“ROBERT CAUGHT HER OUTSTRETCHED HANDS”“ROBERT CAUGHT HER OUTSTRETCHED HANDS”
Perpetua shook back her mane of flame.
“Yes, for you said you would come, and truth is the best thing in the world.”
If she had seemed adorable before in the green heart of the ancient wood, she seemed many times more adorable now to the hot eyes of the man as she sat there so quietly, speaking so frankly, looking at him so frankly. He would linger no more over this sweet preface of pleasure. He asked her eagerly:
“Shall I tell you the best truth in the world? I love you.”
The girl’s calm eyes studied his flushed face gravely.
“Love is the greatest truth or the greatest lie in the world. We have met but twice. Can you love so quickly?”
The fierce desire which the King called love clamored for interpretation. Robert spoke swiftly, warmly, feeding his greedy eyes with her beauty.
“When I drank the white water from your hands, I drank love with it. When I looked into your glorious eyes love leaped from them, allarmed, and conquered me. The wood wind blew one tress of your red hair across my face and the red flame of love ran through my veins and burned out all memories save only the memory of your face. I would lose a kingdom to kiss you on the lips. I would surrender the power and the glory to be kissed upon the lips by you.”
He made as if to clasp her in his arms, but in a moment she eluded him with the quickness of some forest creature. She had risen and was standing at a little distance before he realized that his longing arms clasped emptiness.
“You speak with the speech of angels,” Perpetua said, speaking low; “wonderful words that shine like little stars, that make me tremble as if they were little flames that played about me.” She paused for a moment as if thoughts troubled her; then went on: “And yet I think you say too much. All I should ask of my lover would be but a true heart and a true hand.”
Anger strove with admiration on Robert’s cheeks and in his eyes. He was untrained to any cross, and the composure with which the girl at once accepted and held off his homage galledhim. But he curbed his irritation, remembering himself as the beseeching hunter, not as the commanding King.
Quitting the column, he came to where she stood. She did not move, but she did not take his offered hand, and he let it fall idly by his side, while he tried to overcrow her with his bold eyes.
“You have never loved or you would not reason so,” he argued. “Let me look into your eyes. I think you love me a little.”
He was very close to her now, but she did not surrender to his lips or his eyes. A kind of wonder was growing in her face, but she met his gaze as firmly as she answered his words.
“I have never loved, and yet I know what love might be. The spring wind sighs in these forests, and the nightingales are my friends. Though I know only of the world by hearsay, I know that men and women have done great things for love’s sake, and are remembered with songs and tears. I am not afraid of love.”
Her eyes were smiling as she spoke. Life seemed clear and easy to her. Life seemed clearand easy to her suitor; but his clarity, his ease, were not those of the mountain maid, and he misunderstood her, weighing her soul in false scales. He wooed her now with a low, triumphant challenge.
“I believe you love me a little.”
She baffled his challenge by her immediate frankness. The powers of life were not to be denied in shyness by a child who might have been a nymph of Artemis.
“I think I might love you a great deal. I will love you with all my heart if you know how to win me. I will surrender my soul to my true lord and lover when he comes.”
Her eyes softened as she made her sweet confession, and his cheeks burned to hear her. But her purity only tempted him without touching him. Again he made to clasp her in his arms.
“He has come. Kiss me, Perpetua!” he cried, exultingly; but she flitted from his reach as subtly as a shadow shifting with the sun, and there was command in her voice as she motioned to him to hold aloof.
“Wait! I am not to be won in a whirlwind. Great love is gentle love, hunter.”
He could have cursed at her for avoiding him, yet the avoidance spurred him to succeed, and his words were tender as caresses.
“When I clasp you in my arms you will forget to be so wise.”
The fair girl knitted her brows in a frown at his overboldness. For his life the King could not tell why he refrained from again attempting to embrace her—and yet he did refrain, standing and listening while she reproved him, and to his ears there seemed to be something of irony and something of mirth in her smooth, cool tones.
“Then you shall not clasp me in your arms till I am sure of myself and you.”
Robert wrestled with an unwelcome sense of reverence. Surely it was madness to be baffled by a country maid. He held out his comely hands, he commanded every appealing intonation of his musical voice.
“Child,” he cried, “you shall not deny me now. I am your hunter, sweet, and you my quarry. Be happy, being mine.”
