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Put him in jail, would they? A man who had not only once ruled a mighty people in peace, but who had, some hundreds of centuries later, made Europe tremble under the tread of his victorious armies. Ram-tah had been no fighter but Napoleon! He, Bunker Bean, was a wise king, yet a mighty warrior. Beat him down, would they? Merely because he wanted to become a director in their company!
She was dear, if you came right down to it. And Ram-tah had brought her to him. He erected himself to look down once more. They knew, those two selves; understood each other and life. It occurred to him for the first time that Ram-tah, too, must have liked dogs, must have been inexpressibly moved by the chained souls that were always trying to speak from their brown eyes.
They glided swiftly on. "Oh, just a little old last year's car!" said Bean, frowning royally at a couple of mere foot people who turned to stare. What would that flapper do next? He surrendered to the movement. Drunkenly he mused upon a wild inspiration to bring Ram-tah out and give him a ride in this big red car. It appealed to him much.
It so he usually thought of the great Ram-tah would have worn the cravat without a tremor, but It had been born a king. One glance at the thing about his neck had vividly recalled the awkward circumstance that, to the world at large, he was still Bunker Bean, a youth incapable of flaunt or flourish. Let it not be thought, however, that his new growth showed no result above ground.
She just perfectly wanted him there an hour too early; all there was about it! These events had beaten upon him with the unhurried but telling impact of an ocean tide. Two facts were salient from the mass: whatever he had done he had done because of Ram-tah; and he was going to Paris, where he would see the actual tomb of that other outworn shell of his. He thought he would not be able to sleep.
He fastened the straps of the trunk and sighed in relief. It was a steamer trunk, and he was to sail on a little old steamer, but other people had survived that ordeal. Ram-tah would have met it boldly. Ram-tah! He stood in the doorway, his attention attracted to Nap, who had for some moments been more than usually vocal.
He wished he had ordered raspberry ice instead of ginger ale, which he didn't like. He would order one anyway. It was all Ram-tah. If you knew you were a king, you needn't ever worry again. You sat still and let things come to you. After all, a king was greater than a pitcher, if you came down to it in some ways, certainly. He stared until the group left the table.
Such were the immediate and actual fruits of Ram-tah's influence. There were other effects, perhaps more subtle. Performing his accustomed work for Breede that day, he began to study his employer from the kingly, or Ram-tah, point of view.
Now he had finished the circle and was ready to become again his kingly self, his Ram-tah self able, reliant, fearless. He expanded his chest, erected his shoulders and studied himself in the glass: there was undoubted majesty in the glance. He vibrated with some fresh, strange power.
And now, far off on this splendid highway, he descried a mighty arch. Sternly gray and beautiful it was. And when, standing under it, he looked aloft to its mighty facade, its grandeur seemed threatening to him. He knew what that arch was another monument imposed upon the city by the imperial assassin without royal lineage since the passing of Ram-tah. "Some class to that upstart!" he muttered.
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