King John of Jingalo Part 65

"If it were decided," said he, "that an actual invasion of England were advisable, I have three separate plans now forming in my head, all equally feasible and promising, and all capable of being put into operation at one and the same time. Each one, in fact, would serve to divert attention from the others."

It may be noted that at this point Professor Teller suddenly ceased to be amused; his look of half-quizzical detachment becoming changed to one of gravity, almost of distress; his Majesty's "pace" had apparently become too much for him.

"We know, for instance," pursued the King, "that if we succeeded in effecting a landing the German waiters would rise as one man and join us as volunteers. Germany would, of course, officially disown them, while for the purposes of the war we should give them letters of Jingalese naturalization on their enlistment; these, which they would carry in their knapsacks, would prevent them from being shot in the event of their being taken prisoners. Our own army of twenty thousand picked Jingalese sharp-shooters would go to England disguised as tourists. Each in his bag would carry a complete military outfit; our new uniforms are so like those of the English territorials that they would arouse no suspicion at the Customs House, and even when worn only experts would know the difference. At a given signal----"

There the Prime Minister, having extracted a look of despairing encouragement from the Council, got upon his feet.

"I have to ask your Majesty," he said very resolutely, "that we may now be allowed to proceed to the business for which we have been called together."

"At a given signal----" went on the King.

"I must protest, your Majesty."

It was quite useless.

"At a given signal--I will give you your signal, Mr. Prime Minister, when you may throw your bomb; yes, for I have seen you preparing it!--at a given signal when the King and his Parliament were a.s.sembled together in one place, some of our forces would mingle with the crowd; others emerging from places of concealment would form into ranks and advance from various quarters upon Westminster. Then, before any one was aware, we would cable our declaration of war, rush the House, seize the heads of the Government, carry them off to the topmost story of the clock tower, garrison it from bas.e.m.e.nt to roof, and there, with the King and his whole Cabinet in our hands, stand siege till the rest of the nation sued for peace."

Once more the Prime Minister endeavored to interpose; he was borne down.

"They could not blow us up," went on the King, "without blowing our prisoners up also; they could not starve us out, for the King and his Cabinet would perforce have to share our privations. We should have in our possession not only the whole personnel of the Government, but that supreme symbol and safeguard of the popular will which crowns their const.i.tutional edifice. And, gentlemen, you may think me as mad as you like--you may arrest me, you may take me to the police-station, you may rob me of all the evidence of conspiracy I have against you, and you may call me Jack--jack-of-all-trades, master of none--Jack, plain Jack----"

The Prime Minister and Council sprang to their feet. Consternation was upon the faces of all.

"But nothing! nothing!" he went on, "no power on earth--except it were a whole army of steeplejacks----"

At that word the flow of his eloquence ceased; his mouth remained open but no sound came from it. Suddenly his staring eyes puckered and closed, wincing as from a blow; and his face flushed to a fiery red, then paled.

He gave a short cry, threw out an arm feebly; wavered, toppled, crumpled like a thing without bone, and fell back into his chair.

"My G.o.d!" muttered the Prime Minister. "Oh, great Heaven!"

Some one, more nimble of wit than the rest, dashed out of the room to seek aid. All the others, impressed with a true sense of incompetence, stood looking at their fallen King. Not one of them knew how to handle him, whether it were best to lay him down or leave him alone. First aid--even to their sovereign lord--had formed no part in the education of these his counselors.

The Prime Minister did the one thing which he knew to be correct--and which could not possibly do harm; he felt the King's heart. But n.o.body for a moment supposed him to be dead; unconscious though he lay, his heavy breathings could be seen and heard.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE VOICE OF THANKSGIVING

I

For three whole weeks thereafter--if the papers were to be believed--the entire nation hung upon the bulletins which were issued hourly from the royal palace. The King's illness gave the finis.h.i.+ng touch to his popularity; devotion to affairs of State had brought on brain-fever, and the more desperate the symptoms of the illness could be made to appear, the more sublime became the moral character of its august victim, and the more deeply-rooted the affection of his people.

