REALMAH BECOMES KING.

The city was now in peace. Order had been restored; and all the sensible inhabitants of Abibah felt that to Realmah this peace and order were due. No member of the family of the chief of the West had come forward to take his place. The flight of the chiefs of the North and of the South was looked upon as an act of abdication on their part. The councils of these quarters of the town met together, and it was almost unanimously resolved (what was done in one council not being, at the time, known in the others) that the chiefdom of each quarter should be offered to Realmah. His aged uncle, the great chief of the East, upon hearing the determinations of the several councils, said that he would abdicate in favour of his nephew, who should thenceforward be king of the whole nation. It is curious to observe that, from their having a word in their language for king, the kingly form of government must, at some time or other, have prevailed amongst them. There was an ancient proverb to this effect,--“_Lakaree[20] slapped the king’s white face--when he was dead._”

Footnote 20:

A cant name for one of the lowest class of weavers.

The principal men of the several councils presented themselves before Realmah, and tendered to him this kingly office. He asked for twenty-four hours to deliberate.

The evening after he had received these men was like the one that has been described at the beginning of this story. The atmosphere was cloudless, and the stars were visible. Realmah walked out upon the balcony overlooking the lake, which he had walked upon in the early days of his career, and when his chief thought had been how to defeat the wiles of the ambassador of the Phelatahs. What great events had happened to him during the interval that had passed! He had been comparatively an obscure young man when he first walked up and down that balcony, and gazed upon those stars. Since then, he had been in battles; had performed the part of a conqueror, and endured that of a prisoner. He had been madly in love with the beautiful Talora; and now, if he told the truth, her charms had very small attraction for him. The despised Ainah had taken with her, to her untimely grave, all the capability for love that there was in him.

Since that first walk, too, on the balcony, he had become a great inventor; and his discovery of iron, he felt, would be the chief safeguard for his nation.

These were the principal subjects of thought for Realmah; but there were others which will force themselves upon the minds of all poetic and imaginative people when they regard the unclouded heavens, and think of, or guess at, the great story which those heavens can tell them.

Perhaps a starlight night is the greatest instructor that is permitted, otherwise than in revelation, to address mankind. Realmah could not know what science has taught us. We now know that, in contemplating those heavens, we are looking at an historical scene which makes all other histories trivial and transitory. That speck of light which we call a star is an emanation which proceeded from its origin thousands of years ago perhaps, and may not in any manner represent the state of the star at the present day. Then, again, it is not as if we were reading the history of any one past period; but we are reading the commingled history of innumerable ages, widely distant from each other.[21] If men thoroughly entered into the spirit of this strange, weird scene, it would be the greatest cure for ambition, vanity, and avarice that has ever been devised.

Footnote 21:

The idea in the text is very difficult to realize, or to express. To compare small things with great, this illustration may be used. It is as if a man of the present day were to see (not to read about, but to see) Lord George Gordon’s riots, Louis the Fourteenth’s conquest of Flanders, Charlemagne’s slaughter of the Saxons, Hannibal’s victory at Cannæ, the building of the hundred-gated Thebes, and weary Methuselah celebrating his seven hundredth birthday--all at the same time, these scenes having reached his eyes at the same moment, and being for him the story of the present day.

_Milverton._ You see, Sir Arthur, that I have stolen your thunder.

Realmah, however, gazed upon it with the ignorant eyes of one comparatively a savage. And yet the wonderful scene had a strange influence upon him, and roused in his mind those thoughts which are common to all thinking men, and which, as we have seen, had before, on a remarkable occasion, been present to his mind; namely: “Whence am I? What am I? What am I here for? What does it all mean?”--thoughts which are never without a wild kind of melancholy, the melancholy of an inquiring and unsatisfied soul. And then he turned to business. There were motives which made him hesitate, now that the opportunity had come, to accept the greatness thrust upon him. I have said that, after the death of the Ainah, he had become ambitious. But still his nature was to a great extent like that of Hamlet, as described by our great poet, who felt it so hard that rough action, and dire struggle with the world around him, should be forced upon one who would far rather contemplate the ways of men than be in any measure mixed up with them.

Moreover, there was one thought that plagued Realmah, and drove him like a goad; namely, the consideration as to who should be his successor to the throne--for he was childless. After long pondering, he resolved that he would adopt some youth, the worthiest of the scions of those noble houses which had fallen from their high estate in the sudden revolution. With a sigh he congratulated himself, or rather the state, upon his being childless. “For,” as he said to himself, “any child of mine might be most unworthy to succeed me; but it will be hard if I cannot discover one amongst these young men of noble family, who should be able to guide the kingdom when I am old, or dead.” This thought soothed his mind; and, as the cold grey light of early morning broke in upon his meditations, he had completely made up his mind how to act, in every particular, on this, the greatest occasion of his life.

He had resolved, unhesitatingly, to be the King of the Sheviri.

_Ellesmere._ I am an ass, an idiot, a dolt, a dunce, a blockhead, and a dunderhead. All the rough, rude things that my enemies say against me are true. All the utterances of the refined malice of my friends are true. Yes, Cranmer, you are right. I cannot be sure of doing a simple sum in addition correctly. Say what you like of me, all of you.

Whatever any theologian has said of any other theologian, who differs from him slightly, is true of me.

Whatever any editor of any Greek play has said of any former editor of the same Greek play, is true of me.

Whatever any elderly lady who attends the Billingsgate Market and sells fish, says of any other elderly lady engaged in the same vocation, who sells her fish at a lower price, is true of me.

Whatever any “Right Honourable friend” who has left the Cabinet, says of any other “Right Honourable friend” who remains in the Cabinet, is true of me.

_Sir Arthur._ No, no, Ellesmere; keep within some bounds.

_Mauleverer._ Whence comes this sudden burst of just, but long-deferred, self-appreciation?

_Ellesmere._ I have been puzzling my brain for weeks to find out what this man was at, and I now see that I ought to have perceived his drift at once. The first syllable of the word Realmah ought to have enlightened me. Of course he was to become king; and of course, he is to initiate a form of government, or a mode of foreign policy, which is to be eminently instructive in modern times.

I am disgusted. I have been bothered about all these love affairs: I have been worried about the smelting of iron-stones: my feelings--my tenderest feelings--have been harrowed by the death of the Ainah; and now I find that I have gone through all this suffering, only that I might become interested in the character and fortunes of Realmah, and therefore be induced to listen more patiently to the record of his official and diplomatic proceedings. I am a dupe.

Mr. Milverton did not make any reply to this outburst of Sir John Ellesmere’s, but continued the reading of the story.