The Silver Stallion: A Comedy of Redemption

“A pert pirate in all men’s affairs, a mere cock-boat sailing under the Jolly Roger!” was Coth’s verdict, as repeated by an eavesdropping page. “This Madame Dorothy has had in her more”—he mumbled so that something was lost—“than there are trees in Acaire. All the trees in Acaire are judged by their fruits. This Dorothy is a very betraying fruit from the rank tree of the Redeemer. This Dorothy has inherited from Dom Manuel such lewdness as is advantageously suited to a warrior, but misbecomes a young woman. It seems rather a pity that this light wagtail should ever have come between me and Jurgen.”

Coth said this without any raging. He was merely puzzled.

For all, everywhere, appeared to have failed and deserted him. This Coth had been in his day a hero: and none of that far-off adventuring seemed much to matter now, nor could he quite believe that these things had happened to the tired old fellow who went muttering about the lonely Chateau des Roches, and was kept alive with slops of gruel and barley-water. This tremulous frail wreckage was not, assuredly, the Coth who had killed single-handed the three Turks at Lacre Kai, and who had kidnapped the fat King of Cyprus and in the sight of two armies had hung the crown of yet another king on the thorn-bush at Piaja, and who had been himself an emperor, and who had held the White Tower at Skeaf against the Comprachos, and who had put that remarkable deception upon the enamored one-legged tyrant of Ran Reigan, and who had shared in so many other splendid rough-and-tumble happenings.

There had been a host of women in these happenings, fine women, not to be had at anybody’s whistle like the tow-headed Dorothys whom these sanctimonious times were spawning everywhere to come between a father and a boy with no real harm in him. And none of these dear women mattered now. . . . Besides, it was not true to say that Jurgen had no real harm in him. Jurgen had been violent and headstrong from the very first: that was another pity, but Jurgen had taken after his mother in this, old Coth reflected, and his mother had always been injudicious alike in pampering and in rebuking Jurgen, with the result that Jurgen was nowadays a compendium of all iniquity.

And the Manuel too whom Coth had loved was gone now, and was utterly ousted from every person’s memory by that glittering tomb at Storisende, where a Manuel who had never lived was adored as a god is worshiped. Yet that, also, seemed not to matter. It was preposterous. But all the world was preposterous: and nothing whatever could be done about it, by a tired muttering old man.

People, no doubt, were living more quietly and more decorously because of this fictitious Manuel whom they loved and this gaunt ranting Holmendis whom they feared. But that too, to Coth, seemed not to matter. People nowadays were such fools that their doings and the upshot of these doings were equally unimportant, Coth estimated. If they succeeded in worming their way into heaven by existing here as spiritlessly as worms, Coth had not any objection, since he himself was bound for hell and for the company of his peers in a more high-hearted style of living.

Coth fell a little complacently to thinking about hell, and about the fine great sinners who would make room for him there, on account of the Coth that had been, and about the genial flames in which nobody was pestered by milksops prattling about their damned Redeemer. And Manuel—the real Manuel, that squinting swaggering gray rogue whose thefts and bastards and killings had been innumerous,—that Manuel would be there too, of course; and he and Coth would make very excellent mirth over those reforms which had ensnared all the milksops into heaven, even at the high price of spoiling the Poictesme of Coth’s youth.

For those elder heroic days were quite over. Of the great fellowship there remained, beside the hulk that was Coth, only Guivric and Donander and Ninzian. Donander of Evre was now, they said, in the far kingdom of Marabon, combining the pleasures of knight-errantry with a pious pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Thomas. And while Coth had always admired Donander as a fighting-machine, in all other respects Coth considered him a deplorable young fool, nor, after holding this opinion steadfastly for twenty-five years, was Coth prepared to change it. Ninzian was a sleek hypocrite, a half-hearted fellow who had stinted himself to one poor pale adultery with a pawnbroker’s wife; and who flourished in the sanctimonious atmosphere of these abominable times because he truckled to Holmendis nowadays just as formerly he had toadied to Manuel. That prim and wary Guivric whom people called the Sage, Coth had always most cordially detested: and when Coth heard—from somebody, as he cloudily remembered, but it was too much trouble to recall from whom,—that old Guivric too was now departed from Poictesme, it seemed not to matter.

Perhaps, Coth speculated, one of those troubled-looking servants had told him Guivric was dead. Almost everybody was dead. And in any event, it did not matter about Guivric. Nothing really mattered any longer. . . .

All that Coth had ever loved was gone out of life. Gray Manuel, the most superb and admirable of earthly lords (howsoever often the man had needed a little candid talking to, for his own good), and peevish tender-hearted wise Miramon, and courteous Anavalt, and pedantic innocent Kerin (who had been used to blink at you once or twice, like the most amiable of owls, before he gave his opinion upon any subject), and Holden, the most brave where all were fearless, and indolent gay Gonfal, whom you might even permit, within limits, to rally you, because Gonfal was the world’s playmate,—all these were gone, the dearest of comrades that any warrior had ever known, in that lost, far-off season when the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion had kept earth noisy with the clashing of their swords, and had darkened heaven with the smoke of the towns they were sacking, and when throughout the known world men had talked about the wonders which these champions were performing with Dom Manuel to lead them.

And so many splendid women too were gone: these days produced only your flibbertigibbet Melicents and Dorothys and such trash. There were no women nowadays like Azra, nor like Gunnhilda, nor like Muirne of the Marshes,—or like plump, ardent, brown Utsume, or like Orgeleuse, that proud lady of Cyprus, who had yet yielded in the end, or like Azra. . . . And Coth, chewing meditatively at nothingness, with sunken and toothless lips, thought also about great-hearted Dame Abonde, and about little Fleurette, and about Azra, and about Credhe, that jolly if remarkably exigent Irish girl, and about tall Asgerda, and about Azra, and about Bar, that treacherous but very lovely sea-wife, and about Oriande, and about poor Felfel Rhasif Yedua, who had given all the hair of her body and afterward her life, to preserve his life, and about Azra.

He remembered the girl that Azra had been, and he thought without any joy about the scores of other delectable persons which Coth had known, amorously and intricately, so very long ago. All these women were gone out of living: one or two of them might perhaps as yet pretend to survive in the repulsive skins of shriveled old lean ugly hags, and in some remote chimney-corner or another might as yet be mumbling—with sunken and toothless lips, like his own lips,—over nothingness; for nothingness was now their portion too; and those close-kissing, splendid, satiated, half-swooning girls whom Coth remembered, with indelicate precision, now no longer existed anywhere.

And Jurgen, the unparalleled of babies, and that cuddling little lad prattling his childish lies about Dom Manuel and ascents into heaven and other nonsense to ward off a spanking, and that fine upstanding boy just graduating into pimples in whom Coth had so exulted when Coth returned from Tollan and the throne of Tollan,—his Jurgen in dozens upon dozens of stages of growth,—now every one of these dear sons was gone. There remained only a dissolute and heartless wastrel bellowing rhymed nonsense and rampaging about the world wherever the grand duchesses and the abbesses made most of him. Coth looked at his motto.

Life then, at utmost, after all the prizes of life had been gained, and you were a looked-up-to and prosperous alderman, amounted to just this. It profited nothing that you had been a tender and considerate father, or a dutiful and long-suffering son who had boxed your father’s jaws, when you last parted from him, only after considerable provocation,—or a loving and faithful husband to the full extent of human frailty, or a fearless champion killing off brawny adversaries like flies, or even an emperor crowned with that queer soft gold of Tollan and dragging black corrupted gods about the public highways. In the end you were, none the less, a withered hulk, with no more of pride nor any hope of pleasure nor any real desire alive in you; and you felt cold always, even while you nodded here beside the fire; and there was not anybody to talk to, except those perturbed-looking servants who never came very near you. . . .

If you had only had a son, now, matters might be different. . . . Then Coth recollected that he did, in point of fact, have a son, somewhere. It had slipped his mind for the instant. But old people forget things, and he was very old. Yes, a fine lad, that: and he would be coming in for supper presently,—extremely late for supper, with his hat shoved a great way back on his black head, and with his boots all muddy,—and Azra would scold him. . . . Only, it seemed to Coth that Azra, or somebody, was dead. That was a pity, but it was too much trouble to remember all the pity and the dying that was in the world; it was a great deal too much trouble for, an old man to keep these wearying matters quite straight in his mind. And, besides, everybody died; there was for all an end of all adventuring: and nothing whatever could be done about it.

Well, but at least one more adventure was yet to come, for the Coth who could make no wheedling compromise with the fictions by which fools live and preserve alike their foolish hopes and their smirking amenities. He had, he felt, been sometimes rather brusque with these fools. But all that was over, too. They went their way; and he was going his. And, once that last adventure had been achieved, you might hope to settle down comfortably with the swaggering and great-hearted sinners, and to be stationed not too far from that gray squinting sinner who had been the most dear and admirable of earthly lords; and to foregather with all such fine rogues eternally among the genial and robustious flames, in which there was no more loneliness and no more cold and no more pettifogging talk about some Redeemer or another paying your scot, and where no more frightened servants would be spying on you always. . . .

The adventure came unheralded, for Coth died in his sleep, having outlived the wife of his youth by just four months.

BOOK SIX

IN THE SYLVAN’S HOUSE

“Is it time for you to dwell in your ceiled house, and this hose lies waste?”

—Haggai, i, 6

Chapter XXXIV. Something Goes Wrong: and Why

Now the tale is of Guivric of Perdigon, more generally called the Sage, who in the days after Anavalt went into Elfhame was chief of the lords of the Silver Stallion who yet remained in Poictesme. And the tale tells how it appeared to Guivric of Perdigon that something was going wrong.

He had not anything tangible to complain of. There was, indeed, no baron in Poictesme more powerful and honored than was Guivric the Sage. He had no need to bother over any notions about Manuel which in no way affected the welfare of Guivric of Perdigon, and he had no quarrel with the more staid and religious ordering of matters which now prevailed in Poictesme. Guivric had, howsoever frostily, adapted himself to these times, and in them a reasonably staid and religious Guivric had, thus, thrived.

As Heitman of Asch, he still held as rigorously as he had held in Manuel’s heyday, the fertile Piemontais between the Duardenez river and Perdigon. He had money and two castles, he lived in comeliness and splendor, he had wisdom and a high name and the finest vineyards anywhere in those regions. He had every reason to be proud of his tall prospering son Michael, a depressingly worthy young warrior, whose superabundant virtues, modeled with so much earnestness after the Manuel of the legend, caused Guivric to regard the amours of Michael’s wife (and Manuel’s daughter) with quiet and unregenerate amusement. And Guivric got on with his own wife as well, he flattered himself, as any person could hope to do upon the more animated side of deafness.

Yet something, this prim and wary Guivric knew, was somewhere going wrong. Things, even such prosaic common things as the chair he was seated in, or his own hands moving before him, were becoming dubious and remote. People spoke with thinner voices: and their bodies flickered now and then, as if these bodies were only appearances of colored vapor. The trees of Guivric’s flourishing woodlands would sometimes stretch and flatten in the wind like trails of smoke. The walls of Guivric’s fine home at Asch, and of his great fort at Perdigon also, were acquiring, as their conservative owner somewhat frettedly observed, a habit of moving, just by a thread’s width, when you were not quite looking at them; and of shifting in outline and in station as secretively as a cloud alters.

Instability and change lurked everywhere. Without any warning, well-known faces disappeared from Guivric’s stately household: the men-at-arms and the lackeys who remained seemed not to miss them, nor indeed ever to have known of those vanished associates.

And Guivric found that the saga which the best-thought-of local bards had compiled and adorned, under his supervision, so as to preserve for posterity’s benefit the glorious exploits and the edifying rewards of Guivric the Sage, was dwindling alike in length and in impressiveness. Overnight a line here and there, or a whole paragraph, would drop out unaccountably, an adventure would lose color, or an achievement would become less clear-cut: and the high and outrageous doings in which Guivric had shared as a lord of the Silver Stallion, these began, in particular, to become almost unrecognizable. At this rate, people would soon have no assurance whatever that Guivric the Sage had lived in unexampled heroism and respectability and had most marvelously prospered in everything.

And it was all quite annoying. It was as though Guivric, or else each one of his possessions and human ties, were wasting away into a phantom: and neither alternative seemed pleasant to consider.

Guivric locked fast the doors of the brown room in which now for so many years he had conducted his studies and his thaumaturgies. He set out a table, the top of which was inscribed with three alphabets. He put on a robe of white: about his withered neck he arranged a garland of purple vervain such as is called herb-of-the-cross. From seven rings he selected—because this day was a Sunday,—the gold ring inset with a chrysolite upon which was engraved the figure of a lion-headed serpent.

When this ring had been hung above the table, with a looped red hair plucked long ago from the tail of a virgin nightmare, and when the wan Lady of Crossroads had been duly invoked, then Guivric lighted a taper molded from the fat of Saracen women and of unweaned dogs, and with the evil flaming of this taper he set fire to the looped hair. The red hair burned with a small spiteful sizzling: the gold ring fell. The ring rolled about upon the table, it uncoiled, it writhed, it moved glitteringly among the characters of three alphabets, passing like a tortured worm from one ideograph to another, and it revealed to Guivric the dreadful truth.

The Sylan whom people called Glaum-Without-Bones was at odds with Guivric. This was not a matter which anybody blessed with intelligent self-interest could afford to neglect.

Chapter XXXV. Guivric’s Journey

Certainly Guivric the Sage, who cared only for himself, did not neglect this matter. The prim and wary man armed, and rode eastward, beyond Megaris; and fared steadily ever further into the East, traveling beyond the Country of Widows and the fearful Isle of the Ten Carpenters. Then, at Oskander’s Well, Guivric put off material armor. He put off even his helmet, and in its stead he assumed a cap of owl feathers. He passed through arid high pastures, beyond the wall of the Sassanid, he rubbed lemon juice upon his horse’s legs and rode unmolested through the broad and shallow lake, and thus came to the Sylan’s House. And all went well enough at first.

Guivric had feared, for one thing, that the Norns would forbid his entering into the mischancy place: but when he had tethered safely the fine horse which Guivric was never again to ride upon, he found that the gray weavers did not hinder him. They had not ever, they said, planned any future for Guivric: and it was all one to them whether he fared forward to face his own destruction or intrepidly went back to living with his wife.

“But do you not weave the sagas and the dooms of all men?” he asked of them.

“Not yours,” lean Skuld replied, looking up at him with pallid little cold bright eyes.

Guivric thus passed the haggard daughters of Dvalinn; and the proud man went onward, disquieted but unhindered. And in the gray anteroom beyond, were the progenitors of Guivric disporting themselves, each in the quaint manner of his bygone day, and talking with uneager and faded voices about the old times.

Since none of these ancestors had ever heard or thought of Guivric, they gave scant attention to him now. And to see them was unsetting, somehow. One of these strangers had Guivric’s high thin nose, and another just his long thin hands, and another his prim mouth, and another his excellent broad shoulders. Guivric could recognize all these fragments of himself moving at random about the gray room. He knew that, less visibly but quite as really, his tastes and his innate aversions—his little talents and failings and out-of-date loyalties, his quickness at figures, his aptitude for drawing, his tendency to catch cold easily, and his liking for sweets and highly seasoned foods,—were all passing about this gray room.

A compost of odds and ends had been patched together from these unheeding persons; that almost accidental patchwork was Guivric: the thought was humiliating. There was, he reflected, in this gray room another complete Guivric, only this other Guivric was not entire, but moved about in scattered fragments. That thought appeared, to a peculiarly self-centered person like Guivric, rather uncomfortable.

So Guivric went beyond his ancestors. Without delay the proud man passed stiffly by the inconsiderate people whose casual amours had created him, and had given him life and all his qualities, without consulting his preference or his convenience, or even thinking about him.

Chapter XXXVI. The Appointed Enemy

He came to a door beside which a saturnine castrato sat drowsing over a scythe. Guivric caught him intrepidly by the forelock; and tugging at it, thus forced the gaunt warden in his pain to cry out, “Enough!”

“For time enough is little enough,” said Guivric, “and when you are little enough, I can go safely by without killing time here. And that I shall certainly do, because to spare time is to lengthen life.”

“Come, come now,” grumbled the ancient warden, “but these tonsorial freedoms and this foolish talking seem very odd—”

“Time,” Guivric answered him, “at last sets all things even.”

Then Guivric walked widdershins in a complete circle about the old eunuch; and so went on into a room hung with black and silver: and in this place was a young and beautifully fashioned boy, with the bright unchanging gaze of a serpent.

The boy arose; and, putting aside a rod upon which grew black poppies, each with a silver-colored heart, he said to Guivric, “It is needful that you should hate.”

Now, at the sight of this stranger, Guivric was filled with an inexplicable wild rapture; and after shaping the sign of the River Horse and of the Writing of Lo, he demanded of this young man his name.

But the other only answered: “I am your appointed enemy. There is between us an eternal hatred; and should our bodies encounter we would contend as heroes. But something has gone wrong, our sagas have been perverted, and our spirits have been ensnared into the Sylan’s House, and all our living wears thin.”

“Come, come, my enemy!” cried Guivric, “hatred—since, as you tell me, this is hatred,—is throbbing in me now as a drum beats: and I would that we two might encounter!”

“That may not be,” replied the young man. “I am only a phantom in the Sylan’s House. I live as a newborn child in Denmark, I drowse as yet in swaddling cloths, dreaming at this instant about my appointed enemy. Yet in the life which you now have you will not ever go to Denmark: and by the time that I am grown, and am able to wield a sword and to contrive mischief against you, and to beset you everywhere with my lewd perversities, the body which you now have will have been taken away from you.”

“I am sorry,” Guivric said, “for in all my life, even in the rough old times of that blundering Manuel—I mean, of course, that, although I was privileged to share in the earthly labors of the Redeemer, in all my life I have never hated before to-day. I have merely disliked some persons, somewhat as I dislike cold veal or house-flies, without real ardor. And very often these persons could be useful to me, so that, through many little flatteries and small falsehoods, I must keep on their good side. But I perceive now that, throughout the living which my neighbors applaud and envy, I have needed some tonic adversary to exalt my living with a great and heroic loathing.”

“I know, dear adversary! And I know too that all the life which I now have must run slack because of an unfed lusting for my appointed enemy. But affairs will go more grandly by and by, if ever we get out of the Sylan’s House.”

“Heyday,” said Guivric, masterfully, “I am not going out! Instead, I am going in, even to the heart of this mischancy place; and you must go with me.”

But the lad shook his lovely evil head. “No: for, now that the Sylan is about to become human, they tell me, at the heart of the Sylan’s House is to be found pity and terror; and both of these must remain forever unknown to me.”

“Well, but why?” said Guivric, “why need those two cathartics which Aristotle most highly recommends remain forever unknown to you in particular?”

“Ah,” replied the boy, “that is a mystery. I only know it is decreed—and is decreed, for that matter, in the name of Eloim, Muthraton, Adonay, and Semiphoras,—that my rod here as it was first raised up in Gomorrah should possess quite other virtues than the rods of Moses and of Jacob.”

“Oh, in Gomorrah! So it was in that wicked city of the plain of Jordan, my spoiled child, that they first spared the rod! I see. For is not that rod to be used—thus?”

And Guivric showed with a discreet but obvious gesture what he meant.

The lad fearlessly answered him.

Chapter XXXVII. Too Many Mouths

So Guivric quitted his appointed enemy. And at the next door sat a discomfortable looking dyspeptic, crowned and wearing an old shroud, and huddled up, as if by spasms of pain, upon a tombstone, very neatly engraved with the arms and the name and the parentage and the titles of Guivric of Perdigon. Only the date and the manner of Guivric’s decease remained as yet vacant. And the crowned toiler put aside his chisel, and he grinned at Guivric rather pitiably.

“I really must be more careful,” observed this second warden, groaning and fidgeting and shaking his fleshless head, but of necessity grinning all the while, because he had no lips. “I am decreed, you see, to keep no measure in my diet; I must eat sheep as well as lambs; and afterward I find out only too plainly that there is not any medicine for death.”

