The Witch-Woman Trilogy

  Madoc lived statelily, with all manner of comfort, in his broad hall, with dragons handsomely painted upon each end of it, and with a stout palisade of oak logs enclosing everything. The most prominent thieves and cutthroats in the country delighted to hear and to reward the singing of Madoc; Druids had crowned Madoc with the sacred mistletoe, as the king of skalds; the fame of Madoc was spread everywhither about the world: and the renowned poet had not anything to trouble him, and no heavier task confronted Madoc than to make praiseworthy music.

  But Ettarre made no more music. “How was it that little air of yours used to run, my darling?” her illustrious husband would ask, very carelessly.

  And Ettarre would reply, with the common-sense of a married woman: “How can I remember a music I never learned until centuries after this morning? And besides, what time have I for such fiddle-faddle with all these children on my hands?”

26. WHAT WAS NOT TROUBLE

  Madoc knew that he had not anything to trouble him. You were not really troubled by your vagrant notion that the face of Ainath or the face of Maya, or the more terrible strange pallor of Queen Lilith’s face, seemed now and then to be regarding the well-thought-of poet that was Madoc, with a commingling—for so illogical are all day-dreams—of derision and of pity.

  Nor could you call it a trouble that, now and then, in such misleading reveries as were apt to visit idle persons when upon the plains and hills of Noenhir the frail tints of spring were resting lightly, and ever so briefly, the women whom tall, red-haired young Madoc had thrust aside, because of the magic laid upon the prime of his manhood, seemed to have been more dear and more desirable than anybody could expect a mere boy to appreciate.

  Nor was it a trouble—rather, was it, when properly regarded, a blessing—that the one woman whom you had ever loved was endlessly wrangling nowadays over your meals and the validity of your underclothing, and over the faithlessness of all servants, and over the doings of her somewhat tedious children; and was endowed, nowadays, with the chronic and the never wholly smothered dissatisfaction which is the mark of a competent housekeeper. Madoc very well knew that he had not anything to trouble him.

27. TOO MUCH IS NOT ENOUGH

  Meanwhile love’s graduates lived with large ease and splendor. About their rheumatic knees were now the flaxen heads of grandchildren: they had broad farmlands, and thralls to do their bidding, and many cattle lowed in their barns. Life had given them all the good things which life is able to give. And Madoc had no desires save those which food and sleeping satisfied, and lean red-haired Madoc now was lean and gray and pompous, and unaccountably peevish also.

  He rarely wrote new songs. But everywhere his elder songs had been made familiar, in all quarters of the world, by the best-thought-of pirates and sea rovers, as the sort of thing of which the decadent younger generation was incapable. Everybody everywhere was charmed by their resonant beguilement. Even the most callow poets admitted that with a little more frankness about sexual matters and the unfairness of social conditions the old fellow would have been passable.

  Madoc, in brief, had not any care or need, nor, it was plain, any contentment. He fell more and more often to asking Ettarre if she could not recollect, just for the fun of the thing, a strain or two of the music from behind the moon with which she used to keep him without any home and miserable. And the old lady would tell him more and more pettishly that she had no patience whatever with his nonsense.

28. THE RESPECTABLE GESTURE

  Then his wife died. She died sedately, with the best medical and churchly aid, and after an appropriate leave-taking of her numerous family. There was a loneliness upon Madoc when he saw her white and shriveled old body,—so troublingly made strange by the forlorn aloofness of the dead,—lying upon the neat bed among four torches of pine wood. His loneliness closed over him like a cold flood.

  He thought confusedly of the fierce loving which had been between them in their youth; and of their high adventuring because of a music which was not wholly of this earth; and of the ensuing so many years through which a sensible, unmoonstruck married couple had shared in all and in howsoever trivial matters loyally; and of how those fallen pale lips would not ever find fault with him any more. It was then that he fetched the black pen with which Madoc had written his world-famous songs; and he laid his pen in the cold hand of Ettarre.