The Nightmare Had Triplets (42 page)

    “Murder, sir, is not thus lightly to be dismissed as a mere error in judgment.”

    And it was obvious that the propriety of her sentiments had impressed the highwayman favorably. He dismounted at once from his black mare; and removing his red-plumed hat, he declared, in frank contrition:

    “I was not thinking about the decease of these lackeys with the seriousness which their fate merits. I admit my fault. These two have died bravely in defence of you, madame, in the while that their more intelligent comrade galloped away in search of the police. These two at this instant, no doubt, are being welcomed into paradise with a great deal more of enthusiasm than awaits him at the police station. So let us duly honor these undergraduate archangels.”

    “That, sir, is nobly spoken, with a ring of true poetry,” Marianne conceded: “and yet, to a gentlewoman in my present distressed condition, fine words avail little.”

    Her situation, it was beyond dispute, seemed deplorable, and of a sort which in no feature befitted a maid of honor to the strait-laced Queen of Ecben. In broad daylight the coach in which Marianne was riding had been attacked by this masked horseman, as her party attempted to pass through an outlying spur of the forest of Branlon. Her coachman and one of her outriders, in the quick confusion of some spirited gunplay, had fallen victims to the marauder’s superior marksmanship. The other outrider had at once vanished, in the direction of the near-by police station. And Marianne thus remained deserted, in a magic-infected forest, alone with two deceased persons and a desperado but too regrettably alive.

    In such circumstances, the Queen’s maid of honor produced her pocket handkerchief, and gave way to pardonable emotion, in the while she continued,—

    “I assuredly am the most unfortunate of living creatures!”

    “I deny that, madame,” the masked man returned, with warmth.

    She paused then in her weeping; and she put by her handkerchief. She upraised toward the young highwayman two enormous eyes, blue as cornflowers. This shrinking, tender, blonde girl, he perceived, was lovely beyond any poet’s imagining; and great was the man’s joy and delight for the well-remembered beauty of her appearance.

    A large cloak of vair covered all save her dear face; yet this cloak was now open a little way, so that upon her breast showed a silver gleaming; and she gazed up at him forlornly, from out of a hood of vair, saying, in her frank terror:

    “Let us be sensible, sir! Your orders to stand and deliver, combined with your dexterity in putting out of life my two attendants, have led me to regard your moral principles with suspicion. Is it not unavoidable that I should shudder to find myself thus left alone with you in the midst of a forest?”

    “But I, madame—” he protested.

    “For an indiscretion,” she explained, “leads naturally to wrong-doing; and thence one slips, almost inevitably, into actual sin. You have indiscreetly killed two of my lackeys; with what I can but describe as foolhardiness, you have permitted Lelio (for such is the name of my third attendant) to ride hence in search of the police of Arleoth. You now contemplate, I cannot doubt, the wrong-doing of robbing me of those jewels which I was fetching back to wear at the court ball this evening.”

    “But I, madame—” he repeated.

    “Oh, I do not dispute,” Marianne admitted, broad-mindedly, “that, in so far as you are a highwayman, such wrong-doing is a part of your professional duties. I do not criticize the wrong-doing, in itself, but only the most dreadful carnal sin which you intend now that I am at your mercy. Well, then, to get over with the wrong-doing as quickly as may be possible, you will find my jewel-case is on the seat of the coach, to the left side.”

    She sobbed afresh, in the while that Marianne prepared to meet, without any extra discomforts, a doom worse than death, by unfastening her cloak of vair. When this cloak was put by, you saw that she was clothed wholly in black, with a dove embroidered above her young breasts in threads of silver. She resorted once more to her handkerchief, saying:

    “I am helpless. So my conscience is clear. I shall only have to lament that a big and bold and impudent beast of a bandit has no conscience.”

    “But I, madame—” he cried out, removing his mask.

