Early yesterday morning our sister Eschine's second baby was announced, and in the afternoon the holy Patriarch baptized it by Guy's name. Amaury was in ecstasies with his boy; but alas! in the evening the poor little thing fell into convulsions, and barely lived to see the dawn of another day. Amaury passed from the climax of triumph to the depths of despair. He growled and snarled at every body, and snapped at Eschine in particular, as though he thought she had let her child die on purpose to vex him. That she could be in as much distress as himself, did not seem to occur to him. If anything could have provoked me more than Amaury's unreasonableness, it would have been the calm patience with which Eschine took it. There he stalked about, grumbling and growling.
"Why did you all let the child die?" he wanted to know—as if we could have helped it. "There is not one of you has any sense!"—as if he had! "Alix's boy manages to live. She knows how to treat him. Women are all idiots!" (Alix, apparently, not being a woman.)
Poor Eschine lay still, a few tears now and then making their way down her white cheeks, and meekly begging her lord and master's pardon for what she had not done. When he was gone, she said—I think to anticipate what she saw on the tip of my tongue—
"Thou knowest, Elaine dear, he is not angry with me. Men do set such store by a son. It is only natural he should be very much distressed."
She will persist in making excuses for him.
"Distressed?—well!" said I. "But he does not need to be so silly and angry. Natural!—well, yes,—I think it is natural to Amaury to be an idiot. I always did think so."
"O Lynette! don't, dear!" pleaded Eschine.
I am beginning to think I have been rather unjust to Eschine when I said there was nothing in her; but it has taken a long while to come out. And it seems to come rather in the form of doing and bearing, than of thinking and saying.
But that Amaury is a most profound donkey no mortal man can doubt,—or at any rate, no mortal woman.
I was awfully startled this morning when Marguerite undrew my curtains, and told me that our Lord King Beaudouin had been commanded to God. It seems now that for some time past he has been more ill than any one knew, except the Lady Queen his stepmother. What that wicked Count of Tripoli may have known, of course, I cannot say. But I am sure he has had a hand in the late King's will. The crown is left to the little King, Beaudouin V., and our sweet Sybil is disinherited. What that really means, I suppose, is that the Count is jealous of Guy's influence over his Lady, and imagines that he can sway the child better than the mother.