Short Stories 1895-1926 (48 page)

Stealthily as a serpent the Prince lifted himself to his feet and stepped down out of the carriage. A tense silence now lay over this loop of the great highway. All tongues had fallen still, and though curiosity had turned not one head by a hair's-breadth in his direction, the complete cavalcade was arrested as if at a secret word of command. It might have been the assemblage of a dream.

With a word to the horseman that now stood dismounted in the dust a little behind the royal coach, Prince Ahmat Naigul passed on, preceded by the leper, and at a few paces distant came to a pause and confronted him.

The wolf of disease had all but gnawed away the nose. The cheek was sunken, the coarse hair hung limp and matted over the eroded ears. The hand that held the bowl to his breast shimmered as if it were inlaid with the scales of a fish, while the other grasped tight its copper bell as if with the talons of a bird. None the less, the glass-like eyes beneath their withering lids continued to gaze out as if in reverie. And not only humility, but an inward gentleness and peace, like that burthening the sails of an incoming ship in a squalid haven, shed their influences from this appalling shape. As in a lamp fashioned out of the coarsest horn, a gentle flame seemed to be burning from within the emaciated physiognomy.

Amid the folds of Ahmat Naigul's dimmed orange and scarlet, the jewels glowed softly in the moonlit atmosphere. His narrow head was flung back a little as if his nostrils were in doubt of the air they breathed. Poverty, it has been recorded, is a gift of the Infinite. And the Prince made a slight obeisance as he drew a ring from his finger and advancing a pace nearer dropped it into the leper's bowl.

‘A voice within,' he muttered, ‘tells me that life is brief. I am prepared, Sorrowful One, and of your mercy would be thankful to follow at once.'

The leper inclined his head a little towards the Prince, but his eyes remained unstirring.

‘How knowest thou,' the parched lips gasped, ‘how knowest thou the message has come for
thee
? Brief though the hour may be, it has its meed of minutes. Empty your mind of all but its most secret memories; have you peace at last?'

‘Is rest possible where happiness dwells?' returned Ahmat Naigul.

‘Only where rest is is happiness. Your journeyings have brought you here. Nor is it my bidding to call you yet away.'

‘Who then?' answered the thread-like voice, as the hand beneath the cloak groped upwards towards the dagger concealed beneath it.

‘I have your alms,' said the leper; ‘and now, if, as it seems, your highness's will is to lead while others follow, our one and only need is that we exchange the kiss of peace.'

And it seemed to the Prince as he stooped forward, resting his trembling hands upon the leper's shrivelled shoulders, that the infinitely aged face beneath his eyes might be that of Death, so utterly serene it was. But no dreadful horror of mortal malady now showed itself. Even the holes, where nostrils as sweet with health as his should be, were now dark casements commanding a secret country; and the narrowed eyes above them were as windows lit with such sunlight as springs reflected from untrodden snows. And as if Ahmat Naigul had sipped of some potent syrup, consciousness lost count for one instant of eternity of time and space. Memories as of a myriad lifetimes swept pleasantly before his eyes.

He drew back at last, and there broke upon his ear, loud as the clang of a temple gong, the clink of a horseman's silver bridle. And even yet the leper had not bent his eyes in his direction. Releasing his bell from his grasp and letting it swing soundlessly above the dust, the leper stooped, and having groped, hoarsely breathing, with his fingers in the dust, raised himself up once more and thrust out from his body his dried-up palm, at angles with his wrist, and almost as narrow as a monkey's.

Ahmat Naigul in turn outstretched his ungloved hand, from beneath his cloak, and the leper deposited in it an object so minute that the Prince had to press it firmly into the skin with his third finger lest he should lose it.

‘The seven ways remain,' said the leper. ‘And the easternmost is the way of life. My gift, Highness, is but for remembrance's sake.' And without more ado this saint of poverty swathed his miserable rags around his body, and turned back towards the blossoming tree where he had been resting his bones beside the waters of the lake.

Ahmat Naigul remounted into his coach, and the horsemen swept on. Time passed unheeded while he sat bolt upright, finger still fixed to palm, his lips like ice above his gums, and his eyes dark with the fear that had clouded them.

