And very often, too, Coth would look at his wife Azra, and would remember the girl that she had been in the times when Coth had not yet given over loving anybody. He rather liked her now. It was a felt loss that she no longer had the spirit to quarrel with anything like the fervor of their happier days: not for two years or more had Azra flung a really rousing taunt or even a dinner plate in his direction: and Coth pitied the poor woman’s folly in for an instant bothering about that young scoundrel of a Jurgen, who had set up as a poet, they said, and—in the company, one heard, of a grand duchess,—was rampaging everywhither about Italy, with never a word for his parents. Coth, now, did not worry over such ingratitude at all: not less than twenty times a day he pointed out to his wife that he, for one, never wasted a thought upon the lecherous runagate.

His wife would smile at him, sadly: and after old Coth had been particularly abusive of Jurgen, she would, without speaking, stroke her husband’s knotted, stubby, splotched hand, or his tense and just not withdrawing cheek, or she would tender one or another utterly uncalled-for caress, quite as though this illogical and broken-spirited creature thought Coth to be in some sort of trouble. The woman, though, had never understood him....

Then Azra died. Coth was thus left alone. It seemed to him a strange thing that the Coth who had once been a fearless champion and a crowned emperor and a contender upon equal terms with the High Gods, should be locked up in this quiet room, weeping like a small, punished, frightened child.

33.
Economics of Coth

══════════════════════════════════════════════════

IN the months that followed, Coth wore a puzzled and baffled look. His servants reported that he talked to himself almost incessantly. But it was incoherent, uncharacteristic stuff, without any quarreling in it, they said.... Coth at the last had well-nigh given over fault-finding. He was merely puzzled.

For life, somehow, in some as yet undetected fashion, seemed to have cheated him. It was not possible that, with fair play everywhere, life would be affording you, as the sum and harvest of all, no more than this. No sort of pleasure remained: girls left, and for that matter found, you wholly frigid; wine set you to vomiting. You wanted, as if in a cold cemetery of desires, one thing alone, nowadays.

Yet the son Jurgen whom Coth’s tough heart remembered and desired was still frolicking about the pleasant and famous places of the world, with no time to waste in sedate Poictesme: and Coth rather suspected that, even now, in this sick unimaginable loneliness, were Jurgen to return, a feebly raging Coth would storm at the lad and turn him out of doors. For that was Coth’s way. He had only one way.... He reflected, now, Jurgen was no longer a lad: it well might be, indeed, that pock-marked, greasy-headed roisterer had ended living, with some husband’s dagger in his ribs. The last news heard of Jurgen, though, was that he was making songs in Byzantium with the aid of a runaway abbess, who at least had no husband. And in any event, Jurgen would not ever return, because Coth had come between the boy that had been and the leering, high-nosed strumpet at Asch, who was reported to be rivaling even that poor Kerin’s widow, Saraïde, in the great number of her co-partners in lectual exercise.

“A pert pirate in all men’s affairs, a mere cockboat sailing under the Jolly Roger!” was Coth’s verdict, as repeated by an eavesdropping page. “This Madame Dorothy has had in her more”—he mumbled so that something was lost—“than there are trees in Acaire. All the trees in Acaire are judged by their fruits. This Dorothy is a very betraying fruit from the rank tree of the Redeemer. This Dorothy has inherited from Dom Manuel such lewdness as is advantageously suited to a warrior, but misbecomes a young woman. It seems rather a pity that this light wagtail should ever have come between me and Jurgen.”