The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales Part 27

"But the imputation of cruelty which might attach to your majesty's proceedings?"

"There can be no cruelty where there is no injustice. If any there be, it must be on thy part, since, as I have demonstrated, so far from my despoiling thee of thy head, it is thou who iniquitously withholdest mine.

I will labour to render this even clearer to thy apprehension. Thou art found, as thou must needs admit, in possession of a contraband article forfeit to the crown by operation of law. What then? Shall the intention of the legislature be frustrated because thou hast insidiously rendered the possession of _my_ property inseparable from the possession of _thine_?

Shall I, an innocent proprietor, be mulcted of my right by thy fraud and covin? Justice howls, righteousness weeps, integrity stands aghast at the bare notion. No, friend, thy head has not a leg to stand on. Wouldst thou retain it, it behoves thee to show that it will be more serviceable to the owner, namely, myself, upon thy shoulders than elsewhere. This may well be.

Hast thou peradventure any subtleties in perfumery? any secrets in confectionery? any skill in the preparation of soup?"

"I have condescended to none of these frivolities, O king. My study hath ever consisted in divine philosophy, whereby men are rendered equal to the G.o.ds."

"And yet long most of all for purple!" retorted the monarch, "as I conclude from perceiving thou hast after all preferred the latter. Thy head must indeed be worth the taking."

"Thy taunt is merited, O king! I will importune thee no longer. Thou wilt indeed render me a service in depriving me of this wretched head, hideous without, and I must fear, empty within, seeing that it hath not prevented me from wasting my life in the service of vanity and luxury. Woe to the sage who trusts his infirm wisdom and frail integrity within the precincts of a court! Yet can I foretell a time when philosophers shall no longer run on the futile and selfish errands of kings, and when kings shall be suffered to rule only so far as they obey the bidding of philosophers.

Peace, Knowledge, Liberty--"

The King of Ayodhya possessed, beyond all princes of his age, the art of gracefully interrupting an unseasonable discourse. He slightly signed to a courtier in attendance, a scimitar flashed for a moment from its scabbard, and the head of Soria.n.u.s rolled on the pavement; the lips murmuring as though still striving to dwell with inarticulate fondness upon the last word of hope for mankind.

It soon appeared that the principle of life was essential to the resplendence of the Purple Head. Within a few minutes it had a.s.sumed so ghastly a hue that the Rajah himself was intimidated, and directed that it should be consumed with the body.

The same full-moon that watched the white-robed throng busied with the rites of incremation in a grove of palms, beheld also the seven dragons contending for the body of Marcobad. But, for many a year, the maids and matrons of Rome were not weary of regarding, extolling, and coveting the priceless purple tissue that glowed in the fane of Jupiter Capitolinus.

THE FIREFLY

A certain Magician had retired for the sake of study to a cottage in a forest. It was summer in a hot country. In the trees near the cottage dwelt a most beautiful Firefly. The light she bore with her was dazzling, yet soft and palpitating, as the evening star, and she seemed a single flash of fire as she shot in and out suddenly from under the screen of foliage, or like a lamp as she perched panting upon some leaf, or hung glowing from some bough; or like a wandering meteor as she eddied gleaming over the summits of the loftiest trees; as she often did, for she was an ambitious Firefly. She learned to know the Magician, and would sometimes alight and sit s.h.i.+ning in his hair, or trail her l.u.s.tre across his book as she crept over the pages. The Magician admired her above all things:

"What eyes she would have if she were a woman!" thought he.

Once he said aloud, "How happy you must be, you rare, beautiful, brilliant creature!"

"I am not happy," rejoined the Firefly; "what am I, after all, but a flying beetle with a candle in my tail? I wish I were a star."

"Very well," said the Magician, and touched her with his wand, when she became a beautiful star in the twelfth degree of the sign Pisces.

After some nights the Magician asked her if she was content.

"I am not," replied she. "When I was a Firefly I could fly whither I would, and come and go as I pleased. Now I must rise and set at certain times, and s.h.i.+ne just so long and no longer. I cannot fly at all, and only creep slowly across the sky. In the day I cannot s.h.i.+ne, or if I do no one sees me. I am often darkened by rain, and mist, and cloud. Even when I s.h.i.+ne my brightest I am less admired than when I was a Firefly, there are so many others like me. I see, indeed, people looking up from the earth by night towards me, but how do I know that they are looking at me?"

"The laws of nature will have it so," returned the Magician.

"Don't talk to me of the laws of Nature," rejoined the Firefly. "I did not make them, and I don't see why I should be compelled to obey them. Make me something else."

"What would you be?" demanded the accommodating Magician.

"As I creep along here," replied the Star, "I see such a soft pure track of light. It proceeds from the lamp in your study. It flows out of your window like a river of molten silver, both cool and warm. Let me be such a lamp."

"Be it so," answered the Magician: and the star became a lovely alabaster lamp, set in an alcove in his study. Her chaste radiance was shed over his page as long as he continued to read. At a certain hour he extinguished her and retired to rest.

Next morning the Lamp was in a terrible humour.

"I don't choose to be blown out," she said.

"You would have gone out of your own accord else," returned the Magician.

