Chapter IV: Part ONE: The End of Long Wanting (2)

“No,” Florian said, wistfully, “there is an etiquette in these matters. Even if I cared to dabble in sorcery, it would not be quite courteous for me to interfere with the magic which Madame Mélusine has laid upon the high place and her blood relations. It would be meddling in her family affairs, it would be an incivility without precedent, to her who was so kind to me in my childhood.”

“You think too much about precedent, Monsieur the Duke. In any event, Mélusine has half forgotten the matter. So much has happened to her, in the last several hundred years, that her mind has quite gone. She cares only to wail upon battlements and to pass through dusky corridors at twilight, predicting the deaths of her various descendants. You can see for yourself that these are not the recreations of a logical person. No, Florian, you are considerate, and it does you great credit, but you would not annoy Madame Mélusine by releasing Brunbelois.”

Said Florian, gently: “My intimates, to be sure, address me as Florian. But our acquaintance, Monsieur Janicot, however delightful, remains as yet of such brevity that, really, whether you be human or divine—”

“Oh, but, Monsieur the Duke,” replied the other, “but indeed I entreat your pardon for my inadvertence.”

And Florian too bowed. “It is merely a social convention, of course. Yet it is necessary to respect the best precedents even in trifles. Well, now, and as to your suggestion, I confess you tempt me—”

“Only, you could not free Brunbelois unaided, nor could any living sorcerer. For Mélusine’s was the Old Magic that is stronger than the thin thaumaturgy of these days. Yet I desire to have happy faces about me, so I will give you this Melior for a while.”

“And at what price?”

“I who am the Prince of this World am not a merchant to buy and sell. I will release the castle, and you may have the girl as a free gift. I warn you, though, that, since she is of the Léshy, at the year’s end she will vanish.”

Florian shook his head, smilingly. He knew of course that marriage with one of the Léshy could not be permanent. But this fiend must believe him very simple indeed, if Janicot thought Florian so uninformed as not to know that whoever accepts a gift from hell is thereby condemned to burn eternally: and to perceive this amused Florian.

“Ah, Monsieur Janicot, but a Puysange cannot take alms from anybody. No, let us be logical! There must be a price set and paid, so that I may remain under no distasteful and incendiary debts.”

Janicot hid excellently the disappointment he must have felt. “Then suppose we fix it that she is yours until you have had a child by her? And that then she will vanish, and that then the child is to be given me, as my honorarium, by”—Janicot explained,—“the old ritual.”

“Well,” Florian replied, “I may logically take this to be a case of desperate necessity, since all my happiness depends upon it. Now in such cases Paracelsus admits the lawfulness of seeking aid from—if you will pardon the technical term, Monsieur Janicot,—from unclean spirits. He is supported in this, as I remember it, by Peter Ærodius, by Bartolus of Sassoferato, by Salecitus, and by other divines and schoolmen. So I have honorable precedents, I do not offend against convention. Yes, I accept the offer; and the child, whatever my paternal pangs, shall be given, as your honorarium, by the old ritual.”

“Of course,” said Janicot, reflectively, “if there should be no child—”

“Monsieur, I am Puysange. There will be a child.”

“Why, then, it is settled. Now I think of it, you will need the sword Flamberge with which to perform this rite, since Melior is of the Léshy, and that sword alone of all swords may spill their blood—”

“But where is Flamberge nowadays?”

“There is one at home, in an earthen pot, who could inform you.”

“Let us not speak of that,” said Florian, hastily, “but do you tell me where is this sword.”

“I have no notion as to the present whereabouts of Flamberge. Nor, since you stickle for etiquette, is it etiquette for me to aid you in finding this sword until you have made me a sacrifice.”

“Why, but you offered Melior as a free gift!” said Florian, smiling to see how obvious were the traps this Janicot set for him. “Is a princess of smaller importance than a sword?”

“A princess is easier to get, because a princess is easier to make. A sword, far less a magic sword like Flamberge, cannot be fashioned without long training and preparation and special knowledge. But no man needs more than privacy and a queen’s goodwill to make a princess.”

“I confess, Monsieur Janicot, that your logic is indisputable. Well, when at the winter solstice you hold your Festival of the Wheel, I shall not sacrifice to you. That would be to relapse into the old evil ways of heathenry, a relapse for which is appointed an agonizing reproof, administered in realms unnecessary to mention, but doubtless familiar to you. However, I shall be glad to tender you a suitable Christmas present, since that sacred season falls at the same time.”

“You may call it whatever you prefer. But it must be a worthy gift that one offers me at my Yule Feast.”

“You shall have—not as a sacrifice, you understand, but as a Christmas present,—the greatest man living in France. You shall have no less a gift than the life of that weasel-faced prime-minister who now rules France, the all-powerful Cardinal Dubois. For the rest, your bargain is reasonable: it contains none of those rash mortgagings of the soul, about which—if you will pardon my habitual frankness, Monsieur Janicot,—one has to be careful in all business dealings with your people. So let us subscribe this bond.”

Janicot laughed: his traffic was not in souls, he said; and he said also that Florian, for a nobleman, was deplorably the man of business. None the less, Janicot now produced from his pocket a paper upon which the terms of their bargain happened, rather unaccountably, to be neatly written out: and they both signed this paper, with the pens and ink which Florian had not previously noticed to be laid there so close at hand, upon one of the tree-stumps.

