Part 27

"I should be proud," she said, "to count myself fair for your sake, for you are the fairest of men and the bravest."

Even while she spoke her spirit seemed to laugh within her, for she remembered to whom she had last said those words, and she wondered to whom she would say them next. But the prince's eyes glowed as if with the exaltation of strong wine.

"Your words are sweet to hear," he vowed. "I will do my best endeavor to merit some little of their grace."

She bent her head forward as if to kiss him on the lips. There was no one to see her--at least no one that counted; no page or servant loitering in the court-yard mattered, and even before a larger audience the duchess would scarcely have denied herself. But even as Rainouart waited for her kiss the quiet of the noontime was broken by the shrill call of a clarion, the call that warned all knights to hasten to the lists and make them ready for the tournament. Rainouart stooped and kissed the white hand of the duchess.

"Farewell, fair lady," he said; "I must go to my tent."

"I will watch your triumph from the gallery," Esclaramonde said, and he turned and left her with no other word, and went down the stairway into the court-yard.

Esclaramonde waited a little while, watching him depart and thinking Thessalian thoughts. He was under her spell; he had forgotten what she willed him to forget; he should never remember while she was by his side. That he was only her lover through the make-believe of her philtres and her will troubled her nothing. He was her lover, comely and young, and she saw herself Duchess of Athens, and her heart leaped and she laughed at times. When Rainouart was out of sight and she was tired of her thoughts, she turned to the far end of the gallery, where her immediate women waited, and summoned them with a gesture to follow her to her appointed pavilion by the lists.

THE CHALLENGE OF RAINOUART

Rainouart walked slowly down the sacred mound through the long lines of soldiers that made a lane for the gentry all along the winding road and at the foot of the hill. He went as he always went after parting with Esclaramonde in these few fantastic hours--like one in a feverish day-dream who found himself unfamiliar amid familiar surroundings. The realities of life distorted themselves into unrealities; your simple soldier standing on guard in his rank loomed monstrous as a giant; your habitual building chose to enlarge and radiate door upon door and gallery upon gallery into infinite, meaningless space. Rainouart walked airily, for his physical condition seemed strangely light; he walked warily, because his mental condition seemed strangely heavy. He was troubled at he knew not what; he wondered, he knew not why; he thought ceaselessly of Esclaramonde, and yet the thought of her seemed always to tease his drugged memory with a desire for some face, some voice, that were not the face and voice of the Duchess of Thebes. So, like a man that walks in sleep, he came from the Acropolis to the meadow at its foot, heedless of the mass of folk, heedless of the clamor and the flapping banners, the eager mien of knights and the radiant faces of ladies, only conscious that his duty in life was that day to sustain in arms the fame of the Lady Esclaramonde.

As he passed through the wicket into the lists and found himself in the vacant space behind the galleries, he was accosted by a young knight, partly armored, whose words and gesture invited him to a halt. The young knight was Argathona, daintily boyish in her man's armor. When she and Simon had made their way to the tilting-field they found that a pavilion had been allotted to the Prince of Eleusis by order of Count Ernault, wherein were placed the arms and armor promised by the different knights, while the white horse of Andronicus Palæologus waited in the stables to carry its new burden. Simon of Rouen, as the strange prince's esquire, helped his seeming master to arm swiftly, and thus Argathona was ready to meet Rainouart as he entered the enclosed meadow. Rainouart did not recognize her face, for it was the woodland will of the dryad that she should seem unfamiliar to him. The aura of the immortals was about her, and mortal eyes must see her as she pleased. But there is a power higher even than the wills of such immortals, and the young prince, looking into the face of the youth who stopped him, found his strange stupor troubled with new torments of striving to remember the unrememberable. He could not assure himself that he had ever seen the stranger's face before, and yet the sight of that strange face, with its gleam of golden hair beneath the silken cap, with its haunting suggestions of sea wave and lake water and forest fountain in its blue eyes, troubled him with an aching desire and the yet more aching knowledge that he knew not what he desired. If he had loved some woman in his boyhood, some woman long dead, this might have been her brother come upon him unawares, at all adventure, with some trick of the old love's look in his eyes, of the old love's carriage in his gait. But he shook himself impatiently, for there was no such memory in his life, and he was vexed with the blind, maimed memories that would never take shape and color. Through the dull hum of his confused thoughts he was conscious that the stranger knight addressed him.

"Rainouart of Athens, are not you to-day the general challenger?"

Rainouart saluted him mechanically, looking into his eyes and only finding there unanswerable mysteries.

"At your service, sir knight," he answered, and the sound of his own voice seemed as meaningless to him as the thin sighs of spirits heard in dreams, and yet he knew that he had spoken and that his hearer had heard and understood. Through all the entanglement of his senses he was conscious dimly of a curious surprise at his own ability to understand the stranger's speech, and his wonderment seemed to hark back to some other time, some other age, perhaps some other existence, when in some way he had heard one speak to him whom he understood and yet marvelled to understand.

"What are the terms of your challenge?" the stranger knight asked him. The prince answered, slowly:

"That my Lady Esclaramonde of Thebes is the rose of the world."

There was a moment's pause, and the prince made to resume his journey, but again the stranger stopped him with a question:

"You love this lady?"

The prince looked wonderingly at the fair, perplexing face.

"I wed her to-night," he answered, and still the stripling persisted:

"You are very sure you love this lady?"

The prince hesitated, then said, sharply:

"You question somewhat rustically. I wed her to-night."

Again the strange knight interrogated, pertinacious:

"You have left no other love for her sake?"

The prince drew back and set his hand to his sword.

"Sir," he said, angrily, "if you question my honor I will answer you to your hurt!"

The bearer of the name of Prince of Eleusis came a little nearer to Rainouart, and her voice was as plaintive as summer rain on forest leaves.

"No maid weeps for you in the greenwood?"