CHAPTER VI
THE GARDEN
THE Abbot of Saint Pamphilius and Garin the squire rode westward—thatis to say they rode away from the busy town of Roche-de-Frêne; thecathedral, where, atop the mounting tower, trowel clinked againststone; the bishop’s palace, where, that morning Ugo wrote a letter toPope Alexander; and the vast castle with Gaucelm the Fortunate’s bannerabove it.
Roche-de-Frêne dyed with scarlet second only to that of Montpellier.It wove fine stuffs, its saddlers were known for their work, it madegood weapons. Rome had left it a ruined amphitheatre—not so largeas that at Arles, but large enough to house a trade. Here was thequarter of the moulders of candles. A fair wine was made in the countryroundabout, brought to Roche-de-Frêne and sold, and thence sold again.It was a mart likewise for great, creamy-flanked cattle. They came indroves over the bridge that crossed the river and were sold and boughtwithout the walls, in the long, poplar-streaked field where was heldthe yearly fair.
It was not a free town—not yet. Time was when its people had beenserfs wholly, chattels and thralls completely of the lords who builtthe great castle. Less than a hundred years ago that was still largelytrue. Then had entered small beginnings, fragmentary privileges,rights of trade, commutations, market grants. These had increased;every decade saw a little freedom filched. Lords must have wealth, andthe craftsmen and traders made it; money-rent entered in place of oldobediences. Silver paid off body-service. Skill increased, and thenumber of wares made, and commerce in them. Wealth increased. The towngrew bolder and consciously strove for small liberties. Roche-de-Frênewas different now indeed from the old times when it had been whollyservile. It was growing with the strong twelfth century. All manner ofideas entered its head.
Gaucelm the Fortunate’s father had been Gaucelm the Crusader, Gaucelmof the Star. Certain of the ideas of the burghers of Roche-de-Frênehad been approved by this prince. Others found themselves stinginglyrebuked. One of Roche-de-Frêne’s concepts of its own good mightflourish in court favour, a second just exist like grass under astone, wan and sere, a third encounter all the forces of extirpation.In the main Gaucelm of the Star bore hardly against the struggle forliberty. But at the last he took the cross, and needing moneys sothat he might go to Jerusalem with great array, granted “privileges.”After three years he returned from Palestine and granted no more. Hedied and Gaucelm the Fortunate reigned. For five years he fought theideas of Roche-de-Frêne. Then he changed, almost in a night-time, andgranted almost more than was asked. His barons and knights stared andwondered; Gaucelm was no weakling. Roche-de-Frêne sat down to digestand assimilate what it had gained. The town was no more radical than itthought reasonable. The meal was sufficient for the time being. Therebegan a string of quiet years.
The bishop’s palace stood a long building, with wings at rightangles. Before it spread a flagged place, and in the middle of this afountain jetted, the water streaming from dolphins’ jaws. In old timesthe bishops of Roche-de-Frêne had been mightier than its ravening,war-shredded lords. Then had arisen the great line that built thecastle and subdued the fiefs and turned from baron to prince andoutweighed the bishops. The fountain, shifting its spray as the windblew, had seen a-many matters, a-many ambitions rise and fall and riseagain.
The fountain streamed and the spray shifted this autumn, while thetrees turned to gold and bronze and the grapes were gathered, andthrough the country-side bare feet of peasants trod the wine-press, andover the bridge in droves lowed the cream-hued cattle. It rose and felltime before and time after that feast-day on which the squire Garin hadknelt in the cathedral dusk between the Palestine pillars, before OurLady of Roche-de-Frêne in blue samite and a gemmy crown. It streamedand sparkled on a sunny morning when Bishop Ugo, bound for the castle,behind him a secretary and other goodly following, checked his whitemule beside the basin and blessed the lounging folk who sank upon theirknees.
The process consumed no great while. Ugo was presently riding up thetown’s chief street, a thoroughfare that marked the ridge pole of thehill of Roche-de-Frêne. People were abroad, and as he passed they didhim reverence. He was a great churchman, who could hurt or help them,soul and body, here and hereafter! But at a quieter corner, before apile of old, dark buildings, he came upon, and that so closely that hismantle almost brushed them, a man and two women, poorly dressed, whostood without movement or appeal for blessing. Had they been viewedat a distance, noted merely for three stony units in a bending crowd,the bishop had been too superb to notice, but here they were under hisnose, unreverent, stocks before his eyes, their own eyes gazing asthough he were not!