He moved upon her as he spoke, trusting to charm her with the spell of speech that never yet had known defeat. But the girl stretched out her hand to stay him, and he paused, angry and yet curious to see how far she would carry contradiction.
“Stand back!” she said. “I am not afraid of love. I am not afraid of you. But your voice is not the voice of the woods, and your eyes shine with another light. You cannot snare me so.”
He saw that she distrusted him; he saw that she did not fear him; he knew that he had not won her, yet believed himself near to the winning.
“If you love me—” Robert cried.
The girl stretched out her arms to the wide sky in protest.
“If I love you!” Her arms dropped to her sides and she continued, sadly, “I have dreamed of you very often, but I never dreamed of you thus.”
“All lovers love fiercely,” Robert insisted, passionately.
Perpetua shook her head. “I do not believe you.”
Chafing to find himself so powerless to soften her, Robert made a gesture of despair.
“Ah!” he sighed, “we waste irrevocable seconds that should be spent in kisses.”
Perpetua moved a little closer to him. The man’s pain in his voice stirred the woman’s pity in her heart, and she spoke more tenderly than she had spoken for some time.
“Hunter, if you love me, you shall tell my father your tale and he will be your friend as he is mine, and we will marry and live and die in the woodland.”
She stood before him, beautiful as the living image of a goddess offering herself to a mortal with Olympian simplicity. So might Œnone have willed to wed with Paris. Robert stared at her, amazed, confounded.
“I cannot marry you,” he protested. “You are the executioner’s daughter.”
Now, indeed, the warm color of her cheeks grew warmer and her eyes darkened with indignation.
“My father is a good and honest man, but were I the child of a robber, were I a fosterling of awolf of the woods, I am a woman—the woman you say you love.”
Robert waved her words away disdainfully, peevishly.
“I cannot marry you.”
Perpetua’s cheeks paled and her lips quivered a little, and her eyes were moist beneath their lowered lids, but she answered him as firmly as before and more sadly.
“Good-bye, then. I am not sorry you came, for I cherish sweet thoughts of you, but I shall be glad to see you go.”
She turned as if to glide into the woods, but Robert stayed her, calling to her in a voice of loud command.
“I will not lose you!” he cried. “If I cannot win you as the simple hunter, I will command you as the King. I am Robert of Sicily.”
As he spoke he slipped the green mantle from his arms and shoulders, flung it from him, and stood before her in the royal garments of the King. Perpetua gazed in astonishment at the rich habit, at splendor such as she had never seen.
“You are the King?” she whispered.
“I AM ROBERT OF SICILY”“I AM ROBERT OF SICILY”
Robert answered proudly, confident now of reward.
“I am, indeed, the King.”
Perpetua looked on him with the same fearless honor wherewith she would have faced some monster in the forest.
“If you are the King, what have you to do with me?” she asked.
Robert answered her joyously, passionately.
“You shall be my loveliest mistress now, my loveliest memory forever.” But even as he spoke the fire in his blood was chilled by the scorn and wrath in Perpetua’s eyes.
“God pity and God pardon you,” she prayed. “You are called Robert the Bad by honest men. Be called so always by clean women!” Her outstretched right hand seemed to hurl her imprecation into his brain. Blind fury seized upon him.
“You play the fool with me!” he said, and advanced upon her only to recoil as she slipped her hand to her girdle and drew the long, keen knife that rested there.
“Keep away from me!” she warned him. “For I am strong and young, and I might kill you.”Her face was pitifully pale now in its great sorrow, but the determination in her eyes menaced more than steel.
“I think I could master you,” Robert sneered, but he kept his place, watching her.
“Then you should kill me,” Perpetua sighed. “And that might be best, for you have destroyed my beautiful dream.”
She turned as she spoke, and, casting her weapon from her, to fall upon the soft grass, she ran into the wood. For a moment the King stood still, stupidly conscious of the humming of the bees, stupidly staring after the flying child. Then he stirred himself into pursuit, crying, “Stay, fool, stay!” but desisted instantly, for the girl was as fleet as a fawn, and could run surely where his feet would stumble. Already she was out of sight in the thick of the trees.
“Go, fool, go!” he shouted. “If you are crazy enough to repel greatness!” And flinging himself upon the fallen column, he buried his face in his hands to keep back the bitter tears.
Lying there in his wild rage, he babbled to himself.
“Am I mad? Shall I, Sicily, be defied by this cold Amazon? She shall burn as a witch for this; she shall burn! She has put some spell upon me, and she shall burn for my burning. I would not have her now, but she shall die in pain.”
Drowned in his frenzy of thwarted passion and baffled anger, the King was unaware that a woman had entered the open space from the mountain-path, and was moving with light steps across the grasses towards the spot where he sat and ate his heart. The new-comer was beautiful with a beauty so different from that of the girl whose kingdom was the hill-top that few to whom the one seemed perfect would have found the other all-conquering fair. Tall and imperious as someevil empress of old Rome, her black hair bound with ivy leaves of gold, her fine body draped in strangely dyed silks—snake-colored, blue and green and golden-scaled—that shot a shimmering iridescence with every movement of the limbs, whose whiteness their transparency rather betrayed than veiled, she trod the earth with such an air as Balkis may have worn when she came a-visiting Solomon. The painters of the antique world would have welcomed in that voluptuous flesh, in the poppy of her mouth, in the midnight of those eyes that glowed with the fires of Thessalian incantations, their ideal for some image of the goddess of all-conquering desire. The Sophists of the antique world would have read her story charactered in every lithe line, in every appealing motion, and saluted in her the priestess of sheer appetite, for whom the gods were dead, indeed, yet living in their material form—Dionysus as wine, Aphrodite as the act of love, Apollo as the kindling sunlight.
As Balkis came to seek Solomon, so this woman came to the mountain-summit seeking a king. But she had thought to greet him coming out ofthe gray church, and it was with a start of surprise that she saw the glittering figure crouched in an attitude of woe upon the fallen column, and recognized in that image of abasement the Prince of Naples, the young lord of Sicily. Swiftly, but with the stately grace of those who of old time moved and allured in the streets of Rome when the feast of Flora was towards, she passed through the thick grasses to the column and the King. She knew it was he by his habit, by the familiar form, though she could not see his face, and she wondered why he sat there alone and with such show of grief. She was by his side without his hearing her, and it was not until she spoke that he knew of her presence.
“My lord!” she said, softly, in a voice as sweet as the voices of the women who sang the praises of the mystic Venus in the secret gardens of Cyrene.
Robert jerked his head from his hands, startled to find that he was no longer alone, but, when he saw who it was that had interrupted his meditations, wonder and joy contended in his countenance.
“Lycabetta!” he cried; “Lycabetta, by the gods! Why is the priestess of love on these summits?”
Lycabetta had dropped on her knees at his feet in Oriental abasement, but her face was raised to his and her eyes were lamps of passion.
“Sire,” she sighed. “If I disturb your Majesty’s quiet, sign and I will retire.”
Robert, bending to her, caught her by the shoulders, and, lifting her to her feet, kissed her mouth.
“No, no!” he cried. “Stay, fair priestess of the ungovernable flesh. What brought you here?”
Lycabetta knitted her white fingers together beseechingly.
“Your Majesty is a most Christian king. Will you promise me your pardon if I confess to a pagan superstition?”
Robert kissed her again and laughed. Her trained senses knew the unreality of his kisses, of the words with which he answered her.
“Exquisite idol, I could pardon you much for the sake of your kisses. What bountiful windhas blown you to the height of this Sicilian hillock?”
Lycabetta answered him humbly, the false humility enhancing her exuberant beauty.
“When I and my women followed your Majesty from Naples—for what could such poor sunflowers as we are do without our sun?—I learned that on this hill there stood long ago a temple to Venus, very propitious to women of my kind, who came and prayed there. Your father suffered no daughters of delight to ply their trade in Syracuse, and so in gratitude for our happy restoration I came to kneel in the ancient, sacred dust. My litter bore me part of the way, till the path became too steep and I had even to climb like a peasant or abandon my purpose.”
Robert smiled condescension.
“Dear goddess of exquisite desires, our piety has power to pardon your paganism. I am king over the pagan shrine as over the Christian altar. But, before I absolve you, I have a command to lay upon you.” His smile became cruel as he spoke, for a scheme of revenge, exquisitely evil, possessed him.
“Your slave listens,” Lycabetta said, lifting her hands to her jewelled forehead in sign of submission.
Robert flung his arm around her and drew her down beside him on the column.
