PART THREE

THE END OF LEAN WISDOM

“Ne point aller chercher ce qu’on fait dans la lune,
Et vous mesler un peu de ce qu’on fait chez vous,
Où nous voyons aller tout sans-dessus-dessous.”

[Pg 219]

21.
Of Melior Married

OW Florian returned to Bellegarde to face the disillusion appointed for every husband in passing from infatuation to paternity. His disenchanted princess now was hardly recognizable. Her face was like dough, her nose seemed oddly swollen; under and about the blood-shot eyes were repulsive yellow splotches. As for the bloated body, he could not bear to look at it. He was shaken with hot and sick disgust when he saw this really perfectly dreadful looking creature.

Perhaps, though, Florian reflected, he saw her through emotions which exaggerated every blemish unfairly. He knew all other pregnant women had seemed to him unattractive rather than actually loathsome. But here, here was the prize he had so long and fervently desired, the prize to gain which he had sacrificed those dearest to him in this world, and had parted with the comforting assurances of
[Pg 220]
religion.... For, Melior, then, had flawless and unequalled beauty. So he had bought, at an exceedingly stiff price, this shining superficies, to learn almost immediately thereafter that she possessed not one other desirable quality. And now Melior had not even the thin mask of loveliness. Worse still, the beauty which he had worshipped since boyhood now existed nowhere. To purchase an hour or two of really not very remarkable entertainment, he had himself destroyed this beauty....

“My love,” said Florian, “now if only I were a conceited person, I would dare to hope that the long months since I last saw you have passed as drearily with you as with me.”

He kissed her tenderly. Even the woman’s breath was now unpleasant. It seemed to Florian that nothing was being spared him.

“Yes, that sort of talk is all very well,” replied Melior, fretfully. “But I do think that at a time when I have every right to expect particular attention and care, you might at least have made an effort to get home sooner, and not leave everything upon my shoulders, especially with all the neighbors everywhere pretending, whenever I come into the room, that they were not talking about your having killed your brother—”

“Yes, yes, a most regrettable affair! But what,
[Pg 221]
sweetheart, has been going amiss at Bellegarde?”

“That is a pretty question for you to ask, with me in my condition, with all these other worries on top of it, about your friend Orléans. Because, knowing you as well as I do, Florian, and not being able to feel as you do that a prime minister is no more than a house fly or a flea,—and seeing quite well, too, how little you consider what my feelings naturally would be if they cut off your head—”

“Ah, but let us take one thing at a time, and for the present leave my head where it is. Do you mean that you have been unwell, my pet?”

“Have you no eyes in the head you keep talking about just to keep me upset! But I do not wonder you prefer not to look at me, now I am such a fright, and that is you men all over. Still, you might at least have the decency to remember who is responsible for it, and that much I must say.”

“But, dearest, I have both the eyes about which you inquire, and in those doubtless partial orbs you happen not to look a fright. So I cannot quite follow you. No, let us be logical! There is a slight pallor, to be sure—But, no! No, dear Melior, upon the whole, I never saw you looking lovelier, and I wonder of what you are talking.”

“I mean, you fool, that I am sick and miserable because now almost any day I am going to have a baby.”

[Pg 222]

Florian was honestly shocked. He could remember no precedent among his mistresses of anybody’s having put this news so bluntly: and when he recalled the behavior of his first wife in precisely these circumstances, he could not but feel that women were deteriorating. A wife endowed with proper sensibility would have hidden her face upon his shoulder, just as Carola had done, and would in this posture have whispered her awed surmise that Heaven was shortly to consign them a little cherub. But this big-bellied vixen appeared to have no sensibilities. “You fool, now almost any day I am going to have a baby!” was neither a loving nor a dignified way of announcing the nearness of his freedom.

But Florian’s plump face was transfigured, as he knelt before his Melior, and very reverently lifted to his lips her hand. He slipped a cushion under his knee, made himself comfortable, and, kneeling still, went on to speak of his bliss and of his love for her and of how sacred in his eyes appeared the marks of her condition. She listened: he could see that Melior was pleased; and he in consequence continued his gallant romanticizing.

For Florian really wanted to be pleasant to the woman; and was resolved politely to ignore even this last disillusionment, and to condone as far as was humanly possible, the lack of consideration
[Pg 223]
through which this dreadful creature had now added to stupidity and garrulity even physical ugliness.

But while Florian was talking he could see, too, that the central diamond in the charmed ring that Melior wore was to-day quite black, like an onyx, so that he took care to keep it covered with his hand all the while he was talking about his adoration. Here was an appalling omen, a portent, virtually, of open conflict between Florian and his patron saint. The central stone of this ring had become as black and as bright and as inimical looking as though, he reflected, one of the small eyes of Marie-Claire Cazaio stared thence. This was a depressing sight: and it seemed to Florian quite vexingly illogical that the ring should change in this fashion when, after all, he was planning no harm against Melior.

When she had borne her child, he meant of course to carry out his bargain with brown Janicot,—a bargain that Florian considered an entirely private matter, and an affair with which Hoprig could not meddle without exhibiting absolute ill breeding. Then Melior would disappear, Florian did not know whither, to be sure, but her destination would be none of his selecting or responsibility. A really logical ring would not call that contriving any harm against Melior. Even Holy Hoprig must be reasonable enough to see that much. So Florian for the while put aside his foreboding, and assured him
[Pg 224]
self that, with anything like fair luck, he was on the point of getting rid of this dreadful woman forever. The reflection spurred him to eloquence and to the kindliness which Florian had always felt to be due his wives in their last hours.

[Pg 225]

22.
The Wives of Florian

LORIAN watched his Melior with a not unnatural care. She remained, to the eye, unperturbed, and was her usual maddening self throughout the evening: it seemed to him she must inevitably have noticed the changing of her ring; and in that event, he granted the woman’s duplicity at least to be rather magnificent.

For Melior talked, on and on and on,—with that quite insupportable air of commingled self-satisfaction and shrewdness,—about Monsieur du Belloc’s new liveries, which were the exact color, my dear, of Madame des Roches’ old wig, the one she was wearing that day she drove in here in all that rain; and about how that reminded Melior of what a thunderstorm had come up only last Thursday without the least warning; and about how Marie-Claire had been looking at Melior again in that peculiar way and ought not to be permitted to raise storms and cast spells that dried up people’s cows.

[Pg 226]

Even so, Melior continued, milk was fattening and was not really good for you in large quantities, and, for one, she meant to give it up, though if you were intended to be fat you had in the end simply to put up with it, just as some persons got bald sooner than others, and no hair-dresser could help you, not even if he was as airy and as pleased with himself as that high-and-mighty François over at Manneville. Oh, yes, but Florian must certainly remember! He was the very skinny one whom she had in two or three times last autumn, and who had turned out to be a Huguenot or a Jansenist or something of that sort, so that, people did say, the dear old Bishop was going to take the proper steps the very instant he was out again. That was the trouble, though, with colds at his age, you never knew what they might lead to at the moment you were least expecting it—

So her talking went, on and on and on, while Florian looked at the woman,—who was repulsive now even to the eye,—and he reflected: “And it was for this that I intrepidly assailed the high place, and slaughtered all those charming monsters! It was for this that I have sacrificed poor Philippe and my dear Raoul!”

Bed-time alone released him from listening to her; but not from prudent watchfulness.

That night he roused as Melior slipped from
[Pg 227]
their bed. Through discreetly half-closed eyelids Florian saw her take from the closet that queer carved staff which had once belonged to her sister Mélusine. Now Melior for a while regarded this staff dubiously. She replaced it in the closet. She took up the night-light from the green-covered table beside the bed, and she passed out of the room.

He lay still for a moment, then put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and followed her. Melior turned, with her lamp, at the second corridor, and went out into the enclosed Thoignet Court-yard, skirted the well, and so disappeared through the small porch into the Chapel. Florian followed, quite noiselessly. The paved court was chilly underfoot: as he went into the porch a spray of ivy brushed his cheek in the dark.

Inside the Chapel three hanging lamps burned before the altar, like red stars, but they gave virtually no illumination. Florian saw that Melior had carried her yellow lamp into the alcove where his earlier wives were buried. She knelt there. She was praying, no doubt, for the intercession of that meddlesome Hoprig. Florian was rather interested. Then his interest was redoubled, for of a sudden the place was flooded with a wan throbbing bluish luminousness. The effigies upon the tombs of Florian’s wives were changed; and the recumbent marble figures yawned and stretched themselves.
[Pg 228]
Thus, then, began the unimaginative working of Hoprig’s holy ring, with a revamping of the affliction put upon Komorre the Cursed in the old nursery tale, Florian decided; and these retributory resurrections were rather naïve. He drew close his dressing-gown, and got well into the shadow of his great-grandfather’s tomb, the while that his four earlier wives sat erect and looked compassionately at Melior.

“Beware, poor lovely child,” said the likeness of Aurélie, “for it is apparent that Florian intends to murder you also.”

“I was beginning to think he had some such notion,” Melior replied, “for otherwise, of course, he would hardly be fetching home the sword Flamberge.”

She had arisen from her knees, and there was in the composure with which she now sat sociably beside the ghost of Carola, on top of Carola’s tomb, something that Florian found rather admirable. And he recalled too with admiration the innocence and the unconcern with which Melior had commented upon his having acquired such a delightfully quaint and old-fashioned looking sword....

“Yes, for, my dear,” said Carola, “you have permitted him to get tired of you. It was for that oversight he murdered all of us.”

“But I have no time to put up with the man’s
[Pg 229]
foolishness just now, when I am going to have a baby,” said Melior, with unconcealed vexation.

“Go seek protection of St. Hoprig,” advised Hortense.

“And how may she escape,” asked Marianne, “when Florian’s lackeys are everywhere, and Florian’s great wolfhounds guard the outer courts?”

“She can give them the sweet-scented poison which destroyed me,” said Carola. “But all the gates of Bellegarde are locked fast; and how could anyone climb down the unscalable high walls of the outer fortress?”

“By means of the strong silken cord which strangled me,” answered Marianne.

“But who would guide her through the dark to sorcerous Morven?”

“The molten lead which was poured into my ear,” replied Aurélie, “will go before her glowing like a will-o’-the-wisp.”

“And how can she, in her condition, make so long a journey?”

“Let her take the fine ebony cane which broke my skull,” rejoined Hortense. “For now the cup of Florian’s iniquity runs over, and all the implements of his wickedness revolt against him.”

“Come now,” said Melior, “there has been a great deal of nonsense talked. But you have at last, poor ghost, suggested something really practical, and
[Pg 230]
something that had occurred to me also. Yes, you are entirely right, and your suggestion is most sensible, though, to be sure, it can hardly be ebony: for now that I am quite certain about Florian I simply owe it to my self-respect to leave him before he murders me too, and the easiest way to do that of course is to use my unfortunate and misguided sister’s staff. But ebony, you know, is perfectly black—”

“Now of what staff can you be talking?”

