The Casque's Lark; or, Victoria, the Mother of the Camps

CHAPTER VIII
CAPTAIN MARION

Early in the morning I repaired to Victoria's residence. The humble house of the Mother of the Camps was reached through a long narrow path, skirted on either side by high ramparts that constituted the outer fortifications of one of the gates of Mayence. I was about twenty paces from the house when I heard behind me the following cries uttered in terror:

"Save yourself! Save yourself!"

Looking back, I saw with no little fright a two-wheeled cart dashing rapidly towards me. The cart was drawn by two horses whose driver had lost control over them.

I could jump off neither to the right nor the left of the narrow path to let the cart pass; its wheels almost grazed the opposite walls; I was still too far from Victoria's residence to hope for escape in that direction; however swiftly I might run, I would be overtaken by the horses and trampled under their hoofs long before I could have reached the door. There was nothing left for me to do but to face the runaways, and, however hopeless the prospect, to seize them by the bit and attempt to stop them. Accordingly, I rushed forward upon the animals with my hands raised. Oh! A prodigy! Hardly did I touch the horses' reins when they suddenly reared upon their haunches. It was almost as if my mere gesture had sufficed to check their impetuous course. Happy at having escaped what seemed certain death, but aware that I was not a magician, endowed with the power to arrest a runaway team with a mere motion of my hand, I asked myself while leaping back what the cause might be of the extraordinary spectacle. I noticed that the horses still made violent efforts to proceed on their career; they reared, tugged forward and stretched out their necks, but were unable to advance, as if the cart's wheels were locked, or some superior power restrained them.

My curiosity stirred to a high pitch, I drew near, and gliding between the horses and the wall, succeeded in climbing over the dashboard of the cart whose driver I found crouching under the seat, looking more dead than alive. As the mystery seemed to deepen, my curiosity was pricked still more. I ran to the rear of the vehicle and noticed with no slight amazement that a large sized man, robust as a Hercules, was clinging to two ornamental pieces that projected from the rear of the cart. It was thanks to his weight, and to the superhuman resistance that his great strength enabled him to offer, that the team was held back.

"Captain Marion!" I cried. "I should have known as much! There is none other in the whole Gallic army able to hold back a cart going at full speed."

"Tell that fool of a driver to pull in the reins. My wrists begin to tire."

I was transmitting the orders to the driver who was beginning to recover his senses, when I saw several soldiers, on guard at Victoria's dwelling, pour out of the house attracted by the noise. They opened the yard gate and thus offered a safe exit to the cart.

"There is no longer any danger," I said to the driver; "lead your horses on. But whom does this conveyance belong to?"

"To Tetrik, the Governor of Gascony, who arrived yesterday at Mayence. He stops at Victoria's house," answered the driver, while calming down his horses.

While the cart proceeded into the yard of Victoria's residence, I walked back towards the captain to thank him for his timely aid.

Marion had left his blacksmith's anvil for the army many years previous. He was well known and generally beloved among the soldiers, as much for his heroic courage and extraordinary strength, as for his exceptional good judgment, his sound reasoning powers, the austerity of his morals, and his extreme good fellowship. He now stood on the road, and with his casque in his hand wiped the sweat off his brow. He wore a cuirass of steel scales over his Gallic blouse, and a long sword at his side. His dusty boots told of a recent and long ride on horseback. His large sunburnt face, partly covered by a thick beard that began to be streaked with grey, was open and pleasing.

"Captain Marion," I said to him, "I must thank you for having saved me from being ground under the wheels of that cart."

"I did not know it was you who ran the risk of being trampled under the hoofs of those horses like a dog! A stupid sort of a death for a brave soldier like you, Schanvoch! But when I heard that devil of a driver crying: 'Save yourself!' I surmised he was about to kill somebody and I tried to hold the cart back. Fortunately my mother endowed me with a good pair of wrists. But where is my dear friend Eustace?" added the captain looking around.

"Whom do you refer to?"

"To a brave fellow, the old companion of my blacksmith days. Like me, he left the hammer for the lance. The fortune of war served me better than it did him. Despite his bravery, my friend Eustace has remained a simple horseman, while I have been promoted to captain. But there he is, yonder, with his arms crossed, and motionless as a signpost. Ho! Eustace! Eustace!"

At the call, the companion of Captain Marion approached slowly, with his arms crossed over his breast. He was a man of middle size and vigorous frame. His pale blonde hair and beard, his bilious complexion, his harsh and sullen physiognomy offered a striking contrast to the pleasant exterior of the captain. I asked myself what singular affinity could draw two men of such different appearance, and doubtless also such dissimilar characters, into close and constant friendship.

