Historical
An Uncrowned King Chapter 7 Part 1
“I feel I’ve about earned my night’s repose,” yawned Cyril to himself in the solitude of his own room. “If all the Thracians have worked as hard to-day as their king and his brother, they’re an industrious nation. Hullo! some of them must be at it still. I suppose old Drakovics has been hurrying them, for fear things won’t be ready for the coronation.”
By Sydney Grier4 years ago in Fiction
An Uncrowned King Chapter 5 Part 4
“But how can it signify what I thought of you? How can my conscience judge for yours? Oh, I have been thinking often since we have been here that I may have led you wrong. I ought to have advised you to see which was the harder to do—to accept or decline the crown—and to choose that.”
By Sydney Grier4 years ago in Fiction
An Uncrowned King Chapter 8 Part 4
The persons who in reality carried on the work of government were not the grey-haired chiefs who surrounded their new King, but the army of inferior officials to whom the Scythian newspapers were wont to refer scathingly as “briefless barristers and unsuccessful journalists.” They were western to a fault, wore their black broadcloth as though to the manner born, and it was easy to see that it was on them, and not on the titular heads of their departments, that M. Drakovics relied for the prosecution of his policy. Each of these men was directly responsible to him, for the nominal Ministers relied on him to tell them what papers they were to sign, and what orders they were to give, and he sent them as subordinates whom he chose. On these subordinates he could depend, for he had raised them from their original obscurity to the position they occupied at present, and all their interests were bound up with his, so that they were ready to cling to him through thick and thin. Perilous as such an autocracy may appear, the dangers which usually accompany an experiment of the kind had not as yet shown themselves in any great degree, probably owing to the common peril from Scythia which menaced ruler and ruled alike, while the administration of King Peter Franza had been so corrupt that the people hailed the present one as a foretaste of the millennium.
By Sydney Grier4 years ago in Fiction
An Uncrowned King Chapter 5 Part 3
Caerleon followed him out, intending to comply with the request, but speech was impossible in presence of the cry of welcome that went up as soon as he became visible. For some minutes he was perforce silent, while the people shouted themselves hoarse, flung their caps into the air, leaped for joy, embraced one another, and wept copiously. He felt oddly reminded of his coming of age, and how he had risen to make his speech at the great dinner his father had given to the Llandiarmid tenants amid a scene of excitement such as this, when the sturdy farmers had sprung up like one man, and drunk his health with acclamations. They had presented him with an old silver punch-bowl—rather an incongruous gift for an uncompromising temperance man—and it had put him into an awkward predicament. A happy thought had struck him, he remembered, and he had told them that he would use the bowl for salad—a statement which was regarded as an exquisite joke, and received with shouts of approving laughter. It was queer that this should all pass through his mind now, as he stood waiting until the rejoicing calmed down a little, and he was able to obtain a moment’s silence. He found himself almost as much at a loss for words as on that earlier occasion, but at last he managed to say—
By Sydney Grier4 years ago in Fiction
An Uncrowned King Chapter 6 Part 2
“Oh, my friend, why were you not born a Thracian?” cried M. Drakovics, seizing Cyril in his arms, and imprinting a fervent kiss on each of his cheeks. “Your plan is almost perfect: it has only one drawback—that it is impossible. Every King of Thracia must be crowned in the chapel of St Peter at Bellaviste. It is a small, rude building, standing in the quadrangle of the palace, and in it Alexander Franza, first of the name—the patriot king—saw a vision of St Peter, the night before the great battle in which he burst the Roumi yoke. No other coronation would be valid in the opinion of the people, nor can the crown be legally removed from the chapel. It is kept in a great chest built into the wall, of which I hold one key, the Metropolitan another, and the king the third. I have it now to deliver to his Majesty, but none of the keys will open the box without the other two. Your brother cannot be crowned until we reach Bellaviste, for no make-shift crown would be tolerated by the Thracians.”