Guivric, without a word of condolence, took out of his pocket a handful of coins, and he selected from among the thalers and pistoles a newly minted mark. This coin he tendered to the second warden, and the tomb-maker accepted lovingly this shining mark.

Then Guivric walked widdershins in a circle about this warden also: and when the king of terrors had been thus circumvented, Guivric went forward into the next room. A sweet and piercing and heavy odor now went with Guivric, and clung to him, and it was like the odor of embalming spices.

This room was hung with white and gold; and in this room a plump and naked man, wearing only a miter, was praying to nine gods. He arose and, after brushing off his reddened knees, he said to Guivric, “It is needful that you should believe.”

“I wish to believe,” replied Guivric. “Yet when I ask—Well, but you know what always happens.”

“Such, my dear errant son, is the accustomed punishment of unhallowed curiosity. It should, equally, be looked for and overlooked. The important thing is to believe.”

Guivric smiled rather bleakly now, beneath his cap of owl feathers. He said, like one who repeats a familiar ritual, “What should I believe?”

Upon the arms and upon the chest and upon the belly, and everywhere upon the naked body of the mitered man, opened red and precise-looking mouths, and each mouth answered Guivric’s question differently, and in the while that they all spoke together no one of these answers was clear. The utmost which Guivric could distinguish in the confusion was some piping babblement about Manuel the Redeemer. Then the mouths ended their speaking, and closed, and became invisible. The mitered man now seemed like any other benevolent gentleman in the middle years of a well-fed existence, and he was no longer horrible.

“You see,” said Guivric, with a shrug. “You see what always happens. I ask, and I am answered. Afterward I am impressed by the unusual phenomena, and I am slightly nauseated: but I, none the less, do not know which one of your countless mouths I should put faith in, and so bribe it to smile at me and prophesy good things.”

“That does not matter at all, my son. You have but to believe in whatsoever divine revealment you prefer as to what especial Redeemer will come tomorrow, and then you will live strongly and happily, you will go no longer as a phantom in the Sylan’s House.”

“Heyday!” said Guivric, “but it is you who are the phantom, and not I!”

The other for a moment was silent. Then he too shrugged. “With secular opinions as to such unimportant and wholly personal matters no belief is concerned.”

“I,” Guivric pointed out, “do not think this an unimportant matter. At all events, each one of your mouths speaks to me with the same authority and resonance: and in consequence, I can hear none of them.”

“Well, well!” said the plump mitered man, resignedly, “that sometimes happens, they tell me, when the Sylan is at odds with anybody. But, for one, I keep away from the Sylan, now that the Sylan is about to become human, because I suspect that at the heart of the Sylan’s House abides that which is too pitiable and too terrible for any of my mouths to aid.”

“I do not know about your aiding such things or any other things,” replied Guivric. “But I do know that, even though you dare not accompany me, I intend to match my thaumaturgies against the Sylan’s magic; and that we shall very shortly see what comes of it.”

Chapter XXXVIII. The Appointed Lover

Now at the next door sat a fierce and jealous destroyer, with a waned glory about his venerable Semitic head. The upper half of him was like amber, his lower parts shone as if with a fading fire. He seemed forlorn and unspeakably outworn. He looked without love at Guivric, saying, “Anm ashr ahih.”

“No deity could put it fairer than that, sir,” replied Guivric. “I respect the circumstance. Nevertheless, I have made a note of your number, and it is five hundred and forty-three.”

Then about this warden also Guivric walked widdershins, in a complete circle.

“Issachar is a large-limbed ass,” said Guivric, soberly. “He has become a servant under taskwork. Yet his is the circumambulation.”

Whereafter Guivric still went onward, into the next room: and Guivric’s feet now glittered each with a pallid halo, for in that instant he had trodden very near to God, and glory clung to them.

And in this room, which was hung with green and rose-color, white pigeons were walking about and eating barley. In the midst of the room a woman was burning violets and white rose-petals and olive wood in a new earthen dish. She arose from this employment, smiling. And her loveliness was not a matter of mere color and shaping, such as may be found elsewhere in material things: rather, was this loveliness a light which lived and was kindly.

Now this dear woman too began, “It is needful—”

“I think it is not at all needful, madame, to explain what human faculty you would exhort me to exercise.”

Guivric said this with a gallant frivolity: and yet he was trembling.

And after a while of looking at him somewhat sadly, the woman asked, “Do you not, then, remember me?”

“It is a strange thing, madame,” he answered, “it is a very strange thing that I should so poignantly remember you whom I have not ever seen before to-day. For I am shaken by old and terrible memories, I am troubled by the greatness of ancient losses not ever to be atoned for, in the exact moment that I cannot, for the life of me, say what these memories and these losses are.”

“You have loved me,—not once, but many times, my appointed lover.”

“I have loved a number of women, madame,—although I have of course avoided giving rise to any regrettable scandal. And it has been very pleasant to love women without annoying the prejudices of their recognized and legitimate proprietors. It enables one to combine physical with mental exercise. But this is not pleasant. To the contrary, I am frightened. I am become as a straw in a wide and rapid river: I am indulging in no pastime: that which is stronger than I can imagine is hurrying me toward that of which I am ignorant.”

“I know,” she answered. “Time upon time it has been so with us. But something has gone wrong—”

“What has happened, madame, is that the Sylan is at odds with me; and covets, so my dactyliomancy informed me, some one thing or it may be two things which I possess.”

“The Sylan is about to become human. That is why your saga has been perverted, and that is the reason of your having been ensnared as a phantom into the Sylan’s House—”

“Eh, then, and do you also, madame, dismiss me as a phantom!”

“Why, but of course no person’s body may enter into this mischancy place! The body which I have to-day, my appointed lover, is that of a very old woman in Cataia, nodding among my body’s many children and grandchildren, and dreaming of the love this life has denied to me. It is a blotched and shriveled body, colored like a rotting apple: and the bodies which we now have may not ever encounter. So all our living wears thin, and the lives that we now have must both be wasted tepidly, as a lukewarm water is poured out: and there is now no help for it, now that the Sylan is at odds with you.”

“I go to match my thaumaturgies against his magic.” said Guivric stoutly.

“You go, my dearest, to face that thing which is most pitiable and terrible of all things that be! You go to face your own destruction!”

“Nevertheless,” said Guivric, “I go.”

Yet still he looked at this woman. And Guivric’s thin hard lips moved restively. He sighed. He turned away and went on silently. His face could not be seen under his cap of owl feathers, but his broad shoulders sagged a little.

Chapter XXXIX. One Warden Left Uncircumvented

Beside the next door lay a huge white stallion. And as Guivric approached this door, it opened. Through the brown curtains came that ambiguous young man called Horvendile, with whom Guivric, off and on, had held considerable traffic during a forty years’ practice of thaumaturgies.

The stallion now arose, before Guivric could walk widdershins about him, and the stallion went statelily away. And Horvendile gazed after the superb beast, rather wistfully.

“He, too,” said Horvendile, “goes as a phantom here. Is it not a pity, Guivric, that this Kalki will not come in our day, and that we shall not ever behold his complete glory? I cry a lament for that Kalki who will some day bring back to their appointed places high faith and very ardent loves and hatreds; and who will see to it that human passions are never in a poor way to find expression with adequate speech and action. Ohe, I cry a loud lament for Kalki! The little silver effigies which his postulants fashion and adore are well enough: but Kalki is a horse of another color.”

“I did not come into this accursed place to talk about horses and nightmares,” replied Guivric, “but to attend to the righting of the wrongs contrived by one Glaum-Without-Bones, who is at odds with me, and who has perverted my saga.”

Now Horvendile reflected for an instant. He said, “You have then, after so many years, come of your own will into the East, just as I prophesied, to face the most pitiable and terrible of all things?”

Guivric answered, guardedly, “I cannot permit my saga to be perverted.”

Horvendile said then: “Nevertheless, I consider the saga of no lord of the Silver Stallion to be worth squabbling over. Your sagas in the end must all be perverted and engulfed by the great legend about Manuel. No matter how you may strive against that legend, it will conquer: no matter what you may do and suffer, my doomed Guivric, your saga will be recast until it conforms in everything to the legend begotten by the terrified imaginings of a lost child. For men dare not face the universe with no better backing than their own resources; all men that live, and that go perforce about this world like blundering lost children whose rescuer is not yet in sight, have a vital need to believe in this sustaining legend about the Redeemer: and the wickedness and the foolishness of no man can avail against the foolishness and the fond optimism of mankind.”

“These aphorisms,” Guivric conceded, “may be judicious, they may be valuable, they may even have some kernel somewhere of rational meaning. But, in any case, they do not justify my living’s having been upset and generally meddled with by a lecherous and immodest Sylan who goes about wearing not even a skeleton.”

Horvendile replied: “I can see no flaw in your way of living. You are the chief of Emmerick’s barons now that Anavalt is gnawed bones in Elfhame: you have wealth and rather more than as much power as Emmerick himself, now that your son is Emmerick’s brother-in-law, and poor Emmerick is married to a widow. You are a well-thought-of thaumaturgist, and you are, indeed, excelled in your art by nobody since Miramon Lluagor’s death. And you have also, they tell me, a high name for wisdom and for learning now that Kerin has gone down under the earth. What more can anybody ask?”

“I ask for much more than for this sort of cautious and secondary excellence.” Guivric seemed strangely desperate. He spoke now, with a voice which was not in anything prim and wary, saying, “I ask for the man whom I can hate, for the priest whom I can believe, and for the woman whom I can love!”

But Horvendile shook his red curls, and he smiled a little cruelly. “Successful persons, my poor careful Guivric, cannot afford to have any of these luxuries. And one misses them. I know. The Sylan too is, in his crude and naive way, a successful person. He is now almost human. He cherishes phantoms, therefore, and I suspect these phantoms have been troubling you with their nonsense, since it is well known that all illusions haunt the corridors of this mischancy place into which phantoms alone may enter.”

“Yet I have entered it,” Guivric pointed out.

“Yes,” Horvendile said, non-committally.

“And I now enter,” Guivric stated, “to the heart of it, to match my thaumaturgies against the Sylan’s magic.”

Chapter XL. Economics of Glaum-Without-Bones

Then Guivric passed through this door likewise; and so, with glowing feet and with an odor of funereal spices, Guivric came into the room in which was the Sylan. Glaum-Without-Bones looked up from his writing, tranquilly. Glaum said nothing: he merely smiled. All was quiet.

Guivric noticed a strange thing, and it was that this room was hung with brown and was furnished with books and pictures which had a familiar seeming. And then he saw that this room was in everything like the brown room at Asch in which now for so many years he had conducted his studies and his thaumaturgies; and that in this mischancy place, for all his arduous traveling beyond the Country of Widows and the fearful Isle of the Ten Carpenters and the high Wall of the Sassanid, here you still saw, through well-known windows, the familiar country about Asch and the gleaming of the Duardenez river, and beyond this the long plain of Amneran and the tall Forest of Acaire. And Guivric saw that this Glaum-Without-Bones, who sat there smiling up at Guivric, from under a cap of owl feathers, had in everything the appearance of the aging man who had so long sat in this room; and that Glaum-Without-Bones did not differ in anything from Guivric the Sage.

Guivric spoke first. He said:

“This is a strong magic. This is a sententious magic. They had warned me that I would here face my own destruction, that I would here face the most pitiable and terrible of all things: and I face here that which I have made of life, and life of me. I shudder; I am conscious of every appropriate sentiment. Nevertheless, sir, I must venture the suggestion that mere, explicit allegory as a form of art is somewhat obsolete.”

Glaum-Without-Bones replied: “What have I to do with forms of art? My need was of a form of flesh and blood. I had need of a human body and of human ties and of a human saga of the Norn’s most ruthless weaving. We Sylans have our powers and our privileges, but we are not the children of any god; and so, when we have lived out our permitted centuries, we must perish utterly unless we can contrive to become human. Therefore I had sore need of all human discomforts, so that a soul might sprout in me under oppression and chastening, and might, upon fair behavior, be preserved in eternal bliss, and not ever perish as we Sylans perish.”

“Everybody has heard of these familiar facts about you Sylans,” returned Guivric, impatiently, “and it is your stealing, in this shabby fashion, of my own particular human ties that I consider unheard-of—”

“Yes, yes,” said Glaum, with some complacence, “that was done through a rare magic, and through a strong magic, and through a magic against which there is no remedy.”

“That we shall see about! For what has happened to me is not fair—”

“Of course it is not,” Glaum assented. “The doom which is now upon you is no fairer than the doom which was upon me yesterday, to perish utterly like a weed or an old tom-cat.”

“—And so I have come hither to match my resistless thaumaturgies against your piddling magic, and to compel you to restore to me your pilferings—”

“I shall restore to you,” Glaum stated, “nothing. And I have taken all. Your saga is now my saga, your castles are my castles, your son is my son, and your body is my body. Inside that body I intend to live self-mortifyingly and virtuously, for some ten years or so; and then that body will die: but by that time a soul will have sprouted in me, an immortal soul which, you may be certain, I shall keep stainless, because I at least know how to appreciate such a remunerative bit of property. Thus, when your tomb becomes my tomb, that soul will of course ascend to eternal bliss.”

“But what,” said Guivric, scornfully, “what if I do not consent to be robbed of the salvation assured to me by sixty years of careful and respectable living? and what if I compel you—?”

“I think that, in your sorry case, you should not speak of compelling anybody to do anything. Nor is it altogether my doing that your house is now the Sylan’s House. Self-centered and self-righteous man, you had no longer any strength nor real desires, but only many little habits. Nothing at all solid remained really yours, not even when I first set about my magicking. Oho, and then you were an easy prey! and the human ties you held so lightly slipped very lightly away from you who had so long been living without any love or hatred or belief. For throughout that over-comfortable while the strength and the desire had been oozing out of you, and all your living wore thin. I had only to complete the emaciation. And in consequence”—Glaum gestured, rather gracefully, with Guivric’s long thin hands,—“in consequence, you go as a phantom.”

Guivric saw this was regrettably true. He saw it was as a slight grayish mist, through which he was looking down unhindered at the familiar rug behind him, that he now wavered and undulated in the midst of this room in which he had for so many years pursued his studies without a hint of such levity. Yet nothing was changed. Guivric of Perdigon still sat there, behind the oak table with copper corners. Guivric of Perdigon kept his accustomed place, palpable and prim and wary, as vigorous as could be hoped for at his age, and honored and well-to-do, and, in fine, with nothing left to ask for, as men estimate prosperity.

And the living of this Guivric was reasonably assured of going on like that, for year after year, quite comfortably, and with people everywhere applauding, and with nothing anywhere alluring you toward any rash excesses in the way of emotion. It was from this established and looked-up-to sort of living that a nefarious Sylan was planning to oust Guivric the Sage; and to leave Guivric a mere phantom, a thing as transitory and as disreputable—and of course, in a manner of speaking, as free too, and as lusty and as ageless,—as the Sylan’s self had been only yesterday. . . . For those abominable thieves and ravishers of maidens did not grow old and vigorless and tired: instead, when the appointed hour had struck, they vanished. . . .

“Well, well!” said Guivric, and he now flickered into a sitting posture, more companionably. “This sort of eviction from every human tie is unexpected and high-handed and deplorable and so on. But we ought, even when all else is being lost, to retain composure.”

The Sylan let him talk. . . .

And Guivric went on: “So, you are indissuadably resolved, at the cost of any possible conflict between my thaumaturgies and your magic, to leave me just a disembodied intelligence! Do you know, Messire Glaum, I cannot quite regard it as a compliment, that you refuse to take over my intelligence! Yet you, no doubt, prefer your own intelligence—”

The Sylan let him talk. . . .

But Guivric had paused. For the Sylan’s intelligence had, after all, enabled Glaum to acquire—through howsoever irregular methods,—the utmost that a reasonable mind could look for in the way of success and comfort and of future famousness long after Glaum-Without-Bones had ascended to the eternal bliss assured by a careful and respectable past. The Sylan’s intelligence had gained for him the very best that any man could hope for. There was thus no firm ground, after all, upon which any human being could disrespect the Sylan’s intelligence. ... It was only that these Sylans, always so regrettably lewd and spry, did not ever grow old and tired and vigorless: they did not ever, except of their own volition, become disgustingly smug-looking old prigs: instead, when the appointed hour had struck, they vanished.

“—For your intelligence appears to me a very terrible sort of intelligence,” Guivric continued, “and I have no doubt that your magic is upon a plane with it. My little thaumaturgies could have no chance whatever against such magic and such intelligence. Oh, dear me, no! So I concede my helplessness, Messire Glaum, without mounting the high and skittish horse of virtuous indignation. I avoid the spectacle of an unseemly wrangle between fellow artists: and, in asking you to restore to me the customary rewards of a thrifty and virtuous and in every way prosperous existence, I can but appeal to your mercy.”

“I,” said the Sylan, “have none.”

“So I had hoped.”—here Guivric coughed. “Anguish, sheer anguish, sir, deprives me of proper control of my tongue. For I had of course meant to say,” Guivric continued, upon a more tragic note,—“so I had hoped in vain! Now every hope is gone. Henceforward you are human, and I am only an un-honored vague Sylan! Well, it is all very terrible; but nothing can be done about it, I suppose.”

“Nothing whatever can be done about it,—unless you prefer to court something worse with those thaumaturgies of yours?”

Guivric was pained. “But, between fellow artists!” he stated. “Oh, no, dear Glaum, that sort of open ostentatious rivalry, for merely material gains, seems always rather regrettably vulgar.”

“Why, then, if you will pardon me,” the Sylan submitted, in Guivric’s most civil manner when dealing with unimportant persons, “I shall ask to be excused from prolonging our highly enjoyable chat. Some other time, perhaps—But I really am quite busy this morning: and, besides, our wife will be coming in here any minute, to call me to dinner.”

“I shall not intrude.” Vaporously arising, Guivric now smiled, with a new flavor of sympathy. “A rather terrible woman, that, you will find! And, Lord, how a young Guivric did adore her once! Nowadays she is one of the innumerous reasons which lead me to question if you have been quite happily inspired, even with the delights of heaven impendent. You see, she is certainly going to heaven. And Michael too,—do you know, I think you will find Michael, also, something of a bore? He expects so much of his father, and when those expectations seem imperiled he does look at you so exactly like a hurt, high-minded cow! Now it is you who will have to live up to his notions, and to the notions of that fond, fretful, foolish woman, and it is you who will be bothered with an ever-present sense of something lost and betrayed. . . . But you will live up to their idiotic notions, none the less! And I do not doubt that, just as you say, the oppression and the chastening will be good for you.”

The Sylan answered, sternly, “Poor shallow learned selfish fool! it is that love and pride, it is their faith and their jealousy to hide away your shortcomings, it is the things you feebly jeer at, which will create in me a soul!”

“No doubt—” Then Guivric went on hastily, and in a tone of cordial encouragement. “Oh, yes, my dear fellow, there is-not a doubt of it! and I am sure you will find the birth-pangs well rewarded. Heaven, everybody tells me, is a most charming place. Meanwhile, if you do not mind, just for a minute, pray do not contort my face so unbecomingly until after I am quite gone! To see what right thinking and a respectably inflated impatience with frivolity can make of my face, and has so often made of my face,” reflected Guivric, as he luxuriously drifted out of the familiar window like a smoke, “is even now a little humiliating. But, then, the most salutary lessons are invariably the most shocking.”

Chapter XLI. The Gratifying Sequel

Thus the true Guivric passed beyond the knowledge of men: and the false Guivric gathered up his papers and took off his cap of owl-feathers and prepared for dinner.

