"Ay," said the man, without relaxing a muscle of his grim face.
"It is the King of England--my king and yours."



II

In the small hours of the next morning I was awoke by a most
unearthly sound. It was as if all the cats on all the roofs of
Santa Chiara were sharpening their claws and wailing their
battle-cries. Presently out of the noise came a kind of
music--very slow, solemn, and melancholy. The notes ran up in
great flights of ecstasy, and sunk anon to the tragic deeps. In
spite of my sleepiness I was held spellbound and the musician had
concluded with certain barbaric grunts before I had the curiosity
to rise. It came from somewhere in the gallery of the inn, and
as I stuck my head out of my door I had a glimpse of Oliphant,
nightcap on head and a great bagpipe below his arm, stalking down
the corridor.

The incident, for all the gravity of the music, seemed to give a
touch of farce to my interview of the past evening. I had gone
to bed with my mind full of sad stories of the deaths of kings.
Magnificence in tatters has always affected my pity more deeply
than tatters with no such antecedent, and a monarch out at elbows
stood for me as the last irony of our mortal life. Here was a
king whose misfortunes could find no parallel. He had been in
his youth the hero of a high adventure, and his middle age had
been spent in fleeting among the courts of Europe, and waiting as