France -- History -- Capetians, 987-1328 -- Fiction; Knights and knighthood -- Fiction
The bevy turned and came up the sloping lawn to the three trees and
the cushions upon the grass. The shape in dark blue with the Eastern
veil moved beyond them to the cedar and the stone chair. Here she took
her seat, and when the others would have gathered about her waved them
back with a slender, long-fingered hand. One brought to her a basket of
grapes. She chose a purple cluster resting upon a web of vine leaves
but laid it untouched beside her upon the wide seat. There was a space
between her and the dark enshadowing cedar and those others resting
now upon the cushions. She sat quite still, a hand upon each arm of
the chair, the deep blue of her dress flowing about her, the gems of
the girdle ends making a sombre gleaming. The veil hid all her face
from Garin, lying so near. He felt in her something solitary, something
powerful, yet felt that she was young, young—She sat with her gaze
straight before her upon the blue crests that showed afar. She sat as
still as though an enchanter had bid her stay. And between her and the
young man crouching in the laurels streamed no wide ocean of the autumn
air, of the subtle ether. The moments passed, slow, plangent, like the
notes of the harp that was being played....
What happened to one or both? Did one only feel it, the one that knew
there were two—or did, in some degree, the other also, and think
it was a day-dream? All that Garin knew, kneeling there, was that
something touched him, entered him. It came across that space, or it
came from some background and space not perceived. It was measureless,
or it seemed to him without measure. It was clothed in marvel; it was
fulness and redoubling, it was more life. It was as loud as thunder,
and as still as the stillest inner whisper. It was so sweet that he
wished to weep, and yet he wished too to leap and spring and exult
aloud, to send his cry of possession to the skies. He felt akin to all
that his senses touched. But as for the form in the stone chair—he sat
with her there, she knelt with him here, they were one body.... With
a swimming feeling, her being seemed to pass from his. He knelt here,
Garin of the Black Castle, squire of Raimbaut the Six-fingered, and she
sat there whose face he had not seen—a great dame, lady doubtless of
some lord of a hundred barons each worthier than Raimbaut.
Garin gazed across the little space between, and now it was as though
it were half the firmament. She sat like a figure among the stars,
blue-robed, amid the deep blue, and the cloudy world was between them.
She grew like to a goddess—like to the Unattainable Ideal, and he
felt no longer like a king, but like the acolyte that lights the lamp
and kneels as he places it. Now it was the Age for this to happen,
and for one man to act as had acted that knight in the wood toward
Roche-de-Frêne, and for another to do as now did Garin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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