Part 5

"But Percivale was thinking so much of the raven and the snow and the blood and the lady of the castle that he gave no answer, and then the young man thrust at him with his spear. Then Percivale turned and struck the young man with his own spear and knocked him off his horse, and he went back to tell the King how he had fared. And Kay said: 'I will go and make him tell me who he is.'

"So Kay came and said and did very much as the young man had done, and Percivale knocked him off his horse too, and in the fall he broke his arm. Kay's horse galloped back alone to where the King and the knights were and Kay had to walk back. 'Now, I will go,' said Gawain. 'It is likely, Kay, that you spoke to him rudely, for you do speak rudely sometimes. The knight may be deep in some thoughts in which he does not like to be disturbed, but I will try to bring him back.'

*[Illustration: "Kay's horse galloped back alone" (missing from book)]*

"It used to be said that Gawain could speak so well that nobody could ever refuse him anything that he asked. He went to Percivale and stood still beside him for a moment and then said to him: 'If I thought that it would be pleasant to you to hear it, I would give you a message from King Arthur. He wishes that you would come to his tent. Two others have come here before me to speak to you.'

"'Yes,' said Percivale, 'and they spoke to me rudely and attacked me. And it annoyed me, because I was looking at the snow and the raven and the blood, and I was thinking of the face and the hair and the cheeks of the lady whom I fought for yesterday. But tell me, is Sir Kay with King Arthur?'

"'Yes,' said Gawain, 'and he was the second of the men who came to speak to you, and the fall from his horse that you gave him broke his arm.'

"'Ah, then I am glad,' said Percivale, 'for now I have punished him for striking the dwarf.'

"'For striking the dwarf?' Gawain repeated, 'then you are Percivale! This is good news! Come back with me to the King, for he and all of us have left Camelot to seek for you.'

"'Yes,' Percivale answered, 'I can come back with you now, for I have met Sir Kay and have punished him for striking the dwarf.'

"So Gawain led Percivale back to the King, and Arthur and his knights welcomed him as one of the best among them all. Then they all went back to Camelot together, and as soon as they were there King Arthur made Percivale a knight. And he said to him, when he had touched his shoulders with his sword: 'Rise, Sir Percivale, and may God make you a good knight. I know that He will, Sir Percivale, for no young man who has ever come to my court has done so soon such noble things as you have done. For before you were a knight at all you fought many battles for right and justice, and you are worthy to be called God's own knight. And you are worthy, too, to be a knight of the Round Table. Kneel again, Sir Percivale, and take the oath of the Round Table.'

"Then Percivale knelt before the King again and the King said to him: 'Do you swear that you will help the King to guard his people and to keep peace and justice in his land; that you will be faithful to your fellows; that you will do right to poor and rich alike? Do you swear that in all things you will be true and loyal to God and to the King?'

"And Percivale answered: 'I swear it.'

"The King took Percivale's hand and turned toward the Round Table. All the knights looked eagerly to see where his place would be, for they thought: 'No man of us has ever done such deeds as his while he was still so young, and who knows but he may be that best knight of all the world, who is to sit in the Siege Perilous?'

"The King thought of that too, and he paused beside the Siege Perilous, to see if there were any letters in it, but there were not. But in the next seat to it, where no one had ever sat since Arthur had been King, he saw new letters of gold, and the letters said: 'This is the seat of Percivale, God's knight.'"

*CHAPTER IV*

*THE QUEEN'S ROBING-ROOM*

When we got back to the hotel at Glastonbury that night there was a surprise awaiting us. Helen's mother had a letter and she said: "We are going to London by the first train to-morrow morning, and then we are going straight to Paris."

Now you must know that before we started on this journey Helen's mother had said that she did not care in the least where we went, except that we must go to Paris. So it was agreed between us that she should be allowed to go to Paris just whenever she pleased and that I should arrange everything else just as I pleased. And so, when she said that we were going to Paris at once, she made exactly the one announcement that she had a perfect right to make, without asking me anything about it at all. Still, just at first, I was not at all pleased.

I said that of course we should do just as she liked about it, still we had thought that we were to have plenty of time in Glastonbury, and so we had not gone to see the ruins of the abbey yet, and it seemed a pity to have to leave Glastonbury without seeing them. Helen knew nothing about the ruins of the abbey, but she agreed with me. That made no difference to Helen's mother. She had a letter from somebody whom she knew, who was in Paris. That somebody was to be there only for a week, and she must be there at the same time. We really had no right to object, and so I gave up objecting and tried to think of the best way out of it. "Couldn't we come back here again afterwards?" Helen suggested.

Now the notion of going to a little place like Glastonbury, so far off the usual lines of travel, twice in the same journey, is one that would never come into the head of any ordinary traveller. But Helen is not an ordinary traveller. And when I came to think of it I could not see the slightest reason in the world why we should not come back to Glastonbury after we had been to Paris. I looked at Helen's mother and said: "May we?"

"You know very well," she said, "that you can go and come wherever you like, as long as you let me go to Paris."

Here was another notion. "As long as I let you go to Paris," I repeated. "That is just what I will do. What do you want of me in Paris? All the time that you are there you women will be running about the city, seeing things that I don't care about and doing things that I don't care about, such as shopping, and I should only be in the way. You would get on better without me, and so why should I go to Paris at all? I will go to London with you to-morrow, and then I will wait there for you till you come back."

Helen's mother liked my plan so much that I almost felt hurt. "I don't see," she said, "how you could be of the least use in Paris. You will have a much better time in London, and I shall have you off my mind, and can do just what I like."

This almost took my breath away, but, as the plan was my own, of course I had to pretend that I liked it. I said that there were several things in London that I wanted to see again, and I wanted to look up two or three places not far from London that had stories about them. I was afraid I should not have time to go to them if I went to Paris too. When I said that Helen began to take an interest, as I had thought that perhaps she might. "Are there more stories in London?" she asked.

"If you and I," I said, "were to stay in London and find a story every day, we should not live long enough to find half of them."

"Oh!" said Helen.

"Now do you think?" I said, "when you come to think of it a second time, that you really need Helen in Paris any more than you do me? When she is a little older she will want to go there just as much as you do now, and then she can go. But now, don't you think that you should like to have her off your mind as well as me, and don't you think that she could do a good deal toward cheering me up there in London, while you are gone?"

Helen looked at her mother to see what she was going to say. She said nothing at all, but she looked at Helen in a way that meant that she might do just as she pleased about it, and Helen said: "If you don't mind very much, I think I will stay in London."

Helen's mother did not mind very much, so I said: "Very well, then; this is what we will do. We will go all the way to Dover with you, and then we will come back to London and have as good a time as we can, till you come back from having the best time that ever was in the world, in Paris. And when you are with us again we will come back here to Glastonbury and go to some other good places."

Nobody could make the least objection to that. And so the next day but one Helen and I found that we were left quite to ourselves in London. We found plenty of things to amuse us. We went to see the Tower of London, as Americans do. We found the old armor and weapons that were there most interesting, and Helen made a discovery. "Did King Arthur's knights wear armors like those?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, "about like those."

"With all those chains and iron things?"

"Yes, to be sure."

"Then I know what became of the green lace girdles that Gawain and the rest of them had."

"Very well; what did become of them?"

"Why, don't you see? They all wore out. They wouldn't last a week, if they put them round their waists, with all those iron things on."

There was really no need of any better explanation than this, and so I gave up ever finding any.

"There is one curious little thing about this Tower," I said, "that is not in most of the books about it. It was here, you know, long before King Arthur's time. One of the old kings was called Bran the Blessed. And once he told his men that when he was dead they must cut off his head and bury it under the White Tower, in London, with the face toward France, and that as long as it stayed there England could never be harmed by any foe from abroad. Now I have never heard of any White Tower in London, except this big square one in the middle of the Tower of London, so that I have no doubt that it was here that the head of Bran the Blessed was buried, with the face toward France, to guard England from her foreign foes. But when Arthur came to be King he had the head dug up, for he said that it would be better for England to be guarded by the strength and the courage of Englishmen than by magic. You can look around you at the England of to-day and judge for yourself whether Arthur was right."

I had heard that there were pictures of some of the King Arthur stories in the Queen's robing-room, at the Palace of Westminster, and of course we wanted to see them. Now anybody who looks moderately respectable can walk through the Palace of Westminster any Saturday. The trouble is that the policemen who are posted in the rooms will not let you stay in any one of them long enough to do more than take a glance at it and pass on to the next room. Of course this would not do for us, when there were pictures of King Arthur to be looked at. But we were very lucky. We knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody else, and I rather think that this last somebody was the secretary of the Lord Great Chamberlain. At any rate, there were some letters written about us, and we were told to go to the Palace of Westminster and ask for the inspector of police. So we went there when Saturday came around and saw the inspector and told him that we were the ones whom the letters had been written about. He was very glad to see us and he introduced us to somebody else. Once more I think that it was the secretary of the Lord Great Chamberlain, but I am not sure. Whoever he was, he was most polite, and when we told him what friends of King Arthur's we were he ordered the policemen on duty to let us stay in the Queen's robing-room as long as we liked.

