the day had seen should have been 
 possible was the most acute mortification to him. 
 The cypher telegrams of Juliuses on the event, in 
 their sarcastic condolence and their ironical sympathy, 
 were like gad-flies in a raw wound. Julius was no 
 doubt wondering why Helios was not placed in a 
 
 393 
 
394 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 state of siege. John of GunderOde knew that he 
 must seem a poor creature to his dominant nephew. 
 
 When the population of Helios became aware 
 of Elim's arrest it was indignant, and willing, had it 
 known how, to rescue and revenge him. The city- 
 was in ferment. Angry groups discussed and con- 
 demned the arrest until far into the night. Work 
 was neglected ; in the docks and many other places 
 it was entirely suspended. Strong measures were 
 taken by the authorities to prevent any violence or 
 harangues, or meetings of any sort. Most of the 
 shops and places of refreshment or of amusement 
 were closed. The palaces of the aristocracy and 
 plutocracy were shuttered and their iron gates were 
 bolted and locked. The guard around and within 
 the Soleia was doubled, and the troops were, as on 
 the previous day, confined to barracks ready for any 
 emergency. The aspect of Helios was that of a city 
 in a state of siege or on the eve of revolution. 
 
 But John of GunderOde was not alarmed ; he 
 knew the Helianthines. They were like women, 
 loud and excessive in their emotions, but in action 
 weak and hesitating. Their stomachs knew not the 
 beef and beer of the Guthones. It was a wave of 
 remembrance, of reverence, of repentance, which swept 
 through the land from the Mare Magnum to the alps 
 of Rhastia. It might die down like a fire of straw ; 
 it might live on till it burnt all that was opposed to it. 
 No one could say ; but it was alight, and the King's 
 son had held the torch to the tow. The King 
 consulted no one. He was the father of the offender, 
 the sovereign of the country, the head of the army. 
 Othyris was in a triple sense guilty towards him. He 
 caused a court-martial to be held pro forma, but its 
 
XXV HELIANTHUS 395 
 
 sentence was a foregone conclusion — a foreseen and 
 dictated condemnation. The crime of the King's 
 second son was, in the judgment of the King himself, 
 of the military caste, of the conservative party, of the 
 Court at home and all other Courts abroad, utterly 
 unmentionable and unpardonable. 
 
 It was a sin against the sacred manes of all the 
 kings who had ever lived and ruled ; every imperial 
 and monarchical sentiment in the world had been 
 outraged by his public escort through the city of the 
 funeral of Illyris. Even Kantakuzene dared not 
 defend such an action. 
 
 When asked why he had not endeavoured to 
 obtain the royal assent to his escort of the funeral, 
 Othyris answered that there had been no time to 
 seek it ; also that he did not think his accompaniment 
 of the bier was one which required any permission 
 from the Crown. It had been an inoffensive 
 testimony of a perfectly natural union of sentiment 
 on his part with the people of Helios. 
 
 ' You must be aware, sir,' said the President, 
 * that such an act on your part was on the contrary 
 most offensive to the Crown.' 
 
 * I do not see the offence,' said Othyris. ' Neither 
 on my own part, nor on that of the populace, was 
 there any disrespect shown to my father or to the 
 State.' 
 
 * What, sir ! Not the burial of a revolutionist in 
 the same temple with Theodoric the Great ! ' 
 
 * They fought side by side once. Of the two it is 
 not Platon Illyris who has the lesser title to a place 
 in that classic sepulchre.' 
 
 A murmur of horror from the officers assembled 
 in council followed this speech. The words would 
 
396 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 have been shocking from any one, — but from a prince 
 of the blood ! 
 
 ^ Let me caution you, sir, such speeches as yours 
 cannot assist your defence, they must increase your 
 punishment/ 
 
 * That will be as it may.' 
 
 * You are wofully mistaken, sir, as a prince, as a 
 son, as an officer/ 
 
 'It is inevitable that a military tribunal should 
 think so.' 
 
 Those who sat in judgment were perplexed. Any 
 other person making use of such speech as his could 
 have been shot. With Othyris they could not take 
 so severely swift and simple a solution. 
 
 If they could only have bent him to any measure 
 of retractation, of admission of offence, of regret, of 
 apology, their course of action would have been 
 clearer to them. 
 
 The examination lasted long and was full of 
 wearisome repetition. Othyris did not alter or 
 increase his replies either in matter or in manner. 
 He had done that which he had done out of respect 
 for the dead man, and out of consciousness that his 
 own House had never shown either respect or grati- 
 tude to the great patriarch by whom Helianthus had 
 been freed from the foreigner. 
 
 * Platon Illyris,' he replied, * was the liberator of 
 Helianthus.' 
 
 * Sir, you forget your great and revered ancestor.' 
 ' I forget nothing.' 
 
 ' Do you consider, sir, that a prince of your House 
 should have publicly proclaimed his sympathy with a 
 republican ? ' 
 
 * I consider that my family, beyond all others, 
 
XXV HELIANTHUS 
 
 397 
 
 owes gratitude and honour to the victor of Argileion 
 and of Samaris.' 
 
 * He was a rebel against your illustrious ancestor/ 
 ' He had full right to be so, if he were.' 
 
 * That is strange language on your part, sir, being 
 who you are/ 
 
 * Being who I am, I am bound to speak the truth/ 
 To most of those present it seemed that a mili- 
 tary execution in the courtyard of the fortress would 
 have been the most wise and the most just end to an 
 unpardonable scandal. But what would the people 
 of Helianthus, the citizens of Helios, think of such a 
 sentence passed by a father on a son, by the head of 
 a nation on the favourite of that nation ? 
 
 They felt that if a hair of the head of this rebel 
 were touched, the city certainly, and probably after 
 it the country, would rise in arms. True, Elim 
 being dead would be powerless to profit by their 
 rising ; but before now dead men have had more 
 sway than their living foes. 
 
 Three days went by without any news reaching 
 those at Aquilegia from the city. Janos was for- 
 bidden by his lady to go down to the gates, for she 
 was afraid that his ignorance and his excitement might 
 get him into trouble there, in his pride at the triumph 
 of his late master. No one came ; the few necessities 
 of life were at hand on the soil and in the cupboard ; 
 there was less need than ever for any expenditure to 
 meet their simple wants. Therefore nothing was 
 known by any one there of the arrest of Othyris until 
 the fourth day, when, as it was market-day, Janos 
 could not be kept on the land, as he had produce to 
 sell and calves to fetch home. He returned late. 
 
398 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 greatly distressed and agitated, consigning the calves 
 to Philemon. 
 
 ' The great lord is being sent away,' said Janos, 
 when he came up to the house. 
 
 ' What do you mean ^ ' asked Ma'ia, who was 
 spinning by the well. 
 
 ' Our prince who saved Philemon,' replied Janos. 
 * They sent him away, to keep him away for years 
 and years, that the people may not see him. They 
 were all talking of it in the streets. The King, his 
 father, wills it so. The King is jealous of him. The 
 people are very angry.' 
 
 ' Are you sure of what you say ? ' 
 
 * Sure .? Ay, I am sure. A score of mouths 
 yelled it at me. The city is angry.' 
 
 * But why does the King do this ? What is his 
 offence ^ ' 
 
 ' They say it is because he put our Master in the 
 House of the Immortals. That made the King hot 
 against him.' 
 
 ' That is like enough,' said Maia gravely, and she 
 resumed her spinning. 
 
 Ilia came towards them, from the stone bench by 
 the porch where she had been seated ; she had heard 
 the words they spoke. 
 
 * Is he to go into exile ? ' she asked. Her face was 
 very pale. 
 
 ' What is exile ^ ' said Janos. ' To go out of 
 the country ? ' 
 *Yes.' 
 ' That I do not know. I think not.* 
 
 * Why did you not ask more .? ' 
 
 * The streets were like hives of swarming bees ; 
 they dumfoundered me. Besides, I had to go to 
 
XXV HELIANTHUS 399 
 
 the end of the world to fetch the bull calves. But 
 this I heard from a dozen mouths in the morning, 
 and then again as I brought the calves through the 
 city : he is to be shut up far away/ 
 ' For what he did the other day ? ' 
 
 * Ay, for that. So they say.' 
 Ilia was silent. 
 
 *Some said the people should rise,* added the 
 peasant ; * but others said no, they were not ready, 
 and the King is strong.' 
 
 ' The King is very strong,' muttered Maia. 
 
 Ilia said nothing ; she went away under the 
 shade of the olive branches. The sun was setting, 
 a dusky gold shining through the grey shadows of 
 the great trees. She walked on alone through their 
 solitudes ; what she had heard smote her conscience 
 with a sense of unworthiness and coldness ; he 
 suffered for her and hers, and he had received 
 scarcely a dry crust of gratitude. 
 
 * And I scarcely thanked him. I closed the house 
 to him,' thought she ; and the tears stood in her 
 eyes and blinded her to the sunlight, and to the 
 blaze of the distant dome of gold under which 
 Platon Illyris and Theodoric lay side by side, 
 their enmities forgot, their valour alone remembered 
 in Helios. 
 
 At sunrise she sent Maia down into the city to 
 hear if the tidings brought by Janos were confirmed. 
 The woman returned before noon and said that they 
 were true. All the people of Helios were agitated 
 by them ; some wished for a demonstration before 
 the Soleia, but the hours slipped away and nothing 
 was done ; only the number of the city guards and 
 carabineers was doubled. It was not known whether 
 
400 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 the Duke of Othyrls had already gone, but it was 
 generally believed that he had taken his departure 
 by a night train ; rumours as to the length of his 
 term of banishment were various, and always greatly 
 exaggerated. The populace were incensed, but help- 
 less for want of a controlling hand. 
 
 As Maia spoke, the noon sun struck the golden 
 dome of the Pantheon where it stood amidst its 
 cypress groves on the other side of the bay. Through 
 a break in the woods it was visible across the water, 
 the dome shining in the meridian light. Othyris 
 had opened the gates of the Temple to Platon 
 Illyris, and had been chastised for the act as for a 
 crime. 
 
 That morning a letter was given by the common 
 postman to the boy Philemon, as he worked in the 
 lower woods. 
 
 * Take that to your mistress,' said the letter- 
 carrier. He took it to her. 
 
 It was a note of only a few lines in the hand- 
 writing of Othyris. It said briefly that he had been 
 condemned to twelve months' detention in a fortress, 
 and added : 
 
 * / heg you not to he distressed. I am frond to have 
 merited such punishment in so just a cause. Accept the 
 homage of your humble servant.' 
 
 It was signed merely * Elim. ' 
 
 The note dropped from Ilia's hand on the cushion 
 of the lace at which she worked. The shock was 
 great to her. She was conscious that she had not 
 deserved from him so much devotion or such total 
 forbearance from reproach. A year of his life was 
 
XXV HELIANTHUS 401 
 
 lost through her ! She could never give that year 
 back to him. Its slow, long, cruel hours would drag 
 their dull length away, and be for ever dead and 
 buried like a sunless day. 
 
 ' I am sorry — oh, I am sorry ! ' she murmured ; 
 the tears swam in her eyes, an intense sense of her 
 debt to him and of his sacrifice to her filled her with 
 regret which was well-nigh remorse. She could 
 never give him back this year of his youth which 
 he was about to spend in captivity for her and hers. 
 She felt humbled and ashamed. 
 
 That night she could not sleep. In the morning 
 she sent Janos to the market in the city. 
 
 * Bring me news of what has happened,' she said 
 to him. He brought her news, with sobs of rage in 
 his chest, and brown hairy hands clenched. 
 
