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Updated: June 4, 2025
"But Mollie," he said, "with all her belief in Cophetua, you think there is not enough of the beggar-maid element in her character to sustain her under like circumstances?"
Instead of this, she had seen a King who seemed to regard life as a sensual gratification; and a beggar-maid, who looked upon her lover, not timidly, as a new-born flower upon the sun, but as a clever huckstress at a customer who had bought her goods at her valuing.
Prince Hugh's cheeks were red as peonies. "Your words are too bold, beggar-maid. If you will not sell your glove, I will take it." She stretched out her arm. "You will not be able to take what is not yours!" "Will I not!" and he rushed at her and began to tug at the glove. His face grew redder and redder, but he could not strip off the glove, which seemed to have grown to the maid's arm.
The strain was instantly taken up, and then, on the current of a plain religious melody, the two voices were united, and, as two perfumes, they seemed to blend and become one. Alice would have preferred something less ethereal, for the exigencies of the situation demanded that the King should get out of the window and claim the hand of the beggar-maid in the public street.
Then the Princess Myrtle's heart felt as weary as feet on a long road; but she awaited patiently the King's next word, which was spoken to Prince Richard and Prince Hugh, inviting them to dance with the beggar-maid. Each made an excuse. Then King Cuthbert addressed her.
"In the first place," she answered, "it makes me feel as if the dust of ages was accumulating in my pathway, and in the second, it is not safe for her." "Why, again?" he demanded. "She is far too pretty, and her knowledge of the world is far too limited. She secretly believes in Lord Burleigh, and clings to the poetic memory of King Cophetua and the Beggar-maid." "And you do not?"
He had been prepared for considerable friction; he had been quite sure of opposition on the part of 'Society, but, Society, moved for once from its usual selfishness by the boldness and daring of a heroic king, had ranked itself entirely on his side, and was ready and even anxious to accept in Prince Humphry a new kind of 'Cophetua, even if he had chosen to wed a beggar-maid!
My love was real, but that did not prevent its patronizing complacency being an insult. I was King Cophetua. If I did not actually say in so many words, 'This beggar-maid shall be my queen', I said it plainly and often in my manner. She was the daughter of a dissolute, evil-tempered artist whom I had met at a Bohemian club.
King Cuthbert could not believe his ears, nor trust his eyes, for the Princess Myrtle had great vaults of gold under the thousand-year-old turrets of her castle; and pearls like pigeon eggs in the renowned diadem with which the generations of her royal race were crowned kings or queens. "My uncle sends me as a beggar-maid so that I can make a true marriage. I desire to be loved for myself alone.
Her thoughts followed Merlin as if her substance had been changed into his shadow. All the court had assembled for dinner, when she entered the banquet hall behind the shame-faced Dame Caecilia, who made a curtsey to the floor as she explained to the King that the beggar-maid, being lacking in art, refused the silken clothes. "She would wear only this crown of wood violets."
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