The High Place

James Branch Cabell

The High Place

James Branch Cabell

[1879–1958]

The High Place

A Comedy of Disenchantment

1923

“Build on high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, and for horned Ashtoreth, the abomination of Zidon, and for Moloch, the abomination of the children of Amman.”

To

Robert Gamble Cabell III

this book, where so much more is due.

Table of Contents

PART ONE

THE END OF LONG WANTING

1. The Child Errant

2. Sayings about Puysange

3. Widowers Seek Consolation

4. Economics of an Old Race

5. Friendly Advice of Janicot

6. Philosophy of the Lower Class

7. Adjustments of the Resurrected

8. At the Top of the World

9. Misgivings of a Beginning Saint

10. Who Feasted at Brunbelois

PART TWO

THE END OF LIGHT WINNING

11. Problems of Beauty

12. Niceties of Fratricide

13. Débonnaire

14. Gods in Decrepitude

15. Dubieties of the Master

16. Some Victims of Flamberge

17. The Armory of Antan

18. Problems of Holiness

19. Locked Gates

20. Smoke Reveals Fire

PART THREE

THE END OF LEAN WISDOM

21. Of Melior Married

22. The Wives of Florian

23. The Collyn in the Pot

24. Marie-Claire

25. The Gander That Sang

26. Husband and Wife

27. The Forethought of Hoprig

28. Highly Ambiguous

29. The Wonder Words

30. The Errant Child

PART ONE

THE END OF LONG WANTING

“Lever un tel obstacle est à moy peu de chose.

Le Ciel défend, de vray, certains contentemens;

Mais on trouve avec luy des accommodemens.”

1. The Child Errant

PROBABLY Florian would never have gone into the Forest of Acaire had he not been told, over and over again, to keep out of it. Obedience to those divinely set in authority was in 1698 still modish: none the less, such orders, so insistently repeated to any normal boy of ten, even to a boy not born of the restless house of Puysange, must make the venture at one time or another obligatory.

Moreover, this October afternoon was of the sun-steeped lazy sort which shows the world as oversatisfied with the done year’s achievements, of the sort which, when you think about it so long, arouses a dim dissent from such unambitious aims. It was not that the young Prince de Lisuarte—to give Florian his proper title,—was in any one point dissatisfied with the familiar Poictesme immediately about him: he liked it well enough. It was only that he preferred another place, which probably existed somewhere, and which was not familiar or even known to him. It was only that you might—here one approximates to Florian’s vague thinking, as he lay yawning under the little tree from the East,—that you might find more excitement in some place which strove toward larger upshots than the ripening of grains and fruits, in a world which did not every autumn go to sleep as if the providing of food-stuffs and the fodder for people’s cattle were enough.

To-day, with October’s temperate sunlight everywhere, the sleek country of Poictesme was inexpressibly asleep, wrapped in a mellowing haze. The thronged trees of Acaire, as Florian now saw them just beyond that low red wall, seemed to have golden powder scattered over them, a powder which they stayed too motionless to shake off. Yet logic told him these still trees most certainly veiled wild excitements of some sort, for otherwise people would not be at you, over and over again, with exhortations to keep out of that forest.

Nobody was watching. There was nothing in especial to do, for Florian had now read all the stories in this curious new book, by old Monsieur Perrault of the Academy, which Florian’s father had last month fetched back from Paris: and, besides, nobody at Storisende had, for as much as a week, absolutely told Florian not to leave the gardens. So he adventured: and with the achievement of the adventure came a strengthening of Florian’s growing conviction that his elders were in their notions, as a rule, illogical.

For in Acaire, even when you went as far as Brunbelois, the boy found nothing hurtful. It was true that, had he not at the beginning of his wandering met with the small bright-haired woman who guided him thereafter, he might have made mistakes: and mistakes, as Melusine acknowledged, might have turned out awkwardly in approaching the high place, since monsters have to be handled in just the right way. She explained to Florian, on that warm long October afternoon, that sympathy is the main requisite, because the main trouble with such monsters as the bleps and the strycophanes and the calcar (she meant only the gray one, of course) is that each is unique, and in consequence lonely.

The hatred men feel for every ravening monster that wears fangs and scales, she pointed out, is due to its apparel being not quite the sort of thing to which men are accustomed: whereas people were wholly used to having soldiers and prelates and statesmen ramping about in droves, and so viewed these without any particular wonder or disapproval. All that was needed, then, was to extend to the bleps and the strycophanes a little of the confidence and admiration which men everywhere else accorded to the destroyers of mankind; and you would soon see that these glittering creatures—as well as the tawny eale, and the leucrocotta, with its golden mane and whiskers, and the opal-colored tarandus,—were a great deal nicer to look at than the most courted and run-after people, and much less apt to destroy anybody outside of their meal hours.

In any event, it was Melusine who had laid an enchantment upon the high place in the midst of the wood, and who had set the catoblepas here and the mantichora yonder to prevent the lifting of her spell, so that Florian could not possibly have found a better guide than Melusine. She was kindly, you saw, but not very happy: and from the first, Florian liked and, in some sort, pitied her. So he rode with her confidingly, upon the back of the queerest steed that any boy of ten had ever been privileged to look at, not to speak of riding on it: and the two talked lazily and friendlily as they went up and up, and always upward, along the windings of the green way which long ago had been a road.

As they went, the body of this sweet-smelling Melusine was warm and soft against his body, for Melusine was not imprisoned in hard-feeling clothes such as were worn by your governesses and aunts. The monsters stationed along the way drew back as Melusine passed; and some purred ingratiatingly, like gigantic kettles, and others made obeisances: and you met no other living creatures except three sheep that lay in the roadway asleep and very dingy with the dust of several hundred years. No self-respecting monster would have touched them. Thus Florian and Melusine came through the forest without any hindrance or trouble, to the cleft in the mountain tops where the castle stood beside a lake: and Florian liked the stillness of all things in this high place, where the waters of the lake were without a ripple, and the tall grass and so many mist-white flowers were motionless.

He liked it even more when Melusine led him through such rooms in the castle as took his fancy. He was glad that Melusine did not mind when Florian confessed the sleeping princess—in the room hung everywhere with curtains upon which people hunted a tremendous boar, and stuck spears through one another, and burst forth into peculiarly solid-looking yellow flames,—seemed to him even more lovely than was Melusine. They were very much alike, though, the boy said: and Melusine told him that was not unnatural, since Melior was her sister. And then, when Florian asked questions, Melusine told him also of the old unhappiness that had been in this place, and of the reasons which had led her to put an enduring peacefulness upon her parents and her sister and all the other persons who slept here enchanted.

Florian had before to-day heard century-old tales about Melusine’s father, Helmas the Deep-Minded. So it was very nice actually to see him here in bed, with his scarlet and ermine robes neatly folded on the armchair, and his crown, with a long feather in it, hung on a peg in the wall, just as the King had left everything when he went to sleep several hundred years ago. The child found it all extremely interesting, quite like a fairy tale such as those which he had lately been reading in the book by old Monsieur Perrault of the Academy.

But what Florian always remembered most clearly, afterward, was the face of the sleeping princess, Melior, as he saw it above the coverlet of violet-colored wool; and she seemed to him so lovely that Florian was never wholly willing, afterward, to admit she was but part of a dream which had come to him in his sleeping, on that quiet haze-wrapped afternoon, in the gardens of his own home.

Certainly his father had found him asleep, by the bench under the little tree from the East, and Florian could not clearly recollect how he had got back to Storisende: but he remembered Brunbelois and his journeying to the high place and the people seen there and, above all, the Princess Melior, with a clarity not like his memories of other dreams. Nor did the memory of her loveliness quite depart as Florian became older, and neither manhood nor marriage put out of his mind the beauty that he in childhood had, however briefly, seen.

2. Sayings about Puysange

WHEN Florian awakened he was lying upon the ground, with the fairy tales of Monsieur Perrault serving for Florian’s pillow, in the gardens of Storisende, just by the little tree raised from the slip which his great uncle, the Admiral, had brought from the other side of the world. Nobody knew the right name of this tree: it was called simply the tree from the East. Caterpillars had invaded it that autumn, and had eaten every leaf from the boughs, and then had gone away: but after their going the little tree had optimistically put forth again, in the mild October weather, so that the end of each bare branch was now tipped with a small futile budding of green.

It was upon the bench beneath this tree that Florian’s father was sitting. Monsieur de Puysange had laid aside his plumed three-cornered hat, and as he sat there, all a subdued magnificence of dark blue and gold, he was looking down smilingly at the young lazibones whom the Duke’s foot was gently prodding into wakefulness. The Duke was wearing blue stockings with gold clocks, as Florian was to remember. …

Not until manhood did Florian appreciate his father, and come properly to admire the exactness with which the third Duke of Puysange had kept touch with his times. Under the Sun King’s first mistress Gaston de Puysange had cultivated sentiment, under the second, warfare, and under the third, religion: he had thus stayed always in the sunshine. It was Florian’s lot to know his father only during the last period, so the boy’s youth as spent dividedly at the Duke’s two chateaux, at Storisende and at Bellegarde, lacked for no edifying influence. The long summer days at Storisende were diversified with all appropriate religious instruction. In winter the atmosphere of Versailles itself—where the long day of Louis Quatorze seemed now to be ending in a twilight of stately serenity through which the old King went death-ward, handsomely sustained by his consciousness of a well-spent life and by the reverent homage of all his bastards,—was not more pious than was that of Bellegarde.

Let none suppose that Monsieur de Puysange affected superhuman austerities. Rather, he exercised tact. If he did not keep all fast-days, he never failed to secure the proper dispensations, nor to see that his dependants fasted scrupulously: and if he sometimes, even now, was drawn into argument, Monsieur de Puysange was not ever known after any lethal duel to omit the ordering of a mass, at the local Church of Holy Hoprig, for his adversary’s soul. “There are amenities,” he would declare, “imperative among well-bred Christians.”

Then too, when left a widower at the birth of his second legitimate son, the Duke did not so far yield to the temptings of the flesh as to take another wife; for he confessed to scruples if marriage, which the Scriptures assert to be unknown in heaven, could anywhere be a quite laudable estate: but he saw to it that his boys were tended by a succession of good-looking and amiable governesses. His priests also were kept sleek, and his confessor unshocked, by the Duke’s tireless generosity to the Church; and were all of unquestioned piety, which they did not carry to excess. In fine, with youth and sentiment, and the discomforts of warfare also, put well behind him, the good gentleman had elected to live discreetly, among reputable but sympathetic companions. …

When Florian told his father now about Florian’s delightful adventure in Acaire, the Duke smiled: and he said that, in this dream begotten by Florian’s late reading of the fairy tales of Monsieur Perrault, Florian had been peculiarly privileged.

“For Madame Melusine is not often encountered nowadays, my son. She was once well known in this part of Poictesme. But it was a long while ago she quarreled with her father, the wise King Helmas, and imprisoned him with all his court in the high place that ought not to be. Yet Melusine, let me tell you, was properly punished for her un-filial conduct; since upon every Sunday after that, her legs were turned to fishes’ tails, and they stayed thus until Monday. This put the poor lady to great inconvenience: and when she eventually married, it led to a rather famous misunderstanding with her husband. And so he died unhappily; but she did not die, because she was of the Leshy, born of a people who are not immortal but are more than human—”

“Of course I know she did not die, monsieur my father. Why, it was only this afternoon I talked with her. I liked her very much. But she is not so pretty as Melior.”

It seemed to Florian that the dark curls of his father’s superb peruke now framed a smiling which was almost sad. “Perhaps there will never be in your eyes anybody so pretty as Melior. I am sure that you have dreamed all this, jumbling together in your dreaming old Monsieur Perrault’s fine story of the sleeping princess—La Belle au Bois Dormant,—with our far older legends of Poictesme—”

“I do not think that it was just a dream, monsieur my father—”

“But I, unluckily, am sure it was, my son. And I suspect, too, that it is the dream which comes in varying forms to us of Puysange, the dream which we do not ever quite put out of mind. We stay, to the last, romantics. So Melior, it may be, will remain to you always that unattainable beauty toward which we of Puysange must always yearn,—just as your patron St. Hoprig will always afford to you, in his glorious life and deeds, an example which you will admire and, I trust, emulate. I admit that such emulation,” the Duke added, more drily, “has not always been inescapable by us of Puysange.”

“I cannot hope to be so good as was Monseigneur St. Hoprig,” Florian replied, “but I shall endeavor to merit his approval.”

“Indeed, you should have dreamed of the blessed Hoprig also, while you were about it, Florian. For he was a close friend of your Melior’s father, you may remember, and performed many miracles at the court of King Helmas.”

“That is true,” said Florian. “Oxen brought him there in a stone trough: and I am sure that Monseigneur St. Hoprig must have loved Melior very much.”

And he did not say any more about what his father seemed bent upon regarding as Florian’s dream. At ten a boy has learned to humor the notions of his elders. Florian slipped down from the bench, and tucked his book under his arm, and agreed with his father that it was near time for supper.

None the less, though, as the boy stood waiting for that magnificent father of his to arise from the bench, Florian reflected how queer it was that, before the falling of the Nis magic, this beautiful Melior must have known and talked with Florian’s heavenly patron, St. Hoprig of Gol. It was to Holy Hoprig that Florian’s mother had commended the boy with her last breath, and it was to Holy Hoprig that Florian’s father had taught the boy to pray in all time of doubt or peccadillo, because this saint was always to be the boy’s protector and advocate. And this made heaven seem very near and real, the knowledge that always in celestial courts this bright friend was watching, and, Florian hoped, was upon occasion tactfully suggesting to the good God that one must not be too severe with growing boys. Melior—Florian thought now,—was remotely and half timidly to be worshipped: Hoprig, the friend and intercessor,—a being even more kindly and splendid than was your superb father,—you loved. …

Florian had by heart all the legends about Holy Hoprig. Particularly did Florian rejoice in the tale of the saint’s birth, in such untoward circumstances as caused the baby to be placed in a barrel, and cast into the sea, to be carried whither wind and tide directed. Florian knew that for ten years the barrel floated, tossing up and down in all parts of the ocean, while regularly an angel passed the necessary food to young Hoprig through the bung-hole. Finally, at Heaven’s chosen time, the barrel rolled ashore near Manneville, on the low sands of Fomor Beach. A fisherman, thinking that he had found a cask of wine, was about to tap it with a gimlet; then from within, for the first time, St. Hoprig speaks to man: “Do not injure the cask. Go at once to the abbot of the monastery to which this land belongs, and bid him come to baptize me.”

