Читать книгу Hamlet had an Uncle - James Branch Cabell - Страница 6
ОглавлениеOF GERUTH AND HER SECOND HUSBAND
'In brief, my dear Geruth,' says Fengon, 'Wiglerus has been at large pains to settle this somewhat disagreeable affair. He has represented the matter to your father in a proper light, through the aid of some unavoidable perjury. And his wise suggestion that, for the sake of Jutland, you and I should be married at once, was introduced to my counsellors with your brother's unfailing tact. We should always be grateful to Wiglerus.'
'It is really a comfort to be married to you,' Geruth admitted, 'because it makes me feel far more respectable than to be meeting you in that hole-and-corner way which I never did quite enjoy, with somebody apt to pop in at almost any moment.'
'Yet for me to marry you, my dear, was an extremity of fortune-hunting,' returned Fengon, smiling. 'A marriage between us two--just as wise Wiglerus pointed out to the council--was the most politic manner of keeping me, no less than all my loyal counsellors, in office now and for ever, by making sure that your father would continue my appointment as King of Jutland. Wiglerus thinks of everything off-hand. It is a rare trait; and I would that I shared it.'
Very lightly Geruth touched her husband's left ear as she passed him, going toward her embroidery frame.
'You are too tender-hearted, Fengon,' she observed, as she took up her bag of silks; 'and I always said so. If only you had not been so very foolishly tender-hearted about Horvendile, for example, and so pig-headed too about taking my advice, then we could have been rid of him years ago.'
'But I loved my big blustering foolish brother,' said Fengon fondly; 'and even nowadays, although everything has ended quite happily, like an old fairy tale, it troubles me, once in a while, to remember that, of all Vikings, I should have been the person to ensure his eternal welfare, perhaps a tiny bit roughly.'
The Queen answered: 'My dearest, that is wholly sweet of you; and I can quite see your point of view. I do not share it, of course. I was not Horvendile's brother, but only his wife. Yes, and I was married to him the first day I ever saw him, without being consulted in the matter one way or the other, and I never pretended to love him, any more than he did me. Yet I do not bear him any least ill-will; and so it is a sound comfort to me to know that he is now in Valhalla, with any number of Valkyries about, who will not mind his coming to bed with them drunk every night, as I did mind extremely. There would be no earthly sense in saying I did not.'
'Yes, but,' says Fengon, 'we ought to feel remorse.'
'I do feel remorse,' replied Geruth. 'It is not at all pleasant to remember that I lived in a state of sin for so long. Yet I must remind you, my darling, that it was wholly your fault, because if only you had taken my advice, poor Horvendile would have inherited eternal bliss a long while before he did; and our wickedness would not have been anything like so extensive.'
'Still,' Fengon pursued, 'I assisted him out of the toils and disappointments of human life; and in consequence I ought to be horror-stricken. I ought to be entirely miserable.'
'You defended yourself against an enraged bellowing bull, who was about to murder you, and me also, my dear Fengon; and in mere point of fact you are not a bit miserable, except when your stomach is upset. You ought not to have touched that bacon this morning. And I told you so at the time.'
Fengon replied: 'My dearest, I have loved you since the first moment I saw you. So I admit it is not possible for me to be unhappy, or even suitably remorseful, now that I have you all to myself. I have taken some of the tonic.'
'Why, then all is as it should be, my dear husband; and we need have no further worries to bother us. Except, of course, fried food of any kind, which you really ought to be more careful about.'
'And except Hamlet,' says Fengon.
'The affliction of our unlucky son,' replied Geruth piously, 'is the will of Heaven. We can but make the best of it.'
Having thus put the matter in divine hands, she turned her own capable hands towards her temporarily put-by needlework; and averted, tranquilly, from unremunerative regret to some much-needed embroidery. Fengon regarded her with fond admiration.
