THE LAST DAYS OF THE SIEGE.

On the twelfth day after the lodgment was effected, another great attack was made upon the southern and western quarters of the town.

A few words must here be given in explanation of the way in which Abibah had been built.

When the first settlers commenced driving their piles, there was, from some inequality in the nature of the ground at the bottom of the lake, a curved line about eighteen feet in breadth and about a thousand yards in length, in which the piles sank hopelessly into soft mud, finding no footing. This part therefore had been abandoned as foundation, and had been bridged over by flooring which could easily be removed. It divided the city in this way: that two-fifths of the city were on the southern and western side of this sort of covered canal, and three-fifths on the other side. The canal itself was called “The Way of the Pescaras” (the largest kind of fish found in those waters). Unfortunately, there was a bit of the eastern quarter of the town which was in a similar way cut off from the main part of that eastern quarter by a canal. The enemy became aware of this fact. That island, if it may be so called, in the eastern quarter, was mainly occupied by a small fortress.

The attack, on the part of the besiegers, commenced at the rising of the sun. The number of assailants who were brought into immediate action was twice as great as that which had been brought into action on the previous occasion. And, moreover, they had this great advantage, that their people had gained and maintained a lodgment in the “Street of the Ambassadors.” From early morning till late evening the battle raged furiously in the southern and western quarters, and also at that part of the eastern quarter which I have described.

By the evening all the barricades were forced. The women and children were hastily removed into the northern and eastern quarters of the town, where the poor creatures were huddled together in the open spaces.

Where the battle raged most furiously was in the great market-place, which, for the sake of convenience, as being nearer to the land whence they drew their supplies, was in the southern part of the town. Here Realmah himself was present, though not taking much part in the action. In his mind he compared the attack of the numerous enemy to a flood of molten lava. The comparison was a just one; for, as in the flow of a stream of lava it is at the edges of the torrent that there is least force, while at the middle part it boils up and overflows the edges, so it was with the attack of the enemy, who pressed over the prostrate bodies of their own men, and overwhelmed Realmah’s now disheartened forces.

The shades of evening came on, and found the men of the North in possession of the two-fifths of the town, bounded by the Pescara Canal; and also, which was still more alarming, of the fortress in the eastern quarter of the town. The slaughter on both sides had been immense; and, alas! many women and children of the town of Abibah had been slain during this dreadful day. One remarkable incident must be commemorated. Litervi, that cautious and judicious councillor, had returned from his mission, and had been placed in command of the eastern fortress. Like another great man whose fate is commemorated in the story of one of the greatest sieges that ever took place in the world, Litervi had found himself alone at the topmost part of the fortress, with all his warriors slain around him; and, after hurling his massive club (for he was one of those old-fashioned warriors who could not take to the new weapons) upon the enemy beneath him, he threw himself down--being resolved to slay at least one of the enemy by that last missile. This was told to Realmah, who merely remarked that Litervi was a wise, happy, and good man.

Llama-mah, too, had shown his devotion in a very unexpected manner. According to the usual theory, Llama-mah, who had been a flatterer in the days of prosperity, ought to have been a coward and betrayer in the days of adversity. But men are so strange in their ways that there is no accounting for them. Llama-mah, at the risk of his own life (for he received a dangerous wound), had stepped in front of Realmah and saved the King’s life in the great fight in the market-place; for Llama-mah really loved the man he had so often flattered and beguiled.

Realmah sat in the great Hall of Audience on the evening of this day’s disastrous fight. A cordon of his guard kept off the crowd of persons who came for orders, admitting them one by one. Suddenly a head, which had been hurled over the canal by the enemy with loud triumphant shouts, was brought to Realmah. He recognised at once the noble features of Londardo, who, it appears, had fallen in some skirmish, while leading the scattered troops of the Phelatahs to the place of rendezvous.

Realmah was much affected by this sight, but did not show what he felt. He merely observed--“Preserve it for a noble burial when we have conquered.”

All night long the King received his chieftains, and gave to each man the orders or the encouragement that he required. There was one thing that much astonished these chieftains, who were all men of high rank,--namely, that sundry obscure persons, mere artisans, fishermen, and iron-workers, were admitted to Realmah’s presence, and had long audiences of the King.

