notable pots of blazing sulphur and fat and quicklime that were emptied
over the walls of Storisende, to the discomfort of Manuel's men. For
although this was a very heroic war, with a parade of every sort of high
moral principle, and with the most sonorous language employed upon both
sides, it somehow failed to bring about either the reformation or the
ruin, of humankind: and after the conclusion of the murdering and
general breakage, the world went on pretty much as it has done after all
other wars, with a vague notion that a deal of time and effort had been
unprofitably invested, and a conviction that it would be inglorious to
say so.
Therefore it suffices to report that there was much killing and misery
everywhere, and that in June, upon Corpus Christi day, the Conde de
Tohil Vaca was taken, and murdered, with rather horrible jocosity which
used unusually a heated poker, and Manuel's forces were defeated and
scattered.
[Illustration]
XXVI
Deals with the Stork
Now Manuel, driven out of Poictesme, went with his wife to Novogath,
which had been for some seven years the capital of Philistia. Queen
Stultitia, the sixtieth of that name to rule, received them friendlily.
She talked alone with Manuel for a lengthy while, in a room that was
walled with glazed tiles of faience and had its ceiling incrusted with
moral axioms, everywhere affixed thereto in a light lettering of tin, so
as to permit of these axioms being readily changed. Stultitia sat at a
bronze reading-desk: she wore rose-colored spectacles, and at her feet
dozed, for the while, her favorite plaything, a blind, small, very fat
white bitch called Luck.
The Queen still thought that an alliance could be arranged against Duke
Asmund as soon as public sentiment could be fomented in Philistia, but
this would take time. "Have patience, my friend!" she said, and that was
easy saying for a prosperous great lady sitting comfortably crowned and
spectacled in her own palace, under her own chimneys and skylights and
campaniles and domes and towers and battlements.
But in the mean while Manuel and Niafer had not so much as a cowshed
wherein to exercise this recommended virtue. So Manuel made inquiries,
and learned that Queen Freydis had taken up her abode on Sargyll, most
remote of the Red Islands.
"We will go to Freydis," he told Niafer.
"But, surely, not after the way that minx probably believes you treated
her?" said Niafer.
Manuel smiled the sleepy smile that was Manuel. "I know Freydis better
than you know her, my dear."
"Yes, but can you depend upon her?"
"I can depend upon myself, and that is more important."
"But, Manuel, you have another dear friend in England; and in England,
although the Lord knows I never want to lay eyes on her, we might at
least be comfortable--"
Manuel shook his head: "I am very fond of Alianora, because she
resembles me as closely as it is possible for a woman to resemble a man.
That makes two excellent reasons--one for each of us, snip,--why we had
better not go into England."
So, in their homeless condition, they resolved to set out for
Sargyll,--"to visit that other dear friend of yours," as Niafer put it,
in tones more eloquent than Manuel seemed quite to relish.
Dame Niafer, though, now began to complain that Manuel was neglecting
her for all this statecraft and fighting and speech-making and private
conference with fine ladies; and she began to talk again about what a
pity it was that she and Manuel would probably never have any children
to be company for Niafer. Niafer complained rather often nowadays, about
details which are here irrelevant: and she was used to lament with every
appearance of sincerity that, in making the clay figure for Niafer to
live in, Manuel should have been so largely guided by the elsewhere
estimable qualities of innocence and imagination. It frequently put her,
she said, to great inconvenience.
Now Manuel had been inquiring about this and that and the other since
his arrival in Novogath, and so Manuel to-day replied with lordly
assurance. "Yes, yes, a baby or two!" says Manuel. "I think myself that
would be an excellent idea, while we are waiting for Queen Stultitia to
make up her subjects' minds, and have nothing else in particular to
do--"
"But, Manuel, you know perfectly well--"
"--And I am sufficiently versed in the magic of the Apsarasas to be able
to summon the stork, who by rare good luck is already indebted to me--"
"What has the stork to do with this?"
"Why, it is he who must bring the babies to be company for you."
"But, Manuel," said Niafer, dubiously, "I do not believe that the people
of Rathgor, or of Poictesme either, get their babies from the stork."
