It was the constant effort of those responsible in the State to marry off a young prince almost as soon as he came to the age of puberty. For such youngsters are great rovers, with appetites as gluttonous as dogs, and so care-free that they are surprised and indignant if others question the action which they do not themselves weigh. It is certainly a hardship and a tyranny if a neighbour should constrain a neighbour’s wife to his own domestic uses, but it is only a hardship because the affair occurs between equals, among whom friendly observances are due, and between whom equal respect is grounded. Among equals anything that implies inequality is a punishable wrong: but there is no hardship when the superior takes what he carelessly desires. It is community of interests which makes equals, and the disturbance of this which makes enemies; but there is no community of interests between the prince and the subject, and no man is aggrieved by an action which can only affect his honour by increasing it. Nevertheless, so illogical is the mind of man, and so uncompromising is the sense of property, that men could be found who would interrupt with a spear the careless pleasure of a prince; and there were some, blacksmiths mostly and cobblers, who would take a cudgel to the king’s majesty itself and beat it out of a warm bed.
So, when Lavarcham thought that she might conduct her ward between the lax arms of her sovereign, she but harboured an idea which every male person in the realm who had a wife, a sister, or a daughter, hoped for with fervour.
Nor did the idea occur only to her.
Within a month of Maeve’s disappearance more young ladies began to appear in Emania than had been noticed there previously, so that Conachúr, had he been in a condition to observe such things, might have noticed that Ulster had begun to blossom like the rose.
But plottings such as these were of small use in the case of a man like Conachúr, and it is likely that the first person to know what should be done and what was expected from the head of the State was the king himself. His duty as a king would point him the way: the necessity to repair what had been damaged would claim his mind; and the desire to forget by replacing would be even more insistent; for if a hair of the dog that bit you is the specific against drunkenness, it is a medicine against love also, and is, alas! the only one we know of.
Therefore the king did for a while take a fevered interest in the ladies of his court, but he found, so jaundiced was his eye, that they were neither worth looking at nor worth talking to, and he did not grudge their companionship to any man.
To Lavarcham, at last, he opened his mind.
“I must marry, Lavarcham, my soul.”
“There is plenty of time for that, master,” said the wily woman.