“Arising, falling,The sword of sharpness,Weapon of Godhead,Baffles the Devil.”
“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. Tellme 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.
PERPETUAPERPETUA
“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 allpeace 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 andaffection 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 HellasBlessed it with beauty;The gods of NorlandFilled it with fury.”
“The gods of HellasBlessed it with beauty;The gods of NorlandFilled 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 thehill 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 advancingcortège, 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 thehills, 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. Clearerand 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.
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 Syracusewas 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.
But to-day the condition of things was strangely changed. In the mellow light of the late afternoon the grassy platform below the rock on which the church stood was thronged with a brilliant assemblage of men and women, as unfamiliar to the bronze archangel as the bronze archangel was unfamiliar to them. Within a circle of men-at-arms in shining shirts of mail and pointed helmets, and of knights more heavily armored and appointed with fantastically painted shields, stood at one side the lords and ladies who made up the flower of the new King’s court, and on the other all the principal ecclesiasticsof Syracuse. Court and Church vied with each other in splendor of apparel. The jewels that gleamed on the hands and in the hair and round the neck of beautiful women and comely men stiffened with no lesser splendor the vestments of the princes of the Church, whose robes, as rich as the gorgeous garments of the court, answered color with color and texture with texture. A Sicilian nurtured in the school of Robert the Good would have frowned at the effrontery with which the women audaciously intensified the clinging fit of the garments, which moulded the form so precisely, and would have deplored the elegance, the effeminate foppery, which the comrades of the new King had imported with them as part and parcel of the Neapolitan inheritance. But the new-comers cared nothing for the opinion of the old-fashioned adherents of a dead king and a dead day; their desire was, as their master’s, to renew the delights of Naples under a Sicilian sky and to enrich life to the limit with all the luxury that could add a grace to grace and give a sharper zest to pleasure.
This splendid brotherhood, this shining sisterhood,stood, as it were, poised in an attitude of expectation more eager than ever was shown for the passing of Ramazan by any of those Saracens who at one time were lords of the lovely island. The sun that means so much to the Saracen was sinking down the sky, but the sun for which those fair faces of men and women watched with so much real or assumed impatience had not yet risen upon their horizon. They were waiting for the coming of the King. At the point where the road to the church had become impracticable for horse or litter, courtiers and ladies, priests and knights had to climb as best they could the stubborn slope to the summit. But the fatigue which was thus imposed upon the tender limbs of women, upon the ancient frames of ecclesiastics, was not to be borne by the new King of Sicily. He was carried up the incline in a chair by two herculean Moorish slaves, so strong and surefooted that the stubborn ascent could be made with the least possible discomfort to his royal body. While the others had groaned and sweated as they scuffled up the hill—that they might reach the goal in time to receive their royal master—that royalmaster made his progress with all the ease and leisure possible, accompanied by his closest friend, his dearest favorite, the Count Hildebrand.
A little stir in the courtly circle intimated that the awaited moment had arrived. Men bent the knee in homage, women bowed in reverence, as the young King, lightly resting his hand on Hildebrand’s shoulder, leaped from his chair and advanced in smiles upon his worshippers.
It is the privilege of an older world to learn with something like intimate accuracy the appearance of the King, for though the few pictures that exist of him in certain illuminated manuscripts in the libraries of Sicilian monasteries are, in the first place, but indifferent specimens of the indifferent portraiture of the period, and, in the second place, are almost all taken at a later period of his life, the records, both monastic and civil, of the age furnish descriptions, evidently faithful and always in agreement, which allow of some attempt to appreciate his form and features.