“Why, but, my dear! As anybody at Brunbelois, even the veriest tidbits of children, could tell you, it was presented to Mélusine by one of the most fearful and ruthless demons resident in the Red Sea. It was the staff the poor darling always rode on. I do not, of course, mean him: in fact, I only saw him once, on a Saturday, when I was the merest child. And with all those scales, he could hardly expect anybody to call him a darling, even if you overlooked his having a head like a cat. Only much more so, of course, on account of his being larger. No, I meant that Mélusine rode on it—”

Now Florian was reflecting, “With what a lovely air of innocence she lied to me about that staff!” And Aurélie was saying, ineffectively, “Yes, but—”

“—Not as a steady thing, of course, but when she was about some particularly important enchantment, and wanted to make an impression. Mélusine
[Pg 231]
was accomplished, and all that, and nobody denies it, but, if you ask me about being vain, then I can only say that, sister or not, I believe in being truthful. And as for leaving her things about helter-skelter, even the crown jewels—for Mélusine was the oldest of us girls, and Father always spoiled her quite terribly, and Mother never cared especially for dressing up,—why, we all know what clever people are in that way: and I need only say that I found this very staff stuck away in a cupboard, like an old worn-out broom—”

Said Marianne, “Yes, but—”

“—When I was getting my things together to leave Brunbelois. And, much as I hate to contradict anybody, it has a distinctly red tinge, so that it could not possibly be ebony. So, what with all the talk, and Hoprig’s suspicions about Florian, it simply occurred to me that this staff was not the sort of thing my dear father would care to be stirring up unpleasant old memories with, by seeing it, after all his trouble with Mélusine. For, even if Hoprig had been quite wrong, still, marriage, as I so often think, is really just a lottery—”

“Yes, but,” said Hortense, “but, but, but! one needs to know the charm that controls the staff—”

“My dear creature! But you are Hortense, are you not? Yes, I remember Florian told me all about you: and after the manner in which he has
[Pg 232]
behaved to me, I am perfectly willing to believe that he misrepresented you in every way. Even if you used to make it a regular habit of flying at people’s throats like that, I know how many perfectly well meaning women simply do not realize what an annoyance it is for any one person to want to do all the talking—”

“I think so too, but—”

“Oh, I am not in the least offended, my dear. It is merely that, as I was telling you, Hortense, my sister Mélusine was one of the most potent sorceresses in the known world, and so utterly devoted to her art that hardly a day passed without at any rate a little parlor conjuring. And I used often to be playing in the corner with my building blocks and my dolls when she was at her practising. If I were to tell you half the things I have witnessed with my own eyes, you simply would not believe a word of it. Yes, Mélusine was quite accomplished, there is no denying that. And as I was saying, you know how children are, and how often they surprise you when you had no notion they were paying the least attention. Yes, as I often think, it is the littlest pitchers that have the largest ears—”

“If you know how the cantraps run, then, to be sure—”

“Why, but,” said Melior, now with her air of
[Pg 233]
one who is dealing patiently with an irrational person, “but everybody knows if it is not the
Eman hetan
charm, it has to be either the
Thout tout a tout
or the
Horse and hattock
one. And so, I do hope, you see my feeling in the matter. Because, of course, appreciating as I do the perfectly well-meant suggestions of every one of you, still nobody in my delicate condition exactly likes to go about sliding down ropes and poisoning the servants, not to speak of the dogs, who, after all, are not responsible for their master’s doings, and walking nobody knows how many miles in the dark. So I shall go to Hoprig more carefully, and quickly too, upon the demon’s staff, vexatious as it is not to be remembering his name. I distinctly remember there was a Z in it, because there always seemed to me something romantic about a Z, and that he had talons like an eagle; but it was not Bembo, or Celerri, or El-Gabal—No, it has quite gone out of my mind, but, in any event, I am much obliged to all of you. And no doubt it will come back to me the moment I stop trying to remember—”

Thus speaking, Melior arose from the tomb, and left the Chapel reflectively. A brief silence followed, a silence that was broken by Marianne. She said, “Poor Florian!”

“He had his faults of course,” assented Hortense,
[Pg 234]
“but really, to a person of any sensibility—Do peep, my love, and tell me if my skirts are down properly—”

Now Florian came forward, as statelily as anybody can walk in bedroom slippers, just as his wives were settling back upon their various tombs.

“Dear ladies,” said he, “I perceive with real regret that not even death is potent enough to allay your propensities for mischief making.”

“Oh, oh!” they cried, each sitting very erect, “here is the foul murderer!”

“Parbleu, my pets, what grievance, after all, have you against me? Are you not happier in your present existence than when you lived with me?”

“I should think so, indeed!” replied Carola, indignantly. “Why, wherever do you suppose we went to?”

“I do not inquire. It is a question raised by no widower of real discretion: he merely inclines in this, as in most matters, to be optimistic. Yet come now, let us be logical! Is it quite right for you four to complain against me, and to harbor actual animosity, on account of what was in the beginning just the natural result of my rather hasty disposition, and in the end my quadruple misfortune? Do you, Carola, for example, honestly believe that, after having been blessed with your affection, I could ever be actually satisfied with Melior?”

[Pg 235]

“For one, I certainly see nothing in her. And I really do think, Florian—”

“Nor I, either,” said Aurélie, “nor could any rational person. And for your own good, I must tell you quite frankly, Florian—”

“Though, heaven knows,” said Marianne, “it is not as if any of us could envy the poor idiot for being your wife—”

“It is merely that one cannot help wondering,” said Hortense, “that even you should have had no more sense or good taste—”

So for an instant the sweet voices were like a choir of birds in fourfold descant: and they thrilled him with remembered melodies, vituperative and plaintive and now strangely dear. Then came the changing. All, Florian saw in that queer bluish light, were pitiably eager to talk about Melior, and to explain to him exhaustively just what a fool he had been, and how exactly like him was such behavior. But the magic of Hoprig’s revivifying ring was spent: and color and flexibility were going away from the pretty bodies, so that their lips could but move stiffly and feebly now, without making the least noise. It was really heart-breaking, Florian thought, to see these lovely women congeal into stone, and be thus petrified upon the verge of candors which would have completely freed their minds.

Then that strange throbbing bluish light was
[Pg 236]
gone: and Florian was alone in the dark Chapel where only three dim lamps were glowing like red stars. An ordinary person would have estimated that this gloom did but very inadequately prefigure Florian’s future. But a Puysange knew perfectly where next to apply for help against any and all saints.

[Pg 237]

23.
The Collyn in the Pot

LORIAN went from the Chapel to the secret chamber which nobody else cared to enter. At this last pinch he was resolved to enlist in his defence that power which was at least as strong as Hoprig’s power. So Florian carried with him wine and wafers.

He opened a wicker basket, wherein was an earthen pot. Inside this pot lay, upon strips of white and black wool, a small, very smooth dun-colored creature that had the appearance of a cat. Florian with a green-handled little knife pricked the end of his ring-finger until he got the necessary blood; and presently the Collyn of Puysange had opened her yellow eyes and was licking daintily her lips so as to lose no drop of the offering. Florian fed her also with the wine and wafers.

“Whither,” asked Florian then, “will the staff carry Melior?”

The Collyn answered, in a tiny voice: “To the
[Pg 238]
hut which is between Amneran and Morven. For that hut is the outpost of romance, and is as near as the demon’s staff may dare approach to the hermitage of Holy Hoprig.”

“Where is that hermitage?”

“Upon Morven, upon the highest uplands of Morven, between a thorn-tree and an ash-tree, and beneath an oak-tree.”

“What is my patron saint doing in this place?”

“Master, I also keep away from these saints. But it is rumored that this Hoprig is now somewhat recklessly exercising the privileges of sainthood; that his doings are not very favorably looked down upon; and that the angels, in particular, are complaining because of his frequent demands on them.”

“That does not sound at all well,” said Florian, “and certainly there is no precedent for the wife of a Puysange consorting with people who annoy the angels.”

The Collyn yawned: and for a while she looked at Florian somewhat as ordinary cats regard a mouse-hole.

“Master, I would not bother about this last wife. Why should you count so scrupulously one woman more or less on the long list?”

“It is not the woman I wish to keep. Faith of a gentleman, no! But I must keep my plighted word.”

[Pg 239]

“Master,” said the cool and tiny voice, “you are thrusting yourself into a dangerous business. For this woman is now under Hoprig’s protection, and the powers of these saints are not to be despised.”

“That is true, but I must hold to my bargain with Monsieur Janicot. The pious old faith that made my living glad has been taken away from me, the dreams that I preserved from childhood have been embodied for my derision. I see my admirations and my desires for what they are, and this is a spectacle before which crumbles my self-conceit. The past, wherein because of these empoisoned dreams I stinted living, has become hateful: and of my hopes for the future, the less said the better. All crumbles, Collyn: but Puysange remains Puysange.”

“I wonder, now,” the cat asked, innocently, “if that means anything?”

“Yes, Collyn,” Florian answered: “it means that I shall keep my own probity unstained, keep honor at least, whatever else goes by the board. One must be logical. My quiet unassuming practise of religion and my constant love which once derided time and change—and in fact, the entire code of ideals by which I have lived so comfortably for all of thirty-six years,—appear to have been founded everywhere upon delusion and half-knowledge. Yet Helmas, I find, was truly wise. I also shall
[Pg 240]
keep up my dignity by not letting even fate and chance upset me with their playfulness, and I shall continue to do what was expected of me yesterday. For the code by which I have lived contents me, or, rather, I am subdued to it. So I must go on living by it while living lasts.”

“Yet if this romantic code of yours be based upon nothing—”

“If I have wholly invented it, without the weaving into its fabric of one strand of fact,—why, then, all the more reason for me to be proud of and to cherish what is peculiarly mine. Do my dreams fail me? That is no reason why I should fail my dreams, which indeed, Collyn, have erred solely in contriving a more satisfactory world than Heaven seems able to construct.”

“And does all this, too, mean something?”

“A pest! it seems to mean at least my destruction, since it is an article of my code that a gentleman may not in any circumstances break his word. For the rest, I find that abstract questions of right and wrong are too deep for me, too wholly based upon delusion and half-knowledge, so I shall meddle with them no more. Good and evil must settle their own vaporous battles, with which I am no longer concerned.”

“To fling down your cards in a rage profits nobody.”

[Pg 241]

“But do I indeed rage? Do I speak bitterly? Well, for thirty-six years I have taken sides, and for thirty-six years I have been the most zealous of churchmen, only to find at the last that not one of my irregularities has been charged off. I can assure you, Collyn, that it is quite vexing to have the business credit of one’s religion thus shaken by the news that so much piety has ended with more debts than assets.”

The small predatory beast still waited warily: and never for an instant did her unwinking tilted yellow eyes leave looking at Florian.

“So many of you I have served! your father, and your grandfather, and all the others that for a brief while were here. And in the end you all come to nothing.”

“Ah, Collyn, if the life of a Puysange be of no account,—although that is an unprecedented contention, let me tell you,—then so much the more reason for me to shape what remains of that life to my own liking.”

Florian thought for a while. Florian shrugged. That was the deuce of listening to yourself when you were talking. Florian, who had come hither to purchase aid from the Collyn, had logically convinced himself, through this sad trick of heeding his own words, that Puysange must stand or fall unaided. Yes, vexing as it was, that which he had
[Pg 242]
spoken with so much earnestness was really true.

“All these years,” said Florian, rather sadly, “you have lain here at my disposal, prepared to serve me in my need, with no small power. And I, unlike the others of my race, have bought of you nothing. What I have wanted I have taken, asking no odds of anyone, whether here or below. It is true I have made to Heaven some civil tenders, in the shape of good works and church-windows, just as I have been at pains to supply you with blessed wine and wafers. It seemed well in logic to preserve a friendly relation with both sides. For the rest, whatever I felt my life to lack I have myself fetched into it, even holiness and beauty, even”—Florian smiled,—“even Melior and Hoprig. It is perhaps for this self-sufficiency that I am punished in a world wherein people are expected to live and to act in herds because of their common distrust of the future and of one another. I do not complain; and I remain self-sufficient.”

“In fact, with me to aid you, master, you need lack for nothing.”

That was precisely what Florian had been thinking when he came hither. But Florian had since then been listening to that most insidious of counsellors, himself. He was utterly convinced; and one must be logical.

