"I will tell you the truest thing about the King. He needs you at his
side. For all his friends, he is at heart a lonely man, throned upon
sorrows. I dare to tell you that, knowing you. He needs not a mere
wife, but a mate, a helpmate, to strive with him, her hand in his. Every
man needs the helpmate, as I read the world. For it cannot but be that a
man falls below himself when he comes home always to an empty room."
The Princess was silent. Wogan hoped that he had reassured her. But her
thoughts were now turned from herself. She leaned yet further forward
with her elbows upon her knees, and in a yet lower voice she asked a
question which fairly startled him.
"Does she not love you?"
Wogan, indeed, had spoken unconsciously, with a deep note of sadness in
his voice, which had sounded all the more strange and sad to her from
its contrast with the quick, cheerful, vigorous tones she had come to
think the mark of him. He had spoken as though he looked forward with a
poignant regret through a weary span of days, and saw himself always in
youth and middle years and age coming home always to an empty room.
Therefore she put her question, and Wogan was taken off his guard.
"There is no one," he said in a flurry.
Clementina shook her head.
"I wish that I may hear the King speak so, and in that voice; I shall be
very sure he loves me," she said in a musing voice, and so changing
almost to a note of raillery. "Tell me her name!" she pleaded. "What is
amiss with her that she is not thankful for a true man's love like
yours? Is she haughty? I'll bring her on her knees to you. Does she
think her birth sets her too high in the world? I'll show her so much
contempt, you so much courtesy, that she shall fall from her arrogance
and dote upon your steps. Perhaps she is too sure of your devotion? Why,
then, I'll make her jealous!"
Wogan interrupted her, and the agitation of his voice put an end to her
raillery. Somehow she had wounded him who had done so much for her.
"Madam, I beg you to believe me, there is no one;" and casting about for
a sure argument to dispel her conjectures, he said on an impulse,
"Listen; I will make your Highness a confidence." He stopped, to make
sure that Gaydon and Mrs. Misset were still asleep. Then he laughed
uneasily like a man that is half-ashamed and resumed,--"I am lord and
king of a city of dreams. Here's the opening of a fairy tale, you will
say. But when I am asleep my city's very real; and even now that I am
awake I could draw you a map of it, though I could not name its streets.
That's my town's one blemish. Its streets are nameless. It has taken a
long while in the building, ever since my boyhood; and indeed the work's
not finished yet, nor do I think it ever will be finished till I die,
since my brain's its architect. When I was asleep but now, I discovered
a new villa, and an avenue of trees, and a tavern with red blinds which
I had never remarked before. At the first there was nothing but a queer
white house of which the original has fallen to ruins at Rathcoffey in
Ireland. This house stood alone in a wide flat emerald plain that
stretched like an untravelled sea to a circle of curving sky. There was
room to build, you see, and when I left Rathcoffey and became a
wanderer, the building went on apace. There are dark lanes there from
Avignon between great frowning houses, narrow climbing streets from
Meran, arcades from Verona, and a park of many thickets and tall
poplar-trees with a long silver stretch of water. One day you will see
that park from the windows of St. James. It has a wall too, my city,--a
round wall enclosing it within a perfect circle; and from whatever
quarter of the plain you come towards it, you only see this wall,
there's not so much as a chimney visible above it. Once you have crowded
with the caravans and traders through the gates,--for my town is
busy,--you are at once in the ringing streets. I think my architect in
that took Aigues Mortes for his model. Outside you have the flat, silent
plain, across which the merchants creep in long trailing lines, within
the noise of markets, the tramp of horses' hoofs, the talk of men and
women, and, if you listen hard, the whispers, too, of lovers. Oh, my
city's populous! There are quiet alleys with windows opening onto them,
where on summer nights you may see a young girl's face with the
moonlight on it like a glory, and in the shadow of the wall beneath, the
cloaked figure of a youth. Well, I have a notion--" and then he broke
off abruptly. "There's a black horse I own, my favourite horse."