KING ROBERT OF SICILYKING ROBERT OF SICILY
The young Prince, whom the fool Diogenes had nicknamed Robert the Bad, was still in the flower of his age, the pride of his health, the triumph ofhis beauty. Of middle height, his slender form made him always seem taller than he really was, an effect further heightened by the erect grace of his carriage. His body was nimble and alert—the words are the words of an ancient chronicler—his limbs were finely shaped; his hands and feet were the theme and the despair of his parasites. But no quality with which it had pleased Heaven to endow his body was ever noted by an observer who was not at first taken captive by the enchantment of the young King’s face. His countenance was cast in the mould of antique beauty. So might Alcibiades have looked when he reeled into the banquet-hall, with roses on his forehead, to reason and to jest with Socrates; so might Antinous have seemed when he drifted with Hadrian upon the Nile. The passion for pleasure, which had characterized him from the moment of his recovery from the illness that threatened his youth, had laid no stain upon his visage; his cheeks were as smooth, his lips as red, his hair as bright as those of a child, and the limpid clearness of his eyes met the beholder’s gaze with the unblemished frankness of a boy. Most of those whopraised Prince Robert for his physical beauty would, no doubt, have so praised him if he had been as ugly as a monkey, but for once in a way the tongue of flattery could scarcely overcrow the truth.
The young King, heedless of the fashion of the day, clothed his comely body so as to display it to the best advantage; he eschewed the long and cumbrous garments that were associated with dignity, with royalty, and wore, instead, the tunic and long hose that gave his shapely limbs the greatest freedom and the most liberal display. But any simplicity in the form of his habit was splendidly atoned for by the costliness of the material. The revenues of a rich merchant for a year might have been spent upon the woven and embroidered stuffs that garbed the King’s person, yet little of these noble stuffs was visible, so richly were they embellished with gold and adorned with jewels.
Behind the King came the Count Hildebrand, who might have passed for the handsomest man in Sicily if Sicily had no King Robert. Dressed almost as richly as the monarch, he would havedazzled many if Robert himself had not been by. He was of a more powerful make than the King, though he affected with success the same almost feminine daintiness of carriage and habit; but the beauty of his face was of a coarser pattern than the King’s, and his dark eyes had no gleam of the almost infantile candor which was the charm of the King’s regard.
Robert greeted his adorers with a salutation that was in itself an act of grace, and made an amiable gesture with his hand which immediately summoned to him those of the court ladies who for the moment were warmed by his more immediate favor.
They fluttered about him in an instant, tremulous as brilliant butterflies hovering around a royal rose: Faustina, with the proud face of a Roman marble; Messalinda, with the fair hair of some witch-woman of the North; Yolande, the exquisite French girl with the brown hair and the brown eyes—Yolande so envied of all the others, as being, as it seemed, the latest in the King’s favor, the nearest in the King’s grace. Robert caught Faustina and Messalinda round the waistand drew them for a moment tenderly to him, serenely indifferent to the presence of spectators, many of whom were ministers of the Church, while he shot a mocking smile at Yolande, who modestly lowered her lids. Then he released his laughing, delighted captives, and snatched a fan from Yolande’s fingers, with which he fanned himself languishingly.
“Surely this hill is as high as heaven,” he complained. “Of a truth, we should wear the wings of angels for these adventures into cloud-land.”
Messalinda gave him an extravagant bow and a yet more extravagant simper.
“Your Majesty has all the other attributes of angelhood,” she averred.
Faustina hastened to offer her own tribute of flattery to the pleased Prince.
“Would you leave nothing to the celestials, sire?”
The bright face of the King smiled infinite approval of her speech.
“In truth,” he said, “if they were like me at all points they might become too vain for the courts of heaven.”
It was now Yolande’s turn to weave her flower of praise into the royal garland.
“The celestials had better abide in the courts of heaven, for if they came to earth they could never hope to rival Sicily.”
Her brown eyes glowed more adoration than her words. Robert, advancing towards her and taking her by the chin, peered into their depths with a perverse smile that made the girl quiver.
“Your lips drop honey,” he said, lightly. “But you must linger for your reward. I kiss out of court to-night.”
At this insolent announcement the favorites exchanged rapid glances. Faustina spoke first and swiftly.
“One smile from the King’s eyes is sufficing payment for his poor servants.”
Messalinda came quickly at her heels with no less flagrant humility.
