The Fortunes of Garin by Mary Johnston (romantic novels in english .txt) 📖

The girls laughed for joy in him. “Hè! We see his collar around your neck! What does he make you do?”

“He makes me to serve a lady.”

“‘Ladies!’ We do not like ‘ladies’! They are as proud as they were made of sugar!”

“In the court of Lord Love,” said Garin, “every woman mounts into a lady.”

One of the girls laughed more silently than the other. “Oh, the pleasant fool!” she said. “You go on a long pilgrimage when you go to Compostella. But to that court would be the longest I have ever heard tell of!”

The other dug her bare foot into the ground. “If you are in no hurry, the house can give you work to do, and for it supper and lodging.”

“I have to reach the sun. And who would do that,” said Garin, “must be travelling.”

He stood up, left the mulberry tree, and because they were young and not unfair, and there was to be seen in it no harm or displeasure, he kissed them both. They laughed and pushed him away, then, their hands on his shoulders, each kissed back.

Leaving them and the hamlet behind, he came again into fair country where the blue sky touched the hill-tops. Morning had slipped into afternoon. Not far away would be a town he had heard of. He meant to get there a different dress. It was necessary to do that. Wandering so, in this serf’s wear,[121] he might at any hour be taken up, called to account, made to name his master. “Lord Love” would not answer far. Say that, without fathomless trouble, he got the dress, what was going to follow upon the getting? He did not know.

Ahead of him walked a thin figure wrapped in a black mantle and wearing a wide hat somewhat like a palmer’s. Garin lessened the distance between them. The black-clad one was talking, or more correctly, chanting to himself as he walked, and that with such abstraction from the surrounding world that he did not hear the other moving close behind him. Garin listened before speaking.

“In Ethiopia is found basilisk, cockatrice, and phœnix; in certain parts of Greece the centaur, and in the surrounding seas mermaiden. The dolphin is of all beasts the tenderest-hearted. Elephants worship the sun.... Pliny tells us that there are eleven kinds of lightning. Clap your hands when it lightens.... The elements are four—earth, air, fire and water. To each of these pertaineth a spirit—gnome, sylph, salamander, ondine. By long and great study a scholar at last may perceive sylph or salamander. Such an one rises to strange wisdom.... The earth is not a plain as we were taught. Impossible for our human mind to conceive how it may be round, and yet the most learned hold that it is so. Holy Church denieth, in toto, the Antipodes, and one must walk warily. Yet, if it is fancied a square, there are difficulties. Aristotle—”

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Garin came even with him. “God save you, sir!”

The black mantle started violently, returned the salutation, but looked around him nervously. Then, seeing in a neighbouring field half a dozen peasants, men and women, he recovered his equanimity. Moreover, when he looked at him closely, the youth had not the face of a robber. He addressed Garin in a slightly sing-song voice. “Do you know this road? How far is it to the town?”

“I do not know the road. It is not much further, I think.”

The man in the black mantle was a thin, pale, ascetic-looking person. He had a hungry look, or what, at first, Garin thought was such. The esquire had seen hungry men, peasants starved and wolfish, prisoners with a like aspect, fasting penitents. But it was the man’s eyes, Garin decided, that gave him the look, and it was not one of hunger for bread. They were large and clear, and they seemed to seek something afar.

Their owner at first looked askance and with a somewhat peevish pride at the peasant keeping beside him. Garin had forgotten his garb and the station it assigned him. But the feeling, such as it was, seemed to drift out of the black-clad’s mind. “I grow weary,” he said, “and shall be glad to beg a night’s shelter.”

“Have you travelled far?”

“From Bologna.”

“Bologna! That is in Italy.”

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“Yes. The University there. I am going to Paris. It may be that I shall go to Oxford.”

“Ah,” said Garin, with respect. “I understand now why you were talking to yourself. You are a student.”

“That am I. One day I may be Magister or Doctor.” He walked with a lifted gaze. “I serve toward that—and toward the gaining of Knowledge.”

Garin was silent; then he said with some wistfulness, “I, too, would have learning and knowledge.”

The other walked with a rapt gaze. “It is the true goddess,” he said, “it is the Great Love.”

But Garin dissented from that with a shake of the head and a short laugh of rapture.

The student turned his large eyes upon him. “You love a woman.—What is her name?”

“I do not know,” said Garin. “Nor the features of her face, nor where she lives.” Suddenly as he moved, he made a name. “The Fair Goal,” he said, “I have named her now.”

The interest of the man in black had been but momentary. “Study is a harsh mistress,” he said; “fair, but terrible! It would irk any pitying saint to see how we students fare! Hunger and cold and nakedness. Books, without warmth or cheer or light where we can con them. And we often want books and nowhere can procure them. We live in booths or in corners of other men’s dwellings, and none care to give us livelihood while we master knowledge. There were several thousand of us in[124] Bologna, and in Paris there are more, and at Oxford they say there are many thousands. I have seen us go blind, and I have seen us die of hunger, and I have seen us unwitted—”

“But you go on,” said Garin.

“It is the only life,” answered the black mantle.

They walked in silence. After a few moments a thought seemed to occur to the journeyer from Bologna. He looked more closely at his companion. “By your dress you are out of the fields. But your tongue speaks castle-wise.”

Garin had his vanity of revealment. “My tongue is my own, but this dress is not,” he said; then, repenting his rashness, “Do not betray me! I am fleeing from trouble.”

“No, I will not,” answered the student with simplicity. “I know trouble, and he is hard to escape. You are, perchance, a young knight?”

“I was my lord’s esquire. But it is my meaning to become a knight.—I would make poems, too.”

“Ah!” said the student, “a troubadour.”

Garin made no answer, but the word sank in. He had a singing heart to-day. You could be knight and troubadour both. He wished now to write a beautiful song for the Fair Goal.

They came in sight of the town. It was fairly large, massed, like most towns, about a castle. As in all towns, you saw churches and churches rising above the huddled houses.

“I will find,” said the student, “some house of[125] monks. I will give them all the news I know, and they will give me food and a pallet. Best come with me.”

But Garin would not try the monastery.

The afternoon was waning. They entered the town not more than an hour before the gates would shut, and parted in the shadow of the wall. When Garin had gone twenty paces, he looked back. The student was standing where he had left him, in a brown study, but now he spoke across the uneven, unpaved way. “Choose knowledge!” he said.

Garin, going on through a narrow, dark, and tortuous lane, found in his mind the jongleur to whom he had talked on the road from Roche-de-Frêne. “Choose love!” had said the jongleur. Garin laughed. “I choose what I must!” The dark way seemed to blossom with roses; jewels and perfumes were in his hands.

He found, after an hour of wandering and enquiry, lodging in a high, old, ruinous house above a black alley. Here he got a Spartan supper, and went to bed, tired but hopeful. Morning seemed to come at once. He rose in a high, clear dawn, ate what they gave him, sallied forth, and in the first sunshine came to a shop where was standing a Jew merchant in a high cap. Garin bought shirt, hose and breeches, tunic and mantle, shoes and cap. The Jew looked questions out of his small, twinkling black eyes, but asked none with his tongue.

Back to his lodging went Garin, his purchases[126] under his arm, shifted from serf’s garb into these, and stood forth in russet and blue—a squire again to the eye, though not the squire of any knight or lord of wealth. He counted over the moneys yet in his purse, and then, having paid to a half-blind old woman the price of his lodging, went forth again, and at a place for weapons bought a dagger with sheath and belt. Near the weapon shop was a church porch. Garin wished to think things out a little, so he went across to this and took his seat upon the steps in the sunshine, his back to a pillar.

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