Quietly folding his arms, he took his stand by the coffin of the dead
in silence. The dashing spray that leaped at the masts of the vessel,--
the wind that scooped up the billows into higher and higher pinnacles
of emerald green, might have been soundless and powerless, for all he
seemed to hear or to heed.
"Why are you with us?" cried Thord again--"How came you on this ship,
where I thought I had hidden myself alone with her, voyaging to Death?
Could you not have left her to me?--you who have a throne and kingdom
--I, to whom she was all my life!"
"I came--as you have come"--answered the King--"to die with her--or
rather not to die, but to find Life with her! She loved me!"
With a savage curse, Thord raised the pistol he held. The King looked
him full in the eyes.
"Take good aim, Sergius!" he said tranquilly--"For here between us lies
Lotys--the silent witness of your deed! Go hence, if you must, with two
murders on your soul! There is no escape from death for either you or
me, take it how we may;--and I care not at all how I meet it, whether
at your hands or in the waves of the sea! Give me the same death you
gave to Lotys! I ask no better end! For so at least shall we meet more
quickly!"
Half choked with his fury, Thord looked at him with fixed and glassy
eyes. He was jealous of death!--jealous that death should of itself
seem to reunite Lotys and the man she had loved more closely together!
Standing erect by the purple pall that covered the one woman of the
world to them both, the King looked 'every inch a king,'--the
incarnation of pride, love, resolve and courage.
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