So Florian replied languidly:

[Pg 243]

“My dear creature! but I do not require your aid. Instead, I am come to declare you free from your long bondage to the house of my fathers. Yes, you are free, with no claim upon me, alone of all my race, since now that I renounce good I shall put away evil also. For I am Puysange: I dare to look into my own heart, and I can find there no least admiration for Heaven or for Heaven’s adversaries. It may be I am fey: I speak under correction, since that is not a condition with which I have had any experience. But it seems to me that gods and devils are poor creatures when compared to man. They live with knowledge. But man finds heart to live without any knowledge or surety anywhere, and yet not to go mad. And I wonder now could any god endure the testing which all men endure?”

At this sort of talking the Collyn purred.

“Master, you shall evade that testing, for you shall have unbounded knowledge. Ah, but what secrets and what powers I will give you, my proud little master, for a compact and a price.”

“No: I have no doubt the powers you offer are very pleasant, very amusing to exercise, and all that; but I have had quite enough of compacts.”

“I will give you the master-word of darkness, that single word which death speaks to life, and which none answers. I will give you the power of the crucified serpent, and the spell which draws
[Pg 244]
the sun and the moon to bathe in a silver tub and do your will. There is wealth in that spell, the wealth which purchases kingdoms. And I will give you, who have smiled so long, the power to laugh. I will do more, my proud little master: for I will give you the bravery to weep—”

But Florian answered: “You cannot give me anything worthy of comparison with that which I once had, and now have lost. I had my dreams of beauty and of holiness. I had the noblest dreams imaginable. These dreams I have embodied as no other man has ever done before me: these dreams I have made vital things, and I have introduced them into my living, full measure. No, you can give me nothing worthy of comparison with what I have lost. And you are free. In all these years the one service I have asked of you, who have been so long the mainstay and the destroyer of Puysange, is now at the last to reveal to me the shortest way to my patron saint.”

“From these saints you will get a quick and ugly shrift: from me long years of ease and wisdom, master,—utter wisdom, and no more restless doubtings about anything.”

Florian felt of a sudden that this small fawning creature was loathsome: and just as suddenly, Florian too was weary of all things that are and of all that was ever to happen anywhere.

[Pg 245]

“No, Collyn, I repudiate your wicked aid; and I set you free, not really hating evil or good either. But I honestly prefer to owe allegiance to nobody except myself. Because of that preference I shall go undefended to yet another high place in quest of my embodied dreams,—now for a second time, and now with a somewhat different intent.”

“You march toward death and toward utter destruction, my proud little master, when even now my power might save you. There is no other power that would befriend you now, for you march up against Heaven.”

“Yes, yes! that is regrettable of course, it tends to establish a bad precedent. But it is my ill luck to be both a gentleman and a poet,—a poet who, I can assure you,” Florian said, hastily, “has never written any verses. That, at least, nobody can charge me with. Now to a gentleman destruction is preferable to dishonor: and to a married poet, Collyn, there are worse things than death.”

[Pg 246]

24.
Marie-Claire

LORIAN left Bellegarde at dawn. For once, he did not travel in his favorite bottle-green and silver. Good taste suggested that a plain black suit with his best Mechlin ruffles, was the appropriate wear in which to court destruction. Thus clad, he girded on Flamberge, and set out as merrily as might be, afoot: no horse could come to the top of Morven, where once had stood the grove of Virbius.

Florian journeyed first to Amneran, and went to a very retired cottage built of oak and plaster upon a stone foundation. Here was his last hope of aid, and of succour which he might accept without any detriment to the pride of Puysange, for this was the ill spoken-of home of his half-sister, Marie-Claire Cazaio. She was alone at her spinning when he came into the room. He took her hand. He kissed it.

“You told me once, dear Marie-Claire, a long
[Pg 247]
while since, that in the end I would come to you in an old garden where dead leaves were falling, and would kiss your hand, and tell you I had loved you all my life. I wonder, Marie-Claire, if you remember that?”

“I have forgotten,” she said, “nothing.”

“You were wrong as to the garden and as to the dead leaves. But in all else you were right. This is the end, Marie-Claire. And in the end I fulfill your prophecy.”

She looked at him, for no brief while, with those small darkened eyes which seemed to see beyond him. “Yes, you are speaking the truth. I had thought that when this happened it would matter. And it does not matter.”

“Only one thing has mattered in all our lives, Marie-Claire. I was at Storisende last week. I remembered you and our youth.”

“And were you”—she smiled faintly,—“and were you properly remorseful?”

“No. I have regretted many of my doings. But I can find nowhere in me any of the highly requisite repentance for those of my actions which people would describe as criminal. I suppose it is because we of Puysange are so respectful of the notions of others that we do not commit crimes rashly. We enter into no illegal turpitude until rather careful reflection has assured us of its expediency. I, in
[Pg 248]
any event, have sometimes been virtuous with unthinking levity, and with depressing upshots: but my vices, which my judgment had to endorse before prudence would venture on them, have resulted well enough. So I can regret no irregularities, and certainly not the happiness of our far-off youth.”

Again Marie-Claire was in no hurry to reply. When she spoke, it was without any apparent conviction either one way or the other. “Our happiness involved, they say, considerable misdoing.”

This stirred him to mild indignation. “And is love between brother and sister a misdoing? Come, Marie-Claire, but let us be logical! All scientists will tell you that endogamy is natural to mankind as long as men stay uncorrupted by over-civilization. The weight of history goes wholly one way. The Pharaohs and the Ptolemies afford, I believe, precedents that are tolerably ancient. Strabo is explicit as to the old Irish, Herodotus as to the Persians. In heaven also Osiris and Zeus and I know not how many other supreme gods have, in cherishing extreme affection for their sisters, set the example followed upon earth by the Kings of Siam and of Phœnicia, and by the Incas of Peru—”

She shook that small dark head. “But, none the less—”

“—An example followed by the Sinhalese, the
[Pg 249]
Romans of the old Republic, the Tyrians, the Guanches of the Canary Islands—”

“Let us say no more about it—”

“—An example, in short, of the best standing in all quarters of the globe. In the Rig-Veda you will find Yami defending with unanswerable eloquence the union of brother and sister. In Holy Writ we see Heaven’s highest blessings accorded to the fruit of Abraham’s affection for his sister Sarah, nor need I allude to the marriage of Azrun with her two brothers, Abel and Cain. And in the Ynglinga Saga—”

She laid her hand upon his mouth. “Yes, yes, you have your precedents: and in your eyes, I know, that is the main thing, because of your dread of being unconventional and offending the neighbors. We were not wicked, then, whatever our less well-read father thought: we were merely”—and here she smiled,—“we were merely logical in our youth. In any event, we wasted our youth.”

“Yes,” Florian admitted, “for I was then logical, but not sufficiently logical. I could, as easily at that time as later, have cured our father of his habit of meddling with my affairs. But I turned unthinkingly away from the contented decades of technical criminality which we might have shared. For I was in those days enamored of the beauty that I in childhood had, however briefly, seen: even
[Pg 250]
while my body rioted, my thoughts remained bewilderedly aware of a beguiling and intoxicating brightness which stayed unwon to; and I could care whole-heartedly about nothing else.”

“I know,” she answered. “You were a dear boy. And it does not matter, now, that you went away from me, and played at being a man about whom I knew nothing and cared nothing. For old times’ sake my sending followed you to Brunbelois, and even there for old times’ sake I warned you. But you would not heed—”

“I cared for nothing then save the beauty of Melior. And now her beauty,” he said, with a wry smile, “is gone. And that also does not matter. For months her beauty has been the one thing about her I never think of.”

“She is flesh and blood,” said Marie-Claire, as if that explained everything. “It is a combination which does not long detain Puysange. What is this peril that you go to encounter to-day?”

“I go up upon Morven to keep my word as frankly and as utterly as I gave it; and thereby to be embroiled, I am afraid, in open conflict with my patron saint.”

“That is bad. You must keep your word of course, because favoritism to anybody is wrong. But these saints do not understand this; they build all upon Heaven’s favoritism: and these holy persons are stronger than we, precisely because they are immune to such clear seeing as we are cursed with.”

He closed upon
FLORIAN
, straightforwardly, without any miracle-working.
See page
281

[Pg 251]

“But your powers of sending and perverting and blighting and so on,” he said,—“are none of these to be enlisted in my favor?”

“Not against Hoprig,” she replied, “for the elect have that invincible unreason and stupidity against which alone our powers are feeble. No, my dearest, I cannot aid you. For these saints are stronger than we are: and in the end, whatever grounds they may afford us for contempt or for laughing at them, they conquer us.”

It was in some sort a relief to know there was not hope anywhere. Florian spoke now with more animation. “No, Marie-Claire. Even at the last let us adhere to logic! These saints do not conquer; they destroy us, that is all. The ruthless power of holiness is strong enough for that, but it is not strong enough to hold me, not for one instant, in subjection.”

“Ah, and must you still be playing, dear boy that was, at being a most tremendous fellow?” she said, still smiling very tenderly. “Heaven will destroy you, then: and this is the hour of your return, the hour which I once prophesied, the hour which comes—so unportentously!—to end our living. So let us not waste that hour in quibbles.”

[Pg 252]

“You are so practical,” he lamented, “and with all that is lovable you combine such a dearth of admirable sentiments. In brief, you are Puysange.”

She said pensively: “You were not lonely in my little time of happiness. You would not ever have been lonely with me.”

“Have you divined that also, Marie-Claire? Yes, it has been lonely. I have had many friends and wives and mistresses. Perhaps I have had everything which life has to give—”

Florian sat looking moodily at two queer drawings done in red and black upon the plaster of the wall: one represented a serpent swallowing rods, the other a serpent crucified. Beneath these drawings was a dark shining stone, and in its gleaming he saw figures move.

Florian turned, and said without any apparent emotion: “But I have lived quite alone, with no comprehension of anyone, and with so much distrust of everybody! And now it is too late.”

She considered this: she spread out her hands, smiling without mirth. “Yes, it is too late, even with me. Nothing is left, where all was yours once, Florian. I seem a husk. I do not either love or hate you any longer. Only,”—again that dark blind staring puzzled over him,—“only, it is not you who wait here in this fine black suit.”

That made him too smile, and shrug a little. “It
[Pg 253]
is what remains of me, my dear,—all that remains anywhere to-day. Such is the end of every person’s youth and passion. I sometimes think that we reside in an ill-managed place. For look, Marie-Claire!” He waved toward the window, made up of very small panes of leaded glass, through which you saw the first vaporous green of the low fruit trees and much sunshine. “Look, Marie-Claire! spring is returning now, on every side. That seems so tactless.”

But Marie-Claire replied, with more tolerance: “That is Their notion of humor. I suppose it amuses the poor dears, so let us not complain.”

Then they fell to talking of other matters, and they spoke of shared small happenings in that spring of eighteen years ago, talking quite at random as one trifle reminded them of another. The son of Marie-Claire, young Achille Cazaio, was away from home in the way of business: for at seventeen he had just set up as a brigand, and he was at this time only a hopeful apprentice in the trade through which he was to prosper and to win success and some fame. So they were undisturbed; and Florian that day saw nothing of the stripling bandit, whom gossip declared remarkably to resemble his half-uncle.

And Florian stayed for some while in this neat sparsely furnished room. He was content. At the bottom of his mind had always been the knowl
[Pg 254]
edge that by and by he would return to Marie-Claire. Such events as had happened since he left her, and the things that people had said and thought and done because of him, and in particular the responsibilities with which he had been entrusted,—his dukedom, his wives, his order of the Holy Ghost, a whole château to do with whatever he pleased,—were the materials of a joke which he was to share with his sister some day, when the boy that had left her came back after having hoodwinked so many persons into regarding him as mature and efficient and unprincipled and all sorts of other amusing things. Marie-Claire alone knew that this fourth Duke of Puysange was still the boy who had loved her; and her blind gazing seemed always to penetrate the disguise.

Well! he had come back to her, to find that both of them were changed. The fact was sad, because it seemed to him that boy and girl had been rather wonderful. But it did not matter. Probably nothing mattered. Meanwhile he was again with Marie-Claire. It was sufficient to be home again, for the little while which remained before his destruction by that pig-headed and meddlesome Hoprig. And Florian was content....

Toward mid-day Florian parted with his sister for the last time. He found it rather appalling that neither she nor he was moved by this leave-taking.
[Pg 255]
Then he reflected: “But we are dead persons, dead a great while ago. This is the calm of death.”

He saw that this was true, and got from it the comfort which he always derived from logic.

Nevertheless, he went back very softly, and he peered through the door he had left not quite closed. Marie-Claire now knelt before the dark polished stone in whose gleaming moved figures.

“Lalle, Bachera, Magotte, Baphia—” she had begun.

Florian shrugged as, this time, he really went away from the house of oak and plaster. He knew whom she invoked. But that did not matter either. And in fact, for Marie-Claire to pass from him to that other was profoundly logical.

[Pg 256]

25.
The Gander That Sang

LORIAN followed the brook. Florian went hillward, walking upon what seemed a long-ruined roadway. As he went upstream, the brook was to his left hand: to his right was the hillside thick with trees. Florian, whose familiarity with rural affairs was limited, was perforce content to recognize among these trees the maples, the oaks, the pines and the chestnuts.

“Only, I should by every precedent, now that I go to inevitable destruction, be observing everything with unnatural vividness,” he reflected: “and to have about me so many familiar looking but to me anonymous trees and bushes makes my impression of the scenery quite unbecomingly vague.”

Midges danced vexatiously about his face, and now and again he slapped at them without gaining the least good. So much of the ruined roadway had collapsed into the brook, in disorderly jumbles of stones and clay and splintered slate, that what re
[Pg 257]
mained was very awkward to walk on: your right foot was always so much higher up the hill than your left. All was peculiarly still this afternoon: it startled you, when, as happened once or twice, a grasshopper sprang out of your way, rising from between your feet with vicious unexpected whirrings. That did not seem wholly natural, in April.

Florian came at last to a log hut beside three trees. Here then was the hermitage of Holy Hoprig, wherein Florian was to encounter the unpredictable. Florian regarded this hut with disfavor. He had never thought to be destroyed in such an unimpressive looking building.

He shrugged, he loosened Flamberge in the scabbard, he went forward, and he pushed open the door. “Now if only,” he reflected, “I had the height and the imposing appearance of Raoul!” Florian made the most of every inch; and entered with the bearing becoming to a Duke of Puysange.

The hut was unoccupied, save that in one corner was a cage painted brown; and inside this sat, upon a red silk cushion, a large gander.

“Do not disturb me,” said this bird, at once, “for I have had quite enough to upset me already.”

Florian for an instant stayed silent and somewhat confused. For this evidently was not the saint’s hermitage, and a talking gander seemed not wholly natural. Then Florian recollected that Mor
[Pg 258]
ven had always been the home of sorcery. So Florian replied, with great civility, that he had not meant to intrude, but merely happened to be passing. And Florian then talked with this gander, who told of the quite disgusting scene he had witnessed when a woman, riding upon a magic staff, had come into the hut, and had there been delivered of a child.

“Children are not usually acquired so,” said the gander, “for as a rule, a stork brings them, and that is a much nicer method.”

“But where,” said Florian, “is now this honorarium?”

“I do not know what that means,” the bird replied, “but I do know that if it means anything objectionable it has almost certainly been in here to-day to annoy me.”

And the bird told of how a dove had come and had carried off in its beak the ring the woman had given it. He told how presently had come a fine looking man with a shining about his head, not flying but luxuriously riding through the air upon a gold cloud, with cherubs’ heads floating about him; and how the woman and the child had gone away upon this same cloud, surrounded by, the gander thought, extremely fretful looking cherubs.

“The whole affair has upset me very much,” said
[Pg 259]
the gander, “for I was composing, and I can never bear to be interrupted.”

And the gander sang to Florian of the proper way in which children should be born and should live thereafter. About the glory of love and the felicities of marriage, about patriotism and success in business and about the high assurances of religion, the gander sang, and about optimism and philanthropy and about the steady advancing of every kind of social improvement. And of man that is the child and heir of God, and of the splendor of man’s works, and of the magnanimity of human nature, and of the wonder of man’s living upon earth, the gander sang also.

“Parbleu, but let us be logical about this!” said Florian. “Your art is very pleasing; but it embellishes a lazar-house with pastels. For human living is not at all like the song you have made concerning it.”

“So much the worse for human living,” the gander answered. “It does not bother me here in my cage. Besides, the purpose and the effect of my singing, like that of all great singing, is to fill my fellows with a sentiment of their importance as moral beings and of the greatness of their destinies. So I do not mimic. I create.”

Florian looked at the gander for some while, and
[Pg 260]
Florian sighed. This creature too had in it nothing of the realist, Florian reflected, and it preferred to live by its own code; but its æsthetic theories coincided with Hoprig’s. And the hermitage of that—somehow—ambiguous Hoprig was still to seek.

Florian left the imprisoned gander singing very gloriously, and Florian went now across Morven, that place of abominable fame. These uplands were thickly overgrown with a queer vine that had large oval leaves, the green of which was mottled with red, somewhat like the skin of snakes. Here also grew strawberry vines. As he walked this undergrowth was continually catching in the buckles of Florian’s shoes. Everywhere were inexplicable soft noises, and about his face danced a small cloud of midges.

There was no other sign of life except that once five large black and white birds rose from the ground immediately before him, seeming to rise from between his feet as the grasshoppers had done. This did not frighten Florian, exactly, but the suddenness of it, in this lonely place, gave him a shock not wholly delightful. These birds, he saw, had been feeding there upon the berries of a small bush, upon purple berries which were about the size of a wren’s egg, and whose outer sides had been pecked away by the birds, leaving the seeds exposed. All this was natural enough until you reflected that in
[Pg 261]
these latitudes no bush produced berries as early as April.

Now toward twilight Florian came to clumps of big and vividly yellow toad-stools, which seemed fat and poisonous and very evil. He passed among these, breaking many of them with his feet, and reflecting that the tiny screams which appeared to be uttered by these broken, loathsomely soft things must be the cry of some other sort of queer bird hidden somewhere near at hand. And he presently saw the appearance of a man coming toward him, and about the head of this man was a shining, as Florian perceived from afar, and was so assured that this was Hoprig.

Florian went forward intrepidly, once he had loosened Flamberge in the scabbard. But this was not Hoprig. It was, instead, an incredibly old man in faded blue, who carried upon his arm an open basket filled with small roots. At his heel came a blue and white dog. The old man looked once at Florian, with peculiarly bright eyes, like the eyes of those who had watched the Feast of the Wheel, and he passed without speaking. The dog paused, and without making any noise, sniffed about Florian’s legs once or twice, as if this inspection were a matter of duty, and then followed this old man who had about his head a shining. It was odd, but the dog made no noise when he sniffed
[Pg 262]
thus close to you; and neither the man in blue nor the blue and white dog made any least noise as they passed through the thick and tangled vines underfoot; nor did their passing at all move these vines which caught at the buckles of Florian’s shoes so that he was continually tripping. These things rendered it difficult to believe that the man and the dog could be wholly natural.

And still those pertinacious midges danced before Florian’s eyes: and he was tired of slapping at them without ever driving them away. Morven did not appear a merry place, upon this the last day of April, as Florian toiled through Morven’s thickening twilight, in search of Holy Hoprig’s hermitage, wherein was now the child that Florian had need of.

[Pg 263]

26.
Husband and Wife

OWARD evening Florian came into the saint’s hermitage. Inside, it proved a most comfortable hermitage, having walls builded of logs with the interstices filled with plaster. It seemed rather luxuriously furnished, to Florian’s glance, which took exact note of nothing more specific than the skull upon the lectern and the three silver-gilt candelabra. These twelve candles, as you came in from the twilight, made the room quite cosy. Florian did not, however, look at the room’s equipment with the interest he reserved for his wife.

Melior sat there, alone except for the newborn child in her lap. At the sound of Florian’s entrance she had drawn the child closer, raising her blue mantle about it in an involuntary movement of protection: and as she faced him thus, Florian could see, without any especial interest, that with motherhood all her lost beauty had returned. It seemed
[Pg 264]
inexplicable, but Melior was, if anything, more lovely than she had ever been: it was probably one of Hoprig’s miracles: and Florian found time to wonder why he should be, so unquestionably and so actively, irritated by the sight of a person in everything so pleasing.

Neither spoke for a while.

“I thought that you would be here before long: and all I have to say is that I wonder how you can look me in the face,” observed Melior, at last. “Still, that you should be so bent upon your own destruction that you have followed us even here, does, I confess, astonish me. Why, Florian, have you no sense at all!”

“My dearest, you underestimate the power of paternal affection.” Florian came to her, and gently uncovered the child’s face. The baby, having supped, was asleep. Florian looked at it for a moment and for yet another moment. He shrugged. “No: I am aware of none of the appropriate emotions. The creature merely seems to me unfinished. Its head, in particular, has been affixed most unsatisfactorily; and I lament the general appearance of having been recently boiled. No, I sacrifice little.”

Melior put the sleeping child into the cradle yonder, a cradle which Florian supposed that Hoprig must have created extempore and miraculously when
[Pg 265]
a cradle was needed. It hardly seemed the most natural appurtenance of an anchorite’s retreat.

Then Melior turned, and she regarded Florian with her maddening air of dealing very patiently with an irrational person.

“Do you actually think, Florian, that, now, you can harm the little pet? Florian, that is one fault you have, though I am far from saying it is the only one. Still, as I so often think, no one of us is perfect: and perpetual fault-finding never gets you anywhere, does it? Even so, Florian, there is no denying you do not like to take a common-sense view of the most self-evident facts when the facts are not quite what you want them to be, and that much I feel I ought to tell you frankly. Otherwise, Florian, you would comprehend at once that I have only to cry out to St. Hoprig, who is back yonder chopping the wood to cook our supper, after those cherubs were positively rude about being asked to do it, and then he will blast you with a miracle.”

She had gone back to her outlandish mediæval clothing. He recognized, now, the dreadful gown she was wearing the morning he first came to her upon the mountain top,—that glaring, shiny, twinkling affair, which reminded you of an Opera dancer’s costume in some spectacular ballet. For a Duchess of Puysange to be thus preposterously at
[Pg 266]
tired was unbecoming, and was in quite abominable taste.

“First, madame,” said Florian, with a vexed, rather tired sigh, “let us explain matters. I have loved you since my boyhood, Melior, with a love which no woman, I think, can understand. For I loved you worshipfully, without hope, without any actual desire: and I loved you, by ill-luck, with a whole-heartedness which has prevented my ever loving anything else. It is droll that a little color and glitter and a few plump curves, seen once and very briefly, should be able to make all other things not quite worth troubling about. But the farce is old. They used to call us nympholepts; and they fabled that the beauty which robbed us of all normal human joys was divine. Well, I have no desire to discuss the nature of divinity, madame, nor to bore you with any further talking about what no woman understands. It suffices that I loved you in this pre-eminently ridiculous fashion; and that a way was offered me by which I might very incredibly win to you.”

To which Melior replied: “You mean about your bargaining with Janicot, I suppose, and I am sure I never heard of such nonsense in my life. Why, Florian, to think that the moment I let you out of my sight, even if it was a little while before I first actually saw you, because that does not in the least
[Pg 267]
alter the principle of the thing,—quite apart from its happening the same morning, anyhow,—that you should be mixing yourself up with such people! It is positively incredible! But, as for your supposing that I am going to let you and your Janicots lay one finger on my precious lamb—!”

“Madame,” he replied, “let us be logical! I can conceive of no possible reason why you should especially value this child. It may be no more repulsive looking than other babies: that is a point upon which I cannot pretend to speak with authority. But it is certainly not in itself an attractive animal. And your acquaintance with it, dating only from this morning, is far too brief to have permitted the forming of any personal attachment. For the rest, this bargain with Monsieur Janicot is an affair in which I have given my word. I can say no more. It is in your power, of course, to summon my patron saint, who, from what I know of him, will probably attempt to coerce me into rank dishonesty; and in that case the issue remains doubtful. The most probable outcome—need I say?—in view of his boasted proficiency in blasting, cursing and smiting, seems my annihilation. Would you, madame, who are of royal blood and are born of a race that is more than human,—would you have me, on that account, hold back in an affair in which my honor is involved?”

[Pg 268]

“Why, Florian, since you are asking my advice, I think it is not quite nice to speak of the power of a saint as being at all doubtful. We both know perfectly well that he would resent any impudence from you with a palsy or an advanced case of leprosy or perhaps a thunderbolt, and make things most unpleasant for everybody. And besides, it is just as well to avoid the subject of doubtfulness, because after talking with your other wives, I confess, Florian, that I have the very gravest doubts as to what you are planning to have become of me.”

“You will vanish, madame, after the usual custom of your race. I am sure I do not know whither the Léshy usually vanish.”

“I decline to vanish. Now that I am a Christian, Florian, I should think that even you would know I must decline to take any part in any such silly and irreligious proceedings—”

To which he answered patiently, “But I have given my word, madame.”

And still this obstinate woman clung to her pretence that he was behaving irrationally. She said, with an effect of being almost sorry for him:

“My poor Florian! now but let us be perfectly friendly about this. I am disposed to bear no malice, because, as I so often think, what is the odds? In the long run, I mean—”

[Pg 269]

“Madame, it is my misfortune never quite to know what you mean.”

“Why, I mean that we all make mistakes, and that it is to be expected, and the least said about it, the soonest mended. Besides, as I was telling you, I do not know of course who it was that first set women upon a pedestal, and even if I did, I would be willing to overlook his mistakes too—”

“But you have not been telling me about this over-imaginative unmarried person! You were talking about malice and vanishing—”

“—Still, I certainly would not thank him, because I have had to pay for that mistake, even more heavily than women do now. Ah, Florian, as I so often think, it is always the woman who pays! For, you conceive, in my first life, back at Brunbelois, I mean, in those perfectly awful days of chivalry, I used to be worshipped, or at least that was what it came to in practise, as a symbol of heavenly excellence—”

Florian said, with an attempt at gallantry, “I can well imagine—”

“Oh, it was without any actually personal application, you understand: it was just that all ladies were regarded in that light. It was considered that in making women Heaven had revealed the full extent of Heaven’s powers. So they made us sit upon uncomfortable thrones at their tournaments—”

[Pg 270]

“But,” Florian protested, “these honorable and extremely picturesque customs—”

“My dear, that is all very well! but they used to last for a week sometimes. And there we would have to sit, from six to seven hours a day, with canopies but no cushions, and with no toilet conveniences, and with nothing whatever to do except to watch them sticking and poking and chopping one another in order to show how they respected us,—though I could never understand just how that came in, because my back hurt me too much, apart from my other troubles—”

“But as a symbol—” This horrible woman seemed resolved to leave him no one last shred of his dream.

“It was not the symbolism I objected to, Florian, but the endless inconvenience. The tournaments were only a part of it; and of course even after them you could get liniment, and you soon learned not to drink anything with your breakfast. But they walked off with your sleeves and handkerchiefs, with or without your leave: and when you go to put on your gloves, let me tell you, it is most annoying to find that the other one is several miles away in somebody’s helmet—”

“Now,” Florian said, yet more and more shocked, “you illogically apply prosaic standards to the entirely poetic attitude of chivalry—”

[Pg 271]

“Oh, as for their poetry, telling what marvelous creatures they thought us, they were all over the place with it. That was trying enough in the day-time: but when it came to being waked up long before dawn, and prevented from getting a wink of beauty-sleep at night, by their aubades and serenas about how wonderful you were, I do assure you, it was really very tiresome—”

“I can see that.” Logic compelled the admission, however repulsive it was to find a woman blundering into logic. “But, still, madame—”

“Yes, you can see that, Florian, now, because you now comprehend you have been as foolishly exaggerative as any of them. Florian, you are a romantic: and from the first that has been the trouble, because it was that which made you fall in love with your notion of Melior. That was just what you did, without even having talked with me—”

“Parbleu, but certainly it was without having heard you talk—”

“And as far as it went, it was quite nice of you, Florian, for you appear even to have imperilled your soul—which, to be sure, must have been in a rather dangerous way already,—through your desire to have me for your wife. Nobody thinks of denying that was a very pretty compliment, but, if you ask me, it was a mistake—”

This seemed to Florian such a masterpiece in the
[Pg 272]
art of understatement that he said almost sullenly, “We needs must love the highest—”

“Nonsense, Florian, I am far from being the highest. And so, let me tell you, is any other woman. After a month or two of sleeping with and mooning around me,—who, you must do me the justice to admit, never laughed at you once, though I do not deny that I was tempted, for, Florian, my dear, it seems only fair to tell you that at times you are simply—! But then, it is not as if other men were very different—”

“Let us,” said Florian,—who was reflecting that he had never really detested anybody before he met this woman,—“let us turn to more profitable topics than masculine romanticism—”

“So you made the appalling discovery that I did not belong upon a pedestal. That was inevitable, though I must say it was not as if I had endeavored to hide it from you. And you resented it fiercely. That too, I suppose, was only you romantic men all over, though it was just as foolish as the mooning. And from what I can gather, you appear to have been equally rash and—if you do not mind my saying so, dear,—equally inconsiderate, in your treatment of your other wives. Though, to be sure, whatever you could see in those women, even at the first—!”

“I am a Puysange. We are ardent—”

[Pg 273]

“In any event, it is not as if anything could be done about them now. So, really, Florian, taking one consideration with another, I do not see why, now that we have talked it over amicably, and you have more or less explained yourself,—and, I am willing to believe, are quite properly sorry,—we should not get on tolerably well. And about men I say nothing, because one does want to be kind, but I doubt if any woman anywhere really hopes for more than that when she marries.”

Melior had stopped talking. Not that fact alone had roused Florian to chill amazement. He said, “You plan, madame—?”

“Why, first of all, I plan for both of us to appeal, in a suitably religious and polite manner, to your patron saint. That is the plain duty of a Christian. For if this Janicot has any real claim upon the little darling, you surely must see how much nicer it would be, in every way, for Hoprig to be working miracles against him instead of smiting you with something unpleasant. And besides, I do not see how he can have any real claim—”

Florian resolutely thrust aside the suspicion that this obstinate and shiny and gross-minded woman was now planning, among other enormities, to return to living with him. He said only:

“I am astounded. I am grieved. You would have me meanly crawl out of my bargain by invok
[Pg 274]
ing the high powers of Heaven to help me in a swindle, very much as one hears of dishonest persons repudiating fair debts through the chicanery of a death-bed repentance. Pardieu, madame! since you suggest such infamies, and since you will not hear reason, I can but leave you, to defy this Hoprig to his ugly nose, and to perish, if necessary, upon his woodpile with untarnished faith.”

He turned sadly from this woman who appeared to have no sense of logic or honor, not even any elementary notion of fair-dealing. And as Florian turned, he saw the door open, and through the doorway came first an armful of faggots and behind it the flushed but still benevolent face of Hoprig.

[Pg 275]

27.
The Forethought of Hoprig

OME now,” said St. Hoprig, as he laid down the wood, “but here is that abominable ward of mine! and upon the point of defying me too!” Whereon he shook hands cordially with Florian.

“Ah, but, monsieur,” said Florian, “be logical! We meet as enemies.”

“Frequently,” observed the saint, “that is the speediest way of reaching a thorough understanding. I suppose that you have come about your foolish bargain with Janicot.”

“Upon my word,” replied Florian, “but all my business affairs appear to be well known to everybody upon Morven!”

The saint had turned to Melior, with a wise nod. “So, you perceive, madame, our precautions were justified. Now, my dear son, do not worry any more about your contract with the powers of evil, but off with your things, and have some supper with us. For I have excellent news for you. You were
[Pg 276]
to sacrifice to Janicot the first child that you and Madame Melior might have, and she was then to vanish. Your bargain is void, or, rather, the terms have not yet been fulfilled.”

Florian looked forlornly at his wife, then toward the cradle, and he said, “I fail to perceive the omission, Monsieur Hoprig.”

“Luckily for human society, my son, a great many persons are similarly obtuse.”

“Ah,” said Florian, “but let us have no daring coruscations of wit where plain talking is needed.”

“I must tell you, then,” the saint continued, “that, when my suspicions were aroused at Brunbelois, I communicated with higher powers, and the Recording Angel obliged me with a fair copy of your first interview with Janicot. He objected to giving it: but I stood up for my rights as a saint, and in the end, after some little unpleasantness, he did give it. One really has to be firm with these angels, I find, in order to get the least bit of service. After that, at all events, the way to foil your wicked scheme was clear enough: in fact, it was the one possible way to prevent, without open scandal, your begetting of a child upon your wife for deplorable purposes. I advised the Princess to follow this way, and to make sure before marrying you that you should win to her embraces a bit too late to be the father of her child.”

[Pg 277]

“That seems to be unprecedented advice,” said Florian, sternly, “to have come from a saint of the Calendar.”

He tried, at least, to speak sternly: but a dreadful thought had smitten him, and Florian knew that he, who had wondered what people meant when they talked about fear, had done with wondering.

“It was for your own good and eternal salvation,” observed Melior, “though, to be sure, all men are like that, and, as I often think, the more you do for them the less they seem to appreciate your trouble—”

Florian said only, “May I inquire, madame, without appearing unduly intrusive, who was your collaborator in arranging this infant’s début?”

“Why, but of course she received all the necessary assistance,” replied St. Hoprig, “from me. I never grudge the efforts necessary to a good action of this sort: and all night long, my son, I labored cheerfully for your salvation. For it was my plain duty as your celestial patron to save you, at any cost, from falling into grave sin: and, besides, it was a matter hardly to be entrusted to any other gentleman without considerable possibilities of scandal.”

Florian looked from one to the other. “So it was to prevent scandal that my wife and my patron saint have put together their heads: and beauty and holiness—they also!—must combine to avoid offending
[Pg 278]
against the notions of the neighbors. You will permit the remark that here is ambiguous logic.”

“Ah, but my dear,” replied Melior, “can you with logic deny that we did it for your own good? So often, when affairs look wrong, if you will just regard the spirit of the thing—”

“Madame,” said Florian, without unkindliness, “let us not argue about that. I am sure you were persuaded as to the spirit of the thing, when no doubt Monsieur Hoprig went into it at full length—”

Yet Florian spoke perturbedly, for in his heart remained despair and terror. To find that he had been hoodwinked was not a discovery to upset a person used to the ways of the world and of more wives than he had ever married: to be hoodwinked was the métier of husbands. Moreover, reflection had already suggested that the saint had followed the honorable old tradition of various nations who deputed exactly the task which Hoprig had spared Florian to their most holy persons.

Florian took snuff. With his chin well up, he inhaled luxuriously....