"What!" exclaimed the Lamp, "am I not s.h.i.+ning by my own light?"

"Certainly not: you are not now a Firefly or a Star. You must now depend upon others. You would be dark for ever if I did not rekindle you by the help of this oil."

"What!" cried the Lamp, "not s.h.i.+ne of my own accord! Never! Make me an everlasting lamp, or I will not be one at all."

"Alas, poor friend," returned the Magician sadly, "there is but one place where aught is everlasting. I can make thee a lamp of the sepulchre."

"Content," responded the Lamp. And the Magician made her one of those strange occult lamps which men find ever and anon when they unseal the tombs of ancient kings and wizards, sustaining without nutriment a perpetual flame. And he bore her to a sepulchre where a great king was lying embalmed and perfect in his golden raiment, and set her at the head of the corpse. And whether the poor fitful Firefly found at last rest in the grave, we may know when we come thither ourselves. But the Magician closed the gates of the sepulchre behind him, and walked thoughtfully home.

And as he approached his cottage, behold another Firefly darting and flas.h.i.+ng in and out among the trees, as brilliantly as ever the first had done. She was a wise Firefly, well satisfied with the world and everything in it, more particularly her own tail. And if the Magician would have made a pet of her no doubt she would have abode with him. But he never looked at her.

PAN'S WAND

Iridion had broken her lily. A misfortune for any rustic nymph, but especially for her, since her life depended upon it.

From her birth the fate of Iridion had been a.s.sociated with that of a flower of unusual loveliness--a stately, candid lily, endowed with a charmed life, like its possessor. The seasons came and went without leaving a trace upon it; innocence and beauty seemed as enduring with it, as evanescent with the children of men. In equal though dissimilar loveliness its frolicsome young mistress nourished by its side. One thing alone, the oracle had declared, could prejudice either, and this was an accident to the flower. From such disaster it had long been s.h.i.+elded by the most delicate care; yet in the inscrutable counsels of the G.o.ds, the dreaded calamity had at length come to pa.s.s. Broken through the upper part of the stem, the listless flower drooped its petals towards the earth, and seemed to mourn their chast.i.ty, already sullied by the wan flaccidity of decay.

Not one had fallen as yet, and Iridion felt no pain or any symptom of approaching dissolution, except, it may be, the unwonted seriousness with which, having exhausted all her simple skill on behalf of the languis.h.i.+ng plant, she sat down to consider its fate in the light of its bearing upon her own.

Meditation upon an utterly vague subject, whether of apprehension or of hope, speedily lapses into reverie. To Iridion, Death was as indefinable an object of thought as the twin omnipotent controller of human destiny, Love.

Love, like the immature fruit on the bough, hung unsoliciting and unsolicited as yet, but slowly ripening to the maiden's hand. Death, a vague film in an illimitable sky, tempered without obscuring the suns.h.i.+ne of her life. Confronted with it suddenly, she found it, in truth, an impalpable cloud, and herself as little competent as the gravest philosopher to answer the self-suggested inquiry, "What shall I be when I am no longer Iridion?" Superst.i.tion might have helped her to some definite conceptions, but superst.i.tion did not exist in her time. Judge, reader, of its remoteness.

The maiden's reverie might have terminated only with her existence, but for the salutary law which prohibits a young girl, not in love or at school, from sitting still more than ten minutes. As she s.h.i.+fted her seat at the expiration of something like this period, she perceived that she had been sitting on a goatskin, and with a natural a.s.sociation of ideas--

"I will ask Pan," she exclaimed.

Pan at that time inhabited a cavern hard by the maiden's dwelling, which the judicious reader will have divined could only have been situated in Arcadia. The honest G.o.d was on excellent terms with the simple people; his goats browsed freely along with theirs, and the most melodious of the rustic minstrels attributed their proficiency to his instructions. The maidens were on a more reserved footing of intimacy--at least so they wished it to be understood, and so it was understood, of course. Iridion, however, decided that the occasion would warrant her incurring the risk even of a kiss, and lost no time in setting forth upon her errand, carrying her poor broken flower in its earthen vase. It was the time of day when the G.o.d might be supposed to be arousing himself from his afternoon's siesta.

She did not fear that his door would be closed against her, for he had no door.

The sylvan deity stood, in fact, at the entrance of his cavern, about to proceed in quest of his goats. The appearance of Iridion operated a change in his intention, and he courteously escorted her to a seat of turf erected for the special accommodation of his fair visitors, while he placed for himself one of stone.

"Pan," she began, "I have broken my lily."

"That is a sad pity, child. If it had been a reed, now, you could have made a flute of it."

"I should not have time, Pan," and she recounted her story. A G.o.dlike nature cannot confound truth with falsehood, though it may mistake falsehood for truth. Pan therefore never doubted Iridion's strange narrative, and, having heard it to the end, observed, "You will find plenty more lilies in Elysium."

"Common lilies, Pan; not like mine."

"You are wrong. The lilies of Elysium--asphodels as they call them there--are as immortal as the Elysians themselves. I have seen them in Proserpine's hair at Jupiter's entertainment; they were as fresh as she was. There is no doubt you might gather them by handfuls--at least if you had any hands--and wear them to your heart's content, if you had but a heart."