It was after such considerations that Niafer would go to pray beside the tomb which she had builded in honor of Manuel.
Chapter LXVII. The Women Differ
Now the tale tells that in the spring of the year old Niafer, thus sitting beside her husband’s tomb, looked up and found another aged woman waiting near her.
“Hail, Queen of England!” said Dame Niafer, with quite as much civility as there was any need for.
“So!” said the other. “You would be his wife. Yes. I remember you, that day near Quentavic. But how could you be recognizing me?”
“Are there not tears in your old eyes? There is no other person living, since that double-faced Freydis got her just deserts,” replied Niafer, very quietly, “who would be shedding tears over my Manuel’s tomb. We two alone remember him.”
“That is true,” said Alianora. And for no reason at all she smiled a little. “One hears so much about him, too.”
“The world has learned to appreciate my husband,” Niafer assented. She did not altogether approve of Madame Alianora’s smile.
Now the Queen said: “He was rather a dear boy. And I am not denying that I cared a great deal about him once. But even so, my dear, this wonder of the world that the poems and the histories are about, and that the statues and the shrines commemorate, and that one, in mere decency, has to pretend to remember!”
“I am sure I do not at all understand you, Madame Alianora.” And Niafer looked without any love at this Queen of England who in the old days had been upon terms of such regrettable intimacy with Dom Manuel.
But Alianora went on, with that provokingly pleasant air of hers: “No, you would not understand the joke of it. You do not properly value the work of your hands and of your imagining. But this legend which you in chief, with the pride and the foolishness of Poictesme to back you, have been quietly and so tirelessly fostering through all these years, has spread through the known world. Our Manuel has become the peer of Hector and of Arthur and of Charlemagne for his bravery and his wisdom and his other perfections. Our Manuel is to come again, in all his former glory! And I, who remember Manuel quite clearly—though I am not denying he has had his successors in my good will and friendly interest,—well, in perfect candor, my dear, I find these notions rather droll.”
To this sort of talking Niafer replied, sharply enough, “I do not know of any reason in the world for you to be speaking of my husband as ‘our Manuel’”
“No, my dear, I am sure he took excellent care that you should never know about such things. Well, but all that is over a great while ago. And there is no need for us two to be quarreling over the lad that took his pleasure with the pair of us, and with Queen Freydis too, and with nobody knows how many other women, and who, to do him justice, gave to each playfellow a fair half of that pleasure.”
This exposed unvenerable handsome old Alianora to the gaze of perturbed decorum. “I do not think, madame, that you ought to be alluding to such frivolous matters here at his tomb.”
“After all, though,” Alianora stated, “it is not as if he were really buried in this place. You dreaming braggarts of Poictesme had not even a corpse to start with, when you began on your fine legend. No: the entire affair is pure invention; and is very neatly symbolized by this stately tomb with nothing whatever inside it.”
“What, though, if Manuel had been truly buried here, what would this world have been relinquishing to the cold grave?” said Freydis. For Niafer saw that Freydis also was at hand. This Freydis was a witch-woman with whose connivance Dom Manuel had in the old days made unholy images and considerable scandal.
“Nobody knows that,” continued Freydis. “Not even we who, as we said, loved Manuel the Redeemer in his mortal life knew anything about Manuel. I know that he wanted what he never found. I think that he never, quite, knew what he wanted. But that is all. That is all I know, to-day. What sort of being lived inside that squinting tall strong husk which used to fondle us? I often wonder about that.”
“My dear creature,” said Alianora, “do you really think it particularly matters? I am sure we never used to think about that especial question at the time, because the husk was, in all conscience, enough to deal with. Yes, you may say what you will about Manuel, but among friends there is no harm in conceding that in some respects we three know him to have been quite wonderful.”
It was then that the old Queen of England looked up toward the gleaming statue of the man whom these three women had loved variously. Manuel towered high above them, bedazzling in the May sunlight, serene, eternally heroic, eternally in that prime of life which his put-by spent bedfellows had long ago overpassed; and he seemed to regard exalted matters ineffably beyond the scope of their mortal living and the comprehension of frail human faculties. But wrinkled jovial Alianora smiled up at this superb Redeemer fondly and just a little mockingly.
“You understood me,” Alianora said, “and I you. But we did not talk about it.”
“I say that nobody understood Manuel,” replied Freydis. “I say it is a strange thing that we three should be continuing the life of Manuel and the true nature of the being who lived inside that husk, and that we three should yet stay ignorant of what we are giving to the times that are to come. For Manuel has already returned, and he will keep returning again and again, without redeeming anything and without there being any wonder about it—”
Alianora was interested. “But do you explain, my darling—!”
“Dead Manuel lives again in your tall squinting son—”
“Yes,—and do you just imagine, Freydis dear, what a reflection that is to any mother, what with Manuel’s irregular notions about marriage—!”
“—And in the four children that he had by Niafer,” Freydis continued. “And in these children’s children our Manuel’s life will be renewed, and after that in their grandchildren: and Manuel’s life and Manuel’s true nature will thus go on, in many bodies, so long as men act foolishly by day and wickedly at night. And in the images which I aided him to make and to inform with fire from Audela, in these also, when these are set to live as men among mankind,—and, to my fancy, no more reasonably than my two elder children, Sesphra and Raimbaut, have lived already,—in these also, will our Manuel live. Yes, in all these inheritors of his foiled being, our Manuel will, thus, live many lives,—wanting always what he has not ever found, and never, quite, knowing what thing it is which he wants, and without which he may not ever be contented.”
“I see,” said Alianora: “and your explanation of his second and of, indeed, his two thousandth coming seems to me, I confess, much the more plausible. Yes, I see. Manuel has already returned; and he will return again any number of times—”
Freydis said moodily, “And to whose benefit and pleasuring?”
“My darling Freydis! You may depend upon it that on each occasion two persons will get a great deal of pleasure out of preparing the way for him. And that,” said Alianora, “that and whatever else may befall those persons who have Manuel’s proclivities and life in them will be but another happening in the Biography of Manuel. We three have begun a never-ending set of comedies in which the life of Manuel will be the main actor. We have, as one might say,—among friends, my darlings,—collaborated with the dear boy to make an endless series of Manuels, without any special reassurance that to do this was going to give good and pleasure to anybody except—say what you will, my dears,—it does always give to a hearty young woman. For we do not know, even now, exactly what sort of a creature this Manuel was and, thanks to our collaboration, will continue to be. Yes, now I see your point, my dear Freydis; and it is really a curious one.”