HIS MAJESTY.
"From nature's lawes he did decline,
For sure he was not of my mind:
He cared not for women-kinde,
But did them all disdaine."
Kophetua was undoubtedly the handsomest man in his kingdom. The
slightest suspicion of Moorish blood, incurred from a Spanish
ancestress, had only added, as it were, a tropical richness to the
beauty which he had inherited from the founder, and that was no small
inheritance. It was part of the constitution that every king of Oneiria
should be known by the name of Kophetua, but a grateful and imaginative
people had been dissatisfied with the bald arithmetical distinctions
which this law entailed. In the old fashion they had begun to speak of
their sovereigns by surnames, till an unforeseen difficulty arose. After
the death of the founder, his splendid sons succeeded him one after
another with an alarming rapidity, due to the reckless exposure of their
persons to the early Berber enemies of the State. Every brother was
handsomer than the last, and obviously demanded a surname expressive of
personal beauty. It was a characteristic so dazzling that the popular
mind could not fix itself on any other of the family qualities,
brilliant as they were. To a humorous people the monotony soon became
ridiculous, and every one was relieved when, before two generations had
passed away, it was found that every word in the Oneirian vocabulary in
any way synonymous with "handsome" was already exhausted, and by tacit
agreement the country fell back restfully upon the limitless resources
of the ordinal numbers.
So our Kophetua was simply known as "Thirteenth." Yet it made a pretty
name when you got used to it. It is a soft-sounding one as it stands,
and was still prettier in the popular dialect. As the trade of the
country was almost entirely with the Canaries, the common people counted
in Spanish, and so by a diminutive of affection their King was known to
them as "Trecenito."
Yet of all the line of Kophetuas he most deserved a more distinctive
surname. Any one must have so agreed who could have seen him as he sat
to-day in his library with a copy of Rousseau's _Origin of Inequality_
dropped listlessly on his knees. It was an ideal book-room, in the style
of the early French Renaissance. The whole palace indeed was designed in
the same manner. It was the most eclectic style the founder could light
upon, and everything in Oneiria was eclectic.
Ten panels opposite the ten windows were occupied by fine portraits of
the ten successors of the founder. Trecenito's own had to hang on a
screen. At either end of the long chamber was a magnificent fireplace
reaching to the panelled ceiling. Not that a fireplace was ever
necessary in the balmy air of Oneiria, but still, where the capital was
situated, amongst the hills facing the Atlantic, it enjoyed a temperate
climate, and with considerable discomfort fires could be endured on the
coldest days. This discomfort every one was glad to undergo for the sake
of the European atmosphere generated by the blazing logs. It was hot but
refined, and that was everything to a well-bred Oneirian.
In a smaller panel above one of these sacred hearths was a picture of
the first King Kophetua placing with love-lorn gesture the wondering
beggar-maid upon his jewelled throne. It was a beautiful work, obviously
by a dreamy and backward pupil of Perugino. By his childish colour,
naïve composition, and vague expression of sentiment, the painter had
unconsciously given a 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.