 ' He is gone,' he said. * They have sent him 
 away into prison. It was done at night all secretly. 
 He is there in the fortress of Constantine. The 
 people are curs, sheep, cravens. They let this thing 
 be done ! ' 
 
 In the fortress of Constantine ! Where Theodoric 
 had confined Illyris ! Truly he had paid with his 
 person for the offences of his forbears, for the false- 
 hood of his race. 
 
 * What shall we do, O daughter of Illyris ^ ' cried 
 Janos. * Command, I will give my life.' 
 
 'We can do nothing, my friend,' she answered. 
 * We are weak as water, you and I.' 
 
 * But the people ^ They would be with us, and 
 for him.' 
 
 ' Platon Illyris lay five years in the casemates of 
 that prison, and the people let him lie. What can 
 they do against the metal mouths of cannon .? Pray, 
 
 2 D 
 
402 HELIANTHUS chap, xxv 
 
 Janos ; you believe in prayer. That is all that you 
 can do.' 
 
 Janos swore a great oath on the names of saints 
 and pagan gods, who were all one to him. 
 
 * My arm is strong. It should be broken from 
 shoulder to wrist for him. He gave me back 
 Philemon.' 
 
 ' If ever the time come, yes, do not spare your- 
 self. But now you can do nothing. The King is 
 strong and cruel.' 
 
 * Those lads missed the King. I should not miss 
 him. My knife is sure. In a sure hand a knife is 
 better than a bullet.' 
 
 ' Hush ! The Master, were he here, would bid 
 you do no evil that good may come, nor would Prince 
 Elim wish for vengeance.' 
 
 Janos, his bronzed face wet with sweat and black 
 with passion, slunk away like a dog forbidden to 
 avenge a friend. Ilia went within. 
 
 The dove which had been often fondled by 
 Platon Illyris flew to her and stroked her cheek with 
 its caressing beak. 
 
 * O bird of peace, you are no bird of ours ! ' she 
 cried, in passion. 'The Illyris were men of war. 
 Alas that I, a woman, and alone, cannot lift their 
 sword, cannot lead their people ! ' 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 Detention for life in a fortress would not have 
 seemed too much severity in the esteem of the King. 
 But with the shrewd caution which was his most 
 useful quality, he knew that the nation would not 
 consent to any such sentence. The majority of the 
 people admired the conduct of his second son ; and 
 too great severity of the popular favourite would 
 provoke dangerous resentment, perhaps even danger- 
 ous action. He would have liked nothing better 
 than to consign Elim for life to one of the great, 
 grim, fortified buildings standing in desolate places of 
 the hills or of the sea shores, which served as military 
 prisons, as barracks, or as powder-magazines, and 
 where many a young officer, condemned by court- 
 martial, had fretted his soul away in the dreary case- 
 mates, amongst those rugged solitudes where no 
 sound ever came except the tramp of sentinels, the 
 grounding of arms, the lumbering of caissons, the 
 cries of the sea birds on the waters, and the plovers 
 on the moors. To one of these strongholds the 
 King would willingly have consigned Othyris, and 
 have left him there, to eat his heart out like the 
 caged eagle he had pitied in his childhood. But he 
 did not dare. 
 
 Obstinate, insolent, disdainful of the people as he 
 403 
 
404 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 was, John of GunderCde knew that such a course 
 might lead to a revolt of the masses and to that 
 exile of himself which Kantakuzene had pictured to 
 himself with so much amusement. If he had been 
 sure of his army he would not have hesitated ; but 
 he was not sure. 
 
 His secret reports left him no doubt as to the 
 increase of socialism and republicanism amongst his 
 troops : the murrain in the patient flocks, of which 
 his eldest son had spoken. So, with his usual power 
 of restraint upon his own desires, he limited himself 
 to the mild punishment of the banishment of Othyris 
 to one of his own estates, Hydaspe, for twelve 
 months' time, in an honourable captivity with which 
 public opinion could not presume to quarrel. 
 Hydaspe was far away from the capital, on the 
 south - east coast, in a sparsely - peopled province ; 
 Othyris would be removed from the sight of the 
 populace of Helios, and the King considered that 
 what a mob does not see it forgets. 
 
 Kantakuzene greatly regretted the sentence ; but 
 it was impossible for him to oppose a decision of the 
 head of the State and the head of the army. He 
 too knew the temper of the Helianthines. Removed 
 from their sight, it was probable that Othyris would 
 retain little place in their memories. They would 
 not march across half the width of the country to his 
 place of captivity in their tens of thousands and bring 
 back in triumph to the capital the man they loved. 
 They had not the grit in them to do that. His 
 presence could move them to anything ; in absence 
 he would be rarely remembered, or so their rulers 
 thought. Personally Kantakuzene was much attached 
 to him ; he felt the charm of an unselfish character 
 
XXVI HELIANTHUS 405 
 
 and of generous and exalted ideals ; but being now 
 First Minister of the Crown, he could not but feel 
 relieved from the extreme embarrassment which the 
 presence of Othyris caused to him in Helios — an 
 embarrassment which might increase perilously at 
 any moment of public excitement. 
 
 Kantakuzene was sincerely distressed, but he was in 
 the midst of all the agitation, anxiety, and difficulty of 
 forming his Cabinet, of apportioning the loaves and 
 fishes between the numerous claimants, of endeavour- 
 ing to disarm enmity, to confirm hesitation, to pass 
 over friendship which might be safely slighted, to 
 irritate none, to alienate none, and, above all, to remain 
 sole master of the situation. At such a vital moment 
 Kantakuzene had little thought to give even to one 
 who so much interested him as the second son of 
 the King. If he could have interfered success- 
 fully, he would have done so even to his own hin- 
 drance ; but it was impossible for him to touch a 
 question so delicate and personal, to interfere in a 
 matter which was exclusively at once a military and 
 a family question for the judgment and the action of 
 the sovereign alone. Kantakuzene consoled himself 
 with the reflection that Othyris would doubtless be 
 pardoned as soon as some months of his punishment 
 had been endured, and in the agreeable sense of 
 dominance and of success which came to him as he 
 presided at his first Cabinet Council, he had not much 
 time or inclination to give to the prisoner of 
 Hydaspe. ' He is quixotic ! He is quixotic ! * said 
 Kantakuzene to others, with a sigh. * It is a fine 
 defect, but it is a defect ! ' 
 
 Men have to take the world as it is, and live in 
 it as best they may. It is not quite the bear-garden 
 
4o6 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 that satirists say, but neither is it quite the rose- 
 garden which poets picture. Kantakuzene, who 
 in his early time had gathered his roses, now pre- 
 ferred to tame the bears. Perchance Othyris would 
 do so also in the future. 
 
 It was characteristic of the King that he did not 
 select ^nothrea, which was beloved by Elim and 
 beautiful in every way, as the estate on which his son 
 was to pass a year of solitude. He chose Hydaspe, 
 which was hot as a furnace in summer and cold as 
 the North Pole in winter — a great mediaeval pile 
 which had stood many sieges, standing on bare rocks 
 which rose out of marshes and rice-fields, and which 
 looked on a river which was a boiling torrent in winter 
 and a bed of stones in the dry season. There was, 
 indeed, the sea near at hand ; but it was separated 
 by three miles of sand and quicksands from the 
 fortress, and was a portion of the eastern waters on 
 which a sail was rarely seen — a melancholy and land- 
 locked bay, on which a red and rayless sun rose 
 drearily in the canicular heats. It was not a portion 
 of the inheritance from Basil, but had been bequeathed 
 to Othyris by a cousin-german. It was a possession 
 of little value, although of great extent and antiquity ; 
 its revenues were always returned by him to the poor 
 dwellers on the soil, chiefly workers in the rice-fields 
 or in the dreary plains of maize, — people whose lot he 
 could make less hard but could never render other- 
 wise than melancholy ; burnt up by the heat in one 
 season, chilled by the blasts and frosts at another, 
 getting up at every dawn to toil in the same furrows 
 and ditches, giving their sons to the cannon and the 
 barracks, seeing their daughters naked to the thighs in 
 
XXVI HELIANTHUS 407 
 
 the rice channels, living pell-mell in their conical 
 huts, their wives dropping the fruit of their womb as 
 ewes drop lambs by the roadside, seeing always the 
 sun go down upon their hopeless labour which could 
 never change. 
 
 If Othyris had given his parole not to leave 
 Hydaspe he would not have been subjected to any 
 form of surveillance. But he would not give it. 
 Therefore his movements were watched continually, 
 and there were sentries at all the doors and gates of 
 the castle. The place was his indeed, but the will of 
 another, not of himself, ruled there. He was not 
 allowed either to have any boat, large or small, in 
 the bay for any movement on the sea. It was im- 
 prisonment in all but name, and when he heard the 
 tramp of the sentinels on the ramparts or the ground- 
 ing of arms by the soldiers on the gateways, he 
 realised that his freedom was as completely lost for 
 the time as any condemned convict's. True, he was 
 still owner of Hydaspe and still a prince of Helian- 
 thus, and the guards set over him all saluted as he 
 passed and stood at attention so long as he was in 
 sight ; but he was virtually and to all intents and 
 purposes a captive, though an undiminished deference 
 and an elaborate ceremonial of etiquette still pre- 
 served to him the dignity of a rank which he hated, 
 and which now, more than ever before, seemed to 
 him an irony and a burden. 
 
 So he devoured his soul in silence, and the heavy 
 intense heat grew more painful, and evening after 
 evening the red, rayless ball of the sun sank down 
 behind the rocky ridges of the interior, and another 
 joyless and useless day was dead. 
 
 IHa was three hundred miles away, in the green, 
 
4o8 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 shadowy Helichrysum hills, where the streams ran 
 fresh and cool throughout the longest day. 
 
 At any other time Othyris might not have disliked 
 this dreary solitude, since it would have given him 
 time for study, for art, for philosophy ; and he would 
 have taken pleasure in putting on canvas the desolate, 
 severe landscapes of this joyless province. But at 
 the present moment the distance separating him from 
 Aquilegia, his ignorance of what shape Ilia's future 
 might take, his fear that she might be molested or 
 watched, the longing of a man in love to be near the 
 object of his love, made his imprisonment, three 
 hundred miles from Helios, almost as unbearable as 
 if he had been sent to a convicts' island in the 
 distant sea which rolled away from those eastern 
 shores of Helianthus to the still mysterious Orient. 
 At times his obedience to his father's commands 
 seemed to him cowardly and unworthy ; at others he 
 felt that he could not in duty, in honour, give the 
 nation an example of insubordination to a man who 
 was the head of the State as well as his father. 
 Kantakuzene had said rightly that the second son of 
 the King was not a revolutionist any more than he 
 was a reactionist. People who believe in any 
 extreme are satisfied with their faith and with them- 
 selves ; but Othyris had not such consolation. He 
 would have thought that he had erred if he had 
 rebelled ; he feared that he was a coward because 
 he obeyed. 
 
 At times, indeed, he was tempted to escape. 
 There was a close cordon of sentinels drawn round 
 the great rocky pile of Hydaspe, but he believed 
 that his gentlemen would assist him and his guards 
 shut their eyes to his secret departure. But even in 
 
XXVI HELIANTHUS 409 
 
 this, his own scruples stood like incorruptible gaolers 
 in his path. His flight would entail degradation 
 and punishment on those who rendered it possible ; 
 even if he himself succeeded in gaining his liberty, 
 those who remained behind him would pay the price 
 of it to one who never pardoned. Moreover, if he 
 were to remain in the country, he would be speedily 
 retaken ; and if he were to leave the country what 
 use would freedom be? He would be still farther 
 from Aquilegia. 
 
 There is no punishment so stupid or so stupefying 
 as captivity. The strongest intellects feel its bitter 
 narcotic dull their brain and corrode their energies. 
 A man stays happily on a half-acre of ground when 
 he stays on it by his own choice ; but a principality 
 is insupportable when the will of another forbids him 
 to pass its confines. 
 
