“I fear more from her inordinate piety than from her indifferent looks and her stupid well-meaningness. That woman will be reforming things everywhere into one gray ruin.”
“Indeed,” said Gonfal, smiling, “these rising fogs have to me very much the appearance of church incense.”
Guivric nodded. “Yes. Had it been possible, I believe that Madame Niafer would have preserved and desecrated the fellowship by setting in Dom Manuel’s place that Holy Holmendis who is nowadays her guide in all spiritual matters; and who will presently, do you mark my prophesying, be making a sanctimonious hash of her statecraft.”
“He composed for her, it is well known,” said Gonfal, “the plaint which she made for Dom Manuel.”
“That was a cataloguing of ecclesiastic virtues,” Guivric said, dryly, “which to my mind did not very immediately suggest the tall adulterer and parricide whom we remember. This Holmendis has, thus, already brought hypocrisy into fashion.”
“He will be Niafer’s main counselor,” Gonfal speculated. “He is a pushing, vigorous fellow. I wonder now—?”
Guivric nodded again. “Women prefer to take counsel in a bedchamber,” he stated.
“Come, Guivric,” put in pious young Donander of Évre. “Come now, whatever his over-charitable opinion of our dead master, this Holmendis is a saint: and we true believers should speak no ill of the saints.”
“I have nothing against belief, nor hypocrisy either, within reason, nor have I anything against saints, in their proper place. It is only that should a saint—and more particularly, a saint conceived and nurtured and made holy in Philistia,—ever come to rule over Poictesme, and over the bedchamber of Dom Manuel,” said Guivric, moodily, “that saint would not be in his proper place. And our day, my friends, would be ended.”
“It is already ended,” Gonfal said, “so far as Poictesme is concerned: these fogs smell over-strongly of church incense. But these fogs which rise about Poictesme do not envelop the earth. For one, I shall fare south, as that Horvendile directed me, and as I had already planned to do. In the South I shall find nobody so amusing as that fine great squinting quiet scoundrel of a Manuel. Yet in the South there is a quest cried for the hand of Morvyth, the dark Queen of Inis Dahut; and, now that my wife is dead, it may be that I would find it amusing to sleep with this young queen.”