“It gives its life for its father!”
Without sound or warning, she sank at my feet, and lay motionless, her white face turned upward.
A harsh jest was uttered at my shoulder.
“Bravo! It is so they always think to sport with our feelings. But we have an infallible medicine”—and the gaoler, coming from behind me, cut across the senseless face with his whip.
With a roar, a figure bounded out of the darkness of the cell, and whirling long arms about the beast, fell with and upon him, and battered out his brains upon the stone floor. It all passed in a moment; and in that moment I knew my lost monster again, gaunt and foul and tattered, yet even in his wasted strength a god, and glorious. Then against a coming tumult and scurry of feet I flung my body.
“Back!” I shrieked; “the king gives me a life! I claim his—do you hear? If by a hair it is injured, the bitter worse for you all!”
Sobbing, burning, in a flurry of passion, I threw myself, an hour later in the palace, at the king’s knees.
“Sire,” I cried, “I claim your royal promise. I ask mercy for a friend.”
Taken off his guard, bewitched, perhaps, “It is granted,” he said.
Then he recovered himself, and laughed, and patted my shoulder.