II
RAINOUART
The studious young knight lay for some little while in the pleasing shadow where Simon had left him, busy with his book. In the enchantment of its pages he had soon forgotten Simon and his lantern and his angry face. In that warm May evening it was very agreeable to lie stretched at his ease there in the green shade and to read the wonderful story of the Romance of the Rose. The little volume was very neatly written on vellum in a clear, clerkly hand, and a hand that was more than clerkly had enriched it with many agreeable pictures in which wonderful attenuated youths and slender maidens with yellow hair, all in garments of vivid green and blue and red and yellow, wandered over enamelled fields that were studded with daisies, and in pleasances of fantastic trees. The book was not new to Europe, but it was always new to the youth. He had brought it with him from the court of Philip the Fair, who had given it to the young knight on the occasion of his departure from Greece. Now because Philip the Fair, a shrewd discerner of humanity, knew his man, his gift contained only that early part, which was written by William of Lorris, and which exalted love and ladies, and not that later part, from the hand of John of Meung, which treated ladies with scant ceremony and would have spelled love after another fashion. For the youth who lay in the shadow and read the Romance of the Rose was, in the first place, a youth of a high mind and gentle heart, whose spirit swam in the clearest ether of chivalry; and, in the second place, he was son and heir of the reigning Duke of Athens, Duke Baldwin of the Rock.
In all the stormy stories of the conquest of Greece by the Frankish princes, few histories were more stormy or more splendid than those of the Princes of the Rock and of their connection with the city of the Violet Crown. For long enough the Princes of the Rock had ruled in Athens in the direct line, but in the year 1308 the torch was blown out by the death of Guy II., who died childless, and the title swerved off to a cousin of the dead duke, Count Baldwin of the Rock, who at that time was living a brisk, piratical, and filibustering life in the East, much to the discomfort of those with whom his turbulent, truculent nature brought him at loggerheads. Baldwin was a whole-hearted soldier of fortune who loved the bustle of battle, the sacking of cities, the filling of his pockets with other people's money, and the cheering of his occasional solitude with other people's wives. Baldwin had been married himself years before in France to the Lady Isabeau of Hainault. She had loved him much, having been deceived, as sweet women sometimes will be deceived, into the belief that the manners of a savage were truly the manners of a man. He had loved her a little just because her pale graces were new to him, and of her and her pale graces he soon heartily wearied. It was not Count Baldwin's way to trouble himself long about anything that wearied him, and he flung himself headlong into a life of fierce adventure in the scrimmage-ground of the East, leaving his lady, who by that time was not broken-hearted to lose him, in France, with his infant son to take care of.
It was not unnatural that Isabeau of Hainault, having known what it meant to be companion for a season to Duke Baldwin, was honestly and honorably determined to bring up her son to be as unlike his father as, God willing, might be accomplished. Melancholy, heart-sick Isabeau worked out her purpose well. For all her pale grace and fragile person, the Lady Isabeau of Hainault was a strong woman with strong thoughts. She recognized very frankly and very fully from the first how she had been deceived in Count Baldwin, and she made it her whole purpose and endeavor that no other woman should be so deceived by Count Baldwin's son. She had a kind of clear seeing that many such women have, and as she rocked the cradle of the sleeping boy she believed that his days and his ways might prove beautiful. Over the child she prayed one strange prayer morning and night—"I pray that you may never love till you find the loveliest, nor woo till you find the worthiest," and because she knew in her soul that the child would be strong of limb, and because she loved all the old tales of chivalry, she named the child Rainouart, after the noble youth with the giant's strength in the ancient tale of Aliscans.
As the new Rainouart grew from infancy to boyhood, day by day he redeemed his mother's prayers and fulfilled his mother's wishes. He showed from the first an extraordinary strength of body. His physical frame had in it nothing of the bull-bulk of Count Baldwin, but inside his slender form and smooth skin he seemed to be compact with steel. The Lady Isabeau was too brave a lady to forget that a man's first business is to be a man, wherefore the young prince was well trained in arms and skilled in all bodily exercises. As he grew into years and proficiency in martial arts, the contrast between his slender juvenility and his extraordinary vigor and power grew more remarkable. It was curious to find this amazing heritance of the paternal strength so intimately allied with, and subject to, the spirituality of his mother. Rainouart was never quarrelsome, and could scarcely be provoked into a brawl save by some deed of injustice or dishonor; but if ever he were forced to fisticuffs it always went hard with his adversaries, though the odds were heavy against him, as they always were in such cases. Youths of his own age, but youths of greater breadth of body and show of muscle, taken unawares by his appearance, would often challenge him to feats of strength, confident of easy victory, only to be amazed and discomfited by the gentle serenity with which he overcame their sturdiest efforts.
The boy's mind was not neglected at the charge of his body. The tastes of the Lady Isabeau were lettered for an age which did not overprize letters, and she saw to it that her son had a breeding more scholarly than would have pleased the mind of Count Baldwin, who lustily despised and damned all clerks and cared for nothing in manhood but big-boned fighting-engines. The boy was early trained to read and write, to taste some tincture of Latinity, and to find his inspiration and his ideal in the chivalrous epics of France and Britain. When he came to young manhood and entered the service of the King of France, he was soon recognized as one of the most promising knights of the king's following, and the friendship of many men was given to him and the friendship of many women offered to him. The friendship of the men he took amiably and modestly, though no man was his superior of all the king's men in strength or skill. The friendship of the women he let go by him, also very modestly but always with decision. There were many that longed to knock at the door of his heart and enter in, and there were some that showed their longing, most notably of all the beautiful Esclaramonde of Bayonne, whom most men worshipped for her dark, imperious loveliness, and whom all the women, her rivals, hated for a witch, and upbraided beneath their breaths for her skill in philtres. But Esclaramonde, who had won many hearts, and was said to have shown herself generous in reward for her victories, gained no greater favor in Rainouart's eyes than any other lady of the many dainty ladies in the court of Philip the Fair. It would seem as if the prayer his mother had prayed over his cradle had acted on his nature like a charm. Consciously or unconsciously, those words were the governance of his life—"Never love till you find the loveliest, nor woo till you find the worthiest." Truly the Lady Isabeau so loved her son that she thought no woman born of woman worthy to be his wife, and truly she was pleased to believe that in this, as in all other thoughts, Rainouart was of her mind. Moreover, the Lady Isabeau was, as became her rank, familiar with the family histories of the great houses of which the fine court ladies were the fairest flowers, and what she chose to tell or suggest to her son had its service in steeling his spirit against temptations. Anyway, Rainouart served all the fine court ladies with the high-bred homage of an equal and even courtesy, but no pretty face out of all those pretty faces had ever blotted the sun from his mind's firmament, and no white hand of all those white hands had ever held his spirit its prisoner. Esclaramonde of Bayonne, in chagrin, it was whispered, married the ancient, doting Lord of Nemours, who had gained a duchy in Greece, where he reigned as Duke of Thebes, and whither he carried his passionate, magical, dangerous lady. Rainouart paid no heed to her passing; he knew only three services in life—his service to God, his service to his king, and his service to his mother. And from two of these services he was, to his sorrow, soon to be set free. A little while before destiny called upon him to quit the service of Philip the Fair destiny denied him the present service of his mother. The Lady Isabeau passed away from a world of which, had it not been for her son, her pale and gracious presence had long been weary. When the time came to leave him, the last words she said to him were:
"It is good to be brave, it is better to be good; strive to be both," and so she passed away and left him very lonely.
