PAGE
ONEIRIA, 1
CHAPTER II.
HIS MAJESTY, 8
CHAPTER III.
THE MARRIAGE QUESTION, 17
CHAPTER IV.
THE QUEEN-MOTHER, 26
CHAPTER V.
MADEMOISELLE DE TRICOTRIN, 38
CHAPTER VI.
THE KING'S COUNCILLORS, 52
CHAPTER VII.
THE LIBERTIES OF ST. LAZARUS, 64
CHAPTER VIII.
ESCAPE, BUT NOT LIBERTY, 81
CHAPTER IX.
IN THE QUEEN'S GARDEN, 94
CHAPTER X.
THE FALL OF TURBO, 108
CHAPTER XI.
OPENING THE CAMPAIGN, 120
CHAPTER XII.
A DECISIVE ACTION, 133
CHAPTER XIII.
MISTRESS AND MAID, 148
CHAPTER XIV.
"MORIBUNDUS AMOR," 159
CHAPTER XV.
TWO VICTIMS, 171
CHAPTER XVI.
A NIGHT MARCH, 185
CHAPTER XVII.
"CHECK!", 196
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE QUEEN'S MOVE, 216
CHAPTER XIX.
CONSPIRATORS, 230
CHAPTER XX.
PLAYERS, 245
CHAPTER XXI.
HUNTER AND HUNTED, 262
CHAPTER XXII.
HERMITS, 275
CHAPTER XXIII.
AN OFFICIAL REPORT, 291
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE SACRIFICE OF LOVE, 301
CHAPTER XXV.
THE CROWN OF KISSES, 319
CHAPTER I.
ONEIRIA.
"I read that once in Affrica
A princely wight did raine,
Who had to name Kophetua,
As poets they did faine."
The outburst of political speculation which followed the Renaissance is
well known to us by its remarkable literature. True it is that the
greater part of it is long since dead and sleeps in peace, save where
every now and then its ghosts are scared by a literary historian. But
this obscurity only adds to its interest, and increases at once the
charm, the safety, and the credit we may enjoy in discussing it. For the
ordinary Englishman perhaps the only work of the class which is still
really alive is the delightful political romance of Sir Thomas More. Yet
to those who love the dustier shelves of libraries long ranks of its
comrades will be not unfamiliar, standing guard as it were over the
memory of an intellectual movement as vigorous and creative as any the
world has seen.
It is to the more daring and fantastic of these works that this chapter
in the history of philosophy owes its charm and freshness. So
entrancing indeed are they that those double traitors to humanity, who
not only write books, but write books about books, have led us to look
upon these ponderous folios as the only mark the movement has left on
history, and we are apt to forget that it also had its practical side.
Yet that side not only had an existence, but it was even more romantic
and fanciful than the other.
For many of the pregnant seeds from the tree of political knowledge,
which the strong breath of the Renaissance was wafting over Europe, fell
on good ground, where pedantry did not spring up and choke them. There
were many cultivated earnest gentlemen of that time in whose chivalrous
hearts they alighted, and whose imagination was so stirred with the new
ideas, that they actually attempted to carry them into practice.
Coming as the movement did contemporaneously with the dayspring of
colonial enterprise, it naturally suggested itself to these high-souled
scholars to leave the corruption and oppression of the old countries
which it was hopeless to reform, and sailing away with a little
community of kindred souls in whom the new spirit breathed, to found in
some distant land a colony, where a polity established in pure reason
should grow to be a model to the world.
Many of these attempts were complete failures at once, nearly all were
more or less short-lived, and by the end of the last century there was
not one so prosperous as the African colony of Oneiria.
Lying as it did in that remote and little-known corner of the world
which is watered by the Drâa and its tributaries, and is intersected by
the spurs of the Anti-Atlas, it had been able to enjoy after its first
struggle for existence the repose of a well-earned obscurity. There was
no one who envied it anything, and consequently it had no enemy, nor
even an importunate friend to seek its alliance and lead it into
scrapes. The half savage Shelluhs, who sparsely occupied the country,
were soon content to remain as tributaries under their own chiefs, in
the more inaccessible parts of the mountains, and to leave the teeming
valleys and table-lands to the newcomers.
Through the Canary Islands the colony kept up a small but regular trade
with Western Europe. The exports were of a very mixed nature, but
chiefly consisted of dates. As the country was practically
self-supporting, the imports were comparatively simple. They were
confined to books, works of art, and clothes of the latest mode.
