Part 4

"Is the pretty lady looking for the pretty knight that passed this way yestere'en?" asked the witch-wife, with a horrible leer of her sunken eyes.

The Princess elevated her eyebrows with a look of scorn.

"No," she answered coldly; "I am looking for the Microbe."

"How?" asked the witch-woman, with her hand behind her ear.

"The Microbe!" shouted the Princess.

"Is it a man, or a lady, or a place?"

"It's a monster!" shrieked the Princess. "It kills, and eats, and destroys." And then followed a faithful repetition of Auguste Philippe's description of the beast. The witch-wife laughed and rocked to and fro, her yellow teeth showing in her shrunken gums.

"Oh, deary, deary, deary!" she said, "there ain't any such critter, truly there ain't. I've lived here in the swamp seventy-nine year; I never saw one, and I sees pretty nigh everything."

"Who eats the youths and the maidens, and the old men and the children?" demanded the Princess sternly.

"How do I know? How do I know?" cackled the old woman. "_I_ don't."

The Princess Victorine rode away, and behind her the witch-wife laughed.

"That's the way the pretty knight went," she called. "You'll find him further on."

The Princess indignantly turned her charger and rode in the opposite direction. That morning came her moment of great reward, for, by the side of a noxious swamp, a gray mist met her, blinding her eyes, and she thought she heard sounds of gurgling and lashing and clawing. Once she caught sight of the great shining eye of which Auguste Philippe had told her, and then she dimly detected the grin of teeth. Olivera Rinalda Victorine was sure that she had met the Microbe at last. With lifted spear, and with the shout, "A maiden to the rescue!" she rode into the floating cloud and thrust it through and through. Her spear crashed on--something; her charger seemed to trample a living creature under foot, and snorted with terror. Thrice came swift blows upon the Princess's shield, but whether they were of claws or tail, she could not tell. Her ears were deafened by the noise; her armor ripped in the gathers at the waist; her good steed for a moment lost his footing in the morass, but she reined him up, and, mad with the thrill of victory, struck out again and again with more than woman's strength. Then, was it fancy, or did she hear a roar as of mortal pain? Did she catch the sound of swift retreat of a hundred thousand wounded legs?

At home, upon the battlements, that morning, stood Auguste Philippe with some ladies of the court. (Lady Marie was lovely in deepest crêpe, and the Duchess was looking her best in heavy mourning.)

"It was in that direction that she went, did you say?" sobbed the Duchess, with a black-bordered handkerchief at her eyes.

The young king nodded.

"How can I bear it?" asked Lady Marie, raising her clasped hands to heaven. "Oh, your Highness, send out a searching party! Send fifty armed knights! Think what may happen at any moment!"

"Pshaw!" said Auguste Philippe the Twenty-fourth, "Victorine can take care of herself. She is four inches taller than I, and her arms are like iron. Let her be. She is foolish, but she has got to have her fling."

"In my day," said Lady Marie, "no modest girl would have suggested such a thing."

"I dare say," sighed his Majesty; "but the thing has got to come; they must sow their wild oats! She will come back all right."

Though Lady Marie did not know it, his Majesty Auguste Philippe then, as always, spoke the truth.

At that very moment, beyond the wide green plain, and beyond the sandy waste, a young knight, riding slowly, with his head bent down upon his breast, came upon a maiden sitting at the edge of a wood. Near her, cropping the grass, strayed a gray charger, with his bridle falling loose upon his neck. The maiden was curiously clad in shining armor, only her helmet was off, and tears were trickling down her cheeks. Now and then she dried them with strands of her yellow hair, and then she shuddered, gazing at a bloody spear that she held in her left hand.

"Fair lady," said the Knight, riding toward her, "tell me your trouble, that I may help you."

The Princess Olivera Rinalda Victorine looked up at him and sobbed, and her chain armor rose and fell upon her bosom. She had not cried this way since that memorable day on the stone bench in the garden, twelve years ago.

"I've--I've killed the Microbe!" gasped Princess Victorine.

"Indeed?" said the Knight, raising his visor and showing a pleasant smile upon a pale face. "And are you not glad?"

