"O Holy Moon, I beg a boon: Keep me healthy, Make me wealthy Very soon."

Children not yet abed played quaint blindfold games in which they made the moon their playmate, shrilling the distich:

"Tell us, Mistress Moon, who ask it, What you carry in your basket."

Fishermen in Syracuse, hanging out their little lanterns at the prows of their boats, compared on the dancing waters the lustre of the moonlight with the reflection of their little wicks, and were proud of the power of their fish-oil. Dogs in Syracuse bayed.

In the hills above Syracuse all was silent. The moonlight, flooding slope and valley, wood and ruin and church, shone on the figure of a man in motley lying motionless upon the grass. It shone, too, on the sad face of a girl wandering, wandering through the pine woods. The moonlight shone caressingly upon her crown of flame-colored hair, upon his deep, tearless eyes.

Since she had fled from the false hunter into the thickets of the wood Perpetua had wandered hither and thither in its familiar deeps, drinking the cup of pain. In one short day she had learned from foul face and from fair face such knowledge of the evil of the world as tortured her brave heart. Nothing could stagger her belief in goodness as the law of life, but she had not dreamed until this day of the strength of its enemies. The bright of face, made in the mould of beauty, stamped with the seal of grace, these could be traitors to God, slayers of peace.

Torn by such thoughts, she drifted almost unconsciously, fighting with her sorrow, to all the dear places of her daily visits--the companionable tree, the well-spring of cool waters, the bowl-shaped hollow in which she loved to lie and see nothing but the sky, the little shrine in the clearing where a path ran through the wood--to each of these spots she went in turn as one who makes a pilgrimage. All were the same in the sweet moonlight as they had been that morning in the light of the sweet sun. How green the world had seemed that morning!--and now it had grown gray and the birds sang nothing but dirges. But the girl was too strong to let her young sadness master her. Stoutly she told herself she was a fool to think that the world was changed because of a maid's sorrow; bravely she bade herself bear her cross. To-morrow, perhaps, she would tell her father, and they would climb higher on the hills, hide deeper in the woods--fly somewhere from the envy of the evil King. To-night she might not sleep, but at least she would not weep.

Perpetua made her way homeward through the wood. As she passed into the open space where the ancient fane had risen, she saw in the bright moonlight the figure of a man extended at full length on the grass. A sudden fear for her father leaped into her mind--could he have fallen there? She ran swiftly forward, but as she neared the prostrate figure her fears fled, for she recognized by his garments the withered fool of the morning. He seemed to be moaning like a beast in pain, and her distaste of him could make no head against her pity. She knew, too, being Sicilian, how dangerous it was to lie in the moonlight--to do so was to court madness. She bent down beside him and touched him very softly on the shoulder. "What is the matter with you?" she asked.

She had moved so lightly over the thick grasses--he was steeped so heavily in his stupor--that he did not know of her approach until she spoke. Then Robert raised his heavy, weary head and stared at her, dazed, while she looked sadly at the twisted visage of the fool. Then consciousness came back to Robert, and he knew Perpetua, and his heart rejoiced within him.

"You! you!" he cried, hopefully. "Do you not know me?"

Perpetua looked pitifully at the ill-favored face. Who that had once seen it could fail to remember it, she thought; so she answered, gently,

"Indeed I do."

Robert rose stiffly to his feet and held out his hands to her eagerly.

In the moonlight his face seemed to her more hideous than even she had thought it in the morning, and she drew away from him involuntarily, but he paid no heed to this, thinking only of her words.

"Ah, Heaven be praised!" he sighed. "You know I am the King."

Instantly Perpetua remembered the fool's tale of the morning--how he had played at being the King and was menaced with death for his mimicry. She felt sure that the moon had overthrown his weak wits, and that he had now come to believe, in his madness, that he was, indeed, the King. But Robert plied her eagerly.

"You remember," he insisted, "a while ago, in the sunlight, how I told you who I was? I am the King."

He drew himself up proudly, and his air of dignity contrasted so grimly with his wry figure that Perpetua, who had found no tears for her own grief, was ready to weep for him. So she answered him according to his folly, hoping to soothe him.

"Yes, yes, I remember," she murmured, touched to the heart by the trouble in his wild eyes. "But you seem sick and faint. Shall I bring you some water?"

She made as if to leave him, to seek for water, but he stayed her with a gesture, speaking rapidly, in a low voice that seemed charged with fear.

"There is a strange conspiracy against me"--he paused, as if trying to command his fevered thoughts, and pressed his hands to his forehead--"or else I have been dreaming a strange dream." He looked around him drearily, and then again fixed his questioning gaze upon her. "But you--you know me?"

"Yes, yes, I know you," Perpetua answered him, gently; but to herself she said, "Poor soul! poor soul!" and she wondered what she could do to help the afflicted thing. If her father had returned he would know what to do--or one of the holy brothers of the Church. Even while she reflected two forms rose against the sky, coming from the pathway, giant figures with skins like burnished copper, clad with a barbaric splendor, with pelts of leopards over their shoulders, and having great rings of gold upon their arms and in their ears.

"This is the place," said one; and, "Knock at the door," ordered the other. Perpetua stepped out of the shadow of the trees towards them.

Robert, following her action with his eyes, saw the men and knew them, amazed, for his Moorish slaves Zal and Rustum. He asked himself why they were there, and could not answer the question; yet some memory seemed to be trying to assert itself in his troubled brain, and he watched what followed vaguely as one shackled by sleep.

