The Merriest Knight

by Theodore Goodridge Roberts

  "Sir, he seeks something to touch his memory to life," Dennys whispered.

  "Is it dead?" the other whispered back.

  "It sleeps," Dennys told him. "But only in his brain. He remembers with his heart and hands."

  "How do you know him for a knight, then, if he has lost his memory?"

  "Sir, his golden spurs were on his heels when he was discovered in the wilderness, and the great white horse at his shoulder, and his arms and harness and shield no great way off."

  "His shield? What is the device?"

  "None, sir. A shield of unpainted iron scales backed with hide and wood. The only marks on it are dents from spear-points and scars of sword-strokes."

  The old lord nodded, and was about to question further, but an exclamation from the knight stopped him; and even as he turned toward the sudden sound, even more arresting sounds assailed his ears, and he held action to match them. A panel of the arras tore away and crumpled down, and men rolled on the floor like fighting dogs—the knight and two others: but the two did the rolling, in vain efforts to get out from under the clutching and pounding hands and knees of the knight. Dennys leaped to his master's help, but by then the strangers lay limp and still. Sir Lorn got to his feet lightly and with a hint of animation on his melancholy face.

  "They stirred behind the picture I was looking at, so I plucked them forth," he said simply.

  He glanced down at the motionless figures in leather and added, just as simply: "I banged their heads, for fear they meant mischief with their knives, but I don't think I killed them."

  "Shrewd bangs!" exclaimed the old lord. "They meant mischief, rest assured of that—to my goods and my life too! Gramercy, young man!"

  Now three oldsters came in by way of two doors, tottering and stumbling in anxious haste, one clutching a fine gown about him and shuffling in slippers of Spanish leather, and two barefooted and tying their points with fumbling fingers.

  "Have we disturbed your just slumbers?" asked the old lord softly. Then he cried out shrilly: "God's wounds—d'ye stuff your ears with pillows?"

  The gentleman in the dressing gown and the fellows in wool made deprecating gestures, but spoke no word.

  "But for this alert and powerful young knight, we might all be murdered in our beds before dawn," continued His Lordship, but now softly again, in tones more of resignation than of wrath. "These two cutthroats were behind the arras. Bind them and carry them to the cellar, and fetch two flagons of wine and a crock of meat back with you. Give them the keys, Sir James, and tell Luke to lay the board with trenchers and four of the silver-gilt cups, and the new pie."

  Within a short while, the four were at table and being served by an ancient called Luke. Sir Lorn was on their host's right hand, and Dennys was on his left, and old Sir James sat at the young squire's other side. Luke tottered around with a flagon, then with the great pie of larks and pigeons, then with the flagon again. The old knight moaned that to eat and drink at this barbaric hour would be the death of him, owing to a weakness of the stomach that was the result of a shipwreck on the coasts of Ireland and the consequent enforced diet of shellfish.

  "But for these gentlemen, good James, you'd be dead by dawn of more than a bellyache," jeered the old lord. "And as for your shipwreck—I dare say I have been wrecked on every coast of Christendom, but do you hear me complain?"

  He looked to his right, at his guest of honor, with an engaging smile, and said: "I´ll wager ten hides of good land against a cast horseshoe he was older than you are now, though still but a gawky squire, at that time."

  Sir Lorn's only reply was a puzzled and apologetic smile.

  "Gawky I never was," the old knight protested, with a flicker in his faded eyes, but in the same voice of self-pity and whining complaint. "A squire, yes. Knighthood was hard come by in those days. Golden spurs did not hang on every bush."

  Then Dennys ap Rhys, who had drained his cup twice, spoke up hardily.

  "Worshipful sir, permit me to inform Your Honor that if that shaft is intended for my master, you are shooting wide of the mark. Young my master may be, but he did not pluck his golden spurs from a bush!"

  Sir James made no answer, but hunched his shoulders and wagged his beard skeptically, and eyed the succulent bits of lark and pigeons and pastry on his trencher distastefully.

  "You speak with assurance, good youth," said the old lord to Dennys kindly. "And may I ask—since your friend will not speak for himself—if your high opinion of him is based upon hearsay or observation?"

