Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (43 page)

“Ah, yes,” he sighed, working the silly model to see dourly the ridiculous parody of his rise and descent. “So then I am come to this.”

“Do you not think it droll?” she asked, for certainly the little romp herself thought it comical enough. “Is not that really to be known and famous, to be turned into a toy, do you not think so?”

Before he could answer, or indeed even think of something wherewith to answer, there was a great commotion and certain loud angry cries from the direction of the house. It was Betsy’s mother who had appeared, a trim English lady of the mercantile class, evidently wroth with her daughter and crying words which he could not well comprehend, though their import was lucid enough. Soon she was boxing the child’s ears and poor Betsy was emitting cries of her own.

“Come,” said he, “I am not offended. It is but the foolishness of children who know no better. Oh, is not this punishment too hard for so trivial a breach of courtesy?”

Mrs. Bascombe did not understand all his words, but in her halting French she made him to understand that the girl must grow up and out of her rudeness, Mr. Bonaparte being a guest when all was said and done, and that she must now be shut up in a room and go supperless while she meditated on her inexcusable behavior.

And so it was that, later in the day, Uncle Napoleon the Great Monster and Tyrant and Libertine of Europe stood outside the door of the room wherein blubbering Betsy was locked, and spoke soft words to her.

“You see to what it is come,” he said to the door. “I liberated all Europe but you I cannot liberate. There is a great lesson in all this. It is for my sake, it would seem, that you are incarcerated thus, and yet I do not wish your incarceration. With all of us there are forces hardly to be controlled, whether with spade or
spada
. None of us is really free.”

She could, as a mere child, not be expected to comprehend the deeper drift of his words, but she said: “I have said I am sorry and I can say no more,” in a voice muffled both by the salt of her tears and by the intervening oak. “Except,” she added, “once more to say that I am sorry.”

“You are not to say you are sorry to me,” he rejoined kindly. “Rather it is to some ancient law or tradition of what is due to a guest to which your good mother and father strictly adhere. Well, perhaps it is better to be made a prisoner for a breach of such than to be like myself, who am become a prisoner because of the greater guns and cavalry of envious kingdoms. And transformed also, as you have shown, into a monkey.” This renewed her blubbering, though he swiftly quietened it with a paraphrase, with only the locked door as apparent listener, of the tale of
Gerusalemme
Liberata
.

IN such encounters may ive find

RIght contact betiveen mind and mind.

INhuman to the larger sense,

RIch, though, in human innocence,

INto the little zone of light

RIdes the Archruler of the Night.

T
hose of our readers who are prepared to seek occasional diversion in what may, for want of a more learned term, be described as
literal magic
, will perhaps be encouraged to ponder on the signification of the letter W in the truncated career of our incarcerated Corsican. We refer, naturally, to our own W, to W as a right English letter, that brief kissing melody that parts lips for the omission of a right English vowel, ignoring for the nonce the silent tombstone of earlier and barbarous modes of Saxon speech in
wrath
and
wreath
and the like, as also the ghost of an owl-call that terminates such words as
now
and
know
. For names like Warsaw and Wagram, extinguished stars in the sped constellation of his triumphs, carry the Continental V, and the vivving and vowing and vuvving that are attached in the tongues of Europe to our special and characteristic and, may we say, patriotic English letter are but a known part of the jibber jabber of his customary garlic-laden Gallic and coarse-grained Corsican speech.

He has had time enough to ponder on Wellington and Waterloo, and now, lo, he is presented with the empire of Longwood. We doubt not, also, that, finding in these three W’s three coffin-nails for his boxed and buried reputation, and wondering at the lethal trinity in his Corsican superstitious way (for this propensity of his nature, as of his nation’s, is well enough known), he will have made certain enquiries as to the meanings of the words so terrifyingly double-yewed. His downfall was as much water as land, for the British Navy deterred his huddle of a Channel army from the temerity of a foredoomed essay at crossing the narrow seas, save for a piteous ketchload that ran screaming for dear life from the scarlet shawls of Welsh fishwives, believing these to be doubtless a sort of Amazonian redcoats, just as the same undefeatable force made the world’s oceans serve him in the office of a national prison wall. Nay, even in the fateful Leipzig encounter with the Allies, it was the waters of an inconsiderable river that indirectly spoke the word Defeat, when a scared pressed fledgling of a sapper blew the bridge with premature haste. He must know too by now, however unwilling to learn the tongue of exile, that Water comes from Wells and is ever Welling forth from the natural springs by the very Ton—and, for good measure, may we not add that his own
L’eau
was in orthographic bo-peep hiding in the Loo? But what now will our jailed general be making of Longwood? Nothing of a watery grave offers there, and we are happy that he is afforded that small onomastical comfort.

Yet if he avoids the blasphemous ring of one signification (and there are some of the Whig faction all too ready to apotheotize him to a degree that makes the sacrilege sufficiently explicit), he will be unavoidably confronted by the dire prolepsis of another, since a trio (we will not suggest another blasphemy) of Longwoods will escort him to his last end: one Longwood will creak beneath his extreme groans, on another Longwood will he be borne away, and in a subterranean casket of Longwood will his body at last disintegrate to its component atomies, what time his soul is experiencing the awfulness of the condign sentence. Meanwhile, each day at Longwood he will be reminded, in the name of his illustrious and gallant keeper Sir Hudson, that he has indeed been brought most Lowe, and find too, though humbly disposed in that cognomen, the persistent letter of his downfall, a Cassiopeia of retribution whose fiery original, by a strange irony, he will never see blazing in the southern firmament of his confinement.

The mutual frown with which the antagonists confronted each other was a kind of ocular thunder, while their eyes flashed levin enough. The British knight was no whit abashed by the eminence of rank of his opponent, nor of the terrific reputation which his exploits in arms had earned throughout the world. As for his imperial crown, this, following the dictate of his masters, he saw as a mere impudent and pretentious fiction; here was but a soldier and a captive one, and wholly at the mercy of Sir Hud, in whom, nevertheless, the chivalric blood ran strong and rendered him ill disposed to assume the vindictiveness of the captor. For all that, he was hard put to it to drive from his warrior’s memory his previous encounters with the forces of his prisoner, whether in Egypt, Germany or France, and he smarted yet from the ignominy of his dislodgement of Capri. Nor did his intimate knowledge of the race, language and very birthplace of his captive dispose him to a compensative sympathy. In his eyes, then, shone the fire of one who would willingly dispense justice but in no wise admit the tempering of mercy; while the orbs of the other bespoke a grievous resentment above the common lot.

“So, Sir Knight,” cried Lion of the Valley, “I am at last granted the overlong deferred favor of an interview with my jailor. I have much to say, and you will please to listen.”

“I am not so bound,” frowned the other. “My duty is fulfilled in overseeing the provision of what is meet, by the laws of my commission, for a captive taken fairly in war, and that duty I have been officious to perform. You have nothing further to ask and I nothing further to grant.”

“Yet,” said Lion of the Valley, “do I not descry in a gaze otherwise obdurate odd rays of misgiving, and is this granting of a parley between us itself not a concession beyond what you term your duty?”

“I perform a courtesy,” the other replied, “and I satisfy myself that all goes as well as may be expected to. That you are in health I am able to observe, as also the adequacy of your lodging and of such other amenity as is fitting. And so, Sir General, there is no more to be either said or done.”

“Ah, is there not?” exclaimed the prisoner. “And, for an apt beginning, I will pick you up on your mode of address. For I am not Sir General but Lord Emperor, and that address is the garment of a reality, and the reality’s self persists despite the outer conditions to which I am subjected. Your prisoner I may be, Sir Knight—who indeed can deny it?—but I am in no wise a common prisoner, and it is your persistent and insolent treatment of myself as such that I most bitterly resent.”