“To be honored with one thought of the great King’s mind is to be honored above the need of women.”
French Yolande was less politic. Perhaps she had hoped to hold the King’s fancy more surelythan her fellows. She, too, winged her compliment, but she barbed it with a question.
“Who is the happiest she in all the world?” she asked. “Whom does the King’s pleasure consecrate to-night?”
Robert smiled enigmatically, teasing her with his eyes, teasing her with his fan. All the women leaned forward their heads, hoping for an answer. Robert let his gaze travel over their eager faces and laughed aloud, mockingly.
“Sweet creatures of prey, I will not tell you this secret, for if you knew you would make an end of her between you, and very surely I would have her live to see another sunrise. To-morrow, who knows, I may care no more, and then you may make common cause against her.”
He yawned slightly behind the fan, and then made a little gesture of dismissal, which sent the three women scurrying back from his immediate presence to the places they had quitted in the courtly ranks. His eyes, quietly indifferent, travelled over the body of Church dignitaries, waiting patiently till he should be pleased to tire of women’s talk and turn to them; his gaze rested withno show of interest upon the gray church and the great effigy of the archangel. He beckoned Hildebrand to his side.
“Is this the goal of our generosity?” he asked, pointing disdainfully with the fan to the sacred house. Hildebrand answered with deferential familiarity.
“This is the church of St. Michael, sire. Your amiable father set it here in the tenth year of your life.”
“Yes, yes, I have heard the story,” Robert said, again checking a desire to yawn. “My excellent parent, fretting over some childish sickness that presumed upon our person, vowed to build this shrine to his patron saint if I recovered. As if such men as I ever died in childhood!”
Hildebrand agreed, obsequiously. “May the King live forever,” he murmured. Robert surveyed the church again with cold disfavor.
“Whoever wrought that image, wrought it well,” he said. “It is pity to think of so much skill and so much good metal going to the composition of a mere saint that might have moulded me a Venus.”
Hildebrand raised his hands in pitying protestation against the folly of the late King.
“Your royal father was something weak of wit,” he sneered. Robert sighed commiseratingly.
“Poor man, he meant well,” he condescended. “Measured by our standard he must needs seem puny—as, indeed, what king of them all, Christian or Pagan, would not?” His manner so far had been in agreement with his supple companion, but suddenly a change came over his temper, and he turned on Hildebrand a frown so coldly menacing that the favorite recoiled in surprise and alarm.
“Still, he had the honor to beget me,” he added. “So you will do well not to speak lightly of him, my good Hildebrand.”
The embarrassed favorite tried to recover his ground and his composure.
“Sire, you are always right,” he stammered. “The tree from which so royal a rose sprang—”
Robert, having enjoyed his friend’s discomfiture, was now weary of it, and interrupted his apologies with a raised hand.
“Enough,” he said, and, turning from Hildebrandin the direction of the group of ecclesiastics, he deigned for the first time to regard them as if they really existed and were not mere gorgeous puppets set up there as portion of the pageant of his pride. The archbishop of Syracuse and his fellows had waited in their splendid vestments as patiently for any sign of the King’s favor as any light lady of the court, and this slight show of it served to stir them into delighted animation.
Few in that synod of slaves had served the Church in the days of Robert the Good. In his six-weeks’ reign, Robert the Bad had worked wonders, and now his armies, civil and ecclesiastic, were generalled by his servants imported from Naples. Such soldiers, such churchmen as had offered opposition to his imperious humors had been either banished or imprisoned, or at the best flung from their offices without reward or appeal, and the young Prince had both sword and crozier at his absolute command, for it pleased Robert’s fancy to proclaim himself religious as well as military head of the state, to whom the proudest of prelates was no more and no less a pawn than a captain of the guard.
Contempt smiled in the eyes of the King and on his lips as he saw the new-made archbishop of Syracuse move eagerly forward in response to the disdainful gesture which told him that the King remembered his existence. He was followed by two priests who bore between them on a stand of ebony a magnificent reliquary, a masterpiece of Byzantine handicraft, its gold and jewels glowing like the fires of fairyland in the mellow evening sunlight.