 Othyris wrote to Ilia Illyris. 
 
 It was an imprudence, but no man in love was 
 ever prudent yet if his heart were tender and his 
 years were few. Moreover, he felt in her that pro- 
 found trust which was inspired by the limpid serenity 
 of her regard, the character of her thoughts, and the 
 traditions of her lineage. An Illyris might be 
 betrayed, but never could betray. 
 
 His letter was not answered, but it was not 
 returned. That was the utmost he had hoped for 
 when he wrote. After an interval he wrote again ; 
 he had never written in confidence before to any 
 human being ; it was a new and delightful outlet of 
 his inmost thoughts. It was unwise, it was 
 imprudent, it was dangerous ; but it was for those 
 reasons an irresistible temptation to lay bare his 
 inmost self to the one mind which was capable of 
 
4IO HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 sympathy with him. That he received no reply did 
 not surprise or chill his ardour ; she could not have 
 written to him without being something less than 
 what he thought her, something lower than an 
 lUyris should have been. He sent his letters by the 
 common post, for if he had sent them by messengers 
 he imagined that they would have been returned ; 
 she would have taken alarm at such a correspondence. 
 He hoped that coming, like house swallows, noise- 
 lessly and familiarly, they would not cause her any 
 apprehension. What is written enters the brain by 
 the eyes, and perhaps penetrates more deeply than 
 what is spoken and enters by the ears. 
 
 The first of the letters which Ilia received from 
 Othyris came from the town in the wallet of Janos 
 with the bread and meat and other frugal fare. It had 
 been given to him by a postman whom he had met on 
 the shore. Ilia had no correspondence, as she had no 
 friends except the nuns in the north, who never wrote, 
 and the lace merchant who wrote only on the receipt 
 of work. The first letter from Othyris caused her 
 extreme surprise and emotion. It was impossible to 
 read its pages without belief in its sincerity. There 
 was no possible cause to doubt the veracity of its 
 expressions ; and in its humility there was a contrast 
 to the position of the writer which could not fail to 
 touch the reader. Whether she would or no. Ilia 
 could not resist the conviction that he meant most 
 absolutely all he said. The letters did not alarm her, 
 because though eloquent they were restrained, though 
 ardent they were timid, though impassioned they were 
 reverent. They were the letters of a poet, not of a 
 libertine. All that was best in him, all that was 
 simplest, truest, most sensitive, most unhappy, was 
 
XXVI HELIANTHUS 411 
 
 expressed in them ; the dross of the world and its 
 vanities and its passions was burned out of his 
 soul as it spoke to hers ; he was a man who 
 loved her and was no more, no less. She felt that 
 his devotion to her was great, but she was too 
 ignorant of the world to be able to measure the 
 greatness of it. 
 
 His adoration might be a passing caprice ; a 
 passion inflamed by difficulty ; the wilful insistance 
 of a spoilt child of fate ; but it was absolutely true. 
 
 Ilia read the first of his letters once, twice, thrice, 
 in the solitude of the lonely house ; then she wound 
 it about a stone and dropped it from her window 
 into the open well which was immediately beneath, its 
 marble copings overgrown by stone crop and violet 
 roots, its depths never troubled save by the old bronze 
 pail let down by a cord at dawn and twilight. The 
 stone smote the water, and she knew that the letter 
 would in a brief time be soaked, obliterated, 
 destroyed ; but words which could not die lived on 
 in letters of fire in her remembrance. Each letter 
 which he wrote her sank to the same watery grave. 
 The peasants believed that the well went down, down, 
 down to the very centre of the earth ; it seemed to 
 her that there could be no better keeper of his secret 
 than that dark, still, mysterious silence of an 
 unfathomed source. 
 
 No vanity tempted her to keep his correspondence. 
 The nature which is born free from vanity cannot be 
 touched by it. 
 
 Ilia had in her a great pride, the pride of race ; but 
 such pride excludes vanity, as the true heir excludes 
 the bastard. Letter after letter as the weeks went 
 on succeeded each other and passed to that safe and 
 
412 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 silent grave, although it hurt her somewhat as though 
 she slew a living thing to consign those ardent, tender, 
 faithful words to the dumb, unmeasured depths which 
 mirrored the stars and the planets and the moon-rays, 
 and sometimes were white with showers of acacia 
 blossoms, and sometimes moved and muttered 
 sullenly, as seismic forces troubled their subterranean 
 springs, but which never gave back what was given 
 to them : whether written word, or faded flower, dead 
 dragon-fly, or dropped plume of wounded kestrel, or 
 tears which fell from a woman's eyes as she leaned 
 over its moss-grown parapet. 
 
 It never occurred to Ilia to send the letters back to 
 Othyris. It would have seemed to her too harsh and 
 thankless an act to the man by whom the gates or 
 the House of the Immortals had been opened to the 
 body of Platon Illyris. So his letters did Othyris this 
 service, that gradually he became in her sight the 
 writer of them rather than aught else ; no longer 
 only the King's son, the descendant of Theodoric of 
 Gund erode, the hereditary enemy of the Illyris. In 
 his presence she never forgot this ; but in his letters 
 she did. In them, one human heart spoke to another : 
 that was all. The finest ruses of the studied seducer 
 could not have served him better than did the simple, 
 natural, and imprudent impulse which had moved him 
 to write thus to her. 
 
 Sentiment and sensuality were alike unknown to 
 Ilia. Fear was a stranger to her temper. She was 
 an Illyris. Something of the fire of Argileion, some- 
 thing of the steel of Samaris had entered into her 
 blood ; she would have gone to the stake without a 
 visible tremor ; she would have borne torture without 
 a cry ; she was brave with the bravery transmitted to 
 
XXVI HELIANTHUS 413 
 
 her by great men ; but, even as her young bosom 
 was soft and flower-like, so her young heart had its 
 weakness ; her affections were dormant, but they 
 were alive ; and as the bosom would fill with milk 
 for the unborn child, so would the soul fill with the 
 desire of unrealised joys. At her heart her youth 
 was living as it was living in the light of her eyes, in 
 the gloss of her hair, in the blue of her veins, in the 
 roundness of her breasts : that sleeping youth which 
 now awoke in her, tremulous, virgin, and afraid, but 
 living. The well in which the letters of Elim were 
 thrown was to her as the magic crystal in which the 
 destiny of those who gazed therein was mirrored. 
 She was afraid of what she saw, but she saw it. 
 Their sentences seemed to stand out under the 
 stars ; their words seemed echoed from the deep 
 waters down in the earth. When the nightingales 
 came with the irises and the windflowers they seemed 
 to sing of them and of nothing else. 
 
 She was calmer, stronger, more self- controlled 
 than most women of her years. She had dwelt with- 
 in reach of the frost of a great lone soul, and it had 
 chilled her youth in her ; she had been led to see as 
 an old man, alone with his memories, had seen a 
 world unworthy of and ungrateful to him. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 Othyris had been in solitude with the serried ranks 
 of the stone hills between him and the world of men 
 during six weary months, when the most unlooked- 
 for stroke of fate opened the gates of his prison 
 and called him back to life. Relays of mounted 
 messengers, for there was no telegraph from any place 
 to this remote spot, brought him an order from his 
 father to come to the capital at once with all speed : 
 his eldest brother was dangerously ill with angina. 
 
 Theo ill ! Othyris could not credit it. Theo, the 
 concentration of robust, self-satisfied, brutal and 
 arrogant manhood, brought down to the same level 
 as the beggar starved by the roadside, a conscript 
 slain by a sunstroke on a march, a miner suffocated 
 by the noxious fumes of a gas ! It was incredible. 
 Rigid as a suit of armour, all-sufficient to himself as 
 a deity, unbending as a rod of iron, as sure of his 
 own wisdom as a high priest of his, full of blood, of 
 health, of authority, of food and wine, and muscular 
 force — Theo, who believed in doctors as prophets, who 
 had his residences deluged by disinfectants, who had 
 always been sure that any one who was ill was so 
 through his or her own fault, — Theo, whose health 
 and strength were as great as those of prize-bull on 
 
 414 
 
CHAP. XXVII HELIANTHUS 415 
 
 a pasture, had contracted a fatal malady : that of the 
 angina. 
 
 How he had contracted it, neither he nor his 
 physicians and surgeons could tell. He remembered 
 that a fly had flown down his throat as he had ridden 
 through the home woods of one of his country-places 
 to a slaughter of wild boars. The fly might possibly 
 have brought the infection from some sick plebeian 
 throat. Why would not common people all go into 
 hospitals when they felt that anything was the matter 
 with them ? There they were safe out of the way 
 of others, and were useful to the Faculty as studies 
 in corpore vili ! When he went home he could not 
 eat any dinner ; he felt a brackish, nauseous taste in 
 his mouth ; his throat was hoarse and uncomfortable ; 
 he had a difliculty in swallowing. The Court 
 physicians looked very grave. In the morning, to the 
 consternation of his wife, his doctors, and his house- 
 hold, the disease had fully declared itself; he was 
 very ill ; his father was informed ; he became at once 
 grotesque and piteous ; and death, which lends 
 dignity and pathos to the most humble of creatures, 
 stripped him bare of all his pompous greatness ; the 
 butchered steer for which he had felt no compassion 
 had gained from death more sorrowful nobility than 
 he. At sunrise on the third day the great bell of St. 
 Athanasius, tolling in long solemn notes, told the city 
 of Helios that the heir to the throne was no more. 
 
 His wife, who had been sacrificed to his tyrannies 
 for fourteen sunless and imprisoned years, wept for 
 him tears which she sincerely believed to be those of 
 a sincere sorrow. 
 
 His little daughters, who had never heard his 
 step without fear, or been summoned to his presence 
 
41 6 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 without apprehension, seeing their mother's woe, 
 were moved to an innocent and unconscious 
 hypocrisy, and did not dare to whisper even to 
 each other that a load as of lead was lifted off their 
 childish souls. 
 
 The shops were closed ; the muffled bells tolled ; 
 the nobility and the bourgeoisie wore mourning ; 
 the nation made believe that it was intensely shocked, 
 intensely grieved, and mute out of fear ; but at its 
 heart it was glad, and beyond all the populace was glad, 
 that the heir to the throne was now the man it loved. 
 
 The one mourner who felt as much regret as his 
 stolid egotism could permit him to feci at any time 
 was the King. Theo could have been trusted to 
 continue all the traditions of the House of Gunde- 
 r5de ; Theo would never have yielded to maudlin 
 sentiment or have stooped to popular dictation. 
 
 Theo would have always slept booted and spurred. 
 Under him, Helianthus would have been a careful 
 copy in miniature of the great Guthonic empire, all 
 its natural instincts stamped out of it, all its youth 
 weighted with musket and haversack, all its free 
 speech silenced, all its gaiety eclipsed, all its energies 
 crushed under one order, — * obey.' 
 
 When John of GunderOde realised that his second 
 son was now unavoidably designated as his own 
 immediate successor, he cursed the crookedness and 
 crabbedness which makes circumstance jeer at mortals, 
 and the undesired always become the inevitable. All 
 his rigour, all his severity, all his acuteness, all his 
 unmercifulness could not give him the power to 
 shape and control the futurity of events. 
 