It seemed to Florian that was a glorious start in life for a boy of ten, a boy of just the same age as Florian. All the later miracles and prodigies appeared, in comparison with that soul-contenting moment, to be compact of paler splendors. Nobody, though, could hear unenviously of the long voyage to the Red Islands and the realm of Hlif, and to Pohjola, and even to the gold-paved Strembolgings, where every woman contains a serpent so placed as to discourage love-making,—of that pre-eminently delightful voyage made by St. Hoprig and St. Hork in the stone trough, which, after its landing upon the coasts of Poictesme, at mid-winter, during a miraculous shower of apple-blossoms, white oxen drew through the country hillward, with the two saints by turns preaching and converting people all the way to Perdigon. For that, Florian remembered, was the imposing fashion in which Holy Hoprig had come to the court of Melior’s father,—and had wrought miracles there also, to the discomfiture of the abominable Horrig. But more important, now, was the reflection that St. Hoprig had in this manner come to Melior and to the unimaginable beauty which, in the high place, a coverlet of violet stuff just half concealed. …

Certainly Monseigneur St. Hoprig must have loved Melior very much, and these two must have been very marvelous when they went about a more heroic and more splendid world than Florian could hope ever to inhabit. It was of their beauty and holiness that the boy thought, with a dumb yearning to be not in all unworthy of these bright, dear beings. That was the longing—to be worthy,—which possessed Florian as he stood waiting for his father to rise from the bench beneath the little tree from the East. There, the Duke also seemed to meditate, about something rather pleasant.

“You said just now, monsieur my father,” Florian stated, a trifle worried, “that we of Puysange have not always imitated the good examples of St. Hoprig. Have we been very bad ?”

Monsieur de Puysange had put on his plumed hat, but he stayed seated. He appeared now, as grown people so often do, amused for no logical or conceivable reason: though, indeed, the Duke seemed to find most living creatures involuntarily amusing.

He said: “We have displayed some hereditary foibles. For it is the boast of the house of Puysange that we trace in the direct male line from Poictesme’s old Jurgen. That ancient wanderer, says our legend, somehow strayed into the bedchamber of Madame Felise de Puysange; and the result of his errancy was the vicomte who flourished under the last Capets.”

Young Florian, in accord with the quaint custom of the day, had been reared without misinformation as to how or whence children came into the world. So he said only, if a little proudly, “Yes,—he was another Florian, I remember, like me.

“There were queer tales about this first Florian, also, who is reputed to have vanished the moment he was married, and to have re-appeared here, at Storisende, some thirty years later, with his youth unimpaired. He declared himself to have slept out the intervening while,—an excuse for remissness in his marital duties which sceptics have considered both hackneyed and improbable.”

“Well,” Florian largely considered, “but then there is Sir Ogier still asleep in Avalon until France has need of him; and John the Divine is still sleeping at Ephesus until it is time to bear his witness against Antichrist; and there is Merlin in Brocéliande, and there is St. Joseph of Arimathaea in the white city of Sarras—and really, monsieur my father, there is Melior, and all the rest of King Helmas’ people up at Brunbelois.”

“Are you still dreaming of your Melior, tenacious child! Certainly you are logical, you cite good precedents for your namesake, and to adhere to logic and precedent is always safe. I hope you will remember that.”

“I shall remember that, monsieur my father.”

“Certainly, too, this story of persons who sleep for a miraculous while is common to all parts of the world. This Florian de Puysange, in any event, married a granddaughter of the great Dom Manuel; so that we descend from the two most famous of the heroes of Poictesme: but, I fancy, it is from Jurgen that our family has inherited the larger number of its traits.”

“Anyhow, we have risen from just being vicomtes—”

Florian’s father had leaned back, he had put off his provisional plan of going in to supper. You could not say that the good gentleman exactly took pride in his ancestry: rather, he found his lineage worthy of him, and therefore he benevolently approved of it.

So he said now, complacently enough: “Yes, our house has prospered. Steadily our fortunes have been erected, and in dignity too we have been erected. Luck seems to favor us, however, most heartily when a woman rules France, and it is to exalted ladies that we owe most of our erections. Thus Queen Ysabeau the Bavarian notably advanced the Puysange of her time, very much as Anne of Beaujeu and Catherine de Medici did afterward. Many persons have noted the coincidence. Indeed, it was only sixty years ago that Marion de Lorme spoke privately to the Great Cardinal, with such eloquence that the Puysange of the day—another Florian, and a notably religious person,—had presently been made a duke, with an appropriate estate in the south—”

“I know,” said Florian, not a bit humble about his erudition. “That is how we came to be here in Poictesme. Mademoiselle de Lorme was a very kind lady, was she not, monsieur my father?”

“She was so famed, my son, for all manner of generosity that when my grandfather remodeled Bellegarde, and erected the Hugonet wing of the present chateau, he sealed up in the cornerstone, just as people sometimes place there the relics of a saint, both of Mademoiselle de Lorme’s garters. Probably there was some salutary story connected with his acquiring of them; for my pious grandfather cared nothing for such vanities as jeweled garters, his mind being wholly set upon higher things.”

“I wish we knew that story,” said Florian.

“But nobody does. My grandfather was discreet. So he thrived. And his son, who was my honored father, also thrived under the regency of Anne of Austria. He thrived rather unaccountably in the teeth of Mazarin’s open dislike. There was some story—I do not know what,—about a nightcap found under the Queen’s pillow, and considered by his eminence to need some explaining. My honored father was never good at explaining things. But he was discreet, and he thrived. And I too, my son, was lucky in Madame de Montespan’s time.”

Now Madame de Montespan’s time antedated Florian’s thinking: but about the King’s last mistress,—and morganatic wife, some said,—Florian was better informed.

“Madame de Maintenon also is very fond of you, monsieur my father, is she not?”

The Duke slightly waved his hand, as one who disclaims unmerited tribute. “It was my privilege to know that incomparable lady during her first husband’s life. He was a penniless cripple who had lost the use of all his members, and in that time of many wants I was so lucky as to comfort Madame Scarron now and then. Madame de Maintenon remembers these alleviations of her unfortunate youth, and notes with approval that I have forgotten them utterly. So Madame is very kind. In short,—or, rather, to sum up the tale,—the lords of Puysange are rumored, by superstitious persons, to have a talisman which enables them to go farther than may most men in their dealings with ladies.”

“You mean, like a magic lamp or a wishing cap?” said Florian, “or like a wizard’s wand?”

“Yes, something in that shape,” the Duke answered, “and they tell how through its proper employment, always under the great law of living, our house has got much pleasure and prosperity. And it is certain the Collyn aids us at need—”

“What is the Collyn?”

“Nothing suitable for a boy of ten to know about. When you are a man I shall have to tell you, Florian. That will be soon enough.”

“And what, monsieur my father, is this great law of living?”

The Duke looked for a while at his son rather queerly. “Thou shalt not offend,” the Duke replied, “against the notions of thy neighbor.”

With that he was silent: and, rising at last from the bench, he walked across the lawn, and ascended the broad curving marble stairway which led to the south terrace of Storisende. And Florian, following, was for an instant quiet, and a little puzzled.

“Yes, monseigneur my father, but I do not see—”

The Duke turned, an opulent figure in dark blue and gold. He was standing by one of the tall vases elaborately carved with garlands, the vases that in summer overflowed with bright red and yellow flowers: these vases were now empty, and the gardeners had replaced the carved lids.

“Youth never sees the reason of that law, my son. I am wholly unprepared to say whether or not this is a lucky circumstance.” The Duke again paused, looking thoughtfully across the terrace, toward the battlemented walls and the four towers of the southern facade. His gazing seemed to go well beyond the fountain and the radiating low hedges and gravelled walkways of the terrace, to go beyond, for that matter, the darkening castle. Twilight was rising: you saw a light in one window. “At all events, we are home again, young dreamer. I too was once a dreamer. And at all events, there is Little Brother waiting for us.”

3. Widowers Seek Consolation

LITTLE BROTHER was indeed waiting for them, at the arched doorway, impatient of his governess’ restraint. At sight of them he began telling, coincidently, of how hungry he was, and of how he had helped old Margot to milk a cow that afternoon, and of how a courier was waiting for Monsieur my Father in great long boots, up to here. The trifold tale was confusing, for at eight little Raoul could not yet speak plainly. His sleeve was torn, and he had a marvelously dirty face.

Behind him stood pallid pretty Mademoiselle Berthe, the governess who a trifle later, during the next winter, killed herself. She had already begun bewailing her condition to the Duke, even while she obstinately would have none of the various husbands whom her kindly patron recommended, from among his dependants, as ready to make that condition respectable. There seemed no pleasing the girl, and Florian could see that his father, for all his uniform benevolence, regarded her as a nuisance.

But the Duke now gazed down, at the pale frightened-looking creature, with that fine condescending smile which he accorded almost everybody. “Mademoiselle, children are a grave responsibility. I have just found Florian asleep in the mud yonder, whereas you have evidently just plucked this other small pest from the pig-sty. It is lucky that we have no more brats to contend with, Mademoiselle, for the present, is it not?”

Florian wondered, long afterward, how Mademoiselle had looked, and what she replied. He could not recollect. But he did remember that at this instant Little Brother ran from her and hugged first one of his father’s superb legs and then Florian. Little Brother was warm and tough-feeling and astonishingly strong, and he smelled of clean earth.

Florian loved him very much, and indeed the affection between the two brothers endured until the end of their intercourse. Florian was always consciously the elder and wiser, and felt himself the stronger long after Raoul had become taller than Florian. Even after Raoul was well on in his thirties, and both the boys had boys of their own, Florian still thought of the Chevalier de Puysange as a little brother with a dirty face and a smell of clean earth, whom you loved and patronized, and from whom you had one secret only. For of course you never told Raoul about Melior.

You spoke to nobody about Melior. You found it wiser and more delicious to retain all knowledge of her loveliness for entirely private consideration, and thus not be bothered with people’s illogical notion that Melior was only a dream.

For the memory of the Princess Melior’s loveliness did not depart as Florian became older, and neither manhood nor marriage could put quite out of mind the beauty that he had in childhood, however briefly, seen. Other women came and in due season went. His wives indeed seemed to die with a sort of uniform prematureness in which the considerate found something of fatality: nor did the social conventions of the day permit a Puysange to shirk amusing himself with yet other women. Florian amused himself so liberally, once his father was dead, and the former Prince de Lisuarte had succeeded to the major title and to his part of the estates, that they of Bellegarde were grieved when it was known that the fourth Duke of Puysange now planned to marry for the fifth time.

At Florian’s chateau of Bellegarde, affairs had sped very pleasantly since the death of his last wife, and the packing off of his son to Storisende. Storisende, by the old Duke’s will, had fallen to Raoul. Affairs had sped so pleasantly, they said at Bellegarde, that it seemed a deplorable risk for monseigneur to be marrying a woman who might, conceivably, be forthwith trying to reclaim him from all fashionable customs. Besides, he was upon this occasion marrying a daughter of the house of Nerac, just as his brother the Chevalier had done. And this was a ruiningly virtuous family, a positively dowdy family who hardly seemed to comprehend—they said at Bellegarde,—that we were now living in the modern world of 1723, and that fashions had altered since the old King’s death.

“For how long, little monster, will this new toy amuse you?” asked Mademoiselle Cecile. It appears unfair here to record that at nine o’clock in the morning they were not yet up and about the day’s duties, without recording also, in palliation of such seeming laziness, that there was no especial need to hurry, for all of mademoiselle’s trunks had been packed overnight, and she was not to leave Bellegarde until noon.

“Parbleu, one never knows,” Florian replied, as he lay smiling lazily at the smiling cupids who held up the bed-canopies. “It is a very beautiful feature of my character that at thirty-five I am still the optimist. When I marry I always believe the ceremony to begin a new and permanent era.”

“Oh, very naturally, since everywhere that frame of mind is considered appropriate to a bridegroom.”

The girl had turned her sleek brown head a little, resting it more comfortably upon the pillow, and she regarded Florian with appraising eyes. “My friend, in this, as in much else, I find your subserviency to convention almost excessive. It becomes a notorious mania with you to do nothing whatever without the backing of logic and good precedent—”

“My father, mademoiselle, impressed upon me a great while ago the philosophy of these virtues.”

“Yes, all that is very fine. Yet I at times suspect your logic and your precedents to be in reality patched-up excuses for following the moment’s whim: or else I seem to see you adjusting them, like colored spectacles, to improve in your eyes the appearance of that which you have in hand.”

“Now you misjudge me, mademoiselle, with the ruthlessness of intimate personal acquaintance—”

“But indeed, indeed, those precedents which you educe are often rather far-fetched. You are much too ready to refer us to the customs of the Visigoths, or to cite the table-talk of Aristotle, or to appeal to the rulings of Quintilian. It sounds well: I concede that. Yet these, and the similar sonorous pedantries with which you are so glib to justify your prank’s, do not, my friend, let me assure you, seem always wholly relevant to the conditions of modern life—”

“My race descends from a most notable scholar, mademoiselle, and it well may be the great Jurgen has bequeathed to me some flavor of his unique erudition. For that I certainly need not apologize—”

“No, you should rather apologize because that ancient hero appears also to have bequeathed to you a sad tendency to self-indulgence in matrimony. Now to get married has always seemed to me an indelicate advertising of one’s intentions: and I assuredly cannot condone in anybody a selfish habit which to-day leads to my being turned out of doors—”

“A pest! you talk as if I too did not sincerely regret those social conventions which make necessary your departure—”

“Yet it is you who evoke those silly conventions by marrying again.”

“—But in a grave matter like matrimony one must not be obstinate and illiberal. Raoul assures me, you conceive, that his little sister-in-law is a delightful creature. He thinks that as a co-heiress of Nerac, without any meddlesome male relatives, she is the person logically suited to be my wife. And I like to indulge the dear fellow’s wishes.”

“Behold a fine sample of your indulgence of others, by marrying a great fortune! After all, though,” Cecile reflected, philosophically, “I would not change shoes with her. For it is not wholesome, my friend, to be your wife. But it has been eminently pleasant to be your playfellow.”

Florian smiled. And Florian somewhat altered his position.

“Bels doux amies,” sang Florian, softly, “fassam un joc novel—!”

“I must ask for some explanation of, at least,” Cecile stated, with that light, half-muffled laugh which Florian found adorable, “your words.”

“I was about to sing, mademoiselle, a very ancient aubade. I was beginning a morning-song such as each lover in the days of troubadours was used, here in Poictesme, to sing to his mistress at arising.”