Then Janicot put up the paper, and remarked: “A thing done has an end. For the rest, these fellows will escort you to Brunbelois.”

“And of what fellows do you speak?” asked Florian.

“Why, those servants of mine just behind you,” replied Janicot.

And Florian, turning, saw in the roadway two very hairy persons in an oxcart, drawn by two brown goats which were as large as oxen; and yet Florian was certain no one of these things had been in that place an instant before. This Janicot, however easy to see through had been his traps for Florian, was beyond doubt efficient.

Florian said: “The liveries of your retainers tend somewhat to the capillary. None the less, I shall be deeply honored, monsieur, to be attended by any servants of your household.”

Janicot replied: “Madame Mélusine has ordained against men and the living of mankind eternal banishment from the high place. Very well!”

He drew his sword, and without any apparent effort he struck off the head of his brown horse. He set this head upon a stake, and he thrust the other end of the stake into the ground, so that the stake stood upright.

“I here set up,” said Janicot, “a nithing post. I turn the post. I turn the eternal banishment against Madame Mélusine.”

He waited for a moment. He was entirely brown: about him lilies bloomed, with a surprising splendor of white and gold: and the flowering at his feet was more red than blood.

He moved the stake so that the horse’s head now faced the east, and Janicot said: “Also I turn this post against the protecting monsters of the high place, in order that they may all become as witless as now is this slain horse. I send a witlessness upon them from the nithing post, which makes witless and takes away the strength of the rulers and of the controlling gods of whatever land this nithing post be turned against. I, who am what I am, have turned the post. I have sent forth the Seeing of All, the Seeing that makes witless. A thing done has an end.”

_6._

_Philosophy of the Lower Class_

Florian parted from brown Janicot for that while, and mounted his white horse, and rode upward toward the castle of Brunbelois, without further thought of the girl at Storisende whom logic had picked out to be his wife. Florian was followed by the oxcart which Janicot had provided. Florian found all the monsters lying in a witless stupor. So he fearlessly set upon and killed the black bleps and the crested strycophanês and the gray calcar.

He passed on upward, presently to decapitate the eale, which writhed its movable horns very remarkably in dying. Florian went on intrepidly, and despatched the golden-maned and-whiskered leucrocotta. The tarandus, farther up the road, proved more troublesome: this monster had, after its sly habit, taken on the coloring of the spot in which it lay concealed, so that it was hard to find; and, when found, its hide was so tough as to resist for some while the edge of Florian’s sword. The thin and flabby neck of the catoblepas was in contrast gratifyingly easy to sever. Indeed, this was in all respects a contemptible monster, dingily colored, and in no way formidable now that its eyes were shut.

Florian’s heroic butchery was well-nigh over: so he passed on cheerily to the next turn in the road; and in that place a moment later the bright red mantichora was impotently thrusting out its sting in the death agony, a sudden wind came up from the west, and the posture of the sun was changed.

Having dauntlessly performed these unmatched feats, the champion paused to reward himself with a pinch of snuff. The lid of his snuff-box bore the portrait of his dear friend and patron, Philippe d’Orléans, and it seemed odd to be regarding familiar features in these mischancy uplands. Then Florian, refreshed, looked about him. Three incredibly weather-beaten sheep were grazing to his right: to the left he saw, framed by the foliage upon each side of and overhanging the green roadway, the castle of Brunbelois.

Thus one by one did Florian cut off the heads of the seven wardens, with real regret—excepting only when he killed the catoblepas,—that his needs compelled him to destroy such colorful and charming monsters. The two remarkably hairy persons, without ever speaking, lifted each enormous head, one by one, into the cart. The party mounted within eyeshot of Brunbelois thus triumphantly. And at Brunbelois, where the old time yet lingered, the hour was not afternoon but early morning: and at the instant Florian slew the mantichora all the persons within the castle had awakened from what they thought was one night’s resting.

Now the first of the awakened Peohtes whom Florian encountered was a milkmaid coming down from Brunbelois with five cows. What Florian could see of her was pleasurably shaped and tinted. He looked long at her.

“To pause now for any frivolous reason,” reflected Florian, “or to disfigure in any way the moment in which I approach my life’s desire, is of course unthinkable—”

Meanwhile the milkmaid looked at Florian. She smiled, and her naturally high coloring was heightened.

“—So I do not pause for frivolous reasons. I pause because one must be logical. For, now that I think of it, to rescue people from enchantment is a logical proceeding only when one is certain that this rescuing involves some positive gain to the world. Do you drive on a little way, and wait for me,” said Florian, aloud, to his hirsute attendants, “while I discover from this enticing creature what sort of persons we have resurrected.”

The hairy servants of Janicot obeyed. Florian, very spruce in bottle-green and silver, dismounted from his white horse, and in the ancient roadway now overgrown with grass, held amicable discourse with this age-old milkmaid. She proved at bottom not wholly unsophisticated. And when they parted, each had been agreeably convinced that the persons of one era are much like those of another.

Florian thus came to the gates of Brunbelois logically reassured that he had done well in reviving such persons, even at the cost of destroying charming monsters and of the labor involved in removing so many heads. He counted smilingly on his finger-tips, but such was his pleased abstraction that he miscalculated, and made the total eight.