The wife and the son of Guivric from that time forth delighted in his affection and geniality: and it was observed, for another wonder, that Guivric of Perdigon had, with increasing age, graduated from a cool reserve about religious matters into very active beneficence and piety. The legend of Manuel had nowhere, now, a more fervent adherent and expounder, because Glaum nourished his sprouting soul with every sort of religious fertilizer. Nor was his loving-kindness confined to talking about itself, for the good works of Glaum were untiring and remarkably freehanded, since he had everything to gain by being liberal with Guivric’s property.

The old gentleman thus became a marked favorite with Holy Holmendis: and indeed it was Glaum who at this time, when Guivric’s ancient comrade Kerin of Nointel came back into Poictesme, chiefly assisted Holmendis in converting Kerin to the great legend of Manuel.

In fine, Glaum lived, without detection, in Guivric’s body; and preserved it in unquestioned virtue, since a well-to-do nobleman is, after sixty, subject to very few temptations which cannot be gratified quietly without scandal. He died in the assurance of a blessed resurrection, which he no doubt attained.

As for the true Guivric, nothing more was ever quite definitely known of him. It was remarked, however, that for many years thereafter an amorous devil went invisibly about the hill country behind Perdigon. The girls of Valneres and Ogde reported that by three traits alone could the presence of this demon be detected: for one thing, he diffused a sweet and poignant odor, not unlike that of an embalmer’s spiceries; and, for another, the soles of his feet had been observed, after dusk, to be luminous. A third infallible sign of his being anywhere near you they, with blushes and some giggling, declined to reveal.

BOOK SEVEN

WHAT SARAIDE WANTED

“None shall want her mate.”

—Isaiah xxxiv, 16

Chapter XLII. Generalities At Ogde

Now the tale tells that it was in the winter after Guivric’s encounter with the Sylan that Kerin of Nointel returned into Poictesme to become yet another convert to the great legend of Manuel; and tells also of how for the first time men learned why and in what fashion Kerin had gone out of Poictesme.

Therefore the tale harks back to very ancient days, in the May month which followed the passing of Manuel, and the tale speaks of a season wherein it appeared to Kerin of Nointel that he could understand his third wife no better than he had done the others. But for that perhaps unavoidable drawback to matrimony, he was then living comfortably enough with this Saraide, whom many called a witch, in her ill-spoken-of, eight-sided home beside the notorious dry Well of Ogde. This home was gray, with a thatched roof upon which grew abundant mosses and many small wild plants; a pair of storks nested on the gable; and elder-trees shaded all.

It was a very quiet and peaceful place, in which, so Kerin estimated, two persons might well have lived in untroubled serenity, now that the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion was disbanded, and a younger Kerin’s glorious warfaring under Dom Manuel was done with forever.

Mild-mannered, blinking Kerin, for one, did not regret Dom Manuel’s passing. The man had kept you fighting always, whether it was with the Easterlings or the Northmen, or with Othmar Black-Tooth or with old yellow Sclaug or with Manuel’s father, blind Oriander. It was a life which left you no time whatever for the pursuit of any culture. Kerin liked fighting, within moderation, with persons of admitted repute. But Kerin, after four years of riding into all quarters of the earth at the behest of this never-resting Manuel, was heartily tired of killing strangers in whom Kerin was in no way interested.

So, upon the whole, it was a relief to be rid of Manuel and to be able once more to marry, and to settle down at Ogde in the eight-sided house under the elder-trees. Yet, even in this lovely quietude, the tale repeats, the third wife of Kerin seemed every night to bother herself, and in consequence her husband, about a great many incomprehensible matters.

Now of the origin of Saraide nothing can here be told with profit and decorum: here it is enough to say that an ambiguous parentage had provided this Saraide with a talisman by which you might know the truth when truth was found. And one of the many things about Kerin’s wife which Kerin could not quite understand, was her constant complaining that she had not found out assuredly the truth about anything, and, in particular, the truth as to Saraide. “I exist,” she would observe to her husband, “and I am in the main as other women. Therefore, this Saraide is very certainly a natural phenomenon. And in nature everything appears to be intended for this, that or the other purpose. Indeed, after howsoever hasty consideration of the young woman known as Saraide, one inevitably deduces that so much of loveliness and wit and aspiration, of color and perfume and tenderness, was not put together haphazardly; and that the compound was painstakingly designed to serve some purpose or another purpose. It is about that purpose I want knowledge.”

And Kerin would reply, “As you like, my dear.” So this young Saraide, whom many called a witch, had sought, night after night, for the desired knowledge, in widely various surroundings, from the clergy, from men of business, from poets, and from fiends; and had wakened in her talisman every color save only that golden shining which would proclaim her capture of the truth. This clear soft yellow ray, as she explained to Kerin, would have to be evoked, if ever, in the night season, because by day its radiance might pass unnoticed and her perception of the truth be lost.

Kerin could understand the common-sense of this, at any rate. And so young Saraide was unfailingly heartened in all such nocturnal experiments by the encouragement of her fond husband.

“And do not be discouraged, wife,” he would exhort her, as he was now exhorting upon this fine spring evening, “for women and their belongings are, beyond doubt, of some use or another, which by and by will be discovered. Meanwhile, my darling, what were you saying there is for supper? For that at least is a matter of real importance—”

But Saraide said only, in that quick, inconsequential childish way of hers, “O Kerin of my heart, I do so want to know the truth about this, and about all other matters!”

“Come, come, Saraide! let us not despair about the truth, either; for they tell me that truth lies somewhere at the bottom of a well, and at virtually the door of our home is a most notable if long dried well. Our location is thus quite favorable, if we but keep patience. And sooner or later the truth comes to light, they tell me, also,—out of, it may be, the darkness of this same abandoned Well of Ogde,—because truth is mighty and will prevail.”

“No doubt,” said Saraide: “but throughout all the long while between now and then, my Kerin, you will be voicing just such sentiments!”

“—For truth is stranger than fiction. Yes, and as Lactantius tells us, truth will sometimes come even out of the devil’s mouth.”

Saraide fidgeted. And what now came out of her own angelic mouth was a yawn.

“Truth is not easily found.” her Kerin continued. “The truth is hard to come to: roses and truth have thorns about them.”

“Perhaps,” said Saraide. “But against banalities a married woman has no protection whatever!”

“Yet truth,” now Kerin went on with his kindly encouragement, “may languish, but can never perish. Isidore of Seville records the fine saying that, though malice may darken truth, it cannot put it out.”

“Husband of mine,” said Saraide, “sometimes I find your wisdom such that I wonder how I ever came to marry you!”

But Kerin waved aside her tribute modestly. “It is merely that I, too, admire the truth. For truth is the best buckler. Truth never grows old. Truth, in the words of Tertullian, seeks no corners. Truth makes the devil blush.”

“Good Lord!” said Saraide. And for no reason at all she stamped her foot.

“—So everybody, in whatsoever surroundings, ought to be as truthful as I am now, my pet, in observing that this hour is considerably past our usual hour for supper, and I have had rather a hard day of it—”

But Saraide had gone from him, as if in meditation, toward the curbing about the great and bottomless Well of Ogde. “Among these general observations, about devils and bucklers and supper time, I find only one which may perhaps be helpful. Truth lies, you tell me, at the bottom of a well just such as this well.”

“That is the contention alike of Cleanthes and of Democritos the derider.”

“May the truth not lie indeed, then, just as you suggested, at the bottom of this identical well? For the Zhar-Ptitza alone knows the truth about all things, and I recall an old legend that the bird who has the true wisdom used to nest in this part of Poictesme.”

Kerin looked over the stone ledge about the great and bottomless Well of Ogde, peering downward as far as might be. “I consider it improbable, dear wife, that the Zhar-Ptitza, who is everywhere known to be the most wise and most ancient of birds and of all living creatures, would select such a cheerless looking hole to live in. Still, you never can tell: the wise affect profundity; and this well is known to be deep beyond the knowledge of man. Now nature, as Cicero informs us, in profundo veritatem penitus abstruserit—”

“Good Lord!” said Saraide again, but with more emphasis. “Do you slip down there, then, like a dear fellow, and find the truth for me.”

Saying this, she clapped both hands to his backside, and she pushed her husband into the great and bottomless Well of Ogde.

Chapter XLIII. Prayer And The Lizard Maids

The unexpectedness of it all, alike of Saraide’s assault and of the astonishing discovery that you could fall for hundreds after hundreds of feet, full upon your head, without getting even a bruise, a little bewildered Kerin when he first sat up at the bottom of the dry well. He shouted cheerily, “Wife, wife, I am not hurt a bit!” because the fact seemed so remarkably fortunate and so unaccountable.

But at once large stones began to fall everywhere about him, as though Sara’ide upon hearing his voice had begun desperately to heave these stones into the well. Kerin thought this an inordinate manner of spurring him onward in the quest of knowledge and truth, because the habitual impetuosity of Saraide, when thus expressed with cobblestones, would infallibly have been his death had he not sought shelter in the opening he very luckily found to the southwest side. There was really no understanding these women who married you, Kerin reflected, as, after crawling for a while upon hands and feet, he came to a yet larger opening, in which he could stand erect.

But this passage led Kerin presently to an underground lake, which filled all that part of the cavern, so that he could venture no farther. Instead, he sat down upon the borders of these gloomy and endless looking waters. He could see these waters because of the many ignes fatui, such as are called corpse candles, which flickered and danced above the dark lake’s surface everywhere.

Kerin in such dismal circumstances began to pray. He loyally gave precedence to his own faith, and said, first, all the prayers of his church that he could remember. He addressed such saints as seemed appropriate, and when, after the liveliest representation of Kerin’s plight, sixteen of them had failed in any visible way to intervene, then Kerin tried the Angels, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, and Archangels.

Yet later, when no response whatever was vouchsafed by any member of this celestial hierarchy, Kerin inferred that he had, no doubt, in falling so far, descended into heretical regions and into the nefarious control of unchristian deities. So he now prayed to all the accursed gods of the heathen that he could remember as being most potent in dark places. He prayed to Aidoneus the Laughterless, the Much-Receiving, .the People-Collecting, the Invincible and the Hateful; to the implacable Keres, those most dreadful cave-dwellers who are nourished by the blood of slain warriors; to the gloom-roaming Erinnyes, to the Gray-Maids, to the Snatchers, and, most fervently, to Kore, that hidden and very lovely sable-vested Virgin to whom belonged, men said, all the dim underworld.

But nothing happened.

Then Kerin tried new targets for his praying. He addressed himself to Susanoo, that emperor of darkness who was used to beget children by chewing up a sword and spitting out the pieces; to Ekchuah, the Old Black One, who at least chewed nothing with his one tooth; to the red Maruts, patched together from the bits of a shattered divine embryo; to Onniont, the great, horned, brown and yellow serpent, whose lair might well be hereabouts; to Tethra, yet another master of underground places; to Apep also, and to Set, and to Uhat, the Chief of Scorpions; to Camazotz, the Ruler of Bats; to Fenris, the wolf who waited somewhere in a cave very like this cave, against the coming time when Fenris would overthrow and devour God the All-Mighty Father; and to Sraosha, who had charge of all worlds during the night season.

And still nothing happened: and Kerin could see only endless looking waters and, above them, those monotonously dancing corpse candles.

Kerin nevertheless well knew, as a loyal son of the Church, the efficacy of prayer; and he now began, in consequence, to pray to the corpse candles, because these might, he reflected, rank as deities in this peculiarly depressing place. And his comfort was considerable when, after an ave or two, some of these drifting lights came flitting toward him; but his surprise was greater when he saw that each of the ignes fatui was a living creature like a tiny phosphorescent maiden in everything except that each had the head of a lizard.

“What is your nature?” Kerin asked, “and what are you doing in this cold dark place?”

“Should we answer either of those questions,” one of the small monsters said, in a shrill little voice, as though a cricket were talking, “it would be the worse for you.”

“Then, by all means, do not answer! Instead, do you tell me if knowledge and truth are to be found hereabouts, for it is of them that I go in search.”

“How should we know? It was not in pursuit of these luxuries that we came hither, very unwillingly.”

“Then, how does one get out of this place?”

Now they all twittered together, and they flitted around Kerin with small squeakings. “One does not get out of this place.”

Kerin did not cry pettishly, as Saraide would have done, “Good Lord!” Instead, he said, “Dear me!”

“Nor have we any wish to leave this place,” said the small lizard-women. “These waters hold us here with the dark loveliness of doom; we have fallen into an abiding hatred of these waters; we may not leave them because of our fear. It is not possible for any man to imagine the cruelty of these waters. Therefore we dance above them; and all the while that we dance we think about warmth and food instead of about these waters.”

“And have you no food here nor any warmth, not even brimstone? For I remember that, up yonder in Poictesme, our priests were used to threaten—”

“We do not bother about priests any longer. But a sort of god provides our appointed food.”

“Come, come now, that is much better. For, as I was just saying to my wife, supper is a matter of vital importance, after a rather hard day of it—But who is this sort of god?”

“We do not know. We only know that he has nineteen names.”

“My very dear little ladies,” said Kerin, “your information appears so limited, and your brightness so entirely physical, that I now hesitate to ask if you know for what reason somebody is sounding that far-off gong which I can hear?”

“That gong means, sir, that our appointed food is ready.”

“Alas, my friends, but it is quite unbearable,” declared Kerin, “that food should be upon that side of the dark water, and I, who have had rather a hard day of it, should be upon this side!”

“No, no!” they reassured him, “it is not unbearable, for we do not mind it in the least.”

Then the squeaking little creatures all went away from Kerin, flitting and skimming and twinkling over broad waters which seemed repellently cold and very dreadfully deep. Nevertheless, Kerin, in his desperation,—now that no god answered his prayer, and even the ignes fatui had deserted him, and only a great hungering remained with Kerin in the darkness,—Kerin now arose and went as a diver speeds into those most unfriendly looking waters.

The result was surprising and rather painful: for, as Kerin thus discovered, these waters were not more than two feet in depth. He stood up, a bit sheepishly, dripping wet, and rubbing his head. Then Kerin waded onward in a broad shallow puddle about which there was no conceivable need to bother any god.

Kerin thus came without any hindrance to dry land, and to a place where the shining concourse of lizard-women had already begun to nibble and tug and gulp. But Kerin, after having perceived the nature of their appointed food, and after having shivered, walked on beyond this place, toward the light he detected a little above him.

“For supper,” he observed, “is a matter of vital importance; and it really is necessary to draw the line somewhere.”

Chapter XLIV. Fine Cordiality of Sclaug

Now Kerin seemed in the dark to be mounting a flight of nineteen stairs. He came thus into a vast gray corridor, inset upon the left side with nineteen alcoves: each alcove was full of books, and beside each alcove stood a lighted, rather large candle as thick about as a stallion’s body. And Kerin’s surprise was great to find, near the first alcove, that very Sclaug with whom Kerin pleasurably remembered having had so much chivalrous trouble, and such fine combats, before, some years ago, this Sclaug had been killed and painstakingly burned.

Nevertheless, here was the old yellow gentleman intact and prowling about restively on all fours, in just the wolf-like fashion he had formerly affected. But after one brief snarl of surprise he stood erect; and, rubbing together the long thin hands which were webbed between the fingers like the feet of a frog, Sclaug asked whatever could have brought Kerin so far down in the world.

For Kerin this instant was a bit awkward, since he knew not quite what etiquette ought to govern re-encounters with persons whom you have killed. Yet Kerin was always as ready as anybody to let bygones be cast off. So Kerin frankly told his tale.

Then Sclaug embraced Kerin, and bade him welcome, and Sclaug laughed with the thin, easy, neighing laughter of the aged.

“As for what occurred at Lorcha, dear Kerin, do not think of it any more than I do. It was in some features unpleasant at the time: but, after all, you burned my body without first driving a stake through my rebellious and inventive heart, and so since then I have not lacked amusements. And as for this knowledge and truth of which you go in search, here is all knowledge, in the books that I keep watch over in this Naraka,—during the intervals between my little amusements,—for a sort of god.”

Kerin scratched among the wiry looking black curls of Kerin’s hair, and he again glanced up and down the corridor. “There are certainly a great many of them. But Saraide desired, I think, all knowledge, so near as I could understand her.”

“Let us take things in the order of their difficulty,” replied Sclaug. “Do you acquire all knowledge first, and hope for understanding later.”

The courteous old gentleman then provided Kerin with white wine and with food very gratefully unlike that of the ignes fatui, and Sclaug placed before Kerin one of the books.

“Let us eat first,” said Kerin, “for supper, in any event, is a matter of vital importance, where knowledge and truth may turn out to be only a womanish whim.”

He ate. Then Kerin began comfortably to read, after, as he informed Sclaug, rather a hard day of it.

Now the book which Kerin had was the book written by the patriarch Abraham in the seventy-first year of his age: and by and by Kerin looked up from it, and said, “Already I have learned from this book one thing which is wholly true.”

“You progress speedily!” answered Sclaug. “That is very nice.”

“Well,” Kerin admitted, “such is one way of describing the matter. But no doubt other things are equally true: and optimism, anyhow, costs nothing.”

Chapter XLV. The Gander Also Generalizes

So began a snug life for Kerin. The nineteen candles remained always as he had first seen them, tranquilly lighting the vast windless corridor, burning, but not ever burning down, nor guttering, nor even needing to be snuffed: and Kerin worked his way from one candle to another, as Kerin read each book in every alcove. When Kerin was tired he slept: all the while that he waked he gave to acquiring knowledge: he had no method, nor any necessity, of distinguishing between his daily and his nocturnal studies.

Sclaug went out and came back intermittently, bringing food for Kerin. Sclaug returned as a rule with blood upon his lips and chin. When Sclaug was away, Kerin had to make the best—a poor best,—of the company of the garrulous large gander which lived in the brown cage.

Then, also, unusual creatures, many of them not unlike men and women, would come sometimes, during these absences of Sclaug,—whom, for some reason or another, they seemed to dislike,—and they invoked the gander, and paid his price, and ceremonies would ensue. Ever-busy Kerin could not, of course, spare from his reading much time to notice these ornithomantic and probably pagan rites. Yet he endured such interruptions philosophically; because, at least, he reflected, they put an end for that while to the gander’s perilously sweet and most distracting singing.

And several years thus passed; and Kerin had no worries in any manner to interrupt him except the gander. That inconsiderate bird insisted upon singing, with a foolish, damnable sort of charm: and so, was continually checking Kerin’s pursuit of knowledge, with anserine rhapsodies about beauty and mystery and holiness and heroism and immortality, and about a variety of other unscientific matters.

“For life is very marvelous,” this gander was prone to remark, “and to the wonders of earth there is no end appointed.”

“Well, I would not say that, precisely,” Kerin would reply, good-temperedly looking up for the while from his book, “because geology has made great progress of late. And so, Messire Gander, I would not say quite that. Rather, I would say that Earth is a planet infested with the fauna best suited to survive in this particular stage of the planet’s existence. In any case, I finished long ago with earth, and with all ordinary terrestrial phenomena, such as earthquakes, and the formation of continents, and elevation of islands, and with stars and meteorics and with cosmography in general.”

“—And of all creatures man is the most miraculous—”

“The study of anthropology is of course important. So I have learned too about man, his birth and organization, his invention and practice of the arts, his polities at large, and about the sidereal influences which control the horoscope and actions of each person as an individual.”

“—A child of god, a brother to the beasts—!”

“Well, now, I question too the scientific value of zoomorphism: yet the facts about beasts, I admit, are interesting. For example, there are two kinds of camels; the age of the stag can be told by inspection of his horns; the period of gestation among sheep is one hundred and fifty days; and in the tail of the wolf is a small lock of hair which is a supreme love charm.”

“You catalogue, poor Kerin,” said the gander; “you collect your bits of knowledge as a magpie gathers shining pebbles; you toil through one book to another book as methodically as a worm gnaws out the same advance: but you learn nothing, in the wasted while that your youth goes.”

“To the contrary, I am at this very moment learning,” replied Kerin. “I am learning about the different kinds of stone and marble, including lime and sand and gypsum. I am learning that the artists who excelled in sculpture were Phidias, Scopas and Praxiteles. The last-named, I have just learned also, left a son called Cephisodotos, who inherited much of his father’s talent, and made a notably fine Group of Wrestlers.”

