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.”
“Yet,” said Ettarre, “yet, as the strength of a man’s mortal body fails, so do his desires perish also. It is a thing more sad than any other thing which men know about, that under the touch of time even they who serve with the most ardor men’s highest fancies must lose, a little by a little, all hunger and all faith as to that which is beyond and above them.”
He now looked somewhat wistfully into this girl’s quite nicely colored and shaped face which was, to him, so like the face of any other young woman who has good health. The gaunt old man flung back his head. His white hair fluttered about in the dawn wind, untidily, and the palely colored eyes of the tricked wanderer had a vexed and tormented shining, in the while that he said:
“It is not a true thing which you are speaking. For I retain my faith in that which is beyond and above me. I have lost the desire and the vision: but I retain my faith. I retain my faith in that beauty which I may not see, and in that music which I may not hear ever any more, and in that dream which has betrayed me. And I am content.”
The girl answered: “You are strangely obstinate. And I could never let anyone remain content.”
With that she clasped for one moment his withered hands between her hands, and the witch-woman said, very tenderly:
“Most brave and steadfast, and most foolish, of all them who have followed after Ettarre, the gods do well to smile at your strange and fond imaginings. And yet, tall king of men, the gods provide for him that holds to his faith.”
She touched his ears. Her finger tips fell lightly upon his wrinkled eyelids.
Chapter XVII. The Changing of Alfgar
ALL things were changed for Alfgar. He was not any longer a frail and aged person, now that contentment had gone out of him. For all his stoical, enforced contentment had now made room for joy, because his youth had returned to him; and in that garden, now, exulted that Alfgar who had been foremost among the champions of Ecben, the Alfgar who had been the most powerful of kings and the most ardent of lovers and the most knightly of chevaliers.
All things were changed for Alfgar. He noted, with roving and imperious young eyes, that lilies abounded to each side of him, and that in this garden many climbing white roses also were lighted by the clear and tempered radiancy of early dawn. White rabbits were frisking about King Alfgar. He saw that all the world was lovely, and that time was friendly to all lovers. He heard a music which was not of this world, and it still sought and could not find its desire in any quarter of earth. But now was intermingled with this music the sound of doves that called to their mates; and in this music he found, now, no doubtfulness and no discontent, but only the dear promise of a life which presently would be created out of the resistless might of this music’s yearning, and which would be more noble than had been any life yet known to human kind.