“So that, now you are, as I perceive, arising, you plan to honor the old custom ? That is well enough for you, who are a Duke of Puysange, and who have so much respect for precedent and logic. But I am not logical, I am, as you can see, a woman. Moreover, I am modern in all, I abhor antiquity. I find it particularly misplaced in a bedroom. And so, my friend, I must entreat you, whatever you do, not to sing any of those old songs, which may, for anything I know, have some improper significance.”

Florian humored this young lady’s rather strict notions of propriety, and they for a while stopped talking. Then they parted with a friendly kiss, and they dressed each for travelling: and Mademoiselle Cecile rode south upon a tentative visit to Cardinal Borgia, whose proffered benefactions had thus far been phrased with magniloquence and vagueness. This fair girl had the religious temperament, and she delighted in submitting herself to her spiritual fathers, but she required some daily comforts also.

Florian next sent for the boy Gian Paolo, who had now for seven months been Florian’s guest. “I am marrying,” said Florian. “We must part, Gian Paolo.”

“Do you think so?” the boy said. “Ah, but you would regret me!”

“Regretting would become a lost art if people did not sometimes do their duty. Now that I am about to take a wife, you comprehend, I shall for the while be more or less pre-empted by my bride. It is unlikely that I shall be able, at all events during the first ardors of the honeymoon, to entertain my friends with any adequacy. Let us be logical, dear Gian Paolo! I find no fault in you, beloved boy, I concede you to be fit friend for an emperor. It is merely that the advent of my new duchess now compels me to ensure the privacy of our honeymoon by parting, however regretfully, with Mademoiselle Cecile and with you also.”

“Your decision does not surprise me, Florian, for they say that you have parted with many persons who loved you, and who left you—”

“Yes?” said Florian.

“—Very suddenly—”

“Yes?” Florian said, again.

“—And yet without their departure surprising you at all, dear Florian.”

“Oh, it is merely that in moments of extreme anguish I attempt to control my emotions, and to give them no undignified display,” said Florian. “Doubtless, I was as surprised as anybody. Well, but this foolish gossip of this very censorious neighborhood does not concern us, Gian Paolo: and, now that you too are about to go, I can assure you that all your needs”—here for an instant Florian hesitated,—“have been provided for.”

“Indeed, I see that you have wine set ready. Is it”—and the boy smiled subtly, for he was confident of his power over Florian,—“is it my stirrup-cup, dear Florian ?”

Florian now looked full upon him. “Yes,” Florian said, rather sadly. Then they drank, but not of the same wine, to the new Duchess of Puysange. And the boy Gian Paolo died without pain.

“It is better so,” said Florian. “Time would have spoiled your beauty. Time would have spoiled your joy in life, Gian Paolo, and would have shaken your fond belief that I was your slave in everything. Time lay in wait to travesty this velvet chin with a harsh beard, to waken harsh doublings in the merry heart, and to abate your lovely perversities with harsh repentance. For time ruins all, but you escape him, dear Gian Paolo, unmarred.”

Now Florian was smiling wistfully, for he found heartache in this thinking of the evanescence of beauty everywhere, and heartache too in thinking of the fate of that charming old lady, La Tophania, who had been so kind to him in Naples. For Florian could rarely make use of her recipes without recollecting how cruelly the mob had dealt with his venerable instructress: that was, he knew, a sentimental side to his nature, which he could never quite restrain. So he now thought sadly of this stately old-world gentlewoman, so impiously dragged from a convent and strangled, now four years ago, because of her charity toward those who were afflicted by the longevity of others. Yes, life was wasteful, sparing nobody, not even one who was so wise and amiable as La Tophania, nor so lovable as Gian Paolo. The thought depressed him: such wastefulness was illogical: and it seemed to Florian, too, that this putting of his household into fit order for the reception of his bride was not wholly a merry business.

Then Florian, stroking the dead hand which was as yet soft and warm, said gently: “And though I have slain you, dear Gian Paolo, rather than see you depart from me to become the friend of another, and perhaps to talk with him indiscreetly after having learned more about me than was wise, I have at worst not offended against convention, nor have I run counter to the fine precedents of the old time. Just so did the great Alexander deal with his Clitus, and Hadrian with his Antinous; nor did divine Apollo give any other parting gift to Hyacinthos, his most dear friend. Now the examples afforded us by ancient monarchs and by the heathen gods should not, perhaps, be followed blindly. Indeed, we should in logic remember always that all these were pagans, unsustained by the promptings of true faith, and therefore liable to err. None the less, they at least establish an arguable precedent, they afford people of condition something to go by: and to have that is a firm comfort.”

He kissed the dead lips fondly; and he bade his lackeys summon Father Joseph to bury Gian Paolo, with due ceremony, in the Chapel, next to Florian’s wives.

“We obey. Yet, it will leave room for no more graves,” one told him, “in the alcove wherein monseigneur’s wives are interred.”

“That is true. You are an admirable servant, Pierre, you think logically of all things. Do you bury the poor lad in the south transept.”

Then Florian took wine and wafers into the secret chamber which nobody else cared to enter, and he made sure that everything there was in order. All these events happened on the feast day of St. Swithin of Winchester, which falls upon the fifteenth of July: and on that same day Florian left Bellegarde, going to meet his new wife, and traveling alone, toward Storisende.

4. Economics of an Old Race

FLORIAN rode alone, spruce and staid in a traveling suit of bottle-green and silver, riding upon a tall white horse, riding toward Storisende, where his betrothed awaited him, and where the wedding supper was already in preparation. He went by the longer route, so that he might put up a prayer, for the success of his new venture into matrimony, at the church of Holy Hoprig. Nobody was better known nor more welcome at this venerable shrine than was Florian, for the Duke of Puysange had spared nothing to evince his respect for the fame and the favorable opinion of his patron saint. Whether in the shape of candles or a handsome window, or a new chapel or an acre or two of meadow land, Florian was always giving for the greater glory of that bright intercessor who in heaven, Florian assumed, was tactfully suggesting that such generosity should not be overlooked. So it was that Florian kept his accounts balanced, his future of a guaranteeable pleasantness, and his conscience clear.

Having prayed for the success of this new marriage and for the soul of Gian Paolo, and having confessed to all the last month’s irregularities, Florian went eastward. He passed Amneran and a spur of the great forest, now that he went to ford the Duardenez. As he neared Acaire he thought, idly, and with small shrugs, of a boy’s adventuring to the sleeping princess in the midst of these woods, and of the beauty which he had not ever forgotten utterly: and his heart was troubled with that worshipful and hopeless longing which any thinking about this Melior would always evoke in Florian, because he knew that his “dream,” as people would call it, was a far more true and vital thing than Florian’s daily living.

Then on a sudden he reined up his horse, and Florian’ waited there, looking down upon the dark woman who had come out of this not over-wholesome forest. Florian did not speak for some while, but he smiled, and he shook his head in a sort of humorous disapprobation.

This woman was his half-sister, whom Florian’s father had begotten, with the co-operation of the bailiff of Ranee’s daughter, some while before middle age and the coming into extreme fashion of continence had made such escapades criticizable.

Marie-Claire Cazaio was thus of an age with Florian, being his senior by only three months. In their shared youth these two had not been strangers, for the old Duke had handsomely recognized his responsibility for this daughter, and had kept Marie-Claire about his household until the girl had outraged propriety by bearing an illegitimate child. After this the Duke had no choice except to turn her out of doors. She had since then taken up with companions whose repute was not even dubious: and her manner of living was esteemed intemperate by the most broad-minded persons in Poictesme, where sorcery was treated with all reasonable indulgence.

“My dear,” said Florian, at last, still shaking his head, “I must tell you, however little good it does, that there was another deputation of peasants and declamatory grocers at me, only last week, to have you seized and burned. You are too careless, Marie-Claire, about offending against the notions of your neighbors. You should persuade your unearthly lovers to curb their ardors until after dark. You should at least induce them not to pass over Amneran in such shapes as frighten your neighbors in the twilight, and so provoke their very natural desire to burn you at broad noon.”

“These little peasants will not burn me yet,” she answered. “My term is not yet run out—” You saw that Marie-Claire was thinking of quite other matters. She said, “So, they tell me, you are to marry again?”

She had lifted to him now that half-pensive, half-blind staring which he uneasily recognized. Florian had always under this woman’s gaze the illogical feeling that, where he was, Marie-Claire saw some one else, or, to be exact, saw some one a slight distance behind him. Her eyes could not be black. Florian knew that nobody’s eyes were really black. But this woman’s small eyes were very dark, they had such extraordinarily thick lashes upon both upper and lower lids, that these little eyes most certainly seemed blobs of infernal ink. There was in his sister’s eyes a discomfortable knowingness. Puysange looked at Puysange.

He answered, quietly, “Yes, Mademoiselle de Nerac is now about to make me the happiest of men.”

“Unhappy child! for she too is flesh and blood.”

“And what does that anatomical truism signify when it is so cryptically uttered, Marie-Claire ?”

“It means that you and I are not enamored of flesh and blood.”

Florian did not reply to this in words. But he smiled at his half-sister, for he was really fond of her, even now, and they understood each other excellently.

So he stayed silent, still looking at her. By and by he said: “You come out of a wood that is not often visited by abbots and cherubim, and you carry a sieve and shears. Who is yonder?”

Marie-Claire replied, “How should I know the real name of the adversary of all the gods of men?”

“Pardieu!” said Florian, “so it is company of such sinister grandeur that you entertain nowadays. You progress, my sister, toward a truly notable damnation.”

“In these parts, to be sure, they call him Janicot—”

“Yes, I know,” said Florian, “and, certainly, his local name does not matter in the least.” Florian smiled benevolently, and said, “Good luck to you, my dear!”

Then he rode on, into the pathway from which Marie-Claire had just emerged. He was interested, for it might well be rather amusing to overtake this whispered-about Janicot in the midst of his sombre work: but, even so, the thoughts of Florian were not wholly given over to Janicot, or to Marie-Claire either. Instead, he was still thinking of the sleeping woman’s face which he had not ever forgotten utterly: and this dark sullen sister of his—who had once been so pretty too, he recollected,—and all her injudicious traffic seemed, somehow, rather futile.

No, he reflected, Marie-Claire was not pretty now. Her neck remained wonderful: it was still the only woman’s neck familiar to Florian that really justified comparison with a swan’s neck by its unusual length and roundness and flexibility. But her head was too small for that superb neck: she had taken on the dusky pallor of a Puysange: she was, in fine, thirty-five, and looked rather older. It showed you what irregular and sorcerous living might lead to. Florian at thirty-five looked—at most, he estimated,—twenty-eight. Yes: it was much more sensible to adhere to precedent, and to keep all one’s accounts in order, through St. Hoprig’s loving care, and to retain overhead a thrifty balance in one’s favor.

5. Friendly Advice of Janicot

WHEN he had entered a little way into Acaire, Florian came to an open place, where seven trees had been hewn down. A brown horse was tethered here, and here seven lilies bloomed with a surprising splendor of white and gold. These stood waist-high about a sedate looking burgess, unostentatiously but very neatly dressed in some brown stuff, which was just the color of his skin. At his feet was a shrub covered with crimson flowers: no sun shone here, the sky was clouded and cast down a coppery glow.

Such was Janicot. Florian saluted him, quite civilly, but with appropriate reserve.

“Come,” Janicot said, smiling, “and is this the rapturous countenance of a bridegroom? I am not pleased with you, Monsieur the Duke, I must have happy faces among my friends.”

“So you also have heard of my approaching marriage! Well, I am content enough, and for me to marry the co-heiress of Nerac seems logical: but in logic, too, I cannot ignore that I ride toward a disappointing business. There is magic in the curiously clothed woman who is mistress of herself, the hour and you: but the prostrate, sweating and submissive meat in a tangle of bed-clothing—!” Florian shrugged.

“In fact,” said Janicot, as if pensively, “I have observed you. You do not enter wholly into the pleasures suitable for men and women: you do not avoid these agreeabilities, but your sampling of them is without self-surrender, and there is something else which you hold more desirable.”

“That is true.” Florian for an instant meditated. Florian shrugged. Then Florian dismounted from his white horse, and tethered it. Here was the one being in whom you might confide logically. Florian told Janicot the story of how, in childhood, Florian had ascended to the high place, and had seen the Princess Melior, whom always since that time his heart had desired.

And Janicot heard him through, with some marks of interest. Janicot nodded.

“Yes, yes,” said Janicot. “I do not frequent high places. But I have heard of this Melior, from men a long while dead, and they said that she was beautiful.”

“Then they spoke foolishly,” replied Florian, “because they spoke with pitiable inadequacy. Now I do not say that she is beautiful. I do not speak any praise whatever of Melior, because her worth is beyond all praising. I am silent as to the un-forgotten beauty of Melior, lest I cry out against that which I love. When I was but a child her loveliness was revealed to me, and never since then have I been able to forget the beauty of which all dreams go envious, I jest with women who are lovable and nicely colored; they have soft voices, and their hearts are kind: but presently I yawn and say they are not as Melior.”

“Ah, but in fact,” said Janicot, “in fact, you do—without caring to commit yourself formally,—believe that this Melior is beautiful?”

Now Florian’s plump face was altered, and his voice shook a little. He said:

“Her beauty is that beauty which women had in the world’s youth, and whose components the old world forgets in this gray age. It may be that Queen Helen possessed such beauty, she for whom the long warring was. It may be that Cleopatra of Egypt, who had for her playmates emperors and a gleaming snake, and for her lovers all poets that have ever lived, or it may be that some other royal lady of the old time, in the world’s youth, wore flesh that was the peer of Melior’s flesh in loveliness. But such women, if there indeed was ever Melior’s peer, are now vague echoes and blown dust. I cry the names that once were magic. I cry to Semiramis and to Erigone and to Guenevere, and there is none to answer. Their beauty has gone down into the cold grave, it has nourished grasses, and cattle chew the cud which was their loveliness. Therefore I cry again, I cry the name of Melior: and though none answers, I know that I cry upon the unflawed and living beauty which my own eyes have seen.”

Janicot sat on a tree-stump, stroking his chin with thumb and fore-finger. He was entirely brown, with white and gold about him, and the flowering at his neatly shod feet was more red than blood. He said:

“In that seeing, denied to all other living persons,—in that, at least, you have been blessed.”

