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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_67._
_The Women Differ_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_68._
_Radegonde is Practical_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_69._
_Economics of Jurgen_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
“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—”