It was not, either—not altogether,—that the young fools thought they had much to gain by these eccentricities. They had, somehow, been tempted into emulation by this nonsense about Manuel’s virtues. And then they had—still somehow, still quite unexplainably,—found pleasure in it. Coth granted this rather forlornly: these young people were getting a calm and temperate, but a positive, gratification out of being virtuous. There must, then, lurk somewhere deep hidden in humanity a certain trend to perverse delight in thus denying and curbing its own human appetites. And since the comparatively intelligent and unregenerate persons were all profiting by their fellows’ increased forbearance, altogether everybody was reaping benefit.
This damnable new generation was, because of its insane aspiring, happier than its fathers had been under the reign of candor and common-sense. This moonstruck legend of Manuel was bringing, not to be sure any omnipresent and unendurable perfection, but an undeniable increase of tranquillity and contentment to all Poictesme. Coth saw that too.
He remembered what his true liege-lord had said to him in the Place of the Dead: and Coth admitted that, say what you might as to the Manuel who had really lived, the squinting rascal did as a rule know what he was talking about.
30.
Havoc of Bad Habits
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NEWS as to court affairs and the rest of the province came now to Coth, in his two lairs at Haut Belpaysage, belatedly and rarely. Yet at this time he heard that Anavalt the Courteous had gone out of Poictesme with as little warning as the other lords of the Silver Stallion had accorded their intimates when Gonfal and Kerin and Miramon, and Coth himself, had each gone out of the land after Manuel’s passing.
These overnight evasions appeared to be becoming a habit, Coth said to his wife Azra, so you had best cherish me in the night season while you may, instead of shrieking out nonsense about my hands being so cold. She replied with an uxorial generality as to sore-headed bears and snapping-turtles and porcupines, which really was not misplaced. And it was not for a long while that any tidings were had of Anavalt the Courteous, and the riddle of his evasion was unraveled,[[1]] but at the last the news came as to the end which Anavalt had found near a windmill in the Wood of Elfhame, in his courtship of the mistress of that sinister and superficial forest.
[1]. Among other places, in a volume called Straws and Prayer-Books.
“At his age, too! and with a woman too thin to keep him warm!” said Coth. “It simply shows you, my dear son, what comes of lecherous habits, and I trust you may profit by it, for the world is very full of such deceits.”