“You and your wrestlers,” said the gander, “are profoundly absurd! But time is the king of wrestlers; and he already prepares to try a fall with you.”

“Now, indeed, those Wrestlers were not absurd,” replied Kerin. “And the proof of it is that they were for a long while the particular glory of Pergamos.”

At that the gander seemed to give him up, saying, after a little hissing: “Very well, then, do you catalogue your facts about Pergamos and staghorns and planets! But I shall sing.”

Kerin now for a while regarded his fellow prisoner with a trace of mild disapproval. And Kerin said:

“Yet I catalogue verities which are well proven and assured. But you, who live in a brown cage that is buried deep in this gray and lonely corridor, you can have no first-hand information as to beauty and mystery and holiness and heroism and immortality, you encourage people in a business of which you are ignorant, and you sing about ardors and raptures and, above all, about a future of which you can know nothing.”

“That may very well be just why I sing of these things so movingly. And in any event, I do not seek to copy nature. I, on the contrary, create to divert me such faith and dreams as living among men would tend to destroy. But as it is, my worshipers depart from me drunk with my very potent music; they tread high-heartedly, in this gray corridor, and they are devoid of fear and parvanimity; for the effect of my singing, like that of all great singing, is to fill my hearers with a sentiment of their importance as moral beings and of the greatness of their destinies.”

“Oh, but,” said Kerin, “but I finished long ago with the various schools of morals, and I am now, as I told you, well forward in petrology. Nor shall I desist from learning until I have come by all knowledge and all truth which can content my Saraide. And she, Messire Gander, is a remarkably clear-sighted young woman, to whom the romantic illusions which you provide could be of no least importance.”

“Nothing,” returned the gander, “nothing in the universe, is of importance, or is authentic to any serious sense, except the illusions of romance. For man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. These axioms—poor, deaf and blinded spendthrift!—are none the less valuable for being quoted.”

“Nor are they, I suspect,” replied Kerin, “any the less generally quoted for being bosh.”

With that he returned to his books; and the gander resumed its singing.

And many more years thus passed: overhead, the legend of Manuel had come into being and was flourishing, and before its increase the brawling bleak rough joyous times which Kerin had known, were, howsoever slowly, passing away from Poictesme, not ever to return. Overhead, Count Emmerick was ruling—inefficiently enough, but at least with a marked bent toward the justice and mercy and kindliness imposed upon him by the legend,—where Dom Manuel had ruled according to his own will alone. Overhead, Dame Niafer and Holmendis were building everywhere their shrines and convents and hospitals; and were now beginning, a little by a little, to persecute, with the saint’s rather ruthless miracle-working, the fairies and the demons and all other unorthodox spirits aboriginal to this land; and were beginning, too, to extirpate the human heretics who here and there had showed such a lack of patriotism and of religious faith as to question the legend of Manuel and the transcending future of Poictesme.

The need of doing this was a grief to Niafer and Holmendis, as well as a troubling tax upon their hours of leisure: but, nevertheless, as clear-headed philanthropists, they here faced honestly the requirements of honest faith in any as yet revealed religion,—by which all unbelievers must be regarded as lost in any event, and cannot be permitted to continue in life except as a source of yet other immortal souls’ pollution and ruin.

Meanwhile the gander also exalted the illusions of romance: and Kerin read. His eyes journeyed over millions upon millions of pages in the while that Kerin sat snug: and except for the gander’s perilously sweet and most distracting singing, Kerin had no worries in any manner to interrupt him, and no bothers whatever, save only the increasing infirmities of his age.

Chapter XLVI. Kerin Rises In The World

Then old Sclaug said to Kerin, who now seemed so much older than Sclaug seemed: “It is time for you and me to cry quits with studying: for you have worked your way as a worm goes through every alcove in this place, you have read every book that was ever written; and I have seen that vigor which destroyed me destroyed. I go into another Naraka: and you must now return, omniscient Kerin, into the world of men.”

“That is well,” said Kerin, “because, after all, I have been away from home a long while. Yes, that is well enough, although I shall regret to leave the books of that god of whom you told me,—and whom, by the way, I have not yet seen.”

“I said, of a sort of god. He is not worshiped, I must tell you, by the very learned nor by the dull. However!” Sclaug said, after a tiny silence, “however, I was wondering if you have found in these books the knowledge you were looking for?”

“I suppose so,” Kerin answered, “because I have acquired all knowledge.”

“And have you found out also the truth?”

“Oh, yes!” said Kerin, speaking now without hesitancy.

Kerin took down from its place the very first book which Sclaug had given him to read, when Kerin was yet young, the book which had been written—upon leaves of tree bark, with the assistance of a divine collaborator,—by the patriarch Abraham when an horror of great darkness fell upon him in the plain of Mamre. This book explained the wisdom of the temple, the various master-words of chance, the seven ways of thwarting destiny, and one thing which is wholly true. And Kerin half opened this book, at the picture of an old naked eunuch who with a scythe was hacking off the feet of a naked youth gashed everywhere with many small wounds; then turned to a picture of a serpent crucified; and, shrugging, put by the book.

“—For it appears,” said Kerin, “that, after all, only one thing is wholly true. I have found nowhere any other truth: and this one truth, revealed to us here, is a truth which nobody will blame the patriarch for omitting from his more widely circulated works. Nevertheless, I have copied out every word of it, upon this bit of paper, to show to and make glad the dear bright eyes of my young wife.”

But Sclaug replied, without looking at the proffered paper, “The truth does not matter to the dead, who have done with all endeavor, and who can change nothing.”

Then he told Kerin good-by; and Kerin opened the door out of which Sclaug was used to go in search of Sclaug’s little amusements. When Kerin had passed through this door he drew it to behind him: and in that instant the door vanished, and Kerin stood alone in a dim winter-wasted field, fingering no longer a copper door-knob but only the chill air.

Leafless elder-trees rose about him, not twenty paces before Kerin was the Well of Ogde: and beyond its dilapidated curbing, a good half of which somebody had heaved down into the well, he saw, through wintry twilight, the gray eight-sided house in which he had been used to live with the young Saraide whom many called a witch.

Chapter XLVII. Economics of Saraide

Kerin went forward, beneath naked elder boughs, toward his dear home; and he saw coming out of the door of the gray house the appearance of a man who vaguely passed to the right hand of Kerin in the twilight. But a woman’s figure waited at the door; and Kerin, still going onward, came thus, in the November twilight, again to Saraide.

“Who is that man?” said Kerin, first of all. “And what is he doing here?”

“Does that matter?” Saraide answered him, without any outcry or other sign of surprise.

“Yes, I think it matters that a naked man with a red shining about his body should be seen leaving here at this hour, in the dead of winter, for it is a thing to provoke great scandal.”

“But nobody has seen him, Kerin, except my husband. And certainly my own husband would not stir up any scandal about me.”

Kerin scratched his white head. “Yes, that,” said Kerin, “that seems reasonable, according to the best of my knowledge. And the word knowledge reminds me, Saraide, that you sent me in search of knowledge as to why life is given to human beings, so that you might in the light of this knowledge appropriately dispose of your youth. Well, I have solved your problem, and the answer is, Nobody Knows. For I have acquired all knowledge. All that any man has ever known, I am now familiar with, from the medicinal properties of the bark aabec to the habits of the dragonfly called zyxomma: but no man, I find, has ever known for what purpose life was given him, nor what ends he may either help or hinder in any of his flounderings about earth and water.”

“I remember,” Saraide said now, as if in a faint wonder. “I wanted, once, when I was young and when the eye of no man went over me without lingering, then I wanted to know the truth about everything. Yet the truth does not really matter to the young, who are happy; and who in any case have not the shrewdness nor the power to change anything: and it all seems strange and unimportant now. For you have been a long time gone, my Kerin, and I have lived through many years, with many and many a companion, in the great while that you have been down yonder getting so much knowledge from the bird who has the true wisdom.”

“Of whatever bird can you be talking?” said Kerin, puzzled. “Oh, yes, now I also remember! But, no, there is nothing in that old story, my darling, and there is no Zhar-Ptitza in the Well of Ogde. Instead, there is a particularly fine historical and scientific library: and from it I have acquired all knowledge, and have thus happily solved your problem. Nor is that the end of the tale: for you wanted not merely knowledge but truth also, and in consequence I have found out for you the one thing which—according to Abraham’s divine collaborator, in a moment of remarkable and, I suppose, praiseworthy candor,—is wholly true. And that truth I have neatly copied out for you upon this bit of paper—”

But there was really no understanding these women who despatched you upon hazardous and quite lengthy quests. For Saraide had interrupted him without the least sign of such delight and satisfaction, or even of pride in her husband’s exploits, as would have seemed only natural. And Saraide said:

“The truth does not matter to the aged. Of what good is the truth to you or to me either, now that all the years of our youth are gone, and nothing in our living can be changed?”

“Well, well!” observed Kerin, comfortably, and passing over her defects in appreciation, “so the most of our lifetime has slipped by since I slipped over that well-curbing! But how time flies, to be sure! Did you say anything, my dear?”

“I groaned,” replied Saraide, “to have you back again with your frayed tags of speech and the desolation of your platitudes: but that does not matter either.”

“No, of course not: for all is well, as they say, that ends well. So out with your talisman, and let us quicken the golden shining which will attest the truth I have fetched back to you!”

She answered rather moodily: “I have not that talisman any longer. A man wanted it. And I gave it to him.”

“Since generosity is a virtue, I have no doubt that you did well. But to what man, Saraide, did you give the jewel that in youth you thought was priceless?”

“Does that matter, now? and, indeed, how should I remember? There have been so many men, my Kerin, in the tumultuous and merry years that are gone by forever. And all of them—” Here Saraide breathed deeply. “Oh, but I loved them, my Kerin!”

“It is our Christian duty to love our neighbors. So I do not doubt that, here again, you have done well. Still, one discriminates, one is guided, even in philanthropy, by instinctive preferences. And therefore I am wondering for what especial reason, Saraide, did you love these particular persons?”

“They were so beautiful,” she said, “so young, so confident in what was to be, and so pitiable! And now some of them are gone away into the far-off parts of earth, and some of them are gone down under the earth in their black narrow coffins, and the husks of those that remain hereabouts are strange and staid and withered and do not matter any longer. Life is a pageant that passes very quickly, going hastily from one darkness to another darkness with only ignes fatui to guide; and there is no sense in it. I learned that, Kerin, without moiling over books. But life is a fine ardent spectacle; and I have loved the actors in it: and I have loved their youth and their high-heartedness, and their ungrounded faiths, and their queer dreams, my Kerin, about their own importance and about the greatness of the destiny that awaited them,—while you were piddling after, of all things, the truth!”

“Still, if you will remember, my darling, it was you yourself who said, as you no doubt recall, just as you shoved me—”

“Well! I say now that I have loved too utterly these irrational fine things to have the heart, even now, to disbelieve in them, entirely: and I am content.”

“Yes, yes, my dear, we two may both well be content. For we at last can settle down and live serenely in this place, without undue indulgence in philanthropy; and we two alone will know the one truth which is wholly true.”

“Good Lord!” said Saraide; and added, incoherently, “But you were always like that!”

Chapter XLVIII. The Golden Shining

They went then, silently, from the twilight into the darkness of the house which had been their shared home in youth, and in which now there was no youth and no sound and no assured light anywhere. Yet a glow of pallidly veiled embers, not quite extinct where all else seemed dead, showed where the hearth would be. And Saraide said:

“It is droll that we have not yet seen each other’s faces! Give me your foolish paper, Kerin of my heart, that I may put it to some use and light this lamp.”

Kerin, a bit disconsolately, obeyed: and Saraide touched the low red embers with the paper which told about the one thing which is wholly true. The paper blazed. Kerin saw thus speedily wasted the fruit of Kerin’s long endeavor. Saraide had lighted her lamp. The lamp cast everywhither now a golden shining: and in its clear soft yellow radiancy, Saraide was putting fresh wood upon the fire, and making tidy her hearth.

After that necessary bit of housework she turned to her husband, and they looked at each other for the first time since both were young. Kerin saw a bent, dapper, not unkindly witch-woman peering up at him, with shrewd eyes, over the handle of her broom. But through the burning of that paper, as Kerin saw also, their small eight-sided home had become snug and warm and cozy looking, it even had an air of durability: and Kerin laughed, with the thin, easy, neighing laughter of the aged.

For, after all, he reflected, it could benefit nobody ever to recognize—either in youth or in gray age or after death—that time, like an old envious eunuch, must endlessly deface and maim, and make an end of, whatever anywhere was young and strong and beautiful, or even cozy; and that such was the one truth which had ever been revealed to any man, assuredly. Saraide, for that matter, seemed to have found out for herself, somewhere in philanthropic fields, the one thing which was wholly true; and she seemed, also, to prefer to ignore it, in favor of life’s unimportant, superficial, familiar tasks. . . . Well, and Saraide, as usual, was in the right! It was the summit of actual wisdom to treat the one thing which was wholly true as if it were not true at all. For the truth was discomposing, and without remedy, and was too chillingly strange ever to be really faced: meanwhile, in the familiar and the superficial, and in temperate bodily pleasures, one found a certain cheerfulness. . . .

He temperately kissed his wife, and he temperately inquired, “My darling, what is there for supper?”

Chapter XLIX. They of Nointel

Thus then, it was that, in the November following Guivric’s encounter with the Sylan, Kerin of Nointel came back into Poictesme, to become yet another convert to the great legend of Manuel.

Kerin was converted almost instantaneously. For when the news of Kerin’s return was public, Holmendis soon came that way, performing very devastating miracles en route among the various evil and ambiguous spirits which yet lurked in the rural districts of Poictesme. The Saint was now without any mercy imprisoning all such detected immortals right and left, in tree-trunks and dry wells and consecrated bottles, and condemning them in such exiguous sad quarters to await the holy Morrow of Judgment. With Holmendis, as his coadjutor in these praiseworthy labors, traveled the appearance of Guivric the Sage.

And when St. Holmendis and Glaum-Without-Bones (in Guivric’s stolen body) had talked to Kerin of Nointel about the great cult of Manuel the Redeemer which had sprung up during Kerin’s pursuit of knowledge underground, and had showed him the holy sepulchre at Storisende and Manuel’s bright jewel-encrusted effigy, and had told about Manuel’s ascent into heaven, then old Kerin only blinked, with mild, considerate, tired eyes.

“It is very likely,” Kerin said, “since it was Manuel who gave to us of Poictesme our law that all things must go by tens forever.”

“Now, what,” said Glaum, in open but wholly amiable surprise, “has that to do with it?”

“I have learned that a number of other persons have entered alive into heaven. I allude of course to Enoch, whose smell the cherubim found so objectionable that they recoiled from him a distance of five thousand, three hundred and eighty miles. I allude also to Elijah; to Eliezer, the servant of Abraham; to Hiram, King of Tyre; to Ebed Melek the Ethiop; to Jabez, the son of Prince Jehuda; to Bathia, the daughter of a Pharaoh; to Sarah, the daughter of Asher; and to Yoshua, the son of Levi, who did not go in by the gateway, but climbed over the wall. And I consider it quite likely that Dom Manuel would elect to make of this company, as he did of everything else, a tenth.”

Thereafter Holmendis said, rather dubiously, “Well—!” And Holmendis talked again of Manuel. . . .

“That too seems likely enough,” Kerin agreed. “I have learned that these messengers from the gods to our race upon earth are sent with commendable regularity every six hundred years. The Enoch of whom I was speaking but a moment since was the first of them, in the six-hundredth year after Adam. Then, as the happy upshot of a love affair between a Mongolian empress and a rainbow, came into this world Fo-hi, six hundred years after Enoch’s living; and six hundred years after the days of Fo-hi was Brighou sent to the Hindoos. At the same interval of time or thereabouts have since come Zoroaster to the Persians, and Thoth the Thrice Powerful to the Egyptians, and Moses to the Jews, and Lao Tseu to the men of China, and Paul of Tarsus to the Gentiles, and Mohammed to the men of Islam. Mohammed flourished just six hundred years before our Manuel. Yes, Messire Holmendis, it seems likely enough that, here too, Manuel would elect to make a tenth.”

Then pious gentle old Glaum-Without-Bones began to speak with joy and loving reverence about the glories of Manuel’s second coming. . . .

“No doubt, dear Guivric: for I have learned that all the great captains are coming again,” said Kerin, almost wearily. “There is Arthur, there is Ogier, there is Charlemagne, there is Barbarossa, there is Finn, the son of Cumhal,—there is in every land, in fine, a foreknowledge of that hero who will return at his appointed time and bring with him all glory and prosperity. Prince Siddartha also is to return, and Saoshyant, and Alexander of Macedon, and Satan too, for that matter, is expected to return, for his last fling, a little before the holy Morrow of Judgment. Therefore, I consider it not unlikely that, here again, Dom Manuel may elect to make a tenth.”

In short, the old fellow took Poictesme’s epiphany almost too calmly. . . . Glaum was satisfied, on the ground that a conversion was a conversion, and an outing for all the angels in heaven. But it was apparent that Holy Holmendis did not quite like the posture of affairs. . . . You could not, of course, detect in this incurious receptiveness any skepticism; nor could a person who went ten times too far in the way of faith be, very rationally, termed an unbeliever. It was, rather, as if Kerin viewed the truth without joy: it was as if Kerin had, somehow, become overfamiliar with the sublime truths about Manuel the Redeemer some while before he heard them; and so, was hearing them, now at long last, without any appropriate upliftedness and flow of spirits.

Holmendis must have felt that the desiderata here were intangible. In any event, he shook his aureoled head; and, speaking in the tongue of his native Philistia, he said something to Glaum-Without-Bones—which Glaum could not at all understand,—about “the intelligentsia, so-called.” But Holmendis did not resort to any dreadful miracle by which old Kerin might have been appalled into a more proper excitement and joyousness. . . .

Yet it was a very unbounded joy, and a joy indeed at which all beholders wondered, to Kerin of Nointel, when he saw and embraced the fine son, named Fauxpas, who had been born to Saraide during the fifth year of Kerin’s studies underground. For Kerin’s studies had informed him that such remarkably prolonged gestations are the infallible heralds of one or another form of greatness,—a fact evinced by the birth of Phoebos Apollo and Osiris and of several other gods and of all elephants,—and Kerin deduced that his son would in some way or another rise to worldly preeminence.

And that inference proved to be reasonably true, since it was this Fauxpas de Nointel who, when but a lad of twenty, led Count Emmerick’s troops for him in the evil days of Maugis d’Aigremont’s rebellion, and who held Poictesme for Manuel’s son until aid came from the Comte de la Foret. For twelve years at least this son of Kerin was thus preeminent among most of his associates, and twelve years is a reasonable slice out of any man’s life. And the eldest son of Fauxpas de Nointel was that Ralph who married Madame Adelaide, the daughter of the Comte de la Foret, and the granddaughter of Dom Manuel, and who builded at Nointel the great castle with seven towers which still endures.

BOOK EIGHT

THE CANDID FOOTPRINT

“They have reproached the footsteps of thine appointed.”

—Psalms, lxxxix, 51

Chapter L. Indiscretion of a Bailiff

Now the tale tells that upon the day of the birth of the first son begotten by Count Emmerick, in lawful marriage and with the aid of his own wife Radegonde, there was such a drinking of healths and toasts as never before was known at Storisende. The tale speaks of a most notable banquet, at which twelve dishes were served to every two persons, with a great plenty of the best wine and beer. In the minstrels’ gallery were fiddlers, trumpeters and drummers, those who tossed tambourines, and those who played upon the flute. Ten poets discoursed meanwhile of the feats of Dom Manuel, and presented in even livelier colors the impendent achievements of the Redeemer’s second coming into Poictesme with a ferocious heavenly cortege. And meanwhile also the company drank, and the intoxication of verse was abetted with red wine and white.

