Lying there in his wild rage, he babbled to himself.
“Am I mad? Shall I, Sicily, be defied by this cold Amazon? She shall burn as a witch for this; she shall burn! She has put some spell upon me, and she shall burn for my burning. I would not have her now, but she shall die in pain.”
Drowned in his frenzy of thwarted passion and baffled anger, the King was unaware that a woman had entered the open space from the mountain-path, and was moving with light steps across the grasses towards the spot where he sat and ate his heart. The new-comer was beautiful with a beauty so different from that of the girl whose kingdom was the hill-top that few to whom the one seemed perfect would have found the other all-conquering fair. Tall and imperious as some evil empress of old Rome, her black hair bound with ivy leaves of gold, her fine body draped in strangely dyed silks—snake-colored, blue and green and golden-scaled—that shot a shimmering iridescence with every movement of the limbs, whose whiteness their transparency rather betrayed than veiled, she trod the earth with such an air as Balkis may have worn when she came a-visiting Solomon. The painters of the antique world would have welcomed in that voluptuous flesh, in the poppy of her mouth, in the midnight of those eyes that glowed with the fires of Thessalian incantations, their ideal for some image of the goddess of all-conquering desire. The Sophists of the antique world would have read her story charactered in every lithe line, in every appealing motion, and saluted in her the priestess of sheer appetite, for whom the gods were dead, indeed, yet living in their material form—Dionysus as wine, Aphrodite as the act of love, Apollo as the kindling sunlight.
As Balkis came to seek Solomon, so this woman came to the mountain-summit seeking a king. But she had thought to greet him coming out of the gray church, and it was with a start of surprise that she saw the glittering figure crouched in an attitude of woe upon the fallen column, and recognized in that image of abasement the Prince of Naples, the young lord of Sicily. Swiftly, but with the stately grace of those who of old time moved and allured in the streets of Rome when the feast of Flora was towards, she passed through the thick grasses to the column and the King. She knew it was he by his habit, by the familiar form, though she could not see his face, and she wondered why he sat there alone and with such show of grief. She was by his side without his hearing her, and it was not until she spoke that he knew of her presence.
“My lord!” she said, softly, in a voice as sweet as the voices of the women who sang the praises of the mystic Venus in the secret gardens of Cyrene.
Robert jerked his head from his hands, startled to find that he was no longer alone, but, when he saw who it was that had interrupted his meditations, wonder and joy contended in his countenance.
“Lycabetta!” he cried; “Lycabetta, by the gods! Why is the priestess of love on these summits?”
Lycabetta had dropped on her knees at his feet in Oriental abasement, but her face was raised to his and her eyes were lamps of passion.
“Sire,” she sighed. “If I disturb your Majesty’s quiet, sign and I will retire.”