There was dancing afterward and a sumptuous supper. The Vicomte de Puysange was generally accounted that evening the most excellent of company. He mingled affably with the revellers and found a prosperous answer for every jest they broke upon the projected marriage of Dame Melicent and King Theodoret; and meanwhile hugged the reflection that half the realm was hunting Perion de la Foret in the more customary haunts of rascality. The springs of Perion's turbulent mirth were that to-morrow every person in the room would discover how impudently every person had been tricked, and that Melicent deliberated even now, and could not but admire, the hunted outlaw's insolence, however much she loathed its perpetrator; and over this thought in particular Perion laughed like a madman.
"You are very gay to-night, Messire de Puysange," said the Bishop of Montors.
This remarkable young man, it is necessary to repeat, had reached Bellegarde that evening, coming from Brunbelois. It was he (as you have heard) who had arranged the match with Theodoret. The bishop himself loved his cousin Melicent; but, now that he was in holy orders and possession of her had become impossible, he had cannily resolved to utilise her beauty, as he did everything else, toward his own preferment.
"Oh, sir," replied Perion, "you who are so fine a poet must surely know that gay rhymes with to-day as patly as sorrow goes with to-morrow."
"Yet your gay laughter, Messire de Puysange, is after all but breath: and breath also"--the bishop's sharp eyes fixed Perion's--"has a hackneyed rhyme."
"Indeed, it is the grim rhyme that rounds off and silences all our rhyming," Perion assented. "I must laugh, then, without rhyme or reason."
Still the young prelate talked rather oddly. "But," said he, "you have an excellent reason, now that you sup so near to heaven." And his glance at Melicent did not lack pith.
"No, no, I have quite another reason," Perion answered; "it is that to-morrow I breakfast in hell."
"Well, they tell me the landlord of that place is used to cater to each according to his merits," the bishop, shrugging, returned.
And Perion thought how true this was when, at the evening's end, he was alone in his own room. His life was tolerably secure. He trusted Ahasuerus the Jew to see to it that, about dawn, one of the ship's boats would touch at Fomor Beach near Manneville, according to their old agreement. Aboard the Tranchemer the Free Companions awaited their captain; and the savage land they were bound for was a thought beyond the reach of a kingdom's lamentable curiosity concerning the whereabouts of King Helmas' treasure. The worthless life of Perion was safe.
For worthless, and far less than worthless, life seemed to Perion as he thought of Melicent and waited for her messenger. He thought of her beauty and purity and illimitable loving-kindness toward every person in the world save only Perion of the Forest. He thought of how clean she was in every thought and deed; of that, above all, he thought, and he knew that he would never see her any more.
"Oh, but past any doubting," said Perion, "the devil caters to each according to his merits."