 The death of his heir-apparent was a greater blow 
 to the King than any he had ever suffered except the 
 
XXVII HELIANTHUS 417 
 
 enforced disarmament of his carefully prepared 
 expedition for war in the Dark Continent. He 
 could have trusted Theo implicitly to move on his 
 own lines, to govern with his own measxires, to follow 
 his own example in all ways. With Theo the jagged 
 bit would have pressed firmer on the sensitive mouth 
 of the blood-mare, and the knotted whip would have 
 cut wounds unceasingly on the nervous, trembling, 
 and highly-bred creature. Theo would have walked 
 in the steps of his father, and being without even his 
 father's measure of intelligence would have known 
 no law but force. Under Theo, Helianthus would 
 have been flogged on the road to Guthonic measures, 
 Guthonic despotism, Guthonic brutality, and the 
 strange Guthonic mixture of science and superstition 
 and militarism would have been forced down the 
 throat of the nation as a veterinary thrusts a medicine 
 down the throat of a mare. The Guthonic empire 
 had been the idol and ideal of the dead prince. But 
 dead he was, in the prime of his early manhood ; 
 and in his place stood Elim. 
 
 Never in all his life before had John of GunderSde 
 realised his own helplessness before the sledge- 
 hammer of accident and the chances of mortality. 
 His stubborn and unbending spirit realised for once 
 its own impotency and incapacity. He could not 
 save his eldest born from the darkness of the tomb, 
 and he could not alter the succession to the throne. 
 His olive cheek grew greyer, his cold eyes harder, he 
 smoked unceasingly, he scarcely ever spoke, and when 
 he did he growled like an angry mastiff. For three 
 days he scarcely ate ; and in place of his burgundies 
 and bordeaux he drank brandy. Every one has his 
 own way of mourning ; this was his. On the fourth 
 
 2 E 
 
41 8 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 evening he took up the menu card of his dinner and 
 said the cook was a fool. On the fifth day he 
 resumed his usual manner of life. But in his silent 
 soul, tight shut as a bivalve on a rock, there was a 
 bitter fury of regret, a sombre rage of useless 
 sorrow. 
 
 Hydaspe was at a distance of over twenty hours 
 from the capital ; the railway only went half the way, 
 and the rest of the journey was made by relays of 
 horses. When Othyris reached Helios he was met 
 by the tidings that his brother was dead. What he 
 had most dreaded had come to pass. He himself 
 was heir-apparent to the throne. 
 
 He covered his face with his hands, and great 
 tears forced themselves through his fingers. His 
 sorrow was not for Theo, but for himself; the 
 burden of a power he abhorred seemed to lie on him 
 like a rock rolled on to the breast of a living man. 
 If only the little child had lived ! As he drove to 
 his residence a murmur of delight and of respectful 
 welcome rose from the crowds in the streets as they 
 recognised his equipage, although the blinds were 
 drawn. The cheers were checked immediately by the 
 city guards, but the joy was in the hearts of the people. 
 Their darling was now some day to be their ruler. 
 ' He will reign over us,' they thought, * and then 
 there will be no more men to poke us in the ribs 
 and drag us oiF to prison.' They, like the populace 
 of every nation, imagined that a sovereign could do 
 as he chose, and knew nothing of the innumerable 
 threads which bind him like Gulliver. There was 
 a dense crowd gathered in the Square of the Dioscuri, 
 and although the people could not see Othyris as his 
 
XXVII HELIANTHUS 419 
 
 carriage passed rapidly between the gates of his 
 palace, all the force of the guards of Helios could 
 not prevent a great muffled shout of welcome rolling 
 down the air and reaching him in his chamber. 
 
 'They care for me, they believe in me/ he 
 thought. ' Alas, poor people ! What more power 
 to serve them shall I ever have than a gilded puppet 
 on a carnival car ! ' 
 
 He could not feel regret for Theo ; he knew that 
 Theo, as ruler, would have treated the people of 
 Helianthus as a brute treats a timid colt or a sickly 
 wife. Theo had prided himself on his hardness 
 and recklessness, and nothing could have broken his 
 backbone of steel except the grip of that skeleton- 
 king who makes all other kings lie low as paupers. 
 
 Othyris sorrowed for himself, on whose life fell the 
 crushing glacier of impending power ; he sorrowed 
 for the nation who would look to him for so much 
 and to whom he could give so little ; he sorrowed 
 for the love of his life, more distant from him in 
 his freedom and what the world deemed splendour 
 than she had been in his captivity and solitude. 
 
 The great bell of the Cathedral tolled with its 
 deep brazen tongue, and all the chimes of churches 
 and chapels resounded in echo, proclaiming the 
 death of one for whom all the land of Helianthus 
 was supposed to mourn as a mother the loss of her 
 first-born. Ilia heard the swell of the great threnody 
 as it rose upwards from the city below, joining the 
 booming of the surf upon the shore. 
 
 ' Who is dead ? ' she asked Ma'fa, startled and 
 vaguely apprehensive. * Some one in high place.' 
 
 *The eldest son of the King,' said the woman. 
 
420 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 * He died in the night of that fungus which grows 
 in the throat.' 
 
 * The Crown Prince dead ! Then ! ' 
 
 * It is the Prince EHm who will reign,' said 
 Ma!a. 
 
 The waves of deep and solemn sound joined 
 with the anger of a wind-driven sea on the beach 
 below. 
 
 'It is a cruel fate,' thought Ilia ; she knew that 
 to him of all others it would seem so. She remem- 
 bered the words of Illyris : * If he lead the people 
 or If he forsake the people, either way he will repent. 
 To rule you must have iron in you. He has silver ; 
 but silver will not make a sword-blade.' 
 
 All night long the bells, great and small, tolled 
 all over the country, in cities and townships and 
 hamlets, in lonely churches on bare hillsides, and in 
 monasteries by lakes and streams ; and in the chapels 
 of feudal castles, and on the solitary shores by the 
 sea, from the Mare Magnum to the Rhastian moun- 
 tains, the tongues of bronze told all the land that 
 the heir to the throne was dead. But in the silent 
 heart of Helianthus there was no sorrow ; there was 
 only gladness, mute and timid gladness, hiding like 
 a hunted hare, and rejoicing because the man they 
 loved would one day or another rule over them. In 
 their ignorance and their credulity the people believed 
 that he would change the whole face of the country, 
 set a barn of plenty beside every poor man's hearth, 
 lift the musket and the knapsack from every strip- 
 ling's back, and make the golden corn grow on every 
 stony plain. In their ignorance they could not tell 
 that in the kingdom of men individual character 
 
XXVII HELIANTHUS 421 
 
 can change little in the lot of the multitude or in 
 the burdens borne by them. Though Solomon in 
 all his glory, or Trojan in all his justice, were to 
 reign in this actual time, he could not alter by 
 a hair's breadth, by a gramme's weight, the pressure 
 of poverty, the disparity of fates, the irony of 
 circumstance, the brutality of war, the satire of 
 success, the vast misery of the majority. But the 
 people do not know that. 
 
CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 Othyris had no sleep that night. He felt like a 
 man who lies pressed down under a rock which has 
 fallen on him, leaving him breath and brain to suffer, 
 but with no power to rise and move. 
 
 With the change of position went such liberty and 
 such privacy as he had hitherto enjoyed. His life 
 henceforward belonged entirely to others. He had 
 never seriously feared the possibility of his own future 
 reign. His eldest brother, risks of sport apart, had 
 seemed a man certain of long life, as he had always 
 been of health and strength. When he had thought 
 of his own possible accession it had been with little 
 apprehension of such a fate becoming ever a reality. 
 
 It was but half a year ago that he had heard the 
 same outcries of popular affection rise from the same 
 square and the same surrounding streets ; he could not 
 doubt the preference of the people for himself. But 
 to what, in its uttermost, could it lead ? Only to civil 
 war. His father was not a man to take a passage in 
 a steamer at the first intimation to him of his own 
 unpopularity. If fully convinced of it, he might 
 prefer his accumulated scrip to a struggle with a 
 hostile people ; but he would not be easily convinced, 
 and he had the temper of the bull-dog. 
 
 The night was moonlit and serene; across the 
 422 
 
CHAP. XXVIII HELIANTHUS 423 
 
 masses of foliage of his gardens he could see the 
 distant peaks of Mount Atys, faint and ghastly against 
 the starlit skies on the other side of the bay of 
 Helios. 
 
 Was Ilia sleeping under the guard of those snows 
 as virginal as the white hills of her breast ? Had she 
 any memory in her dreams of him ? Was he not 
 farther away from her than ever, now that he was 
 direct heir to that crown which had been seized by 
 Theodoric ? 
 
 The overwhelming desire to be in her presence 
 was stronger than any prudence, either for his own 
 sake or hers. Six months had passed since he 
 had looked upon her face. The night was the long 
 night of October ; it had been evening when he had 
 entered Helios ; and, under the plea of fatigue, he 
 had seen only two or three of his gentlemen, the 
 most faithful and attached. When he dismissed 
 these and retired for the night, he said to himself : 
 ' She rises with the sun at all seasons ; I can go there 
 at dawn and return by eight o'clock in the forenoon.' 
 
 His absence would probably be noticed by his 
 household, but he knew that he could trust the 
 most devoted of them to conceal it from the rest ; 
 they would attribute it to some amatory tryst. He 
 did what he had often done when on less innocent 
 errands bent : he went down into his gardens and 
 opened a little postern gate which led into the courts 
 at the back of the palace where the stables, coach- 
 houses, and other buildings were situated. All was 
 still and closed, men and animals slumbered ; the 
 sentinels stationed there challenged, then recognising 
 him, presented arms. He opened the door of the 
 spacious line of loose boxes, in which his riding horses 
 
424 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 were kept ; awakened one of his fleetest favourites, 
 saddled her, and led her out by one of the gates, the 
 sentinels of course remaining immovable. He was 
 sure of their silence. He locked the door of the 
 courtyard behind him, holding the mare by her bridle ; 
 then mounted and rode towards the Gate of Olives 
 on the other side of the city. 
 
 It was scarcely daybreak ; heavy mists hung over 
 the sea, and as he went down the southern quay the 
 air blew on him cold and refreshing as a draught from 
 a mountain stream. Some fishermen, some men-of- 
 war sailors, some dockyard labourers, alone passed 
 him ; the sentinels on the quay saluted as their 
 comrades had done ; there was no one else abroad in 
 the dusk of the chilly autumn morn of which the 
 shadows and the vapours hid Mount Atys from his 
 sight. He rode as fast as it was possible to do on 
 the slippery marble of the paven roads, and when he 
 reached the barrier of the south-west gate the way to 
 it was blocked by long strings of ox carts, and mule 
 carts, and flocks and cattle, and laden asses, and 
 peasants mounted and on foot, who had waited 
 wearily there ever since the small hours of the 
 night. 
 
 * The accursed Octroi ! ' thought Othyris. * The 
 most brutal of all the taxes, save the blood-tax ! 
 Can they find no better way to get the money 
 they squander than to keep the husbandman out 
 of his bed two - thirds of the night, and make 
 his poor animals footsore and famished before 
 sunrise ? ' 
 
 The guards, sleepy and sullen, were drawing back 
 the huge bolts of the iron gates, swearing savagely 
 at the throngs gathered there. With a sharp and 
 
XXVIII HELIANTHUS 425 
 
 stern rebuke to them, as they, in fear and trem- 
 bling, recognised him, Othyris passed through under 
 the ancient portcullis into the familiar country road 
 which wound up into the hills beyond. When he 
 had got rid of the waiting crowd of patient labourers 
 the way was clear. The day was fully risen ; the fresh 
 scents of the fields were blown about on the change- 
 ful winds, the wreaths of mists were drifting, whiter 
 and whiter at each moment ; the great crests of the 
 Helichrysum hills were lifted one by one out of the 
 clouds. He rode as fast as the steepness of the path 
 would permit, towards that hermitage which had 
 been scarcely absent an hour from his thoughts since 
 he had last been there on that memorable day when 
 the people of Helios had remembered Illyris. Every 
 knot of thyme or clump of tussock grass beside the 
 path, all the falling waters, some broad and deep as 
 torrents, some mere threads of rippling moisture, all 
 the great trees leaning down over the rocks and 
 myrtle bushes, — all were familiar and welcome to him, 
 and as the morning light widened and the winds 
 moderated, the repose and beauty of the place sank 
 like balm into his soul. It was still so early that the 
 dews were heavy and the sun had not reached these 
 woods ; only a clear and solemn light awakened the 
 woodlarks and the redcaps, and shone, green and 
 transparent, through the branches of the oaks and 
 olives. 
 
