Kophetua the Thirteenth. Julian Stafford Corbett
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charm to the subject which the greatest of his contemporaries could never have achieved.
You turned from it with a sympathetic smile to look in vain down the long vista of books for the founder's portrait over the other hearth. Picture there was none. Even his features were forgotten, but where the painting should have been hung a splendid suit of armour of the later sixteenth century fashion. Morion, corselet, tassets, all were richly chased. Below hung a great pair of Cordovan boots armed with heavy gilded spurs. One gauntlet seemed to grasp a five-foot rapier with a great cup-guard and hilt-points of extravagant length, while in the other was placed a shell-dagger of the same design.
It was the very suit in which the heroic founder had stepped from his pinnace upon the burning sand, and claimed that land for his company "by right divine of inheritance from Adam," and somehow that trophy of arms always gave to Trecenito a vivid sense of the old knight's presence in the room, which no dead portrait could have conveyed. Indeed, it was not hard to fancy a grim face beneath the shadow of the peaked morion, as the gloom of evening fell and the firelight flickered. It was on this the king was gazing with his Rousseau on his knees. Surfeited with philosophy, he fell to musing on his ancestor till he saw beneath the morion the stern, burnt features, as he pictured them, with grey pointed beard and bristling moustache. He could not help contrasting the fancy with his own smooth, shaven face, and the old adventurous life with his own colourless existence.
"Turbo!" he cried, as, stung with the unhappy contrast, he started up and half unconsciously tore off a black patch which, after the custom of the time, adorned his cheek—"Turbo! I am a miserable man."
"So your majesty is continually hinting. May I die if I know why!"
With an air of well-feigned interest in his monarch's state of mind, the speaker rose from an elegant buhl writing-table, which would have been covered with official papers had there been any business for the King to transact with his Chancellor; but as usual there was none, and the table bore nothing weightier than a half-finished copy of Latin verses, perhaps quite heavy enough for its slender proportions, for the Chancellor was a poet by conviction rather than birth.
Indeed poetry could hardly have dwelt in a form so revolting. His face was distorted by two livid scars. One stretched across the lower part of his nose up to his right eye, which in healing it had drawn down so that it looked like a bloodhound's. The other ran across his mouth in such a way that it exposed his teeth on one side and gave to his face a snarling expression that was acutely unprepossessing. His shoulders, too, seemed in some way ill-matched, and he joined Kophetua at the founder's hearth with an ungainly limp which completed the picture of deformity he presented.
"No! may I die if I know why," repeated Turbo.
"Ah, you will not understand," said the King. "How can I be happy, how can I live according to nature, leading the life I do, without an annoyance, literally without an annoyance? How can I ever rival the knight," he went on, "with nothing to overcome, with nothing to stand in my way? I tell you I am a miserable man."
"If your majesty will have it so," answered Turbo, "I must of course agree."
"And why should you not in any case?" asked Kophetua a little testily. "Look at me. Here before you is practically the only sovereign in the civilised world who at this moment has not a revolution more or less developed in his dominions, while my disgracefully contented subjects will not—why, they will not even read the Jacobin paper we have been at the pains surreptitiously to start for them."
"No," said the Chancellor gravely, "I believe that only six copies were sold this week. There were two copies for you and me, one for the Queen-mother, and one for General Dolabella, who I am sure only lights his pipe with it. There was one went to the beggars for decorative purposes, it is said; and the sixth—let me see," he continued as he limped to his desk and took out a small memorandum on large official paper. "The sixth—ah! yes, that was a presentation copy to the Museum which I paid for myself."
"It is heart-breaking, absolutely heart-breaking," cried the King. "To what end have I spent all these years in the study of politics? To what end have you lavished your inestimable instruction on me, and sacrificed what should have been the most brilliant career in Europe in order to educate me for a throne? Is there a single writer on statecraft, from Plato to More, from Machiavelli to Voltaire, that I have not mastered from end to end, to say nothing of the knight's manuscript?"
"Indeed, sire," answered the Chancellor, "you have made yourself a most consummate statesman."
"No, Turbo," said the King, "be just. It is you that have made me so. Without you these books would have said not a word to me for all their wisdom. But to what end is it all, I say? Here I stand disgraced before the knight's armour, not because I will not or cannot do anything, but because there is nothing to do. I tell you, Turbo, I shrink with shame when I see his grave face look out at me from under the morion, and yet,"—he went on, pacing the room, with a noble look on his handsome face—"he has no right to scorn me. I know that were there wrongs to right, I have will and power to right them, or at least the courage to die fighting for the same end to which his heroic life was sacrificed."
"Well, be comforted," said Turbo; "to-morrow you will have an annoyance. For to-morrow, I would remind you, comes your mother's last choice for you; at least, I imagine that is the intention. It will be very serious this time. Remember you have entered your thirtieth year, and if at the end of it you are not married——"
"By the constitution," broke in the King, "I shall cease to reign. I know it, and then they will elect you. I cannot help it. I shall dislike and despise this woman, as I do every other. Thank God, I have learnt your lesson well. How I should have been deceived had it not been for the wise misogyny which you, my dear instructor, were at such pains to teach me!"
As he spoke he stretched out his hand as though to lay it affectionately on his old governor's shoulder, when there was a sudden clash of steel overhead. With a start he looked up in time to catch the founder's long rapier as it fell, and in a moment he was standing with its great hilt in his outstretched hand and its point straight at the heart of Turbo, who started back in alarm.
Kophetua turned deadly pale, hardly daring to think what this ghostly warning might mean. As he felt the dusty hilt between his fingers it was as though the dead, war-worn hand of his ancestor were stretched up out of the grave to grasp his own: he stood almost expecting to hear a hollow voice from under the morion, and Turbo watched him with restless eyes.
Even as he held it the King knew the heavy weapon was tiring his arm. It was the last touch to his misery, and he dropped the point with a little nervous laugh.
"One would think," he said, in a voice that sounded very strange in the dead silence which followed the clash of steel—"One would think the old knight discerned in you an enemy instead of my best and only friend."
The Chancellor laughed loud and hoarsely at the King's humour, but did not touch the weapon which his monarch laid down sorrowfully.
"The wire must have rusted away till it broke," said he.
"Exactly," said the King. "Yet it is a most remarkable occurrence." A short but awkward silence followed, till fortunately the chamberlain entered the room to inquire if the King desired to prepare for supper. So the colloquy of the two friends ended, and Turbo was left alone, gazing absently out of the window at the beggars before the palace gate, as one by one they rose from their crouching postures, stretched their cramped limbs, and wandered slowly away to their dens with the air of men conscientiously satisfied with a long day's work.
CHAPTER III. THE MARRIAGE QUESTION.
"The Lords they tooke it grievously,
The Commons cryed pitiously."
It has already been mentioned that there was one recurrent subject of discussion which saved Oneirian politics from entire extinction. This was the great marriage question.
The