By Sydney Grier4 years ago in Fiction
An Uncrowned King Chapter 6 Part 4
On these occasions Cyril generally remained in the background, afraid of being caught laughing, as he told M. Drakovics, to the no small indignation of the Premier. Wright shared his objection to publicity, but for a different reason, feeling very uneasy in his mind as to the whole proceeding, now that he understood its import, and not at all sure that it was consistent with his duty to Queen Victoria to become a subject of Caerleon. There was an unhappy consciousness that something was wrong about his whole aspect, which would have afforded Cyril infinite amusement at any other time; but now, as from his commanding position on horseback he watched his brother’s close-cropped fair head towering above the unkempt locks of his new subjects, he was busy trying to enter into the feelings of the Thracians. Mothers brought their children to look at Caerleon, for good luck, as they said, “that their eyes might see the King’s face”; old men came tottering up to touch his coat or his riding-whip, and to call down blessings on his head. It was all too absurdly medieval, thought Cyril, as the office-bearers of the little towns came hurrying to take the oath of allegiance to their new King, and the peasants crowded round to entreat him to raise an army to conquer Scythia, in which every man of them would enlist. Why should they make all this fuss about an unimaginative Englishman, who merely looked uncomfortable when a more than usually fervent assurance of devotion was translated to him, and who could say nothing in return but that he would try to do his best for the people and the country? There could be no idea of Divine Right in this case, for how could such a sentiment consist with the popular election of the monarch? and as for loyalty, how could they feel loyalty to a man of whom they knew nothing but that he was an English prince, for whom M. Drakovics vouched as a suitable candidate for the throne? Cyril decided at last that they regarded Caerleon as the incarnation of the spirit of the late revolution, and as a bulwark against Scythia and the return of the House of Franza; but the Thracians themselves would probably have explained their delight much more simply by saying that they had a king at last, that he was young, good-looking, and fair-haired, and that he spoke courteously and looked like a soldier.
By Sydney Grier4 years ago in Fiction
An Uncrowned King Chapter 3 Part 1
Leaving his brother to contemplate the beauties of nature under the shade of the pines, Caerleon walked on, finding his progress much more rapid than it had been when Cyril was his companion, and arrived before very long at a point from which he was able to descry the huntsman’s cottage, built under the shelter of a towering crag. Pausing for a moment to determine which of two paths now before him would be more likely to lead him directly towards it, he heard footsteps above him, and presently a lady came in sight round a turning in the right-hand path. Tall and slight, she wore a plain tweed dress and felt hat, and the trim neatness of her appearance struck Caerleon as most refreshing after the alternate dowdiness and magnificence of many of the Austrian belles he had come across. It did not occur to him at first that this stately lady could be the hoydenish little Scythian schoolgirl of whom he was in search, but presently it struck him as unlikely that two young ladies would be wandering alone in the mountains on the same day, and he advanced to meet the girl.
By Sydney Grier4 years ago in Fiction
An Uncrowned King Chapter 6 Part 6
“Call this being king?” said Caerleon, when he and Cyril met at dinner in the comparatively small room which they had chosen out of the wilderness of state apartments as their dining-room when by themselves, for there were few regular court officials at present. The chief functionaries had all gone into exile with the late king, and it had not been possible to appoint their successors as yet, so that matters were in the hands of such of the less important officials as had adopted the cause of the revolution. These had not yet acquired the reverential obtuseness which would have enabled those whose places they had taken to maintain their position about the king as long as etiquette required, in spite of his disinclination for their society. Accordingly they effaced themselves obediently when their sovereign intimated that their attendance was not further desired that night, and it did not strike Caerleon that even the freedom he now enjoyed would have been impossible in a properly constituted court. “I call it being a slave, no less,” he went on. “What a luxurious beast old Franza must have been! I never saw anything like the rooms up-stairs. Well, if luxury could compensate him for all the bother and fuss, he deserved it.”
By Sydney Grier4 years ago in Fiction
An Uncrowned King Chapter 6 Part 5
“That is all our work since the revolution,” said M. Drakovics, pointing to this rampart with pride. “Under the Franzas, the money voted for fortifications was all spent on excavating and arming useless batteries along the river-front, which no foe would think of attacking, while the town was left defenceless.”
By Sydney Grier4 years ago in Fiction
