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'And to me he was kind, said Nicolete, 'God wot. Then they looked at each other. 'Well? said Nicolete. And Mall, 'What you do I will do. So they kissed together, knowing it was a gallows matter, and went in to the dead body of the King. Afterwards came the Chancellor, Stephen of Turon, called up in a great hurry from a merry-making, with one or two others, and took some order in the affair.
There were one or two points on which they needed my guidance, but they were unimportant; and when at last Nicolete would consent to stand up straight and let me have a good look at her, for, poor child! she was as shy and shrinking as though she had nothing on, she made a very pretty young man indeed. She didn't, I'm afraid, look like a young man of our degenerate day.
He will think that in the scene with the Major-General I acted with lamentably little spirit, and that generally my friend Alastor would have proved infinitely more worthy of the situation. It is quite true, I confess it. The whole episode was made for Alastor. Nicolete and he were born for each other.
Many of us have first found our way into the Realm of Romance, properly so called, through the pages of a little crimson clad volume of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne. Its last pages contain the charming Cante-Fable of Aucassin et Nicolete, which Mr. Walter Pater's praises and Mr. Andrew Lang's brilliant version have made familiar to all lovers of letters.
I didn't strike the Major-General, because, oh, because I AGREED WITH HIM! I loved Nicolete, you must have felt that. She was sweet to me as the bunch of white flowers that, in their frail Venetian vase, stand so daintily on my old bureau as I write, doing their best to sweeten my thoughts.
She and Nicolete exchanged many kisses which were hard to bear, and the first quarter of an hour of our journey was much obstructed by the farewells of her far-fluttering handkerchief. When at last we were really alone, I turned and looked at Nicolete striding manfully at my side, just to make sure that it was really true. "Well, we're in for it now," I said; "aren't you frightened?"
For there was its luxurious lace border, a thing for the soft light of the boudoir, or the secret moonlight of love's permitted eyes, alone to see, shamelessly brazening it out in this terrible sunlight. Obviously there was but one way out of the dilemma, to confess my pilgrimage to Nicolete, and reveal to her all the fanciful absurdity to which, after all, I owed the sight of her.
If you say that no young lady would have behaved as I have presently to relate of Nicolete, that no parents were ever so accommodating in the world of reality, I reply, No doubt you are right, but none the less what I have to tell is true and really did happen, for all that.
All day long, to the ear of the spirit, there was in this little library a sound of harping and singing and the telling of tales, songs and tales of a world that never was, yet shall ever be. Here day by day Nicolete fed her young soul on the nightingale's-tongues of literature, and put down her book only to listen to the nightingale's-tongues outside.
However, to the latter-day hero, whose appetite for dragons is not keen, this absence of adventure is perhaps rather pleasurable than otherwise; and I confess that I enjoyed the days I spent on foot with Nicolete none the less because they passed in tranquil uneventfulness, that is, without events of the violent kind. Of course, all depends on what you call an event.
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