Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (409 page)

“That is the old story,” the young knight said, and then he exclaimed again: “I am a most unfortunate man!” He stretched his naked arm, with its huge and bony elbow, through the opening of his cloak, and pointed at the armour.

“Mark that!” he said. “I did bid Gorhelm son, the armourer, to make me that rondelet, such as those Sir John of Hainault wears. Now mark, I bring Gorhelm son with me because Gorhelm the old is too obstinate to make armour after the new fashions. Now it appears that Gorhelm son is too stupid. For that rondelet is no more like those of Sir John of Hâinault than an egg is like an onion.”

Gertrude said nothing. The page continued to turn the armour, now that way, now this, before his lord’s eyes.

“Mercy of God!” the young knight exclaimed suddenly in a high bellow; “there are spots of rain upon the steel. Ay de mi! You have carried my armour through the rain, and it is not greased.”

He leant back in his bath exclaiming:

“Mercy of God! Mercy of God!” many times, whilst his mouth fell open with amazement.

“Ah, gentle knight,” the page was beginning to explain, when with a marvellous spring — it was reported that many times in full armour the young knight had sprung right over his war-horse — he was right out of the bath. His mantle, blazing red and white and clasped at the neck with a buckle of gleaming beaten gold weighing three ounces, whirled out all round him; the water dripped from his wet and hairy limbs that, white beneath the scarlet and all knotted and distorted, fell like the sails of a windmill about the page’s ears.

The page dodged that way and this; he held up the armour to defend himself from the painful blows, and upon it the knight’s horny hands fell with metallic and hollow sounds, whilst he bellowed with fury. The page yelped like a small cur at each blow. And then from the street, rhythmic and mingled with cries, came the light, measured tread of the returning soldiery. Evading the body of the page, which the young knight, who now had the boy by the throat, was whirling around the room, Gertrude, the leman, went to look out at the window.

In greens, in browns, in greys, all woollen and wet, the Wiltshire archers were tramping home through the rain. They raised their hands, and cried out to familiar faces at the windows of the street. One bent beneath the weight of a table strapped to his back; another was burdened with a bundle of hides like a harness; yet another bore a sackful of meat and bones. Yet, upon the whole, they had very little booty, and they marched rhythmically, at each step there coming a little clittering sound like hail from all the arrows shaken in the quivers behind their shoulders, and from the strings that flapped against the mighty bows that were slung across their backs. From them all there came up a warm odour of wet woollens and of humanity. They had been for three weeks incessantly upon the search for an enemy that constantly evaded them, amongst the stony bottoms of stream-filled valleys, and amongst the stinging mists of the heathery uplands.

From the room there came a mighty splash. The knight had thrown the boy into the wooden bath; the water gushed out on to the dirty stone floor; the shoulder-piece rolled into the corner. The young knight held the page in the bath, pressing him down with a bony foot and a leg scarred with the chafing of steel armour. His cloak flying round and round as with fury he waved his bare arms, he addressed the back of Gertrude, who was leaning from the window.

His misfortunes poured out from his mouth in loud and grating howls.

Did ever, he asked her, any man have such misfortunes? Was ever any knight so served by dolts?

The boy was sobbing in the water; the knight, still pressing him down, began to howl an immensely long story of how Gorhelm the old, his armourer, whom he had left behind in Wiltshire, had flatly refused to imitate a cannon called a saker, one of which the young knight had bought, along with twenty hundredweight of soft iron, from the ironfounders in the weald of Sussex. Gorhelm the old was to have forged this iron in the shape of the other saker — so that the young knight would, have four when he went sieging to strong castles. But would Gorhelm the old do this work? No. He said he was a smith, a swordmaker, an inlayer of harness; with iron logs he would have no truck. He had been beaten, but this had only made him the more obstinate. He would have nothing to do with any new fashions which were all toys and folly! Then Gorhelm the younger was an incapable fool; this page was ill-trained! And, by the five wounds of the Redeemer, his ear listening to the sounds in the street told him that his archers were marching back in the rain — with their bows out of the cases and the covers off their quivers!

“In the rain!” the knight called out. “Merciful God, in the rain! There will not be feather on arrow or bowstring that will not be frayed and perished! And these are my men!”

Gertrude turned slowly from the window.

“Ah, gentle knight,” she said sulkily, “it has not rained more than three minutes. It would take them longer to cover their bows and to cap their quivers than they will need for reaching shelter.”

The knight’s mouth fell open with rage and despair.

“By the bones of the Virgins of Cologne!” he called out, “is it thus a courteous leman speaks to her paramour? Merciful God, do you too side with this idle, dissolute, and neglectful rabble? I will sell you to Mahound and the Anthropophagi! I will throw you into chains in the town gaol. Merciful Saviour, I will tie you down upon the bed and beat your naked flesh with rods until you bleed from shoulder to thigh. All this I will do because you have no heart nor bowels of compassion.”

Gertrude raised her shoulders slowly to a level with her ears; she let them as slowly fall, and then turned her back on him.

The unfortunate knight’s arms fell desolately to his sides, and he remained lost in dismal thoughts. He imagined he must be bewitched, and he thought it would be well to consult a wizard or a priest. For, try as he would, deserve it as she might, he could not raise his hand against this insulting atomy. And yet he was the young Knight of Egerton who had been famed for having in but ten years seven of the most famous lemans in Christendom. There had been Isabelle de Joie, with hair like corn; Constance de Verigonde, with teeth like pearls; Bearea la Belle, with breasts like mother-of-pearl; Bice de Carnas, with arms like alabaster; and Jeune la Ciboriee, whose breath was sweeter than the odour of pinks. And there had been Margaret of Wyvern....

All these famous and beautiful women had wept, sighed, groaned or coaxed according to their natures when he had only frowned. Why, if it had come into his head he would have beaten them in his cups for the amusement of hearing them howl! But this wretched, ugly, mean little girl controlled him as she did the brachet dog. She had a face like a rat, limbs as thin as stalks of corn, the insatiable hunger of a leech. Yet she — she kept him there. For he knew that long since, packing his arms upon waggons and setting his men to march afoot, he would have gone back home to Tamworth — but for the fact that the Lady Dionissia awaited him. He could not tell that the Lady Dionissia would not send Gertrude packing, sell her to some strange man, at the thought of which his bowels turned over, or slay her with a dagger as the Queen Eleanor had done to Rosamond of Clifford. Yes, assuredly, but for this mean girl he would have gone to the south again. Then, equally assuredly, he must be bewitched. Bewitched! She must be Garanigonione, the leech of the desert that Holy Writ and the Lays tell us of! Her filthy old mother had appeared to be a witch!

He had loved her with jewels, fed her with sugar; he had borne her device on a shoulder knot at the Queen Mother’s table, which was beyond reasonable decency. He had composed in her honour five rondels and three virelais, which his jongleur had sung to her during the day before the hearth in the guest-room of this inn, and which he himself had recited to her in the dusk of the night when his pains prevented his sleep. During the day she had shown no sense of the honour; at night she had turned over in bed, yawned, and fallen asleep at once. Perhaps that was because the young knight could compose poems only in French, for he spoke English indifferently, whilst Gertrude understood only the language of the Midlands....

So the young knight meditated, his foot pressing down the wet page in the bath, whilst outside the archers went by, and Gertrude watched them from the window.

His own incomprehensible condition engrossed him so much that he did not come out of it even when the sound of iron armour came knocking along the staircase wall into the very door of the room. A huge figure, all black and rusted mail, with the high cheekbones of an enormous red face peering good-humouredly from the visor, creaked stiffly across the floor. The young knight turned his head despondently, and muttered:

“Hum!”

And, tranquilly peering out of his black helmet, the Knight of Coucy and Stapleford said nothing at all. At last the young knight came out of his reverie.

“Why the devil!” he exclaimed, “do you come here in these greasy potlids?”

His jovial and sagacious eyes upon the young knight’s face, the Knight of Coucy set one mailed hand heavily upon the other, and with a gesture of weary satisfaction he pulled off one gauntlet and cast it rattling upon the hutch at the foot of the bed. His armour was very old, and had seen much service; it was coated deep with a mixture of grease and soot to keep it from the mist of the weather. When they went against the Scots they were thus homely clad, for there was no eye to see them and only too little glory to be got. Therefore the Knight of Coucy wore a very old helmet, sorely dinted at the top, much like a sooty crock with an iron flap that he had pushed up the better to see. Clenching and unclenching his huge fists that were covered with hair of a bluish black, he said:

“My hands are as stiff and cold as a skeleton’s. I thought it was never coming to the time when I should get these things off,”

The young knight vented another “Hum!” of less ill-humour, and like a threatening spectre of iron the large knight moved himself towards the fireplace and stretched out his large cold hands.

“If you have pickled your Henry enough,” he said, “lend him me to take off these things. My Jeannot has a broken arm. My Peter has a crushed leg. Griselda is gadding God knows where. I have not one to undress me in my chamber. So I came here.”

“Mercy of God!” the young knight said, startled into a sudden hospitality, and, removing his foot from the page, he bent down, and catching at the wet velvet of the boy’s throat he threw him out into the middle of the floor. “Dirty little bastard, who have wetted my armour and art thyself wet, hurry to take off the gentle knights potlids!”

And with a shivering, hurried obedience, the miserable page, his long hair hanging about his shoulders like rats’ tails, ran to kneel down about the great black limbs of the knight before the fire. And Gertrude, coming slowly from the window, stretched out gingerly her white hands to the greasy straps and buckles round the knight’s neck.

“Ha! saucy one!” the knight exclaimed. “Here is condescension!” and with his hairy fingers he touched her bare neck and shoulders. Her tiny and delicate hands slapped at his immense paws, and, when she had loosened his helmet so that he could take it off, she went to the bed and slipped herself into her dress, which was all of one piece, long and trailing in the skirts, so that she might appear taller, and of blue cloth, the sleeves, lined with yellow silk, falling to the dirty floor.

“There have never been so many broken arms and crushed legs amongst my villains,” the knight said. “We have been stumbling amongst wet rocks all these three weeks.”

“Well, you are back,” the young knight said. He stretched his arms wide apart with an easy gesture. “My pains are much better.”

“That too is well!” the Knight of Coucy commented; “but there is plaguey trouble coming. Three times today the Lord Mortimer has been in my rooms with messages from the Queen Mother.”

“Let her rave!” the young knight said. “Gentle knight, the Queen Mother is a very evil bitch. I have dined at her table but three times whilst you have been gone, and the nearest I have sat to her has been six away.”

“Then there will be new fines asked you!” the Knight of Coucy said slowly. He had got his helmet off, his huge red face appearing above his iron shoulders whilst, holding his helmet patiently on his chest, he waited for the page to peel off his black thigh pieces beneath which was a suit of brown leather, marked here and there with grease.

The young knight had set himself down on the edge of his bath.

“Let the fines come!” he said. “I shall get me away to the Holy Land with Gertrude. I have a plan for assaulting the Holy Sepulchre.”