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Temporal Power

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Charles Adarondo and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team



TEMPORAL POWER




A STUDY IN SUPREMACY

BY MARIE CORELLI




CONTENTS

I. THE KING'S PLEASAUNCE

II. MAJESTY CONSIDERS AND RESOLVES

III. A NATION OR A CHURCH?

IV. SEALED ORDERS

V. "IF I LOVED YOU!"

VI. SERGIUS THORD

VII. THE IDEALISTS

VIII. THE KING'S DOUBLE

IX. THE PREMIER'S SIGNET

X. THE ISLANDS

XI. "GLORIA--IN EXCELSIS!"

XII. A SEA PRINCESS

XIII. SECRET SERVICE

XIV. THE KING'S VETO

XV. "MORGANATIC" OR--?

XVI. THE PROFESSOR ADVISES

XVII. AN "HONOURABLE" STATESMAN

XVIII. ROYAL LOVERS

XIX. OF THE CORRUPTION OF THE STATE

XX. THE SCORN OF KINGS

XXI. AN INVITATION TO COURT

XXII. A FAIR DEBUTANTE

XXIII. THE KING'S DEFENDER

XXIV. A WOMAN'S REASON

XXV. "I SAY--'ROME'!"

XXVI. "ONE WAY--ONE WOMAN!"

XXVII. THE SONG OF FREEDOM

XXVIII. "FATE GIVES--THE KING!"

XXIX. THE COMRADE OF HIS FOES

XXX. KING AND SOCIALIST

XXXI. A VOTE FOR LOVE

XXXII. BETWEEN TWO PASSIONS

XXXIII. SAILING TO THE INFINITE

XXXIV. ABDICATION




CHAPTER I

THE KING'S PLEASAUNCE


"In the beginning," so we are told, "God made the heavens and the
earth."

The statement is simple and terse; it is evidently intended to be
wholly comprehensive. Its decisive, almost abrupt tone would seem to
forbid either question or argument. The old-world narrator of the
sublime event thus briefly chronicled was a poet of no mean quality,
though moved by the natural conceit of man to give undue importance to
the earth as his own particular habitation. The perfect confidence with
which he explains 'God' as making 'two great lights, the greater light
to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night,' is touching to
the verge of pathos; and the additional remark which he throws in, as
it were casually,--'He made the stars also,' cannot but move us to
admiration. How childlike the simplicity of the soul which could so
venture to deal with the inexplicable and tremendous problem of the
Universe! How self-centred and sure the faith which could so arrange
the work of Infinite and Eternal forces to suit its own limited
intelligence! It is easy and natural to believe that 'God,' or an
everlasting Power of Goodness and Beauty called by that name, 'created
the heavens and the earth,' but one is often tempted to think that an
altogether different and rival element must have been concerned in the
making of Man. For the heavens and the earth are harmonious; man is a
discord. And not only is he a discord in himself, but he takes pleasure
in producing and multiplying discords. Often, with the least possible
amount of education, and on the slightest provocation, he mentally sets
Himself, and his trivial personal opinion on religion, morals, and
government, in direct opposition to the immutable laws of the Universe,
and the attitude he assumes towards the mysterious Cause and Original
Source of Life is nearly always one of three things; contradiction,
negation, or defiance. From the first to the last he torments himself
with inventions to outwit or subdue Nature, and in the end dies,
utterly defeated. His civilizations, his dynasties, his laws, his
manners, his customs, are all doomed to destruction and oblivion as
completely as an ant-hill which exists one night and is trodden down
the next. Forever and forever he works and plans in vain; forever and
forever Nature, the visible and active Spirit of God, rises up and
crushes her puny rebel.

There must be good reason for this ceaseless waste of human life,--this
constant and steady obliteration of man's attempts, since there can be
no Effect without Cause. It is, as if like children at a school, we
were set a certain sum to do, and because we blunder foolishly over it
and add it up to a wrong total, it is again and again wiped off the
blackboard, and again and again rewritten for our more careful
consideration. Possibly the secret of our failure to conquer Nature
lies in ourselves, and our own obstinate tendency to work in only one
groove of what we term 'advancement,'--namely our material self-
interest. Possibly we might be victors if we would, even to the very
vanquishment of Death!

So many of us think,--and so thought one man of sovereign influence in
this world's affairs as, seated on the terrace of a Royal palace
fronting seaward, he pondered his own life's problem for perhaps the
thousandth time.

"What is the use of thinking?" asked a wit at the court of Louis XVI.
"It only intensifies the bad opinion you have of others,--or of
yourself!"