“If you are Lord Emperor,” Sir Hud rejoined, not without the suggestion of a sneer, “then your documents and seals of abdication were but a dream that the whole world joins you in dreaming. Know too, and here I forbear to jest, that the greater part of mankind rejects even your retrospectual claim to the title. General you are, and General I must call you. For the condition of your servitude, it is approved by all the signatories of the Peace, and the
insolence
you prate of must be referred to higher authority than my own.”

“
Insolent
I said,” cried the other, and he strode threateningly a pace or so nearer to his adversary as he spoke. “I say also
tyrannical
I further add
vindictive
. The defeats that I, or my marshals, inflicted upon you in the field rankle within and forbid the disposing of your mind to the forms of common justice. Yea, common justice I say, since you will have it that I am but a common prisoner.”

Stung to the nerve, Sir Hud hissed: “Sir, I will not bandy words. But nor will I be impugned so, for it is my honor, as a soldier and as a knight, at which you hit. And so I challenge you to show in what manner I have assumed the posture of
vindictive tyrant
.”

“Ah,” said Lion of the Valley, a smile playing on his lips, “so we have at least entered a region of converse. Well then, Sir Knight, I would ask you this one easy question: where is my prison?”

“Your prison, as you know well, is this island,” said the other, and at once would fain have called back the words, for he perceived the trap into which he was like to fall. “Or,” he added in haste, “shall I say that it is the manor of Longwood on this island.”

“Nay, I take your first answer,” smiled Lion of the Valley, “as true and sufficient, for the common prison of a common prisoner may be located indifferently in any place, since it is the walls that confine. But for this uncommon prisoner a most uncommon piece of topography has, I assume with care and reason, been selected. Are not the walls of my prison this entire Southern Ocean? Are they not? Answer me.”

“In a manner that is true,” responded the other with caution.

“Well, then,” his prisoner continued, “if it be true, another thing is true, and that is, since I am not in chains, I may justly claim the liberty of passage from wall to wall of my dungeon. That is, I may have freedom of the island from shore to shore, and likewise freedom of converse with the inhabitants thereof. Why then,” and he raised his powerful voice to a shout, “am I not granted such right? Why do I have your musketeers and your grenadiers peering in my very windows and even violating the sanctity of—I will not speak the word, in deference to your knightly delicacy. By what right and by what order?”

“Raise not your voice so,” returned the other with an equal anger. “I am not one of your underlings to be railed at. To your uncivil rantings I will return a civil answer, and that is this: that once you are on the shore you may well be on the sea, and that we have ample precedent of that danger. In a manner,” he said, and the sneer was now patent, “it is to protect yourself from another such signal defeat as you suffered at Waterloo.”

“Puppy dog,” raved Lion of the Valley, now near dancing in his rage, “how you dare taunt me thus I marvel at—”

“That you will retract and at once. You will take back between your insolent teeth that unseemly—”

“Aye,” returned the other, sneering in his turn. “I could indeed swallow such as you at a breakfast, puppy dog. So,” he continued, while Sir Hud chafed in the freshly self-imposed bonds of his habitual courtliness, “you fear, do you? You fear that the Ogre may scape your confines and, whatever the outcome in Europe, if outcome there might be, your head would roll on Tower Hill for negligence. And if I am not to wet my feet in your encompassing ocean, nor am I to set my feet at all beyond the limits of this pitiable manor, since feet once freed to walk may walk towards some phantom vessel of liberation. You are a fool, Sir Knight, and you are also a caitiff coward.”

“I will no more of this,” said the British knight with the calm of an inner strength to which the barbarian adventurer could not, either through training or through racial endowment, himself even remotely pretend. And he picked up his helmet from the table whereon he had put it, and prepared to take his leave. But the prisoner was swift to place himself between his jailor and the door.