Ninzian’s stammered talking died away. He saw there was no moving her.
“No, Ninzian, I simply cannot stand having a husband who walks like a bird, and is liable to be detected the next time it rains. It would be on my mind day and night, and people would say all sorts of things. No, Ninzian, it is quite out of the question. I will get your things together at once, and you can go to hell or over to that giggling ill-bred friend of yours at the pawnbroker’s nasty shop, just as you elect: and I leave it to your conscience if, after the way I have worked and slaved for you, you had the right to play this wrong and treachery upon me.”
And Balthis said also: “For it is a great wrong and treachery which you have played upon me, Ninzian of Yair, getting from me such love as men will not find the equal of in any of the noble places of this world until the end of life and time. This is a deep wound that you have given me. Upon your lips were wisdom and pleasant talking, there was kindliness in the gray eyes of Ninzian of Yair, your hands were strong at sword-play, and you were the most generous of companions all through the daytime and in the nighttime too. These things I delighted in, these things I regarded: I did not think of the low mire, I could not see what horrible markings your passing by had left to this side and to that side.”
Then Balthis said: “Let every woman weep with me, for I now know that to every woman’s loving is this end appointed. There is no woman that gives all to any man, but that woman is wasting her substance at bed and board with a greedy stranger, and there is no wife who escapes the bitter hour in which that knowledge smites her. So now let us touch hands, and now let our lips too part friendlily, because our bodies have so long been friends, the while that we knew nothing of each other, Ninzian of Yair, on account of the great wrong and treachery which you have played upon me.”
Thus speaking, Balthis kissed him. Then she went into the house that was no longer Ninzian’s home.
Chapter LII. Remorse of a Poor Devil
Ninzian sat on a stone bench which was carved at each end with a crouching sphinx, and he waited there while the sunlight died away behind the poplars. The moment could not but seem to anybody pregnant with all danger. Holmendis was coming, and Holmendis would very soon be hearing the confession of Balthis, and these saints were over often the prey of an excitability which damaged their cause.
These saints had many bad qualities as Ninzian freely admitted; and in the main he approved of saints: but he did wish that holiness could be more urbane in its exercises and more long-sighted.
That impetuous Holmendis was quite as apt as not to resort out of hand to unbridled miracle-working, and with the fires of Heaven to annihilate his leading fellow laborer in every exercise of altruistic intermeddling,—without pausing, rationally, to reflect what an annihilation the resultant scandal would be to Holmendis’ own party of reform and uplift. Holmendis would no doubt be sorry afterward: but he would get no sympathy from Ninzian.
And, meanwhile, Ninzian loved his wife so greatly that prolonged existence without her did not tempt him. His wife, whoever she might be, had always seemed peculiarly dear to Ninzian. And now, as he looked back upon the exceeding love which he had borne his wife, in Nineveh and Thebes and Tyre and Babylon and Rome and Byzantium, and in all other cities that bred fine women, and as he weighed the evanescence of this love which was evading him after these few thousand years, it seemed to Ninzian a pitiable thing that his season of earthly contentment should thus be cut off in its flower and withered untimelily.
And his conscience troubled him, too. For the fiend had not been entirely candid with his Balthis, and Poictesme was not by any means the stage of the complaisant easy-going fellow’s primal failure. So he now forlornly thought of how utterly he had failed in his mission upon Earth, ever since he first came to Mount Kaf to work evil among men, in the time of King Tchagi, a great while before the Deluge; and he considered with dismay the appalling catalogue of virtuous actions into which these women had betrayed him.
For always the cause of Ninzian’s downfall had been the same: he would get to talking indiscretion to some lovely girl or another, just through his desire to be agreeable to everybody, and his devilish eloquence would so get the better of her that the girl would invariably marry him and ruthlessly set about making her husband a well-thought-of citizen. Nor did it avail him to argue. Women nowhere appeared to have any sympathy with Ninzian’s appointed labor upon Earth: they seemed to have an instinctive bent toward Heaven and the public profession of every virtue. Just as in the case of that poor Miramon Lluagor, Ninzian reflected, Ninzian’s wife also did not care two straws about her husband’s career and the proper development of his talents.
Then Ninzian on a sudden recollected the cause of the disturbance which had been put upon his living. He drew his dagger, and, squatting on the paved walkway, he scratched out that incriminating footprint.
He was none too soon.
Chapter LIII. Continuation of Appalling Pieties
He was none too soon, because Ninzian rose from this erasement just in time to bump into no other than the energetic tough flesh of Holy Holmendis, who in the cool of the evening was coming up the walkway; and indeed, in rising, Ninzian jostled against the Saint rather roughly. So Ninzian apologized for his clumsiness, and explained that he was going fishing the next day, and was digging for worms: and Ninzian was in a bad taking, for he could not know how much this peppery and overexcitable Saint from out of Philistia had seen or suspected, or might be up to the very next moment with one or another bull-headed miracle.
But Holy Holmendis said friendlily that no bones were broken, and he went on, with the soul-chilling joviality of the clergy, to make some depressing joke about fishers of men. “And that is why I am here,” said the Saint, “for this evening Dame Balthis is to confess to me whatever matters may be on her conscience.”
“Yes, yes,” said Ninzian, fondly, “but we both know, my dear and honored friend, that Balthis has a particularly tender conscience, a conscience which is as sensitive to the missteps of others as a sore toe.”
“That is how everybody’s conscience ought to be,” returned the Saint: and he went on to speak of the virtuous woman who is a crown to her husband. And he made a contrast between the fine high worth of Balthis and the shamelessness of that bad beggar-woman upon whom, just outside the gate, the Saint had put apoplexy and divine fire for speaking over-lightly of the second coming of Manuel.
Ninzian fidgeted. He of course said sympathizingly that he would send some servants to remove the blasted carcass, and that it ought to be a lesson, and that there was no telling what the world was coming to unless right-thinking persons took strong steps through the proper channels. Nevertheless, he did not like the hard, pinched little mouth and glittering, very pale blue eyes of this gaunt Saint; and the nimbus about the thick white hair of Holy Holmendis was beginning to shine brighter and brighter as the dusk of evening thickened. Ninzian found it uncomfortable to be alone with this worker of miracles; piety is in all things so unpredictable: and Ninzian was unfeignedly glad when Balthis came out of the loved house that was no longer Ninzian’s home, and when Balthis held open the door for Holmendis to enter where Ninzian might not come any more.
Yet, so tenacious is the charitableness of women, that even now, as Holmendis went in, Dame Balthis tried to speak, for the last time, sensibly and kindly with her husband.