“What a pity, and how much they lose,” Helen replied, “but if you’ll excuse me I’d rather sit in the hammock. My head still aches a little.”
She had no idea of being in close proximity to Craig, who might ply her with troublesome questions. She preferred the safety of the hammock, and, with the help of Mark, who at once came forward, put herself into it, half sitting, half reclining on the cushions, with her face away from all the party except Mark, who stood just where he could see her. No one would ever have suspected there was anything of the schoolmaster about Craig, but he assumed that role to some extent, and before commencing to read, he said, “I think we shall understand the poem better if we know something of the subject, Sordello. Who was he? Miss Alice will perhaps tell us?”
“Oh, don’t ask me! Pass on to Helen. She is posted,” Alice said, while Helen raised herself on her elbow,—moved her fan back and forth slowly, and replied, hesitatingly, as if cudgelling her memory for something she had once known and which had become a little indistinct.
“I don’t know that I can talk very clearly about him, there were so many fictitious accounts of him. I believe, though, he was a troubadour, who was born in the twelfth or thirteenth century at Goito, near Mantua. Am I right?”
She was looking at Craig, who nodded affirmatively, and smiled upon her as she went on still more slowly.
“Wasn’t he at first in the family of some count, who was chief of the Guelph faction, and didn’t he afterward enter the service of Berenger, of the house of Barcelona?”
Again Craig bowed and Helen continued: “He wrote songs and poems and was distinguished for his pleasing address and grace of manner, although said to be small in stature. The stories told of him are so filled with anachronisms, romances and fictions that it is difficult to decide which are true and which are false.”
“That is all encyclopedia. Of herself Helen never mastered such a word as anachronism,” Alice thought, while Mark had a similar idea.
Craig had no suspicion, and was delighted to find one person in so perfect accord with himself. He motioned her to go on, and, pleased with the attention she was receiving, she went on rapidly now and a little incoherently, as her memory was beginning to fail her.
“I think,” she said, “that some writers have accused him of eloping with another man’s wife. This is doubtful. There is a Palma, who figures very conspicuously with him. I can’t tell you all about it, or just how he died. I know Dante met him in Purgatory with those who had died without a chance to repent.”