“Lycabetta,” he said. “If I know you well, you are a creature of little scruple, to whom what fools call virtue is a soundless word, and virginity but an unpierced pearl of price in the market.” He paused for a moment, weighing his revenge, tasting it, finding it sweet to savor. “To-night I will deliver into your care a young girl, proud of her purity, strong in her simple innocence. It shall be your task to make her into a courtesan like yourself, shaming and staining the flower of her girlhood into a flaming rose of vice. You can do this?”
“It is an easy task, sire.”
Robert shook his head, and the cruelty in his face deepened.
“You will not find it easy. I think she will resist you. I know she will resist you. Conquer her resistance by what means you please. I shall not question them.” His voice broke into ascream of rage. “Break her spirit, degrade her body, slay her soul, and when she is as I would have her be, send me word that I may come and laugh at her.”
Lycabetta watched him curiously.
“It shall be done, sire,” she said, dispassionately.
“She is angel-fair. Fools would say she was angel-good—fools who believe in angels. She will plead with the speech of angels. You must be pitiless.”
Lycabetta shrugged her shoulders. In her heart she wondered if the King were losing his wits.
“Were she my sister, sire, your whim should be my law. Trust me, I shall make her worthy of our ancient rites. But, sire, forgive me if I doubt this fierce resistance. We women are all alike in the end.”
Robert turned away from her with a stifled groan.
“I thought so till this morning,” he said, heavily.
Lycabetta guessed at the secret and pricked with a question.
“Surely this moon-flower never defied you, sire?”
Instantly the King turned on her, his fair face so hideous with fury that Lycabetta slipped from his side and cowered before him.
“Silence, jade!” he snarled, beastlike. “If you play with me, I will nail you naked to your own door for Syracusan clowns to mock at.”
Lycabetta grovelled in the grass at his feet.
“Forgiveness, sire,” she begged.
Robert shook his rage from him, for he needed the woman to play out the evil play.
“Go into the chapel,” he ordered her, “and whisper to the captain of the guard that I need Hildebrand.”
Pagan though the woman was, she respected the ruling faith and made bold to protest.
“Sire, if I disturb the ceremony—”
Robert rose and towered above her, disdainful in pride.
“I am the King. There is no church, no shrine, no ceremony where I am not. Go!”
Not daring to disobey, Lycabetta left him, and, mounting the steps of the chapel, openedthe door cautiously and entered. Robert seated himself again with burning brain and heart. A little white, bell-like flower grew at his feet. He trampled it with his heel into the grass, crushing it shapeless.
“How I shall triumph over this Diana,” he said, aloud, hugging his foul thought, “when every seaman can command her!”
Then he sat in silence, brooding over sins, till Lycabetta came out of the chapel and descended the steps, followed by Hildebrand, who came to Robert.
“You called me, sire?” he said.
Robert sprang to his feet and drew Hildebrand apart.
“Speed to the city,” he whispered. “When it dusks, send my two Moorish slaves to Theron’s hut. They must persuade or force the girl to go with them and bear her to the house of Lycabetta.”
Hildebrand bowed.
“I obey, sire. Will you enter the chapel? They wait for you.”
“They shall wait till the world’s end, if I choose,” Robert answered, sourly. “If I choosethat they shall sit there till they die and rot, what is that to you?” He dropped moodily on the seat and sat staring fiercely at the empty air.
Hildebrand left him and joined Lycabetta.
“The King is peevish,” he whispered to her, and Lycabetta whispered back to him:
“Some girl has crossed him. It is the first time he has known refusal, and it maddens him like mandrake.”
Hildebrand looked thoughtful.
“She may prove court favorite yet, if his mood changes. Maybe we were wise to use her gently. Let me bring you to your litter.”
She gave him her hand and the pair descended the mountain-path, leaving the King again alone.
