CHAPTER XXXIII THE KNIGHT OF THE CRIMSON ROSE The row of horsemen had halted in a curving line before the grand stand, and now in the silence the herald, holding a parchment scroll, spurred before each rider in turn, demanding his title. As this was given he whirled to proclaim it, accompanying each evolution with a blast on his horn. “Knight of the Golden Spur,” “Knight of Castlewood,” “Lord of Brandon,” “Westover’s Knight,” “Knight of the Silver Cross”: the names, fanciful, or those of family estates, fell on John Valiant’s ear with a pungent flavor of medievalism. His eyes, full of the swaying crowd, the shift and shimmer of light and color, returned again and again to an alluring spot of blue at one side, which might for him have been the heart of the whole festal out-of-doors. He started as he became aware that the rider next him had answered and that the herald had paused before him. “Knight of the Crimson Rose!” It sprang to his lips without forethought, an echo, perhaps, of the improvised sash and the flower in his hat-band, but the shout of the herald and the trumpet’s blare [Pg 290]seemed to make the words fairly bulge with inevitability. And through this struck a sudden appalled feeling that he had really spoken Shirley’s name, and that every one had heard. He could not see her face, and clutched his lance fiercely to overcome an insane desire to stoop hideously in his saddle and peer under the shading hat-brim. Lest he should do this, he fastened his eyes determinedly on the major, who now proceeded to deliver himself of the “Charge to the Knights.” The major made an appealing center to the charming picture as he stood on the green turf, “the glass of fashion and the mold of form,” his head bare, his shock of blond-gray hair thrown back, and one hand thrust between the buttons of his snowy waistcoat. His rich bass voice rolled out to the farthest corner of the field: “Sir Knights! “The tournament to which we are gathered to-day is to us traditional; a rite of antiquity and a monument of ancient generations. This relic of the jousts of the Field of the Cloth-of-Gold points us back to an era of knightly deeds, fidelity to sacred trust, obligation to duty and loyalty to woman—the watchwords of true knighthood. “We like to think that when our forefathers, offspring of men who established chivalry, came from over-seas, they brought with them not only this ancient play, but the precepts it symbolizes. We may [Pg 291]be proud, indeed, knowing that this is no hollow ceremonial, but an earnest that the flower of knighthood has not withered in the world, that in an age when the greed of gold was never so dazzling, the spirit of true gallantry has not faded but blooms luxuriant in the sparkling dews of the heart of this commonwealth.