Lord of the Sea

by M. P. Shiel

  XLV

  ESTRELLA, THE PROPHETESS

  For three weeks a Provisional Ministry carried on the Government,confining itself to Supply; till, on the 3rd March, the Lord Regentsucceeded in forming a Cabinet; and at 9 on the evening of the 5th forthe first time addressed himself to the country in the House of Lords.

  That night the world seemed hushed to listen, the peridom of Britainpacking the Gallery with rainbow, and the peerdom those benches andcross-benches, red as massacre and the Scarlet Woman, where thronged580, while to Charing Cross spread the crowd without. He, from theThrone, addressed them, and they, startled by the revelation of a castechaster far than Vere de Vere, and a pride far more serenely thronedthan Hohenzollern, acknowledged him high-born... "Your lordships willnot fail to perceive my will to invigorate some of our ancient epithets:thus, the First Estate of the Realm shall, during the present Regency,be veritably 'First', and in no case last"; anon he blew his bugle: "Letus play the man!--easy to say, hard to do: yet it was first said by anEnglishman when the doing, I think, was hard enough, his martyr'sshroud already rapt aloft in flame: _that_ was magnanimous, my lords, Ideclare! _there_ was the British Lion"....

  That same night a new Land Bill was introduced by Sir Robert Wortley,the Prime Minister--a bill drafted, criticized, and re-altered duringtwo years by the legal experts of the Sea, proposing the "purchase" ofGreat Britain at a price of twice the annual value for inherited land,and seven times for land held by purchase: this to be paid in two andseven years respectively, without interest, lands yielding no revenueto become crown-lands from the date of the Bill, which was called: LandDepartment (Creation) Bill.

  It passed first reading; but the question was: would the Jews vote forthe second reading? Reluctant enough the Jewish members, but therewere rumours that the Jewish electorate were instructing theirrepresentatives to repent and vote for.

  And now spread far the League of Resistance, so did the Adair StreetSociety, its secret daughter, of which Admiral Donald (O'Hara) had nowbeen elected Honorary Vice-Master, and whose Roll contained the names ofan extraordinary number of Territorial officers.

  The Society was busy: had building four yachts, all models of theAdmiral's yacht attached to the _Mahomet_, which was called the _MahometII_; every dusk companies of 25 to 40 men drilled darkly in the backyard at Adair Street, some of them Territorial officers: in rotationthey came, they drilled, over 1000; a top room piled with revolvers,swords, bowie-knives...

  For the land-magnates laughed at the notion of submitting to the Bill:rather, said they, "rivers of blood". The mention by Hogarth of Ridleyand Latimer they considered irrelevant; their fathers' heroic mood was adetail: not an entail.

  In secret they met. Anarchists of the reddest hue.

  One night when the Bill was approaching second-reading Frankl introducedHarris as a member; and wide-eyed stood Harris, though still cynical,with elegant walking-stick, hat cocked, and "I sye", he whispered, "areall these real, living lords?"

  "Large as life", answered Frankl.

  "Strike me dotty! The Lord said unto my lord, sit thou at my righthand"...the reason of this introduction of Harris being a relation whichhad arisen between the Army and the Lord Regent, who had been takinga startling interest in this branch of the services, had visitedAldershot, and held five reviews, flattering the soldier by privatenotice, shifting officers. By an Order in Council of the 3rd March, areorganization was effected in the Army Board and Consultative Council,of the new men the Adjutant-General being General Sir Merrick Parr,uncle of Admiral Parr of the sea-fort _Shakespeare_, while theCommander-in-Chief and Inspector-General were the direct creations ofthe Regent, and the whole Headquarters Staff bound to follow him throughthick and thin; and that "second reading" was near, which, if the Jewswould vote against, well and good for Adair Street, but, if not, thereremained either (1) the prompt execution of O'Hara's scheme withoutwaiting for the four yachts, copies of the _Mahomet II_, which were slowin building; or (2) the knife of Harris.

  But, as to (1), when three delegates from the Society had waited uponO'Hara in the _Mahomet_ to urge immediate action, O'Hara had replied:"No, my lords, I cannot enter into this undertaking until preparationsare complete, since the troops we send would never be allowed to landon the forts, if they arrived in ships not apparently our own. Yourlordships cannot be more anxious than I to rid the earth of a devouringlion like Richard Hogarth, I do assure you; but, tut, is there nothingelse meanwhile? Just let me introduce to your lordships a little youngman whom I know"--he had summoned Harris.

  But when the three delegates had gone, he had struck his brow,exclaiming: "Wretch that I am!--that great and good fellow, the fairestof the sons of men!...what a black depravity must be in this heart--"he had underlooked in the mirror, and cut a face; "but ah, Hogarth! thisheart is in your net; and I loved the mother, too"....

  He had sought the altar, and that night had written piteously toHogarth, appealing for fresh friendship and reconsideration of hissentence of dismissal.

  So, at any rate, was Harris introduced to Adair Street, became its chiefminister, and ten days before the second-reading debate had won, byO'Hara's recommendation, an _entree_ into the Palace as servant to agentleman-usher-daily-waiter: and now he made bright the knife of theassassin, tending its edge as a gardener the tender sprout, the knifebeing his _metier_ and forte, he despising the noisy, mediate, uncertainpistol, nor could use it, his instincts belonging to the Stone Age. Butthe days passed, and he could by no means get near to Hogarth.

  One night he boldly penetrated to the royal antechamber with the knifeunder his waist-band, having passed the stairs-guard by a speciousofficial envelope. As it was late, he thought it must be about theRegent's bedtime, having the vaguest ideas as to royal ways andbedtimes, Hogarth being then in a consultation with three of the Cabinetdestined to last till morning. And Harris: "Can I see the Lord Regent?"with that lifted brow of perpetual surprise and alertness.

  "You? Who are you?" asked a gentleman-in-waiting.

  "That's neither 'ere nor there, if it comes to that. I'm CaptainMacnaghten's man, then".

  "But what is it you want?"

  "He told me to give the Regent this 'ere"--showing the envelope.

  "Weally! then, give it to me".

  "He said I was to give it to the Regent's self".

  "Then, go to blazes quickly, will you? and let Captain Macnaghten knowfwom me that he has been dwinking".

  Harris could not penetrate the ten-fold barrier; but he lay in wait;watched from some coign every Royal exit and entrance, careful thatHogarth never saw his face; and he cherished the knife-edge.

  One night, four days before the debate, he stood by the Green Parkrailings, listless, smoking, when--he started: saw a hurried figure comeout--face muffled--Hogarth!--alone.

  Hogarth walked a little, entered a cab; Harris, in another, shadowedhim.

  Down Piccadilly, the Hammersmith Road, into the Addison: Hogarthalighted; Harris followed.

  Now, at this time Hogarth had a spy, who presented him reports of thedoings of Rebekah Frankl--a species of literature which the Regent foundagreeable; and, as for two days Rebekah had, for some reason, been at avilla of Addison Road, this escapade of the Lord Regent was motived byhis hope of catching there some glimpse of her, the house being small,he having seized his first chance of secret escape from state-affairsnear midnight: and behind him, like the shadow of death, stole theassassin.

  Hogarth, going soft up to the house, leaned aside from the frontagesteps to peer; but Venetian blinds barred him from the least sightof the interior, though he could hear sounds, strange sounds, as ofwailing; and, as the villa was in the midst of quite a spacious ground,well grown with trees and shrubberies, he stole round to the back,peered into an open door level with the garden, and within saw a doorwayof twilight in the midst of darkness; had hoped to see a servant, whomight talk gossip, or even contrive him sight of the Sacred Body; hadready bribe in hand: but nobody there. So, after some hesitation, hee
ntered; and Harris, just then come to the house-corner on tiptoe,discerned him go in, ran on hot bricks to the door, and now distinctlysaw Hogarth, who had passed through a kitchen, standing on three woodensteps before a doorway which framed a faint light in the room beyond.

  On which a shivering of eagerness, quick as winking sheet-lightning,shook Harris' right knee.

  Hogarth, meantime, having seen the chamber before him empty, in hisheadlong way had entered, and the guess now in Harris' mind was this:"It's a girl: a night out"....

  He hesitated, Hogarth being once within the house and lost to him, butafter some minutes dared to follow.

  Hogarth, meantime, had seen that the light came from a death-taper, withwhich was a vessel of water for ceremonial purification, and a napkin,here being all the preparations for _tahara_ (washing); and suddenly,in a near room, arose the clamorous dole of _shivah_ (the sevenmourning-days), Rachel weeping for her children, because they are not:a Jew was dead: "shema, Yisrael...": and this explained Rebekah's staythere, for the bereaved may not leave the house. A peer at the bed--acovered face--pierced him with a compunction like shame: here was_kodesh_, and he a desecrator with his earthy passion: so he turned tobeat a retreat by the way he had come--when a faint sound that way, madeby Harris; and, instead, he leapt lightly through a window five feetabove the garden.

