Read Ebook: The Proud Prince by McCarthy Justin H Justin Huntly

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Ebook has 1372 lines and 47946 words, and 28 pages

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To serve my father's sword!"

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

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

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

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

"I am the daughter of Theron the executioner," she said, gravely.

The monster flung a sneer from thrust-out lips, emphasizing it with thrust-out hands.

"A pretty trade!" he cried, derisively. The girl answered him as calmly and proudly as if she were the very divinity of justice rebuking some obscene brawler.

"I have no horror of my father's trade. This sword is but the red weapon of law, as law is the red weapon of life."

"I have heard of you," the man retorted, yelping at her serenity. "The wild, shy country people believe the blood that sword has shed flushes in your hair, and that the life it has taken rekindles in your eyes."

Perpetua shook her head.

"This sword has shed no blood since I was born. King Robert the Good had no need of it."

The deformed clasped his lean fingers across his knees and rocked to and fro in an ecstasy of pleasure.

"King Robert the Bad will have great need of it. Your father's arms shall ache with swinging. Why, my own head would drop to-morrow like a wind-fallen apple if I had not taken fool's leave to the heights and the hollows."

The girl drew back a little, still clinging to the sword.

"Are you blood-guilty?" she asked, sternly.

The fool laughed shrilly to see the executioner's daughter shrink from blood-guiltiness.

Even as he spoke Diogenes renewed his antics, skipping on the grass to mimic how the King skipped on the palace floor, and with his lean claws he blew kisses. Perpetua thought him more repulsive in his mirth than in his rage. But suddenly his mirth dropped and his voice fell to a whisper.

"And then the King caught me at my capers and his heart swelled like a wet sponge. He swore a great oath that my fool's head should be the first to fall under his tyranny."

The girl crossed herself in horror as she questioned.

"Surely, he would not kill a fool for his folly?"

The fool shrugged his shoulders; fear and malignity tugged at the muscles of his cheeks and made them twitch.

"The King's soul is as red as hell; sin scarlet through and through; warp and woof, there is no white thread of heaven in him. Shall I number you the beads in his chaplet of vices? The seven deadly devils wanton in his heart; his spirit is of an incredible lewdness; he is prouder than the Pope, more cruel than a mousing cat--all which I complacently forgave him till he touched at my top-knot, but now I hate him."

Again the girl crossed herself swiftly, while she looked at the puckered face with curiosity, with pity.

"Can you hate in God's sunshine?" she asked, and as she spoke she looked about her at the trees and the mountains and the sea and the grass and the flowers, ennobled and ennobling in the sunlight, and her heart ached at the new thoughts that had thrust themselves into her life. But the fool sneered at her surprise and did not heed her pity.

"My hate is a cold snake, and the sun will not thaw me." He struck himself fiercely on the breast and stared at her. "Look at me, humped and hideous. How could this rugged hull prove an argosy of ineffabilities?"

The pity deepened on the girl's face, scattering the curiosity, and she spoke gently, hopefully:

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