Lives of Alcyone

upon him, but nevertheless he knew that to kill a member of a rich
and powerful house was a dangerous action, no matter now great
the provocation may have been; so he judged it wise to have himself
carried at the earliest dawn in a litter to the court of the Raja, so that
he himself might state his case before a complaint could against
him.
He told the whole truth to the king, exactly as it had occurred.
The Monarch had little difficulty in believing the story, for the dead
man’ s character was well known, and Alcyone’ s reputation was a
good one. The Raja expressed perfect sympathy and assured him
that the law should not punish him for the deed, which he
considered entirely justifiable; but at the same time powerful
enemies, from the subtler forms of whose vengeance even he, the
king, might not be able to shield him.
Meanwhile the Raja forestalled any complaint or criticism by
himself issuing a notice announcing the death of the ravisher, and
the circumstances under which it had taken place, adding a free
pardon to Alcyone, and an expression of his belief that no brave
man could have acted otherwise than he had done. After that there
was nothing more too be said, and the majority of his people heartily
approved the manifesto; the injured family thought it politic to appear
to agree with the general verdict, but at the same time they gave
elaborate funeral ceremonies to their kinsman, and contrived in
various small ways to make it apparent that they were by no means
ready to forget and forgive the stain that had fallen on their name.
From this time onwards Alcyone’ s life was never free from
all kinds of intrigues and accusations; and he soon began to realise
that this was due not merely to the physical plane persecution of a