Chroniclers of the age do not seek to deny, though they strive to
attenuate, the fact that the meeting of father and son was not wholly
felicitous. The young soldier who read poetry on all days and even
wrote poetry on some days, and who venerated the memory of a fair
and unhappy lady, found his inherited delicacy something offended
by the boisterous joviality of Baldwin, the huge eater and drinker,
the furious fighter, the promiscuous wooer, quarrelsome when sober,
quadruply quarrelsome in his cups. Duke Baldwin, for his part, thought
his son's native delicacy of taste effeminate, sneered patently at
his sobriety, ramped like a madman at his passion for books, and was
flagrantly disgusted by the indifference with which a son of his blood
viewed the genial and yielding lemans of the paternal court. But if the
young man failed to satisfy his father's wishes in all things, if he
failed to explain his tastes for reading and luting, at least he proved
satisfactory in other matters. His physical strength was an abiding
joy. When Duke Baldwin grasped his son's hand in greeting he strove to
crush it to pulp between his merciless fingers, but young Rainouart
gave him back grip for grip and squeeze for squeeze till the blood
came from the finger-nails of both, and Duke Baldwin was glad in two
fashions to unclinch that clasp.
Thereafter it something consoled Duke Baldwin to reflect that if the
lad from Paris had a womanish weakness for books and music, at least
he could ride as straight and wield lance and sword and axe as well as
any youthful paladin of Greece. And if the youth disdained the snares
spread for him by the amorous damsels of Athens, he soon made himself
friends with the gallantest of the young swaggerers, who learned to
love him more for his sinews of steel than for his heirship to the
duchy. Duke Baldwin was as volubly proud of his son's skill in arms as
he was bitterly ashamed of his skill in arts, and he would have been
willing enough in his rough-and-tumble way to let his pride of the one
blot out his contempt of the other. But the son would have found it
hard in any case to forget Duke Baldwin's neglect of his mother, and
he saw nothing to his credit to commend in the man whom he knew to be
his father. So it came about that the duke and his son did not see
very much of each other, and that while the duke was holding prolonged
revels with rollicking swashbucklers and frolicsome, complaisant
ladies, the young prince mostly chose to ride abroad, a solitary
explorer of the lovely Attic land, dreaming his dreams. He knew little
more than honest Simon or than any other French adventurer, gentle or
simple, then in Greece, of the ancient days and the ancient fame. When
his horse carried him abroad to Colonos or Marathon, or, as it had
carried him this day, to the farthermost edge of the Eleusinian wood,
his memory was neither pleased nor troubled by thoughts of Œdipus or
Miltiades or the rites of Demeter. All he asked when he took the road
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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