Times change for all of us. The roaring flood of youth goes by, and the stream of life sinks to a quiet flow. Sapt is an old man now; soon my sons will be grown up, men enough themselves to serve Queen Flavia. Yet the memory of Rudolf Rassendyll is fresh to me as on the day he died, and the vision of the death of Rupert of Hentzau dances often before my eyes. It may be that some day the whole story shall be told, and men shall judge of it for themselves. To me it seems now as though all had ended well. I must not be misunderstood: my heart is still sore for the loss of him. But we saved the queen’s fair fame, and to Rudolf himself the fatal stroke came as a relief from a choice too difficult: on the one side lay what impaired his own honor, on the other what threatened hers. As I think on this my anger at his death is less, though my grief cannot be. To this day I know not how he chose; no, and I don’t know how he should have chosen. Yet he had chosen, for his face was calm and clear. Come, I have thought so much of him that I will go now and stand before his monument, taking with me my last-born son, a little lad of ten. He is not too young to desire to serve the queen, and not too young to learn to love and reverence him who sleeps there in the vault and was in his life the noblest gentleman I have known. I will take the boy with me and tell him what I may of brave King Rudolf, how he fought and how he loved, and how he held the queen’s honor and his own above all things in this world. The boy is not too young to learn such lessons from the life of Mr. Rassendyll. And while we stand there I will turn again into his native tongue--for, alas, the young rogue loves his toy soldiers better than his Latin!--the inscription that the queen wrote with her own hand, directing that it should be inscribed in that stately tongue over the tomb in which her life lies buried. “To Rudolf, who reigned lately in this city, and reigns for ever in her heart.--QUEEN FLAVIA.” I told him the meaning, and he spelt the big words over in his childish voice; at first he stumbled, but the second time he had it right, and recited with a little touch of awe in his fresh young tones: RUDOLFO Qui in hac civitate nuper regnavit In corde ipsius in aeternum regnat FLAVIA REGINA. I felt his hand tremble in mine, and he looked up in my face. “God save the Queen, father,” said he. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Rupert of Hentzau, by Anthony Hope