Still the King sat on the column, the living sovereign throned on the relic of dead grandeur. He sat so motionless that the birds heeded him no more than if he had stiffened into stone, senseless as the block which supported him, monumental as the marble. His robes, his jewels, glowed and glittered in the light of the descending sun; but the birds in their wheelings heeded them no more than if they had been the adornments of the radiant image that once had reigned in that place. The bees boomed homeward, the shadows lengthened, all the sounds of evening began to voice along the aisles of the forest, but the King gave them no heed. From fierce thoughts of vengeance, from the ache of defied desires, his mind had dropped into the past as a swimmer might drop into the darkness of a cool pool. Andas such a swimmer snared by treacherous weeds might in his struggles see all the facts and happenings of his past life flow before him, so to Robert’s brain the flood of memory flowed unsummoned, or, rather, he seemed to sit, with a great painted book upon his knee, and turn at once unreluctant and indifferent the gold-and-purple pages of his past—his fretful, curious youth, his joyous flight over sea, his viceroyalty at Naples. And every page of the book was a tale of pleasure sated, fleshly greeds gratified, the pride of life, the lust of the eye. And every page was starred with the faces of fair women, who had welcomed, wooed, worshipped; they seemed to shift and flicker over the fancied pages like the vivid faces of dreams, the many forgotten, the few faintly remembered—dark Faustina, fair Messalinda, brown Yolande—whose score was yet to pay—Lycabetta, the miracle of ivory and ebony. So the faces thronged, thick-haunting, beseeching, teasing, pleading, and then suddenly they vanished; on a white, stainless page one face glowed into life, the face of a girl with clear, honest eyes, with adorable, maiden mouth, with wind-blown tresses as redas the most royal sunset—the face of the executioner’s daughter, the face of a brave virgin, the face of Perpetua.
Robert wrenched himself from his lethargy with an impious oath, and glared about him. He laughed as he thought of his company, priests and courtiers, minions and soldiers, cooped up in the church, while he, their master, sat out there enjoying sunshine and shadow and telling the beads of his sweetest sins. A mad thought came into his mind—would it not be droll to girdle the church with soldiers sworn to slay whoever dared to issue from the church without the summons of the King, and so hold them there to hunger and thirst and belike die, so long as it pleased him so to hold them? As he hugged the fancy, chuckling over attendant thoughts, a little bell sounded, clear and sweet as the voice of a child, calling from the belfry of the church. It was vesper-time, and the servants of the church were fulfilling their service for the largest congregation their temple had known since its foundation. Robert frowned at the sound. How did the shavelings dare not to wait for his presence? He struck hishands angrily together. In the chime of the bell he seemed to hear the voice of Perpetua crying out against the words that had ruined the beautiful world. In the golden evening light he seemed to see the face of Perpetua gazing with scornful eyes upon her enemy. He closed his hands as if he were crushing her body and soul in his grasp.
“I did not think the woman lived who could so wound me,” he cried, aloud. “If she fawned at my feet now, I would spurn her. To deny me—me, the greatest prince in the world! There is not another woman in the world who would say me nay.”
From the little church came the swell of solemn music, mingled with clear, human voices, the voices of the holy ones within chanting the “Magnificat.” The noble Roman words came flowing through the still air, grand and simple, to the ears of the King. But their grandeur, their simplicity, carried no calm to his writhing spirit.
“Magnificat anima mea Dominum: et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo.”
Robert frowned as he listened. He remembered enough of his boyhood’s Latin to interpret theirmessage, and he muttered it sourly to himself in the vulgar tongue of Sicily.
“My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.”
The reverential words chafed his disordered temper. He wove their fine gold into the dark web of his tempestuous passions. “Why do these monks plague me with their croakings?” he cried. “I need no help from Heaven to strengthen me against this buffet.”
Renewed rage at his denial set him devising new pangs for her who had denied him, heedless of the chanting from the church; but soon again he found himself listening, as if against his will, to the sonorous words.
“Fecit potentiam in brachio suo: dispersit superbos mente cordis sui.”
“What are the fools crooning?” cried the exasperated King. “He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.”
The words, as he rendered them, rang in his ears like a warning. He hardened his heart, but he listened still, for the next sentence seemed tolapse with deeper solemnity through the golden air.
“Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles.”
Robert echoed the words in a scream of insane fury.
“He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree.”
In the quiet of the evening his voice sounded strange to him, horridly shouting; he shook his clinched fists at the church as he raved.
“These fools shall bray no more folly. Who shall uplift or cast down here save I? Is there any other God save I in Sicily?”
To him, in his heat, it seemed as if the church, through the voices of her ministrants, was seeking to come between him and his purpose, to save Perpetua from his hate. Though the voices had ceased, the august menace echoed in his brain, and he raved again.
“Shall I, who am the glory of the world, the very flower of knighthood, believe that any power beyond those skies can cast me from my seat or save this woman from my will?”