  "Noble sir, I have heard nothing," Dennys replied; "but I can tell Your Lordship that this knight's reason for not speaking for himself is that he knows nothing of his past, as I have said. He knows no more of himself than I have learned of him in the nine months since our first meeting."

  "It should be a short story," said the host, smiling back and forth between his young guests. "But short or long, I am curious to hear it."

  Dennys turned an inquiring look upon Sir Lorn le Perdu, who met it with a faint smile and a slight nod.

  Chapter Two

  Dennys Tells What He Knows

  Dennys told it simply: in the fall of last year, he and his father and six of their people went into the wilderness in search of strays from their flocks. They reached the high valley of that dark water called the Kelpie's Pond just before sunset of their third day out, and the serfs made a little shelter of fir boughs and a great fire of deadwood from a grove of wind-twisted hawthorn and mountain oak. It was an ancient and desolate land. Soon after sunset a white frost fell from the frozen stars. The herdsmen drew closer to the fire. Even after their supper of mutton collops and barley bread and ale, they continued to press upon the fire, but as much for its singing light as its heat; for this was reputed an unholy place, still frequented by more dangerous beings than its wild human and beasty denizens— than its heathen men and great wolves and the scaly things that bred in the crevices of its highest rocks. Even Dennys and his father were glad of the dancing shine and bright sparks, as well as of the heat.

  One of the tethered ponies whinnied in the outer darkness behind the fire and the hut of boughs, and was answered by a louder whinny from the darkness beyond the opposite margin of firelight. Every eye moved; but no man there, gentle or free or in a serfs iron collar, moved more than his eyes: and the breath caught in every windpipe and the blood slowed in every vein. A tall man stepped into the circle of light and stood there, silent and motionless. The head of a great white horse appeared at his shoulder.

  Dennys thought, Kelpies don't ride horses! and his breath and blood moved again. The same thought must have struck the father too, for he got to his feet and cried: "God be with you!"

  The stranger inclined his head but said no word. Dennys got up then and passed around the fire, but shaking in his shoes the while. He stood close to the stranger, who was in leather save for his legs, which were armored from the knees down. But he knew enough of the polite world to recognize this leather, by stains and marks of bruises and abrasions which could come only from friction with plates and chains of iron, as the fighting underwear of a knight. "Sir, you have lost your harness," he said. And then he looked down at the spurs on the iron heels, and stooped and saw that they were of gold.

  So they called him the Lost Knight, though he looked too young for knighthood. While he ate and drank beside Rhys ap Tudor, draped in that worthy gentleman's cloak of castor skins, Dennys tended the great white horse. He removed saddle and bridle and the plates of bronze from face and chest. The high saddle had been rolled upon and somewhat damaged, and the bit of the bridle was tangled with coarse herbage. Dennys rubbed him down, fed him a loaf of barley bread, and tethered him on a patch of fine grasses and mountain clover that was close by.

  * * *

  In the morning Dennys and his father and the herdsmen wandered about the margins of the lake, but now more in search of the Lost Knight's equipment than of lost sheep. The knight himself kept to the encampment, sometimes sitting with
a hand to his brow and sometimes standing and gazing vacantly around at plain and lake and rocky tor and looming mountain.

  Dennys came upon the knightly sword—sword and scabbard and belt studded with gold and bright stones, all together. One of the herds discovered a mighty spear with a bent point, and yet another serf stumbled upon the great shield. It was Dennys' father who found the helmet in a ferny hollow, its plume bedraggled with frost and dew, and the open vizard crisscrossed with a spider's web. The breast- and backplates and thigh-pieces, and numerous parts of fine-linked, supple chain mail, and the knightly secondary armament—after spear and long sword—of short sword, Spanish dagger, and the spike-headed mace, were found by noon.