Since the poems were rather long, all this resulted in an entertainment from which the High Bailiff of Upper Ardra went homeward hiccoughing and even more than usually benevolent, and without any consciousness of that one single slight misstep—induced by the allied virtues of patriotism and of alcohol,—which had imperiled his continued stay upon earth.

For Ninzian of Yair and Upper Ardra had not wholly broken with the heroic cenatory ways of the years wherein Dom Manuel ruled over Poictesme. This seemed the more regrettable because Ninzian, always a pious and philanthropic person, had otherwise become with age appropriately staid. He in theory approved of every one of the reforms enacted everywhere by the Countess Niafer, and confirmed by the Countess Radegonde; and, in practice, Ninzian was of course a staunch supporter of his revered and intimate associate, St. Holmendis, in all the salutary crusades against elves and satyrs and trolls and other uncanonical survivals from unorthodox mythologies, and against the free-thinking of persons who questioned the legend of Manuel, and in the holy man’s hunting down of such demons and stringing up of such heretics, and in all other devout labors. But there, nevertheless, was no disputing that the benevolent and florid bailiff of Upper Ardra had kept a taint of the robustious social customs of Dom Manuel’s worldly heyday.

It followed that Ninzian evaded none of the toasts at Count Emmerick’s banquet and left no friend unpledged. Instead, sleek Ninzian drank the wines of Orleans, of Anjou and of Burgundy; of Auxerre and Beaune, and of St. Jean and St. Porcain. He drank Malvoisin, and Montrose, and Vernage, and Runey. He drank the wines of Greece, both Patras and Farnese; he drank spiced beers; he drank muscatel; and he drank hypocras. He did not ignore the cider nor the pear cider; to the sweet white sparkling wine of Volnay he confessed, and he exhibited, an especial predilection; and he drank copiously, also, of the Alsatian sherry and of the Hungarian tokay.

Thereafter Ninzian went homeward with a pleasurable at-randomness, for which—in a so liberal contributor to every pious cause and persecution,—appropriate allowances were made by St. Holmendis and everybody else except one person only. Ninzian was married.

Chapter LI. The Queer Bird

The next evening Ninzian and his wife were walking in the garden. They were a handsome couple, and the high-hearted love that had been between them in their youth was a tale which many poets had embroidered. It was an affection, too, which had survived its consummation with so slight impairment that Ninzian during the long while since he had promised eternal fidelity was not known to have begotten but one by-blow. Even that, as he was careful to explain, was by way of charity: for well-thought-of rich old Pettipas, the pawnbroker at Beauvillage, had lived childlessly with his buxom young second wife for nearly three years before Ninzian, in odd moments, provided this deserving couple with a young heiress.

But in the main Ninzian preferred his own lean and pietistic wife above all other women, even so long after he had won her in the heyday of their adventurous youth. Now they who were in the evening of life were lighted by a golden sunset as they went upon a flagged walkway, made of white and blue stones; and to either side were the small glossy leaves and the crimson flowering of well-tended rose-bushes. They waited thus for Holy Holmendis, their fellow laborer in multifarious forms of church work and social betterment, for the Saint had promised to have supper with them. And Balthis (for that was the name of Ninzian’s wife) said, “Look, my dear, and tell me what is that?”

Ninzian inspected the flower-bed by the side of the walkway, and he replied, “My darling, it appears to be the track of a bird.”

“But surely there is in Poictesme no fowl with a foot so huge!”

“No. But many migratory monsters pass by in the night, on their way north, at this time of year: and, clearly, one of some rare species has paused here to rest. However, as I was telling you, my pet, we have now in hand—”

“Why, but think of it, Ninzian! The print is as big as a man’s foot!”

“Come, precious, you exaggerate! It is the track of a largish bird,—an eagle, or perhaps a roc, or, it may be, the Zhar-Ptitza paused here,—but it is nothing remarkable. Besides, as I was telling you, we have already in hand, for the edifying of the faithful, a bit of Mary Magdalene’s haircloth, the left ring-finger of John the Baptist, a suit of Dom Manuel’s underclothes, and one of the smaller stones with which St. Stephen was martyred—”

But Balthis, he saw now, was determined not to go on in talk about the church which Ninzian had builded in honor of Manuel the Redeemer, and which Ninzian was stocking with very holy relics. Instead, she asserted with deliberation, “Ninzian, I think it is fully as big as a man’s foot.”

“Well, be it as you like, my pet!”

“But I will not be put off in that way! Do you tread beside it in the flower-bed there, and, by comparing the print of your foot with the bird track, we shall easily see which is the larger.”

Ninzian was not so ruddy as he had been. Yet he said with dignity, and lightly enough, he hoped:

“Balthis, you are unreasonable. I do not intend to get my sandals all over mud to settle any such foolish point. The track is just the size of a man’s foot, or it is much larger than a man’s foot, or it is smaller than a man’s foot,—it is, in fine, of any size which you prefer. And we will let that be the end of it.”

“So, Ninzian, you will not tread in that new-digged earth?” said Balthis, queerly.

“Of course I will not ruin my second-best sandals for any such foolish reason!”

“You trod there yesterday in your very best sandals, Ninzian, for the reason that you were tipsy. I saw the print you made there, in broad daylight, Ninzian, when you had just come from drinking with a blessed saint himself, and were reeling all over the neat ways of my garden. Ninzian, it is a fearful thing to know that when your husband walks in mud he leaves tracks like a bird.”

Now Ninzian was truly penitent for yesterday’s over-indulgence. And Ninzian said:

“So, you have discovered this foible of mine, after all my carefulness! That is a great pity.”

Balthis replied, with the cold non-committalness of wives, “Pity or no, you will now have to tell me the truth about it.”

That task did, in point of fact, seem so appallingly unavoidable that Ninzian settled down to it, with such airiness as would have warned any wife in the world exactly how far to trust him.

“Well, my darling, you must know that when I first came into Poictesme, I came rather unwillingly. Our friend St. Holmendis, I need not tell you, was, even in the time of Dom Manuel’s incarnation in frail human flesh, setting such a very high moral tone hereabouts, and the holy man is so impetuous with his miracles when anybody differs with him on religious matters, that the prospect was not alluring. But it was necessary that my prince should have some representative here, as in all other places. So I came, from—well, from down yonder—”

“I know you came from the South, Ninzian! Everybody knows that. But that appears to me no excuse whatever for walking like a bird.”

“As if, my dearest, it could give me any pleasure to walk like a bird, or like a whole covey of birds! To the contrary, I have always found this small accomplishment in doubtful taste, it exposes one to continual comment. But very long ago those who had served my prince with especial distinction were all put upon this footing, in order that true demerit might be encouraged, and that fine sportsmanship might be preserved, and so that, also, our adversaries in the great game might be detecting us.”

Now Balthis fixed on him wide, scornful, terrible eyes. After a breathless while she said:

“Ninzian, I understand. You are an evil spirit, and you came out of hell in the appearance of a man to work wickedness in Poictesme!”

And his Balthis, as he saw with a pang of wild regret, was horribly upset and grieved to know the thing which her husband had so long hid away from her; and Ninzian began to feel rather ashamed of not having trusted her with this secret, now it was discovered. At all events, he would try what being reasonable might do.

“Darling,” said he, with patient rationality, “no sensible wife will ever pry into what her husband may have been or done before she married him. Her concern is merely with his misdemeanors after that ceremony; and, I think, you have had no heavy reason to complain. Nobody can for one moment assert that in Poictesme I have not led an appallingly upright and immaculate existence.”

She said, indignantly: “You had fear of Holmendis! You came all this long way to do your devil work, and then had not the pluck to face him!”

Ninzian found this just near enough the truth to be irritating. So he spoke now with airy condescension.

“Precious, it is true the lean man can work miracles, but then, without desiring to appear boastful, I must tell you that I have mastery of a more venerable and blacker magic. Oh, I assure you, he could not have exorcised or excommunicated or tried any other of his sacerdotal trick-work upon me without sweating for it! Still, it seemed better to avoid such painful scenes: for when one has trouble with these saints the supporters of both sides are apt to intervene; the skies are blackened and the earth shakes, and whirlwinds and meteors and thunderbolts and seraphim upset things generally: and it all seems rather boisterous and old-fashioned. So it really did appear more sensible, and in better taste, to respect, at all events during his lifetime, the well-meaning creature’s religious convictions—in which you share, I know, my pet,—and, well!” said Ninzian, with a shrug, “to temporize! to keep matters comfortable all around, you understand, my darling, by evincing a suitable interest in church work and in whatever else appeared expected of the reputable in my surroundings.”

But Balthis was not to be soothed. “Ninzian, this is a terrible thing for me to be learning! There was never a husband who better knew his place, and the only baby you ever upset me with is at the pawnbroker’s, and Holy Church has not ever had a more loyal servitor—”

“No,” Ninzian said, quietly.

“—But you have been a hideous-demon in deep hell, and the man that I have loved is a false seeming, and the moment St. Holmendis ascends to bliss you mean to go on with your foul iniquities. That is foolish of you, because of course I would never permit it. But, even so—! Oh, Ninzian, my faith and my happiness are buried now in the one grave, now that all ends between us!”

Ninzian asked, still very quietly: “And do you think I will leave you, my Balthis, because of some disarranged fresh earth? Could any handful of dirt have parted us when because of my great love for you I fought the seven knights at Evre—”

“What chance had the poor fellows against a devil!”

“It is the principle of the thing, my darling,—as well as the mathematics. Also, as I was going on to observe, you would never have been flinging mud in my face when for your sake I overthrew Duke Oribert and his deplorable custom of the cat and the serpent, and cast the Spotted Dun of Lorcha down from a high hill.”

She answered without pity: “You will be lucky to get out of this mud with a whole skin. For it is on this evening of the month that St. Holmendis hears my confession, and I must confess everything, and you know as well as I do of his devastating miracles.”

Ninzian, having thus failed in his appeal to the better qualities of his wife, forthwith returned to soliciting her powers of reason.

“Balthis, my sweet, now, after all, what complaint have you against me? You cannot help feeling that the no doubt ill-advised rebellion in which I was concerned in youth, unarithmeticable aeons before this Earth was thought of, took place quite long enough ago to be forgotten. Besides, you know by experience that I am only too easily guided by others, that I have never learned, as you so eloquently phrase it, to have any backbone. And I do not really see, either, how you can want to punish me to-day for iniquities which, you grant, I have not ever committed, but—so you assume, without any warrant known to me,—have just vaguely thought of committing by and by, and it may be, not for years to come,—my adorable pouting darling,—because this stringy Holmendis seems tough as whit-leather—”

Ninzian’s stammered talking died away. He saw there was no moving her.

“No, Ninzian, I simply cannot stand having a husband who walks like a bird, and is liable to be detected the next time it rains. It would be on my mind day and night, and people would say all sorts of things. No, Ninzian, it is quite out of the question. I will get your things together at once, and you can go to hell or over to that giggling ill-bred friend of yours at the pawnbroker’s nasty shop, just as you elect: and I leave it to your conscience if, after the way I have worked and slaved for you, you had the right to play this wrong and treachery upon me.”

And Balthis said also: “For it is a great wrong and treachery which you have played upon me, Ninzian of Yair, getting from me such love as men will not find the equal of in any of the noble places of this world until the end of life and time. This is a deep wound that you have given me. Upon your lips were wisdom and pleasant talking, there was kindliness in the gray eyes of Ninzian of Yair, your hands were strong at sword-play, and you were the most generous of companions all through the daytime and in the nighttime too. These things I delighted in, these things I regarded: I did not think of the low mire, I could not see what horrible markings your passing by had left to this side and to that side.”

Then Balthis said: “Let every woman weep with me, for I now know that to every woman’s loving is this end appointed. There is no woman that gives all to any man, but that woman is wasting her substance at bed and board with a greedy stranger, and there is no wife who escapes the bitter hour in which that knowledge smites her. So now let us touch hands, and now let our lips too part friendlily, because our bodies have so long been friends, the while that we knew nothing of each other, Ninzian of Yair, on account of the great wrong and treachery which you have played upon me.”

Thus speaking, Balthis kissed him. Then she went into the house that was no longer Ninzian’s home.

Chapter LII. Remorse of a Poor Devil

Ninzian sat on a stone bench which was carved at each end with a crouching sphinx, and he waited there while the sunlight died away behind the poplars. The moment could not but seem to anybody pregnant with all danger. Holmendis was coming, and Holmendis would very soon be hearing the confession of Balthis, and these saints were over often the prey of an excitability which damaged their cause.

These saints had many bad qualities as Ninzian freely admitted; and in the main he approved of saints: but he did wish that holiness could be more urbane in its exercises and more long-sighted.

That impetuous Holmendis was quite as apt as not to resort out of hand to unbridled miracle-working, and with the fires of Heaven to annihilate his leading fellow laborer in every exercise of altruistic intermeddling,—without pausing, rationally, to reflect what an annihilation the resultant scandal would be to Holmendis’ own party of reform and uplift. Holmendis would no doubt be sorry afterward: but he would get no sympathy from Ninzian.

And, meanwhile, Ninzian loved his wife so greatly that prolonged existence without her did not tempt him. His wife, whoever she might be, had always seemed peculiarly dear to Ninzian. And now, as he looked back upon the exceeding love which he had borne his wife, in Nineveh and Thebes and Tyre and Babylon and Rome and Byzantium, and in all other cities that bred fine women, and as he weighed the evanescence of this love which was evading him after these few thousand years, it seemed to Ninzian a pitiable thing that his season of earthly contentment should thus be cut off in its flower and withered untimelily.

And his conscience troubled him, too. For the fiend had not been entirely candid with his Balthis, and Poictesme was not by any means the stage of the complaisant easy-going fellow’s primal failure. So he now forlornly thought of how utterly he had failed in his mission upon Earth, ever since he first came to Mount Kaf to work evil among men, in the time of King Tchagi, a great while before the Deluge; and he considered with dismay the appalling catalogue of virtuous actions into which these women had betrayed him.

For always the cause of Ninzian’s downfall had been the same: he would get to talking indiscretion to some lovely girl or another, just through his desire to be agreeable to everybody, and his devilish eloquence would so get the better of her that the girl would invariably marry him and ruthlessly set about making her husband a well-thought-of citizen. Nor did it avail him to argue. Women nowhere appeared to have any sympathy with Ninzian’s appointed labor upon Earth: they seemed to have an instinctive bent toward Heaven and the public profession of every virtue. Just as in the case of that poor Miramon Lluagor, Ninzian reflected, Ninzian’s wife also did not care two straws about her husband’s career and the proper development of his talents.

Then Ninzian on a sudden recollected the cause of the disturbance which had been put upon his living. He drew his dagger, and, squatting on the paved walkway, he scratched out that incriminating footprint.

He was none too soon.

Chapter LIII. Continuation of Appalling Pieties

He was none too soon, because Ninzian rose from this erasement just in time to bump into no other than the energetic tough flesh of Holy Holmendis, who in the cool of the evening was coming up the walkway; and indeed, in rising, Ninzian jostled against the Saint rather roughly. So Ninzian apologized for his clumsiness, and explained that he was going fishing the next day, and was digging for worms: and Ninzian was in a bad taking, for he could not know how much this peppery and overexcitable Saint from out of Philistia had seen or suspected, or might be up to the very next moment with one or another bull-headed miracle.

But Holy Holmendis said friendlily that no bones were broken, and he went on, with the soul-chilling joviality of the clergy, to make some depressing joke about fishers of men. “And that is why I am here,” said the Saint, “for this evening Dame Balthis is to confess to me whatever matters may be on her conscience.”

“Yes, yes,” said Ninzian, fondly, “but we both know, my dear and honored friend, that Balthis has a particularly tender conscience, a conscience which is as sensitive to the missteps of others as a sore toe.”

“That is how everybody’s conscience ought to be,” returned the Saint: and he went on to speak of the virtuous woman who is a crown to her husband. And he made a contrast between the fine high worth of Balthis and the shamelessness of that bad beggar-woman upon whom, just outside the gate, the Saint had put apoplexy and divine fire for speaking over-lightly of the second coming of Manuel.

Ninzian fidgeted. He of course said sympathizingly that he would send some servants to remove the blasted carcass, and that it ought to be a lesson, and that there was no telling what the world was coming to unless right-thinking persons took strong steps through the proper channels. Nevertheless, he did not like the hard, pinched little mouth and glittering, very pale blue eyes of this gaunt Saint; and the nimbus about the thick white hair of Holy Holmendis was beginning to shine brighter and brighter as the dusk of evening thickened. Ninzian found it uncomfortable to be alone with this worker of miracles; piety is in all things so unpredictable: and Ninzian was unfeignedly glad when Balthis came out of the loved house that was no longer Ninzian’s home, and when Balthis held open the door for Holmendis to enter where Ninzian might not come any more.

Yet, so tenacious is the charitableness of women, that even now, as Holmendis went in, Dame Balthis tried to speak, for the last time, sensibly and kindly with her husband.

“Pig with the head of a mule,” she said, in a lowered tone, “do you stop looking at me like a sick calf, and go away! For I must confess in what a state of sin I have been living, as a devil’s wife, and I have little faith in your black magic, and you know as well as I do that there is no telling what blasted tree-trunk or consecrated bottle or something of that sort he may seal you up in until the holy Morrow of Judgment, precisely as he has done all those other evil spirits.”

Ninzian replied, “I shall not ever leave you of my freewill.”

“But, Ninzian, it is as if I were putting you into the bottle, myself! For if I do not tell that spiteful old bag of bones”—she crossed herself,—“I mean, that beloved and blessed Saint, why, he would never have the sense, or rather, I intended to say that his faith in his fellow creatures is too great and admirable for him ever to suspect you, and so you see just how it is!”

“Yes, my most cruel love,” said Ninzian, “it is quite as if you yourself were thrusting me into a brazen bottle, for all that you know how dependent I am on open-air exercise, and as if you were setting to it the unbreakable seal of Sulieman-ben-Daoud with your own dear hands. But, nevertheless—!”

He took her hand, and gallantly he kissed her finger-tips.

At that she boxed his jaws. “You need not think to make a fool of me! no, not again, not after all these years! Oh, but I will show you!”

Then Balthis also went into the house where the gaunt Saint was making ready to hear her mensual confession.

Chapter LIV. Magic That Was Rusty

Poor-spirited, over-easy-going Ninzian sat upon the stone bench, an outcast now in his own garden: and he thought for a while about the pitiless miracles with which this Holmendis had harried the fairies and the elves and the salamanders and the trolls and the calcars and the succubae and all the other amiable iniquities of Poictesme; and about the Saint’s devastating crusades against moral laxity and free-thinking and the curt conclusions which he had made with his ropes and his fires to the existence of mere heresy. It seemed uncomfortably likely that in dealing with a devil this violent and untactful Holmendis would go to even greater lengths, and would cast off all compunction, if somehow Ninzian could not get the better of him.

So Ninzian decided to stay upon the safe side of accident, by destroying the fellow out of hand. Ninzian took from his pocket the stone ematille, and he broke off a branch from a rose-bush. With the flowering rose branch Ninzian traced a largish circle about his sleek person, saying, “I infernalize unto myself the circumference of nine feet about me.” Here the sign of Sargatanet was repeated by him thrice. Then Ninzian went on, “From the east, Glavrab; from the west, Garron; from the north—”

He paused. He scratched his head. The boreal word of power was Cabinet or Cabochon or Capricorn or something of that kind, he knew: but what it was exactly was exactly what Ninzian had forgotten. He would have to try something else.

Ninzian therefore turned to the overthrowing of Holmendis by cold and by heat. Ninzian said:

“I invoke thee who art in the empty wind, terrible, invisible, all-potent contriver of destruction and bringer of desolation. I upraise before thee that rod from which proceeds the life abhorrent to thee. I invoke thee through thy veritable name, in virtue of which thou canst not refuse to hear,—JOERBET-JOPAKERBETH-JOBOLCHOSETH—”

But there he gave it up. That dreadful, jaw-cracking obscene appellation had, Ninzian recollected, eleven more sections: but in bewildered Ninzian’s mind they were all jumbled and muddled and hopelessly confused.