Professional vanity had also to be flattered; and during those fierce fluctuations of hope and despair, Jingalo's topmost place in the world of medical science became vindicated to the meanest intelligence. If by a scientific miracle the King's life was to be saved, Jingalese doctoring, and no other doctoring in the world would do it.

n.o.bly the press performed its task of giving to every factor in the situation its due prominence; even the Church got its share; and when favorable bulletins became the order of the day, their origin was generously ascribed, even by the ministerial press, almost as much to the prayers of the people publicly offered as to the skill of the six best medical authorities. But when all was said and done it was to the King's marvelous const.i.tution, his patient courage, and his quiet submission to the hands of his nurses (foremost of whom was her Majesty the Queen), that the praise was chiefly due; for it was necessary, in order to complete the situation, that the loyalty so n.o.bly tendered should be n.o.bly earned.

And n.o.bly tendered it certainly was. Never could the nation have had so good an opinion of itself as during those dark weeks when, taught by its press the meanings of the various symptoms, it sat by the King's bed feeling his pulse, holding his breath, and scarcely daring to raise any voice above a whisper. Various sections of the public were informed in their daily journals how they and other sections were behaving themselves; how business men went to office almost apologetically, and only because they could not help themselves; how nursemaids hushed the voices of their charges as they wheeled them past the precincts of the palace for their morning's airing in the royal park; and how Jingalo only consented to its accustomed portion of beer in order that it might drink to the King's health and his quick recovery.

Every week in the streets at the back of the palace fresh straw was laid down, not so much for the benefit of the sufferer (whose room was too far away for any sound of traffic to disturb him), but as a stimulus to popular imagination. The men who laid it down performed their task as though the eye of the whole nation were upon them; and even upon the Stock Exchange one learned that the rise and fall of prices were but the harmonious accompaniment of a stupendous national anxiety.

All these things Jingalo was told by its newspapers, and some of them were true; and in the reading and the doing of them how Jingalo enjoyed itself! It had never had such a time of feeling good, unselfish, and thoughtful on a large and h.o.m.ogeneous scale, without having to do anything particularly unpleasant in return. The theaters suffered, but not nearly so much as the charities; for though Jingalo was still able decorously to amuse itself--and did so at her Majesty's special request, for the sake of trade--it could not have its heart successfully wrung by human compa.s.sion in more than one direction at a time--at least, not to the same extent. And so, charitable appeals had to wait till a livelier sense of grat.i.tude prompted by the King's recovery should revive them.

In the conduct of human affairs a.s.sociation plays a very curious part.

When a man is shouting for joy he can scatter largesse with a free hand, but he cannot loosen his purse-strings while he is holding his breath; and even when it is only being held for him by a sort of hypnotic suggestion, his nature is still undergoing a certain impedimental strain.

And as a visible embodiment to all this strain of calculation and suspense, small crowds could be seen standing constantly at the gates of the palace, waiting for bulletins and watching with a curious fascination the flag that so obstinately continued to float mast high.

They watched it as a crowd watches for a similar sign outside the walls of a jail: not that they wanted it to fall--but still, if it had to, they dearly wished that they might be there to see. Thus, even in their griefs, did the sporting instincts of the Jingalese people rise to the surface and bring them a consolation which nothing else could afford.

My readers will give me credit, I trust, for not having sought to impose on them that fear of impending doom, that apprehension of what the next hour might bring forth, on the strength of which the Jingalese press so sedulously ran its extra editions from day to day. I have never for a moment pretended that the King was going to die, seeing, on the contrary, that he was destined to make a complete recovery. But he was not to be quite the same man again--not at least that man whom we have seen in these pages b.u.mping his way conscientiously through a period of const.i.tutional crisis. For when the six Jingalese medicos came to put their heads together over him, they found in the back of his head a small dislodgment of bone, rather less than the size of a florin, and protruding almost an eighth of an inch from the surface of the skull.

Great was their speculation as to how such a thing could have come about without their knowing it--for here, of course, was the root of the whole mischief. This fracture, brought about perhaps by some flying fragment of bomb, unnoticed in the excitement of the moment and afterwards ignored, had evidently been the cause of the brain-fever; and when a cause of this sort is discovered nothing is easier for medical science than to put it right again.

And so, seeing that the bone was out of place, they put it back just where it ought to be, that is to say, where it had been. And as soon as that was done, and the right pressure once more restored to the King's brain, then his temperature went down, his delirium abated, and his mind, as it gradually came back to him, recovered the dull, safe, and retiring qualities which had belonged to it a year ago; and with its old const.i.tutional balance restored to it, it became once more contented with its limitations and surroundings, and made a very quiet, happy, and peaceful convalescence. And though on his recovery the King still remembered the events of the past months they appeared to him rather in the light of a bad dream than as a slice of real life.

The Prime Minister came to see him on the very first day when he was allowed to sit up and receive visitors, and they met without any sign of constraint or enmity.

"Well, Mr. Prime Minister, how are things going?" inquired the King.

"Very well, indeed, sir," replied the minister, "now that your Majesty has taken the necessary step to relieve us of all anxiety. And, though I have not come on this occasion to intrude politics, it may interest you, sir, to hear that on the question of the Spiritual Chamber, the Archbishop and I have come to an arrangement, and the necessary legislation is to be carried through by the consent of both parties."

"Very gratifying, I am sure," said the King. "How did it come about?"

The Prime Minister hesitated. "Well, sir," he said, "there were several contributing causes: I need not go into them all. The one thing, however, which made some modification of our plans clearly necessary was the death of the Archimandrite of Cappadocia. After that our proposed consecration of Free Churchmen to the new bishoprics ceased to be possible. No doubt your Majesty will feel relieved."

"Yes, I am," murmured the King mildly.

And so was the Prime Minister; for that event, happening so fortuitously at the right moment, had saved his face; his political retreat was covered, partly at any rate, by the death--in a queer odor of sanct.i.ty all his own--of that exiled patriarch of the Eastern Church.

His exit, though opportune, had not been dramatic; attention being at the moment otherwise directed. His two wives nursed him devotedly to the end, and wrapped him for burial in the magnificent cape which in his brief day of political importance the Prime Minister had given him. Very quietly and unostentatiously he was laid to rest under the rites of an alien Church--for his own would have none of him; nor was there any one left to say of him now, in the land of his exile and temporary adoption, "Ah, Lord," or "Ah, his glory!" Only in his duplicated domestic circle was he in anywise missed; polities had s.h.i.+fted the ground from under him, and he had become negligible.

II

The King's recovery was the event of the new year, not only giving it an auspicious send-off, but lending thereafter a peculiar flavor to the whole social calendar. For months, addresses of congratulation kept coming in from all the societies and public bodies in the kingdom, and at every philanthropic function in which any member of royalty took part during the next twelve-month it gave pith to all the speeches and focussed the applause. Its influences extended to every department of public life; it affected politics, trade, public holiday, art, science; it invaded literature, increased the circulation of the newspapers, and lent inspiration even to poetry.

And those being the facts, how useless for satirists and cynics to pretend any longer that monarchy as an inst.i.tution was not firmly and inextricably imbedded in the very life and habits of the Jingalese people?

Even at the universities the theme chosen for the prize poem that year was the King's recovery from sickness; and though the prizes were few an unusually large number of the rejected poems, owing to the popularity of their subject, were published in the local newspapers. Perhaps only a few of them were good, but one at least achieved success, and was recited at all charity bazaars, concerts, and theatrical entertainments given in the ensuing year. One couplet alone shall be here quoted, portraying as it does in graphic phrase the national suspense during those weeks of prolonged crisis when telegram after telegram continued to pour monotonous negation on the hopes of an expectant people--

"Swift o'er the wires the electric message came, He is no better: he is much the same!"

Even amateur reciters could make an effect out of lines like that. Many of them did, and on one occasion the Princess Charlotte was a conspicuous member of the touched and attentive audience. It was a difficult moment for her, but with the help of a handkerchief she concealed her emotion, and the papers referred to it appreciatively as a touching incident.