Produced by D. Alexander and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)
THE PROUD PRINCE
BY
JUSTIN HUNTLY McCARTHY
AUTHOR OF "MARJORIE" "IF I WERE KING" ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
R. H. RUSSELL
1903
Copyright, 1903, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
Published October, 1903.
[Illustration: "'I LOVE THE MAN'"
See p. 276]
DEDICATED
TO
E. H. SOTHERN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. FAIR MAID AND FOUL FOOL 1
II. THE COMING OF THE KING 28
III. ROBERT OF SICILY 46
IV. THE HUNTER 71
V. LYCABETTA 89
VI. THE ARCHANGEL 99
VII. DISCROWNED, DISHONORED 118
VIII. PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN 128
IX. THE LILY OF SICILY 150
X. THE TWO VOICES 164
XI. GLAMOUR 177
XII. IN SYRACUSE 194
XIII. THE CHURCH BY THE SEA 201
XIV. THE EXILES 213
XV. THE HUNTER'S VOICE 223
XVI. THE CALL OF THE BELL 232
XVII. IN THE ARENA 247
XVIII. ORDEAL OF BATTLE 264
XIX. ROBERT THE RIGHTEOUS 271
ILLUSTRATIONS
"'I LOVE THE MAN'" _Frontispiece_
PERPETUA AND DIOGENES THE FOOL _Facing p._ 14
PERPETUA " 36
KING ROBERT OF SICILY " 50
"ROBERT CAUGHT HER OUTSTRETCHED HANDS" " 78
"'I AM ROBERT OF SICILY'" " 86
"PERPETUA MOVED SLOWLY TOWARDS HIM" " 180
"ROBERT, SWINGING THE CROSS, WITH ONE BLOW
BEAT HIM TO THE GROUND" " 244
THE PROUD PRINCE
I
FAIR MAID AND FOUL FOOL
The girl stood on the summit of the hill looking down the white highway
that stretched to Syracuse. The morning sun shone hotly; sky and sea and
earth seemed to kindle and quicken in the ecstasy of heat, setting free
spirits of air and earth and water, towards whom the girl's spirit
stirred in sympathy. All about her beauty flamed luxuriant. At her feet
the secrets of the world were written in wild flowers, the wild flowers
of Sicily, which redeem the honor of the wellnigh flowerless land of
Greece. All about her the ground flushed with such color as never yet
was woven on a Persian loom or blended in a wizard's diadem. The gold
and silver of great daisies gleamed in the grass; pimpernel blue and
red, mallow red and white, yellow spurge and green mignonette, blue
borage and pink asphodel and parti-colored convolvulus, snap-dragon and
marigold, violet and dandelion, and that crimson flower which shepherds
call Pig's Face and poets call Beard of Jove for its golden change in
autumn--all these and a thousand other children of the spring lay at the
girl's feet and carpeted her kingdom. But the girl was more beautiful
than all the flowers.
The spot where the girl stood was as fair a spot as any in Sicily.
Behind her on the fringe of the thick mountain pine-wood the blue tiled
dome of a Saracenic mosque glowed like a great turquoise in the midst of
the amber-tinted pillars of a ruined Grecian temple. In front of her, on
a little hill, stood the beautiful Norman church that Robert the King
had erected there on the highest point of his kingdom in gratitude for
his son's recovery from sickness, a miracle of austere strength and
comeliness, with its great bronze image in a niche by the door of the
Archangel Michael, all armored, with his hands resting on the hilt of
his drawn sword. Below her lay all the splendor of Syracuse, the island
town, the smiling bay where the Athenian galleys had been snared more
than fifteen hundred years before, the quarries where the flower of
Athenian chivalry had died its dreadful death, the sapphire sea that
sang its secrets to Theocritus. In all Sicily there was no lovelier
spot, no fairer prospect. But the girl was more beautiful than the place
whereon she stood or the sights on which she gazed.
If the spirit of Theocritus, coming from the fields where Virgil
lingered unaware of Dante, could have revisited his much-loved Syracuse,
the poet of Berenice would have found that the island of Aphrodite still
bore women worthy of the goddess. The girl was tall and straight and
slim; health and youth gave their warm color to her cheeks; the old
Greek beauty reigned in her face, but her blue eyes shone with the
brightness of Oriental stars. Her red hair, wine red, blood red, framed
her face with amazing color. Something of the composition of the
woodland entered into the hues of the garments she wore, the simple
garments of a country girl, but shaped of stuffs that were dyed warm
reds and browns, the red of forest fires, the brown of forest trees. It
seemed as if the child, conscious of the strange loveliness of her red
hair, sought to harmonize her very habit to its fierce assertion. Yet
there was no fierceness in the face that the red hair crowned so
radiantly. If it carried the Grecian beauty, it carried also the Grecian
calm, the noble repose of the Grecian image that once had stood in the
splendid temple whose ruined pillars now girdled ironically the ruined
Moslem mosque. Two civilizations had withered in Sicily to afford a
shelter for Perpetua, the daughter of Theron, the executioner of
Syracuse.
