Adventure Magazine Cover — page 82: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

74 great promise for a jongleur of your years. Glad am I to add to your store of vengeance. God send you success.” “But, ah, zounds, what a sore pity for you, pretty boy!” cried the lady. ‘Father and mother dead—and you may not bear your father’s name!” “That is true, lady!” said Matteo, re- solved not to blink the fact. “‘Nay, do not depress the youth,” urged her lord. “He hath a fine fancy and a keen wit. He shall go far in the world.”’ They made much of him, would have listened to him until cock-crow; and when he laughingly declined to pursue his store of Saracen tales past midnight he was led to the best chamber of the keep and made to sleep between sheets of Damascus linen. In the morning the lady of the castle gave him a stirrup-cup with her own hands, and the lord walked with him to the gate. ‘“Tarry with us a while,” suggested the Jord at parting. ‘‘Good company is not readily come by, and here you shall have all that your heart may desire.”’ ‘“‘Nay, messer, I may not,” returned Matteo, “for ere he died my _ father laid a command upon me, and I go to execute it.” “Then, if you may not stay, visit Karoon next time you ride Jordanward.” “Aye, right willingly, fair sir.” They clasped hands beneath the port- cullis, and with Ali at his heels, Matteo rode over the draw and took the road for Nablus. He was in no mood for glooming this day. His eyes found delight in all that passed; a song rose to his lips. Ali perceived the lifting of his master’s spirits, and at the end of the town precincts clinked up alongside of him. “Rare luck we had yon, Messer Matteo,” he observed, jerking a thumb backward over his shoulder. ‘““Aye,” agreed Matteo, “and if only I might come by a gittern my fears for the road would be gone forever.”’ “Why, let us e’en take the first one we come upon,”’ suggested Ali practically. “Nay, nay, we may not become robbers. In sooth, Ali, my heart beats more freely for knowing that I have this gift. Yet I give due thanks to you and old Moosha that taught me.” His face clouded momentarily at recol- lection of old Moosha and the life she had ) Adventure represented, a life gone forever. But buoyant spirits would not be denied. A palmer by the wayside cried a blessing on him, and Matteo tossed the holy man a copper penny from his new-won store. At Belvoir that night they were directed to a home of the Gray Friars, and in the refectory after supper the good monks plied them with questions, for the monks were the chroniclers of the land and gained their knowledge of all that passed from such chance intercourse and the exchange of gossip betwixt the different monastic es- tablishments. When the master of the novices heard that Matteo could play and sing, he insisted that the brethren should be entertained and even sent for the prior. “But, I beseech you, gentle youth,” he said, ‘make your romaunt instructive as well as diverting, and eschew all follies of female guile and love-idleness, for ’tis not befitting that we men of God should hark to such trivialities.”’ Now, as it chanced, Matteo had been turning in his mind a new lay which had come to him in the music of his horse’s hoofs throughout the long day on the twisting road. A caravan of merchants, with jin- gling pack-mules, had halted at a cross- roads to permit the passage of a party of knights and lords riding to attend a tourney at Mirabel; and in the neighboring fields the hinds had suspended their sluggish labor to eye the contrasting colors of the scene. In that moment there had come to Matteo a realization of the essence of his age, and his mind had sought mechanically to turn it into rhyme. “Gladly will I try, holy father,” he made answer to the master of the novices, “but as you see, I lack gittern or other instru- ment for accompaniment.” “Of that no difficulty shall be made,” retorted the monk. ‘‘There are instru- ments of many kinds in the chantry, for ’tis our belief that any sweet sound is pleasant in Monseigneur God’s ear.” A lay brother fetched several gitterns for Matteo’s choice; the prior himself arrived, and was duly enthroned at the head of the refectory; the monks in their several orders and degrees gathered at the tables; and Matteo was led out before them all. It was no romaunt for alternate singing and recitation he gave them, but a simple lay, that in after-years was sung through COIN cClooolkks ©