 His heart beat fast, and anxiety quickened his 
 breath as he drew nearer and nearer to the house 
 and passed the spot where he had met Ilia beside 
 the old man's bier. That shyness of the true lover, 
 which he had never felt before, came over him and 
 made him fear that he should have no welcome. To 
 
426 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 all others he was the heir of the throne, to her he 
 was but her humble servant in his own sight, and 
 less than that in hers. Had his letters made any way 
 for him into her sympathies ? He could not tell. He 
 feared that there was no response in her to his own 
 feelings. His soul had crossed the gulf of difference 
 which divided them, but hers remained aloof upon 
 a distant shore. 
 
 It was still early in the earliest hours of morning 
 when Othyris reached the last portion of the bridle- 
 path up which it was possible to urge a horse. He 
 heard the sound of plough-oxen being urged by a 
 human voice, but they were distant, far down in the 
 twilight of the foliage, and he saw nearer to him 
 two little lads with wooden tubs on their shoulders — 
 such tubs, cone-shaped, as are used to carry water in 
 drought or grapes in vintage-time. No doubt they 
 were the younger sons of Janos, going to gather roots 
 or fruits that did not grow at this altitude. He 
 called to them and they stumbled up through the 
 rank grass, frightened but obedient, for they recog- 
 nised him. He gave them the bridle of the mare to 
 hold, and said a word in her ear which she under- 
 stood, bidding her wait there ; then he went up on 
 foot to the house, standing in the deep shadows of its 
 great trees. 
 
 He saw Ilia on the threshold ; she was throwing 
 grain to the pigeons ; the tamed dove of Illyris sat 
 on her shoulder, and watched its wilder cousins eat 
 and fight and flutter. 
 
 She looked so serene, so content, so wholly satis- 
 fied with these simple things, with only that shadow 
 of sadness which the death of Illyris had left her, 
 that Othyris could not think that he had been 
 
XXVIII HELIANTHUS 427 
 
 remembered or regretted. He paused on the edge 
 of the rough grass and the wild rose-bushes. 
 
 His shadow fell across the turf, and the dog 
 Ajax came towards him with welcome and recog- 
 nition. She looked up and let fall the boxwood 
 bowl of grain. She did not speak. She stood still 
 in the shock of surprise ; she had not known that he 
 had arrived in Helios. 
 
 ' Have I done wrong ? ' he said, as he stood with 
 uncovered head. * May I hope for welcome ? Or, 
 if that is too much, for pardon ? ' 
 
 She was silent still ; he could not see on her 
 countenance any expression of her emotions, any 
 reflection of her mind ; she stood with the flock of 
 pigeons at her feet ; the dove had flown on to the ivy 
 of the roof. Was she indifi'erent ? Was she angered? 
 Was she thinking of the change in his position, or of 
 the confessions of his letters ? He could not tell. 
 With his hand on the dog's head he stood before 
 her. 
 
 ' Have you no word for me ? ' he said humbly. 
 
 ' What would you have me say ? ' she murmured. 
 * What have I to do with you ? You are to rule in 
 Helianthus.' 
 
 * In some far-off future — or more likely never. 
 Such a change was always possible. What has it to 
 do with you and me ? Will you not let me enter ? 
 Enter at least into his chamber ? ' 
 
 ' If you wish.* 
 
 She drew back and signed to him to pass her. 
 Emotion, embarrassment, astonishment, were all so 
 unusual in her life, so alien to her temperament, 
 that they confused her ; she could not either welcome 
 or repulse him. All he had done for her forbade 
 
42 8 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 the one ; all he had written to her, and all that 
 circumstance made him and gave him, forbade the 
 other. 
 
 ' I cannot pass before you,' he said with a smile. 
 
 She understood ; he might be what he would to 
 the rest of the world ; there at Aquilegia he chose 
 to be only the scholar, the disciple, the pilgrim, who 
 had stood before the hero of Argileion and Samaris. 
 
 She entered the house and opened the door of the 
 book-room, in which the hundreds of volumes, the 
 great leather chair, the elmwood table, laden with 
 papers and old manuscripts, were all as they had 
 been in the lifetime of the Master. 
 
 Othyris stood silent a few moments in respectful 
 memory as men may stand beside a tomb. 
 
 Then he turned to Ilia. 
 
 ' You received my letters ? * 
 
 'Yes.' 
 
 ' Did you read them ? ' 
 
 A faint colour rose over her face. ' Yes, and then 
 I destroyed them.' 
 
 * Why ? Do you think me a coward, or what 
 they said untrue ? ' 
 
 * No, neither.' 
 
 * Could you not have answered them .? ' 
 ' Silence answered them.' 
 
 * Silence means many things.' 
 
 ' I thought you would understand — between you 
 and me there can be no correspondence, there can be 
 no sympathy.' 
 
 ' Why .? ' 
 
 * Why ? I have often told you. Now it is 
 more impossible than ever. You are the heir to the 
 throne.' 
 
XXVIII HELIANTHUS 429 
 
 * No one, no law, no nation, can make me accept 
 that position unless I choose. I can say nothing 
 more than I have in those letters. I am yours in any 
 way, by any bond, you choose.' His words broke 
 down in an impatient sigh. * But nothing that I can 
 say moves you more than a marble mask is moved. 
 And yet ' 
 
 He was about to say : * I have suffered for your 
 sake, I have lost a part of my life ! ' 
 
 But he checked the words unuttered. He would 
 not remind her of her debt to him. 
 
 Ilia did not answer. 
 
 She stood by the great leather chair against the 
 casement, through which a green light fell through 
 the leaves of the ivy. She was prepared for his 
 words by his letters ; but she was unprepared for 
 his presence, and for the effect it had on herself. 
 In the well without, those letters of his had perished,, 
 soaked in the deep, cold water of the subterranean 
 spring ; but many of their lines had been burnt into 
 her memory before she had dropped them into their 
 tomb. Their recollection made her nervous, timid,, 
 self-conscious, ashamed, all that she had never been 
 before ; the weakness of sex awoke in her. 
 
 She leaned her hand on the back of the old black 
 chair as if to gain courage and strength from its 
 contact ; the green cool light falling through the ivy 
 leaves flickered on her face. She felt the passion of 
 his gaze burn into her inmost being. That he loved 
 her greatly she could not doubt ; that he might 
 become dear to her she felt with terror. She heard 
 the stern and haughty voice of Platon Illyris saying : 
 *What have you, my daughter, to do with the 
 House of Gunderode ? ' 
 
430 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 * Listen, sir,' she said, gently but with firmness, 
 to Othyris, ' I am sensible of all we owe to you. 
 I am conscious of what you have suffered for our 
 sakes. I grieve for it. I cannot repay you all you 
 have done for us. It is impossible to put into words 
 my sense of it. But do not come here. You only 
 pain me, and compromise yourself. You belong to 
 the people of Helianthus. You are not free to do 
 what you choose or what you wish. You are theirs : 
 at once their lord and their servant.' 
 
 ' But if I will not be either ? ' 
 
 ' You cannot escape your obligations.' 
 
 * Why not ? It is a yoke laid on me by the 
 accident of birth. I have the right to reject it if I 
 choose.' 
 
 * You could not change yourself if you did,' she 
 said sadly. *You could not wash the blood of 
 Theodoric out of your veins. You could not be 
 otherwise than one of the princes of his House 
 though you beggared yourself or swept the streets. 
 We are what we are born, till death releases us.' 
 
 * Those are ideas of a world that is dead,' he said, 
 with anger and impatience. ' Ideas of the days of 
 blood-feud, of inherited hatreds, of Capulet and 
 Montagu, of Monteuki and Salimbeni. Surely we 
 belong to a calmer and colder time when the sins of 
 the father are not visited on the children. We have 
 lost much, but we have gained something. The 
 chief of our gains is surely the temperate spirit of 
 modern feeling.' 
 
 * It is indifference, it is often even mere cynicism, 
 that which you praise. There are wrongs which 
 cannot die, which should not die, as long as memory 
 lives.' 
 
XXVIII HELIANTHUS 431 
 
 * If you had any regard for me, you would have 
 no memory but that/ 
 
 * Perhaps.' 
 
 She spoke almost sorrowfully, almost regretfully. 
 What she had felt for him in his absence died away 
 in his presence. 
 
 He felt that it did so. It filled him with despair. 
 
 * Is there any one living fitter to reign in Heli- 
 anthus than you — fitter in body, in mind, in 
 race ? ' 
 
 * Oh, sir, you are mad ! ' she said in mingled 
 anger and fear. ' Quite mad ! I ! False to all the 
 creeds and traditions I have inherited ? Apostate to 
 all the religion of my people ? Could I be so, the 
 women of Helios would have a right to stone me in 
 their streets.' 
 
 ' They would fling the roses of Helianthus under 
 your feet. Would to God I could prove it to you ! 
 You have the blood in your veins of the liberator of 
 this country.' 
 
 ' Whom they allowed to live thirty years above 
 their seashore, poor, alone, forgotten ! They scarcely 
 knew that he was amongst them. Who buried him 
 where the great dead lie ? You ; not they.' 
 
 ^ Yes, it was they, not I, whom my father feared.' 
 ' Would your father admit that he feared them ? ' 
 ' I know not ; I know that he did so.' 
 She was silent ; she felt that she must seem to 
 him thankless, callous, unworthy of all that he had 
 done, and was ready to do ; and her own heart 
 trembled within her ; she was afraid of it, afraid of 
 its weakness, afraid of its betrayal of herself. 
 
 * If I had any feeling for you,' she said, with 
 more passion than had been ever in her voice, * if — 
 
432 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 what would it be ? An insult to my race, a curse to 
 myself. You ? You and I ^ It would be sacri- 
 lege ! ' 
 
 ' Wherefore ? Mutual love has healed the 
 wounds of feuds before now in many a human 
 history.* 
 
 * It was not a feud. It was the betrayal of an 
 Iscariot that which your forefather did to Platon 
 Illyris.' 
 
 * Perhaps, but it was not my sin.* 
 
 * You cannot cleanse yourself from it. You may 
 be called to ascend the throne to-morrow.* 
 
 * And I would refuse the throne unless you 
 shared it.* 
 
 * I ? My people would rise from their graves to 
 strike me. How can you say such things to me ? ' 
 
 Some consciousness of the immense force of a 
 great passion dawned on her ; some sense that it was 
 irresistible as a forest fire. She rose, and threw her 
 veil about her head. 
 
 ' These are all useless words,* she said to him. 
 ^ Between you and me there is a great gulf fixed ; it 
 is as deep as the Hellespont, and I will drown in it 
 like Helle.* 
 
 She entered the house, and his heart sank within 
 him. 
 
 Othyris found the mare chafing restlessly at her 
 inaction, and rode her at dangerous speed down the 
 steep road back to Helios and through the Gate of 
 Olives. He was in time to enter by the back courts 
 of his palace, and regained his apartments seen by few 
 of his household, and confident that of those few none 
 were likely to be indiscreet enough to talk of his 
 absence in those early morning hours. His life had 
 
XXVIII HELIANTHUS 433 
 
 been erratic and adventurous ; his courtiers knew 
 well that no quality in them was so favourably- 
 seen by him as that of discretion. They knew him 
 too well to anger him by prying into his amorous 
 secrets. 
 
