"No, praise each and every Saint!" said the Prince of Orange, heartily.
"And yet, I am not sure----" He rose, for his sight had failed him so
that he could not distinctly see you except when he spoke with head
thrown back, as though he looked at you over a wall. "For instance, do
you understand that I hold Biatritz here as a prisoner, because her
dower-lands are necessary to me, and that I intend to marry her as soon
as Pope Innocent grants me a dispensation?"
"All Venaissin knows that. Yes, you have always gained everything
which you desired in this world, Guillaume. Yet it was at a price, I
think."
"I am no haggler. . . . But you have never comprehended me, not even in
the old days when we loved each other. For instance, do you
understand--slave of a spoken word!--what it must mean to me to know
that at this hour to-morrow there will be alive in Venaissin no person
whom I hate?"
Messire de Vaquieras reflected. His was never a rapid mind. "Why, no,
I do not know anything about hatred," he said, at last. "I think I
never hated any person."
Guillaume de Baux gave a half-frantic gesture. "Now, Heaven send you
troubadours a clearer understanding of what sort of world we live
in----!" He broke off short and growled, "And yet--sometimes I envy
you, Raimbaut!"
They rode then into the Square of St. Michel to witness the death of
Lovain. Guillaume took with him his two new mistresses and all his
by-blows, each magnificently clothed, as if they rode to a festival.
Afterward, before the doors of Lovain's burning house, a rope was
fastened under Lovain's armpits, and he was gently lowered into a pot
of boiling oil. His feet cooked first, and then the flesh of his legs,
and so on upward, while Lovain screamed. Guillaume in a loose robe of
green powdered with innumerable silver crescents, sat watching, under a
canopy woven very long ago in Tarshish, and cunningly embroidered with
the figures of peacocks and apes and men with eagles' heads. His hands
caressed each other meditatively.
It was on the afternoon of this day, the last of April, that Sire
Raimbaut came upon Madona Biatritz about a strange employment in the
Ladies' Court. There was then a well in the midst of this enclosure,
with a granite ledge around it carven with lilies; and upon this she
leaned, looking down into the water. In her lap was a rope of pearls,
which one by one she unthreaded and dropped into the well.
Clear and warm the weather was. Without, forests were quickening,
branch by branch, as though a green flame smoldered from one bough to
another. Violets peeped about the roots of trees, and all the world
was young again. But here was only stone beneath their feet; and about
them showed the high walls and the lead-sheathed towers and the
parapets and the sunk windows of Guillaume's chateau. There was no
color anywhere save gray; and Raimbaut and Biatritz were aging people
now. It seemed to him that they were the wraiths of those persons who
had loved each other at Montferrat; and that the walls about them and
the leaden devils who grinned from every waterspout and all those dark
and narrow windows were only part of some magic picture, such as a
sorceress may momentarily summon out of smoke-wreaths, as he had seen
Zoraida do very long ago.
This woman might have been a wraith in verity, for she was clothed
throughout in white, save for the ponderous gold girdle about her
middle. A white gorget framed the face which was so pinched and shrewd
and strange; and she peered into the well, smiling craftily.
"I was thinking death was like this well," said Biatritz, without any
cessation of her singular employment--"so dark that we may see nothing
clearly save one faint gleam which shows us, or which seems to show us,
where rest is. Yes, yes, this is that chaplet which you won in the
tournament at Montferrat when we were young. Pearls are the symbol of
tears, we read. But we had no time for reading then, no time for
anything except to be quite happy. . . . You saw this morning's work.
Raimbaut, were Satan to go mad he would be such a fiend as this
Guillaume de Baux who is our master!"
"Ay, the man is as cruel as my old opponent, Mourzoufle," Sire Raimbaut
answered, with a patient shrug. "It is a great mystery why such
persons should win all which they desire of this world. We can but
recognize that it is for some sufficient reason." Then he talked with
her concerning the aforementioned infamous emperor of the East, against
whom the old knight had fought, and of Enrico Dandolo and of King
Boniface, dead brother to Madona Biatritz, and of much remote,
outlandish adventuring oversea. Of Zoraida he did not speak. And
Biatritz, in turn, told him of that one child which she had borne her
husband, Prince Conrat--a son who died in infancy; and she spoke of
this dead baby, who living would have been their monarch, with a sweet
quietude that wrung the old knight's heart.
Thus these spent people sat and talked for a long while, the talk
veering anywhither just as chance directed. Blurred gusts of song and
laughter would come to them at times from the hall where Guillaume de
Baux drank with his courtiers, and these would break the tranquil flow
of speech. Then, unvexedly, the gentle voice of the speaker, were it
his or hers, would resume.