Perpetua, daughter of Theron the executioner of Syracuse, waiting for
the coming of Theron the executioner, looked with calm eyes upon
Syracuse, upon the distant city of which she knew no more in all her
eighteen years of life than that same distant vision, a jewel city lying
in orchards at her feet. She had no desire to know more of it; her
father wished that she should know no more of it, and she was content,
for Theron the executioner was the wisest man in the world, wiser than
the few priests who tended the chapel on the hill, wiser than the few
country folk who sometimes climbed to those heights and seemed to fear
the executioner and the executioner's hut and the executioner's
daughter, the white girl with the hair that was red as blood. These were
all the men she knew; these made the world, the outer world, for her.
Her real world was where her father was with his tales of gods and
heroes, and his ancient songs and his great sword. It was her task,
self-chosen and rich in pride, to tend the great sword, to keep it
stainless, to sharpen its edge on the grindstone while she sang the Song
of the Sword, and the sparks flew and the great sword seemed to gleam
with an answering fervor. But never in all the days of her young life
had blood to be washed from the sword. For Sicily smiled under the sway
of King Robert the Good, who had no need for executioners.
But the father went sometimes into the city, where the girl never went,
and then the hours seemed long to the girl, and she often came to the
edge of the mountain and gazed down the white ribbon of winding road for
the earliest glimpse of the dear, familiar figure, toilsomely ascending.
To-day the hours seemed longer than ever, for there was the shadow of a
secret over the child's soul, and she sighed for her father's presence,
that she might tell him the secret and be free of it, though she knew
very well in her heart that when her father was by her side she would
still stifle her secret. A little secret, indeed, a laughable secret,
for those down there in Syracuse, at the foot of the mountain, who took
the world for what it was, but a great one to the soul of a girl who had
lived all her life on the top of a mountain in a dwelling whose roof was
the crest of a Moslem mosque, and whose garden palings were the pillars
of a temple of Aphrodite; a girl who took the world for what it was not
and for what it could never be.
The white road was as empty as a noon-day dream; its whiteness only
troubled by one moving object, as noon-day dreams are often troubled by
one persistent, inappreciable idea. But the girl had eyes as keen as a
mountain-eagle, and she knew that, whoever the climber was, the climber
was not her father. Then she sighed a little sigh and turned and entered
her dwelling and drew the door behind her, and the mountain-top was
lonely for a time. Only for a time. Up the hill came a fantastical
fellow, alternately singing and sighing, for it seemed that the fierce
heat vexed him despite of his melody. He was a strange ape, tall and
lean and withered, with a wry shoulder like a gibbous moon and a wry leg
like a stricken tree, and his face was as the face of a goblin, with a
long, peaked nose, and loose, protruding lips, traitors to the few and
evil teeth that interwalled his livid gums, and his ears stood out like
bats' wings from his yellow, wrinkled cheeks. He was visibly punished by
his journey; the sweat streamed from his leather and under his puckered
eyelids his eyes flamed imprecations. His grotesque body was enveloped
in yet more grotesque apparel--the piebald of the buffoon, the mottled
livery of the chartered mountebank. There was a slender collar of gold
about his neck, on which those that were near enough to him and had
quick sight might read in plain terms that he was a royal fool, one of
those jesters whom the great loved to tend to their beck, that they
might ply them with mirth in hours that were mirthless. When the
fantastical fellow had reached the summit he flung himself at once onto
the nearest seat that one of the fallen columns afforded, and sat for a
space gasping and puffing and spitting out blasphemies between every
gasp and puff of his staggered anatomy.
When his wind came to him it took shape in a furious soliloquy,
addressed to the vacant space about. "Devil take the day!" he grunted,
pressing his hands to his lean sides as if he were trying to squeeze
back the breath into his jaded body. "The sun rides as sky-high as the
King's pride, and the air blazes as dog-hot as the King's choler. I have
climbed the hill-side to spite him, and now am like to die of thirst to
spite myself, unless I can find friends and flagons."
So he chattered to himself as if he were conversing with some familiar
spirit or demon, and as he babbled his dull eyes stared around him
stupidly, taking slow stock of unfamiliar objects. He grinned
spitefully at the church and its great archangel and mouthed a lewd
objurgation. Turning his back on the church, he leered at the pillars
and the mosque contemptuously until it dimly dawned upon him that the
ruin was now a place of human habitation. He rose with a groan of
fatigue and hobbled towards it. "A church is no good," he muttered, "but
hospitality may hide in that hovel. Knock and know." And having by this
time arrived at the door of the dwelling, he proceeded to rain a
succession of blows on it with his clinched fists, as if he were
determined not to be denied, and, at worst, to force an entrance.
The fury of his call was soon answered. Perpetua flung back the door and
faced the insistent fool.
"Is doom-crack at hand," she asked, quietly, as she eyed the strange
figure before her, "that you hammer so hotly?"
The misshapen petitioner surrendered something of his malevolence to the
beauty of the girl. He swept her a salutation that exaggerated
courtliness, and there was a quality of apology in his voice as he
spoke.
"I am sand dry as the ancient desert, and to be thirsty roughens my
temper. Ply me tongue-high with wine and I will pipe for you blithely."
Perpetua shook her head, and her red locks gleamed and quivered with the
motion like an aureole of flame.
"I have no wine," she said, gravely, "for my father denies its virtues.
But there is a pitcher of milk within at your pleasure."
At the mention of the word milk the face of the petitioning fool, ugly
enough when untroubled by crosses, took upon itself an expression so
hideous that if the girl's spirit had ever permitted her to recoil from
any terror she might have recoiled from that.
"Milk!" he yelped, and the sound of his voice was as ugly as the show of
his face. "Milk! Gods of the Greeks! Milk! Your father is no less than a
fool to favor such liquor."
The girl's red eyebrows knitted. "Unless you mend your manners," she
said, decisively, "you shall go as thirsty as you came. You dare not
speak so to my father's face."
The fool answered with a little crackling laugh, while the wide sweep
of his withered fingers seemed at once to plead for forgiveness and to
justify impertinence.
"Fair virgin of the heights and of the hollows," he cackled, "I would
speak so to his face or to his foot or to any part of his honorable
anatomy, for, you see, I am a fool myself, and may pass the crazy name
without cuffing. Come, I will sip your white syrup to please you."
The girl shrugged her shoulders at the sudden condescension. "Please
yourself. There is water, if you disdain milk."
The hunchback twisted his pliant features into a new and peculiarly
repulsive form of protest.
"Even as there is the devil if you escape from the deep sea," he
sneered. "I begin to lust after milk now."
The maiden looked at him for a moment, with a curious pity for his
changing moods and his changeless deformity. Then she turned and entered
her home, from which she emerged a moment later with a vessel of milk in
one hand and a silver cup in the other. She filled the cup with milk and
handed it to the fool, who took it from her fingers with an ill grace.
His spiteful eyes grinned at the white fluid malignly, as if whatever it
emblemed of purity, of simplicity, exasperated him. He leered up again
at the girl with the same visible rage at her purity, her simplicity,
and he made a little tilting motion with his fingers, as if the devil in
him were minded to dash the milk in the maid's face. But her
indifference defied him and the thirst tugged at his throat.
"Water is the drink of the wise," the girl said, steadily. "But milk is
the wine of the gods."
She was saying words that her father often said, and for his sake they
seemed very fair and very true, and she uttered them lovingly. To the
fool they seemed the last frenzy of folly. But there was nothing better
to drink, and his dryness yearned furiously. He lifted the cup to his
lips and sipped with a wry face. Then he glanced up at the girl slyly.
"It were but courteous to drink my hostess's health, but I will not
pledge your ripeness in so thin-spirited a tipple. Yet a malediction may
cream on it, so here's damnation to the King."
And as he spoke he drank again, and seemed to drink with more gusto, but
the girl frowned at his malevolence.
"The milk should be sour that is supped so sourly," she said.
The grimace on the twisted face deepened into a sneer as the fool handed
back the empty cup, to be filled again.
"Mistress Red-head," he said, "if you knew the King as well as I know
him you would damn him as deeply."
Perpetua's wide eyes watched the deformed thing with wonder. She thought
he must, indeed, be mad to rail at the good King, so she answered him
gently as she gave him back the full cup.
"I have lived on this hill-top all my life, and know little of the world
of cities at the foot of the mountain. But whenever my father speaks of
the King he calls him Robert the Good."
[Illustration: PERPETUA AND DIOGENES THE FOOL]
The fool shrugged his shoulders--an action that accentuated their
deformity; and he chuckled awhile to himself, like a choking hen, while
he peered maliciously at the maiden through narrowed slits of eyelids.
When he had savored sufficiently whatever jest so moved him to ugly
mirth he spoke again.
"Oh, ay--Robert the Good! But virtue is no medicine for mortality, so
Robert the Good is dead and buried these six weeks, and Robert the Bad
reigns in his stead, and again I drink to his happy damnation."
And again he drank the cool fluid, sucking it greedily from the cup ere
he returned it to Perpetua.
The girl took it unconsciously. She had forgotten the fool in his
phrase, in the name he gave to the King. Her springs had been sweetened
by hearing of Robert the Good, of his gentleness, his justice, his
mercy, of how men loved him in Sicily. She had taken it for granted that
his golden reign would endure forever, and now she learned from these
mocking lips that gentleness and justice and mercy were in the dust.
"Robert the Bad," she murmured to herself, and the words made her
shudder in the sun.
The fool leered at her as if he read her thoughts, and he laughed
briskly.
"Angel of Arcady," he piped, "shall I tell you tales of the King to
admonish your innocency?"
Perpetua's eyes and mind came back from the sky into which she had been
staring. There might be a new king in Sicily, but she had her old work
to do.
"I have my task to do," she answered. "But you can talk to me at my
work, if you choose."
"What is your task?" questioned the fool, and the girl answered, simply:
"To serve my father's sword!"
She turned from her interrogator and entered her dwelling, passing
between its fringe of columns, as slim and erect as they, while the fool
gaped at her. In another moment she reappeared, carrying with her that
which contrasted strangely enough with her sex, her beauty, and her
youth. She bore in her strong hands, and bore with ease, a great
two-handed sword--the two-handed sword of the executioner, her
father--the two-handed sword that was the symbol of the stroke of
justice in the eyes of all the world. With an air of pride the girl
carried the great weapon, the pride of a child with its doll, of a
mother with her infant, of a soldier with his flag.
At the sight of her the fool flung up his arms and emitted a queer, ropy
gust of laughter.
"Oh, ho!" he gurgled, "oh, ho! I think I know you now. You are the
daughter of Theron the executioner."
