The Nightmare Had Triplets (30 page)

    Then dozens of yet other gentlemen arose to protest angrily that this patriotic tenet of the kingdom of Osnia was a true tenet and remained a mere axiom among intelligent persons.

    Volmar, who was now drunk to the point when all which a man desires appears plausible, swayed on his feet a little; but his glazed dark eyes did not turn from the Princess Sonia, where she sat beside the King her father under a gold-fringed cloth of estate.

    She was very nobly dressed this evening, in a close gown of crimson and gold. She wore a diadem of gold inset with rubies; about the neck and the hem of her gown showed a strip of ruddy fox fur. But her face was like the new moon, Volmar reflected, so thin, so clear, so bright, so unapproachable, was its loveliness.

    “It is true,” said Volmar, with a judicious hiccough, “that there is no person more beautiful than Sonia. Nor is there any princess more wise than is Sonia. She has, for a woman, really remarkable powers of penetration. She has perceived my merits, where even I did not perceive them. And in return for my merits, gentlemen, she has given me her fancy, and until life ends, she will be remembering me with love.”

    All they who heard him had heard, at first, in mere wonderment. That at a king’s banquet any male person should boast of his high and peculiar standing in a lady’s heart, appeared, to the chivalrous gentry of Osnia, a performance as incredible as that, in the same circumstances, any self-respecting gentleman would omit to lie about his high and peculiar standing in warfare. In brief, the rules of polite usage had been violated; insulted decency shrieked for vengeance; and every nobleman’s sword was now out.

    But the King stilled them. “With your swords, gentlemen,” said King Ludwig, very handsomely, “it is permitted you to kill yet other gentlemen. But not dogs.”

    Well, and at that, all the nobility of Osnia necessarily dropped their swords in order to applaud the antithesis.

    Then the King said, to Caspar, the captain of the royal guard:

    “Take away Volmar the dark wanderer to a dungeon. This day is sacred, inasmuch as it is my daughter’s birthday: no bloodshed must mar to-day. But at dawn tomorrow, when, this hulking beast is sober, and awake to his own infamy, do you cut off his head, and bring it up to me with my breakfast, so that I may be sure his poisoned tongue is silenced forever.”

    “My king and my father,” said Sonia, speaking angrily, in a young girl’s unthinking way, where the experienced, sage King had. spoken with deliberation, “it is not proper that you should let your great modesty check the keen judgment and the fine eloquence which the whole world admires!”

    “I have no doubt that you speak with entire justice, my daughter; but just what do you mean?”

    “I mean, sire, that we all know you are thinking, and are eager to be saying—in your own superb fashion, such as the rhetoric of no other king equals—that it is not right this braggart should meet death honorably under the clean axe-edge. It is not right that his lying tongue should be brought back into the palace it has defiled.”

    “Nevertheless—” said King Ludwig.

    “Oh, but I agree with you,” the Princess assured him. “I did not understand this matter until you expressed it thus nobly and forcibly.”

    “Yet—” said the King.

    “But you, sire, as you must permit me to tell you frankly, have compounded the fine honey of your eloquence with the firm hand of your wisdom.”

    “Ah, but have I indeed, my daughter?”

    “Very certainly you did that, sire, when you declared this insane slanderer ought to be hanged, and then buried whole in our dung-heap, because it is only in a dung-heap that such filth belongs. And I quite agree with you.”

    “The wrong was yours, my dear daughter,” replied King Ludwig, indulgently: “and even though you have somewhat forestalled my remarks, apart from mixing your metaphors, it is proper that the punishment of your wrong should be whatsoever you desire. So you may do with him what you like.”

    “Do you mark that, Caspar,” said the Princess; and the gray captain answered:

    “I hear, Lady, and I obey the King’s saying. I shall do with this Volmar that which you order.”

    So was it that Volmar—whom the Master of Gods, then passing as an errant philosopher, had begotten upon Rani, the South Wind’s third daughter—spent this night in a deep dungeon, without any comforters except a pitcher of water and three rats. But at dawn, Caspar and five soldiers, each armed with a musket, bring Volmar into a field to the back of the palace, with a rope about his neck and with his hands bound behind him.

