: The Proud Prince by McCarthy Justin H Justin Huntly - Sicily (Italy) Fiction

@FreeBooksWed 07 Jun, 2023

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o plead for forgiveness and to justify impertinence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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