And with daybreak, the forest by the roadside now withdrew itself a little. Dark herbage scattered with flowers nodded its dews in the first rays of the sun, as the eyes of the gentle unstirring one beside him opened, to gaze once more at the companion of her journey; and her beauty was like a looking-glass to the beauty of the morning.

‘You have been gathering flowers,' she said; ‘and the narrow air herewithin is sweeter far than that of the country in which I have been wandering.'

‘And what country was that?' whispered the Prince.

‘I dreamed,' she said, ‘that you were once a man, and a bird, and a serpent. And I dreamed, Ahmat Naigul, that you were once a scullion to the Sages of the Most High. And that sometimes – forgive me, beloved – you sipped of their wine-cups when the veil of the entering-in had hidden you from their sight.'

She drew a warm hand from beneath her feathers. ‘Why,' she said, touching his, ‘your lips are stained with it yet. They are like crimson threads upon a honey ground. And what have you there beneath your finger-tip?'

She paused awhile. But Ahmat Naigul made no movement. ‘And what have you there beneath your finger-tip?' she questioned him again, a remote accent of disappointment lurking in her voice.

‘If, Princess, I had tasted the wine of that other sage whose glance none can resist, what would you say then?'

‘Silence is golden, beloved. I would do just like this.'

And heedless of sunbeams, of strange eyes amid the thickets, of the birds wandering on their pathless ways from tree to tree, she bent upwards her fair face, and kissed Ahmat Naigul.

But not until the Prince's chief magician had toiled laboriously and for days together over his hoard of polished crystal was the Princess enabled at last to detect with clearness the speck that had lain so closely imprisoned beneath the finger of his hand; and this even though the magician had succeeded in so adjusting his workmanship that it enlarged it almost to the magnitude of a grain of mustard-seed.

So it was still by faith rather than by direct evidence of her gentle senses that she believed the frettings and mouldings on its infinitesimal surface resembled the features and hollows and fairnesses of a human face. And that, her own …

The mud houses at the western end of the vast city, crammed hugger-mugger together within its enormous sun-baked walls, showed no sign of life, even though the first frigid grey of dawn already showed in the eastern skies; even though from point to point in the distance the cocks crowed acknowledgment one to another of this mysterious though often repeated fragment of news. A peculiar odour lay heavy on the air, compounded of the sweet and the offensive. The beaten road wound out between the outlying huddle of houses, but was soon lost in the gloom that still overlay the desert.

The watchman at the slit of window in his turret, which looked inwards towards the city, muffled up in his sheepskin coat, his grey beard spread spadewise upon his chest, sat with so fixed and motionless an attention on the long vista of narrow street which stretched out beneath his eyes, that he was probably asleep. But one accustomed to sleep with caution can also wake with it. Not a hair of him stirred, except his eyelashes, at sound of a shuffling footstep approaching his eyrie.

A bent old man in the attire and with the symbols of a pilgrim dangling round his neck and affixed with a slender iron chain to his brow, was approaching the watch-tower. In spite of his feebleness and the cobwebs of age that seemed to hang about him even more visibly than the folds of his pilgrim's garb, a serenity, a gravity haunted his appearance which roused the watchman clean out of the last lingering fumes of sleep that yet hung over his senses, and brought him hastily down to the thick-barred door below. Thence his eyes – their whites just touched with the light that was rilling on and on into this country's dark – peered out at this untimely intruder.

News that a princeling, more gracious than Springtime in the wilderness, and yet of tender age, was now seated upon the throne of his father, had been the common property of the market-place the whole long day before. He had himself heard the High Officer of the Court, his retinue attired in silver and purple, read out for all to hear a proclamation announcing that father's abdication. Universal sorrow had been its effect, and universal gladness also that Fate had sweetened her medicine with a successor of such high promise.

The watchman continued to glare out of his window at the pilgrim in the street – who at length approached and was accosted. Pilgrims of any faith which the experience of life in this world may instil or fail to shatter, had long since been free to come and go without other question than could be answered by the symbols and relics which they bore.

