THROUGH THE CENTURIES
As they discovered that the sea journey to Copenhagen would be somewhat
tedious and uninteresting, and that the steamers were not exactly
palatial, Nitocris and her father decided at the last minute to cross to
Ostend, spend a day there and go on to Cologne, put in a couple of days
more among its venerable and odorous purlieus, and two more at Hamburg,
so that, while the present-day inhabitants were asleep, they might, as
Nitocris somewhat flippantly put it, take a trip back through the
centuries, and watch the great city grow from the little wooden village
of the Ubii and the Roman colony of Agrippina into the Hanse Town of the
thirteenth century: watch the laying of the first stone of the mighty
Dom, the up-rising of the glorious fabric, and the crowning of the last
tower in 1880.
During the journey from Hamburg to Copenhagen, Nitocris, reclining
comfortably in a corner of their compartment in the long, easily-moving
car, entertained herself with a review of these extraordinary
experiences from the point of view of her temporal life, and found them
not only extraordinary, but also very curious. She had already learnt
that the connecting link between the two existences, when once the
border had been passed, was Will: but Will of a far more intense and
exalted character than that which was necessary as an incentive to
action on the lower plane. There was naturally something that seemed
extra-human in the mysterious force which was capable of bidding the
present-day world vanish like a shadow into either the future or the
past, its solid-seeming substance melt away like "the airy fabric of a
vision," and summon in an instant, too brief to be measured, the past
from the grave where it lay buried beneath the dust of uncounted ages,
or the future from the womb of unborn things.
But to her, at least at first, the strangest part of the new revelation
was this: When her will had carried her across the confines of the
tri-dimensional world, and she saw the centuries marshalled and
motionless before her, she felt not the slightest sense of wonder or
awe. She was simply a being apart, moving along their ranks and passing
them in review, herself unseen and unknown save by that other being who,
in this state, was no longer her father or even her friend, but merely a
companion endowed with power and intelligence equal to her own. Her
human hopes and fears and loves and passions had, as it were, been left
behind. The men and things she saw were absolutely real to her, as they
had been to the men of other days, or would be in days to come; but she
herself was a pure Intelligence which saw and acted and thought with
perfect clearness, but with absolutely no feeling save that of
intellectual interest.
She saw armies meet in the shock of battle without a thrill of fear or
horror; towns and cities roared up to the unheeding heavens in flame and
smoke, and left her standing unmoved amidst their ruins; she heard the
screams of agony that rang through the torture chambers without a
quiver, and watched the long, pale lines of the martyrs to what in the
earth-life was called Religion pass to the stake without a quiver of
pity or a thrill of disgust. She stood face to face with the great ones
of the earth who have graven their names deep upon the tablets of Time
without reverence or admiration; and she witnessed the most heroic deeds
and the most atrocious crimes with neither respect for the one nor
hatred for the other.
Human history was in her eyes merely a logical sequence of necessary
events, neither good nor bad in themselves, but only as they were viewed
from this standpoint or that, by the oppressor or the oppressed, the
slayer or the slain, the robber or the robbed, the governor or the
governed. She learned that human emotion is merely a matter of time and
space. One century does not feel the loves and hates of another, and the
sorrows of Here have no real sympathy with the sufferings of There.
Beyond the Border all these were merely matters of intense intellectual
interest.
But when she returned to the temporal life the memory of them was
marvellous and terrible. Her heart throbbed with pity and burned with
righteous anger. Horror seemed to take hold of her soul and shake it
with earthquake shudders when she thought that what she had seen but a
few time-moments ago had really come to pass; and she longed for the
power to show all this to the men and women of her own passing day, and
bid them have done with the poor, shadowy images of themselves, which,
had they really been gods, would have made of human life something
better and happier and nobler than the ghastly tragedy which, as she had
seen with her own eyes, it had been. But she knew that such a power was
not hers. She, like her father, had, through the toil and strife and
stress of many lives of mingled good and evil, knowledge and ignorance,
won her way to the Perfect Knowledge; and so she knew that all these
poor kings and slaves, conquerors and conquered, torturers and tortured,
were all doing the same thing, were all groping their way through the
shadows and the night towards the dawn and the light, through the hell
of ignorance to the heaven of knowledge.
