Part 4

"It may be," he suggested, "that it will prove too proud a quarry for two such gibbet-kites as you to pike at. The featherhead in the fine clothes may be a fool, but I do not think such a brace of barn-filchers would show very fearsome even in a fool's eyes."

He that called himself Captain Fox snarled with lips that were as leathern and teeth that were as yellow as his jerkin.

"Do not vex your liver for that," he answered. "We have comrades otherwhere in the wood that we will call to our comfort: Captain Rat and Captain Badger, Captain Bat and Captain Chanticleer, no less--valiant captains all."

Simon laughed heartily as the fantastic catalogue swelled.

"Here is an army out of Noah's ark," he applauded, "with as many generals to it as ever followed Alexander. Ye lack only the leader and the led. Well, go your ways. I give you Golden Jacket for a guerdon."

Again Captain Gander chuckled, but Captain Fox looked at Simon with some show of suspicion.

"Why do you tell us this?" he asked.

Simon answered him in the honesty of his malevolence.

"To help you to the gallows and him to his hurt, for he is a book-reading noodle. Go your ways, I am tired of you," and he pointed with his staff in the direction in which he knew the highway ran, though he could see no sign of it through the clustering trees. "You cannot miss him, for I have seen no other rider this eve, and he shines like a star, for his coat is of cloth of gold and he has jewels in his cap."

The rogues licked their lips. Captain Fox saw himself already in the coat of cloth of gold. Captain Gander, in imagination, pocketed some of those jewels.

"We thank you," Fox cried; and--

"Good-night," cried his fellow. And the pair made off at a pace between a walk and a trot in the direction indicated. Simon looked after them till they disappeared in the deepening dusk.

"I misdoubt me much," he meditated, "if reading of romances of roses will help that lad to tackle these grab-alls." Then he dismissed the matter from his mind and resumed his journey.

A little way farther he came upon a quiet glade which seemed very reposeful in the dying light, and here, in default of water, he decided to rest and munch his onions dryly. He sprawled at his ease on the soft grass and bit thoughtfully at his vegetable, pricking his wits for verses. This ballad was to be his biography, but so far it had not travelled beyond the nursery. The sharpness of his root stimulated fancy:

When I was no more than a span, Honey and gingerbread pleased me highly; When I came to the height of a man, Women and vintages used me vilely.

This quick flow of inspiration fascinated him. The rhymes were as true as they were beautiful. He must needs try again while the fit was on him:

When I went to lovemonger school, Poppets and fopperies killed my credit; All my sweethearts thought me a fool While I had pence; but when poor they said it.

He was hugely amused at this fruition. A man might read verses and yet prove no fool, if the verses were of such stuff as this ballad he fashioned. Here was no nonsense about a rose, but a plain tale of a brave man's life, bravely told, meat for heroes. Thinking it over, he felt that it had gone far enough. It said with a noble simplicity all that he wanted to say; there lay his life by and large. Love of women, love of wine; and for result, your penniless misanthrope yawning in a forest. For Simon was yawning noisily. The unwonted intellectual effort had overmastered his activity; he ought to be up and doing, but sloth pawed at his eyelids and the dusk was all a-humming with lullabies.

"Well, thanks be," he murmured, as he chewed on the last bite of his onion, "there is no woman-thing in this wood to worry me if I choose to slumber."

Even as he spoke he closed his eyes, and, as it seemed to him, had scarcely closed them when he opened them again, suddenly conscious that a woman was standing before him and staring at him.

RAINOUART

The studious young knight lay for some little while in the pleasing shadow where Simon had left him, busy with his book. In the enchantment of its pages he had soon forgotten Simon and his lantern and his angry face. In that warm May evening it was very agreeable to lie stretched at his ease there in the green shade and to read the wonderful story of the Romance of the Rose. The little volume was very neatly written on vellum in a clear, clerkly hand, and a hand that was more than clerkly had enriched it with many agreeable pictures in which wonderful attenuated youths and slender maidens with yellow hair, all in garments of vivid green and blue and red and yellow, wandered over enamelled fields that were studded with daisies, and in pleasances of fantastic trees. The book was not new to Europe, but it was always new to the youth. He had brought it with him from the court of Philip the Fair, who had given it to the young knight on the occasion of his departure from Greece. Now because Philip the Fair, a shrewd discerner of humanity, knew his man, his gift contained only that early part, which was written by William of Lorris, and which exalted love and ladies, and not that later part, from the hand of John of Meung, which treated ladies with scant ceremony and would have spelled love after another fashion. For the youth who lay in the shadow and read the Romance of the Rose was, in the first place, a youth of a high mind and gentle heart, whose spirit swam in the clearest ether of chivalry; and, in the second place, he was son and heir of the reigning Duke of Athens, Duke Baldwin of the Rock.

