THE KING'S COUNCILLORS.
"And now he seeks which way to proove,
How he his fancie might remoove."
Monsieur de Tricotrin was right. The King had been fascinated. That was
clear. It was the talk of every breakfast-table in Oneiria. And Mlle de
Tricotrin was right too. It made very little difference to the King,
except to amuse him; but this was not so clear to the breakfast-tables.
Amused Kophetua certainly was. It was highly entertaining to see how
clever the little woman was. He quite laughed to himself to think how
great an impression she had made on him, and he looked forward with a
fresh pleasure to playing with a toy of such exquisite ingenuity,
without giving a thought to the danger of the pastime. The mere fact
that he was charmed he considered quite a sufficient safeguard. It was
only a proof that she was a deeper cheat than the rest, and therefore
more contemptible. And yet, somehow, this morning the wiles of women did
not appear quite so detestable; he found himself wondering if there were
not something to be said for them, when they could produce so
delightful a result. He was sitting in the library pretending to
transact business with Turbo and Dolabella, when his train of thought
brought him for the twentieth time that morning to this same point, and
with a half-unconscious desire for protection against what he knew to be
a dangerous heresy, he addressed himself to his friends.
"What a charming woman Mlle de Tricotrin would be," he said, "to any one
who could not see through her!"
The general started. He happened to have a piece of business that
morning, but he was absent, and had made little progress: and now
Kophetua's voice suddenly awoke him to the mortifying fact that, with a
view of ascertaining the value of a living which was under his
consideration, he was unconsciously looking out "Tricotrin" in the army
list. Turbo did not start at all. He had been watching the King, and
expecting the remark for the last hour.
"Yes, she is certainly very pretty," said the General, with a confusion
which was not bettered by his feeling immediately that he ought to have
said something else.
"That is assuredly the case, sire," said Turbo, looking hard at the
disconcerted General. "It is very fortunate we can all see through women
so easily."
"But she is clever, isn't she, General?" said the King, with a smile of
amusement.
"Well, your majesty," replied the General, regaining his composure,
"she might deceive more than a tiro, but to us it was evident from the
first."
"Ah!" said Turbo, with more than his ordinary sneer, "I knew what the
General would be thinking when she shrank on her father's arm. It was
very clumsy."
"Positively disgusting," cried the General, with great relief.
At this moment a chamberlain announced that the Marquis de Tricotrin was
at the palace, and awaited General Dolabella's leisure.
"I ventured last night," explained Dolabella hurriedly, "to ask him to
see the gardens; we were discussing a little question of tactics which I
thought we might elucidate there at our leisure."
"And was his daughter coming with him?" asked the King, with affected
unconcern.
"That is what is so annoying," the General answered. "You see he asked
if he might bring her, and what could I say? It will be hopeless to
settle the point this morning."
"Not at all, General," said Turbo maliciously; "you could not have a
better master in tactics than Mlle de Tricotrin."
"Yes," laughed the King, "you had better go at once. I excuse your
further attendance."
"What a child our General is!" said the King when he was gone. "Now tell
me what you thought of her, Turbo. It always amuses me."
So Turbo told the King what he wanted the King to think. He was never
more trenchant or merciless; but the more he reviled, the more clearly
there came before the King's eyes the beautiful face and the baby look
it wore when she seemed to forget herself in the dance. Whether it was
this, or whether it was that Turbo was more brutal than usual, it
matters little, but the King was not amused. The Chancellor's coarse
satire seemed particularly distasteful. He began to wish he had not
started the subject. At last as he listened he noticed the founder's
rapier was still lying on the table between them. That increased his
discomfort. He looked up into the shadows under the morion, and then at
his watch. It was time for his morning walk, and he descended by his
private stair into the gardens.
There was a long and trim grass alley where he was accustomed to take
the air, and, plunged as he was in thought, he turned into it
mechanically almost before he knew. The sound of women's voices aroused
him, and he looked up to see a sight which convinced him that General
Dolabella's point in tactics was likely to be thoroughly discussed that
morning after all. For from the end of the alley he saw his mother and
Mlle de Tricotrin approaching. They were talking, but were too far for
him to hear what they said, yet not so far but that he could see that
the beauty looked if possible more beautiful than last night.
