"A redhead? She was beautiful—externally—as a summer dawn and a night of stars."
"A redhead nonetheless, sir. And with green eyes. And so was the next one who broke your heart a redhead, sir. And the third was a towhead, and the fourth kind of betwixt and between. And so on. And you stuck your neck out for the chopper every time, sir, till I've blushed for you. Hell, sir, I'd be a gibing cynic too if—well, in your boots, sir. Why don't you fall for a brown-haired or black-haired damosel for a change, sir, for your peace of mind? Their hearts may be of truer stuff. I know of one such who is beautiful enough to inspire any poet and—ah—well enough heeled, in her own right, to support him."
Dinadan cried out: "Have done! I trust none of them between the ages of eight and eighty. I'd as lief jump into a river with a millstone 'round my neck, or pull an oar in a Turkish galley, as take on the gyves of wedlock. I´ll starve first—by the knuckle-bones of the twenty-seven lost virgins of Mount Gomery!"
Kedge heaved a sigh and said: "In that case, sir, shall we go straight forward, or turn to the right or the left, in search of a quiet spot in which to starve peacefully?"
The horses lifted their heads and pricked their ears; and Dinadan raised a cautioning hand and whispered: "Hark! A harp."
Kedge nodded and murmured: "Ay, sir, a harp. And a right heartbreaking tune."
Knight and squire dismounted and went forward softly, and the curious chargers went after them almost as softly. So they won through the leafy underbrush to the edge of a little glade, and beheld a ferny well in the glade, and a damosel seated beside the well with a small harp of silver on her knee. They checked at the sight. The harpist's tresses, which were long and luxuriant and dark as seaweed, veiled her face.
"Her attitude matches her music," whispered Dinadan. "Both are eloquent of bereavement and grief—and both are false, probably,"
Kedge protested: "You'd not say so if she was a redhead or a towhead!"
"I trust none of them!" Dinadan retorted, louder than he had intended.
The damosel ceased her harping, raised her head and swept the veiling tresses back from her face. For the passage of six heartbeats she regarded the knight, who was slightly in front of the squire, with eyes which Dinadan himself would have hesitated about attempting to describe, then veiled their mysteries with white lids and curling lashes. Dinadan, staring like a zany, opened and shut his mouth several times without uttering. But Kedge did better.
"Lady—at your service!" he gasped.
The white eyelids and their appendant dusky lashes fluttered up and instantly down again. Then Dinadan found his voice, or a sliver of it.
"Not so fast!" he whispered aside to Kedge, but with his eyes still upon the damosel. "I can speak for myself."
Kedge muttered an apology. Then Sir Dinadan spoke up.
"Damosel, I am a knight-errant, hight Dinadan, of King Arthur's court when not abroad in search of chivalrous adventures, and am always ready to bring spear and sword to the succor of any overmatched cavalier or lady in need of a champion."
Kedge muttered: "A redhead or towhead, for choice."
Dinadan ignored him. The damosel looked again. Her eyelids and lashes fluttered like the waving wings of white-and-black butterflies.
"I am not in need of a champion," she said softly and uncertainly, yet clearly enough. "Or am I? I thought I had a champion—a slightly mad one, but brave and strong. But he is gone. He is lost. He wandered away—he often wandered in the wilderness; and that time he did not return; and I fear some evil thing has befallen him. My poor heart is broken."
Kedge said: "Lady, Sir Dinadan here is an authority on broken hearts. His own has been broken so often that he has become a cynic. But I doubt that he knows how to mend them—with the exception of his own, of course. He mends that by being a cynic and reviling all women as false and unworthy of love."
Dinadan didn't so much as glance aside at his trusted squire. For why? He didn't hear him. In truth, he heard nothing save the damosel, and he saw nothing else.
"But that is not fair!" cried the damosel. She stood up; and she lost nothing in the standing. And her eyes were wide upon Dinadan's stricken optics. "It's not fair or true! And I wonder at you, sir—a generous knight like you—I can see your kind heart in your handsome face—speaking so knavishly of women."
