For this charming young girl--said, later, to have been the most beautiful woman of her time in England--though reared to Roman ways and Roman speech, had too well furnished a mind not to think for herself. "She spake," so says the record, "many tongues and was replete with piety." The only child of King Coel, her doting old father had given her the finest education that Rome could offer. She was, even before she grew to womanhood, so we are told, a fine musician, a marvellous worker in tapestry, in hammered brass and pottery, and was altogether as wise and wonderful a young woman as even these later centuries can show.
But, for all this grand education, she loved to hear the legends and stories of her people that in various ways would come to her ears, either as the simple tales of her British nurse, or in the wild songs of the wandering bards, or singers.
As she listened to these she thought less of those crude and barbaric ways of her ancestors that Rome had so vastly bettered than of their national independence and freedom from the galling yoke of Rome, and, as was natural, she cherished the memory of Boadicea, the warrior queen, and made a hero of the fiery young Caractacus.
It is always so, you know. Every bright young imagination is apt to find greater glories in the misty past, or grander possibilities in a still more misty future than in the too practical and prosaic present in which both duty and destiny lie.
And so Helena the princess, Leaning against the soft cushions of her gilded barge, had sighed for the days of the old-time British valor and freedom, and, even as she looked off toward the approaching triareme, she was wondering how she could awake to thoughts of British glory her rather heavy-witted father, Coel the King--an hereditary prince of that ancient Britain in which he was now, alas, but a tributary prince of the all too powerful Rome.
Now, "old King Cole," as Mother Goose tells us--for young Helena's father was none other than the veritable "old King Cole"of our nursery jingle--was a "jolly old soul," and a jolly old soul is very rarely an independent or ambitious one. So long as he could have "his pipe and his bowl" not, of course, his long pipe of tobacco that all the Mother Goose artists insist upon giving him--but the reed pipe upon which his musicians played--so long, in other words, as he could live in ease and comfort, undisturbed in his enjoyment of the good things of life by his Roman over-lords, he cared for no change. Rome took the responsibility and he took things easily. But this very day, while his daughter Helena was floating down the river to meet him on the strand at Wivanloe, he was returning from an unsuccessful boar-hunt in the Essex woods, very much out of sorts--cross because he had not captured the big boar he had hoped to kill, cross because his favorite musicians had been "confiscated" by the Roman governor or propraetor at Londinium (as London was then called), and still more cross because he had that day received dispatches from Rome demanding a special and unexpected tax levy, or tribute, to meet the necessary expenses of the new Emperor Diocletian.
Something else had happened to increase his ill temper. His "jolly old soul," vexed by the numerous crosses of the day, was thrown into still greater perplexity by the arrival, just as he stood fretful and chafing on the shore at Wivanloe, of one who even now was with him on the trireme, bearing him company back to his palace at Camolodunum--Carausius the admiral.
This Carausius, the admiral, was an especially vigorous, valorous, and fiery young fellow of twenty-one. He was cousin to the Princess Helena and a prince of the blood royal of ancient Britain. Educated under the strict military system of Rome, he had risen to distinction in the naval force of the Empire, and was now the commanding officer in the northern fleet that had its central station at Gessoriacum, now Boulogne, on the northern coast of France. He had chased and scattered the German pirates who had so long ravaged the northern seas, had been named by the Emperor admiral of the north, and was the especial pride, as he was the dashing young leader, of the Roman sailors along the English Channel and the German shores.
The light barge of the princess approached the heavier boat of the king, her father. At her signal the oarsmen drew up alongside, and, scarce waiting for either boat to more than slacken speed, the nimble-footed girl sprang lightly to the deck of her father's galley. Then bidding the obedient Cleon take her own barge back to the palace, she hurried at once, and without question, like the petted only child she was, into the high-raised cabin at the stern, where beneath the Roman standards sat her father the king.
Helena entered the apartment at a most exciting moment. For there, facing her portly old father, whose clouded face bespoke his troubled mind, stood her trimly-built young cousin Carausius the admiral, bronzed with his long exposure to the sea-blasts, a handsome young viking, and, in the eyes of the hero-loving Helen, very much of a hero because of his acknowledged daring and his valorous deeds.
Neither man seemed to have noticed the sudden entrance of the girl, so deep were they in talk.
