The Proud Prince. Justin H. McCarthy

rose with a groan of fatigue and hobbled towards it. “A church is no good,” he muttered, “but hospitality may hide in that hovel. Knock and know.” And having by this time arrived at the door of the dwelling, he proceeded to rain a succession of blows on it with his clinched fists, as if he were determined not to be denied, and, at worst, to force an entrance.

      The fury of his call was soon answered. Perpetua flung back the door and faced the insistent fool.

      “Is doom-crack at hand,” she asked, quietly, as she eyed the strange figure before her, “that you hammer so hotly?”

      The misshapen petitioner surrendered something of his malevolence to the beauty of the girl. He swept her a salutation that exaggerated courtliness, and there was a quality of apology in his voice as he spoke.

      “I am sand dry as the ancient desert, and to be thirsty roughens my temper. Ply me tongue-high with wine and I will pipe for you blithely.”

      Perpetua shook her head, and her red locks gleamed and quivered with the motion like an aureole of flame.

      “I have no wine,” she said, gravely, “for my father denies its virtues. But there is a pitcher of milk within at your pleasure.”

      At the mention of the word milk the face of the petitioning fool, ugly enough when untroubled by crosses, took upon itself an expression so hideous that if the girl’s spirit had ever permitted her to recoil from any terror she might have recoiled from that.

      “Milk!” he yelped, and the sound of his voice was as ugly as the show of his face. “Milk! Gods of the Greeks! Milk! Your father is no less than a fool to favor such liquor.”

      The girl’s red eyebrows knitted. “Unless you mend your manners,” she said, decisively, “you shall go as thirsty as you came. You dare not speak so to my father’s face.”

      The fool answered with a little crackling laugh, while the wide sweep of his withered fingers seemed at once to plead for forgiveness and to justify impertinence.

      “Fair virgin of the heights and of the hollows,” he cackled, “I would speak so to his face or to his foot or to any part of his honorable anatomy, for, you see, I am a fool myself, and may pass the crazy name without cuffing. Come, I will sip your white syrup to please you.”

      The girl shrugged her shoulders at the sudden condescension. “Please yourself. There is water, if you disdain milk.”

      The hunchback twisted his pliant features into a new and peculiarly repulsive form of protest.

      “Even as there is the devil if you escape from the deep sea,” he sneered. “I begin to lust after milk now.”

      The maiden looked at him for a moment, with a curious pity for his changing moods and his changeless deformity. Then she turned and entered her home, from which she emerged a moment later with a vessel of milk in one hand and a silver cup in the other. She filled the cup with milk and handed it to the fool, who took it from her fingers with an ill grace. His spiteful eyes grinned at the white fluid malignly, as if whatever it emblemed of purity, of simplicity, exasperated him. He leered up again at the girl with the same visible rage at her purity, her simplicity, and he made a little tilting motion with his fingers, as if the devil in him were minded to dash the milk in the maid’s face. But her indifference defied him and the thirst tugged at his throat.

      “Water is the drink of the wise,” the girl said, steadily. “But milk is the wine of the gods.”

      She was saying words that her father often said, and for his sake they seemed very fair and very true, and she uttered them lovingly. To the fool they seemed the last frenzy of folly. But there was nothing better to drink, and his dryness yearned furiously. He lifted the cup to his lips and sipped with a wry face. Then he glanced up at the girl slyly.

      “It were but courteous to drink my hostess’s health, but I will not pledge your ripeness in so thin-spirited a tipple. Yet a malediction may cream on it, so here’s damnation to the King.”

      And as he spoke he drank again, and seemed to drink with more gusto, but the girl frowned at his malevolence.

      “The milk should be sour that is supped so sourly,” she said.

      The grimace on the twisted face deepened into a sneer as the fool handed back the empty cup, to be filled again.

      “Mistress Red-head,” he said, “if you knew the King as well as I know him you would damn him as deeply.”

      Perpetua’s wide eyes watched the deformed thing with wonder. She thought he must, indeed, be mad to rail at the good King, so she answered him gently as she gave him back the full cup.

      “I have lived on this hill-top all my life, and know little of the world of cities at the foot of the mountain. But whenever my father speaks of the King he calls him Robert the Good.”

      

PERPETUA AND DIOGENES THE FOOL

      The fool shrugged his shoulders—an action that accentuated their deformity; and he chuckled awhile to himself, like a choking hen, while he peered maliciously at the maiden through narrowed slits of eyelids. When he had savored sufficiently whatever jest so moved him to ugly mirth he spoke again.

      “Oh, ay—Robert the Good! But virtue is no medicine for mortality, so Robert the Good is dead and buried these six weeks, and Robert the Bad reigns in his stead, and again I drink to his happy damnation.”

      And again he drank the cool fluid, sucking it greedily from the cup ere he returned it to Perpetua.

      The girl took it unconsciously. She had forgotten the fool in his phrase, in the name he gave to the King. Her springs had been sweetened by hearing of Robert the Good, of his gentleness, his justice, his mercy, of how men loved him in Sicily. She had taken it for granted that his golden reign would endure forever, and now she learned from these mocking lips that gentleness and justice and mercy were in the dust. “Robert the Bad,” she murmured to herself, and the words made her shudder in the sun.

      The fool leered at her as if he read her thoughts, and he laughed briskly.

      “Angel of Arcady,” he piped, “shall I tell you tales of the King to admonish your innocency?”

      Perpetua’s eyes and mind came back from the sky into which she had been staring. There might be a new king in Sicily, but she had her old work to do.

      “I have my task to do,” she answered. “But you can talk to me at my work, if you choose.”

      “What is your task?” questioned the fool, and the girl answered, simply:

      “To serve my father’s sword!”

      She turned from her interrogator and entered her dwelling, passing between its fringe of columns, as slim and erect as they, while the fool gaped at her. In another moment she reappeared, carrying with her that which contrasted strangely enough with her sex, her beauty, and her youth. She bore in her strong hands, and bore with ease, a great two-handed sword—the two-handed sword of the executioner, her father—the two-handed sword that was the symbol of the stroke of justice in the eyes of all the world. With an air of pride the girl carried the great weapon, the pride of a child with its doll, of a mother with her infant, of a soldier with his flag.

      At the sight of her the fool flung up his arms and emitted a queer, ropy gust of laughter.

      “Oh, ho!” he gurgled, “oh, ho! I think I know you now. You are the daughter of Theron the executioner.”

      The girl looked straightly at him, her eyes shining under levelled brows. She let the point of the great sword rest on the grass, and she leaned upon its mighty cross-piece, resting her cheek against its handle. Her red hair ran in ripples over her shoulders and over the hilt of the blade, red as ever the blood the blade had caused to