Her weak, old, shriveled hands were fluttering before her, helplessly, in a kind of futile wildness. She clasped them now, so that each hand seemed to restrain the other. And Jurgen answered:
“I quail. I am appropriately terrified by your snappishness, and flattered by your choice of an adjective. I venture, none the less, to observe that I have encountered, Centurion dear, in the writings of one or another learned author, whose name at the present escapes me, the striking statement, and the wholly true statement,—and a statement which was, indeed, a favorite with my saintly father,—that a tree may always be judged by its fruit. Now, the children of Dom Manuel have thus far most emphatically borne out this statement. Count Emmerick”—here Jurgen coughed,—“Count Emmerick is noted for his hospitality—”
“Emmerick,” said Dame Niafer, “would be well enough if he were not led by the nose in everything by that wife of his.”
Then Jurgen’s shoulders went up, his hands went outward, to disclaim any personal share in the old lady’s appraisement of his present client Radegonde. But Jurgen did not argue the matter.
“Madame Melicent,” Jurgen equably resumed, “has been the provoker of much gratifyingly destructive warfare oversea, just as Madame Ettarre has been the cause of another long war here at home, in which many gentlemen have won large honor, and hundreds of the humbler sort have been enabled to enter into a degree of eternal bliss appropriate to their inferior estate. Such wars evoke the noble emotions of patriotism, they enable people to become proficient in self-sacrifice, and they remarkably better business conditions, as my ledgers attest. As for Madame Dorothy, while she has incited no glorious public homicides and arsons, she has gratified and she has made more pleasurable the existence of half the gentry of Poictesme—”
“And what, you rogue, do you mean by that?”
“I allude to the organ of vision, without any anatomical excursus. I mean that to behold such perfect beauty makes life more pleasurable. Moreover, Madame Dorothy has incited a fine poem and a hungering and a dreaming that will not die, and a laughter which derides its utterer, too pitilessly—”
Now Jurgen’s voice had altered so that the old lady looked at him more narrowly. Niafer had an excellent memory. She perfectly recalled the infatuation of Jurgen’s youth, she who had no delusions about this daughter of hers. And Niafer reflected briefly upon the incurable romanticism of all men.
But Niafer said only, “I never heard of any such poem.”
Jurgen now completed the third of those convenient coughing spells. “I refer to an epic which stays as yet unpublished. It is a variation upon the Grail legend, madame, and pertains to the quest of a somewhat different receptacle. However! In regard to the other children of Dom Manuel,—concerning whose mothers your opinions, my adored Centurion, do equal credit to your sturdy morality and your skill in the art of impassioned prose,—we have Messire Raimbaut, a very notably respected poet, we have Sesphra, who has become a god of the Philistines. Poets befall all families, of course, with nobody to blame, whereas a god, madame, is not ever, as rhetoricians express it, to be sneezed at. We have, moreover, Edward Longshanks, one of the most applauded monarchs that England has ever known, because he so compactly exhibits in his large person every one of the general defects and limitations of his people. Thus far, madame, we may estimate the children of Dom Manuel’s body to have made a rather creditable showing.”