“In that,” said Florian, bitterly, “I was accursed. Because of this beauty which I may not put out of mind, the tinsel prettiness of other women becomes grotesque and pitiable and hateful. I strive to mate with them, and I lie lonely in their arms. I seek for a mate, and I find only meat and much talking. Then I regard the tedious stranger in whose arms I discover myself, and I wonder what I am doing in this place. I remember Melior, and I must rid myself of the fond foolish creature who is not as Melior.”

“Ah, ah!” said Janicot then, “so that is how it is. I perceive you are a romantic. The disorder is difficult to cure. Yet we must have you losing no more wives: there must be an end to the ill luck which follows your matrimonial adventures and causes hypercritical persons to whisper. Yes, since you are a romantic, since all other women upset your equanimity and lead you into bereavements which people, let me tell you, are festooning with ugly surmises, you certainly must have this Melior.”

“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 Melusine 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, Melusine 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 Melusine 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 Melusine’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 Leshy, at the year’s end she will vanish.”

Florian shook his head, smilingly. He knew of course that marriage with one of the Leshy 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 Aerodius, 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 Leshy, 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 Melusine 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 Melusine.”

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 strycophanes 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 fingertips, 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 Melusine 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 cobblestones. 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 dais 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 dais, 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 Melusine, 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 hill-side 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

THAT 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 naïf 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.

Sunset was approaching. The entire heavens, not merely the west, had taken on a rose-colored glare. Unbelievably white clouds were passing very rapidly, overhead but not far-off, like scurrying trails of swans’ down and blown powder puffs. The air was remarkably cool, with rain in it. The diffused radiancy of this surprising sunset loaned the gravelled walkway before him a pink hue: the lawns about him, where the grass was everywhere intermingled with white blossoms, had, in this roseate glowing which flooded all, assumed a coldly livid tinge. To Florian’s left hand, piled clouds were peering over the mountain like monstrous judges, in tall powdered wigs, appraising the case against someone in Florian’s neighborhood.

He shrugged, but his look of thoughtfulness remained. It was distinctly upsetting to have one’s patron saint, in place of contriving absolution for the past,—a function which that recreant Hoprig had never, after all, attended to,—now absolutely planning mischief for the future.

10. Who Feasted at Brunbelois

FLORIAN had been married so often that he had some claim to be considered a connoisseur of weddings: and never, he protested, had assembled to see him married a more delightful company than the revellers who came from every part of Acaire now that the magic was lifted from these woods.

Acaire was old, it had been a forest since there was a forest anywhere: and all its denizens came now to do honor to the champion who had released them from their long sleeping. The elves came, in their blue low-crowned hats; the gnomes, in red woolen clothes; and the kobolds, in brown coats that were covered with chips and sawdust. The dryads and other tree spirits of course went verdantly appareled: and after these came fauns with pointed furry ears, and the nixies with green teeth and very beautiful flaxen hair, and the duergar, whose loosely swinging arms touched the ground when they walked, and the queer little rakhna, who were white and semi-transparent like jelly, and the Bush Gods that were in Acaire the oldest of living creatures and had quite outlived their divinity. From all times and all mythologies they came, and they made a tremendous to-do over Florian and the might which had rescued them from their centuries of sleeping under Melusine’s enchantment.

He bore his honors very modestly. But Florian delighted to talk with these guests, who came of such famous old families: and they told him strange tales of yesterday and of the days before yesterday, and it seemed to him that many of these stories were not quite logical. Few probabilities thrived at Brunbelois. Meanwhile the Elm Dwarfs danced for him, pouring libations from the dew pools; the Stromkarl left its waterfall in the forest, to play very sweetly for Florian upon the golden harp whose earlier music had been more dangerous to hear; and the Korrid brought him tribute in the form of a purse containing hair and a pair of scissors. And it was all profoundly delightful.

“I approve of the high place,” said Florian, upon the morning of his marriage: “for here I seem to go about a more heroic and more splendid world than I had hoped ever to inhabit.”

“Then, why,” asked Helmas, “do you not remain at Brunbelois, instead of carrying off my daughter to live in that low sort of place down yonder? Why do you two not stay at Brunbelois, and be the King and Queen here after I am gone?”

Florian looked down from the porch where they were waiting the while that Queen Pressina finished dressing. From this porch Florian could see a part of the modern world, very far beneath them. He saw the forests lying like dark flung-by scarves upon the paler green of cleared fields; he saw the rivers as narrow shinings. In one place, very far beneath them, a thunderstorm was passing like—of all things, on this blissful day,—a drifting bride’s-veil. Florian saw it twinkle with a yellow glow, then it was again a floating small white veil. And everywhere the lands beneath him bathed in graduations of vaporous indistinction. Poictesme seemed woven of blue smokes and of green mists. It afforded no sharp outline anywhere as his gazing passed outward toward the horizon. And there all melted bafflingly into a pearl-colored sky: the eye might not judge where, earth ending, heaven began in that bright and placid radiancy.

It was droll to see this familiar, everyday, quite commonplace Poictesme in that guise, to see it as so lovely, when one knew what sort of men and women were strutting and floundering through what sort of living down there. It would be pleasant to remain here at high Brunbelois, and to be a king of the exalted old time that lingered here and no where else in all the world. But Florian remembered his bargain with brown Janicot, and he knew that in this high place it could not be performed: and it was as if with the brightness of Florian’s day-dreaming already mingled the shining of the sword with which Florian was to carry out his part of the bargain. Flamberge awaited him somewhere in those prosaic lowlands of 1723, down yonder.

Therefore, as became a man of honor, Florian said, resolutely: “No, your majesty, my kingdom may not be of this world. For my duty lies yonder in that other world, wherein I at least shall yet have many months of happiness before that happens which must happen.”

“So you are counting upon many months of happiness,” the King observed. “Your frame of mind, my son-in-law, is so thoroughly what it should be that to me it is rather touching.”

“A pest! and may one ask just what, exactly, moves your majesty toward sadness?”

“The reflection that there is no girl anywhere but has in her much of her mother,” the King answered, darkly. “But my dear wife is already dressed, I perceive, and is waiting for us, after having detained us hardly two hours. So let us be getting to the temple.”

“Very willingly!” said Florian. He wondered a little at the blindness of fathers, but he was unutterably content. And straightway he and Melior were married, in the queer underground temple of the Peohtes, according to the marriage rites of Llaw Gyffes.

Melior wore that day upon her lovely head a wreath of thistles, and about her middle a remarkable garment of burnished steel fastened with a small padlock: in her hand she carried a distaff, flax and a spindle. And the marriage ceremony of the Peohtes, while new to Florian, proved delightfully simple.

First Melior and Florian were given an egg and a quince pear: he handed her the fruit, which she ate, and the seeds of which she spat out; he took from her the egg and broke it. Holy Hoprig, who had tendered his resignation as the high-priest of Llaw Gyffes, but whose successor had not yet been appointed, then asked the bridegroom a whispered question.

Florian was astonished, and showed it. But he answered, without comment, “Well, let us say, nine times.”

Hoprig divided a cake into nine slices, and placed these upon the altar. Afterward Hoprig cut the throat of a white hen, and put a little of its blood upon the feet of Melior and Florian. The trumpets sounded then, as King Helmas came forward, and gave Florian a small key.

PART TWO

THE END OF LIGHT WINNING

“En femme, comme en tout, je veux suivre ma mode. …

Et j’ay beny le del d’avoir trouve mon faict,

Pour me faire une femme au gré de mon souhait .”

11. Problems of Beauty

IT was conceded even by the younger and most charming ladies of the neighborhood that the new Duchess of Puysange was quite good looking. The gentlemen of Poictesme appeared, literally, to be dazzled by any prolonged consideration of Melior’s loveliness: otherwise, as Florian soon noted, there was no logical accounting for the discrepancy in their encomia. Enraptured paeans upon her eyes, for example, he found to differ amazingly and utterly in regard to such an important factor as the color of these eyes. This was, at mildest, a circumstance provocative of curiosity.

Florian therefore listened more attentively to what people said of his wife; and he discovered that his fellows’ ecstasies over Melior’s hair and shape and complexion were not a whit less inconsistent. These envious babblers were at one in acclaiming as flawless the beauty which he had intrepidly fetched down from the high place: but in speaking of any constituent of this loveliness they seemed not to be talking of the same woman. Either her perfection actually did dazzle men so that they were bewilderedly aware of much such a beguiling and intoxicating brightness as Florian, on looking back, suspected Melior to have been in his own eyes before he married her, or else the appearance of this daughter of the Leshy was not to all persons the same. Well, this was queer: but it was not important. Florian at least was in no doubt of his wife’s appearance nor of his right to glory in it.

So Florian tended to let this riddle pass unchallenged, and to quarrel with nothing, for Florian was very happy.

He could not have said when or why awoke the teasing question if, after all, this happiness was greater than or different from that which he had got of Aurélie or Hortense or Marianne or Carola? Being married to a comparative stranger was, as always, pleasant; it was, in fact, delightful: but you had expected, none the less, of the love which had miraculously triumphed over time and all natural laws some sharper tang of bliss than ordinarily flavored your honeymoons. Still, at thirty-five, you were logical about the usual turning-out of expectations. And you were content: and Melior was beautiful; and among the local nobility this new Duchess of Puysange had made friends everywhere, and she was everywhere admired, however puzzlingly men seemed to word their praise of her loveliness.

The newly married pair had journeyed uneventfully from Brunbelois to Florian’s home. The mute hairy persons brought Melior’s trunks in their cart; and St. Hoprig too came with them through Acaire, but no further. Florian had at last persuaded him of how untactful it would be for Hoprig to disrupt a simple and high-hearted faith that had thrived for so many hundred years, by appearing at Bellegarde in person. Florian had pointed out the attendant awkwardnesses, for the fetich no less than for the devotees. And Hoprig, upon reflection, had conceded that for a saint in the prime of life there were advantages in travelling incognito.

So the holy man left them at the edge of the forest. “We shall meet again, my children,” the saint had said, with a smile, just as he vanished like a breaking bubble. It seemed to Florian that his heavenly patron had become a little ostentatious with miracles, but Florian voiced no criticism. Still, he considered the evanishment of the two hairy persons and their monstrous goats, an evanishment quite privately conducted in the stable to which they had withdrawn after uncarting Melior’s trunks, to be in much better taste.

But Florian picked no open fault with Hoprig nor with anyone, for Florian was content enough just now. He began to see that his notions about Melior had been a trifle extravagant, that the strange loveliness which he had been adoring since boyhood was worn by a creature whose brilliance was of the body rather than of the intellect: however, he had not married her in order to discuss philosophy; and, with practise, it was easy enough to pretend to listen without really hearing her.

All this was less worrying, less imminent, than the trouble he seemed in every likelihood about to have with his brother, on account of Raoul’s damnable wife. For Madame Marguerite de Puysange, as Florian now heard, was infuriated by his failure to appear at Storisende upon the twentieth of July, the day upon which he had been due to marry her sister: nor by learning that he had married somebody else was the unconscionable virago soothed. She considered a monstrous affront had been put upon them all, a deduction which Florian granted to be truly drawn, if that mattered. What certainly mattered was that the lean woman had no living adult male relatives. She would be at her husband to avenge this affront by killing Florian: and dear, plastic, good-natured Raoul so hated to deny anybody anything that the result of her coaxing and tears and nagging would probably be a decided nuisance. …

“That ring with the three diamonds in it,” Florian had said, “is deplorably old-fashioned—”

“Yes, I suppose it is, sweetheart: but it was given me by a dear friend, and you know the sort of things they pick out, and, besides, I like to have it keeping me in mind of how ridiculously the best-meaning people may be sometimes,” his Melior had answered,—very happily, and nuzzling a very wonderfully soft cheek against his cheek.

So he had let the matter stand. …

It was a nuisance, too, this news which Florian had received as to the great Cardinal Dubois, whom Florian had promised—as he regretted now to remember, in carelessly loose terms,—to offer as a Christmas present to Janicot. It appeared that during Florian’s stay at Brunbelois the over-gallant cardinal had been compelled to submit to an operation which deprived him of two cherished possessions and shortly afterward of his life. His death was a real grief to Florian, not as in itself any loss, but because, with Dubois interred at St. Roch, the greatest man living in France when Christmas came would be the Duc d’Orléans.

Florian had long been fond of Philippe d’Orléans, and Florian loathed the thought of making a present of his friend’s life to a comparatively slight and ambiguous acquaintance like Janicot. There seemed no way out of it, however, for Florian had in this matter given his word. But he regretted deeply that he had thus recklessly promised the greatest man in the kingdom instead of specifically confining himself to that selfish Dubois, who could without real self-denial have lived until December, and who could so easily have furthered everybody’s well-being by restricting his amours to ladies of such known piety and wholesomeness and social position as made them appropriate playfellows for a high prince of the Church.

But all this was split milk. What it came to in the upshot was that Florian, through his infatuation for Melior, was already in a fair way to lose his most intimate and powerful friend and his only legitimate brother. It was a nuisance, for Florian disliked annoying either one of them, and thus to be burdened with the need of bereaving yourself of both appeared a positive imposition. But we cannot have all things as we desire them in this world, his common-sense assured him: and, in the main, as has been said, the incidental disappointments, now that he had attained his life’s desire, were tepid and not really very deep.

For Melior was beautiful; after months of intimacy and fond research he could find no flaw in her beauty: and in other respects she proved to be as acceptable a wife as any of his own marrying that he had ever had. If she was not always reasonable, if sometimes indeed she seemed obtuse, and if she nagged a little now and then, it was, after all, what past experience had led him to expect alike in marriage and in liaisons. The rapture which he had known at first sight of her, the rapture of the mountain-top, was not, he assured himself, a delusion of which he had ever expected permanence. …

“But this remarkably carved staff, my darling—?”

“Oh, it was one of my sister Melusine’s old things. I would not be in the least surprised if it were magical— And while we are speaking about sisters, Florian, I do wish that black-faced one of yours would not look at me so hard and then shrug, because she has done it twice, in quite a personal way—”

“Marie-Claire is a strange woman, my pet.”

But that fretted him. He knew so well why Marie-Claire had shrugged. …

No, he had never, really, expected the rapture of the mountain-top to be permanent. Besides, he need not expect permanency of Melior. It was sad, of course, that when she had borne him a child, the child must be disposed of, and the mother must vanish, in accordance with Florian’s agreement with Janicot. But there was always some such condition attached to marriage between a mortal and any of the Leshy, or some abstention set like a trap where into the unwary mortal was sure to flounder, and so lose the more than mortal helpmate. The union must always, in one way or another, prove transitory, as was shown by the sad history of the matrimonial ventures of Melior’s own sister, and of the knight Helias, and by many other honorable old precedents.

