Chapter III: Part ONE: The End of Long Wanting (1)

“_Lever un tel obstacle est à moy peu de chose.
Le Ciel défend, de vray, certains contentemens;
Mais on trouve avec luy des accommodemens._”

_1._

_The Child Errant_

Probably Florian would never have gone into the Forest of Acaire had he not been told, over and over again, to keep out of it. Obedience to those divinely set in authority was in 1698 still modish: none the less, such orders, so insistently repeated to any normal boy of ten, even to a boy not born of the restless house of Puysange, must make the venture at one time or another obligatory.

Moreover, this October afternoon was of the sun-steeped lazy sort which shows the world as over-satisfied with the done year’s achievements, of the sort which, when you think about it so long, arouses a dim dissent from such unambitious aims. It was not that the young Prince de Lisuarte—to give Florian his proper title,—was in any one point dissatisfied with the familiar Poictesme immediately about him: he liked it well enough. It was only that he preferred another place, which probably existed somewhere, and which was not familiar or even known to him. It was only that you might—here one approximates to Florian’s vague thinking, as he lay yawning under the little tree from the East,—that you might find more excitement in some place which strove toward larger upshots than the ripening of grains and fruits, in a world which did not every autumn go to sleep as if the providing of food-stuffs and the fodder for people’s cattle were enough.

To-day, with October’s temperate sunlight everywhere, the sleek country of Poictesme was inexpressibly asleep, wrapped in a mellowing haze. The thronged trees of Acaire, as Florian now saw them just beyond that low red wall, seemed to have golden powder scattered over them, a powder which they stayed too motionless to shake off. Yet logic told him these still trees most certainly veiled wild excitements of some sort, for otherwise people would not be at you, over and over again, with exhortations to keep out of that forest.

Nobody was watching. There was nothing in especial to do, for Florian had now read all the stories in this curious new book, by old Monsieur Perrault of the Academy, which Florian’s father had last month fetched back from Paris: and, besides, nobody at Storisende had, for as much as a week, absolutely told Florian not to leave the gardens. So he adventured: and with the achievement of the adventure came a strengthening of Florian’s growing conviction that his elders were in their notions, as a rule, illogical.

For in Acaire, even when you went as far as Brunbelois, the boy found nothing hurtful. It was true that, had he not at the beginning of his wandering met with the small bright-haired woman who guided him thereafter, he might have made mistakes: and mistakes, as Mélusine acknowledged, might have turned out awkwardly in approaching the high place, since monsters have to be handled in just the right way. She explained to Florian, on that warm long October afternoon, that sympathy is the main requisite, because the main trouble with such monsters as the bleps and the strycophanês and the calcar (she meant only the gray one, of course) is that each is unique, and in consequence lonely.

The hatred men feel for every ravening monster that wears fangs and scales, she pointed out, is due to its apparel being not quite the sort of thing to which men are accustomed: whereas people were wholly used to having soldiers and prelates and statesmen ramping about in droves, and so viewed these without any particular wonder or disapproval. All that was needed, then, was to extend to the bleps and the strycophanês a little of the confidence and admiration which men everywhere else accorded to the destroyers of mankind; and you would soon see that these glittering creatures—as well as the tawny eale, and the leucrocotta, with its golden mane and whiskers, and the opal-colored tarandus,—were a great deal nicer to look at than the most courted and run-after people, and much less apt to destroy anybody outside of their meal hours.

In any event, it was Mélusine who had laid an enchantment upon the high place in the midst of the wood, and who had set the catoblepas here and the mantichora yonder to prevent the lifting of her spell, so that Florian could not possibly have found a better guide than Mélusine. She was kindly, you saw, but not very happy: and from the first, Florian liked and, in some sort, pitied her. So he rode with her confidingly, upon the back of the queerest steed that any boy of ten had ever been privileged to look at, not to speak of riding on it: and the two talked lazily and friendlily as they went up and up, and always upward, along the windings of the green way which long ago had been a road.

As they went, the body of this sweet-smelling Mélusine was warm and soft against his body, for Mélusine was not imprisoned in hard-feeling clothes such as were worn by your governesses and aunts. The monsters stationed along the way drew back as Mélusine passed; and some purred ingratiatingly, like gigantic kettles, and others made obeisances: and you met no other living creatures except three sheep that lay in the roadway asleep and very dingy with the dust of several hundred years. No self-respecting monster would have touched them. Thus Florian and Mélusine came through the forest without any hindrance or trouble, to the cleft in the mountain tops where the castle stood beside a lake: and Florian liked the stillness of all things in this high place, where the waters of the lake were without a ripple, and the tall grass and so many mist-white flowers were motionless.

He liked it even more when Mélusine led him through such rooms in the castle as took his fancy. He was glad that Mélusine did not mind when Florian confessed the sleeping princess—in the room hung everywhere with curtains upon which people hunted a tremendous boar, and stuck spears through one another, and burst forth into peculiarly solid-looking yellow flames,—seemed to him even more lovely than was Mélusine. They were very much alike, though, the boy said: and Mélusine told him that was not unnatural, since Melior was her sister. And then, when Florian asked questions, Mélusine told him also of the old unhappiness that had been in this place, and of the reasons which had led her to put an enduring peacefulness upon her parents and her sister and all the other persons who slept here enchanted.