Having all the time we wanted, we did not hurry, but stood for a few minutes at the windows, looking out across the Thames. "It was somewhere over there," I said, "not very far on the other side of the river, that there used to live one of the wickedest knights that were ever in King Arthur's court. His name was Meliagraunce. I don't know what made him so wicked, but I suppose he was so to start with. It occurred to him once that there could be no better way for him to make trouble than by stealing the Queen and carrying her off to his castle, over there across the Thames. King Arthur was holding his court just here at Westminster then, for it seems that there was a palace here as long ago as that.

"Meliagraunce had to watch a long time for his chance, for there were usually a good many people about the Queen, and Lancelot was likely to be among them, and somehow, wicked as he was, he did not care about doing anything to harm the Queen while Lancelot was with her. But one day he heard that the Queen was going maying, with some knights and ladies, and that Lancelot was not going. That, he thought, would be just his chance. Now, as the Queen did not mean to go far from Westminster, there was no thought of any danger. So the knights who rode with her wore swords at their sides, as they did almost everywhere, but they carried no spears or shields, and they wore no armor. There were only ten of them, with ten ladies and a few squires and pages. But Meliagraunce got ready twenty knights, fully armed, and a hundred archers on foot.

"Westminster and the country about it looked very different then from what they do now. Now there is nothing but city for miles around, but then there were fields, and a little farther off there were woods. So the Queen and her knights and ladies rode to the woods and gathered flowers and green branches, and decked themselves and their horses with them and started back toward Westminster. Then Meliagraunce and his armed men fell upon them. The Queen's knights fought for her as well as they could, but they were so few and so poorly armed that they were no match for their enemies. In a little while they were all of them wounded, and the Queen saw that they would all be killed if the fight went on. So she called to Meliagraunce and begged him to stop the fight and promised that she would go with him to his castle, if he would let all her knights go too, for they were wounded and she must have them with her, so that she could take care of them.

"Meliagraunce agreed to this and they all set off toward his castle. But on the way the Queen whispered to a page who was on a swift horse, and told him to ride back to Westminster and tell Lancelot that she was a prisoner in the castle of Meliagraunce. So the page watched till nobody was looking, and then turned his horse suddenly and rode back. Of course Meliagraunce and his men saw in a moment what he was doing and what it was for, and they shot at him with arrows, but they missed him and he was soon beyond their reach.

"Now Meliagraunce and all those who were with him had to go slowly, because of the wounded knights, but the page who went to tell Lancelot rode fast. And when Lancelot heard what the page had to tell he rode fast too, so that he came to the castle of Meliagraunce not long after the others arrived there. And as soon as Meliagraunce heard that Lancelot had come he began to see what a silly thing he had done and to wish that he were well out of it. So he went to the Queen and begged her not to let Lancelot kill him. If she would promise that, he said, they would all go back to Westminster the next morning. So the Queen sent for Lancelot and told him that it would be better to do as Meliagraunce had said, for Meliagraunce was a knight of King Arthur's and it would be better that it should not be known what he had done as it would have to be if Lancelot fought with him and killed him. And of course Lancelot said that it should be as the Queen wished.

"But Meliagraunce had still other mischief in his mind. Now that he had found that he must send the Queen back to Westminster, he decided that he would charge her with treason to the King. That was as easy a charge to make against her as any, and it was as easy a way to harm her as any, since that was what he wanted to do. You know anybody could charge anybody else with anything, as long as he was ready to fight and risk his life to prove it. of course it did not take a minute for Lancelot to say that the charge that Meliagraunce made was a lie and that he would fight with him to prove that the Queen was not a traitor to the King, whenever and wherever Meliagraunce liked. And Meliagraunce said that it should be eight days from that day, at Westminster, before King Arthur.

"Now you may be sure that Meliagraunce would never have said a word against the Queen if he had thought that he should really have to fight with Lancelot about it. But he had still another trick to play, which he thought was a good one. He pretended to be very friendly with Lancelot and asked him if he should like to see his castle. Then he led him about from room to room and at last he led him over a trap door. It gave way and Lancelot fell down into a dungeon and struck on a heap of straw. And there Meliagraunce meant to keep him till after the time for the fight. And so, as he expected, it would all be decided his way, because Lancelot would not be there to defend the Queen, or, at the worst, he would have to fight with some knight who was not so good as Lancelot.

"I suppose I ought to tell you just here that King Arthur himself could not fight for the Queen in such a case as this, because he had to sit and be the judge in all such fights. And Arthur always did justice to rich and poor and to great and small alike, and he would do the same justice, or he would try to, to the one whom he loved best of all the world as to the meanest man or woman who could be brought before him.

