Alan was gathering his French for some sort of greeting, when the young girl spoke in a sweet clear voice and in English.
“I am glad that you have come,” she said. “Father Stephen says that you desire to hear of my father.”
“I came from England in the hope that I might,” Alan answered simply.
“I cannot tell you very much of his work,” the girl went on, motioning him to a seat, with a quaint grace of gesture. “I was so very tiny, you see, when he went away. He used to tell me stories and sing little songs to me, and teach me to know the flowers and the birds. My mother would have done so, he said, and he wished so far as he could to be both father and mother to me. It seemed to me that he was so, and I loved him—not as dearly as he loved me, because I was so small, but as much as I possibly could. Oh, much more than my nurse, although Maddalena is very dear to me.
“We lived almost always in the city, so that we had not any garden, but we had pots of flowers in the windows, and I used to tend them. Sometimes, when my father went into the woods and the fields, he would take me, and then I was happy; no bird could have been happier. I would weave garlands of flowers, singing my rhymes about colors, and he taught me how to arrange them to make every blossom beautiful in its place.
“When he sat writing at his table he called me his mouse, and if I kept still I had cheese for my dinner with the bread and fruit. But when I forgot and made a noise he would say that the mouse must be caught in a trap, and he would take me in his arms and call Maddalena to carry me away. And sometimes he went out alone, or shut himself in his own room for days and days. Once he came out in the twilight and found me asleep with my head on his threshold. After that he said that I must have work to do while he did his work, and he would have Maddalena teach me the use of the needle. He dyed the silks for me himself in beautiful colors, and when I had done my task he would teach me to read in the big books and the small, and to draw pictures of what I read. Here is one of the very books I used to read with him.”
Alan would have thought what he saw was impossible if anything had seemed unbelievable in this elfin girl. She laid open upon the table a finely illuminated copy, in Greek, of Aesop's Fables, written on vellum in a precise beautiful hand.
“He himself wrote books for me—not many, for he said there were books enough in the world. One was on the nature of herbs, and another was about the stars and their houses in the heavens. But they were lost, those books. Father Stephen brought me others, but they are not the same; my father wrote those only for me.”
“Had your father no friends?” Alan asked, with a great compassion for the lonely man bending his genius to make a world for his motherless baby.
“Not many, and none here except Father Stephen, who knew my mother when she was a child, in Ravenna. People came sometimes, but they were not friends; their eyes were cold and their voices hard. Since my father went away two old friends of his have been here with Father Stephen, but they came only once. They were not of this people; they came from Byzantium.”
“And you have lived here always?”
The maiden laughed, a merry laughter like the lilt of a woodlark. “Oh, no—o! Father Stephen has taken me to many places—to Venice once, and to Rome, and when I was little we lived in Cordova. That is how I learned to speak in different languages. I learned a new one every year for four years. But for three years I have stayed in Goslar, and Father Stephen says that no one must know I am here. That is queer, is it not, to live in a city where not even the people in the next house know that you are alive? Perhaps some day I shall go away, and live as others do. I wonder very much what it will be like.”
The jester's face was shadowed by a sad tenderness. “May you never wish yourself back in your cage, my child,” he said. “But it grows late, and I think that you have told this guest all that you can of your father's work.”
“All that I know,” the young girl said, regretfully. “I really know so little of it—and the books were lost.”
In a maze Alan followed the jester down the darkening stairway. At the foot Stefano turned and faced him. “You see what she is,” he said. “She is Archiater's only child—she has his signet ring and his letters written her from prison—only two, but I risked my own life to get them for her. When they took him away they did not know that such a little creature existed. She was but seven years old, and her nurse, Maddalena, hid with her in a chest in the garret, telling her that it was a game. That night I took them to a place of safety.”
“And you have taken care of her ever since?” the young man asked. The jester nodded his big head. Then, as a group of courtiers came around the corner, with a mocking gesture, Stefano limped away. Alan heard their shout of laughter at his words of greeting, and went home in a dream.
During the following days Stefano treated him with every appearance of confidence. By the jester's invitation he spent many hours at the tall ancient house, in that enchanted room with its latticed windows looking out over street and wall to the mountains. Stefano spent the time lounging on the divan or in the great chair, or watching the street far below. He said very little and often seemed scarcely to hear the talk of the youth and the maiden.
Their talk ranged over many subjects. The girl could read not only in Latin, the common language of all scholars, but in Greek and Arabian. Many of her books were heavy leatherbound tomes by Avicenna, Averroes, Damascene, Pliny, and other writers whose very names were unfamiliar to Alan's ears. She poised above them like a bee over a garden, gathering what pleased her bright fancy. Sometimes while they talked she would be working upon her tapestry, some rich, delicate or curious design in her many-hued silks.
Alan found that her father had begun teaching her the laws of design and color before she could read. He had told her that colors were like notes in music, and had their loves and hates as people do.
“Is it not so in your work, Al-an?” she asked. “Do not the good colors and the bad contend always until you bring them into agreement?”
Alan had told her of his work, and it seemed to interest her immensely. She was greatly delighted when she learned that he had found memoranda in her father's own handwriting, which had led to the making of wonderful deep blue glass.
“If I had the little books he wrote for me,” she said one day, “you might find something beautiful in them also.”
He watched and wondered at the sure instinct guiding her deft, small fingers in the placing of colors—the purple fruit, the gold-green vine or the scarlet pomegranate flower in her maze-like embroidery. “But how can you make pictures in the windows,” she would say, with her lilting laughter, “if you do not know about color?”
To Alan's secret amusement he perceived that she thought her life very ordinary and natural, while his own adventures on the moorland farm of his boyhood were to her like fairy-tales. She was shyly but intensely curious about his mother. She had never known anything of the ways of mothers except from books and tales.
One bright morning she took from a coffer a prism of rock-crystal. “This is one of the playthings my father gave me,” she said. “Look how it makes the colors dance upon the wall.”
Like a quick silent fairy the little rainbow flitted here and there. “He told me,” she went on, “that seven invisible colors live together in a sunbeam, but when they pass this magic door they must go in single file, and then we may see them. Not all are good colors. Some are bad and quarrelsome, and some are good when they are alone, but not when they are with colors they do not like. But when they live together in peace they make the beautiful clear daylight, and we see the world exactly as it is.”
“As it is—saints protect her,” muttered old Maddalena, and the jester smiled his twisted smile.
That evening Stefano said suddenly, “What are you going to do with your clerk?”
“To-morrow,” said Alan, “I shall go to his mine.”
“You have not been there?”
“No; he has made some silly excuse each time it has been suggested.”
“He will never take you there,” said the jester. “You will see.”
“Simon,” said Alan pleasantly that night, “I am going into the mountains with you to-morrow.”
Suspicion, fear, jealous greed, chased one another over the clerk's mean face. “You are in great haste,” he muttered. “It is not good weather, but we will go of course, if you wish.”
In the morning Simon lay groaning with rheumatism, unable to move. Alan made a fire, covered him warmly, left food within his reach, and went out to think the matter over. Unconsciously his steps tended toward the house of the jester. Stefano, coming out, caught sight of him.
“Hey!” said the fool, “why are you not in the mountains?”
Alan explained. The other gave a dry little laugh. “That need not hinder you,” said he. “I will send some one to show you the place. Come to the market-square an hour hence and look for a youth with two horses. I think you would pass for a wood-cutter if you had an ax.”
Acting on this hint, Alan provided himself with ax and maul, and found in the place appointed a serving boy riding one horse and leading another. He had reason to be glad of the rough life of his boyhood, for he had ridden all over the moors, bareback, on just such wiry half-broken animals, and the road they now took was not an easy one.
At last they left the horses in a dell at the foot of the ledges and scrambled up to a small stone building near the top of the mountain, half hidden among evergreens. Its door was gone and its roof half fallen in, but in it could be seen a stone altar and various tools and utensils, wood cut and ready for burning. Evidently some one had been using the place—in fact, some one was here now. As Alan stood in the doorway a figure rose from a pile of leaves in the corner.
“Vanni!” said Alan under his breath.
“Oh, he can be trusted,” said Giovanni, with a glance at the guide. “I have been here two days. This was Archiater's private workshop. The mountain people think it is haunted, so that it is a good place to hide. I was not pleased when I found that your clerk had taken it for his own. I lay upon the roof for two hours yesterday watching him. Having an errand at Rheims I thought I would come along and see what had happened to you.”
Alan had as yet no right to tell the most important thing that had happened. “I have not been here before,” he said. “Simon has put me off, and he does not know I am here now.”
“Has he shown you his findings? He took a bag away with him—a heavy one.”
“Only some minerals which are worth more than he thinks. I have been working with them more or less. He is mightily curious about the action of the furnace. I make a guess he is going to try to test the ore himself.”
“There is a donkey-load of it here,” said Giovanni, tilting with his foot a stone in the floor. Under it gleamed a mass of irregular shining fragments and yellow lumps of stone. Alan picked up one and scraped it, struck it with a hammer, rubbed it across a chip of wood, “Guy was right,” he said, “it is not gold. I can prove that to the fellow if he gives me a chance.”
“What shall you do?”
“I am not sure. Are you safe here?”
“So long as they do not know I am here. Master Gay and his son are at Rheims, and I am to join them. If you will come to-morrow or the day after we can go together. I will show you a short way over the mountains that Cimarron found when we were here. Stefano knows of my coming, and I shall see him to-night.”
Alan had been thinking. “Vanni, I will do this. I will go with you to-morrow if I can, but if I do not meet you here before noon you will know that I must stay on. Will that answer?”
“I suppose it must. I dislike leaving you here with a twice-proved rascal like this Simon. You do not know what he may do.”
“I should like to thrash him,” said Alan. “He is planning to get the whole of this gold, as he thinks it, for himself.”
“Of course he is. But what good would it do to beat him? You cannot thrash the inside of him, can you?”
Alan laughed, and strode off to the place where the horses were tethered. Before returning to his lodgings he went to see Stefano.
“Well,” said the jester when he had heard all, “what shall you do?”
Alan hesitated. “So far as my errand is concerned,” he answered, “I might join Giovanni to-morrow. We had all along suspected that the ore was only fool's gold. But—”
“I know,” nodded the jester. “And for that other reason, I am going to tell you something. I have known for some time that Josian is not safe in my care. It has never been over-safe, this arrangement, but while she was a child the risk was not so great. Also, having the Emperor's favor, I could do more for her than any one else could—then.
“I have thought for some days that the house was watched, and I do not like that. Some one may have got wind of her being here, or may be tempted by the reports of my hoard of gold. It is not hidden here, but they may think it is. There is danger in the air. I can smell it.
“I have trusted no man as I am trusting you now. I have been looking for some means of sending her away to Tomaso, her father's old friend, but the thing has been most difficult to arrange. I dare not wait longer. Will you take her away, with her nurse Maddalena, and protect her as if she were your sister? You will have the aid of Giovanni, though he has never known this secret.”
Alan's eyes met those of the old man eagerly and frankly. “Master Stefano,” he answered, “I will guard her with my life. But can she be ready to go at once?”
Stefano nodded. “The preparations that remain to be made will take no more than an hour or two. She is a good traveler. My servant will secure horses for you and meet you just before sunrise, near the gate. Maddalena will come there with her, and you must not ride so fast as to arouse curiosity. I have to play the buffoon at a banquet to-night, and there is but little time, therefore—addio!”
Alan walked home slowly, pondering on all he had seen and heard that day. Coming within sight of his lodgings, he found the street full of people gazing at the windows, out of which a thick smoke was pouring.
“What has happened here?” he asked of a little inn-keeper from Boulogne, with whom he had some acquaintance.
“They say it is the devil,” the other replied with a shrug. “Mortally anxious to see him they seem to be.”
Alan shouldered his way through the crowd and ran up the stairs. Half way up he met Simon reeling down, and caught him by the arm. “What have you been about?” he asked sternly.
“The gold is bew-witched!” bubbled Simon, arms waving and eyes rolling in terrified despair. “It is changed in the crucible! It is the work of Satan!”
“Nonsense!” said Alan roughly. “You have been roasting the wrong ore. I could have told you it was not true gold. Be quiet, or we shall be driven out of Goslar.”
Simon was too distracted to heed, and Alan went hastily up to the rooms, where he found some copper pyrites in process of oxidation, giving forth volumes of strangling sulphur smoke. After quenching the fire and doing what he could to purify the air he gathered his belongings together and left the house, extremely annoyed. He could see suspicion and even threatening in the look of the crowd.
