“What hast thou here, that thou hast hewed thee out a sepulchre?”
—Isaiah, xxii, 16
—Salut, ami, dit Jürgen, si vous êtes une créature de Dieu.
—Votre protase est du bien mauvais grec, observa le Centaure, car en Hellade nous nous abstenions de semblables réserves. D’ailleurs mon origine vous intéresse certes moins que ma destination.
—la haulte historie de Jürgen
Chapter LXVI. Old Age of Niafer
Now the tale is of crippled old Dame Niafer, who had reformed the Poictesme which her husband redeemed, and of the thinking which came upon her in the last days of her life. Until latterly Niafer had not, with at every turn so many things requiring to be done, had very much time for thinking. But now there was nothing more ever to be done by Madame Niafer. Radegonde saw to that.
The gray-eyed minx ruled everything and everybody. That was not pleasant for her mother-in-law to behold, after Niafer herself had ruled over Poictesme for some twenty years, and all the while had kept frivolity and disorder out of fashion. No mother could, in the first place, honestly enjoy seeing her own son thus hoodwinked and led into perpetual dissipation at all hours of the night, by a wife who, at thirteen hundred and some years of age, might reasonably be expected to know better. In the second place, Niafer could have managed things, and very certainly poor Emmerick, with immeasurably more benefit to everybody, and to common-sense too.
All that warring with Maugis, for instance, had been a sad mistake. Now, under my regency, the aged Countess would reflect with complacence, there was grumbling here and there,—men being what they are, with no least idea as to what is actually good for them,—but never any armed revolt. When people were dissatisfied, you sent for them, they came, you had a sensible talk, you found out what was really wrong, and you righted matters to the utmost extent that such a righting seemed judicious; you eked out the remainder with a little harmless soft-soaping, and that was all there was to it. No warrior in his sane senses would go to war with an intelligent old lady who esteemed him such a particularly fine fellow.
Now, if at the very beginning, that poor Maugis—quite a nice-looking child, too, until he lost flesh under that continual plotting and throat-cutting, with parents you had known for years,—had been had in to dinner, just with the family, then all that killing and burning and being awakened at unearthly hours by the misguided boy’s night attacks upon Bellegarde would have been avoided.
But Niafer, of course, had been allowed no say in the matter. She was allowed no say in any matter by that woman, who topped off her ill-doing by being always so insufferably pleasant and so considerate of Mother Niafer’s comfort. And in this enforced idleness it was rather lonely now that Holmendis was dead. Nearly seven years ago now that dependable and always firm friend had gone crusading with St. Louis; and the pair of them had passed from the ruins of Carthage to eternal glory with the aid of dysentery. Niafer missed Holmendis a great deal, after the three decades of close friendship and of the continuous intimacy about which people said things of which the old Countess was aware enough and utterly unmindful.
She had her children, of course. It was particularly nice to have Melicent back again, after all these years of never quite really knowing whether the child was managing her abductor tactfully, in that far-off Nacumera. But the children had their own children now, and their own affairs; and none of these possessions were they inclined to let Niafer control, in the Poictesme wherein, for eighteen years, she had controlled everything. For the rest, Dame Niafer knew that a prophecy which had been made to her very long ago by the Head of Misery was now being fulfilled: she had no place in the world’s ordering, she was but a tolerated intruder into her children’s living, and nobody anywhere did more than condone her coming.
Niafer did not blame her children. She instead admitted, with the vast practicality not ever to be comprehended by any male creature, that their behavior was sensible.
“I would meddle perpetually if they permitted it. I am very often a nuisance, as it is. And so, that part of the prophecy about my weeping in secret is quite plainly nonsense, since there is nothing whatever to weep about, or even to be surprised at,” Dame Niafer stated cheerily.
And so, too, if sometimes, after one or another crossing of her still pertinacious will, the dethroned old ruler of Poictesme would hobble very quietly into her own rooms, and would remain there for a lengthy while with the door locked, and would come out by and by with reddened eyes, nobody noticed it particularly. For she, who in her prime had been the most sociable of potentates, seemed nowadays to prefer upon the whole to be alone. She was continually, without any ostentation, limping away from any little gathering of her descendants. Mother was becoming slightly queer: you shrugged, not at all unfondly, over the fact, and put up with it. Grandmother would be there one moment laughing and talking like everybody else; and the very next moment she was gone. And you would find her, accidentally, in some quiet corner, quite alone, bent up a little, and not doing anything whatever, but just thinking. . . .
Dame Niafer thought, usually, about her husband. Her lot had been the most glorious among the lots of all women, in that she had been Manuel’s wife. That marvelous five years of living which she had shared with Manuel the Redeemer was not an extensive section of her life, but it was the one part which really counted, she supposed. It was only on account of her human frailty that she remembered so many more things about Holmendis, who was a mere Saint, than she did about her Manuel. She found it, nowadays, rather hard—and injudicious, too,—to recall any quite definite details about her miraculous husband: there was only, at a comfortable remoteness, a tall gray god in a great golden glowing. It was all wonderful, and inspiring, and very sad, too, but noticeably vague: and the tears which came into your eyes were pleasant, without your knowing exactly what you were crying about.
That was the best way in which to think of her Manuel. A prying into particulars, a dwelling upon any detail whatever, was injudicious. Such a perhaps blasphemous direction of your thoughts suggested, for instance, that matters were going to be a trifle awkward, just at first, after that second coming of the Redeemer.
It was not, altogether, that Manuel would be a stranger to her, nor even that omniscience, of course, knew all about Holmendis. In dealing with a liberal patron of the Church it was the métier of omniscience to become a little myopic. For that matter, Dom Manuel’s earthly past was not so far gone out of his wife’s memory that he could be the only person to do any talking about natural frailties. No, the drawback would be, rather, that, when her Manuel had returned, in undiminished glory, you would have to get accustomed to so many things, all over again. . . . Niafer hoped that, in any event, at his second coming he would not bring back with him that irritating habit of catching cold on every least occasion: for you probably could not with decency rebuke a spiritual Redeemer for his insistence upon keeping the rooms stuffy and shut up everywhere on account of the draughts, any more than you could really look up to him with appropriate reverence if he came snorting and sneezing all over the place. . . . And if he for one single solitary moment expected to have, in his reordering of human affairs, that Alianora and that Freydis of his established anywhere near his lawful wife. . . .
That mad contingency, however, was not at any time mentally provided against, because at this point Niafer would turn away from this undoubtedly blasphemous trend of speculation. Her Manuel was in all things perfect. He would come again in unimaginable glory, and he would exalt her, his chosen, his one bride, who was so utterly unworthy of him, to the sharing of an eternal felicity which—after you got accustomed to it, and really settled down, with a fresh growth of hair and a complete set of teeth and all the other perquisites of unfading youth,—would be quite pleasant. Details could wait. Details, the moment you dwelt upon them, became upsetting. Details in any way relative to those hussies were no doubt directly suggested by the powers of evil.