The Jester. LM

If thou dost e’er desire.

       Nor seek to close thine eyes,

       But take this good advice

       And quest with willing heart.

       For they are truly wise

       Who bear the smart of fire apart.

       Nor seek to close thine eyes.

       And shrink not from the fire

       If thou hast true desire

       Through pain to win thy day.

       Shake from thy feet the mire,

       The mud of clay gained by the way,

       And shrink not from the fire.

       So shall thou find thy goal,

       And finding gain thy soul.

       Thy dreaming was not all;

       It asked a lesser toll,

       A toll so small. Then came the call.

       So shall thou find thy goal.

      The song ended a silence fell on the room. Mary Chester had heard it very sanely, the words lost for the most part in the melody that accompanied them. Leonora, dreaming, saw the goal of motherhood, though as yet distant. Monica pictured some peaceful cloister, heard the sweet tones of the Angelus. Brigid, half-smiling, sighed; saw, I fancy, further than did the others.

      As for Isabel, she looked at the fire. Pippo, lying on the hearth, looked from her to Peregrine.

      “Whose are the words?” asked Isabel.

      “Madam, they come from realms of fancy.”

      “Your own?”

      “Those wherein I have occasionally wandered.”

      “Find you many such songs there?”

      “Now and again. They are, however, often elusive, escaping as soon as perceived.”

      Isabel turned from the fire, looked full at him. She gave him now a smile, rare with her, though Peregrine was not to know that. His heart beat hotly.

      “Methinks,” she said, “you are poet rather than Jester.”

      The colour rushed to Peregrine’s face. Memory of his resolution surged towards him, yet was it driven back by the smile that trembled on her lips.

      “Madam, I—” he stammered.

      Isabel misunderstood the hesitation. She had seen his sire wince with the new jest ready on his tongue. Here was no jest ready, and strangely enough she would cloak the deficiency.

      “I—I am not displeased.” The words fell softly from her lips.

      And at that laughter sprang to Peregrine’s throat, a flash of mockery to his eyes, though he replied gravely enough and meekly, “Madam, I am at all times what you would desire me.”

      “Ah!” breathed Isabel watching him. Then very sweetly, “Now I see in you courtier, yet I would have you poet; therefore, sir poet, sing again.”

      And Peregrine sang.

      Some hour or so later, Peregrine departed, Isabel asked carelessly of her women:

      “What think you of our Jester?”

      “A very proper man,” quoth Brigid demurely.

      “He has a sweet voice,” ventured Monica timidly.

      “He differs from his sire,” mused Leonora.

      Mary Chester alone was silent.

      “And you?” asked Isabel, looking directly at her.

      “Madam, I have no opinion,” replied Mary; and took herself to task for the lie.

CHAPTER III

       SWEET BONDAGE

       Table of Contents

      SPRING that year made battle royal with cold winds. Together they fought for the mastery. Yet where they gained in strength she gained in insistence. Driven away she yet returned again and again, till at length they were weary of the fight, and fled before her to return no more.

      The victory hers she reigned supreme and triumphant, flung her snowy mantle over fruit trees, kissed to full awakening the flowers in copse and field, roused to chorus of warblings the birds’ song in the hedges. Knowing her reign late and soon to pass to that of summer she lost no moment of it once established. The south and west winds, now her subjects, sang softly among the trees and grasses at her bidding. The sun, king of all, crowned his reigning queen.

      Peregrine sat in the castle garden at the foot of the white sundial which stood at the edge of the velvet grass sward. Around him were flower-beds brilliant with colour. Here were masses of small purple campanula covering the stone border between flower-bed and flagged path; clumps of anemones many-hued, named for St. Brigid; narcissi golden-eyed trembling in the soft air; forget-me-nots blue as the sky or Our Lady’s robe; scillas deeper dyed; tulips chalice-shaped, gold, crimson, and white—a very riot of colour, gay as the sweet mad call of spring.

      Beyond lay the park, the trees clean and fresh in their vesture of new leaves; and beyond that again the open spaces of the moorland. Peregrine, looking thereat, saw its freedom, remembered his own. A prisoner now, he laughed, yet without bitterness. Ten short weeks to change a man, yet he found himself changed.

      Peregrine set himself to think. Yet this he found no easy task. He could see himself as he was ten weeks agone, fancied the mental image as clear-cut as a cameo, a good likeness withal. He could see himself as he was now, the outlines dimmed truly, blurred by some curious mist of thought, yet sufficiently clear to know that here was a different man from the sharp-cut cameo. To the change, the manner of its happening, he found it no easy task to bring clear thought. Once a freeman scorning all thought of thraldom, now a prisoner exulting in his bonds. That the bonds which held him differed from those that had held his sire he was very certain. Custom had bound his sire, he had his own word for it. Here was no custom to hold him, but bonds infinitely sweeter, light yet inflexible as iron. He would not be free of them if he could.

      What was he? A prisoner in very sooth. Yet more—a Jester who failed to jest; a man seeking for art, for guile, wherein to hide his heart, yet clothing it ever in truth, though truth carved to poetic fancy.

      “Dogs are we!” so had cried his sire. No dog was he to fawn and cringe at the foot of his mistress, but in very sooth a man kneeling in adoration at his lady’s shrine. And as he was, so she accepted him, this Jester who could not jest. She saw the man beneath the fool, and stooping from her heights recognized his manhood. Even so might the Gracious Mother of God bend from Heaven to a suppliant son of earth. There was no hint of blasphemy in his thought; in his very manhood he was humble.

      You see in him a man who had had no thought for women. Two only had held his love—his mother, at whose knee in childhood he had prayed, and that other Mother to whom his prayers had been addressed, “Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostræ.”

      Therefore he brought to his lady a very clean heart, a very humble heart, one which in all childlikeness accepted her favours, though warm with the strength of a man’s devotion it sang a man’s praises in her honour. You must not think that he lifted his eyes one whit higher than the hem of her robe; she was to him a very queen, himself the humblest of her subjects. Yet he knew himself now as man, and no fool, his adoration clean and strong, no hint of the fawner in his attitude.

      That