E-Book, Englisch, Band 17, 321 Seiten
Reihe: Delphi Parts Edition (Ouida)
E-Book, Englisch, Band 17, 321 Seiten
Reihe: Delphi Parts Edition (Ouida)
ISBN: 978-1-78877-887-9
Verlag: Delphi Classics (Parts Edition)
Format: EPUB
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CHAPTER II
THE people’s favourite, on reaching his own residence, 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 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 Gunderöde, 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 himself, 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 pleasurable 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; 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 défilé; 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.’ ‘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 belle affaire! 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.’ ‘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 feelings, 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 commanding 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, inexcusable. 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 unknown 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 impatience, ‘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 think that I did right as they go through the meadows this evening.’ The Princess sighed. ‘Yes; oh yes, poor creatures! But, my dear Elim, 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 Hélianthine 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.’ ‘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...
