“The Morvyth that I see, and in my manner worship, can be no man’s wife. All poets learn this truth in their vexed progress to becoming realists.”
For yet another while the young Queen was silent. And then she said:
“I do not quite understand you, my dear, and probably I never shall. But I know that through your love of me you have twice maimed yourself, and have, as though it were a trifle, put aside your chance of winning honor and great wealth and all that gentle persons most prize—”
“I am,” he replied, “a realist. To get three utterly pleasant years one pays, of course. But realists pay without grumbling.”
“My dearest,” the Queen continued,—now breathing quicklier, and with the sort of very happy sobbing which she felt the occasion demanded,—“you alone of all the men who have talked and postured so much, you alone have given me whole-hearted and undivided love, not weighing even your own knightly honor and worldly fame against the utterness of that love. And while of course, just as the Imaun says, if I were ever to marry anybody else, as I suppose I did promise to do,—in a way, that is,—still, it is not as if I cared one snap of my fingers about appearances, and I simply will not have it cut off! For such utterly unselfish love as yours, dear Gonfal, is the gift which is worthiest to be my bridal gift: and, no matter what anybody says, it is you who shall be my husband!”
“Ah, but the cried quest, madame!” he answered, “and your promise to those seven other idiots!”
“I shall proclaim to those detestable third sons, and to the Imaun, and to Masu, and to everybody,” the Queen said, “a very weighty and indeed a sacred truth. I shall tell them that there is no gift more great than love.”
But the tall man who now stood before her shared in nothing in the exaltedness of her sentiments; and his dismay was apparent. “Alas, madame, you propose an enormity! for we are all so utterly the slaves of our catchwords that everybody would agree with you. There is no hope in ‘what anybody may say.’ Imbeciles everywhere will be saying that you have chosen wisely.”
Morvyth now sat peculiarly erect upon the ivory couch. “I am sure, I am really quite sure, Gonfal, that I do not understand you.”
“I mean, madame, that—while of course your offer is all that is most kind and generous,—that I must, here again, in mere honesty, I must distinguish. I mean that I think you know, as well as I do, love is not a gift which any man can give nor any person hope long to retain. Ah, no, madame! we shrug, we smilingly allow romanticists their catchwords: meanwhile it remains the veriest axiom, among realists like you and me, that love too is but a loan.”