He went into the alley where Martin Bouvin's little inn was and asked shelter for the night.
“I go away to-morrow,” he said, “and there is no returning to that place for hours to come.”
“H'm!” said the inn-keeper. “What really happened?”
Alan explained. “My faith,” commented Bouvin, decanting some wine into his guest's cup, “you are well rid of that fellow. Do you know that he has been spying on you for a week? He dared not follow you, but he tried to hire some one else to do it—that I know.”
It was already late. Alan dozed off, despite his uneasiness, for he had had a tiring day. Suddenly he awoke and sat bolt upright. There was a commotion in the street. The innkeeper was peeping out through a hole in the solid shutters. “It is the clerk again,” he said. “He is haranguing the people.”
Alan slipped out and came up on the outskirts of the crowd. He caught the words “fool's gold” in Simon's shrill voice, and then the crowd began to mutter, “Die Hexe! Die Hexe!”
Alan waited to hear no more. He knew that this meant that sinister thing, a witch-hunt. If Simon had connected Stefano's house and his reputed hoard of gold with his disastrous experiment, and possibly suspected Josian's existence there, it was a time for quick thought and bold action. He raced down the street leading to the rear of the house, vaulted the wall and found old Maddalena unlocking the small side door.
“Get her away,” he said in a low voice, “at once—there is danger!”
The old woman pointed up the stairs, and Alan went leaping over them to find the girl hooded and cloaked for the journey in the small room, now bare and cold as the moonlight. Her soft light steps kept pace with his to the garden gate; he hurried her and Maddalena out, bidding them walk away quietly. Then he turned back, heaped a pile of straw and rubbish under the stairs, and flung the contents of a lighted charcoal brazier on it. As the fire blazed up he heard the snarl of the mob coming down the street which passed the front entrance. He could hear words in the incoherent shouting—“Die Hexe! Die Hexe! Brennen—brennen!”
As he shut the gate and slipped away he found Martin Bouvin keeping pace with him, “Do you know what has happened?” the little man asked. “The guests at the Prince's banquet came late into the street and found Simon raving about his gold. They questioned him, and he told them of a mysterious house where an old witch dwelt and changed into a young girl at sunset. The Prince knew the house. He asked Master Stefano what it meant. When he got no answer but a jest he struck Stefano down and rode over him. He is dead. Then the people caught up the cry and began to talk of burning the witch. They are all out there now, and the Prince is trying to make his guard go in after the gold. That was a good thought of yours, setting fire to the house: they will stay to watch it. I will go with you if I may, Master. If Stefano is gone Goslar is no good place for me!”
Alan remembered now that the jester had spoken in terms of friendship of Martin Bouvin. In any case they were now nearing the gate where the man stood waiting with the horses. Josian and Maddalena were already mounted. As the servant held Alan's stirrup the Englishman looked down and saw under the hood the black piercing eyes and thin face of Giovanni.
“It is all right,” whispered the Milanese with a glance at Bouvin. “He can ride the pack-horse. His only reason for staying here was Stefano's business.”
The sleepy guard let them out without a look, and they rode on at a good pace toward the mountains. Josian had not said one word.
“Are you afraid, Princess?” Alan asked presently.
She shook her head. When she heard the story of the jester's death she was less shaken than Alan had feared. “He told me last night that he could not live long,” she said sadly. “I knew that I should never see him again in this world.”
At last they halted for an hour beside a little spring. Josian looked back at the gray pointed roofs and towers of Goslar. “Al-an,” she said, “what was that light in the sky?”
“It was your tower,” Alan answered. “No one will ever live there again, since you cannot.”
Alan marveled at Josian's self-possession during the rough journey. She obeyed orders like a child, showed no fear in the most perilous passes, and fared as roughly as the others did, with quiet endurance. Soon, however, they had crossed the frontier and met the party of travelers in whose company were the London merchant and his wife and son.
