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

Passing through a gate in a wall, they were on Abbey land, nor was it long before they were at the Abbey portal. Beggars and piteous folk were there before them, and a nun giving bread to these through the square in the door. Garin and Audiart stood aside, waiting their turn. She gazed upon him, he upon her.

“Came you ever to a place like this,” she breathed, “in green and brown before?”

“I think that it is so, Jael the herd.”

“A squire in brown and green?”

He nodded, “Yes.”

Jael the herd put her hand over her eyes. “Truth my light! but our life is deep!”

The mendicants left the portal. The slide closed, making the door solid.

“Wait here,” said the herd-girl. “I will go knock. Wait here until you are called.”

She knocked, and the panel slid back. He heard her speaking to the sister and the latter answering. Then she spoke again, and, after a moment of hesitation, the door was opened. She entered; it[327] closed after her. He sat down on a stone bench beside the portal and watched the lacework of branches, great and small, over the blue. A cripple with a basket of fruit sat beside him and began to talk of jongleurs he had heard, and then of the times, which he said were hard. With his lameness, something in him brought Foulque to Garin’s mind. “Oh, ay!” said the cripple, “kings and dukes make work, but dull work that you die by and not live by! The court will buy my grapes, but—” He shrugged, then whistled and stretched in the sun.

“How stands Duke Richard in your eye?”

The cripple offered him a bunch of grapes. “Know you aught that could not be better, or that could not be worse?”

“Well answered!” said Garin. “I have interest in knowing how high at times can leap the better.”

“Higher than the court fool thinks,” said the cripple. He sat a little longer, then took his crutch and his basket of fruit and hobbled away toward the town.

Garin waited, musing. An hour passed, two hours, then the panel in the door slid back. A voice spoke, “Jongleur, you are to enter.”

The door opened. He passed through, when it closed behind him. The sister slipped before, grey and soundless as a moth, and led him over stone flooring and between stone walls, out of the widened space by the Abbey door, through a corridor that echoed to his footfall, subdue his footfall as he[328] might. This ended before a door set in an arch. The grey figure knocked; a woman’s voice within answered in Latin. The sister pushed the door open, stood aside, and he entered.

This, he knew at once, was the abbess’s room, then saw the Abbess Madeleine herself, and, sitting beside her, that one whose companion he had been for days and weeks. The herd-girl’s worn dress was still upon her, but she sat there, he saw, as the Princess of Roche-de-Frêne, as the friend, long-missed, of the pale Abbess. He made his reverence to the two.

The Abbess Madeleine spoke in a voice of a silvery tone, mellowing here and there into gold and kindness. “Sir Knight, you are welcome! I have heard a wondrous story, and God gave you a noble part to play.—Now will speak your liege, the princess.”

“Sir Garin de Castel-Noir,” said Audiart, “in Angoulême lodges a great lord and valiant knight, Count of Beauvoisin, a kinsman of the most Reverend Mother. She has written to him, to my great aiding. Take the letter, find him out, and give it to him, your hand into his. He will place you in his train, clothe you as knight again. Only rest still of Limousin, and, for all but this lord, choose a name not your own.” She mused a little, her eyes upon the letter, folded and sealed, that she held. “But I must know it—the name. Call yourself, then, the Knight of the Wood.” She held out the letter. He touched his knee to the stone floor and took it. “Go[329] now,” she said, “and the Saints have a true man in their keeping!”

The Abbess Madeleine, slender, pure-faced, of an age with the princess, extended her hand, gave the blessing of Mother Church. He rose, put the letter in the breast of his tunic, stepped backward from the two, and so left the room. Without was the grey sister who again went, moth-like, before him, leading him through the corridor to the Abbey door. She opened this—he passed out into the sunshine.

Back in Angoulême, the first man appealed to sent him to the court quarter of the town, the second gave him precise directions whereby he might know when he came to it the house that lodged the Count of Beauvoisin, here in Angoulême with Duke Richard. By a tangle of narrow streets Garin came to houses tall enough to darken these ways, in the shadow themselves of the huge castle. He found the greatest house, where was a porter at the door, and lounging about it a medley of the appendage sort. Jongleur’s art and his own suasive power got him entrance to a small court where gathered gayer, more important retainers. He sang for these, and heads looked out of windows. A page appeared with a summons to the hall. Following the youngster, Garin found himself among knights, well-nigh a score, awaiting in hall the count’s pleasure. Here, moreover, was a troubadour of fame not inconsiderable, knight as well, but not singer of his own[330] verses. He had with him two jongleurs for that, and these now looked somewhat greenly at Garin.

A knight spoke. “Jongleur, sing here as well as you sang below, and gain will come to you!” Garin sang. “Ha!” cried the knights, “they sing that way in Paradise!”

The troubadour advanced to the front of the group and bade him sing again. He obeyed. “Gold hair of Our Lady!” swore the troubadour. “How comes it that you are not jongleur to a poet?”

“I had a master,” answered Garin, “but he foreswore song and, chaining himself to a rock, became an eremite. Good sirs, if the Count might hear me—”

“He will be here anon from the castle. He shall hear you, jongleur, and so shall our Lord, Duke Richard! Springtime in Heaven!” quoth the troubadour. “I would take you into my employ, but though I can pay linnets, I cannot pay nightingales!—Do you know any song of Robert de Mercœur?”

He asked for his own. Garin, seeing that he did so, smiled and swept the strings of the lute. “Aye, I know more than one!” He sang, and did sweet words justice. The knights, each after his own fashion, gave applause, and Robert de Mercœur sighed with pleasure. The song was short. Garin lifted his voice in another, made by the same troubadour. “Ah!” sighed Robert, “I would buy you and feed you from my hand!” He sat for a moment[331] with closed eyes, tasting the bliss of right interpretation. Then, “Know you Garin of the Golden Isle’s, If e’er, Fair Goal, I turn my eyes from thee?”

Garin sang it. “Rose tree of the Soul!” said Robert de Mercœur; “there is the poet I would have fellowship with!”

The leaves of the great door opened, and there came into hall the Count of Beauvoisin, with him two or three famed knights. All who had been seated, or lounging half reclined, stood up; the silence of deference fell at once. Garin saw that the count was not old and that he had a look of the Abbess Madeleine. He said that he was weary from riding, and coming to his accustomed great chair, sat down and stretched himself with a sigh. His eyes fell upon the troubadour with whom he had acquaintance. “Ha, Robert! rest us with music.”

“Lord count,” said Robert, “we have here a jongleur with the angel of sound in his throat and the angel of intelligence in his head! Set him to singing.—Sing, jongleur, again, that which you have just sung.”

Garin touched his lute. As he did so he came near to the count. He stood and sang the song of Garin of the Golden Island. “Ah, ah!” said the Count of Beauvoisin. “The Saints fed you with honey in your cradle!” A coin gleamed between his outstretched fingers. Garin came very near to receive it. “Lord,” he whispered as he bent, “much hangs upon my speaking to you alone.”

[332]

A jongleur upon an embassy was never an unheard-of phenomenon. The Count moved so as to let the light fall upon this present jongleur’s face. The eyes of the two men met, the one in an enquiring, the other in a beseeching and compelling gaze. The count leaned back in his chair, the jongleur, when he had bowed low, moved to his original station. “He sings well indeed!” said the Count. “Give him place among his fellows, and when there is listening-space I will hear him again.”

Ere long he rose and was attended from the hall. The knights, too, left the place, each bent upon his own concerns. Only the troubadour Robert de Mercœur remained, and he came and, seating himself on the same bench with Garin, asked if he would be taught a just-composed alba or morning song, and upon the other’s word of assent forthwith repeated the first stanza. Garin said it over after him. “Ha, jongleur!” quoth Robert, “you are worthy to be a troubadour! Not all can give values value! The second goes thus—”

But before the alba was wholly learned came a page, summoning the jongleur. Garin, following the boy, came into the count’s chamber. Here was that lord, none with him but a chamberlain whom he sent away. “Now, jongleur,” said the count, “what errand and by whom despatched?”

Garin drew the letter from his tunic and gave it, his hand into the other’s hand. The count looked at the writing. “What is here?” he said. “Does the[333] Abbess Madeleine choose a jongleur for a messenger?” He broke the seal, read the first few lines, glanced at the body of the letter, then with a startled look, followed by a knit brow, laid it upon the table beside him but kept his hand over it. He stood in a brown study. Garin, watching him, divined that mind and heart and memory were busied elsewhere than in just this house in Angoulême. At last he moved, turned his head and spoke to the page. “Ammonet!” Ammonet came from the door. “Take this jongleur to some chamber where he may rest. Have food and wine sent to him there.” He spoke to Garin, “Go! but I shall send for you here again!”

The day descended to evening, the evening to night. Darkness had prevailed for a length of time when Ammonet returned to the small, bare room where Garin rested, stretched upon a bench. “Come, jongleur!” said the page. “My lord is ready for bed and would, methinks, be sung to sleep.”

Rising, he followed, and came again to the Count’s chamber, where now was firelight and candle-light, and the Count of Beauvoisin in a furred robe, pacing the room from side to side. “Wait without,” he said to Ammonet, and the two men were alone together. The count paced the floor, Garin stood by the hooded fireplace. He had seen in the afternoon that he and this lord might understand each other.

The count spoke. “No marvel that we liked your singing! What if there had been in hall knight and crusader who had heard you beyond the sea?”

[334]

“Chance, risk, and brambles grow in every land.”

“Garin of the Golden Island.—I know not who, in Angoulême, may know that you fight with Roche-de-Frêne. Duke Richard, who knows somewhat of all troubadours, knows it.”

“I do not mean to cry it aloud.—Few in this country know my face, and my name stays hidden.—May we speak, my lord count, of another presence in Angoulême?”

The other ceased his pacing, flung himself down on a seat before the fire, and leaned forward with clasped hands and bent head. He sat thus for an appreciable time, then with a deep breath straightened himself. “When she was the Lady Madeleine the Abbess Madeleine ruled a great realm in my life. God knoweth, in much she is still my helm!... Sit you down and let us talk.”

[335]