Niafer arose, not without difficulty; and the bent, limping, very aged Countess Dowager of Poictesme now went away from Jurgen, slowly and moodily.
70.
All Ends Perplexedly
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JURGEN, thus left alone, forthwith ascended the side of the great tomb. He stood now at the top of it, holding to the neck of the horse upon which sat the sculptured effigy of Manuel. The stone face, above and looking beyond Jurgen, when seen at such close quarters, was blotched and grotesquely coarse, the blank eyeballs gave it a repellent air of crass idiocy. But Jurgen was there to appraise not the face but the garments of the overtowering hero, and it was at the gems with which this famous effigy was inset that Jurgen was really looking.
Then, without any deep surprise, Jurgen whistled. To his trained eye it was apparent enough that these gems with which Madame Niafer had prodigally adorned her husband’s statue were one and all, and had been from the first, bright bits of variously colored glass. The Countess Radegonde, it appeared, had been by a great many years forestalled in her economics and in her practical view of this tomb by the countess who builded it.
And somehow Jurgen was not much surprised. His only verbal outbreak was to utter one of his favorite remarks. He said, “These women!”
He climbed down to the pavement afterward, with the gingerly care befitting a person of forty-and-something. He cocked his gray head, looking upward with a remarkable blending of the quizzical and of the regretful. Now, seen at an appropriate distance, now Manuel of Poictesme appeared again resplendent and in everything majestic. He sat there, wary and confident and superb, it seemed, perpetually to guard the country which he had redeemed; and to which, men said, he was to return....
Thus Jurgen waited for some while, regarding the vast tomb which was wholly empty, and which everywhere was adorned with a worthless tinsel glitter, and which yet stayed the most holy and, precisely as Jurgen had pointed out, the actually inspiring shrine of the heroic cult of the Redeemer....
Jurgen opened his mouth. Then he shut it.