She was dressed in the same kind of soft high-girdled gown, in strange
contrast with the Queen-mother's stiff brocades. Her face glowed with
freshness like a flower, and she seemed in the King's eyes more natural
than Nature itself, or at least than it was permitted to be in the
gardens of the Palace. For there Nature was generously assisted, not
merely with the trim clipping and rectilinear planting of our old
English gardens. In Oneiria they had advanced a long way beyond the
ideas which the old knight brought with him: the inorganic kingdoms had
been called in to supply the poverty of the organic, and vases and
statues were there without number. As though to show Nature what a
mistake she had committed, the vases were made to look like shrubs and
the shrubs like vases, and the long-legged statues seemed always in a
gale of wind, while the trees looked as though a hurricane could not
stir their rigidity. It is then little to be wondered at that Mlle de
Tricotrin, in the midst of such surroundings, sustained the impression
she had originally produced in the King's mind.
She greeted him charmingly, so charmingly indeed, that he a little lost
his presence of mind, and in trying to recover his composure he found
himself kissing the Queen-mother affectionately. It was difficult to
say how it happened, unless it was that she looked so happy and motherly
that morning. When it was over he was sufficiently himself again to
notice that Mlle de Tricotrin was gazing at him with a look of
admiration he had not noticed before; and it disturbed his balance once
more that she did not lower her blue eyes when he caught her looking at
him, but continued to watch him from under her long dark lashes while he
made her his compliments.
"It is fortunate we met," said the Queen-mother, when the first few
words were over. "I wanted to go in. It is too hot for me here. We were
trying to find Monsieur de Tricotrin; but you can take my place now,
Kophetua."
Kophetua did not think it at all fortunate. In fact he was getting a
little afraid of Mlle de Tricotrin. She had a disturbing effect upon
him, but he could hardly refuse, especially since the Queen-mother
withdrew as she spoke and left them in the alley alone.
They were some time in finding the Marquis. In fact the Marquis had seen
everything from a terrace behind the trees, and had no intention of
allowing himself to be found too soon. So the poor General, with rueful
countenance, had to listen at painful length to certain invaluable
military opinions which the Marquis had acquired at second-hand. The
King's conversation was certainly more pleasant. He soon regained his
composure as they strolled along, and began to talk.
"I am sure, sire," she said, after they had admired the garden a little,
"you must be the one perfectly happy man in the world. Till yesterday,"
she added, with something like a sigh, "I thought there was not even
one."
"And why do you think I am that one, mademoiselle?" asked the King.
"Because you have everything, sire."
"But you forget I am a King."
"No, sire. I remember it. I know kings should be the unhappiest men in
the world while those they govern are so unhappy. In France a prince
like you would be miserable, but it is different here where every one is
so happy and none are oppressed, or poor, or wicked."
"And do you think that should make me happy, mademoiselle?"
"Yes, sire, I know it must. Had my ancestors handed me down a kingdom
like yours, which they had purged of every evil, I should worship them
every day."
"And do you think that nothing more is needed--that it is enough to
contemplate the happiness of my subjects?"
"Yes, sire, it is the highest happiness."
"Can you not think there may be something else a man may crave for,
something still higher?"
"Is there something else?" she said looking up at him sympathetically.
He paused before he answered. He did not like the way she was drawing
him immediately to tell her his inmost thoughts; yet it was so
pleasant--this strange, sympathetic power of the beautiful woman at his
side, who was so frank and unaffected. It was somehow like talking to a
man, and yet so widely different. He knew his next reply would place
them on closer terms than he had ever been with a woman before. He
hesitated, and then took the plunge.
