WE WERE doomed to suffer tedious waits and delays, and we settled
ourselves down to our fate and bore it with a dreary patience, counting
the slow hours and the dull days and hoping for a turn when God should
please to send it. The Paladin was the only exception—that is to say, he
was the only one who was happy and had no heavy times. This was partly
owing to the satisfaction he got out of his clothes. He bought them at
second hand—a Spanish cavalier’s complete suit, wide-brimmed hat with
flowing plumes, lace collar and cuffs, faded velvet doublet and trunks,
short cloak hung from the shoulder, funnel-topped buskins, long rapier,
and all that—a graceful and picturesque costume, and the Paladin’s great
frame was the right place to hang it for effect. He wore it when off
duty; and when he swaggered by with one hand resting on the hilt of his
rapier, and twirling his new mustache with the other, everybody stopped
to look and admire; and well they might, for he was a fine and stately
contrast to the small French gentlemen of the day squeezed into the
trivial French costume of the time.
He was king bee of the little village that snuggled under the shelter
of the frowning towers and bastions of Courdray Castle, and acknowledged
lord of the tap-room of the inn. When he opened his mouth there, he got
a hearing. Those simple artisans and peasants listened with deep and
wondering interest; for he was a traveler and had seen the world—all of
it that lay between Chinon and Domremy, at any rate—and that was a wide
stretch more of it than they might ever hope to see; and he had been
in battle, and knew how to paint its shock and struggle, its perils and
surprises, with an art that was all his own. He was cock of that walk,
hero of that hostelry; he drew custom as honey draws flies; so he was
the pet of the innkeeper, and of his wife and daughter, and they were
his obliged and willing servants.
Most people who have the narrative gift—that great and rare
endowment—have with it the defect of telling their choice things over
the same way every time, and this injures them and causes them to sound
stale and wearisome after several repetitions; but it was not so with
the Paladin, whose art was of a finer sort; it was more stirring and
interesting to hear him tell about a battle the tenth time than it
was the first time, because he did not tell it twice the same way, but
always made a new battle of it and a better one, with more casualties
on the enemy’s side each time, and more general wreck and disaster all
around, and more widows and orphans and suffering in the neighborhood
where it happened. He could not tell his battles apart himself, except
by their names; and by the time he had told one of then ten times it had
grown so that there wasn’t room enough in France for it any more, but
was lapping over the edges. But up to that point the audience would not
allow him to substitute a new battle, knowing that the old ones were
the best, and sure to improve as long as France could hold them; and so,
instead of saying to him as they would have said to another, “Give us
something fresh, we are fatigued with that old thing,” they would say,
with one voice and with a strong interest, “Tell about the surprise at
Beaulieu again—tell it three or four times!” That is a compliment which
few narrative experts have heard in their lifetime.
At first when the Paladin heard us tell about the glories of the Royal
Audience he was broken-hearted because he was not taken with us to it;
next, his talk was full of what he would have done if he had been there;
and within two days he was telling what he did do when he was there. His
mill was fairly started, now, and could be trusted to take care of its
affair. Within three nights afterward all his battles were taking a
rest, for already his worshipers in the tap-room were so infatuated with
the great tale of the Royal Audience that they would have nothing else,
and so besotted with it were they that they would have cried if they
could not have gotten it.
Noel Rainguesson hid himself and heard it, and came and told me, and
after that we went together to listen, bribing the inn hostess to let us
have her little private parlor, where we could stand at the wickets in
the door and see and hear.
The tap-room was large, yet had a snug and cozy look, with its inviting
little tables and chairs scattered irregularly over its red brick floor,
and its great fire flaming and crackling in the wide chimney. It was a
comfortable place to be in on such chilly and blustering March nights
as these, and a goodly company had taken shelter there, and were sipping
their wine in contentment and gossiping one with another in a neighborly
way while they waited for the historian. The host, the hostess, and
their pretty daughter were flying here and there and yonder among the
tables and doing their best to keep up with the orders. The room was
about forty feet square, and a space or aisle down the center of it had
been kept vacant and reserved for the Paladin’s needs. At the end of
it was a platform ten or twelve feet wide, with a big chair and a small
table on it, and three steps leading up to it.
Among the wine-sippers were many familiar faces: the cobbler, the
farrier, the blacksmith, the wheelwright, the armorer, the maltster, the
weaver, the baker, the miller’s man with his dusty coat, and so on; and
conscious and important, as a matter of course, was the barber-surgeon,
for he is that in all villages. As he has to pull everybody’s teeth and
purge and bleed all the grown people once a month to keep their health
sound, he knows everybody, and by constant contact with all sorts of
folk becomes a master of etiquette and manners and a conversationalist
of large facility. There were plenty of carriers, drovers, and their
sort, and journeymen artisans.
When the Paladin presently came sauntering indolently in, he was
received with a cheer, and the barber hustled forward and greeted him
with several low and most graceful and courtly bows, also taking his
hand and touching his lips to it. Then he called in a loud voice for a
stoup of wine for the Paladin, and when the host’s daughter brought it
up on the platform and dropped her courtesy and departed, the barber
called after her, and told her to add the wine to his score. This won
him ejaculations of approval, which pleased him very much and made his
little rat-eyes shine; and such applause is right and proper, for when
we do a liberal and gallant thing it is but natural that we should wish
to see notice taken of it.
The barber called upon the people to rise and drink the Paladin’s
health, and they did it with alacrity and affectionate heartiness,
clashing their metal flagons together with a simultaneous crash, and
heightening the effect with a resounding cheer. It was a fine thing to
see how that young swashbuckler had made himself so popular in a strange
land in so little a while, and without other helps to his advancement
than just his tongue and the talent to use it given him by God—a talent
which was but one talent in the beginning, but was now become ten
through husbandry and the increment and usufruct that do naturally
follow that and reward it as by a law.
The people sat down and began to hammer on the tables with their flagons
and call for “the King’s Audience!—the King’s Audience!—the King’s
Audience!” The Paladin stood there in one of his best attitudes, with
his plumed great hat tipped over to the left, the folds of his short
cloak drooping from his shoulder, and the one hand resting upon the hilt
of his rapier and the other lifting his beaker. As the noise died down
he made a stately sort of a bow, which he had picked up somewhere, then
fetched his beaker with a sweep to his lips and tilted his head back and
drained it to the bottom. The barber jumped for it and set it upon the
Paladin’s table. Then the Paladin began to walk up and down his platform
with a great deal of dignity and quite at his ease; and as he walked he
talked, and every little while stopped and stood facing his house and so
standing continued his talk.
We went three nights in succession. It was plain that there was a
charm about the performance that was apart from the mere interest which
attaches to lying. It was presently discoverable that this charm lay in
the Paladin’s sincerity. He was not lying consciously; he believed what
he was saying. To him, his initial statements were facts, and whenever
he enlarged a statement, the enlargement became a fact too. He put his
heart into his extravagant narrative, just as a poet puts his heart into
a heroic fiction, and his earnestness disarmed criticism—disarmed it as
far as he himself was concerned. Nobody believed his narrative, but all
believed that he believed it.
He made his enlargements without flourish, without emphasis, and so
casually that often one failed to notice that a change had been made.
He spoke of the governor of Vaucouleurs, the first night, simply as the
governor of Vaucouleurs; he spoke of him the second night as his uncle
the governor of Vaucouleurs; the third night he was his father. He did
not seem to know that he was making these extraordinary changes; they
dropped from his lips in a quite natural and effortless way. By his
first night’s account the governor merely attached him to the Maid’s
military escort in a general and unofficial way; the second night his
uncle the governor sent him with the Maid as lieutenant of her rear
guard; the third night his father the governor put the whole command,
Maid and all, in his special charge. The first night the governor spoke
of him as a youth without name or ancestry, but “destined to achieve
both”; the second night his uncle the governor spoke of him as the
latest and worthiest lineal descendent of the chiefest and noblest of
the Twelve Paladins of Charlemagne; the third night he spoke of him as
the lineal descendent of the whole dozen. In three nights he promoted
the Count of Vendome from a fresh acquaintance to a schoolmate, and then
brother-in-law.
At the King’s Audience everything grew, in the same way. First the four
silver trumpets were twelve, then thirty-five, finally ninety-six; and
by that time he had thrown in so many drums and cymbals that he had to
lengthen the hall from five hundred feet to nine hundred to accommodate
them. Under his hand the people present multiplied in the same large
way.
The first two nights he contented himself with merely describing and
exaggerating the chief dramatic incident of the Audience, but the third
night he added illustration to description. He throned the barber in his
own high chair to represent the sham King; then he told how the Court
watched the Maid with intense interest and suppressed merriment,
expecting to see her fooled by the deception and get herself swept
permanently out of credit by the storm of scornful laughter which would
follow. He worked this scene up till he got his house in a burning fever
of excitement and anticipation, then came his climax. Turning to the
barber, he said:
“But mark you what she did. She gazed steadfastly upon that sham’s
villain face as I now gaze upon yours—this being her noble and simple
attitude, just as I stand now—then turned she—thus—to me, and stretching
her arm out—so—and pointing with her finger, she said, in that firm,
calm tone which she was used to use in directing the conduct of a
battle, ‘Pluck me this false knave from the throne!’ I, striding forward
as I do now, took him by the collar and lifted him out and held him
aloft—thus—as if he had been but a child.” (The house rose, shouting,
stamping, and banging with their flagons, and went fairly mad over this
magnificent exhibition of strength—and there was not the shadow of
a laugh anywhere, though the spectacle of the limp but proud barber
hanging there in the air like a puppy held by the scruff of its neck was
a thing that had nothing of solemnity about it.) “Then I set him down
upon his feet—thus—being minded to get him by a better hold and heave
him out of the window, but she bid me forbear, so by that error he
escaped with his life.
“Then she turned her about and viewed the throng with those eyes of
hers, which are the clear-shining windows whence her immortal wisdom
looketh out upon the world, resolving its falsities and coming at the
kernel of truth that is hid within them, and presently they fell upon
a young man modestly clothed, and him she proclaimed for what he
truly was, saying, ‘I am thy servant—thou art the King!’ Then all were
astonished, and a great shout went up, the whole six thousand joining in
it, so that the walls rocked with the volume and the tumult of it.”
He made a fine and picturesque thing of the march-out from the Audience,
augmenting the glories of it to the last limit of the impossibilities;
then he took from his finger and held up a brass nut from a bolt-head
which the head ostler at the castle had given him that morning, and made
his conclusion—thus:
“Then the King dismissed the Maid most graciously—as indeed was her
desert—and, turning to me, said, ‘Take this signet-ring, son of the
Paladins, and command me with it in your day of need; and look you,’
said he, touching my temple, ‘preserve this brain, France has use for
it; and look well to its casket also, for I foresee that it will be
hooped with a ducal coronet one day.’ I took the ring, and knelt and
kissed his hand, saying, ‘Sire, where glory calls, there will I be
found; where danger and death are thickest, that is my native air; when
France and the throne need help—well, I say nothing, for I am not of the
talking sort—let my deeds speak for me, it is all I ask.’
“So ended the most fortunate and memorable episode, so big with future
weal for the crown and the nation, and unto God be the thanks! Rise!
Fill your flagons! Now—to France and the King—drink!”
They emptied them to the bottom, then burst into cheers and huzzas, and
kept it up as much as two minutes, the Paladin standing at stately ease
the while and smiling benignantly from his platform.