Florian had before to-day heard century-old tales about Mélusine’s father, Helmas the Deep-Minded. So it was very nice actually to see him here in bed, with his scarlet and ermine robes neatly folded on the armchair, and his crown, with a long feather in it, hung on a peg in the wall, just as the King had left everything when he went to sleep several hundred years ago. The child found it all extremely interesting, quite like a fairy tale such as those which he had lately been reading in the book by old Monsieur Perrault of the Academy.

But what Florian always remembered most clearly, afterward, was the face of the sleeping princess, Melior, as he saw it above the coverlet of violet-colored wool; and she seemed to him so lovely that Florian was never wholly willing, afterward, to admit she was but part of a dream which had come to him in his sleeping, on that quiet haze-wrapped afternoon, in the gardens of his own home. Certainly his father had found him asleep, by the bench under the little tree from the East, and Florian could not clearly recollect how he had got back to Storisende: but he remembered Brunbelois and his journeying to the high place and the people seen there and, above all, the Princess Melior, with a clarity not like his memories of other dreams. Nor did the memory of her loveliness quite depart as Florian became older, and neither manhood nor marriage put out of his mind the beauty that he in childhood had, however briefly, seen.

_2._

_Sayings about Puysange_

When Florian awakened he was lying upon the ground, with the fairy tales of Monsieur Perrault serving for Florian’s pillow, in the gardens of Storisende, just by the little tree raised from the slip which his great-uncle, the Admiral, had brought from the other side of the world. Nobody knew the right name of this tree: it was called simply the tree from the East. Caterpillars had invaded it that autumn, and had eaten every leaf from the boughs, and then had gone away: but after their going the little tree had optimistically put forth again, in the mild October weather, so that the end of each bare branch was now tipped with a small futile budding of green.

It was upon the bench beneath this tree that Florian’s father was sitting. Monsieur de Puysange had laid aside his plumed three-cornered hat, and as he sat there, all a subdued magnificence of dark blue and gold, he was looking down smilingly at the young lazibones whom the Duke’s foot was gently prodding into wakefulness. The Duke was wearing blue stockings with gold clocks, as Florian was to remember....

Not until manhood did Florian appreciate his father, and come properly to admire the exactness with which the third Duke of Puysange had kept touch with his times. Under the Sun King’s first mistress Gaston de Puysange had cultivated sentiment, under the second, warfare, and under the third, religion: he had thus stayed always in the sunshine. It was Florian’s lot to know his father only during the last period, so the boy’s youth as spent dividedly at the Duke’s two châteaux, at Storisende and at Bellegarde, lacked for no edifying influence. The long summer days at Storisende were diversified with all appropriate religious instruction. In winter the atmosphere of Versailles itself—where the long day of Louis Quatorze seemed now to be ending in a twilight of stately serenity through which the old King went deathward, handsomely sustained by his consciousness of a well-spent life and by the reverent homage of all his bastards,—was not more pious than was that of Bellegarde.

Let none suppose that Monsieur de Puysange affected superhuman austerities. Rather, he exercised tact. If he did not keep all fast-days, he never failed to secure the proper dispensations, nor to see that his dependants fasted scrupulously: and if he sometimes, even now, was drawn into argument, Monsieur de Puysange was not ever known after any lethal duel to omit the ordering of a mass, at the local Church of Holy Hoprig, for his adversary’s soul. “There are amenities,” he would declare, “imperative among well-bred Christians.”

Then too, when left a widower at the birth of his second legitimate son, the Duke did not so far yield to the temptings of the flesh as to take another wife; for he confessed to scruples if marriage, which the Scriptures assert to be unknown in heaven, could anywhere be a quite laudable estate: but he saw to it that his boys were tended by a succession of good-looking and amiable governesses. His priests also were kept sleek, and his confessor unshocked, by the Duke’s tireless generosity to the Church; and were all of unquestioned piety, which they did not carry to excess. In fine, with youth and sentiment, and the discomforts of warfare also, put well behind him, the good gentleman had elected to live discreetly, among reputable but sympathetic companions....

When Florian told his father now about Florian’s delightful adventure in Acaire, the Duke smiled: and he said that, in this dream begotten by Florian’s late reading of the fairy tales of Monsieur Perrault, Florian had been peculiarly privileged.

“For Madame Mélusine is not often encountered nowadays, my son. She was once well known in this part of Poictesme. But it was a long while ago she quarreled with her father, the wise King Helmas, and imprisoned him with all his court in the high place that ought not to be. Yet Mélusine, let me tell you, was properly punished for her unfilial conduct; since upon every Sunday after that, her legs were turned to fishes’ tails, and they stayed thus until Monday. This put the poor lady to great inconvenience: and when she eventually married, it led to a rather famous misunderstanding with her husband. And so he died unhappily; but she did not die, because she was of the Léshy, born of a people who are not immortal but are more than human—”

“Of course I know she did not die, monsieur my father. Why, it was only this afternoon I talked with her. I liked her very much. But she is not so pretty as Melior.”

It seemed to Florian that the dark curls of his father’s superb peruke now framed a smiling which was almost sad. “Perhaps there will never be in your eyes anybody so pretty as Melior. I am sure that you have dreamed all this, jumbling together in your dreaming old Monsieur Perrault’s fine story of the sleeping princess—La Belle au Bois Dormant,—with our far older legends of Poictesme—”

“I do not think that it was just a dream, monsieur my father—”

“But I, unluckily, am sure it was, my son. And I suspect, too, that it is the dream which comes in varying forms to us of Puysange, the dream which we do not ever quite put out of mind. We stay, to the last, romantics. So Melior, it may be, will remain to you always that unattainable beauty toward which we of Puysange must always yearn,—just as your patron St. Hoprig will always afford to you, in his glorious life and deeds, an example which you will admire and, I trust, emulate. I admit that such emulation,” the Duke added, more drily, “has not always been inescapable by us of Puysange.”

“I cannot hope to be so good as was Monseigneur St. Hoprig,” Florian replied, “but I shall endeavor to merit his approval.”

“Indeed, you should have dreamed of the blessed Hoprig also, while you were about it, Florian. For he was a close friend of your Melior’s father, you may remember, and performed many miracles at the court of King Helmas.”

“That is true,” said Florian. “Oxen brought him there in a stone trough: and I am sure that Monseigneur St. Hoprig must have loved Melior very much.”

And he did not say any more about what his father seemed bent upon regarding as Florian’s dream. At ten a boy has learned to humor the notions of his elders. Florian slipped down from the bench, and tucked his book under his arm, and agreed with his father that it was near time for supper.

None the less, though, as the boy stood waiting for that magnificent father of his to arise from the bench, Florian reflected how queer it was that, before the falling of the Nis magic, this beautiful Melior must have known and talked with Florian’s heavenly patron, St. Hoprig of Gol. It was to Holy Hoprig that Florian’s mother had commended the boy with her last breath, and it was to Holy Hoprig that Florian’s father had taught the boy to pray in all time of doubt or peccadillo, because this saint was always to be the boy’s protector and advocate. And this made heaven seem very near and real, the knowledge that always in celestial courts this bright friend was watching, and, Florian hoped, was upon occasion tactfully suggesting to the good God that one must not be too severe with growing boys. Melior—Florian thought now,—was remotely and half timidly to be worshipped: Hoprig, the friend and intercessor,—a being even more kindly and splendid than was your superb father,—you loved....

Florian had by heart all the legends about Holy Hoprig. Particularly did Florian rejoice in the tale of the saint’s birth, in such untoward circumstances as caused the baby to be placed in a barrel, and cast into the sea, to be carried whither wind and tide directed. Florian knew that for ten years the barrel floated, tossing up and down in all parts of the ocean, while regularly an angel passed the necessary food to young Hoprig through the bung-hole. Finally, at Heaven’s chosen time, the barrel rolled ashore near Manneville, on the low sands of Fomor Beach. A fisherman, thinking that he had found a cask of wine, was about to tap it with a gimlet; then from within, for the first time, St. Hoprig speaks to man: “Do not injure the cask. Go at once to the abbot of the monastery to which this land belongs, and bid him come to baptize me.”

It seemed to Florian that was a glorious start in life for a boy of ten, a boy of just the same age as Florian. All the later miracles and prodigies appeared, in comparison with that soul-contenting moment, to be compact of paler splendors. Nobody, though, could hear unenviously of the long voyage to the Red Islands and the realm of Hlif, and to Pohjola, and even to the gold-paved Strembölgings, where every woman contains a serpent so placed as to discourage love-making,—of that pre-eminently delightful voyage made by St. Hoprig and St. Hork in the stone trough, which, after its landing upon the coasts of Poictesme, at mid-winter, during a miraculous shower of apple-blossoms, white oxen drew through the country hillward, with the two saints by turns preaching and converting people all the way to Perdigon. For that, Florian remembered, was the imposing fashion in which Holy Hoprig had come to the court of Melior’s father,—and had wrought miracles there also, to the discomfiture of the abominable Horrig. But more important, now, was the reflection that St. Hoprig had in this manner come to Melior and to the unimaginable beauty which, in the high place, a coverlet of violet stuff just half concealed....

Certainly Monseigneur St. Hoprig must have loved Melior very much, and these two must have been very marvelous when they went about a more heroic and more splendid world than Florian could hope ever to inhabit. It was of their beauty and holiness that the boy thought, with a dumb yearning to be not in all unworthy of these bright, dear beings. That was the longing—to be worthy,—which possessed Florian as he stood waiting for his father to rise from the bench beneath the little tree from the East. There, the Duke also seemed to meditate, about something rather pleasant.

“You said just now, monsieur my father,” Florian stated, a trifle worried, “that we of Puysange have not always imitated the good examples of St. Hoprig. Have we been very bad?”

Monsieur de Puysange had put on his plumed hat, but he stayed seated. He appeared now, as grown people so often do, amused for no logical or conceivable reason: though, indeed, the Duke seemed to find most living creatures involuntarily amusing.

He said: “We have displayed some hereditary foibles. For it is the boast of the house of Puysange that we trace in the direct male line from Poictesme’s old Jurgen. That ancient wanderer, says our legend, somehow strayed into the bed-chamber of Madame Félise de Puysange; and the result of his errancy was the vicomte who flourished under the last Capets.”

Young Florian, in accord with the quaint custom of the day, had been reared without misinformation as to how or whence children came into the world. So he said only, if a little proudly, “Yes,—he was another Florian, I remember, like me.”

“There were queer tales about this first Florian, also, who is reputed to have vanished the moment he was married, and to have re-appeared here, at Storisende, some thirty years later, with his youth unimpaired. He declared himself to have slept out the intervening while,—an excuse for remissness in his marital duties which sceptics have considered both hackneyed and improbable.”

“Well,” Florian largely considered, “but then there is Sir Ogier still asleep in Avalon until France has need of him; and John the Divine is still sleeping at Ephesus until it is time to bear his witness against Antichrist; and there is Merlin in Broceliande, and there is St. Joseph of Arimathæa in the white city of Sarras—and really, monsieur my father, there is Melior, and all the rest of King Helmas’ people up at Brunbelois.”

“Are you still dreaming of your Melior, tenacious child! Certainly you are logical, you cite good precedents for your namesake, and to adhere to logic and precedent is always safe. I hope you will remember that.”

“I shall remember that, monsieur my father.”

“Certainly, too, this story of persons who sleep for a miraculous while is common to all parts of the world. This Florian de Puysange, in any event, married a granddaughter of the great Dom Manuel; so that we descend from the two most famous of the heroes of Poictesme: but, I fancy, it is from Jurgen that our family has inherited the larger number of its traits.”

“Anyhow, we have risen from just being vicomtes—”

Florian’s father had leaned back, he had put off his provisional plan of going in to supper. You could not say that the good gentleman exactly took pride in his ancestry: rather, he found his lineage worthy of him, and therefore he benevolently approved of it.

So he said now, complacently enough: “Yes, our house has prospered. Steadily our fortunes have been erected, and in dignity too we have been erected. Luck seems to favor us, however, most heartily when a woman rules France, and it is to exalted ladies that we owe most of our erections. Thus Queen Ysabeau the Bavarian notably advanced the Puysange of her time, very much as Anne of Beaujeu and Catherine de Medici did afterward. Many persons have noted the coincidence. Indeed, it was only sixty years ago that Marion de Lorme spoke privately to the Great Cardinal, with such eloquence that the Puysange of the day—another Florian, and a notably religious person,—had presently been made a duke, with an appropriate estate in the south—”

“I know,” said Florian, not a bit humble about his erudition. “That is how we came to be here in Poictesme. Mademoiselle de Lorme was a very kind lady, was she not, monsieur my father?”

“She was so famed, my son, for all manner of generosity that when my grandfather remodeled Bellegarde, and erected the Hugonet wing of the present château, he sealed up in the cornerstone, just as people sometimes place there the relics of a saint, both of Mademoiselle de Lorme’s garters. Probably there was some salutary story connected with his acquiring of them; for my pious grandfather cared nothing for such vanities as jeweled garters, his mind being wholly set upon higher things.”

“I wish we knew that story,” said Florian.

“But nobody does. My grandfather was discreet. So he thrived. And his son, who was my honored father, also thrived under the regency of Anne of Austria. He thrived rather unaccountably in the teeth of Mazarin’s open dislike. There was some story—I do not know what,—about a nightcap found under the Queen’s pillow, and considered by his eminence to need some explaining. My honored father was never good at explaining things. But he was discreet, and he thrived. And I too, my son, was lucky in Madame de Montespan’s time.”

Now Madame de Montespan’s time antedated Florian’s thinking: but about the King’s last mistress,—and morganatic wife, some said,—Florian was better informed.

“Madame de Maintenon also is very fond of you, monsieur my father, is she not?”

The Duke slightly waved his hand, as one who disclaims unmerited tribute. “It was my privilege to know that incomparable lady during her first husband’s life. He was a penniless cripple who had lost the use of all his members, and in that time of many wants I was so lucky as to comfort Madame Scarron now and then. Madame de Maintenon remembers these alleviations of her unfortunate youth, and notes with approval that I have forgotten them utterly. So Madame is very kind. In short,—or, rather, to sum up the tale,—the lords of Puysange are rumored, by superstitious persons, to have a talisman which enables them to go farther than may most men in their dealings with ladies.”

“You mean, like a magic lamp or a wishing cap?” said Florian, “or like a wizard’s wand?”

“Yes, something in that shape,” the Duke answered, “and they tell how through its proper employment, always under the great law of living, our house has got much pleasure and prosperity. And it is certain the Collyn aids us at need—”

“What is the Collyn?”

“Nothing suitable for a boy of ten to know about. When you are a man I shall have to tell you, Florian. That will be soon enough.”

“And what, monsieur my father, is this great law of living?”

The Duke looked for a while at his son rather queerly. “Thou shalt not offend,” the Duke replied, “against the notions of thy neighbor.”

With that he was silent: and, rising at last from the bench, he walked across the lawn, and ascended the broad curving marble stairway which led to the south terrace of Storisende. And Florian, following, was for an instant quiet, and a little puzzled.

“Yes, monseigneur my father, but I do not see—”

The Duke turned, an opulent figure in dark blue and gold. He was standing by one of the tall vases elaborately carved with garlands, the vases that in summer overflowed with bright red and yellow flowers: these vases were now empty, and the gardeners had replaced the carved lids.

“Youth never sees the reason of that law, my son. I am wholly unprepared to say whether or not this is a lucky circumstance.” The Duke again paused, looking thoughtfully across the terrace, toward the battlemented walls and the four towers of the southern façade. His gazing seemed to go well beyond the fountain and the radiating low hedges and gravelled walkways of the terrace, to go beyond, for that matter, the darkening castle. Twilight was rising: you saw a light in one window. “At all events, we are home again, young dreamer. I too was once a dreamer. And at all events, there is Little Brother waiting for us.”

_3._

_Widowers Seek Consolation_

Little brother was indeed waiting for them, at the arched doorway, impatient of his governess’ restraint. At sight of them he began telling, coincidently, of how hungry he was, and of how he had helped old Margot to milk a cow that afternoon, and of how a courier was waiting for Monsieur my Father in great long boots, up to here. The trifold tale was confusing, for at eight little Raoul could not yet speak plainly. His sleeve was torn, and he had a marvelously dirty face.

Behind him stood pallid pretty Mademoiselle Berthe, the governess who a trifle later, during the next winter, killed herself. She had already begun bewailing her condition to the Duke, even while she obstinately would have none of the various husbands whom her kindly patron recommended, from among his dependants, as ready to make that condition respectable. There seemed no pleasing the girl, and Florian could see that his father, for all his uniform benevolence, regarded her as a nuisance.

But the Duke now gazed down, at the pale frightened-looking creature, with that fine condescending smile which he accorded almost everybody. “Mademoiselle, children are a grave responsibility. I have just found Florian asleep in the mud yonder, whereas you have evidently just plucked this other small pest from the pig-sty. It is lucky that we have no more brats to contend with, Mademoiselle, for the present, is it not?”

Florian wondered, long afterward, how Mademoiselle had looked, and what she replied. He could not recollect. But he did remember that at this instant Little Brother ran from her and hugged first one of his father’s superb legs and then Florian. Little Brother was warm and tough-feeling and astonishingly strong, and he smelled of clean earth.

Florian loved him very much, and indeed the affection between the two brothers endured until the end of their intercourse. Florian was always consciously the elder and wiser, and felt himself the stronger long after Raoul had become taller than Florian. Even after Raoul was well on in his thirties, and both the boys had boys of their own, Florian still thought of the Chevalier de Puysange as a little brother with a dirty face and a smell of clean earth, whom you loved and patronized, and from whom you had one secret only. For of course you never told Raoul about Melior.

You spoke to nobody about Melior. You found it wiser and more delicious to retain all knowledge of her loveliness for entirely private consideration, and thus not be bothered with people’s illogical notion that Melior was only a dream.

For the memory of the Princess Melior’s loveliness did not depart as Florian became older, and neither manhood nor marriage could put quite out of mind the beauty that he had in childhood, however briefly, seen. Other women came and in due season went. His wives indeed seemed to die with a sort of uniform prematureness in which the considerate found something of fatality: nor did the social conventions of the day permit a Puysange to shirk amusing himself with yet other women. Florian amused himself so liberally, once his father was dead, and the former Prince de Lisuarte had succeeded to the major title and to his part of the estates, that they of Bellegarde were grieved when it was known that the fourth Duke of Puysange now planned to marry for the fifth time.

At Florian’s château of Bellegarde, affairs had sped very pleasantly since the death of his last wife, and the packing off of his son to Storisende. Storisende, by the old Duke’s will, had fallen to Raoul. Affairs had sped so pleasantly, they said at Bellegarde, that it seemed a deplorable risk for monseigneur to be marrying a woman who might, conceivably, be forthwith trying to reclaim him from all fashionable customs. Besides, he was upon this occasion marrying a daughter of the house of Nérac, just as his brother the Chevalier had done. And this was a ruiningly virtuous family, a positively dowdy family who hardly seemed to comprehend—they said at Bellegarde,—that we were now living in the modern world of 1723, and that fashions had altered since the old King’s death.

“For how long, little monster, will this new toy amuse you?” asked Mademoiselle Cécile. It appears unfair here to record that at nine o’clock in the morning they were not yet up and about the day’s duties, without recording also, in palliation of such seeming laziness, that there was no especial need to hurry, for all of mademoiselle’s trunks had been packed overnight, and she was not to leave Bellegarde until noon.

“Parbleu, one never knows,” Florian replied, as he lay smiling lazily at the smiling cupids who held up the bed-canopies. “It is a very beautiful feature of my character that at thirty-five I am still the optimist. When I marry I always believe the ceremony to begin a new and permanent era.”

“Oh, very naturally, since everywhere that frame of mind is considered appropriate to a bridegroom.” The girl had turned her sleek brown head a little, resting it more comfortably upon the pillow, and she regarded Florian with appraising eyes. “My friend, in this, as in much else, I find your subserviency to convention almost excessive. It becomes a notorious mania with you to do nothing whatever without the backing of logic and good precedent—”

“My father, mademoiselle, impressed upon me a great while ago the philosophy of these virtues.”

“Yes, all that is very fine. Yet I at times suspect your logic and your precedents to be in reality patched-up excuses for following the moment’s whim: or else I seem to see you adjusting them, like colored spectacles, to improve in your eyes the appearance of that which you have in hand.”

“Now you misjudge me, mademoiselle, with the ruthlessness of intimate personal acquaintance—”

“But indeed, indeed, those precedents which you educe are often rather far-fetched. You are much too ready to refer us to the customs of the Visigoths, or to cite the table-talk of Aristotle, or to appeal to the rulings of Quintilian. It sounds well: I concede that. Yet these, and the similar sonorous pedantries with which you are so glib to justify your pranks, do not, my friend, let me assure you, seem always wholly relevant to the conditions of modern life—”

“My race descends from a most notable scholar, mademoiselle, and it well may be the great Jurgen has bequeathed to me some flavor of his unique erudition. For that I certainly need not apologize—”

“No, you should rather apologize because that ancient hero appears also to have bequeathed to you a sad tendency to self-indulgence in matrimony. Now to get married has always seemed to me an indelicate advertising of one’s intentions: and I assuredly cannot condone in anybody a selfish habit which to-day leads to my being turned out of doors—”

“A pest! you talk as if I too did not sincerely regret those social conventions which make necessary your departure—”

“Yet it is you who evoke those silly conventions by marrying again.”

“—But in a grave matter like matrimony one must not be obstinate and illiberal. Raoul assures me, you conceive, that his little sister-in-law is a delightful creature. He thinks that as a co-heiress of Nérac, without any meddlesome male relatives, she is the person logically suited to be my wife. And I like to indulge the dear fellow’s wishes.”

“Behold a fine sample of your indulgence of others, by marrying a great fortune! After all, though,” Cécile reflected, philosophically, “I would not change shoes with her. For it is not wholesome, my friend, to be your wife. But it has been eminently pleasant to be your playfellow.”

Florian smiled. And Florian somewhat altered his position.

“_Bels dous amicx_,” sang Florian, softly, “_fassam un joc novel—!_”

“I must ask for some explanation of, at least,” Cécile stated, with that light, half-muffled laugh which Florian found adorable, “your words.”

“I was about to sing, mademoiselle, a very ancient aubade. I was beginning a morning-song such as each lover in the days of troubadours was used, here in Poictesme, to sing to his mistress at arising.”

“So that, now you are, as I perceive, arising, you plan to honor the old custom? That is well enough for you, who are a Duke of Puysange, and who have so much respect for precedent and logic. But I am not logical, I am, as you can see, a woman. Moreover, I am modern in all, I abhor antiquity. I find it particularly misplaced in a bedroom. And so, my friend, I must entreat you, whatever you do, not to sing any of those old songs, which may, for anything I know, have some improper significance.”

Florian humored this young lady’s rather strict notions of propriety, and they for a while stopped talking. Then they parted with a friendly kiss, and they dressed each for travelling: and Mademoiselle Cécile rode south upon a tentative visit to Cardinal Borgia, whose proffered benefactions had thus far been phrased with magniloquence and vagueness. This fair girl had the religious temperament, and she delighted in submitting herself to her spiritual fathers, but she required some daily comforts also.

Florian next sent for the boy Gian Paolo, who had now for seven months been Florian’s guest. “I am marrying,” said Florian. “We must part, Gian Paolo.”

“Do you think so?” the boy said. “Ah, but you would regret me!”

“Regretting would become a lost art if people did not sometimes do their duty. Now that I am about to take a wife, you comprehend, I shall for the while be more or less pre-empted by my bride. It is unlikely that I shall be able, at all events during the first ardors of the honeymoon, to entertain my friends with any adequacy. Let us be logical, dear Gian Paolo! I find no fault in you, beloved boy, I concede you to be fit friend for an emperor. It is merely that the advent of my new duchess now compels me to ensure the privacy of our honeymoon by parting, however regretfully, with Mademoiselle Cécile and with you also.”

“Your decision does not surprise me, Florian, for they say that you have parted with many persons who loved you, and who left you—”

“Yes?” said Florian.

“—Very suddenly—”

“Yes?” Florian said, again.

“—And yet without their departure surprising you at all, dear Florian.”

“Oh, it is merely that in moments of extreme anguish I attempt to control my emotions, and to give them no undignified display,” said Florian. “Doubtless, I was as surprised as anybody. Well, but this foolish gossip of this very censorious neighborhood does not concern us, Gian Paolo: and, now that you too are about to go, I can assure you that all your needs”—here for an instant Florian hesitated,—“have been provided for.”

“Indeed, I see that you have wine set ready. Is it”—and the boy smiled subtly, for he was confident of his power over Florian,—“is it my stirrup-cup, dear Florian?”

Florian now looked full upon him. “Yes,” Florian said, rather sadly. Then they drank, but not of the same wine, to the new Duchess of Puysange. And the boy Gian Paolo died without pain.

“It is better so,” said Florian. “Time would have spoiled your beauty. Time would have spoiled your joy in life, Gian Paolo, and would have shaken your fond belief that I was your slave in everything. Time lay in wait to travesty this velvet chin with a harsh beard, to waken harsh doubtings in the merry heart, and to abate your lovely perversities with harsh repentance. For time ruins all, but you escape him, dear Gian Paolo, unmarred.”

Now Florian was smiling wistfully, for he found heartache in this thinking of the evanescence of beauty everywhere, and heartache too in thinking of the fate of that charming old lady, La Tophania, who had been so kind to him in Naples. For Florian could rarely make use of her recipes without recollecting how cruelly the mob had dealt with his venerable instructress: that was, he knew, a sentimental side to his nature, which he could never quite restrain. So he now thought sadly of this stately old-world gentlewoman, so impiously dragged from a convent and strangled, now four years ago, because of her charity toward those who were afflicted by the longevity of others. Yes, life was wasteful, sparing nobody, not even one who was so wise and amiable as La Tophania, nor so lovable as Gian Paolo. The thought depressed him: such wastefulness was illogical: and it seemed to Florian, too, that this putting of his household into fit order for the reception of his bride was not wholly a merry business.

Then Florian, stroking the dead hand which was as yet soft and warm, said gently: “And though I have slain you, dear Gian Paolo, rather than see you depart from me to become the friend of another, and perhaps to talk with him indiscreetly after having learned more about me than was wise, I have at worst not offended against convention, nor have I run counter to the fine precedents of the old time. Just so did the great Alexander deal with his Clitus, and Hadrian with his Antinous; nor did divine Apollo give any other parting gift to Hyacinthos, his most dear friend. Now the examples afforded us by ancient monarchs and by the heathen gods should not, perhaps, be followed blindly. Indeed, we should in logic remember always that all these were pagans, unsustained by the promptings of true faith, and therefore liable to err. None the less, they at least establish an arguable precedent, they afford people of condition something to go by: and to have that is a firm comfort.”

He kissed the dead lips fondly; and he bade his lackeys summon Father Joseph to bury Gian Paolo, with due ceremony, in the Chapel, next to Florian’s wives.

“We obey. Yet, it will leave room for no more graves,” one told him, “in the alcove wherein monseigneur’s wives are interred.”

“That is true. You are an admirable servant, Pierre, you think logically of all things. Do you bury the poor lad in the south transept.”

Then Florian took wine and wafers into the secret chamber which nobody else cared to enter, and he made sure that everything there was in order. All these events happened on the feast day of St. Swithin of Winchester, which falls upon the fifteenth of July: and on that same day Florian left Bellegarde, going to meet his new wife, and traveling alone, toward Storisende.

_4._

_Economics of an Old Race_

Florian rode alone, spruce and staid in a traveling suit of bottle-green and silver, riding upon a tall white horse, riding toward Storisende, where his betrothed awaited him, and where the wedding supper was already in preparation. He went by the longer route, so that he might put up a prayer, for the success of his new venture into matrimony, at the church of Holy Hoprig. Nobody was better known nor more welcome at this venerable shrine than was Florian, for the Duke of Puysange had spared nothing to evince his respect for the fame and the favorable opinion of his patron saint. Whether in the shape of candles or a handsome window, or a new chapel or an acre or two of meadow land, Florian was always giving for the greater glory of that bright intercessor who in heaven, Florian assumed, was tactfully suggesting that such generosity should not be overlooked. So it was that Florian kept his accounts balanced, his future of a guaranteeable pleasantness, and his conscience clear.

Having prayed for the success of this new marriage and for the soul of Gian Paolo, and having confessed to all the last month’s irregularities, Florian went eastward. He passed Amneran and a spur of the great forest, now that he went to ford the Duardenez. As he neared Acaire he thought, idly, and with small shrugs, of a boy’s adventuring to the sleeping princess in the midst of these woods, and of the beauty which he had not ever forgotten utterly: and his heart was troubled with that worshipful and hopeless longing which any thinking about this Melior would always evoke in Florian, because he knew that his “dream,” as people would call it, was a far more true and vital thing than Florian’s daily living.

Then on a sudden he reined up his horse, and Florian waited there, looking down upon the dark woman who had come out of this not over-wholesome forest. Florian did not speak for some while, but he smiled, and he shook his head in a sort of humorous disapprobation.

This woman was his half-sister, whom Florian’s father had begotten, with the co-operation of the bailiff of Ranec’s daughter, some while before middle age and the coming into extreme fashion of continence had made such escapades criticizable. Marie-Claire Cazaio was thus of an age with Florian, being his senior by only three months. In their shared youth these two had not been strangers, for the old Duke had handsomely recognized his responsibility for this daughter, and had kept Marie-Claire about his household until the girl had outraged propriety by bearing an illegitimate child. After this the Duke had no choice except to turn her out of doors. She had since then taken up with companions whose repute was not even dubious: and her manner of living was esteemed intemperate by the most broad-minded persons in Poictesme, where sorcery was treated with all reasonable indulgence.

“My dear,” said Florian, at last, still shaking his head, “I must tell you, however little good it does, that there was another deputation of peasants and declamatory grocers at me, only last week, to have you seized and burned. You are too careless, Marie-Claire, about offending against the notions of your neighbors. You should persuade your unearthly lovers to curb their ardors until after dark. You should at least induce them not to pass over Amneran in such shapes as frighten your neighbors in the twilight, and so provoke their very natural desire to burn you at broad noon.”

“These little peasants will not burn me yet,” she answered. “My term is not yet run out—” You saw that Marie-Claire was thinking of quite other matters. She said, “So, they tell me, you are to marry again?”

She had lifted to him now that half-pensive, half-blind staring which he uneasily recognized. Florian had always under this woman’s gaze the illogical feeling that, where he was, Marie-Claire saw some one else, or, to be exact, saw some one a slight distance behind him. Her eyes could not be black. Florian knew that nobody’s eyes were really black. But this woman’s small eyes were very dark, they had such extraordinarily thick lashes upon both upper and lower lids, that these little eyes most certainly seemed blobs of infernal ink. There was in his sister’s eyes a discomfortable knowingness. Puysange looked at Puysange.

He answered, quietly, “Yes, Mademoiselle de Nérac is now about to make me the happiest of men.”

“Unhappy child! for she too is flesh and blood.”

“And what does that anatomical truism signify when it is so cryptically uttered, Marie-Claire?”

“It means that you and I are not enamored of flesh and blood.”

Florian did not reply to this in words. But he smiled at his half-sister, for he was really fond of her, even now, and they understood each other excellently.

So he stayed silent, still looking at her. By and by he said: “You come out of a wood that is not often visited by abbots and cherubim, and you carry a sieve and shears. Who is yonder?”

Marie-Claire replied, “How should I know the real name of the adversary of all the gods of men?”

“Pardieu!” said Florian, “so it is company of such sinister grandeur that you entertain nowadays. You progress, my sister, toward a truly notable damnation.”

“In these parts, to be sure, they call him Janicot—”

“Yes, I know,” said Florian, “and, certainly, his local name does not matter in the least.” Florian smiled benevolently, and said, “Good luck to you, my dear!”

Then he rode on, into the pathway from which Marie-Claire had just emerged. He was interested, for it might well be rather amusing to overtake this whispered-about Janicot in the midst of his sombre work: but, even so, the thoughts of Florian were not wholly given over to Janicot, or to Marie-Claire either. Instead, he was still thinking of the sleeping woman’s face which he had not ever forgotten utterly: and this dark sullen sister of his—who had once been so pretty too, he recollected,—and all her injudicious traffic seemed, somehow, rather futile.

No, he reflected, Marie-Claire was not pretty now. Her neck remained wonderful: it was still the only woman’s neck familiar to Florian that really justified comparison with a swan’s neck by its unusual length and roundness and flexibility. But her head was too small for that superb neck: she had taken on the dusky pallor of a Puysange: she was, in fine, thirty-five, and looked rather older. It showed you what irregular and sorcerous living might lead to. Florian at thirty-five looked—at most, he estimated,—twenty-eight. Yes: it was much more sensible to adhere to precedent, and to keep all one’s accounts in order, through St. Hoprig’s loving care, and to retain overhead a thrifty balance in one’s favor.

_5._

_Friendly Advice of Janicot_

When he had entered a little way into Acaire, Florian came to an open place, where seven trees had been hewn down. A brown horse was tethered here, and here seven lilies bloomed with a surprising splendor of white and gold. These stood waist-high about a sedate looking burgess, unostentatiously but very neatly dressed in some brown stuff, which was just the color of his skin. At his feet was a shrub covered with crimson flowers: no sun shone here, the sky was clouded and cast down a coppery glow.

Such was Janicot. Florian saluted him, quite civilly, but with appropriate reserve.

“Come,” Janicot said, smiling, “and is this the rapturous countenance of a bridegroom? I am not pleased with you, Monsieur the Duke, I must have happy faces among my friends.”

“So you also have heard of my approaching marriage! Well, I am content enough, and for me to marry the co-heiress of Nérac seems logical: but in logic, too, I cannot ignore that I ride toward a disappointing business. There is magic in the curiously clothed woman who is mistress of herself, the hour and you: but the prostrate, sweating and submissive meat in a tangle of bed-clothing—!” Florian shrugged.

“In fact,” said Janicot, as if pensively, “I have observed you. You do not enter wholly into the pleasures suitable for men and women: you do not avoid these agreeabilities, but your sampling of them is without self-surrender, and there is something else which you hold more desirable.”

“That is true.” Florian for an instant meditated. Florian shrugged. Then Florian dismounted from his white horse, and tethered it. Here was the one being in whom you might confide logically. Florian told Janicot the story of how, in childhood, Florian had ascended to the high place, and had seen the Princess Melior, whom always since that time his heart had desired.

And Janicot heard him through, with some marks of interest. Janicot nodded.

“Yes, yes,” said Janicot. “I do not frequent high places. But I have heard of this Melior, from men a long while dead, and they said that she was beautiful.”

“Then they spoke foolishly,” replied Florian, “because they spoke with pitiable inadequacy. Now I do not say that she is beautiful. I do not speak any praise whatever of Melior, because her worth is beyond all praising. I am silent as to the unforgotten beauty of Melior, lest I cry out against that which I love. When I was but a child her loveliness was revealed to me, and never since then have I been able to forget the beauty of which all dreams go envious. I jest with women who are lovable and nicely colored; they have soft voices, and their hearts are kind: but presently I yawn and say they are not as Melior.”

“Ah, but in fact,” said Janicot, “in fact, you do—without caring to commit yourself formally,—believe that this Melior is beautiful?”

Now Florian’s plump face was altered, and his voice shook a little. He said:

“Her beauty is that beauty which women had in the world’s youth, and whose components the old world forgets in this gray age. It may be that Queen Helen possessed such beauty, she for whom the long warring was. It may be that Cleopatra of Egypt, who had for her playmates emperors and a gleaming snake, and for her lovers all poets that have ever lived, or it may be that some other royal lady of the old time, in the world’s youth, wore flesh that was the peer of Melior’s flesh in loveliness. But such women, if there indeed was ever Melior’s peer, are now vague echoes and blown dust. I cry the names that once were magic. I cry to Semiramis and to Erigonê and to Guenevere, and there is none to answer. Their beauty has gone down into the cold grave, it has nourished grasses, and cattle chew the cud which was their loveliness. Therefore I cry again, I cry the name of Melior: and though none answers, I know that I cry upon the unflawed and living beauty which my own eyes have seen.”

Janicot sat on a tree-stump, stroking his chin with thumb and fore-finger. He was entirely brown, with white and gold about him, and the flowering at his neatly shod feet was more red than blood. He said:

“In that seeing, denied to all other living persons,—in that, at least, you have been blessed.”

“In that,” said Florian, bitterly, “I was accursed. Because of this beauty which I may not put out of mind, the tinsel prettiness of other women becomes grotesque and pitiable and hateful. I strive to mate with them, and I lie lonely in their arms. I seek for a mate, and I find only meat and much talking. Then I regard the tedious stranger in whose arms I discover myself, and I wonder what I am doing in this place. I remember Melior, and I must rid myself of the fond foolish creature who is not as Melior.”

“Ah, ah!” said Janicot then, “so that is how it is. I perceive you are a romantic. The disorder is difficult to cure. Yet we must have you losing no more wives: there must be an end to the ill luck which follows your matrimonial adventures and causes hypercritical persons to whisper. Yes, since you are a romantic, since all other women upset your equanimity and lead you into bereavements which people, let me tell you, are festooning with ugly surmises, you certainly must have this Melior.”