13. Economics of Gisèle

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NOW Madame Gisèle also was looking at that which Ninzian had procured for her husband at a price. She looked at it—upon the whole—with slightly less disfavor than she afterward looked at the two men.

“A good day and a grand blessing to you, Messire Ninzian!” said Madame Gisèle: and she extended her hand, along with her scouring-rag, for him to kiss, and she inquired about his wife Dame Balthis, pleasantly enough. She spoke then, in a different tone, to Miramon Lluagor. “And with what are you cluttering up the house now?”

“Ah, wife,” replied Miramon, “here, very secretly fetched out of the land of Assyria, are those bees about whom it is prophesied that they shall rest upon all bushes. Here are the bright bees of Toupan, a treasure beyond word or thinking. They are not as other bees, for theirs is the appearance of shining ice: and they crawl fretfully, as they have crawled since Toupan’s downfall, about this cross of black stone—”

“That is a very likely story for you to be telling me, who can see that the disgusting creatures have wings to fly away with whenever they want to! And, besides, who in the world is this Toupan?”

“He is nobody in this world, wife, and it is wiser not to speak of him. Let it suffice that in the time of the Old Ones he made all things as they were. Then Koshchei came out of Ydalir, and took the power from Toupan, and made all things as they are. Yet three of Toupan’s servitors endure upon earth, where they who were once lords of the Vendish have now no privilege remaining save to creep humbly as insects: the use of their wings is denied them here among the things which were made by Koshchei, and the charmed stone holds them immutably. Oho, but, wife, there is a cantrap which would free them, a cantrap which nobody has as yet discovered, and to their releaser will be granted whatever his will may desire—”

“This is some more of your stuff and nonsense, out of old fairy tales, where everybody gets three wishes, and no good from any of them!”

“No, my love, because I shall put them to quite practical uses. For you must know that when I have found out the cantrap which will release the bees of Toupan—”

Gisèle showed plainly that his foolishness did not concern her. She sighed, and she hung the sword in its accustomed place. “Oh, but I am aweary of this endless sorcery and piddling with vain dreams!”

“Then, wife,” said Miramon, “then why are you perpetually meddling with what you do not understand?”

“I think,” Ninzian observed at once, for Ninzian too was married, “I think that I had best be going.”

But Gisèle’s attention was reserved for her husband. “I meddle, as you so very politely call it, because you have no sense of what is right and proper, and no sense of morals, and no sense of expediency, and, in fact, no sense at all.”

Miramon said, “Now, dearest—!”

Ninzian was hastily picking up his hat.

And Gisèle continued, with that resistless and devastating onflow which is peculiar to tidal waves and the tongue of her who speaks for her husband’s own good.

“Women everywhere,” Gisèle generalized, “have a hard time of it: but in particular do I pity the woman that is married to one of you moonstruck artists. She has not half a husband, she has but the tending of a baby with long legs—”

“It is so much later than I thought, that really now—” observed Ninzian, ineffectively.

“—And I might have had a dozen husbands—”

Miramon said, “But, surely, no woman of your well-known morality, my darling—”

“—I might, as you very well remember, have married Count Manuel himself—”

“I know. I can recall how near you came to marrying him. He was a dull, a cold-blooded and a rather dishonest clod-hopper: but the luck of Manuel Pig-Tender did not ever desert him,” said Miramon, sighing, “not even then!”

“I say, I might have had my pick of a dozen really prominent and looked-up-to warriors, who would have had the decency to remember our anniversary and my birthday, and in any event would never have been in the house twenty-four hours a day! Instead, here I am tied to a muddle-head who fritters away his time contriving dreams that nobody cares about one way or the other! And yet, even so—”

“And yet, even so—as you were no doubt going on to observe, my dearest,—even so, since your soliloquy pertains to matters in which our guest could not conceivably be interested—”

“And yet,” said Gisèle, with a heavier and a deadlier emphasis, “even so, if only you would be sensible about your silly business I could put up with the inconvenience of having you underfoot every moment. People need dreams to help them through the night, and nobody enjoys a really good dream more than I do when I have time for it, with the million and one things that are put upon me. But dreams ought to be wholesome—”

“My darling, now, as a matter of esthetics, as a mere point of fact—”

“—But dreams ought to be wholesome, they ought to be worth while, they ought to teach an uplifting moral, and certainly they ought not to be about incomprehensible thin nonsense that nobody can half way understand. They ought, in a word, to make you feel that the world is a pretty good sort of place, after all—”

“But, wife, I am not sure that it is,” said Miramon, mildly.

“Then, the more shame to you! and the very least you can do is to keep such morbid notions to yourself, and not be upsetting other people’s repose with them!”

“I employ my natural gift, I express myself and none other. The rose-bush does not put forth wheat, nor flax either,” returned the sorcerer, with a tired shrug. “In fine, what would you have?”

“A great deal it means to you,—you rose-bush!—what I prefer! But if I had my wish your silly dream-making would be taken away from you so that we might live in some sort of reputable and common-sense way.”

All the while that she reasoned sensibly and calmly with her husband for his own good, Gisèle had feverishly been dusting things everywhere, just to show what a slave she was to him, and because it irritated Miramon to have his personal possessions thus dabbed at and poked about: and now, as she spoke, Gisèle slapped viciously with her scouring-rag at the black cross. And a thing happened to behold which would have astonished the innumerous mages and the enchanters who had given over centuries to searching for the cantrap which would release the bees of Toupan. For now without any exercise of magic the scouring-rag swept from the stone one of the insects. Koshchei, who made all things as they are, had decreed, they report, that these bright perils could be freed only in the most obvious way, because he knew this would be the last method attempted by any learned person.

Then for an instant the walls of the ivory tower were aquiver like blown veils. And the bee passed glitteringly to the window and through the clear glass of the closed window, leaving a small round hole there, as the creature went to join its seven fellows in the Pleiades.