"Ye-es!" said the Princess, with a great heave of her bosom as she looked at the disfigured spear.

The stranger alighted from his horse and came slowly toward the Princess. He was tall and strongly built, but he walked as one to whom every motion brings pain.

"Are you quite sure that the beast is dead?"

The Princess nodded.

"Quite."

"I wonder," said the Knight meditatively, "if you brought away his head or a claw?"

"No, I didn't; but I feel very sure. Men are so skeptical!" said the Princess, with some heat.

"Not at all," answered the Knight courteously, "only your quest is the same as mine, and I should be glad to know that it is over. I, too, am hunting him."

A beautiful expression swept over the Princess's face and into her blue eyes. She looked less like a baby than she had done at any time for seventeen years.

"I thought men didn't care."

"Some do."

"Auguste Philippe doesn't--he only laughs, and so does old Lord Jean; but I think that this will convince them," and Princess Victorine triumphantly brandished her spear.

"Ah!" said the Knight, looking at it with sudden interest, "may I see your point?" But as he moved to take it, he gave a sudden groan and fainted at the Princess's feet.

"Oh, oh, oh!" cried Olivera Rinalda Victorine. In a trice she unlaced the Knight's helmet and corselet, and was horrified to find blood flowing from an open wound in his shoulder. Hastily she brought water in her helmet from a spring hard by, and bathed his forehead and eyes, and then ran for more to pour on the wound, saying, as she went, something unpleasant about her skirt of chain armor, which kept getting in her way. As she worked, the eyelids fluttered, and the dark eyes slowly opened.

"Are you hurt?" asked the Princess eagerly.

"I'm afraid that I am rather badly cut up," he answered, with a groan.

"Did that--Beast do it?" asked the Princess.

"It may be," said the Knight.

The Princess rose and put on her helmet.

"Where are you going?" asked the Knight.

"After It," said Victorine sternly.

"Lovely lady," he said feebly, "don't you think you ought to wait until I am better?"

"I'm not a lovely lady, I'm a warrior," said the Princess; "but of course I'll stay if you want me to."

"You are both," said the Knight. "Do you know I think that it would make me forget my pain if you should tell me of your fight."

So the Princess, with a shining face, told him of her battle in the mist, and of the monster with the great, glowing eye, and as she talked, she failed to see that the wounded man kept looking toward the spot where his gleaming helmet lay.

"And now," said the Princess reproachfully, with red flushing her cheeks, "tell me how you were wounded. Do you mind explaining how you came to be hurt in the back?"

"Somebody or something attacked me from behind," said the Knight, with a smile half hiding the look of pain on his face.

"The coward!" cried the Princess Victorine, in great anger.

"It may have been some one who did not know the rules of the game," said the Knight.

"That makes _no_ difference," said Princess Victorine loftily.

"Well, it was a strange combat," remarked the Knight, "and the blows were the oddest I ever received. They came thrashing from all sides, in defiance of all the laws of fighting. Whether they came from man or beast I could not see--you know yourself that it is foggy in the woods, and I was disabled by the blow in the back."

"I know," nodded the Princess sympathetically. "You've been fighting that same monster that I killed." And for the life of her, she could not help a little feeling of triumph that the beast had gone down before her rather than before him.

"When did you kill him?" asked the wounded man.

"This morning," beamed the Princess. "When were you hurt?"

"Oh, I believe it was this morning," said the Knight carelessly.

"I wish, for your sake, I had done it sooner," said Victorine regretfully. One of her greatest charms was her slowness in putting two and two together. Now she had little time for it, for the Knight fainted again. For the first time in her life, the Princess repented of her aversion to smelling-salts. However, there was plenty of water in the spring, and she kept her best lawn handkerchief, which she had carried up her sleeve, wet upon the sick man's brow. Through the fever of that day she watched him, and all night, and again a second one, and on the third day there was a look of weariness upon her face that had never been there before. As the fever abated, and the Knight was aware of the tender nursing that he was receiving, he watched the Princess with eyes full of gratitude. She had laid aside her armor, and was becomingly attired in blue brocade, which she had worn underneath the steel. The sun shone pleasantly on her yellow hair, and if the color in her cheeks was less pink than it had been, it meant, with the dark shadows under her eyes, only new beauty. When he spoke his thanks, she turned red as a boy would have done, and asked him please to stop, which he did.