Yes, Florian reflected, there were priests everywhere,—the Brahmans of Malabar, the Piaches of the Arawaks, the Dedes of Lycia, the Chodsas of the Dersim uplands, and the Ankuts of the Esquimaux,—to all these priests was formally relegated the performing of this task when a woman was
[Pg 279]
about to marry. Every part of the world wherein mankind remained unspoiled by civilization, reflected Florian, afforded an exact and honorable precedent: and he could advance no ground for complaint. For one was logical. Certain physical reservations were made much of, to be sure, in Holy Writ and in the sermons preached in convents to auditories of schoolgirls. And this theory perhaps did no great harm. But, after all, there was a grain of folly in this theory that to-day’s letters still in the post contained of necessity more virtuous matter than did yesterday’s letters, whose seals had been broken. No, let us be logical about this theory.

He closed his snuff-box. The lid bore the portrait of poor Philippe. He regretted Philippe, who had been destroyed with no real gain to anybody. Florian slipped the box into his waistcoat pocket....

Hoprig’s painstaking forethought, then, gave a philosopher no ground for wonder or dissatisfaction. But none the less, in the heart of Florian was despair and terror. The terms of his bargain had not been fulfilled, and the one course open to a gentleman who held by his word was to go on living with his disenchanted princess for, at the very least—he estimated, appalled,—another full year.

Florian extended his right hand, dusting the fingers one against the other. He liked those long white fingers. But this was simply dreadful: and
[Pg 280]
he would have to speak now, he would have to say something. They were both waiting. Negligently he straightened the Mechlin ruffles at his throat....

Then with a riotous surge of joy, he recollected that the current conventions of society afforded him a colorable pretext to provoke the saint into annihilating him. As against continuing to live within earshot of Melior’s insufferable jabbering,—as against a year of hourly frettings under a gross-minded idiot’s blasphemies against the bright and flawless shrine of beauty which she inhabited,—the everywhere betrayed romantic had still the refuge of bodily destruction in this world and damnation in the next. And all because of a graceful social convention! all because of one of those fine notions which, precisely as he had always contended, made human living among the amenities of civilization so much more comely and more satisfying than was the existence of such savages as lived ignobly with no guide except common-sense. The Piaches and the Brahmans and the Ankuts were all savages, and their obscene notions were wholly abominable.

“Madame,” said Florian, with his best dignity, “whatever the contrast between the purity of your intentions and of your conduct, I shall cling to the old simple faith of my ancestors. I am a Puysange. I do not care for airdrawn abstractions, I do not palter with such dangerous subtleties as you suggest.
[Pg 281]
I act with the forthright simplicity which becomes a gentleman, and I avenge my wounded honor.”

Whereupon, with due respect for the possible incandescence of a halo, Florian struck Hoprig on the jaw.

“Now, holy Michael aid me!” cried the saint, and he closed upon Florian, straightforwardly, without any miracle-working.

And as Hoprig spoke, there was a great peal of thunder. The crash, with its long shuddering reverberations was utterly appalling, but Hoprig was not appalled. Instead, he had drawn away from Florian, and Hoprig was now smiling deprecatingly.

“Dear me!” the saint observed, “but I am always forgetting. And now, I suppose, they will be vexed again.”

[Pg 282]

28.
Highly Ambiguous

ND then as the last shaken note of thunder died away, and as Melior fell to comforting the awakened baby, a tall warrior entered. He wore the most resplendent of ancient corselets, and embossed greaves protected his legs, but no helmet hid his flaxen curls. He now laid down an eight-sided shield, emblazoned argent with a cross gules, and he rustled his wings rather indignantly.

“Really, Hoprig,” said the new-comer, “this is carrying matters entirely too far; and you must not summon the princes of Heaven from their affairs to take part in your fisticuffs.”

“What more can you expect, good Michael, of misguided efforts to make saints of my people?”

This was a voice which was not unknown to Florian. And he saw that Janicot too had come,—not in that unreserved condition in which Florian had last seen him, but discreetly clothed and showing in everything as the neat burgess of Florian’s first
[Pg 283]
encounter. And it was evident that this Janicot was not a stranger to St. Michael, either, when the archangel answered:

“It is well enough for you to grin, but with us the matter is no joke. This Hoprig has been duly canonized. When he invokes any of us we are under formal obligations to minister unto him, for he is entitled to all the perquisites of a saint: and he puts them to most inappropriate uses. For I must tell you—”

“Come, Monseigneur St. Michael,” observed Hoprig, waving toward Melior’s back, where she was comforting the mewing baby without the least attention to anything else,—“come, let us remember that a lady is present.”

“And for that matter, upon how many nights since you began going about earth—But I shall say no more upon a topic so painful. It is sufficient to state that the entire affair is most unsettling, and has displeased those high in authority. The Church has canonized you, and we have of course to stand by the Church, with which our relations have for some while been, in the main, quite friendly. I do not deny that if anything could have been done about you, just quietly—But we find the Church has provided no method whatever for removing saints from the Calendar—”

“You might remove him from earth, however,”
[Pg 284]
Janicot suggested, helpfully. “A thunderbolt is not expensive.”

“It has been considered. But the effect, we believe, would not upon the whole be salutary. It would discourage the pious in their efforts toward sanctity to observe that bolt coming from, of all quarters, heaven. Besides, as a saint, he must, directly after being killed, ascend to eternal glory. You ought to understand that we would be the last persons actually to hurry him.”

“I think I see,” said Janicot. “You are bound to stand by the Church as faithfully as I do, if not through quite the same motives. Now, I hold no brief for this saint. He has swindled me,—cleverly enough, but with that lack of common honesty which as a rule lends ambiguity to pious actions,—out of Madame Melior’s child. I name only the mother, because, as I understand—?”

He had turned to Florian, and Janicot’s raised eyebrows were sententious.

Florian answered them, “Yes, Monsieur Janicot; it appears that I have acquired an increase of grace through works of supererogation.”

“Ah! and I had thought you were ardent! The child, in any event, is a detail about which there is no hurry. I am not fond of children myself—”

And Florian marvelled. “Then, why—?”

“It is merely that my servants have a use for
[Pg 285]
them. Yes, my servants make them quite useful, by adding the juice of water parsnip and soot and cinquefoil and some other ingredients. And I endeavor to supply my servants’ needs. However!”—and Janicot waved the matter aside,—“when I am beaten I acknowledge it. The disenchanted princess remains yours: and I shall have no claim upon you until”—here Janicot smiled again,—“until the great love between your wife and you has approached a somewhat more authentic fruition.”

“Monsieur Janicot,” replied Florian, “you set the noble example of confessing when one is beaten. I was very careful when we made the compact which secured me this flawlessly beautiful lady as my wife. I am no longer careful. I cannot live with her for another year, not for a month, not for a half-hour! As you perceive, at the bare thought I grow hysterical. I tell you I cannot face the thought that this is the woman whom I have worshipped so long! I am a broken man, and I repent of every crime I committed in order to get her. Therefore let us make a second compact, my dear Monsieur Janicot, a compact by which she will be taken away from me! And you may name your own terms.”

“Ah, but you are all alike!” sighed Janicot. “You palter and haggle about the securing of your desires: but once you have your desires, no price appears too high to rid you of them. I cannot under
[Pg 286]
stand my people, and my failure quite to comprehend them troubles me: yet I could have told you, Florian, the first day we met, that it would come to this. But you were that droll creature the romantic, the man who cherishes superhuman ideals. And I really cannot put up with ideals—” Janicot ceased from talking half as if in meditation. He now glanced from one to another of the company with a sort of friendly petulance. “However, why is everybody looking so solemn? I like to have happy faces about me.”

“It is well enough for you to philosophize and grin,” Michael returned, in lordly indignation. “But grinning settles few religious difficulties, and philosophy muddles them worse than ever. Yet, if you ask why I look solemn, it is because this saint here has become a scandal on earth, a nuisance in heaven, and an impossibility in hell. And after all our conferences we can find no place for him anywhere to-day.”

“Yet the affair is really very simple,” replied Janicot. “Let Hoprig and Melior, and their child too, return to Brunbelois and to the old time before he was a saint. Let them return to the high place and to the old time that is overpast now everywhere except at Brunbelois. Thus earth will be rid of your scandal-breeding saint, and Hoprig of his halo and Florian of his threatened hysteria. And this Melior and this Hoprig will no longer be real persons, but will once more blend into an ancient legend of exceeding beauty and holiness. And nobody anywhere will be dissatisfied. This I suggest because I like to have happy faces about me, and happy faces everywhere, even in heaven.”

“—And this is the last cloud going west.”
See page
291

[Pg 287]

Michael said: “You are subtle. That is not our strong point, of course. Still, I really do wonder why, after so many conferences, we never thought of such an obvious solution as to antedate him at Brunbelois.”

And Michael looked at Hoprig.

Hoprig smiled, benevolently as always, but not in the least repentantly, and Hoprig said: “Why, after all, I have seen quite as much of this modern world as interests a saint in the prime of life; this halo certainly is, in ways we need not go into, sometimes in inconvenience; and there is no real pleasure in being ministered unto by unwilling angels. So that I am ready to leave it to the lady.”

Now Melior arose from beside the cradle, wherein the child was now once more asleep. And Melior looked at Florian, without saying anything: but she was smiling rather sadly; and Florian knew that nowhere in this world, at any time, had there been any person more lovely than was his disenchanted princess.

And Florian said: “A pest! but, in the name of
[Pg 288]
earth and sky and sea, in the name of Heaven and all the fiends, let this be done! For the moment you are again a legend, madame, I shall recapture the dear misery of my love for you and for that perfect beauty which should be seen and not heard.”

“Indeed,” she replied, “I daresay that is the truth. So, for all our sakes, Hoprig and I will go back to the time before I married you: and then, on account of the baby, I suppose I will have to marry Hoprig, who at least takes women as he finds them.”

“You speak, I assume, metaphorically,” observed the saint, “but, in any case, I believe you exhibit good sense. So let us be going.”

Then Florian said farewell to Melior and to Hoprig also. Florian had put aside his dapper look: he had quite lost his usual air of tolerating a mixture of vexation and mirth: and for that moment he did not show in anything as a jaunty little person of the very highest fashion.

“Now that you two,” said Florian, “become again a legend and a symbol, I can believe in and love and worship you once more. It is in vain, it is with pitiable folly, that any man aspires to be bringing beauty and holiness into his daily living. These things are excellent for dilettanti to admire from afar. But they are not attainable, in any quantity that suffices. We needs believe in beauty: and there needs always flourish the notion that beauty
[Pg 289]
exists in human living, so long as memory transfigures what is past, and optimism what is to come. And sometimes one finds beauty even in the hour which is passing, here and there, at wide intervals: but it is mixed—as inextricably as is mixed your speaking, bright-colored enemy of all romance,—with what is silly and commonplace and trivial.”

“It seems so very vexatious,” Melior stated, as if from depths of long deliberation, “when you can distinctly remember having brought your hat, to be quite unable—Yes, go on talking, Florian. It is on the peg by the door, and we are all listening.”

“And I would like to believe,” continued Florian, “that there is holiness in human living; but I at least have always found this also mixed with, I do not say hypocrisy, but ambiguity.... Mankind have their good points, but—to my knowledge,—no firm claim of any sort on admiration. I have been familiar with no person without finding that intimacy made some liking inevitable and any real respect preposterous. I deduce that in no virtue, and in no viciousness, does man excel: his endowments, either way, are inadequate. So holiness and beauty must remain to me just notions very pleasant to think about, and quite harmless to aim at if you like, if only because such aiming makes no noticeable difference anywhere. But they remain also unattained by mortal living. I do not know why this
[Pg 290]
should be the law. I merely know that I overrode the law which says that only mediocrity may thrive in any place; and that I have been punished, with derision and with too clear seeing.”