The first faint dawn of morning, with its cold grey light, began to appear. Realmah quitted the Hall of Audience and went up to the topmost story of his uncle’s palace, now his own. Realmah was fond of high places; and this topmost story, or watch-tower, having an open gallery round it, was the only addition he had made to that palace.

What a scene was spread before him! Towards the north and west he could hardly discern any water for the innumerable rafts of the enemy, which now surrounded those parts of the town. To the extreme east, however, there was a sight to be seen which gladdened the King’s heart. A large army of the Sheviri and their allies was posted on the eastern heights about three miles and a half distant; and, to attack them, numerous bodies of the enemy’s troops were already beginning to march eastward, deserting their quarters on the southern shore of the town.

Realmah had ordered that, upon no account, whatever might happen, should he be disturbed while he remained in this watch-tower. Joyfully he observed the movement of the enemy’s troops on shore, until the greater part of them had moved to a position within a mile’s distance of Athlah’s. He then raised a large green flag, and watched with satisfaction his little fleet, which he had kept far out of harm’s way until the present moment (a fleet of arrant cowards, as the enemy called them), move in good order, round the eastern part of the town, and take up a position close to the southern quarter of the town, near that part of the shore which the enemy had abandoned.

Meanwhile he had raised a large red flag which he still kept in his hand. One half-hour, a time of dreadful suspense, in which Realmah seemed to himself to live a life, passed away; and then, to his infinite joy, appeared in twenty or thirty different places in the southern and western parts of the town, on the further side of the Pescara Canal, light wreaths of smoke--the prelude to so many great fires.

Realmah’s plan was simple. He had resolved to sacrifice two-fifths of his town, and by that means to secure victory. His own escape at the outbreak of the revolution had long given him the groundwork of this plan. He had caused maps to be carefully made of what we may call the underground, or rather underfloor, part of his city, and knew to a nicety those devious paths upon the waters along which small boats could make their way amongst the piles. Thirty canoes, which had been moored under his palace, had been destined for this work of incendiarism; and their men had been furnished with the most inflammable materials.

Realmah had hardly time to descend from his watch-tower and place himself at the head of his troops before the flames had burst out furiously in many quarters of that part of the town occupied by the enemy. They were utterly dismayed by this new and unexpected form of attack, and before they had time to recover their presence of mind, Realmah had thrown planks across the Pescara Canal, forming temporary bridges, and was upon them.

His own people had not thoroughly known Realmah before that day. There are two lines of Byron’s which well describe what had been, and what were now, Realmah’s feelings and his mode of action:--

“Then all was stern collectedness and art, Now rose the unleavened hatred of his heart.”

Thus it is ever with men in whose natures are combined great passion and great prudence. A hundred times, perhaps, they play with the hilt of their swords; and the bystander, or opponent, little knows how much they have longed to draw them, and what restraint they have exercised upon themselves. But when the time has come, and they do flash forth those swords, it is with a fury that contains in itself the long-accumulated passion hitherto oppressed and controlled, but never really annihilated, by the restraints of prudence.

The King’s feelings were very bitter against the men of the North. To them he traced all the misfortunes of his life. By reason of them he had been made a prisoner. For them he had lost his Ainah. To contend with them, he had left the peaceful paths of life so dear to him, and had become a king, with all the miseries (for to such a man miseries they were) of kingly state. Silently he had seen his choicest troops fall before these barbarians. Silently, and with no outward demonstration of sorrow, but with tears of the heart, he had seen the poor women and children of Abibah slaughtered before his eyes; and, at this moment, he saw a large part of the city he loved so well about to be consumed by fire, to get rid of these hateful invaders.

The King was that day as one possessed. Danger and Death, as if scared by such a madman, fled before him. His guards, the most active and energetic of the young men, toiled after their sickly, careworn, almost-deformed King, in vain.

The enemy in the city being attacked at once by fire, by the fierce Realmah, and by the fleet of boats which prevented their escape, and cut off their retreat, perished nearly to a man. Those on the rafts made at once for the southern shore, where they joined the main body of the troops, who, discovering the stratagem that had been devised against them, quitted their position opposite to Athlah’s camp, and returned to their old quarters.