  Some moments later Harris, entering on prowling all-fours, and seeingthe bed-clothes hang immediately near, stole under; waited: no soundsave the singsong lament; and "O Gawd", thought he, cynic even in hispalest agitation, "there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashingof teeth"....But that Hogarth had not come to wail and gnash he feltconvinced: if he heard no sound above him, that might be because of thesounds around; so he crawled barely out, and, kneeling, put up a mostcautious groping hand, the bed being in the darkest part of the room;someone there: and swiftly as a dolphin twists to dart and snap,his knife was in a breast and instantly ready to strike its expectedbedfellow.

  But the breast was alone, the breast of Estrella, the Prophetess, fourdays dead.

  Harris snatched off the face-cloth, peered upon a noble old visage,fixed now in trance, and said: "Well, I'm--"

  Now he ran, but in the kitchen stopped wild-eyed. It I might bemurder-he was not certain; at least it was out-rage, and he might betraced: there was the cabman who had brought him--his absence fromthe Palace---"Bah! it can't be proved...." But still, if he were evenarrested, and Hogarth got to hear of his presence about the Court--thatwould spoil all. He listened: all that part of the house a settledsolitude, the servants themselves sitting _shivah_; and back he ran,seized upon the little old body, not now stiff, _rigor mortis_ havingpassed, saw that the sheet was unstained, and snatched her away outto the bottom of the garden where shrubbery and holly-hedge formed ajungle.

  Now he set to dig with hissing haste; and, even as he hissed and digged,he talked without pause, envenomed, heaping her sanctity with insult:"Old cat you...dust to dust and ashes to ashes, it is....What you wantto do that for? under you go in the cold, cold sod....Who arst you toput your little finger in the pie? There's another one for you, fair inthe gullet! Now take her up tenderly, lift her with care-and down shegoes"....

  Such were Estrella's _kaddish_ and "House of Life"....As he had only theknife, and the work was slow, and in the midst of it an outcry from thehouse, the body missed, he stopped, listening, but without acute fear,knowing it improbable that they could dream of seeking in the grounds,and as a matter of fact their minds were a mere paralysis of holywonder; so presently he had the little body in a two-foot grave,arranged surface and dead leaves to naturalness, leapt a wall, and gotaway.

  Never did act of assassin have result so momentous: for though thepredictions of Estrella had lately spread far among upper-class Jews, itwas only on the day after her burial by Harris that her fame reached toeach Jew under the sun.

  It was given out that divine confirmation had been vouchsafed to herprophecies by the snatching of her body, like Enoch's, into Heaven, orby its burial, like Moses', by Jahvah: for when no explanation but oneis extant, the brain fastens upon that, and embraces it.

  And as Estrella, who, in life, had guarded her hard sayings for the few,had left papers revealing for her whole race what she had dreamed, likewildfire now ran her message among the Chosen.

  Now Temple and Synagogue were crowded: rabbi and pawnbroker and_maggid,_ clothes-man and _takif,_ were infected; and there spread thecry (for the most part meaningless): "To Zion!"

  It may be that the Jewish electorate were now too agitated with the nearprobability of Shiloh to interest themselves in any mundane question: atall events, it was during that rage that the Government-whips announcedthe certainty that the Jewish members would vote against the Land Bill.

  Hogarth first heard it pretty late at night from the Prime Minister; and"Ha!-the Jews", he went: "so they have dared, these men? I never thoughtthat they would! May God deliver me from His ill-chosen people--!"

  "And ill-choosing, it seems, my Lord King".

  "Quite so! But, Sir Robert Wortley, is it supportable this thing?"--abrand now on his brow--"an alien race in Britain opposing thus daringlynot _my_ will only, but the plain will of the people? And have I the airof one who will support it? Rather, I assure you, would I govern withouta Parliament! But stop--perhaps I shall be found capable of dealing withthese mischievous children of Israel. Give me a night: and to-morrowat noon come, and hear. Of course, this second-reading business must bepostponed ".

  And deep and wide, in lonely vigil, wrought the Regent's thought thatnight, till morning: of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of tendencies,histories, soils, ports, railways, possibilities, race-genius,analogies, destinies; of Rothschild and I Solomon; of Hirsch and Y'hudahHanassi; of the Jewish Board of Guardians, Rab Asa, and the Targum onthe Babylonish Talmud; of the Barbary Jews, the Samaritans, and Y'hudahHalevi; of the Colonial Bank, and the Karaite Jews....

  When at dawn he threw himself dressed into bed, he had resolved upona very great thing: their expulsion from England, Pole and Hungarian,Baron and coster, and the little child at the breast, ten millions.

  His eyes had closed toward sleep when, with a start, he remembered aprophecy uttered one evening in the _Boodah_ Throne-room, and thesewords: "Richard, deal gently with my people...."

  Two nights later, with a retinue, he hurriedly left England-forConstantinople.