"I will tell you," he said, speaking with an earnestness which surprised
him, and which he could not prevent. "That something else which is
highest of all is to contemplate happiness, which you have wrought
yourself. What is it to me that my people are contented, rich, and
unoppressed? It is not my work. I could not even make them otherwise if
I tried. It is my ancestors who have done it all. Without a thought for
those who were to come after they laid law to law, and ordinance to
ordinance, till the whole was perfect. They tore up every weed, they
smoothed down every roughness in their unthinking greed of well-doing.
They strove unceasing to perfect their own nobility and gave no heed to
me. See in what fetters they have bound my soul. All my life I have
striven and denied myself that I might grow up a statesman in fact as
well as name; that I might be a physician to my people, to detect and
cure the most secret maladies that seize on nations, and stretch out my
arm in such wide-reaching strokes as men see wondering, and say, 'There
is a king of men.' But you are a woman," he said, suddenly dropping his
inspired tone to one of no little bitterness, "and cannot understand
what it is for a man to feel thus."
"Indeed, indeed, I understand," she cried, "and from my heart I pity
you. I know what you would say. You who rise up and feel your strength
to make a garden of the wilderness and see the work is done. I know all
you mean. It was what the great voice of the wind said to me, when it
had borne our galleon into port so bravely and roared out through the
naked spars as we lay at anchor: 'See what a power is in me, but my work
is done. You give no heed to the might that is going by, and I must pass
on and consume my strength without an end.'"
The King looked at her in wonder. It was a woman that spoke, but they
were the words of more than a man. She understood all that he meant;
nay, much that he had hardly grasped before. He was more disturbed than
ever, and it was with difficulty he steadied his voice to speak.
"Then you can understand, mademoiselle," he said quite softly, "that I
am perfectly miserable rather than perfectly happy?"
"Yes, sire," she said; "but such sorrow as yours is a better thing than
other men's happiness."
"Yet it is none the less hard to bear."
"True; but it is also the easier to change to gladness."
"I do not understand; what do you mean?"
"There is a remedy so simple that I hardly dare to tell your majesty. I
have presumed too far in all this--yet forgive me, sire, if when I heard
such words as yours, I forgot that I spoke with a king."
"Nay, tell me all. I desire to know."
"It is then, sire," she said, looking down almost shyly, and speaking
with some hesitation,--"it is, when the great things are done, to do the
little things that are left undone. It is not given to all to do deeds
that sound to the ends of the earth, but there are little things that a
great man may do greatly so that they shall ring in the furthest heights
of heaven."
"What things are those? I do not understand."
"Perhaps I speak foolishly, yet I feel so strongly, that a man like you
would be sure to find them if you sought."
"But where--where am I to seek?"
"Amongst your people. If you were to go down to them so that they might
not know you, you would find wrongs to right, wrongs that are little in
the eyes of man but great before Heaven. Then you would know in your
heart that the greatest acts are those which are done with the loftiest
purpose and by the greatest soul."
"You would have me a very Haroun-al-Raschid," he said, with a laugh, for
he felt that their talk was getting dangerously elevated, and he was
ashamed of his weakness in letting it go so far.
"And why not?" she answered, smiling, as though her mood had changed
with his. "What monarch had a happier life or left a happier memory
behind him? and it is for the little things that he is remembered. But I
see my father," she added, "I need detain your majesty no longer."
With the prettiest curtsey in the world she left him, and Kophetua
returned to his apartments with his peace of mind considerably
disturbed. The whole day he was the prey of the most conflicting
thoughts, but above all to the humiliating conviction that he had been
saying to this bewitching Frenchwoman things which he had never breathed
in his life to any one but Turbo, his bosom friend. The idea she had
suggested was fascinating enough. It would be very pleasant to try, and
to tell her of his success afterwards; and at all events an excitement
of any kind would be good for him, and serve to get her out of his mind
a little.
Which of these considerations weighed most with him perhaps he hardly
knew himself. He made and unmade his mind fifty times before nightfall;
but still it is certain that as the moon rose Trecenito found himself
stealing out of the private entrance of his gardens with his hair
dishevelled and unpowdered, and his person concealed with a wide slouch
hat, and a voluminous cloak or burnouse which he used on his hunting
expeditions.