“No doubt you could, my wonderful, kind-hearted, clever darling,” Ettarre replied. “But now that fearful place, my precious, is a place with which you have no further need to be bothering.”
Odo of Valneres, however, was smiling with something of the enthusiast’s fervor. Then, for one instant only, he again looked downward, with the air of a man as yet perplexed and irresolute, and again he crossed himself, and he drew a deep breath which seemed to inform him through and through with unpersuadable determination.
Gently he put aside the love of his youth: and, with that frank fine air of manliness which had always graced his professional utterances, he spoke.
“No, sweetheart: for one of my cloth must not be wholly selfish; and at a pinch a well-thought-of bishop must choose for what seems to him a more noble and a safer investment than is the happiness of which your affection assures me. I had believed religion to be only a narcotic and a restraint for man’s misery upon earth. I was wrong. I confess it, with humble contrition. And my heart is aglow, Ettarre, with no ignoble fervor, to discover that the profession to which I have devoted all my modest abilities—such as they are, my dear,—must always satisfy, for the better conducted of my fellow beings, no merely temporal but an eternal requirement. Even after death, I perceive, I am privileged to remain the spiritual guide and consoler of my little flock—”
“But, my darling, the poor dears are already saved beyond redemption; and so, to me, that sounds like nonsense.”
“That is because you reason hastily, my pet. Yonder, inside that shining wall, my people need me as never before. More sorely now than in their mortal life they require the feeling that some capable and tactful person mediates between them and the uncomfortably contiguous contriver of their surroundings. Now, as not ever in their merely earthly misery, they need the most eloquent assurances that these inconveniences are trivial and by-and-by will prove transient. They need, in this unsanitary, zooplastic, explosive, and perturbing Heaven, as they did not need in the more urbane atmosphere which I was always careful to maintain in my diocese, to be sustained by salutary faith as to the oncoming rewards for prudent and respectable conduct. So, you perceive, my dearest, I could not honorably desert my little flock after having in some sense betrayed them into their present condition. All these strong arguments are passing through my mind, my darling; and they are reinforced by my firm conviction that the Ettarre whom I remember, both as a simple peasant girl and as a blessed saint, did not use to have cloven feet like—shall I say?—a tender-eyed and very charming gazelle.”
But now Ettarre, who during her most recent mortal life had been in practice among the witches of Amneran, as the most lovely of Satan’s traps, had drawn a little away from Odo of Valneres in uncontrollable sorrow and disappointment.
“You have,” she stated, “and you always did have, Odo, a mean and suspicious nature, quite apart from being a long-winded fat hypocrite. And you can talk from now to doomsday if you want to, but I think that to make a cross like that, when I was doing my very best for your real comfort, was cheating!”
“Noblesse oblige,” replied the good Bishop Odo, with that impressiveness which he invariably reserved for any remark a trifle deficient in meaning. Then he went slowly but unfalteringly toward the gate marked “Levi.”
Yet he looked back just once, through a mist of unshed, unepiscopal, and merely human tears, upon the grief of that delicious and so lovely Ettarre. Her distress over this final parting was becoming so passionate and extreme that it had turned the adorable child all black and scaly, and had set her to exhaling diversely colored flames. And Odo sighed to notice these deteriorations in her appearance, and in her deportment also, as his lost love assumed a regrettably dragonish shape, and with many frantic lashings of her tail swept whooping down the abyss.
After that, he removed his red flannel footwarmers, as introductive of an undesirable chromatic note; he tidied his white nightgown into the general effect of a surplice; and the Bishop of Valneres went through that bright and lofty gate with appropriate dignity.
He was a bit surprised, though, when a tender voice said,—
“Welcome home, my Prettyman!”
Black Odo saw that the gates of this dubious, glaring place were now being locked, behind him, by dark, withered, and complacent looking, old Gui de Puysange.
Thus ends the history of that Odo called Le Noir, who nevertheless, even as the morning star makes light the womb of a black cloud, shone with the bright beams of his life and teaching; who by his radiance led into the light them that shivered in the gray cloud of the shadow of death; and who, like unto the rainbow giving light in the white clouds, set forth in his righteous ending the seal of his fond Master’s covenant.
explicit
THE WAY OF ECBEN
A Comedietta Involving a Gentleman
by
James Branch Cabell
“I go the way of all the earth: be thou strong therefore, and show thyself a man; and keep the charge of thy god, to walk in his way and preserve his testimonies.”
New York
Robert M. McBride & Company
1929
COPYRIGHT, 1929
BY JAMES BRANCH CABELL
PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1929
(First Impression)
Printed in the United States of America By the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Massachusetts
For
Robert M. McBride
this brief and somewhat tragic tale, to
commemorate our long and rather
comical association
Synopsis
From Antan behind the moon delay
What line of hidden white-robed life, beyond
Old Jurgen’s judging, in that Eve’s high wand
Taboos all music, if but as eagles may?
Figures of love, these sonnets’ souls repay
Proud earth with gallantry; and rivet Eve
With something about merchants—to reprieve
With silver, and with jewels, Ecben’s way.
Grandfathers wake, with prayer-books and cords,
The cream of chivalry; and stallions rightly
Deride the shadow of a lineage, lords
To domnei’s straws of vanity; while nightly
The jest of Lichfield moves toward place and power
The certain town’s end of a neck’s last hour.
Words for the Intending Reader
NOBODY will think, I hope, that I pretend to have invented this story. Those who are familiar with the earlier works of Felix Kennaston will of course recognize that one encounters hereinafter the Norrovian legend upon which is based The King’s Quest. There has never been, though, so far as I am aware, any prose version made in English; and in taking over this story from Garnier’s anthology, Kennaston necessarily introduced many and frequent changes prompted by the demands of Spenserian verse. Moreover, Kennaston—with, as I think, unwisdom—has toiled to prettify the tale throughout, and to point, a bit laboriously, an apologue which in the story’s original form simply does not exist. I may at least assert that in The Way of Ecben (which “teaches “nothing whatever) I have clung rigorously to the queer legend’s restrained, and quite unfigurative, first shaping.