Even as he spoke the golden sunlight withered around him; the blackness of darkness seemed to muffle all the earth; only a pale light like the light of earliest dawn illuminated the gray walls of the church and gleamed with strange effulgence upon the armored image of the archangel. The King, rigid with terror, beheld the image of the archangel move slowly into life. It lifted the drawn sword on which its hands had rested and pointed the weapon at the crouching King. Slowly the radiant figure seemed to leave its niche; stately it descended the rough-hewn steps. Then it paused. The church now was swallowed up in the enveloping darkness. Only the figure of the archangel was visible in that agony of blackness, bright as burnished silver, bright as moonlight. Its right arm extended its sword towards the crouching King, and the blade glowed like a blade of white fire. Like a flash of lightning it seemed to leap to Robert’s breast and sear his heart; he would have screamed with the pain, but his voice seemed dead within him, and all around him thunder rolled, horrible as the noise of a dispersing world.
The awful tumult was followed by a yet more awful silence. Robert, unable to move, unable to speak, feeling as if he were the last living thing on an obliterated earth, unable to do aught save stare in terror at that shining, celestial shape, now saw the beautiful lips part, now heard a voice address him; and the sound of that voice was clear like light, and loud as all the winds of all the world—a terrible, beautiful voice, the trumpet of doom.
“Robert of Sicily!”
The great voice called him by his name, and the King in his abasement thrust out his hands appealingly.
“Heaven has been patient with your pride. But now the cup of your offence is overfull, your silver has become dross, and Heaven is weary of you. You shall be as an oak whose leaf fadeth and as a garden that hath no water. I will set you up as a gazing-stock, and it shall come to pass that all they that look upon you shall loathe you. Base of soul, be base of body. God will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible.”
As the great words died into silence, Robert’sbody was wrung with pangs. His spirit seemed to struggle in its earthly house, his flesh to divide and dissolve in anguish. Horrid tremors tore him; rigor of cold clawed at his heart, yet fever seemed to flush every channel of his body; his senses reeled as if to dissolution. Again the lightning flamed from the sword of the archangel; again the sullen thunder rumbled through the vaulted darkness. Robert staggered to his feet with an inarticulate cry as the archangel vanished from his view. All was unutterable night, and then in a moment the veil of darkness dissipated; again the mountain summit was flooded with golden air; again the kindly sunlight reigned over earth and sea; again the birds called joyously through the trees, and belated bees forsook the flowers; again Robert, dizzy and dismayed, sat on the fallen column and stared at the gray church.
But not Robert the King, the young, the comely, the radiantly clad. His fair features had withered to the foul features of the fool Diogenes; his body had warped to the crooks and hunches of the fool’s body; his raiment had faded from its regal pomp to the stained livery of the mountebank. But itwas with no knowledge of his metamorphosis that the changed man stared at the church and shuddered in the warm air.
“What a horrible dream!” he muttered to himself, drawing his hand across his damp forehead. “I must have dozed in the warm air; yet I did not think I slept. The storm seemed so real, and the spirit with the flaming sword—”
At the thought of the spirit he scrambled to his feet and limped across the grass to the church. The bronze image of the archangel stood in its niche, its hands resting as of yore on the hilt of the great sword. Robert peered at it with eyes still dazzled, and he babbled to himself weakly.
“That image seemed to quicken, but now it is no more than motionless bronze. I slept; I dreamed, and the lying vision has shaken me. I am wet with sweat and my knees tremble. I will go into the chapel and pray.”
He moved a little farther to ascend the steps, conscious of an unfamiliar heaviness, unconscious of transformation. But as he made to set his foot upon the lowest of the steps leading to the church, its doors were thrown wide open, and toRobert’s astonishment the congregation began to issue forth, headed by the archbishop of Syracuse, and ranged themselves in a double rank on the semicircle of the steps as if forming a lane for one who was yet to come.
For a moment, in his rage, speech seemed denied to Robert as he glared at the many-colored crowd before him—the fair ladies of honor, butterfly bright; the slim, Italianate youths, fantastically foppish; the smooth, eager priesthood; the soldiers weary of ceremonial but indifferent to fatigue; the sturdy bulk, blue eyes, and yellow hair of the Northern Guards. They paid no heed to Robert, standing there below them; their glances were all for the open portal of the church and its depths beyond of cool twilight.