“Yes, but,” said Janicot, “you are punishing everybody else with verbosity—”

“I also can perceive no reason, my son,” declared St. Hoprig, “for talking highflown bombast and attempting to drag an apologue from the snarls of a most annoying affair. It should be sufficient to reflect that your romantic hankerings have upset heaven, and have given rise—I gather from the sneers of this brown fiend,—to unfavorable comment even in hell. And there is simply no telling into what state my temple of Llaw Gyffes may have got during the months you have held me in this frivolous modern world.”

“Your temple of Llaw Gyffes!” said Florian, sadly. “But can it be, monsieur, that, after having been a saint of the Calendar, now that you return to heathen Brunbelois and the old time—?”

“My son, in any time,” Hoprig replied, “and in any place, my talents are such as qualify me only for the best-thought-of church. My nature craves stability and the support of tradition and of really nice people. New faiths sometimes allure unthinking hot-heads like that poor dear Horrig, but not ever me: for I find that any religion, when once it is
[Pg 291]
endowed and made respectable, works out in its effect upon human living pretty much like any other religion. Meanwhile, of course, one naturally prefers to retain a solid position in society. So that really it does seem foolish to quarrel, in any time or place, with the best-thought-of faith. No, Florian, creeds shift and alter in everything except in promising salvation through church-work: but the prelate remains immortal. And I will tell you another thing, Florian, that you should remember when we are gone: and it is that all men and all women are human beings, and that nothing can be done about it.” And Hoprig at this point regarded Florian for some while with a sort of pity. “In any case,” the saint said then, “do you look out for another celestial patron, and for a second father in the spirit, now that sunset approaches, and this is the last cloud going west.”

And Melior took up the still sleeping child, without saying anything, but smiling very lovelily at Florian: and she and Hoprig entered into a golden cloud, and these two went away from Florian forever. And they went as a blurred shining: for Florian was recollecting a child’s desire to be not in all unworthy of these bright, dear beings; and Florian somewhat wistfully recalled that brave aspiring, and that glad ignorance, which nothing now could ever reawaken any more.

[Pg 292]

29.
The Wonder Words

UT now,” said Florian, “what now is to become of me, who have no longer any standards of beauty and holiness?” And he looked expectantly from Janicot to the archangel, and back again, to see when they would begin their battling for possession of the Duke of Puysange. Both spirits seemed almost unflatteringly unbellicose.

“I have no instructions about you,” replied Michael. “I did not come hither in the way of official duty, but only at the summons of that fellow—It is really a very great comfort to reflect that, now he has gone back to the old time before he was canonized, he is no longer a saint! Still, as for you, your ways have been atrocious, and it is hardly doubtful that your end should be the same.”

Florian at that had out the magic sword Flamberge. “Then, Monseigneur St. Michael, logic prompts one to make the best of this: and I entreat
[Pg 293]
that you do me the honor of crossing blades with me, so that I may perish not ignobly.”

“Come,” Michael said, “so this shrimp challenges an archangel! That is really a fine gesture.”

“Yes, there is spirit in this romantic,” Janicot declared. “It seems to take the place of his intelligence. I cannot see it matters what becomes of the creature, but, after all, old friends will welcome any excuse to chat together. See, here is excellent wine in the saint’s cupboard, and over a cup of it let us amicably decide what we should do with this little Florian.”

“It is well thought of,” Michael estimated, “for I have been working all day upon the new worlds behind Fomalhaut, with the air full of comet dust. Yes, that rapscallion Hoprig fetched me a long way, and I am thirsty.”

So these two sat down at the table to settle the fate of Florian. Janicot poured for Florian also: and Florian took the proffered cup, and a chair too, which he modestly placed against the log-and-plaster wall at some distance from his judges.

Florian’s judges made an odd pair. For resplendent Michael showed in everything as divine, and in his face was the untroubled magnanimity of a great prince of Heaven. But Janicot had the appearance of a working man, all a sober and practical brown, which would show no stains after the performance
[Pg 294]
of any necessary labor, and his face was the more shrewd.

“First,” said Janicot, “let us drink. That is the proper beginning of any dispute, for it makes each think his adversary a splendid fellow, it promotes confidence and candor alike.”

“Nobody should lack confidence and candor when it comes to dealing with sin,” replied Michael: and with one heroic draught he emptied his cup.

Florian sipped his more tentatively: for this seemed uncommonly queer wine.

“Sin,” Janicot said now, as if in meditation, “is a fine and impressive monosyllable.”

“Sin,” Michael said, with sternness, “is that which is forbidden by the word of God.”

“But, to be sure!” Florian put in. “Sin is a very grave matter: and to expiate it requires stained windows and candles and, above all, repentance—”

“Ah, but a word,” said Janicot, “has no inherent meaning, it has merely the significance a mutual agreement arbitrarily attaches to that especial sound. Let me refill your cup, which I perceive to be empty: and, Monsieur the Duke, do you stop talking to your judges. That much—to resume,—is true of all words. And the word of your god has been so variously pronounced, my good Michael, it has been so diversely interpreted, that, really, men begin to wonder—”

[Pg 295]

“I did not sit down,” cried Michael, “to hear blasphemies, but to settle the doom of this sinner. Nor will I chop logic with you. I am a blunt soldier, and you are subtle. Yes, the world knows you are subtle, but how far has your subtlety got you? Why, it has got you as far as from heaven to hell.”

Florian vastly admired that just and pious summing-up as he leaned back in his chair, and looked toward Janicot. Florian was feeling strangely complacent, though, for Hoprig’s wine was extraordinarily potent tipple to have come from the cupboard of a saint.

“Ah, friend,” returned Janicot, smiling, “and do you really put actual faith in that sensational modern story that I was an angel who rebelled against your Jahveh?”

“It was before my time, of course,” Michael conceded. “I only know that my Lord created me with orders to conquer you, who call yourself the Prince of this World. So I did this, though, to give the devil his due, it was no easy task. But that is far-off stuff: a soldier bears no malice when the fighting is over: and I drink to you.”

“Your health, bright adversary! Yet what if I were not conquered, but merely patient? Why should not I, who have outlived so many gods, remain as patient under the passing of this tribal god
[Pg 296]
come out of Israel as I stayed once under Baal and Beltane? Both of these have had their adorers and tall temples hereabouts: and Mithra and Zeus and Osiris and I know not how many thousands of other beautiful and holy deities have had their dole of worship and neglect and oblivion. Now I have never been omnipotent, I am not worshipped in any shining temple even to-day; but always I have been served.”

Florian, through half-closed eyelids,—for he felt a trifle drowsy after that extraordinary wine,—was admiring the curious proud look which had come into the brown face of Janicot. Florian began complacently to allow this fiend had his redeeming points. This Janicot was quite distinguished looking.

“For I,” said Janicot, “am the Prince of this World, not to be ousted: and I have in my time, good Michael, had need to practise patience. You think with awed reverence of your Jahveh: and that in your station is commendable. Yet you should remember, too, that to me, who saw but yesterday your Jahveh’s start in life as a local storm-god upon Sinai, he is just the latest of many thousands of adversaries whom I have seen triumph and pass while I stayed patient under all temporary annoyances. For in heaven they keep changing dynasties, and every transient ruler of heaven is bent upon
[Pg 297]
making laws for my little kingdom. Oh, I blame nobody! The desire is natural in omnipotence: and many of these laws I have admired, as academic exercises. The trouble seemed to be that they were drawn up in heaven, where there is nothing quite like the nature of my people—”

“A very sinful people!” said Michael.

“There, as in so many points, bright adversary, our opinions differ. You perceive only that they are not what, in accordance with your master’s theories, they ought to be. I am more practical: I accept them as they are, and I make no complaint. That which you call their lust and wantonness, I know to be fertility—” And Janicot spread out both hands. “But it is an old tale. God after god has set rules to bridle and to change the nature of my people. Meanwhile I do not meddle with their natures, I urge them to live in concord with their natures, and to make the most of my kingdom. To be content and to keep me well supplied with subjects, is all that any reasonable prince would require. And as for sin, I have admitted it is a fine word. But the wages of sin—in any event, very often,” said Janicot, and with a smile he illuminated the parenthesis,—“is life.”

“To all this,” said Michael, extending his empty cup, “the answer is simple. You are evil, and you lie.”

[Pg 298]

“Before your days, before there were men like those of to-day,” said Janicot, indulgently, as he poured sombre wine, “and when the dwarf peoples served me in secret places, even they had other official gods. When your Jahveh is forgotten, men will yet serve me, if but in secrecy. Creeds pass, my friend, just as that little Hoprig said. And it is true, too, that the prelate remains always, as my technical opponent. But the lingham and the yoni do not pass, they do not change, they keep their strong control of all that lives: and these serve me alone.”

“If my Lord passes,” Michael answered, very nobly and very simply, “I pass with Him. We that love Him could then desire no other fate. Meanwhile I have faith in Him, and in His power and in His wisdom, and my faith contents me.”

“Faith!” Janicot said, rather wistfully. “Ah, there we encounter another fine word, a wonder word: and I admit that your anodyne is potent. But it is not to my taste. However, this wine here is emphatically to my taste. So let us drink!”

“It is a good wine. But it begets a treacherous softness of heart and an unsuitable, a quite un-Hebraic tendency to let bygones be bygones. I mean, unsuitable for one in my service. For, after all, old adversary, without intending any disrespect, of course, we were originally for martial law and
[Pg 299]
military strictness, for smiting hip and thigh when the least thing went wrong: and in spite of our recent coming over to these new Christian doctrines—And, by the way, that reminds me of this sinner here. We seem to keep wandering from the point.”

They had looked toward Florian, who discreetly remained lying back in his chair, watching them between nearly closed lids.

“Indeed, we have so utterly neglected him that he has gone to sleep. So let us drink, and be at ease,” said Janicot, “now that we are relieved of his eavesdropping. This little Florian annoys me, rather. For he makes something too much of logic: so he rebels against your creed of faith and of set laws to be obeyed, asking Why? Did you never hear the creature crying out, Let us be logical! in, of all places, this universe? And he rebels against my creed, which he believes a mere affair of the lingham and the yoni, saying This is not enough. Such men as he continue to dream, my friend, and I confess such men are dangerous: for they obstinately aspire toward a perfectibility that does not exist, they will be content with nothing else; and when your master and I do not satisfy the desire which is in their dreams, they draw their appalling logical conclusions. To that humiliation, such as it is, I answer Drink! For the Oracle of Bacbuc also—that oracle which the little curé of Meudon was not alone in misun
[Pg 300]
derstanding,—that oracle speaks the true wonder word.”

Michael had listened, with one elbow on the table, and with one hand propping his chin. Michael had listened with a queer mingling, in his frank face, of admiration and distrust.

The archangel now slightly raised his head, just free of his hand, and he asked rather scornfully, “But what have we to do with their dreams?”

“A great deal. Men go enslaved by this dream of beauty: but never yet have they sought to embody it, whether in their wives or in their equally droll works of art, without imperfect results, without results that were maddening to the dreamer. Men are resolved to know that which they may whole-heartedly worship. No, they are not bent upon emulating what they worship: it is, rather, that holiness also is a dream which allures mankind resistlessly. But thus far,—by your leave, good Michael,—they have found nothing to worship which bears logical inspection much better than does Hoprig. The dangerous part of all this is that men, none the less, still go on dreaming.”

“They might be worse employed.” Michael himself refilled his cup. “For I could tell you—”

“Pray spare my blushes! Yes, they obstinately go on dreaming. Your master is strong, as yet, and I too am strong, but neither of us is strong enough
[Pg 301]
to control men’s dreams. Now, the dreaming of men—mark you, I do not say of humankind, for women are rational creatures,—has an aspiring which is ruthless. It goes beyond decency, it aspires to more of perfectibility than any god has yet been able to provide or even to live up to. So this quite insane aspiring first sets up beautiful and holy gods in heaven, then in the dock; and, judging all by human logic, decrees this god not to be good enough. Thus their logic has dealt with Baal and Beltane and Mithra; thus it will deal—” Janicot very courteously waved a brown and workmanlike hand. “But let us not dwell upon reflections that you may perhaps find unpleasant. In the meanwhile, me too this human dreaming thrusts aside, as not good enough.”

