BY ETHEL WHEELER

CROSS the columns of sunshine, falling on the heads of the musicians between the columns of stone, I felt the eyes of the African slave weighing like lead upon my quivering eyelids. The place of the musicians was on the left side of the steps to the throne; but, by reason of the faint delicacy of the notes of my instrument, my seat was set at the extreme limit of the line dividing the slave boundary from the court of the King of Kings. As I waited the turn of my five-stringed instrument I could see, through lowered lashes, the rainbow-glimmer of those marble throne steps; sometimes the purple shadow of the royal robes seemed to touch with a sombre glory the edge of vision; but the eyes of the African weighed like lead upon my quivering eyelids, which pulsed fiercely to be raised, though for a slave to look upon the face of the King of Kings bore the penalty of death by torture.

Day after day, when the gold of afternoon cut its tiger-stripes upon the shadowy floors, we passed silent-footed through the cool corridors about the throne-chamber, into the awful silence of the Presence itself. The air thrilled with the terrible quiet of power; a fear that was splendid, because of the mightiness of its source, wrapped the limbs like a garment; unworthy and forbidden to lift eyes towards the blinding majesty of the equal of the gods, yet the mere force of so glorious a proximity fluttered the being to its depths, and the emotions beat like imprisoned butterflies, and like imprisoned butterflies the eyelids quivered to rise.

Sometimes, because of the languor that comes of extreme trembling, my fingers had scarce strength to strike the sweetness out of those strings in whose music they were so skilled. The note would falter into the stillness, hesitating, faint with timidity; and only the sharp realisation of the mighty listener could nerve the fingers to their appointed task. Then, answering to the memories in my mind, I drew from my instrument echo after echo of mountain music-sounds loud as the cataract, and low as the surge of wind in grass, that floated into the air, strong and clear and pure; and I, who was doomed to walk with bent head and with eyes that for ever sought the earth, sent my few wild messengers with more than mortal daring to climb the great stairs of the throne, and penetrate into the very heart of the King.

I had heard in my distant home, whence they had taken me for the music that was in my throat and in my fingers, that the King was a mighty hunter, and loved the sense of open spaces. And I deemed he heard my music because it held the call of forces only less splendid than his own; and in the dreadful pauses of silence, when I sat dizzy with sickness for the scenes of my lost freedom

that I had been building into harmonies, the desire to lift my eyes to the face of him who so transcended them in majesty became a torture in repression that grew in poignancy with every moment.

Sometimes the anguish of the controlled eyelids became so tense that they must have transgressed my will-power, and hurried me to a horrible death, but for the weight that the giant African set upon them. He stood at the other end of the group of musicians, to keep watch over our glances, lest any of them should stray; but there seemed no moment that I was free from his observation. His ugly stolidity of alertness, though it saved me from the mad promptings of my heart, did but increase the torment: it precluded that halfglimpse through half-shut eyelids that I might have thought to dare. And with every day the prick of desire became more importunate; with every day every day more racking the agony of control.

One evening I played late into the sunset, and the large metal plates that hung from my belt, interlinked by chains into long bands, caught on their surfaces the ruddy glow. And as I ceased playing, and began to shift my downward glance, a metal plate that lay aslant my knee shone with a glory more magnificent than the sun's a splash of purple radiance, glinting and changing as I stirred -the very splendour of heaven-a reflected light from the purple robes of the King of Kings.

My body seemed to flush through my thin white draperies as, with eyes riveted on that royal glow, the full tide of possibilities coursed through my being. By a little wisdom in the calculation of the angle I should be able without fatality to achieve the sum of my desire resolve the vague purple of the disk into lines and folds, sharpen the floating glints of red and green into the jewels of the diadem, and fix that pale halo of light-the blurred image of the King's own face-into the definition of his god-like features, on whose radiance I might feast unhindered, nor die the dreadful death.

But, though I polished the metals until they shone like moonlight, on the succeeding day my fingers lacked both courage and skill to set the disk so that it should receive the splendid vision. Again and again my hand stole towards the appointed plate, sending a mist over its surface, and moved the position with infinite terror lest the chain should jangle; but it cleared to a shining vacancy, or the dull confusion of stone-reflections, and only once the shadow of purple swept darkly across its moving.

On the afternoon that followed, I set the plate against the edge of my instrument, and bent low over it. The whole throne suddenly shone on me, minute, as if far away, but clear with the clearness of distance in dreams. I saw in the silver unrealityremote, but sharp-cut as the lines of crisp water-the sublime form of him who was the equal of the gods and ruler of the world. He

leaned back in his marble chair, with his arms resting upon it; the purple draperies of his robes overflowed the steps. There was the calm of a terrible indifference about him-a gravity of aloofness as cold as the stars. The dark face, moulded like a god's, stone-quiet, the close-shut hands, the stillness of the form, implied a power the more awful because of its absolute silence. I had known the loftiness of mountains and the solitude of wildernesses, but never a loneliness so terrible and so remote. It seemed the very pathos of divinity; and while my soul rose in worship before this dreadfulness of majesty, I felt my eyes grow dim with tears that I dared not think to be of human pity.