  The party returned to camp then, and to a surprising scene. The Lost Knight sat hunched on an outcrop of granite, elbow on knee and head on hand in an attitude of deep thought, and scattered about the sward in various final attitudes were four dead men with crushed skulls. They were heathens of the wildest and most savage of the mountain tribes. They had crept close, without using their short bows, and sprung upon the unarmed knight with boar-spears and knives. But he had leaped aside and snatched up a half-burned trunk of a young oak from the dead coals of the fire; and when he had smitten down four, three survivors had turned to escape back to their rocky fastnesses; and then the warhorse had broken free of the peg he was tethered to, pursued, and overtaken one of the fugitives and killed him as a dog kills a rat. The knight had taken but little hurt—a shallow stab in the left shoulder and a shallow cut along a rib—and the great horse none at all.

  They went home from the wilderness in less time than the out-trip had taken them by half a day, with a score of strayed sheep that had not fallen to savages or wolves trotting before them, and the Lost Knight riding between father and son on his white warhorse. It was Dennys' pleasure to act as the stranger's squire, bearing shield and spear, and with his half-breed mountain horse hung all about with pieces of armor. But when they came to the northern edge of the manor, which lay in a wide vale of groves and fields and walled yards of apple trees and plum trees, the knight dismounted, at Dennys' request, and allowed himself to be harnessed and armed cap-a-pie. So they issued from the hanging wood of fir and were espied with wonder by a variety of people. Plowmen stopped their slow oxen and gaped and hallooed; children left off their games, and gammers and gaffers their gossip; herds and wards sounded their horns; and heads appeared above walls and at the windows of the manor house.

  The family and all the household made much of the mysterious stranger. The ladies of the family devoted most of their waking hours to him. From Dennys' grandmother, Dame Gwyn, down to his sisters Edyth and Mary, by way of his mother and two aunts, one and all seemed to have lost all their former interests in life. They would learn his past, though he knew it not himself—mauger their heads! And they would teach him the present and even shape the future for him. His paucity of speech did not discourage them. His forlorn condition, his knightly state, youth, melancholy mien, gentle smile, and good though dimmed facial features, won all hearts. And his two wounds.

  But Dame Gwyn healed those in as many days with a salve of herbs of Druidical origin. And it was Dame Gwyn who found the name for him. She fixed his gaze and attention with her bright black eyes, and recited names to him, pausing briefly after each for his reaction. She opened with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but without effect. The names of the other Apostles, and of the Prophets and a score of Christian martyrs, were spoken to no more avail, as were those of hundreds of old kings and heroes; for the dame was deeply read in books, both sacred and profane. After that she went on haphazardly, offering anything that came into her head. And at last her persistence was rewarded; for at her utterance of the word Lorn, the distraught youth started in his seat and widened his eyes and gasped, "Yes!" So Dame Gwyn pronounced his name and style to be Sir Lorn le Perdu, and hung a small charm from his neck that contained a splinter of the True Cross, and prophesied great things of him.

  * * *

  Winter came early with storms of wind and snow; in the heart of the storm came a horde of savages and outlaws from the northern wastes, and mayhap even from the craggy fastnesses of No-man's-land beyond the Wall and just this side of Ultima Thule. Many warders and herds and foresters perished in their isolated huts, even in their sleep, stabbed and bludgeoned in the dark or by tossing torch-shine. Fire was put to hovels and houses and ricks; and confusion and terror invaded the great valley and was spread by cotters and farmers fleeing in clouds of snow and smoke.

  The alarum reached the manor house; and it was not long before Rhys ap Tudor and his son Dennys ap Rhys led two score armed men through the outer wall of timbers and sharpened stakes, both horsed and afoot.

  They had armed with as little disturbance as might be, for the ladies said that the knightly guest needed his sleep and was in no condition for mortal combat. But they were no farther than a bowshot from the gate when the warhorse overtook them, screaming and galloping, with the knight shouting in the high saddle. And horse and rider passed through their toiling ranks; and Dennys shouted too, and galloped after.

  "A Lorn—a Lorn!" shouted the melancholy knight in a voice that outrang the gale. "Strike hard! Bite deep!" And Dennys riding furiously, cried: "A Lorn, a Lorn!"

