The Cream of the Jest

The tale tells how Count Emmerick planned a notable marriage-feast for his sister La Beale Ettarre and Sir Guiron des Rocques. The tale relates that, in honor of this wedding, came from Nacumera, far oversea, Count Emmerick’s elder sister Dame Melicent and her husband the Comte de la Forêt, with an outlandish retinue of pagan slaves that caused great wonder. All Poictesme took holiday. The tale narrates how from Naimes to Lisuarte, and in the wild hill-country back of Perdigon, knights made ready for the tournament, traveling toward Storisende in gay silken garments such as were suited to these new times of peace. The highways in those parts shone with warriors, riding in companies of six or eight, wearing mantles worked in gold, and mounted upon valuable horses that glittered with new bits and housings. And the tale tells, also, how they came with horns sounding before them.

Ettarre watched from the turrets of Storisende, pensively. Yet she was happy in these days. “Indeed, there is now very little left this side of heaven for you to desire, madame,” said Horvendile the clerk, who stood beside her at his service.

“No, there is nothing now which troubles me, Horvendile, save the thought of Maugis d’Aigremont. I cannot ever be sure of happiness so long as that man lives.”

“So, so!” says Horvendile⁠—“ah, yes, a master-villain, that! He is foiled for the present, and in hiding, nobody knows where; but I, too, would not wonder should he be contriving some new knavery.

“I will tell you,” Horvendile replied, “though I much fear you will not understand⁠—” He meditated, shook his head, smiling. “Indeed, how is it possible for me to make you understand? Well, I blurt out the truth. There was once in a land very far away from this land⁠—in my country⁠—a writer of romances. And once he constructed a romance which, after a hackneyed custom of my country, purported to be translated from an old manuscript written by an ancient clerk⁠—called Horvendile. It told of Horvendile’s part in the love-business between Sir Guiron des Rocques and La Beale Ettarre. I am that writer of romance. This room, this castle, all the broad rolling countryside without, is but a portion of my dream, and these places have no existence save in my fancies. And you, messire⁠—and you also, madame⁠—and dead Maugis here, and all the others who seemed so real to me, are but the puppets I fashioned and shifted, for a tale’s sake, in that romance which now draws to a close.”

He paused; and Sir Guiron sighed. “My poor Horvendile!” was all he said.

“It is not possible for you to believe me, of course. And it may be that I, too, am only a figment of some greater dream, in just such case as yours, and that I, too, cannot understand. It may be the very cream of the jest that my country is no more real than Storisende. How could I judge if I, too, were a puppet? It is a thought which often troubles me.⁠ ⁠…”

As she came toward him through the fog, “How annoying it is,” she was saying plaintively, “that these moors are never properly lighted.”

“Ah, but you must not blame Ole-Luk-Oie,” he protested. “It is all the fault of Beatricê Cenci.⁠ ⁠…”

Then Kennaston knew he had unwittingly spoken magic words, for at once, just as he had seen it done in theaters, the girl’s face was shown him clearly in a patch of roseate light. It was the face of Ettarre.

“Things happen so in dreams,” he observed. “I know perfectly well I am dreaming, as I have very often known before this that I was dreaming. But it was always against some law to tell the people in my nightmares I quite understood they were not real people. Today in my daydream, and here again tonight, there is no such restriction; and lovely as you are, I know that you are just a daughter of subconsciousness or of memory or of jumpy nerves or, perhaps, of an improperly digested entrée.”

“No, I am real, Horvendile⁠—but it is I who am dreaming you.”

“I had not thought to be a part of any woman’s dream nowadays.⁠ ⁠… Why do you call me Horvendile?”

He was looking down at the most repulsive old woman he had ever seen. Hers was the abhorrent fatness of a spider; her flesh appeared to have the coloring and consistency of dough. She sat upon the stone pavement, knitting; her eyes, which raised to his unblinkingly, were black, secretive, and impersonally malevolent; and her jaws stirred without ceasing, in a loose chewing motion, so that the white hairs, rooted in the big mole on her chin, twitched and glittered in the sunlight.

“But one does not pay on entering,” she was saying. “One pays as one goes out. It is the rule.”

“And what do you knit, mother?” Kennaston asked her.

“Eh, I shall never know until God’s funeral is preached,” the old woman said. “I only know it is forbidden me to stop.”

So he went past her, aware that through some nameless grace the girl whom he had twice seen in dreams awaited him there, and that the girl’s face was the face of Ettarre. She stood by a stone balustrade, upon which squatted tall stone monsters⁠—weird and haphazard collocations, as touched anatomy, of bird and brute and fiend⁠—and she in common with these hobgoblins looked down upon a widespread comely city. The time was a bright and windy morning in spring; and the sky, unclouded, was like an inverted cup which did not merely roof Ettarre and the man who had come back to her, but enclosed them in incommunicable isolation. To the left, beyond shimmering treetops, so far beneath them that it made Felix Kennaston dizzy to look, the ruffling surface of a river gleamed.⁠ ⁠…