The Holy Sinner

The Children-1

The ChildrenWith what care now the noble little children were reared by women of experience, whose brow and chin the coif embraced! These fed them with sweetened gruel and pap, bathed them in bran-water, and rubbed their bare gums with wine that the milk teeth might come through more easily and quickly and grace their smiles. They did so, readily, without much puling and the teeth were like pearls, though very sharp too. But as the twain were now no longer in swaddling-bands, no more the tenderest of newcomers here below, the sweet light they had brought with them from above passed as cloud-shadows pass; and they grew darker and began to take on more earthly shape, though the very most graceful, I must say. The down of young chicks on their little heads turned into smooth brown hair that contrasted quite charmingly with the unusual foreign yvorie pallor of the fine-fine little faces and the skin of their growing bodies: clearly an inheritance from distant forebears, not their parents, for the Lady Baduhenna had been white and apple-red and Sieur Grimald was vermilion-hued in the face. The children’s eyes, whose rays at first were azure, darkened deeper and deeper into black with a blue depth, seldom seen and almost uncanny, if also no longer heavenly—which is not to say why some little angels should not have such night-blue eyes. Also they both had a way of looking sidelong out of one corner as though they were listening and waiting for something. Whether for good or ill I cannot tell.

At seven, the time of losing the first teeth, they got chickenpox and as they scratched the pocks a mark remained on the forehead of each, a scar and a flat hollow, in exactly the same place and the same shape, namely like a sickle. Their silken brown hair fell over it but the Lord Grimald sometimes in playfulness or wonder stroked it back from their brows, what time the coiffed women, as they did daily at a fixed hour, brought the children before his footstool, as he sat with goblet of claret ready to his hand. The nurses with bent heads smiling withdrew for several paces down the hall in order not to disturb by their lowly proximity the pleasure of the noble family. Or they remained standing by the door and let the children go to their sire, Sibylla in her little shot-silk gown (or whatever one calls a pattern artfully woven with gold thread), Wiligis in his velvet smock bordered with beaver, the hair of both on their shoulders. Wiligis by precept and training knew well to bend the knee: ‘Dieu vus sal, dear Herre wert,’ said they in little voices somewhat hoarse with alarm. And then the father chatted and jested with them, called them gent mignote de soris and sweethearts, asked how their day went, and commended them at length to the Saint Esperit, clapping Willo and kissing Sibylla. He told them: ‘Be good children!’ They answered in unison, with their hoarse little voices: ‘May God reward you!’ and went away backwards from him as custom bade, while the women hurried towards them from the door and took their hands, the outside ones, as they were holding each other’s.

They were ever handfast wherever they went, at eight and at ten years, and were like a pair of dwarf parrots or love-birds, together day and night, for from the first they had shared a bedchamber high up in the tower where the little owls flew hooting and where their bedsteads stood with straps of salamander-skin on which the cushions lay and bedposts of twisted snakes. The upholstery under the cushions was palmat. Of the coiffed women who still for company and serving slept by them on pallets, they often inquired: ‘We are little yet, aren’t we?’—‘Two little turtle-doves, high-born and fine.’—‘And shall be small a long time, shan’t we, n’est-ce voir?’—‘Yes, suerement, sweetnesses, a long time yet.’—‘But we want to be little always on earth,’ they said. ‘We have made it up like that, when we cosy together. We shall then easier become little angels in hefen. It must be very hard with belly and beard and bosom to turn into a little angel when one dies.’—‘Oh, little silly, que Dieu dispose! And He will not have it that one remain for ever a child, whatever you may have made up. Deus ne volt.’—‘But if we chastise ourselves, and not sleep for three nights long but only pray that God keep us little?’—‘Hark to the sweet simplicity! My faith you will fall asleep and sweetly grow in sleep.’

And so it was. I do not know whether they tried the scourging in earnest; I would like to think that the nurses’ words refrained them. But by little and little, as the years passed over castle and country, foliaged and fallow, ice-grey and then again green with may, they came to be nine and ten and eleven, two buds which would unfold, or even if they would not, yet were about to, no longer small, but young-young things, pretty as pictures their pale faces, with silken brows, lively eyes, thin nostrils which visibly quivered, and long, somewhat arched upper lip; in body quietly shaping according to their destinies, not yet rightly in proportion, but rather like young hounds whose paws are too big; thus when Wiligis in the morning, high-spirited from sleep, nude like a pagan god, his sickle mark in his tumbled hair, jumped about the wooden bathtub before his bed, whereon swam rose-leaves, that by which he differed from his sister, his male part, looked too large and developed compared with his slender yvorie-toned body. The sight makes me in a way sad. So childlike fine and wise on top the little head on the slender shoulders and then low down such a thumper! But the nurses clucked their tongues respectfully and made great eyes at each other, saying: ‘L’espoirs des dames!’ As for the maid, she sat, a bud scarce yet half open on the bed’s edge, the sign on her forehead quite plain since her hair had been drawn back for the night; almost darkly she looked out of the corner of her eye on him and his admiring womenkind. I know what she was thinking. She thought: ‘I will—l’espoirs! Mine is the sweetheart. That damsel who has to do with him—j’arracherai les yeux and take no poena for it, I, little daughter of the Duke!’