Rage overcame amazement and gave Robert back his speech.
“How is this, my lord archbishop?” he cried out in a great voice—“I bade you wait within the church till I came.”
The archbishop, hearing this sudden appeal to him, turned for a moment his wrinkled, astute face in the direction of the speaker, and, followinghis example for the moment, all the others turned their indifferent eyes upon Robert. Some of the pretty she-things whispered and tittered. The archbishop spoke in a voice of gentle petulance.
“Peace, fool!” he said, and waved his jewelled hand in gentle reproof of importunacy. If the jewelled hand had struck Robert brutally in the face it could not more have staggered him. All the air seemed to glow red around him; his reason surrendered itself to fury at this unmeaning, indecent affront.
“Are you mad, priest?” he gasped, pointing a hand that trembled with passion at the prelate, who had turned away from him and was again gazing reverentially into the church. The women now were laughing outright, but most of the men had only frowns for the unseemly license of a court buffoon. Sigurd Blue Wolf, the captain of the Varangians, moved leisurely down a step.
“Stand aside, fellow!” he said, placidly, in his large voice of Northern command. He had some pity in his heart for the misshapen thing.
“Where did the buffoon spring from?” Faustina whispered behind her fan to Messalinda.
Robert had no eyes for the laughing, frowning faces; no ears for the bidding of Sigurd. He mouthed at the archbishop, foam on his lips and blood in his eyes.
“You shall hang for this were you ten times archbishop!” he cried. He could not understand the madness, the audacity of his people; his anger could not pause in its gallop to make coherent question, to frame coherent answer. A slim, courtier creature, a thing of jewels and feathers, perched on the lowest tier of the steps, admonished him with a shake of scented fingers. Through his frenzy Robert remembered that only last night he made this same courtier serve him as a foot-stool.
“Do you dare to speak thus to your King?” he gasped, tearing at the breast of his jerkin in a new-felt difficulty of breathing, a new-felt longing for air.
Messalinda turned to those about her as one who held the key to the riddle.
“This is how he played the King yesterday,” she said, “and earned the King’s displeasure.”
The others nodded. They knew Diogenes’ pertinacitywith a joke. Yolande gave voice to the general feeling:
“It is ever the worst of these mountebanks, that they will harp on a dull jest.”
The archbishop, irritated at the continuance of the talking and brawling, averted his eyes a moment from the interior of the church, and turned them again upon Robert, who stood as if rooted to his place, the image of a fighting beast at bay.
“You presume too much upon our patience,” he said, sharply. “You will vex the King again.” As he spoke he glanced in the direction of Sigurd Blue Wolf, a significant glance, suggesting that it was time these interruptions should be ended. Sigurd moved leisurely a little nearer to Robert, who did not heed him, heeding only the archbishop. Through his bewildered mind bewildering thoughts were flitting. What was the meaning of this strange jest at his expense? Could the archbishop believe that he would ever pardon so preposterous an enormity? Yet now a kind of fear crept in upon his rage, as he heard the priest use the name of the King.
“I am the King,” he asserted, hotly. “What ribaldry is this? I am the King!”
A chorus of derisive laughter came from his spectators, amused at the insistence of the fool. After all, if Diogenes chose to jeopardize his head, what was it to them? Robert glared at all those familiar faces that dared to regard him so familiarly. Every contemptuous glance of their eyes, every mocking note of their voices were so many arrows, stinging his tortured mind beyond endurance. Was this some sick dream from which a mighty effort of will should set him free?
“This is dangerous sport, to tease the lion!” he yelled. “Now, by my royal word—”
He made a stride forward as if to advance upon his tormentors. Sigurd Blue Wolf advanced, caught him by the arm and whispered to him, not unkindly:
“His Majesty is at his prayers within. You were wise to slip away ere he comes out, for the sight of you may anger him. Quick, fool, into the wood.”
Robert tried in vain to shake off his mighty grasp. He beat ineffectually at the Northman’sbreast as he might have beaten at a gate of brass.
“Insolent fool!” he screamed. “How can the King be within when I stand here? I am the King!”
