Allegories; Fantasy fiction; Historical fiction; Middle Ages -- Fiction
So in the upshot Jurgen was never to forget that moment wherein he
waited behind the door, and through the crack between the half-open
door and the door-frame saw Guenevere approach irresolutely, a
wavering white blur in the dark corridor. She came to talk with him
where they would not be bothered with interruptions: but she came
delightfully perfumed, in her night-shift, and in nothing else.
Jurgen wondered at the way of these women even as his arms went
about her in the gloom. He remembered always the feel of that warm
and slender and yielding body, naked under the thin fabric of the
shift, as his arms first went about her: of all their moments
together that last breathless minute before either of them had
spoken stayed in his memory as the most perfect.
And yet what followed was pleasant enough, for now it was to the
wide and softly cushioned throne of a king, no less, that Guenevere
and Jurgen resorted, so as to talk where they would not be bothered
with interruptions. The throne of Gogyrvan was perfectly dark, under
its canopy, in the unlighted hall, and in the dark nobody can see
what happens.
Thereafter these two contrived to talk together nightly upon the
throne of Glathion: but what remained in Jurgen's memory was that
last moment behind the door, and the six tall windows upon the east
side of the hall, those windows which were of commingled blue and
silver, but were all an opulent glitter, throughout that time in the
night when the moon was clear of the tree-tops and had not yet risen
high enough to be shut off by the eaves. For that was all which
Jurgen really saw in the Hall of Judgment. There would be a brief
period wherein upon the floor beneath each window would show a
narrow quadrangle of moonlight: but the windows were set in a wall
so deep that this soon passed. On the west side were six windows
also, but about these was a porch; so no light ever came from the
west.
Thus in the dark they would laugh and talk with lowered voices.
Jurgen came to these encounters well primed with wine, and in
consequence, as he quite comprehended, talked like an angel, without
confining himself exclusively to celestial topics. He was often
delighted by his own brilliance, and it seemed to him a pity there
was no one handy to take it down: so much of his talking was
necessarily just a little over the head of any girl, however
beautiful and adorable.
And Guenevere, he found, talked infinitely better at night. It was
not altogether the wine which made him think that, either: the girl
displayed a side she veiled in the day time. A girl, far less a
princess, is not supposed to know more than agrees with a man's
notion of maidenly ignorance, she contended.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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