PERPETUA AND DIOGENES THE FOOL
The fool shrugged his shoulders—an action that accentuated their deformity; and he chuckled awhile to himself, like a choking hen, while he peered maliciously at the maiden through narrowed slits of eyelids. When he had savored sufficiently whatever jest so moved him to ugly mirth he spoke again.
“Oh, ay—Robert the Good! But virtue is no medicine for mortality, so Robert the Good is dead and buried these six weeks, and Robert the Bad reigns in his stead, and again I drink to his happy damnation.”
And again he drank the cool fluid, sucking it greedily from the cup ere he returned it to Perpetua.
The girl took it unconsciously. She had forgotten the fool in his phrase, in the name he gave to the King. Her springs had been sweetened by hearing of Robert the Good, of his gentleness, his justice, his mercy, of how men loved him in Sicily. She had taken it for granted that his golden reign would endure forever, and now she learned from these mocking lips that gentleness and justice and mercy were in the dust. “Robert the Bad,” she murmured to herself, and the words made her shudder in the sun.
The fool leered at her as if he read her thoughts, and he laughed briskly.
“Angel of Arcady,” he piped, “shall I tell you tales of the King to admonish your innocency?”
Perpetua’s eyes and mind came back from the sky into which she had been staring. There might be a new king in Sicily, but she had her old work to do.