“Sire,” said the archbishop, “this is your princely gift to this poor temple; this is the reliquary, fashioned by the most cunning artificers of your realms, rich in outward seeming, richer still in holding in its core the precious relics of a saint.”
Robert looked at the reliquary with sufficient attention to assure himself that it was as magnificent an offering as his pride could desire.
“It is a pleasing piece of work,” he said. “Look at it, ladies fair; there be jewels here as bright as your eyes, as red as your lips. Truly, I shall be famous for my piety.”
He turned with a little shrill laugh of satisfaction to the three women, who in obedience tothe invitation of his speech had come near him and were gazing in greedy admiration at the precious vessel.
“It would have made me a rare jewel-box,” Messalinda sighed.
“I would have made it a casket for love-songs,” Faustina muttered.
Yolande, eager to be quickest in saying something that should please the King, looked up reverentially at Robert.
“Some day, sire,” she said, “your precious bones will be so shrined and worshipped.”
In a second the summer of the King’s face lowered to storm darkness, and he turned on Yolande with so much fury, stretching out his hands as if he would take her by the throat, that the girl fell back in a panic fear. For a second the King could not speak with rage; his lips mouthed ineffective; at last words came to him.
“How dare you speak to me of death?” he screamed at her. “You she-devil, do you wish to die of scourging?”
The fury in his eyes, the fury in his fury, the fury in his gestures, transforming him so swiftlyfrom his regal civility to a raging animal, palsied the fair girl’s limbs, palsied her tongue.
“Sire,” she stammered, piteously, “forgive—”
She could say no more, for her fear choked her, and tears raced from her eyes. Her companions shrank from her as from an unclean thing, one blighted by this fierce show of the King’s disfavor. Robert, by a violent effort, controlled himself to composure. His arms dropped by his side, his face smoothed again.
“You shall weep red tears for this, minion!” he said to the unhappy girl, and turned from her again to regard the reliquary. Yolande slunk back to hide herself in the courtly company, and Faustina and Messalinda regained their places.
“The fool!” whispered Faustina to Messalinda, with a glance in the direction where Yolande sought to efface herself—“to hint at death to a king who would like to believe himself immortal as a god.”
“Ay,” retorted Messalinda, “and to hint it now when they say that the plague creeps abroad.”
Robert now addressed the obsequious prelate: “My lord archbishop, escort this coffer into thechapel and give your ceremonial rein. Attend him, lords and ladies,” he continued, turning to his retinue; “for ourselves we will linger awhile in this sunlight, having some thoughts of weight to change with the Lord Hildebrand. We will bless you with our presence by-and-by.”
Obedient to the King’s somewhat contemptuous dismissal, all those that had accompanied Robert to the summit of the mountain now made haste to leave him alone with his favorite. Priests and courtiers, ladies and soldiers, a glittering line, ascended the stone steps that led to the chapel and disappeared within its doors. The rear of the procession was brought up by the King’s Varangian body-guard, under the captain, Sigurd Olafson, a young Norseman, whose yellow hair and bright blue eyes made him a conspicuous figure in the thick of so many Southern forms and faces.
When the church doors had closed upon the last of the company, Robert turned a smiling face upon his friend.
“Do you think, Hildebrand,” he questioned, “that I came here for this mummery in my father’s monument?”
“I never question your Majesty’s thoughts or deeds,” Hildebrand answered, deferentially. “They are oracles and miracles to your slave.”
The King’s face yielded a ready brightness to a flattery that never staled.
“I will tell you my true purpose instantly,” he said. “But first I have a task for you.”
He took Hildebrand by the arm and drew him through the first fringe of the pine wood to the space where Theron’s home stood, the mosque with its circle of pillars.
“What do you see?” he asked.
Hildebrand eyed the two beautiful ruins with frank indifference.
