The pity deepened on the girl’s face, scattering the curiosity, and she spoke gently, hopefully:
“I have sometimes picked a wrinkled, twisted pear and found it honey-sweet at the heart.”
Even the callous fool felt the tenderness in Perpetua’s voice, the tender pity of the strong spirit for the weak, the evil, the unhappy. He shook his head less angrily than before.
“I am no such bird-of-paradise,” he sighed. “My mind is a crooked knife in a crooked sheath. When I was a child in my Italian village, trimly built, children laughed at me for my ugliness, for my hump, for my peaked chin and my limp, and I learned to curse other children as I learned to speak. Every hand, every tongue was against the hunchback, yet my shame saved me. For my gibbosities tickled the taste of a travelling mountebank. He bought me of my parents, who were willing enough to part with their monster; he trained me to his trade, taught me to sing foul songs and to dance foul dances. I have grinned and whistled through evil days and ways. My wit was gray with iniquities when Hildebrand, the King’s minion, saw me one day at a fair in Naples and picked me out for jester to Prince Robert.”
The head of Diogenes drooped upon his breast. He had not talked, he had not thought, of the past for long enough, and the memory vexed him. Perpetua propped the sword against the wall of her dwelling and stood with linked hands for a little while in silence, looking out over the sea. Then she turned again to where the fool crouched, and spoke to him softly.
“Are all court folk like you?”
Diogenes lifted his head, and the old malignity glittered in his eyes.
“Ay, in the souls; but for the most part they have smooth bodies.”
He watched the girl closely while her eyes again sought the sea and came back and met the fool’s gaze.