"How is that, friend Eustace," the captain jokingly remarked to him, "you remain yonder looking at me with crossed arms, while I am engaged in holding back a runaway team?"

"You are strong," Eustace answered; "what aid can the flesh-worm bring to the bull?"

"That man is certainly consumed with jealousy and hatred," I thought to myself at hearing the answer and observing the sullen looks of the captain's friend.

"There is no flesh-worm nor bull in the case, my friend Eustace," answered the captain with his habitual joviality and looking rather flattered by the comparison; "but when the flesh-worm and the bull are comrades, then, however strong the latter may be, or small the former, the one does not forsake the other – union makes strength, says the proverb."

"Captain," answered the soldier with a bitter smile, "did I ever forsake you in the hour of danger? Have I not always fought at your side, since we left the forge together?"

"I bear witness to the truth of that," cried Marion cordially, taking Eustace by the hand. "As true as the sword you carry is the last weapon I forged in order to give you a token of friendship, as it is engraved on the blade, you have ever in battle 'marched in my shadow,' as the saying goes in my country."

"What is there strange about that?" replied the soldier. "Beside you, so brave and robust, I was what the shadow is to the body."

"By the devil! Look at the shadow! My friend Eustace!" the captain exclaimed and laughed, and addressing me he added pointing at his companion Eustace:

"Let me have two or three thousand shadows like that, and the first battle that we fight on the other side of the Rhine, I shall bring back a herd of Frankish prisoners."

"You are a captain of renown! I, like so many other poor waifs, are good only to obey, to fight and to be killed. We are only meat for battles," replied the old blacksmith with an envious look and his lips slightly losing their color.

"Captain," I said to Marion, "I presume you wish to see Victorin and his mother?"

"Yes, I have a report to render to Victorin of a journey that my friend and I have just made."

"I followed you as a soldier," Eustace said; "the name of an obscure horseman must not be remembered before Victoria the Great."

The captain shrugged his shoulders with impatience and jokingly shook his enormous fist at his friend.

"Captain," I insisted, addressing Marion, "let us hasten to Victoria. I should have been with her since dawn. I am late."

"Friend Eustace," Marion said, starting to walk with me toward Victoria's residence, "will you stay here, or wait for me at our lodging?"

"I shall wait here at the door – that is a subaltern's place."

"Would you believe it, Schanvoch," Marion replied laughing, "would you believe that it is nearly twenty years that lad and I live together and quarrel like two brothers? He will not forget that I am a captain, and will not treat me as a simple anvil-beater, as he formerly used to."

"I am not the only one, Marion, to realize the difference there is between us," Eustace answered. "You are one of the most renowned captains in the army – I am only one of the least of its soldiers."

Saying this Eustace sat down on a stone near the door, and bit his nails.

"He is incorrigible," the captain remarked to me; and we two entered the house of Victoria.

"Captain Marion must be strangely blinded by friendship," I thought to myself, "to fail to perceive that his companion is consumed with malevolent jealousy."

The residence of the Mother of the Camps was extremely simple. Captain Marion having asked one of the soldiers on guard whether Victorin could receive him, the soldier answered that he could give him no information on that head, seeing that the young general had not spent the night in the house.

Despite the camp life, Marion preserved great austerity of morals. He seemed shocked to learn that Victorin had not yet returned home, and he cast a dissatisfied look at me. I wished to excuse Victoria's son, and said to him:

"Let us not be hasty in believing evil. Tetrik, the Governor of Gascony, arrived yesterday at the camp. It may be that Victorin spent the night in conference with him."

"So much the better. I would like to see that young man, who to-day is chief of the Gauls, free himself from the claws of that pest of profligacy that drives so many of us to evil deeds. As to myself, the moment I see a woman's bonnet or a short skirt, I turn my head away as if I saw the devil in person."

"Victorin improves, and he will improve still more with ripening years," I replied to the captain. "But what can we do – he is young – he loves pleasure – and pretty girls."

"I also love pleasure, and furiously, too!" exclaimed the good captain. "There is nothing that I delight more in, when my duties are done, than to enter my lodging and empty a pot of cool beer with my friend Eustace, while we chat over our old trade, or entertain ourselves furbishing our weapons and good armor. Those are real pleasures! And notwithstanding all the excitement that one finds in them, they are absolutely honorable. Let us hope, Schanvoch, that Victorin may some day prefer them to his immodest and diabolical orgies with the pretty girls, that scandalize us."

