THE GARDEN
THE Abbot of Saint Pamphilius and Garin the squire rode westward—that
is to say they rode away from the busy town of Roche-de-Frêne; the
cathedral, where, atop the mounting tower, trowel clinked against
stone; the bishop’s palace, where, that morning Ugo wrote a letter to
Pope Alexander; and the vast castle with Gaucelm the Fortunate’s banner
above it.
Roche-de-Frêne dyed with scarlet second only to that of Montpellier.
It wove fine stuffs, its saddlers were known for their work, it made
good weapons. Rome had left it a ruined amphitheatre—not so large
as that at Arles, but large enough to house a trade. Here was the
quarter of the moulders of candles. A fair wine was made in the country
roundabout, brought to Roche-de-Frêne and sold, and thence sold again.
It was a mart likewise for great, creamy-flanked cattle. They came in
droves over the bridge that crossed the river and were sold and bought
without the walls, in the long, poplar-streaked field where was held
the yearly fair.
It was not a free town—not yet. Time was when its people had been
serfs wholly, chattels and thralls completely of the lords who built
the great castle. Less than a hundred years ago that was still largely
true. Then had entered small beginnings, fragmentary privileges,
rights of trade, commutations, market grants. These had increased;
every decade saw a little freedom filched. Lords must have wealth, and
the craftsmen and traders made it; money-rent entered in place of old
obediences. Silver paid off body-service. Skill increased, and the
number of wares made, and commerce in them. Wealth increased. The town
grew bolder and consciously strove for small liberties. Roche-de-Frêne
was different now indeed from the old times when it had been wholly
servile. It was growing with the strong twelfth century. All manner of
ideas entered its head.
Gaucelm the Fortunate’s father had been Gaucelm the Crusader, Gaucelm
of the Star. Certain of the ideas of the burghers of Roche-de-Frêne
had been approved by this prince. Others found themselves stingingly
rebuked. One of Roche-de-Frêne’s concepts of its own good might
flourish in court favour, a second just exist like grass under a
stone, wan and sere, a third encounter all the forces of extirpation.
In the main Gaucelm of the Star bore hardly against the struggle for
liberty. But at the last he took the cross, and needing moneys so
that he might go to Jerusalem with great array, granted “privileges.”
After three years he returned from Palestine and granted no more. He
died and Gaucelm the Fortunate reigned. For five years he fought the
ideas of Roche-de-Frêne. Then he changed, almost in a night-time, and
granted almost more than was asked. His barons and knights stared and
wondered; Gaucelm was no weakling. Roche-de-Frêne sat down to digest
and assimilate what it had gained. The town was no more radical than it
thought reasonable. The meal was sufficient for the time being. There
began a string of quiet years.
The bishop’s palace stood a long building, with wings at right
angles. Before it spread a flagged place, and in the middle of this a
fountain jetted, the water streaming from dolphins’ jaws. In old times
the bishops of Roche-de-Frêne had been mightier than its ravening,
war-shredded lords. Then had arisen the great line that built the
castle and subdued the fiefs and turned from baron to prince and
outweighed the bishops. The fountain, shifting its spray as the wind
blew, had seen a-many matters, a-many ambitions rise and fall and rise
again.
The fountain streamed and the spray shifted this autumn, while the
trees turned to gold and bronze and the grapes were gathered, and
through the country-side bare feet of peasants trod the wine-press, and
over the bridge in droves lowed the cream-hued cattle. It rose and fell
time before and time after that feast-day on which the squire Garin had
knelt in the cathedral dusk between the Palestine pillars, before Our
Lady of Roche-de-Frêne in blue samite and a gemmy crown. It streamed
and sparkled on a sunny morning when Bishop Ugo, bound for the castle,
behind him a secretary and other goodly following, checked his white
mule beside the basin and blessed the lounging folk who sank upon their
knees.
The process consumed no great while. Ugo was presently riding up the
town’s chief street, a thoroughfare that marked the ridge pole of the
hill of Roche-de-Frêne. People were abroad, and as he passed they did
him reverence. He was a great churchman, who could hurt or help them,
soul and body, here and hereafter! But at a quieter corner, before a
pile of old, dark buildings, he came upon, and that so closely that his
mantle almost brushed them, a man and two women, poorly dressed, who
stood without movement or appeal for blessing. Had they been viewed
at a distance, noted merely for three stony units in a bending crowd,
the bishop had been too superb to notice, but here they were under his
nose, unreverent, stocks before his eyes, their own eyes gazing as
though he were not!
