The Nightmare Had Triplets (27 page)

    These things were true. These things did not satisfy me. For beside me stood Gerda. In my first youth, in my boyhood, I had loved Gerda as I have loved no other human being. And with Gerda I had broken faith. I saw the fine curve of her throat. I had forgotten how lovely was the white throat of Gerda.

    I knew that this girl was dead. She was lost to me. I had only much wealth and honor and my famousness. I had only a great name which would be applauded after I was past hearing what men said about it. A skull has no ears. Yes, I had bargained with my one life upon earth unthriftily. I saw now how very poorly I had bargained, and a large weariness possessed me. I slept, because a dim and proud music lulled me. I slept, because nothing mattered any more.

    When I awoke, it was morning. I lay among dead leaves, under a thorn-tree. Beside me stood my bay horse. It was tethered to an ash-tree. There was no copper house anywhere. I had but dreamed about much unhappy and faded and quite inconclusive nonsense, I reflected.

    Charlemagne said: “These dreams about dead women have no profit in them. They trouble contentment. Such dreams are known to me. Such dreams make only a wasting, yes, and they make an unhappiness also, in the life of their dreamer.”

    “Not so, my uncle,” replied Roland the fine fighting-man: “inasmuch as my horse was tethered to the ash-tree with this same chain of copper which you behold now about my neck. My dream does not any longer make an unhappiness now that it has made also a chain of copper, a chain of Dame Venus’ true metal, to be a bright and assured token that Gerda has forgiven my unfaith. She awaits my return, in high paradise, I deduce from this chain of copper; and so, by this chain of copper, am I led to believe that the magic of Branlon is kindly.”

    Then said the pedlar: “Let the young poets come to Branlon. Let the gray poets whose hearts yet keep their youth seek Branlon for their hearts’ comfort. So will Branlon delude all these into such contentment as now has helped Duke Roland, for the magic of Branlon is compassionate and above reason. For absurd loyalties this forest has made a haven; this forest feeds magnanimity; this forest revives the hurt daydreams of youth. Let all the young in heart repair to the country home of Mr. Smith, the retired poet, because in this way, for so long a while as the slender, blended, tender magic of Branlon endures, may they believe that all life may be made noble and highhearted.”

    The Emperor cleared his throat, in a thoroughgoing fashion which shook his white beard.

    “Your remarks,” observed Charlemagne—“coming, as they do, in the form of an addition to my dear nephew’s moonstruck story—have set me to thinking about more women than I need name. Hah, and by Holy Magdalene I cannot see that their forgiveness of our shared doings is called for. I cannot see that such forgiveness is either an assured or a very important matter. These poets! I reflect: and my opinion of most verse-makers takes form as a shrug. Moreover, I do not think that a copper chain, howsoever unaccountably acquired, and no matter how shiny, establishes beyond moral doubt a fixed assignation in paradise, or anywhere else.”

    Afterward he dismissed Roland indulgently, because the Emperor loved this young man as dearly as if the flaxen-haired champion were his own son. And indeed it was generally whispered, among his detractors, that he had reason to love Roland in this way.

    “Now then,” said Charlemagne, “now that the most brave has spoken, let the most shrewd continue. Let us hear what Archbishop Turpin reports.”

    Turpin, the bland Archbishop, ruling over Rheims, was a quiet-spoken clergyman, with a serene, thin and very noble face, having gray hair. On his steel helmet was the head of a cherub moulded in silver; and his close-fitting shirt of mail was of pale gold woven out of little chains as pliant as silk. This Turpin said:

    I rode into the forest of Branlon but a short way before I came to a house builded of silver. In the courtyard I found a woman whose face was not strange to me. There is no living woman more beautiful, nor more prodigally tricked out with those demure, those soft, those glowing, and those most damnable snares such as betray men’s flesh, than this girl whom I had known in my ruinous youth. It was troubling to reflect that she had died a great while ago, for this woman was no phantom. The hand which I kissed—with that civility which befits a prince of the Church in dealing with all living creatures—was so warm and tender that in touching it my own hand trembled. Her robe might have been a cloud, so soft and white it was. About her wrists were broad bands of silver. At her girdle hung a net very finely woven of silver threads. In her face stayed that tenderness which I had not merited, so the obtuse said, when my better nature and all the orderings of common-sense led me to abandon a woman so godless that but a little while afterward she committed the dreadful crime of
felo-de-se
... I wept for her misdemeanor, I remember. I was very young then … Well, and now the appearance of this same woman stood beside a bright shallow pool in which were swimming small fish of twelve colors.

