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Belhs Cavaliers
by
Raimbaut, trapped, impotent, cried out: “This is not possible—-” And for all that, he knew the Saracen to be foretelling the inevitable.
Makrisi went on, quietly: “After the Question men will parade her, naked to the middle, through all Orange, until they reach the Marketplace, where will be four horses. One of these horses they will harness to each arm and leg of your Biatritz. Then they will beat these horses. These will be strong horses. They will each run in a different direction.”
This infamy also was certain. Raimbaut foresaw what he must do. He clutched the dagger which Makrisi fondled. “Belhs Cavaliers, this fellow speaks the truth. Look now, the moon is old–is it not strange to know it will outlive us?”
And Biatritz came close to Sire Raimbaut and said: “I understand. If I leave this room alive it will purchase a hideous suffering for my poor body, it will bring about the ruin of many brave and innocent chevaliers. I know. I would perforce confess all that the masked men bade me. I know, for in Prince Conrat’s time I have seen persons who had been put to the Question—-” She shuddered; and she re-began, without any agitation: “Give me the knife, Raimbaut.”
“Pardieu! but I may not obey you for this once,” he answered, “since we are informed by those in holy orders that all such as lay violent hands upon themselves must suffer eternally.” Then, kneeling, he cried, in an extremity of adoration: “Oh, I have served you all my life. You may not now deny me this last service. And while I talk they dig your grave! O blind men, making the new grave, take heed lest that grave be too narrow, for already my heart is breaking in my body. I have drunk too deep of sorrow. And yet I may not fail you, now that honor and mercy and my love for you demand I kill you before I also die–in such a fashion as this fellow speaks of.”
She did not dispute this. How could she when it was an axiom in all Courts of Love that Heaven held dominion in a lover’s heart only as an underling of the man’s mistress?
And so she said, with a fond smile: “It is your demonstrable privilege. I would not grant it, dear, were my weak hands as clean as yours. Oh, but it is long you have loved me, and it is faithfully you have served Heaven, and my heart too is breaking in my body now that your service ends!”
And he demanded, wearily: “When we were boy and girl together what had we said if any one had told us this would be the end?”
“We would have laughed. It is a long while since those children laughed at Montferrat. . . . Not yet, not yet!” she said. “Ah, pity me, tried champion, for even now I am almost afraid to die.”
She leaned against the window yonder, shuddering, staring into the night. Dawn had purged the east of stars. Day was at hand, the day whose noon she might not hope to witness. She noted this incuriously. Then Biatritz came to him, very strangely proud, and yet all tenderness.
“See, now, Raimbaut! because I have loved you as I have loved nothing else in life, I will not be unworthy of your love. Strike and have done.”
Raimbaut de Vaquieras raised an already bloodied dagger. As emotion goes, he was bankrupt. He had no longer any dread of hell, because he thought that, a little later, nothing its shrewdest overseer could plan would have the power to vex him. She, waiting, smiled. Makrisi, seated, stretched his legs, put fingertips together with the air of an attendant amateur. This was better than he had hoped. In such a posture they heard a bustle of armored men, and when all turned, saw how a sword protruded through the arras.