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

is mine? To endure until I may ride as knight and find or make some door in a high, thick wall? To take the tonsure—to study, work and plan—to become, maybe, canon, and after long time, larger things?... Which is mine? This—or that—or either? O Blessed Lady, I would choose from within!”

The tall, jewelled Queen of Heaven looked serenely down upon him. She had ceased to breathe. The sign seemed not to be coming. He had before him a long ride, and he must go, with or without the token. He kept his position yet another minute, then, with[7] a deep sigh, relinquished the quest. Rising, he stepped backward from the presence of the Virgin of Roche-de-Frêne, out of the line of the Saracen pillars. As he went, the climbing shaft of amber light caught his eye and forthwith Jacob’s ladder came into his head, and he began to send slim angels up and down it. He had a potent fancy.

Leaving the church, he passed Boniface of Beaucaire and Hugues the Free Lance. His step made a ringing on the pavement beside their prone heads. He felt for them no contempt. They were making, more or less, an honourable amende. Everybody in their lives had done or would do penance, and after life came purgatory. He passed them as he might pass any other quite usual phenomenon, and so quitted the cathedral.

Outside was Roche-de-Frêne, grey, close-built, massed upon the long hill-top, sending spurs of houses down the hillsides between olive and cypress, almond and plane and pine—Roche-de-Frêne, so well-walled, Roche-de-Frêne beat upon, laved, drowned by the southern sun.

Crown of its wide-browed craggy hill rose another hill; crown of this, a grey dream in the fiery day, sprang the castle of its prince, of that Gaucelm the Fortunate whose father had brought the pillars. The cathedral had its lesser rise of earth and faced the castle, and beside the cathedral was the bishop’s palace, and between the church and the castle, up and down and over the hillsides, spread the town.[8] The sky was as blue as the robe of the Virgin of Roche-de-Frêne. The southern horizon showed a gleam of the Mediterranean, and north and west had purple mountains. In the narrow streets between the high houses, and in every little opening and chance square the people of Roche-de-Frêne, men, women and children, talked, laughed, and gestured. It was a feast day, holiday, merry in the sun. Wine was being drunk, jongleurs were telling tales and playing the mountebank.

Garin sought his inn and his horse. He was in Roche-de-Frêne upon Raimbaut’s business, but that over, he had leave to ride to Castel-Noir and spend three days with his brother. The merry-making in the town tempted, but the way was long and he must go. A chain of five girls crossed his path, brown, laughing, making dancing steps, their robes kilted high, red and yellow flowers in their hair. “What a beautiful young man!” said their eyes. “Stay—stay!” Garin wanted to stay—but he was not without judgement and he went. At the inn he had a spare dinner, the only kind for which he could pay. A bit of meat, a piece of bread, a bunch of grapes, a cup of wine—then his horse at the door.

Half a dozen men-at-arms from the castle passed this way. They stopped. “That’s a good steed!”

Garin mounted. “None better,” he said briefly.

The grizzled chief of the six laid an approving touch upon the silken flank. “Where did you get him?”

[9]

Garin took the reins. “At home.”

“Good page, where is that?”

“I am not page, I am esquire,” said Garin.

“Good esquire, where is that?”

“‘That’ is Castel-Noir.”

“A little black tower in a big black wood? I know the place,” said the grizzled one. “Your lord is Raimbaut of the Six Fingers.”

“Just.”

“Whose lord is the Count of Montmaure, whose lord is our Prince Gaucelm, whose lord is the King at Paris, whose lord is the Pope in Rome, whose lord is God on His Throne.—Do you wish to sell your horse?”

“I do not.”

“I have taken a fancy to him,” said the man-at-arms. “But there! the land is at peace. Go your ways—go your ways! Are you for the jousting in the castle lists?”

“No. I would see it, but I have not time.”

“You would see a pretty sight,” quoth the man-at-arms. “There is Prince Gaucelm’s second princess, to wit Madame Alazais that is the most beautiful woman in the world, and sitting beside her the prince’s daughter, our princess Audiart, that is not so beautiful.”

“They say,” spoke Garin, “that she is not beautiful at all.”

“That same ‘They say’ is a shifty knave.—Better go, and I will go with you,” said the man-at-arms,[10] “for truly I have not been lately to the lists.”

But Garin adhered to it that he could not. He made Paladin to curvet, bound and caracole, then with a backward laugh and wave of his hand went his way—but caused his way to lead him past the castle of Roche-de-Frêne.

So riding by, he looked up wistfully to barbican and walls and towers. The place was vast, a great example of what a castle might be. Enough folk for a town housed within it. At one point tree tops, peering over the walls, spoke of an included garden. Above the donjon just stirred in the autumn air the great blue banner of Gaucelm the Fortunate. The mighty gates were open, the drawbridge down, the water in the moat smiled as if it had neither memory nor premonition of dead men in its arms. People were crossing, gay of dress. The sunny noon, the holiday time, softened all the hugeness, kept one from seeing what a frown Roche-de-Frêne might wear. Garin heard trumpets. The esquire of Raimbaut the Six-fingered, the brother of Foulque the Cripple, the youth from the small black tower in the black wood, gazed and listened with parted lips. Raimbaut held from Montmaure, but for Raimbaut’s fief and other fiefs adjacent, Montmaure who held mainly from the House of Aquitaine, owed Roche-de-Frêne fealty. Being feudal lord of his lord, Gaucelm the Fortunate was lord of Foulque the Cripple and Garin the Squire. The latter wondered[11] if ever he would enter there where the trumpets were blowing.

The great pile passed, the town itself passed, he found himself upon a downward sweeping road and so, by zig-zags, left the hill of Roche-de-Frêne and coming to the plain rode west by north between shorn fields and vineyards. The way was fair but lonely, for the country folk were gone to the town for this day of the patron saint and were not yet returning. Before him lay woods—for much of the country was wooded then—and craggy hills, and in the distance purple mountains. He had some leagues to ride. Now and again he might see, to this hand or to that, a castle upon a height, below it a huddled brown hamlet. Late in the afternoon there would lie to his right the Convent of Our Lady in Egypt. But his road was not one of the great travelled ways. It traversed a sparsely populated region, and it was going, presently, to be lonely enough.

Garin rode with sunken head, trying to settle matters before he should see Foulque. If Raimbaut had been a liberal, noble, joyous lord! But he was none such. It was little that page or esquire could learn in his gloomy castle, and little chance might have knight of his. A gloomy castle, and a lord of little worth, and a lady old and shrewish.... Every man must have a lord—or so was Garin’s world arranged. But if only every man could choose one to his liking—

The road bent. Rounding a craggy corner, Paladin[12] and he well-nigh trod upon a sleeping man, propped at the road edge against a grey boulder. Paladin curvetted aside, Garin swore by his favourite saint, the man awoke and stretched his arms. He was young,—five or six years older, perhaps, than Garin. His dress, when it came to hue and cut, showed extravagant and gay, but the stuffs of which it was composed were far from costly. Here showed a rent, rather neatly darned, and here a soil rubbed away as thoroughly as might be. He was dark and thin, with long, narrow eyes that gave him an Eastern look. Beside him, slung from his neck by a ribbon, lay a lute, and he smiled with professional brilliancy.

[13]