The Baron had placed the bishop at his right hand at the head of the long table, on his left the Greek Cæsar. But a little lower sat Richard, and beside him Musa and Mary Kurkuas; and while they were busy over the trenchers talk flew fast, and these in brief were the stories they told one another.
William Longsword, the present Baron of Cefalu, had been a Norman seigneur of noble lineage and slender estates near the ducal capital of Rouen. The Longswords were an ancient house. They boasted their descent from that notable William Longsword who had succeeded to the sovereignty of Rollo the Norman; yet, as too often, a great name did not mean great fiefs, and young William's best fortune was the weight of his battle-axe. But that battle-axe was very heavy. At Val-es-Dunes, when William the Bastard crushed his rebellious barons, Longsword had won the great Duke's highest favor. At Hastings none had struck doughtier blows than he. For a moment he had dreamt of a broad English barony and a Saxon heiress. But when the new king was at York there rose ill-blood and a hint to the monarch that the mutiny of certain Anjou mercenaries was due to his vassal.
One morning Longsword finding that fetters, not fiefs, waited him in England, fled just in time to Flanders, and went south to gaaignant, "to go a gaining," as the Normans put it, seeking fortune wherever the saints favored. In Auvergne he had married the daughter of a mountain baron, but had drifted on to Italy, had served with Counts Robert Guiscard and Roger, his brother, in Calabria, Epirus, and Sicily; and at last when Noto, the last Saracen stronghold in Sicily, fell, and Count Roger rewarded his faithful cavaliers, William Longsword had found himself Lord of Cefalu, with a stout castle and a barony of peaceful and industrious Moslems and Greeks for vassals; now for four years past he had ceased roving, and dreamed of handing down a goodly seigneury to his firstborn.
Thus Richard told his father's story, and Mary related more briefly how her father—and she proudly recounted his titles—was the "preëminently august" Cæsar Manuel Kurkuas; whose family was of the most noble and wealthy of the whole imperial city. He had been a great warrior in his day, until a crippling wound in the Patzinak war had forced the one-time "commander of the guards" to accept the peaceful office of "first prefect" of the capital. And in this position he might have died in honor and prosperity, had it not come to Emperor Alexius's ears that he had intrigued in favor of Constantine, the son of the dead sovereign Romanus, who was just raising the rebel standard. "And so," explained his daughter, quite simply, for she was bred at the Grecian court, "the Princess Anna Comnena, who is my kind friend, gave me to understand that all was not well with my father, and the Grand Chamberlain let fall that 'his eyes were in danger.' Therefore, with the aid of St. Basil and our cousin, the High Admiral, we made escape on a Venetian ship, and it was well we did; for Constantine, I hear, has been captured and blinded, and if we had been taken, the like would have befallen my father, and I would have been cast into the convent of Antiochus 'to live with the angels,' as they call taking the veil, at Constantinople."
"Allah forbid!" cried Musa, who had been following all her story, and Richard winced when he thought of those brown locks falling under the shears.
The Greek gave a little shrug and shiver. "Ah!" said she, "let us not speak of it. Yet I do not blame the Emperor. He has many enemies to guard against." And she paused.
"But you said you were half a Frank," said Richard, wishing to turn the conversation.
"Yes, truly, my father was envoy to the Duke of Aquitaine. In Provence he met my mother, daughter of the Baron of La Haye. She must have been a beautiful woman. They say all Constantinople was at her feet, when my father brought her there—his bride. But she died when I was a very little girl. I can only remember her bright eyes and sweet face." Another pause; and Richard did not try to break it. Was he not conscious in his innermost soul, that there were bright eyes and a sweet face very close to his own? That for an hour past, as the fashion was, he had been dipping his hand in the same bowl where also dipped another hand, soft, and white, and delicate? The evening was stealing on. Now the ruddy torches were sputtering in their cressets along the wall; and the glow fell softly over the feasters, seeming to hide witchery and sweet madness in every flickering shadow. For the first time in his life Richard Longsword felt a strange intoxication stealing over him. Not the wine—he had not drained a beaker. Up at the head of the table the Baron and the bishop were matching bumpers, and the former, between his draughts, was trying to tell Cæsar Manuel some tale of the Durazzo campaign in which they had both fought, though on opposing sides. At the foot of the table the Norman men-at-arms were splashing their liquor, and roaring broad jests at the Greek serving-maids. Musa, having satisfied hunger, sat with his long eyelashes cast down in dreamy Oriental revery. Only for one face and for one voice did Richard have sight or hearing. The princess held the Majolica cup to her lips, tasted, held it toward the Norman.
"See," said she, softly, "you have saved my father's liberty—perhaps his life—and me"—the color half left the wonderful face while she spoke—"from death or worse." The cup trembled as she shuddered at the thought. "When the Berbers seized me, I pleaded with all the saints to let me die,—better a thousand deaths than to breathe out one's life captive in an African harem!"
"By Our Lady, speak not of it," came from Richard,—he, too, trembling. But the brightness had darted again into the Greek's eyes while she continued: "And now attend—the reward! Know, brave Frank, that three months since a 'supremely august' prince, close to Alexius's self, would have given half his inheritance for gift like this!"
And with her own hands she held the cup to his lips. Richard drank. What else possible? He felt himself caught in a tide irresistible, too delicious in its caress to escape from if he might. Was the wine fire, that it burned through every vein? Yet the very flame bore a sweetness, a delight beyond all thought; the hot pain drowned in the ecstasy. He did not know what he replied, but the lady was answering.
"Eu! What joy I take in you Franks, whom I have never seen before to-day. When first did we meet? This morning beside the raging horse? I think I have known and admired you these score of years!"
"I?" quoth Richard, wool-gathering.
The lady laughed at her indiscretion.
"You do well to ask. At times my father rails at me; 'Daughter, you open your mind to strangers like a casket.' Again I am silent, hidden, locked fast, as my mood alters. Be it so, I am the open casket to-night. I will speak it all forth. The saints grant I may dwell amongst you Franks; how much better to crush down a raging horse with one touch, than to know all the wisdom of Plato!"
"Why better?" asked the Norman, never taking his gaze from that face all rosy in the flickering light.
"Why?" her voice rose a little, and the brightness of the torches was in her eyes. "Let others con the musty parchments,—a thousand times better are the men who do, as you of the West,—than the weaklings who only know. Plato babbled foolishness describing his 'perfect nation,' for when he strove to realize it—failure!"
"These are riddles, sweet lady!" cried Richard; "who was this Plato—some pagan long since in hell?"
Whereat the princess began to laugh afresh; not offensively, but sweetly as a running brook; so that the other would have said a hundred witless things to make her continue. Then she answered, her eyes dancing, and Richard thought he saw the lips of the dreamy Spaniard twitch: "Yes,