The Silver Stallion: A Comedy of Redemption

Emmerick had replied, with appropriate indignation, that it would be blasphemy thus to despoil the tomb of his heroic father.

But to the contrary, it was Emmerick, as he forthwith learned, who blasphemed his heroic father’s memory in even for one moment supposing that the blessed dead cared about such vanities as rubies and sapphires, and wanted their own innocent grandchildren to starve in the gutter; and, for the rest, would he simply look at that pile of bills, and not be driving everybody crazy with his high-and-mighty nonsense.

Emmerick did look, very briefly and with unhidden aversion, toward the candid smallish mountain of unsettled accounts with which he was already but too familiar. “Nevertheless,” said Emmerick, “it would be an abominable action, if the story were ever to get out—”

“It will not get out, my dear,” replied his wife, “for we will leave the whole matter to Jurgen, who is the soul of discretion.”

“And I cannot afford to have any part in it,” said Emmerick, virtuously.

“You need take no part whatever,” his wife assured him, “but only your fair half of the proceeds.”

So Radegonde sent for Jurgen the pawnbroker, and asked him to appraise the jewels in Dom Manuel’s effigy and to name his best price for them.

It was thus that Jurgen happened to come just then to Manuel’s tomb and to disturb the dreaming of Madame Niafer.

Chapter LXIX. Economics of Jurgen

“You,” the fluttered old lady began—oddly enough, it must have seemed to Jurgen,—“you were the last living person to lay eyes upon him. It is strange that you, of all people, should come now to end my dreaming. I take your coming, rogue, as an omen.”

Then Madame Niafer began to tell him somewhat of her dream. And Jurgen listened, with the patience and the fondness which the plight of very old persons always seemed to evoke in him.

Jurgen was upon excellent terms with Madame Niafer, whom, for Biblical reasons, he was accustomed to refer to as the Centurion. “You say to one man, Go, and he goeth; and you say to another man, Come, and he cometh,” Jurgen explained. “In fine, you are a most terrible person. But when you say to me, Go, I do not obey you, madame, because you are also a dear.”

Niafer regarded this as sheer impudence, and vastly liked it.

So she told him about her dream. . . . And it was possible, Dame Niafer now admitted, that this dream might have a little misrepresented the deplorable women involved, because that snaky-eyed Freydis was known, since she got her dues from the Druids and the satirists, to be satisfactorily imprisoned in infamous Antan, whereas that hypocrite of an Alianora was now a nun at Ambresbury. But in Madame Niafer’s dreaming the hussies had seemed equally free from the constraint of infamy and of the convent: they had seemed to be far more dreadfully constrained by skepticism. . . .

“Madame,” said Jurgen, at the end of her account, “what need is there, after all, to worry over this little day-dream? I myself had but last month, upon Walburga’s Eve, a far more extensive and disturbing dream: and nothing whatever came of it.”

The Countess answered: “I grow old; and with age one is less certain of everything. Oh, I know well enough that the lewd smirking hussies were very slanderously in the wrong! Still, Jurgen, still, dear rogue, there is a haunting whisper which tells me that time means to take all away. I am a lonely powerless old creature now, but I stay Manuel’s wife. That alone had remained to me, to have been the one love and the proud wife of the great Redeemer of Poictesme. Now, at the last, a whispering tells me, time must take away that also. My Manuel, a whispering tells me, was no more splendid than other men, he performed no prodigies, and there will be no second coming of the Redeemer: a whispering tells me that I knew this always and that all these years I have been acting out a lie. I think that whispering talks nonsense. And yet, with age, Jurgen, with age and in the waiting loneliness of age, one grows less certain of everything.”

“Madame,” said Jurgen, with his most judicial aspect, “let us regard this really very interesting question from its worst possible side. Let us—with suitable apologies to his great shade, and merely for the quicker confounding of his aspersers,—suppose that Dom Manuel was, in point of fact, not anything remarkable. Let us wildly imagine the cult of the Redeemer, which now is spread all over our land, to be compact of exaggeration and misunderstanding and to be based virtually upon nothing. The fact remains that this heroic and gentle and perfect Redeemer, whether or no he ever actually existed, is now honored and, within reason and within the reach of human frailty, is emulated everywhere, at least now and then. His perfection has thus far, I grant you, proved uncontagious; he has made nobody anywhere absolutely immaculate: but none the less,—within limits, within the unavoidable limits,—men are quite appreciably better because of this Manuel’s example and teachings—”

“Men are happier also, Jurgen, because of that prediction as to his second coming which he uttered in your presence on the last night of his living, and which you brought down from Upper Morven.”

Jurgen coughed. “It is a pleasure, it is always a pleasure, to further in any way the well-being of my fellow-creatures. But—to resume the immediate thread of my argument,—if this superb and most beneficial example was not ever actually set by Dom Manuel—owing to the press of family and state affairs,—if this example were, indeed, wholly your personal invention, then you, O terrible Centurion, would be one of the most potent creative artists who ever lived. That, now, I proclaim, as a retired poet, to be a possibility from which you should not take shame, but only pride and thankfulness.”

“Do not be talking your wheedling nonsense to me, young fellow! For, if my life had been given over to the spreading of romances about a Manuel who never lived—!”

Her weak, old, shriveled hands were fluttering before her, helplessly, in a kind of futile wildness. She clasped them now, so that each hand seemed to restrain the other. And Jurgen answered:

“I quail. I am appropriately terrified by your snappishness, and flattered by your choice of an adjective. I venture, none the less, to observe that I have encountered, Centurion dear, in the writings of one or another learned author, whose name at the present escapes me, the striking statement, and the wholly true statement,—and a statement which was, indeed, a favorite with my saintly father,—that a tree may always be judged by its fruit. Now, the children of Dom Manuel have thus far most emphatically borne out this statement. Count Emmerick”—here Jurgen coughed,—“Count Emmerick is learned in astrology. He is noted for his hospitality—”

“Emmerick,” said Dame Niafer, “would be well enough if he were not led by the nose in everything by that wife of his.”

Then Jurgen’s shoulders went up, his hands went outward, to disclaim any personal share in the old lady’s appraisement of his present client Radegonde. But Jurgen did not argue the matter.