“Some pagan pillars,” he answered, “and the praying-place of the followers of Mahomet.”
“It is to my mind a lovelier shrine than the gaudy box we have just been gaping at,” Robert said; and then went on, answering the surprise in his companion’s face: “You shall learn why by-and-by. In the mean time know that it is the dwelling of Theron the executioner.”
“Theron the executioner?” said Hildebrand.“I thought your honest father had no use for such shedders of blood.”
“In the very madness of truth, he had not,” Robert answered. “So this rogue has rusted here idly through a generation of eating and sleeping. Very likely his sword is grown with ivy. But now he must stretch his sinews, now he must scour his scimitar, now he begins to be briskly busy.”
Robert drew from his thumb his massive gold signet-ring and handed it to Hildebrand.
“Knock at his door. Show him my signet-ring and tell him to speed at once to Syracuse, to my palace, for the beheading of my court-fool.”
Hildebrand, weighing the great ring in the cup of his hand, stared at his master.
“Have you caught the runagate?” he questioned, “and do you, indeed, mean to divide him so dismally?”
“I have not caught him yet,” said the King, with a frown; “but when I do I will halve him and set up his head on a spear in Syracuse market-place, as a warning to all who cross my pleasure.”
Robert emphasized the word “all” so unpleasantlythat Hildebrand hastened to excuse himself from any suspicion of sympathy with the offending jester.
“You may carve him into cutlets, for all I care,” he said. “He was a ribald thing, and deserves no pity.”
He advanced towards the mosque as he spoke, while Robert screened himself from view behind one of the pillars of the ruined temple.
As the fist of Hildebrand beat upon the door of the dwelling, the voice of Theron answered from within: “Who knocks?”
“Open in the King’s name!” Hildebrand cried, imperiously. He could hear the voice of Theron inside repeat his words: “‘In the King’s name!’”
In another moment Theron opened the door and came out, closing it carefully behind him.
“Who calls me in the King’s name?” he asked, gazing in astonishment at the brilliant youth who had summoned him.
“I am the Lord Hildebrand, the King’s friend,” Hildebrand answered, impatiently, holding out the ring. “Here is the King’s signet. He bids you by my lips that you gather up your greatsword and go to Syracuse with what speed you may, for he has work for you.”
Theron gave a heavy groan.
“Work for me?” he echoed.
“Ay, work for you!” Hildebrand retorted. “You have been idle a great while, gaffer, but your age-long holiday dies to-day. We are no longer in the reign of King Robert the Foolish.”
Theron shook his head in protest.
“King Robert the Good,” he murmured.
Hildebrand reiterated his nickname with a sneer:
“King Robert the Foolish! King Robert the Wise means to begin his reign by beheading his court-fool as an example to all other fools and courtiers. So bustle, man; bring out your blade and be off.”
Theron turned away with a gesture of sorrow.
“King Robert the Bad!” he said, beneath his breath. Then he entered his hut again and passed to an inner room, where Perpetua sat spinning. As she looked up he laid his finger on his lip.
“I am called to Syracuse,” he said. “Bolt doors and bar windows. Make all fast and firm. Open to none till I return.”
“Why, who should come?” Perpetua asked, pausing in her work. Her clear eyes saw the trouble in her father’s face, but she did not seek its cause, for he had laid finger on lip.
Theron shivered as if cold. “I do not know,” he said. “Open to none.”
Perpetua rose and rested her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes.
“You speak as if you feared something,” she whispered.
And Theron whispered back, “Perhaps I do.”
Perpetua shook her head, and the flame of her hair rippled over her shoulders.
“God’s will rules the world. There is nothing to fear. Farewell, dear father.”
Theron took her face in his two brown, wrinkled hands and kissed it tenderly.
“Farewell, eaglet,” he sighed. Then he left her and went into the open, bearing the great sword, that seemed to gleam crimson with the sunlight. He closed the door behind him carefully, and was making for the mountain-path, when Hildebrand caught him by the arm.