And Florian now began to see that if the Melior whom he had adored since boyhood were thus lost to him in the fulltide of their love and happiness,—for these were still at fulltide, he here assured himself,—then he would retain only pleasant and heartbreaking and highly desirable memories. A great love such as his for his present wife ought, by all the dictates of good taste, to end tragically: to have it dwindle out into the mutual toleration of what people called a happy marriage would be anti-climax, it would be as if one were to botch a sublime and mellifluous sonnet with a sestet in prose.

Melior, so long as she stayed unattainable, had provided him with an ideal: and Melior, once lost to him, once he could never hear another word of that continuous half-witted jabbering,—or, rather, he emended, of this bright light creature’s very diverting chat,—then his high misery would afford him even surer ground for a superior dissatisfaction with the simple catering of nature. So the company of his disenchanted princess, her company just for the present, could be endured with a composure not wholly saddened by that dreadful and permanent bereavement which impended.

He reasoned thus, and was in everything considerate and loving. His devotion was so ardent and unremittent, indeed, that, when Florian left Bellegarde, Melior was forehandedly stitching and trimming baby-clothes. This was at the opening of December, and he was going to court in answer to a summons from the great Duke of Orleans.

“It is rather odd,” observed Florian, “that it is at Philippe’s expressed desire I go to him. Eh, but one knows that shrewd old saying as to the gods’ preliminary treatment of those whom they wish to destroy.”

“Still, if you ask me,” observed his wife,—not looking at him, but at her sewing,—“I think it is much better not to talk about the gods any more than is necessary, and certainly not in that exact tone of voice—” The break in speech was for the purpose of biting a thread.

You saw, as she bent over this thread, the top of her frilly little lace cap efflorescent with tiny pink ribbons. You saw, as she looked up, that Melior was especially lovely to-day in this flowing pink robe à la Watteau over a white petticoat and a corsage of white ribbons arranged in a sort of ladder-work. There was now about her nothing whatever of the medieval or the outré: from the boudoir cap upon her head to the pink satin mules upon her feet, this Melior belonged to the modern world of 1723: and the whiteness and the pinkness of her made you think of desserts and confectionery.

“But what exact tone of voice,” asked Florian, smiling with lenient pride in his really very pretty duchess, “does my darling find injudicious?”

“Why, I mean, as if you were looking at something a great way off, and smelled something you were not quite certain you liked. To be sure, now that we are both good Christians, we know that the other gods are either devils or else illusions that never existed at all—Father Joseph has the nicest possible manners, and just the smile and the way of talking that very often reminds me of Hoprig, and qualifies him to teach any religion in the world, even without stroking both your hands all the time, but in spite of that, as I told him only last Saturday, he will not ever speak out quite plainly about them—”

“About your lovely hands, madame?”

“Now, monsieur my husband, what foolish questions you ask! I mean, about whether they are devils or illusions. Because, as I told him frankly—”

“Ah, now I comprehend. Yet, surely, these abstruse questions of theology—”

She was looking at him in astonishment. “Why, but not in the least! I am not interested in theology, I merely say that a thing is either one way or the other: and, as I so often think, nothing whatever is to be gained by beating about the bush instead of being our own candid natural selves, and confessing to our ignorance, even if we happen to be priests, where ignorance is no disgrace—”

“Doubtless, my dearest, you intend to convey to me—”

“Oh, no, not for one instant!” And this bewitching seamstress was virtually giggling, quite as if there were some logical cause for amusement. “Anybody who called that dear old soft-soaper stupid would be much more mistaken, monsieur my husband, than you suspect. I merely mean that is one side of the question, a side which is perfectly plain. The other is that, as I have told him over and over again, it is not as if I had ever for a moment denied that Father and Mother are conservative, but quite the contrary—”

Florian said: “Dearest of my life, I conjecture you are still referring to your confessor, the good Father Joseph. Otherwise, I must admit that, somehow, I have not followed the theme of your argument with an exactness which might, perhaps, have enabled me to form some faint notion as to what you are talking about.”

And again the loveliest face in the world was marveling beneath that very pleasing disorder of little pink ribbons. “Why, I was talking about Father Joseph, of course, and about my wanting to know how my parents at their time of life could be expected to take up with new ideas. Oh, and I kept at him, too: because, even if they are worshipping devils up at Brunbelois, and doing something actually wicked when they sacrifice to Llaw Gyffes a few serfs that are past their work and are of no use to anybody, and no real pleasure to themselves,—which is a side you have to look at,—it would be a sort of comfort to be certain of the worst. Whereas, as for them, the poor dears, as I so often say, what you do not know about does not worry you—”

“I take it, that you mean—”

“Exactly!” Melior stated, with the most sagacious of nods. “Though, for my part, I feel it is only justice to say that such devils as my sister Melusine used to have in now and again, in the way of sorcery, were quite civil and obliging. So far as looks go, it is best to remember in such cases that handsome is as handsome does, and I am sure they did things for her that the servants would never have so much as considered—”

“But, still—”

“Oh, yes, of course, we all know what a problem that is, at every turn, with your kindness and your consideration absolutely wasted: and in fact, as I so often think, if I could just have two rooms somewhere, and do my own cooking—” Another thread was bitten through by the loveliest teeth in the world.

“You aspire to such simple pleasures, my wife, as are denied to a Duchess of Puysange. No, one must be logical. We have the duties of our estate. And among these duties, as I was just saying, I now discover the deplorable need of absenting myself from the delights of your society and conversation—”

“I shall miss you, monsieur my husband,” replied Melior, abstractedly holding up a very small undershirt, and looking at it as if with the very weightiest of doubts, “of course. But still, it is not as if I cared to be travelling now, and, besides, there really is a great deal of sewing to be done for months to come. And with everything in this upset condition, I do hope that—if by any chance you are sitting on that other pair of scissors? I thought they must be there. Yes, I do hope that you will be most careful in this affair, because I already have enough to contend with. You ought to send the lace at once, though: and I suppose we might as well have pink yarn and ribbons, since the chances are equal in any event—”

“But in what affair, delight of my existence, are you requesting me to be careful?”

“Why, how should I know?” And Melior, he perceived, had still the air of one who is dealing patiently with an irrational person. “It is probably a very good thing that I do not, since you are plainly up to something with your friend Orleans which you want nobody to find out about. All men are like that: and, for my part, I have no curiosity whatever, because, as I so often think, if everybody would just attend to their own affairs—”

He bowed and, murmuring “Your pardon, madame!” he left her contentedly sewing. It seemed to Florian a real pity that a creature in every way so agreeable to his eye should steadily betray and tease his ear. He did not find that, as wives average, his Melior was especially loquacious: it was, rather, that when she discoursed at any length, with her bewildering air of commingled self-satisfaction and shrewdness, he could never make out quite clearly what she was talking about: and as went intelligence, his disenchanted princess seemed to him to rank somewhere between a magpie and a turnip.

This, upon the whole, adorable idiocy might have made it appear, to some persons, surprising that Melior should divine, as she had so obviously divined, that Florian, in going to Philippe d’Orléans, was prompted by motives which discretion preferred to screen. But Florian had learned by experience that your wives very often astound you by striking the target of your inmost thinking, fair and full, with just such seemingly irrational shots of surmise. You might call it intuition or whatever else you preferred: no husband of any at all lengthy standing would be quick to call it accident. Rather, he would admit this to be a faculty which every married woman manifested now and then: and he would rejoice that, for the health of the world’s peace, such clairvoyancy was intermittent. Florian esteemed it to be just one of the inevitable drawbacks of matrimony that the most painstaking person must sometimes encounter discomfortable moments when his wife appears to be looking over his secret thoughts somewhat as one glances over the pages of a not particularly interesting book. So the experienced husband would shrug and would await this awkward moment’s passing, and the return of his wife’s normal gullibility and charm.

Melior, too, then, had her instants of approach to wifely, if not precisely human, intelligence. And Melior was beautiful. There was no flaw anywhere in her beauty. This Florian repeated, over and over again, as he prepared for travel. Here, too, one must be logical. That ideal beauty which he had hopelessly worshipped, and had without hope hungered for, ever since his childhood, was now attained: and the goddess of his long adoration was now enshrined in, to be exact, the next room but one, already hemming diapers for their anticipated baby. Nobody could possibly have won nearer to his heart’s desire than Florian had come; he had got all and more than his highest dreaming had aspired to: and so, if he was now sighing over the reflection, it must be, he perceived, a sigh of content.

Then he kissed his wife, and he rode away from Bellegarde, toward the vexatious duties which awaited him at court. Florian stopped, of course, to put up a prayer, for the success of his nearing venture into homicide, at the Church of Holy Hoprig. That ceremonial Florian could not well have omitted without provoking more or less speculation as to why the Duke of Puysange should be defaulting in a pious custom of long standing; nor, for that matter, without troubling his conscience with doubts if he was affording the country-side quite the good example due from one of his rank.

Through just such mingled considerations of expediency and duty had Florian, since his return from Brunbelois, continued his giving to this church with all the old liberality, if with somewhat less comfort to himself. It was a nuisance to reflect that so many irregularities which Florian had believed compounded, to everybody’s satisfaction, had never been attended to at all by his patron saint. It was annoying to know that the church had got, and was continuing to get, from the estate of Puysange so many pious offerings virtually for nothing. Even so, replied logic, what was to be gained by arousing criticism or by neglecting your religious duties in a manner that was noticeable? Let us adhere to precedent, and then, if we can no longer count assuredly on bliss in the next world, we may at least hope for tranquillity in this one.

So Florian, for the preservation of the local standards, now put up a fervent prayer to his patron saint in heaven; and reflected that, after all, the actual whereabouts, and the receptivity to petitions, of Holy Hoprig was none of Florian’s affair. A little wonder, however, about just where the saint might be doing what, was, Florian hoped, permissible, since he had found such wondering not to be avoided.

12. Niceties of Fratricide

NOW that Florian came out of the provinces, he wished to take matters in order. Not merely a snobbish pride of race led him to give his family affairs precedence to those of the Bourbons. It was, rather, that Florian yet had a day to wait before the coming of the winter solstice. He was unwilling to waste these twenty-four hours, because Florian looked with some uneasiness toward the inevitable encounter with his wife-ridden brother, and Florian was desirous to get this worry off his mind. For, a thing done, as Janicot had mentioned, has an end. …

Florian therefore made inquiries as to where Raoul was passing that evening; and the two brothers thus met, as if by chance, at the home of the Duc de Brancas. The circle of Monsieur de Brancas was not gallant toward women, and his guests were gentlemen in middle age, the most of whom came each with a boy of seventeen or thereabouts.

Florian was grieved when, as he approached the group clustered about the big fireplace, he saw with what ceremony Raoul bowed. Raoul had fattened, he seemed taller, he was to-night superb in this crimson coat, with huge turned-back cuffs,—that must be the very latest mode,—and in this loose gold-laced white waistcoat, descending to the knees, and unfastened at the bottom. Raoul had the grand air of their father: a tall man was always so much more impressive. For the rest, it was fully apparent that the dear fellow’s abominable wife had been at her mischief-making.

“Monsieur the Duke,” Raoul began, “this encounter is indeed fortunate.”

“To encounter Monsieur the Chevalier,” replied Florian, with quite as sweet a stateliness, but feeling rather like a bantam cock beside this big Raoul, “is always a privilege.”

People everywhere were listening now: this gambit hardly seemed fraternal. The well-bred elderly friends of Monsieur de Brancas, to be sure, made a considerate pretence at going on with their talk, but most of the scented and painted boys had betrayed their lower social degree by gaping openly: and Florian knew he was in for an unpleasant business.

“—For I am wondering if you have heard, monsieur,” the Chevalier went on, “that the Comte d’Arnaye has spread the report that at Madame de Nesle’s last ball I appeared with two buttons missing from my waistcoat?”

“I really cannot answer for the truth of such gossip, monsieur,”—thus Florian, with high civility,—“since I have not seen my uncle for some time.”

“Ah, ah! so the Comte d’Arnaye is your uncle!” Raoul seemed gravely pleased. “That is excellent, for, inasmuch as I cannot readily obtain satisfaction for this calumny from your uncle, who has retired into the provinces for the winter, I can apply to you.”

Florian said, with careful patience: “I am delighted, monsieur, to act as his representative. In that capacity I can assure you whoever asserted Monsieur d’Arnaye declared the waistcoat in which you attended the last ball of Madame de Nesle to be deficient in two buttons, or in one button, or in a half-stitch of thread, has told a lie.”

Raoul de Puysange frowned. “Diantre! it was my own cousin, the Count’s youngest son, who was my informant; and since my cousin, monsieur, as you are well aware, is little more than a child—”

“You should have the less trouble, then,” said Florian, vexed by his brother’s pertinacity, “in horsewhipping the brat for his silly falsehood.”

“Come, Monsieur the Duke, but I cannot have my cousin called a liar, far less listen to this talk of horsewhipping one who is of my blood. I must ask satisfaction for these affronts, and I will send a friend to wait upon you.”

Florian looked sadly at his brother. But the Duc de Puysange shrugged before a meddlesome and quite unimportant person.

Florian answered: “I am well content, Monsieur the Chevalier. Only, to save time, I would suggest that your friend go direct to the Vicomte de Lautrec, since he is here to-night, and since I have promised him that he should second me in my next affair.”

The two brothers bowed and parted decorously, having thus arranged a public quarrel in which Mademoiselle de Nerac was in no way involved. The instant’s tension was over, and the guests of Monsieur de Brancas thronged hastily through the corridor,—which was rather chilly, because all the outer side of this corridor was builded of stained glass,—and went into the little private theatre, where the fiddles were already tuning for the overture of a new and tuneful burletta that dealt with The Fall of Sodom. The curtain by and by rose on the civic revels, and the rest of the evening passed merrily.

After the first act, while the scenery was being shifted so as to represent Lot’s cave in the mountains, all details of the fraternal duel were arranged by Messieurs de Lautrec and de Soyecourt. Tall lean Monsieur de Soyecourt had, as a cousin, been prompt to insist upon his right to act for Raoul in an encounter so sure to be discussed everywhere. Shortly after midnight,—at which hour the other guests of Monsieur de Brancas went into the Salon des Flagellants to amuse themselves at a then very fashionable game which you played with little whips,—the two brothers left the hotel with their seconds. A surgeon had been sent for, and he accompanied them and the five girls, whom the Vicomte de Lautrec had caused to be fetched from La Fillon’s, to a house near the Port Maillot, where all indulged in various pleasantries until morning.