Ugo checked his mule, spoke sharply. “Why, shameless ones, do you notbend to Holy Church, her councillors and seneschals?”
The man spoke. “We bend to God.”
“To God within,” said one of the women. “Not to ill within—not toluxury, pomp, and tyranny!”
“Woe!” cried the other woman, the younger. “Woe when the hearth nolonger warms, but destroys!”
“_Bougres_,” spoke the secretary at his master’s ear. “Paulicians,Catharists, _Bons hommes_, Perfecti, Manichees.”
“That is to say, heretics,” said Ugo. “They grow hideously bold, havingSatan for saviour and surety! Take order for these. Lodge complaintagainst them. See them laid fast in prison.”
The younger woman looked at him earnestly. “Ah, ah!” she said. “Thoupoor prisoner! Let me whisper thee—there is a way out of thy darkhold! If only the door is not too high and wide and fully open forthine eyes to see it!”
“They are not of Roche-de-Frêne,” spoke the secretary. “I warrant themfrom Toulouse or Albi!”
“I, and more than I, have eyes upon Count Raymond of Toulouse,” saidthe bishop. “Two or three of you take these wretches to the rightofficer. And do thou, Nicholas, appear against them to-morrow.”
He touched his mule with his riding switch and rode on, a dark-browedman, with a thin cheek and thin, close-shutting lips. He was a martialbishop; he had fought in Sicily and at Damascus and Edessa, and atConstantinople.
The street ran steeply upward, closing where, in the autumn day, therespread and towered the castle. Ugo, approaching moat and drawbridge,put with a customary action his hand over his lips and so regardedouter and inner walls, the southward-facing barbican and the towersthat flanked it,—Lion Tower and Red Tower. Men-at-arms in numberlounged within the gate, straightening when the warder cried thebishop’s train. Ugo took his hand from his lips and crossed thehollow-sounding bridge. He rode beneath the portcullis and through thedeep, reverberating, vaulted passage opening on either hand into LionTower and Red Tower, and so came to the court of dismounting, whereesquires and pages started into activity. From here he was marshalled,the secretary and a couple of canons behind him, to the Court ofHonour, where met him other silken pages.
They bowed before him. “Lord Bishop, our great ones are gathered in thegarden, harkening to troubadours.”
One of higher authority came and took the word from them. “My lord,I will lead you to where these rossignols are singing! They sing inhonour of ladies, and of the court’s guest, the duke from Italy whowould marry our princess!”
They moved through a noble, great hall, bare of all folk butdoorkeepers.
“Will the match be made?” asked Ugo.
“We do not know,” answered his conductor. “Our Lady Alazais favours it.But we do not know the mind of Prince Gaucelm.”
Ugo walked in silence. His own mind was granting with anger the truthof that. Presently he spoke in a measured voice. “If it be made, itwill be a fair alliance. Undoubtedly a good marriage! For say that toour sorrow Prince Gaucelm hath never a son of his own, then it may comethat his daughter’s son rule that duchy and this land.”
“Dame Alazais,” said the other in a tone of discreetness, “hath beensix years a wife. The last pilgrimage brought naught, but the next mayserve.”
“Pray Our Lady it may!” answered Ugo with lip-devoutness, “and soGaucelm the Fortunat
e become more fortunate yet.—The Princess Audiarthath been from home.”
“Aye, at Our Lady in Egypt’s. But she is returned, the prince havingsent for her. Hark! Raimon de Saint-Rémy is singing.”
There was to be heard, indeed, a fine, manly voice coming from where,through an arched exit, they now had a glimpse of foliage and sky. Itsang loudly and boldly, a chanson of the best, a pæan to woman’s lipsand throat and breast, a proud, determined declaration of slavery, along, melodious cry for mistress mercy.
The bishop stood still to listen. “Ha!” he said, “many a song like thatdoes my Lady Alazais hear!”
“Just,” answered his companion. “When they look on her they begin tosing.”
Moving forward they stood within the door that gave upon the garden.It lay before them, a velvet sward enclosed by walls, with a highwatch-tower pricked against the eastern heavens.
“It is a great pity,” said Ugo guardedly, “that the young princessstands so very far from her stepdame’s loveliness!”
“Aye, the court holds it a pity.”
“The prince hath an extraordinary affection toward her.”
“As great as if she were a son! She hath wit to please him,—though,”said he who acted usher, “she doth not please every one.”
