Part 24 (1/2)
”--Besides, you are miles away from Poictesme. You could not even manage to get there this afternoon.”
Manuel put his hand over her mouth. ”Niafer, when I spoke of subjugating Poictesme this afternoon I was attempting a mild joke. I will never any more attempt light irony in your presence, for I perceive that you do not appreciate my humor. Meanwhile I repeat to you, No, no, a thousand times, no! To be called Count of Poictesme sounds well, it strokes the hearing: but I will not be set to root and vegetate in a few hundred spadefuls of dirt. No, for I have but one lifetime here, and in that lifetime I mean to see this world and all the ends of this world, that I may judge them. And I,” he concluded, decisively, ”am Manuel, who follow after my own thinking and my own desire.”
Niafer began to weep. ”I simply cannot bear to think of what people will say of you.”
”Come, come, my dear,” says Manuel, ”this is preposterous.”
Niafer wept.
”You will only end by making yourself ill!” says Manuel.
Niafer continued to weep.
”My mind is quite made up,” says Manuel, ”so what, in G.o.d's name, is the good of this?”
Niafer now wept more and more broken-heartedly. And the big champion sat looking at her, and his broad shoulders relaxed. He viciously kicked at the heavy glistening green head of the dragon, still bleeding uglily there at his feet, but that did no good whatever. The dragon-queller was beaten. He could do nothing against such moisture, his resolution was dampened and his independence was washed away by this salt flood. And they say too that, now his youth was gone, Dom Manuel began to think of quietness and of soft living more resignedly than he acknowledged.
”Very well, then,” Manuel says, by and by, ”let us cross the Loir, and ride south to look for our infernal coronet with the rubies in it, and for your servants, and for some of your palaces.”
So in the Christmas holidays they bring a tall burly squinting gray-haired warrior to King Ferdinand, in a lemon grove behind the royal palace. Here the sainted King, duly equipped with his halo and his goose-feather, was used to perform the lesser miracles on Wednesdays and Sat.u.r.days.
The King was delighted by the change in Manuel's looks, and said that experience and maturity were fine things to be suggested by the appearance of a n.o.bleman in Manuel's position. But, a pest! as for giving him any troops with which to conquer Poictesme, that was quite another matter. The King needed his own soldiers for his own ends, which necessitated the immediate capture of Cordova. Meanwhile here were the Prince de Gatinais and the Marquess di Paz, who also had come with this insane request, the one for soldiers to help him against the Philistines, and the other against the Catalans.
”Everybody to whom I ever granted a fief seems to need troops nowadays,”
the King grumbled, ”and if any one of you had any judgment whatever you would have retained your lands once they were given you.”
”Our deficiencies, sire,” says the young Prince de Gatinais, with considerable spirit, ”have not been altogether in judgment, but rather in the support afforded us by our liege-lord.”
This was perfectly true; but inasmuch as such blunt truths are not usually flung at a king and a saint, now Ferdinand's thin brows went up.
”Do you think so?” said the King. ”We must see about it. What is that, for example?”
He pointed to the pool by which the lemon-trees were watered, and the Prince glanced at the yellow object afloat in this pool. ”Sire,” said de Gatinais, ”it is a lemon which has fallen from one of the trees.”
”So you judge it to be a lemon. And what do you make of it, di Paz?” the King inquired.
The Marquess was a statesman who took few chances. He walked to the edge of the pool, and looked at the thing before committing himself: and he came back smiling. ”Ah, sire, you have indeed contrived a cunning sermon against hasty judgment, for, while the tree is a lemon-tree, the thing that floats beneath it is an orange.”
”So you, Marquess, judge it to be an orange. And what do you make of it, Count of Poictesme?” the King asks now.
If di Paz took few chances, Manuel took none at all. He waded into the pool, and fetched out the thing which floated there. ”King,” says big Dom Manuel, sagely blinking his bright pale eyes, ”it is the half of an orange.”
Said the King: ”Here is a man who is not lightly deceived by the vain shows of this world, and who values truth more than dry shoes. Count Manuel, you shall have your troops, and you others must wait until you have acquired Count Manuel's powers of judgment, which, let me tell you, are more valuable than any fief I have to give.”
So when the spring had opened, Manuel went into Poictesme at the head of a very creditable army, and Dom Manuel summoned Duke Asmund to surrender all that country. Asmund, who was habitually peevish under the puckerel curse, refused with opprobrious epithets, and the fighting began.
Manuel had, of course, no knowledge of generals.h.i.+p, but King Ferdinand sent the Conde de Tohil Vaca as Manuel's lieutenant. Manuel now figured imposingly in jeweled armor, and the sight of his s.h.i.+eld bearing the rampant stallion and the motto _Mundus vult decipi_ became in battle a signal for the more prudent among his adversaries to distinguish themselves in some other part of the conflict. It was whispered by backbiters that in counsel and in public discourse Dom Manuel sonorously repeated the orders and opinions provided by Tohil Vaca: either way, the official utterances of the Count of Poictesme roused everywhere the kindly feeling which one reserves for old friends, so that no harm was done.