Dinadan, having heard only her contributions to the conversation, felt confused and embarrassed, and looked the parts. But he was even more conscious of a great urge to champion her, whether or no her case called for championing. He moved forward dazedly yet determinedly and halted within a pace of her; and the squire and the horses advanced and halted with him.
"Mad indeed—to wander away from you!" he exclaimed. "But if you want him found, I'll find him for you. If you want him back, I'll fetch him back, mauger my head! And his too! Who is he? What's his name?"
"I don't know his name. He never said it. I think he did not know it himself—had forgot it, or he would have told me."
"A nitwit!"
"Nay, no nitwit! Slightly mad, but no fool! And fie upon you for defaming him behind his back. You'd not dare do so to his face, I trow, for I judge him a knight of more prowess than yourself. And he loved me dearly—and I him again."
Dinadan shook with conflicting emotions, but only for a count of seven. Then, to his attentive squire's not unmixed relief, he answered meekly:
"Ah—love. Beware it, lady. Stuff for songs! Forget it, even as I have forgot it. Broken hearts? Broken bubbles! But about your strayed lover, now? How am I to know him when I find him for you? What is the device on his shield?"
"I don't know. He had no shield when he came to us. I think he had cast it aside. And no horse, neither. I think it had run away, hours and miles before—for he was foul with mud to the knees, and his golden spurs were tangled with weeds. I was playing on my harp by candlelight when he came suddenly out of the dark like a—like a shining angel."
"Hah! A shining angel! Just so. He was still fully armed, I take it."
"He had lost his lance, but only a few bits of his harness. And his casque. But he still had his sword."
"And you say you were playing on your harp."
"Yes, it was my music that brought him from stumbling about in the apple-yard. I looked up, and there he was looking in at me. And when our eyes met, he came in through the window. But it is a long story."
"I must hear it all, however, or how am I to know him when I find him?"
Then Kedge, who had for minutes maintained a considering silence, spoke up respectfully but to the point.
"Lady, may I presume to suggest that Sir Dinadan might keep his attention more closely upon the story of your lost lover—pay more heed to your words than to the play of your lips and eyes, that's to say—if he were seated; and I don't mean on the greensward. And if he had horn and trencher within easy reach. For we have come a long, dry, and hungry way since our last bite and sup."
At that, the damosel blushed from the V of her bodice up to her sable tresses; and she apologized in pretty confusion for her thoughtlessness and begged them to follow her.
* * *
They had not far to go. The fields and hedges were weedy and ill-kept. The moat was extensive, but choked with bushes and reeds; and for water it had nothing to show but mud puddles. The main drawbridge was down permanently, and its ponderous hoisting gear rusted and broken. The manor house—or castle, rather—was as extensive as the useless moat and in as sorry a plight. Outer and inner walls were breached and gnawed by time and weather; half the roofs were fallen; a half of the battlements of a tower had tumbled into the moat; stables, byres, middens, and unpruned orchards crowded in on the flanks and rear; and the massive flagstones of the courtyards were upheaved and cracked by wild roots and fringed with weeds.
"God save us! Rack an' ruin! Is everyone dead here?" Kedge growled.
At a call from the damosel, a lout in leather appeared and made to take the horses: Kedge would have none of him, however, but u
nbitted and unsaddled and stabled the chargers himself, and saw to their baiting in a masterful manner, then left them in the lout's care with a promise of slashed skin and broken bones should they come by any mishap; and he cuffed the fellow, to show that he meant what he said. . . .
Later the damosel and the knight and the squire sat at a table in a high hall. From the rafters depended spiders' webs as heavy as curtains with dust and the wings and shells of flies. The board was dressed with platters and trenchers, horns and jacks and leather bottles, but the meats were salty and ill-cooked, the loaves and scones soggy or scorched, and the ale was thin and the wine sour.
Sharp and dry though the cavaliers were, they ate and drank in strict moderation. The damosel took neither bite nor sup, but told her sad story as follows, though more wordily.
