hate people, and makes people be hateful. I am sure the good God never
made Count Raymond do such wicked things.
Instead of casting Adam and Eva out of Paradise,--Oh why, why did the
good God not cast out the Devil?
"Is my Damoiselle so much wiser than the Lord?" quietly asks Marguerite.
I cannot understand it. The old cry comes up to me again,--Oh, if I
could know! Why cannot I understand?
And then Lady Judith lays her soft hand on my head, and says words which
I know come from the holy Evangel,--"'What I do, thou knowest not now.'"
Ay, I know not I must not know. I can only stretch forth appealing
hands into the darkness, and feel nothing. Not like her and Marguerite.
They too stretch forth helpless hands into the darkness, but they find
God.
It must be a very different thing. Why cannot I do the same? Is He not
willing that I should find Him too?--or am I not worthy?
I suppose it must be my fault. It seems as if things were always one's
own fault. But I do not think they are any better on that account;
especially when you cannot make out where your fault lies.
Guy behaves like a saint. He does not see any fault in Count Raymond: I
believe he won't. Lady Sybil, poor darling! looks very grieved; but not
one word of complaint can I get her to utter.
As to Amaury, when I have quite finished slicing up the Count, if he
does not mind, I shall begin with him. What does he say but--"Well, a
great deal of it is Guy's own fault. Why wasn't he more careful?
Surely, if he has any sense, he might expect to be envied and
supplanted, when he had climbed to such a height."
"If he has any sense!" Pretty well for Messire Amaury!
*CHAPTER IX.*
_*ELAINE FINDS MORE THAN SHE EXPECTED*_*.*
"And when I know not what Thou dost,
I'll wait the light above."
--DODDRIDGE.
Both Guy and Lady Sybil are in a state of the highest ecstasy, and say
that they are abundantly recompensed for all their past disappointments.
And this is because they are disappointed just like Amaury, but they
bear it in as different a style as possible. I think, if I were they, I
should consider I had more right to be troubled of the two, for little
Heloise is a strong child enough, and is growing almost pretty: while
dear Lady Sybil's baby girl is a little delicate thing, that the wind
might blow away. Of course I shall love her far better, just because
she is Guy's and Sybil's; and she crept into the warmest corner of my
heart when she showed me her eyes--not Lady Sybil's gentle grey, but
those lovely flashing dark eyes of Guy's; the most beautiful eyes, I
think, that were ever seen.
"Marguerite, is not she charming?" I cried.
"Ah, the little children always are," said the old woman.
(I don't agree with her--little children can be great teases.) But
Marguerite had more to say.
"My Damoiselle sees they are yet innocent of actual sin; therefore they
are among the best things in God's world. I may be wrong, but I think
the good God must have been the loveliest babe ever seen. How I should
have liked to be there!--if the holy Mother would have allowed me to
hold Him in my arms!"
"Ah, I suppose only the holiest saints would be allowed to touch Him,"
said I.
"I am not so sure, if my Damoiselle will pardon me. She was no saint,
surely, that crept into the Pharisee's house to break the
casting-bottle[#] on His feet; yet the hardest word she had from Him was
'Go in peace.' Ah, I thank the good God that His bidding is not, 'Come
unto Me, all ye that are holy.' There are few of us would come, if it
were! But 'Come unto Me, all ye that are weary'--that takes us all in.
For we are all weary some time. The lot of a woman is a weary lot, at
the best."
[#] Used to sprinkle perfumes.
"Well, it may be, among the villeins," said I.
"My Damoiselle, I never saw more bitter tears than those of the old Lady
de Chatelherault--mother of the Lady de Lusignan--when her fair-haired
boy was brought in to her in the bower, with the green weeds in his long
bright hair, and the gold broidery of his velvet tunic tarnished by the
thick stagnant water. Early that morning he had been dancing by her,
with the love-light in his beautiful blue eyes; and now, when the dusk
fell, they laid him down at her feet, drowned and dead, with the light
gone out of the blue eyes for ever. Ah, I have seen no little sorrow
amongst men and women in my seventy years!--but I never saw a woman
look, more than she did, as if she had lost the light of life. The
villeins have a hard lot, as the good God knows; but all the sorrow of
life is not for the villeins--no, no!"
How oddly she puts things! I should never have thought of supposing
that the villeins had any sorrow. A certain dull kind of coarse grief,
or tired feeling, perhaps, they may have at times, like animals: but
sorrow surely is a higher and finer thing, and is reserved for the
nobles. As to old Marguerite herself, I never do quite think of her as
a villein. She has dwelt with nobles all her life, so to speak, and is
not of exactly the same common sort of stuff that they are.
Yesterday afternoon Lady Sybil and I were alone in the bower, and she
had the baby in her arms. The little creature is to be made a Christian
on Sunday. I asked her what name it was to have. I expected her to say
either Marie, which is the Lady Queen's name, or Eustacie, the name of
Guy's mother. But she said neither. She answered, "Agnes." And she
spoke in that hushed, reverent voice, in which one instinctively utters
the names of the beloved dead. I could not think whose it could be.
The name has never been in our House, to my knowledge; and I was not
aware of it in Lady Sybil's line.
"Dost thou not know whose name it is, Helena?" asked Lady Sybil. I
fancy she answered my look.
"No," said I.
"My dear lord has been very good to me," she said. "He made not the
least objection. It was my mother's name, Helena."
"Oh!" said I, enlightened. "Lady Sybil, do tell me, can you remember
the Lady Queen your mother? How old were you when she died?"
She did not answer me for an instant. When I looked up, I saw tears
dropping slowly on the infant's robes.
"When she--died!" There was a moment's pause. "Ay, there are more
graves than men dig in the churchyard! When she--_died_,--Helena, I was
six years old."
"Then you can remember her?" I said eagerly. "Oh, I wish I could
remember mine."
"Ay, memory may be intense bliss," she answered; "or it may be terrible
torture. I can remember a fair face bent down over mine, soft, brooding
arms folded round me, loving kisses from gentle lips. And then----O
Helena, did my lord tell thee she was dead? It was kind of him; for he
knows."[#]
[#] I trust it will not be imagined from this that I think lightly of
"white lies." Romanists, as a rule, are very lenient towards them.
Lady Sybil was sobbing.
"Then she is not dead?" I said, in a low voice.
"I do not know!" she replied. "No one knows. She is dead to us. Oh,
why, why does holy Church permit such terrible things?--What am I
saying? May the good Lord pardon me if I speak against Him!--But I
cannot understand why it must be. They had been wedded nearly ten years,
Helena,--I mean my parents,--when it was discovered that they were
within the prohibited degrees. Why cannot dispensations be given when
such things occur? They knew nothing of it. Why must they be parted,
and she be driven into loneliness and obscurity, and I---- Well, it was
done. A decree of holy Church parted them, and she went back to her
people. We have never heard another word about her. But those who saw
her depart from Jerusalem said she seemed like one whose very heart was
broken."
"And she never came back?" I said pityingly.
"Is it much wonder?" answered Lady Sybil, in a low voice, rocking the
child gently in her arms. "It would have been much, I think, for the
crowned and anointed Queen of Jerusalem to steal into her capital as
Damoiselle de Courtenay. But it would have been far more for the wife
and mother to come suing to her supplanter for a sight of her own
children. No, I cannot wonder that she never, never came back."
I was silent for a little while, then I said--
"Was the Lord King as grieved as she? I cannot understand, if so, why
they should not have obtained a dispensation, and have been married over
again."
Lady Sybil shook her head, and I saw another tear drop on the baby's
robe.
"No, Helena," she said, hardly above a whisper: "I do not think he was.
He had the opportunity of allying himself with the Caesars. And there
are men to whom a woman is a woman, and one woman is just as good as
another, or very nearly so. Do men selling a horse stop to consider
whether it will be as happy with the new master as the old? They do not
care. And, very often, they cannot understand."
Ay, Amaury is one of that sort.
"And you think--if she be alive--that she will never come?" I asked.
"I hope she might. But I think she will not. Ah, how I have hoped it!
Helena, hast thou wondered how it is that nothing short of absolute
impossibility will suffer me to depute to another the daily distribution
of the dole at the postern gate to those poor women that come for alms?
Canst thou not guess that amongst all the faces I look but for one--for
the one that might creep in there unrecognised to look on me, and that
must never, never go away with a soreness at her heart, saying, 'She was
not there!' Every loaf that I give to a stranger, I say, 'Pray for the
soul of Agnes of Anjou!' And then, if some day she should creep in
among the rest, and I should not know her--ah! but I think I should, if
it were only by the mother-hunger in the eyes--but if she should, and
hear that, and yet not speak, she will say in her heart, 'Sybil loves me
yet.' And if she could only creep one step further,--'_God_ loves me
yet!' For He does, Helena. Maybe He has comforted her long ago: but if
she should not have found it out, and be still stretching forth numb
hands in the darkness--and if I could say it to her! Now thou knowest
why I call the babe by her name. I know not where she is, nor indeed if
she is on earth. But He knows. And He may let her hear it. If she
come to know that I have called my child by her name, she may not feel
quite so lost and lonely. I have no other way to say to her,--'I have
not forgotten thee; nor has God. I love thee; I would fain help thee.
He loves thee and is ready to save thee.' Who can tell?--she _may_
hear."
"Oh dear, this is a bad world!" said I. "Why are people so hard on each
other? We are all fellow-sinners, I suppose."
"Ah, Helena!" said Lady Sybil, with a sorrowful smile. "Hast thou not
found, dear, that the greater sinner a man is himself, very generally,
the harder he will be on other sinners--especially when their sins are
of a different type from his own. The holier a man is, the more he
hates sin, and yet the more tenderly will he deal with the sinner. For
as sin means going away from God, so holiness must mean coming near God.
And God is more merciful than men to all who come to Him for mercy."
Lady Judith came in while the last words were being spoken.
"I never can quite tell," said I, "what sin is. Why should some things
be sin, and other things not be sin?"
"Go on, Helena," said Lady Judith, turning round with a smile. "Why
should so many things be wrong, which I like, and so many things be
right, which I do not like?"
"Well, holy Mother, it is something like that," said I, laughing. "Will
you please to tell me why?"
"Because, my child, thou hast inherited a sinful nature."
"But I do not like sin--as sin," said I.
"Then temptation has no power over thee. Is it so? Art thou never
'drawn away of thine own lust, and enticed'?"
"Well, I am not perfect," said I. "I suppose nobody expects to be."
"Yet without absolute perfection, Helena, thou canst never enter
Heaven."
"O holy Mother!" cried I.
"Where art thou about to get it?" said she.
"I am sure I do not know!" I replied blankly.
"Thou shouldst know, my child," she responded gently. "Think about it."
I cannot guess what she means. I am sure I may think about that for a
year, and be no nearer when I have done.
I have had a great pleasure to-day, in the shape of a letter from
Monseigneur our father, addressed to Guy, but meant for us all three.
He wrote about six months after we set out; and I should hope he has
before now received my letter, which I sent off on the first opportunity
after our arrival in the Holy City. Every body seems to be well, and
Alix has a baby boy, whom she means to call after Monseigneur--Geoffrey.
There is no other special news. Level, he says, misses us sorely, and
lies at my door with his nose between his paws, as if he were
considering what it could all mean. I wonder whether he thinks he comes
to any satisfactory solution.
The Lord King, I hear, has been more indisposed for some days past. The
Lady Queen is very attentive to him. Lady Isabel and her lord have gone
through another tremendous quarrel,--about what I do not know.
Early yesterday morning our sister Eschine's second baby was announced,
and in the afternoon the holy Patriarch baptized it by Guy's name.
Amaury was in ecstasies with his boy; but alas! in the evening the poor
little thing fell into convulsions, and barely lived to see the dawn of
another day. Amaury passed from the climax of triumph to the depths of
despair. He growled and snarled at every body, and snapped at Eschine
in particular, as though he thought she had let her child die on purpose
to vex him. That she could be in as much distress as himself, did not
seem to occur to him. If anything could have provoked me more than
Amaury's unreasonableness, it would have been the calm patience with
which Eschine took it. There he stalked about, grumbling and growling.
"Why did you all let the child die?" he wanted to know--as if we could
have helped it. "There is not one of you has any sense!"--as if he had!
"Alix's boy manages to live. She knows how to treat him. Women are all
idiots!" (Alix, apparently, not being a woman.)
Poor Eschine lay still, a few tears now and then making their way down
her white cheeks, and meekly begging her lord and master's pardon for
what she had not done. When he was gone, she said--I think to
anticipate what she saw on the tip of my tongue--
"Thou knowest, Elaine dear, he is not angry with me. Men do set such
store by a son. It is only natural he should be very much distressed."
She will persist in making excuses for him.
"Distressed?--well!" said I. "But he does not need to be so silly and
angry. Natural!--well, yes,--I think it is natural to Amaury to be an
idiot. I always did think so."
"O Lynette! don't, dear!" pleaded Eschine.