“Madame Melicent,” Jurgen equably resumed, “has been the provoker of much gratifyingly destructive warfare oversea, just as Madame Ettarre has been the cause of another long war here at home, in which many gentlemen have won large honor, and hundreds of the humbler sort have been enabled to enter into a degree of eternal bliss appropriate to their inferior estate. Such wars evoke the noble emotions of patriotism, they enable people to become proficient in self-sacrifice, and they remarkably better business conditions, as my ledgers attest. As for Madame Dorothy, while she has incited no glorious public homicides and arsons, she has gratified and she has made more pleasurable the existence of half the gentry of Poictesme—”

“And what, you rogue, do you mean by that?”

“I allude to the organ of vision, without any anatomical excursus. I mean that to behold such perfect beauty makes life more pleasurable. Moreover, Madame Dorothy has incited a fine poem and a hungering and a dreaming that will not die, and a laughter which derides its utterer, too pitilessly—”

Now Jurgen’s voice had altered so that the old lady looked at him more narrowly. Niafer had an excellent memory. She perfectly recalled the infatuation of Jurgen’s youth, she who had no delusions about this daughter of hers. And Niafer reflected briefly upon the incurable romanticism of all men.

But Niafer said only, “I never heard of any such poem.”

Jurgen now completed the third of those convenient coughing spells. “I refer to an epic which stays as yet unpublished. It is a variation upon the Grail legend, madame, and pertains to the quest of a somewhat different receptacle. However! In regard to the other children of Dom Manuel,—concerning whose mothers your opinions, my adored Centurion, do equal credit to your sturdy morality and your skill in the art of impassioned prose,—we have Messire Raimbaut, a very notably respected poet, we have Sesphra, who has become a god of the Philistines. Poets befall all families, of course, with nobody to blame, whereas a god, madame, is not ever, as rhetoricians express it, to be sneezed at. We have, moreover, Edward Longshanks, among the most applauded monarchs that England has ever known, .because he so compactly exhibits in his large person every one of the general defects and limitations of his people. Thus far, Madame, we may estimate the children of Dom Manuel’s body to have made a rather creditable showing.”

“There is something in what you say,” Dame Niafer admitted. “Yet what is this nonsense about ‘the children of his body’? Have men any other implement, unknown to their wives, with which to beget children?”

Jurgen beamed. Jurgen, it was apparent, had found an enticing idea to play with.

“There is quite another sort of paternity, acquired without the need of troubling and upsetting any woman. So, for the perfect rounding off of our argument, we must consider also Dom Manuel’s children in the spirit, those lords who were of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion, and whose heroism was modeled so exactly after his fine example.”

Niafer replied, a little puzzled: “They were notable and pious persons, who were sent into all parts of the earth as the apostles of the Redeemer, and who will return again with Manuel. . . . But do you tell me just what you mean!”

“I mean that it was of rough and ungodly fighting-men that Dom Manuel’s example made these incomparable heroes. There was a time, madame,—a time to which we may now, in the proper spirit, refer without any impiety,—when their delight in battle was as vigorous as their moral principles were lax, a time when they jested at holy things, and when their chastity was defective.”

The Countess nodded. “I remember that time. It was an evil time, with no respectability in it: and I said so, from the first.”

“Yet do you consider what Dom Manuel’s example and teachings made, in the end, of his companions in this life! Do you consider the saintly deeds of Holden and of Anavalt, and how Ninzian was for so long the mainstay of all religion hereabouts—”

“Ninzian was a holy person, and even among the apostles of Manuel he was perhaps the most devout. Nevertheless—”

But Jurgen now became more particular. “Do you consider how but fourteen years ago Donander died a martyr in conflict with the pagan Northmen, proving with his body’s loss the falsity and wickedness of their superstitions, when in the sight of both armies Donander was raised up into heaven by seven angels in the same instant that a devil carried his adversary northward!”

“That miracle is attested. Yet—”

“Consider how holy Gonfal also perished as a martyr among the infidels of Inis Dahut, after his chaste resistance to the improper advances of their Queen! There, madame, was a very soul-stirring example for you, because you brunettes are not easy to resist.”

“Get along with you, you rogue! My eyes stay dark and keen enough to see that what hair I have is white in these days.”

“Then also, pious Miramon Lluagor, it is well known, converted many hundreds of the heathen about Vraidex, by the great miracle which he wrought when Koshchei the Deathless, and Toupan, the Duke of Chaos, and Moloch, Lord of the Land of Tears, and Nergal, the Chief of Satan’s Secret Police,—and several thousand other powers of evil whose names and infernal degrees at this instant evade me,—came swarming out of hell in the form of gigantic bees.”

“It is known that such favor was vouchsafed by Heaven to the faith and the prayers of Miramon. Ninzian, indeed, was present at the time, and told me about those awful insects. Each was about as large as a cow, but their language was much worse. Nevertheless—”

But Jurgen was nowhere near done. “Then Guivric,” he pointed out,—“Guivric of Perdigon, also, in whom the old leaven stayed longer than in the others, so that for a while he kept some little faults, they say, in the way of pride and selfishness,—Guivric got wholly rid of these blemishes after his notable trip into the East to discomfit single-handed the signal schisms of the pernicious and sinister Sylan. There was never a sweeter nor a more prodigally generous nor a more generally lovable saint upon earth than all found Guivric after his return from exorcising that heathen heresiarch into a mere pile of bones; and so the dear old Heitman stayed up to the glorious hour of his seraphic death.”

“That is true. I recall the change in Guivric, and it was most edifying.”

“Do you recall, also, madame, how the venerable Kerin went down to teach the truth about the Redeemer in the deepest fastnesses of error and delusion! and how he there confuted, one by one, the frivolous scientific objections of the overseers of hell,—with a patience, a painstakingness and a particularity surprising even in an apostle,—in an argument which lasted twenty years!”

“That also is true. In fact, it was his own wife who told me about it. Nevertheless—”

But Jurgen was still talking. “Lastly, madame, my beloved father Coth, as a matter of equally general knowledge, went as an evangelist among the brown-skinned and black-hearted unbelievers of Tollan. He introduced among them the amenities of civilization and true religion. He taught them to cover their savage nakedness. And, in just the manner of holy Gonfal, Coth likewise subdued the goad of carnal desire and the prick of his flesh—not once, but many times,—when Coth also was tempted by such an ill-regulated princess as but to think of crimsons the cheek of decency.”