That afternoon the Princess grew confidential. She was sitting near the invalid, who was propped up on a mossy pillow, supported from underneath by her armor and her shield.

"Just feel my muscle!" said the Princess impulsively.

"I have!" said the sick Knight gravely.

"Why, when?" demanded the Princess. "Oh, you mean when I lifted your head. But look how it stands out."

He did so.

"You see," said Olivera Rinalda Victorine, "I am so unfeminine. I ought to have been a boy."

"Never!" cried the Knight vehemently.

The Princess looked at him in surprise.

"I'm very sure," she said gently. "I've known it ever since I was so high," and she measured off the stature of six years by holding her white hand above the ground.

"I don't agree with you," said the Knight. "You're not in the least like a boy, really. You do not look like one, nor use your arms like one."

"When have you noticed that?" asked the Princess, in surprise.

"Oh, lots of times," he answered evasively. "But tell me why you think so."

Sitting beside him, with the beech leaves making a flickering shade on her face and throat, the Princess told him all the tragedy of her life, her discovery of her initial great mistake, her unavailing efforts to set it right, and the persecutions she had suffered because she was not ladylike. It was the first confidence that she had made in all her life, and her cheeks flushed deep red. Overhead sang thrush and sparrow, and a little breeze came and played with her floating hair. Suddenly the Knight reached out and took the white hand in his and kissed it.

"Why did you do that?" asked the Princess softly. "To comfort me for not being a boy?"

"No," growled the sick man.

"Then why?" she persisted, drawing it away.

"Oh, I can't tell you," he groaned, "until I know whether I shall get well of this beastly wound."

But the Princess, taking both hands to arrange the wet handkerchief, suddenly found them prisoned and covered with kisses.

"It is because I love you," he moaned. "Don't you understand?"

Princess Victorine eyed him with curiosity, and shook her head.

"No," she answered, kneeling down and looking at him, "I'm afraid I don't. Nobody ever did before."

The Knight laughed out from the mossy green pillow.

"That's just what makes you so adorable."

"Won't you try to make me understand?" said the Princess. "I am very slow, but when I once learn, I never forget."

"Victorine," said the Knight, fixing his dark eyes on her, "I love you, and I need you. I love your hair and your eyes and the touch of your hands, and I want you to be my queen. You are a princess, I know, but then I am a prince."

Olivera Rinalda Victorine was silent a long time, kneeling on the moss.

"Are you angry?" asked the Knight, at length.

"No," said the Princess, in a whisper. "I think I like it." Then he smiled up at her, but did not even touch her hand.

"Tell me truly," said the Princess, "don't you mind my climbing trees and doing all those things?"

"Not a bit."

"Nor the device on my shield?"

He laughed and shook his head.

"Nor my wanting to go on a quest, and do all those unfeminine things?"

"Victorine," said the Knight, "it is the brave soul of you that I love. We will go on and fight together."

Then there was a sudden shining that was neither from the sun nor the Princess's hair, but from the light that sprang into her face, and when the wounded man lifted his arms and drew her toward him, she bent and kissed him on the eyes, and no one ever knew, she least of all, where she had learned that.

Three days more and three nights they stayed there, and the sick man's strength came slowly back. In the quiet they talked of many things in the past and many yet to come. Only once in all that time did Princess Victorine looked troubled.

"Dear," she said one day, "there are moments when I am afraid that you do not quite believe in me. I am not sure that you are convinced that I have really killed the Microbe."

"Beloved," said the Knight, putting down a piece of his armor, where he had been idly fitting the point of the Princess's spear into a great hole, "I believe in you utterly, only, there may be more than one, you know, and so our quest is not over."

