“The Gods Provide for Him that Holds to his Faith.”
Chapter XIV. We Encounter Dawn
IT IS told that all loveliness endured in this garden whereinto time had not yet entered. It is told that, advancing very wearily through the first glow of dawn, Alfgar now passed into the spring of a year which was not registered upon any almanac. Here youth, as always, lived for the passing moment: the difference here was that the moment did not pass. And it is told also that this ever-abiding moment was that moment wherein the spring dawn promises a day more fair than any day may ever be, and when the young leaves whisper in their merry prophesying of more than a century of summers may by any chance fulfil.
But Alfgar was no longer in the prime of his youth. To every side of him, through the first glow of dawn, young persons walked in couples, and they were glad because they knew that the world was their plaything, and that their love was a wholly unexampled love which the dark daughters of Dvalinn, even those three Norns who weave the fate of all the living, regarded respectfully; and which the oncoming years all labored to reward with never-ending famousness and contentment. They, who were young, knew that time was but a bearer of resplendent gifts; they knew that their love was eternal; they knew also that they themselves were far more remarkable and more glorious than any other pair of lovers which had ever existed: and, as they walked there in couples, they mentioned all these facts.
But Alfgar walked alone: and of necessity, he looked at these youngsters with the eyes which time had given him; and it was with the ears which time had given him that he heard these chattering, moonstruck, gangling young half-wits talk their nonsense.
In no great while, however, as the infirm old King reflected, these silly children would be self-respecting men and women, and this bleating and this pawing at one another would happily be put aside for warfare and housework and other sensible matters. Those interlocked young hands would soon be parted, the one hand to kill honorably, with fine sword strokes, in a wellbred melee of gentlemen, and the other hand to scrub stew-pans and wash diapers. And that would be an excellent outcome: for, to old Alfgar’s finding, the unrestrainedness of these semi-public endearments was, in its way, an indignity to human intelligence.
Chapter XV. How the King Triumphed
THEN Alfgar saw a woman who walked alone, upon a gravelled walkway, beneath the maples and the sycamore-trees of this garden. She came toward the old wanderer, and a jangling and a skirling noise came with her, so that Alfgar knew this was indeed Ettarre. He heard again that music which sought and could not find its desire in any quarter of earth.
But the ears which time had given him got no delight from this music. It seemed, to this decrepit king of men, an adolescent and morbid music. He did not like these unhappy noises which seemed to doubt and question. It was better to have about you much merrier noises than were these noises, in the while that yet remained for an aging frail old fellow to be hearing any noises at all.
She was near him now. And Ettarre, he found, was well enough to look at, but in no way remarkable: for to the eyes which time had given him the face of one woman was very much like that of any other woman. Nevertheless, this was his appointed lady in domnei. So the old romantic knelt, and he Kissed the hands of this girl who appeared, after all, quite nice looking, in an unpretentious fashion.
He knelt because this was the Ettarre who had drawn Alfgar out of the set ways of life, and who had stripped him of all that well-thought-of monarchs desired. It was in order that he might kneel here at the feet of his appointed lady in domnei, upon this walkway,—which really was a bit damp, he reflected, for a person of his age,—and upon these rather uncomfortable small stones, that Alfgar had given up his pre-eminent name. It was in order to be hurting his thin old knees, with these little rocks’ sharp edges, that he had given up his tall throne builded of apple-wood with rivets of copper, and the King of Ecben’s four houses builded of white polished stone, with all their noble furnishings, and their fertile gardens and orchards, and their low-lying, red-roofed stables; and he had given up, too, his big golden sceptre with the five kinds of rubies in it, and his herds of fine speckled cattle at Pen Loegyr, and all the pretty shaping and the bright colors of Ettaine, the daughter of Thordis Bent-Neck.
These things Alfgar had yielded up not all unwillingly, because of his magnanimous old notions. These things he had put far behind him now, so that he might be following after that Ettarre whom a poet fetched from out of the Waste Beyond the Moon, to be alike the derider and the prey and the destroyer of mankind. Of all these things the witch-woman had bereft King Alfgar, and of all other things save only of that dream which yet ruled defiantly in the old wanderer’s brave heart.
Chapter XVI. Contentment of a Chevalier
THUS then is the quest ended,” Alfgar said, after he had risen up shakily from kneeling upon the edges of those more and yet more uncomfortable small stones. “I have kept faith with the old way of Ecben, and with you also I have kept faith.”
The girl answered: “You have kept faith, instead, with Alfgar, after your own fashion, and after no fashion which became a well-thought-of monarch.”
Now Alfgar went on speaking with the quiet pertinacity of an old man; and he spoke, too, as though he were a little, but not very deeply, puzzled by a matter of no really grave importance, saying:
“So have I won to you who were my lady in domnei and my heart’s desire. But I am aged now, and it is as your playfellow said: time has laid hold of me with both hands, and with the weak remnants of my mortal body’s strength I may neither take nor defend you as becomes a king of men. The music that I once delighted in seems only a thin vexing now. And there is in your face no longer any beauty that my wearied eyes can find.”
The girl replied: “Yet even from the first, my friend, you followed after a music which you could not hear, and after a shining to which your eyes were dimmed. All that which other men desire you have given up because of a notion in which you did not ever quite believe. Yes: you have clung—in your own fashion,—to the old way of Ecben.”
He said, “And for that reason, I am content.”
She answered him with that cool, and yet condoning, bright gaze which women keep for the strange notions of men. She answered him with words also, saying:
“Yet so have you raised up a brutish and lewd Ulf to the throne of Ecben. So have you tumbled down the god of Ecben. So have you lost that Ettaine for whom your love was human and convenient to the ways of men. So do you stand here, a very aged outcast, from whom all ecstasy has departed. Thus ends the King of Ecben’s questing after his vain dream, in folly and wide hurt.”
He replied: “Yet am I content. For I have served that dream which I elected to be serving. It may be that no man is royal, and that no god is divine, and that our mothers and our wives have not any part in holiness. Oh, yes, it very well may be that I have lost honor and applause, and that I take destruction, through following after a dream which has in it no truth. Yet my dream was noble; and its nobility contents me.”
To that the girl returned, rather sadly, “Alas, my friend, but it is an imagining at which Heaven laughs; and the gray Norns do not fulfil that dream for any man.”
Alfgar replied:” Then men are better than that power which made them. For the kings of men do not laugh at this dream: and in the heart of every person that is royal this dream may be fulfilled even in the while that his body fails and perishes.”