  They came upon the main body of the raiders in a farmyard, massed in the awful light of flaming hayricks and a flaming house under a billowing, shaking canopy of smoke and driven snow shot through with sparks. Then the white horse and the Lost Knight fell on with teeth and hooves and sword; and Dennys on his half-breed gelding followed close and did what he could with an ancient sword that once was wielded by Dame Gwyn's father, who had been the Black King Owen of the old ballads. Screams of terror mingled with the battle scream of the white horse and the shouts of knight and squire. Round targes of hide and the fur-clad savages behind them were cut clean through by Lorn's sword, and cracked and staggered by Dennys' antique blade of bronze; and limbs were torn and bodies crushed by chopping teeth and hammering hooves, for the mountain-bred gelding was soon biting and striking and kicking as viciously as the white stallion. When Rhys ap Tudor arrived, there was no fighting left for him and his men, but only pursuit into the white storm, and blind slaughter beyond the red glare of the fires. . . .

  The rest of the winter passed peacefully in that remote manorial valley. The melancholy knight learned to smile when spoken to prettily by a lady or damosel, and even to laugh upon occasion, and once said six words in one breath to old Dame Gwyn, with whom he was on especially friendly terms. He and Dennys exercised at arms every day, using old swords of soft metal and blunted edges, and daggers of fir which broke on their leather jerkins like thin ice. Sometimes they donned their armor and mounted their horses bareback and tilted with blunted spears roughly made for them by Howell the wheelwright. Those mock spears of inferior wood broke at a touch; but a touch was usually enough to send either saddleless champion backward over his horse's tail.

  At that game, the knight took almost as many falls as the squire. But afoot it was quite another matter. With any manner of sword, or with wooden staves or cudgels even, Sir Lorn could sweep Dennys away with a half-dozen strokes. It was a notable thing that at all this play in rick-yard or snowy meadow, the great white horse comported himself more like a lamb than a killer, without so much as a show of teeth or hoof, or a snort of his battle cry, at Dennys or the brown gelding.

  * * *

  In early spring, a wandering company consisting of a troubadour who claimed to be from Brittany, three jongleurs, a packman, and an Irish scrivener came to the manor house and were received with good cheer. They were as hungry as wolves and as thirsty as the Questing Beast; and they supped so well on the evening of their arrival that they slept till the following noon. They would have returned to their slumbers after dinner but for the protests of the household, and especially of the ladies. The jongleurs were the first to respond to the demand for entertainment. Their leader, a plump man in his fif
ties with the face of a wrinkled boy and round, faded blue eyes, took a russet apple from a dish and presented it to Dennys, with a mocking bow and a sly smile.

  "Gramercy!" said Dennys; but he felt the apple move in his hand, whereupon he dropped it quickly; and behold, it was a warty brown toad hopping on the flagstones, and between two hops it was gone, as if dissolved in air. Then, still smiling, the jongleur took Dame Gwyn's shawl of silk from her shoulders; and what he would have made of that, had she not snatched it right back from him, the devil only knows. And she cried out at him, naming him a saucy rogue. Unabashed, he stepped away and took a boar-spear from a rack of sylvan weapons on the nearest wall. This he held close to his face for seconds, muttering the while in a strange tongue, then gave a sudden, fierce shout and flung it upward at the gloom beyond the rafters. All eyes turned upward, in expectation of its fall.

  "It is already fallen down into its place," said the fellow; and there it was in its rack on the wall, sure enough!

  Many gasped in wonder, but not old Dame Gwyn. "Hocus-pocus!" she scoffed. "It never left the rogue's hand!" Whereat she cackled with laughter, and he laughed with her, as if all others present were their inferiors in wit and wisdom; and she gave him a silver three-penny piece, for which he thanked her humbly and sincerely. The second jongleur, a thin man who looked more like a learned clerk than a vagabond, gave an indifferent exhibition with four daggers, of which he appeared to be afraid. The third and youngest of that team, a mere lad, turned handsprings and air-springs. When the troubadour's turn came, he said, "This is a piece I learned of an old bard in Brittany, but out of Ireland, who told how he had sung it before all the kings and queens and courts of Christendom and won fame thereby, which he could not understand, for it was a common old nursery rhyme where he came from." And he twanged the strings and sang in a disconsolate voice: