Chivalry Read Free Page A

facilely
imagine—have left the weakling thus enthroned, free to direct the heavy
outcome, free to choose, and free to evoke much happiness or age-long
weeping, but with no intermediate course unbarred.
Now prove thyself
!
saith Destiny; and Chance appends:
Now prove thyself to be at bottom a
god or else a beast, and now eternally abide that choice. And now
(O
crowning irony!)
we may not tell thee clearly by which choice thou
mayst prove either
.
    In this little book about the women who intermarried, not very enviably,
with an unhuman race (a race predestinate to the red ending which I have
chronicled elsewhere, in
The Red Cuckold
), it is of ten such moments
that I treat.
    You alone, I think, of all persons living, have learned, as you have
settled by so many instances, to rise above mortality in such a testing,
and unfailingly to merit by your conduct the plaudits and the adoration
of our otherwise dissentient world. You have often spoken in the stead
of Destiny, with nations to abide your verdict; and in so doing have
both graced and hallowed your high vicarship. If I forbear to speak of
this at greater length, it is because I dare not couple your well-known
perfection with any imperfect encomium. Upon no plea, however, can any
one forbear to acknowledge that he who seeks to write of noble ladies
must necessarily implore at outset the patronage of her who is the light
and mainstay of our age.
    Therefore to you, madame—most excellent and noble lady, to whom I love
to owe both loyalty and love—I dedicate this little book.

I - The Story of the Sestina
*
    "Armatz de fust e de fer e d'acier, Mos ostal seran bosc, fregz,
e semdier, E mas cansos sestinas e descortz, E mantenrai los frevols
contra 'ls fortz."
    THE FIRST NOVEL.—ALIANORA OF PROVENCE, COMING IN DISGUISE AND IN
ADVERSITY TO A CERTAIN CLERK, IS BY HIM CONDUCTED ACROSS A HOSTILE
COUNTRY; AND IN THAT TROUBLED JOURNEY ARE MADE MANIFEST TO EACH THE
SNARES WHICH HAD BEGUILED THEM AFORETIME.
The Story of the Sestina
    In this place we have to do with the opening tale of the Dizain of
Queens. I abridge, as afterward, at discretion; and an initial account
of the Barons' War, among other superfluities, I amputate as more
remarkable for veracity than interest. The result, we will agree at
outset, is that to the Norman cleric appertains whatever these tales may
have of merit, whereas what you find distasteful in them you must impute
to my delinquencies in skill rather than in volition.
    Within the half hour after de Giars' death (here one overtakes Nicolas
mid-course in narrative) Dame Alianora thus stood alone in the corridor
of a strange house. Beyond the arras the steward and his lord were at
irritable converse.
    First, "If the woman be hungry," spoke a high and peevish voice, "feed
her. If she need money, give it to her. But do not annoy me."
    "This woman demands to see the master of the house," the steward then
retorted.
    "O incredible Boeotian, inform her that the master of the house has no
time to waste upon vagabonds who select the middle of the night as an
eligible time to pop out of nowhere. Why did you not do so in the
beginning, you dolt?" The speaker got for answer only a deferential
cough, and very shortly continued: "This is remarkably vexatious.
Vox
et praeterea nihil
—which signifies, Yeck, that to converse with women
is always delightful. Admit her." This was done, and Dame Alianora came
into an apartment littered with papers, where a neat and shriveled
gentleman of fifty-odd sat at a desk and scowled.
    He presently said, "You may go, Yeck." He had risen, the magisterial
attitude with which he had awaited her entrance cast aside. "Oh, God!"
he said; "you, madame!" His thin hands, scholarly hands, were plucking
at the air.
    Dame Alianora had paused, greatly astonished, and there was an interval
before she said, "I do not recognize you, messire."
    "And yet, madame, I recall very clearly that some thirty years ago the
King-Count Raymond Berenger, then