The Nightmare Had Triplets (34 page)

    Said Volmar: “The polite wise world honors every woman who prevents its monarchs from sleeping too much. Yes, Lady, I have arranged for you a match which well shows my loving-kindness in overlooking your hard-headedness and your bad temper.”

    And Sonia, apart from making a face at him, replied nothing, at this time.

    Then in Melphé the betrothed wife of King Feodor was entertained in superb form by Duke Philibert, who by the late murder of his nephew Cosimo the Well-Loved had made firm the Duke’s guidance of all social gaieties. So in this place, for her entertainment, was enacted a masque, in which the Seven Virtues and the Three Graces and the Nine Muses tendered homage to Queen Sonia. These abstractions were realized by the duchy’s best-thought-of professional harlots, who appeared in very brightly gilded chariots drawn by centaurs, dragons, hippogriffins, negroes, doctors of divinity and camels, and by eunuchs with lovely soprano voices, so that Duke Philibert’s hospitality lacked for nothing in the way of magnificence.

    Moreover, he gave to Sonia an embossed plate of gold, about the size of a carriage wheel, upon which was represented the history of Helios, and a yet larger plate of silver upon which were shown the exploits of Artemis.

    “Everywhere the great lords of earth,” said Volmar, “have combined with one another to see which potentate can most liberally honor the wife of King Feodor. And so, by arranging this match for you, I have atoned for my misdeeds quite handsomely. Yes, even though I lied in saying that you had given me your fancy, because of that afternoon in the orchard—”

    “I do not remember,” said the Princess, crisply, “anything which happened in my father’s orchard upon that Thursday afternoon, or at any other time.”

    “And in fact,” remarked Mr. Smith, soothingly, “as a betrothed queen, it is your royal duty to forget all such occurrences.”

    But Volmar cried out, in anger: “Very well, then, even though I lied in saying that you had given me your fancy, and that until life ends, you will be remembering me with love, yet it is I and none other who have got for you, most hateful and most forgetful of women, a young king of men to be your husband. And may Heaven grant him the patience to put up with you!”

    “Oho, and besides that, self-seeking and swindling Volmar, you have got for yourself a lordship and the estates which the King will give you when you deliver to him my body.”

    “You are a lewd-minded woman, Sonia, always to be thinking about your body! And it would much better become you to be thanking me for making you a great queen in well-to-do Rorn. Only last week you were nothing but a two-penny princess in little Osnia.”

    “You are being well paid for it, you thrifty servant, with your lordship over Druim.”

    “And besides that,” declared Volmar, “I have seen, in Auster, and in yet other places, dozens upon dozens of women with far handsomer bodies.”

    She replied to this statement, as a digression, by returning to the real point at issue. She remarked, loftily:

    “Yes, it is you, Volmar, who ought to be thanking King Feodor for his great foolishness in creating you Lord of Druim, as if anybody could make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear; and for so causing me to think poorly of my husband before I had ever even seen him.”

    “Oh, but come now—!” said Mr. Smith, ineffectively.

    For Volmar was shouting, with frank fury: “It is not your body but your heart also that you will be giving to my master, you abominable creature, when once you have beheld his excellence! Yes, you will remember to do that, no matter how much else you may have forgotten!”

    “It is you who forget yourself, Volmar, when you dare to bellow at me in that way. Yes, and you forget also everything which you ever said in an orchard.”

    “Do you stop lying, most untruthful of women! I keep firm my memories! Now may God smite me dead if ever I have forgotten any least word that passed between us, or any moment I shared with you, you wicked silken Sapphira! you king’s tidbit!”

    “You absurd Volmar,” she replied, smiling, upon a sudden, for reasons which were best known to herself, “and is it certain that I must love this young Feodor quite as entirely as you love him?”

    “But I do not love him, you minx, you jill-flirt, you harridan! Rather, it is hatred which possesses me when I look on this great-hearted young champion and perceive in him all that I might have been and shall never be. Rather, it is hatred which possesses me when I think that this man merits all your abominable perfections.”