And now, too, since the Wisdom of the Ages was hers, she saw that over
all the vast, weltering swarm of struggling immortals, hung the
inevitable decree of silent, impersonal destiny. "As ye live, so shall
ye die; as ye end, so shall ye begin again--in knowledge or ignorance,
in good or evil, life after life, death after death, world without
end."
It was clear to her now why "some are born to honour and some to
dishonour": some to happiness and some to misery, each in his or her
degree; why the liver of a good life was happy, no matter what his place
in the earth-life might be: and why the evil liver, no matter how high
he might stand in his own or others' sight, carried the canker of past
misdeeds in his heart. Standing, as she now did, in the midway of the
present, looking with single gaze on past and future, she saw at once
the honest striver after good in his yesterday-life rise to his reward
in the life of to-day, and the dishonest rich and powerful sitting in
the high places of to-day cast down into the gutterways of to-morrow.
Life had ceased to be a riddle to her now.
What with their halts at Ostend, Cologne, and Hamburg, the
thirty-three-hour journey lengthened itself out very pleasantly into a
week; and so, when the famous city on the Sound was reached, they were
as fresh and unfatigued as they were on the morning that they left "The
Wilderness." Of course, they put up at the Hôtel d'Angleterre, and here
they enjoyed themselves quietly for four days, for of all European
capitals, Copenhagen is one of the pleasantest in which to idle a few
fine summer days away.
On the evening of the fourth day they were just sitting down to their
table by one of the windows overlooking the Oestergade when Nitocris
happened to look up towards the door through which the diners were
trickling in an irregular stream of well-dressed men and women. For a
moment her eyes became fixed. Then she bent her head over the table, and
said:
"Dad, there is Prince Oscarovitch. I wonder what he is doing here? He is
alone: please go and ask him to join us. I will tell you why
afterwards."
They exchanged glances, and the Professor got up and went towards the
door, while his daughter got through a considerable amount of hard
thinking in a very short time. She was, of course, perfectly conversant
with his share in the Zastrow affair, so far as her father had yet gone
with it; but she determined that when Copenhagen had gone to sleep that
night they would cross the Border and pay a visit to the Castle of
Trelitz at the time of the tragedy, and follow it out as far as it had
gone.
It has already been shown that on her first meeting with the Prince she
conceived an aversion from him which was then inexplicable save by the
ordinary theory of natural antipathy: but now she knew that she had been
Nitocris, Queen of Egypt, when he was Menkau-Ra, the Lord of War, who
would have forced her to wed him by the might and terror of the sword,
and the will of a blind and blood-intoxicated populace. She had hated
him then even to death, and now she hated him still in life; wherefore
she desired to make his closer acquaintance on the earth-plane on which
they had met once more after many lives.
As he had been in those far-off days, so he was now, a splendid specimen
of aristocratic humanity. Many eyes had followed her as she had walked
to her table, but there were more people in the room now, and as the
Prince walked towards her beside the famous Professor who had puzzled
all the mathematicians of Europe, the whole crowd of guests was looking
at nothing but these three.
"This is indeed good fortune, Miss Marmion, and as good as it is
unexpected--which, perhaps makes it all the better! Who would have
thought of finding you in Copenhagen?" he said, as he bowed low over her
hand.
"If there is any reason at all for it, Prince, it is that my father and
I always like to take our holidays at irregular times and in unexpected
places: by which, I mean places where we do not expect to meet all our
acquaintances," she replied, as she sat down. "I think we manage to bore
each other quite enough in London, and we like each other all the better
when we meet again."
"Is not that rather an ungracious speech, Niti, seeing that one of the
said acquaintances has only just chanced to join us?" said the Professor
mildly.
"You mean as regards the Prince?" she laughed. "Certainly not. His
Highness is hardly an acquaintance--yet. You know we have only had the
pleasure of meeting him once: and then, of course, I said _all_ our
acquaintances. There might be exceptions."
