The Keepers of the People

955After their passion for building and keeping the people, the strongest passions of the Princes were their passion for hunting and their passion for women. The first Prince Ralph, when he brought the country under cultivation, had left in the North a large tract of waste land, marsh, and forest where the wild beasts might increase, untroubled by any but himself. And each of the three Princes, when the burden of ruling wearied him, or he tired of the luxurious delights of the palace, was used to betake himself, alone, or with three or four mutes, to this preserve; and thence, spending his days in laborious, perilous hunting, he drew a fresh health and vigour for his work and his pleasure. The first Prince Ralph too, after his wife had died, had built in the garden furthest from the palace the Pavilion of Wonderful Delights; and many a Varandal maiden of excelling beauty had vanished from among her friends to dwell in it, while the maidens her companions grieved that it had not fallen to their lot to be chosen for the harem of the Prince. Prince Raleigh had been an untiring hunter of women; more than once at the fame of beauty, that not even the towering barrier of the hills could keep out, he had gone forth upon the chase. The story of his wandering many hundreds of perilous miles into Hindostan to carry off a Princess of Rajpootana, is the most wonderful adventure in the second Book of the Wisdom of the Princes; the wooing of Judith, the mother of Vashti, its most moving incident. His son had brought back from one raid the daughter of a chief of Kafiristan, and from another a beautiful Persian. Thus the Pavilion of Wonderful Delights was ever the casket of some fine jewel ravished by force, or fraud, or both, from its possessor. But the loves of the Princes were deadly: the pavilion had a tradition of exquisite, exhausting pleasure; the beautiful girls, flowers in an oven, withered in that scorching air; or the Princes tired of them, and made mute and wedded to mutes, they paid the price of a perpetual silence for their season of delight.