"Doubtless, like every country, they have their quaint local customs. We
have no concern, however with these provincialities just now, for we are
in Philistia. Besides, as you cannot well have forgotten, our main
dependence is upon the half-promised alliance with Queen Stultitia, who
is, as far as I can foresee, my darling, the only monarch anywhere
likely to support us."
"But what has Queen Stultitia to do with my having a baby?"
"Everything, dear snip. You must surely understand it is most important
for one in my position to avoid in any way offending the sensibilities
of the Philistines."
"Still, Manuel, the Philistines themselves have babies, and I do not see
how they could have conceivably objected to my having at any rate a very
small one if only you had made me right--"
"Not at all! nobody objects to the baby in itself, now that you are a
married woman. The point is that the babies of the Philistines are
brought to them by the stork; and that even an allusion to the
possibility of misguided persons obtaining a baby in any other way these
Philistines consider to be offensive and lewd and lascivious and
obscene."
"Why, how droll of them! But are you sure of that, Manuel!"
"All their best-thought-of and most popular writers, my dear, are
unanimous upon the point; and their Seranim have passed any number of
laws, their oil-merchants have founded a guild, especially to prosecute
such references. No, there is, to be sure, a dwindling sect which favors
putting up with what babies you may find in the cabbage patch, but all
really self-respecting people when in need of offspring arrange to be
visited by the stork."
"It is certainly a remarkable custom, but it sounds convenient if you
can manage it," said Niafer. "What I want is the baby, though, and of
course we must try to get the baby in the manner of the Philistines, if
you know that manner, for I am sure I have no wish to offend anybody."
So Manuel prepared to get a baby in the manner preferred by the
Philistines. He performed the suitable incantation, putting this and
that together in the manner formerly employed by the Thessalian witches
and sorcerers, and he cried aloud a very ancient if indecent charm from
the old Latin, saying, as Queen Stultitia had told him to say, without
any mock-modest mincing of words:
Dictum est antiqua sandalio mulier habitavit,
Quae multos pueros habuit tum ut potuit nullum
Quod faciundum erat cognoscere. Sic Domina Anser._
Then Manuel took from his breast-pocket a piece of blue chalk and five
curious objects something like small black stars. With the chalk he drew
upon the floor two parallel straight lines. Manuel walked on one of
these chalk lines very carefully, then beckoned Niafer to him. Standing
there, he put his arms about her and kissed her. Then he placed the five
black stars in a row,--
* * * * *
--and went over to the next line.
The stork having been thus properly summoned, Manuel recalled to the
bird the three wishes which had been promised when Manuel saved the
stork's life: and Manuel said that for each wish he would take a son
fetched to him by the stork in the manner of the Philistines.
The stork thought it could be arranged. "Not this morning, though, as
you suggest, for, indebted as I am to you, Dom Manuel, I am also a very
busy bird. No, I have any number of orders that were put in months
before yours, and I must follow system in my business, for you have no
notion what elaborate and exact accounts are frequently required by the
married men that receive invoices from me."
"Come now," says Manuel, "do you be accommodating, remembering how I
once saved your life from the eagle, and my wife and I will order all
our babies now, and spare you the trouble of keeping any accounts
whatever, so far as we are concerned."
"Oh, if you care to deal with such wholesale irregularity, and have no
more consideration than to keep casting old debts in my bill, I might
stretch a point in order to be rid of you," the stork said, sighing.
"Now, but surely," Manuel considered, "you might be a little more
cheerful about this matter."
"And why should I, of all the birds that go about the heavens, be
cheerful?"
"Well, somehow one expects a reasonable gaiety in you who bring hilarity
and teething-rings into so many households--"
The stork answered:
"I bring the children, stainless and dear and helpless, and therewith I,
they say, bring joy. Now of the joy I bring to the mother let none
speak, for miracles are not neatly to be caged in sentences, nor is
truth always expedient. To the father I bring the sight of his own life,
by him so insecurely held, renewed and strengthened in a tenement not
yet impaired by time and folly: he is no more disposed to belittle
himself here than elsewhere; and it is himself that he cuddles in this
small, soft, incomprehensible and unsoiled incarnation. For, as I bring
the children, they have no evil in them and no cowardice and no guile.
"I bring the children, stainless and dear and helpless, when later I
return, to those that yesterday were children. And in all ways time has
marred, and living has defaced, and prudence has maimed, until I grieve
to entrust that which I bring to what remains of that which yesterday I
brought. In the old days children were sacrificed to a brazen burning
god, but time affects more subtile hecatombs: for Moloch slew outright.
Yes, Moloch, being divine, killed as the dog kills, furiously, but time
is that transfigured cat, an ironist. So living mars and defaces and
maims, and living appears wantonly to soil and to degrade its prey
before destroying it.
"I bring the children, stainless and dear and helpless, and I leave them
to endure that which is fated. Daily I bring into this world the beauty
and innocence and high-heartedness and faith of children: but life has
no employment, or else life has no sustenance, for these fine things
which I bring daily, for always I, returning, find the human usages of
living have extinguished these excellences in those who yesterday were
children, and that these virtues exist in no aged person. And I would
that Jahveh had created me an eagle or a vulture or some other hateful
bird of prey that furthers a less grievous slaying and a more
intelligible wasting than I further."
To this, Dom Manuel replied, in that grave and matter-of-fact way of
his: "Now certainly I can see how your vocation may seem, in a manner of
speaking, a poor investment; but, after all, your business is none of my
business, so I shall not presume to criticize it. Instead, let us avoid
these lofty generalities, and to you tell me when I may look for those
three sons of mine."
Then they talked over this matter of getting babies, Manuel walking on
the chalk line all the while, and Manuel found he could have, if he
preferred it so, three girls in place of one of the boys, since the
demand for sons was thrice that for daughters. To Niafer it was at once
apparent that to obtain five babies in place of three was a clear
bargain. Manuel said he did not want any daughters, they were too much
of a responsibility, and he did not intend to be bothered with them. He
was very firm and lordly about it. Then Niafer spoke again, and when she
had ended, Manuel wished for two boys and three girls. Thereafter the
stork subscribed five promissory notes, and they executed all the other
requisite formalities.
[Illustration: "SUMMONS THE STORK"]
The stork said that by a little management he could let them have one of
the children within a day or so. "But how long have you two been
married?" he asked.
"Oh, ever so long," said Manuel, with a faint sigh.
"Why, no, my dearest," said Niafer, "we have been married only seven
months."
"In that event," declared the stork, "you had better wait until month
after next, for it is not the fashion among my patrons to have me
visiting them quite so early."
"Well," said Manuel, "we wish to do everything in conformance to the
preferences of Philistia, even to the extent of following such
incomprehensible fashions." So he arranged to have the promised baby
delivered at Sargyll, which, he told the stork, would be their address
for the remainder of the summer.
[Illustration]
XXVII
They Come to Sargyll
Then Manuel and Niafer put out to sea, and after two days' voyaging they
came to Sargyll and to the hospitality of Queen Freydis. Freydis was
much talked about at that time on account of the way in which King
Thibaut had come to his ruin through her, and on account of her equally
fatal dealings with the Duke of Istria and the Prince of Camwy and three
or four other lords. So the ship-captains whom Dom Manuel first
approached preferred not to venture among the Red Islands. Then the
Jewish master of a trading vessel--a lean man called Ahasuerus--said,
"Who forbids it?" and carried them uneventfully from Novogath to
Sargyll. They narrate how Oriander the Swimmer followed after the yellow
ship, but he attempted no hurt against Manuel, at least not for that
turn.
Thus Manuel came again to Freydis. He had his first private talk with
her in a room that was hung with black and gold brocade. White mats lay
upon the ground, and placed irregularly about the room were large brass
vases filled with lotus blossoms. Here Freydis sat on a three-legged
stool, in conference with a panther. From the ceiling hung rigid blue
and orange and reddish-brown serpents, all dead and embalmed; and in the
middle of the ceiling was painted a face which was not quite human,
looking downward, with evil eyes half closed, and with its mouth half
open in discomfortable laughter.
Freydis was clad in scarlet completely, and, as has been said, a golden
panther was talking to her when Dom Manuel came in. She at once
dismissed the beast, which smiled amicably at Dom Manuel, and then
arched high its back in the manner of all the cat tribe, and so
flattened out into a thin transparent goldness, and, flickering,
vanished upward as a flame leaves a lampwick.
