into melicent's bedroom, about two o'clock in the morning, came ahasuerus the jew. she sat erect in bed and saw him cowering over a lamp which his long glistening fingers shielded, so that the lean face of the man floated upon a little golden pool in the darkness. she marvelled that this detestable countenance had not aged at all since her first sight of it.
he smoothly said:
"now let us talk. i have loved you for some while, fair melicent."
"you have desired me," she replied.
"faith, i am but as all men, whatever their age. why, what the devil! man may have javeh's breath in him, but even scripture proves that man was made of clay." the jew now puffed out his jaws as if in recollection. "you are a handsome piece of flesh, i thought when i came to you at bellegarde, telling of perion's captivity. i thought no more than this, because in my time i have seen a greater number of handsome women than you would suppose. thereafter, on account of an odd reason which i had, i served demetrios willingly enough. this son of miramon lluagor was able to pay me well, in a curious coinage. so i arranged the bungling snare demetrios proposed—too gross, i thought it, to trap any woman living. ohé, and why should i not lay an open and frank springe for you? who else was a king's bride-to-be, young, beautiful, and blessed with wealth and honour and every other comfort which the world affords?" now the jew made as if to fling away a robe from his gaunt person. "and you cast this, all this, aside as nothing. i saw it done."
"ah, but i did it to save perion," she wisely said.
"unfathomable liar," he returned, "you boldly and unscrupulously bought of life the thing which you most earnestly desired. nor solomon nor periander has won more. and thus i saw that which no other man has seen. i saw the shrewd and dauntless soul of melicent. and so i loved you, and i laid my plan—"
she said, "you do not know of love—"
"yet i have builded him a temple," the jew considered. he continued, with that old abhorrent acquiescence, "now, a temple is admirable, but it is not builded until many labourers have dug and toiled waist-deep in dirt. here, too, such spatterment seemed necessary. so i played, in fine, i played a cunning music. the pride of demetrios, the jealousy of callistion, and the greed of orestes—these were as so many stops of that flute on which i played a cunning deadly music. who forbids it?"
she motioned him, "go on." now she was not afraid.
"come then to the last note of my music! you offer to bargain, saying, save perion and have my body as your chattel. i answer click! the turning of a key solves all. accordingly i have betrayed the castle of nacumera, i have this night admitted perion and his broad-shouldered men. they are killing orestes yonder in the court of stars even while i talk with you." ahasuerus laughed noiselessly. "such vanity does not become a jew, but i needs must do the thing with some magnificence. therefore i do not give sire perion only his life. i give him also victory and much throat-cutting and an impregnable rich castle. have i not paid the price, fair melicent? have i not won god's masterpiece through a small wire, a purse, and a big key?"
she answered, "you have paid."
he said:
"you will hold to your bargain? ah, you have but to cry aloud, and you are rid of me. for this is perion's castle."
she said, "christ help me! you have paid my price."
now the jew raised his two hands in very horrible mirth. said he:
"oh, i am almost tempted to praise javeh, who created the invincible soul of melicent. for you have conquered: you have gained, as always, and at whatever price, exactly that which you most desired, and you do not greatly care about anything else. so, because of a word said you would arise and follow me on my dark ways if i commanded it. you will not weight the dice, not even at this pinch, when it would be so easy! for perion is safe; and nothing matters in comparison with that, and you will not break faith, not even with me. you are inexplicable, you are stupid, and you are resistless. again i see my melicent, who is not just a pair of purple eyes and so much lovely flesh."
his face was as she had not ever known it now, and very tender.
ahasuerus said:
"my way to victory is plain enough. and yet there is an obstacle. for my fancy is taken by the soul of melicent, and not by that handsome piece of flesh which all men—even perion, madame!—have loved so long with remarkable infatuation. accordingly i had not ever designed that the edifice on which i laboured should be the stable of my lusts. accordingly i played my cunning music—and accordingly i give you perion. i that am ahasuerus win for you all which righteousness and honour could not win. at the last it is i who give you perion, and it is i who bring you to his embrace. he must still be about his magnanimous butchery, i think, in the court of stars."
ahasuerus knelt, kissing her hand.
"fair melicent, such abominable persons as demetrios and i are fatally alike. we may deny, deride, deplore, or even hate, the sanctity of any noble lady accordingly as we elect; but there is for us no possible escape from worshipping it. your wind-fed ferions, who will not ever acknowledge what sort of world we live in, are less quick to recognise the soul of melicent. such is our sorry consolation. oh, you do not believe me yet. you will believe in the oncoming years. meanwhile, o all-enduring and all-conquering! go now to your last labour; and—if my brother dare concede as much—do you now conquer perion."
then he vanished. she never saw him any more.
she lifted the jew's lamp. she bore it through the women's garden, wherein were many discomfortable shadows and no living being. she came to its outer entrance. men were fighting there. she skirted a hideous conflict, and descended the queen's stairway, which led (as you have heard) toward the balcony about the court of stars. she found this balcony vacant.
below her men were fighting. to the farther end of the court orestes sprawled upon the red and yellow slabs—which now for the most part were red—and above him towered perion of the forest. the conqueror had paused to cleanse his sword upon the same divan demetrios had occupied when melicent first saw the proconsul; and as perion turned, in the act of sheathing his sword, he perceived the dear familiar denizen of all his dreams. a tiny lamp glowed in her hand quite steadily.
"o melicent," said perion, with a great voice, "my task is done. come now to me."
she instantly obeyed whose only joy was to please perion. descending the enclosed stairway, she thought how like its gloom was to the temporal unhappiness she had passed through in serving perion.
he stood a dripping statue, for he had fought horribly. she came to him, picking her way among the slain. he trembled who was fresh from slaying. a flood of torchlight surged and swirled about them, and within a stone's cast perion's men were despatching the wounded.
these two stood face to face and did not speak at all.
i think that he knew disappointment first. he looked to find the girl whom he had left on fomor beach.
he found a woman, the possessor still of a compelling beauty. oh, yes, past doubt: but this woman was a stranger to him, as he now knew with an odd sense of sickness. thus, then, had ended the quest of melicent. their love had flouted time and fate. these had revenged this insolence, it seemed to perion, by an ironical conversion of each rebel into another person. for this was not the girl whom perion had loved in far red-roofed poictesme; this was not the girl for whom perion had fought ten minutes since: and he—as perion for the first time perceived—was not and never could be any more the perion that girl had bidden return to her. it were as easy to evoke the perion who had loved mélusine….
then perion perceived that love may be a power so august as to bedwarf consideration of the man and woman whom it sways. he saw that this is reasonable. i cannot justify this knowledge. i cannot even tell you just what great secret it was of which perion became aware. many men have seen the sunrise, but the serenity and awe and sweetness of this daily miracle, the huge assurance which it emanates that the beholder is both impotent and greatly beloved, is not entirely an affair of the sky's tincture. and thus it was with perion. he knew what he could not explain. he knew such joy and terror as none has ever worded. a curtain had lifted briefly; and the familiar world which perion knew, for the brief instant, had appeared to be a painting upon that curtain.
now, dazzled, he saw melicent for the first time….
i think he saw the lines already forming in her face, and knew that, but for him, this woman, naked now of gear and friends, had been to-night a queen among her own acclaiming people. i think he worshipped where he did not dare to love, as every man cannot but do when starkly fronted by the divine and stupendous unreason of a woman's choice, among so many other men, of him. and yet, i think that perion recalled what ayrart de montors had said of women and their love, so long ago:— "they are more wise than we; and always they make us better by indomitably believing we are better than in reality a man can ever be."
i think that perion knew, now, de montors had been in the right. the pity and mystery and beauty of that world wherein high god had— scornfully?—placed a smug perion, seemed to the comte de la forêt, i think, unbearable. i think a new and finer love smote perion as a sword strikes.
i think he did not speak because there was no scope for words. i know that he knelt (incurious for once of victory) before this stranger who was not the melicent whom he had sought so long, and that all consideration of a lost young melicent departed from him, as mists leave our world when the sun rises.
i think that this was her high hour of triumph.
