“No doubt, dear Guivric: for I have learned that all the great captains are coming again,” said Kerin, almost wearily. “There is Arthur, there is Ogier, there is Charlemagne, there is Barbarossa, there is Finn, the son of Cumhal,—there is in every land, in fine, a foreknowledge of that hero who will return at his appointed time and bring with him all glory and prosperity. Prince Siddartha also is to return, and Saoshyant, and Alexander of Macedon, and Satan too, for that matter, is expected to return, for his last fling, a little before the holy Morrow of Judgment. Here again, therefore, I consider it quite likely that Dom Manuel may elect to make a tenth.”
In short, the old fellow took Poictesme’s epiphany almost too calmly.... Glaum was satisfied, on the ground that a conversion was a conversion, and an outing for all the angels in heaven. But it was apparent that Holy Holmendis did not quite like the posture of affairs.... You could not, of course, detect in this incurious receptiveness any skepticism; nor could a person who went ten times too far in the way of faith be, very rationally, termed an unbeliever. It was, rather, as if Kerin viewed the truth without joy: it was as if Kerin had, somehow, become over-familiar with the sublime truths about Manuel the Redeemer some while before he heard them; and so, was hearing them, now at long last, without the appropriate upliftedness and flow of spirits. Kerin merely accepted these tremendous truths; and seemed upon the whole to be more interested in life’s unimportant, superficial, familiar tasks, and in his food.
Holmendis must have felt that the desiderata here were intangible. In any event, he shook his aureoled head; and, speaking in the tongue of his native Philistia, he said something to Glaum-Without-Bones—which Glaum could not at all understand,—about “the intelligentsia, so-called.” But Holmendis did not resort to any dreadful miracle by which old Kerin might have been appalled into a more proper excitement and joyousness....
Yet it was a very unbounded joy, and a joy indeed at which all beholders wondered, to Kerin of Nointel, when he saw and embraced the fine son, named Fauxpas, who had been born to Saraïde during the fifth year of Kerin’s studies underground. For Kerin’s studies had informed him that such remarkably prolonged gestations are the infallible heralds of one or another form of greatness,—a fact evinced by the birth of Osiris and of several other gods and of all elephants,—and he deduced that his son would in some way or another rise to worldly preëminence.
And that inference proved to be reasonably true, since it was this Fauxpas de Nointel who led Count Emmerick’s troops for him in the evil days of Maugis d’Aigremont’s rebellion, and held Poictesme for Manuel’s son until aid came from the Comte de la Fôret. For twelve years at least this son of Kerin was thus preëminent among most of his associates, and twelve years is a reasonable slice out of any man’s life. And the eldest son of Fauxpas de Nointel was that Ralph who married Madame Adelaide, the daughter of the Comte de la Fôret, and the granddaughter of Dom Manuel, and who builded at Nointel the great castle with seven towers which still endures.
BOOK EIGHT
THE CANDID FOOTPRINT
“They have reproached the footsteps of thine anointed.”
—Psalms, lxxxix, 51.