The Devil's Mirror Read Online Free PDF

do.’
    ‘You speak of decency? You ?’ he cried. ‘All hot and hungry mouth you were from head to foot, burning with thirst, parched from an old husband’s neglect, bold, unquenchable, depraved—’
    ‘Shut your vile lips! You are to blame for our foul fortune. I would not be crouching here naked, like a plucked peacock in a parrot cage, awaiting seven days of torture, if you had not made advances to me in the first place.’
    ‘Your memory is as tarnished as your virtue! It was you made the first sign towards me!’
    ‘You are a liar!’
    ‘You are a trollop!’
    She wept. Repenting a little of his words, he grumbled, ‘It well may be it is no fault of ours but of your hoary hymn-singer of a husband...’
    ‘Whorey? No, that is the very rub, he did not—’
    ‘You misrender me. His fault, I mean, to wed a wife whose I years are but a third his threescore span. His fault to let her languish unslaked. His fault to throw the two of us so much together, telling me how much you loved my songs, telling you how much I loved your singing of them. His fault for living in such purblind holiness, such ignorance of fleshly wants, such idiot innocence that he could not foresee the natural outcome of it all. Yes, his the fault! All his! Ah, damn him for a prating prig!’
    She murmured tonelessly, ‘It was of latter days the Duke eschewed my bed. When first we wed, my youthful flesh so kindled him that his silver locks and holly ways were quite forgot, and he was less like monk and more like monkey, or, as one might say, like goat or bull or stallion, what you will. Then, for reasons never understood but which I took for sad depletion of his aged energies, he grew mild and no more than a brother to me...’
    ‘Brother?’ the troubadour scoffed. ‘Graadsire!’
    A dank draught of air tinkled the bones of an old skeleton that hung by dry wrists from rusted ceiling chains. It drew their eyes and their unvoiced wonderings: who had it been and how long ago and was it a man or a woman? For what had it died and how had it died—strung up with, grim simplicity to starve, or had there been other things, less simple? The man shuddered and the woman wept afresh and both were silent for a while.
    Then he said, ‘Let us think clearly. In all his long life, has the Duke ever been feared for harshness? Has he condemned to torture even the most black-hearted malefactors? Has he so much as flogged the lowest churl? Is he not laughed at by lackeys for his softness? Sneered at as a weak and womanish wight? Is not his meekness the mock and marvel of the land? Is he not praised by priests and prelates for his piety, his charity, his unending orisons, his saintliness? Well? Do I speak true?’
    A stifled ‘Yes’ escaped the crouched woman in the neighbouring cage.
    He resumed: ‘How, then, can it be that such a man could visit hideous torments upon two human creatures, and one of them his comely wife?’
    She sniffled, her head crammed between her knees, her tears running in rivulets down her bare legs to glisten on her toenails. ‘You grasp at straws,’ she moaned. ‘You heard him. Seven days of torture—’
    ‘Of punishment !’ he crowed. ‘And what, pray, does he deem punishment, that lily-livered nun of a man? Fasting and kneeling and praying and mortifying the flesh? Hair shirts for seven days? Stern sermons, righteous rhetoric?’ He laughed. ‘A little discomfort, a humble show of repentance and a deal of yawning boredom! That is the “torture” you fear!’ He laughed again, rocking back on his heels as far as the cage would permit.
    The woman delivered herself of a despondent sigh. ‘You are a fool,’ she said without rancour, as a plain statement of fact. ‘On the seventh day, we die. That was his command.’
    ‘ Demised? he said. ‘We are to be demised upon the seventh day!’
    ‘The selfsame thing...’
    ‘Not so! A word of many meanings! Chief among them: to be released !’ He laughed louder. ‘Released!