Then began days and weeks of travel, the like of which Alan had not known. He had gone from one place to another in such company as offered, many a time, but here were folk who knew every road and every inn, beguiled the hours with songs and jests and stories, and made the time pass like a holiday. He found that his knowledge of the out-of-door world interested Josian more than the ballads and tales of the others. He often rode at her side for an hour or more, pointing out to her the secret quick life of woodland and meadow, and finding perhaps that she already knew the bird, squirrel, marmot or hare, by another name. “London is well enough,” he said one day, “but 'tis not for me. I could never live grubbing in the dark there like a mouldiwarp.”
Josian's delicate brows drew together. “Mouldi—what strange beast is that, Al-an?” and Alan laughed and explained that it was a mole.
It was at noon of one of the long fragrant days of early summer, while the travelers rested in the forest, that Josian spoke of the jester once more. In the green stillness of the deep woods, birds singing and shy delicate blossoms gemming the moss, the fierce and savage past was like a dream.
“Father Stephen gave me a packet that last night,” she said. “He gave Giovanni gold for the journey, but this parcel he said I must carry myself and show to you when I thought fit. I wonder what it can be?”
Alan took the packet and turned it over. It was sealed with a device of Greek letters.
“That is my father's signet,” the girl added. “Here is his ring,” and she drew from under her bodice a man's ring, hung on a slender gold chain, the stone a great emerald carved with the Greek “AEI”—“Always.” Alan cut the cord of the packet and handed it to her. “It is not for me to open it,” he said.
She unfolded, tenderly and reverently, the wrappings of parchment and oiled silk, and disclosed a compact manuscript closely written on the thinnest leaves, in a firm clear hand. Lifting two or three of the pages she read eagerly and then looked up, her eyes alight with wondering joy.
“Here are all the most precious of his writings, Al-an!” she cried, “the secrets that were in all the books that were lost—written clearly so that I myself can read them! Oh, it is like having him come back to speak to us—and Father Stephen, too—here by ourselves in the forest! And now you will know all the secrets of his work, for they are written here.”
Alan's face had gone whiter than the parchment. Here indeed was the treasure he had come to seek. And it was Josian's free gift.
But that was not all. “Josian,” he said, not putting out his hand even to touch the precious parcel, “you must not give away these manuscripts so lightly. They are worth much gold, child—they are a rich dowry for you. You must wait until you see Tomaso the physician, and he will tell you what is best to do with them.”
She shook her head. “Oh, n-o,” she said. “Father Stephen said that you would make good use of them, and had earned them—but I think he knew quite well what you would say. Perhaps some day you will feel differently.”
Dame Cicely of the Abbey Farm welcomed Josian in due time as a daughter. When she and Alan had been married about three months Josian was surveying a panel of just-completed embroidery in which all the colors in exquisite proportion blended in a gold-green jeweled arabesque. Alan came up behind her and caught the sunlight through it. He asked to borrow it, and reproduced the design in painted glass. That was the first window which he made for York Minster.
Among the formulae in the scripts which were Josian's dowry were several for stained glass and the making of colors to be used therein. By means of one of these it became possible to make glass of wonderful rich hues, through which the light came white, as if no glass were there. This is one of the secrets known to the workers of the Middle Ages and now lost; but in old windows there still remain fragments of the glass.
If to-day certain precious bits of glass, ruby-red, emerald-green, sapphire-blue, topaz-yellow, set in the windows of old cathedrals, could speak, they would say proudly that they are the work of Alan of York and Josian, the daughter of Archiater, the philosopher.
NEW ALTARS
I Publius Curtius, these many years dwelling
Among these barbarians, a foe and a prefect,
To Those whom they worship unreasoning,
Gods of the Land, I raise this new altar.
To Thee whom the wild hares in silence foregathering
Worship with ears erect in the moonlight,
(And vanish at sound of a footstep approaching)
God of the Downs, I pour this libation.
To Thee whom the trout in the rainbow foam drifting
Behold in the sunlight through wet leafage sifting
(And vanish like shadows of clouds in the water)
God of the Streams, I pay this my tribute.
To Thee whom the skylark, in rapture ascending
Adores in his dithyramb perfect, unending,
(And vanishes in the high heaven still singing)
God of the Mist, I utter this prayer.
To Ye whom my children, born here in my mansion,
Reverence beyond the gods of their fathers,
Gods of the Land, I build ye this temple!
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg