Domnei, James Branch Cabell [red scrolls of magic .TXT] 📗

“You sail tomorrow for the fighting oversea. Take me with you.”

“Indeed the feat would be worthy of me. For you are a lady tenderly nurtured and used to every luxury the age affords. There comes to woo you presently an excellent and potent monarch, not all unworthy of your love, who will presently share with you many happy and honourable years. Yonder is a lawless naked wilderness where I and my fellow desperadoes hope to cheat offended justice and to preserve thrice-forfeited lives in savagery. You bid me aid you to go into this country, never to return! Madame, if I obeyed you, Satan would protest against pollution of his ageless fires by any soul so filthy.”

“You talk of little things, whereas I think of great things. Love is not sustained by palatable food alone, and is not served only by those persons who go about the world in satin.”

“Then take the shameful truth. It is undeniable I swore I loved you, and with appropriate gestures, too. But, dompnedex, madame! I am past master in these specious ecstasies, for somehow I have rarely seen the woman who had not some charm or other to catch my heart with. I confess now that you alone have never quickened it. My only purpose was through hyperbole to wheedle you out of a horse, and meanwhile to have my recreation, you handsome jade!⁠—and that is all you ever meant to me. I swear to you that is all, all, all!” sobbed Perion, for it appeared that he must die. “I have amused myself with you, I have abominably tricked you⁠—”

Melicent only waited with untroubled eyes which seemed to plumb his heart and to appraise all which Perion had ever thought or longed for since the day that Perion was born; and she was as beautiful, it seemed to him, as the untroubled, gracious angels are, and more compassionate.

“Yes,” Perion said, “I am trying to lie to you. And even at lying I fail.”

She said, with a wonderful smile:

“Assuredly there were never any other persons so mad as we. For I must do the wooing, as though you were the maid, and all the while you rebuff me and suffer so that I fear to look on you. Men say you are no better than a highwayman; you confess yourself to be a thief: and I believe none of your accusers. Perion de la Forêt,” said Melicent, and ballad-makers have never shaped a phrase wherewith to tell you of her voice, “I know that you have dabbled in dishonour no more often than an archangel has pilfered drying linen from a hedgerow. I do not guess, for my hour is upon me, and inevitably I know! and there is nothing dares to come between us now.”

“Nay⁠—ho, and even were matters as you suppose them, without any warrant⁠—there is at least one silly stumbling knave that dares as much. Saith he: ‘What is the most precious thing in the world?⁠—Why, assuredly, Dame Melicent’s welfare. Let me get the keeping of it, then. For I have been entrusted with a host of common priceless things⁠—with youth and vigour and honour, with a clean conscience and a child’s faith, and so on⁠—and no person alive has squandered them more gallantly. So heartward ho! and trust me now, my timorous yoke-fellow, to win and squander also the chiefest jewel of the world.’ Eh, thus he chuckles and nudges me, with wicked whisperings. Indeed, madame, this rascal that shares equally in my least faculty is a most pitiful, ignoble rogue! and he has aforetime eked out our common livelihood by such practices as your unsullied imagination could scarcely depicture. Until I knew you I had endured him. But you have made of him a horror. A horror, a horror! a thing too pitiful for hell!”

Perion turned away from her, groaning. He flung himself into a chair. He screened his eyes as if before some physical abomination.

The girl kneeled close to him, touching him.

“My dear, my dear! then slay for me this other Perion of the Forest.”

And Perion laughed, not very mirthfully.

“It is the common usage of women to ask of men this little labour, which is a harder task than ever Hercules, that mighty-muscled king of heathenry, achieved. Nay, I, for all my sinews, am an attested weakling. The craft of other men I do not fear, for I have encountered no formidable enemy save myself; but that same midnight stabber unhorsed me long ago. I had wallowed in the mire contentedly enough until you came.⁠ ⁠… Ah, child, child! why needed you to trouble me! for tonight I want to be clean as you are clean, and that I may not ever be. I am garrisoned with devils, I am the battered plaything of every vice, and I lack the strength, and it may be, even the will, to leave my mire. Always I have betrayed the stewardship of man and god alike that my body might escape a momentary discomfort! And loving you as I do, I cannot swear that in the outcome I would not betray you too, to this same end! I cannot swear⁠—Oh, now let Satan laugh, yet not unpitifully, since he and I, alone, know all the reasons why I may not swear! Hah, Madame Melicent!” cried Perion, in his great agony, “you offer me that gift an emperor might not accept save in awed gratitude; and I refuse it.” Gently he raised her to her feet. “And now, in God’s name, go, madame, and leave the prodigal among his husks.”

“You are a very brave and foolish gentleman,” she said, “who chooses to face his own achievements without any paltering. To every man, I think, that must be bitter work; to the woman who loves him it is impossible.”

Perion could not see her face, because he lay prone at the feet of Melicent, sobbing, but without any tears, and tasting very deeply of such grief and vain regret as,