He found this saying true. Thinking is a pernicious habit in which very
great personages are not supposed to indulge; and in his younger days
he had avoided it. He had allowed the time to take him as it found him,
and had gone with it unresistingly wherever it had led. It was the best
way; the wisest way; the way Solomon found most congenial, despite its
end in 'vanity and vexation of spirit.' But with the passing of the
years a veil had been dropped over that path of roses, hiding it
altogether from his sight; and another veil rose inch by inch before
him, disclosing a new and less joyous prospect on which he was not
too-well-pleased to look.

The sea, stretching out in a broad shining expanse opposite to him,
sparkled dancingly in the warm sunshine, and the snowy sails of many
yachts and pleasure-boats dipped now and again into the glittering
waves like white birds skimming over the tiny flashing foam-crests.
Dazzling and well-nigh blinding to his eyes were the burning glow and
exquisite radiance of colour which seemed melted like gold and sapphire
into that bright half-circle of water and sky,--beautiful, and full of
a dream-like evanescent quality, such as marks all the loveliest
scenes and impressions of our life on earth. There was a subtle scent
of violets in the air,--and a gardener, cutting sheafs of narcissi from
the edges of the velvety green banks which rolled away in smooth
undulations upward from the terrace to the wider extent of the palace
pleasaunce beyond, scattered such perfume with his snipping shears as
might have lured another Proserpine from Hell. Cluster after cluster of
white blooms, carefully selected for the adornment of the Royal
apartments, he laid beside him on the grass, not presuming to look in
the direction where that other Workman in the ways of life sat silent
and absorbed in thought. That other, in his own long-practised manner,
feigned not to be aware of his dependant's proximity,--and in this
fashion they twain--human beings made of the same clay and relegated,
to the same dust--gave sport to the Fates by playing at Sham with
Heaven and themselves. Custom, law, and all the paraphernalia of
civilization, had set the division and marked the boundary between
them,--had forbidden the lesser in world's rank to speak to the
greater, unless the greater began conversation,--had equally forbidden
the greater to speak to the lesser lest such condescension should
inflate the lesser's vanity so much as to make him obnoxious to his
fellows. Thus,--of two men, who, if left to nature would have been
merely--men, and sincere enough at that,--man himself had made two
pretenders,--the one as gardener, the other as--King! The white
narcissi lying on the grass, and preparing to die sweetly, like
sacrificed maiden-victims of the flower-world, could turn true faces
to the God who made them,--but the men at that particular moment of
time had no real features ready for God's inspection,--only masks.

"C'est mon metier d'être Roi!" So said one of the many dead and gone
martyrs on the rack of sovereignty. Alas, poor soul, thou would'st have
been happier in any other 'métier' I warrant! For kingship is a
profession which cannot be abandoned for a change of humour, or cast
aside in light indifference and independence because a man is bored by
it and would have something new. It is a routine and drudgery to which
some few are born, for which they are prepared, to which they must
devote their span of life, and in which they must die. "How shall we
pass the day?" asked a weary Roman emperor, "I am even tired of killing
my enemies!"

'Even' that! And the strangest part of it is, that there are people who
would give all their freedom and peace of mind to occupy for a few
years an uneasy throne, and who actually live under the delusion that a
monarch is happy!

The gardener soon finished his task of cutting the narcissi, and though
he might not, without audacity, look at his Sovereign-master, his
Sovereign-master looked at him, furtively, from under half-closed
eyelids, watching him as he bound the blossoms together carefully, with
the view of giving as little trouble as possible to those whose duty it
would be to arrange them for the Royal pleasure. His work done, he
walked quickly, yet with a certain humble stealthiness,--thus
admitting his consciousness of that greater presence than his own,--
down a broad garden walk beyond the terrace towards a private entrance
to the palace, and there disappeared.

The King was left alone,--or apparently so, for to speak truly, he was
never alone. An equerry, a page-in-waiting,--or what was still more
commonplace as well as ominous, a detective,--lurked about him, ever
near, ever ready to spring on any unknown intruder, or to answer his
slightest call.

But to the limited extent of the solitude allowed to kings, this man
was alone,--alone for a brief space to consider, as he had informed his
secretary, certain documents awaiting his particular and private
perusal.