"Well, well, you bade me come to you, dear friend, when I had need of
you," says Manuel, very cordially shaking hands, "and nobody's need
could be more great than mine."
"Different people have different needs," Freydis replied, rather
gravely, "but all passes in this world."
"Friendship, however, does not pass, I hope."
She answered slowly: "It is we who pass, so that the young Manuel whom I
loved in a summer that is gone, is nowadays as perished as that summer's
gay leaves. What, grizzled fighting-man, have you to do with that young
Manuel who had comeliness and youth and courage, but no human pity and
no constant love? and why should I be harboring his lighthearted
mischiefs against you? Ah, no, gray Manuel, you are quite certain no
woman would do that; and people say you are shrewd. So I bid you very
welcome to Sargyll, where my will is the only law."
"You at least have not changed," Dom Manuel replied, with utter truth,
"for you appear today, if anything, more fair and young than you were
that first night upon Morven when I evoked you from tall flames to lend
life to the image I had made. Well, that seems now a lengthy while ago,
and I make no more images."
"Your wife would be considering it a waste of time," Queen Freydis
estimated.
"No, that is not quite the way it is. For Niafer is the dearest and most
dutiful of women, and she never crosses my wishes in anything."
Freydis now smiled a little, for she saw that Manuel believed he was
speaking veraciously. "At all events," said Freydis, "it is a queer
thing surely that in the month which is to come the stork will be
fetching your second child to a woman resting under my roof and in my
golden bed. Yes, Thurinel has just been telling me of your plan, and it
is a queer thing. Yet it is a far queerer thing that your first child,
whom no stork fetched nor had any say in shaping, but whom you made of
clay to the will of your proud youth and in your proud youth's likeness,
should be limping about the world somewhere in the appearance of a
strapping tall young fellow, and that you should know nothing about his
doings."
"Ah! what have you heard? and what do you know about him, Freydis?"
"I suspicion many things, gray Manuel, by virtue of my dabblings in that
gray art which makes neither for good nor evil."
"Yes," said Manuel, practically, "but what do you know?"
She took his hand again. "I know that in Sargyll, where my will is the
only law, you are welcome, false friend and very faithless lover."
He could get no more out of her, as they stood there under the painted
face which looked down upon them with discomfortable laughter.
So Manuel and Niafer remained at Sargyll until the baby should be
delivered. King Ferdinand, then in the midst of another campaign against
the Moors, could do nothing for his vassal just now. But glittering
messengers came from Raymond Bérenger, and from King Helmas, and from
Queen Stultitia, each to discuss this and that possible alliance and aid
by and by. Everybody was very friendly if rather vague. But Manuel for
the present considered only Niafer and the baby that was to come, and he
let statecraft bide.
Then two other ships, that were laden with Duke Asmund's men, came also,
in an attempt to capture Manuel: so Freydis despatched a sending which
caused these soldiers to run about the decks howling like wolves, and to
fling away their swords and winged helmets, and to fight one against the
other with hands and teeth until all were slain.
The month passed thus uneventfully. And Niafer and Freydis became the
best and most intimate of friends, and their cordiality to each other
could not but have appeared to the discerning rather ominous.
"She seems to be a very good-hearted sort of a person," Niafer conceded,
in matrimonial privacy, "though certainly she is rather queer. Why,
Manuel, she showed me this afternoon ten of the drollest figures to
which--but, no, you would never guess it in the world,--to which she is
going to give life some day, just as you did to me when you got my looks
and legs and pretty much everything else all wrong."
"When does she mean to quicken them?" Dom Manuel asked: and he added,
"Not that I did, dear snip, but I shall not argue about it."
"Why, that is the droll part of it, and I can quite understand your
unwillingness to admit how little you had remembered about me. When the
man who made them has been properly rewarded, she said, with, Manuel,
the most appalling expression you ever saw."
"What were these images like?" asked Dom Manuel.
Niafer described them: she described them unsympathetically, but there
was no doubt they were the images which Manuel had left unquickened upon
Upper Morven.
Manuel nodded, smiled, and said: "So the man who made these images is to
be properly rewarded! Well, that is encouraging, for true merit should
always be rewarded."
"But, Manuel, if you had seen her look! and seen what horrible misshapen
creatures they were--!"
