Part 10

As he passed through the wicket into the lists and found himself in the vacant space behind the galleries, he was accosted by a young knight, partly armored, whose words and gesture invited him to a halt. The young knight was Argathona, daintily boyish in her man's armor. When she and Simon had made their way to the tilting-field they found that a pavilion had been allotted to the Prince of Eleusis by order of Count Ernault, wherein were placed the arms and armor promised by the different knights, while the white horse of Andronicus Palæologus waited in the stables to carry its new burden. Simon of Rouen, as the strange prince's esquire, helped his seeming master to arm swiftly, and thus Argathona was ready to meet Rainouart as he entered the enclosed meadow. Rainouart did not recognize her face, for it was the woodland will of the dryad that she should seem unfamiliar to him. The aura of the immortals was about her, and mortal eyes must see her as she pleased. But there is a power higher even than the wills of such immortals, and the young prince, looking into the face of the youth who stopped him, found his strange stupor troubled with new torments of striving to remember the unrememberable. He could not assure himself that he had ever seen the stranger's face before, and yet the sight of that strange face, with its gleam of golden hair beneath the silken cap, with its haunting suggestions of sea wave and lake water and forest fountain in its blue eyes, troubled him with an aching desire and the yet more aching knowledge that he knew not what he desired. If he had loved some woman in his boyhood, some woman long dead, this might have been her brother come upon him unawares, at all adventure, with some trick of the old love's look in his eyes, of the old love's carriage in his gait. But he shook himself impatiently, for there was no such memory in his life, and he was vexed with the blind, maimed memories that would never take shape and color. Through the dull hum of his confused thoughts he was conscious that the stranger knight addressed him.

"Rainouart of Athens, are not you to-day the general challenger?"

Rainouart saluted him mechanically, looking into his eyes and only finding there unanswerable mysteries.

"At your service, sir knight," he answered, and the sound of his own voice seemed as meaningless to him as the thin sighs of spirits heard in dreams, and yet he knew that he had spoken and that his hearer had heard and understood. Through all the entanglement of his senses he was conscious dimly of a curious surprise at his own ability to understand the stranger's speech, and his wonderment seemed to hark back to some other time, some other age, perhaps some other existence, when in some way he had heard one speak to him whom he understood and yet marvelled to understand.

"What are the terms of your challenge?" the stranger knight asked him. The prince answered, slowly:

"That my Lady Esclaramonde of Thebes is the rose of the world."

There was a moment's pause, and the prince made to resume his journey, but again the stranger stopped him with a question:

"You love this lady?"

The prince looked wonderingly at the fair, perplexing face.

"I wed her to-night," he answered, and still the stripling persisted:

"You are very sure you love this lady?"

The prince hesitated, then said, sharply:

"You question somewhat rustically. I wed her to-night."

Again the strange knight interrogated, pertinacious:

"You have left no other love for her sake?"

The prince drew back and set his hand to his sword.

"Sir," he said, angrily, "if you question my honor I will answer you to your hurt!"

The bearer of the name of Prince of Eleusis came a little nearer to Rainouart, and her voice was as plaintive as summer rain on forest leaves.

"No maid weeps for you in the greenwood?"

The prince shifted his hand from his sword-hilt to his brow, for his head ached with confusing, formless memories; but the troubling thoughts fled elusive through his brain, leaving no more behind them than the blackened spaces left by a forest fire.

"The greenwood!" he echoed. "The greenwood! It was in the greenwood my lady found me." He paused again, ever seeking to remember the unrememberable, then ended, rapidly, "The Lady Esclaramonde, whom I love, and whose love makes me invincible."

Infinitely sad the eyes of Argathona shone upon her lost lover's sadness. Against the spells of the subtle sorceress her simple immortality seemed compelled to surrender. Were she to declare herself now, she might fail to quicken the wit that was crippled by the incantations of Esclaramonde. Only Esclaramonde could undo what Esclaramonde had done, and to bring this about Argathona must trust to herself--she, the immortal, alone in an unfriendly world. Argathona had lived but a few hours in the company of men, yet she had lived with them long enough to pity all, to mistrust most, to love one with a love as abiding as her gift of ceaseless life. But her unstained spirit read clearly and swiftly the lessons of the world's law, and she hoped to overthrow the guile of a woman with the guile of a girl.

"You are very proud of your love and your lover," she said, gently, for her heart ached to see him so astray. Rainouart answered her with a kind of resentful defiance, as one that sought to convince himself, and he echoed her words:

"I am very proud of my love," and so far his voice rang clear and bright as a battle-call; then he ended, more heavily, "and of my lover."

He turned from her with a courteous salutation and went towards his tent, and Argathona went her way to her own pavilion and made an end of her arming, thinking upon many things.