The girl looked straightly at him, her eyes shining under levelled
brows. She let the point of the great sword rest on the grass, and she
leaned upon its mighty cross-piece, resting her cheek against its
handle. Her red hair ran in ripples over her shoulders and over the hilt
of the blade, red as ever the blood the blade had caused to flow of old.
"I am the daughter of Theron the executioner," she said, gravely.
The monster flung a sneer from thrust-out lips, emphasizing it with
thrust-out hands.
"A pretty trade!" he cried, derisively. The girl answered him as calmly
and proudly as if she were the very divinity of justice rebuking some
obscene brawler.
"I have no horror of my father's trade. This sword is but the red
weapon of law, as law is the red weapon of life."
"I have heard of you," the man retorted, yelping at her serenity. "The
wild, shy country people believe the blood that sword has shed flushes
in your hair, and that the life it has taken rekindles in your eyes."
Perpetua shook her head.
"This sword has shed no blood since I was born. King Robert the Good had
no need of it."
The deformed clasped his lean fingers across his knees and rocked to and
fro in an ecstasy of pleasure.
"King Robert the Bad will have great need of it. Your father's arms
shall ache with swinging. Why, my own head would drop to-morrow like a
wind-fallen apple if I had not taken fool's leave to the heights and the
hollows."
The girl drew back a little, still clinging to the sword.
"Are you blood-guilty?" she asked, sternly.
The fool laughed shrilly to see the executioner's daughter shrink from
blood-guiltiness.
"Not I. I am but Diogenes, the Court Fool. I have been Prince Robert's
plaything over yonder in Naples since the dawn of his evil spring. When
his father's death brought him over-seas to Sicily, I must needs come
too, for my wry wit diverts him and my wry body sets off his comeliness.
I plumed myself on my favor, but I was bottle-brave last night, and I
blundered. In my cups I aped the King's airs and graces to a covey of
court strumpets till their sleek sides creaked with laughter. 'Thus does
King Robert carry himself,' jigged I, 'and thus does he kiss a lady's
hand--fa, la, la!' Oh, it was rare."
Even as he spoke Diogenes renewed his antics, skipping on the grass to
mimic how the King skipped on the palace floor, and with his lean claws
he blew kisses. Perpetua thought him more repulsive in his mirth than in
his rage. But suddenly his mirth dropped and his voice fell to a
whisper.
"And then the King caught me at my capers and his heart swelled like a
wet sponge. He swore a great oath that my fool's head should be the
first to fall under his tyranny."
The girl crossed herself in horror as she questioned.
"Surely, he would not kill a fool for his folly?"
The fool shrugged his shoulders; fear and malignity tugged at the
muscles of his cheeks and made them twitch.
"The King's soul is as red as hell; sin scarlet through and through;
warp and woof, there is no white thread of heaven in him. Shall I number
you the beads in his chaplet of vices? The seven deadly devils wanton in
his heart; his spirit is of an incredible lewdness; he is prouder than
the Pope, more cruel than a mousing cat--all which I complacently
forgave him till he touched at my top-knot, but now I hate him."
Again the girl crossed herself swiftly, while she looked at the puckered
face with curiosity, with pity.
"Can you hate in God's sunshine?" she asked, and as she spoke she looked
about her at the trees and the mountains and the sea and the grass and
the flowers, ennobled and ennobling in the sunlight, and her heart ached
at the new thoughts that had thrust themselves into her life. But the
fool sneered at her surprise and did not heed her pity.
"My hate is a cold snake, and the sun will not thaw me." He struck
himself fiercely on the breast and stared at her. "Look at me, humped
and hideous. How could this rugged hull prove an argosy of
ineffabilities?"
The pity deepened on the girl's face, scattering the curiosity, and she
spoke gently, hopefully:
"I have sometimes picked a wrinkled, twisted pear and found it
honey-sweet at the heart."
Even the callous fool felt the tenderness in Perpetua's voice, the
tender pity of the strong spirit for the weak, the evil, the unhappy. He
shook his head less angrily than before.
"I am no such bird-of-paradise," he sighed. "My mind is a crooked knife
in a crooked sheath. When I was a child in my Italian village, trimly
built, children laughed at me for my ugliness, for my hump, for my
peaked chin and my limp, and I learned to curse other children as I
learned to speak. Every hand, every tongue was against the hunchback,
yet my shame saved me. For my gibbosities tickled the taste of a
travelling mountebank. He bought me of my parents, who were willing
enough to part with their monster; he trained me to his trade, taught me
to sing foul songs and to dance foul dances. I have grinned and whistled
through evil days and ways. My wit was gray with iniquities when
Hildebrand, the King's minion, saw me one day at a fair in Naples and
picked me out for jester to Prince Robert."
The head of Diogenes drooped upon his breast. He had not talked, he had
not thought, of the past for long enough, and the memory vexed him.
Perpetua propped the sword against the wall of her dwelling and stood
with linked hands for a little while in silence, looking out over the
sea. Then she turned again to where the fool crouched, and spoke to him
softly.
"Are all court folk like you?"
Diogenes lifted his head, and the old malignity glittered in his eyes.
"Ay, in the souls; but for the most part they have smooth bodies."
He watched the girl closely while her eyes again sought the sea and came
back and met the fool's gaze.
"Is the King like you?" she questioned.
The fool unhuddled himself and leaped to his feet, snapping his fingers
in fantastic imprecation.