    So unbounded was the atrocious woman’s unreason that, under the pelting of Volmar’s abuse, she continued to smile happily.

    “Come now,” said Sonia, “but let us be more wise, and discuss other matters than the undying dislike which we have for each other.”

    “Ah, ah!” declared Mr. Smith, “but, at last, one of you has said something sensible. Let us by all means talk about other matters. It is the peculiar blessing of man that, even though he has five senses with which to acquire knowledge, and a brain with which to make reflections, he has likewise a vocabulary with which to edit any awkward results.”

    Volmar grunted. Volmar said then,—

    “But what is there to talk about?”

    “Everything,” replied Mr. Smith, with enthusiasm.

    —Whereafter he proceeded to demonstrate the at least partial truth of his statement. For Mr. Smith, now that he had touched on the great importance of mankind’s vocabulary, began talking about the odd fact that no tribe of American Indians, howsoever large their vocabulary, appeared to have practised any regular system of writing; and he quoted the five theories by which scientists have accounted for the omission. He spoke also of the
couvade,
customary among the Carib Indians, by which, when a child was born, the father was brought to bed instead of the mother; and he passed on to consider the equally strange crowning of Inez de Castro as the lawful Queen of Portugal several years after her death. Why was it, in point of fact, Mr. Smith then debated, that washing was injurious to pearls? and just how far north did the redbird migrate in spring? He deduced that the most probable answers were: (
a
) on account of the concentric layers of the pearl; and (
b
) Massachusetts.

    He next mentioned, as a fact of not inconsiderable interest to a sound logician, that Mount Fujiyama was 12,395 feet in height; told why milk boiled more quickly than water; explained the difference between a concerto and a symphony; and he talked eloquently about the dolphin (or
Coryphcena hippurus
) both as a conventional symbol in printing and in candlesticks and as a prognosticator, in marine credence, of fair weather and of white-capped waves and of cloudless blue skies.

    Very deeply engrossed by the informative nature of Mr. Smith’s remarks, the three of them (in the same instant that Mr. Smith finished telling about how the cushions used in upholstering came to be called squabs) reached a broad muddied river shining like brass in the sunlight. Fording this river, the Amio, they rode up, across fields which were overgrown with blue-flowering heather, into the city of Sorram. This town was girdled with olive-trees and mulberry-trees, and well fortified with white stone towers. Here they were met by the King of Ecben in person, who came piously with an abbot riding on each side of him; and before him walked four clerks, each clothed in long robes of lamb-skin and carrying a leaden sword, because the realm was at peace with all other kingdoms this week.

    They attended mass here, first at the convent church of St. Clara, and afterward at the cathedral church of St. Agnan. But the feasting was different in Sorram, because of the old custom of Ecben that the men sat at table with men, while the ladies ate together in another banqueting hall, which was walled with engraved plates of silver that depicted the misfortunes of Alfgar, who had once reigned over this same kingdom.

    So they came uneventfully, upon the next afternoon but one, to where the charmed forest of Branlon stood between the kingdoms of Ecben and Rorn.

    “Let us pause here,” said Volmar, when they had reached a deserted smithy.

    “You select an uncheering spot,” returned Mr. Smith, “where desolation alone woos the regard. And yet, truly, it is well for us to sip, rather than to gulp, our advancement. We need but one step onward, over the invisible line between Ecben and Rorn, to step up in this world rather dizzily. A step more, and we are in the semi-fabulous kingdom of Rorn. Through that step you become a queen, Lady Sonia. A step more, and Volmar and I, with our embassy discharged, and with the uncaptivating off-chance of being sewed up alive in a sack of quicklime dismissed, will become very great lords in reality as well as in title, the each one owning his castles, his demesnes, his manors—”

    “Now but do you stop talking for one half-minute,” said Volmar, “if you find such a thing to be possible.”