After that a rather troubled High Bailiff rearranged his clothing; and he now tried to get in touch with Nebiros, the Field-Marshal and Inspector General of Hell. But again Ninzian was in his magic deplorably rusty.

“Agla, Tagla, Malthon, Oarios—” he rattled off, handily enough,—and once more he bogged in an appalling stretch of unrememberably difficult words. Black magic was not an accomplishment in which you could stay expert without continual practice, and Ninzian had regrettably neglected all infernal arts for the last five centuries and over.

So in this desperate pinch he turned perforce to a simple abecedary conjuration such as mere wizards used; and the High Bailiff of Upper Ardra said, rather shame-facedly, “Prince Lucifer, most dreadful master of all the Revolted Spirits, I entreat thee to favor me in the adjuration which I address to thy mighty minister, Lucifuge Rofocale, being desirous to make a pact with him—”

And Ninzian got through this invocation at least, quite nicely, though he a trifle bungled the concluding words from the Grand Clavicle.

This conjuration, however, worked a bit too well. For instead of the hoped-for appearance of genial old Lucifuge Rofocale endurably disinfected of his usual odor, now came to Ninzian, from among the sweet-smelling rose-bushes, the appearance of a proud gentleman in gold and sable; and a rather perturbed Ninzian bowed very low before his liege-lord, Lucifer, Prince over all the Fallen Angels.

Chapter LV. The Prince of Darkness

The newcomer paused for an instant, as if he were reading what was in the troubled mind of Ninzian, and then he said: “I see. Surkrag, whom mortals hereabouts call Ninzian! O unfaithful servant, now must you be punished for betraying the faith I put in you. Now is your requital coming swiftly from this ravening Saint, who will dispose of you without mercy. For your conjuring would disgrace a baby in diapers; you have forgotten long ago what little magic you ever knew; and when this Holmendis gets hold of you with one hand and exorcises you with the other, there will be hardly a cinder left.”

So did Ninzian know himself to stand friendlessly, between the wrath of evil and the malignity of holiness, both bent upon his ruin. He said, “Have patience, my prince!”

But Lucifer answered sternly: “My patience is outworn. No, Surkrag, there is no hope for you, and you become shameless in perfidy as steadily you go from good to better. Once you would have scorned the least deviation from the faith you owe me: but a little by a little you have made compromises with virtue, through your weak desire to live comfortably with your wives, and this continual indulgence of women’s notions is draining from you the last drop of wickedness. Not fifty centuries ago you would have been shocked by a kindly thought. Twenty centuries back and you at least retained a proper feeling toward the Decalogue. Now you assist in all reforms and build churches without a blush. For is there nowadays, my deluded, lost Surkrag! in candor, is there any virtue howsoever exalted, is there a single revolting decency or any form of godliness, before which your gorge rises? No, my poor friend: you came hither to corrupt mankind, and instead they have made you little worse than human.”

The Angel of Darkness paused. He had spoken, as became such a famous gentleman, very temperately, without rage, but also without any concealing of his sorrow and disappointment. And Ninzian answered, contritely:

“My prince, I have not wholly kept faith, I know. But always the woman tempted me with the droll notion that our sports ought to open with a religious service, and so I have been now and then seduced into marriage. And my wife, no matter what eyes and hair and tint of flesh she might be wearing at the time, has always been bent upon having her husband looked up to by the neighbors; and in such circumstances a poor devil has no chance.”

“So that these women have been your ruin, and even now the latest of them is betraying your secret to that implacable Saint! Well, it is honest infernal justice, for since the time of Kaiumarth you have gained me not one follower in this place, and have lived openly in all manner of virtue when you should have been furthering my power upon Earth.”

Thus speaking, Lucifer took his seat upon the bench. Then Ninzian too sat down, and Ninzian leaned toward this other immortal, in the ever-thickening dusk; and Ninzian’s plump face was sad.

“My prince, what does it matter? From the first I have let my fond wife have her will with me, because it pleased her, and did no real good. What do these human notions matter, even in so dear a form? A little while and Balthis will be dead. A little while and there will be no Yair nor Upper Ardra, and no shining holy sepulchre at Storisende, and all Poictesme will be forgotten. A little while and this Earth will be an ice-cold cinder. But you and I shall still be about our work, still playing for the universe, with stars and suns for counters. Does it really matter to you that, for the time this tiny trundling Earth exists and has women on it, I pause from playing at the great game, to entertain myself with these happy accidents of nature?”

Lucifer replied: “It is not only your waste of time that troubles me. It is your shirking of every infernal duty, it is your cherubic lack of seriousness. Why, do you but think how many thousand women have passed through your fingers!”

“Yes, like a string of pearls, my prince,” said Ninzian, fondly.

“Is that not childish sport for you that used to contend so mightily in the great game?”

But Ninzian now was plucking up heart, as the saying is, hand over fist. “Recall the old days, my prince,” he urged, with the appropriate emotional quaver, “when we two were only cherubs, with no bodies as yet sprouted from our little curly heads! Do you recall the merry romps and the kissing games we had as tiny angel-faces, sporting together so lovingly among the golden clouds of heaven, without any cares whatever, and with that collar of wings tickling so drolly one’s ears! and do you let the memory move you, even to unmerited indulgence. I have contracted an odd fancy for this inconspicuous sphere of rock and mud, I like the women that walk glowingly about it. Oh, I concede my taste is disputable—”

“I dispute nothing, Surkrag. I merely point out that lechery is nowhere a generally received excuse for good works.”

“Well, but now and then,” said Ninzian, broad-mindedly, “the most conscientious may slip into beneficence. And, in any case, how does it matter what I do on Earth? Frankly, my prince, I think you take the place too seriously. For centuries I have watched those who serve you going about this planet in all manner of quaint guises, in curious masks which are impenetrable to any one who does not know that your preeminent servitors tread with the footfall of a bird wherever they pass upon your errands—”

“Yes, but—” said Lucifer.

“—For ages,” Ninzian continued, without heeding him, “I have seen your emissaries devote much time and cunning to the tempting of men to commit wickedness: and to what end? Man rises from the dust: he struts and postures: he falls back into the dust. That is all. How can this midge work good or evil? His virtue passes as a thin scolding: the utmost reach of his iniquity is to indulge in the misdemeanor of supererogation, by destroying a man or two men, whom time would very soon destroy in any event. Meanwhile his sympathies incline—I know,—by a hair-breadth or so, toward Heaven. Yes, but what does it matter? is it even a compliment to Heaven? Ah, prince, had I the say, I would leave men to perish in their unimportant starveling virtues, without raising all this pother over trifles.”

Ninzian could see that he had made a perceptible impression: yet, still, dark Lucifer was shaking his head. “Surkrag, in abstract reason you may be right: but warfare is not conducted by reason, and to surrender anything to the Adversary, though it were no more than Earth and its inhabitants, would be a dangerous example.”

“Come, prince, do you think how many first-class constellations there are to strive for, made up of stars that are really desirable possessions! Turn that fine mind of yours to considerations worthy of it, sir! Consider Cassiopeia, and the Bull, and the dear little Triangle! and do you think about Orion, containing such sidereal masterpieces as Bellatrix and Betelgeuse and Rigel, and the most magnificent nebula known anywhere! Do you think also about that very interesting triple sun which is called Mizar, in the Great Bear, a veritable treasure for any connoisseur! and do you let me have this Earth to amuse me!”

Now Lucifer did not answer at once. The bats were out by this time, zigzagging about the garden: the air was touched with the scent of dew-drenched roses: and somewhere in the dusk a nightingale had tentatively raised its thrilling, long-drawn, plaintive voicing of desire. All everywhere about the two fiends was most soothing. And the Angel of Darkness laughed without a trace left in his manner of that earlier reserve.

“No, no, old wheedler! one cannot neglect the tiniest point, in the great game. Besides, I have my pride, I confess it, and to behold Earth given over entirely to good would vex me. Yet, after all, I can detect no unforgivable beneficence in your continuing to live virtuously here with your seraglio for such a while as the planet may last. These little holidays even freshen one for work. So, if you like, I will summon Amaimon or Baalzebub, or perhaps Succor-Benoth would enjoy the sport, and they will dispose of this two-penny Saint.”

But Ninzian seemed hesitant. “My prince, I am afraid that some of those officious archangels would be coming too; and one thing might lead to another, and my wife would not at all like having any supernal battlings in her own garden, among her favorite rosebushes. No, as I always say, it is much better to avoid these painful scenes.”

“Your wife!” said Lucifer, in high astonishment, “and is it that thin faded pious wretch you are considering! Why, but your wife has repudiated you! She has caught just your trick of treacherousness, and so she has betrayed you to that flint-hearted Saint!”

Ninzian in the dusk made bold to smile. . . .

Chapter LVI. Economics of Ninzian

Ninzian in the dusk made bold to smile at this sort of bachelor talk. Lucifer really would be a bit more broad-minded, a shade less notably naive, if only the dear fellow had not stayed always so stubbornly prejudiced against marriage, merely because it was a sacrament. All that was required, alike to perfect him in some real knowledge of human nature and to secure everybody’s well-being everywhere, Ninzian reflected, was for Lucifer just once to marry some capable woman. . . .

So Ninzian smiled. But Ninzian did not need to say anything, for at this moment Balthis came to the door, and—not being able in the twilight to see the Prince of Darkness,—she called out that supper was getting stone-cold on the table, and that she really wished Ninzian would try to be a little more considerate, especially when they had company.

And Ninzian, rising, chuckled. “My wife has been like that since Sidon was a village. Time and again she has found me out; and never yet has she let me off with a public exposure. Oh, if I could explain it, I would perhaps care less for her. In part, I think, it means that she loves me: in part, I fear—upon looking back,—it means that no really conscientious person cares to entrust the proper punishment of her husband to anybody else. Of course, all that is merely theory. What is certain is that my wife’s confession has been conducted tactfully, and that you and I are going in to talk solemn nonsense with St. Holmendis.”

But Lucifer once more was shaking his head. He said, with firmness:

“No, Surkrag. No, I am not squeamish, but I have no use for saints.”

“Well, prince, I would not be overhasty to agree with you. For Holmendis has some invaluable points. He is perfectly sincere, for one thing, and for another, he is energetic, and for a third, he never pardons any one who differs with him. Of course, he is all for having men better than they were intended to be, and with his tales about that second coming of Manuel he does frighten people. . . . For they have been altering that legend, my prince, considerably. Nowadays, it is not only glory and prosperity which Manuel is to bring back with him. He is to return also, it seems, with a large cargo of excruciate punishments for all persons who differ in any way with the notions of Holmendis and Niafer.”

“Ah, the old story! It is really astounding,” Lucifer commented, in frank wonder, “how one finds everywhere this legend of the Redeemer in just this form. It seems an instinct with the creatures.”

“Well, but,” said Ninzian, tolerantly, “it gives them something to look forward to. It promises to gratify all their congenital desires, including cruelty. And, above all, it prevents their going mad, to believe that somebody somewhere is looking out for them. In any event,—as I was saying,—this gaunt Holmendis does frighten Poictesme into a great deal of public piety. Still, there are always corners and bedrooms and other secluded places, in which one strikes a balance, as it were; and abstinence and fear make wonderful appetizers: so that, in the long run of affairs, I doubt if you have anywhere upon Earth any more serviceable friends than are these saints who will put up with nothing short of their own especial sort of perfection.”

Lucifer was not convinced. “It is proper of course that you should attempt to exculpate your friend and associate during the last twenty years. Nevertheless, all these extenuatory sayings, about the viciousness of virtue, are the habitual banalities of boyhood; and no beardless cynic, even when addicted to verse, has ever yet been permanently injured by them.”

“But,” Ninzian returned, “but here, I am not merely theorizing. I speak with rather high authority. For you will be remembering, prince, that, by the rules of our game, when any mortal has gained a hundred followers for you, Jahveh is penalized to put him upon the same footing as the rest of us. And, well, sir! you may see here in the mud, just where I jostled Holmendis from the walkway—”

Lucifer made luminous his finger-tips, and held them like five candles to the Saint’s footprint. The Angel of Darkness bowed thereafter, with real respect, toward heaven.

“Our Adversary, to do Him justice, keeps an honest score. Come, Surkrag, now this is affecting! This very touchingly recalls that the great game is being played by the dear fellow with candor and fine sportsmanship. Meanwhile I must most certainly have supper with you; and the great game is far from over, since I yet make a fourth with the fanatic, the woman and the hypocrite.”

“Ah, prince,” said Ninzian, a little shocked, as they went into his sedate snug home, “should you not say, more tactfully, with us three leaders of reform?”

BOOK NINE

ABOVE PARADISE

“He was Caught up into paradise and heard unspeakable words.”

—II Corinthians, xii, 4

Chapter LVII. Maugis Makes Trouble

Now the tale speaks of the rebellion of Maugis, who was the son of Donander of Evre, the Thane of Aigremont. For Count Manuel’s youngest child, Ettarre, born after her father’s passing, was now come to the full flowering of her strange beauty: and it was at this time—with the result that two young gentlemen went out of their wits, four killed themselves, and seven married,—that Ettarre was betrothed to Guiron des Rocques, of the famous house of Gatinais. And it was at this time also that young Maugis d’Aigremont resorted to a more stirring solace than might be looked for in imbecility or death or a vicarious bedfellow. He seized and carried off Ettarre. His company of ten was pursued by Count Emmerick and Guiron with twenty followers; and after a skirmish in Bovion the girl was recaptured unharmed.

But Maugis escaped. And after that he went into open rebellion against Count Emmerick’s authority, and occupied those fastnesses in the Taunenfels which Othmar Black-Tooth had once held for a long while against the assaults of Count Manuel himself.

History in fine appeared to honor banality by repeating itself, with the plain difference that gaunt Maugis was equally a great captain and a great lover and in every way more formidable than Othmar had been, whereas Emmerick, elsewhere than at a banquet, was not formidable at all. Moreover, Emmerick in these days lacked even any stronger kinsman to lean upon, for his brother-in-law Heitman Michael was now in Muscovy, Count Gui of Montors was dead, and Ayrart de Montors had removed to the court of King Theodoret. Emmerick had, thus, to lead his troops only that blustering but gifted young Fauxpas de Nointel or that utterly unreasonable Guiron, who expected, of all persons, the Count of Poictesme to lead these troops.

So Emmerick wavered; he made terms; he even winked at Guiron’s capture by the pirates of Caer Idryn, in order to be rid of this troublesome posturer who insisted upon dragging Emmerick into so much uncomfortable fighting: and Maugis, since these terms did not include his possession of Ettarre, soon broke them. Thus was the warring that now arose in Poictesme resumed: and, because of Maugis’ great lust and daring, and Count Emmerick’s supineness, and the ever-blundering obstinacy of loud Fauxpas de Nointel, this war dragged on for many wearying fevered years.

Then Emmerick’s eldest sister, Madame Melicent, returned from oversea with her second husband, the Comte de la Foret, a gentleman who remarkably lacked patience with brigands and with shilly-shallying. This Perion de la Foret took charge of matters, with such resolution that out of hand Guiron was rescued from his captivity, Maugis was overpowered and killed, the Ettarre whom he had desired to his own hurt was married to Guiron, and Count Emmerick gave a banquet in honor of the event. Such was this Perion’s impetuosity.

It is of these matters that the tale speaks in passing. For the tale now is of Donander of Evre, who was the father of Maugis, and who would not break faith with that Emmerick who, howsoever unworthily, sat in the place of that great master whom Donander had been privileged to serve even in this mortal life. For Donander was the only one of the lords of the Silver Stallion who accepted with joy and with unbounded faith the legend of Manuel, and who in all his living bore testimony to it.

This Donander of Evre had been the youngest of the fellowship, he was at this time but newly made a widower while yet in his forties, and whatsoever he lacked in brilliance of wit he atoned for with his hardiness in battle. Yet in this war he chose not to display his prowess, since the fighting was between the son of Dom Manuel and the son of Donander himself. He chose instead exile.

First, though, he went to Storisende; and, standing beside the holy sepulchre, he looked up for some while at the serene great effigy of Manuel, poised there in eternal watchfulness over Donander’s native land, and bright with all the jewels of the world. Donander knelt and prayed in this sacred place, as he knew, for the last time. Then Donander, without any complaining, and without any grieving now for his wife’s death, went out of Poictesme, a landless man; and he piously took service under Prince Balein of Targamon (the same that twenty years ago had wooed Queen Morvyth, a little before the evil times of her long imprisonment and the cutting off of her head), because this always notably religious prince was now once more harrying the pagan Northmen.

Thus it was that Donander also at the last went out of Poictesme, not by his own election, to encounter the most strange of all the dooms which befell the lords of the Silver Stallion after the passing of Dom Manuel.

Chapter LVIII. Showing That Even Angels May Err

This doom began its workings in the long field below Rathgor, when Palnatoki rode forth and made his brag. “I am the champion of the AEnseis. In the Northland there is nobody mightier than I; and if a mightier person live elsewhere, it is not yet proven. Who is there in this place will try a fall with me?”

Behind him the pagan army waited, innumerable, and terrible, and deplorably ill-mannered. These shouted now:

“We cry a holmgang. Who will fight with Red Palnatoki, that is overlord of the Swan’s bath, and that slew the giants in Noenhir?”

Then from the opposed ranks came clanking, and shining in full armor, Donander of Evre. And he said:

“I, howsoever unworthy, messire, am the person who will withstand you. I also have fought before this morning. Under Count Manuel’s banner of the Silver Stallion I have done what I might. That much I will again do here to-day, and upon every day between this day and the holy Morrow of Judgment.”

After that the Christian army shouted: “There is none mightier .than Donander! Also, he is very gratifyingly modest.”

But Palnatoki cried out scornfully: “Your utmost will not avail this morning! Behind me musters all the might of the AEnseis, that are the most high of gods above Lserath, and their strength shall be shown here through me.”

“Behind the endeavors of every loyal son of the Church,” Donander said, “are the blessed saints and the bright archangels.”

“Indeed, Donander, that may very well be the truth,” replied Red Palnatoki. “The old gods and the gods of Rome have met to-day; and we are their swords.”

“Your gods confess their weakness, Messire Palnatoki, by picking the better weapon,” Donander answered him, courteously.

With these amenities discharged, they fought. Nowhere upon Earth could have been found a pair of more stalwart warriors: each had no equal anywhere existent between seas and mountains save in his adversary: so neatly were they matched indeed that, after a half-hour of incredible battling, it was natural enough they should kill each other simultaneously. And then the unfortunate error occurred, just as each naked soul escaped from the dying body.

For now out of the north came Kjalar, the fair guide of pagan warriors to eternal delights in the Hall of the Chosen; and from the zenith sped, like a shining plummet, Ithuriel to fetch the soul of the brave champion of Christendom to the felicities of the golden city walled about with jasper of the Lord God of Sabaoth. Both emissaries had been attending the combat until the arrival of their part therein; both, as seasoned virtuosi of warfare, had been delighted by this uncommonly fine fight: and in their pleased excitement they somehow made the error of retrieving each the other’s appointed prey. It happened thus that the soul of Donander of Evre fared northward, asleep in the palm of Kjalar’s hand, while Ithuriel conveyed the soul of Red Palnatoki to the heaven of Jahveh.

Chapter LIX. The Conversion of Palnatoki

Ithuriel’s blunder, it is gratifying to record, did not in the outcome really matter. For Christendom just then was at heated odds over points of theology not very clearly understood in Jahveh’s heaven, where in consequence no decisions were hazarded upon the merits of the controversy; and the daily invoices of Christian champions and martyrs of all sects were being admitted to blessedness as fast as they murdered one another.

Moreover, Red Palnatoki was, by the articles of his stern Nordic creed, a fatalist. When he discovered what had happened, and the strange salvation which had been put upon him, his religion therefore assured him that this too had been predestined by the wayward Norns, and he piously made no complaining. The eternal life which he had inherited, with no fighting in it for the present, and no stronger drink than milk, was not up to human expectation, but the tall sea-rover had long ago found out that few things are. Meanwhile he could, at any rate, look forward to that promised last great battle, when those praiseworthy captains Gog and Magog (with, as Palnatoki understood it, a considerable company of fine fighting-men), would attack the four-square city, and when Palnatoki would have again a chance really to enjoy himself in defending the camp of the saints.

And meanwhile too, he was interested in those girls. It seemed at best to anyone with his religious rearing quite unaccountable to find women in heaven, and this especial pair appeared to Palnatoki a remarkably quaint choice for exceptional favoritism. He could only deduce they had got in through some error similar to that which had procured his own admission, particularly as he saw no other women anywhere about.

And Palnatoki reflected that the enceinte lady, with eagle’s wings and the crown of little stars, whom the presumably pet dragon followed everywhere with touching devotion, could not for as yet some months repay cultivating. But that very pretty brunette, with the golden cup and all those splendid clothes and with the placard on her forehead, who had just ridden by upon that seven-headed scarlet monster, rather took Palnatoki’s fancy. That girl was not, you could see, a prude; she had come very near winking at him, if she, indeed, had not actually winked, in the moment she glanced back: so that the Great Whore of Babylon (which, as they told him, was this second lady’s name) gave him, upon the whole, something else to look forward to.

Without any sulking under his halo, Palnatoki bent resolutely to his first harp-lesson; and, in place of protests, civilly voiced alleluias.

For, with two fine to-morrows to look forward to, Palnatoki was content enough. And in Jahveh’s heaven, therefore, all went agreeably, and as smoothly as Red Palnatoki at just this point goes out of this story.

Chapter LX. In The Hall of the Chosen

When Donander of Evre awoke in the Northern paradise, he also was content enough. It was a strange and not what you would call a cozy place, this gold-roofed hall with its five hundred and forty mile-wide doors: and the monsters, in the likeness of a stag and of a she-goat, which straddled above the building, perpetually feeding upon the lower leaves of the great tree called Laerath, seemed to Donander preeminently outlandish creatures, animals under whose bellies no really considerate persons would have erected a residence. Yet, like Palnatoki, Donander of Evre was an old campaigner, who could be tolerably comfortable anywhere. Nor was to discover himself among pagans a novel experience, since in his mortal life Donander had ridden at adventure in most corners of the world, and rather more than half of his finest enemies and of his opponents in many delightful encounters had been infidels.

“Excepting always their unfortunate religious heresies,” he was used to concede, “I have no fault to pick with heathen persons, whom in the daily and nocturnal affairs of life I have found quite as friendly and companionable as properly baptized ladies.”

In fine, he got on well enough with the flaxen-haired spirits of these Northern kings and skalds and jarls and vikingar. They stared, and some guffawed, when he fitted out a little shrine, in which Donander prayed decorously, every day at the correct hours, for the second coming of Manuel and for the welfare of Donander’s soul upon the holy Morrow of Judgment. Yet, after all, these boreal ghosts conceded, in paradise if anywhere a man should be permitted utterly to follow his own tastes, even in imaginative eschatology. And when they talked their really pathetic nonsense about being the guests of Sidvrar the Weaver and Constrainer, and about living forever through his bounty thus happily in the Hall of the Chosen, it was Donander’s turn to shrug. Even had there been no other discrepancies, everybody knew that heaven had, not five hundred and forty golden gates, but only twelve entrances, each carved from a single pearl and engraved with the name of a tribe of Israel.

“Besides,” Donander asked, “who is this Weaver and Constrainer? Certainly, I never heard of him before.”

“He is the King and Father of the AEnseis,” they told him. “He is overlord of that unimaginable folk who dwell in Ydalir; and who do not kill their deformed and weakling children, as we were used to do, but instead cast from the ivory ramparts of Ydalir all such degenerate offspring, to be the gods of races who are not blond and Nordic.”

Donander, as a loyal son of the Church, could only shake his head over such nonsense, and the innumerous other errors by which these heathen were being misled to everlasting ruin. Aloud, Donander repeated his final verdict as to the pretensions of this Sidvrar, by saying again, “I never heard of him.”

Nevertheless, Donander went without real discontent among the pleasures of paradise, and he joined in all the local sports. In common with the other dead, he ate the flesh of the inexhaustible boar, and with them he drank of the strong mead which sustained them in perpetual tipsiness. And he sedately rode out with the others, every morning, into the meadows where these blessed pagan lords fought joyously among themselves until midday. At noon a peal of thunder would sound, the slain and wounded warriors were of a sudden revivified and cured of their hurts, and were reunited to whatsoever arms and heads and legs the contestants had lost in their gaming: and the company would return fraternally to the gold-roofed hall, where they ate and drank and made their brags until they slept.

“Yet perhaps our banquets might, messieurs,” Donander had suggested, after a century or so of these rough-and-ready pleasures, “be not unadvantageously seasoned with the delights of feminine companionship, if only for dessert?”

“But it is one of our appointed blessings to have done with women and their silly ways,” cried out the vikingar, “now that we have entered paradise.”

And Donander, who had always been notable for his affectionate nature, and who had served vigorously so many ladies par amours, seemed grieved to hear the uttering of a saying so unchivalrous. Still, he said nothing.

Much time passed thus; and the worlds were changed: but in the eyes of Donander of Evre, as in the eyes of all who feasted in the Hall of the Chosen, there was no knowledge nor any fear of time, because these blessed dead lived now in perpetual tipsiness. And, as befitted a loyal son of the Church, Donander, without any complaining, in the surroundings which Heaven out of Heaven’s wisdom had selected for him, awaited the second coming of Manuel and the holy Morrow of Judgment.

Chapter LXI. Vanadis, Dear Lady of Reginlief

Then, from the highest part of this paradise, and from the unimaginable yew-vales of Ydalir which rose above the topmost branches of the tree called Laerath, descended blue-robed Vanadis, the lady of Reginlief, dear to the AEnseis. She had disposed of five inefficient husbands, in impetuous mythological manners, but still a loneliness and a desire was upon her; and with the eternal optimism of widowhood she came to look for a sixth husband among these great-thewed heroes who jeered at women and their wiles.

But Donander of Evre was the person who for two reasons found instant favor in her eyes when she came upon Donander refreshing himself after the pleasant fatigues of that morning’s combat, and about his daily bath in the shining waters of the river Gipul. So did the dead call that stream which flowed from the antlers of the monstrous stag who stood eternally nibbling and munching above the Hall of the Chosen.

“Here is an eminently suitable person.” Vanadis reflected. Aloud, she said, “Hail, friend! and does a stout fine fellow of your length and of your thickness go languidly shunning work or seeking work?”

Stalwart Donander climbed out of the clear stream of Gipul. He came, smilingly and with a great exaltation, toward the first woman whom he had seen in seven hundred years. And, so constant is the nature of woman, that divine Vanadis regarded Donander in just the reflective wonder with which, more than seven hundred years ago, barbarian Utsume had looked at Coth in the market-place of Porutsa.

Donander said, “What is your meaning, madame?”

Vanadis replied, “I have a desire which, a fine portent has informed me, agrees with your desire.”

Then Vanadis, with godlike candor, made wholly plain her meaning. And since Donander’s nature was affectionate, he assented readily enough to the proposals of this somewhat ardent but remarkably handsome young woman, who went abroad thus unconventionally in a car drawn by two cats, and who, in her heathenish and figurative way, described herself as a goddess. He stipulated only that, so soon as he was dressed, they be respectably united according to whatever might be the marriage laws of her country and diocese.

The AEnseis were not used in such matters to stand upon ceremony. Nevertheless, they conferred together,—Aduna and Ord and Hieifner and Ronn and Giermivul, and the other radiant sons of Sidvrar. It was they who good-humoredly devised a ceremony, with candles and promises and music and a gold ring, and all the other features which seemed expected by the quaint sort of husband whom their beloved Vanadis had fetched up from the Hall of the Chosen. But her sisters took no part in this ceremony, upon the ground that they considered such public preliminaries to be unheard-of and brazen.

Thus was Donander made free of Ydalir, the land that was above Laerath and the other heavens and paradises: and after Donander’s seven hundred years of celibacy, he and his bride got on together in her bright palace lovingly enough. Vanadis found that she too, comparatively speaking, had lived with her five earlier husbands in celibacy.

Chapter LXII. The Demiurgy of Donander Veratyr

Now the one change that Donander made an explicit point of was to fit out in this palace of Reginlief a chapel. There he worshiped daily at the correct hours, so near as one could calculate them in an endless day, and there he prayed for the second coming of Manuel and for the welfare of Donander’s soul upon the holy Morrow of Judgment.

“But, really, my heart,” his Vanadis would say, ineffectually, “you have been dead for so long now! and, just looking at it sensibly, it does seem such a waste of eternity!”

“Have done, my darling, with your heathen nonsense!” Donander would reply. “Do I not know that in heaven there is no marrying or giving in marriage? How then can heaven be this place in which two live so friendlily and happily?”

Meanwhile, to the pagan priests wherever the AEnseis were adored, had been revealed the sixth and the wholly successful marriage of blue-robed Vanadis: her spouse had been duly deified: and new temples had been builded in honor of the bright lady of Reginlief and of the Man-God, Donander Veratyr, her tireless savior from vain desire and bodily affliction. And time went stealthily as a stream flowing about and over the worlds, and changing them, and wearing all away. But to Donander it was as if he yet lived in the thrice-lucky afternoon on which he married his Vanadis. For, since whatever any of the AEnseis desired must happen instantly, thus Ydalir knew but one endless day: and immeasurably beneath its radiance, very much as sullen and rain-swollen waters go under a bridge upon which young lovers have met in the sunlight of April, so passed wholly unnoted by any in Ydalir the flowing and all the jumbled wreckage of time.

But it befell, too, after a great many of those aeons which Ydalir ignored and men cannot imagine, that Donander saw one of his smaller brothers-in-law about a droll-looking sport. Donander asked questions: and he learned this dark brisk little Koshchei was about a game at which the younger AEnseis were used to play.

“And how does one set about it?” Donander asked then.

“Why, thus and thus, my heart,” his wife replied. Fond Vanadis was glad enough to find for him some outdoor diversion which would woo him from that stuffy chapel and its depressing pictures of tortured persons and its unwholesome fogs of stifling incense.

Then Donander broke away a bough from the tree called Laerath, saying meanwhile the proper word of power. Sitting beside the fifth river of Ydalir, he cut strips of bark from this bough, with the green-handled knife which Vanadis had given him, and he cast these strips about at random. He found it perfectly true that those scraps of bark which touched the water became fish, those which he flung into the air became birds, and those which fell upon the ground became animals and men.

He almost instantly, indeed, had enough creatures to populate a world, but no world, of course, for them to animate and diversify. So Donander destroyed these creatures, and placed one of the lighter weirds upon the beetle Karu. That huge good-tempered insect fell at once to shaping a ball of mud, and to carving it with mountains and plains and valleys. Then Karu burrowed his way into the center of this ball of mud: and from the hole into which Karu had entered came all kinds of living beings needful for the animating and diversifying of a world; and these began to breed and to kill one another and to build their appropriate lairs, in nests and dens and cities.

This so excited another beetle, named Khypera, that he behaved in a fashion not at all convenient to record; but many living creatures were at once brought forth by his remarkable conduct, and plants and creeping things and men and women, too, came out of the moisture which Khypera let fall.

That was the second demiurgy of Donander Veratyr. Then with a golden egg Donander made another world: and from the entrails of a spider he drew another; from the carrion of a dead cow he made a fifth world; and with the aid of a raven Donander made yet one more. Thereafter he went on, in turn attempting each method that any Ans had ever practiced.

These sports amused Donander for a long while and yet another while. And Vanadis, apart from her natural pleasure in the augmented vigor he got from so much open-air exercise, bright Vanadis smiled at his playing, in the way of any wife who finds her husband occupied upon the whole less reprehensibly than you would expect of the creature. And the sons of Sidvrar also were used, as yet, to smile not unfriendlily when they passed where Donander was busy with his toys. Even the sisters of Vanadis only said that really of all things, and that of course they had expected it from the very first.

Sidvrar Vafudir, the Weaver and Constrainer, said nothing whatever. . . . So everybody was content for a long while and yet another while.

And throughout both these whiles Donander was pottering with his worlds, keeping them bright with thunderbolts and volcanic eruptions, diligently cleansing them of parasites with one or another pestilence, scouring them with whirlwinds, and perpetually washing them with cloud-bursts and deluges. His toys had constantly such loving care to keep them in perfect condition. Meanwhile, his skill increased abreast with his indulgence in demiurgy, and Donander thought of little else. He needed now no aid from ravens and beetles. He had but, he found, to desire a world, and at once his desire took form: its light was divided from its darkness, the waters gathered into one place, the dry land appeared and pullulated with living creatures, all in one dexterous complacent moment of self-admiration.

His earlier made stars and comets and suns and asteroids Donander Veratyr began destroying one by one, half vexedly, half in real amusement at the archaic, bungling methods he had outgrown. In their places he would set spinning, and glittering, and popping, quite other planetary systems which, for the moment in any event, appeared to him remarkably adroit craftsmanship. And everywhere upon the worlds which he had made, and had not yet annihilated, men worshiped Donander Veratyr: and in his pleasant home at Reginlief, high over Lserath and every other heaven and paradise, Donander worshiped the god of the fathers and of all the reputable neighbors of Donander of Evre; and in such pagan surroundings as Heaven out of Heaven’s wisdom had selected for him, awaited the second coming of Manuel and the holy Morrow of Judgment.

Chapter LXIII. Economics of Sidvrar

Then of a sudden gleaming Sidvrar Vafudir, the Weaver and Constrainer, came with his wolves frisking about him. He came with his broad-brimmed hat pulled down about his eyes decisively. He came thus to his daughter, blue-robed Vanadis, and he stated that, while patience was a virtue, there was such a thing as overdoing it, no matter how little he himself might care for the talking of idle busybodies, because, howsoever long she might argue, and always had done from childhood, being in this and in many other undesirable respects precisely like her mother, even so, no sensible Ans could ever deny her husband’s conduct was ridiculous: and that, said Sidvrar Vafudir, was all there was to it.

“Do not bluster so, my heart,” replied Vanadis, “about the facts of nature. All husbands are ridiculous. Who should be surer of this than I, who have had six husbands, unless it be you, who as goat and titmouse and birch-tree have been the husband of six hundred?”

“That is all very well,” said Sidvrar, “in addition to not being what we were discussing. This Donander of yours is now one of the AEnseis, he is an Ans of mature standing, and it is not right for him to be making worlds. That is what we were discussing.”

“Yet what divine hands anywhere,” asked Vanadis, “are clean of demiurgy?”

“That is not what we were discussing, either. When you brats of mine were children you had your toys, and you played with and you smashed your toys. Nobody denies that, because you all did, from Ronn to Aduna, and even little Koshchei used to be having his fling at such nonsense. Now do you look at the very fine and sober fellow he is, with all his pranks behind him, and do you ask Koshchei what he thinks of that husband of yours! But instead, you prefer to wander away from what we were discussing, because you know as well as I do that for children to be playing at such games is natural enough, besides keeping the young out of grave mischief, now and then. Though, to be sure, nothing does that very long nor very often, as I tell you plainly, my Vanadis, for do you look, too, as a most grievous example, at the wasteful and untidy way you destroy your husbands!”

“Donander Veratyr I shall not ever destroy,” replied Vanadis, smiling, “because of the loving human heart and the maddening human ways he has brought out of his Poictesme, and for two other reasons.”

“Then it is I who will put an end, if not to him, at least to his nonsense. For this Donander of yours is still playing with stars and planets, and setting off his comets, and exploding his suns, and that is not becoming.”

“Well, well, do you, who are the Father and Master of All, have your own will with him, so far as you can get it,” Vanadis returned, still with that rather reminiscent smile. She had now lived for a great while with this sixth husband of hers, who had a human heart in him and human ways.

Chapter LXIV. Through The Oval Window

Sidvrar went then from Vanadis to Donander. But the Constrainer found there was no instant manner of constraining Donander Veratyr into a conviction that Donander of Evre had died long ago, and had become an Ans. People, Donander stated, did not do such things; when people died they went either to heaven or to hell: and further reasoning with Donander seemed to accomplish no good whatever. For Donander, as a loyal son of the Church, now shrugged pityingly at the heathen nonsense talked by his father-in-law. He stroked the heads of Sidvrar’s attendant wolves, he listened to the Weaver and Constrainer with an indulgence more properly reserved for the feeble-minded; and he said, a little relishingly, that Messire Sidvrar would be wiser on the holy Morrow of Judgment.

Then Sidvrar Vafudir became Sidvrar Yggr, the Meditating and Terrible. Then Sidvrar fell about such magicking as he had not needed to use since he first entered into the eternal yew-vales of Ydalir. Then, in a word, Sidvrar unclosed the oval window in Reginlief that opened upon space and time and upon the frozen cinders which once had been worlds and suns and stars, and which their various creators had annihilated, as one by one the AEnseis had put away their childhood and its playing.

Among such wreckage sped pretentiously the yet living worlds which Donander had made. These toys, when seen thus closely through the magic of the oval window, were abristle with the spires of the temples and the cathedrals in which they that lived, as yet, upon these worlds were used to worship. In all these churches men invoked Donander Veratyr. Through that charmed window now, for the first time, came to his ears the outcry of his clergy and laity: nowhere was there talk of another god, not even where from many worlds arose the lecturing of those who explained away their ancestors’ quaint notions about Donander the Man-God, the Savior from Vain Desire, the Preserver from Bodily Affliction, and proved there could not be any such person. And to Donander, looking out of the window at Reginlief, all these things showed as a swarming of ants or as a writhing of very small maggots about the worlds which he had made to divert him: and in the face as in the heart of Donander awoke inquietation.

“If this be a true showing,” Donander said, by and by, “show now that Earth which is my home.”

After a while of searching, Sidvrar found for him the drifting clinker which had once been Earth. Upon its glistering nakedness was left no living plant nor any breathing creature, for the Morrow of Judgment was long past, and Earth’s affairs had been wound up. Upon no planet did anyone remember the god whom Donander worshiped, now that Jahveh had ended playing, and his toys were broken or put away. Upon many planets were the temples of Donander Veratyr, and the rising smoke of his sacrifice, and the cries of his worshipers as they murdered one another in their disputing over points of theology which Donander could not clearly understand.

Nor did he think about these things. Instead, Donander Veratyr, who was the last of the AEnseis to play at this unprofitable sport of demiurgy, was now remembering the days and the moon-lighted nights of his youth, and the dear trivial persons whom he had then loved and revered. He did not think about the two wives whom he had married upon Earth, nor about his son Maugis, nor about any of the happenings of Donander’s manhood. He thought of, for no reason at all, the shabby little village priest who had confirmed him, and of the father and mother who had been all-wise and able to defend one from every evil, and of the tall girl whose lips had, once, and before any other lips, been sweeter than were the joys of Ydalir. And he thought of many other futile things, all now attested always to have been futile, which long ago had seemed so very important to the boy that, in serving famous Manuel of Poictesme, had postured so high-heartedly in one of the smallest provinces of an extinct planet.

And Donander wrung immortal hands, saying, “If this be a true showing, what thing have I become, who can no longer love or reverence anything! who can have no care for any Morrow of Judgment! and to whom space reveals only the living of these indistinguishable and unclean and demented insects!”

The cry of his worshipers came up to him. “Thou art God, the Creator and Preserver of all us Thy children! Thou art Donander Veratyr, in Whom is our firm hope! Thou art the Man-God, That wilt grant unto us justice and salvation upon the holy Morrow of Judgment!”

“Is it,” Donander said, “of Manuel that these little creatures speak?”