 2F 
 
CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 The funeral of the late Crown Prince was a great 
 spectacle, a military pageant of the first order ; only 
 that of the King could have surpassed it. The 
 body was placed upon a gun-carriage, like a dead 
 god upon his altar, and the princes, his brothers, 
 with a galaxy of foreign princes, their relations, 
 followed it ; all of them in full uniform and mounted 
 on splendid chargers. If the music played by the 
 massed bands had not been so slow, so mournful, and 
 so solemn, the procession might easily have been 
 mistaken for a wedding march or a conqueror's 
 entry. The population of the capital was in the 
 streets, dumb, sullen, yet magnetised by the grandeur 
 of the show. In no city of the world has the 
 populace the courage to display its disapproval by 
 shutting its shutters before a pageant. 
 
 At that same hour another man was being carried 
 to his end ; carried a short journey from the mattress 
 on which he had died to the dissecting table in the 
 floor below in the great central hospital dedicated to 
 St. Elizabeth. He had been a good man all his 
 days, a worker in the docks ; he had reared a large 
 family with honesty and kindness ; they had most of 
 them emigrated at an age when they began to grow 
 useful ; two only were now alive, labouring men in 
 
 434 
 
CHAP. XXIX HELIANTHUS 435 
 
 the Western hemisphere ; he had been long ill and 
 out of work ; he had suffered from tumour in the 
 liver ; he had been promised a cure at the great 
 hospital ; he had found only death. There was 
 none to pay the fee which permits the removal of 
 a body from the hospital; his wife was weeping 
 miserably outside the gates ; she could not buy the 
 right to bury him ; his remains were laid on the 
 dissecting table, and the instruments of the students 
 searched his inmost parts, traced the net-work of his 
 veins, scooped out his brain, sawed his spine in 
 sections. The sounds of the military music, the 
 passing of the troops, the boom of the funeral guns, 
 rolled through the operating-room from an adjacent 
 street. 
 
 The contrasts of life are too sharp, and its dis- 
 parities are too great. 
 
 At ten o'clock on the day following the funeral 
 Othyris went to his first interview with his father ; a 
 meeting whicji both would have been equally willing 
 to avoid had such avoidance been possible. 
 
 John of Gunderode received him in the room in 
 which he spent most of his indoor hours, surrounded 
 by the modern substitutes for the thunderbolt of 
 Zeus and the wand of Proteus. He was seated 
 before his bureau on a revolving chair, and he 
 wheeled round and faced his son, with a sign dis- 
 missing the attendant officials. His olive cheeks 
 were pale and their flesh was flabby ; his eyes were 
 sullen and restless ; in his teeth was the inevitable 
 cigarette ; he had rarely known embarrassment, but 
 he knew it then. 
 
 Othyris felt none. He was cold, resentful, paying 
 
436 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 to the smallest iota all the deference demanded of 
 him ; but to the King this extreme ceremony seemed 
 irony, although any lack of it would have appeared 
 to him offence. 
 
 John of Gunderode had never felt impatience 
 before ; but now he was totally powerless to undo 
 this knot which fate had tied, to rid himself of the 
 successor whom he hated, of the revolutionary whom 
 he feared. Judging Othyris by himself, he opined 
 that, now, being immediate heir to the throne, his 
 son would cease to be a revolutionary, but would 
 not for that reason cease to be a foe. He was con- 
 vinced that Elim, impatient to reign, would use his 
 popularity with the masses to dethrone himself. 
 
 The two men were in strong contrast. The 
 King's stout and stunted figure filled his revolving 
 writing-chair without grace, his eyebrows were drawn 
 together in a gloomy gravity, his skin was yellower 
 than before ; he had neglected to dye his hair, and 
 patches of grey showed in it ; his teeth were shut, 
 and scarcely unclosed for speech ; he looked like an 
 adjutant, like a merchant, like the head of a depart- 
 ment worried and incensed by matters offensive and 
 odious which could not be altered or controlled. 
 
 His son stood before him in the full light from 
 the windows, pale as the dead Adonis, fair as the 
 Sun-god of the poets, tall, slender, calm, and cold ; 
 with a great weariness upon him, but with no weak- 
 ness ; a man who forgot nothing, and who, if he 
 forgave, did so only because his own conception of 
 duty made it incumbent on him. 
 
 His father understood that he himself had been in 
 error in his estimate of one whom he had considered 
 a visionary, an anarchist, a fool. He received an 
 
XXIX HELIANTHUS 437 
 
 impression of his own incapacity to dominate his 
 successor which was new and odious to him. 
 
 Force at the present moment was out of the 
 question. Persuasion had never been one of the 
 methods of the monarch. What he required in the 
 heir to the Crown was a copy of himself, acquiescence 
 in all his own views and acts ; a will servilely copying 
 his own will, and promising him for the future, when 
 he should be no more, the continuation of his own 
 influence, the development of his own projects and 
 his own home and foreign policy. 
 
 To hope for this from Elim was to indulge in a 
 baseless vision. There could be no continuity of 
 action and opinion between him and a man who was 
 in every way his opposite, who had no more similarity 
 to his own absolutism than Vergniaud had to a Ver- 
 saillais. If he died that day and Elim reigned in his 
 stead he knew all that he had done would be undone : 
 that the Guthonic alliance would be broken, that the 
 military dominance would be at an end, that the net- 
 work of policies which he had been at such pains to 
 weave would be swept away like a cobweb, that the 
 whole future of absolutism which he had built up 
 under the cover of constitutionalism would be pushed 
 down like a child's sand castle. The country was 
 ready to welcome such changes — setting aside its 
 bureaucracy and some portion of its aristocracy. Of 
 the existence of revolutionary feeling in the army 
 itself he had been long aware. The rank and file 
 were ready to throw down their arms at the first 
 propitious moment. 
 
 His dead son could have been trusted never to 
 allow that moment to arrive, but his actual heir 
 would certainly hasten its advent. For the first 
 
438 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 time in his reign his astute and obstinate mind found 
 itself baffled. In such difficulties the rulers of large 
 armies and disposers of large exchequers are able to 
 launch their nation into some racial feud or flattering 
 conquest, and in the ferment and wrath thus excited 
 make their peoples forget their hatred of compulsory- 
 service and bend their backs under the knapsack. 
 But Helianthus could not be thus launched into 
 oblivion and war-fever. Her allies kept her immov- 
 able ; her finances were limited ; her power to move 
 alone was small, almost nil ; in Europe her cannon 
 would not be allowed to fire ; in savage and distant 
 States she had renounced her share in that butchery 
 which is called the crusade of civilisation. Candor, 
 since she had become Imperia, did not allow her 
 friends to stop a ball or hold a wicket in the great 
 game she played in the Dark Continent. Now and 
 then she called to a crew of a Helianthine battleship 
 to come ashore and field for her on some barbaric 
 coast or uncertain frontier ; but this was very rarely, 
 and neither navy nor army of Helianthus dared move 
 without her. 
 
 All these thoughts passed through the King's 
 brain as he sat in that silence which was his constant 
 refuge in any difficult moment. 
 
 In his successor he wanted a careful and exact 
 continuance of his own work ; in Elim he could only 
 see the destroyer of it. 
 
 The interview was ceremonious, strictly confined 
 to that which the moment demanded, with a rigid 
 limitation on both sides to what was necessary 
 and politic. By neither was there spoken a single 
 superfluous word ; between them there could not 
 be either confidence or candour ; they were 
 
XXIX HELIANTHUS 439 
 
 enemies, and consanguinity only intensified an- 
 tagonism. 
 
 The King felt less contempt for his son than 
 before, but he felt also, more strongly, that between 
 himself and Elim there could never be other than 
 enmity of the most bitter kind. He had thought 
 his second son a weak and dreamy enthusiast, but he 
 recognised now that behind these ideals and phantasies 
 which seemed so miserably absurd to himself, there 
 was something of the iron of the GunderOde tempera- 
 ment, as yet latent but existent, and likely to grow 
 harder as youth passed. Whatever it might become, 
 he knew that it would be inimical to himself, contrary 
 to all his plans, his ambitions, his ruling power. 
 
 When he had intimated to Othyris that in his 
 present position it would be necessary to renounce 
 the friendships and preferences which had been 
 notably his choice hitherto, his son had briefly replied 
 that he could not be unfaithful either to his friends 
 or to his faiths ; and the monarch had felt that he 
 would have no power to make him so. 
 
 * You must surely perceive the indecency of such 
 sentiments in your changed position,' he said with 
 ill-restrained wrath. 
 
 * I perceive, sire, the indecency of changing a 
 principle merely because a situation has changed,* 
 replied Othyris. ' I hope that I shall never be guilty 
 of it.' 
 
 ' The heir to the throne cannot be a revolutionist ! ' 
 ' I have led no revolution, sire.' 
 'Because you were arrested in time to prevent 
 your doing so.' 
 
 * Your Majesty has been misinformed. I attended 
 a funeral ; I assisted in a reparation ; I did no more.' 
 
440 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 * The military court judged otherwise/ 
 
 * I cannot help its incorrect opinions. Your 
 Majesty did not deign to question me yourself.' 
 
 * I do not consider that my prerogative extends to 
 interference with the sentences of military tribunals, 
 especially where a member of my family is the 
 offender. You had every facility given you for 
 defence. If you did not avail yourself of such 
 facilities the fault was yours. Your replies offended 
 your judges, who certainly would have been better 
 pleased if they could have acquitted you.' 
 
 * They did their duty doubtless as they saw it. I 
 trust your Majesty will believe that I also did mine 
 as I saw it.' 
 
 * There was no question of duty in your case. 
 There were only insubordination and offence.' 
 
 * I regret that your Majesty sees my conduct in 
 that light.' 
 
 The King gave utterance to a short, harsh sound, 
 half laugh, half curse. 
 
 * If I order you now to return to Hydaspe and 
 fulfil the remainder of your sentence ? ' 
 
 * I go, sir, of course, instantly.' 
 
 His father's half-shut, gloomy, penetrating eyes 
 looked at him in inquisitive scepticism. He was 
 strongly tempted to take his son at his word and 
 send him back to the saline marshes of the east coast. 
 But his inclinations never ran away with his judgment 
 or his passions with his prudence. His sense of what 
 was best for himself was always his guiding con- 
 sideration. He knew how his Cabinet, his Senate, 
 his Chamber, his people in general would view such 
 an action. 
 
 * That is impossible now,' he said curtly. ' I 
 
XXIX HELIANTHUS 441 
 
 regret that seclusion and solitude have not produced 
 a greater change in your character and opinions. I 
 hope that the great responsibilities which have 
 devolved on you may produce more effect.' 
 
 With these words he intimated that the interview 
 was over, and turning to his bureau put the acoustic 
 tube to his ear. 
 
 There was a secret chamber which opened out of 
 the King's study. It had been made when that 
 portion of the Soleia had been builded by the 
 Byzantine emperors. The gyration of the panel, 
 which was movable, was undiscoverable by any one 
 to whom the secret was unknown ; and it contained 
 a hidden lock, of which the key had been handed 
 down by Theodoric to his son, and by his son to his 
 successor. An old monk of an Oriental monastery 
 had given the secret and the key to Theodoric as 
 price of the permission to his order to remain 
 unmolested on their rocky eyrie on the northern 
 mountains of Helianthus. Theodoric and the monk 
 had long been dead, but the key had been trans- 
 mitted to the reigning monarch ; and the barefooted, 
 unwashed, famished anchorites still paced their stony 
 corridors, and lighted their bronze lamps, and intoned 
 their wild litanies, in the recesses of the Rhastian 
 alps. 
 