Still, the watchman was human, and this particular pilgrim one of uncommon interest. None the less, the colloquy that followed in the murk of the deserted street and gate-house, was brief. The watchman was given to understand (though he had difficulty in distinguishing the quavering, muffled words) that the pilgrim had here expected to meet an acquaintance, a fellow-wayfarer, a friend. One of renowned punctuality, even though his assignations might be one-sided.

According to his own showing, the watchman could have slumbered never so much as a wink during the hours of his vigil, for he assured the old man that no human figure had entered or passed through under the gate-house during the whole of the preceding night. Feastings and junketings, he explained, even at this less ornate end of the great city, were over betimes. There was little need to enforce order where laws were so beneficent, and the people who obeyed them so content.

None the less, the old man persisted in assuring the watchman that this particular tryst was one impossible of failure. Could perchance the friend he looked for have concealed himself in the watch-tower? Was he, maybe, at this very moment surveying the street from the ancient battlements above – too far overhead for the discernment of his own faded sight? Could he have crept in under the shadows, secret and unseen?

The watchman's chin sunk deeper into his straggling beard. By the intensity of his scrutiny it might be guessed that he both desired and feared the increasing light which would enable him to pierce a little further under the peak of the pilgrim's hood. His next natural question concerned the appearance of the expected stranger. And at sound of the reply, the pupils of his eyes showed even a little more stonily in their sockets. With a hasty and furtive glance over his shoulder he perceived that the great door was securely barred. ‘That being so, I can show you –' he muttered in the face of the old man pressing close against his barred window, ‘I can show you the very likeness of him you seek.'

At this the pilgrim paused and looked gently and gravely around him. Nothing living, however, except a stray cur which had stretched itself up out of its dusty corner and now stood shaking the dried dung from its mangey slate-grey hide, appeared in view. He turned once more to the watchman, and explained that he would be able to recognize that likeness even at a glance.

The watchman withdrew and (his lamp having been extinguished) groped his way unsteadily up the narrow staircase, muttering what might be prayers or maledictions beneath his breath. There he paused awhile, consulting anxiously his hazy old wits whether or not he dare venture to betray his instant recognition of this august visitor. The lean black cat that shared his small earthen chamber in the turret stretched itself and yawned.

It was an omen, and he returned at last, carrying in his hand a platter of burnished metal, by means of which he was accustomed to trim his beard and hair when they were in urgent need of it. Between finger and thumb of both hands he held this mirror up to the window so that his own eyes over the rounded rim were only just able to watch its effect upon the pilgrim.

To free himself from any possible offence or discourtesy he explained rapidly that the features now reflected in the mirror answered as precisely as he could remember to the description which the old man had given of his friend.

The pilgrim gazed long and earnestly. ‘Ah, my friend,' he said at last, ‘you have a discerning eye, and an unflattering tongue. You have not only freed my mind of any mistrust of one whom I was prepared to find awaiting me here – lest, I mean, that he had perchance. forgotten me; but you fill me with a happiness beyond even the voice of youth itself to express. I understand, as if he himself uttered it, that he and I are at one; and that I must forthwith continue my pilgrimage towards the Seventh Valley. Meanwhile, I pray you accept of me for his remembrance this most precious keepsake and relic. Guard it safely; and present it to him – press it into the very palm of his hand – when he shall himself come your way.'

The watchman drew down his blurred old mirror and thrust a horny hand close to the lattice. Into its palm the pilgrim pressed an object that appeared to have been carved out of ivory, but which in magnitude was whole worlds smaller than a pea. It was strange, too, that in these few moments the light of dawn seemed to have intensified to such a degree that it surrounded the bent old hooded head at the window with a vague radiance like that of a lunar rainbow. Having bowed a blessing, he was gone.

The watchman, being, as it has already been related, of an unusually cautious and sluggish brain, refrained from stirring for some few minutes afterwards. Having then for safety deposited beneath his tongue the relic he had received for keepsake, he stealthily ascended the deep worn stone steps of his staircase, and from well within the chamber peeped out across the flat roofs towards the desert.