Temporal Power | Page 6

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!
CHAPTER II
MAJESTY CONSIDERS AND RESOLVES
The little episode of his first love, combined with his ungovernable fury
and despair at its tragic conclusion, had of course the natural result
common in such a case, to the fate of all who are destined to occupy

thrones. A marriage was 'arranged' for him; and pressing reasons of
state were urged for the quick enforcement and carrying out of the
'arrangement.' The daughter of a neighbouring potentate was elected to
the honour of his alliance,--a beautiful girl with a pale, cold clear- cut
face and brilliant eyes, whose smile penetrated the soul with an icy
chill, and whose very movement, noiseless and graceful as it was,
reminded one irresistibly of slowly drifting snow. She was attended to
the altar, as he was, by all the ministers and plenipotentiaries of state
that could possibly be gathered together from the four quarters of the
globe as witnesses to the immolation of two young human lives on the
grim sacrificial stone of a Dynasty; and both prince and princess
accepted their fate with mutually silent and civil resignation. Their
portraits, set facing each