The unnamed knight had come in at her window, drawn to her from the darkness by the music of her harp, like a moth to a candle. Without a word of greeting, but with an enchanting smile, he had knelt at her knee, taken the harp gently from her hands and played upon it himself with such matchless skill that her heart throbbed and sang and wept with the music as if the harpstrings and her heartstrings were one. And he had given her back the little harp, and she had played for him as well as she could—ah, better than she had ever played before. Then he had taken the harp again, and played again, and handed it back again; and so, turn and turn about, they had exchanged wordless songs of love and yearning until the flame of the candle had fallen and drowned in the hot grease. Then he had kissed her. And so love had enveloped them; and for sennights or maybe months—she had lost all count of time—her life had been all loving and musicking and this ruinous demesne a heaven on earth.
Kedge muttered: "More like a fools' paradise!"
But that crack passed unheeded; and the damosel told how, whenever he was out of her sight more than a few minutes, she had only to call him back on her silver harp. One of the melodies they had wrought together, and sometimes but a fragment of one, always brought him to her through brush and brier. Always—till the last time he had wandered. That had been nine desolate days and nights since. She had played the harp all about the inner courts and the purlieus of the place, and even around the outside of the moat and as far abroad as the sylvan well beside which they had found her—but never farther, for fear of gypsies and unicorns. All to no purpose, alas!
"I will find him," Dinadan assured her softly. "And fetch him to you," he added after a moment's pause, and not so softly.
"Alive or dead," said the squire cryptically. "Not dead!" she cried.
"Nay, do you not worry," Dinadan soothed her. "He will come willingly enough, I doubt not."
"Or more the fool he," said Kedge; and he looked at the damosel and added: "On two counts, lady. First, a man would be indeed a fool to resist being brought back to you; and second, Sir Dinadan shows a stubborn nature in his dealings with men, no matter how often he is made a monkey of by—But let it pass!"
The three agreed that the likeliest method of gaining touch with the lost lover would be to lure him with harp music; and as the damosel could not desert her aged grandparents to carry that music afar in the wilderness in person, that she should teach Sir Dinadan the mysteries of that instrument.
"And that should not take long, for he is musically gifted and one of the world's best lutanists," Kedge assured the lady; and Dinadan admitted as much with a modest smirk.
* * *
Thus it came about that Sir Dinadan added harping to his many other accomplishments. But it was not done in a day, nor five even, though he received instruction every morning, every afternoon, and then again after supper by star-shine or candle-shine. School was kept mostly in the cobwebby high hall, and sometimes in a runaway rose garden or a natural bower in the wild orchard, and more rarely in the dusty chamber where old Sir Gyfyl and old Dame Ingrid dozed time away in cushioned chairs. The little harp passed back and forth a thousand times between teacher and pupil, twanging high and low, fast and slow.
As for Kedge, he felt out of the picture and busied himself with other matters. By example, and then with well-judged cuffs, he taught the louts around the stable the proper care of horses. He invaded the kitchens, and there he distributed instructions and cuffs among the loafers of both sexes so effectively that next day's broths and roasts and puddings came hot to the table. He mustered a force armed with brooms and hayrakes and hop-poles and ousted the fat gray spiders and their curtainy lairs from the high hall. He set complaining fellows to work with bushhooks and spades.
"This place might be saved from rack and ruin even yet," he told the Damosel Alyne one morning, where she and Dinadan sat in a bower with the little harp idle between them.
"Nay, the place is well enough," she said.
Then he asked: "Has Sir Dinadan proved an apt pupil?"
She averted her face and murmured: "No, his poor fingers are all thumbs, I fear."
So he looked at Dinadan; and the knight avoided the glance and muttered: "I haven't got the hang of it yet, my friend."
At that, the squire exclaimed "Hah!" with a wry grimace. "Just so. Lady, I was mistaken in him. I see it now, on second thought. For twiddling on a lute and crooning of love-ditties, at which Sir Dinadan is as good as any wandering troubadour, is mere child's play to the mastery of the harp. I had better myself undertake to learn to lure your strayed lover home to you, though I have no more gift that way than yonder moldy haystack."
Dinadan sat upright with a jerk and cried: "Say you so? Twiddling on a lute is child's play, is it? And twanging on a harp calls for more skill than I am capable of, does it? Saint Swithin's whiskers! I'll show you!"
He snatched the little harp to his knee, plucked a string or two, then went at it like a cat sharpening her claws on a table leg. There was tinkling, then a singing, then a sobbing. (Kedge smiled behind his hand and the damosel arched her pretty brows.) There was a buzzing as of bees, then a rushing as of a plunging eagle's wings, then a high and thin crying as of angelic voices and the horns of Elfland and the harps of Heaven. (The damosel sighed and veiled her eyes and the squire's square face took on a dreamy look.) Then Dinadan's voice joined the singing of the strings.
When the music ceased, Alyne was in tears and Kedge was sighing like the bellows of a forge. Dinadan himself looked none too happy, and his voice was grim when he addressed the lady.
"Could your own harping crack-brained lover harp better than that?"
Her only answer was more tears.
"And you, my friend?" he asked of Kedge.
"Sir, I gibed but to bring you to your senses," Kedge whispered. "I knew you had mastered the thing, however you may have hoodwinked the damosel—but I feared you were losing the mastery of yourself."
"What then, good Kedge?"
"What then, sir! Do you ask? Your pledged knightly word, sir—to seek the lost knight, the lost lover—and fetch him back to her, by your halidom and mauger your head!"
The knight gnawed his lip and bunched his brows.
"You are right. It is time we were gone. Trust you to keep your feet on the ground! But this time—ah, 'twill truly break."
"Sir, better a broken heart, or a broken neck even, than your knightly word broken."
"Yes, yes, honest Kedge, I quite agree with you. But it hurts! We shall go tomorrow then, bright and early—and no matter what gets broken, my knightly word will remain inviolate."
* * *
But Sir Dinadan departed alone next morning, and not very bright and early either; for Kedge, while setting a gang of hedgers to work at break of day, when he had better have been seeing to the horses, had fallen into a ditch and sprained an ankle. So, after binding the ankle, Dinadan had left his squire in the damosel's care and gone forth alone on the quest of the strayed nameless lover. He took both horses, using Kedge's for a beast of burden, for the search might prove long and victuals and drink hard to come by in the wilderness. But he carried the damosel's little silver harp in his hand.
Dinadan's heart was not in the quest ahead, but behind him in the tumble-down castle. He would liefer fail in it than win it, for his private opinion of its object was that he was not only a fool but a dishonorable knave and faithless deserter too—wickedly designing rather than honestly mad—a dirty, cowardly, despicable scoundrel, in short. His heart was not in the search, but his hatred was, hot and waxing hotter with the passage of every mile.
"If I find him—and I'll do that, by Saint Peter's key!—I'll take him back to her willy-nilly, and show her who's the better man and the true knight—if he dies of it!" he swore.
Never before had his susceptibilities been so mortally stricken as by Damosel Alyne: and he really believed it, God help him! So he rode in a daze as well as a maze, letting his horse take what forest track he would—of deer, wild swine, unicorn, or half-wild human. So he chanced upon a shaggy hut shortly before the sun went down. A shaggy woman and some shaggy children were before the hut, but the children vanished like young partridges at the sudden appearance of the armored knight and the two tall horses. But the woman stood her ground, with an axe in her hand, and glared suspiciously.
"Fear me not, good woman," said Dinadan. "I come in peace—sword in scabbard, see!—and harp in hand. I seek a wandering cavalier who is slightly—ah, you know." And he cocked an eyebrow at her and tapped on his forehead with a forefinger.
"Hah, that poor gentleman!" she exclaimed, with obvious relief and amusement. "He was here, lord, and ate like a wolf an' drank all our brown ale. But he was mad without the drink—shouting and climbing trees. But harmless, lord. Wouldn't hurt a fly. Why d'ye seek him, lord? Is he Yer Honor's brother?"
"God forbid! No, that's to say—no kin to me. I seek him for a lady."
The woman laughed and asked: "Wot would a lady want with that poor soul? He passed the night he was here high up in yonder oak."
The Merriest Knight Page 7