52. Remorse of a Poor Devil

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NINZIAN sat on a stone bench which was carved at each end with a crouching sphinx, and he waited there while the sunlight died away behind the poplars. The moment could not but seem to anybody pregnant with all danger. Holmendis was coming, and Holmendis would very soon be hearing the confession of Balthis, and these saints were over-often the prey of an excitability which damaged their cause.

That impetuous Holmendis was quite as apt as not to resort out of hand to unbridled miracle-working, and with the fires of Heaven to annihilate his leading fellow laborer in every exercise of altruistic intermeddling,—without pausing, rationally, to reflect what an annihilation the resultant scandal would be to Holmendis’ own party of reform and uplift. Holmendis would no doubt be sorry afterward: but he would get no sympathy from Ninzian.

And, meanwhile, Ninzian loved his wife so greatly that prolonged existence without her did not tempt him. His wife, whoever she might be, had always seemed peculiarly dear to Ninzian. And now, as he looked back upon the exceeding love which he had borne his wife, in Nineveh and Thebes and Tyre and Babylon and Rome and Byzantium, and in all other cities that bred fine women, and as he weighed the evanescence of this love which was evading him after these few thousand years, it seemed to Ninzian a pitiable thing that his season of earthly contentment should thus be cut off in its flower and withered untimelily.

And his conscience troubled him, too. For the fiend had not been entirely candid with his Balthis, and Poictesme was not by any means the stage of the complaisant easy-going fellow’s primal failure. So he now forlornly thought of how utterly he had failed in his mission upon Earth, ever since he first came to Mount Kaf to work evil among men, in the time of King Tchagi, a great while before the Deluge; and he considered with dismay the appalling catalogue of virtuous actions into which these women had betrayed him.

For always the cause of Ninzian’s downfall had been the same: he would get to talking indiscretion to some lovely girl or another, just through his desire to be agreeable to everybody, and his devilish eloquence would so get the better of her that the girl would invariably marry him and ruthlessly set about making her husband a well-thought-of citizen. Nor did it avail him to argue. Women nowhere appeared to have any sympathy with Ninzian’s appointed labor upon Earth: they seemed to have an instinctive bent toward Heaven and the public profession of every virtue. Just as in the case of that poor Miramon Lluagor, Ninzian reflected, Ninzian’s wife also did not care two straws about her husband’s career and the proper development of his talents.

Then Ninzian on a sudden recollected the cause of the disturbance which had been put upon his living. He drew his dagger, and, squatting on the paved walkway, he scratched out that incriminating footprint.

He was none too soon.