XVI

THE TOURNAMENT

Captain Fox and Captain Gander, Captain Bat and Captain Chanticleer, Captain Rat and Captain Badger had thoroughly enjoyed their visit to Athens. The first day of the tournament had come and gone and left them very substantially the better in paunch and pocket. On this, the second day, they hoped, and with reason, for still fairer fortune, and severally, and as a corporation, made liberal vows of wax candles to St. Nicholas if their hopes should come true. They moved at ease through the assemblage outside the lists, clad in the disguises that time had taught them to be best suited to each man's individuality. Captain Fox, who had a persuasive tongue, went as a mendicant friar and vended relics. Captain Gander, because he could sing a catch at random with some volume of voice, jigged and whistled, minced and ambled as a wandering minstrel. Captain Bat was a lame beggar, arm in sling, patch on eye, a maimed hero, victim of wars, voluble of sorrows, and eloquent in appeal. Captain Chanticleer skipped hither and thither as a glib-lipped fortune-teller, and fumbled dirty pieces of wood that were painted with pips and points and dots of mystical meanings. Captain Rat and Captain Badger, who had each some skill in tumbling, clowned to the crowd as itinerant mountebanks, and paraded alternately one on the other's shoulders inviting the world to see wonders.

So dexterous were all these gentry in their assumed occupations that their legitimate receipts represented a very fair proportion of the day's earnings. Therefore, as Captain Fox pithily observed, they did very well both as honest folk and as rogues. But while their hands were busy in emptying the pouches of others to fill their own, their eyes were not idle or indifferent to the pleasures which Duke Baldwin provided for knave as well as for knight. Experience of camps had made the gang of rascals acquainted with the bearings of many warlike lords, and they were able to blazon with confidence to a gaping crowd about them most of the coats displayed upon the shields that hung before the pavilions in the lists.

Thus said Captain Fox to his audience: "The black pale on a silver field proclaims the Prince of Epirus. The red bend on the gold enriched with three laurel wreaths on the field is the bearing of Andronicus Palæologus, who longs to wear the imperial laurels of Constantinople. The six gold lozenges on purple are the arms of Sir Jaufre de Brabant. The three boars' heads of silver on the black field assert Sir Ambrose of Blois. The golden stag at gaze on a green field stands for Sir Raymond of Provence. The golden dolphin on the orange field represents Sir Guy de Hainault. The shield divided per pale green and silver and charged with a scarlet castle, from whose summit emerges a black dragon, belongs to Fernand Ximenes, the aspiring Spaniard." Only one cognizance baffled the garrulity of Captain Fox that day. There was a shield bearing a golden acorn on a green field that was as unfamiliar to him as to his hearers. So he looked mighty wise, gabbled some patter about mysteries that might not be revealed, and went on to explain, what every one of course knew, that Prince Rainouart carried a golden shield with no charge upon it, and that the lord-marshal, Count Ernault, carried potent blue and silver. Of many another knight that day, of many more armorial bearings, Captain Fox discoursed learnedly enough to such as would listen to him, and generally succeeded while his tongue wagged in impoverishing his hearers of some jewel, purse, or button, dexterously nipped by his thievish fingers. But at least the plundered person, when he discovered his loss and Captain Fox had vanished into the sea of human beings, might console himself with the reflection that he had moved, as it were, for a season in a kind of intimacy with the great, and that this pleasure, like all others, had to be paid for.

The place which Duke Baldwin had appointed for the holding of the tournament was excellently well chosen. One of the greenest meadows of the Athenian plain facing the sea, with the Acropolis for a background, had been enclosed with great hoardings of painted wood, red and white, the duke's own colors. Under the shadow of the Acropolis a great gallery had been erected, glittering with gilding and brilliant with silk, to form a bower from which the Duchess of Thebes and the fair ladies of Baldwin's court might witness the encounters. Behind these, still within the enclosures, were two pavilions set apart, one for the use of the Duchess of Thebes and the other for Duke Baldwin, who took no part in that day's sport save as on-looker and arbiter. The pavilions of the knights were ranged inside the lists, and at the door of each a page in some fantastic habit stood holding his master's shield. Here and there in the wooden barrier encircling the lists were apertures guarded by mighty men-at-arms, brothers in size and strength to those that wardered the door of the ducal court-yard. At each of these doorways a herald was stationed to make sure that none entered the lists unprivileged.

