His Majesty King George III stood gazing from a corridor window of
the royal palace. For all practical purposes he was alone, and the
equerries and others attendant on the sovereign presence flitted
almost as remote in actuality as they figured to his mental vision.
They were shadows, no more--little blots of bile, too minute to
intercept his view of things, though collectively, as denoting a
bodily condition, a source of irritation.
The corridor was very dim, and full of gusty flaws. It was night, and
the rain beat upon the windows. Without, it was all a chaos of
cavernous glooms and myriad-drawn threads of water, weaving cloud to
earth in one inextricable bondage. The darkness lay upon the King’s
heart like a tombstone. He cried to One in his agony to lift it, and
bid the dead arise and come forth. He seemed to feel the cerements
about his limbs, the headcloth binding and stupefying his brain. He
talked incessantly to himself--prayers, expostulations, even
blasphemies--though he did not know it. A fearful thought was haunting
him persistently--the thought that his reason was once more succumbing
to the illness which had seized and overwhelmed it in the fifth year
of his reign. He gasped and shivered in the stress of that
apprehension. Providence had then thought fit to restore him, after a
few terrible weeks of possession; would not a renewed attack signify
his proved unworthiness of Its favours, and his abandonment by It to
the powers of darkness, this time for all eternity?
He uttered a sudden cry, and, sinking into a chair, covered his face
with his hands. The storm screamed above him, dashing its torrents on
the glass. Only that fragile glaze stood between him and the besieging
horrors. In a minute, in a moment, they must be through, and he would
be claimed by them and damned for evermore.
He fought kingly to rally his nerves. A crown! A monstrous destiny!
Yes, but its divine virtues engendered like qualities in those meet
and resolute to assume them. He had striven, he would strive, to
honour, according to his lights, the trust reposed in him. The will
was his, if the lights were Heaven’s. God might decree him a fool; He
should never call him a coward.
He rose to his feet once more and looked pallidly from the window. The
sky was full of countless faces, and all gibing and distorted. There
was not one among them but was known to him, or had been, though he
could not recall when or how. Statesmen, warriors, servants, kith and
kin--torn this way and that, they mingled, a multitudinous galaxy of
spectres, with the darkness, and hemmed him in, a wall of mowing
visages.
To stand thus and gaze upon the throng was to drink the very utterness
of despair. Had none a gentle look for him? Were all kings doomed so
to realise their loneliness in the vast of time? No mercy for him; no
hope, no love. How was it possible to love one so singly exalted, so
isolated from all contact with the dear common human emotions? Was it
not appalling to be a king!
Sudden through the dark, through the twisted faces, a light twinkled.
He started, he stared, he drew a deep ecstatic breath. He thought he
heard a voice saying “Arise, and come forth!” and he shook the bandage
from his head and stood erect.
The light! O God, not one, but infinite! Like daisies opening upon a
hill, they climbed that wall of darkness and spread from town to sky.
And in their blossoming the faces were gone.
And then in a moment he saw and understood. The wind had fallen, the
sky was full of stars: they laughed and twinkled above the twinkling
city. He was looking from a window of St. James’s Palace across the
Mall----
What had happened? What had been affecting him a moment ago? He
breathed a prayer of fervid thanksgiving to Heaven for his quick
emergence from that terrific shadow--called down by what? He believed
he penetrated the cause. It was only yesterday that the _pourparlers_
for his marriage had been begun; and was he so inhuman, or so
superhuman, that, unlike all other men, he might experience no shock,
no temporary unbalance of reason, in the immediate prospect of that
tremendous change? Nay, was not the prospect more distracting for him
than for most? seeing that no sentiment warmer than duty--duty to his
people, duty to his succession--coloured its cold inevitability. He
had heard of men, though bond-slaves to love, killing themselves in
their inability to face that more lifelong bondage. What wonder that,
in his case, a contract so based on policy should have terrified his
reason in the thought?
Well--he was well now, he was well. The loveless lot of kings? That
had been the chimera of a fancy momentarily diseased. No love for
kings? He laughed softly to himself, and, crossing his arms on the
sill, leaned down his face into them.
And then instantly a dream came to him. The stars of the sky--first
one, then another, then dripping streams of them--descended from their
high places and, enshrining themselves in crystal, became the lamps of
the city. Faster and faster they poured, until he was treading a very
milky-way of radiance. He could hardly see his path for the brightness
as he walked--for, yes, he was walking! Half dazzled, with the glowing
smile of all things reflected on his face, he pushed his way through
the golden mist. It was jewelled and spangled everywhere with
glittering thoughts; one might hardly know it for the London of one’s
daily experience. He remembered when he had first encountered this
transformation--he, a serious, well-intentioned young prince,
resolute, in his sober, unimaginative way, to justify his election
before the face of Heaven--and how of a sudden some spirit exquisite
beyond conception had usurped in him the place of duty.
No, not usurped, but sanctified. Self-fulfilled through love, his debt
to Heaven and his country would find him tenfold strengthened in its
discharge.
Yet he walked like a thief, conscious through all the transcendent
glow of a half-guilty rapture, glorying, though fearfully, in the
thought of the treasure whose shrine he had desecrated to possess. He
had never dreamed at one time of such a thing. It had come to him in a
single moment how he, bred and educated under the severest maternal
discipline, “cabin’d, cribbed, confined” within the narrowest limits
of orthodoxy, was still not excluded from the destinies which Love
creates. Why should he be? A King, and denied the prerogative of his
meanest subject?
His way did not lie far through that garden of lamps; but others were
incessantly crossing and obstructing it. These shadows worried him: he
seemed to know so many of them, yet the instant he thought to identify
one it would fade and disappear. Along Pall Mall, across St. James’s
Square, into Charles Street, and thence towards the glare and bustle
of the Market--throughout the whole short route it was always the
same. Thicker and thicker they came, hurrying across his path, until
at length he could hardly force his way through the press. Their
insistence, their air of urgency, amazed and troubled him; yet,
possessed of a stubborn will, he would not be gainsaid. He knew the
goal of his wild desires, and inch by inch he fought his way to attain
it.
And then in a moment he was standing before the door, and he saw that
it was closed and dark. The whole house was lightless, the
window-panes were broken, there was no sign of life in all the empty
place.
With a gasp he stepped back into the kennel. What did it mean? Had he
all this time been dreaming a dream, never realising its unreality, of
a little Quaker bird whose song had once filled his soul with a
passion for possession? Had there ever been for him a “Nanny,” a
large-eyed, lovely child, who had captivated him with her sweet looks
and words, and been lost somewhere in the gulfs of the dead past? For
whom, then, if not for him? He could remember her pretty ways; the
very tones of her young voice when she first called him “Friend,” and
choked over the whispered daring. And what then--what thereafter?
Surely no dream?
Of a sudden he became aware that the throng was all about him
again--faces, a wall of white, mowing faces such as he had seen in the
clouds. There were hundreds there, each one somehow known to him, and
all congregated without relation to the sequence of time.
_Time?_--Merciful God! It had ceased to exist for him; and now in a
moment he remembered. What could have driven him to seek Nanny on the
eve of his own wedding? He had forgotten that. He was to be married,
he was to give the people a Queen and a succession, and Nanny had long
been made to disappear from the path to that tremendous end. Months
ago had it been, or years and years? It was all one to him in the
terror of his utter loneliness. These faces! If they could arise and
crowd upon him so confusedly, so irrelatively, why not Nanny’s amongst
them? He wanted her, and they were crushing forward to withhold, to
intercept him. She was there within all the time, and they had taken
this cruel means to blind him to the truth. They were moving, they
were sweeping upon him like a rushing wind; with a cry he turned, and
beat with frantic hands upon the closed door----
A quick step came down the corridor, and a formal, stiff-lipped
gentleman paused beside the King.
“What are you doing, sir?” he said. “You must please to control
yourself.”
His Majesty turned, clutching his hand above his wild eyes. He was not
standing and sobbing, a young emotional prince, before Nanny’s house
in the street off the old Market; he had not come from St. James’s
Palace at all. He was standing in the dark corridor at Windsor Castle,
beating with feeble fingers on the storm-thrashed casement--an old,
old mad and weary man, age-long forgetting and forgotten by all the
world.
“You must not thump the window like that, sir,” said Willis, the
cold-eyed doctor in attendance, “or you will cut your hands. What is
it you need?”
The tears dropped from the old King’s eyes. He shook his head,
muttering and mumbling.
“I was thinking,” he said, “I was thinking. I need very little--only a
new suit of clothes. But they must be black--black, in memory of
George the Third.”