“Your cause is just, your sword is sharp; fight in God’s name. I will go to your daughter now.”
Theron thanked him with a grateful glance.
“Tell her her father loves her. She knows that well, yet tell it to her.”
Hieronymus left him and passed out of the arena through the archway which led to the cells. Theron remained sitting on the step with his elbows on his knees and his chin propped on his hands.
“This is the time when a man should pray,” he said to himself, “but my thoughts tangle and my words jangle.”
Through the gardens came a singular figure, tall and lean and withered, with a wry shoulder like a gibbous moon and a wry leg like a stricken tree, and his face had a long, peaked nose and loose, protruding lips, and ears like the wings of bats. His mottled livery was grass-stained and earth-stained, and he had dizened it with a kind of woodland finery. He had wild flowers twisted in his hair; a chaplet of scarlet wood-berries was about his neck; he carried an ash sapling for a staff, and he munched at an apple. He looked about him curiously, as if a little dazed. Then he saw Theron and went towards him.
“Good-morning, gaffer,” he said.
Theron looked up and beheld to his surprise the missing court-fool Diogenes.
“You are the fool Diogenes,” Theron said. “Why have you come back? The King longs for your head. I care little who lives or dies, save one, but fly if you are wise.”
Diogenes, for it was indeed he, shook his head. “Nay, nay, gaffer,” he answered. “I am wise; I know my business. I think I have been asleep in the green wood a thousand years and waited upon by elves and fairies and all manner of pygmies, and they taught me the speech of birds, and what the trees whisper to each other from dawn to dusk, and the war-cries of the winds, with other much delectable knowledge which would have made me wiser than the wisest—but now that I am awake I have forgot it all.”