The Duke Baldwin was a great stickler for custom, past-master of punctilio. He knew all that there was to know of the laws that had hitherto governed the gentle art of tourney, and thinking that nothing in the world exists so good that it could not be bettered, especially by Duke Baldwin of Athens, he had devised many novel regulations in gracious methods for mimic combat, which pleased him highly the more they rendered complicated and intricate the laws of the royal sport. He rejoiced to invent some new rule for the disqualification of a combatant who might to the unconcerned eye of the actual spectator appear to be the victor. His opponent might, indeed, lie sprawling on the grass, fairly pushed from his horse by the heavy impact of the blunt-headed spear, but if that spear had not struck in precisely the right place permissible at that very moment of the play, according to the laws of Duke Baldwin, or had struck in some place not permissible, again according to the laws of Duke Baldwin, it was the sprawler on the ground who received the laurel and not he who rode his horse victoriously amid the cheers of the multitude. It followed, naturally enough, that Duke Baldwin's regulations were not always and altogether popular with the knights who encountered under his eyes. But the duke was so deeply versed in the whole history of his sport, and always so readily recited precedents from this great tournament here and that noble jousting there, that it would have been difficult, even had it been profitable or even advisable, to argue a point with him, and as he was autocrat of Athens, strong of hand and choleric of nature, few ever did venture to argue with him.

On this occasion Duke Baldwin had taken special pains over the whole paraphernalia of the tournament. He had examined with his own hands and eyes the great barrier that ran down the middle of the lists to divide the encountering knights and prevent their horses from colliding. He had made sure by personal interrogation that each of the heralds was well acquainted with the arms, titles, lineage, and deeds of each of the nobles who offered themselves to take part in the combat. He saw to the pitching of the pavilions, the comfort of their furniture, the lodgings of the squires. He visited the stables where the horses were to dwell, the stithies where swarthy smiths were to wait ready with bellows working and fires burning for the mending of shattered mail, and he was at pains to see that the pavilion of the Duchess of Thebes was adorned with all the luxury that even a lovely woman could desire.

Duke Baldwin was so well satisfied with himself and with the world in general that he allowed himself the relaxation of idleness in one particular. He left to his lord-marshal, Count Ernault, all that belonged to the personal arrangement of the tourney, to the order of the encounters, and to the degree of those who might be permitted to take part in them. Thus it came about that when the hour struck, and the trumpets sounded for the beginning of battle, he knew nothing of the existence of a Prince of Eleusis to whom Count Ernault had given promise to ride in the fight.

All the meadow-land round the lists was thronged with a fantastic congregation of folk. Every square inch of standing room a-nigh the red and white palings was occupied by eager spectators hotly arguing the merits of their favorites, and when they could afford it going so far as to stake silver piece against silver piece on the issue of the conflicts. On the fringe of this multitude the speculative had erected a veritable village of wooden booths, wherein all kinds of foods and drinks, gross and dainty, were to be had for the asking and the paying by those whom the thoughts of martial prowess made hungry and the spring sunlight stung to thirst. Travelling glee-men, penniless enough, pushed their bold, sunburned faces hither and thither, ready at any moment for coin or cup to sing to the interested some song of the deeds of heroes--Charlemagne and his twelve peers, Arthur of Brittany and his knights of the Table Round, or the fortunes of the lord of Orange. Every tree in the meadow bore its load of human fruit; scarce any bough seemed too high or too slender for some adventurous spirit to assail, obtaining thereby a view of the tournament at greater peril to life and limb than any run by the knightly combatants.

In the delicate air of Athens, where sound travels far, the chattering of all this swarm of human beings came to the ears of those in the pavilions like the humming of a hive of monstrous bees, or the chattering of an incredible army of starlings, or the slappings of an angry sea. Inside the sacred enclosure the scene was less crowded, but more brilliant and many-colored. On the silk-swathed galleries which had been set up for the benefit of non-combatant courtiers and the ladies of the palace, the gallantest gentlemen vied with the loveliest women in the magnificence of their apparel. Cloth of gold and cloth of silver, all the dyes and jewels of the East, all the plumage of the brightest-hued birds, glittered and twinkled in the strong sunlight in a manner dazzling to the eye. Outside the lists the common folk chattered and gabbled. Inside the lists the noble lords and ladies chattered and gabbled, too, until, as Simon said to himself, it seemed as if the world might very well fear to be talked out of existence. But when the great trumpets sounded which told to every eager ear of all those thousands that the time had come and that the game was afoot, there fell upon the plain a silence as deep and still as the clamor had before been plangent. In that awful silence Duke Baldwin lifted his mighty bulk in the golden throne which groaned under his weight, and, raising his sceptre in his right hand, gave order, in a voice which would have honored a bull, to the lord-marshal that the sport might now begin. The lord-marshal in his turn spoke to the heralds. Again there came a blare of trumpets, and then again a silence pierced by the voices of the heralds calling upon the earliest combatants to begin the fray.

