Читать книгу The Legend of Ulenspiegel - Charles de Coster - Страница 27

Table of Contents

The Emperor being returned from war, asked why his son Philip had not come to greet him.

The Infante’s archbishop-governor replied that he had not desired to do so, for, so he said, he cared for nothing but books and solitude.

The Emperor enquired where he was at that moment.

The governor answered that they must seek him in every place where it was dark. They did so.

Having gone through a goodly number of chambers, they came at last to a kind of closet, unpaven, and lit by a skylight. There they saw stuck in the earth a post to which was fastened by the waist a pretty little tiny monkey, that had been sent to His Highness from the Indies to delight him with its youthful antics. At the foot of this stake faggots still red were smoking, and in the closet there was a foul stench of burnt hair.

The little beast had suffered so much dying in this fire that its little body seemed to be not an animal that ever had life, but a fragment of some wrinkled twisted root, and in its mouth, open as though to cry out on death, bloody foam was visible, and the water of its tears made its face wet.

“Who did this?” asked the Emperor.

The governor did not dare to reply, and both men remained silent, sad, and wrathful.

Suddenly in this silence there was heard a low little sound of a cough that came from a corner in the shadow behind them. His Majesty, turning about, received the Infante Philip, all clad in black and sucking a lemon.

“Don Philip,” said he, “come and salute me.”

The Infante, without budging, looked at him with his timid eyes in which there was no affection.

“Is it thou,” asked the Emperor, “that hast burned this little beast in this fire?”

The Infante hung his head.

But the Emperor:

“If thou wert cruel enough to do it, be brave enough to confess it.”

The Infante made no answer.

His Majesty plucked the lemon out of his hands and flung it on the ground, and he was about to beat his son melting away with fright, when the archbishop, stopping him, whispered in his ear:

“His Highness will be a great burner of heretics one day.”

The Emperor smiled, and the two men went away, leaving the Infante alone with his monkey.

But there were others that were no monkeys and died in the flames.