"My soul is as the soul of a sucking babe by his wicked soul; but, as
for his body, the imperious gods who mock us have given him a most
exquisite outside, the case of an angel masking a devil."
He raged into silence, but his mouth still worked hideously, as if his
hate were fumbling for words it could not find. The girl gave a great
sigh.
"I did not know there were such men in the world," she said. The fool
stared at her in amaze.
"Then you must have seen few men," he grunted.
"I have seen few men," the girl answered, sadly--"my father, who is old,
and the timid country folk, and the holy brothers of the church. Of men
from the valley, from the city, I have seen but two--you and one other."
She paused for a moment, thoughtfully, and then went on with a swell of
exultation in her voice--"and that other was not like you."
The fool drew nearer to her, eagerly, apish curiosity goading him. "Who
was my fellow?" he asked of the girl, who, with averted head, seemed as
one who dreams waking. Dreamily she answered:
"One dewy morning a week ago I met a hunter in these happy woods." She
closed her eyes for a moment as if the memory was sweet to her and she
wished to shut it away from the staring fool.
"Humph!" said Diogenes. "In the days of Robert the Good men might not
hunt in these forests."
Perpetua looked at Diogenes again with bright eyes of scorn.
"King Robert was gentle with beast as with man. But this hunter did not
seem cruel. Like you, he was tired; like you, he was thirsty. I showed
him where a spring of sweet water bubbled."
"What was his outer seeming?" Diogenes asked. Somewhat of a warmer color
touched the girl's cheeks.
"My father has told me tales of the ancient heroes. I think he was
blessed with all the comeliness and goodliness of the Golden Age."
Diogenes jeered at her enthusiasm with his voice, with his eyes, with
every curve and angle of his misshapen frame--protesting against praise
of beauty.
"Did he pilfer your silly heart from your soft body?" he asked. Perpetua
answered him mildly, heedless of the sneering speech.
"He spoke me fair. He was grave and courteous. I know he was brave and
good." She moved a little away, with her hands clasped, speaking rather
to herself, but indifferent to the presence of the fool. "When God
wishes me to mate, God grant that I love such a man."
The frankness, the simplicity, the purity of this prayer seemed to sting
Diogenes to a fierce irritation. Leering and lolling, he advanced upon
the girl.
"Did he kiss you upon the mouth?" he whispered, mean insinuation
lighting his face with an ignoble joy.
The girl turned upon him swiftly, and there was a sternness in her face
that made the fool recoil involuntarily and wince as if at a coming
blow. But there was little anger in the girl's clear speech as she
condemned the unclean thing.
"You have a vile mind," she said, quietly. "And if I did not pity you
very greatly I should change no words with you."
Diogenes, nothing dashed by her reproof, neared her in a dancing manner,
smiling as some ancient satyr may have smiled at the sight of some shy,
snared nymph.
"How if I chose to kiss you?" he asked, and his loose lips mouthed
caressingly. To his surprise the girl met his advances as no shy nymph
ever met satyr, with a hearty peal of laughter, that brought the tears
into her eyes and red rage into his. She thrust towards him her strong,
smooth arms.
"I have a man's strength to prop my woman's pity," she said, as she
broke off her laughter, "and, believe me, you would fare ill."
Diogenes eyed her with a dubiousness that soon became certainty. That
well-fashioned, finely poised creature, with the firm flesh and the
clean lines of an athlete, was of very different composition from the
court minions who swam in the sunshine of Robert's favor, of late at
Naples and now in Sicily. He had strength enough to tease them and hurt
them sometimes when it pleased Robert to suffer him to maltreat them;
but here was a different matter. He gave ground sullenly, the girl still
laughing, with her strong arms lying by her sides.
"You seem a stalwart morsel," he grunted. "I will leave you in peace if
you will tell me where to hide from the King's anger. Indeed, I do not
greatly grieve to leave the city, for they say a seaman died of the
plague there last night, one of those that came with us out of Naples."
He shivered as he spoke, and his bird-like claws fumbled at his breast
in an attempt to make the unfamiliar sign of the cross. But the face of
the girl showed no answering alarm.
"Neither the plague nor the King's rage need be feared in these
forests," she said. "The pure breezes here bear balsam. As for the
King's rage, there are caves in these woods where a man might hide, snug
and warm, for a century. Bush and tree yield fruits and nuts in plenty,
for a simple stomach."
"I will keep myself alive, I warrant you," Diogenes responded, "and to
pay for your favor I will sing you a song." So he began to sing, or
rather to croak, to a Neapolitan air, the words of the Venus-song of the
light women of Naples:
"Venus stretched her arms, and said,
'Cool Adonis, fool Adonis,
Hasten to my golden bed--'"
Perpetua's face flamed, and she put her fingers in her ears. "Away with
you! away with you!" she commanded.
The fool stopped in his measure; it was no use piping to deaf ears.
"Farewell, fair prudery," he chuckled, and in a series of fantastic hops
and bounds he reached the edge of the pine wood and soon was lost to
sight within its sheltering depths.
II
THE COMING OF THE KING
When the last gleam of the fool's parti-colored habit had disappeared in
the sanctuary of the wood, Perpetua took her hands from her ears and
seated herself on a fragment of a fallen column that had formerly made
part of the colonnade of the Temple of Venus. Here she sat for a while
with her hands listlessly clasped, trying to disentangle the puzzling
web of her thoughts. Her most immediate sensation was delight at the
departure of Diogenes. The warm, fair day seemed to have grown old and
cold with his world wisdom, a wisdom so different from all that she had
ever been taught to venerate as wise.
"If I were a bird," she sighed aloud, "I could not sing while he was
near. If I were a flower, I should fade at his coming."
She rose from her throne and blew kisses on her finger-tips to the
birds that sang about her, to the flowers that flamed beneath her feet.
"Be happy, birds," she whispered; "be happy, flowers, for the withered
fool has gone."
She spoke to the birds, she spoke to the flowers as she would have
spoken to human friends if she had any; they were her friends, and she
loved them dearly, and she believed with all her heart that they
understood her speech. She bent tenderly over one tall plant and touched
its golden crest. Diogenes had passed from her thoughts as she stooped
and made the flower her confidant. "I wonder when the hunter will come
again."
She turned and stretched out her hands in pretty appeal towards the
woodland.
"Dear forest beasts," she whispered, "forgive me, for I think I shall
rejoice at his coming."
She drew her hand across her forehead, as if she sought to banish
distracting thoughts, thoughts that had no place before in the simple
order of her life. Then, as one who seeks distraction in the fulfilment
of an appointed task, she moved to take the great sword and dedicate
herself to its service. Holding it surely and firmly in her strong
grasp, she carried it to where the grindstone stood, and carefully laid
the edge of the blade to the shoulder of the stone wheel, while she
worked the treadle with her foot. As the wheel spun and the sword hissed
on the stone, she sang to herself the old, old sword-song that her
father had taught her, the song that men who made swords had sung in
some form or other from the dawn of war:
"Out of the red earth
The sword of sharpness;
Blue as the moonlight,
Bright as the lightning."
The song wavered on her lips to the merest thread of music and then
faded into silence. Her body was still busy with the sword, but her mind
had drifted away from the place where she was to the place where she had
been a week ago, to that cool, green hollow in the wood where she had
met the tired hunter. He came upon her through the cracking brush,
through the parting leaves; he stood before her, the sunlight touching
him through the branches, with a smile on his young, fair face; he
saluted her with simplicity and grace, and as she gazed at him dim
legends of Greek heroes crowded upon her and she could well have
believed that she beheld Perseus the dragon-slayer or Theseus the
redresser of mortal wrongs. Their speech had been scanty, but it still
sounded sweet to her ears. He had said he was thirsty, and she gave him
to drink from a familiar spring; he had asked for guidance, and she had
shown him the way out of the forest.
That was all, or almost all. He had said he would come again; and, of
course, he would come again. In her simple philosophy a given word was
given, a promise ever redeemed. There was no trouble in her thought of
him; she had been glad to meet this wonderful, joyous being; she would
be glad to see him again; in the mean time there was pleasure in
meditation. How bright his hair was and how kind his smile! and his eyes
were like a mountain lake.
Perpetua was so absorbed by her thoughts and her task that she did not
hear the soft sound of quiet footsteps on the grass as a man crested the
hill, an old man, tall and gray and sturdy, dressed in a jerkin and
leggings of faded scarlet leather, who stood upon the open space,
silently watching her.
Once again the clear voice of Perpetua floated into the air:
"Arising, falling,
The sword of sharpness,
Weapon of Godhead,
Baffles the Devil."
The song ended; the sword lay motionless upon the motionless stone; the
girl's thoughts were in the green heart of the wood.
"I wonder what sweet name he carries. I wonder who was his mother. She
must have been a happy woman. I wonder who will be his happy wife."
A tear fell upon the bright blade and startled Perpetua.
"I am too big a girl," she said to herself, "to be such a baby--and
tears will rust on a sword."
As she wiped the sword clean with her sleeve, the new-comer advanced and
touched her gently on the shoulder. The girl swung round with a cry of
joy. She leaned the sword against a tree, and, running to the man,
clasped him in her arms, the strong young girl clinging to the strong
elder like some beautiful creeper encircling an ancient, stalwart tree.
"Oh, father!" she cried. "I am so glad you have come! I have been so
lonely."
Theron's brown hand rested gently on the girl's head, and his brown face
smiled love. There was trouble in his eyes, there was trouble in the
lines of his forehead, but the sight of his daughter softened them, and
she read nothing but greeting.
"Lonely, little eagle?" he asked, with surprise in his voice. The girl
noted the surprise and laughed a little as she answered.
"I never knew what it was to be lonely before. You and I and the sword,
and our songs, and the holy men, and the trees and the flowers and the
furred and feathered woodlanders"--she ran through the sum of her
companionships--"they seemed to make a perfect world of peace."
Theron heard the change in the child's voice, Theron saw the change in
the child's eyes.
"Who has disturbed this world of peace?" he asked, and a frown grew on
his face.
"Strangers," the girl answered, turning a little away, while the old man
caught at the word and echoed it in fear and anger, while his hand went
to the hilt of his knife.
"Strangers?"
"There was one here but now," Perpetua answered, "a fugitive from the
city, whose coming troubled me. He said the world was as wicked as a
sick dream, and my heart grew cold in the sunshine."
The lines on Theron's face deepened dangerously. "Had I been by I would
have twitched his tongue out," he said, fiercely. Perpetua pressed her
hand upon his lips.
"No, father, you could not have touched him, for he was deformed and
twisted--a hideous, helpless thing."