But even as he spoke he stiffened as a man suddenly struck with catalepsy. For again all eyes were turned away from him to the doorway of the church, and there, framed in that doorway, Robert’s haggard eyes saw his own image, his royal likeness, his very self. So had he seen himself that morning in his Venetian mirror—the familiar smooth face and waved hair, the familiar carriage, the chosen robes and gold and jewels. All present, save only Robert, saluted Robert’s double reverentially, Sigurd released his grasp of Robert’s arm, and then on Robert’s stricken ears came the sound of his own voice from the threshold of the church.
“Who says he is the King?” his own voice asked. The archbishop turned to him who spoke and answered, “Sire, your fool in a most unseemly humor plagues us.”
Into Robert’s distraught brain there leapedsome wild idea of conspiracy, of intrigue to supplant him by the means of some pretender fashioned like himself.
“Who is this impostor?” he cried, and, turning to Sigurd, he commanded, “Seize him, soldiers!”
Sigurd answered with a blow like the butt of a ram.
“Silence, dog!” he shouted, now out of all patience. Robert reeled under an insult bitterer than the blow, and insanity overswept his senses.
“Traitors! villains!” he cried, and clapped his hand to his girdle, where his sword-hilt should have been. But no sword-hilt answered to his eager fingers. Mad, confused thoughts of treachery mastered him. “Where is my sword?” he cried. “Who has disarmed me while I slept?” A wild sense of defied kingship flooded his spirit. “With my naked hands I will overthrow this treason.”
Blindly, idly, he flung himself forward, meaning to scale the steps and grapple with his parallel, but in a moment the strong arms of Sigurd held him in the grip of a bear. Then he who stood at the summit of the steps, and wore the likenessof the lord of Sicily, lifted his hand and spoke, and his voice was as the voice of King Robert in the ears of all men there save only one, save only Robert the King, struggling in the grip of Sigurd Blue Wolf, and to him, through the cruel echo of his own speech there seemed to ring some note of tones heard in a dream, a dream of a bronze image that quickened and spoke words of doom.
“Do him no hurt,” said the kingly presence, gently. “He is mad, and madness needs compassion. Let him be in peace, and those of you who are pitiful may well pray for him. Let us go hence, friends.”
“You hear what the King says,” Sigurd growled in Robert’s ear. “To your knees, fool!” Robert struggled helplessly to release himself, crying, “I am the King!” whereat Sigurd, dropping his strong hands on his captive’s shoulders and repeating, angrily, “To your knees, fool!” forced him ignominiously to the ground, first tottering on his knees and then collapsing in a huddle on the ground.
The kingly presence on the steps surveyed thegrovelling, abject thing in the fool’s livery with an implacable smile.
“Remember,” he said, softly, and the word beat upon Robert’s brain like the blow of a hammer. Then he came slowly down the steps through the lane of adoring faces. As he came to the last, Sigurd, as if fearing some further attempt on the part of the fool, set his heavy foot on Robert’s back where he sprawled, and pinned him to the ground. But Robert made no struggle. Unchallenged, his presentment passed to the edge of the mountain-path, and, descending, disappeared, followed by whispering courtiers, full of the King’s mercy to a brawling fool. Sigurd lifted his foot from the fallen man and headed his Varangians. Ladies and youths, priests and soldiers, all in their turn and order descended the slope of the hill, and Syracuse swallowed them up in time.
But the man in the fool’s motley lay on his face on the grass and made no sign of life.
The red shield of the sun had slipped into the sea, the warm twilight had glided into warm night, and the yellow circle of the perfect moon glowed in a sea-blue sky. To your Sicilian the moon is ever a marvel, a mystical influence, now generous, now maleficent, always portentous. One salutes in her the spirit of Diana; another sees on that yellow disk only the awful face of Cain; to yet a third the moon is nothing more nor less than a baker’s daughter; while a fourth will swear that she is the sister of the sun, who loved her brother too well and is condemned, in punishment for her sin, to drift forever in solitude through the skies. But whatever the moon meant to each, all paid the moon homage. Lovers in Syracuse, wandering in grove or garden, looked up at it, thinking sweet thoughts, uttering sweet words,and then, looking into each other’s eyes, forgot the world as their lips met. Poets in Syracuse, catching sight of the moon through their open casemates, abandoned lamp and parchment, and, propping their chins on their hands, stared at that enigmatic field of silver and believed themselves to be inspired. Philosophers in Syracuse, pacing quiet streets, smiled at the ancient of days and sighed over their flying shadows, symbolical of much. Needy folk, greedy folk, showed pieces of silver to it, singing: