“Madame,” said Jurgen, with his most judicial aspect, “let us regard this really very interesting question from its worst possible side. Let us—with suitable apologies to his great shade, and merely for the quicker confounding of his aspersers,—suppose that Dom Manuel was, in point of fact, not anything remarkable. Let us wildly imagine the cult of the Redeemer, which now is spread all over our land, to be compact of exaggeration and misunderstanding and to be based virtually upon nothing. The fact remains that this heroic and gentle and perfect Redeemer, whether or no he ever actually existed, is now honored and, within reason and within the reach of human frailty, is emulated everywhere, at least now and then. His perfection has thus far, I grant you, proved uncontagious; he has made nobody anywhere absolutely immaculate: but none the less,—within limits, within the unavoidable limits,—men are quite appreciably better because of this Manuel’s example and teachings—”
“Men are happier also, Jurgen, because of that prediction as to his second coming which he uttered in your presence on the last night of his living, and which you brought down from Upper Morven.”
Jurgen coughed. “It is a pleasure, it is always a pleasure, to further in any way the well-being of my fellow-creatures. But—to resume the immediate thread of my argument,—if this superb and most beneficial example was not ever actually set by Dom Manuel—owing to the press of family and state affairs,—if this example were, indeed, wholly your personal invention, then you, O terrible Centurion, would be one of the most potent creative artists who ever lived. That, now, I proclaim, as a retired poet, to be a possibility from which you should not take shame, but only pride and thankfulness.”
“Do not be talking your wheedling nonsense to me, young fellow! For, if my life had been given over to the spreading of romances about a Manuel who never lived—!”
Her weak, old, shriveled hands were fluttering before her, helplessly, in a kind of futile wildness. She clasped them now, so that each hand seemed to restrain the other. And Jurgen answered:
“I quail. I am appropriately terrified by your snappishness, and flattered by your choice of an adjective. I venture, none the less, to observe that I have encountered, Centurion dear, in the writings of one or another learned author, whose name at the present escapes me, the striking statement, and the wholly true statement,—and a statement which was, indeed, a favorite with my saintly father,—that a tree may always be judged by its fruit. Now, the children of Dom Manuel have thus far most emphatically borne out this statement. Count Emmerick”—here Jurgen coughed,—“Count Emmerick is learned in astrology. He is noted for his hospitality—”
“Emmerick,” said Dame Niafer, “would be well enough if he were not led by the nose in everything by that wife of his.”
Then Jurgen’s shoulders went up, his hands went outward, to disclaim any personal share in the old lady’s appraisement of his present client Radegonde. But Jurgen did not argue the matter.
“Madame Melicent,” Jurgen equably resumed, “has been the provoker of much gratifyingly destructive warfare oversea, just as Madame Ettarre has been the cause of another long war here at home, in which many gentlemen have won large honor, and hundreds of the humbler sort have been enabled to enter into a degree of eternal bliss appropriate to their inferior estate. Such wars evoke the noble emotions of patriotism, they enable people to become proficient in self-sacrifice, and they remarkably better business conditions, as my ledgers attest. As for Madame Dorothy, while she has incited no glorious public homicides and arsons, she has gratified and she has made more pleasurable the existence of half the gentry of Poictesme—”
“And what, you rogue, do you mean by that?”
“I allude to the organ of vision, without any anatomical excursus. I mean that to behold such perfect beauty makes life more pleasurable. Moreover, Madame Dorothy has incited a fine poem and a hungering and a dreaming that will not die, and a laughter which derides its utterer, too pitilessly—”
Now Jurgen’s voice had altered so that the old lady looked at him more narrowly. Niafer had an excellent memory. She perfectly recalled the infatuation of Jurgen’s youth, she who had no delusions about this daughter of hers. And Niafer reflected briefly upon the incurable romanticism of all men.
But Niafer said only, “I never heard of any such poem.”
Jurgen now completed the third of those convenient coughing spells. “I refer to an epic which stays as yet unpublished. It is a variation upon the Grail legend, madame, and pertains to the quest of a somewhat different receptacle. However! In regard to the other children of Dom Manuel,—concerning whose mothers your opinions, my adored Centurion, do equal credit to your sturdy morality and your skill in the art of impassioned prose,—we have Messire Raimbaut, a very notably respected poet, we have Sesphra, who has become a god of the Philistines. Poets befall all families, of course, with nobody to blame, whereas a god, madame, is not ever, as rhetoricians express it, to be sneezed at. We have, moreover, Edward Longshanks, among the most applauded monarchs that England has ever known, .because he so compactly exhibits in his large person every one of the general defects and limitations of his people. Thus far, Madame, we may estimate the children of Dom Manuel’s body to have made a rather creditable showing.”
“There is something in what you say,” Dame Niafer admitted. “Yet what is this nonsense about ‘the children of his body’? Have men any other implement, unknown to their wives, with which to beget children?”
Jurgen beamed. Jurgen, it was apparent, had found an enticing idea to play with.
“There is quite another sort of paternity, acquired without the need of troubling and upsetting any woman. So, for the perfect rounding off of our argument, we must consider also Dom Manuel’s children in the spirit, those lords who were of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion, and whose heroism was modeled so exactly after his fine example.”
Niafer replied, a little puzzled: “They were notable and pious persons, who were sent into all parts of the earth as the apostles of the Redeemer, and who will return again with Manuel. . . . But do you tell me just what you mean!”
“I mean that it was of rough and ungodly fighting-men that Dom Manuel’s example made these incomparable heroes. There was a time, madame,—a time to which we may now, in the proper spirit, refer without any impiety,—when their delight in battle was as vigorous as their moral principles were lax, a time when they jested at holy things, and when their chastity was defective.”
The Countess nodded. “I remember that time. It was an evil time, with no respectability in it: and I said so, from the first.”
“Yet do you consider what Dom Manuel’s example and teachings made, in the end, of his companions in this life! Do you consider the saintly deeds of Holden and of Anavalt, and how Ninzian was for so long the mainstay of all religion hereabouts—”
“Ninzian was a holy person, and even among the apostles of Manuel he was perhaps the most devout. Nevertheless—”
But Jurgen now became more particular. “Do you consider how but fourteen years ago Donander died a martyr in conflict with the pagan Northmen, proving with his body’s loss the falsity and wickedness of their superstitions, when in the sight of both armies Donander was raised up into heaven by seven angels in the same instant that a devil carried his adversary northward!”