Garin obeyed. When it was done, “That is loveliness!” said the Princess. “This very moment that fair lady has you, doubtless, in her thought.”
“She whom I sing, lady, and call the Fair Goal, has never seen me. She knows not that such a man lives.”
“What!” exclaimed the princess and turned upon him. “You have seen her once, and she has not seen you at all! You know not her true name nor her home, and she knows not that you are in life! Now, by my faith—”
She broke off, sitting staring at him with a strangely vivid face. “I have heard troubadours sing of such loves,” she said slowly, “but I have not believed them. Such loves seemed neither real, nor greatly desirable to be made real. It was to me like other pretences.... But you, Sir Garin of the Golden Island, I hold to be honest—”
Garin laid the lute upon the earth beside him. He looked at the trees of the garden, and he seemed to see again a nightingale that flew from shade to shade and sang with a sweetness that ravished. “If I know my own heart,” he said, “it loves with reality!” And as he spoke came the first confusion, strangeness, and doubt, the first sense of something new, or added. It was faint—so underneath that only the palest dawn-light of it came over the horizon of the mind—so far and speechless that Garin knew not what it was, only divined that something was there. Whatever recognition occurred was of something not unpleasing, something that, were it nearer, might be known for wealth. Yet there was an admixture of pain and doubt of himself. He fell silent, faint lines between his brows.
The Princess of Roche-de-Frêne likewise sat without speaking. A colour was in her cheek and her eyes had strange depths. There was softness in them, but also force and will. She looked a being with courage to name her ends to herself and power to reach them.
The dusk was coming, the small winged creatures that harboured in the castle garden were at their vesper chirping. The page Pierol and the dark-eyed girl whispered among the myrtles.
The princess rose. “I am not so tired nor so melancholy now! I thank you for your singing, Sir Garin.”
“I would, my princess,” answered Garin, “that, like the singers of old, I might build walls where they are broken! I would that, with armèd hand, I might bring you victory!”
“One paladin alone no longer does that,” said Audiart. “If we win, we all have part—you and Sir Aimar and Lord Stephen, for whom I grieve, and all the valiant chivalry and those who fight afoot. And Thibaut Canteleu and every brave townsman. And the women who are so brave, ready and constant. And the children who hush their crying. All have part—all! Account must be taken, too, of my father’s jester, who, the other day, penned a cartel to Montmaure. He tied it to an arrow and shot it from the point of highest danger. And it was a scullion who threw down the ladder from the northern wall. All share. The value is in each!”