But you saw, too, people pardoning and even befriending persons who had affronted or injured them, and doing this because of the fame of Manuel’s loving kindliness toward his fellows: everywhere you saw that wholly groundless notion flowering also into a squeamishness about taking any other person’s property away from him, even when you really wanted it. You saw bodily sound young men avoiding, or at any rate stinting, the normal pleasures of youth, alike among their peers and in bed, because of the famousness of Dom Manuel’s sobriety and chastity: and you saw milksops, in fine, giving up all the really intelligent vices because of that slanderous rumor about Manuel’s addiction to the virtues.
It was not, either—not altogether,—that the young fools thought they had much to gain by these eccentricities. They had, somehow, been tempted into emulation by this nonsense about Manuel’s virtues. And then they had—still somehow, still quite unexplainably,—found pleasure in it. Coth granted this rather forlornly: these young people were getting a calm and temperate, but a positive, gratification out of being virtuous. And since the, comparatively, intelligent and unregenerate persons were all profiting by their fellows’ increased forbearance, altogether everybody was reaping benefit.
This damnable new generation was, because of its insane aspiring, happier than its fathers had been under the reign of candor and common-sense. This moon-struck legend of Manuel was bringing, not to be sure any omnipresent and unendurable perfection, but an undeniable increase of tranquility and contentment to all Poictesme. Coth saw that too.
He remembered what his true liege-lord had said to him in the Place of the Dead: and Coth admitted that, say what you might as to the Manuel who had really lived, the squinting rascal did as a rule know what he was talking about.
Chapter XXX. Havoc of Bad Habits
News as to court affairs and the rest of the province came now to Coth, in his two lairs at Haut Belpaysage, belatedly and rarely. Yet at this time he heard that Anavalt the Courteous had gone out of Poictesme with as little warning as the other lords of the Silver Stallion had accorded their intimates when Gonfal and Kerin and Miramon, and Coth himself, had each gone out of the land after Manuel’s passing.
These overnight evasions appeared to be becoming a habit, Coth said to his wife Azra, so you had best cherish me in the night season while you may, instead of shrieking out nonsense about my hands being so cold. She replied with an uxorial generality as to sore-headed bears and snapping-turtles and porcupines, which really was not misplaced. And it was not for a long while that any tidings were had of Anavalt the Courteous, and the riddle of his evasion was unraveled, [1] but by and by came news as to the end which Anavalt had found near a windmill in the Wood of Elfhame, in his courtship of the mistress of that sinister and superficial forest.
“At his age, too! and with a woman too thin to keep him warm!” said Coth. “It simply shows you, my dear son, what comes of lecherous habits, and I trust you may profit by it, for the world is very full of such deceits.”
And Coth, for his Jurgen’s benefit, piously indicated the motto which you encountered at well-nigh every turn in Coth’s two homes, along with the stallion rampant in every member.
Nevertheless, Coth was unhappier than he showed. He had loved Anavalt in the days when these two had served together under the banner of the Silver Stallion. It seemed to Coth that in dark Elfhame a handsome and fine-spoken and kindly rascal had been trapped and devoured rather wastefully. Nor was it cheering to consider that, now, but five of the great fellowship remained alive. . . . Meanwhile, in rearing a son judiciously, one must preserve the proper moral tone.
And Coth heard also, at about this time, of the magic which had been put upon King Helmas the Deep-Minded, that monarch whom, as people said, Dom Manuel in the old days had bamboozled into giving Manuel a fine start in life. At first, to be sure, the tale ran that Helmas had been murdered, and his treasury rifled, by one of his attendants: and this Perion de la Foret, after his escape from prison, was sought for everywhere. Later, the truth was known: and Coth heard of how a magic had been put upon Helmas, by his own daughter Melusine, and of the notable transfer of the king’s castle of Brunbelois and the king’s person and entire entourage, from out of Albania to that high place in the great Forest of Acaire, where, people said, the ill-fated court of Helmas now stayed enchanted.
And Coth drew the moral. “It shows you what parents may expect of their children,” he remarked, with a malevolent glance toward his adored Jurgen. “It shows you what comes of this habit of indulging children.”
“Now, Father—” said the boy.
“Stop storming at me! How dare you attempt to bulldoze me, sir! Do you take me for another Helmas!”
“But, Father, I was only—”
“Get out of my sight, you quarrelsome puppy! I will not be thus deafened. Get back to that Dorothy of yours! You care for nobody else,” said jealous old Coth.
“But, Father—”
“And must you still be arguing with me! Do you think there is no end to my patience? What is there to argue about? The puppy follows the bitch. That is natural.”
“But, Father, how can you—!”
“Get out of my sight before I break every bone in your body! Get back to that cold sanctimonious court and to your hot wench!” said Coth.
Yet all the while that he spoke with such fluency Coth’s heart was troubled. Of course, in rearing a son judiciously, one must preserve the proper moral tone. Nevertheless, Coth felt, at heart, that he might be taking the wrong way with the boy, and was being almost brusque.
But Coth was Coth. That was his doom. He had only one way.
Chapter XXXI. Other Paternal Apothegms
Now Jurgen went very often to court, since the boy at twenty-one was fathoms deep in love with Count Manuel’s second daughter, whom they called Dorothy la Desiree. Coth saw her but once: and, even over and above his rage at the thought of sharing Jurgen with anybody, Coth was honestly moved, in the light of his considerable boudoir experience, to uncivil prophecy. He was upon this occasion, in the main hall at Bellegarde, with dozens of persons within earshot, most embarrassingly explicit with Jurgen, alike as to the quality of Jurgen’s intelligence and the profession which Coth desired no daughter-in-law of his to practice.
The two quarreled. That nowadays was no novelty. The difference was that into this quarrel Jurgen put all his heart. So the insolent, overbearing, bulldozing young scoundrel was packed off to serve under the Vidame de Soyecourt: and before the year was out Coth heard that this Dorothy la Desiree was married to Guivric’s son Michael.
“This Michael is but the first served at an entertainment preparing for the general public,” was Coth’s epithalamium.
And many rumors came back to Haut Belpaysage as to Jurgen’s doings in Gatinais, and, while they all seemed harmless enough, not all were precisely what a father would have elected to hear. Coth considered, for example, that Jurgen had acted with imprudence in thus hastily making Coth a grandfather with the assistance of the third wife of the Vidame de Soyecourt. Husbands had a sad way of being provoked by such offspring, upon the wholly illogical ground that the provocation was not mutual. Still, young people needed their diversions, and husbands, to Coth’s experience, were not a dangerous tribe. What really fretted a somewhat aging Alderman, however, was that such stories reached him casually, and that from Jurgen himself he heard nothing.