She was no longer the most beautiful of women, no longer his be-hymned
Belhs Cavaliers--you may read elsewhere how he came to call her that in
all his canzons--but only a fine and gracious stranger. It was
uniformly gray, that soft and plentiful hair, where once such gold had
flamed as dizzied him to think of even now; there was no crimson in
these thinner lips; and candor would have found her eyes less wonderful
than those Raimbaut had dreamed of very often among an alien and
hostile people. But he lamented nothing, and to him she was as ever
Heaven's most splendid miracle.
"Yes," said this old Raimbaut,--"and even to-day we have not reclaimed
the Sepulcher as yet. Oh, I doubt if we shall ever win it, now that
your brother and my most dear lord is dead." Both thought a while of
Boniface de Montferrat, their playmate once, who yesterday was King of
Thessalonica and now was so much Macedonian dust.
She said: "This week the Prince sent envoys to my nephew. . . . And
so you have come home again----" Color had surged into her time-worn
face, and as she thought of things done long ago this woman's eyes were
like the eyes of his young Biatritz. She said: "You never married?"
He answered: "No, I have left love alone. For Love prefers to take
rather than to give; against a single happy hour he balances a hundred
miseries, and he appraises one pleasure to be worth a thousand pangs.
Pardieu, let this immortal usurer contrive as may seem well to him, for
I desire no more of his bounty or of his penalties."
"No, we wish earnestly for nothing, either good or bad," said Dona
Biatritz--"we who have done with loving."
They sat in silence, musing over ancient happenings, and not looking at
each other, until the Prince came with his guests, who seemed to laugh
too heartily.
Guillaume's frail arm was about his kinsman, and Guillaume chuckled
over jests and by-words that had been between the cousins as children.
Raimbaut found them no food for laughter now. Guillaume told all of
Raimbaut's oath of fealty, and of how these two were friends and their
unnatural feud was forgotten. "For we grow old,--eh, maker of songs?"
he said; "and it is time we made our peace with Heaven, since we are
not long for this world."
"Yes," said the knight; "oh yes, we both grow old." He thought of
another April evening, so long ago, when this Guillaume de Baux had
stabbed him in a hedged field near Calais, and had left him under a
hawthorn bush for dead; and Raimbaut wondered that there was no anger
in his heart. "We are friends now," he said. Biatritz, whom these two
had loved, and whose vanished beauty had been the spur of their long
enmity, sat close to them, and hardly seemed to listen.
Thus the evening passed and every one was merry, because the Prince had
overcome Lovain of the Great-Tooth, and was to punish the upstart on
the morrow. But Raimbaut de Vaquieras, a spent fellow, a derelict,
barren of aim now that the Holy Wars were over, sat in this unfamiliar
place--where when he was young he had laughed as a cock crows!--and
thought how at the last he had crept home to die as a dependent on his
cousin's bounty.
Thus the evening passed, and at its end Makrisi followed the troubadour
to his regranted fief of Vaquieras. This was a chill and brilliant
night, swayed by a frozen moon so powerful that no stars showed in the
unclouded heavens, and everywhere the bogs were curdled with thin ice.
An obdurate wind swept like a knife-blade across a world which even in
its spring seemed very old.
"This night is bleak and evil," Makrisi said. He rode a coffin's
length behind his master. "It is like Prince Guillaume, I think. What
man will sorrow when dawn comes?"