Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (64 page)

‘The devil you would!’ exclaimed the Prince.

The licentiate Roederer laughed most heartily.  ‘I thought I should astonish you,’ he said.  ‘These are not the ideas of the masses.’

‘They are not, I can assure you,’ Otto said.

‘Or rather,’ distinguished the licentiate, ‘not to-day.  The time will come, however, when these ideas shall prevail.’

‘You will permit me, sir, to doubt it,’ said Otto.

‘Modesty is always admirable,’ chuckled the theorist.  ‘But yet I assure you, a man like you, with such a man as, say, Doctor Gotthold at your elbow, would be, for all practical issues, my ideal ruler.’

At this rate the hours sped pleasantly for Otto.  But the licentiate unfortunately slept that night at Beckstein, where he was, being dainty in the saddle and given to half stages.  And to find a convoy to Mittwalden, and thus mitigate the company of his own thoughts, the Prince had to make favour with a certain party of wood-merchants from various states of the empire, who had been drinking together somewhat noisily at the far end of the apartment.

The night had already fallen when they took the saddle.  The merchants were very loud and mirthful; each had a face like a nor’west moon; and they played pranks with each others’ horses, and mingled songs and choruses, and alternately remembered and forgot the companion of their ride.  Otto thus combined society and solitude, hearkening now to their chattering and empty talk, now to the voices of the encircling forest.  The starlit dark, the faint wood airs, the clank of the horse-shoes making broken music, accorded together and attuned his mind.  And he was still in a most equal temper when the party reached the top of that long hill that overlooks Mittwalden.

Down in the bottom of a bowl of forest, the lights of the little formal town glittered in a pattern, street crossing street; away by itself on the right, the palace was glowing like a factory.

Although he knew not Otto, one of the wood-merchants was a native of the state.  ‘There,’ said he, pointing to the palace with his whip, ‘there is Jezebel’s inn.’

‘What, do you call it that?’ cried another, laughing.

‘Ay, that’s what they call it,’ returned the Grünewalder; and he broke into a song, which the rest, as people well acquainted with the words and air, instantly took up in chorus.  Her Serene Highness Amalia Seraphina, Princess of Grünewald, was the heroine, Gondremark the hero of this ballad.  Shame hissed in Otto’s ears.  He reined up short and sat stunned in the saddle; and the singers continued to descend the hill without him.

The song went to a rough, swashing, popular air; and long after the words became inaudible the swing of the music, rising and falling, echoed insult in the Prince’s brain.  He fled the sounds.  Hard by him on his right a road struck towards the palace, and he followed it through the thick shadows and branching alleys of the park.  It was a busy place on a fine summer’s afternoon, when the court and burghers met and saluted; but at that hour of the night in the early spring it was deserted to the roosting birds.  Hares rustled among the covert; here and there a statue stood glimmering, with its eternal gesture; here and there the echo of an imitation temple clattered ghostly to the trampling of the mare.  Ten minutes brought him to the upper end of his own home garden, where the small stables opened, over a bridge, upon the park.  The yard clock was striking the hour of ten; so was the big bell in the palace bell-tower; and, farther off, the belfries of the town.  About the stable all else was silent but the stamping of stalled horses and the rattle of halters.  Otto dismounted; and as he did so a memory came back to him: a whisper of dishonest grooms and stolen corn, once heard, long forgotten, and now recurring in the nick of opportunity.  He crossed the bridge, and, going up to a window, knocked six or seven heavy blows in a particular cadence, and, as he did so, smiled.  Presently a wicket was opened in the gate, and a man’s head appeared in the dim starlight.

‘Nothing to-night,’ said a voice.

‘Bring a lantern,’ said the Prince.

‘Dear heart a’ mercy!’ cried the groom.  ‘Who’s that?’

‘It is I, the Prince,’ replied Otto.  ‘Bring a lantern, take in the mare, and let me through into the garden.’

The man remained silent for a while, his head still projecting through the wicket.

‘His Highness!’ he said at last.  ‘And why did your Highness knock so strange?’

‘It is a superstition in Mittwalden,’ answered Otto, ‘that it cheapens corn.’

With a sound like a sob the groom fled.  He was very white when he returned, even by the light of the lantern; and his hand trembled as he undid the fastenings and took the mare.

‘Your Highness,’ he began at last, ‘for God’s sake . . . ‘  And there he paused, oppressed with guilt.

‘For God’s sake, what?’ asked Otto cheerfully.  ‘For God’s sake let us have cheaper corn, say I.  Good-night!’  And he strode off into the garden, leaving the groom petrified once more.

The garden descended by a succession of stone terraces to the level of the fish-pond.  On the far side the ground rose again, and was crowned by the confused roofs and gables of the palace.  The modern pillared front, the ball-room, the great library, the princely apartments, the busy and illuminated quarters of that great house, all faced the town.  The garden side was much older; and here it was almost dark; only a few windows quietly lighted at various elevations.  The great square tower rose, thinning by stages like a telescope; and on the top of all the flag hung motionless.

The garden, as it now lay in the dusk and glimmer of the starshine, breathed of April violets.  Under night’s cavern arch the shrubs obscurely bustled.  Through the plotted terraces and down the marble stairs the Prince rapidly descended, fleeing before uncomfortable thoughts.  But, alas! from these there is no city of refuge.  And now, when he was about midway of the descent, distant strains of music began to fall upon his ear from the ball-room, where the court was dancing.  They reached him faint and broken, but they touched the keys of memory; and through and above them Otto heard the ranting melody of the wood-merchants’ song.  Mere blackness seized upon his mind.  Here he was, coming home; the wife was dancing, the husband had been playing a trick upon a lackey; and meanwhile, all about them, they were a by-word to their subjects.  Such a prince, such a husband, such a man, as this Otto had become!  And he sped the faster onward.

Some way below he came unexpectedly upon a sentry; yet a little farther, and he was challenged by a second; and as he crossed the bridge over the fish-pond, an officer making the rounds stopped him once more.  The parade of watch was more than usual; but curiosity was dead in Otto’s mind, and he only chafed at the interruption.  The porter of the back postern admitted him, and started to behold him so disordered.  Thence, hasting by private stairs and passages, he came at length unseen to his own chamber, tore off his clothes, and threw himself upon his bed in the dark.  The music of the ball-room still continued to a very lively measure; and still, behind that, he heard in spirit the chorus of the merchants clanking down the hill.

BOOK II — OF LOVE AND POLITICS

CHAPTER I — WHAT HAPPENED IN THE LIBRARY

At a quarter before six on the following morning Doctor Gotthold was already at his desk in the library; and with a small cup of black coffee at his elbow, and an eye occasionally wandering to the busts and the long array of many-coloured books, was quietly reviewing the labours of the day before.  He was a man of about forty, flaxen-haired, with refined features a little worn, and bright eyes somewhat faded.  Early to bed and early to rise, his life was devoted to two things: erudition and Rhine wine.  An ancient friendship existed latent between him and Otto; they rarely met, but when they did it was to take up at once the thread of their suspended intimacy.  Gotthold, the virgin priest of knowledge, had envied his cousin, for half a day, when he was married; he had never envied him his throne.

Reading was not a popular diversion at the court of Grünewald; and that great, pleasant, sunshiny gallery of books and statues was, in practice, Gotthold’s private cabinet.  On this particular Wednesday morning, however, he had not been long about his manuscript when a door opened and the Prince stepped into the apartment.  The doctor watched him as he drew near, receiving, from each of the embayed windows in succession, a flush of morning sun; and Otto looked so gay, and walked so airily, he was so well dressed and brushed and frizzled, so point-device, and of such a sovereign elegance, that the heart of his cousin the recluse was rather moved against him.

‘Good-morning, Gotthold,’ said Otto, dropping in a chair.

‘Good-morning, Otto,’ returned the librarian.  ‘You are an early bird.  Is this an accident, or do you begin reforming?’

‘It is about time, I fancy,’ answered the Prince.

‘I cannot imagine,’ said the Doctor.  ‘I am too sceptical to be an ethical adviser; and as for good resolutions, I believed in them when I was young.  They are the colours of hope’s rainbow.’

‘If you come to think of it,’ said Otto, ‘I am not a popular sovereign.’  And with a look he changed his statement to a question.

‘Popular?  Well, there I would distinguish,’ answered Gotthold, leaning back and joining the tips of his fingers.  ‘There are various kinds of popularity; the bookish, which is perfectly impersonal, as unreal as the nightmare; the politician’s, a mixed variety; and yours, which is the most personal of all.  Women take to you; footmen adore you; it is as natural to like you as to pat a dog; and were you a saw-miller you would be the most popular citizen in Grünewald.  As a prince — well, you are in the wrong trade.  It is perhaps philosophical to recognise it as you do.’

‘Perhaps philosophical?’ repeated Otto.

‘Yes, perhaps.  I would not be dogmatic,’ answered Gotthold.

‘Perhaps philosophical, and certainly not virtuous,’ Otto resumed.

‘Not of a Roman virtue,’ chuckled the recluse.

Otto drew his chair nearer to the table, leaned upon it with his elbow, and looked his cousin squarely in the face.  ‘In short,’ he asked, ‘not manly?’

‘Well,’ Gotthold hesitated, ‘not manly, if you will.’  And then, with a laugh, ‘I did not know that you gave yourself out to be manly,’ he added.  ‘It was one of the points that I inclined to like about you; inclined, I believe, to admire.  The names of virtues exercise a charm on most of us; we must lay claim to all of them, however incompatible; we must all be both daring and prudent; we must all vaunt our pride and go to the stake for our humility.  Not so you.  Without compromise you were yourself: a pretty sight.  I have always said it: none so void of all pretence as Otto.’

‘Pretence and effort both!’ cried Otto.  ‘A dead dog in a canal is more alive.  And the question, Gotthold, the question that I have to face is this: Can I not, with effort and self-denial, can I not become a tolerable sovereign?’

‘Never,’ replied Gotthold.  ‘Dismiss the notion.  And besides, dear child, you would not try.’

‘Nay, Gotthold, I am not to be put by,’ said Otto.  ‘If I am constitutionally unfit to be a sovereign, what am I doing with this money, with this palace, with these guards?  And I — a thief — am to execute the law on others?’

‘I admit the difficulty,’ said Gotthold.

‘Well, can I not try?’ continued Otto.  ‘Am I not bound to try?  And with the advice and help of such a man as you — ’

‘Me!’ cried the librarian.  ‘Now, God forbid!’

Otto, though he was in no very smiling humour, could not forbear to smile.  ‘Yet I was told last night,’ he laughed, ‘that with a man like me to impersonate, and a man like you to touch the springs, a very possible government could be composed.’

‘Now I wonder in what diseased imagination,’ Gotthold said, ‘that preposterous monster saw the light of day?’

‘It was one of your own trade — a writer: one Roederer,’ said Otto.

‘Roederer! an ignorant puppy!’ cried the librarian.

‘You are ungrateful,’ said Otto.  ‘He is one of your professed admirers.’

‘Is he?’ cried Gotthold, obviously impressed.  ‘Come, that is a good account of the young man.  I must read his stuff again.  It is the rather to his credit, as our views are opposite.  The east and west are not more opposite.  Can I have converted him?  But no; the incident belongs to Fairyland.’

‘You are not then,’ asked the Prince, ‘an authoritarian?’

‘I?  God bless me, no!’ said Gotthold.  ‘I am a red, dear child.’

‘That brings me then to my next point, and by a natural transition.  If I am so clearly unfitted for my post,’ the Prince asked; ‘if my friends admit it, if my subjects clamour for my downfall, if revolution is preparing at this hour, must I not go forth to meet the inevitable? should I not save these horrors and be done with these absurdities? in a word, should I not abdicate?  O, believe me, I feel the ridicule, the vast abuse of language,’ he added, wincing, ‘but even a principulus like me cannot resign; he must make a great gesture, and come buskined forth, and abdicate.’

‘Ay,’ said Gotthold, ‘or else stay where he is.  What gnat has bitten you to-day?  Do you not know that you are touching, with lay hands, the very holiest inwards of philosophy, where madness dwells?  Ay, Otto, madness; for in the serene temples of the wise, the inmost shrine, which we carefully keep locked, is full of spiders’ webs.  All men, all, are fundamentally useless; nature tolerates, she does not need, she does not use them: sterile flowers!  All — down to the fellow swinking in a byre, whom fools point out for the exception — all are useless; all weave ropes of sand; or like a child that has breathed on a window, write and obliterate, write and obliterate, idle words!  Talk of it no more.  That way, I tell you, madness lies.’  The speaker rose from his chair and then sat down again.  He laughed a little laugh, and then, changing his tone, resumed: ‘Yes, dear child, we are not here to do battle with giants; we are here to be happy like the flowers, if we can be.  It is because you could, that I have always secretly admired you.  Cling to that trade; believe me, it is the right one.  Be happy, be idle, be airy.  To the devil with all casuistry! and leave the state to Gondremark, as heretofore.  He does it well enough, they say; and his vanity enjoys the situation.’