The woman whom divine will had led hither to serve as a scapegoat for the Princess Evasherah proceeded to drown satisfactorily, and with indeed a sort of decorum. She sank twice, with hardly any beating or splashing of the waters, because of that doom which was upon her. The child, though, whom no long years of living had taught to accept a preponderance of unpleasant happenings, screamed continuously, in candid, mewing disapproval of divine will.
Out of the near-by reeds came a bright-eyed jackal; and it furtively approached the child.
The Princess rose from the alabaster couch and from Gerald’s partially detaining arms. She stood for an instant irresolute. In her lovely face was trouble. Her mouth, a little open, trembled. Gerald liked that. Here was revealed the ever-tender heart of womanhood and the quick generous sympathy with all afflicted persons which living had taught him to look for only in the best literature.
The Princess quitted Gerald. She hastened to the river bank. The jackal backed from her, crouching in a half-circle, with bared teeth, and the reeds swallowed the beast. The Princess leaned down, and with a lovely gesture of compassion the Princess caught the drowning woman by one hand and assisted her ashore.
It was then that the Princess Evasherah cried out in wordless surprise. Then too her raised hands clenched, and her little fists jerked downward in a gesture of candid exasperation.
And then also the woman whom the Princess had just saved from drowning unfastened the small copper bowl and the knife which hung by copper chains about her waist. The Princess took these, she approached the wailing child, she stooped, and the crying ceased. The Princess returned to the strange woman, calling out, “Hrang, hrang!” To the gray lips of this woman Evasherah applied the blood which was now in the copper bowl, and the remainder of the child’s blood she sprinkled over the woman’s unveiled breasts and between the woman’s legs, which were held wide apart for this fecundation.
“Hail, Mother!” said Evasherah. “All hail, O red and wrinkled Mother of Every Princess! Hail, patient and insatiable Havvah! A salutation to thee! Spheng, spheng! a salutation to thee, and all delight to thee for a thousand years of thy Wednesdays! Drink deep, beloved and wise Mother, for an oblation of blood which has been rendered pure by holy texts is more sweet than ambrosia.”
At first the elder lady had seemed peculiarly red and inflamed and hideous among her tousled tresses. Now she was placated, she panted, and her eyes rolled languorously. She began, with aggrieved reproach, “But, O my dearie! you have relapsed into a masculine display of clemency such as has flung away your allotted chance of redemption.”
“Sorrow and mourning reside in my heart, O my Mother: my limbs are rendered infirm by remorse. For I had no least notion it was you. I thought only that some mortal woman was to take over my duties in the repulsive shape of a crocodile; and I could not bear to hear the small voice of the little child crying out as the sharp jackal teeth drew nearer, and to reflect that I was destroying two lives in order to purchase my freedom from this endless love-making and over-eating.”
“But it was a boy child. Dearie, you are talking as though these sons of Adam were of real importance. And to hear you, nobody would ever give you your due credit for having piously ended the ambitions of so many hundreds of them, since you have protected the entrance to the road of gods and myths against the impudence of these romantics.”
“Yet, refuge of the uplifted, and asylum of the vigorous, the persons whose blood has nourished my exile were all young men aflame with impure intentions. And a child is different. It is not right that the stainless flesh of a little boy, which is an offering acceptable to all our exalted race, should be torn by the long teeth of an undomesticated dog.”
“That is true. That is alike a truthful and a pious reflection. A child is different from all other afflictions, because a child alone can always be an endless and a quite new sort of trouble. That nobody knows better than I who am the Mother of Every Princess, with my daughters everywhere policing the wild dreams of men so inadequately. Yet a thing done has an end. And it may be that by and by I can get around your Father—”
“Whose name be exalted!” remarked Evasherah.
“That also, dearie, is a wholly proper observation,—though, as I was saying, you know as well as I do how pig-headed he is. Meanwhile, there is nothing left for you, for the present, save another incarnation, and another century or two of seductiveness upon the verge of Doonham.”
“But I have been,” observed the Princess, “a crocodile professionally for nine thousand years, for all that my chest is so delicate. The cats of conjecture are therefore abroad in the meadows of any meditation purring that this time I would prefer something a little less damp.”
“Dearie, since your next incarnation is but a matter of form, do you by all means please yourself, so that you stay a destruction to young men and to their upsetting aspirations. You have been wholly inadequate this morning, I observe—”
“Why, but—” said the abashed Princess.
Her voice sank as she went on rather ruefully with a talking which to Gerald was now inaudible. He could merely see that the elder lady had hazarded a suggestion which Evasherah at once dismissed with an emphatic toss of her lovely head. He saw too the Princess place together the palms of her hands and then draw them about seven inches apart.
“Oh, fully that, at first!” she stated, in the raised tones of mild exasperation, “so that, altogether, this unresponsive person (within whose ancestral tomb may all goats propagate!) remains quite incomprehensible.”
The old woman replied: “In any event, you have failed; but that does not really matter. He travels, you assure me, with his assured betrayer. And the road he follows, that also, is lively enough and long enough to betray him in the end. For he will meet others of my daughters; and if all else fails, he will meet me.”
“The ship of my enduring resolution is not yet wrecked upon the iceberg of his indifference; and I am not through with him, by any means. I am returning to this unremunerative occupier of my couch,—for breakfast, O my Mother,” the Princess added, with a merry laugh.
And the old lady answered her with a mother’s ever-responsive tenderness. “That is my own child. One has to persevere with these romantics, no matter how hard the task may seem. For none of us knows yet what these romantic men desire. My daughters prepare for them fine food and drink, my daughters see to it that their homes are snug, and at the end of each day my daughters love them dutifully. All things that men can ask for, my daughters furnish them. Why need so many of these men nurse strange desires which do not know their aim? for how can any of my daughters content such desires?”
“One can but summon, O my Mother, the terminator of delights and the separator of companions and the ender of all desires.”
“There are other ways, my dearie, which are more subtle. That way is of the East, that way is old and crude. Still, that way also quiets over-ambitious dreaming; and that way serves.”
Gerald blinked. He was a bit troubled by the matter-of-fact occurrence before his eyes of a perfectly incredible happening.
For the elder lady became transfigured. She became larger, all ruddiness went away from her, and she took on the black and livid coloring of a thunder cloud. In her left hand she now carried a pair of scales and a yardstick. Her face smiled rather terribly as she steadily grew larger. Her necklace, you perceived, was made of human skulls, and each of her earrings was the dangling corpse of a hanged man in a very poor state of preservation. Altogether, it was not a grief to Gerald when the Mother of Every Princess had attained to her full heavenly stature, and had vanished.