It was as well that the king was in Leinster at the time of Maeve’s
flight. Had he been nearer home he would have been obliged to
do something, and, in such a situation, to do anything is to be
ridiculous. He knew Maeve too well to imagine that she would return for
a threat, yet he made the threats which seemed politic, for that was a
matter of course.
But the messengers who bore these rigorous intimations to her father
bore others to Maeve, and in these the son of Ness was humble as no one
could imagine possible, and as his counsellors might not have deemed
advisable.
There was no arrangement which she might have suggested that he would
not have agreed to, but the difference between them was too radical to
be spanned by arrangements.
Maeve was proud; she was vain to boot, and could not consent to be
second to any one. Living with Conachúr she had to be second, whatever
he or she might desire. Indeed, living with him anywhere she would have
to take second place, for the first place came to him so naturally,
with such ease and finality, it could not be questioned or revoked, or
contrived in any way.
More, and worse, she detested him for he had always dared her and
succeeded. She, it is true, had dared him, and on this occasion had
succeeded. But she could not live with him and dare him competently,
which is just what he could do with her. Even if he abdicated the
throne to her he would keep the sceptre, and she could no more take it
from him than she could have abstracted the speed from the lightning.
If she came back to Emania she would come back dead, or, should it
happen that she did come back alive, the king would at last have to
kill her or she would kill the king. Conachúr knew it, and at last
renounced his vain embassies and hopes.
If we should wonder why he sent them, or why he should hope, the answer
lay in his character. That clever, energetic man could not exist with a
tame mate. A mere bodily satisfaction he, sated in such satisfactions,
would have exhausted in a week, and thereafter he would be without a
refreshment which is as much of the mind as of the body, and which, to
one of his temperament, has always most of the mind even when it seems
fleshy to beastliness. She satisfied cravings of his nature which he
himself but dimly understood; and if, with her, the mistress was more
apparent than the wife, therein lies the desire and doom of a clever
man.
For he was diabolically clever, and, so, not wise, and, so, not great.
Only the great escape slavery, and he was the slave to his ego and
would be whipped. A great man would not, because he could not, take
mean advantages. But the manner in which Conachúr ousted Fergus from
his throne will command the admiration of his peers only, and obtain
from them the justification which success requires. And yet he could
retain the love of his victim, the trust of his people. He was so
near to greatness; there were such sterling qualities running with
the egotism; he could be so mild in difficulties, so clear-sighted in
counsel; he could be so staunch a friend; he could forgive with such
royal liberality; he could spend himself so endlessly for his realm.
Cúchulain did not think of him as a bad man, nor did Fergus; and as to
the latter, he loved and honoured Conachúr above the men of Ireland.
Was that a defect or a merit in Fergus? Was he too great or too simple?
But it was not for clever tricks he admired Conachúr, nor was it for
tricks that his people referred to him as the “wide-eyed, majestic
king.”
However he bore the flight in public, he mourned for and craved for
Maeve in private, and the illness which comes to a baulked will fell on
him, corroding his mind and his temper, so that even Lavarcham left him
as much alone as her duties permitted.
Again and again by an effort of the will he would arouse from that sour
brooding to throw himself into work and into the grave joviality which
had once been his note; but, as instantly, he would relapse visibly
to any eye, and might stare so sardonically and uncomprehendingly on
a suppliant that the latter would be glad to go away with his tale
unlistened to.
Matters were thus when a new plan began to brood in Lavarcham’s mind,
so that when she looked on her babe again it began to seem that she
looked on a queen, for she intended to marry Deirdre to Conachúr.
All Ulster wished the king to marry again, for a celibate prince is a
scandal to the people.
It was the constant effort of those responsible in the State to marry
off a young prince almost as soon as he came to the age of puberty.
For such youngsters are great rovers, with appetites as gluttonous as
dogs, and so care-free that they are surprised and indignant if others
question the action which they do not themselves weigh. It is certainly
a hardship and a tyranny if a neighbour should constrain a neighbour’s
wife to his own domestic uses, but it is only a hardship because the
affair occurs between equals, among whom friendly observances are due,
and between whom equal respect is grounded. Among equals anything that
implies inequality is a punishable wrong: but there is no hardship
when the superior takes what he carelessly desires. It is community of
interests which makes equals, and the disturbance of this which makes
enemies; but there is no community of interests between the prince and
the subject, and no man is aggrieved by an action which can only affect
his honour by increasing it. Nevertheless, so illogical is the mind of
man, and so uncompromising is the sense of property, that men could
be found who would interrupt with a spear the careless pleasure of a
prince; and there were some, blacksmiths mostly and cobblers, who would
take a cudgel to the king’s majesty itself and beat it out of a warm
bed.
So, when Lavarcham thought that she might conduct her ward between the
lax arms of her sovereign, she but harboured an idea which every male
person in the realm who had a wife, a sister, or a daughter, hoped for
with fervour.
Nor did the idea occur only to her.
Within a month of Maeve’s disappearance more young ladies began to
appear in Emania than had been noticed there previously, so that
Conachúr, had he been in a condition to observe such things, might have
noticed that Ulster had begun to blossom like the rose.
But plottings such as these were of small use in the case of a man like
Conachúr, and it is likely that the first person to know what should
be done and what was expected from the head of the State was the king
himself. His duty as a king would point him the way: the necessity to
repair what had been damaged would claim his mind; and the desire to
forget by replacing would be even more insistent; for if a hair of the
dog that bit you is the specific against drunkenness, it is a medicine
against love also, and is, alas! the only one we know of.
Therefore the king did for a while take a fevered interest in the
ladies of his court, but he found, so jaundiced was his eye, that they
were neither worth looking at nor worth talking to, and he did not
grudge their companionship to any man.
* * * * *
To Lavarcham, at last, he opened his mind.
“I must marry, Lavarcham, my soul.”
“There is plenty of time for that, master,” said the wily woman.
“While I have no wife,” Conachúr replied, “the people will talk of the
wife I had, and the only way to stop that is to give them something
else to talk of.”
“It is true, indeed,” said Lavarcham.
“I foresee,” he continued, “that I shall be compelled to marry some one
I do not care for.”
“In that case, master, you will be saved the trouble of choosing, for
you may take the first that comes.”
“They seem to resemble one another like peas in a pod. Are women all
alike, my friend?”
“They are much of a pattern, master.”
“And yet----” said the king, brooding deeply on one that had fled.
“Our little ward,” Lavarcham continued thoughtfully, “is rather
unusual.”
“What age is she now?” said the dull king.
“Sixteen years and a few months.”
“So much. We must think of marrying her to some friend. Perhaps one of
our kinsmen of Scotland. I must be reminded again of it.”
“Come and see her, master, and then you will be able to decide how she
should be disposed of.”
“I shall go to see her some day.”