The young Rainouart deeply mourned his mother's memory, for she had ever been his ideal of gentle womanhood, and he made it a mighty resolve in all his life so to act as if she were still with him and her approbation still to be won. Losing thus his best friend, he would have been well content to remain in the service of the adventurous French king, but the death of Guy II. changed his fortune. When the Duchy of Athens came to Count Baldwin, and that jovial freebooter hurried hot-foot to Greece and found himself in unquestioned possession of his duchy, he remembered, belated, that he was a family man. His wife was dead, indeed, but his son lived, and a son was an advantageous possession for the holder of a great title and the ruler of a great state. So messengers were sent speeding across seas to the court of King Philip the Fair, summoning the young man by his filial allegiance to Athens and to the father whom he had never seen. It is by no means overlikely that Rainouart would have thriven at the court of Philip the Fair. For though that astute and unscrupulous monarch had a high regard for the strength, the courage, and the scholarship of the young knight, Rainouart had other qualities which Philip disliked exceedingly, chiefly, indeed, the candor of his mind and the frankness of his speech. He would never consent to condone King Philip's savage treatment of Pope Boniface VII., which had ended, as it seemed, in the pontiff's death at the hands of Philip's men. He held his peace about it, as was meet in the servant of a king, but once when Philip plied him for his opinion, and would take no denial, Rainouart said what he thought, simply and straightly, and the king never plied him for his opinion again, deciding that he was better as a king's fighter than as a king's councillor. Yet he liked the lad for his comeliness, and Rainouart liked the king as his lord. So the young man regretfully said farewell to the king, his master, and his master gave him the beautiful painted manuscript of William of Lorris's romance as a farewell gift, and the young man journeyed over-seas to his father's duchy.
Chroniclers of the age do not seek to deny, though they strive to attenuate, the fact that the meeting of father and son was not wholly felicitous. The young soldier who read poetry on all days and even wrote poetry on some days, and who venerated the memory of a fair and unhappy lady, found his inherited delicacy something offended by the boisterous joviality of Baldwin, the huge eater and drinker, the furious fighter, the promiscuous wooer, quarrelsome when sober, quadruply quarrelsome in his cups. Duke Baldwin, for his part, thought his son's native delicacy of taste effeminate, sneered patently at his sobriety, ramped like a madman at his passion for books, and was flagrantly disgusted by the indifference with which a son of his blood viewed the genial and yielding lemans of the paternal court. But if the young man failed to satisfy his father's wishes in all things, if he failed to explain his tastes for reading and luting, at least he proved satisfactory in other matters. His physical strength was an abiding joy. When Duke Baldwin grasped his son's hand in greeting he strove to crush it to pulp between his merciless fingers, but young Rainouart gave him back grip for grip and squeeze for squeeze till the blood came from the finger-nails of both, and Duke Baldwin was glad in two fashions to unclinch that clasp.
Thereafter it something consoled Duke Baldwin to reflect that if the lad from Paris had a womanish weakness for books and music, at least he could ride as straight and wield lance and sword and axe as well as any youthful paladin of Greece. And if the youth disdained the snares spread for him by the amorous damsels of Athens, he soon made himself friends with the gallantest of the young swaggerers, who learned to love him more for his sinews of steel than for his heirship to the duchy. Duke Baldwin was as volubly proud of his son's skill in arms as he was bitterly ashamed of his skill in arts, and he would have been willing enough in his rough-and-tumble way to let his pride of the one blot out his contempt of the other. But the son would have found it hard in any case to forget Duke Baldwin's neglect of his mother, and he saw nothing to his credit to commend in the man whom he knew to be his father. So it came about that the duke and his son did not see very much of each other, and that while the duke was holding prolonged revels with rollicking swashbucklers and frolicsome, complaisant ladies, the young prince mostly chose to ride abroad, a solitary explorer of the lovely Attic land, dreaming his dreams. He knew little more than honest Simon or than any other French adventurer, gentle or simple, then in Greece, of the ancient days and the ancient fame. When his horse carried him abroad to Colonos or Marathon, or, as it had carried him this day, to the farthermost edge of the Eleusinian wood, his memory was neither pleased nor troubled by thoughts of Œdipus or Miltiades or the rites of Demeter. All he asked when he took the road was to pass through pleasant champaigns and presently to dismount and lie at ease in shady places and read unceasing in the Romance of the Rose, and wonder unceasing if ever Good-Greeting would take him by the hand and lead him through the thicket to the place where the Holy Rose-bud awaited him. For Rainouart dreamed day and night of the rose that he had never found. He had sailed across the seas to Athens with a whole and lonely heart. Whole and lonely his heart had remained at the court of the Duke of Athens, though there, too, as at the court of Philip the Fair, beautiful women swarmed like butterflies, spreading out their colored wings in the ceaseless sunlight, and ever ready to smile their brightest when the young prince came a-nigh. But Rainouart paid them no heed. He was courteous to them because they were women; he disliked them because they were light women; he dreamed of a star. Not yet had he loved the loveliest or wooed the worthiest.