Theron stamped his foot upon the ground. "I set my heel upon a
scorpion!" he cried. Perpetua shook her head.
"I am sorry for the things that are made to bite and sting. Let us think
no more of it. Tell me of the Golden Age, father, when heroes roamed
through the world, beautiful youths with eyes like mountain lakes."
Theron turned moodily from his daughter, and, going to the edge of the
hill, looked down upon the distant city.
"The Golden Age is over long ago," he said, gloomily, "and we have come
to the end of time."
Perpetua saw that her father was agitated, and wondered why the passing
of Diogenes should move him so much. She yearned to tell him her sweet
secret of the other comer, the beautiful hunter with the bright eyes and
the bright hair, yet when she strove to speak words seemed to be denied
her. In all the years of her young life, in all the years of love for
her father, and of a friendship, a comradeship wellnigh more wonderful
than love, there had been no secret shut in her heart from him. Now
there was, and it seemed as if she could not set it free. While she
hesitated, Theron turned to her again, and asked, abruptly, "Was this
the only intruder to-day?"
Perpetua felt her cheeks burn as she answered, "Ay," but Theron did not
notice her confusion, for he was again gazing down upon the city, and,
though he questioned anew, his voice was listless.
"I thought you said strangers?"
"There has been no one else to-day," Perpetua answered. She purposely
set some stress on the last word, that her father might, if he chose,
make further question, but he seemed to be absorbed in heavy thoughts.
He turned from his view of the city and came to her with a grave face.
"There will be others," he said. "The new King--"
"Robert the Bad?" Perpetua interrupted.
Theron stared at her. "Where did you learn that?"
"The withered fool called the King so."
"The fool yelped wisdom," Theron said, bitterly.
Perpetua came up to him and touched him on the arm. "Father," she said.
"You did not tell me that there was a new king in Sicily."
The executioner looked down upon his daughter's face with a smile of
grim pity. Putting his arm around her shoulders, he led her to the
fallen column, and they sat there side by side.
[Illustration: PERPETUA]
"Ill news comes too soon, whenever it comes," he said. "I had hoped
against hope for so long. I never told you that our good King had a son,
the pride and anguish of his life, the beautiful youth for whose
restoration to health yonder church was set on the highest pinnacle of
these mountains. Sometimes we get our wish and find it a weapon that
wounds our flesh. 'Any price,' King Robert prayed--'any price for my
son's life.' And life came back to the dying child, but it seemed like a
new life, selfish and vain and cruel. Weary of his father's simple rule
and quiet court, he went oversea to his duchy of Naples and lived there
an evil life. The King's ministers tried to keep knowledge of this from
the good King's ears, but such news flies in through the chinks of
palace doors. Still he did not know the worst, and to the day of his
sudden death he hoped that his heir might yet prove worthy to wear the
crown of Sicily. How vain that hope was Sicily now knows."
Theron was silent, staring sullenly at the ground. Perpetua plucked
softly at his sleeve.
"Why did you never tell me this?" she whispered.
Theron shook his head.
"Dear child, for the sake of your mother's memory, who died to give you
life, you have lived here in the holy woods away from an unholy world.
As a man shelters a little, flickering flame, hollowing his hands around
it to keep it from the wind, as a man screens a flower from the cold, so
I have striven to shelter and to screen your life, so that you might
come to womanhood in such a fashion--so simple, so pure, so holy--as
that in which girls grew to womanhood in the Golden Age. Therefore I did
not tell you that Robert the Good was dead; therefore I did not tell you
that this Italianate Prince of Naples reigned in his stead. So much you
have learned from a stranger, but you shall learn no more. Men seldom
come to these windy pinnacles; the King and the King's men and the
King's women never, in all likelihood, again."
The girl listened lovingly to the well-loved voice. "Father," she asked,
"why does the King come to these heights? His father never came here."
"Robert the Good never came here in your life-time, child," Theron
answered, "for his heart was sad within him at the thought of all the
hope and joy that had gone to the building of this temple and all the
disappointment that came after. But his son comes in ostentation. Since
his accession, he has visited in turn every church in his kingdom, and
given to every altar some glorious gift, that Heaven, so he boasts,
impiously, may be in debt to him. He comes to-day to this, the least and
last."
Perpetua crossed herself as her father spoke of the King's impious
boast.
"Then I shall see the King?" she said.
Theron shook his head.
"No, Perpetua, you will not see the King. You and I will keep close
in-doors to-day, talking of the old gods and the old heroes, till the
King has come and gone, and then we will try to forget that there is
such a king in Sicily."
Perpetua sat silently for a few moments, with her hands clasped across
her knees, gazing with wide eyes at the golden air, quivering with heat.
Then she turned to Theron.
"Father," she said, "if the world be not all peace and sweetness, are
we wise to shut our eyes to the worse part of God's handiwork? Are we
wise to hide from life, like a lizard in a cranny of a wall? You say the
Golden Age is dead and gone. Can we bring it back by make-believe? Can
we hold the summer back by saying it is still summer while the snow is
on the ground?"
Theron turned and looked at her thoughtful face with some wonder. Never
before had it happened that she had questioned his judgment. They had
been happy together in their mountain nest; he had shut out the world
for so long; he hated to think that he could not shut it out forever.