They passed a screen of fruit trees and came upon a vision first offormal paths with grass, flowers, and aromatic herbs between, then ofa wide raised space, stage or dais, of the smoothest turf that everwas. It had a backing of fruit trees, and behind these of grey wall andparapet, and it was attained by shallow steps of stone. On these, andon low seats and cushions and on banks of turf, sat or half-reclinedmen and women, for the most part youthful or in the prime of life.Others stood; others, men and women, away from the raised part,strolled through the garden that here was formal and here maintaineda studied rusticity. The men wore neither armour nor weapons, save,maybe, a dagger. Men and women were very richly dressed, for even wherewas perpetual state, this was an occasion.
In a greater space than a confined castle garden they would not haveseemed so many; as it was there appeared a throng. In reality theremight be a hundred souls. The castle was as populous as an ant-heap,but here was only the garland of the castle. The duke who was seekinga mate had with him the very spice-pink of his own court. He and theywere of the garden. The festival that was made for him had drawnneighbouring barons and knights, vassals of Gaucelm. There was no timewhen such a court failed to entertain travellers of note, wanderingknights, envoys of sorts, lords going in state to Italy on the onehand, to France or Spain or England on the other. Of such birds ofpassage several were in the garden. And there were troubadours of morethan local fame, poets so great that they travelled with their ownservants and jongleurs. When the bishop came with two canons in histrain there were churchmen. And, moving or seated, glowed bright damesand damosels.
But in the centre sat Alazais, and she seemed, indeed, of Venus’smeinie. She was a fair beauty, with deep-red, perfect lips, and a curveof cheek and throat to make men tremble. Her long brown eyes, set wellapart, had a trick of always looking from between half-shut lids. Herlimbs spoke the same languor, and yet she had strength, strength, itseemed, of a pard or a great serpent. She was not pard and she was notserpent; she was not evil. She was—Alazais, and they all sang to her.Even though they did not name her name; even though they used othernames.
There were four chairs of state, though not set arow. Only two wereoccupied—that in which sat ivory-and-gold Alazais, and that in whichsat the duke who had come to view Prince Gaucelm’s daughter. The dukesat over against Alazais, with a strip of green grass between. He wasnot beautiful: he had a shrunk form and a narrow, weazened face. But hestared at the beauty before him, and a slight shiver went through himwith a fine prickling. “Madonna!” he thought. “If the other were hiswife, and this his daughter!”
Ugo came to the green level. Alazais rose to greet him and theduke followed her. He had informed himself in the politics ofRoche-de-Frêne: he knew that though now there was peace between princeand bishop, it had not always been so and might not be so again. Theduke was no great statesman, but to every one, at the moment, he wasas smooth as an innate, cross-grained imperiousness would let himbe. A fair seat was found for my lord bishop, the two canons and thesecretary standing behind him.
“Ah, my lord,” said Alazais, “you are good to grace our idle time! Ourpoets have sung and will sing again, and then myself and all theseladies are pledged to judge of a great matter. Sir Gilles de Valence,what is the matter?”
The troubadour addressed bent the knee. “Princess, the history ofMadame Dido, and if she were not the supremest servant of Love whowould not survive, not the death but the leave-taking of her knight,Messire Æneas, but made a pyre and burned herself thereon! And ofher example, as lover, to fair ladies, and if they should not,emulating her,—in a manner of figure and not, most fair, with actualflames!—withdraw themselves, as it were, from being and existencethroughout the time that flows between the leave-taking and comingagain of their knights. And of Messire Æneas, and if Love truly had himin bonds.”
“Truly, a fair matter!” said Ugo, with hidden scorn. “Here are theprince and the Princess Audiart!”
Dais and garden broke off their talk, turned with a flash of colour anda bending movement toward the lord of the land.
Gaucelm the Fortunate came upon the scene with an easy quietness. Hewas a large man, wearing a _bliaut_ of dark silk, richly belted, andaround his hair, that was a silvering brown, a fillet or circlet ofgold. There breathed about him something easy, humorous, wise. Hedid not talk much, but what he said was to the purpose. Now he had aprofound and brooding look, and now his eye twinkled. In small thingshe gave way; where he saw it his part to be firm he was firm enough.Though he listened to many, the many did not for ever see their waytaken. He may have been religious, but he exhibited little or nothingof his time’s religiosity. He had a stilly way of liking the presentminute and putting much into it. He did not laugh too easily, but yethe seemed to find amusement in odd corners where none else looked forit. He was not fond of state, but relaxed it when he could, yet keptdignity. He came now into the castle garden with but a few attending,and beside him, step for step, moved the young princess, his daughterAudiart.