    “Why, pray, should the all-envied, proud Lord of Achren not talk at his own will about facts which are of considerable interest to a sound logician?” Mr. Smith demanded; and he continued, equably:

    “Also his warrens, his parks, his woodlands, his messuages, his fishings, his peasantry, his
droits de seigneur,
and all the other appurtenances of a snug nobleman. No, my dear Lord of Druim; I shall not keep silence; for admiration finds here its food. In such circumstances it really does behoove us, I submit, to acclaim the wonders of geography; and to applaud without any glum backwardness the injustice of our good fortune. In short, upon this engagingly funereal occasion, which marks the decease of all sorrow and trouble, we ought to step out of Ecben with the solemnity of rejoicing pall-bearers.”

    “Ah, but for one,” replied Volmar, “I shall not step at all; and you two must go forward without me. To become a blacksmith has long been my ambition; it was the dream of my boyhood: and in this smithy I intend to fulfill my desire.”

    Now Mr. Smith shook his divine head; and he emitted the brief low whistle of a dignified reflectiveness upon the dissatisfying.

    “Truly,” remarked Mr. Smith, “the arts of Urc Tabaron are dependable. So it is in this manner that he compels you to make your home in Branlon.... Well! I assent; and yet it does seem a trifle unfair to the all-envied, proud Lord of Druim.”

    “This thing is in no way reasonable,” said Sonia, “that on a sudden the Lord of Druim should become a blacksmith.”

    The gross eyebrows of Volmar puckered. His face scowled. And he said, sullenly,—

    “Nevertheless, Lady, it does not suit me to enter the kingdom of Rorn, now that the woman whom I most dislike of all women living is to be Queen over Rorn.”

    Then Sonia came to him, with a little laugh which was half a sob; and her eyes were very bright, and all her bright-colored small face seemed wholly wonderful. She took his hand, saying:

    “Let there be friendship between us, Volmar, putting the past aside. Out of that ancient lie which you spoke in my father’s hall has come for you a wide lordship and much wealth, and for me a kingdom and a champion without any stain to be my husband. The old evil has turned somehow into good; and so let our sharp enmity turn now into friendship.”

    He replied: “I have got for you a young king of men to be your bedfellow. And now”—his face changed—“now that I bring you to King Feodor’s bedside, I perceive that I detest you more than I had suspected, Sonia, O my lost Sonia, and I cannot go forward to witness your happiness.”

    She appeared startled and a little troubled. But she said only,—

    “You speak in riddles, Volmar.”

    “Indeed,” said Mr. Smith, “I believe that the Lord of Druim speaks of a most ancient riddle. And I could give a guess at its name.”

    “It is called hatred,” Volmar returned. “I dislike this woman so much that I am not content to be a well-thought-of baron, and her husband’s servant, in any kingdom of which this woman is the queen. I prefer to remain here in Ecben as a blacksmith or, if the need be, to go as a vagabond into wild places where I shall not be seeing her detestable face or be thinking about her golden-brown eyes and her hateful milk-white body. So do you ride forward with her, Lord of Achren. Do you deliver her soft, sweet, dear, damnable, paltry abominable body to King Feodor. And I will await your return here in this smithy.”

    Long and steadfastly the Princess looked up at Volmar. Her large eyes were not friendly now. There was in them only a doubtfulness and a half-frightened wondering. She said then:

    “O most perverse and most stubborn man, I am well rid of you, for your ways trouble me beyond endurance. So I will go now to become a crowned queen in whose thoughts there is no place for a drunken liar.”

    Volmar sat late at the door of his smithy. There was no moon; darkness lay about him; but overhead all the stars of heaven seemed flaring and vibrant, in the while that Volmar regarded them and thought gravely about celestial deficiencies. Yes; it was undeniable that the Great Dipper needed a very much brighter star in the place of Megrez, so as to keep the outline of the Great Dipper distinct and uniform, nor did it appear pardonable for Orion to be wearing his sword on the wrong side, or for Cassiopeia, who was a great queen, but you must not think about queens, to have a chair which was rickety and back-breaking to sit in, even though these celestial blunders were not the concerns proper to a blacksmith, who must not think above his station, who must not think about the most lovely and dear of all human faces, but only about horses. Yes, you must think very resolutely about horses.