Temporal Power | Page 6

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 other with a silly smile, or taken in a linked arm-in-arm attitude against a palatial canvas background, appeared in every paper published throughout the world, and every scribbler on the Press took special pains to inform the easily deluded public that the Royal union thus consummated was 'a romantic love- match.' For the People still have heart and conscience,--the People, taken in the rough lump of humanity, still believe in love, in faith, in the dear sweetness of home affections. The politicians who make capital out of popular emotion, know this well enough,--and are careful to