She is very wonderful, thought Fengon, and I am not worthy to possess a helpmate so matter-of-fact, so sensible, and so brave. Not even to me will she admit in full her sorrow as to young Hamlet's mental condition. Instead, she does make the best of it, a trifle sanctimoniously perhaps, but with sound resignation; and to every appearance her concern about the poor lad is less deep than mine.
Perhaps, Fengon meditated yet further, the union which existed between Geruth and himself was so firm-set, and had been buttressed so stoutly by the tranquil years of their incest, as to make both of these lovers a thought callous towards other persons. Fengon recalled that, during the progress of their secret romance, he had felt upon many occasions that Geruth really ought to be somewhat more remorseful over her betrayal and her systematic hoodwinking of his brother. Fengon felt now that her affection for him subdued, or at least kept to the back of her mind, her maternal affection for Hamlet; and, with entire illogic, Fengon resented this. He wanted Geruth, his all-perfect wife, to be likewise an all-perfect mother.
That, however, was the trouble with all men who had once been idealists, and who, when youth left them, had put aside the high-hearted harum-scarum doings of youth, to live as they best might in a workaday flesh-and-blood world: they still hungered after, they even looked for, the noble absurdities in which they no longer believed. Once, when young Fengon and young Wiglerus and young Edric had adventured no less happily in battles than between bed-covers, and when the three of them had bustled about half the known world as gay soldiers of fortune, then you had found everywhere divinely beautiful and witty and philanthropic female creatures of whom to-day's women, even at their best, appeared to be uninspired copies. You loved Geruth with entire affection; the special sort of excitement with which you had once regarded her had given way, perhaps, to a sort of but half-amused impatience: yet you would not willingly have your prosaic dear wife changed in any least particular. It was merely that you remembered, even nowadays, the more flawless and the finer sweethearts whom you had known when everybody was young. You felt, somehow, that your loyal and complete satisfaction with Geruth, and with your lot in general, was a betrayal of that young Fengon who to-day did not exist anywhere.
Instead, a greying Fengon, with his hair thinning and with his digestion become a more or less ever-present consideration, sat here in contentment, by and large, with his plump wife and his well-furnished castle and his thriving province. Yonder in Britain, as King of the Deiri, an ageing but still red-headed Edric was equally preoccupied, and equally satisfied, no doubt--or at any rate almost satisfied, just as you were--by the amusing puzzles of statecraft, and by the bracing outdoor exercise of an occasional war, and by a reigning monarch's official employments in general. Dapper Wiglerus alone of the three comrades (under a thatching of sleek brown hair, which the rascal quite probably dyed) still went about his wanderings pretty much as he elected, inasmuch as Wiglerus, being only the third son of the King of Denmark, stayed unencumbered by any special duties.
Yet Wiglerus, no matter with what gay firmness he defied time and its ugly dilapidations, no longer was young. Nobody anywhere whom you had once known and loved, or whom you had hated, with a vigour now strange to you, was young any longer. Life would not ever be any more lofty in confidence, or in possibilities, than it was to-day; there could be for you no more rapture, no more beguiling hope that, by and by, your existence would become resplendent and wholly satisfying, somehow, and would continue a display of such characteristics for ever. You could hope, now, at best, for a continuance of but slowly aggravated infirmities, and for a relatively unpainful death--at no remote date. It was not youth which you missed, but the eternally deluded hopefulness and the impermanent bright sheen of youth's lost world.
'See now,' says Fengon, to himself, 'but how insatiable is the greed of a romanticist, even when, by every romantic tradition, his lot turns out to be the most happy imaginable! All ends like an old fairy tale, with virtue attaining to its just reward, and with true love winning its desired recompense. I have won my kingdom; I am married to that special princess whom I loved and whom I still prefer above all other women; I possess wealth and comfort; and in the bright sunset of living, I may now, with all common sense to back me, look forward to an extended season of political and domestic happiness. Yet I am not really content; for the illness of Hamlet is to me a perpetual small worry.'
Thus Fengon meditated, while his plump handsome Geruth nodded over her embroidery, and each one of them thought about Hamlet.