 The sea-front of the Soleia stood directly on the 
 quay, without any intervening wall or garden. The 
 window of the secret chamber was concealed from 
 without ; it was closed by a marble panel carved to 
 correspond with the exterior carvings, and turned on a 
 steel swivel of elaborate and ingenious workmanship. 
 It was characteristic of the present King's carefulness 
 
442 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 and prudence in all things great and small that he 
 remembered to keep the mechanism in good order, 
 and with his own hands oiled it twice or thrice a year, 
 and moved it to prevent rust. The chamber within 
 was square, small, lofty ; all of stone ; the signs of 
 the Zodiac were sculptured on one of the walls ; 
 when the narrow aperture was open, the person 
 within looked on the great marble quay which 
 separated the palace from the sea. 
 
 The key, which was very small, the King carried in 
 a locket containing a miniature of his first wife, the 
 bride of his boyhood. No one, not even her son, 
 had ever asked him to open that locket ; every one 
 knew that its original had been a homely, unlovely 
 person, with the ruddy skin, the short-sighted eyes, 
 the high cheekbones, the large teeth, of the Guthonic 
 physiognomy. There were many portraits of her in 
 the palaces and castles occupied by the Gunderode, 
 and their original had been lying for over thirty 
 years under the lead and cedar and silver of her triple 
 coffin, never remembered by her husband or her 
 son, or by the people who had acclaimed her on her 
 bridal. 
 
 According to the custom of his House the King 
 had confided the fact of the existence of the retreat to 
 the Crown Prince, so that it should be known by his 
 successor in case of his own sudden death. But he 
 had never shown the Crown Prince more than the 
 key and the trick of the panel ; the less any one of 
 his sons knew, the better ; he did not even exempt 
 the devotion of Theo from that conclusion. It was 
 also characteristic of him that in all the years during 
 which he had been aware of the existence of this 
 closet, no man or woman had ever heard of it from 
 
XXIX HELIANTHUS 443 
 
 him, or seen him enter or leave it. This was the 
 strength of the King : he was sufficient to himself. 
 
 The secret had gone to the grave with Theo ; it 
 should, by precedent, be passed on to the new Crown 
 Prince ; the monarch was bound to have one living 
 holder of the knowledge in case of his own sudden 
 death by disease or assassination. But John of 
 Gunderode, as he stood in the dim cell-like chamber, 
 said to himself that he would not part with that 
 secret to his present heir ; it should sooner die with 
 himself. Why not ? It was only a matter of 
 personal security ; a refuge in case of personal 
 danger ; it had no importance to the nation, or 
 interest for the State ; it was as wholly his own 
 property as the signet- ring on his finger. Elim 
 should live and reign, if circumstance allowed, 
 without that knowledge. There was so much that 
 he was obliged to reveal to his heir ; to allow, to 
 share, to confide, so sorely against his own will. 
 This, at least, he could withhold. Some day, to 
 have thus withheld it would perchance be useful. 
 
 This power of unswerving reticence was the King's 
 great strength, a strength which made up for what 
 was limited and ordinary in his intelligence. * Keep 
 your tongue behind your teeth,' says the Helianthine 
 proverb, ' and you are master of men.' 
 
 Helianthus, he considered, would be too small a 
 realm to hold both him and Elim. All unshared 
 knowledge is power of a sort ; he kept what he had 
 got. 
 
 He looked through the aperture out on to the 
 scene beneath. The southern quay of the city was 
 immediately below, with its marble walls and piers, 
 its long graceful jetty running out into the blue 
 
444 HELIANTHUS chap. 
 
 water, its basins where the royal craft of all kinds 
 was anchored, the offing crowded by vessels of his 
 own and other nations, lying at anchor ; some for 
 defence, some for pleasure, most of them for trade. 
 
 The beauty of the scene was great ; the gleaming 
 marbles, the hyacinth blue skies, the waters — here the 
 colours of a dove's throat, there of a kingfisher's 
 wings ; here green as an arum leaf, and there white as 
 an arum flower — the heaven-pointing masts and the 
 many-hued canvas of the shipping, and across the 
 bay the peaks and slopes of the Mount Atys range, 
 all made up a picture of radiant charm, charged 
 with many august memories of the past. But the 
 King was not a man to think of such things as 
 these, or note their meaning. He looked as the 
 surveyor, as the engineer, looks ; and in his trained 
 soldier's eyes measured, studied, appraised. 
 
 A shot from that secret place, from a sure hand, 
 noiseless and smokeless, would take certain death down 
 into a crowd passing along the broad white paven 
 quay. No, he thought, his son should not know of 
 that chamber. He closed the aperture, and left the 
 cell : the panel fell back into its place, its hinges 
 hidden and its lines united under the carven wreaths 
 of leaf and blossom. He was a practical man ; 
 having decided that silence was the better part he 
 kept silence, and dismissed the subject from his mind. 
 
 It was a very orderly mind ; it resembled a well- 
 arranged medicine-chest ; every separate drug was 
 labelled and ready for use, and if it contained some 
 poisons it was only because poison is as necessary, 
 and sometimes as useful, and even as healing, as is 
 the sedative or the tonic. Above all, he was wise in 
 this : he never left his medicine-chest unlocked. 
 
XXIX HELIANTHUS 445 
 
 The King had been greatly incensed by the demon- 
 strations of joy at the return of Othyris. He con- 
 sidered that the city and the nation ought to be dumb 
 and paralysed by woe. The loss of such a prince as 
 Theo seemed to him only equalled in history by the 
 death of Marcellus ; a not appropriate parallel. All 
 his dominant and imperious temper was in revolt at 
 the subjugation of his will by circumstances over which 
 he had no control. He was accustomed to alter, to 
 bend, to undo, to build up, the circumstances of his 
 own life, and the lives of others, with success and 
 without interference. He could ill stoop to receive 
 the blows of an undesired fate, the opposition of an 
 antagonistic character. Within his own realm he 
 was supreme ; and the limitations enforced on him 
 outside it were sufficient annoyance to his arrogant 
 temper without internecine or family feud. 
 
 The mere casual germ of an ordinary disease had 
 been enough to alter and reverse all his plans, his 
 intentions, and his arbitrary will. Before it he had 
 been as helpless as a pauper in a poorhouse. He felt 
 rage rather than grief that he should be thus abased 
 to the level of the ordinary sons of men. 
 
 One thought alone was prominent in his angry 
 mind : Elim must never reign. 
 
 Printed ly R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh. 
 
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 MARIETTA : A Maid of Venice. 
 
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 powerfully dramatic story of Venice under 'The Ten,' told in a series of picturesque scenes 
 described in strikingly artistic word-painting, the action being carried on by well-imagined, 
 clearly-defined characters." 
 
 THE HEART OF ROME : A Tale of the " Lost IBTater." 
 
 MORNING POST.— "On& of the best novels, in our opinion, that Mr. Crawford has yet 
 produced. From the very first pages ... up to the last . . . the story never flags. . . . Not 
 only is the story finely conceived and developed, but the character-drawing is admirable." 
 
 WHOSOEVER SHALL OFFEND . . . 
 
 DAILY TELEGRAPH.—" Mr. Marion Crawford's new novel will, it is safe to say, 
 take its place among the most successful and most widely-admired of all his stories. . . . 
 Sure to be read by thousands, and to give pleasure and entertainment wherever it is read." 
 
 SOPRANO : A Portrait. 
 
 MORNING LEADER.—" In Soprano Mr. Crawford is at his best. . . . One of the 
 most amusing and interesting books of the season." 
 
 Globe ?>vo. 2s. 6d. net. 
 THE LITTLE CITY OF HOPE : A Christmas Story. 
 
 %vo. 
 THE LITTLE CITY OF HOPE : A Christmas Story. 
 
 With Illustrations in Colour by A. S. Hartrick. (^Autumn 1908.) 
 
 Pott Svo. 2s. net. 
 MAN OVERBOARD! 
 
 Fcap. Svo. 2s. 
 LOVE IN IDLENESS: A Bar Harbour Tale. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., LONDON. 
 
NEW 6s. NOVELS 
 
 These include The Divas Rul-y, by 
 F. Marion Crawford, the completion of 
 the trilogy begun in Soprano, and continued 
 in The Pri madonna ; Ouida's last novel, 
 Helianthusy a glowing romance of the 
 present times, planned on a vast scale j 
 Mammae by Rhoda Broughton, a study 
 which shows that the author has lost none 
 of her old power to charm her readers 3 
 Paths oj the Righteous, by L. Dougall, 
 author of Beggars All, which brings out 
 the startling difference between the ideal 
 and actual relations of Christians who 
 differ in forms of ^rshipj The Sunny 
 Side oj the Hilly by Rosa N. Carey, 
 a story that is likely to become one of 
 the most popular works of this popular 
 writer i The Red City, by Dr. S. Weir 
 Mitchell, a novel that deals with the 
 period covered by the Second Admini- 
 stration of Washington; and a volume 
 by Mr. B. L. Putnam Weale entitled 
 The Forbidden Boundary and other Stories. 
 
 AUTUMN 1908 
 
The Last Novel of Ouida 
 HELIANTHUS 
 
 This is the last work of the gifted writer who was so 
 widely known during her lifetime under the nom de 
 plume of "Ouida." At her death it was found to be 
 still incomplete, but fortunately the first twenty-nine 
 chapters had been set up in type as they were written ; 
 and as these chapters (which occupy over four hundred 
 pages) would clearly have constituted by far the larger 
 portion of the completed book, it has been judged best 
 to publish them, without alteration or addition, exactly 
 in the form in which they were left by their author 
 after having been revised by her in proof. 
 
 Helianthus is a romance of the present time, in which 
 many of the makers of modern Europe appear under a 
 thin disguise. The novel forms a striking commentary 
 on the political and social conditions of the day. It is 
 written with all the author's freedom of expression, and 
 glows with her hatred of injustice and oppression. 
 
 By B. L. Putnam Weale 
 THE FORBIDDEN BOUNDARY 
 
 That Mr. Putnam Weale should appear as the writer 
 of fiction will come as no surprise to the readers of the 
 vivid and dramatic pages of his well-known series of 
 Treatises on the Far East which began with the 
 publication of Manchu and Muscovite. It is the East, 
 too, which he knows so intimately, that has furnished 
 the writer with material for the eight striking and 
 unconventional tales that make up his new book. The 
 Forbidden Boundary refers to the line of demarcation 
 between white and coloured races, and describes what 
 happened to an Englishman and a Japanese maiden ; 
 and The Story of the Adventurous Frenchman, who becomes 
 a contrabandist and makes a large fortune during the 
 Russo-Japanese War, and who, for more romantic 
 reasons, enters Port Arthur in spite of the jealous guard 
 of the Japanese, is full of exciting reading. Among the 
 other stories are The Fever Bed, a grim story of attempted 
 poisoning by a native servant in China ; A Missionary of 
 Empire, with a setting in a Christian missionary settle- 
 ment, and a picture of an educated Chinese gentleman ; 
 Drugs and the Man, a realistic description of an opium 
 den ; and Loot, which recounts an exciting and success- 
 ful hunt for treasure in a Pekin palace by European 
 troops. 
 
 LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. 
 
Marion Crawford^s New Novel 
 
 THE DIVA'S RUBY 
 
 This volume concludes the trilogy of novels in all of 
 which Margaret Donne, the queen of lyrical opera 
 singers, is the heroine. Delightful as were Soprano and 
 The Pvimadonna, The Diva's Rtibv excels them in excite- 
 ment and interest. 
 
