The Cords of Vanity | Page 5

James Branch Cabell
his
father's highway. But the road was bordered by so many wonders--as
here a bright pebble and there an anemone, say, and, just beyond, a
brook which babbled an entreaty to be tasted,--that many folk had
presently overtaken and had passed the loitering Foolish Prince. First
came a grandee, supine in his gilded coach, with half-shut eyes,
uneagerly meditant upon yesterday's statecraft or to-morrow's gallantry;
and now three yokels, with ruddy cheeks and much dust upon their
shoulders; now a haggard man in black, who constantly glanced
backward; and now a corporal with an empty sleeve, who whistled as
he went.
"A butterfly guided every man of them along the highway. 'For the
Lord of the Fields is a whimsical person,' said the Fairy,' and such is his
very old enactment concerning the passage even of his cowpath; but
princes each in his day and in his way may trample this domain as
prompt their will and skill.'
"'That now is excellent hearing,' said the Foolish Prince; and he
strutted.
"'Look you,' said the Fairy, 'a man does not often stumble and break his
shins in the highway, but rather in the byway.'....
"Thus, the Fairy leading, the Foolish Prince went skipping on his
allotted journey, though he paused once in a while to shake his bauble

at the staring sun.
"'The stars,' he considered, 'are more sympathetic....
"And thus, the Fairy leading, they came at last to a tall hedge wherein
were a hundred wickets, all being closed; and those who had passed the
Foolish Prince disputed before the hedge and measured the hundred
wickets with thirty-nine articles and with a variety of instruments, and
each man entered at his chosen wicket, and a butterfly went before him;
but no man returned into the open country.
"'Now beyond each wicket,' said the Fairy, 'lies a great crucible, and by
ninety and nine of these crucibles is a man consumed, or else
transmuted into this animal or that animal. For such is the law in these
parts and in human hearts.'
"The Prince demanded how if one found by chance the hundredth
wicket? But she shook her head and said that none of the Tylwydd Teg
was permitted to enter the Disenchanted Garden. Rumor had it that
within the Garden, beyond the crucibles, was a Tree, but whether the
fruit of this Tree were sweet or bitter no person in the Fields could tell,
nor did the Fairy pretend to know what happened in the Garden.
"'Then why, in heaven's name, need a man test any of these wickets?'
cried the Foolish Prince; 'with so much to lose and, it may be, nothing
to gain? For one, I shall enter none of them.'
"But once more she shook her glittering head. 'In your House and in
your Sign it was decreed. Time will be, my Prince; to-day the kid
gambols and the ox chews his cud. Presently the butcher cries, _Time
is!_ Comes the hour and the power, and the cook bestirs herself and
says, _Time was!_ The master has his dinner, either way, all say, and
every day.'
"And the Fairy vanished as she talked with him, her radiances thinning
into the neutral colors of smoke, and thence dwindling a little by a little
into the vaulting spiral of a windless and a burnt-out fire, until nothing
remained of her save her voice; and that was like the moving of dead

leaves before they fall.
"'Truly,' said the Foolish Prince, 'I am compelled to consider this a
vexatious business. For, look you, the butterfly I just now admire flits
over this wicket, and then her twin flutters over that wicket, and
between them there is absolutely no disparity in attraction. Hoo! here is
a more sensible insect.'
"And he leaped and cracked his heels together and ran after a golden
butterfly that drifted to the rearward Fields. There was such a host of
butterflies about that presently he had lost track of his first choice, and
was in boisterous pursuit of a second, and then of a third, and then of
yet others; but none of them did he ever capture, the while that one by
one he followed divers butterflies of varying colors, and never a golden
butterfly did he find any more.
"When it was evening, the sky drew up the twilight from the east as a
blotter draws up ink, and stars were kindling everywhere like tiny
signal-fires, and a light wind came out of the murky east and rustled
very plaintively in places where the more ambiguous shadows were;
and the Foolish Prince shivered, for the air was growing chill, and the
tips of his fingers were aware of it.
"'A crucible,' he reflected, 'possesses the minor virtue of continuous
warmth.'
"And before the hedge he found
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