“Do you stop deafening me with your talk about irrelevant matters! In Philistia, Dom Manuel’s most precious bantling by Queen Freydis is working every manner of pagan iniquity, and has brought about the imprisonment, in infamous Antan, of his own mother, after having lived with her for some while in incest—”
“Nevertheless—”
“Azra, you have, as I tell you for your own good, a sad habit, and a very ill-bred habit also, of interrupting people, and that habit is quite insufferable. A tree, I repeat to you, may be judged by its fruit! Everybody knows that. Now, in our Poictesme, the increase of Dom Manuel’s body has, thus far, produced two strumpets and a guzzling cuckold—”
“But, even so—”
“You are talking nonsense. A tree, I say to you, may be judged by its fruit! I consider this exhibit very eloquently convincing as to the true nature of our Redeemer.”
Azra now answered nothing. And Coth fell to looking at his motto, rather gloomily.
“It was not that I meant,” he said, heroically, by and by, “to be rude, my dear. But I do hate a fool, and, in particular, an obstinate fool.”
Here too it must be recorded that upon the night of Radegonde’s marriage old Holden had the ill taste to die. That it was by his own hand, nobody questioned, but the affair was hushed up: and Count Emmerick’s married life thus started with gratifyingly less scandal than it culminated in.
Coth heard of this thing also. He looked at his motto, he recalled the love which he had borne for Holden in the times when Coth had not yet given over loving anybody: and he mildly wondered that Holden, at his age, should still be clinging to the fallacy that one wench was much more desirable than another. By and large, thought Coth, they had but one use, for which any one of them would serve, if you still cared for such kickshaws. For himself, he was growing abstemious; and as often as not, found it rather a nuisance when any of his vassals married, and the Alderman of St. Didol was expected to do his seignorial duty by the new made wife. Things everywhere were dwindling and deteriorating.
Even the great Fellowship of the Silver Stallion was wearing away, thus steadily, under the malice and greed of time. Donander of Évre was to-day the only one of Manuel’s barons who yet rode about the world, now and then, in search of good fighting and fine women. All the best of the fellowship were gone from life: the hypocrites and the fools alone remained, Coth estimated modestly. For he and that boy Donander were, at least, not hypocrites....