"When the rest were ready to go back to Westminster they were surprised, of course, that Lancelot was not with them. But they did not think that it was so very strange, for Lancelot often went away suddenly in search of adventures and told nobody that he was going. So they went back and told the King that Meliagraunce had charged the Queen with treason and that Lancelot was to defend her. And the King was not alarmed at all, for he knew that the Queen could not be guilty of such a thing, and he felt sure that Lancelot would be at hand when the time came to prove it.

"But the King felt more sure of Lancelot than Lancelot felt of himself, for all that week he was in prison. And on the eighth day Meliagraunce came to Westminster ready for the fight and called upon the King to give judgment against the Queen, because Lancelot was not there to defend her. Then Arthur said that he was sure that Lancelot must be dead or sick or else in prison, for he never failed to keep his promise before, and he asked if there was any other knight who would fight in his place to defend the Queen. Then a knight of the Round Table said that he was sure, too, that it was as the King had said and he would fight for the Queen instead of Lancelot.

"But Meliagraunce, as clever people sometimes do, had made a mistake. He did not know, perhaps, that there was a woman in his castle who was in love with Lancelot. But there were a good many such women scattered over England and he ought to have been careful about it. On the very morning when the battle was to be she came to Lancelot and told him that she would let him out of his prison if he would give her one kiss. Lancelot thought that this was not a large price to pay and he paid it. Then the woman let him out and found his armor for him and helped him to get a horse from the stable and he set off, as fast as he could go, for Westminster. And he arrived just as the knight who had promised to fight for him had taken his place ready to begin the battle.

"Lancelot rode straight up before the King and told him how Meliagraunce had trapped him and kept him in prison, and then he took the place of the other knight and was ready for the fight. Nobody had any doubt how the fight would go. Everybody felt that the right would win and that the right meant Lancelot. The King felt so sure of it that he had the Queen come and sit in her place beside him, though she was accused of treason. The heralds gave the signal, the knights charged together, and Meliagraunce was thrown from his horse. Lancelot dismounted then and they fought with swords, but it was only a few moments before Meliagraunce was disarmed and helpless and begging for mercy.

"Then Lancelot had a hard question to decide. In any ordinary fight it would be unknightly to refuse mercy to any knight who asked it, but Lancelot felt that such a cowardly, lying wretch as this had no right to live and that he had no right to let him live. He thought for a moment and then he said: 'Meliagraunce, take up your sword and let us go on with this fight to the end.'

"'I will not fight any more,' said Meliagraunce; 'you have beaten me and I ask your mercy, and you must give it, as you are a knight of the Round Table.'

"'Meliagraunce,' said Lancelot, 'I will take off my helmet and all the armor that I can from the left side of my body, and my left hand shall be tied behind me, and then I will fight with you.'

"Then Meliagraunce ran toward the King. 'My lord,' he cried, 'have you heard what he has said? I call upon you to make him keep his promise and fight me with his head and his left side uncovered.'

"'Meliagraunce,' said Lancelot, 'come back! I am not a liar, like you, and I need no one to make me keep my promises, even to traitors and cowards.'

"Then Lancelot's armor was taken off his left side, as much of it as could be, and his helmet was taken off. And his left hand was tied behind him, so that he could not use his shield. And in this way he stood ready for the fight again. Meliagraunce aimed a blow at his head, but Lancelot caught it with his sword and put it aside. Then he struck one great stroke and split Meliagraunce's helmet and laid him dead on the field. And everybody felt that the Round Table was better by the loss of Meliagraunce than it would be by the gain of three good knights. And now I think that it is about time for us to look at these pictures that we came to see."

The pictures were painted on the walls of two sides of the room. On the third side was a throne, with a canopy over it, and on the fourth side were the windows. The artist had painted scenes from the stories of King Arthur and he had made them represent the virtues that he thought ought to belong to a good knight. One of his pictures he called "Mercy," and it showed Sir Gawain kneeling before Queen Guinevere and swearing always to be merciful and never to be against ladies. The one next to this was "Hospitality," and in it King Arthur was receiving Sir Tristram as a knight of the Round Table. Another picture was "Courtesy," and there Tristram was playing his harp to Isolt. For "Religion" there was "The Vision of Sir Galahad and his Company." Then there was one of "Generosity," with King Arthur thrown from his horse in battle and his life spared by Lancelot. "That seems a strange picture to you, no doubt," I said, "but some time I will tell you the story that it belongs to, and then it will not seem so strange."

All around under these pictures and on the side of the room where the throne was, there were carvings: "Arthur Delivered unto Merlin," "Arthur Crowned King," "How Arthur Gate His Sword Excalibur," "King Arthur Wedded to Guinevere," and many more.