“We know not of any Manuel,” the universe replied to him. “We only know that Thou art God, our Creator and Preserver.”

Then, after regarding again the vermin which swarmed about his worlds, Donander said, like one a little frightened, “Is God thus?”

They answered him, fondly and reverently, “How can God be otherwise than Thou art?”

At that Donander shuddered. But in the same moment he said, “If this be a true showing, and if I be indeed a god, and the master of all things, the human heart which survives in me wills now to create that to-morrow for which these weaklings and I too have so long waited.”

And Sidvrar pointed out, as patiently as outraged common-sense permitted: “Still, still, you are talking nonsense! How can an Ans create to-morrow?”

Donander asked, in turn, “Why not, if you be omnipotent?”

“It is because we are omnipotent. Thus in Ydalir there is but one day, from which not even in imagination can any Ans escape. For, whatever any of the AEnseis desires, even if it be a to-morrow, must instantly happen and exist; and so must be to-day. That ought to be plain enough.”

“It is not plain,” Donander answered, “although, the way you put it, I admit, it does sound logical. Therefore, if this indeed be the way of omnipotence, and if none may escape his day, and if I be a trapped and meager immortal, and the master only of those things which are to-day, then now let all things end! For my heart stays human. To-day does not know the runes of my heart’s contentment. My heart will not be satisfied unless it enter into that morrow of justice and salvation which the overlords of men, as you now tell me, cannot desire nor plan. So now, if this be a true showing, now let all things end!”

Within the moment Donander saw that, while he was yet speaking, space was emptied of life. Down yonder now were no more men and women anywhere. None any longer awaited an oncoming day which was to content one utterly with an assured bright heritage, divined in the dreams which allured and derided all human living endlessly, and condemned the heart of every man to be a stranger to contentment upon this side of to-morrow. That ageless dream about to-morrow, and about the redeeming which was to come—to-morrow—had passed, as the smoke of a little incense passes; and with it had gone out of being, too, those whom it had nourished and sustained. There were no more men and women anywhere. Donander could see only many cinders adrift in a bleak loneliness: and Donander of Evre must endure eternally as Donander Veratyr, a lonely and un-comprehended immortal among his many peers.

“So do you be sensible about it, my son-in-law,” said Sidvrar Vafudir, when he had spoken the word of power which closed forever that cheerless window, out of which nobody was ever to look any more,—“be sensible, if there indeed stay any root of intelligence in you. And do you henceforward live more fittingly, as a credit to your wife’s family. And do you put out of mind those cinders and those ashes and those clinkers that were the proper sport of your youth. Such is the end of every wise person’s saga.”

Chapter LXV. The Reward of Faith

Thereafter the King and Father of the AEnseis departed, well pleased with the lesson taught that whippersnapper. And Donander also smiled, and he looked contentedly about his pleasant quarters in the everlasting vales of Ydalir.

“Still, not for a great deal,” Donander reflected, “would I be treading in that old sorcerer’s sandals; and it is a fair shame that I should have such a person for a father-in-law.”

For, as a loyal son of the Church, Donander did not doubt that the wonders which Sidvrar had just shown to him could only be an illusion planned with some evil spirit’s aid to tempt Donander away from respectability and the true faith. In consequence Donander Veratyr, that had been the Creator and Destroyer of all things except the human heart which survived in him, went now into the chapel of Reginlief. There he decorously said the prayers to which Donander was accustomed, and he prayed for the second coming of Manuel and for the welfare of Donander’s soul upon the holy Morrow of Judgment.

BOOK TEN

AT MANUEL’S TOMB

“What hast thou here, that thou hast hewed thee out a sepulchre?”

—Isaiah, xxii, 16

—Salut, ami, dit Jürgen, si vous êtes une créature de Dieu.

—Votre protase est du bien mauvais grec, observa le Centaure, car en Hellade nous nous abstenions de semblables réserves. D’ailleurs mon origine vous intéresse certes moins que ma destination.

—la haulte historie de Jürgen

Chapter LXVI. Old Age of Niafer

Now the tale is of crippled old Dame Niafer, who had reformed the Poictesme which her husband redeemed, and of the thinking which came upon her in the last days of her life. Until latterly Niafer had not, with at every turn so many things requiring to be done, had very much time for thinking. But now there was nothing more ever to be done by Madame Niafer. Radegonde saw to that.

The gray-eyed minx ruled everything and everybody. That was not pleasant for her mother-in-law to behold, after Niafer herself had ruled over Poictesme for some twenty years, and all the while had kept frivolity and disorder out of fashion. No mother could, in the first place, honestly enjoy seeing her own son thus hoodwinked and led into perpetual dissipation at all hours of the night, by a wife who, at thirteen hundred and some years of age, might reasonably be expected to know better. In the second place, Niafer could have managed things, and very certainly poor Emmerick, with immeasurably more benefit to everybody, and to common-sense too.

All that warring with Maugis, for instance, had been a sad mistake. Now, under my regency, the aged Countess would reflect with complacence, there was grumbling here and there,—men being what they are, with no least idea as to what is actually good for them,—but never any armed revolt. When people were dissatisfied, you sent for them, they came, you had a sensible talk, you found out what was really wrong, and you righted matters to the utmost extent that such a righting seemed judicious; you eked out the remainder with a little harmless soft-soaping, and that was all there was to it. No warrior in his sane senses would go to war with an intelligent old lady who esteemed him such a particularly fine fellow.

Now, if at the very beginning, that poor Maugis—quite a nice-looking child, too, until he lost flesh under that continual plotting and throat-cutting, with parents you had known for years,—had been had in to dinner, just with the family, then all that killing and burning and being awakened at unearthly hours by the misguided boy’s night attacks upon Bellegarde would have been avoided.

But Niafer, of course, had been allowed no say in the matter. She was allowed no say in any matter by that woman, who topped off her ill-doing by being always so insufferably pleasant and so considerate of Mother Niafer’s comfort. And in this enforced idleness it was rather lonely now that Holmendis was dead. Nearly seven years ago now that dependable and always firm friend had gone crusading with St. Louis; and the pair of them had passed from the ruins of Carthage to eternal glory with the aid of dysentery. Niafer missed Holmendis a great deal, after the three decades of close friendship and of the continuous intimacy about which people said things of which the old Countess was aware enough and utterly unmindful.

She had her children, of course. It was particularly nice to have Melicent back again, after all these years of never quite really knowing whether the child was managing her abductor tactfully, in that far-off Nacumera. But the children had their own children now, and their own affairs; and none of these possessions were they inclined to let Niafer control, in the Poictesme wherein, for eighteen years, she had controlled everything. For the rest, Dame Niafer knew that a prophecy which had been made to her very long ago by the Head of Misery was now being fulfilled: she had no place in the world’s ordering, she was but a tolerated intruder into her children’s living, and nobody anywhere did more than condone her coming.

Niafer did not blame her children. She instead admitted, with the vast practicality not ever to be comprehended by any male creature, that their behavior was sensible.

“I would meddle perpetually if they permitted it. I am very often a nuisance, as it is. And so, that part of the prophecy about my weeping in secret is quite plainly nonsense, since there is nothing whatever to weep about, or even to be surprised at,” Dame Niafer stated cheerily.

And so, too, if sometimes, after one or another crossing of her still pertinacious will, the dethroned old ruler of Poictesme would hobble very quietly into her own rooms, and would remain there for a lengthy while with the door locked, and would come out by and by with reddened eyes, nobody noticed it particularly. For she, who in her prime had been the most sociable of potentates, seemed nowadays to prefer upon the whole to be alone. She was continually, without any ostentation, limping away from any little gathering of her descendants. Mother was becoming slightly queer: you shrugged, not at all unfondly, over the fact, and put up with it. Grandmother would be there one moment laughing and talking like everybody else; and the very next moment she was gone. And you would find her, accidentally, in some quiet corner, quite alone, bent up a little, and not doing anything whatever, but just thinking. . . .

Dame Niafer thought, usually, about her husband. Her lot had been the most glorious among the lots of all women, in that she had been Manuel’s wife. That marvelous five years of living which she had shared with Manuel the Redeemer was not an extensive section of her life, but it was the one part which really counted, she supposed. It was only on account of her human frailty that she remembered so many more things about Holmendis, who was a mere Saint, than she did about her Manuel. She found it, nowadays, rather hard—and injudicious, too,—to recall any quite definite details about her miraculous husband: there was only, at a comfortable remoteness, a tall gray god in a great golden glowing. It was all wonderful, and inspiring, and very sad, too, but noticeably vague: and the tears which came into your eyes were pleasant, without your knowing exactly what you were crying about.

That was the best way in which to think of her Manuel. A prying into particulars, a dwelling upon any detail whatever, was injudicious. Such a perhaps blasphemous direction of your thoughts suggested, for instance, that matters were going to be a trifle awkward, just at first, after that second coming of the Redeemer.

It was not, altogether, that Manuel would be a stranger to her, nor even that omniscience, of course, knew all about Holmendis. In dealing with a liberal patron of the Church it was the métier of omniscience to become a little myopic. For that matter, Dom Manuel’s earthly past was not so far gone out of his wife’s memory that he could be the only person to do any talking about natural frailties. No, the drawback would be, rather, that, when her Manuel had returned, in undiminished glory, you would have to get accustomed to so many things, all over again. . . . Niafer hoped that, in any event, at his second coming he would not bring back with him that irritating habit of catching cold on every least occasion: for you probably could not with decency rebuke a spiritual Redeemer for his insistence upon keeping the rooms stuffy and shut up everywhere on account of the draughts, any more than you could really look up to him with appropriate reverence if he came snorting and sneezing all over the place. . . . And if he for one single solitary moment expected to have, in his reordering of human affairs, that Alianora and that Freydis of his established anywhere near his lawful wife. . . .

That mad contingency, however, was not at any time mentally provided against, because at this point Niafer would turn away from this undoubtedly blasphemous trend of speculation. Her Manuel was in all things perfect. He would come again in unimaginable glory, and he would exalt her, his chosen, his one bride, who was so utterly unworthy of him, to the sharing of an eternal felicity which—after you got accustomed to it, and really settled down, with a fresh growth of hair and a complete set of teeth and all the other perquisites of unfading youth,—would be quite pleasant. Details could wait. Details, the moment you dwelt upon them, became upsetting. Details in any way relative to those hussies were no doubt directly suggested by the powers of evil.

It was after such considerations that Niafer would go to pray beside the tomb which she had builded in honor of Manuel.

Chapter LXVII. The Women Differ

Now the tale tells that in the spring of the year old Niafer, thus sitting beside her husband’s tomb, looked up and found another aged woman waiting near her.

“Hail, Queen of England!” said Dame Niafer, with quite as much civility as there was any need for.

“So!” said the other. “You would be his wife. Yes. I remember you, that day near Quentavic. But how could you be recognizing me?”

“Are there not tears in your old eyes? There is no other person living, since that double-faced Freydis got her just deserts,” replied Niafer, very quietly, “who would be shedding tears over my Manuel’s tomb. We two alone remember him.”

“That is true,” said Alianora. And for no reason at all she smiled a little. “One hears so much about him, too.”

“The world has learned to appreciate my husband,” Niafer assented. She did not altogether approve of Madame Alianora’s smile.

Now the Queen said: “He was rather a dear boy. And I am not denying that I cared a great deal about him once. But even so, my dear, this wonder of the world that the poems and the histories are about, and that the statues and the shrines commemorate, and that one, in mere decency, has to pretend to remember!”

“I am sure I do not at all understand you, Madame Alianora.” And Niafer looked without any love at this Queen of England who in the old days had been upon terms of such regrettable intimacy with Dom Manuel.

But Alianora went on, with that provokingly pleasant air of hers: “No, you would not understand the joke of it. You do not properly value the work of your hands and of your imagining. But this legend which you in chief, with the pride and the foolishness of Poictesme to back you, have been quietly and so tirelessly fostering through all these years, has spread through the known world. Our Manuel has become the peer of Hector and of Arthur and of Charlemagne for his bravery and his wisdom and his other perfections. Our Manuel is to come again, in all his former glory! And I, who remember Manuel quite clearly—though I am not denying he has had his successors in my good will and friendly interest,—well, in perfect candor, my dear, I find these notions rather droll.”

To this sort of talking Niafer replied, sharply enough, “I do not know of any reason in the world for you to be speaking of my husband as ‘our Manuel’”

“No, my dear, I am sure he took excellent care that you should never know about such things. Well, but all that is over a great while ago. And there is no need for us two to be quarreling over the lad that took his pleasure with the pair of us, and with Queen Freydis too, and with nobody knows how many other women, and who, to do him justice, gave to each playfellow a fair half of that pleasure.”

This exposed unvenerable handsome old Alianora to the gaze of perturbed decorum. “I do not think, madame, that you ought to be alluding to such frivolous matters here at his tomb.”

“After all, though,” Alianora stated, “it is not as if he were really buried in this place. You dreaming braggarts of Poictesme had not even a corpse to start with, when you began on your fine legend. No: the entire affair is pure invention; and is very neatly symbolized by this stately tomb with nothing whatever inside it.”

“What, though, if Manuel had been truly buried here, what would this world have been relinquishing to the cold grave?” said Freydis. For Niafer saw that Freydis also was at hand. This Freydis was a witch-woman with whose connivance Dom Manuel had in the old days made unholy images and considerable scandal.

“Nobody knows that,” continued Freydis. “Not even we who, as we said, loved Manuel the Redeemer in his mortal life knew anything about Manuel. I know that he wanted what he never found. I think that he never, quite, knew what he wanted. But that is all. That is all I know, to-day. What sort of being lived inside that squinting tall strong husk which used to fondle us? I often wonder about that.”

“My dear creature,” said Alianora, “do you really think it particularly matters? I am sure we never used to think about that especial question at the time, because the husk was, in all conscience, enough to deal with. Yes, you may say what you will about Manuel, but among friends there is no harm in conceding that in some respects we three know him to have been quite wonderful.”

It was then that the old Queen of England looked up toward the gleaming statue of the man whom these three women had loved variously. Manuel towered high above them, bedazzling in the May sunlight, serene, eternally heroic, eternally in that prime of life which his put-by spent bedfellows had long ago overpassed; and he seemed to regard exalted matters ineffably beyond the scope of their mortal living and the comprehension of frail human faculties. But wrinkled jovial Alianora smiled up at this superb Redeemer fondly and just a little mockingly.

“You understood me,” Alianora said, “and I you. But we did not talk about it.”

“I say that nobody understood Manuel,” replied Freydis. “I say it is a strange thing that we three should be continuing the life of Manuel and the true nature of the being who lived inside that husk, and that we three should yet stay ignorant of what we are giving to the times that are to come. For Manuel has already returned, and he will keep returning again and again, without redeeming anything and without there being any wonder about it—”

Alianora was interested. “But do you explain, my darling—!”

“Dead Manuel lives again in your tall squinting son—”

“Yes,—and do you just imagine, Freydis dear, what a reflection that is to any mother, what with Manuel’s irregular notions about marriage—!”

“—And in the four children that he had by Niafer,” Freydis continued. “And in these children’s children our Manuel’s life will be renewed, and after that in their grandchildren: and Manuel’s life and Manuel’s true nature will thus go on, in many bodies, so long as men act foolishly by day and wickedly at night. And in the images which I aided him to make and to inform with fire from Audela, in these also, when these are set to live as men among mankind,—and, to my fancy, no more reasonably than my two elder children, Sesphra and Raimbaut, have lived already,—in these also, will our Manuel live. Yes, in all these inheritors of his foiled being, our Manuel will, thus, live many lives,—wanting always what he has not ever found, and never, quite, knowing what thing it is which he wants, and without which he may not ever be contented.”

“I see,” said Alianora: “and your explanation of his second and of, indeed, his two thousandth coming seems to me, I confess, much the more plausible. Yes, I see. Manuel has already returned; and he will return again any number of times—”

Freydis said moodily, “And to whose benefit and pleasuring?”

“My darling Freydis! You may depend upon it that on each occasion two persons will get a great deal of pleasure out of preparing the way for him. And that,” said Alianora, “that and whatever else may befall those persons who have Manuel’s proclivities and life in them will be but another happening in the Biography of Manuel. We three have begun a never-ending set of comedies in which the life of Manuel will be the main actor. We have, as one might say,—among friends, my darlings,—collaborated with the dear boy to make an endless series of Manuels, without any special reassurance that to do this was going to give good and pleasure to anybody except—say what you will, my dears,—it does always give to a hearty young woman. For we do not know, even now, exactly what sort of a creature this Manuel was and, thanks to our collaboration, will continue to be. Yes, now I see your point, my dear Freydis; and it is really a curious one.”

Again, though, Alianora smiled up toward the statue of Manuel as though there were some secret between them. And Niafer had no patience whatever with the leering and iniquitous old hussy.

“The whole world knows,” said Niafer, indignantly, “what sort of person my husband was, for my Manuel is famous throughout Christendom.”

“Yes,” Alianora assented, “he is famous as a paragon of all the Christian virtues, and as the Redeemer whose return is to restore the happiness and glories of his people: and it is upon that joke, my dear Niafer, I was congratulating you a moment or two ago.”

“He is famous for his loyalty and valor and wisdom,” said Freydis. “I hear of it. And I remember the tall frightened fool who betrayed me, and whom at the last I spared out of mere pity for his worthlessness. And still, I spare the frightened, blundering, foiled living of Manuel, and I perpetuate and I foster this living, in my children, because it is certain that a woman’s folly does not ever perish.”

“Nevertheless, I know how to avail myself of a woman’s folly,” said Horvendile,—for now, Dame Niafer perceived, that queer, red-headed Horvendile also was standing beside her husband’s tomb,—” and of the babble of children, and of the unwillingness of men to face the universe with no better backing than their own resources.”

Then Horvendile looked full at Niafer, with his young, rather cruel smile. And Horvendile said:

“So does it come about that the saga of Manuel and the sagas of all the lords of the Silver Stallion have been reshaped by the foolishness and the fond optimism of mankind; and these sagas now conform in everything to that supreme romance which preserves us from insanity. For it is just as I said, years ago, to one of these so drolly whitewashed and ennobled rapscallions. All men that live, and that go perforce about this world like blundering lost children whose rescuer is not yet in sight, have a vital need to believe in this sustaining legend about the Redeemer, and about the Redeemer’s power to make those persons who serve him just and perfect.”

“It is you who are much worse than a rapscallion!” cried out Dame Niafer. “You are as bad as these women here. But I will not listen to any of you or to any more of your jealous and foul blasphemies—!”

Then Madame Niafer awakened, to find herself alone by the great tomb. But real footsteps were approaching, and they proved to be those of a person rather more acceptable to her than was that jeering Horvendile or were those brazen-faced and thoroughly vile-minded women about whom Dame Niafer had been dreaming.

Chapter LXVIII. Radegonde Is Practical

For at this point Madame Niafer was approached by Jurgen, the son of Coth, who came to Manuel’s tomb upon a slight professional matter. Jurgen—now some while reformed by the ruthless impairments of middle age, and settled down into tempestuous matrimony with the daughter of Ninzian (by the wife of well-to-do old Pettipas),—had since his marriage brought new life and fresh connections into the business of his nominal father-in-law; and was to-day the leading pawnbroker of Poictesme. It was thus to Jurgen, naturally enough, that Count Emmerick’s wife, Radegonde, had applied in these hard times which followed the long and impoverishing war with Maugis d’Aigremont.

The Countess had been taking of Dom Manuel’s tomb what she described as a really practical view. The tomb was magnificent and in every way a credit to the great hero’s family. Still, as Radegonde pointed out to her husband, that effigy of Manuel at the top was inset with scores of handsome gems which were virtually being wasted. If—of course without giving any vulgar publicity to the improvement—these jewels could be replaced with bits of suitably colored glass, the visual effect would remain the same, the tomb would be as handsome as ever, and nobody would be the wiser excepting only Count Emmerick and Radegonde, who would also be a good deal the wealthier.