“I too, then, in your Majesty’s transcendent phrase, shall do what was expected of me yesterday. I ask the hand of the King’s daughter in marriage.”
“That is customary,” wise Helmas said, with approval, “and you show a very fine sense of courtesy in adhering to our perhaps old-fashioned ways. Let the lord of Puysange be taken to his betrothed.”
8. At the Top of the World
“YOU will find her,” they had said, “yonder,”—and, pointing westerly, had left him. So Florian went unaccompanied through the long pergola overgrown with grape-vines, toward the lone figure at the end of this tunnel of rustling greenness and sweet odors. A woman waited there, in an eight-sided summer-house, builded of widely-spaced lattice-work that was hidden by vines. Through these vines you could see on every side the fluttering bright gardens of Brunbelois, but no living creature. This woman and Florian were alone in what was not unlike a lovely cage of vines. Florian seemed troubled. It was apparent that he knew this woman.
“I am flesh and blood,” the woman said,—“as you may remember.”
“Indeed, I have been singularly fortunate— But upon reflection, I retract the adverb. I have been marvelously fortunate; and I have no desire to forget it.”
“She also, the girl yonder, is flesh and blood. You will be knowing that before long.”
Florian looked at this woman for some while. “Perhaps that is true. I think it is not true. I have faith in the love which has endured since I was but a child. If that fails me, I must die. And I shall die willingly.”
He bowed low to this woman, and he passed on, through the summer-house, and out into the open air. He came thus to a wall, only breast high, and opened the gate which was there, and so went on in full sunlight, ascending a steepish incline that was overgrown with coarse grass and with much white clover. Thus Florian came to the unforgotten princess and to the beauty which he had in childhood, however briefly, seen. There was in this bright and windy place, which smelled so pleasantly of warm grass, nothing except a low marble bench without back or carving. No trees nor any bushes grew here: nothing veiled this place from the sun. Upon this sunlit mountain-top was only the bench, and upon the bench sat Melior, waiting.
She waited—there was the miracle,—for Florian de Puysange.
Behind and somewhat below Florian were the turrets and banners of Brunbelois, a place now disenchanted, but a fair place wherein the old time yet lingered. Before him the bare hill-side sank sheer and unbroken, to the far-off tree-tops of Acaire: and beyond leagues of foliage you could even see, not a great number of miles away, but quite two miles below you, the open country of Poictesme, which you saw not as anything real and tangible but as a hazed blending of purples and of all the shades that green may have in heaven. Florian seemed to stand at the top of the world: and with him, high as his heart, stood Melior. …
And it was a queer thing that he, who always noticed people’s clothes, and who tended to be very critical about apparel, could never afterward, in thinking about this extraordinary morning, recollect one color which Melior wore. He remembered only a sense of many interwoven brilliancies, as if the brightness of the summer sea and of the clouds of sunset and of all the stars were blended here to veil this woman’s body. She went appareled with the splendor of a queen of the old days, she who was the most beautiful of women that have lived in any day. For, if so far as went her body, one could think dazedly of analogues, nowhere was there anything so bright and lovely as was this woman’s countenance. And it was to the end that he might see the face of Melior raised now to him, he knew, that Florian was born. All living had been the prologue to this instant: God had made the world in order that Florian might stand here, with Melior, at the top of the world.
And it seemed to Florian that his indiscretions in the way of removing people from this dear world, and of excursions into strange beds, and of failures to attend mass regularly, had become alienate to the man who waited before Melior. All that was over and done with: he had climbed past all that in his ascent to this bright and windy place. Here, in this inconceivably high place, was the loveliness seen once and never forgotten utterly, the loveliness which had made seem very cheap and futile the things that other men wanted. Now this loveliness was, for the asking, his: and Florian found his composure almost shaken, he suspected that the bearing suitable to a Duke of Puysange was touched with unbecoming ardors. He feared that logic could not climb so high as he had climbed.
Besides, it might be, he had climbed too near to heaven. For nothing veiled this unimaginably high place: God, seeing him thus plainly, would be envious. That was the thought which Florian put hastily out of mind. …
He parted his lips once or twice. This was, he joyously reflected, quite ridiculous. A woman waited: and Florian de Puysange could not speak. Then words came, with a sort of sobbing.
“My princess, there was a child who viewed you once in your long sleeping. The child’s heart moved with desires which did not know their aim. It is not that child who comes to you.”
“No, but a very gallant champion,” she replied, “to whom we all owe our lives.”
He had raised a deprecating hand. It was trembling. And her face seemed only a blurred shining, for in his eyes were tears. It must be, Florian reflected, because of the wind: but he did not believe this, nor need we.
“Princess, will you entrust to me, such as I am, the life I have repurchased for you? I dare make no large promises, in the teeth of a disastrously tenacious memory. Yet, there is no part in me but worships you, I have no desire in life save toward you. There has never been in all my life any real desire save that which strove toward you.”
“Oh, but, Messire Florian,” the girl replied, “of course I will be your wife if you desire it.”
He raised now both his hands a little toward her. She had not drawn back. He did not know whether this was joy or terror which possessed him: but it possessed him utterly. His heart was shaking in him, with an insane and ruthless pounding. He thought his head kept time to this pounding, and was joggling like the head of a palsied old man. He knew his finger-tips to be visited by tiny and inexplicable vibrations.
“If I could die now—!” was in his mind. “Now, at this instant! And what a thought for me to be having now!”
Instead, he now touched his disenchanted princess. Yet their two bodies seemed not to touch, and not to have moved as flesh that is pulled by muscles. They seemed to have merged, effortlessly and without volition, into one body.
In fine, he kissed her. So was the affair concluded.
9. Misgivings of a Beginning Saint
THAT Florian remembered, afterward, about Brunbelois seemed rather inconsequential. It was, to begin with, a high place, a remarkably high place. In the heart of the Forest of Acaire, arose a mountain with three peaks, of which the middle and lowest was cleared ground. Here stood the castle of Brunbelois, beside a lake, a lake that was fed by springs from the bottom, and had no tributaries and no outlet. Forests thus rose about you everywhere except in the west, where you looked down and yet further down, over the descending tree-tops of Acaire, and could see beyond these the open country of Poictesme.
Now in this exalted and cleared space wherein stood Brunbelois, there was nothing between you and the sky. You were continually noting such a hackneyed matter as the sky. You saw it no longer as dome-shaped, but as, quite obviously now, an interminable reach of space. You saw the huge clouds passing in this hollowness, each inconceivably detached and separate as one cloud would pass tranquilly above and behind the other, sometimes at right angles, sometimes travelling in just the opposite direction. It troubled you to have nothing between you and a space that afforded room for all those currents of air to move about in, so freely, so utterly without any obstruction. It made a Puysange seem small. And at night the stars also no longer appeared tidily affixed to the sky, as they appeared to be when viewed from Bellegarde or Paris: the stars seemed larger here, more meltingly luminous, and they glowed each in visible isolation, with all that space behind them. It had not ever before occurred to Florian that the sky could be terrible: and he began somewhat to understand the notions of the gray-haired porter who had watched this sky from Brunbelois, night after night, alone.