The Countess said, meditatively: “You and your cheek—However, do you go on!”

Jurgen now shook a grizzled head, in rather shocked deprecation. “You ask the impossible. Upon the innumerable other pious exploits of Coth, I, as his wholly unworthy son, may not dwell without appearing vainglorious. That would be most unbecoming. For the modesty of my father was such, madame, that, I must tell you, not even to me, his own son, did he ever speak of these matters. The modesty of my father was such that—as was lately revealed to a devout person in a vision,—even now my father esteems himself unworthy of celestial bliss; even now his conscience troubles him as to the peccadillos of his earlier and unregenerate days; and even now he elects to remain among what, in a manner of speaking, might be termed the less comfortable conditions of eternal life.”

“He is privileged, no doubt, to follow his own choice: for his consecrated labors are attested. Nevertheless. . . .”

Then for a while Dame Niafer considered. These certainly were the facts as to the lords of the Silver Stallion, whom she herself could remember as having been, in the far-off days of her youth, comparatively imperfect persons: these acts of the apostles were facts recorded in the best-thought-of chronicles, these were the facts familiar even to children, facts which now a lengthy while ago, along with many other edifying facts about the saintly lords of the Silver Stallion, had each been fitted into its proper niche as a part of the great legend of Manuel: and as she appraised these facts, the old Countess validly perceived the strength of Jurgen’s argument. . . .

“Yes,” Niafer conceded, by and by, “yes, what you say is true. These consecrated persons had faults when they were first chosen by my husband to be his companions: but through their intimacy with him, and through the force of his example, they were purged of these faults, they were made just and perfect: and after the Redeemer’s passing, they fared stainlessly, and were his apostles, and carried that faith which his living had taught them into every direction and about all quarters of the earth. These are the facts recorded in each history book.”

“So, you perceive, Centurion dear! I can but repeat that, in the axiom favored by my honored father, every tree must be judged by its fruits. The exploits of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion I estimate as the first fruits of the cult of the Redeemer. Men of the somewhat lax principles to which these apostles in their younger days—I say it in the proper spirit, madame,—did now and then, we know, succumb, such men are not unmiraculously made just and perfect. I deduce we may declare this cult of Manuel the Redeemer to be a heavenly inspired and an in all ways admirable cult, since it produces miraculously, from the raw material of alloyed humanity, such apostles. This cult has already, in the holy lives and the high endings of the lords of the Silver Stallion, madame, passed the pragmatic test: it is a cult that works.”

“Besides,” said Niafer, with a not unfeminine ellipsis, and with a feminine preference for something quite tangible, “there is that last sight of my husband’s entry into glory, which as a child you had upon Upper Morven, and the fearful eucharist which you witnessed there. I could never understand why there was not even one angel present, when as many as seven came for Donander. Even so, you did witness very holy and supernatural occurrences with which Heaven would never have graced the passing of an ordinary person.”

“The imagination of a child—” began Jurgen. He stopped short. He added, “Very certainly, madame, your logic is acute, and your deduction is unassailable by me.”

“At all events—” Then it was Niafer who stopped abruptly.

But in a while she continued speaking, and in her withered face was much that puzzled and baffled look which Coth’s old face had worn toward the end.

“At all events, it was only a dream about those hussies. And at all events, it is near time for dinner,” said Dame Niafer. “And people must have both their dreams and their dinners in this world, and when we go out of it we must take what we find. That is all. I have not the imagination of a child. I am old. And when you get old it is better not to imagine things. It is better for an old person not to have any dreams. It is better for an old person not to think. Only one thing is good for an old person, and gives to that old person an end of loneliness and of bad dreams and of too much thinking.”

Niafer arose, not without difficulty; and the bent, limping, very aged Countess Dowager of Poictesme now went away from Jurgen, slowly and moodily.

Chapter LXX. All Ends Perplexedly

Jurgen, thus left alone, forthwith ascended the side of the great tomb. He stood now at the top of it, holding to the neck of the horse upon which sat the sculptured effigy of Manuel. The stone face, above and looking beyond Jurgen, when seen at such close quarters, was blotched and grotesquely coarse, the blank eyeballs gave it a repellent air of crass idiocy. But Jurgen was there to appraise not the face but the garments of the overtowering hero, and it was at the gems with which this famous effigy was inset that Jurgen was really looking.

Then, without any deep surprise, Jurgen whistled. To his trained eye it was apparent enough that these gems with which Madame Niafer had prodigally adorned her husband’s statue were one and all, and had been from the first, bright bits of variously colored glass. The Countess Radegonde, it appeared, had been by a great many years forestalled in her economics, and in her practical view of this tomb, by the countess who builded it. And somehow Jurgen was not much surprised. His only verbal outbreak was to utter one of his favorite remarks. He said, “These women!”

He climbed down to the pavement afterward, with the gingerly care befitting a person of forty-and-something. He cocked his gray head, looking upward with a remarkable blending of the quizzical and of the regretful. Now, seen at an appropriate distance, now Manuel of Poictesme appeared again resplendent and in everything majestic. He sat there, wary and confident and superb, it seemed, perpetually to guard the country which he had redeemed; and to which, men said, he was to return. . . .

Thus Jurgen waited for some while, regarding the vast tomb which was wholly empty, and which everywhere was adorned with a worthless tinsel glitter, and which yet stayed the most holy and, precisely as Jurgen had pointed out, the actually inspiring shrine of the heroic cult of the Redeemer. . . .

Jurgen opened his mouth. Then he shut it.

For Jurgen recalled that only last month he had become involved in a somewhat perturbing experience, on account of having spoken extempore in praise of the Devil; and so, as concerned the Redeemer, Jurgen decided not to commit himself, one way or the other. It seemed the part of wisdom for an aging pawnbroker to keep out of all such extra-mundane affairs. . . . Even so, a carnival of thoughts now tempted him to play with them, because this was a paradoxical tomb about which, but for the promptings of discretion, one might say a number of fine things. Those tinsel fripperies were, to the eyes of a considerate person, worthy of a reverence undemanded by mere diamonds, because of the deeds which they had prompted: and this emptiness was sacred because of the faith which people had put in it. And that this glittering vacuity could, as a matter of fact, work miracles was now fully attested: for it had reduced Jurgen to silence.

No: you could never, shruggingly, dismiss this tomb as, upon the whole, a malefic fraud which emanated only folly and intolerance and a persecution of the short-sighted by the blind. That was, in fact, a relatively unimportant aspect, in that it was an aspect which need never trouble you personally, if you were careful. And, at forty-and-something, you were careful.

Meanwhile you knew the shining thing to have been, also, the begetter of so much charity, and of forbearance, and of bravery, and of self-denial,—and of its devotees so strange, so troublingly incomprehensible, contentment,—that it somewhat frightened Jurgen. For Jurgen, but a moment ago, had been handling—perhaps—a bit over-intimately that really dangerous fountain-head of all the aspiring and fine standards which the aging pawnbroker was used unfeignedly to admire, with a vague, ever-present underthought as to the disastrousness of acquiring them. It would, he felt, be the very deuce if in business life one were ever to find these notions on the wrong side of his counter. . . .

Aesthetically it was, of course, delightful to regard the pre-eminent manifesters of the Redeemer’s power and sanctity, in those splendid lords of the Silver Stallion about whom Jurgen had but now been talking. It was an ennobling and a picturesque reflection, that humanity had once risen to such heights; that mere mortal men had, through their faith in and their contact with the great Redeemer, become purged of all faults and carnal weaknesses, and had lived stainlessly, and had even performed their salutary miracles whenever such a course seemed requisite. Jurgen thought it would be rather fun to work miracles. In any event, it was pleasant, and it was non-committally uplifting, just to think about the heroic saints of yesterday, and to envy their lot in life and their assured fine place in history.

Jurgen thought, for example, of gentle and greathearted old Guivric sharing his worldly wealth in such noble irrationality with all needy persons; and of kneeling Miramon with those seven thousand horrific bees swarming about him,—screeching out infernal threats, but powerless to trouble the serene, psalm-singing and unstung saint. Jurgen thought of Kerin facing so intrepidly yet other hideous cohorts of disputatious fiends and cowing their science so-called with decisive Biblical texts; and of the noble shocked figure of virtuous Gonfal holding fast his nightgown about him with one hand, and with the other repulsing the enamored—and, they said, quite good-looking also,—Queen Morvyth of the Isles of Wonder, when she assaulted his chastity. Performances like these were well worthy to be commemorated in history: and Jurgen regarded them with a warm, gratifying thrill of purely aesthetic appreciation.

For, from any practical standpoint, Jurgen obscurely felt, it would be inconvenient to be quite as perfect and superb as all that. Or, you might put it better, perhaps, that this was not a condition which a really honorable person, with a shop and a wife and other obligations, could conscientiously do anything directly to provoke for himself. Any, as one might say, defenseless householder whom the all-powerful Redeemer had explicitly and unarguably singled out to live in the heroic sanctity of an apostle would be, of course, in a piously different and wholly justifiable case. . . .

And Jurgen was wondering what it was that the child who Jurgen once had been had, actually, witnessed and heard upon Upper Morven. He could not now be certain: the fancies of a child are so unaccountable, so opulent in decorative additions .... Yet the testimony of that child appeared to have done more than anything else toward establishing Dom Manuel’s supremacy over all the men that Poictesme had ever known; indeed, when every fostering influence was allowed for, the whole cult of the returning Redeemer had begun with the testimony of that child. And perhaps it was natural enough (in this truly curious world) that Jurgen nowadays should be the only person remaining in any place who was a bit dubious as to the testimony of that child. . . .

Anyhow, young Jurgen had brought down from Morven a most helpful and inspiring prediction which kept up people’s spirits in this truly curious world; and cheerfulness was a clear gain. The fact that nothing anywhere entitled you to it could only, he deduced, make of this cheerfulness a still clearer gain. . . .

There might, besides, very well have been something to build upon. Modesty, indeed, here raised the point if Jurgen—at that tender age and some while before the full ripening of his powers,—could have invented out of the whole cloth anything quite so splendid and far-reaching? And that question he modestly left unanswered. Meanwhile (among so many perplexities) it was certain that Poictesme, along with the rest of Christendom, had now its wholly satisfactory faith and its beneficent legend.

APPENDIX A. COMPENDIUM OF LEADING HISTORI CAL EVENTS

(Abridged from the computations of Bulg.)

1239 Manual the Redeemer departs from Poictesme, in the September of this year. Last siege of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion held upon the feast of St. Clement the Roman. Niafer named regent in her husband’s stead, pending either the return of Dom Manuel or the arrival of the twenty-first birthday of their son Emmerick.

1240 Gonfal goes into the Isles of Wonder. Coth travels to Sorcha, and thence westward. Kerin disappears in the May of this year. Miramon Lluagor leaves Poictesme.

1243 Execution of Gonfal, on or about the feast day of Tiburtius and Valerianus.

1244 Miraculous birth of Fauxpas de Nointel.

1245 Miramon Lluagor acquires, but gets inadequate benefit from, the bees of Toupan. Coth imprisoned at Ran Reigan.

1247 Coth reaches Porutsa, and is made Emperor of Tollan. Coth is blown back into Poictesme.

1250 Death of Miramon Lluagor. Flight of Demetrios the parricide into Anatolia.

1252 St. Ferdinand enters into eternal life. Anavalt goes into Elfhame, and perishes there.

1253 Ork and Horrig suffer martyrdom among the Peohtes.

1254 Marriage of Dom Manuel’s reputed son, Prince Edward, at fifteen years of age, to the infant daughter of St. Ferdinand.

1255 Melusine puts a magic upon King Helmas, and transfers his charmed castle called Brunbelois to the high place in Acaire. Betrothal of Melicent to King Theodoret.

1256 Perion de la Foret comes, in disguise, to Bellegarde. Jurgen goes into Gatinais. Dorothy marries Michael, the son of Guivric.

1257 Melicent escapes out of Poictesme, and is purchased by Demetrios. Jurgen makes merry with the third wife of the Vidame de Soyecourt.

1258 Ending of Dame Niafer’s regency in the name of Manuel; with the formal accession, in the June of this year, upon the feast day of St. Peter and St. Paul, of Count Emmerick the Fourth.

1260 The portrait of Queen Radegonde becomes a mortal woman, and terminates the intimacy with Holden which began at Lacre Kai in 1237. Count Emmerick marries Radegonde. Death of Holden. Death of Azra.

1261 Guivric goes east to face the Sylan. Coth dies in his sleep. Kerin returns into Poictesme after twenty-one years spent underground.

1262 Birth of Emmerick’s first son. Ninzian detected by his nine hundred and eightieth wife, and is visited by Lucifer.

1263 Rape of Ettarre, with her prompt rescue by Guiron. Maugis d’Aigremont goes into rebellion. Donander leaves Poictesme, and is killed by Palnatoki.

1265 Kerin murdered by outlaws. Continuation of Maugis’ rebellion.

1268 Death of Pope Clement the Fourth, with the resultant accession, in December, of Ayrart de Montors. Jurgen visits the Chateau de Puysange, and there meets the Vicomte’s wife.

1269 Birth of Florian de Puysange.

1270 Holmendis leaves Poictesme, and dies in Africa. Edifying decease of Guivric. Jurgen returns into Poictesme, and marries Lisa, the daughter by courtesy of old Pettipas the pawnbroker. Count Emmerick at odds with the Pope.

1271 Accession to the papal chair of Gregory the Tenth. Continuation of Maugis’ disastrous rebellion, with the partial burning of Bellegarde.

1272 Death of Balthis. Disappearance of Ninzian. Accession of Dom Manuel’s reputed son to the crown of England.

1275 Perion and Melicent come back into Poictesme. End of Maugis’ rebellion, with his just punishment by death. Marriage of Ettarre to Guiron des Rocques, who in the following year succeeds his brother, as Prince de Gatinais.

1277 Jurgen has a queer dream, upon Walburga’s Eve. Niafer visited by a queer dream during the forenoon of St. Urban’s day. Death of Niafer, in the June of this year.

1287 The second rape of Ettarre by Sargatanet, Lord of the Waste Beyond the Moon, and the beginning of her retention in his domain for 592 years.

1291 Alianora dies at Ambresbury, and is interred piecemeal, parts of her being buried in the Benedictine convent there, and the remainder at the Friars Minors in London.

1300 Count Emmerick murdered by his nephew, Raymondin de la Foret, who seeks refuge in the unhallowed forest of Columbiers, and there marries Madame Melusine the enchantress.

APPENDIX B. THE THIN QUEEN OF ELFHAME

§1

For even just how many silken ladies wept, well out of eyeshot of their husbands, when it was known that courteous Anavalt had left Count Emmerick’s court, remains an indeterminable matter. But it is certain the number was large. There were, in addition, the tale tells, three women whose grieving for him was not ever to be ended: these did not weep. In the mean while, with all this furtive sorrowing some leagues behind him, and with a dead horse at his feet, tall Anavalt stood at a sign-post, and doubtfully considered a rather huge dragon.

“No,” the dragon was saying, comfortably, “no, for I have just had dinner, and exercise upon a full stomach is unwholesome. So I shall not fight you, and you are welcome, for all of me, to go your ways into the Wood of Elfhame.”

“Yet what,” says Anavalt, “what if I were to be more observant than you are of your duty and of your hellish origin? and what if I were to insist upon a fight to the death?”

When dragons shrug in sunlight their bodies are one long green glittering ripple. “I would be conquered. It is my business to be conquered in this world, where there are two sides to everything, and where one must look for reverses. I tell you frankly, tired man, that all we terrors who keep colorful the road to the Elle Maid are here for the purpose of being conquered. We make the way seem difficult, and that makes you who have souls in your bodies the more determined to travel on it. Our thin Queen found out long ago that the most likely manner of alluring men to her striped windmill was to persuade men she is quite inaccessible.”

Said Anavalt, “That I can understand, but I need no such baits.”

“Aha,” replied the dragon, “so you have not been happy out yonder where people have souls? You probably are not eating enough: so long as one can keep on eating regularly, there is not much the matter. In fact, I see the hunger in your eyes, tired man.”

Anavalt said:

“Let us not discuss anybody’s eyes, for it is not hunger, nor indigestion either, which drives me to the Wood of Elfhame. There is a woman yonder, dragon, a woman whom ten years ago I married. We loved each other then; we shared a noble dream. To-day we sleep together, and have no dreams. Today I go in flame-colored satin, with heralds before me, into bright long halls where kings await my counsel, and my advising becomes the law of cities that I have not seen. The lords of this world accredit me with wisdom, and say that nobody is more shrewd than Anavalt. But when at home, as if by accident, I tell my wife about these things, she smiles, not very merrily. For my wife knows more of the truth as to me and my powers and my achievements than I myself would care to know: and I can no longer endure the gaze of her forgiving eyes, and the puzzled hurt which is behind that forgiveness. So let us not discuss anybody’s eyes.”

“Well, well!” the dragon returned, “if you come to that, I think it would be more becoming for you not to be discussing your married life with entire strangers, especially when I have just had dinner, and am just going to have a nap.”

With that the evil worm turned round three times, his whiskers drooped, and he coiled up snugly about the sign-post which said, “Keep Out of These Woods.” He was a time-worn and tarnished dragon, as you could see now, with no employment in the world since men had forgotten the myth through which he used to ramp appallingly; so he had come, in homeless decrepitude, to guard the Wood of Elfhame.

Anavalt thus left this inefficient and outmoded monster.

§2

And the tale tells how, when Anavalt had passed this inefficient and outmoded monster, Anavalt went into the wood. He did not think of the tilled meadows or the chests of new-minted coin or the high estate which belonged to Anavalt in the world where people have souls. He thought of quite other matters as he walked in a dubious place. Here, to the right of Anavalt’s pathway, were seen twelve in red tunics: they had head-dresses of green, and upon their wrists were silver rings. These twelve were alike in shape and age and loveliness: there was no flaw in the appearance of any, there was no manner of telling one from another.

All these made a lament, with small sweet voices that followed the course of a thin and tinkling melody: they sang of how much better were the old times than the new and none could know more thoroughly than did Anavalt the reason of their grieving, but since they did not molest him he had no need to meddle with these women’s secrets any more. So he went on: and nothing as yet opposed bold Anavalt of Fomor; at most, a grasshopper started from the path, sometimes a tiny frog made way for him.