    Well, and that, he reflected, that was a most uncomfortable way in which to be walking, on this uneven meadow land, where the new grass showed sparsely. You stumbled perforce; you appeared undignified, not to say drunk; nor, when walking thus, could you keep your broad shoulders handsomely erect.

    It seemed silly to be annoying the last moments of a gentleman with these small inconveniences: but all professional soldiers were hidebound and unimaginative people who went always by routine, Volmar reflected gravely. Even his loved commander and lion-hearted friend, King Aluric of Atlantis, had at bottom possessed no real imagination, Volmar went on in profound meditation, as, for that matter, the dear fellow’s verses showed somewhat plainly, now that nobody was afraid of Aluric any longer, with blond blustering Aluric safely buried in the Place of the Sea God, as indeed were most of the persons whom you had known intimately, although no one of the others, of course, had a fine tomb in a heathen temple, but rather they were lodged helter-skelter in every quarter of earth, in all sorts of mortuary circumstances—even if no one of them lay snug under a dung-heap,—because both as a poet and as a soldier this Volmar had adventured so widely, and so noisily, and so enjoyably, that for it all to be ending within the next ten minutes, in the field just beyond that privet hedge upon which a bluebird perched, appeared simply silly.

    No, Volmar decided, as he stumbled on toward death, he could not give his approval to the hanging of Volmar. The entire business was silly. It was peculiarly silly that this bluebird had come to inform people spring was now near at hand, quite as if that mattered, when everything would be over, within the next nine minutes, for this Volmar, for this not ever explained and incomprehensible Volmar, who seemed somehow to have become a stranger to you, and a somewhat admirable stranger, if you judged honestly, inasmuch as Volmar had rioted, and had sung, and had fought, with the best of earth’s gentry, all the long bright way from his first callow freedoms to this thick privet hedge which you were now stumbling through sidewise, with the twigs tickling your nose at a moment in which you were not able to scratch it, because of the absurd military routine that tied up your hands behind you when you could not possibly risk your last flickers of being a devil-may-care fellow by asking stupid, splendid and pious old Caspar to scratch your nose, like a dry nurse.

    Then of a sudden Volmar’s bemuddled thoughts became clear and bitter, because upon the farther side of the privet hedge he had found a cloaked woman waiting.

    “It is even as I said,” observed Volmar, jeeringly. “This lady intends to see the very last of me. She cannot bear to think that I must die a knave’s death without the spur of her beauty to hearten me now that I cry, Hail and farewell, fair Sonia!”

    Sonia put by her blue cloak. “Wicked man, for what reason must you be speaking your lies about me in my father’s great hall openly?”

    At that, his thick eyebrows went up. He appeared surprised, almost grieved.

    “Why, and did I not speak the truth, Sonia, in saying that until your life ends, you will always be remembering me—now?”

    She said, gravely: “I shall remember you. That is true. But I shall remember you with my contempt and with my hatred.”

    “Time will show,” replied Volmar. “You will recall by-and-by that I provoked certain death in order that you might remember me always. Turn about, my fair idiot, is fair play. You stay forever in my thoughts, the thoughts which end here; and so do I mean henceforward to stay forever in your thoughts through the long years to come in that quiet while after I have put by thinking and all other sorts of time-wasting. You must always remember, will-you or nill-you, my pretty prude, the drink-sodden Volmar who gave his life in order that you might remember him. With time, you will come to appreciate that very handsome compliment. And about the dead man who paid you this compliment, will-you or nill-you, Sonia, you will think, at first, with curiosity, and, by-and-by, with some tenderness.”

    She regarded him for a pensive moment, looking up at him sidewise. She smiled thinly, in replying to him,—

    “You have a knowledge of women, dark Volmar; but not enough knowledge.”

    “I do not pretend to omniscience, Lady. I say only that all which a hale youngster could learn, during the bustling days and the not unbusy nights of some fifteen years, I have learned about women in fifteen kingdoms and in more than fifteen kingdoms.”

    “Lewd Volmar,” she said, sharply, “now your debauchery ends. It ends by your being given into my hands, so that your punishment shall be as I desire.”