"Nonsense!" said Manuel, stoutly: "you are a dear snip, but that does
not make you a competent critic of either physiognomy or sculpture."
So he laughed the matter aside; and this, as it happened, was the last
that Dom Manuel heard of the ten images which he had made upon Upper
Morven. But they of Poictesme declared that Queen Freydis did give life
to these figures, each at a certain hour, and that her wizardry set them
to live as men among mankind, with no very happy results, because these
images differed from naturally begotten persons by having inside them a
spark of the life of Audela.
Thus Manuel and his wife came uneventfully to August; all the while
there was never a more decorous or more thoughtful hostess than Queen
Freydis; and nobody would have suspected that sorcery underlay the
running of her household. It was only through Dom Manuel's happening to
arise very early one morning, at the call of nature, that he chanced to
be passing through the hall when, at the moment of sunrise, the
night-porter turned into an orange-colored rat, and crept into the
wainscoting: and Manuel of course said nothing about this to anybody,
because it was none of his affair.
[Illustration]
XXVIII
How Melicent Was Welcomed
So the month passed prosperously and uneventfully, while the servitors
of Queen Freydis behaved in every respect as if they were human beings:
and at the end of the month the stork came.
Manuel and Niafer, it happened, were fishing on the river bank rather
late that evening, when they saw the great bird approaching, high
overhead, all glistening white in the sunset, except for his thin
scarlet legs and the blue shadowings in the hollows of his wings. From
his beak depended a largish bundle, in pale blue wrappings, so that at a
glance they knew the stork was bringing a girl.
Statelily the bird lighted on the window sill, as though he were quite
familiar with this way of entering Manuel's bedroom, and the bird went
in, carrying the child. This was a high and happy moment for the fond
parents as they watched him, and they kissed each other rather solemnly.
Then Niafer left Manuel to get together the fishing tackle, and she
hastened into the house to return to the stork the first of his
promissory notes in exchange for the baby. And as Manuel was winding up
the lines, Queen Freydis came to him, for she too had seen the stork's
approach; and was, she said, with a grave smile, well pleased that the
affair was settled.
"For now the stork has come, yet others may come," says Freydis, "and we
shall celebrate the happy event with a gay feast this night in honor of
your child."
"That is very kind and characteristic of you," said Manuel, "but I
suppose you will be wanting me to make a speech, and I am quite
unprepared."
"No, we will have none of your high-minded and devastating speeches at
our banquet. No, for your place is with your wife. No, Manuel, you are
not bidden to this feast, for all that it is to do honor to your child.
No, no, gray Manuel, you must remain upstairs this evening and
throughout the night, because this feast is for them that serve me: and
you do not serve me any longer, and the ways of them that serve me are
not your ways."
"Ah!" says Manuel, "so there is sorcery afoot! Yes, Freydis, I have
quite given over that sort of thing. And while not for a moment would I
seem to be criticizing anybody, I hope before long to see you settling
down, with some fine solid fellow, and forsaking these empty frivolities
for the higher and real pleasures of life."
"And what are these delights, gray Manuel?"
"The joy that is in the sight of your children playing happily about
your hearth, and developing into honorable men and gracious women, and
bringing their children in turn to cluster about your tired old knees,
as the winter evenings draw in, and in the cosy fire-light you smile
across the curly heads of these children's children at the dear wrinkled
white-haired face of your beloved and time-tested helpmate, and are
satisfied, all in all, with your life, and know that, by and large,
Heaven has been rather undeservedly kind to you," says Manuel, sighing.
"Yes, Freydis, yes, you may believe me that such are the real joys of
life; and that such pleasures are more profitably pursued than are the
idle gaieties of sorcery and witchcraft, which indeed at our age, if you
will permit me to speak thus frankly, dear friend, are hardly
dignified."
Freydis shook her proud dark head. Her smiling was grim.
"Decidedly, I shall not ever understand you. Doddering patriarch, do you
not comprehend you are already discoursing about a score or two of
grandchildren on the ground of having a five-minute-old daughter, whom
you have not yet seen? Nor is that child's future, it may be, yours to
settle--But go to your wife, for this is Niafer's man who is talking,
and not mine. Go up, Methuselah, and behold the new life which you have
created and cannot control!"