"What do you seek?" Perpetua asked of the new-comers.

The one who had spoken last questioned her.

"Are you the daughter of Theron the executioner?"

"I am she," Perpetua answered.

The other black giant spoke.

"You must come with us. Your father has sent for you. He lies sick at Syracuse."

Perpetua gave a great cry.

"My father sick! I will go with you at once."

The sound of her cry seemed to rend the veil of forgetfulness that hung about the brain of Robert. He knew now why these men had come, sent by Hildebrand in obedience to his King's command. For the first time in his foolish life Robert felt his heart throb with pity, his spirit rise in arms against injustice. The girl who had disdained him in his pride had been kind to him in his misery; she should suffer no wrong from him. He limped into the open space and waved the Saracens aside with a gesture of command, while he called to Perpetua:

"No, no; do not go with them. It is a trick, a lie." Advancing fiercely upon the slaves, who stared at the sudden appearance of the discredited jester, he cried out: "I have changed my mind. Begone!" Then, reading only derision and denial on their countenances, he raged at them.

"Do you not know me, fellows? I am the King!"

The black slaves grinned evilly. One of them turned to Perpetua, who, in her eagerness to join her father, listened with impatience to the grotesque assertions of the fool.

"Come, maiden, come," he said. "There is no time to lose." Then as Robert interposed himself between the girl and the slave, the slave roared at him, "Out of the way, fool!"

Robert felt his members tremble at the ferocity of the monster who was wont to kiss his hand, but he stood his ground.

"She shall not go," he said.

"I say she shall," the black answered, and with his huge hand he dealt Robert a blow that beat him brutally to the earth. Perpetua sprang forward to prevent further cruelty, but the slave paid no further heed to the prostrate man. Catching Perpetua by the hands, they hurried her at full speed down the mountain-path to the place where a litter was waiting.

Robert lay alone on the summit of the hill, dizzy with pain and rage, beating the earth with his clinched fists and moaning to himself: "I am the King! I am the King! I am the King!"

VIII

PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN

A little way from the city Lycabetta had found, dedicated to our Lady of Delights, a fitting shelter for herself and for her attendant nymphs.

This was the palace of a dead and heirless duke, somewhile abandoned and now renewed with life and color by the gold of the Neapolitan. It stood apart in spacious gardens that were girdled so thickly with groves of cypresses that none save the initiated could dream of the wonders masked by the melancholy trees. But those initiated knew well that behind the solemn barrier there smiled a kind of earthly paradise--pleasances where even the flowerful soil of Sicily seemed extravagantly prolific of color, extravagantly prodigal of odors; thickets wherein the great god Pan might have delighted to lurk; fair colonnades thick-carpeted with the petals of roses and framed to greet all cool, benevolent breezes; temples to exquisite divinities; fountains lapsing, murmurous as the laughter of youth, into great basins whose smooth waters welcomed smooth bodies; grottoes deep and mysterious, affording shelter in the fiercest heats. To these enchanted privacies the young and rich who had followed Robert from Naples and had welcomed his coming to Sicily made pilgrimage, and day and night pleasure held there her pagan court as if the wild cry had never been heard by Thamus, the pilot, calling from the islands of Paxae and heralding the coming of the white Christ.

On this night the House of Pleasure was unusually quiet. Those who guarded the golden gates denied admission to all who could not conjure with the King's name, and Lycabetta was alone with her favorite women, fair, Greek-faced girls with fair, Greek names--Glycerium, Hypsipyle, Euphrosyne, Lysidice. The room that shrined her beauty was a marvellous medley of the styles of many architectures, of the arts of many lands, as if the streams of wealth and splendor flowing from all the sources of the world had carried thither its rarest treasures. Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the genius of the Saracen, and the vigor of the Norman had shared in the decoration of those walls, gorgeous with gold and color, hung with sumptuous tapestries woven with alluring figures from the legends of love. The floor, inlaid with iridescent tiles that Persian hands had painted, was strewn with costly stuffs and furs. Before a life-size statue in bronze of Venus, a copy of that Venus Callipyge given by Heliogabalus to Syracuse, a fire of shifting, many-tinted flames burned on a metal tripod, whose stems represented the figures of beautiful, nude women. The air was heavily scented from the burning woods and spices in the brazier, sandal and cinnamon and cassia. Hanging lamps, of strangely fantastic design, filled the wide room with delicate light.

Lycabetta, the triumphant jewel of all this gorgeous setting, reclined upon a golden couch that was made soft for her body with rare furs, and bright--to enhance her whiteness--with brilliant silks. Clad in thin, transparent webs, whose shifting shimmer recalled, whenever she stirred her limbs, the glitter of the serpent, Lycabetta lay with a look of weariness on her face, while Hypsipyle fanned her softly with a huge feather fan of black and white ostrich plumes. Glycerium, seated by the head of the couch, was busy in adorning her mistress's black hair with flowers. At her feet Euphrosyne nursed a kind of lute and sang the Venus song in a small, sweet voice:

"Venus whispered from her nest: 'White Adonis, bright Adonis!

Love is better than the best, Heaven is hidden in my breast, Take delight and leave the rest, Blithe Adonis, lithe Adonis!'

"Venus stretched her arms and said: 'Shy Adonis, sly Adonis!

Gather blooms and make a bed Of the scented petals shed By the roses, white and red, Brisk Adonis, frisk Adonis!'