Chapter XII: Book TEN: At Manuel’s Tomb

“_What hast thou here, that thou hast hewed thee out a sepulchre?_”
—ISAIAH, xxii, 16.

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—Salut, ami, dit Jurgen, 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 HISTOIRE DE JURGEN.

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_66._
_Old Age of Niafer_

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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 indifferent.

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.

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_67._
_The Women Differ_

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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 Wissant. 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. 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 yet 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.”

“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 neverending 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 and I perpetuate and I foster his 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.

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_68._
_Radegonde is Practical_

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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 by a deal the wealthier.

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.

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_69._
_Economics of Jurgen_

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“YOU,” the fluttered old lady began—oddly enough, it must have seemed to Jurgen,—“you were the last of living persons to lay eyes upon him. It is very 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 un-contagious: 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 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. Now that I proclaim, as a retired poet, to be a possibility from which you should not take shame, but only pride and thankfulness.”

“Do you 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 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, one of 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 peccadilloes 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.

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_70._
_All Ends Perplexedly_

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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....

Esthetically it was, of course, delightful to regard the preëminent 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 great-hearted 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 esthetic 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 quite another 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.

EXPLICIT

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COMPENDIUM OF LEADING HISTORICAL EVENTS

(_Abridged from the computations of Bülg_)

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1239 Manuel 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 Mélusine puts a magic upon King Helmas, and transfers
his court to the high place at Brunbelois. Betrothal
of Melicent to King Theodoret.

1256 Perion de la Forêt comes, in disguise, to Bellegarde.
Jurgen goes into Gâtinais. 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 Château 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
Gâtinais.

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.

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
Forêt, who seeks refuge in the unhallowed forest of
Columbiers, and there marries Madame Mélusine the
enchantress.

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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that:
was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).