The wine here proved so good, the girls were so amiable and accomplished, that by daylight Florian had mellowed into an all-embracing benevolence, and he proposed to compound the affair. The suggestion roused an almost angry buzz of protest.

Lautrec was demanding, of the company at large, would you have me, who was married only last week, staying out all night, with no better excuse than that I was drunk with these charming girls? Why, I was committed to three rendezvous last night, and if there be no duel I shall have trouble with a trio of ladies of the highest fashion. Nor is it, put in the Marquis de Soyecourt,—whose speaking was always somewhat indistinct, because of the loss of all his upper front-teeth,—nor is it kind of you, my dear, to wish to deprive us of taking part in a business which will make so much noise in the world: brothers do not fight every day, this affair will be talked about. I quite agree with Lautrec that your whim is foolish and inconsiderate. Besides, Raoul was saying reprovingly, the honor of our house is involved. To have a Puysange cry off from a duel would be a reflection upon our blood that I could not endure—

“What is honor,” replied Florian, “to the love which has been between us?”

The Chevalier looked half-shocked at this sort of talk: but he only answered that Hannibal and Agamemnon had been very pretty fellows in their day while it lasted; so too the boys who had loved each other at Storisende and Bellegarde. Let the dead rest. No, to go back now was impossible, without creating a deal of adverse comment, in view of the publicity of their quarrel.

Florian sighed, half wearied, half vexed, by the remote sound of his brother’s talking, and he replied: “That is true. One must be logical. You three are better advised than I, and we dare not offend against the notions of our neighbors.”

The gentlemen went into the park. They walked toward the old Chateau de Madrid. There had been a very light fall of snow. It felt like sand underfoot as you walked. Florian reflected it was droll that oak-trees should retain so many bronze leaves thus late in winter. They quite overshadowed this place, and made the snow look bluish.

The gentlemen prepared for their duel, each of the four being armed with two pistols and a sword. When all was ready, Raoul fired at once, and wounded Florian in the left arm. It hurt. The little brother whose face was always grimy would never have hurt you.

At Florian’s side Lautrec had fallen, dead. The bullet of the Marquis de Soyecourt had by an incredible chance struck the Vicomte full in the right eye, piercing the brain.

“Name of a name!” observed the Marquis, who was unwounded, “but here is another widow to be consoled,—when I had aimed too at his ear! That is the devil of this carousing all night, and then coming to one’s duels with shaken nerves. But how fare our sons of Oedipus?”

The Marquis turned, and what he saw was sufficiently curious.

Florian had winced when hit, thus for an instant spoiling his aim, but he at once lowered his pistol, and he shot this tall man who had nothing to do with his little brother, neatly through the breast. Raoul de Puysange fired wildly with his second pistol, and drew his sword as if to rush upon Florian, who merely shifted the yet loaded pistol to his uncrippled right hand, and waited. But Raoul had not advanced two paces when Raoul fell.

Florian dropped the undischarged pistol, and went to his brother. This thin snow underfoot was like scattered sand, and your treading in it was audible.

“You have done for me, my dear,” declared the Chevalier.

And Florian was perturbed. He wished, for all that his arm was hurting him confoundedly, to reply whatever in the circumstances was the correct thing, but he could think of no exact precedent. So he put aside the wild fancy of responding, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and to this stranger at his feet he said, with a quite admirable tremor wherein anguish blended nicely with a manly self-restraint: “Raoul, you are the happier of us two. Do you forgive me?”

“Yes,” replied the other, “I forgive you.” Raoul gazed up fondly at his brother. Raoul said, with that genius for the obviously appropriate which Florian always envied, “I feel for you as I know you do for me.”

Thus speaking, Raoul de Puysange looked of a sudden oddly surprised. His nostrils dilated, he shivered a little, and so died.

Florian turned sadly to the gaunt Marquis de Soyecourt. “You spoke of the sons of Oedipus, Antoine. But many other eminent persons have been fratricides. There was Romulus, and Absalom in Holy Writ, and Sir Balen of Northumberland, and several of the Capets and the Valois. King Henry the First of England, a very wise prince, also put his brother out of the way, as did Constantius Chlorus, a most noble patron of the Church. Whereas all Turkish emperors—”

“Oh, have done with your looking for precedents!” said the Marquis. “What we should look for now, my dear, is horses to get us away from this sad affair. For one, I am retiring into the provinces, to spend Christmas at my venerable father’s chateau at Beaujolais, where I shall be more comfortable than in the King’s prison of the Bastile. And I most strongly advise you to imitate me.”

“No,” Florian said, gently, “these are but the first fruits of the attainment of my desire. For, as you remind me, Antoine, Christmas approaches, and I have still unfinished business at court.”

13. Débonnaire

THEREAFTER Florian went to the Duke of Orleans, with two motives. One was the obvious necessity of obtaining a pardon for having killed the Chevalier: Florian’s other motive was the promise given to brown Janicot that he should have for his Christmas present, upon this day of the winter solstice, the life of the greatest man in the kingdom. The greatest man in the kingdom, undoubtedly, was Philippe of Orleans, the former Regent, now prime minister, and the next heir to the throne. The King was nobody in comparison: besides, the King was not a man but a child of thirteen. One must be logical. Florian regretted the loss of his friend, for he was unfeignedly fond of Orleans, but a promise once given by a Puysange was not to be evaded.

He must get the pardon first. Florian foresaw that the granting of a pardon out of hand for his disastrous duel would seem to the Duke of Orleans an action liable to involve the prime minister in difficulties. Florian thought otherwise, in the light of his firm belief that to-morrow Orleans would be oblivious of all earthly affairs, but this was not an argument which Florian could tactfully employ. Rather, he counted upon the happy fact that Florian’s services in the past were not benefits which any reflective statesman would care to ignore. Yes, the pardon would certainly be forthcoming, Florian assured himself, this afternoon, as he rode forth in his great gilded coach, for his last chat, as he rather vexedly reflected, with all-powerful Philippe of Orleans, whom people called Philippe the Débonnaire.

“So!” said the minister, when they had embraced, “so, they tell me that you have married again, and that you killed your brother this morning. I am not pleased with you, Florian. These escapades will come to no good end.”

“Ah, monseigneur, but I like to take a wife occasionally, whereas you prefer always to borrow one. It is merely a question of taste, about which we need not quarrel. As to this duel, I lamented the necessity, your highness, as much as anybody. But these meddling women—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” replied Orleans, “your sister-in-law talks too much. In fact, as I recall it, she talks even in her sleep.”

“Monseigneur, and will you never learn discretion?”

“I am discreet enough, in any event, to look upon fratricide rather seriously. So I am sending you to the Bastile for a while, Florian, and indeed the lettre de cachet ordering your imprisonment was made out an hour ago.”

Florian at this had out the small gold box upon whose lid was painted a younger and far more amiable looking Orleans than frowned here in the flesh,—in a superfluity of flesh,—and Florian took snuff. It was always a good way of gaining time for reflection. Wine and cakes were set ready upon the little table. Philippe was probably expecting some woman. There had been no lackeys in the corridor which led to this part of the chateau. Philippe always sent them away when any of his women were to come in the day-time. Yes, one was quite alone with this corpulent, black-browed and purple-faced Philippe, in this quiet room, which was like a great gilded shell of elaborately carved woodwork, and which had bright panels everywhere, upon the walls and the ceiling, representing, very explicitly indeed, The Triumphs of Love. Such solitude was uncommonly convenient; and one might speak without reticence.

Florian put up his snuff-box, dusted his fingertips, and said: “I regret to oppose you in anything, monseigneur, but for me to go to prison would be inconvenient just now. I have important business at the Feast of the Wheel to-morrow night.”

Since Philippe had lost the sight of his left eye he cocked his head like a huge bird whenever he looked at you intently. “You had best avoid these sorceries, Florian. I have not yet forgotten that fiend whom your accursed lieutenant evoked for us in the quarries of Vaugirard—” Orleans paused. He said in a while, “Before that night and that vision of my uncle’s death-bed, I was less ambitious, Florian, and more happy.”

“Ah, yes, poor old Mirepoix!” said Florian, smiling. “What a preposterous fraud he was, with his absurd ventriloquism and stuffed crocodiles and magic lanterns! However, he foretold very precisely indeed the extraordinary series of events which would leave you the master of this kingdom: and I had not the heart to see the faithful fellow exposed as an ignoramus who talked nonsense. So I was at some pains to help his prophesying come true, and to make you actually the only surviving male relative at the old King’s death-bed.”

“Let us speak,” said Orleans, with a vexed frown, “of cheerier matters. Now, in regard to your imprisonment—”

“I was coming to your notion of a merry topic. This visit to the Feast of the Wheel is about a family matter, your highness, and is imperative. So I must keep my freedom for the while: and I must ask, in place of a lettre de cachet, a pardon in full.”

“Instead, Florian, let us have fewer ‘musts’ and more friendliness in this affair.” Orleans now put his arm about Florian. “Come, I will put off your arrest until the day after to-morrow; you shall spend the night here, my handsome pouting Florian; and you shall be liberated at the end of one little week in the Bastile.”

Florian released himself, rather petulantly. “Pardieu! but I entreat you to reserve these endearments for your bed-chamber! No, you must find some other playfellow for to-night. And I really cannot consent to be arrested, for it would quite spoil my Christmas.”

Orleans, rebuffed, said only, “But if I continue to ignore your misbehaviors, people will talk.”

“That is possible, your highness. It is certain that, under arrest, I also would become garrulous.”

“Ah! and of what would you discourse ?”

Florian looked for a while at his red-faced friend beyond the red-topped writing-table.

Florian said: “I would talk of the late Dauphin’s death, monseigneur; of the death of the Duc de Bourgogne; of the death of the little Duc de Bretagne; and of the death of the Duc de Berri. I would talk of those inexplicable fatal illnesses among your kinsmen which of a sudden made you, who were nobody of much consequence, the master of France and the next heir to the throne.”

Orleans said nothing for a time. Speaking, his voice was quiet, but a little hoarse. “It is perhaps as well for you, my friend, that my people have been dismissed. Yes, I am expecting Madame de Phalaris, who is as yet amusingly shame-faced about her adulteries. So there is nobody about, and we may speak frankly. With frankness, then, I warn you that it is not wholesome to threaten a prince of the blood, and that if you continue in this tone you may not long be permitted to talk anywhere, not even in one of the many prisons at my disposal.”

“Ah, your highness, let us not speak of my death, for it is a death which you would deplore.”

“Would I deplore your death?” Orleans’ head was now cocked until it almost lay upon his left shoulder. “It is a fact of which I am not wholly persuaded.”

“Monseigneur, mere self-respect demands that one’s death should rouse some grief among one’s friends. So I have made certain that your grief would be inevitable and deep. For I am impatient of truisms—”

“And what have truisms to do with our affair?”

“The statement that dead men tell no tales, your highness, is a truism.”

“Yes, and to be candid, Florian, it is that particular truism of which I was just thinking.”

“Well, it is this particular truism I have elected to deride. My will is made, the disposing of my estate is foreordered, and every legacy enumerated. One of these legacies is in the form of a written narrative: it is not a romance, it is an entirely veracious chronicle, dealing with the last hours of four of your kinsmen; and it is bequeathed to a fifth kinsman, to your cousin, the Duc de Bourbon. Should I die in one of your prisons, monseigneur,—a calamity which I perceive to be already foreshadowed in your mind,—that paper would go to him.”

The Duke of Orleans considered this. There had been much whispering; mobs in the street had shouted, “Burn the poisoner!” when Orleans passed: but this was different. Once Bourbon had half the information which Florian de Puysange was able to give, there would be of course no question of burning Orleans, since one does not treat a prince of the blood like fuel: but there would be no doubt, either, of his swift downfall nor of his subsequent death by means of the more honorable ax.

Orleans knew all this. Orleans also knew Florian. In consequence Orleans asked, “Is what you tell me the truth ?”

“Faith of a gentleman, monseigneur!”

Orleans sighed. “It is a pity. By contriving this conditional post-mortem sort of confession to the devil-work you prompted, you have contrived an equally devilish safeguard. Yes, if you are telling the truth, for me to have you put out of the way would be injudicious. And you do tell the truth, confound you! Broad-minded as you are in many ways, Florian, you are a romantic, and I have never known you to break your given word or to voice any purely utilitarian lie. You are positively queer about that.”

“I confess it,” said Florian, frankly. “Puysange lies only for pleasure, never for profit. But what do my foibles matter ? Let us be logical about this! What does anything matter except the plain fact that we are useful to each other? I do not boast, but I think you have found me efficient. You needed only a precipitating of the inevitable, a little hastening here and there of natural processes, to give you your desires. Well, four of these accelerations have been brought about through the recipes of a dear old friend of mine, through invaluable recipes which have made you the master of this kingdom. It is now always within your power, without any real trouble, to remove the scrofulous boy whose living keeps you from being even in title King of France. Yes, I think I have helped you. Some persons would in my position be exigent. But all I ask is your name written upon a bit of paper. I will even promise you that your mercifulness shall create no adverse comment, and that tomorrow people shall be talking of something quite different.”

And Florian smiled ingratiatingly, the while that he fingered what was in his waistcoat pocket, and reflected that all France would very certainly have more than enough to talk about to-morrow.

“This dapper imp, in his eternal bottle-green and silver, will be the ruin of me,” Orleans observed. But he had already drawn a paper from the top drawer: and he filled it in, and signed it, and he pushed it across the red-topped writing-table, toward Florian.

“I thank you, monseigneur, for this favor,” said Florian, then, “and I long to repay it by making you King of France. Let us drink to Philippe the Seventh!”

“No,” said Orleans,—“let us drink if you will, but I have no thirst for kingship. I play with the idea, of course. To be a king sounds well, and I once thought— But it would give me no more than I already have of endless nuisances to endure. As matters stand, I can make shift with the discomforts of being a great personage, because I know that I can, whenever I like, lay aside my greatness. I can at will become again a private person, and I can find a host of fools eager to fill my place. But from the throne there is no exit save into the vaults of St. Denis. So I procrastinate, I play with the idea of putting the boy out of the way, and I play with the idea of resigning my ministry, but I do nothing definite until tomorrow.”

“There are many adages that speak harshly of procrastination,” said Florian, as he poured and, with his back to Orleans, flavored the wine which was set ready. “Logic is a fine thing, monseigneur: and logic informs me that no man is sure of living until to-morrow.”