These words, spoken with a quite indescribable charm, were, as he
thought, quite the sweetest that Oscarovitch had heard for many a day.
It had been perfectly easy for a man with his official influence to
trace by telegraph every movement that the Marmions had made after he
had guessed that they would travel by either Calais or Ostend. He had
wired for his yacht, the _Grashna_, to meet him at Dover, run across to
Ostend, found that they had left there for Cologne with through tickets
for Copenhagen, again guessed rightly that they would spend a few days
there and in Hamburg, and then steam away for the Sound.
The farther north he travelled, the farther he left Phadrig and his
phantasies behind, and the nearer he came to the belief that, if he had
only a fair chance and the field to himself, as he intended to have, he
would not find very much difficulty in convincing Nitocris that there
was no comparison at all between the humble naval officer she had left
behind to do his work on his dirty little destroyer, and the millionaire
Prince who could give her one of the noblest names in Europe and
everything that the heart of woman could desire. And now these
sweetly-spoken words and the glance which accompanied them, her
undisguised pleasure at the chance meeting, and her father's very
evident approval of his presence, quickly but finally convinced him
that he had come to a perfectly just conclusion.
Of course, there was the memory of another woman, only a little less
fair than Nitocris, who had shut herself up yonder in the gloomy Castle
of Trelitz, acting the farce of her official sorrow for love of him, and
pining for the time when the finding of her betrayed husband's corpse
should leave her free, after a decent interval of mock-mourning, to join
her lot with his: but what did that matter? Was it not as easy to get
rid of a woman as a man? Was not the fatal beauty of the Horus Stone at
his command now that he was its possessor for good or evil? A
well-arranged suicide might easily be taken by the world as the
excusable, if deplorable, result of her mysterious bereavement.
The conversation during dinner naturally turned on ways and means of
travelling, and, when the Professor had sketched out their plans,
Oscarovitch said with an admirably simulated deference:
"My dear sir, I most sincerely hope that you and Miss Marmion will not
think that I am presuming on an acquaintance which, if only a new one
now, may perhaps one day be older, if I venture to suggest another way
of making your tour. I am an old voyager in these waters, and I can
assure you that the steamers, though vastly improved, have not quite
reached the standard of the Atlantic liner."
"Oh, but you know, Prince, we didn't expect it," interrupted Nitocris.
"Neither my father nor I have the slightest objection to roughing it a
little. In fact, that is half the fun of wandering."
"And slow travelling between stated points, not always of the greatest
or any interest, together with the enforced company of a promiscuous
crowd of tourists and commercial travellers, who, by the way, are mostly
German, and therefore of nature and necessity disagreeable, would about
make up the other half," said Oscarovitch, leaning back in his chair
with a low laugh. "No, no, my dear Miss Marmion, I am afraid you would
not find that the reality quite squared with the anticipation. Now, may
I risk the suspicion of presumption and offer an alternative
proposition?"
"Why not?" said Nitocris with a smile, and a glance which dazzled him.
"I'm sure it is very kind of you to take so much interest in our poor
little attempt to get away for a while from the madding crowd who are
doing the round of the same stale, weary pleasures that they try so hard
to enjoy year after year, and then come back _so_ tired, after all."
"Then," he replied, looking at them alternately, "as I have your
permission, I would suggest that, instead of rushing from fixed point to
fixed point in crowded steamers and the shackles of Company or
Government regulations, you should take possession of a fairly
comfortable steam yacht of a little over a thousand tons which will be
entirely at your disposal, and will run you from anywhere to anywhere
you choose at any speed you like, from five to thirty-five knots an
hour, with properly trained servants to attend to you, and, as the
advertisements say, 'every possible comfort and convenience.'"
