10. Relative to Gonfal’s Head

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IT followed through the two mischances already recorded that, when spring came again, and when once more the south wind was coursing over Inis Dahut, Gonfal of Naimes sat, as it happened, with his handsome head in Morvyth’s lap, and waited for her less ill-starred lovers to return.

“What gifts, I wonder, will they be bringing me,” Queen Morvyth said, “at about this time to-morrow?”

And Gonfal, without moving, sighed stupendously, and answered: “To me, madame, they will be bringing bitter gifts. For, whosoever wins in this quest, I lose: and whatsoever he may bring to you, to me he brings disseverance from content, and to me he brings a poignant if brief period of loneliness before you decide to have my head off.”

Now she caressed that head maternally. “Why, but what a notion!” said Morvyth, now that the man himself spoke of the nearing social duty whose imminence had for some while been fretting her. “As if, sweetheart, I would ever think of such a thing!”

“Undoubtedly, that will happen, madame. Marriage entails many obligations, not all of them pleasant. Queens in particular have to preserve appearances, they have to ensure the discretion of those whom they have trusted.”

“That,” she said, sorrowfully, “is what the dear old Imaun has been telling me,—lately, you know. And Masu talks about what a married woman owes to religion and setting a fine moral example.”

Then Gonfal, still smiling up at her, went on: “And yet it seems an odd thing, delight of my delights, that I shall leave you—for the headsman,—without any real regret. For I am content. While my shrewd fellows rode about the world to seek and to attain to power and wisdom, I have elected, as an unpractical realist, to follow after beauty. I have followed, to be sure, in the phrase of that absurd young Grimauc, at a paid price, yet, at that price, I have won, maimed and foredoomed, to beauty. And I am content.”

The Queen put on the proper air of diffidence. “But what, my friend, what, after all, is mere beauty?”

And he replied with the neatness which she always rather distrusted. “Beauty, madame, is Morvyth. It is not easy to describe either of these most dear and blinding synonyms, as how many reams of ruined paper attest!”

She waited, still stroking him: and in her mind was the old question, whether it was possible that, even now, this man was laughing at her?

She said: “But would it not grieve you unendurably, sweetheart, to see me the wife of another man? And so, would it not be really a kindness—?”

But the obtuse fellow did not chivalrously aid in smoothing her way to that nearing social duty. Instead, he replied, oddly enough:

“The Morvyth that I see, and in my manner worship, can be no man’s wife. All poets learn this truth in their vexed progress to becoming realists.”

For yet another while the young Queen was silent. And then she said:

“I do not quite understand you, my dear, and probably I never shall. But I know that through your love of me you have twice maimed yourself, and have, as though it were a trifle, put aside your chance of winning honor and great wealth and all that gentle persons most prize—”

“I am,” he replied, “a realist. To get three utterly pleasant years one pays, of course. But realists pay without grumbling.”

“My dearest,” the Queen continued,—now breathing quicklier, and with the sort of very happy sobbing which she felt the occasion demanded,—“you alone of all the men who have talked and postured so much, you alone have given me whole-hearted and undivided love, not weighing even your own knightly honor and worldly fame against the utterness of that love. And while of course, just as the Imaun says, if I were ever to marry anybody else, as I suppose I did promise to do,—in a way, that is,—still, it is not as if I cared one snap of my fingers about appearances, and I simply will not have it cut off! For such utterly unselfish love as yours, dear Gonfal, is the gift which is worthiest to be my bridal gift: and, no matter what anybody says, it is you who shall be my husband!”

“Ah, but the cried quest, madame!” he answered, “and your promise to those seven other idiots!”

“I shall proclaim to those detestable third sons, and to the Imaun, and to Masu, and to everybody,” the Queen said, “a very weighty and indeed a sacred truth. I shall tell them that there is no gift more great than love.”

But the tall man who now stood before her shared in nothing in the exaltedness of her sentiments; and his dismay was apparent. “Alas, madame, you propose an enormity! for we are all so utterly the slaves of our catchwords that everybody would agree with you. There is no hope in ‘what anybody may say.’ Imbeciles everywhere will be saying that you have chosen wisely.”

Morvyth now sat peculiarly erect upon the ivory couch. “I am sure, I am really quite sure, Gonfal, that I do not understand you.”

“I mean, madame, that—while of course your offer is all that is most kind and generous,—that I must, here again, in mere honesty, I must distinguish. I mean that I think you know, as well as I do, love is not a gift which any man can give nor any person hope long to retain. Ah, no, madame! we shrug, we smilingly allow romanticists their catchwords: meanwhile it remains the veriest axiom, among realists like you and me, that love too is but a loan.”

“So you have come back,” the Queen remarked, with an approach to crossness, “to your eternal loans!”

He slightly flung out both hands, palms upward. “Love is that loan, my dear, which we accept most thankfully. But at the same time let us concede, as rational persons, the impermanence of all those materials which customarily provoke the erotic emotions.”

“Gonfal,” the young Queen said, “now you talk stupidly. You talk with a dangerous lack of something more important than discretion.”

“My love, I talk, again, as a widower.” Then for a while he said nothing: and it appeared to Morvyth that this incomprehensible ingrate had shivered. He said: “And still, still, I talk of mathematical certainties! For how can you hope to remain in anything a lovable object? In a score of years, or within at most two-score, you will have become either fat or wrinkled, your teeth will rot and tumble out, your eyes will blear; your thighs will be most unenticingly mottled, your breath will be unpleasant, and your breasts will have become flabby bags. All these impairments, I repeat, my dear, are mathematical certainties.”

To such horrid and irrelevant nonsense the Queen replied, with dignity, “I am not your dear; and I simply wonder at your impudence in ever for one moment thinking I was.”

“Then, too,” the ill-mannered wretch had gone on, meditatively, “you have not much intelligence. That is very well for the present, because intelligence in youth, for some reason or another, is bad for the hair and muddies the complexion. Yet an aging woman who is stupid, such as Madame Niafer or such as another woman whom I remember, is also quite unendurable.”

“But what,” she asked him, rationally, “have I to do with stupid old women? I am Morvyth, I am Queen of the Isles of Wonder. I have the secrets which control all wealth and—if I should ever take a fancy to such things,—all wisdom too. There is no beauty like my beauty, nor any power like my power—”

“I know, I know!” he returned,—“and for the present I of course adore you. But nevertheless, did I fall in with your very dreadful suggestion, and permit you to place me, quite publicly, at your dear side, upon the terraced throne of Inis Dahut,—why, then, within a terribly brief while, I would not mind your being stupid, I would not actually notice your dilapidated looks, I would accept all your shortcomings complacently. And I would be contented enough with you, who, once, were the despair and joy of my living. No, Morvyth, no, my child! I, who was once a poet of sorts, could not again endure to live in contentment with a stupid and querulous woman who was unattractive to look at. And, very certainly, within two-score of years—”

But a queenly gesture had put a check to such wild talk, and Morvyth too had arisen, saying:

“Your arithmetic becomes tiresome. One can afford to honor truisms in their proper place, and about suitable persons: but there is, and always must be, a limit to the scope of such trite philosophy. Your audience is over, Messire Gonfal. And it is your last audience, because I consider you quite unutterably a beast.”

He kissed the imperious little hand which dismissed him. “You at all events, my dear,” he stated, “are quite unutterably human.”