On the fourth day they put their armor on, caught their steeds, and rode away. On the Princess's shield the maiden stood out bravely against the blue; the stranger Knight carried the device of an ugly worm transfixed by a glittering sword, and the motto was "I search." The maiden knight and the man looked at each other from under their visors.

"To the death!" he cried, and he spurred his steed.

"To the death!" echoed the Princess, dashing after him, and so they rode gallantly away. Whether they have found and fought the Microbe none can say, but this is known, that they are happy in the quest.

THE SEVEN STUDIOUS SISTERS

THE SEVEN

STUDIOUS SISTERS

His Majesty the King was in a terrible state of mind. Leaning back, speechless, upon his throne, with his crown over one ear, his fists clenched, he strove in vain to speak, but only an inarticulate gurgling made its way from the royal throat. Behind him stood his Jester, merry in cap and bells; on the right, the court philosophers, with puckered brows and sagely folded arms; and all about knights-at-arms and ladies-in-waiting silent and dismayed.

Before the King, on the lowest step of the throne, almost under the gold-brocaded canopy, knelt, with clasped hands and beseeching eyes, Sylvie, Natalie, Amelie, Virginie, Sidonie, Dorothée, and Clementine, the seven beautiful daughters of old Count Benoît of Verdennes, all badly frightened, but intrepid.

"Speak!" thundered the King at last. "No, do not speak! Every word will be used against you!"

"Your Majesty," began Sylvie, who was the eldest and had black hair, "we came to beg,"--

"With great earnestness," continued Natalie, who had brown hair,--

"That you will give us the opportunity," said golden-haired Amelie, shivering,--

"To study," said Virginie, who had brown eyes,--

"And grow wise," said Sidonie, whose eyes were blue,--

"And so we ask," said Dorothée, who had gray eyes,--

"That we may enter the university," said little Clementine, who had dimples.

It was sad for the youngest to say the hardest part of all, yet perhaps it was only fair, as it was the strong will of Clementine that had led them there, and the courage of Clementine that had kept them from faltering by the way.

They were simply repeating what they had just said; the parts had been arranged before coming, in hope that his Majesty could not resist. Never in their worst forebodings, when they had talked it over as they braided one another's hair in the tiring-room of the castle, had they dreamed of anything so terrible as this.

"Wh-what put this idea into your heads?" thundered his Majesty.

Then the seven answered as one maiden: "The Princess Pourquoi."

The King groaned aloud, and the knights-at-arms and the ladies-in-waiting groaned with him. Was it not enough for him to have had a daughter whose useless thinking had embittered his reign? She, with her quick intellect and ready questions, had made his throne totter under him; and now, when she was safely married and away--ay, and had made as good a match as the dullest maid in Christendom, must the spirit of inquiry come back to him in seven shapes? Since she was gone, all had been peace; he had been able to sleep most of the other half of the day also. His Majesty fidgeted under his purple robe. The Church had taught him that it was right for the sins of the fathers to be visited upon the children, but nothing about the sins of the children being visited upon the fathers, and he could not understand.

Sylvie, Natalie, Amalie, Virginie, Sidonie, Dorothée, and little Clementine looked at him with begging eyes. Now brown eyes and blue eyes and gray eyes and black hair and brown hair and golden hair and dimples all appealed strongly to the King, and he was surprised at himself for a moment for not being able to act as ugly as he thought he felt.

"What do you want to study for?" he demanded, his hands slowly unclenching.

"I don't know," faltered little Clementine, blushing into her dimples. Somewhere there was a faint ripple of laughter, and yet the Jester's face was perfectly sober when he lifted his head.

"To be wise and know things," said Sidonie. The King stamped.

"To be a power," said Natalie.

"Pshaw!" said the King.

"To understand all things," said Virginie. The King groaned.

"So that people will like us," said Amelie. Then came again that echo of mocking laughter, and the Jester muttered from behind the throne:--

"Now are there some here that are greater fools than I; for the whole world knows that a woman is better beloved for what she understands not than for what she understands."

