“So!” said the other. “You would be his wife. Yes. I remember you, that day near Wissant. But how could you be recognizing me?”
“Are there not tears in your old eyes? There is no other person living, since that double-faced Freydis got her just deserts,” replied Niafer, very quietly, “who would be shedding tears over my Manuel’s tomb. We two alone remember him.”
“That is true,” said Alianora. And for no reason at all she smiled a little. “One hears so much about him, too.”
“The world has learned to appreciate my husband,” Niafer assented. She did not altogether approve of Madame Alianora’s smile.
Now the Queen said: “He was rather a dear boy. And I am not denying that I cared a great deal about him once. But even so, my dear, this wonder of the world that the poems and the histories are about, and that the statues and the shrines commemorate, and that one, in mere decency, has to pretend to remember!”
“I am sure I do not at all understand you, Madame Alianora.” And Niafer looked without any love at this Queen of England who in the old days had been upon terms of such regrettable intimacy with Dom Manuel.
But Alianora went on, with that provokingly pleasant air of hers: “No, you would not understand the joke of it. You do not properly value the work of your hands and of your imagining. But this legend which you in chief, with the pride and the foolishness of Poictesme to back you, have been quietly and so tirelessly fostering through all these years, has spread through the known world. Our Manuel has become the peer of Hector and of Arthur and of Charlemagne for his bravery and his wisdom and his other perfections. Our Manuel is to come again, in all his former glory! And I, who remember Manuel quite clearly—though I am not denying he has had his successors in my good will and friendly interest,—well, in perfect candor, my dear, I find these notions rather droll.”
To this sort of talking Niafer replied, sharply enough, “I do not know of any reason in the world for you to be speaking of my husband as ‘our’ Manuel.”
“No, my dear, I am sure he took excellent care that you should never know about such things. Well, but all that is over a great while ago. And there is no need for us two to be quarreling over the lad that took his pleasure with the pair of us, and with Queen Freydis too, and with nobody knows how many other women, and who, to do him justice, gave to each playfellow a fair half of that pleasure.”
This exposed unvenerable handsome old Alianora to the gaze of perturbed decorum. “I do not think, madame, that you ought to be alluding to such frivolous matters here at his tomb.”