For it was the pride of Oneiria, as with most other colonies of the
time, that, notwithstanding its remote position, it floated on the
surface of European opinion; and so freely did it indulge in this
delicious conviction, that it is to be feared it grew but too often to
an actual intemperance, and at the time of which I speak there is no
doubt that Oneiria sometimes caricatured the fantasies of a fantastic
age.
Internally Oneiria was almost as unruffled as in its foreign relations.
The elaborate constitution of the original founder worked so smoothly
and effectively that crime and even discontent seemed almost unknown.
The most ingenious and conscientious politicians had long ago abandoned
the hopeless struggle to extract a difference of opinion out of
questions of the interior. This dearth of disagreement led to a serious
famine in the political world, that had it not been for one recurrent
topic, of which I shall have to speak more fully hereafter, politics
must have completely perished of starvation.
It is not clear who the founder of the fortunate colony was. From an
exaggerated niceness of honour, so characteristic of the age we call
Elizabethan, he seems to have taken most ingenious precautions that his
very name should be forgotten, lest it might appear that his experiment
was a device to feed his personal vanity rather than the disinterested
sacrifice it really was.
That he was an Englishman, who had considerably modified his national
characteristics by extensive and sagacious travel, is almost certain.
His followers were believed to have been recruited from amongst the
hardy seafaring population of the coasts of Bohemia, though more recent
conjecture points to the fact that London was the real parent of the
colony, and it is suggested that by "Bohemia" the "Alsatia" of
Whitefriars is really intended. However, as the whole of the evidence on
the subject is contained in the following pages, it will be an advantage
to allow the reader to judge for himself upon the whole case, and so
avoid a tedious and possibly unfruitful discussion.
The fact in the early history of the colony most interesting for us is
fortunately beyond dispute. Oneiria was, without a shadow of doubt,
founded on the ruins of the kingdom of that Kophetua whose romantic
love-story, probably a good deal perverted, is so familiar to us from
the beautiful ballads of the "King and the Beggar-Maid." It was this
which must have suggested to the founder his first steps towards
oblivion when he ascended his new throne under the style of Kophetua II.
Were this fact not established from other sources, beyond all question
there is ample evidence in the present story to support it. The ancient
kingdom must have been dying, and not dead, at the time. We shall meet
with constant traces of an older, ruder, and more Oriental civilisation
underlying the scientific superstructure of the English knight.
The results were extremely curious, but perhaps the most interesting
phenomenon to which this peculiar fact gave rise, was the extraordinary
organisation and privileges of the beggar class, though it is possible
that some of their wilder laws and customs were a direct importation
from "Whitefriars."
It is a pity that no more is known on these points, but further inquiry
is almost hopeless. The colony was entirely destroyed soon after the
happy reign of Kophetua XIII. and his beloved Queen came peacefully to
an end. There was but a day between their deaths, and so prostrated were
the people by the sudden loss of both their idolised sovereigns, that
they seem to have been able to offer no adequate resistance to a _Jehad_
which, for some unknown cause, was preached against them amongst the
neighbouring Mussulman tribes. It is probable that they had made some
attempts to intervene for the protection of the last of the Berber
Christians. A few of these highly interesting survivals are believed to
have been still in existence at the end of the last century, in the
remoter parts of the Atlas, and some may possibly have continued even
later.
All, however, which we know for certain is that in one of those strange
restless upheavals, so characteristic of the north of Africa, the
Mussulman Berbers rose and flowed like a flood over what was once
Oneiria. As suddenly as the colony had appeared, it disappeared from
history; the country is now impenetrable to Europeans, and has not been
visited since the destruction of the colony. Rohlfs, indeed, tells us
that somewhere in the basin of the Drâa he saw amongst the distant hills
what looked like the nave and tower of a church, and he further noticed
that in this region the people had a much higher style of architecture,
and otherwise seemed distinctly more civilised, than the tribes he was
already familiar with. But no other traces of the colony have been met
with, and its destruction must have been as complete as it was sudden.
Beyond what has already been related, all that is known or likely to be
known of Oneiria is contained in the following pages, which deal with a
romantic episode in the life of King Kophetua XIII. We must congratulate
ourselves that even so much was preserved by the taste of a gentleman
who visited the colony at the beginning of this century, and brought
back with him the notes from which the present romance is taken. For
romance it certainly is, and there seems no reason why we should deprive
it of that title simply because it is also a record of historical
occurrences.