The Jester. LM

Those who eat bread must needs earn it after some fashion, save those who are born, as the saying is, with a silver spoon in the mouth. Peregrine after a while found his hours of roaming curtailed. Armourer, falconer, grooms, alike pressed him into service. No special calling allotted him in view of the one rôle he should later play—though if the truth be known he looked to it with but little favour—he became the server of many. This, as may be imagined, irked him somewhat. He had no mind to await any man’s behest, yet mind or not he found it must needs be done. Being no fool he brought, then, to his tasks what good grace he might. Besides his work with armourer, falconer, and grooms, he learned to play the tabor, and had a very pretty skill thereon.

      Of these years I have little to record. They were in the main uneventful. Their chief incident as far as Peregrine was concerned, and one of deep sorrow to him, was his mother’s death. That was a sorrow which lay heavy for many a long month, till time at length began imperceptibly to ease the burden of his grief.

      Peregrine had come to man’s estate, had seen, I take it, four and twenty summers or thereabouts, when Nichol was stricken of the ague which was to end for him this mortal life. Lying gaunt and hollow-eyed on his bed, the cap and bells on an oak chest near, he called his son to him, pointed with one wasted hand towards the motley dress.

      “To-morrow, or the next day, you will be wearing it,” he said.

      Peregrine bowed his head. Finding it ill to lie, even for comfort’s sake, in the face of Death, he was silent.

      “A jest more often than not holds truth,” said Nichol, “yet now, between you and me, the truth may be spoken without need of jest.” His eyes, blue like Peregrine’s, sought his son’s eyes, but Peregrine’s were lowered.

      “Look at me,” said his father.

      Peregrine raised his eyes.

      “You like not the thought. That I have long known. Yet, what will you? Fate made of me a Jester, as she made a Jester of my father and his sires before me, as she now makes one of you. I accepted my rôle as in the nature of things. With you it is otherwise. Submitting outwardly to the decree of fate, inwardly your spirit rebels. It will be hard for you. The rôle of Jester is no easy one. Dogs are we, waiting with a dog’s wistfulness on the smile of our master’s lips, the pat of our master’s hand. And if, rather than smile and pat, we receive frown and blow, yet may we not bite, since that is of the manner of a cur; nor cringe, since cringing is likewise of a cur. We must accept the frown and blow submissively, should e’en return with wagging tail to fawn upon the hand that struck us; and if we are wise dogs will learn new tricks better suited to please. And the man’s heart in us we should drug, if we cannot kill it, lest it grow to torment us. I drugged mine, or tried to. It was, perchance, too strong to kill. Yet for all the drugging there were times when it pulsed less sluggishly. That day when they took the cap and bells from you, when they beat you, poor miserable little fool, I jested my best. Had I not jested I would have flung my bauble in the face of the woman who sat there smiling as your cries reached the hall. And the man’s heart suffered torment that day in the dog’s body. Yet Jester I was then, Jester I have been since. Now at last I am man, and wholly man. Death, when his shadow touches us, grants us that much solace.”

      He stopped. Peregrine, kneeling by the bed, found no words.

      “Custom,” went on Nichol, “is strong upon man; strongest of all, perchance, upon the Jester. Despite our moments of resentment we look for applause. It is our life, our breath. We long for the favour of our master. I have said we are dogs, and when that is said, all is said. Yet the man’s heart may outgrow the dog’s body. You will don the motley; you, too, will fawn upon the hand that strikes you; you, too, will watch with wistful eyes on the desire of your master. Yet if, as I fancy, the day dawns when drugs no longer bring their soothing anodyne to your man’s heart, when the soul within the motley is a soul in prison, then remember that I now have asked your pardon for the heritage you will accept from me. That is all. Now, son, fetch me a priest.”

      Of Peregrine’s words e’er he went to fulfil his father’s last behest, I make no record. They were not intended, as may well be guessed, for you or me to know. When they were spoken he rose from his knees, set out for the Abbey of Our Lady of the Cliff.

CHAPTER II

       THE FOOL’S ENTRY

       Table of Contents

      AND so it came to pass that Peregrine again saw the hall, entered thereto garbed once more in cap and bells. Candour, so he decreed, should be far from his lips, having in his mind the memory of a day now some sixteen years old. It was not for these among whom he should pass his time. Guile, art, cynicism, anything but truth should be used wherewith to fashion the jests, the darts of speech which he should throw abroad. A Jester heedless of applause, of frowns, or smiles, thus he saw himself, wise for the moment in his own conceit.

      Here you perceive youth, which sees itself strong to venture, disbelieving the prophecies of age. Yet were it not for venturesome youth we may well believe that little would be attained. The babe, who first totters on unsteady feet, may well lack the qualms, the anxieties of the mother who sees the fall imminent. Had the babe her mental tremors methinks there is no mother’s son of us would learn aught but to crawl.

      Peregrine stood by the window in the great hall. He found himself alone. Rain, a thin mist of a rain, fell ceaselessly, insidiously from a leaden sky. The cloyed earth accepted it patiently. There was no joy in the acceptance, no eager thirst as for silver showers streaming downwards. Sodden and satiated it longed for the benign rays of the sun to awaken the half-drowned life within its bosom.

      Peregrine looking across the park to the further reaches of the moorland saw it through a grey mist. The outlook accorded well with his mood. It lacked colour, buoyancy. The future appeared as skeleton as the bare branches of the trees flung against the sullen sky. If Nature’s spring were at hand she hid her face well. Mentally he had no glimpse of her, nor looked to have any. A morbid mood for a man you may well say, yet this was Peregrine’s at the moment.

      Turning from the window he scanned the hall, his eyes roving from inlaid floor to domed ceiling, from arched doorway to carved fireplace. The daylight was waning. Shadows loomed in the corners, were flung trembling on the walls by the firelight—tongued flames among great logs. The light caught the blazon of the house of Belisle among the carving of the overmantel.—On a field argent an inescutcheon azure set within an orle of roses gules.

      He looked at it thoughtfully, memory astir. As a child the vivid bit of colour had pleased him as it flashed jewel-like in sunshine or firelight from the sombre shadows of the oak. It pleased his eye now no less, though memory pricking touched the old wound anew.

      To him in this pensive mood entered a page, a slim lad in blue and silver. Peregrine engrossed in thought heard no sound till:

      “Ahem!” coughed the page.

      Peregrine started, looked up, met a pair of grey eyes, mischief lurking in their depths, saw a smooth-skinned, square-faced lad, wide-mouthed, with tip-tilted nose.

      “Craving your pardon for breaking in upon your meditations,” quoth the lad with mock respect, “but the Lady Isabel desires your presence.”

      Peregrine, returning to matters of the moment, experienced a heart beat. Here was his stage call, and his part by no means well-conned as yet. Save at a distance he had not set eyes upon the Lady Isabel since childhood, sole mistress now of the house of Belisle, since the Lady Clare, her mother, had been laid to rest. The Lord Robert de Belisle, her father, was in Gascony with his King subduing a rebellion.

      “And she has sent you to demand my presence?” asked Peregrine lazily, his inward tremor well controlled.

      “Since I am here,” grinned the boy.

      “Where is she?” demanded Peregrine, less desirous of knowing than wishful to gain a moment’s respite.

      “In the west chamber among her women,” replied