Perpetua clasped her hands together in an agony of compassion for the unhappy fool, and for herself, more helpless and alone through his coming.
“Dear Heaven,” she prayed, “help me to mend this madness.”
“Do you still shun me?” Robert asked, angrily, fretted by the girl’s resistance. “Am I young, smooth, strong, comely to so little purpose? Is it a light thing to be a king like me?”
Perpetua listened to his ravings in despair. It seemed so horrible to see the ugly fool stand there mouthing his own praises, his kingship. As she shrank from him, her averted eyes fell on the silver mirror which Lycabetta had left lying upon her couch. A sudden wild hope came into Perpetua’s mind. Though the man’s brain might be moonstruck, his eyes might still be honest, and a glance might bring him back to sanity. At least the test was worth trying. She sprang to the couch, caught up the mirror, and, turning to Robert as he followed her, thrust, with extended arms, the mirror before his face. Had he been struck by lightning his advance had not stayed more surely.
“God in heaven,” he cried, in a dreadful voice, that made the girl shiver to hear. He snatched the mirror from her and stared into the shining field, reading there the hideous lineaments of the fool Diogenes. His wild eyes turned from the mirror to her and back again.
“What damnable trick is this? I am bewitched, for the fool’s face leers at me. Some devil reigns in Sicily, who has put this stain upon me.”
The tears came into Perpetua’s eyes for the blighted wretch who could thus deny his own image. Robert saw the tears and guessed their meaning.
“Woman,” he entreated. “Can you not pierce through this glamour? I am, indeed, the King. For holy charity believe me. Though it has pleased Heaven or Hell to change me thus, I am the King.”
He held out his hands to her in piteous supplication, and for a moment for very pity’s sake there came the temptation into Perpetua’s mind to humor the poor ruin. But she thrust the temptation from her, and sadly turned her head. Robert, with a groan, flung himself upon the couch and sat there staring into the mirror, trying to understand the calamity that had come upon him and blotted out his form. In the shining glass the wrinkled, twisted face of Diogenes twitched viciously. Blind rage overswept him, and he shook his fist at the foul reflection, screaming madly: