The old woman replied: “In any event, you have failed; but that does not really matter. He travels, you assure me, with his assured betrayer. And the road he follows, that also, is lively enough and long enough to betray him in the end. For he will meet others of my daughters; and if all else fails, he will meet me.”
“The ship of my enduring resolution is not yet wrecked upon the iceberg of his indifference; and I am not through with him, by any means. I am returning to this unremunerative occupier of my couch,—for breakfast, O my Mother,” the Princess added, with a merry laugh.
And the old lady answered her with a mother’s ever-responsive tenderness. “That is my own child. One has to persevere with these romantics, no matter how hard the task may seem. For none of us knows yet what these romantic men desire. My daughters prepare for them fine food and drink, my daughters see to it that their homes are snug, and at the end of each day my daughters love them dutifully. All things that men can ask for, my daughters furnish them. Why need so many of these men nurse strange desires which do not know their aim? for how can any of my daughters content such desires?”
“One can but summon, O my Mother, the terminator of delights and the separator of companions and the ender of all desires.”
“There are other ways, my dearie, which are more subtle. That way is of the East, that way is old and crude. Still, that way also quiets over-ambitious dreaming; and that way serves.”
Gerald blinked. He was a bit troubled by the matter-of-fact occurrence before his eyes of a perfectly incredible happening.
For the elder lady became transfigured. She became larger, all ruddiness went away from her, and she took on the black and livid coloring of a thunder cloud. In her left hand she now carried a pair of scales and a yardstick. Her face smiled rather terribly as she steadily grew larger. Her necklace, you perceived, was made of human skulls, and each of her earrings was the dangling corpse of a hanged man in a very poor state of preservation. Altogether, it was not a grief to Gerald when the Mother of Every Princess had attained to her full heavenly stature, and had vanished.
But the Lady of the Water-Gap was changed in quite another fashion. Where she had stood now fluttered a large black and yellow butterfly.
9.
How One Butterfly Fared
SO it was in the shape of a large butterfly that Evasherah returned toward Gerald, to careen and drift affectionately about him, in a bewildering medley of bright colors. He cried to her adoringly, “My darling—!” He grasped at her: and she did not avoid him.