The marble pavilion in which he sat had been built by his father, the
late King, for his own pleasure, when pleasure was more possible than
it is now. Its slender Ionic columns, its sculptured friezes, its
painted ceilings, all expressed a gaiety, grace and beauty gone from
the world, perchance for ever. Open on three sides to the living
picture of the ocean, crimson and white roses clambered about it, and
tall plume-like mimosa shook fragrance from its golden blossoms down
every breath of wind. The costly table on which this particular Majesty
of a nation occasionally wrote his letters, would, if sold, have kept a
little town in food for a year,--the rich furs at his feet would have
bought bread for hundreds of starving families,--and every delicious
rose that nodded its dainty head towards him with the breeze would have
given an hour's joy to a sick child. Socialists say this kind of thing
with wildly eloquent fervour, and blame all kings in passionate
rhodomontade for the tables, the furs and the roses,--but they forget--
it is not the sad and weary kings who care for these or any luxuries,--
they would be far happier without them. It is the People who insist on
having kings that should be blamed,--not the monarchs themselves. A
king is merely the people's Prisoner of State,--they chain him to a
throne,--they make him clothe himself in sundry fantastic forms of
attire and exhibit his person thus decked out, for their pleasure,--
they calculate, often with greed and grudging, how much it will cost to
feed him and keep him in proper state on the national premises, that
they may use him at their will,--but they seldom or never seem to
remember the fact that there is a Man behind the King!

It is not easy to govern nowadays, since there is no real autocracy,
and no strong soul likely to create one. But the original idea of
sovereignty was grand and wise;--the strongest man and bravest, raised
aloft on shields and bucklers with warrior cries of approval from the
people who voluntarily chose him as their leader in battle,--their
utmost Head of affairs. Progress has demolished this ideal, with many
others equally fine and inspiring; and now all kings are so, by right
of descent merely. Whether they be infirm or palsied, weak or wise,
sane or crazed, still are they as of old elected; only no more as the
Strongest, but simply as the Sign-posts of a traditional bygone
authority. This King however, here written of, was not deficient in
either mental or physical attributes. His outward look and bearing
betokened him as far more fit to be lifted in triumph on the shoulders
of his battle-heroes, a real and visible Man, than to play a more or
less cautiously inactive part in the modern dumb-show of Royalty. Well-
built and muscular, with a compact head regally poised on broad
shoulders, and finely formed features which indicated in their firm
modelling strong characteristics of pride, indomitable resolution and
courage, he had an air of rare and reposeful dignity which made him
much more impressive as a personality than many of his fellow-
sovereigns. His expression was neither foolish nor sensual,--his clear
dark grey eyes were sane and steady in their regard and had no tricks
of shiftiness. As an ordinary man of the people his appearance would
have been distinctive,--as a King, it was remarkable.

He had of course been called handsome in his childhood,--what heir to
a Throne ever lived that was not beautiful, to his nurse at least?--and
in his early youth he had been grossly flattered for his cleverness as
well as his good looks. Every small attempt at witticism,--every poor
joke he could invent, adapt or repeat, was laughed at approvingly in a
chorus of admiration by smirking human creatures, male and female, who
bowed and bobbed up and down before the lad like strange dolphins
disporting themselves on dry land. Whereat he grew to despise the
dolphins, and no wonder. When he was about seventeen or eighteen he
began to ask odd questions of one of his preceptors, a learned and
ceremonious personage who, considering the extent of his certificated
wisdom, was yet so singularly servile of habit and disposition that he
might have won a success on the stage as Chief Toady in a burlesque of
Court life. He was a pale, thin old man, with a wizened face set well
back amid wisps of white hair, and a scraggy throat which asserted its
working muscles visibly whenever he spoke, laughed or took food. His
way of shaking hands expressed his moral flabbiness in the general
dampness, looseness and limpness of the act,--not that he often shook
hands with his pupil, for though that pupil was only a boy made of
ordinary flesh and blood like other boys, he was nevertheless heir to a
Throne, and in strict etiquette even friendly liberties were not to be
too frequently taken with such an Exalted little bit of humanity. The
lad himself, however, had a certain mischievous delight in making him
perform this courtesy, and being young and vigorous, would often
squeeze the old gentleman's hesitating fingers in his strong clasp so
energetically as to cause him the severest pain. Student of many
philosophies as he was, the worthy pedagogue would have cried out, or
sworn profane oaths in his agony, had it been any other than the 'Heir-
Apparent' who thus made him wince with torture,--but as matters stood,
he merely smiled--and bore it. The young rascal of a prince smiled
too,--taking note of his obsequious hypocrisy, which served an
inquiring mind with quite as good a field for logical speculation as
any problem in Euclid. And he went on with his questions,--questions,
which if not puzzling, were at least irritating enough to have secured
him a rap on the knuckles from his tutor's cane, had he been a grocer's
lad instead of the eldest son of a Royal house.