It was plain that Michael distrusted Janicot in all and yet in some sort admired him most unwillingly. Michael asked, with a reserved smiling, “What follows, O subtle one?”

“It follows that all gods must pass until—perhaps—a god be found who satisfies the requirements of this disastrously exigent human dreaming. It follows that I must perforce go quietly about my kingdom because of this insane toplofty dreaming.” And Janicot sighed. “Yes, it is humiliating: but I also have my anodyne, I have my wonder word. And it is Drink!”

[Pg 302]

“Of course it would be,” Michael replied, with the most dignified of hiccoughs, “since drunkenness is a particularly low form of sin.”

“The drinking I advocate is not merely of the grape. No, it is from the cup of space that I would have all drink, accepting all that is, in one fearless draught. Some day, it may be, my people here will attain to my doctrine: and even these fretful little men will see that life and death, and the nature of their dreams, and of their bodies also, are but ingredients in a cup from which the wise drink fearlessly.”

Janicot had risen now. He came toward Florian, and stood there, looking down. And Florian discreetly continued his mimicry of untroubled slumber.

“Meanwhile he does not drink, he merely dreams, this little Florian. He dreams of beauty and of holiness fetched back by him to an earth which everywhere fell short of his wishes, fetched down by him intrepidly from that imagined high place where men attain to their insane desires. He dreams of aspiring and joy and color and suffering and unreason, and of those quaint taboos which you and he call sin, as being separate things, not seeing how all blends in one vast cup. Nor does he see, as yet, that this blending is very beautiful when properly regarded, and very holy when approached with
[Pg 303]
out human self-conceit. What would you have, good Michael? He and his like remain as yet just fretted children a little rashly hungry for excitement.”

Michael stood now beside Janicot. Michael also was looking at Florian, not unkindlily.

“Yes,” Michael said. “Yes, that is true. He is yet a child.”

Then the two faces which bent over Florian were somehow blended into one face, and Florian knew that these two beings had melted into one person, and that this person was prodding him very gently.

[Pg 304]

30.
The Errant Child

IS father, after all these years, was still wearing the blue stockings with gold clocks. Florian noted that first, because his father’s foot was gently prodding Florian into wakefulness, as Florian’s father sat there under the little tree from the East. Beyond the Duke’s smiling countenance, beyond the face which was at once the face of Michael and of Janicot, Florian could now see a criss-crossery of stripped boughs, each one of which was tipped with a small bud of green.

“Come, lazibones, but you will get your death of cold, sleeping here on the bare ground, at harvest-time.”

“At harvest-time—I have been dreaming—” Florian sat erect, rubbing at his eyes with a hand whose smallness he instantly noted with wonder. The ground, too, seemed surprisingly close to him, the grass blades looked bigger than was natural. He
[Pg 305]
could feel sinking away from him such childish notions about God and wickedness, and about being a grown man, as the little boy—who was he, as he now recollected,—had blended in his callow dreaming: and Florian sat there blinking innocent and puzzled eyes. He was safe back again, he reflected, in the seventeenth century: Louis Quatorze was King once more: and all the virtues were again modish. And this really must be harvest-time, for the sleek country of Poictesme appeared inexpressibly asleep, wrapped in a mellowing haze.

Florian said, “It was a very queer dream, monsieur my father—”

“A pleasant dream, however, I hope, my son. No other sort of dream is worth inducing by sleeping under what, they used to tell me, is a charmed tree, and by using for your pillow a book that at least is charming.”

And the Duke pointed to the book by Monsieur Perrault of the Academy, in which Florian had that very morning read with approving interest about the abominable Bluebeard and about the Cat with Boots and about the Sleeping Beauty and about Cendrillon and about a variety of other delightful persons.

But Florian just now was not for fairy tales, rather all his thoughts still clung to his queer dream. And the child said, frowning:

[Pg 306]

“It was pleasant enough. But it was puzzling. For there were beautiful ladies that nobody could stand living with, and a saint that was an out-and-out fraud, and”—Florian slightly hesitated,—“and a wicked man, as bad almost as Komorre the Cursed, that did everything he wanted to, without ever being exactly punished, or satisfied either—”

“Behold now,” Monsieur de Puysange lamented, “how appalling are the advances of this modern pessimism! My own child, at ten, advises me that beauty and holiness are delusions, and that not even in untrammeled wickedness is to be found contentment.”

“No: that was not the moral of my dream. That is what bothers me, monsieur my father. There was not any moral: and nothing seemed to be leading up to anything else in particular. I seemed to live a long while, monsieur my father, I had got to be thirty-six and over, without finding any logic and reasonableness anywhere—”

“Doubtless, at that advanced age, your faculties were blunted, and you had become senile—”

“—And the people that wanted things did not want them any longer once they had got them. They seemed rather to dislike them—”

“From your pronominal disorder,” the Duke stated, “I can deduce fancies which are not a novelty here in Poictesme. Such was the crying, in a
[Pg 307]
somewhat more poetic and grammatical version, of our reputed begetters, men say,—of Dom Manuel and of Jurgen also,—in the old days before there was ever a Puysange.”

“Yes, but that was so long ago! when people were hardly civilised. And what with all the changes that have been since then—! Well, but it really seems to me, monsieur my father, that—just taking it logically,—now that we have almost reached the eighteenth century, and all the nations have signed that treaty at Ryswick to prevent there ever being any more wars, and people are riding about peaceably in sedan chairs, and are living in America, and even some of the peasants have glass windows in their houses—”

“Undoubtedly,” said the Duke, “we live in an age of invention and of such material luxury as the world has never known. All wonders of science have been made our servants. War, yesterday our normal arbiter, has now become irrational, even to the most unreflective, since one army simply annihilates the other with these modern cannons that shoot for hundreds of feet. To cross the trackless Atlantic is now but the affair of a month or two in our swift sailing ships. And we trap and slaughter even the huge whale to the end that we, ignoring the sun’s whims, may loan to nights of feverish dissipation the brilliancy of afternoon, with our oil
[Pg 308]
lamps. We have perhaps exhausted the secrets of material nature. And in intellectual matters too we have progressed. Yet all progress, I would have you note, is directed by wise persons who discreetly observe the great law of living—”

“And what is that law, monsieur my father?”

“Thou shalt not offend,” the Duke replied, “against the notions of thy neighbor. Now to the honoring of this law the wise person will bring more of earnestness than he will bring to the weighing of discrepancies between facts and well-thought-of ideas about these facts. So, at most, he will laugh, he will perhaps cast an oblique jest with studied carelessness: and he will then pass on, upon the one way that is safe—for him,—without ever really considering the gaucherie of regarding life too seriously. And his less daring fellows will follow him by and by, upon the road which they were going to take in any event. That is progress.”

“Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor!” Florian repeated. “Yes, I remember. That was a part of my dream, too.” He was silent for an instant, glancing eastward beyond the gardens of his home. 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. “But—in my dream, you know,—
[Pg 309]
that had been learned by living wickedly. And you have always taught Little Brother and me to be very good and religious—”

“My son, my son! and have I reared an errant child, an actual atheist, who doubts that in the next world also we have—a Neighbor?”

“Do you mean the good God, monsieur my father?”

“Eh,” said the Duke, “I would distinguish, I would avoid anthropomorphology, I would speak here with exactness. I mean that in this world we must live always in subjection to notions which a moment’s thought shows always to be irrational; and that nothing anywhere attests the designer of this world, however high His place or whatever His proper title, to be swayed at all by what we describe as justice and logic.”

“I can see that,” said Florian: “though I have been thinking about another sort of high place—”

But the Duke was still speaking: and now, to Florian’s ear, his father’s tone was somewhat of a piece with this sun-steeped and tranquil and ineffably lazy October afternoon, which seemed to show the world as over-satisfied with the done year’s achievements.

“So life, my son, must always display, to him who rashly elects to think about it, just the incoherency and the inconclusiveness of a child’s dream
[Pg 310]
making. No doubt, this is to be explained by our obtuseness: I design, in any event, no impiety, for to be impious is unwise. I merely mean that I assume Someone also to be our neighbor, in His high place, and that I think His notions also should be treated with respect.”

“I see,” said Florian. But all that was youthful in him seemed to stir in dim dissent from unambitious aims.

“I mean, in short, that the wise person will conform—with, it may be, a permissible shrug,—to each and every notion that is affected by those neighbors whose strength is greater than his. I would also suggest that, if only for the sake of his own comfort, the wise person will cultivate a belief that these notions, however incomprehensible, may none the less be intelligent and well-meaning.”

“I see,” the boy said, yet again. He spoke abstractedly, for he was now thinking of brown Janicot and of resplendent Monseigneur St. Michael, in that queer dream. His father appeared in some sort to agree with both of them.

And as the Duke continued, speaking slowly, and with something of the languor of this surrounding autumnal world,—which seemed to strive toward no larger upshots than the ripening of grains and fruits,—it occurred to Florian, for the first time in Florian’s life, that this always smiling father of his
[Pg 311]
was, under so many graces, an uneasy and baffled person.

The Duke said: “To submit is the great lesson. I too was once a dreamer: and in dreams there are lessons. But to submit, without dreaming any more, is the great lesson; to submit, without either understanding or repining, and without demanding of life too much of beauty or of holiness, and without shirking the fact that this universe is under no least bond ever to grant us, upon either side of the grave, our desires. To do that, my son, does not satisfy and probably will not ever satisfy a Puysange. But to do that is wisdom.”

The boy for some while considered this. He considered, too, the enigmatic, just half-serious face of his father, the face that was at once the face of Michael and of Janicot. To accept things as they were, in this world which was now going to sleep as if the providing of food-stuffs and the fodder for people’s cattle were enough; and to have faith without reasoning over-logically about it: all these grown persons seemed enleagued to proffer him this stupid and unaspiring advice.

But Florian, at ten, had learned to humor the notions of his elders. So he said affably, if not quite without visible doubtfulness, “I see....”

EXPLICIT

[Pg 312]

It is gratifying to relate that, in a world wherein most moral lessons go to waste, young Florian duly honored the teaching of his dream. Therefore, as the boy grew toward maturity, he reduplicated in action all the crimes he had committed in fancy, and was appropriately grateful for his fore-knowledge that all would turn out well. But, when he had reached the thirty-sixth year of his living and the fourth chapter of this history, he then, at the conclusion of his talking with Marie-Claire Cazaio, decorously crossed himself, and he shrugged.

“Let sleeping ideals lie,” said Florian: “for over-high and over-earnest desires are inadvisable.”

Thereafter he rode, not into Acaire, but toward the Duardenez. He forded this river uneventfully; and four days later, at Storisende, was married,
en cinquièmes noces
, to Mademoiselle Louise de Nérac.

It is likewise pleasant to know that this couple lived together in an amity sufficient to result in the begetting of three daughters, and to permit, when the fourth Duke of Puysange most piously and edifyingly quitted this life, in the November of 1736, the survival of his widow.... The moral of all which seems to be that no word of this book, after the fourth chapter, need anybody regard with any least seriousness, unless you chance to be one of those discomfortable folk who contend that a fact is something which actually, but only, happens. A truth—so these will tell you,—does not merely “happen,” because truth is unfortuitous and immortal. This rather sweeping statement ought to be denied—outright—by none who believe that immortals go about our world invisibly.

END