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RAIMBAUT DE VAQUIERAS. Aubade, from F. York Powell's version. You may read elsewhere of the long feud that was between Guillaume de Baux, afterward Prince of Orange, and his kinsman Raimbaut de Vaquieras. They were not reconciled until their youth was dead.
"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.
But Raimbaut de Vaquieras, a spent fellow, a derelict, barren of aim now that the Holy Wars were over, sat in this unfamiliar place where when he was young he had laughed as a cock crows! and thought how at the last he had crept home to die as a dependent on his cousin's bounty. Thus the evening passed, and at its end Makrisi followed the troubadour to his regranted fief of Vaquieras.
"It is like Prince Guillaume, I think. What man will sorrow when dawn comes?" Raimbaut de Vaquieras replied: "Always dawn comes at last, Makrisi." "It comes the more quickly, messire, when it is prompted." The troubadour only smiled at words which seemed so meaningless. He did not smile when later in the night Makrisi brought Mahi de Vernoil, disguised as a mendicant friar.
I think you will understand," Makrisi said, calmly as one who states a maxim. The Sire de Vaquieras replied, in the same tone: "I understand. You have contrived my death?" "Ey, messire, would that be adequate? I could have managed that any hour within the last score of years. Oh no! for I have studied you carefully. Oh no! instead, I have contrived this plight.
"For this RAIMBAUT DE VAQUIERAS lived at a time when prolonged habits of extra-mundane contemplation, combined with the decay of real knowledge, were apt to volatilize the thoughts and aspirations of the best and wisest into dreamy unrealities, and to lend a false air of mysticism to love. . . . It is as if the intellect and the will had become used to moving paralytically among visions, dreams, and mystic terrors, weighed down with torpor."
The curtains were ripped from their hangings as he spoke, and behind him the candlelight was reflected by the armor of many followers. Then de Vernoil perceived Raimbaut de Vaquieras, and the spruce little man bowed ceremoniously. All were still.
But Raimbaut de Vaquieras was not mirthful, for he was remembering a boy whom he had known of very long ago.
Pardieu, I do not even doubt, who know she is of matchless worth." "Wherein have I done wrong, Raimbaut?" She came to him with fluttering hands. "Why, but look you, the man had laid an ambuscade in the marsh and he meant to kill you there to-night as you rode for Vaquieras.
My knaves have slain Philibert and his bewildered fellow-tipplers with less effort than is needed to drown as many kittens." And his followers cried, as upon a signal: "Hail, Prince of Orange!" It was so like the wonder-working of a dream this sudden and heroic uproar that old Raimbaut de Vaquieras stood reeling, near to intimacy with fear for the first time.
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