“Is that the headsman’s weapon? ’Tis a prettypiece of steel. Can your withered sinews still wield it?”
Theron looked at his interrogator with a frown of disdain for his foppery.
“I doubt if you could do as much, younker,” he growled.
Hildebrand only laughed.
“Do you think because I am feathered like a bird-of-paradise that I have no sap in me? Let me handle your chin-chopper.”
Still smiling, he took the sword from Theron, who watched him contemptuously. Hildebrand, to his surprise, lifted the sword easily with one hand, played with it as if it were no heavier than a staff of wood, threw it lightly from his right hand to his left hand and back again, and then returned it to Theron, from whose face contempt had vanished.
“’Tis finely poised,” Hildebrand commented, “but something light for its purpose; yet it will serve its turn. Away!”
“Do you accompany me?” Theron asked, with more respect than he had yet shown to the King’s man.
Hildebrand shook his head.
“Not I, old man. I say a prayer or two in the chapel by the side of my liege lord that I may return with a smooth soul to Syracuse. Farewell.” He turned away and walked towards the chapel.
Shouldering his sword, the old man tramped down the mountain towards the city.
When he was well on his way the King came quietly out of the wood and approached his favorite.
“Was there ever a greater king than I, Hildebrand?” he asked.
“Never since sun-birth,” Hildebrand responded, with glib emphasis. “The glory of Solomon, the sword of Cæsar, the beauty of Adonis, the lyre of Orpheus, the strength of Hercules, the grace of Apollo, the sum of all possibilities—God-man, or man-God, what shall our poor lips call you?” He made the monarch a profound obeisance, too profound to permit Robert to see the mockery shining in his eyes.
The monarch drank the delicious draught with more than royal gravity as he answered:
“You are a wise man. But if I have immortalmerits, I have very mortal desires. This is not the first time that I have climbed to these summits.”
Hildebrand had raised his head, and mockery had given ground to surprise.
“Indeed, sire?” he asked. The King was silent for a moment, musing on sweet memories, and when he spoke it was with smiling lips.
“My honest father, worthy man, forbade hunting in these happy hills, which gave me an itch to beat their coverts. Last week, while you were away at Naples, I rode in these hills till I could ride no longer, left my horse, lost my way, till in the very heart of the forest I met a girl—indeed, at first my joy mistook her for a goddess.”
“Was she so fair?” Hildebrand asked, questioning rather the delight on Robert’s face than the weight of Robert’s words.
And Robert answered him eagerly, hotly:
“I tell you, Hildebrand, the loveliest I ever saw. No wonder that the antique world called Venus Erycina, if in the island where Eryx rears its crest such wonderful women still tread the earth with goddess feet.”
Hildebrand repeated his question. “Was she so fair?”
There was a rapture on Robert’s face as he answered:
“Naples is a very rose-garden of radiant women, but this wild rose of the woods was as far above them as I am above other men. She gave me drink from a fountain, lifting it to me in a cool, green leaf, and the clear water was sweeter than wine of Cyprus and headier than wine of Hungary, and I drank delicious madness.”
A smile puckered Hildebrand’s lips.
“Did you pluck this wild rose of the woods?” he asked.
Robert shook his head, but there was no look of regret in his eyes or sound of regret in his voice.
“No, no, no! Oh, not then, not yet! There are pleasures of Tantalus as well as pains of Tantalus. Had I told her I was the King, she would have flung herself into my arms and there would have been a workaday end to the wonder. No. I lingered and sipped at sweet desires. I masqued and ambled Arcady for her; was nomore than I seemed, a simple hunter; flattered her with honest boy-babble, said her farewell with a low sweep of my cap, and left her with a new happiness in my heart, the happiness of an unsatisfied longing, an unanswered ache. If your school-boy were ever an epicure, he would sometimes leave the queen apples of the orchard unfingered.”
“Is this the end of the idyl?” Hildebrand asked, quietly, when the King had run to the end of his rhapsody. Again Robert shook his head.