I am beginning to think I have been rather unjust to Eschine when I said
there was nothing in her; but it has taken a long while to come out.
And it seems to come rather in the form of doing and bearing, than of
thinking and saying.
But that Amaury is a most profound donkey no mortal man can doubt,--or
at any rate, no mortal woman.
I was awfully startled this morning when Marguerite undrew my curtains,
and told me that our Lord King Beaudouin had been commanded to God. It
seems now that for some time past he has been more ill than any one
knew, except the Lady Queen his stepmother. What that wicked Count of
Tripoli may have known, of course, I cannot say. But I am sure he has
had a hand in the late King's will. The crown is left to the little
King, Beaudouin V., and our sweet Sybil is disinherited. What that
really means, I suppose, is that the Count is jealous of Guy's influence
over his Lady, and imagines that he can sway the child better than the
mother.
There are to be various changes in consequence of the Lord King's death.
The Lady Queen returns to her own family at Byzantium. I do hope Lady
Judith will not go with her; but I am very much afraid she may. Guy
talks about retiring to his city of Ascalon, but though I am sure Lady
Sybil will submit to his will, I can see she does not want to leave her
boy, though I do not believe she distrusts that wicked Tripoli as I do.
I asked Marguerite if she did not feel very angry.
"No," she said quietly. "Is my Damoiselle very angry?"
"Indeed I am," said I.
"Does my Damoiselle know what are the good Lord's purposes for
Monseigneur Count Guy? It is more than old Marguerite does."
"Of course not: but I see what has happened."
"And not what will happen? Ah, that is not seeing much."
"But what can happen, to put things right again, Margot?"
"Ha! Do I know, I? No better than Monseigneur Saint Jacob, when his
son, Monseigneur Saint Joseph, sent for his little brother, and refused
to send the meal until he came. That is so beautiful a history!--and so
many times repeated in this world. The poor old father!--he thought all
these things were against him. He did not know what the good God was
making ready for him. He did not know! And the good God will never be
hurried. It is we that are in a hurry, poor children of time,--we want
every thing to happen to-day. But He, who has eternity to work in, can
afford to let things take their time. My Damoiselle does not know what
old Helweh said to me yesterday."
"No. Who is Helweh?" said I.
"She is an Arab woman who serves in the kitchen."
"A Paynim? O Marguerite! What can a Paynim say worth hearing? Or is
she a Christian?"
"If to be baptized is to be a Christian, as people always say, then
Helweh is a Christian. But if to be a Christian is really to know and
follow the Lord Christ--and it seems to me as if the Evangel always
meant that--then I do not know. I am afraid Helweh does not understand
much about that."
"Oh, if she has been christened, she must be a Christian," said I.
"Well, what did she say?"
"She said--'All things come to him who knows how to wait.' It is a
Saracen proverb."
"Well, I do not believe it."
"Ah, let my Damoiselle pardon me, but it is true."
"Well!" said I, half laughing, "then I suppose I do not know how to
wait."
"I do not think my Damoiselle does," answered Marguerite quietly.
"Wilt thou teach me, Margot?"
"Ha! It takes the good God to teach that."
"I should not think it wanted much teaching."
"Let my Damoiselle bear with her servant. The good God has been
teaching it to me for seventy years, and I dare not make so bold as to
say I have learned it yet."
"Why, Margot, thou art as quiet, and calm, and patient as a stone."
"Ah! not _here_," she said, laying her hand upon her bosom. "Perhaps
here,--and here,"--touching her eyes and lips. "But down there,--no!"
"But for what, or for whom, art thou waiting, Margot?" I asked, rather
amused.
"Ha!--it ought to be only whom. But it is too often _what_. We are
like the little children, waiting for the father to come home, but
thinking more of the toys and bonbons he may bring than of himself. And
then there is another thing: before we can learn to wait, we must learn
to trust."
"To trust what, Margot?"
"I believe we all trust in something, if my Damoiselle pleases. A great
many trust in themselves; and a great many more trust in
circumstances,--fate, or chance, or luck,--as they call it. Some few
trust in other human creatures; and their waking is often the saddest of
all. But it seems as if the one thing we found it hardest to do was to
trust the good God. He has to drive us away, often, from every other
trust, before we will learn to trust Him. Oh, how we must grieve His
heart, when He has done so much for us, and yet we _will not_ trust
Him!"
I wonder what she means. I feel as if I should like to know, and could
not tell how to begin.
