Читать книгу Something About Eve - James Branch Cabell - Страница 16

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SO it was in the shape of a large butterfly that Evasherah returned toward Gerald, to careen and drift affectionately about him, in a bewildering medley of bright colors. He cried to her adoringly, “My darling—!” He grasped at her: and she did not avoid him.

Gerald now held this lovely creature, by the throat, at arm’s length. He began the compelling words, “Schemhamphoras—” And in Gerald’s face was no adoration whatever.

Instead, he continued, rather sadly, “—Eloha, Ab, Bar, Ruachaccocies—” and so went through the entire awful list, ending by and by with “Cados.”

His prey was now struggling frantically. The unreflective girl had not allowed for her lover’s being a student of magic. And her restiveness was—well, it might be, pardonably,—a bit interfering with Gerald’s æsthetic delight, now that he paused to admire the splendor of the trapped Princess’s last incarnation, before he used the fatal Hausa charm.

For Evasherah’s wings were of a wonderful velvety black and a fiery orange color, her body was golden, and her breast crimson. He noted also that Evasherah, in her increasing agitation of mind, had thrust out from the back of her neck a soft forked horn which diffused a horrible odor.

And those curved, strong, needle-sharp fangs which were striking vainly at him were so adroitly designed that Gerald fell now to marveling, still a little sadly, at their superb efficiency. A yellowish oil oozed from their tips. They had, he saw, just the curve of two cat claws: whensoever such fangs struck flesh, their victim’s recoil would but clamp fangs which were shaped like that more deeply and more venomously; it was a quite ingenious arrangement. It perfectly explained, too, how the visitors of this soft-spoken, cuddling and utterly adorable Princess happened to leave their skulls in the thick grass around her alabaster couch.

Then Gerald said: “O Butterfly, O Gleaming One, your breakfast this day is disappointment, your fork is agony, and your napkin death. O Butterfly, repent truly, abandon falsehood, put away deceit and flattery, cease thinking about your deluded lovers even remorsefully. Repent in verity, do not repent like the wildcat which repents with the fowl in its mouth without putting the fowl down. Where now is the artfulness which was yours, where are the high-hearted, tricked lovers?—To-day all lies in the tomb. This world, O Butterfly, is a market-place: everyone comes and goes, both stranger and citizen. The last of your lovers is a pious friend, he assists the decreed course of this world.”

Still, it was rather strange that the body she had chosen appeared to belong to the species Onithoptera crœsus,—Gerald decided, as his foot crushed the squeaking soft remnants and rubbed all into a smeared paste of blood and gold-dust,—because, of course, this kind of butterfly was more properly indigenous to the Malay Archipelago than to these parts, over and above the fact that for any butterfly to have the fangs of a serpent was false entomology.

However, the geography and local customs and all else which pertained to the Marches of Antan were tinged with some perceptible inconsequence, Gerald reflected, as he returned to his tethered stallion. He mounted then, cheered with the yet further reflection that he had got from Evasherah the rather beautiful idea of being a god, and had got also the four remaining drops from the Churning of the Ocean. The properties of this water were sufficiently well known to every student of magic.