“You are a traitor, Hildebrand, to think such treason of your King. What of the wisdom of Solomon? I am of the mind of the ungodly, and let no flower of the spring go by me. But I have lived an exquisite week—sunlight and starlight I have dreamed dreams. In other arms I have sighed divinely for my dryad; but I know she will prove rarer than my most adorable guesses. That I will tell you to-morrow.”
“To-morrow?” Hildebrand asked.
Robert laughed joyously as he pointed to Theron’s dwelling.
“She lives here, Hildebrand. She is the daughter of Theron the executioner.”
Hildebrand shrugged his shoulders. “Fie! A vile parentage!” he protested.
“I am like Midas,” Robert retorted. “All I touch turns to gold. My love will make her flesh imperial as a pope’s niece and her rags as purple as Cæsar’s mantle.”
Hildebrand smiled admiration.
“I have seldom seen your Majesty so enamoured,” he said.
Robert put his arm affectionately round his companion’s neck.
“I tell you, Hildebrand,” he said, earnestly, “my heart sings as it has never sung since its earliest love-flutter. I feel like a stainless god in a sacred garden, listening for the first time to the dear madness of the nightingale. No subtle Neapolitan ever stirred me as this wood-nymph does with her flaming hair and her frank eyes. No wonder the old gods loved mortal women, if they knew my royal joy with this child of earth. Into the church, man, and leave me to my wooing!”
Hildebrand responded to the release of Robert’s arm, and the impatient gesture of dismissal that followed, by a reverential salutation, which Robert suddenly interrupted.
“I had forgotten,” he said. “Did you do as I bade you, and bring a hunter’s cloak with you?”
Hildebrand bowed. “I hid it behind yonder fallen pillar,” he said, and, going to the spot, he returned to the King bearing a large, green cloak, which the King threw over his shoulders and gathered about his arms so as to muffle his royal bravery.
“I woo as the hunter, not as the King,” he said.
Hildebrand bowed again. Then, turning, he climbed the hill that led to the church. Robert’s eyes followed him till the doors of the church had closed upon his minister. Then with swift, noiseless steps he sped in the opposite direction, and, pausing before the dwelling of Perpetua, knocked lightly at the door and listened eagerly for answer. He could hear a sound as of an inner door being opened, of light footsteps crossing an intervening space; then his answer came in the voice of Perpetua.
“Who is there?” Perpetua called through the door. She was wondering at this sudden fulfilment of her father’s fears, but she felt no fear herself. Instantly a voice outside whispered her name:
“Perpetua! Perpetua!”
The words came so softly through the closed door that they might have been uttered by any one. But she was conscious of a stirring at her heart as she asked anew:
“Who calls?”
This time the response came clearly, in the unmistakable voice.
“A certain hunter,” Robert said; and at the sound a passion of memory conquered her, banishing her father’s cautions.
Robert could hear her give a little, glad cry. He could hear the sound of a bolt being shot back; then the door opened and Perpetua came out into the sunlight. Her eyes were very bright, her hands extended in welcome. He drew back a little in delight at her beauty, and she advanced to him joyously.
“You have come back?” she said.
Robert caught her outstretched hands.
“How could I keep away?” he asked, looking into her eyes that mirrored his.
She drew her hands away and spoke softly.
“I dreamed that you would come back. With my eyes open and with my eyes shut, I dreamed that you would come back.”
Robert’s heart leaped at her speech.
“Are you glad to see me?” he questioned, tenderly.
The girl responded with the frankness of a child.
“Very glad. I liked you much that day when we met in the woods hollow, and those whom I like I am always glad to greet.”
Robert took her hand again, and this time she suffered him to hold it for a little, unresisting, as he led her to where a fallen column at the edge of the pine wood offered a noble throne.
“Would you have grieved if I had not come again?” he asked her, as they sat side by side, and the girl answered, simply:
“Much, for my own sake and for yours.”
“For mine, too, maiden?” Robert asked, wondering at her words.