He found that, now the enchantment was lifted, Brunbelois showed in every respect as a fine old castle of the architecture indigenous to fairy tales. Flags were flying from the turrets; sentinels, delightfully shiny in the early morning sunlight, were pacing the walls, on the look-out for enemies that had died many hundred years ago; and at the gate was a night-porter, not yet off duty. This porter wore red garments worked with yellow thistles, and he seemed dejected but philosophic.

“Whence come you, in those queer dusty clothes?” inquired the porter, “and what is your business here?”

“Announce to King Helmas,” said Florian, as he brushed the dust from his bottle-green knees, and saw with regret that nothing could be done about the grass-stains, which, possibly, had got there when he knelt to cut off the tarandus’ head,—“announce to King Helmas that the lord of Puysange is at hand.”

“You are talking, sir,” the porter answered, resignedly, “most regrettable nonsense. For the knife is in the collops, the mead is in the drinking-horn, the eggs are upon the toast, the minstrels are in the gallery, and King Helmas is having breakfast.”

“None the less, I have important business with him—”

“Equally none the less, nobody may enter at this hour unless he is the son of a king of a privileged country or a craftsman bringing his craft.”

“Parbleu, but that is it, precisely. For I bring in that wagon very fine samples of my craft.”

The porter left his small grilled lodge. He looked at the piled heads of the monsters, he poked them with his finger, and he said mildly, “Why, but did you ever!” Then he returned to the gate.

“Now, my friend,” said Florian, with the appropriate stateliness, “I charge you, by all the color and ugliness of these samples of my craft, to announce to your king that the lord of Puysange is at the gate with tidings, and with proof, that the enchantment is happily lifted from this castle.”

“So there has been an enchantment. I suspected something of the sort when I came to, after nodding a bit like in the night, and noticed the remarkably thick forest that had grown up everywhere around us.”

Florian observed, to this degraded underling who seemed not capable of appreciating Florian’s fine exploits, “Well, certainly you take all marvels very calmly.”

The sad porter replied that, with a reigning family so given to high temper and sorcery, the retainers of Brunbelois were not easily astounded. Something in the shape of an enchantment had been predicted in the kitchen last night, he continued, after the notable quarrel between Madame Mélusine and her father.

“My friend,” said Florian, “that was not last night. You speak of a disastrous family jar in which the milk of human kindness curdled several centuries ago. Since then there has been an enchantment laid upon Brunbelois: and the spell was lifted only to-day.”

“Do you mean, sir, that I am actually several hundred and fifty-two years old?”

“Somewhere in that November neighborhood,” said Florian. And he steeled himself against the other’s outburst of horror and amazement.

“To think of that now!” said the porter. “I certainly never imagined it would come to that. However, it is always a great comfort to reflect it hardly matters what happens to us, is it not, sir?”

You could not but find, in this stubborn unwillingness to face the magnitude of Florian’s exploits, something horribly prosaic and callous. Yet, none the less, Florian civilly asked the man’s meaning. And the dejected porter replied:

“It is just a sort of fancying, sir, that one wanders into after watching the stars, as I do in the way of business, night after night. One gets to reading them and to a sort of glancing over of the story that is written in their courses. Yes, sir, one does fall into the habit, injudiciously perhaps, but then there is nothing else much to do. And one does not find there quite, as you might put it, the excitement over the famousness of kings and the ruining of empires that one might reasonably look for. And one does not find anything at all there about porters, I can assure you, sir, because they are not important enough to figure in that story. There is no more writing in the stars about night-porters than there is about bumble-bees; and that is always a great comfort, sir, when one feels low-spirited. Because I would not care to be in that story, myself, for it is not light pleasant reading.”

“A pest! so you inform me, with somewhat the gay levity of an oyster, that you can read the stars!”

The porter admitted dolefully, “One does come to it, sir, in my way of business.”

“And how many chapters, I wonder, are written in the heavens about me?”

The porter looked at Florian for some while. The porter said, now even more dolefully: “I would not be surprised if there was a line somewhere about you, sir. For your planet is Venus, and her people do get written about in an excessive way, there is no denying it. And I would not care to be one of them, myself, but of course there is no accounting for tastes, even if anybody anywhere had any say in the matter.”

“Parbleu, you may be right about my planet,” said Florian, smiling for reasons of his own. “Yet, as an artless veteran of the first and second Pubic Wars, I do not see how you can be certain.”

“Because of your corporature, sir,” replied the porter. “He that is born under this planet is of fair but not tall stature, his complexion being white but tending a little to darkness. He has fine black hair, the brows arched, the face pretty fleshy, a cherry lip, a rolling wandering eye. He has a love-dimple in his cheek, and shows in all as one desirous of trimming and making himself neat and complete in clothes and body. Now these things I see in your corporature and in the fretfulness with which you look at the grass-stains on your knees. So your planet is evident.”

“That is possible, your speech has a fine ring of logic, and logic is less common than hens’ teeth. Upon what sort of persons does this honorable planet attend?”

“If you could call it attending, sir—For I must tell you that these planets have a sad loose way of not devoting their really undivided attention to looking after the affairs of any one particular gentleman, not even when they see him most magnificent in bottle-green and silver.”

