Temporal Power | Page 5

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