“Ainsi il avait trouvé sa mie
 
Si belle qu’on put souhaiter.
 
N’avoit cure d’ailleurs plaider,
 
Fors qu’avec lui manoir et estre.
 
Bien est Amour puissant et maistre.”
THE EIGHTH NOVEL.—BRANWEN OF WALES GETS A KING’S LOVE UNWITTINGLY, AND IN ALL INNOCENCE CONVINCES HIM OF THE LITTLENESS OF HIS KINGDOM; SO THAT HE BESIEGES AND IN DUE COURSE OCCUPIES ANOTHER REALM AS YET UNMAPPED.
 
The Story of the Scabbard
 
In the year of grace 1400 (Nicolas begins) King Richard, the second monarch of that name to rule in England, wrenched his own existence, and nothing more, from the close wiles of his cousin, Harry of Derby, who was now sometimes called Henry of Lancaster, and sometimes Bolingbroke. The circumstances of this evasion having been recorded in the preceding tale, it suffices here to record that this Henry was presently crowned King of England in Richard’s place. All persons, saving only Owain Glyndwyr and Henry of Lancaster, believed King Richard dead at that period when Richard attended his own funeral, as a proceeding taking to the fancy, and, among many others, saw the body of Edward Maudelain interred with every regal ceremony in the chapel at Langley Bower. Then alone Sire Richard crossed the seas, and at thirty-three set out to inspect a transformed and gratefully untrammelling world wherein not a foot of land belonged to him.
 
Holland was the surname he assumed, the name of his half-brothers; and to detail his Asian wanderings would be tedious and unprofitable. But at the end of each four months would come to him a certain messenger from Glyndwyr, supposed by Richard to be the imp Orvendile, who notoriously ran every day around the world upon the Welshman’s business. It was in the Isle of Taprobane, where the pismires are as great as hounds, and mine and store the gold of which the inhabitants afterward rob them through a very cunning device, that this emissary brought the letter which read simply, “Now is England fit pasture for the White Hart.” Presently Richard Holland was in Wales, and then he rode to Sycharth.
 
There, after salutation, Glyndwyr gave an account of his long stewardship. It was a puzzling record of obscure and tireless machinations with which we have no immediate concern: in brief, the barons who had ousted King Log had been the very first to find their squinting King Stork intolerable; and Northumberland, Worcester, Douglas, Mortimer, and so on, were already pledged and in open revolt. “By the God I do not altogether serve,” Owain ended, “you have but to declare yourself, sire, and within the moment England is yours.”
 
Richard spoke with narrowed eyes. “You forget that while Henry of Lancaster lives no other man can ever hope to reign tranquilly in these islands. Come then! the hour strikes; and we will coax the devil for once in a way to serve God.”
 
“Oh, but there is a boundary appointed,” Glyndwyr moodily returned. “You, too, forget that in cold blood this Henry stabbed my best-loved son. But I do not forget this, and I have tried divers methods which we need not speak of,—I who can at will corrupt the air, and cause sickness and storms, raise heavy mists, and create plagues and fires and shipwrecks; yet the life itself I cannot take. For there is a boundary appointed, sire, and beyond that frontier the Master of our Sabbaths cannot serve us even though he would.”
 
Richard crossed himself. “You horribly mistake my meaning. Your practices are your own affair, and in them I decline to dabble. I merely design to trap a tiger with his appropriate bait. For you have a fief at Caer Idion, I think?—Very well! I intend to herd your sheep there, for a week or two, after the honorable example of Apollo. It is your part to see that Henry knows I am living disguised and defenceless at Caer Idion.”
 
The gaunt Welshman chuckled. “Yes, squinting Henry of Lancaster would cross the world, much less the Severn, to make quite sure of Richard’s death. He would come in his own person with at most some twenty trustworthy followers. I will have a hundred there; and certain aging scores will then be settled in that place.” Glyndwyr meditated afterward, very evilly. “Sire,” he said without prelude, “I do not recognize Richard of Bordeaux. You have garnered much in travelling!”
 
“Why, look you,” Richard returned, “I have garnered so much that I do not greatly care whether this scheme succeed or no. With age I begin to contend even more indomitably that a wise man will consider nothing very seriously. You barons here believe it an affair of importance who may chance to be the King of England, say, this time next year; you take sides between Henry and me. I tell you frankly that neither of us, that no man in the world, by reason of innate limitations, can ever rule otherwise than abominably, or, ruling, can create anything save discord. Nor can I see how this matters either, since the discomfort of an ant-village is not, after all, a planet-wrecking disaster. No, Owain, if the planets do indeed sing together, it is, depend upon it, to the burden of Fools All. For I am as liberally endowed as most people; and when I consider my abilities, my performances, my instincts, and so on, quite aloofly, as I would appraise those of another person, I can only shrug: and to conceive that common-sense, much less Omnipotence, would ever concern itself about the actions of a creature so entirely futile is, to me at least, impossible.”
 
“I have known the thought,” said Owain,—“though rarely since I found the Englishwoman that was afterward my wife, and never since my son, my Gruffyd, was murdered by a jesting man. He was more like me than the others, people said.... You are as yet the empty scabbard, powerless alike for help or hurt. Ey, hate or love must be the sword, sire, that informs us here, and then, if only for a little while, we are as gods.”
 
“Pardie! I have loved as often as Salomon, and in fourteen kingdoms.”
 
“We of Cymry have a saying, sire, that when a man loves par amours the second time he may safely assume that he has never been in love at all.”
 
“—And I hate Henry of Lancaster as I do the devil.”
 
“I greatly fear,” said Owain with a sigh, “lest it may be your irreparable malady to hate nothing, not even that which you dislike. No, you consider things with both eyes open, with an unmanly rationality: whereas Sire Henry views all matters with that heroic squint which came into your family from Poictesme.”
 
“Be off with your dusty scandals!” said Richard, laughing.
 
So then Glyndwyr rode south to besiege and burn the town of Caerdyf, while at Caer Idion Richard Holland abode tranquilly for some three weeks. There was in this place only Caradawc (the former shepherd), his wife Alundyne, and their sole daughter Branwen. They gladly perceived Sire Richard was no more a peasant than he was a curmudgeon; as Caradawc observed: “It is perfectly apparent that the robe of Padarn Beisrudd, which refuses to adjust itself to any save highborn persons, would fit him as a glove does the hand; but we will ask no questions, since it is not wholesome to dispute the orderings of Owain Glyndwyr.”
 
Now day by day would Richard Holland drive the flocks to pasture near the Severn, and loll there in the shade, and make songs to his lute. He grew to love this leisured life of bright and open spaces; and its long solitudes, grateful with the warm odors of growing things and with poignant bird-noises; and the tranquillity of these meadows, that were always void of hurry, bedrugged the man through many fruitless and contented hours.
 
Each day at noon Branwen would bring his dinner, and she would sometimes chat with him while he ate. After supper he would discourse to Branwen of remote kingdoms, through which, as aimlessly as a wind veers, he had ridden at adventure, among sedate and alien peoples who adjudged him a madman; and she, in turn, would tell him curious tales from the Red Book of Hergest,—telling of Gwalchmai, and Peredur, and Geraint, in each one of which fine heroes she had presently discerned an inadequate forerunnership of Richard’s existence.
 
This Branwen was a fair wench, slender and hardy. She had the bold demeanor of a child who is ignorant of evil and in consequence of suspicion. Happily, though, had she been named for that unhappy lady of old, the wife of King Matholwch, for this Branwen, too, had a white, thin, wistful face, like that of an empress on a silver coin which is a little worn. Her eyes were large and brilliant, colored like clear emeralds, and her abundant hair was so much cornfloss, only it was more brightly yellow and was of immeasurably finer texture. In full sunlight her cheeks were frosted like the surface of a peach, but the underlying cool pink of them was rather that of a cloud just after sunset, Richard decided. In all, a taking morsel! though her shapely hands were hard with labor, and she rarely laughed; for, as if in recompense, her heart was tender, and she rarely ceased to smile as though she were thinking of some peculiar and wonderful secret which she intended, in due time, to share with you and with nobody else. Branwen had many lovers, and preferred among them young Gwyllem ap Llyr, a portly lad, who was handsome enough, though he had tiny and piggish eyes, and who sang divinely.
 
One day this Gwyllem came to Richard with two quarter-staves. “Saxon,” he said, “you appear a stout man. Take your pick of these, then, and have at you.”
 
“Such are not the weapons I would have named,” Richard answered: “yet in reason, Messire Gwyllem, I can deny you nothing that means nothing to me.”
 
With that they laid aside their coats and fell to exercise. In these unaccustomed bouts Richard was soundly drubbed, as he had anticipated, but he found himself the stronger man of the two, and he managed somehow to avoid an absolute overthrow. By what method he contrived this he never ascertained.
 
“I have forgotten what we are fighting about,” he observed, after ten minutes of heroic thumps and hangings; “or, to be perfectly exact, I never knew. But we will fight no more in this place. Come and go with me to Welshpool, Messire Gwyllem, and there we will fight to a conclusion over good sack and claret.”
 
“Content!” cried Gwyllem; “but only if you yield me Branwen.”
 