    She paused. Her eyes were bright and hard, her lips a straight line. She said:

    “I condemn you to live. So do you loose this long-legged sot, Caspar, and let him go free into exile without any hurt save the sting of his self-knowledge.”

    Volmar cried out, in a changed voice: “I will not accept your mercy! I am too vile!”

    “Nor would I grant you any mercy,” the girl said, “if I did not know that the sick vanities which fester in your drunken thoughts must make of anybody’s mercy a bitterness. For this reason do I punish you with my mercy,—Volmar, the braggart and the fool, the defamer of ladies, the babbler of a sot’s lies! I order that you shall live on in your soiled infamy, and be known everywhere as Volmar the Drunken Liar, and have no place in my thoughts.”

    Obeying her, the soldiers had untied Volmar. He stood clutching and unclutching his numbed fingers, and looking down at Sonia with a flushed face in which rage mingled with amusement. He said, jeeringly:

    “You have conquered for this while, Lady. You have tricked first your father out of satisfying his just anger, as now you trick me out of satisfying my dislike of your mincing, prim-mouthed hypocrisy. It is my one comfort, Sapphira, that your early rising and your glib deceits of everybody proclaim that, after all, you must think about me a great deal.”

    A patch of red in each cheek showed him that Sonia too had a temper to lose.

    “I think about no man living, Volmar the Drunken Liar, in the foul way you leer over. I keep instead my clean heart for that man who shall prove worthy of it; and as yet I have seen him nowhere.”

    At that, Volmar cried out, under the lash of her scorn, and in the anger of his humiliation:

    “Do you not let your itching need of a young man wide awake in your bed be bothering you, most detestable of women! No; for you have given me dishonor and the eternal sting of self-knowledge. But I, Volmar, the son of Smirt, I shall requite you with a fine stalwart young husband to cool your hot prudish lusts every night and all night long.”

    “My husband, lewd foul-tongued Volmar, shall be of my own choosing—yes, and he shall be a man of clean honor and a person as unlike you as I can find anywhere in the whole world.”

    “Your husband shall be of my choosing,” returned Volmar, furiously.

    “He shall not be!” said the Princess, stamping her foot.

    “But indeed he shall be, Sonia! Yes, and moreover, it is he, you bad-tempered creature, who will have to put up with your eternal arguing about everything until you have driven the man quite insane.”

    “Why, then,” said the Princess, “there will be a pair of you.”

    Volmar answered, with a demented loftiness: “Whether there be a pair of men or a round dozen of men who deplore your existence, Sonia, I at least do not mean to argue with you. No; for what I have said, I have said. You shall marry the man whom I pick out for you, this thing I swear by high heaven and by all the gold-slippered saints in it; and that is an end of the matter.”

    “But that, Volmar, that is not an end. It is only another bragging oath; and what sane saint anywhere would be giving his heed to the oath of a drunken liar?”

    Volmar said, gloomily: “I do not know. But I mean to find out.”

    So was it that Volmar was again free to wander at adventure, jeeringly observing the world’s ways. There was in his mind a difference, however, as he rode out of Osnia with no temporal possessions except his horse, his long sword and the two pistols at his belt. He was much fretted by the downfall of his drunken plans, because, just as he had meant to live always in her thoughts, so now in his thoughts was always Sonia.

    And besides that, in plain fairness, Volmar had decided, he must henceforward obey this abominable creature in regard to changing his name. When he came now to any castle, or to the court of a king, he must now bid the porter announce him as Volmar the Drunken Liar. Yes, it was this title—which was not, to Volmar’s opinion, captivating—that the South Wind’s own grandchild, and a son of the sublime Master of Gods, would hereafter have to make the best of, damn the prim slut!

    They relate how Volmar came, in the shadow of five great oaks which had seen the dawn of history, and had borne acorns before human wisdom begot any large wars, to the home of a brown priest who lived alone in this quiet place. They say that this holy man had not any companion except a notably colored huge ram. This ram had bright yellow wool and a crimson head and rather dark blue horns and green feet. They tell also that to this priest Volmar confessed all the sins of Volmar; and thus spoke about that consuming hatred which Volmar now entertained toward the Princess Sonia.