The white road was as empty as a noon-day dream; its whiteness only troubled by one moving object, as noon-day dreams are often troubled by one persistent, inappreciable idea. But the girl had eyes as keen as a mountain-eagle, and she knew that, whoever the climber was, the climber was not her father. Then she sighed a little sigh and turned and entered her dwelling and drew the door behind her, and the mountain-top was lonely for a time. Only for a time. Up the hill came a fantastical fellow, alternately singing and sighing, for it seemed that the fierce heat vexed him despite of his melody. He was a strange ape, tall and lean and withered, with a wry shoulder like a gibbous moon and a wry leg like a stricken tree, and his face was as the face of a goblin, with a long, peaked nose, and loose, protruding lips, traitors to the few and evil teeth that interwalled his livid gums, and his ears stood out like bats’ wings from his yellow, wrinkled cheeks. He was visibly punished by his journey; the sweat streamed from his leather and under his puckered eyelids his eyes flamed imprecations. His grotesque body was enveloped in yet more grotesque apparel—the piebald of the buffoon, the mottled livery of the chartered mountebank. There was a slender collar of gold about his neck, on which those that were near enough to him and had quick sight might read in plain terms that he was a royal fool, one of those jesters whom the great loved to tend to their beck, that they might ply them with mirth in hours that were mirthless. When the fantastical fellow had reached the summit he flung himself at once onto the nearest seat that one of the fallen columns afforded, and sat for a space gasping and puffing and spitting out blasphemies between every gasp and puff of his staggered anatomy.
When his wind came to him it took shape in a furious soliloquy, addressed to the vacant space about. “Devil take the day!” he grunted, pressing his hands to his lean sides as if he were trying to squeeze back the breath into his jaded body. “The sun rides as sky-high as the King’s pride, and the air blazes as dog-hot as the King’s choler. I have climbed the hill-side to spite him, and now am like to die of thirst to spite myself, unless I can find friends and flagons.”
So he chattered to himself as if he were conversing with some familiar spirit or demon, and as he babbled his dull eyes stared around him stupidly, taking slow stock of unfamiliar objects. He grinned spitefully at the church and its great archangel and mouthed a lewd objurgation. Turning his back on the church, he leered at the pillars and the mosque contemptuously until it dimly dawned upon him that the ruin was now a place of human habitation. He rose with a groan of fatigue and hobbled towards it. “A church is no good,” he muttered, “but hospitality may hide in that hovel. Knock and know.” And having by this time arrived at the door of the dwelling, he proceeded to rain a succession of blows on it with his clinched fists, as if he were determined not to be denied, and, at worst, to force an entrance.
The fury of his call was soon answered. Perpetua flung back the door and faced the insistent fool.
“Is doom-crack at hand,” she asked, quietly, as she eyed the strange figure before her, “that you hammer so hotly?”
The misshapen petitioner surrendered something of his malevolence to the beauty of the girl. He swept her a salutation that exaggerated courtliness, and there was a quality of apology in his voice as he spoke.
“I am sand dry as the ancient desert, and to be thirsty roughens my temper. Ply me tongue-high with wine and I will pipe for you blithely.”
Perpetua shook her head, and her red locks gleamed and quivered with the motion like an aureole of flame.
“I have no wine,” she said, gravely, “for my father denies its virtues. But there is a pitcher of milk within at your pleasure.”