That far perspective in its silver atmosphere followed me through my waking hours and through my dreams, so that my mind, rejecting all lesser images, became at last a shrine for the holding of one jewel. I set the mirror of my metal day after day towards its source of light; I brooded with ever increasing agony of rapture on the changeless immobility of that awful calm: stone-cold, stonequiet, the King of Kings sat on his marble chair, and all the powers of death and the grave lay in his unlifted finger. Against the ice of his presence, my body burned as in a fever; a frenzy of love that was half adoration and half passion shook me as though I were an aspen leaf in thrills of wind.

His was the face of a god, perfect of beauty and of strength. At least my madness was a sublime madness, though its boldness were sacrilegious; yet it was no more than a far reflection I worshipped, a tiny surface-combination of lines and lights, removed an infinite distance in space, while the breathing reality was but a stone's-throw off, for ever, even to vision, inaccessible.

Here was the root of bitterness; for the moment came when the throne-reflection seemed thin as a painted image-distorted and inadequate as the shadow beside the substance. My eyelids no longer ached with the stress of mere curiosity: it was the soul that hungered for some nourishment beyond the film of dreams. Before, the restlessness of ignorance had pricked me: now the knowledge of my deprivation filled me with a vaster anguish. The metal mirror had lit a fire that could never cease and that it could never satisfy; and not the eyes of the African, but a new and overwhelming fear lest I should dare, and be blinded with the lightning of the gods, set a weight upon my eyelids.

There came a long pause of war, wherein my being languished and flickered as though it would go out. After followed the Feast of Victory, and music, late into the night. Torches were set in the Throne Chamber, and my belt threw off their flames. They burned still in that crowded stillness; and all the air was tense like a string that is strained. The influence of his presence that I had lacked so long, more terrible and more potent, sent a wild inspiration through

my every nerve. My notes sprang alive buoyant from my fingers, and my voice rose like the voice of a winged bird; and I sang the chant of victory that they sing to the chiefs in my distant home, and the song of the maidens to their lovers who return from battle, and of the lovers to their maidens, that my lover had once sung to me. Then suddenly I felt the fierce fire of the King's eyes burn to my soul, and they called to mine for answer, loud, insistent, all-compelling; and in a sublime moment I found our glances fast interlocked, his and mine; in one sublime moment I touched the very core of emotion, and saw into the depths of that cold aloofness, which was yet human, gloriously human, beyond the shining image of my thought. He was not altogether god-he was man ;-and the human love, winning over the divine, leapt to him from my eyes. For sharp rapture of poignance, the moment seemed eternity; the eyes held me close-close-eyes icy in their indifference, terrible in their uncomprehending calm. Then a finger lifted, and the African was beside me, and my passing from the chamber did not break its silence.

BY LLOYD SANDERS

N

O recent contribution to periodical literature has made half such a stir in England as Sir Robert Hart's memorable article, 'The Pekin Legations: a National Uprising and an International Episode." For its like we must go back to the dim days in which Huxley and Tyndall flouted the accepted theories of the cosmogony, or to the days, almost as dim, when Mr. Gladstone gave the Unspeakable One a notice to quit that he had the bad grace to ignore. Any light that could be thrown upon the Chinese welter was bound, indeed, to draw to it a public blindly groping after the truth of things. The siege of the Legations had had the stunning impact on the intellect of an inexplicable political portent. For, though the dangers of which the Boxer revolution proved capable had been foreseen by those long resident in the East, the 'expert' of Fleet Street and Paternoster Row had been clamorously predicting quite another turn of events: a struggle for the partition of China in which Great Britain, having failed to put forth her Imperial strength, would be ignominiously elbowed away from the booty. The Governments, so far as public utterances went, showed little more inkling of the patriotic resurgence than the facile prophets of Chinese transformation by Western agency, or Chinese decay through innate corruption. Not long before frenzied messages had brought news of the dire straits of the Legations, a French Foreign Minister, M. Hanotaux, had perpetrated a phrase of accepted felicity about a yellow corpse rolling aimlessly in the waters; Count von Bülow had made Bismarckian speeches to an applauding Reichstag on the assertion of German rights; and though Lord Salisbury threw doubts upon the immediate construction of Chinese railways and exploitation of Chinese mines, he was far from anticipating that the representatives of Western civilisation would have to fight for their skins in the heart of Peking, to husband their cartridges as a miser husbands his gold, and to dole out rations of horseflesh as if they were the rarest delicacies. The Boxer uprising came upon the public mind much as an earthquake overwhelms a flimsy village in neighbouring Japan.

The Legations rescued, the Chinese capital occupied and looted, the Powers proceeded to mask their perplexity as to the future under an exchange of notes and much diplomatic buzzing. Meanwhile the full accounts of the siege began to arrive; most of them, as Dr. Morrison's, with the throb of the Indian Mutiny pulsing through their pages, while one, Sir Robert Hart's, tried to get under the whistle of bullets and the splintering of roofs down to the philosophy of the business. The appetite for incident satisfied, there 1 The Fortnightly Review, November, 1900.