"I am of your opinion, captain; hope is better than despair. But in the absence of Victorin you may confer with his mother. I shall notify her of your arrival."

Saying this I left Marion alone, and passing into a neighboring apartment, encountered a serving-girl who led me to Victoria, the Mother of the Camps, my foster-sister.

CHAPTER IX
VICTORIA THE GREAT

I wish, my son, for your benefit and the benefit of our descendants, to trace here the portrait of that illustrious Gallic woman, one of the purest glories of our country.

I found Victoria seated beside the cradle of her grandson Victorinin, a handsome boy of two who lay profoundly asleep. Victoria had some needlework in her hands, and was busy sewing, agreeable to her custom as a good housekeeper. She was then, like myself, thirty-eight years of age, but she would have been hardly taken for thirty. In her youth she was appropriately compared to Diana, the huntress. In her mature years she was no less appropriately compared to the antique Minerva. Tall, well built, and virile, without thereby forfeiting the chaste graces of womanhood, she was magnificently shaped. Her beautiful face, instinct with a grave yet gentle expression, bore the impress of majesty under the crown of black hair which she wore in two braids coiled over her august forehead. Sent when still a little girl to a college of our venerated female druids, and having taken at the age of fifteen the mysterious vows that bound her indissolubly to the sacred religion of our fathers, she ever since, and although married, preserved the black garb of the female druids, which was also the habitual garb of the matrons of old Gaul. Her long wide sleeves, open up to the elbows, exposed a pair of arms as white and as strong as those of the valiant Gallic women, who, as you will see in our family narratives, my son, heroically fought the Romans at the battle of Vannes under the eyes of our grandmother Margarid, and preferred death to the disgraces of slavery.

In the middle of the chamber, and not far from the seat occupied by the Mother of the Camps near her grandson's cradle, several rolls of parchment, together with all that was necessary for writing, lay upon a table. From the wall hung the two casques and swords of Victoria's father and husband, both killed in the same battle. One of the two casques was surmounted by the Gallic cock of gilt bronze, with his wings partly spread, and holding under his feet a lark that he menaced with his beak. The emblem was adopted by Victoria's father as a military ornament after a heroic combat in which, at the head of only a handful of men, he exterminated a Roman legion that bore a lark on its ensign. Under the weapons stood a little brass vase in which seven twigs of mistletoe were arranged. Gaul, you must remember, my son, reconquered her religious liberty in recovering her independence. Close to the brass vase and the twigs of mistletoe, a druid symbol, was a wooden cross, in commemoration of the death of Jesus of Nazareth, for whom the Mother of the Camps, without being a Christian, professed profound admiration. She looked upon him as one of the sages who shed luster upon humanity.

Such, my son, was Victoria the Great, the illustrious Gallic woman whose name our descendants will ever pronounce with pride.

When the Mother of the Camps saw me come in, she rose quickly and approached me with gladness, saying in her sonorous and sweet voice:

"Welcome, brother! The mission was a dangerous one. Not seeing you back before sunset, I did not wish to send any message to your house, lest I alarm your wife by showing uneasiness at your prolonged absence. But here you are; I feel happy to see you back again."

Saying this Victoria pressed my hand tenderly in hers.

The words that we spoke must have disturbed the slumber of Victoria's grandson; he moved in his cradle and made a slight sound. Victoria stepped quickly to him, and kissed the child on the forehead. She then sat down, and placing the tip of her foot on a treadle below the cradle, rocked it gently, while she continued her conversation with me.

"And the message?" she asked, "how did the barbarians receive it? Are they ready for peace? Do they want war? Did they accept our proposition?"

I was just about to begin giving my foster-sister a complete account of my mission, when she interrupted me with a gesture, and, reflecting a second, proceeded to say:

"Do you know that my dear relative Tetrik has been here since yesterday?"

"I know it, sister."

"He is due here any moment. I prefer that you make the report to me before him only."

"I shall do so. Can you receive Captain Marion? He came for a conference with Victorin."

"Schanvoch, my son again spent the night out of the house!" remarked Victoria plying her needle more quickly, an action that, with her, always denoted deep annoyance.

"Having heard of your relative's arrival, I surmised that, possibly, grave questions kept Victorin closeted with Tetrik during the night. That is the theory I threw out to Captain Marion, and told him that perhaps you would be ready to hear the report he has for your son."

Victoria remained silent for a moment; she then dropped her needlework on her lap, raised her head and resumed in a tone of suppressed grief:

"Victorin has vices – his vices are smothering his good parts. Moths destroy the best of grain."