The first part of the tournament consisted of a series of single combats on horse between the allotted pairs of knights. Sir Jaufre de Brabant and Sir Raymond of Provence were the first to ride, and the episode was brief, for in the first encounter Sir Jaufre unhorsed his adversary and cantered to the end of the lists triumphant, while Sir Raymond of Provence scrambled to his feet and regained his tent with as much dignity as he could master under the pitying eyes of the ladies who liked him, the smiles of such lords as misliked him, and the grinning faces of the diverted multitude. Sir Guy de Hainault rode next against Sir Ambrose of Blois, and though Sir Guy looked as slender as a girl in armor and Sir Ambrose a thing of bulk, Sir Ambrose went down at the first push before the well-planted thrust of his adversary's lance. Fernand Ximenes rode against Demetrius of Epirus and overcame him. Andronicus Palæologus overcame Sir Gaston of Nîmes. Many knights rode, gaining good fortune or bad, and the praise or pity of ladies. The inquisitive may seek for their names and their bearings, and their share of that day's fame and shame, in the painted chronicle made later at Count Ernault's cost, from Count Ernault's memory, and now preserved in the University of Madrid, to which Fernand Ximenes presented it. Those who beheld the jousting averred loudly that it was the best and bravest that had ever been seen. In their hearts they were well aware that it was patently like all other tournaments that had ever been held under the laws of honor, and that all the tourneys that would follow through the years would be of like pattern for chance and valor, strength and skill, success or failure--ay, and would be witnessed by eyes as lovely, whether shining with the pride of triumph or shining through the mist of tears.

When a certain number of these courses had been run, then came the great business of the day, the general challenge of the Prince of Athens to all and sundry that were true knights to contend in arms against his declaration that his lady, the Duchess Esclaramonde of Thebes, was the rose of the world. As the prize of this contest he offered a wreath of golden violets, a glory of the goldsmith's art, which the victor was to offer to his queen of beauty, and which Esclaramonde was very confident to receive from the hands of her betrothed.

XVII

THE ROSE OF THE WORLD

A tumult of applause went up as Rainouart entered the lists, riding a black charger given him by Esclaramonde, and glittering in arms, while his handsome head, still unhelmeted, inclined to right and left in recognition of his greeting. For though Rainouart was too newly come to Athens to be very generally known of the populace, and though report, ever busy with tale-bearing from great places, had whispered something sneering of his bookish ways and his distaste for light ladies, he had endeared himself with the fickle Athenian public by his deeds on the preceding day of the tourney, when he had ridden from victory to victory. At the close of the first day there had been a general assault or mêlée between five-and-twenty Frankish knights, champions chosen by Duke Baldwin, and five-and-twenty of the picked chieftains of the Catalan Grand Company. The struggle was as fierce as brief. It seemed at first as if the Moorish-looking warriors from Spain were destined to gain the day under the angry eyes of Duke Baldwin, but Rainouart's individual deeds of prowess and the gallant manner in which he rallied the French force at the last redeemed the honor of Athens, and forced the Catalans from the field. Duke Baldwin's joy had been unbounded, and he had expressed it as exuberantly as he could to the young man who always listened so gravely when he spoke, and while he listened thought upon his mother's wrongs.

Now the heralds cried the challenge of the Prince of Athens, and as they did so, Rainouart, gripping his horse with limbs of steel, felt as if the brisk wind of battle blowing in his face drove from his senses something of that lethargy under which they had lain supine. His tormenting, denying, mysterious memories troubled him for the moment no more; he was just for that moment a good knight on a good horse, with a good lance in hand ready to do battle with all the world for the sake of a woman. Scarcely did he recall the familiar features of Esclaramonde; in his mind, as in his challenge, he was fighting for the rose of the world, but the rose was the rose of the lovely legend, the unfound flower.

Now knight after knight came forth from his pavilion and mounted his horse to do battle, and knight after knight went down before the conquering lance of young Athens. Guy de Hainault, Jaufre de Brabant, Ambrose of Blois, Gaston of Nîmes, Raymond of Provence, Demetrius of Epirus, and Andronicus Palæologus, each had his own fair lady, star of his life or star of the hour, to tilt for, and each in turn sustained defeat, and Rainouart remained invincible. The populace huzzaed, courtiers applauded demonstratively, Duke Baldwin grinned like a pleased hyena, the ladies of the discomfited tried to smile through tears, and the face of Esclaramonde shone with pride, for she had snared a rare mate. As for Rainouart, he thought not of her; his thoughts were only of the joy of strife and the delight of victory. He was fighting for an ideal; he could not give it name, but it seemed to fill the air with the scent and the color of roses.