do not.”
“I have taken a fancy to him,” said the man-at-arms. “But there! the land is at peace. Go your ways—go your ways! Are you for the jousting in the castle lists?”
“No. I would see it, but I have not time.”
“You would see a pretty sight,” quoth the man-at-arms. “There is Prince Gaucelm’s second princess, to wit Madame Alazais that is the most beautiful woman in the world, and sitting beside her the prince’s daughter, our princess Audiart, that is not so beautiful.”
“They say,” spoke Garin, “that she is not beautiful at all.”
“That same ‘They say’ is a shifty knave.—Better go, and I will go with you,” said the man-at-arms, “for truly I have not been lately to the lists.”
But Garin adhered to it that he could not. He made Paladin to curvet, bound and caracole, then with a backward laugh and wave of his hand went his way—but caused his way to lead him past the castle of Roche-de-Frêne.
So riding by, he looked up wistfully to barbican and walls and towers. The place was vast, a great example of what a castle might be. Enough folk for a town housed within it. At one point tree tops, peering over the walls, spoke of an included garden. Above the donjon just stirred in the autumn air the great blue banner of Gaucelm the Fortunate. The mighty gates were open, the drawbridge down, the water in the moat smiled as if it had neither memory nor premonition of dead men in its arms. People were crossing, gay of dress. The sunny noon, the holiday time, softened all the hugeness, kept one from seeing what a frown Roche-de-Frêne might wear. Garin heard trumpets. The esquire of Raimbaut the Six-fingered, the brother of Foulque the Cripple, the youth from the small black tower in the black wood, gazed and listened with parted lips. Raimbaut held from Montmaure, but for Raimbaut’s fief and other fiefs adjacent, Montmaure who held mainly from the House of Aquitaine, owed Roche-de-Frêne fealty. Being feudal lord of his lord, Gaucelm the Fortunate was lord of Foulque the Cripple and Garin the Squire. The latter wondered if ever he would enter there where the trumpets were blowing.
The great pile passed, the town itself passed, he found himself upon a downward sweeping road and so, by zig-zags, left the hill of Roche-de-Frêne and coming to the plain rode west by north between shorn fields and vineyards. The way was fair but lonely, for the country folk were gone to the town for this day of the patron saint and were not yet returning. Before him lay woods—for much of the country was wooded then—and craggy hills, and in the distance purple mountains. He had some leagues to ride. Now and again he might see, to this hand or to that, a castle upon a height, below it a huddled brown hamlet. Late in the afternoon there would lie to his right the Convent of Our Lady in Egypt. But his road was not one of the great travelled ways. It traversed a sparsely populated region, and it was going, presently, to be lonely enough.
Garin rode with sunken head, trying to settle matters before he should see Foulque. If Raimbaut had been a liberal, noble, joyous lord! But he was none such. It was little that page or esquire could learn in his gloomy castle, and little chance might have knight of his. A gloomy castle, and a lord of little worth, and a lady old and shrewish. … Every man must have a lord—or so was Garin’s world arranged. But if only every man could choose one to his liking—
The road bent. Rounding a craggy corner, Paladin and he well-nigh trod upon a sleeping man, propped at the road edge against a grey boulder. Paladin curvetted aside, Garin swore by his favourite saint, the man awoke and stretched his arms. He was young—five or six years older, perhaps, than Garin. His dress, when it came to hue and cut, showed extravagant and gay, but the stuffs of which it was composed were far from costly. Here showed a rent, rather neatly darned, and here a soil rubbed away as thoroughly as might be. He was dark and thin, with long, narrow eyes that gave him an Eastern look. Beside him, slung from his neck by a ribbon, lay a lute, and he smiled with professional brilliancy.
CHAPTER II
THE JONGLEUR AND THE HERD-GIRL
“Jongleur,” said Garin, “some miles from this spot there is a feast day in a fair town. This is the strangest thing that ever I saw, that a jongleur should be here and not there!”
“Esquire,” said the other, “I have certain information that the prince holds to-day a great tourney, and that every knight and baron in forty miles around has gone to the joust. I know not an odder thing than that all the knights should be riding in one direction and all the esquires in another!”
“Two odd things in one day is good measure,” said Garin. “That is a fine lute you have.”
The thin dark person drew the musical instrument in front of him and began to play, and then to sing in a fair-to-middling voice.
“In the spring all hidden close,
Lives many a bud will be a rose.
In the spring ’tis crescent morn,
But then, ah then, the man is born!
In the spring ’tis yea or nay;
Then cometh Love makes gold of clay!
Love is the rose and truest gold,
Love is the day and soldan bold,
Love—”
The jongleur yawned and ceased to sing. “Why,” he asked the air, “why should I sing Guy of Perpignan’s doggerel and give it immortality when Guy of Perpignan, turning on his heel, hath turned me off?”
He drew the ribbon over his head, laid the lute on the grass, and leaning back, closed his eyes. Garin gazed at the lute for a moment then, dismounting, picked it up and tried his hand. He sang a hunting stave, in a better voice by far than was the jongleur’s. None had ever told him that he had a nightingale in his throat.
The jongleur opened his eyes. “Good squire, I could teach you to sing not so badly! But sing of love—sing of love! Hunting is, poetically speaking, out of court favour.”
“I sing of that which I know of,” said Garin.
The other sat up. “Have I found the phœnix? Nay, nay, I trow not! Love is the theme, and I have not found a man—no, not in cloister—who could not rhyme and carol and expound it! Love is extremely in fashion.—Have you a lord?”
“Aye.”
“Has not that lord a lady?”
“Aye, so.”
“Then love thy lady, and sing of it.”
“I know,” said Garin, “that love is the fashion.”
“The height of it,” answered the other. “It has been so now for fifty years and there seems no declining. It rages.”
Garin left his horse to crop the sweet grass and came and sat upon the boulder above the jongleur. “Tell me,” he said, “how it came to be so. I have a brother, older than me, who scoffs and saith that women did not use to be of such account.”
The jongleur took up his lute again.