"Have confidence and hope – age will mature him."

"During the last two years his vices grow upon him, his good parts decline."

"His bravery, his generosity, his frankness have not degenerated."

"His bravery no longer is the calm and provident bravery that becomes a general – it is becoming blind – headless. His generosity no longer distinguishes between the worthy and the unworthy. His reasoning powers decline – wine and debauchery are killing him. By Hesus! A drunkard and a debauché! He, my son! One of the chiefs of Gaul, free to-day and, perhaps, to-morrow, matchless among nations. Schanvoch, I am an unfortunate mother!"

"Victorin loves me – I shall reprove him severely."

"Do you imagine that your remonstrances will accomplish what the prayers of his own mother have failed to do? Of the mother who never left his side all his life, following him with the army, often even into battle? Schanvoch, Hesus punishes me – I have been too proud of my son!"

"And what mother would not have been proud of him the day when a whole valiant army, of its own free choice, acclaimed as its chief the general of twenty years of age, behind whom they saw – you, his mother!"

"What does it matter, if he dishonors me! And yet, my only ambition was to make of my son a citizen, a man worthy of our fathers! Did I not, when nourishing him with my milk, also nourish him with an ardent and holy love for our Gaul that was coming to life again – and to freedom! What was it that I asked; what was it that I always desired? To live an obscure life and ignored, but devote my night-watches and my days, my intelligence, my knowledge of the past, which enables me to understand the present, and at times to peer into the future – in short, to devote all the energies of my soul and of my mind to rendering my son brave, wise, enlightened, worthy at all points of guiding the free men who chose him their chief. And then, Hesus is my witness, proud as a Gallic woman, happy as a mother of having given birth to such a man, I would have enjoyed his glory and my country's prosperity in the seclusion of my humble home. But to have a drunkard and debauché for a son! Oh, wrath of heaven! Does not the giddy-headed boy understand that every excess that he indulges in is a slap that he gives his mother in the face? If he does not understand it, our soldiers do. Yesterday, as I crossed the camp, three old horsemen rode towards me. Do you know what they said to me? 'Mother, we pity you!' – and they rode off dejectedly. Schanvoch, I tell you, I am an unhappy mother!"

"Listen to me. For some time since, our soldiers have been growing dissatisfied with Victorin. I admit it, I understand it. The warrior whom free men have chosen for their chief must be above excesses, and must even be able to control the impulses of his age. That is true, sister; and have I not often chided your son in your presence?"

"You have."

"Well, at this moment I take up his defense. These soldiers, whom we see to-day so full of scruples on the score of slips that are frequent with young chiefs, act, not so much in obedience to their own scruples, as in obedience to perfidious incitements that emanate from some secret enemy."

"What do you mean?"

"There are people who envy your son; they envy his influence over the troops. In order to undo him, his defects are being exploited so as to furnish a foundation for infamous calumnies."

"Who is jealous of Victorin? Who would have an interest in spreading such calumnies?"

"It is especially during the last month, not so, that this hostility to your son has manifested itself and has been on the increase?"

"Yes, yes; but whom do you suspect of inciting it?"

"Sister, what I am about to tell you is serious. It is a month ago that one of your relatives, the Governor of Gascony, came to Mayence – "

"Tetrik!"

"Yes; he departed after a stay of a few days! Almost immediately after Tetrik's departure the silent hostility towards your son began, and has since steadily grown!"

Victoria looked at me in silence, as if she did not quite grasp the bearing of my words. But a sudden thought seeming to flash through her mind, she cried in a tone of reproach:

"What! You suspect Tetrik! My own relative and best friend, the wisest of men, one of the most enlightened citizens of our age, a man who seeks his delight in letters and displays no mean poetic talents! One of the most useful men in the defense of Gaul, although he is not a man of war! Tetrik, who in his government of Gascony repairs by dint of wisdom the evils that civil war inflicted upon the province! Oh, brother, I expected better things from your loyal heart and your good sense!"

"I suspect that man!"

"Oh, you iron-headed, inflexible nature! Why should you suspect Tetrik? By what right? What has he done? By Hesus! If you were not my brother – if I did not know your heart – I would think you are jealous of my esteem for my relative!"

Victoria had barely uttered these last words, when she seemed to regret having allowed them to escape her. She said:

"Forget these words!"

"They would greatly grieve me, sister, if the unjust doubt that they express could blind you to the truth."

At this moment the servant entered and asked whether Tetrik could be admitted.

"Let him in," answered Victoria, "let him in immediately."

Tetrik stepped into the room.