 It opens with a chapter, the scene of which is " in the 
 heart of the mountains near a remote little city of 
 Central Asia, ' ' where is hidden a ruby mine. The secret 
 road to this source of wealth is divulged by a Tartar 
 maiden to the European traveller who has been staying 
 in the town, and with whom she has fallen in love. He 
 manages to secure a supply of the precious stones and 
 makes off with them, leaving Baraka to get out of the 
 terrible position in which her action has placed her as 
 as best she can. In this way the glamour of the East 
 is made to pervade the story, for the girl, dressed in 
 male attire, follows her lover to Europe, and in her 
 search for him she comes into contact with the Greek 
 financier, Logotheti, to whom Margaret has engaged 
 herself, and also with Van Torp the American million- 
 aire, who, on hearing that the Primadonna was actually 
 betrothed, had sold the great Nickel Trust (of which be 
 had been the head) and had come to England with the 
 fixed determination not only to prevent Margaret's 
 marriage with Logotheti, but to marry her himself. 
 The reader of The Primadonna is aware of the interesting 
 personality of this character, and how the aversion with 
 which his acquaintance is made changes to respect and 
 liking. Margaret is moved in the same way, although 
 in the first instance her feeling towards him had been 
 nothing short of loathing and fear. Then, step by step, 
 patiently, doggedly, and with great skill, Van Torp sets 
 himself to rise in Margaret's good opinion. In this he 
 succeeds, and as he ascends Logotheti falls. That this 
 rival's overthrow is mainly owing to Van Torp goes 
 without saying. Yet, with one exception, which after 
 all was "only precious like low-down" as he himself 
 expresses it, the American never acts dishonourably. 
 In all his planning and scheming Baraka unconsciously 
 acts as his good angel, for through her Logotheti so 
 implicates himself that in anger and wounded vanity 
 Margaret decides to break off her engagement with him. 
 After this it is easy sailing for Van Torp, and the story 
 ends with justice meted out to the man for whom Baraka 
 has risked so much, and a happy straightening out of 
 all tangles. 
 
 LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD, 
 
Miss Dougall's New Novel 
 
 PATHS OF THE RIGHTEOUS 
 
 A NEW novel by the author of Beggars All and The 
 Madonna of a Day may count on a welcome from a large 
 circle of readers. Miss Dougall's new story is a frankly 
 serious book, bringing before the reader the startling 
 difference between the ideal and the actual relations of 
 Christians who differ in forms of worship ; and at the 
 same time presenting a vivid picture of life and character 
 in an English rural parish, drawn with subtle truth and 
 unobtrusive humour. 
 
 The scene is laid at the time of the last General 
 Election. An old man from Canada, of fine spirit and 
 broad sympathies, who has unexpectedly come into 
 a fortune, desires to know whether his only relative, an 
 English country vicar, would be a satisfactory heir ; so 
 he and his wife come to England, and settle down in 
 the parish beside the vicar and his family and a typical 
 set of village " society," keeping their wealth a secret. 
 The vicar's wife dislikes these homely relatives, until she 
 accidentally discovers that they are rich. The mental 
 process by which she then persuades herself into trying 
 to please them is described with subtle insight. 
 
 The other leading character in the book is Oriane 
 Graham, a well-bred, well-educated woman. In early 
 youth Oriane had been loved by a young Methodist 
 minister, who, however, had been given to understand 
 by the vicar that his love-making could not be accept- 
 able to a Churchwoman, and had left the place. When 
 the story begins he is a distinguished Oxford professor. 
 Oriane had been, and still is, attached to him, but 
 betrays it to no one. Their love-story runs through the 
 book, but Miss Dougall. as is her wont, makes it no 
 conventional one, and their lives continue to run apart. 
 
 The climax of the book is reached when Oriane, whose 
 outlook has been much widened by friendship with the 
 old man from Canada, reproaches the vicar with having 
 blighted her life by interfering to keep her apart from the 
 man she loved, also with keeping apart Christian people, 
 who ought to be essentially one, by his harsh view of 
 those outside the Church. There are other and varied 
 characters in the book, in particular the artist who 
 makes the worship of beauty and happiness his religion, 
 and the Anglican bishop who, as a Churchman, repre- 
 sents the more saintly type of Christian seen also in 
 the old Canadian. 
 
 LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. 
 
Miss Broughton*s New Novel 
 
 MAMMA 
 
 Admirers of that old favourite, Cometh Up as a Flower, 
 will find that in her new novel Miss Broughton has 
 lost none of her old power to fascinate and charm. 
 Mamma is a skilfully drawn character, and though»irom 
 the beginning the reader is taken behind the scenes and 
 shown the selfishness and vanity by which she is 
 dominated, it is easily understood (so adroitly does 
 this clever old lady work upon the divergent tempera- 
 ments of her relatives) how it is that she is regarded 
 by most of them as worthy of nothing but the highest 
 esteem and most admiring devotion. 
 
 The story opens on her seventieth birthday when her 
 three married daughters come from their respective 
 homes to bring gifts and do homage. An event of this 
 occasion is the conversation that centres round Mr. j 
 Hatton, "a young artist with a curious talent for 
 catching a likeness," who has oifered to paint Mamma's ! 
 portrait. That he has asked her to sit to him "for ! 
 nothing but his own pleasure" is the chief reason for ^ 
 Mamma's acceptance. On his first visit he explains to 
 Lucia (the unmarried daughter who is privileged to \ 
 devote her life to Mamma to such an extent that she 
 even shares that lady's bedroom in order to be within i 
 easy call by night as well as by day) that she is no j 
 stranger to him as he has already heard much about j 
 her from a certain Tommy Carruthers to whom, four- \ 
 teen years before, when Lucia was seventeen, she had j 
 been engaged for exactly four days. | 
 
 From Hatton Lucia learns that Carruthers is "not ] 
 doing well," and had gradually gone down hill till he j 
 had become a waiter in a hotel. There is worse behind, i 
 but Hatton, who is himself failing iu love with Lucia, ; 
 will not tell her this. The whole story then comes to the 
 knowledge of Gwen Baskerville, a niece of Lucia, and a ■ 
 very up-to-date and advanced young woman, who is 
 fired with the desire of bringing the at-one-time lovers 
 together again. This, of course, she cannot do without 
 Hatton's help. He enters reluctantly into the plot 
 and Carruthers. who has unexpectedly inherited a 
 fortune, is found, just as he is celebrating his wedding 
 with the barmaid of his favourite tavern. Meanwhile ; 
 Lucia has discovered that her feelings towards the 
 artist, whose uncultured manners had at first disgusted | 
 her, have undermined the secret tenderness which she 
 had always entertained for her old lover. 
 
 LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD, 
 
Miss Carey^s New Novel 
 
 THE SUNNY SIDE 
 OF THE HILL 
 
 Miss Carey's new book will probably become one of 
 the most popular of her stories, for it lacks none of the 
 attraction that distinguishes the long list of well-known 
 novels by the same author. Readers of every age, too, 
 will find it interesting, for though it relates the love- 
 stories of a brother and sister who are both under 
 twenty-five, its dominant theme is the love-story of 
 a lady who has lived very nearly half a century. Miss 
 Brydon is the aunt of Harold and Maureen, a "love- 
 spinster" as she calls herself, and the possessor of 
 a picturesque old house surrounded by a beautiful 
 garden in a little village near the Kentish coast. Her 
 character is drawn with loving care, and is as fragrant 
 and delightful as the flowers she tends with such 
 assiduous activity. 
 
 At the opening of the story Aunt Margaret has not 
 long inherited the house and a sufficient income to 
 maintain it from an old lady with whom she lived as 
 companion for several years. To her home she invites 
 Maureen, a girl of nineteen, one of the many children 
 of Miss Brydon's only brother. Maureen understands 
 that the invitation is intended as a lasting one, and that 
 if she goes to her aunt it is as an adopted daughter 
 rather than as a mere visitor. She does not like parting 
 from her brothers and sisters, but when she has once 
 settled down in her new home she is happy enough. 
 
 Among the neighbours is the crippled owner of Marsh 
 Hall, a Mr. Romney Chaytor, who in saving the life of 
 his half-sister had met with the injury that had resulted 
 in incurable lameness. He bad made up his mind never 
 to marry, but Miss Brydon succeeds in changing his 
 ideas on the subject, though nobody is more surprised 
 than herself that his choice of a wife should be her own 
 niece, Maureen. Harold's love for Ruth Chaytor has 
 finally also a satisfactory realisation. But Miss 
 Brydon's story is too sacred and unusual to be told. 
 It should be learnt at first hand, and on reaching the 
 end the reader will be as admiring of the real 
 heroine of the story as are any of her own little 
 circle of relatives and friends. Not only in its title 
 should The Sunny Side of the Hill prove an enjoyable 
 companion. 
 
Winston Churchiirs New Novel 
 
 MR. CREWE'S CAREER 
 
 DAILY TELEGRAPH.— "A wonderful picture of 
 American life. . . , More real and living persons it 
 would be impossible to find among the books of to-day. 
 ... In some respects his latest novel may be compared 
 with Disraeli's work ; sometimes the advantage seems 
 to be with Mr. Churchill." 
 
 WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.— "There are five 
 hundred pages of Mr. Crewe's Career, and so admirably 
 are they filled that even the hurried reviewer cannot 
 wish them less." 
 
 STANDARD. — "A remarkably bold and vigorous 
 and enthralling work." 
 
 ACADEMY. — "One of the most engrossing novels 
 that have been written for some considerg^ble time." 
 
 PUNCH. — "A very enjoyable book." 
 
 TIMES. — " Abounds in clever sketches. . . . which 
 show Mr. Churchill at his best. The flavour of his 
 humour is of that stimulating kind which asserts itself 
 just the moment, as it were, after it has passed the 
 palate." 
 
 DAILY CHRONICLE.— " Mr. Crewe's Career is most 
 enjoyable. It is full of humanity, interest, and humour." 
 
 DAILY NEWS.— "Into this novel Mr. Churchill 
 has concentrated his reading of an epoch, and he has 
 done it with sympathy, power, and fine insight. The 
 book is worthy to stand by the side of its brilliant 
 predecessors. The Crisis and Coniston." 
 
 DAILY MAIL. — "An absorbing story," 
 
 New American Novels 
 
 THE RED CITY: A Novel of the Second 
 Administration of Washington. By S. Weir 
 Mitchell, M.D., author of Hugh JVynne^ 
 Constance Trescot^ etc. 65. 
 
 TOGETHER. By Robert Herrick, author of 
 
 The Weh of Life, etc. 6j. 
 FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE. By Zona Gale, 
 
 author of The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre. 
 
 With Illustrations. 6s, 
 
 LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. 
 
THE JUNGLE BOOK. By Rudyard Kipling. 
 
 With Sixteen Illustrations in colour by Maurice 
 and Edward Detmold. 8vo. 55. net. 
 
 THE LITTLE CITY OF HOPE. A Christmas 
 Story. By F. Marion Crawford. A new 
 edition. With Illustrations in colour by A. S. 
 Hartrick. 8vo. 5j. net. 
 
 DE LIBRIS. Prose and Verse. By Austin 
 i DoBsoN. With Illustrations by Hugh Thom- 
 
 I SON and Kate Greenaway. Extra Crown 8vo. 
 
 I HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS IN SURREY. 
 By Eric Parker. With Illustrations by Hugh 
 Thomson. Extra Crown Bvo. 6s, 
 
 A MOTOR FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE. 
 By Edith Wharton. With numerous Illus- 
 trations. Bvo. 
 
 AN ENGLISH HOLIDAY WITH CAR AND 
 CAMERA. By James John Hissey. With 
 Illustrations and Map of the Route. 8vo. 
 
 FAIRIES— OF SORTS. By Mrs. Molesworth, 
 Author of "The Ruby Ring," etc. With 
 Illustrations by Gertrude Demain Hammond. 
 Crown 8vo. Gilt edges. 3^. 6^. 
 
 FAIRY TALES FROM SOUTH AFRICA. By 
 
 Mrs. Drake and Mrs. Bourhill. Illustrated 
 by W. Herbert Holloway. Crown 8vo. 
 Gilt edges. 3^. 6^. 
 
 LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. 
 
 N. 30.8.08 
 
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