The dilapidations of life will no longer move you
deeply. Shrugging, you will say of sorrow, 'What is it?' for you will
know grief also to be impermanent. And your inability to be quite
miserable any more will assure you that your goings are attended by the
ghost of outlived and conquered misery: and I, whom some call Beda, and
others call Kruchina, shall be monstrously amused by this."
Said Niafer, impatiently, "Do you intend to keep me here forever under
these dark twinkling trees, with your thin little talking, while Manuel
stays unhappy through his want of me?"
And Misery answered nothing as he departed from Niafer, for a season.
Such were the happenings in the vision witnessed by Dom Manuel (as Dom
Manuel afterward declared) while he sat playing upon the flageolet.
[Illustration]
XXIII
Manuel Gets His Desire
Now the tale tells that all this while, near the gray hut in Dun
Vlechlan, the earthen image of Niafer lay drying out in the November
sun; and that gray Dom Manuel--no longer the florid boy who had come
into Dun Vlechlan,--sat at the feet of the image, and played upon a
flageolet the air which Suskind had taught him, and with which he had
been used to call young Suskind from her twilit places when Manuel was a
peasant tending swine.
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