Before them, on the floor of the hall, knights and ladies trod an intricate measure. Great candles burned, viols and harps, the jongleurs played their best, varlets stationed by the walls scattered Eastern perfumes. The duke, with a word to the prince his host, rose and bending to Alazais offered his hand. All watched this couple—the measure over, all acclaimed. The duke led Alazais again to the dais, then did what others must expect of him and he of himself. “Fair, sweet lady,” he said to Gaucelm’s daughter. “Will you grace me with this measure?”
The ugly princess gave him her finger-tips. He led her upon the floor and they danced. As the measure, formal and stately, dictated, now they took attitudes before each other, now they came together, palms and fingers touching, now again parted. They were watched with strong interest by the length and breadth of the hall, by both the Court of Roche-de-Frêne and the duke’s following. A marriage such as this—say, what men began to doubt, that it came to pass—by no means concerned only the two who married. Thousands of folk were concerned, their children and their children’s children.
Gaucelm the Fortunate watched from his dais and his great chair, where he sat with bent elbow and his chin resting upon his hand. Sitting so, he opened his other hand and looked again at a small piece of cotton paper that had been slipped within it. Upon the paper appeared, in the up-and-down, architectural writing of the period, these words: “Messire, my father; do not, of your good pity, make me wed this lord! I will be unhappy. You will be unhappy. He will be unhappy. I do think that our lands and his lands will be unhappy. Messire my father, I do not wish to wed.” Prince Gaucelm closed his hand and watched again.
The duke was dancing stiffly, with a bad grace masked as well as he could mask anything that he truly felt. He wished to be prudent, and certainly it were not prudent to give to Roche-de-Frêne either open or secret offence. Not yet, even, had he determined.—He yet might, and he might not.—But he was an arrogant man and a vain, and to his own mind it was important that the world should not think he was fooled. Lasting love between lord and lady, duke and duchess, mattered, forsooth, little enough! It was not in the bond. When it came to beauty, he had seen great queens without beauty of face or form. But the duke, though he had it not himself, demanded that beauty in any woman immediately about him, and with it complaisance, bent head, and burning of incense. And he wished men to envy him, in some sort, all his goods, including the woman whom he would make duchess. That was where Gaucelm was fortunate. What living man, thought the duke, but would like to take from him golden Alazais?
He danced as starkly as though he were in hauberk and helmet, and his hand might have been mailed, so stiffly did it touch Audiart’s hand. Who would envy him this Egyptian? He never noted if she danced well or ill, if she had some grace of body or no; he looked for no expression in her face that he might admire. She was outlandish—ugly. There was—as would have become such a changeling—no awe of him, no tremulous fear lest she should not please. He had an injured, hot heart within him. Report had been too careless, bringing him only news that here was a marriageable princess. He blamed his councillors, determined to withdraw his favour from one who had been called his bosom friend, but who had advocated this match. He blamed Gaucelm, who, to his elaborate letter, had answered only with an invitation to visit Roche-de-Frêne. He should have said: “Fair lord, you do my daughter too much honour, who, you must know—” But chiefly the duke blamed that princess herself.
The measure was over. The duke and the princess returned to the dais. The jongleurs played loudly. The candles burned, the flung perfumes floated through the hall. The music hid the whispers. Gaucelm the Fortunate sat with a slight smile, his chin upon his hand. For an interlude there was brought upon the floor the jongleur who had made part of the forenoon’s entertainment. Elias of Montaudon he called himself, and he was skilful beyond the ordinary with balls of coloured glass and Eastern platters and daggers.
The ugly princess wished the taste of that dance taken from her lips. She watched the jongleur, and because he was all in brown and yellow like an autumn leaf and was as light as one and as quick as a woodland creature, he brought the country to her mind and made her see forests and streams. Her mother had been a mountain lady, and she herself would have liked to rove the earth. She sat still, her gaze straight before her, seeing the coloured balls, but beyond them imagined lands and wanderings.
The duke spoke across to the prince her father, and the words came clean and clear to her hearing, and to that of Stephen the Marshal and others standing near. “I have had letters, sir,” said the duke, “which make me to think that I am required at home.”