“Have we indeed wasted a whole half-hour in squabbling over a woman?” Richard demanded; “like two children in a worldwide toyshop over any one particular toy? Then devil take me if I am not heartily ashamed of my folly! Though, look you, Gwyllem, I would speak naught save commendation of these delicate and livelily-tinted creatures so long as one is able to approach them in a becoming spirit of levity: it is only their not infrequent misuse which I would condemn; and in my opinion the person who elects to build a shrine for any one of them has only himself to blame if his chosen goddess will accept no burnt-offering except his honor and happiness. Yet since time’s youth have many fine men been addicted to this insane practice, as, for example, were Hercules and Merlin to their illimitable sorrow; and, indeed, the more I reconsider the old gallantries of Salomon, and of other venerable and sagacious potentates, the more profoundly am I ashamed of my sex.”
 
Gwyllem said: “This lazy gabbling of yours is all very fine. Perhaps it is also reasonable. Only when you love you do not reason.”
 
“I was endeavoring to prove that,” said Richard gently. Then they went to Welshpool, ride and tie on Gwyllem’s horse. Tongue loosened by the claret, Gwyllem raved aloud of Branwen, like a babbling faun, while to each rapture Richard affably assented. In his heart he likened the boy to Dionysos at Naxos, and could find no blame for Ariadne. Moreover, the room was comfortably dark and cool, for thick vines hung about the windows, rustling and tapping pleasantly, and Richard was content.
 
“She does not love me?” Gwyllem cried. “It is well enough. I do not come to her as one merchant to another, since love was never bartered. Listen, Saxon!” He caught up Richard’s lute. The strings shrieked beneath Gwyllem’s fingers as he fashioned his rude song.
 
Sang Gwyllem:
 
“Love me or love me not, it is enough
 
That I have loved you, seeing my whole life is
 
Uplifted and made glad by the glory of Love,—
 
My life that was a scroll bescrawled and blurred
 
With tavern-catches, which that pity of his
 
Erased, and wrote instead one lonely word,
 
O Branwen!
 
“I have accorded you incessant praise
 
And song and service, dear, because of this;
 
And always I have dreamed incessantly
 
Who always dreamed, when in oncoming days
 
This man or that shall love you, and at last
 
This man or that shall win you, it must be
 
That, loving him, you will have pity on me
 
When happiness engenders memory
 
And long thoughts, nor unkindly, of the past,
 
O Branwen!
 
“Of this I know not surely, who am sure
 
That I shall always love you while I live,
 
And that, when I am dead, with naught to give
 
Of song or service, Love will yet endure,
 
And yet retain his last prerogative,
 
When I lie still, and sleep out centuries,
 
With dreams of you and the exceeding love
 
I bore you, and am glad dreaming thereof,
 
And give God thanks for all, and so find peace,
 
O Branwen!”
 
“Now, were I to get as tipsy as that,” Richard enviously thought, midway in a return to his stolid sheep, “I would simply go to sleep and wake up with a headache. And were I to fall as many fathoms deep in love as this Gwyllem ventures, or, rather, as he hurls himself with a splurge, I would perform—I wonder, now, what miracle?”
 
For he was, though vaguely, discontent. This Gwyllem was so young, so earnest over every trifle, and above all, was so untroubled by forethought: each least desire controlled him, as varying winds sport with a fallen leaf, whose frank submission to superior vagaries the boy appeared to emulate. Richard saw that in a fashion Gwyllem was superb. “And heigho!” said Richard, “I am attestedly a greater fool than he, but I begin to weary of a folly so thin-blooded.”
 
The next morning came a ragged man, riding upon a mule. He declared himself a tinker. He chatted out an hour with Richard, who perfectly recognized him as Sir Walter Blount; and then this tinker crossed over into England.
 
Richard whistled. “Now my cousin will be quite sure, and now my anxious cousin will come to speak with Richard of Bordeaux. And now, by every saint in the calendar! I am as good as King of England.”
 
He sat down beneath a young oak and twisted four or five blades of grass between his fingers while he meditated. Undoubtedly he would kill this squinting Henry of Lancaster with a clear conscience and even with a certain relish, much as one crushes the uglier sort of vermin, but, hand upon heart, Richard was unable to avow any particularly ardent desire for the scoundrel’s death. Thus crudely to demolish the knave’s adroit and year-long schemings savored actually of grossness. The spider was venomous, and his destruction laudable; granted, but in crushing him you ruined his web, a miracle of patient machination, which, despite yourself, compelled hearty admiring and envy. True, the process would recrown a certain Richard, but then, as Richard recalled it, being King was rather tedious. Richard was not now quite sure that he wanted to be King, and, in consequence, be daily plagued by a host of vexatious and ever-squabbling barons. “I shall miss the little huzzy, too,” he thought.
 
“Heigho!” said Richard, “I shall console myself with purchasing all beautiful things that can be touched and handled. Life is a flimsy vapor which passes and is not any more: presently Branwen will be married to this Gwyllem and will be grow............