There had been assigned to her a noble widow, a Comtesse of Cleves, with whom she sang the psalter in the window-seat and who taught her the embroidering of stuffs of costly wool. The younker in his turn had a gouvernail named Eisengrein, Cons du Châtel, that is to say count of a fortified castle in a lake with moats wide and deep and a high look-out over the sea, for the castle stood down in the plain, where it was called Rousselaere and Thorhout, quite near the sea. (Take care and note this water-castle, near the sounding seas! It will have its bearing on this history.) Thence came the Sieur Eisengrein, a foremost in the land and leal vassal, to Beaurepaire expressly to be lord-in-waiting to the younker, and his maistre de courtoisie. There was given to him also for the grosser services the squire Patafrid. But though the Lord Grimald had always because of the radiance from on high preferred the maid before the son, and the more the bud unfolded the more tender and gallant he grew, though the more, as the younker grew up, the gruffer to his son, yet he was right fatherly mindful of the good breeding of the heir and gave order that he become un om de gentilesce, afetié, bien parlant, et anseignié. So from those two he learned knighthood and fine morality. From Patafrid he learned (whether with especial pleasure or not) to leap on his horse without the rein and from Master Eisengrein how when riding for pleasure in light attire one lays légèrement one leg foremost upon the horse. With the principal squires he had to fight a joust in iron armour from Soissons and learn how one aims with the spear at the four nailes on the opponent’s shield, whereupon Patafrid to pleasure him would fall from his horse and give surety. He learned too how one hurls the short gabylot as well as to use the long lance in running up. With his gouvernail and the falconers he rode to the hawking in the greenwood, learned to fling the well-schooled bell-falcon from his hand and whistle so skilfully on a blade of grass that all the wild game thought to hear the cry of their own kind.

What know I of knighthood and venery? I am a monk, at bottom ignorant of all this and even somewhat fearful. I have never confronted a boar nor heard in my ears the crashing horn at fall of the stag, nor brought in the game and as master of the chace eaten the tidbits roasted upon coals. I merely behave as though I could actually say how the younker Wiligis was brought up, and put words to the telling. Never have I swung a gabylot in my hand nor thrown the long lance under my arm; nor yet ‘leafed’—blown on a leaf—to deceive the wild things; this very word for it which I use with such apparent ease I have just picked up. But so is the way and the spirit of story-telling which I embody that all it tells of, it pretends to have experienced and to be at home in it. The buhurd too, the joyous tourney young Wiligis practised on the soft valley bottom at the foot of the castle hill with gentlemen and squires, when in full career host assaults host and each seeks to force the other from the field, while the ladies sat on wooden balconies round about, either mocking or applauding their gallants. This rough-and-tumble too, I say, is at bottom quite beyond me and rather offensive than otherwise. Yet I am able to run and tell how Willo with his host pressed forward, clods flying, the handsomest fifteen-year-old one can imagine, on his dappled steed, without armour save the neck- and shoulder-piece of light chain mail, which framed his fine pale boyish face, in tabard and doublet of red Alexandrine silk; and how one and all courteously avoided him, let him seem to thrust through the whole opposing troop, because he was the Duke’s son; and how the ladies congratulated Sibylla, his sweet sister, who laughed and breathed quick upon his victory.

That it was a sham triumph consoles me somewhat for speaking with such sham fluency of matters which are none of mine. But even from a sham triumph one gets hot too, and hot and proud because they had been so courteous to him came Wiligis back to the castle and stood before his sister, who in her turn knew quite well that he had won by common consent, and in spite of or because of that, was just as hot and proud as he. Would you know how (in celebration of the day) the maid was clad: she was arrayed in a gown green as grass, of Azagoger velvet, very wide and long and voluminously draped, and in front where it hung in wide folds one saw the lining was of red silk and the under-petticoat of white. Round her yvorie throat it fitted close and was sewn like the wrists with pearl and stones which lower on the bosom came together to form a broad ornament. Thick set with precious stones was the girdle too and the virgin crants on her flowing hair consisted as well of little rubies and garnets, red and green. Many a maid might be taken with envy at this description of the Duke’s child, and also because of the length of her lashes, between which played the blue-black eyes; further because I, my own eyes monkishly downcast, record that under velvet and gems her bosom rose and fell, nor may I be silent upon the extraordinary beauty of her hands—hardly smaller they were than her brother’s, but altogether fine-boned, with pointed fingers, on some of which sparkled rings, one each on the upper and the lower joints. Slender she was, with lovely line of hips, and just as with him the upper lip began far forward under the little nose and was arched, the thin nostrils quivered just like his.

‘Ah, lord and brother,’ she said, as she freed him from the chain-mail head-piece and smoothed his dark hair, ‘you were glorious, when they had to let you thrust through the whole troupe! How your legs stood in the stirrups at the attack, that I saw with joy. Yours are the most beauteous young legs of any here. Only mine, in their different kind, are just as beautiful. Insonders thrill me your knees when you gambol and give the animal your thigh.’