The King looked desperately about him, for he was at his wits' end, but none came to his aid. The philosophers, with their eyes cast down, were stroking their beards; the ladies-in-waiting were looking away, as delicacy demanded, after so shocking a request; the knights-at-arms were frankly gazing at blue eyes or brown, as taste suggested. Then the King spoke hoarsely:--

"This is treason. The lowest dungeon in my castle is not too hard a punishment for such offense. At any cost this spirit must be quenched--at any cost."

Tears flowed softly down the cheeks of the seven maidens, and fell on their clasped hands, and the drops from Virginie's brown eyes sparkled like jewels on Amelie's golden hair. Then, in the sorrowful pause, the King's Jester stepped softly forward, and the little bells upon his patches rang as he came.

"Sire," said he, "I could tell a remedy more potent than this and less savage."

"Speak, Fool!" said the King.

"Not afore folks," answered the Jester, with a smile.

"They understand not your folly," said the King.

"Ay, but they might, for none can tell when words of wisdom may begin to penetrate dull brains. Clear me the room of these philosophers and the others, and let the maidens begone, for I cannot abide a woman's tears."

"Go!" said his Majesty.

Then the weeping maidens and the ladies-in-waiting passed out in a shimmer of gold color, and crimson, and blue, and rich green; and after them, like a shadow, crept the philosophers in garments of black; and then, with a clash of steel and flashing of wrought armor, went the knights-at-arms, and the presence chamber was empty, save for the King on the throne and the Jester, who stood before him in the posture of the philosophers, with folded arms and head bent low.

"Sire," said the Fool, "when women grow wise"--

"The kingdom is lost," said his Majesty. "Little enough comfort is there now."

"They will outstrip their brothers," said the Jester.

"They will meddle with matters of state," said the King.

"They will see through us all," continued the Fool. "For my part, I would keep them the sweet, blind creatures that they are. 'Tis enough for me that I see through myself. Now there is one way, and one only, to check the growing intellect of women."

"And what may that be?" asked the King, the sadness lifting from his face.

"Forsooth, they must have a university of their own," answered the Jester.

"What!" thundered his Majesty.

"Ay!" said the Fool, nodding; "there is no other way. The Princess Pourquoi has lighted in this land a fire that can be put out in only one fashion. Let a foundation be made; let walls arise; let lecturers come. Naught save a university curriculum will avail now to dull the wits and divert the minds and check the thought of women."

"In truth you have a pretty wit," said the King, and he smiled. "But who will take charge of this undertaking and plan me the work that it may avail?"

"I," said the Jester. "Who else? Cap and gown would become me well, and though the King may lose his fool, he will gain My Lord Rector, who will speak bravely in the Latin tongue."

"And whom can we trust to aid in the work?" asked his Majesty.

"Lend me but the philosophers," said the Jester, with a wink, "and their natural parts shall prevail where intent might come badly off in this great task of dulling women's wits."

Then the two spoke long between themselves, and when they had finished, the Jester went and called the pages, and the great doors were thrown open, so that all entered as they had gone, and there was shimmer of silk and shining of jewels and gleaming of armor. The seven maidens came trembling in every limb, not knowing but their heads should fall, and they knelt as before at the foot of the throne, only now they had nothing to say. Then the King lifted up his voice and, smiling, said that it should be even as they had desired, and that learning and wisdom should be theirs. In one thing only should change be made: they should not mingle with the herd of men, but should have, sequestered and apart, a place of learning for womankind. When they heard this, Sylvie leaned her face upon the head of Natalie and wept for joy; and Natalie hers upon the head of Amelie, and Amelie upon Virginie, and Virginie upon Sidonie, and Sidonie upon Dorothée, and Dorothée upon little Clementine, and because Clementine had nowhere to lean her head, she wept into her own dimples.

Then the King's Fool went away and did not come again, and of this there was great talk for three days, and then all was forgotten, for another jester filled his place. One day appeared at court a grave gentleman clad all in flowing black, bearded, and with eyes cast down in a sort of inward look. All called him My Lord Rector, and none knew him for the King's Jester because he had changed his cap. He spoke but little, and that in Latin, as "_Verbum sat sapienti; depressus extollor; veni, vidi, vici_;" and if he made gibe or jest, there were none who could understand.