He came to a blue bull that lay in the road, blocking it.

§3

The tale tells that a blue bull lay in the road, blocking it. The tale narrates that this beast appeared more lusty and more terrible than other bulls, telling of how all his appurtenances were larger and seemed more prodigally ready to give life and death.

Courteous Anavalt cried out, “O Nandi, now be gracious, and permit me to pass unhindered toward the striped windmill.”

“To think,” replied the bull, “that you should mistake me for Nandi! No, tired man, the Bull of the Gods is white, and nothing of that serene color may ever come into these woods.”

And the bull nodded very gravely, shaking the blue curls that were between his cruel horns.

“Ah, then, sir,” Anavalt returned, with a little bow, “I must entreat your forgiveness for the not unnatural error into which I was betrayed by the majesty of your appearance.”

While Anavalt was speaking, he wondered why he should be at pains to humor an illusion so trivial as he knew this bull to be. For this of course was just the ruler of the Kittle cattle which everywhere feed upon the dewpools. The Queen of Elfhame, in that low estate to which the world’s redemption had brought her, could employ only the most inexpensive of retainers, for the Gods served her no longer.

“So you consider my appearance majestic! To think of that now!” observed the flattered bull; and he luxuriously exhaled blue flames. “Well, certainly you have a mighty civil way with you, to be coming from that overbearing world of souls. Still, my duty is, as they say, my duty; fine words are less filling than moonbeams: and, in short, I do not know of any sound reason why I should let you pass toward Queen Vae.”

Anavalt answered:

“I must go to your thin mistress because among the women yonder whose bodies were not denied to me there is one woman whom I cannot forget. We loved each other once; we had, as I recall that radiant time, a quaint and callow faith in our shared insanity. Then somehow I stopped caring for these things. I turned to matters of more sensible worth. She took no second lover. She lives alone. Her beauty and her quick laughter are put away, she is old, and the home of no man is glad because of her who should have been the tenderest of wives and the most fond of mothers. When I see her there is no hatred in the brown eyes which once were bright and roguish, but only forgiveness and a puzzled grieving. Now there is in my mind no reason why I should think about this woman differently from some dozens of other women who were maids when I first knew them, but there is in my mind an unreason that will not put away the memory of this woman’s notions about me.”

“Well,” said the bull, yawning, “for my part, I find one heifer as good as another; and I find, too, that in seeking Queen Vae one pretext is as good as another pretext, especially from the mouth of such a civil gentleman. So do you climb over my back, and go your way, to where there are no longer two sides to everything.”

Thus Anavalt passed the King of the Kittle cattle.

§4

Anavalt thus passed the King of the Kittle cattle, and the tale tells how Anavalt journeyed deeper and ever deeper into the Wood of Elfhame. No trumpets sounded before him as they sounded when the Anavalt who was a great lord went about the world where people have souls: and the wonders which Anavalt saw to this side and to that side did not disturb him, nor he them.

He came to a house of rough-hewn timber, where a black man, clothed in a goat-skin, barked like a dog and made old gestures. This, as Anavalt knew, was the Rago: within the house sat cross-legged, at that very moment, the Forest-Mother, whose living is innocent of every normal vice, and whose food is the red she-goat and men. Kuri and Uwardowa and Kogi also were there. Yet upon the farther side of the home of perversity was to be seen a rusty nail in the pathway, and five bits of broken glass, prosaic relics which seemed to show that men had passed this place.

So Anavalt made no reply to the obscene enticements of the Rago. Anavalt went sturdily on, to a tree which in the stead of leaves was overgrown with human hands: these hands had no longer any warmth in them as they caught at and tentatively figured Anavalt, and by and by released him.

Now the path descended, among undergrowth that bore small purple flowers with five petals. Anavalt came here upon wolves which went along with him a little way. Running they could not be seen, but as each wolf leaped in his running his gray body would show momentarily among the green bushes that instantly swallowed it: and these wolves cried hoarsely,—

“Janicot is dead!”

But for none of these things did Anavalt care any longer, and none of the peculiarities of Elfhame stayed him, until his path had led farther downward, and the roadway had become dark and moist. Here were sentinels with draggled yellow plumes, a pair of sentinels at whom Anavalt looked only once: then with averted head he passed them, in what could not seem a merry place to Anavalt, for in the world where people have souls he was used to mirth and to soft ease and to all such delights as men clutch desperately in the shadow of death’s clutching hand.

In this place Anavalt found also a naked boy.

§5

In this place Anavalt found, as the tale tells, a naked boy whose body was horrible with leprosy: this malady had eaten away his fingers, so that they could retain nothing, but his face was not much changed.

The leper stood knee-deep in a pile of ashes: and he demanded what Anavalt was called nowadays.

When courteous Anavalt had answered, the leper said then:

“You are not rightly called Anavalt. But my name is still Owner-of-the-World.”

Says Anavalt, very sadly, “Even though you bar my way, ruined boy, I must go forward to the windmill of the Elle Maid.”

Then the leper asked:

“And for what reason must you be creeping to this last woman? For she will be the last,—as I forewarn you, tired man, who still pretend to be Anavalt,—she will be the last of all of them and of how many!”

Anavalt answered:

“I must go to this last love because of my first love. Once I lay under her girdle, I was a part of the young body of my first love. She bore me to her anguish, even then to her anguish. I cannot forget the love that was between us. But I outgrew my childhood and all childishness: I became, they say, the chief of Manuel’s barons: and my living has got me fine food and garments and tall servants and two castles and a known name, and all which any reasonable mother could hope for her son. Yet I cannot forget the love that was between us, nor our shared faith in what was to be! To-day I visit this ancient woman now and then, and we make friendly talk together about everything except my wife, and our lips touch, and I go away. That is all. And it seems strange that I was once a part of this woman,—I who have never won to nor desired real intimacy with anyone,—and it seems strange to hear people applauding my wisdom and high deeds of statecraft, and in all matters acclaiming the success of Anavalt. I think that this old woman also finds it strange. I do not know, for we can understand each other no longer. I only know that, viewing me, there is in this old woman’s filmed eyes a sort of fondness, even now, and a puzzled grieving. I only know that her eyes also I wish never to see any more.”

“Still, still, you must be talking OEdipean riddles!” the leper answered. “I prefer simplicity, I incline to the complex no longer. So, very frankly, I warn you, who were Anavalt, that you are going, spent and infatuate, toward your last illusion.”

Anavalt replied:

“Rather do I flee pell-mell from the illusions of others. Behind me I am leaving the bright swords of adversaries, and the more deadly malice of out-rivalled friends, and the fury of some husbands, but not because I fear these things. Behind me I am leaving the puzzled eyes of women that put faith in me, because I fear these unendurably.”

“You should have feared them earlier, tired man,” replied the other, “in a sunlit time when I who am Owner-of-the-World would wonderfully have helped you. Now you must go your way, as I go mine. There is one who may, perhaps, yet bring us together once again; but now we are parted, and you need look for no more reverses.”

As he said this, the ruined boy sank slowly into the ash-heap, and so disappeared; and Anavalt went on, through trampled ashes, into the quiet midst of the wood. Among the bones about the striped wind-mill that is supported by four pillars, the witless Elle Maid was waiting.

§6

The witless Elle Maid was waiting there, as the tale tells, among much human wreckage. She rose and cried:

“Now you are very welcome, Anavalt of Fomor. But what will you give Maid Vae?”

Anavalt answered, “All.”

“Then we shall be happy together, dear Anavalt,” replied the witless Elle Maid, “and for your sake I am well content to throw my bonnet over the windmill.”

She took the red bonnet from her head, and turned. She flung the bonnet fair and high. So was courteous Anavalt assured that the Queen of Elfhame was as he had hoped. For when seen thus, from behind, the witless Queen was hollow and shadow-colored, because Maid Vae is just the bright thin mask of a woman, and, if looked at from behind, she is like any other mask, with no more thickness than has canvas or paper. So when she faced him now and smiled,—and as if in embarrassment looked down and pushed aside a thigh bone with her little foot,—then Anavalt could see that the Elle Maid was, when properly regarded, a lovely and most dear illusion.

He kissed her. He was content. Here was the woman he desired, the woman who did not exist in the world where people have souls. The Elle Maid had no mortal body that time would parody and ruin; she had no brain to fashion dreams of which he would fall short, she had no heart that he would hurt. There was an abiding peace in this quiet Wood of Elfhame wherein no love could enter, and wherein none could, in consequence, hurt anybody else very deeply. At court the silken ladies wept for Anavalt, and three women were not ever to be healed of their memories: but in the Wood of Elfhame, where all were soulless masks, there were no memories and no weeping, there were no longer two sides to everything, and a man need look for no reverses.

“I think we shall do very well here,” said courteous Anavalt, as yet again he kissed Maid Vae.

APPENDIX C. THE DELTA OF RADEGONDE

§1

It was, the tale declares, just after the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion had sacked Lacre Kai that young Holden found, among his plunder, the triangular portrait of Elphanor’s queen: and for the time young Holden thought little about the picture. He could not foreknow that its old frame, in shape like the Greek letter Delta, was to bind all his living. But after a few months of peace the lad went to Guivric, afterward called the Sage, who was already coming into esteem as a most promising thaumaturgist.

“Guivric,” says Holden, “the lady in this three-cornered picture is the lady of my love; and you must tell me how I may win her affections.”

Guivric looked at the portrait for some while, scratched off a fleck of paint from it with his fingernail, and he answered:

“There are impediments to your winning this Queen Radegonde. For one thing, she has been dead for thirteen centuries.”

“I admit,” said young Holden, “that thirteen is proverbially an unlucky number; but my all-consuming love is not to be intimidated by superstitions.”

Guivric thereupon consulted the oldest and most authentic poems, and Guivric admitted:

“Well, perhaps her being dead such an unlucky number of centuries does not matter, after all, because my authorities appear agreed that love defies time and death. Yet it does matter, I suspect, that the woman in this picture was the notion which a dead artist perpetuated of the Queen Radegonde whom he saw in the flesh.”

“So would I see her, Guivric.”

“Holden, my meaning is more respectable than your meaning. I mean that, if the man labored as a tradesman executing an order, your cause may prosper. But there is the ugly chance that this radiant, slim, gray-eyed girl was born of the man’s brain, very much as, even more anciently, they say, King Jove brought forth a gray-eyed daughter to devastate the world with wisdom: and in that case, I fear the worst.”

“But what,” asked Holden, a bit bewildered, “is the worst that can happen?”

“Thinking about it too much beforehand,” replied Guivric, drily.

Whereupon the young mage gave directions which must be followed to the letter if one wished to avoid an indescribable fate. But Holden was cautious, and did follow these instructions to the letter; and when it proved to be the Greek letter Delta he entered it, and so came to his desire, and communicated his love to Queen Radegonde.

Now this Radegonde had been alone ever since she was first painted, because in filling in the background, and in completing her portrait, the painter had provided her with no company in the quaint triangular tropic garden which he had painted also to enhance her charms. It followed that to have Holden thus thrusting himself into the vacancy was welcome to Radegonde. And to him her loveliness, and the dearness of her, was greater than he could quite believe in after he had left the Delta, and had returned, in the gray and abject way which Guivric had foretold, to the world of men.

§2

Holden thereafter kept the picture in a secret place, and the years wore on: and in the spring of one of these years he rescued a bright-haired princess, from an enchanter in a large and appalling line of business near Perdigon: and Holden married her, and they got on together very nicely. But times had changed in Poictesme, for Manuel the Redeemer had ridden away to a far place beyond the sunset, and his wife Dame Niafer ruled over-strictly in the tall hero’s stead: and to Holden life seemed not the affair it once had been, and all his pleasuring was to go into the Delta that belonged to tender and warm-blooded Radegonde. The delights of that small tropic garden were joys unknown in the world of men, wherein there are no such women as Elphanor’s queen: and therefore poets have not ever invented any words with which to describe these delights, and they must stay untold.

Yet these delights contented Holden. “Blessed above all men that live am I, in that I am lord of the Delta of Radegonde,” said Holden, who could not foreknow his fate.

§3

And it was an unfailing cordial to aging Holden of Nerac—now the Earl Marshal of St. Tara—thus to steal away from his prosaic workaday life of fighting dragons and ogres, and discomfiting wicked monarchs by guessing their riddles out of hand, and riding about in every kind of weather redressing the afflictions of downtrodden strangers in whom he was not interested; and from the strain of pretending to be wise and admirable in all things, for the benefit of his numerous children; and from living among many servitors somewhat lonelily.

For comeliness and mirth had soon departed from his bright-haired princess wife, through much child-bearing, and presently life too had gone out of her; and her various informal successors proved to be rather stupid, once you got to know them. But tender and warm-blooded Radegonde, whom alone he loved, and the engaging, ever-new endearments of Elphanor’s queen, were to brave Holden of Nerac an unfailing cordial.

“Blessed above all men that live am I, in that I am lord of the Delta of Radegonde,” still said, in his gray beard, brave Holden, who could not foreknow his fate.

§3

But as the years went, so went youth; and the appearance and the abilities of Holden were altering. Bashfully, Radegonde asked questions about certain noticeable changes. The aging champion explained, as well as he could, the ways of nibbling age and of devouring death, to Elphanor’s ageless queen, who knew nothing of these matters, because her painter had willed to put other affairs in the triangular garden.

Thereafter it much troubled Radegonde to know that Holden must be stripped by such marauders of all vigor. Her love for her sole lover, and her horror of being left alone where no other man was ever apt to come thrusting himself into the vacancy, were so great that, with a shedding of resistless tears, the gray-eyed girl persuaded Holden to consult once more with Guivric the Sage; and to discover through the aid of his magic if there were no wizardry by which Radegonde could be made mortal.

“For then,” said she, “we shall abate in vigor together, my dearest, and die together; and not even after death need we dread separation, when I lie buried at your side where men will have engraved upon your tomb, Resurgam.”

Then wise Guivric said that, certainly, there was a way in which Radegonde might come out of the picture, and assume mortality. But Guivric, shaking his white head, advised against it.

And Guivric said:

“It would be better, old friend, to accept the common lot of men; and to be content to see your dreams played with for a while and then put by, rather than see them realized. Besides, you have many grandchildren, and you owe them an example.”

But Holden answered: “Bosh! Do I owe nothing to myself?” So the high-hearted lovers followed the way of which Guivric had told them. This way is not to be talked about; but blood was shed in the Delta, and the worm that dies not was imprisoned: and after other appalling happenings, Holden the Brave climbed out rheumatically from the canvas, and gave his hand to Queen Radegonde; and she also stepped from the triangular frame, and entered into life as the mortal woman that Radegonde had been in the old time.

§4

Straightway she recollected her husband and her children and many of her lovers, and the gilded domes of Elphanor’s seven proud cities, where now not even a hut was, and all the perfumed wasteful living which Radegonde had known in the old time; and straightway, too, she saw that Holden was a tedious and decrepit fumbler long past the love of women. And Holden saw that his Radegonde was a flighty and a rather silly barbarian wench, sufficiently good-looking to be sure, but in no way remarkable.

So did it come about that the two gazed at each other forlornly.

The queen began to shiver and to whimper. “I never,” she said, “I never for one moment was so lonely in my Delta as I am now.”

Avuncularly he patted her white shoulder in the while that gray Holden answered her:

“We have acted unwisely, and nobody denies it. But do you come out of this draught, and I will get you some clothes and have you baptised; and then I will present you to our young Count Emmerick, and you can entertain yourself, within Christian limits, by making a fool of him.”

“A vigorous and handsome count would be better than nothing,” the fair girl conceded.

So this presentation was arranged. And Count Emmerick was infatuated the moment that he saw the queen’s beguiling, innocent, young face. Forthwith the high Count of Poictesme proclaimed a banquet in honor of Elphanor’s queen: and when all were dancing, Holden returned to the void frame; and he considered that lost tropic garden, bereft now forever of the radiant and gray-eyed slip of womanhood whom he had loved, and who would content his life no more.

Guivric came with him: and these two old men kept silence.

“We may deduce that the painter loved her thirteen centuries ago,” says Guivric,—“erecting loveliness where there was little to build upon. Thus it is that the brain of man creates women more desirable than may be created by other means: and such women endure. But the women children that have two parents, may endure only a very little longer than may the scant delights a man can get in gardens that bear bitter fruit or else insipid fruit. For these women have no such Delta as had your lost Radegonde, no more than has that dispossessed, lean, ogling flirt of whom young Emmerick will presently be tiring.”

Moreover Guivric said:

“The women who are born of man’s brain have no flaw in them and no seed of death. There was a Radegonde conceived in Camwy, that walked the glittering pavements of Lacre Kai, and wedded Elphanor, King of Kings, and trysted with many lovers, and later trysted with small worms. But in the artist’s brain was conceived another Radegonde, a maid who walks the sun-paths of eternity, and who is new-born with every April. Thus it was of old: and this tale is not ended.”

And Guivric said also:

“The women who are born of man’s brain bear to their lovers no issue save dissatisfaction. Their ways are lovely, but contentment does not abide in these ways: and he that follows after the women who are born of man’s brain is wounded subtly with wounds which may not ever be quite healed. So let no woman with two parents cosset him: for she toils vainly and in large peril; because it is upon her that he will requite his subtle wounding, just as you, poor Holden, were the destruction of that golden-haired young wife who loved you, and whom you could not love.”

§5

Thus said Guivric the Sage; and Holden, a spent man, much hurt but very proud, who now foreknew his fate, replied with a resolute smiling:

“Blessed above all men that live am I, in that in the days of my folly I have been lord of the Delta of Radegonde. I know this, Guivric, as you may not ever know it,—not you, who are as old as I, and who have only your long years of prudent dealings to look back upon.”

Guivric the Sage answered very soberly:

“That is true. For, to have been wise throughout one’s youth becomes by and by a taunt; and to remember it is a disease.”

And Holden the Brave said now, with another sort of smiling:

“There is in attendance upon everybody a physician that heals all disease. Pending his coming, old friend, I mean to beat you at one more game of chess.”

Whereon these aged men fell to such staid diversion as was suited to their remainder of life. But slim, gray-eyed Radegonde danced merrily with her new lover.

NOTES

[1] Among other places, in a volume called Straws and Prayer-Books. Also see Appendix B of this volume.

[2] See note upon page 147. See also Appendix C.

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