And now some knowledge had come to the so jealously guarded girl,
creeping into the unreal world he had created for her, and the thought
of it vexed him. But there was no vexation in his voice as he answered
her, smiling.
"You talk as glibly as the Seven Sages, little eagle, but I will not
argue with you. We must make the best of a bad world, and the best way
is to shut it out."
Perpetua leaned forward and kissed him. "Dear father," she said, with
infinite reverence and affection in her voice. From far below there
came to her ears a sound of distant music. She read in Theron's face
that he heard it, too, and, hearing, he shuddered.
"Hark!" he said. "Do you hear that music?"
He rose and moved to the brow of the hill, and Perpetua, rising,
followed him. Standing by his side she looked down the slope of the
mountain, and saw, far away, on the long, white road, a moving mass and
the gleam of gold and steel.
"It is the King's company," Theron said, sadly. "In-doors with you,
sword and singer."
Instantly obedient, Perpetua turned, took the sword from the tree
against which she had propped it when Theron arrived, and entered the
dwelling, murmuring as she went another verse of the sword-song:
"The gods of Hellas
Blessed it with beauty;
The gods of Norland
Filled it with fury."
As she passed, singing, out of sight beneath the turquoise-tinted dome,
Theron looked after her sadly. Then he went again to the brow of the
hill and looked down the green slope, clothed thickly with venerable
trees, cypress and pine and pepper tree, tamarisk and prickly pear, to
the fair city beyond, nestling amid her groves of gray-leaved olive and
green-leaved almond, her vineyards, her orchards of peach and apple and
fig.
"Unhappy Syracuse!" he sighed. "Evil hours are gathering about you as
the vultures gather around the dead body that is cast into the
Barathron. It was whispered within your walls this morning that one had
died of the plague, but this proud prince is worse than any plague."
He sighed again as he watched the distant procession moving slowly
onward. His keen sight could distinguish horsemen and litters, golden
trappings, many-colored banners; his keen ears caught, with no pleasure,
the triumphant swell of the royal music. It would be a long while yet
before the new King and his people could reach the shrine of the
archangel. There was a point on the steep hill-side where horseman must
dismount, where lady must leave litter and continue the ascent on foot.
Theron still seemed to gaze at the slowly advancing cortege, but his
mind was far away from the glittering, tinkling company. He was turning
in fancy the pages of his past, as he might have turned the pages of
some painted manuscript, and reading therein the record of his strange
life. He saw himself in his boyhood, the son of the hereditary
executioner, aiding his father's task, learning his father's trade,
patient and unashamed. He saw himself in his young manhood loving beyond
his star, and his heart quickened as he thought of youth and beauty. He
saw himself in his prime, and his eyes filled as he thought of youth and
beauty wronged, betrayed, and abandoned. He saw himself clasping in his
arms the injured idol of his youth; he saw again the strange scene in
the forest, the captured wronger, the rude, lawless trial, and the
stroke of the great sword which avenged dishonor. He saw again his sad,
sweet nuptials; he lived anew through that brief spring and summer and
autumn of belated happiness; he saw again the dead woman and the living
child. He recalled his vow that the girl Heaven had given him should
live apart from the world, sequestered in the holy solitude of the
hills, cloistered in the pine woods. Year by year he seemed to see
again the growth of the girl's life, the patient care, the mutual
love--saw at the last the fairest flower of Sicilian maidenhood,
Perpetua. All these memories belonged to the reign of the good king
Robert, the days when the executioner's sword never swung in the
sunlight over a victim, when it was almost possible for the executioner
to credit the ancient tales that he told to his beautiful child, and to
believe that the Golden Age, indeed, had come again. And now King Robert
the Good was dead and the Golden Age was as far off as those little,
golden clouds above the sea.
The executioner clasped his hands together in a despairing prayer for
Syracuse. For himself he must ply his trade, for that was his duty as it
had been that of his father before him, and his father before him. As
for Perpetua, he would make a home for her still deeper in the heart of
the mountain woods, and still tell her marvellous stories of the Age of
Gold.
He turned away from the prospect of the city and walked slowly towards
his dwelling. Clearer and clearer now came the sound of the advancing
music. He paused for a moment on his threshold.
"I shall be brighter when the King has come and gone," he said. Then he
entered his dwelling and drew the door to after him.
And for a while there was quiet on the summit of the mountain.
III
ROBERT OF SICILY
The bronze archangel, resting on his sword, in the niche hollowed in the
side of the gray Norman church, had never looked before upon so great or
so brave a concourse of people. When the statue had been put in its
place, setting thus the seal upon the pious founder's purpose, King
Robert the Good came simply clad and with little state, as was his
custom, to attend the consecration of the church. Since that day, twenty
years had come and gone, tempering the bronze figure with the changes of
the seasons and the drift of time; but the changing years brought few
visitors to the shrine. King Robert himself never came again, for with
that day had begun the bitter disappointment which shadowed the rest of
the good King's life. And if the King did not visit the temple himself
had erected, the rest of Syracuse was ready enough to follow his
example. For the way was long, the road only in part possible for horse
travel, and the rest of the ascent steep and arduous. The few appointed
priests did their daily offices in the lonely building to a scanty
congregation consisting of Theron and his child, with now and then such
of the country folk as chose rather to climb to the lonely church upon
the height than to descend to the more populous places of worship that
lay along the valley.