    “My dearest,” she said, “the gray years of our separation have been long, but they have gone by now, as a smoke vanishes; and only the love which was once between us endures.”

    “It endures,” I replied, “variously. Love departs from us forever. Only the ghost of love may return, oh, even from out of the deep grave may that bright and bitter ghost return, bringing strange and terrible gifts and unfed desires.”

    She said, “You speak of gifts.”

    “In addressing gentlewomen, Mathilde, I have found that to be the opening most generally looked for in a prince of the Church, who cannot well speak of marriage.”

    “It is a long journey, Turpin, from the grave to the arms of my lover. Because of that journey I must have my bride-gift.”

    My voice answered, hollowly: “A gift for a gift, Mathilde; for I likewise have fared a long way, even from out of our shared iniquity to the dear portals of heaven; and you bid me retrace that journeying.”

    She smiled; and in heaven, as I well knew, there could not be anything more dangerous, or more beautiful, than Mathilde.

    “Give me,” she said, “the archbishop’s ring from that hand which has so often caressed me amorously.”

    “Give me,” I replied, “the net from your girdle which I have so very often unloosed before to-day.”

    So did we exchange gifts, rejecting alike the service of good and of evil because of that love which endured between a great prince of Holy Church and a dead harlot. Mathilde smiled up at me happily. She was frightened, I thought, now that I held the silver net; and yet she was proud of my shrewdness also. I had half forgotten how lovely she was, how brave where I was not over-brave. I looked at her for a while, so that I might remember always how dear to me was the lewdness and the folly of my youth.

    Let none misunderstand me. I believe that for the lewdness and the folly of his youth a good Christian ought to repent with his entire heart. Yes, and he ought to repent not over-belatedly, but at the very first moment that age has made of such carnal matters a temptation feeble enough to be resisted with convenience. There is much comfort in repentance, a virtue which in many cases leads directly to the endowment of cathedrals and convents and to other pious offerings. Yet is charity also a virtue, that all-embracing charity which applies to all persons, including oneself.

    As a prince of the Church, I know that every man is bidden to forgive in his neighbor—according to the mathematics of the most holy Matthew—seventy times seven sins. Likewise, upon the authority of the same Apostle, and of two other Apostles, is every person commanded to love his neighbor and himself equally, without any least difference. Logic infers, I submit, that on account of this equal affection a good Christian must necessarily overlook his own errancy into an equal number of criminal offences.

    Yes, such is every man’s divinely allotted allowance of misdemeanors, even unto seventy times seven. It is an affair in which I would counsel no excess. I say only that not prior to the commission of some four hundred and ninety-first crime may the remorse of a good Christian awaken, or any reprobation of his own conduct be justified, if he has considered our sacred Scriptures with the carefulness proper to a prince of the Church.

    Secured by this course of reasoning, and by my tight hold on the silver net, I made bold, in the time that I looked fondly upon the eternally damned, the very lovely, and the most dear love of my youth, to recall with indulgence the more intimate frolics of our carnal offences. I forgave, with a clear conscience, my part in all these enormities, which by my arithmetic could not well have exceeded four hundred at utmost. Perhaps I ought to explain that necessarily, after this long lapse of time, I figured the sins of each separate evening as a single unit.

    I groaned then. I cast the net so that it fell about her golden fair head; and so, for one heart-beat, she yet smiled at me through the silver meshes.

    What happened after that was dreadful, for the flesh of Mathilde blackened, then it became gray, and it crumbled into foul dust. I stooped, weeping; and from among these ashes I took up again the ring which declared me the faithful servant of all-seeing Heaven. My hands were damp with sweat, so that a gray powdering of these. ashes clung to my finger-tips. And for another odd thing, I noted that the fish of twelve colors had become little creatures having the shape of small frightened men, differently dressed. They were climbing out of the shallow pool, running away in all directions. I was left alone in the forest.

    Then Archbishop Turpin sighed. He spread out his plump, well-shaped and very carefully washed hands, so that his happily preserved episcopal ring gleamed handsomely, in the while the Archbishop was saying: “That is all, highness. I returned unmolested. There is in this forest a disrespectfulness, which does not honor the dignity of a prince of the Church.”

    Now said the pedlar: “Let the kings and the high priests and the judges of this earth, and let all other persons that have overwisely compounded with prudence, avoid the home of a god who fell very long ago from his godhead. For these also are fallen gods who have lost the divine unreason of youth. And in quiet Branlon they perceive this, with sullen and hungry eyes.”

    “So,” said the Emperor, “so—since we speak of kings—it appears that this forest, with its house builded of silver and its house builded of copper, is subject to the old laws of faery. Now, by these known laws, any third adventurer, even though he be a king, must come, of necessity, to a house of gold.”

    “That is known everywhere, highness,” the pedlar returned.

    “And in this house,” Charlemagne went on, “he likewise would encounter a woman. Yes; for the legislators of faery, and of its many provinces, abhor novelty. They are a most conservative people.”

    With that, the Emperor became silent; and the pedlar regarded him silently.

    Charlemagne to-day wore his accustomed simple dress. A long blue cloak hung over his shoulders, closed as far as the loins, where this cloak divided into two parts, of which the shorter part fell before him to his knees, and the longer part hung down behind him to his ankles. His legs were clothed in rather short blue trousers, laced at the outer sides with a silver cord, and he likewise wore blue silk stockings. His legs were regrettably skinny. He wore beneath his cloak a white tunic; and a belt of silver encircled his waist, from which hung, in an ornamented sheath of blue leather, the world-famous sword Flamberge.

    But in his wise, wrinkled, white-bearded face great Charlemagne wore only an air of serene meditation. He said now,—

    “Well, and what long-lost paramour would I, who am a king, tall pedlar, be finding in that same house of gold?”

    The pedlar replied: “No one of your four wives, highness, nor yet any one of those five acknowledged mistresses who have borne your acknowledged children. You would find instead, in that golden house, the appearance of Madame Gilles.”

    “Hah!” said Charlemagne.

    “I mean, highness, your dead sister, the Lord Roland’s mother.”

    Now Charlemagne sat absolutely still, seeming for that instant, inside his somehow collapsed blue mantle, a gray and stricken old dotard. He laughed then. He said, with unshaken lordliness:

    “My Roland was born, even as you tell me the four children of sublime Smirt were born, of a dream which has forsaken its dreamer, long and very long ago. Dreams are not durable, not steadfast … Yet the eyes of a god remain always steadfast. They are like the eyes of a serpent. The eyes of a god do not twitch or blink or shift restlessly, as do the eyes of mankind. So may one recognize a god, tall pedlar, whatsoever be his disguise.”

    Then the pedlar answered, yet again, with not-ever-failing urbanity,—

    “That is known, highness.”

    “Now the eyes of a god,” said Charlemagne, “see clearly. It is permitted them to perceive far-off matters from which my own eyes turn away resolutely. I have sinned against nature, and beyond pardon, it may be. At all events, I am no poet to rhapsodize in picked words, no priest to repent smugly, over the doings of my boyhood. Instead, I must be about my kingly work in this world, laboring to let my good deeds outbalance my ill deeds, in the while that I rule over my people as best I may, without sparing time to consider that which is by-gone and disastrous and dead.”

    His wrinkled, brown-blotched old hands gripped each other, in a sudden wild gesture.

    “Oh, and more dear to me than is my wide kingdom,” he said, “even now! There was love. There was death. To-day there is only much power. And it does not matter. The great power of Charlemagne and all the world-famous doings of Charlemagne are derided by those two commonplaces which we call love and death!”