Ugo checked his mule, spoke sharply. “Why, shameless ones, do you not
bend to Holy Church, her councillors and seneschals?”
The man spoke. “We bend to God.”
“To God within,” said one of the women. “Not to ill within—not to
luxury, pomp, and tyranny!”
“Woe!” cried the other woman, the younger. “Woe when the hearth no
longer warms, but destroys!”
“_Bougres_,” spoke the secretary at his master’s ear. “Paulicians,
Catharists, _Bons hommes_, Perfecti, Manichees.”
“That is to say, heretics,” said Ugo. “They grow hideously bold, having
Satan for saviour and surety! Take order for these. Lodge complaint
against them. See them laid fast in prison.”
The younger woman looked at him earnestly. “Ah, ah!” she said. “Thou
poor prisoner! Let me whisper thee—there is a way out of thy dark
hold! If only the door is not too high and wide and fully open for
thine eyes to see it!”
“They are not of Roche-de-Frêne,” spoke the secretary. “I warrant them
from Toulouse or Albi!”
“I, and more than I, have eyes upon Count Raymond of Toulouse,” said
the bishop. “Two or three of you take these wretches to the right
officer. And do thou, Nicholas, appear against them to-morrow.”
He touched his mule with his riding switch and rode on, a dark-browed
man, with a thin cheek and thin, close-shutting lips. He was a martial
bishop; he had fought in Sicily and at Damascus and Edessa, and at
Constantinople.
The street ran steeply upward, closing where, in the autumn day, there
spread and towered the castle. Ugo, approaching moat and drawbridge,
put with a customary action his hand over his lips and so regarded
outer and inner walls, the southward-facing barbican and the towers
that flanked it,—Lion Tower and Red Tower. Men-at-arms in number
lounged within the gate, straightening when the warder cried the
bishop’s train. Ugo took his hand from his lips and crossed the
hollow-sounding bridge. He rode beneath the portcullis and through the
deep, reverberating, vaulted passage opening on either hand into Lion
Tower and Red Tower, and so came to the court of dismounting, where
esquires and pages started into activity. From here he was marshalled,
the secretary and a couple of canons behind him, to the Court of
Honour, where met him other silken pages.
They bowed before him. “Lord Bishop, our great ones are gathered in the
garden, harkening to troubadours.”
One of higher authority came and took the word from them. “My lord,
I will lead you to where these rossignols are singing! They sing in
honour of ladies, and of the court’s guest, the duke from Italy who
would marry our princess!”
They moved through a noble, great hall, bare of all folk but
doorkeepers.
“Will the match be made?” asked Ugo.
“We do not know,” answered his conductor. “Our Lady Alazais favours it.
But we do not know the mind of Prince Gaucelm.”
Ugo walked in silence. His own mind was granting with anger the truth
of that. Presently he spoke in a measured voice. “If it be made, it
will be a fair alliance. Undoubtedly a good marriage! For say that to
our sorrow Prince Gaucelm hath never a son of his own, then it may come
that his daughter’s son rule that duchy and this land.”
“Dame Alazais,” said the other in a tone of discreetness, “hath been
six years a wife. The last pilgrimage brought naught, but the next may
serve.”
“Pray Our Lady it may!” answered Ugo with lip-devoutness, “and so
Gaucelm the Fortunate become more fortunate yet.—The Princess Audiart
hath been from home.”
“Aye, at Our Lady in Egypt’s. But she is returned, the prince having
sent for her. Hark! Raimon de Saint-Rémy is singing.”
There was to be heard, indeed, a fine, manly voice coming from where,
through an arched exit, they now had a glimpse of foliage and sky. It
sang loudly and boldly, a chanson of the best, a pæan to woman’s lips
and throat and breast, a proud, determined declaration of slavery, a
long, melodious cry for mistress mercy.
The bishop stood still to listen. “Ha!” he said, “many a song like that
does my Lady Alazais hear!”
“Just,” answered his companion. “When they look on her they begin to
sing.”
Moving forward they stood within the door that gave upon the garden.
It lay before them, a velvet sward enclosed by walls, with a high
watch-tower pricked against the eastern heavens.
“It is a great pity,” said Ugo guardedly, “that the young princess
stands so very far from her stepdame’s loveliness!”
“Aye, the court holds it a pity.”
“The prince hath an extraordinary affection toward her.”
“As great as if she were a son! She hath wit to please him,—though,”
said he who acted usher, “she doth not please every one.”
