The Silver Stallion: A Comedy of Redemption

by James Branch Cabell

Then Madame Niafer began to tell him somewhat of her dream. And Jurgen listened, with the patience and the fondness which the plight of very old persons always seemed to evoke in him.

Jurgen was upon excellent terms with Madame Niafer, whom, for Biblical reasons, he was accustomed to refer to as the Centurion. “You say to one man, Go, and he goeth; and you say to another man, Come, and he cometh,” Jurgen explained. “In fine, you are a most terrible person. But when you say to me, Go, I do not obey you, madame, because you are also a dear.”

Niafer regarded this as sheer impudence, and vastly liked it.

So she told him about her dream.... And it was possible, Dame Niafer now admitted, that this dream might have a little misrepresented the deplorable women involved, because that snaky-eyed Freydis was known, since she got her dues from the Druids and the satirists, to be satisfactorily imprisoned in infamous Antan, whereas that hypocrite of an Alianora was now a nun at Ambresbury. But in Madame Niafer’s dreaming the hussies had seemed equally free from the constraint of infamy and of the convent: they had seemed to be far more dreadfully constrained, by skepticism....

“Madame,” said Jurgen, at the end of her account, “what need is there, after all, to worry over this little day-dream? I myself had but last month, upon Walburga’s Eve, a far more extensive and disturbing dream: and nothing whatever came of it.”

The Countess answered: “I grow old; and with age one is less certain of everything. Oh, I know well enough that the lewd smirking hussies were very slanderously in the wrong! Still, Jurgen, still, dear rogue, there is a haunting whisper which tells me that time means to take all away. I am a lonely powerless old creature now, but I stay Manuel’s wife. That alone had remained to me, to have been the one love and the proud wife of the great Redeemer of Poictesme. Now, at the last, a whispering tells me, time must take away that also. My Manuel, a whispering tells me, was no more splendid than other men, he performed no prodigies, and there will be no second coming of the Redeemer: a whispering tells me that I knew this always and that all these years I have been acting out a lie. I think that whispering talks nonsense. And yet, with age, Jurgen, with age and in the waiting loneliness of age, one grows less certain of everything.”

“Madame,” said Jurgen, with his most judicial aspect, “let us regard this really very interesting question from its worst possible side. Let us—with suitable apologies to his great shade, and merely for the quicker confounding of his aspersers,—suppose that Dom Manuel was, in point of fact, not anything remarkable. Let us wildly imagine the cult of the Redeemer which now is spread all over our land, to be compact of exaggeration and misunderstanding and to be based virtually upon nothing. The fact remains that this heroic and gentle and perfect Redeemer, whether or no he ever actually existed, is now honored and, within reason and within the reach of human frailty, is emulated everywhere, at least now and then. His perfection has thus far, I grant you, proved un-contagious: he has made nobody anywhere absolutely immaculate: but none the less,—within limits, within the unavoidable limits,—men are quite appreciably better because of this Manuel’s example and teachings—”

“Men are happier also, Jurgen, because of that prediction as to his second coming which he uttered in your presence on the last night of his living, and which you brought down from Morven.”

Jurgen coughed. “It is a pleasure, it is always a pleasure, to further in any way the well-being of my fellow-creatures. But—to resume the immediate thread of my argument,—if this superb and most beneficial example was not ever actually set by Dom Manuel—owing to the press of family and state affairs,—if this example were, indeed, wholly your personal invention, then you, O terrible Centurion, would be one of the most potent creative artists who ever lived. Now that I proclaim, as a retired poet, to be a possibility from which you should not take shame, but only pride and thankfulness.”

“Do you not be talking your wheedling nonsense to me, young fellow! For, if my life had been given over to the spreading of romances about a Manuel who never lived—!”