Part 20 (2/2)
”If you know them,” he said, ”you will render me no little service in bringing them to my knowledge.”
”It is possible,” I ventured to observe, ”that their distinguis.h.i.+ng excellences are connected with other distinctions which might render it a disservice to them to indicate their peculiar character, I will not say to yourself, but to those around you.”
”I hardly understand you,” he rejoined. ”Take, however, my a.s.surance that nothing you say here shall, without your own consent, be used elsewhere. It is no light gratification, no trifling advantage to me, to find one man who has neither fear nor interest that can induce him to lie to me; to whom I can speak, not as sovereign to subject, but as man to man, and of whose private conversation my courtiers and officials are not yet suspicious or jealous. You shall never repent any confidence you give to me.”
My interest in and respect for the strange character so manifestly suited for, so intensely weary of, the grandest position that man could fill, increased with each successive interview. I never envied that greatness which seems to most men so enviable. The servitude of a const.i.tutional King, so often a puppet in the hands of the worst and meanest of men--those who prost.i.tute their powers as rulers of a State to their interests as chiefs of a faction--must seem pitiable to any rational manhood. But even the autocracy of the Sultan or the Czar seems ill to compensate the utter isolation of the throne; the lonely grandeur of one who can hardly have a friend, since he can never have an equal, among those around him. I do not wonder that a tinge of melancholo-mania is so often perceptible in the chiefs of that great House whose Oriental absolutism is only ”tempered by a.s.sa.s.sination.”
But an Earthly sovereign may now and then meet his fellow-sovereigns, whether as friends or foes, on terms of frank hatred or loyal openness. His domestic relations, though never secure and simple as those of other men, may relieve him at times from the oppressive sense of his sublime solitude; and to his wife, at any rate, he may for a few minutes or hours be the husband and not the king. But the absolute Ruler of this lesser world had neither equal friends nor open foes, neither wife nor child. How natural then his weariness of his own life; how inevitable his impatient scorn of those to whom that life was devoted! A despot not even accountable to G.o.d--a Prince who, till he conversed with me, never knew that the universe contained his equal or his like--it spoke much, both for the natural strength and soundness of his intellect and for the excellence of his education, that he was so sane a man, so earnest, active, and just a ruler. His reign was signalised by a better police, a more even administration of justice, a greater efficiency, judgment, and energy in the execution of great works of public utility, than his realm had known for a thousand years; and his duty was done as diligently and conscientiously as if he had known that conscience was the voice of a supreme Sovereign, and duty the law of an unerring and unescapable Lawgiver. Alone among a race of utterly egotistical cowards, he had the courage of a soldier, and the principles, or at least the instincts, worthy of a Child of the Star. With him alone could I have felt a moment's security from savage attempts to extort by terror or by torture the secret I refused to sell; and I believe that his generous abstinence from such an attempt was as exasperating as it was incomprehensible to his advisers, and chiefly contributed to involve him in the vengeance which baffled greed and humbled personal pride had leagued to wreak upon myself, as on those with whose welfare and safety my own were inextricably intertwined. It was a fortunate, if not a providential, combination of circ.u.mstances that compelled the enemies of the Star, primarily on my account, to interweave with their scheme of murderous persecution and private revenge an equally ruthless and atrocious treason against the throne and person of their Monarch.
My audience had detained me longer than I had expected, and the evening mist had fairly closed in before I returned. Entering, not as usual through the grounds and the peristyle, but by the vestibule and my own chamber, and hidden by my half-open window, I overheard an exceedingly characteristic discussion on the incident of the morning.
”Serve her right!” Leenoo was saying. ”That she should for once get the worst of it, and be disbelieved to sharpen the sting!”
”How do you know?” asked Enva. ”I don't feel so sure we have heard the last of it.”
”Eveena did not seem to have liked her half-hour,” answered Leenoo spitefully. ”Besides, if he did not disbelieve her story, he would have let her prove it.”
”Is that your reliance?” broke in Eunane. ”Then you are swinging on a rotten branch. I would not believe my ears if, for all that all of us could invent against her, I heard him so much as ask Eveena, 'Are you speaking the truth?'”
”It is very uneven measure,” muttered Enva.
”Uneven!” cried Eunane. ”Now, I think _I_ have the best right to be jealous of her place; and it does sting me that, when he takes me for his companion out of doors, or makes most of me at home, it is so plain that he is taking trouble, as if he grudged a soft word or a kiss to another as something stolen from her. But he deals evenly, after all. If he were less tender of her we should have to draw our zones tighter. But he won't give us the chance to say, 'Teach the _amba_ with stick and the _esve_ with sugar.'”
”I do say it. She is never snubbed or silenced; and if she has had worse than what he calls 'advice' to-day, I believe it is the first time. She has never 'had cause to wear the veil before the household'
[to hide blushes or tears], or found that his 'lips can give sharper sting than their kiss can heal,' like the rest of us.”
”What for? If he wished to find her in fault he would have to watch her dreams. Do you expect him to be harder to her than to us? He don't 'look for stains with a microscope.' None of us can say that he 'drinks tears for taste.' None of us ever 'smarted because the sun scorched _him_.' Would you have him 'tie her hands for being white'?”
[punish her for perfection].
”She is never at fault because he never believes us against her,”
returned Leenoo.
”How often would he have been right? I saw nothing of to-day's quarrel, but I know beforehand where the truth lay. I tell you this: he hates the sandal more than the sin, but, strange as it seems, he hates a falsehood worse still; and a falsehood against Eveena--If you want to feel 'how the spear-gra.s.s cuts when the sheath bursts,' let him find you out in an experiment like this! You congratulate yourself, Leenoo, that you have got her into trouble. _Elnerve_ that you are!--if you have, you had better have poisoned his cup before his eyes. For every tear he sees her shed he will reckon with us at twelve years' usury.”
”_You_ have made her shed some,” retorted Enva.
”Yes,” said Eunane, ”and if he knew it, I should like half a year's penance in the black sash” [as the black sheep or scapegoat of her Nursery] ”better than my next half-hour alone with him. When I was silly enough to tie the veil over her mouth” [take the lead in sending her to Coventry] ”the day after we came here, I expected to pay for it, and thought the fruit worth the scratches. But when he came in that evening, nodded and spoke kindly to us, but with his eyes seeking for her; when he saw her at last sitting yonder with her head down, I saw how his face darkened at the very idea that she was vexed, and I thought the flash was in the cloud. When she sprang up as he called her, and forced a smile before he looked into her face, I wished I had been as ugly as Minn oo, that I might have belonged to the miseries, worst-tempered man living, rather than have so provoked the giant.”
”But what did he do?”
”Well that he don't hear you!” returned Eunane. ”But I can answer;--nothing. I s.h.i.+vered like a _leveloo_ in the wind when he came into my room, but I heard nothing about Eveena. I told Eive so next day--you remember Eive would have no part with us? 'And you were called the cleverest girl in your Nursery!' she said; 'you have just tied your own hands and given your sandal into Eveena's. Whenever she tells him, you will drink the cup she chooses to mix for you, and very salt you will find it.'”
”Crach!” (tush or stuff), said Eirale contemptuously. ”We have 'filled her robe with pins' for half a year since then, and she has never been able to make him count them.”
”Able!” returned Eunane sharply, ”do you know no better? Well, I chose to fancy she was holding this over me to keep me in her power. One day she spoke--choosing her words so carefully--to warn me how I was sure to anger Clasfempta” (the master of the household) ”by pus.h.i.+ng my pranks so often to the verge of safety and no farther. I answered her with a taunt, and, of course, that evening I was more perverse than ever, till even he could stand it no longer. When he quoted--
”'More lightly treat whom haste or heat to headlong trespa.s.s urge; The heaviest sandals fit the feet that ever tread the verge'--
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