The Nightmare Had Triplets (33 page)

    Then his counsellors said: “Nay, sire, for high Heaven’s sake, let us not be dragging Heaven impiously into any question of the realm’s public welfare. It is expedient, for this reason or the other reason, that some one of these dozen princesses be declared the most excellent princess in the lands beyond common-sense, and that you should marry her on account of her super-eminence, whether she has it or not.”

    “But,” said the King, “Volmar the Drunken Liar has appealed to the Judgment of God.”

    His counsellors answered: “Nevertheless, we uphold our own judgment; for the harsh conditions of human life have forced us to learn a great deal more about statecraft, let us assure you, than the Eternal Father has any need to be knowing in His enviable estate as an absolute monarch in paradise. As for this Volmar, we think him less fit to adorn a counsel chamber than the city jail.”

    The King looked on their twitterings thoughtfully. Before this all-impudent black crow of a Volmar these counsellors were like fluttered humming-birds. Then the King turned toward Volmar the humorously grave face of a young poet. He smiled, confidentially. And Volmar knew of a sudden that Volmar exceedingly loved this fine lad.

    “You at least,” said King Feodor, “you proclaim yourself to be a liar before offering your counsel. I admire that gambit. So do you now tell me about this Sonia.”

    Volmar smiled back at him. That Volmar winked at King Feodor may be dismissed as a legend not wholly substantiated. Then Volmar spoke about such of the tricks of Sonia as he most hated, denouncing her heart-troubling looks and her inconvenient piety and her wheedling soft kindness toward everybody and her high-spirited intolerance of warm human iniquity. The King listened with attention.

    “You have told,” said King Feodor, by-and-by, “of that woman who shall be my wife, if indeed I can learn to be worthy of her.”

    “That,” Volmar replied, “you can never do, so unmanlike and so high-minded are the ways of this brightly colored idiot’s living. Yet in your appearance, and in your wealth, and in your worldly estate, and in the clean soul which you still keep, I esteem you to be less unfit to marry this detestable woman than is any other man now breathing. With that we must be content.”

    The King answered, “Your approval gratifies me.”

    “Oh, but I have found many kings to be decent enough people when they are properly handled,” replied Volmar. “I am not narrow-minded about royal persons. Some of my best friends are kings.”

    “Meanwhile,” young Feodor continued, “if it indeed has so happened that truth has been brought to my court by a stray pedlar and a drunken liar, it is right that this pleasingly inappropriate couple should bring beauty also. You two shall be my ambassadors to the court of Osnia.”

    They passed then into a six-sided hall which was paved with marble of two colors, and of which the walls were covered by pallid green tapestries embroidered with basilisks and wyverns and hippogriffins worked in threads of pale gold and of silver, the eyes of each monster being made of seed pearls and emeralds. There six trumpets were sounded. Then the young King ennobled Volmar and Mr. Smith, making them respectively the lords of Druim and of Achren, and assigning to each of them a suitable estate.

    “—With the proviso,” King Feodor added, “that if you do not bring back the Princess Sonia to be my wife, each one of you shall be sewed up in a sack of quicklime and cast living into the sea, so that you may be both burned and drowned. That only shall be your inheritance tax.”

    Then he sent these two to be his ambassadors in the realm of Osnia. And Mr. Smith put aside his pedlar’s pack, remarking that his stock of small leaden keys did not harmonize with his present estate as Lord of Achren.

    “You are welcome, fair lords,” said King Ludwig, “and to no living well-to-do monarch would I give my dear daughter more willingly than to the young King of Rorn. Yet, so far as goes my decision, the making up of my mind must rest, as it customarily does rest, with her.”

    “But that, your majesty,” observed Mr. Smith, the newly created Lord of Achren, “that is hardly the approved way in which we shrewd plenipotentiaries set about the arranging of any royal marriage. No, for we must first have protocols, I believe—whatever they may happen to be,—and indentures, and treaties, and diplomacies, and compacts, and perfidies, and affidations, and a large lot of signatures, rather than a mere girl’s mere say-so. Let us do things in order and with proper ceremony.”

    The King answered him, compassionately, “Nevertheless, my Lord of Achren, I can detect in you the chastened, the optimistic, the even adventurous air of a widower.”

    “It is true, your majesty,” replied Mr. Smith, “that, in my time, I have lost a wife or so. If I do not speak a bit more definitely as to these inexpressible distresses, that is due to no lack of candor, believe me, but simply to the fact that I was not ever very good at arithmetic.”

    “Talking then as one widower to another,” the King continued, “let me assure you that Sonia takes after her sainted mother in everything,—except, now I think of it, people have been kind enough to remark that her intelligence and her keen sense of humor and her sweet disposition come from my side of the family.”

    “I can quite understand your majesty,” declared Mr. Smith, with a magnanimous sad sympathy, “for marriage, howsoever steadily it may deepen discomfort and heighten the bitterness of an argument, does broaden the mind.”

    “Do you think so, my Lord of Achren? Now, to the contrary, it was my experience that marriage made a man feel rather too much like a goose.”

    “In fact, your majesty, the goose—or, in any event, the gander—does prefer a seraglio—”

    “No, no, but I did not mean that at all.”

    “Yet it is true,” Mr. Smith went on, equably, “that, irrespective of the gander’s gay gallivanting, a pairing for life—and, in brief, a true marriage—is the custom of many birds. I except of course the Gallinaceous family.”

    “Indeed, and why should you not except them?” said King Ludwig.

    “But not,” Mr. Smith stated, with firmness, “the majority of Mammals. The union of the male and the female is of a durable and monogamous character among gazelles, moles, squirrels, whales, hippopotami, seals, reindeer, and, in all probability, wolves.”

    “Your observations,” replied King Ludwig, “are no doubt truthful; in any case, they arouse in me an interest more easily perceived than described. Yet after all, my Lord of Achren, just what have the family affairs of wolves and gazelles and squirrels to do with my daughter’s marriage?”

    “All facts, your majesty, are of considerable interest to a sound logician—”

    “Yes, but—” the King interrupted, as with both hands he distractedly rumpled his gray hair.

    “And when I say ‘considerable’, I mean worthy of being considered—”

    “It is far more to the point,” the King answered, “to consider what Sonia considers in regard to those considerations which have prompted me to consider favorably the considerate offer of the King of Osnia. And if my talking is mixed up, why, that is simply because you have considerably upset me, my Lord of Achren, by ding-ding-dinging away until the not-ever-resting sound of your tongue has almost led me to believe that my dear Sonia’s sainted mother has brought back all her hard-headedness out of paradise to bemuddle up the entire matter. So, in God’s name, let us now stop talking, for this while, about your whales and your gazelles and your ganders.”

    They summoned Sonia. She came. She walked as daintily as a white hind, Volmar reflected. It was not suitable that the eyes of this repulsive young prude should be as clear and as steady as the eyes of a falcon; or that the whiteness of her skin should dazzle your own eyes; or that it should trouble your thoughts also, with speculations as to its probable softness.

    Well, and when she had heard the King of Rorn’s message, she smiled very graciously upon his two ambassadors. That she did not recognize Volmar, in his bright finery, was a fact so self-evident that the new Lord of Druim could almost, but not quite, believe that in sober earnest this abominable woman did not recognize him.

    “Your master,” she declared, modestly, “has honored me beyond my poor merits. My gratitude shall repay his generosity. And it is a good omen, my Lord of Achren”—she said, to Mr. Smith—“that in many dreams I have seen your face before this fine fortunate morning.”

    He returned, “That is likely; for I live in many dreams just at present.”

    “Now I,” said King Ludwig, “I find more of the familiar in the face of my Lord of Druim. He has somewhat the look of that Volmar whose loud tongue fetched him at long last to our dung-heap.”

    “It is possible that my Lord of Druim is thus afflicted,” replied the Princess; “but I cannot judge the resemblance, because I have quite forgotten this Volmar, and he keeps no place in my thoughts.”

    She made ready then to depart with the two ambassadors; and after them followed the usual dowry of a princess of Osnia, in the form of twenty-nine oaken wagons laden with white silver and red gold and with precious stones of eleven kinds.

    “But
how, pray, should a mere braggart and a foul-mouthed liar come to be Lord of Druim?” the Princess Sonia demanded of Volmar.

    They had now quitted her father’s kingdom, turning toward the stony uplands of Laczo, where the strong fortress of Toysan stood gray and turreted on a gray hill.

    Volmar replied, “It was the inspiration of a young poet, O most detestable of women, to decree me a nobleman because I brought to him truth; and because I promised to bring him beauty also, riding beside me, upon the saddle of your horse.”

    “So!” said the Princess, without seeming displeased by his candor beyond the point whence forgiveness might be hoped for. “And what manner of man is this misguided young poet?”

    Volmar told her: and as he spoke of her husband that was to be, he talked with a noble fervor. In his time Volmar had foregathered indulgently with eight kings and with scores of fine warriors and with at least three world-famous poets whose songs Volmar admitted to be so-so: but no one of these applauded persons had ever captured his fancy as did the greathearted, grave, innocent, young Feodor who was king over Rorn. And in consequence, Volmar’s speaking, as it were, now clapped the hands of enthusiasm to the ribs of dejected reason, in order to play leapfrog upon the extreme limits of eulogy.

    “I can but assure you, most fortunate of women,” Volmar perorated, “that for your special benefit Galahad has come out of his legend to live again on this sinful earth.”

    “Every woman must admire Galahad, of course,” remarked Sonia, without any remarkable conviction. “I am not certain that every woman would want, quite, to marry him.”

    “But, you ungrateful creature, no sane woman could demand more in the way of a husband!”

    “My point is, Volmar, that a sane woman might conceivably beg for less. So! and has your young master no faults at all?”

    “He has none,” said Volmar.

    “Oh, very well! Then I am blessed very far beyond my deserts,” replied Sonia, “and, it may be, a little way beyond my wishes.”

    But at this time they were interrupted. For they had now passed, by a narrow road through some brooks and marshes, into Tarob, a kingdom which Mr. Smith had visited, in the capacity of a pedlar, before to-day.

    He was thus able to inform his companions that Tarob was a place famous for its fine pearls, a place where the houses were all roofed with turtle shells, and a place too where the King was not permitted to beget any children. Should he break this law, then the King must be thrown down into a pit in which had been placed a tigress, an asp, and a wild stallion.

    —Which reminded Mr. Smith of the fact (a fact which he regarded as being of considerable interest to a sound logician) that kings were very often subjected to such rules of etiquette as tended to emphasize the unique social position of a monarch rather than to increase the comforts of his existence. Thus as in Egypt (Mr. Smith pointed out) the Pharaohs were permitted to eat no flesh except that of the calf and of the goose, so in Ireland the Kings of Connaught were commanded not ever to wear speckled garments, and the Kings of Ulster were forbidden to attend a horse fair. In Madagascar the King was not allowed to enter a boat or to cross running water-upon, doubtless, a variant of the same principle by which in Dahomey the King was at once dethroned and killed if he looked at the ocean. Most hidebound of all monarchs, however, Mr. Smith estimated to be the Mikado of Japan (or, to speak properly, the Tenno, inasmuch as “Mikado” was a metonymy, and meant actually “the exalted gate”, Mr. Smith paused to explain), who was not let ever to place his foot on the ground; who must be bathed by other persons during his sleep; and whom the laws of his kingdom forbid ever to trim his hair, his beard or his finger-nails.

    The instructive remarks of Mr. Smith were truncated, at this exact moment, by the King of Tarob himself, who came riding out to meet them attended by seven trumpeters and a troop of fine-looking boys. He wore a violet-colored satin tunic fastened about his waist with a belt of chastity, to which the keys were attached; his mantle was of gold tissue embroidered with purple moons; and on his proud head was a large scarlet hat embroidered with prancing golden lions. In his habiting this King Lithuel the Second was wholly splendid; and his nightly habits concerned only himself and his maker.

    Moreover, all his city, and the granite castle he lived in, had been hung with bright-colored banners and tapestries and with red and white garlands. The banquet which King Lithuel tendered, on that clear summer evening, to the betrothed wife of King Feodor of Rorn was incredibly served. None can describe the profusion of dishes, the abundance of meats both stewed and roasted, the variety of fish, the diversity of wines, the performance of the jugglers and the poets laureate, or the dignity of the butlers, because all that Tarob and the King of Tarob’s luxuriant imagination could produce of elegance, of splendor, of tact, and of merriment, was to be seen at this banquet.