“They are as remiss, then, as you are precise. So do you choose your own verb, and tell me—”

“Sir,” replied the porter, “I regret to inform you that the person whom Venus governs is riotous, expensive, wholly given to dissipation and lewd companies of women and boys. He is nimble in entering unlawful beds, he is incestuous, he is an adulterer, he is a mere skip-jack, spending all his means among scandalous loose people: and he is in nothing careful of the things of this life or of anything religious.”

Florian brightened. “That also sounds quite logical,—in the main,—for you describe the ways of the best-thought-of persons since the old King’s death. And one of course endeavors not to offend against the notions of one’s neighbors by seeming a despiser of accepted modes. But I must protest to you, my friend, you are utterly wrong in the article of religion—”

“Oh, if you come hither to dispute about religion,” said the porter, “the priests of Llaw Gyffes will attend to you. They love converting people from religious errors, bless you, with their wild horses and their red-hot irons. But, for one, I never argue about religion. You conceive, sir, there is an entire chapter devoted to the subject, in the writing we were just talking over: and I have read that chapter. So I say nothing about religion. I like a bit of fun, myself: but when you find it there, of all places, and on that scale—” Again the dejected porter sighed. “However, I shall say no more. Instead, with your permission, Messire de Puysange, I shall just step in, and send up your news about the enchantment.”

This much the porter did, and Florian was left alone to amuse himself by looking about. Through the gateway he saw into a court paved with cobble-stones. Upon each side of the gate was an octagonal granite tower with iron-barred windows: each tower was three stories in height, and the battlements were coped with some sort of bright red stone.

Then Florian, for lack of other diversion, turned and looked idly down the valley, toward Poictesme. There he saw something rather odd. A mile-long bridge was flung across the west, and over it passed figures. First came the appearance of a bear waddling upon his hind legs, followed by an ape, and then by a huddled creature with long legs. Florian saw also an unclothed woman, who danced as she went: over her head fluttered a bird, and by means of a chain she haled after her a sedentarily disposed pig. An incredibly old man followed, dressed in faded blue, and he carried upon his arm an open basket. Last came a shaggy dog, barking, it seemed, at all.

These figures were like clouds in their station and in their indeterminable coloring and vague outline, but their moving was not like the drifting of clouds: it was the walking of living creatures. Florian for an instant wondered as to the nature and the business of these beings that were passing over and away from Poictesme. He shrugged. He believed the matter to be no concern of one whose interests overhead were all in the efficient hands of Holy Hoprig.

_7._

_Adjustments of the Resurrected_

They brought Florian to Helmas the Deep-Minded, where the King sat on a daīs with his Queen Pressina. The King was stately in scarlet and ermine: his nose too was red, and to his crown was affixed the Zhar-Ptitza’s silvery feather. Florian found his appearance far more companionable than was that of the fat Queen (one of the water folk), whose skin was faintly blue, and whose hair was undeniably green, and whose little mouth seemed lost and discontented in her broad face.

Beside them, but not upon the dark red daīs, sat the high-priest of Llaw Gyffes, a fine looking and benevolent prelate, in white robes edged with a purple pattern of quaint intricacies: he wore a wreath of mistletoe about his broad forehead; and around and above this played a pulsing radiancy.

To these persons Florian told what had happened. When he had ended, the Queen said she had never heard of such a thing in her life, that it was precisely what she had predicted time and again, and that now Helmas could see for himself what came of spoiling Mélusine, and letting her have her own way about everything. The wise King answered nothing whatever.

But the high-priest of Llaw Gyffes asked, “And how did you lift this strong enchantment?”

“Monsieur, I removed it by the logical method of killing the seven monsters who were its strength and symbol. That they are all quite dead you can see for yourself,—if I may make so bold as to employ her Majesty’s striking phrase,—by counting the assortment of heads which I fetched hither with me.”

“Yes, to be sure,” the priest admitted. “Seven is seven the world over: everywhere it is a number of mystic potency. It follows that seven severed heads must predicate seven corpses; and such proofs are indisputable, as far as they go—”

Still, he seemed troubled in his mind.

Then Helmas, the wise King, said, “It is my opinion that the one way to encounter the unalterable is to do nothing about it.”

“Yes,” answered his wife, “and much that will help matters!”

“Nothing, my dear,” said the wise King, “helps matters. All matters are controlled by fate and chance, and these help themselves to what they have need of. These two it is that have taken from me a lordship that had not its like in the known world, and have made the palaces that we used to be feasting in, it still seems only yesterday, just little piles of rubbish, and have puffed out my famousness the way that when any man gets impudent a widow does a lamp. These two it is that leave me nothing but this castle and this crevice in the hills where the old time yet lingers. And I accept their sending, because there is no armor against it, but I shall keep up my dignity by not letting even fate and chance upset me with their playfulness. Here the old time shall be as it has always been, and here I shall continue to do what was expected of me yesterday. And about other matters I shall not bother, but I shall leave everything, excepting only my self-respect, to fate and chance. And I think that Hoprig will agree with me it is the way a wise man ought to be acting.”

“Hoprig!” reflected Florian, looking at the halo. “But what the devil is my patron saint doing here disguised as the high-priest of Llaw Gyffes?”

“I am thinking over some other matters,” replied Hoprig, to the King, “and it is in my thinking that nobody could manage to kill so many monsters, and to release us from our long sleeping, unless he was a sorcerer. So Messire de Puysange must be a sorcerer, and that is very awkward, with our torture-chamber all out of repair—”

“Ah, monsieur,” said Florian, reproachfully, “and are these quite charitable notions for a saint to be fostering? And, oh, monsieur, is it quite fair for you to have been sleeping here this unconscionable while, when you were supposed to be in heaven attending to the remission of people’s sins?”

Hoprig replied: “What choice had I or anybody else except to sleep under the Nis magic? For the rest, I do not presume to say what a saint might or might not think of the affair, because in our worship of Llaw Gyffes of the Steady Hand—”

“But I, monsieur, was referring to a very famous saint of the Christian church, which has for some while counted the Dukes of Puysange among its communicants, and is now our best-thought-of form of worship.”

“Oh, the Christians! Yes, I have heard of them. Indeed I now remember very well how Ork and Horrig came into these parts preaching everywhere the remarkable fancies of that sect until I discouraged them in the way which seemed most salutary.”

Florian could make nothing of this. He said, “But how could you, of all persons, have discouraged the spreading of Christianity?”

“I discouraged them with axes,” the saint replied, “and with thumbscrews, and with burning them at the stake. For it really does not pay to be subtle in dealing with people of that class: and you have to base your appeal to their better nature upon quite obvious arguments.”

“My faith, then, how it came about I cannot say, Monsieur Hoprig; but for hundreds upon hundreds of years you have been a Christian saint.”

“Dear me!” observed the saint, “so that must be the explanation of this halo. I noticed it of course. Still, our minds have been rather pre-empted since we woke up—But, dear me, now, I am astounded, and I know not what to say. I do say, though, that this is quite extraordinary news for you to be bringing a well-thought-of high-priest of Llaw Gyffes.”

“Nevertheless, monsieur, for all that you have never been anything but a high-priest of the heathen, and a persecutor of the true faith, I can assure you that you have, somehow, been canonized. And I am afraid that during the long while you have been asleep your actions must have been woefully misrepresented. Monsieur,” said Florian, hopefully, “at least, though, was it not true about your being in the barrel?”

“Why, but how could ever you,” the saint marveled, “have heard about that rain-barrel? The incident, in any case, has been made far too much of. You conceive, it was merely that the man came home most unexpectedly; and since all husbands are at times and in some circumstances so unreasonable—”

“Ah, monsieur,” said Florian, shaking his head, “I am afraid you do not speak of quite the barrel which is in your legend.”

“So I have a legend! Why, how delightful! But come,” said the saint, abeam with honest pleasure, and with his halo twinkling merrily, “come, be communicative; be copious, and tell me all about myself.”

Then Florian told Hoprig of how, after Hoprig’s supposed death, miracles had been worked at Hoprig’s putative tomb, near Gol, and this legend and that legend had grown up around his memory, and how these things had led to Hoprig’s being canonized. And Florian alluded also, with perfect tact but a little ruefully, to those fine donations he had been giving, year in and year out, to the Church of Holy Hoprig, under the impression that all the while the saint had been, instead of snoring at Brunbelois, looking out for Florian’s interests in heaven. And Hoprig now seemed rather pensive, and he inquired particularly about his tomb.

“I shall take this,” the saint said, at last, “to be the fit reward of my tender-heartedness. The tomb near Gol of which you tell me is the tomb in which I buried that Horrig about whom I was just talking, after we had settled our difference of opinion as to some points of theology. Ork was so widely scattered that any formal interment was quite out of the question. My priests are dear, well-meaning fellows. Still, you conceive, they are conscientious, and they enter with such zeal into the performance of any manifest if painful duty—”

Florian said: “They exhibited the archetypal zeal becoming to the ministers of an established church in the defence of their vested rights. They were, with primitive inadequacy, groping toward the methods of our Holy Inquisition and of civilized prelates everywhere—”

“—So they were quite tired out when we passed on to Horrig’s case. I do not deny that I was perhaps unduly lenient about Horrig. It was the general opinion that, tired as we were, this blasphemer against the religious principles of our fathers ought to be burned at the stake, and have his ashes scattered to the winds. But I was merciful. I had eaten an extremely light breakfast. So I merely had him broken on the wheel and decapitated, and we got through our morning’s work, after all, in good time for dinner: and I gave him a very nice tomb indeed, with his name on it in capital letters. Dear me!” observed Holy Hoprig, with a marked increase of his benevolent smile, “but how drolly things fall out! If the name had not been in capital letters, now, I would probably never have been wearing this halo which surprised me so this morning when I went to brush my hair—”

“But what has happened?” said the Queen.

“Why, madame,” replied the saint, “I take it that, with the passage of years, the tail of the first R in the poor dear fellow’s name was somewhat worn away. So when such miracles began to occur at his tomb as customarily emanate from the tombs of martyrs to any faith which later is taken up by really nice people, here were tangible and exact proofs, to the letter, of the holiness of Hoprig. In consequence, this Christian church has naturally canonized me.”

“That was quite civil of them of course, if this is considered the best-thought-of church. But, still,” the Queen said, doubtfully, “the miracles must have meant that Horrig was right, and you were wrong.”

“Certainly, madame, it would seem so, as a matter of purely academic interest. For now that his church is so well-thought-of everywhere and has canonized me, I must turn Christian, if only to show my appreciation of the compliment. So there is no possible harm done.”

“But in that case, it was Horrig that ought to have been made a saint of.”

“Now I, madame, for one, cherish humility too much to dare assert any such thing. For the ways of Providence are proverbially inscrutable: and it well may be that the abrasion of the tail of that R was also, in its quiet way, a direct intervention of Heaven to reward my mercifulness in according Horrig a comparatively pleasant martyrdom.”

“Yes, but it was he, after all, who had to put up with that martyrdom, on a dreadfully depressing rainy morning, too, I remember, whereas you get sainthood out of the affair without putting up with anything.”

“Do I not have to put up with this halo? How can I now hope to go anywhere after dark without being observed? Ah, no, madame, I greatly fear this canonization will cost me a host of friends by adorning my visits with such conspicuous publicity. Nevertheless, I do not complain. Instead, I philosophically recognize that well-bred women must avoid all ostentation, and that the ways of Providence are inscrutable.”

“That is quite true,” observed King Helmas, at this point, “and I think that nothing is to be gained by you two discussing these ways any more. The poets and the philosophers in every place have for a long while now had a heaviness in their minds about Providence, and the friendly advice they have been giving is not yet all acted upon. So let us leave Providence to look out for itself, the way we would if Providence had wisdom teeth. And let us turn to other matters, and to hearing what reward is asked by the champion who has rescued us from our long sleeping.”

“I too,” replied Florian, “if I may make so bold as to borrow the phrase used by your Majesty just now—that phrase by which I was immeasurably impressed, that phrase which still remains to me a vocalisation of supreme wisdom in terms so apt and striking—”

“Wisdom,” said the King, “was miraculously bestowed upon me a great while ago as a free gift, which I had done nothing to earn and deserve no credit for not having been able to avoid. And my way of talking, and using similes and syntax,—along with phraseology and monostiches and aposiopesis and such-like things,—is another gift, also, which I employ without really noticing the astonishment and admiration of my hearers. So do you not talk so much, but come to the point.”

“I too, then, in your Majesty’s transcendent phrase, shall do what was expected of me yesterday. I ask the hand of the King’s daughter in marriage.”

“That is customary,” wise Helmas said, with approval, “and you show a very fine sense of courtesy in adhering to our perhaps old-fashioned ways. Let the lord of Puysange be taken to his betrothed.”

_8._

_At the Top of the World_

“You will find her,” they had said, “yonder,”—and, pointing westerly, had left him. So Florian went unaccompanied through the long pergola overgrown with grape-vines, toward the lone figure at the end of this tunnel of rustling greenness and sweet odors. A woman waited there, in an eight-sided summer-house, builded of widely-spaced lattice-work that was hidden by vines. Through these vines you could see on every side the fluttering bright gardens of Brunbelois, but no living creature. This woman and Florian were alone in what was not unlike a lovely cage of vines. Florian seemed troubled. It was apparent that he knew this woman.

“I am flesh and blood,” the woman said,—“as you may remember.”

“Indeed, I have been singularly fortunate—But upon reflection, I retract the adverb. I have been marvelously fortunate; and I have no desire to forget it.”

“She also, the girl yonder, is flesh and blood. You will be knowing that before long.”

Florian looked at this woman for some while. “Perhaps that is true. I think it is not true. I have faith in the love which has endured since I was but a child. If that fails me, I must die. And I shall die willingly.”

He bowed low to this woman, and he passed on, through the summer-house, and out into the open air. He came thus to a wall, only breast high, and opened the gate which was there, and so went on in full sunlight, ascending a steepish incline that was overgrown with coarse grass and with much white clover. Thus Florian came to the unforgotten princess and to the beauty which he had in childhood, however briefly, seen. There was in this bright and windy place, which smelled so pleasantly of warm grass, nothing except a low marble bench without back or carving. No trees nor any bushes grew here: nothing veiled this place from the sun. Upon this sunlit mountain-top was only the bench, and upon the bench sat Melior, waiting.

She waited—there was the miracle,—for Florian de Puysange.

Behind and somewhat below Florian were the turrets and banners of Brunbelois, a place now disenchanted, but a fair place wherein the old time yet lingered. Before him the bare hillside sank sheer and unbroken, to the far-off tree-tops of Acaire: and beyond leagues of foliage you could even see, not a great number of miles away, but quite two miles below you, the open country of Poictesme, which you saw not as anything real and tangible but as a hazed blending of purples and of all the shades that green may have in heaven. Florian seemed to stand at the top of the world: and with him, high as his heart, stood Melior....

And it was a queer thing that he, who always noticed people’s clothes, and who tended to be very critical about apparel, could never afterward, in thinking about this extraordinary morning, recollect one color which Melior wore. He remembered only a sense of many interwoven brilliancies, as if the brightness of the summer sea and of the clouds of sunset and of all the stars were blended here to veil this woman’s body. She went appareled with the splendor of a queen of the old days, she who was the most beautiful of women that have lived in any day. For, if so far as went her body, one could think dazedly of analogues, nowhere was there anything so bright and lovely as was this woman’s countenance. And it was to the end that he might see the face of Melior raised now to him, he knew, that Florian was born. All living had been the prologue to this instant: God had made the world in order that Florian might stand here, with Melior, at the top of the world.

And it seemed to Florian that his indiscretions in the way of removing people from this dear world, and of excursions into strange beds, and of failures to attend mass regularly, had become alienate to the man who waited before Melior. All that was over and done with: he had climbed past all that in his ascent to this bright and windy place. Here, in this inconceivably high place, was the loveliness seen once and never forgotten utterly, the loveliness which had made seem very cheap and futile the things that other men wanted. Now this loveliness was, for the asking, his: and Florian found his composure almost shaken, he suspected that the bearing suitable to a Duke of Puysange was touched with unbecoming ardors. He feared that logic could not climb so high as he had climbed.

Besides, it might be, he had climbed too near to heaven. For nothing veiled this unimaginably high place: God, seeing him thus plainly, would be envious. That was the thought which Florian put hastily out of mind....

He parted his lips once or twice. This was, he joyously reflected, quite ridiculous. A woman waited: and Florian de Puysange could not speak. Then words came, with a sort of sobbing.

“My princess, there was a child who viewed you once in your long sleeping. The child’s heart moved with desires which did not know their aim. It is not that child who comes to you.”

“No, but a very gallant champion,” she replied, “to whom we all owe our lives.”

He had raised a deprecating hand. It was trembling. And her face seemed only a blurred shining, for in his eyes were tears. It must be, Florian reflected, because of the wind: but he did not believe this, nor need we.

“Princess, will you entrust to me, such as I am, the life I have repurchased for you? I dare make no large promises, in the teeth of a disastrously tenacious memory. Yet, there is no part in me but worships you, I have no desire in life save toward you. There has never been in all my life any real desire save that which strove toward you.”

“Oh, but, Messire Florian,” the girl replied, “of course I will be your wife if you desire it.”

He raised now both his hands a little toward her. She had not drawn back. He did not know whether this was joy or terror which possessed him: but it possessed him utterly. His heart was shaking in him, with an insane and ruthless pounding. He thought his head kept time to this pounding, and was joggling like the head of a palsied old man. He knew his finger-tips to be visited by tiny and inexplicable vibrations.

“If I could die now—!” was in his mind. “Now, at this instant! And what a thought for me to be having now!”

Instead, he now touched his disenchanted princess. Yet their two bodies seemed not to touch, and not to have moved as flesh that is pulled by muscles. They seemed to have merged, effortlessly and without volition, into one body.

In fine, he kissed her. So was the affair concluded.

_9._

_Misgivings of a Beginning Saint_

What Florian remembered, afterward, about Brunbelois seemed rather inconsequential. It was, to begin with, a high place, a remarkably high place. In the heart of the Forest of Acaire, arose a mountain with three peaks, of which the middle and lowest was cleared ground. Here stood the castle of Brunbelois, beside a lake, a lake that was fed by springs from the bottom, and had no tributaries and no outlet. Forests thus rose about you everywhere except in the west, where you looked down and yet further down, over the descending tree-tops of Acaire, and could see beyond these the open country of Poictesme.

Now in this exalted and cleared space wherein stood Brunbelois, there was nothing between you and the sky. You were continually noting such a hackneyed matter as the sky. You saw it no longer as dome-shaped, but as, quite obviously now, an interminable reach of space. You saw the huge clouds passing in this hollowness, each inconceivably detached and separate as one cloud would pass tranquilly above and behind the other, sometimes at right angles, sometimes travelling in just the opposite direction. It troubled you to have nothing between you and a space that afforded room for all those currents of air to move about in, so freely, so utterly without any obstruction. It made a Puysange seem small. And at night the stars also no longer appeared tidily affixed to the sky, as they appeared to be when viewed from Bellegarde or Paris: the stars seemed larger here, more meltingly luminous, and they glowed each in visible isolation, with all that space behind them. It had not ever before occurred to Florian that the sky could be terrible: and he began somewhat to understand the notions of the gray-haired porter who had watched this sky from Brunbelois, night after night, alone.

And Florian remembered Brunbelois as being a silvery and rustling place. A continuous wind seemed to come up from the west. The forests rising about you everywhere except in the west were never still, you saw all day the gray under side of the leaves twinkling restlessly, and you heard always their varying but incessant murmur. And small clouds too were always passing, borne by this incessant wind, very close to you, drifting through the porches of the castle, trailing pallidly over the grass, and veiling your feet sometimes, so that you stood knee-deep in a cloud: and the sunlight was silvery rather than golden. And under this gentle but perpetual wind the broad lake glittered ceaselessly with silver sparklings.

Moreover, the grass here was thick with large white blossoms, which grew singly upon short stalks without any leaves, and these white flowers nodded in an unending conference. They loaned the very ground here an unstable silveriness, for these flowers were not ever motionless. Sometimes they seemed to nod in sleepy mutual assent, sometimes the wind, in strengthening, would provoke them to the appearance of expressing diminutively vigorous indignation. And humming-birds were continually flashing about: these were too small for you to perceive their coloring, they went merely as gleams. And white butterflies fluttered everywhither as if in an abstracted light reconnoitering for what they could not find. And you were always seeing large birds high in the air, drifting and wheeling, as it seemed, in an endless searching for what they never found.

So Florian remembered, afterward, in the main, the highness and the silveriness and the instability of the place that he now went about exultingly with nothing left to wish for. He hardly remembered, afterward, what he and Melior did or talked of, during the days wherein Brunbelois prepared for their wedding: time and events, and people too, seemed to pass like bright shining vapors; all living swam in a haze of happiness. Florian now thought little of logic, he thought nothing of precedent; he thrust aside the implications of his depressing discovery as to his patron saint: he stayed in everything light-headedly bewildered through hourly contemplation of that unflawed loveliness which he had for a quarter of a century desired. He was contented now; he went unutterably contented by that beauty which he in childhood had, however briefly, seen, and which nothing had since then availed ever quite to put out of his mind. He could not, really, think about anything else. He cared about nothing else.

Still, even now, he kept some habit of circumspection: no man should look to be utterly naīf about his fifth wife. So when St. Hoprig contrived to talk in private with Melior, down by the lake’s border, Florian, for profoundly logical reasons, had followed Hoprig. Florian, for the same reasons, stood behind the hedge and listened.

“It is right that you should marry the champion who rescued us all,” said the voice of Hoprig, “for rules ought to be respected. But I am still of the opinion that nobody could have disposed of so many monsters without being an adept at sorcery.”

“Why, then, it seems to me that we ought to be very grateful for the sorcery by which we profit,” said the sweet voice of Melior. “For, as I so often think—”

“As goes the past, perhaps. The future is another matter. It is most widely another matter, for us two in particular.”

“You mean that as his wife I must counsel my husband to avoid all evil courses—”

“Yes, of course, I mean that. Your duty is plain enough, since a wife’s functions are terrestrial. But I, madame! I am, it appears, this young man’s patron saint, and upon his behavior depends my heavenly credit. You will readily conceive I thus have especial reason to worry over the possibility that Messire de Puysange may be addicted to diabolic practises.”

“Is it certain, my poor Hoprig, that you are actually a Christian saint? For, really, when one comes to think—!”

“There seems no doubt of it. I have tried a few miracles in private, and they come off as easily as old sandals. It appears that, now I am a saint, I enjoy, by approved precedents, all thaumaturgic powers, with especial proficiency in blasting, cursing and smiting my opponents with terrible afflictions; and have moreover the gift of tongues, of vision and of prophecy, and the power of expelling demons, of healing the sick, and of raising the dead. The situation is extraordinary, and I know not what to do with so many talents. Nor can anybody tell me here. In consequence, I must go down into this modern world of which Messire de Puysange brings such remarkable reports, and there I can instruct myself as to the requirements of my new dignity.”

“So you will leave Brunbelois with us, I suppose, and then we shall all—”

“I do not say that: I do not promise you my company. Probably I shall establish a hermitage somewhere, once I have seen something of this later world, and shall live in that hermitage as becomes a Christian saint. Here, you conceive, everyone knows me too well. Quite apart from the conduct of my private affairs,—in which I could not anticipate that sanctity might be looked for,—people would be remembering how I preached against these Christian doctrines, exposed them by every rule of logic, and exterminated their upholders. There would be a depressing atmosphere of merriment. But down yonder, I daresay, I might manage tolerably well.”

“I hope you will let depraved women alone,” said the voice of Melior, “because, as you ought with proper shame to remember—”

“My princess, let us not over-rashly sneer at depraved women. They very often have good hearts, they have attested their philanthropy in repeated instances, and I have noticed that the deeper our research into their private affairs, the more amiable we are apt to find their conduct. In any case, as touches myself, a saint is above all carnal stains and, I believe, diseases also. But it was about other matters I wished to speak with you. I am, I repeat, suspicious of this future husband of yours. Sorcerers have an ill way with their wives, and deplorable habits with their children; and your condition, in view of your fine health and youth, may soon be delicate. I shall ask for a revelation upon these points. Whatever impends, though, I shall be at hand to watch over you both.”

“So you will establish your hermitage at Bellegarde? For in that event—”

“Again, madame, you go too fast. I do not know about that either. In the environs of Bellegarde, they tell me, is a church devoted to my worship, and Messire de Puysange considers—inexplicably, I think,—that it might unsettle the faith of my postulants to have me appear among them. It seems more to the point that this Bellegarde is a retired place in the provinces, with no gaming parlors, and, Messire de Puysange assures me, but one respectable brothel—”

“Then Bellegarde would not suit you—” “No, of course not: for I would find ampler opportunities to put down the wicked, and to implant good seed, in large cities, which are proverbially the haunts of vice. In any case, do you take this ring. It was presented to me as a token of not unearned esteem and admiration, by a lady who had hitherto found men contemptible: and at my request—tendered somewhat hastily, but to the proper authorities,—this ring has been endowed with salutary virtues. The one trait of the holy ring which concerns us just now is its recently acquired habit of giving due warning whenever danger threatens its wearer. Dear me, now, how complete would have been my relaxation if only in my pagan days I had possessed such a talisman to put on whenever I undressed for bed! In any case, should the ring change, then do you invoke me.”

“And you will come with your miracles and your blightings and your blastings! My poor Hoprig, I think you do Messire de Puysange a great wrong, but I will keep the ring, for all that. Because, while you may be utterly mistaken, and no doubt hope you are as much as I do, still, the ring is very handsome: and, besides, as I so often think—”

“Do not be telling me your thoughts just now,” replied the voice of the saint, “for I can hear the bugle calling us to supper. There is another precaution I would recommend, a precaution that I will explain to you this evening, after we have eaten and drunk,” said Hoprig, as they went away together.

Florian, after waiting a discreet while, came from behind the hedge. Florian looked rather thoughtful as he too walked toward the castle.