“But it is no fun being a great personage,” Orleans lamented, as he took the tall, darkly glowing glass. “I have had my bellyful of it: and I find greatness rather thin fare. I am master of France, indeed I may with some show of reason claim to be master of Europe. I used to think it would be pleasant to rule kingdoms; but you may take my word for it, Florian, the game is not worth the candle. There are times,” said Orleans, as lazily he sipped the wine which Florian had just seasoned, “there are times when I wish I were dead and done with it all.”

“That, your highness, will come soon enough.”

“Yes, but do you judge what I have to contend with.” Orleans launched into a bewailing of his political difficulties. Florian kept a polite pose of attention, without exactly listening to these complaints about Parliament’s obstinacy, about Alberoni’s and Villeroy’s plottings in their exile, about the sly underminings of Fréjus, about what the legitimated princes were planning now, about Bourbon, about Noailles, about the pig-headedness of the English Pretender, about the empty Treasury— Of these things Philippe was talking, in a jumble of words without apparent end or meaning. But Florian thought of a circumstance unrelated to any of these matters, with a sort of awed amusement.

“All this to make a maniac of me,” the minister went on, “and with what to balance it? Anything I choose to ask for, of course. But then, Florian, what the deuce is there in life for one to ask for at forty-nine ? I was once a joyous glutton: now I have to be careful of my digestion. I used to stay drunk for weeks: now one night of virtually puritanic debauchery leaves me a wreck to be patched up by physicians who can talk about nothing but apoplexy. Women no longer rouse any curiosity. I know so well what their bodies are like that an investigation is tautology: and half the time I go to bed with no inclination to do anything but sleep. Not even my daughters, magnificent women that you might think them—”

“I know,” said Florian, with a reminiscent smile.

“—Not even they are able to amuse me any more. No, my friend, I candidly voice my opinion that there is nothing in life which possession does not discover to be inadequate: we are cursed with a tyrannous need for what life does not afford: and we strive for various prizes, saying ‘Happiness is there,’ when in point of fact it is nowhere. They who fail in their endeavors have still in them the animus of desire: but the man who attains his will cohabits with an assassin, for, having it, he perceives that he does not want it; and desire is dead in him, and the man too is dead. No, Florian, be advised by me; and do you avoid greatness as you should—and by every seeming do not,—the devil!”

So Philippe d’Orléans also, thought Florian, had got what he wanted, only to find it a damnable nuisance. Probably all life was like that. Over-high and over-earnest desires were inadvisable. It was a sort of comfort to reflect that poor Philippe at least would soon be through with his worries.

A bell rang; and Florian, rising, said: “I shall heed your advice, monseigneur— But that bell perhaps announces an arrival about which I should remain in polite ignorance ?”

“Yes, it is Madame de Phalaris. We are to try what Aretino and Romano can suggest for our amusement, before I go up to my hour’s work with the King. So be off with you through the private way, for it is a very modest little bitch.”

Florian passed through the indicated door, but he did not quite close it. Instead, he waited there, and he saw the entrance of charming tiny Madame de Phalaris, whom Orleans greeted with tolerable ardor.

“So you have come at last, you delicious rogue, to end my expounding of moral sentiments. And with what fairy tale, bright-eyed Sapphira, will you explain your lateness?”

“Indeed, your highness,” said the lady, who had learned that in these encounters the Duke liked to be heartened with some gambit of free talk, “indeed, your question reminds me that only last night I heard the most diverting fairy tale. But it is somewhat—”

“Yes?” said the Duke.

“I mean, that it is rather—”

“But I adore that especial sort of fairy story,” he announced. “So of course we must have it, and equally of course we must spare our mutual blushes.”

Thus speaking, Orleans sat at her feet, and leaned back his head between her knees, so that neither could see the face of the other. Her lithe white fingers stroked his cheeks, caressing those great pendulous red jaws: and her sea-green skirts, flowered with a pattern of slender vines, were spread like billows to each side of him.

“There was once,” the lady began, “a king and a queen—”

“I know the tale,” Orleans said,—“they had three sons. And the two elder failed in preposterous quests, but the third prince succeeded in everything, and he was damnably bored by everything. I know the tale only too well—”

He desisted from speaking. But he was making remarkable noises.

“Highness—!” cried Madame de Phalaris.

She had risen in alarm; and as she rose, the Duke’s head fell to the crimson-covered footstool at her feet. He did not move, but lay quite still, staring upward, and his foreshortened face, as Florian saw it, was of a remarkable shade of purple among the elaborate dark curls of Orleans’ peruke.

There was for a moment utter silence. You heard only the gilded clock upon the red chimney-piece. Then Madame de Phalaris screamed.

Nobody replied. She rang wildly at the bell-cord beside the writing-table. You could hear a remote tinkling, but nothing else. The shaking woman lifted fat Orleans, and propped him against the chair in which she had just been sitting. Philippe of Orleans sprawled thus, more drunken looking than Florian had ever seen him in life: the corpse was wholly undignified. The head of him whom people had called Philippe the Débonnaire had fallen sideways, so that his black peruke was pushed around and hid a third of his face. The left eye, the eye with which Philippe had for years seen nothing, yet leered at the woman before him. She began again to scream. She ran from the room, and Florian could now just hear her as she ran, still screaming, about the corridors in which she could find nobody. It sounded like the squeaking of a frightened rat.

Florian came forward without hurry, for there was no pressing need of haste. Florian quite understood that Orleans had dismissed all his attendants, so that Madame de Phalaris might come to him unobserved: her husband was a notionary man. After a little amorous diversion with the lady, Orleans had meant to go up that narrow staircase yonder, for an hour’s work with the young King. It was odd to reflect that poor Philippe would never go to the King nor to any woman’s bed, not ever any more; odd, too, that anyone could be thus private in this enormous chateau wherein lived several thousand persons. At all events, this privacy was uncommonly convenient.

So Florian reflected for an instant, after his usual fashion of fond lingering upon what life afforded of the quaint. It was certainly very quaint that history should be so plastic. He had, with no especial effort or discomfort, with no real straining of his powers, changed the history of all Europe when he transferred this famous kingdom of France and the future of France from the keeping of Philippe to guardians more staid. Probably Monsieur de Bourbon would be the next minister. But whoever might be minister in name, the Bishop of Fréjus, the young King’s preceptor, would now be the actual master of everything. Well, to have taken France from a debauchee like this poor staring gaping Philippe here,—Florian abstractedly straightened the thing’s peruke,—to give control of France to such an admirable prelate as André de Fleury was in all a praiseworthy action. It was a logical action.

Then Florian performed unhurriedly the rite which was necessary, and there was a sign that Janicot accepted his Christmas present. It was not a pleasant sign to witness, nor did they who served Janicot appear to be squeamish. After this came two hairy persons, not unfamiliar to Florian, and these two removed as much as their master desired of Philippe d’Orléans. They answered, too, in a fashion no whit less impressive because of their not speaking, the questions which Florian put as to the proper manner of his coming to Janicot and the Feast of the Wheel. Then they were not in this room: and Florian, somewhat shaken, also went from this room, not as they had gone but by way of the little private door.

It was a full half-hour, Florian learned afterward, before Madame de Phalaris returned with a cortege of lackeys and physicians. These last attempted to bleed Duke Philippe, but found their endeavors wasted: La Tophania’s recipes were reliable, and to all appearance he had for some while been dead of apoplexy. The obscene toy discovered, hanging about his neck, when they went to undress him, surprised nobody: the Duke had affected these oddities. When the physicians made yet other discoveries, a trifle later, they flutteringly agreed this death must, without any further discussion, be reported to have arisen from natural causes. “Monsieur d’Orléans,” said one of them, jesting with rather gray lips, “has died assisted by his usual confessor.”

Florian had of course not needed to amass good precedents for putting out of life anybody who was to all intents a reigning monarch. As he glanced back at history, this seemed to him almost the favorite avocation of estimable persons. So, as Florian rode leisurely away in his great gilded coach, leaving behind him the second fruits of the attainment of his desire, if he lazily afforded a side-thought to Marcus Brutus and Jacques Clement and Aristogeiton and Ehud the Benjaminite, and to a few other admirable assassins of high potentates, it was through force of habit rather than any really serious consideration. For the important thing to be considered now was how to come by the sword Flamberge, for which Florian had, that day, paid.

14. Gods in Decrepitude

NOT one of the ambiguous guardians of the place in any way molested Florian in that journey through which he hoped to win the sword Flamberge. His bearing, which combined abstraction with a touch of boredom, discouraged any advances from phantoms, and made fiends uneasily suspect this little fellow in bottle-green and silver to be one of those terrible magicians who attend Sabbats only when they are planning to kidnap with strong conjurations some luckless fiend to slave for them at unconscionable tasks. That sort of person a shrewd fiend gives a wide berth: and certainly nobody who was not an adept at magic would have dared venture hereabouts, upon this night of all nights in the year, the guardians reasoned, without considering that this traveler might be a Puysange. So Florian passed to the top of the hill, without any molestation, in good time for the beginning of the Feast of the Wheel.

When Florian came quietly through the painted gate, the Master was already upon the asherah stone receiving homage. The place was well lighted with torches which flared bluishly as they were carried about by creatures that had the appearance of huge dark-colored goats: each of these goats bore two torches, the first being fixed between its horns, and the second inserted in another place. Florian stood aside, and watched these venerable rites of unflinching osculation and widdershins movings and all the rest of the ritual. One respected of course the motives which took visible form in these religious ceremonies, but the formulae seemed to Florian rather primitive.

So he sat upon a secluded grassbank, beyond the light of the blue torches, and waited. It was quaint, and pathetic too in a way, now that the communicants were reporting upon their unimaginative doings since the last Sabbat. The Master listened and advised upon each case. To Florian it appeared a rather ridiculous pother over nothing, all this to-do about the drying up of a cow or the unfitting of a bridegroom for his privileges or the sapping away of someone’s health. Florian inclined to romanticism even in magic, whose proper functions he did not consider to be utilitarian or imitative of real life. It seemed to him mere childish petulancy thus to cast laborious spells to hasten events which would in time have happened anyhow, through nature’s unprompted blunderings, when the obvious end of magic should be to bring about chances which could not possibly happen. But the Master had an air of taking it all quite seriously.

Nor were the initiations much more diverting, however dreadfully painful they must be to the virgin novitiates. Florian could not but think that some more natural paraphernalia would be preferable, would be more logical, than that horrible, cold and scaly apparatus. It was interesting, though, to note what disposition was made of the relics of Philippe d’Orléans: and in the giving of four infants also, by the old ritual, Florian took a sort of personal concern, and he watched closely, so as to see just how it was done. He was relieved to find it a simple enough matter, hardly more difficult than the gutting of a rabbit, once you had by heart the words of the invocation. Florian assumed that Janicot would in due course supply the woman whose body must serve as the altar, and Florian put the matter out of mind.

Besides, to one with his respect for ancient custom and precedent, the fertility rites now in full course were interesting: he imagined that to a professed and not prudish antiquary they would be of absorbing interest, coming down, as these ceremonies did unaltered, from the dwarf races that preceded mankind proper. Still, as a whole, the Feast of the Wheel was rather tedious, Florian declared to his large neighbor. Florian had just noticed that others sat on this secluded grassbank, to both sides of him, in a twilight so vague that he could only see these other watchers of the feast were of huge stature and had unblinking shining eyes.

Yes, this dim person assented, these modern ways lacked fervor and impressiveness: and matters had been infinitely better conducted, he said, in the good old days when the Sabbat was held in blasphemy against him.

Florian, really interested at last, asked questions. It developed that this shadowy watcher was called Marduk. He had once been rather widely esteemed, by he had no notion how many millions of men, as the over-lord of heaven and all living creatures, in whose hands were the decrees of fate, and as the bright helper and healer from whom were hid no secrets. Apsu yonder had in those fine days conducted his blasphemies, Marduk repeated, with considerably more splendor and display. Yes, the times worsened, the thing was now done meagrely. Apsu had never been really the same, said Marduk,—with a dry chuckle, like the stirring of a dead leaf,—since Apsu lost his wife. She was called Tiamat: and, say what you might about her—

“I quite agree with you. He was a far more dashing rogue,” put in another half-seen shape, “in the good times when I was the eternal source of light, the upholder of the universe, all-powerful and all-knowing, and when nobody anywhere except that rascal Anra-Mainyu was bold enough to talk back to Ahura-Madza. Yes, the times worsen in every way: and even his effrontery flags, if that is any comfort.”

“Oh, for that matter,” said a third, “this Vukub-Kakix was at hand with his impudence when the Old Ones covered with Green Feathers first came out of the waters and tried to make men virtuous. He was then a splendid rogue. I found him annoying, of course, but wonderfully amusing. Now the times worsen: and the adversary of all the gods of men no longer has such opponents as used to keep him on his mettle.”

“Each one of you,” marvelled Florian, “gives the Master a new and harder christening! And what, monsieur,” asked Florian, of the last speaker, “may be your name ?”

The third dim creature answered, “Xpiyacoc.”

“Ah, now I understand why you should be the most generous to the Master in the matter of cacophony! I take it that you also have retired from a high position in the church. And I am wondering if all you veteran gods are assembled upon half-pay”—here Florian discreetly jerked a thumb skyward,—“to conspire?”

“No,” said a fourth,—who, like that poor Philippe, had only one eye,—“it is true we look to see put down the gods who just now have men’s worship. But we do not conspire. We are too feeble now, and the years have taken away from us even anger and malevolence. It was not so in the merry days when the little children came to me upon spear points. Now the times worsen: and they can but make the best of very poor times up yonder, as we do here.” He seemed to listen to the thing in the appearance of a raven perched on his shoulder, and then said: “Besides, wise Huginn tells me that the reign of any god is an ephemeral matter hardly worth fretting over. I fell. They will fall. But neither fact is very important, says wise Huginn.”

And about the Master these dim watchers preferred not to talk any more. He had denied them, they said, when they were kings of heaven and of man’s worship and terror: and the Master had always maintained his cult against whatever god was for the moment supreme. He had never been formidable, he had never shown any desire toward usurping important powers. He had remained content to assert himself Prince of this World, whoever held the heavens and large stars: and while he had never meddled with the doings of any god in other planets, here upon earth he had displayed such pertinacity that in the end most rulers of the universe let him alone. And now their omnipotence had passed, but the Master’s little power—somehow—endured. The old gods found it inexplicable; but they were under no bonds to explain it; and it was not worth bothering about: nor was anything else worth bothering about, said they, whom time had freed of grave responsibilities.