They passed a screen of fruit trees and came upon a vision first of
formal paths with grass, flowers, and aromatic herbs between, then of
a wide raised space, stage or dais, of the smoothest turf that ever
was. It had a backing of fruit trees, and behind these of grey wall and
parapet, and it was attained by shallow steps of stone. On these, and
on low seats and cushions and on banks of turf, sat or half-reclined
men and women, for the most part youthful or in the prime of life.
Others stood; others, men and women, away from the raised part,
strolled through the garden that here was formal and here maintained
a studied rusticity. The men wore neither armour nor weapons, save,
maybe, a dagger. Men and women were very richly dressed, for even where
was perpetual state, this was an occasion.
In a greater space than a confined castle garden they would not have
seemed so many; as it was there appeared a throng. In reality there
might be a hundred souls. The castle was as populous as an ant-heap,
but here was only the garland of the castle. The duke who was seeking
a mate had with him the very spice-pink of his own court. He and they
were of the garden. The festival that was made for him had drawn
neighbouring barons and knights, vassals of Gaucelm. There was no time
when such a court failed to entertain travellers of note, wandering
knights, envoys of sorts, lords going in state to Italy on the one
hand, to France or Spain or England on the other. Of such birds of
passage several were in the garden. And there were troubadours of more
than local fame, poets so great that they travelled with their own
servants and jongleurs. When the bishop came with two canons in his
train there were churchmen. And, moving or seated, glowed bright dames
and damosels.
But in the centre sat Alazais, and she seemed, indeed, of Venus’s
meinie. She was a fair beauty, with deep-red, perfect lips, and a curve
of cheek and throat to make men tremble. Her long brown eyes, set well
apart, had a trick of always looking from between half-shut lids. Her
limbs spoke the same languor, and yet she had strength, strength, it
seemed, of a pard or a great serpent. She was not pard and she was not
serpent; she was not evil. She was—Alazais, and they all sang to her.
Even though they did not name her name; even though they used other
names.
There were four chairs of state, though not set arow. Only two were
occupied—that in which sat ivory-and-gold Alazais, and that in which
sat the duke who had come to view Prince Gaucelm’s daughter. The duke
sat over against Alazais, with a strip of green grass between. He was
not beautiful: he had a shrunk form and a narrow, weazened face. But he
stared at the beauty before him, and a slight shiver went through him
with a fine prickling. “Madonna!” he thought. “If the other were his
wife, and this his daughter!”
Ugo came to the green level. Alazais rose to greet him and the
duke followed her. He had informed himself in the politics of
Roche-de-Frêne: he knew that though now there was peace between prince
and bishop, it had not always been so and might not be so again. The
duke was no great statesman, but to every one, at the moment, he was
as smooth as an innate, cross-grained imperiousness would let him
be. A fair seat was found for my lord bishop, the two canons and the
secretary standing behind him.
“Ah, my lord,” said Alazais, “you are good to grace our idle time! Our
poets have sung and will sing again, and then myself and all these
ladies are pledged to judge of a great matter. Sir Gilles de Valence,
what is the matter?”
The troubadour addressed bent the knee. “Princess, the history of
Madame Dido, and if she were not the supremest servant of Love who
would not survive, not the death but the leave-taking of her knight,
Messire Æneas, but made a pyre and burned herself thereon! And of
her example, as lover, to fair ladies, and if they should not,
emulating her,—in a manner of figure and not, most fair, with actual
flames!—withdraw themselves, as it were, from being and existence
throughout the time that flows between the leave-taking and coming
again of their knights. And of Messire Æneas, and if Love truly had him
in bonds.”
“Truly, a fair matter!” said Ugo, with hidden scorn. “Here are the
prince and the Princess Audiart!”
Dais and garden broke off their talk, turned with a flash of colour and
a bending movement toward the lord of the land.
Gaucelm the Fortunate came upon the scene with an easy quietness. He
was a large man, wearing a _bliaut_ of dark silk, richly belted, and
around his hair, that was a silvering brown, a fillet or circlet of
gold. There breathed about him something easy, humorous, wise. He
did not talk much, but what he said was to the purpose. Now he had a
profound and brooding look, and now his eye twinkled. In small things
he gave way; where he saw it his part to be firm he was firm enough.
Though he listened to many, the many did not for ever see their way
taken. He may have been religious, but he exhibited little or nothing
of his time’s religiosity. He had a stilly way of liking the present
minute and putting much into it. He did not laugh too easily, but yet
he seemed to find amusement in odd corners where none else looked for
it. He was not fond of state, but relaxed it when he could, yet kept
dignity. He came now into the castle garden with but a few attending,
and beside him, step for step, moved the young princess, his daughter
Audiart.