"Professor," he said on one occasion, "What is man?"

"Man," replied the professor sedately, "is an intelligent and reasoning
being, evolved by natural processes of creation into his present
condition of supremacy."

"What is Supremacy?"

"The state of being above, or superior to, the rest of the animal
creation."

"And is he so superior?"

"He is generally so admitted."

"Is my father a man?"

"Assuredly! The question is superfluous."

"What makes him a King?"

"Royal birth and the hereditary right to his great position."

"Then if man is in a condition of supremacy over the rest of creation,
a king is more than a man if he is allowed to rule men?"

"Sir, pardon me!--a king is not more than a man, but men choose him as
their ruler because he is worthy."

"In what way is he worthy? Simply because he is born as I am, heir to a
throne?"

"Precisely."

"He might be an idiot or a cripple, a fool or a coward,--he would still
be King?"

"Most indubitably."

"So that if he were a madman, he would continue to hold supremacy over
a nation, though his groom might be sane?"

"Your Royal Highness pursues the question with an unwise flippancy;"--
remonstrated the professor with a pained, forced smile. "If an idiot or
a madman were unfortunately born to a throne, a regency would be
appointed to control state affairs, but the heir would, in spite of
natural incapability, remain the lawful king."

"A strange sovereignty!" said the young prince carelessly. "And a still
stranger patience in the people who would tolerate it! Yet over all
men,--kings, madmen, and idiots alike,--there is another ruling force,
called God?"

"There is a force," admitted the professor dubiously--"But in the
present forward state of things it would not be safe to attempt to
explain the nature of that force, and for the benefit of the illiterate
masses we call it God. A national worship of something superior to
themselves has always been proved politic and necessary for the people.
I have not at any time resolved myself as to why it should be so; but
so it is."

"Then man, despite his 'supremacy' must have something more supreme
than himself to keep him in order, if it be only a fetish wherewith to
tickle his imagination?" suggested the prince with a touch of satire,--
"Even kings must bow, or pretend to bow, to the King of kings?"

"Sir, you have expressed the fact with felicity;" replied the professor
gravely--"His Majesty, your august father, attends public worship with
punctilious regularity, and you are accustomed to accompany him. It is
a rule which you will find necessary to keep in practice, as an example
to your subjects when you are called upon to reign."

The young man raised his eyebrows deprecatingly, with a slight ironical
smile, and dropped the subject. But the learned professor as in duty
bound, reported the conversation to his pupil's father; with the
additional observation that he feared, he very humbly and respectfully
feared, that the developing mind of the prince appeared undesirably
disposed towards discursive philosophies, which were wholly unnecessary
for the position he was destined to occupy. Whereupon the King took his
son to task on the subject with a mingling of kindness and humour.

"Do not turn philosopher!" he said--"For philosophy will not so much
content you with life, as with death! Philosophy will chill your best
impulses and most generous enthusiasms,--it will make you over-cautious
and doubtful of your friends,--it will cause you to be indifferent to
women in the plural, but it will hand you over, a weak and helpless
victim to the _one_ woman,--when she comes,--as she is bound to
come. There is no one so hopelessly insane as a philosopher in love!
Love women, but not _a_ woman!"

"In so doing I should follow the wisest of examples,--yours, Sir!"
replied the prince with a familiarity more tender than audacious, for
his father was a man of fine presence and fascinating manner, and knew
well the extent of his power to charm and subjugate the fairer sex,--
"But I have a fancy that love,--if it exists anywhere outside the
dreams of the poets,--is unknown to kings."

The monarch bent his brows frowningly, and his eyes were full of a deep
and bitter melancholy.

"You mistake!" he said slowly--"Love,--and by that name I mean a wholly
different thing from Passion,--comes to kings as to commoners,--but
whereas the commoner may win it if he can, the king must reject it. But
it comes,--and leaves a blank in the proudest life when it goes!"

He turned away abruptly, and the conversation was not again resumed.
But when he died, those who prepared his body for burial, found a gold
chain round his neck, holding the small medallion portrait of a woman,
and a curl of soft fair hair. Needless to say the portrait was not that
of the late Queen-Consort, who had died some years before her Royal
spouse, nor was the hair hers,--but when they brought the relic to the
new King, he laid it back with his own hands on his father's lifeless
breast, and let it go into the grave with him. For, being no longer the
crowned Servant of the State, he had the right as a mere dead man, to
the possession of his love-secret.

So at least thought his son and successor, who at times was given to
wondering whether if, like his father, he had such a secret he would be
able to keep it as closely and as well. He thought not. It would be
scarcely worth while. It can only be the greatest love that is always
silent,--and in the greatest,--that is, the ideal and self-renouncing
love,--he did not believe; though in his own life's experience he had
been given a proof that such love is possible to women, if not to men.
When he was about twenty, he had loved, or had imagined he loved, a
girl,--a pretty creature, who did not know him as a prince at all, but
simply as a college student. He used to walk with her hand in hand
through the fields by the river, and gather wild flowers for her to
wear in her little white bodice. She had shy soft eyes, and a timid,
yet trusting look, full of tenderness and pathos. Moved by a romantic
sense of honour and chivalry, he promised to marry her, and thereupon
wrote an impulsive letter to his father informing him of his intention.
Of course he was summoned home from college at once,--he was reminded
of his high destiny--of the Throne that would be his if he lived to
occupy it,--of the great and serious responsibilities awaiting him,--
and of how impossible it was that the Heir-Apparent to the Crown should
marry a commoner.

"Why not?" he cried passionately--"If she be good and true she is as
fit to be a queen as any woman royally born! She is a queen already in
her own right!"

But while he was being argued with and controlled by all the
authorities concerned in king's business, his little sweetheart herself
put an end to the matter. Her parents told her all unpreparedly, and
with no doubt unnecessary harshness, the real position of the college
lad with whom she had wandered in the fields so confidingly; and in the
bewilderment of her poor little broken heart and puzzled brain, she
gave herself to the river by whose flowering banks she had sworn her
maiden vows,--though she knew it not,--to her future King; and so,
drowning her life and love together, made a piteous exit from all
difficulty. Before she went forth to die, she wrote a farewell to her
Royal lover, posting the letter herself on her way to the river, and,
by the merest chance he received it without a spy's intervention. It
was but one line, scrawled in a round youthful hand, and blotted with
many tears.

"Sir--my love!--forgive me!"

It would be unwise to say what that little scrap of ill-formed writing
cost the heir to a throne when he heard how she had died,--or how he
raged and swore and wept. It was the first Wrong forced on him as
Right, by the laws of the realm; and he was young and generous and
honest, and not hardened to those laws then. Their iniquity and
godlessness appeared to him in plain ugly colours undisguised. Since
that time he had perforce fallen into the habit and routine of his
predecessors, though he was not altogether so 'constitutional' a
sovereign as his father had been. He had something of the spirit of one
who had occupied his throne five hundred years before him; when
strength and valour and wit and boldness, gave more kings to the world
than came by heritage. He did unconventional things now and then; to
the grief of flunkeys, and the alarm of Court parasites. But his
kingdom was of the South, where hot blood is recognized and excused,
and fiery temper more admired than censured, and where,--so far as
social matters went,--his word, whether kind, cold, or capricious, was
sufficient to lead in any direction that large flock of the silly sheep
of fashion who only exist to eat, and to be eaten. Sometimes he longed
to throw himself back into bygone centuries and stand as his earliest
ancestor stood, sword in hand, on a height overlooking the battle-
field, watching the swaying rush of combat,--the glitter of spears and
axes--the sharp flight of arrows--the tossing banners, the grinding
chariots, the flying dust and carnage of men! There was something to
fight for in those days,--there was no careful binding up of wounds,--
no provision for the sick or the mutilated,--nothing, nothing, but
'Victory or Death!' How much grander, how much finer the old fierce
ways of war than now, when any soldier wounded, may write the details
of his bayonet-scratch or bullet-hole to the cheap press, and the
surgeon prys about with Rontgen-ray paraphernalia and scalpel, to
discover how much or how little escape from dissolution a man's soul
has had in the shock of contest with his foe! Of a truth these are
paltry days!--and paltry days breed paltry men. Afraid of sickness,
afraid of death, afraid of poverty, afraid of offences, afraid to
think, afraid to speak, Man in the present era of his boasted
'progress' resembles nothing so much as a whipped child,--cowering
under the outstretched arm of Heaven and waiting in whimpering terror
for the next fall of the scourge. And it is on this point especially,
that the monarch who takes part in this unhesitating chronicle of
certain thoughts and movements hidden out of sight,--yet deeply felt in
the under-silences of the time,--may claim to be unconventional;--he
was afraid of nothing,--not even of himself as King!

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