And Florian mildly pitied their come-down in life, and their descent into this forlorn condition, but felt himself, none the less, to be sitting among ne’er-do-wells, and to be in not quite the company suited to a nobleman of his rank. So it was really a relief when the Master’s religious services were over, and when, with the coming of red dawn, his servants departed, trooping this way and that way, but without ever ascending far above earth as they passed like sombre birds. The Master now stood unattended upon the asherah stone.

Florian then nodded civilly to the fallen gods, and left them. Florian came forward and, removing his silver-laced green hat with a fine stately sweep, he gave Janicot that ceremonious bow which Florian reserved for persons whose worldly estate entitled them to be treated as equals by a Duke of Puysange.

15. Dubieties of the Master

“COME,” said Janicot, yawning in the dawn of Christmas Day, “but here is our romantic lordling of Puysange, to whom love is divine, and the desired woman a goddess.” Florian did not at once reply. He had for the instant forgotten his need of the sword Flamberge. For on account of the requirements of the various ceremonies, Janicot, except for a strip of dappled fawn-skin across his chest, was not wearing any clothes, not even any shoes. Florian had just noticed Janicot’s feet. But Florian was too courteous to comment upon personal peculiarities: for this only is the secret of all good-breeding, he reflected, not ever to wound the feelings of anybody, in any circumstances, without premeditation. So his upsetment was but momentary, and was not shown perceptibly, he felt sure, by the gasp which politeness had turned into a sigh. “But what the deuce,” said Janicot then, “is this a proper groan, is this the appropriate countenance, for one whose love has overridden the by-laws of time and nature and even of necromancy?”

“Ah, Monsieur Janicot,” answered Florian, “gravity everywhere goes arm-in-arm with wisdom, and I am somewhat wiser than I was when we last talked together. For I have been to the high place, and my desires have been gratified.”

“That is an affair of course, since all my friends have all their desires in this world. What cannot be with equal readiness taken for granted is the fact that you appear on that account to be none the happier.”

“Merriment,” replied Florian, “is a febrile passion. But content is quiet.”

“So, then, you are content, my little duke?”

“The word ‘little,’ Monsieur Janicot, has in its ordinary uses no uncivil connotations. Yet, when applied to a person—”

“I entreat your pardon, Monsieur the Duke, for the ill-chosen adjective, and I hastily withdraw it.”

“Which pardon, I need hardly say, I grant with even more haste. I am content, then, Monsieur Janicot. I have achieved my heart’s desire, and I find it”—Florian coughed,—“beyond anything I ever imagined. But now, alas! the great love between my wife and me draws toward its sweet fruition, and one must be logical. So I comprehend—with not unnatural regret,—that my adored wife will presently be leaving me forever.”

“Ah, to be sure! Then you have already, in this brief period, passed from the pleasures of courtship to the joys of matrimony—?”

“Monsieur, I am a Puysange. We are ardent.”

“—And she is already—?”

“Monsieur, I can but repeat my remark.”

“Eh,” replied Janicot, “you have certainly spared no zeal, you have not slept, in upholding the repute of your race: and this punctilious and loving adherence to the fine old forthright customs of your fathers affects me. There remains, to be sure, our bargain. Yet I am honestly affected, and since this parting grieves you so much, Florian, some composition must be reached—”

“It is undeniable,” said Florian, with a reflective frown, “that my most near acquaintances address me—”

“I accept the reproof, I withdraw the vocative noun, and again I entreat your pardon, Monsieur the Duke.”

“I did not so much voice a reproof, Monsieur Janicot, as a sincere lament that I have never enjoyed the privilege of your close friendship.” And Florian too bowed. “I was about to observe, then, that a gentleman adheres in all to all his bargains. So I can in logic consider no alteration of our terms, though you comprehend, I trust, how bitter I find their fulfilment.”

“Yes,” Janicot responded, “it is precisely the amount of your grief which I begin to comprehend. Its severity has even brought on a bronchial irritation which prevents your speaking freely: and indeed, one might have foreseen this.”

“—So I have come to inquire how I am to get the sword Flamberge, which, as you may remember, must figure in the ceremony of—your pardon, but I really do appear to have contracted a quite obstinate cough in the night air,—of giving you your honorarium, by the old ritual.”

Janicot for a moment reflected. “You have sacrificed—”

“Monsieur, pray let us be logical! I have offered you no sacrifice. I have participated in no such inadvisable custom of heathenry. I must remind you that this is Christmas; and that I, naturally, elect to follow our Christian custom of exchanging appropriate gifts at this season of the year.”

“I again apologize, I withdraw the verb. You have made me a Christmas present, then, of the life of a person of some note and mightiness, as your race averages. So it is your right to demand my aid. Yet there is one at your home, in an earthen pot, who could have procured for you the information, and very probably the sword too, without your stirring from your fireside and adored wife. It appears to me odd that, with so few months of happiness remaining, you should absent yourself from the sources of your only joy.”

Florian’s hand had risen in polite protest. “Ah, but, Monsieur Janicot, but in mere self-respect, one would not employ the power of which you speak, unless there were some absolute need. Now, for my part, I have always found it simple enough to get what I wanted without needing to thank anyone for help except myself. And Flamberge too is a prize that I prefer to win unaided, at the trivial price of a slight token of esteem at Christmas. I prefer, you conceive,” said Florian, as smilingly he reflected upon the incessant carefulness one had to exercise in dealing with these fiends, “to settle the affair without incurring humiliating and possibly pyrotechnic obligations to anybody.”

Janicot replied: “Doubtless, such independent sentiments are admirable. And it shall be as you like—”

“Still, Monsieur Janicot,” said Florian, with just the proper amount of heartbreak in his voice, “is it not regrettable that this cruel price should be exacted of me?”

“Old customs must be honored, and mine are oldish. Besides, as I recall it, you suggested the bargain, not I.”

“Yes, because I know that gifts from you are dangerous. Why, but let us be logical! Would you have me purchase an ephemeral pleasure at the price of my own ruin, when I could get it at the cost of somewhat inconveniencing others?”

“You say that my gifts are dangerous. Yet, what do you really know about me, Florian ? Again I entreat your pardon, Monsieur the Duke, but, after all, our acquaintance progresses.”

“I know nothing about you personally, Monsieur Janicot, beyond the handsomeness of your generosity. I only know the danger of accepting a free gift from any fiend; and you I take to be, in cosmic politics, a leader of the party in opposition.”

Janicot looked grave for a moment. He said:

“No, I am not a fiend, Monsieur the Duke; nor, for that matter, does your current theology afford me any niche.”

“Well, then,” asked Florian, with his customary fine frankness, “if you are not the devil, what the devil are you?”

Janicot answered: “I am all that has been and that is to be. Never has any man been able to imagine what I am.”

“Ah, monsieur, that sounds well, and, quite possibly, it means something. Of that I know no more than a frog does about toothache, but I do know they call you the adversary of all the gods of men—”

“Yes,” Janicot admitted, rather sadly, “I have been hoping, now for a great while, that men would find some god with whom a rational person might make terms, but that seems never to happen.”

“Monsieur, monsieur!” cried Florian, “pray let us have no scepticism—!”

“Scepticism also is a comfort denied to me. Men have that refuge always open. But I have in my time dealt at close grips with too many gods to have any doubt about them. No, I believe, and I shudder with distaste.”

“Come, now, Monsieur Janicot, religion and somewhere to go on Sundays are quite necessary amenities—”

Janicot was surprised. “Why, but, Monsieur the Duke, can it be true that you, as a person of refinement, approve of worshipping goats and crocodiles and hawks and cats and hippopotami after the Egyptian custom?”

“Parbleu, not in the least! I, to the contrary—”

“Oh, you admire, then, the monkeys and tigers, in whose honor the men of India build temples?”

“Not at all. You misinterpret me—”

“Ah, I perceive. You approve, instead, of those gods of Greece and Rome, who went about earth as bulls and cock cuckoos and as sprinklings of doubloons and five franc pieces, when they were particularly desirous of winning affection?”

“Now, Monsieur Janicot, you very foolishly affect to misunderstand me. One should be logical in these grave matters. One should know, as the whole world knows, that the Dukes of Puysange care nothing for the silly fables of paganism, and that for five centuries we of Puysange have been notable and loyal Christians.”

Janicot said: “For five whole centuries! Jahveh also, being so young a god, must think that a long while; and doubtless he feels honored by these five centuries of patronage.”

“Well, of course,” said Florian, modestly, “as one of the oldest families hereabouts, we find that our example is apt to be followed. But we ourselves think little of our long lineage, we have grown used to it, we think that logically it is only the man himself who matters: and I confess, Monsieur Janicot, that it seems almost droll to see you impressed by our antiquity.”

“I!” said Janicot. Then he said: “For all that, I am impressed. Yes, men are really wonderful. However, let that pass. So it is Jahveh of whom you approve. You confess it. Why, then, I ask you, as one logical person addressing another—”

“A pest! logic is a fine thing, but let us not put these matters altogether upon the ground of logic,” said Florian, recoiling just perceptibly, as a large tumble-bug climbed on the rock, and sat beside Janicot.

“—I ask you,” Janicot continued, “as one person of good taste addressing another—”

“It is not wholly an affair of connoisseurs. Let us talk about something else.”

“—For you have this Jahveh’s own history of his exploits all written down at his own dictation. I allow him candor, nor, for one so young, does he write badly. For the rest, do these cruelties, these double-dealings, these self-confessed divine blunders and miscalculations, these subornings of murders and thefts and adulteries, these punishments of the innocent, not sparing even his own family—”

Florian yawned delicately, but without removing his eyes from the tumble-bug. “My dear Monsieur Janicot, that sort of talk is really rather naive: it is, if you will pardon my frankness, quite out of date now that we have reached the eighteenth century.”

“Yes, but—”

“No, Monsieur Janicot, I can consent to hear no more of these sophomoric blasphemies. I must tell you I have learned that in these matters, as in all matters, it is better taste to recognize some drastic regeneration may be necessary without doing anything about it, and certainly without aligning ourselves with the foul anarchistic mockers of everything in our social chaos which is making for beauty and righteousness—”

“Why, but, Monsieur the Duke,” said Janicot, “but what—!”

“I must tell you I perceive, in honest sorrow, that with a desire for fescennine expression you combine a vulgar atheism and an iconoclastic desire to befoul the sacred ideas of the average man or woman, collectively scorned as the bourgeoisie—”

“Yes, doubtless, this is excellent talking. Still, what—?”

“I must tell you also that I very gravely suspect you to be one of those half-baked intellectuals who confuse cheap atheism, and the defiling of other men’s altars, with deep thinking; one of those moral and spiritual hooligans who resent all forms of order as an encroachment upon their diminutive, unkempt and unsavory egos; one of the kind of people who relish nasty books about sacred persons and guffaw over the amours of the angels.”

“Yes, I concede the sonority of your periods; but what does all this talking mean ?”

“Why, monsieur,” said Florian, doubtfully, “I do not imagine that it means anything. These are merely the customary noises of well-thought-of persons in reply to the raising of any topic which they prefer not to pursue. It is but an especially dignified manner of saying that I do not care to follow the line of thought you suggest, because logic here might lead to uncomfortable conclusions and to deductions without honorable precedents.”

“Ah, now I understand you,” said Janicot, smiling. He looked down, and stroked the tumble-bug, which under his touch shrank and vanished. “I should have noticed the odor before; and as it is, I confess that, in this frank adhesion to your folly without pretending it is anything else, I recognize a minim of wisdom. So let us say no more about it. Let us return to the question of that sword with which the loyal servant of him who also came not to bring peace, but a sword, has need to sever his family ties. Those persons just behind you were very pretty swordsmen in their day: and I imagine that they can give you all the necessary information as to the sword Flamberge.”

16. Some Victims of Flamberge

IT was really no affair of Florian’s, how these five vaguely-hued and quaintly appareled persons happened to be standing just behind him. They had not been there a moment ago: but Janicot seemed partial to these small wonder-workings, and such foibles, while in dubious taste, did not greatly matter.

So Florian was off again with his silver-laced hat, and Florian saluted these strangers with extreme civility. And Florian inquired of the gray and great-thewed champion if he knew of the whereabouts of Flamberge; and this tall man answered: “No. It was a fine sword, and I wore it once when I had mortal life and was very young. But I surrendered this sword to a woman, in exchange for that which I most desired. So I got no good of Flamberge, nor did anyone else so far as I could ever hear, for there is a curse upon this sword.”

“A curse, indeed!” said Florian, somewhat astonished. “Why, but I have always been told, monsieur, that the wearer of Flamberge is unconquerable.”

“That I believe to be true. Thus the wearer of Flamberge can get all his desires, and he usually does so: and, having them, he understands that the sword is accursed.”

“And did you too get your desire in this world, monsieur, and perceive the worth of it?”

“My boy, there is a decency in these matters, and an indecency. I got my desire. And having it, I did not complain. Let that suffice.”

With that, the speaker picked up his shield, upon which was blazoned a rampant and bridled stallion, and this tall gray squinting soldier was there no longer.

Then came a broad and surly man, in garments of faded scarlet, and with gems dangling from his ears, and he said: “From him, who was in his day a Redeemer, the sword came to my mother, and from her to me, and with it I slew my father, as was foreordained. And the sword made me unconquerable, and I went fearing nobody, and I ruled over much land, and I was dreaded upon the wide sea. And the sword won for me the body of that woman whom I desired, and the sword won for me long misery and sudden ruin.”

“A pest!” said Florian. “So you also, monsieur, were the victim of your own triumph!”

“Not wholly,” the other answered. “For I learned to envy and to admire that which I could not understand. That is something far better worth learning than you, poor shallow-hearted little posturer, are ever likely to suspect.”

And now came a third champion, who said: “From him, who was in his day a most abominable pagan and a very gallant gentleman as well, the sword came to me. And I cast it into the deep sea, because I meant to gain my desire unaided by sorcery and with clean hands. And I did get my desire.”

“And did you also live unhappily ever afterward ?”

“Our marriage was as happy as most marriages. My love defied Time and Fate. Because of my love I suffered unexampled chances and ignominies, and I performed deeds that are still rhymed about; and in the end, through my unswerving love, I got me a wife who was as good as most wives. So I made no complaint.”

And Florian nodded. “I take your meaning. There was once a king and a queen. They had three sons. And the third prince succeeded in everything— Your faces and your lives are strange to me. But it is plain all four of us have ventured into the high place, that dreadful place wherein a man attains to his desires.”

Then said another person: “That comes of meddling with Flamberge. Now my weapon was, at least upon some occasions, called Caliburn. And I ventured into a great many places, but I was careful of my behavior in all of them.”