The Lady Queen is gone back to her people. And I am so glad--Lady Judith
is not gone with her. I was sadly afraid she would do. But Melisende
is gone, and Messire Renaud de Montluc, for whom the Lady Queen trusts
to obtain some high position at the Court of the Byzantine Caesar.
I am not at all sorry that Messire Renaud is gone. He made me feel
uncomfortable whenever I looked at him. I cannot well express my
feeling in words; but he gave me a sensation as if nothing stood on any
thing, and every thing was misty and uncertain. I fancy some people like
that sort of feeling. I detest it. I like figures (though Amaury says
it is a very unladylike taste) because they are so definite and certain.
Two and two make four; and they will make four, do what you please with
them. No twisting and turning will persuade them to be either three or
five. Now I like that--far better than some arts, more interesting in
themselves, such as music, painting, or embroidery, of which people say,
"Yes, it is very fair,--very good,--but of course it might be better."
I like a thing that could not be better. Guy says that is very
short-sighted, and argues a want of ambition in me. I do not quite see
that. If a thing be the best it can possibly be, why should I want it
to be better?
"Oh, but one wants an aim," says Guy; "one must have a mark to shoot at.
If I were besieging a castle, and knew beforehand that I could not
possibly take it, it would deprive me of all energy and object. There
is nothing so devoid of interest as doing something which leads to
nothing, and is worth nothing when done."
"Well," I say then, "I think if sieges and wars were done away with, it
would be no bad thing. Just think what misery they cause."
But such an outcry comes upon me then! Amaury informs me that he is
incomparably astonished at me. Is not war the grandest of all
employments? What on earth could the nobles do, if there were no wars?
Would I have them till the earth like peasants, or read and write like
monks, or sew and dress wounds like women?
And Guy says, good-naturedly,--"Oh, one of Elaine's curious notions.
She never thinks like other people."
"But think," I say, "of the suffering which comes from war--the bereft
widows and fatherless children, and human pain and sorrow. Does a woman
weeping over her husband's corpse think war grand, do you suppose?"
"Stuff!" says Amaury. "Can't she get another?"
(Would he say, if Eschine were to die,--"Never mind, I can get another"?
Well, I should not much wonder if he would!)
Once, after a rather keen contest of this sort, I asked old Marguerite
if she liked war. I saw her eyes kindle.
"Damoiselle," she said, "my husband followed his Seigneur to the war,
and left me ill at home in my cot. He had no power to choose, as my
Damoiselle must know. The night fell, and the Seigneur came home with
banners flying, and along the village street there were bonfires and
rejoicings for a great victory. But my husband did not come. I rose
from my sick-bed, and wrapped myself in a sheepskin, and went out to the
fatal field. Like a candle in the sunlight, the pain of the heart put
out the pain of the body. What I saw that night my Damoiselle will not
ask. It were not meet to rehearse in the ears of a young noble lady. I
do not know how I bore it, only that I did bear--going from one to
another in the moonlight, and turning my lantern on the dead still
faces, ever looking for that face which I feared to find. And at last I
found him, my Piers, the one love of my young life,--where the fight had
been the most terrible, and the dead lay thickest. I knew that he had
acquitted himself right well, for his face was to the foe, and the
broken shaft of his Seigneur's pennon was still grasped tightly in his
hand. Damoiselle, there was no funeral pageant, no table tomb, no
herald's cry for him. Strangers' hands buried him where he lay, as they
might have buried the Seigneur's horse, if need were. And there were no
white weeds and seclusion for me, his young widow, who knelt by my
baby's cradle, too miserable for tears. But may be, in those halls
where all souls are alike before the King of Kings, the Voice from the
Throne said to him, 'Well done!' And the Voice did verily say to me,
'Fear not! Come unto Me, and I will give thee rest.'--Ah, my Damoiselle
knows now what her old nurse thinks of war."
Oh, why must there be such things?
"How else could a knight win his spurs?" indignantly demands Amaury.
But surely, the winning of Amaury's spurs is not the only thing of any
consequence in the world. Does the good God Himself take no account of
widows' tears and orphans' wails, if only the knights win their spurs?
Could not some other way be contrived for the spurs, which would leave
people alive when it was finished?
"Now, Elaine, don't be such a simpleton!" says Amaury.
So at last, as nobody else (except Marguerite, who is nobody) seems to
understand me, I ask Lady Judith what she thinks.