"Which, of course, means that you have got your yacht here, and are so
very kind as to ask us to become your guests for a time," said the
Professor, with a suspicion of stiffness. "It is more than generous of
you, Prince, but really----"
"But really, my dear sir," Oscarovitch interrupted, with a gesture of
deprecation, "I can assure you that, so far as I am concerned, there is
no kindness, to say nothing of generosity. It is pure selfishness. This
is my position. I have managed to escape for a time from the toils of
official work and worry, and the almost equally irksome bonds of that
form of penal servitude which is called Society. Like you, I have fled
overseas, but, unlike you, I have no company but my own, and I have had
a great deal too much of that already, though I have only been three
days and nights at sea. I have no plans, I have got nothing to do and
nowhere to go; and so, if you and Miss Marmion would take pity on my
loneliness all the generosity would be on your side. Of course, I cannot
presume to ask you to change your plans all at once, but if you will
sleep on my proposition and come and lunch with me to-morrow on board
the _Grashna_ and take a run up the Sound, say, to Elsinore, you may be
able to come to a decision."
It was a lovely night, and so they took their coffee and liqueurs, and
the two men their smokes on the balcony overlooking the Oestergade,
which might be called the Rue de la Paix of Copenhagen, and watched the
well-dressed crowds sauntering to and fro past the brilliantly lighted
shops; and Nitocris, who seemed to her father to be in singularly high
spirits, sent the conversation rippling over all manner of subjects with
the exception of politics and the Fourth Dimension. Oscarovitch was
becoming more and more fascinated as the light-winged minutes sped by,
and he took but little pains to conceal the fact. Nitocris, of course,
saw this, and simulated a delightful unconsciousness. The Professor was,
for the time being, completely mystified. He knew that his daughter
hated the Prince with a thorough cordiality, and yet he had never seen
her make herself so entirely charming to any man, not even excepting
Merrill himself, as she was to this man, her enemy of the Ages. He could
have solved the problem instantly by crossing the Border, but then the
sudden vanishing of a famous scientist from the midst of the brilliant
company on the balcony would have set all the newspapers in Europe
chattering, with consequences which would have been the reverse of
pleasant both to his daughter and himself.
However, he had not long to wait, for Nitocris soon rose, saying that
she must go to Jenny, her maid, to see about packing arrangements for
to-morrow; and the Prince, after another cigarette and liqueur, took his
leave and went on board the yacht to give orders for her to be put into
her best trim, and then to have a luxurious half-hour with the Horus
Stone, and indulge in fond imaginings as to how it would look hanging
from a chain of diamonds on the white breast of Miss Nitocris.
When the Professor went to his own sitting-room he found his daughter
waiting to say good-night.
"Niti," he said, as he closed the door, "I don't want to seem
inquisitive, but, frankly, I was astounded at the gracious way in which
you treated that scoundrel Oscarovitch."
"Dad," she replied, with apparent irrelevance, "do you believe in the
forgiveness of sins?"
"Of course not! How could any one who holds the Doctrine do that? We
know that every moral debit must be worked off and turned into a credit
by the sinner, however many lives of suffering it takes to do it. Why do
you ask?"
"So that you might answer as you have done!" she said, with a little
laugh. "Now this Oscarovitch has sinned grievously, not only in this
life but in many others, and I am going to see that he works off at
least some of his debit as you put it somewhat commercially. He loved me
in the old days in Memphis, and he loves me still in the same brutal,
animal way. I know that if he cannot get me by fair means he will try to
take me by force--and I am going to let him do it."
"Niti!"
"Yes, he shall take me; he shall think he had got me safe away from you
and Mark--and when he has got me he shall taste what the hot-and-strong
sort of Christian preachers call the torments of the damned. No, I shall
not kill him. He shall live till he prays to all his gods, if he has
any, that he may die. He shall hunger without eating, thirst without
drinking, lie down without sleeping, have wealth that he cannot spend,
and palaces so hideously haunted that he dare not live in them, until,
when men wish to illustrate the uttermost extreme of human misery, they
shall point to Prince Oscarovitch. I, the Queen, have said it!"
Then, with a swift change of voice and manner, she laid her hands on her
father's shoulders, kissed him, and murmured:
"Good-night, Dad--at least as far as this world is concerned."