In all the stormy stories of the conquest of Greece by the Frankish princes, few histories were more stormy or more splendid than those of the Princes of the Rock and of their connection with the city of the Violet Crown. For long enough the Princes of the Rock had ruled in Athens in the direct line, but in the year 1308 the torch was blown out by the death of Guy II., who died childless, and the title swerved off to a cousin of the dead duke, Count Baldwin of the Rock, who at that time was living a brisk, piratical, and filibustering life in the East, much to the discomfort of those with whom his turbulent, truculent nature brought him at loggerheads. Baldwin was a whole-hearted soldier of fortune who loved the bustle of battle, the sacking of cities, the filling of his pockets with other people's money, and the cheering of his occasional solitude with other people's wives. Baldwin had been married himself years before in France to the Lady Isabeau of Hainault. She had loved him much, having been deceived, as sweet women sometimes will be deceived, into the belief that the manners of a savage were truly the manners of a man. He had loved her a little just because her pale graces were new to him, and of her and her pale graces he soon heartily wearied. It was not Count Baldwin's way to trouble himself long about anything that wearied him, and he flung himself headlong into a life of fierce adventure in the scrimmage-ground of the East, leaving his lady, who by that time was not broken-hearted to lose him, in France, with his infant son to take care of.

It was not unnatural that Isabeau of Hainault, having known what it meant to be companion for a season to Duke Baldwin, was honestly and honorably determined to bring up her son to be as unlike his father as, God willing, might be accomplished. Melancholy, heart-sick Isabeau worked out her purpose well. For all her pale grace and fragile person, the Lady Isabeau of Hainault was a strong woman with strong thoughts. She recognized very frankly and very fully from the first how she had been deceived in Count Baldwin, and she made it her whole purpose and endeavor that no other woman should be so deceived by Count Baldwin's son. She had a kind of clear seeing that many such women have, and as she rocked the cradle of the sleeping boy she believed that his days and his ways might prove beautiful. Over the child she prayed one strange prayer morning and night--"I pray that you may never love till you find the loveliest, nor woo till you find the worthiest," and because she knew in her soul that the child would be strong of limb, and because she loved all the old tales of chivalry, she named the child Rainouart, after the noble youth with the giant's strength in the ancient tale of Aliscans.

As the new Rainouart grew from infancy to boyhood, day by day he redeemed his mother's prayers and fulfilled his mother's wishes. He showed from the first an extraordinary strength of body. His physical frame had in it nothing of the bull-bulk of Count Baldwin, but inside his slender form and smooth skin he seemed to be compact with steel. The Lady Isabeau was too brave a lady to forget that a man's first business is to be a man, wherefore the young prince was well trained in arms and skilled in all bodily exercises. As he grew into years and proficiency in martial arts, the contrast between his slender juvenility and his extraordinary vigor and power grew more remarkable. It was curious to find this amazing heritance of the paternal strength so intimately allied with, and subject to, the spirituality of his mother. Rainouart was never quarrelsome, and could scarcely be provoked into a brawl save by some deed of injustice or dishonor; but if ever he were forced to fisticuffs it always went hard with his adversaries, though the odds were heavy against him, as they always were in such cases. Youths of his own age, but youths of greater breadth of body and show of muscle, taken unawares by his appearance, would often challenge him to feats of strength, confident of easy victory, only to be amazed and discomfited by the gentle serenity with which he overcame their sturdiest efforts.

The boy's mind was not neglected at the charge of his body. The tastes of the Lady Isabeau were lettered for an age which did not overprize letters, and she saw to it that her son had a breeding more scholarly than would have pleased the mind of Count Baldwin, who lustily despised and damned all clerks and cared for nothing in manhood but big-boned fighting-engines. The boy was early trained to read and write, to taste some tincture of Latinity, and to find his inspiration and his ideal in the chivalrous epics of France and Britain. When he came to young manhood and entered the service of the King of France, he was soon recognized as one of the most promising knights of the king's following, and the friendship of many men was given to him and the friendship of many women offered to him. The friendship of the men he took amiably and modestly, though no man was his superior of all the king's men in strength or skill. The friendship of the women he let go by him, also very modestly but always with decision. There were many that longed to knock at the door of his heart and enter in, and there were some that showed their longing, most notably of all the beautiful Esclaramonde of Bayonne, whom most men worshipped for her dark, imperious loveliness, and whom all the women, her rivals, hated for a witch, and upbraided beneath their breaths for her skill in philtres. But Esclaramonde, who had won many hearts, and was said to have shown herself generous in reward for her victories, gained no greater favor in Rainouart's eyes than any other lady of the many dainty ladies in the court of Philip the Fair. It would seem as if the prayer his mother had prayed over his cradle had acted on his nature like a charm. Consciously or unconsciously, those words were the governance of his life--"Never love till you find the loveliest, nor woo till you find the worthiest." Truly the Lady Isabeau so loved her son that she thought no woman born of woman worthy to be his wife, and truly she was pleased to believe that in this, as in all other thoughts, Rainouart was of her mind. Moreover, the Lady Isabeau was, as became her rank, familiar with the family histories of the great houses of which the fine court ladies were the fairest flowers, and what she chose to tell or suggest to her son had its service in steeling his spirit against temptations. Anyway, Rainouart served all the fine court ladies with the high-bred homage of an equal and even courtesy, but no pretty face out of all those pretty faces had ever blotted the sun from his mind's firmament, and no white hand of all those white hands had ever held his spirit its prisoner. Esclaramonde of Bayonne, in chagrin, it was whispered, married the ancient, doting Lord of Nemours, who had gained a duchy in Greece, where he reigned as Duke of Thebes, and whither he carried his passionate, magical, dangerous lady. Rainouart paid no heed to her passing; he knew only three services in life--his service to God, his service to his king, and his service to his mother. And from two of these services he was, to his sorrow, soon to be set free. A little while before destiny called upon him to quit the service of Philip the Fair destiny denied him the present service of his mother. The Lady Isabeau passed away from a world of which, had it not been for her son, her pale and gracious presence had long been weary. When the time came to leave him, the last words she said to him were:

"It is good to be brave, it is better to be good; strive to be both," and so she passed away and left him very lonely.

The young Rainouart deeply mourned his mother's memory, for she had ever been his ideal of gentle womanhood, and he made it a mighty resolve in all his life so to act as if she were still with him and her approbation still to be won. Losing thus his best friend, he would have been well content to remain in the service of the adventurous French king, but the death of Guy II. changed his fortune. When the Duchy of Athens came to Count Baldwin, and that jovial freebooter hurried hot-foot to Greece and found himself in unquestioned possession of his duchy, he remembered, belated, that he was a family man. His wife was dead, indeed, but his son lived, and a son was an advantageous possession for the holder of a great title and the ruler of a great state. So messengers were sent speeding across seas to the court of King Philip the Fair, summoning the young man by his filial allegiance to Athens and to the father whom he had never seen. It is by no means overlikely that Rainouart would have thriven at the court of Philip the Fair. For though that astute and unscrupulous monarch had a high regard for the strength, the courage, and the scholarship of the young knight, Rainouart had other qualities which Philip disliked exceedingly, chiefly, indeed, the candor of his mind and the frankness of his speech. He would never consent to condone King Philip's savage treatment of Pope Boniface VII., which had ended, as it seemed, in the pontiff's death at the hands of Philip's men. He held his peace about it, as was meet in the servant of a king, but once when Philip plied him for his opinion, and would take no denial, Rainouart said what he thought, simply and straightly, and the king never plied him for his opinion again, deciding that he was better as a king's fighter than as a king's councillor. Yet he liked the lad for his comeliness, and Rainouart liked the king as his lord. So the young man regretfully said farewell to the king, his master, and his master gave him the beautiful painted manuscript of William of Lorris's romance as a farewell gift, and the young man journeyed over-seas to his father's duchy.