    “Certainly I can see for myself that you are big. Your conduct has shown you to be bold. You have rather nice eyes, too”—she remarked, in a wanly smiling endeavor to be strictly fair about everything. “As for the impudence, well, but, after all, the amenities of court life have taught me that one young man is no pennyworth worse than another young man, when it comes to being alone with a defenceless and inexperienced girl, so that if, instead of being a bandit, you happened to be a leading banker or a baron—or for that matter, I regret to add, a bishop anywhere under forty—the terrors of my present state would be no less lively. For you men are all alike. Until, at any rate, you have passed fifty.”

    “But I, madame,” he replied, “but I, I, I! Will you not ever permit me the poet’s privilege of talking about myself? It is I who am the most unfortunate of living creatures, because I adore you. For an entire year, lacking but a month, I have adored you hopelessly.”

    “Why, but whatever can the monster of iniquity be talking about?” Marianne inquired, of nobody in particular.

    Thus speaking, the fair young girl walked some little way apart from the relics of her former attendants, directing her progress toward a picturesque, grassy, and soft-looking ridge; she sat down among the violets which adorned this ridge; and she charitably turned back the flowing black sleeves which half hid her very lovely small hands.

    Such affability emboldened the tall bandit to introduce himself as Clitandre, at present a protégé of Mr. Smith, the Lord of the Forest, who, by a strange magic, had released Clitandre from his prison in Melphé, where the lad lay under sentence of death for house-breaking. Mr. Smith had completed this kindness by establishing the young man in the more wholesome out-of-door pursuits of brigandage. Yet Clitandre was not merely a highwayman but a general practitioner of theft in all branches.

    His mother, Madame Arachne, he explained, had in some inexplicable fashion strayed out of Greek mythology into the dreams of a god, in which she had figured intimately. Clitandre had been the result of this intimacy. And Arachne, as Clitandre furthermore explained, had painstakingly perfected her son in the exercise of every acquisitive art, after the disappearance of his father, the sublime Master of Gods, and prior to her change of life when she again became a large spider, through a renewal of the old doom put upon Arachne very long ago by Pallas Athene.

    Of his mother’s charms and of her maternal devotion and of her never-tiring industry Clitandre spoke glowingly. He protested that only once had he found her equal among womankind.

    “Aha!” returned Marianne, with a large-eyed and very lovable archness.

    “Yes,” said Clitandre, gravely,—“only once.”

    He looked full upon her; and that which she saw in his ardent dark young face both pleased and a little troubled her.

    Thereafter, with a praiseworthy attention to practical affairs, such as befitted his mother’s son, Clitandre fell to reloading his discharged pistols, and to speaking, with a refined fervor, about his first sight of Marianne in the market-place of Arleoth. He spoke then of the respectful passion which he, an ambitious and high-minded but as yet undistinguished member of the criminal classes, had cherished ever since that afternoon for the Queen of Ecben’s maid of honor.

    It was a pure worship, he assured Marianne, in the while that he carefully primed his big pistols, without any carnal taint. It was the immaculate star-towering love of the troubadours re-born in the heart of one who remained always, at heart, a poet, whatsoever might be the occasional, nay, the inevitable, prosaic passages in his professional career as a brigand. Clitandre desired merely to see his adored lady, now and then, if only at a distance, noting her numerous bright perfections; to worship these perfections; and thereafter to resume, with renewed ardor, the composition of his heroic love poem, “A Garland for Marianne,” which would tell fittingly of his unexampled passion.

    “Alas, sir,” declared Marianne, “it is not well to speak of poetry, or of love either, to a maid of honor to the Queen of Ecben. The Queen’s strictness in overseeing our moral principles is unbelievable; it swaddles us in ever-present maternal affection and a never quiet meddlesomeness; so that, only this very morning, it sent me on a depressing errand. For my dear friend Célie, I must tell you, was to-day confined in the Convent of the Magdalens, on account of three fervent sonnets and a half-dozen articles of male wearing apparel which were found in her reticule. I have but now returned from bidding my adored pet farewell at the gate of her consecrated prison. And I was going very sadly back to my court duties at Miradol when you interrupted my journey, which was already sufficiently heartbreaking, with assassination.”

    “Indeed, madame,” returned the highwayman, mournfully, “I have committed great sacrilege. In the way of business I attacked your coach without knowing who occupied it. Judge then of my horror when I find that, of all creatures in the world, I have molested the one creature whom I worship!”

    “But why,” said Marianne, with grave innocence, “why should you worship me in particular?”

    “Because, madame, I am a poet. Your perfections, as I have previously remarked, inspire me. They are even now inspiring me with a new stanza to my ‘Garland for Marianne.’”

    She regarded this tall and remarkably handsome malefactor with appreciation. She most certainly knew of no debauched young courtier who, when thus left alone with an innocent blonde girl, in this lonely forest, would have devoted the occasion to composing poetry.

    “Your principles, Master Clitandre,” said Marianne, “are above reproach. The dear Queen herself would approve of your principles, I am afraid. It follows that I shall look forward with intense interest to the receipt of your beautiful poem; and I shall devour every line of it with applause and unbounded pleasures. Especially if you can get it to me in the summer, when one has time for reading.”

    Clitandre answered: “If not with pleasure—O Lady, properly endowed with high station at a queen’s court, and made peerless in pre-eminence by your bright virtues and by the gifts of the Graces in some hour of unusual prodigality—if not with pleasure, if not with your discerning applause, yet do you receive the inconsiderable verses of a still unpublished poet with charity! and do you glance through the spectacles of indulgence upon the slight results of prolonged labors! Not mine are the talents of blind Homer or of bald-headed Æschylus; and though the elephant affords to the huntsman ivory, and the civet-cat a sweet smelling perfume, yet may the hare give only his hide, and the calf cutlets.”

    Then Clitandre said: “Lady, the gods weigh the wills of men, not their offerings; therefore may you, who appear to me divine, well imitate your fellow divinities. Pallas Athene, although a thoughtful and serious-minded immortal, desired that web which was woven by my mother Arachne; therefore may you, it is possible, desire a tapestry into which the son of Arachne has interwoven fine words of diverse sounds with the shuttle of respectful adoration. If I have not labored with the good will of the Muses and a discreet placing of my caesurae—if my tropes ring unhandsomely—then let it be from you that the offspring of my foiled striving receives its doom. If otherwise, then let it be the well-shaped and the silk-soft hand of Marianne, more white than is the pallid paper which conveys to her my love very timidly, yea, let it be the worshipful hand of Marianne which, in exchange for her ‘Garland’ places upon my brow a wreath of laurel, the poet’s customary reward.”

    And Clitandre said also: “It is permitted you, Lady, to convict me of all sins except only the crime of carelessness. So far as I was able, I have always paid an untiring homage to my Muse wheresoever I might happen to be, even in a prison cell. But the talons of the law have often molested my wooing of chaste Erato; wigged judges and rude jailers have instructed me more deeply in penal codes than in scansion; and the police also have refused to honor the license of a poet. Over and yet over again, and under many aliases, have I fled from all sorts of fetters save only those of Apollo which constrain the inspired bard; and in the shadow of the scaffold I have written, it may be, with some little unevenness.”

    To this simple but sincere speech Marianne had listened with unconcealed emotion. She was touched by the frank fervors of the young highwayman’s passion. But other matters now engaged her attention and proclaimed its interruption to be inevitable; so that Marianne sighed regretfully, and observed:

    “I am moved, sir, by the single-heartedness of your devotion. A maiden’s modesty must check me from saying more at this particular instant. For it now occurs to me that the police, as you suggest, are immune from many emotions of a superior nature. And I notice that Lelio approaches us attended by an entire squadron of constables from Arleoth.”

    Clitandre arose, loosening his long sword in its brown leather scabbard; and then, drawing two of the big silver-mounted pistols from the half-dozen which adorned his wide crimson belt, he declared:

    “I deduce death. I infer that it becomes my duty to rebuke with carnage the incivility of these policemen, who have thus interrupted a conversation of grave importance.”

    “It would be far more dignified, Master Clitandre,” Marianne pointed out, “as well as very much more scathing, to express your displeasure by withdrawing in silent contempt. It would also—in view of their numerousness, apart from the circumstance that each constable carries a large blunderbuss—be a great deal more prudent.”

    The young man perceived the justice of this advice, and replied: