Part 5 (2/2)
yet I know not that either. My name is Ennui,”--he smiled again--”Prince Ennui. You have, perchance, heard somewhere our sad story. This is the perpetual silence wherein lies that once-happy princess, my dear sister, Sleeping Beauty.”
His voice seemed but an echo amongst the walls and arches of this old house, and he spoke with a suave enunciation as if in an unfamiliar tongue.
I replied that I had read the ever-lovely story of Sleeping Beauty, indeed knew it by heart, and a.s.sured him modestly that I had not the least doubt of a happy ending--”that is, if the author be the least authority.”
He narrowed his lids. ”It is a tradition,” he replied; ”meanwhile, the thickets broaden.”
Whereupon I begged him to explain how it chanced that among that festive and animated company I had read of, he alone had resisted the wicked G.o.dmother's spell.
He smiled distantly, and bowed me into the garden.
”That is a simple thing,” he said.
Yet for the life of me I could not but doubt all he told me. He who could pa.s.s spring on to spring, summer on to summer, in the company of beasts so sly and silent, so alert and fleet as these hounds of his, could not be quite the amiable prince he feigned to be. I began to wish myself in homelier places.
It seems that on the morning of the fatal spindle, he had gone coursing, with this Safte and Sallow and his horse named ”Twilight,”
and after wearying and heating himself at the sport, a little after noon, leaving his attendants, had set out to return to the palace alone. But allured by the cool seclusion of a ”lattice-arbour” in his path, he had gone in, and then and there, ”Twilight” beneath the willows, his hounds at his feet, had fallen asleep.
Undisturbed, dreamless, ”the unseemly hours sped light of foot.” He awoke again, between sunset and dark; the owl astir; ”the silver gnats yet netting the shadows,” and so returned to the palace.
But the spell had fallen--king and courtier, queen and lady and page and scullion, hawk and hound, slept a sleep past waking--”while I, roamed and roam yet in a solitary watch beyond all sleeping.
Wherefore, sir, I only of the most hospitable house in these lands am awake to bid you welcome. But as for that, a few dwindling and harsh fruits in my orchards, and the cold river water that my dogs lap with me, are all that is left to offer you. For I who never sleep am never hungry, and they who never wake--I presume--never thirst. Would, sir, it were otherwise! After such long silence, then, conceive how strangely falls your voice on ears that have heard only wings fluttering, dismal water-songs, and the yelp and quarrel and night-voice of unseen hosts in the forests.”
He glanced at me with a mild austerity and again lowered his eyes. I cannot now but wonder how the rhythm of a voice so soft, so monotonous, could give such pleasure to the ear. I almost doubted my own eyes when I looked upon his yellow, on that unmoved, sad, mad, pale face.
I had no doubt of his dogs, however, and walked scarcely at ease beside him, while they, shadow-footed, closely followed us at heel.
”Prince Ennui” conducted me with s.h.i.+ning lantern into a dense orchard thickly under-grown, marvellously green, with a small, hard fruit upon its branches, shaped like a medlar, of a crisp, sweet odour and, despite its hardness, a delicious taste. The interwoven twigs of the stooping trees were thickly nested; a veritable wilderness of moonlike and starry flowers ran all to seed amid the nettles and nightshade of this green silence. And while I ate--for I was hungry enough--Prince Ennui stood, his hand on Sallow's muzzle, lightly thridding the dusky labyrinths of the orchard with his faint green eyes.
Mine, too, were not less busy, but rather with its lord than with his orchard. And the strange thought entered my mind, Was he in very deed the incarnation of this solitude, this silence, this lawless abundance? Somewhere, in the green heats of summer, had he come forth, taken shape, exalted himself? What but vegetable ichor coursed through veins transparent as his? What but the swarming mysteries of these thick woods lurked in his brain? As for his hounds, theirs was the same stealth, the same symmetry, the same cold, secret unhumanity as his. Creatures begotten of moonlight on silence they seemed to me, with instincts past my workaday wits to conceive.
And Rosinante! I laughed softly to think of her staid bones beside the phantom creature this prince had called up to me at mention of ”Twilight.”
I ate because I was ravenously hungry, but also because, while eating, I was better at my ease.
Suddenly out of the stillness, like an arrow, Safte was gone; and far away beneath the motionless leaves a faint voice rang dwindling into silence. I shuddered at my probable fate.
Prince Ennui glanced lightly. ”When the magic horn at last resounds,”
he said, ”how strange a flight it will be! These th.o.r.n.y briers encroach ever nearer on my palace walls. I am a captive ever less at ease. Summer by summer the sun rises shorn yet closer of his beams, and now the lingering transit of the moon is but from one wood by a narrow crystal arch to another. They will have me yet, sir. How weary will the sleepy ones be of my uneasy footfall!”
And even as Safte slipped softly back to his watching mate, the patter and shrill menace of voices behind him hinted not all was concord between these hidden mult.i.tudes and their unseemly prince.
The master-stars shone earlier here; already sparkling above the tower was a canopy of clearest darkness spread, while the leafy fringes of the sky glowed yet with changing fires.
We returned to the lawns before the palace porch, and, with his lantern in his hand, the Prince signed to me to go in. I was not a little curious to view that enchanted household of which I had read so often and with so much delight as a child.
In the banqueting-hall only the matted windows were visible in the lofty walls. Prince Ennui held his lantern on high, and by its flame, and the faint light that flowed in from above, I could presently see, distinct in gloom, as many sleepers as even Night could desire.
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