There was mourning and lamentation in the enemy’s camp that night. Three of their greatest chiefs (amongst them it was said the King of the North himself) had perished in the town.

All night the flames rose higher and higher, and affronted the placid skies. These flames did not invade that part of the town which lay to the north and east of the canal; but the rest of the town was completely consumed. There was not, however, a man amongst the Sheviri so base as to lament publicly the loss of his own habitation.

Meanwhile Realmah joined Athlah. The next day a great attack was made upon the position of the men of the North; and their complete defeat ensued. Hardly a man escaped to tell the tale; but Realmah, naturally merciful, gave orders for sparing the women and children who had accompanied the men of the North. These were incorporated into the nation of the Sheviri, who learnt many of the arts of life from their captives.

Thus were the men of the North defeated, without the aid of pestilence and famine; and, for generations, they did not venture again to invade the now indomitable South. The name of Realmah became a word of terror with which they scared their fretful children into swift obedience. “And the land had peace.”

_Ellesmere._ I am not too much devoted to Realmah, but I am glad that he and the besieged have got the best of it. I am always on the side of the besieged. I remember becoming quite excited on behalf of the Dutch when I read Motley’s account of the siege of Antwerp.

_Sir Arthur._ And then, as boys, how we pitied poor Priam, and longed for Hector to gain the victory. I suppose there is no boy who has not been against that bully Achilles, and who has not been anxious to blab to the Trojans about the real contents of that wooden horse, which seems so stupid a device.

_Lady Ellesmere._ I wonder that the Trojan women did not find it out. Now Realmah would not have been taken in by such a device, for he had something of woman’s nature in him, and of woman’s wit.

_Ellesmere._ Say craft. But indeed, my lady, you are talking a great man’s talk without knowing it. That deep thinker, but not always perfectly intelligible writer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, maintained that all the greatest men have something of the feminine nature in them.

_Sir Arthur._ One Trojan maiden, Lady Ellesmere, did warn her people--Cassandra; but nobody believed in her.

“Tunc etiam fatis aperit Cassandra futuris Ora, dei jussu, non unquam credita Teucris.”

_Lady Ellesmere._ Without translating, gentlemen must not talk Latin, nor smoke, nor swear, in the presence of ladies.

_Ellesmere._ She thinks now she has been very epigrammatic. Then men may swear if they translate it? The commonest form of muddlement in sentences is occasioned by this endeavour to be brief. You apply two or three nominatives to one verb, or two or three verbs to one nominative, which do not agree together if you look at them separately. I am obliged to translate for Lady Ellesmere. What she did mean was,--that, in the presence of ladies, men must not smoke without permission: must not swear at all: and must not quote Latin without translating it.

_Sir Arthur._ Sir John’s conjugal correction of Lady Ellesmere, of the justice of which I am very dubious,--

_Ellesmere._ Saccharinity again!

_Sir Arthur._ --has given me time to make my translation:--

“For ever disbelieved by Trojan ears, So willed the god, Cassandra told her fears.”

_Ellesmere._ Such an odd thought struck me while Milverton was reading.

I recalled to my mind Dr. Johnson’s going about, with his ink-bottle stuck in his coat, at the sale of Thrale’s brewery, and saying, “We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

You do not see how this applies, do you? But I said to myself, We are not here to listen to the obscure battles of the Sheviri and the Phelatahs, of the Doolmen or the Koolmen, and their Athlahs, and Realmahs, and Lockmars (about as interesting, as Milton would have said, as the battles of kites and crows); but we are listening to the political notions of a man who is contemplating the present state of Europe and America.

What he means I do not know for certain, but I have ideas.

_Sir Arthur._ And so have I.

_Ellesmere._ But I shall not declare my ideas, because Milverton will be sure to say they are not the right ones.

_Cranmer._ I am sure I do not see what is meant.

_Ellesmere._ Perhaps not; I only said I had ideas. They are not taxable things, Cranmer, and you cannot prevent my having them. They won’t hurt you, Cranmer.

_Mauleverer._ I see nothing more in it than this, which I believe I knew before, without the aid of the ingenious Milverton, that men had always had plenty of tyrants and oppressors among them, and that, a few times in the world’s history, these tyrants and oppressors had been beaten back.

But the Northmen will come again, and then there will be no Realmah to resist them.

_Ellesmere._ I know all about it. I know the nation which eventually conquered the Lake cities: and, what is of more importance, I know how the nation attained to its greatness.

To make the rest of Sir John’s discourse intelligible, I must give a little explanation. Sir John is a man who indulges in very few theories. He chiefly employs himself in demolishing the theories of other people; but one theory he has, and holds to very strongly, viz. that grey-eyed people are much cleverer, wiser, and better than the black-eyed or the blue-eyed. It was pointed out to him that Lady Ellesmere has grey eyes, and we knew that he would never admit in public that she had any especial merit. He merely said that this was the one exception which did not “prove the rule,” as foolish people say, but which confirmed the statement that there is an exception to almost every rule, however well founded.

_Ellesmere._ The nation in question was the nation of the Gogoes. A Gogoe of more intelligence than his neighbours put forth the theory that all the blue-eyed female children under three years of age should be made into mince-meat. This theory found favour among many ingenious and thoughtful people. There was soon a mince-meat society, then a mince-meat newspaper.

The question then entered into the domain of politics. The Gogoes were chiefly governed by two great councils. The most potent council was that which sat in the Hall of Echoes, and was an elected body. The other council consisted of the stoutest men of the community, and was an assemblage of Mauleverers, but chiefly of a jolly nature.

The mince-meat question was taken up by an important party in the first-named council. They were never able, however, to make it the law of the land.

You can easily imagine what an excellent subject it was for debate--how much there was to be said on both sides of the question. Eventually the anti-mince-meat party came into power.

Here I am going to say something so profound, and yet so simple, as regards politics, that if people were allowed to carry round a hat, and to receive subscriptions when they had said anything good, I should, of course, receive much largesse from this liberal company.

It is this. You suppose that the mince-meat party fell from power for some great political reason. Those are the kind of reasons that historical people, like Milverton, endeavour to impose upon us, to account for great political changes; whereas I am a practical man, and I know better. The party fell because people were tired of it. You think that it is only Aristides of whom his neighbours were tired. But I tell you that Julius Cæsar, Sejanus, Thomas à Becket, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, and a host of others, fell--simply because the principal people concerned with them were tired of them. You are fond, Milverton, of quoting that saying of Talleyrand, “that he was avid of facts.” I say that “all men are avid of change.” Why, men become tired even of themselves, and of their position, however powerful! And thus it was that the mince-meat party in the Gogoe Hall of Echoes fell.

Meanwhile public opinion amongst the Gogoes had been pronounced more and more in favour of the mince-meat question. What did the party newly in power do? They were always for large measures, if they were for any measures at all. Largeness was their forte. They proposed that the black-eyed portion of the young maidens should undergo the same fate as that which had been proposed for the blue-eyed.

The original mince-meat party was astounded; but what could they say or do? Their arguments against the blue-eyed were found to have equal force against the black-eyed, and the large measure passed unanimously.

From that time forward the Gogoes became a great nation. They were not so much “blessed”--or shall we say “bored?”--by an affluence of women, as the surrounding nations were; but all their women, whether won by conquest of neighbouring nations, or born in their own territory, were grey-eyed, which became the fashionable colour. It was the Gogoes, as far as my historical researches have gone, who devastated Europe, and conquered the Lake Cities, and to this day their grey-eyed descendants are ruling men wherever they are to be found.

The original country of the Gogoes (this will be a Milvertonian touch) is where the great river Niebelungen curves round the base of the great mountain Oltivago, and falls into the Lake of Palmah, which was then the central part of Europe. I flatter myself that that is equally precise and descriptive, and conveys to you the idea of a territory which can easily be recognised in the present day.

We all laughed very much at the droll way in which Sir John had illustrated his favourite theory, and had combined it with a satirical view of modern politics. Afterwards there was no more conversation, and we went our separate ways.