Again, though, Alianora smiled up toward the statue of Manuel as though there were some secret between them. And Niafer had no patience whatever with the leering and iniquitous old hussy.
“The whole world knows,” said Niafer, indignantly, “what sort of person my husband was, for my Manuel is famous throughout Christendom.”
“Yes,” Alianora assented, “he is famous as a paragon of all the Christian virtues, and as the Redeemer whose return is to restore the happiness and glories of his people: and it is upon that joke, my dear Niafer, I was congratulating you a moment or two ago.”
“He is famous for his loyalty and valor and wisdom,” said Freydis. “I hear of it. And I remember the tall frightened fool who betrayed me, and whom at the last I spared out of mere pity for his worthlessness. And still, I spare the frightened, blundering, foiled living of Manuel, and I perpetuate and I foster this living, in my children, because it is certain that a woman’s folly does not ever perish.”
“Nevertheless, I know how to avail myself of a woman’s folly,” said Horvendile,—for now, Dame Niafer perceived, that queer, red-headed Horvendile also was standing beside her husband’s tomb,—” and of the babble of children, and of the unwillingness of men to face the universe with no better backing than their own resources.”
Then Horvendile looked full at Niafer, with his young, rather cruel smile. And Horvendile said:
“So does it come about that the saga of Manuel and the sagas of all the lords of the Silver Stallion have been reshaped by the foolishness and the fond optimism of mankind; and these sagas now conform in everything to that supreme romance which preserves us from insanity. For it is just as I said, years ago, to one of these so drolly whitewashed and ennobled rapscallions. All men that live, and that go perforce about this world like blundering lost children whose rescuer is not yet in sight, have a vital need to believe in this sustaining legend about the Redeemer, and about the Redeemer’s power to make those persons who serve him just and perfect.”
“It is you who are much worse than a rapscallion!” cried out Dame Niafer. “You are as bad as these women here. But I will not listen to any of you or to any more of your jealous and foul blasphemies—!”
Then Madame Niafer awakened, to find herself alone by the great tomb. But real footsteps were approaching, and they proved to be those of a person rather more acceptable to her than was that jeering Horvendile or were those brazen-faced and thoroughly vile-minded women about whom Dame Niafer had been dreaming.
Chapter LXVIII. Radegonde Is Practical
For at this point Madame Niafer was approached by Jurgen, the son of Coth, who came to Manuel’s tomb upon a slight professional matter. Jurgen—now some while reformed by the ruthless impairments of middle age, and settled down into tempestuous matrimony with the daughter of Ninzian (by the wife of well-to-do old Pettipas),—had since his marriage brought new life and fresh connections into the business of his nominal father-in-law; and was to-day the leading pawnbroker of Poictesme. It was thus to Jurgen, naturally enough, that Count Emmerick’s wife, Radegonde, had applied in these hard times which followed the long and impoverishing war with Maugis d’Aigremont.
The Countess had been taking of Dom Manuel’s tomb what she described as a really practical view. The tomb was magnificent and in every way a credit to the great hero’s family. Still, as Radegonde pointed out to her husband, that effigy of Manuel at the top was inset with scores of handsome gems which were virtually being wasted. If—of course without giving any vulgar publicity to the improvement—these jewels could be replaced with bits of suitably colored glass, the visual effect would remain the same, the tomb would be as handsome as ever, and nobody would be the wiser excepting only Count Emmerick and Radegonde, who would also be a good deal the wealthier.
Emmerick had replied, with appropriate indignation, that it would be blasphemy thus to despoil the tomb of his heroic father.
But to the contrary, it was Emmerick, as he forthwith learned, who blasphemed his heroic father’s memory in even for one moment supposing that the blessed dead cared about such vanities as rubies and sapphires, and wanted their own innocent grandchildren to starve in the gutter; and, for the rest, would he simply look at that pile of bills, and not be driving everybody crazy with his high-and-mighty nonsense.
Emmerick did look, very briefly and with unhidden aversion, toward the candid smallish mountain of unsettled accounts with which he was already but too familiar. “Nevertheless,” said Emmerick, “it would be an abominable action, if the story were ever to get out—”
“It will not get out, my dear,” replied his wife, “for we will leave the whole matter to Jurgen, who is the soul of discretion.”
“And I cannot afford to have any part in it,” said Emmerick, virtuously.
“You need take no part whatever,” his wife assured him, “but only your fair half of the proceeds.”
So Radegonde sent for Jurgen the pawnbroker, and asked him to appraise the jewels in Dom Manuel’s effigy and to name his best price for them.
It was thus that Jurgen happened to come just then to Manuel’s tomb and to disturb the dreaming of Madame Niafer.
Chapter LXIX. Economics of Jurgen
“You,” the fluttered old lady began—oddly enough, it must have seemed to Jurgen,—“you were the last living person to lay eyes upon him. It is strange that you, of all people, should come now to end my dreaming. I take your coming, rogue, as an omen.”
Then Madame Niafer began to tell him somewhat of her dream. And Jurgen listened, with the patience and the fondness which the plight of very old persons always seemed to evoke in him.
Jurgen was upon excellent terms with Madame Niafer, whom, for Biblical reasons, he was accustomed to refer to as the Centurion. “You say to one man, Go, and he goeth; and you say to another man, Come, and he cometh,” Jurgen explained. “In fine, you are a most terrible person. But when you say to me, Go, I do not obey you, madame, because you are also a dear.”
Niafer regarded this as sheer impudence, and vastly liked it.
So she told him about her dream. . . . And it was possible, Dame Niafer now admitted, that this dream might have a little misrepresented the deplorable women involved, because that snaky-eyed Freydis was known, since she got her dues from the Druids and the satirists, to be satisfactorily imprisoned in infamous Antan, whereas that hypocrite of an Alianora was now a nun at Ambresbury. But in Madame Niafer’s dreaming the hussies had seemed equally free from the constraint of infamy and of the convent: they had seemed to be far more dreadfully constrained by skepticism. . . .
“Madame,” said Jurgen, at the end of her account, “what need is there, after all, to worry over this little day-dream? I myself had but last month, upon Walburga’s Eve, a far more extensive and disturbing dream: and nothing whatever came of it.”
The Countess answered: “I grow old; and with age one is less certain of everything. Oh, I know well enough that the lewd smirking hussies were very slanderously in the wrong! Still, Jurgen, still, dear rogue, there is a haunting whisper which tells me that time means to take all away. I am a lonely powerless old creature now, but I stay Manuel’s wife. That alone had remained to me, to have been the one love and the proud wife of the great Redeemer of Poictesme. Now, at the last, a whispering tells me, time must take away that also. My Manuel, a whispering tells me, was no more splendid than other men, he performed no prodigies, and there will be no second coming of the Redeemer: a whispering tells me that I knew this always and that all these years I have been acting out a lie. I think that whispering talks nonsense. And yet, with age, Jurgen, with age and in the waiting loneliness of age, one grows less certain of everything.”