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Scarce was this dream told when Alfred strode that way. "Now, by'r Lady," quoth he, "I bethink me never to have seen a sorrier twain." Then Yseult told him of Harold's going away and how that Harold had besought her not to venture to the feast of Ste. Aelfreda in the sacred grove. "These fears are childish," cried Alfred boastfully.
We must look at the tales which, as we are constantly being told by trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers, were the fashionable reading of the feudal classes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the tales best known to us in the colourless respectability of the collection made in the reign of Edward IV. by Sir Thomas Malory, and called by him the "Morte d'Arthur" of the ladies and knights of Arthur's court; of the quest of the Grail by spotless knights who were bastards and fathers of bastards; of the intrigues of Tristram of Lyoness and Queen Yseult; of Launcelot and Guenevere; the tales which Francesca and Paolo read together.
One might just as well try to make out that the history of Guarino Mezquino, or of the quest of the Holy Grail, is false, or that the loves of Tristram and the Queen Yseult are apocryphal, as well as those of Guinevere and Lancelot, when there are persons who can almost remember having seen the Dame Quintanona, who was the best cupbearer in Great Britain.
"Good-morning, papa," said the eldest, and the other two repeated it in chorus. "We hope you have slept well and had a nice passage across the sea." They evidently had been drilled outside. Then, nature getting uppermost, they patted him patronizingly. "Daddie, darling, have you brought us any new dolls from Paris?" "And I want one with red hair, like Evangeline," said Yseult, the youngest.
The most poetical and pathetic of all mediæval love stories, the very incarnation of all that is most lyric at once and most tragic in the new kind of passion, is the story, told and retold by a score of poets and prose writers, of the loves of Yseult of Ireland and of Sir Tristram who, as the knight was bringing the princess to his uncle and her affianced, King Mark of Cornwall drank together by a fatal mistake a philter which made all such as partook of it in common inseparable lovers even unto death.
How wilt thou love me when thou know'st my sacrifice. Farewell, farewell forever, oh, alder-liefest mine." So Harold went his way, and Yseult was lost in wonderment. On the morrow night came Yseult to the sacred grove wherein the feast was spread, and she bore old Siegfried's spear with her in her girdle. Alfred attended her, and a score of lusty yeomen were with him.
But Alfred had hit the truth: the curse of old Siegfried was upon Harold slumbering a century, it had awakened in the blood of the grandson, and Harold knew the curse that was upon him, and it was this that seemed to stand between him and Yseult. But love is stronger than all else, and Harold loved.
Yseult of Brittany and Elaine, the mother of Galahad, do not succeed in breaking the vows made to Yseult the Fair and to Queen Guenevere. The beautiful lady in the hawthorn alba "a son cor en amar lejalmens."
Then, ah, then in very truth there was great joy, and loud were the acclaims, while, beautiful in her trembling pallor, Yseult was led unto her home, where the people set about to give great feast to do her homage, for the werewolf was dead, and she it was that had slain him. But Yseult cried out: "Go, search for Harold go, bring him to me. Nor eat, nor sleep till he be found."
First she went over all those that have Italian endings, such as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala; she liked Galsuinde pretty well, and Yseult or Leocadie still better. Charles wanted the child to be called after her mother; Emma opposed this. They ran over the calendar from end to end, and then consulted outsiders.
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