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

"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.

CHAPTER X

TETRIK

The personage who now entered the apartment was an undersized man of middle age. His face was refined and gentle; an affable smile played permanently around his lips. In short, his exterior bespoke so fully the man of honor that, seeing him enter, Victoria could not refrain from casting at me a look that still seemed to reproach me for my suspicions.

Tetrik walked straight to Victoria, kissed her on the forehead with paternal familiarity and said:

"Greeting to you, Victoria!"

And approaching the cradle in which the grandson of the Mother of the Camps still slept, the Governor of Gascony contemplated the child with tenderness, and added, in a low voice, as if afraid to awaken him:

"Sleep, poor little one! You are smiling in your infantine dreams, and you know not that, perhaps, the future of our beloved Gaul may rest upon your head. Sleep, little fellow, predestined, no doubt, to carry out the task that your glorious father has undertaken! A noble task that will engage his efforts for many long years under the inspiration of your august grandmother! Sleep, poor little one," Tetrik added, with eyes dimmed with tears of tenderness, "the gods that are propitious to Gaul will watch over you – you will grow up for the welfare of your country!"

While her relative wiped his moist eyes, Victoria again interrogated me with her looks, as if asking me whether such was the language and the physiognomy of a traitor, of a cowardly hypocrite, of a man who was a perfidious enemy of the child's father.

Turning then to me, Tetrik said affectionately:

"Greeting to the best, the most faithful friend of the woman whom I most love and venerate in the world; greeting to Victoria's foster-brother."

"Your speech is true. I am the obscurest but also the most devoted friend of Victoria," I answered looking fixedly at Tetrik, "and it is the duty of a friend to unmask scamps and traitors."

"I am of your opinion, friend Schanvoch," Tetrik answered with simplicity. "A friend's first duty is to unmask scamps and traitors. I fear the roaring lion with its jaws wide open less than the serpent that creeps in the dark."

"Now, then, I, Schanvoch, have this to say to you, Tetrik. You are one of the dangerous reptile that you have just mentioned. I consider you a traitor! And I purpose to unmask your treason!"

"Schanvoch!" cried Victoria interrupting me in a reproachful tone.

"I perceive that the old Gallic love for raillery, one of our franchises, has returned with our gods and our freedom," replied the governor smiling.

And turning to Victoria he added:

"Our friend Schanvoch possesses the art of dry humor – the most amusing of all – "

"My brother speaks seriously and out of an honorable impulse," the Mother of the Camps broke in saying. "And I grieve thereat, since I know that he is mistaken; but he is sincere in his error – "

Tetrik let his eyes wander alternately from Victoria to me with no little amazement; for a moment he was silent; thereupon he said in a serious and penetrating voice:

"All faithful friends are quick to suspect. Good Schanvoch, your distrust is inexplicable to me; but it must have its reason. The attack was frank, frank shall be the answer. Let us settle the question. What is your charge against me?"

"About a month ago you came to Mayence. A man of your retinue, your secretary, Morix by name and well supplied with money, gave the soldiers to drink and at the same time endeavored to irritate them against Victorin, saying to them that it was disgraceful that their general, one of the two chiefs of regenerated Gaul, should be a drunkard and a profligate. Did your secretary hold such language, yes or no? I wait for your answer."

"Proceed, friend Schanvoch, proceed – "

"Your secretary told a story that, being subsequently spread through the camp, has greatly irritated the soldiers against Victorin. This was the story: A few months ago, Victorin and several officers went to a tavern on one of the isles in the Rhine; after having drunk copiously, Victorin, excited by the wine, violated the innkeeper's wife, and she thereupon killed herself in despair – "

"Calumny!" cried Victoria. "I know and condemn my son's faults – but he is incapable of such an infamous act!"

The governor listened to me without betraying the slightest emotion. Presently he said with a smile and his habitual placidity of countenance:

"So, then, good Schanvoch, it is your opinion that, obedient to orders received from me, my secretary spread unworthy calumnies in the camp?"

"Yes. It is all done with your knowledge and consent."

"And what could be my motive?"

"You are ambitious – "

"And in what manner could such calumnies subserve my ambition?"

"If the dissatisfaction of the soldiers with Victorin, whom they elected, continues, you would then use your influence with Victoria to the end of inducing her to propose you to the soldiers as Victorin's successor in the government of Gaul."

"A mother! Did you stop to consider that, good Schanvoch?" Tetrik answered looking at Victoria. "A mother sacrifice a son to a friend!"

"In the greatness of her love for her country, Victoria would certainly sacrifice her son to your elevation if the measure became necessary to the welfare of Gaul. Am I mistaken, sister?"

"No," Victoria answered me evidently grieved at my accusations against her relative; "in that you say the truth, but as to the inferences that you draw therefrom, I reject them."

"And that heroic sacrifice, good Schanvoch," resumed the governor, "Victoria is expected to make knowing that it was through my underground calumnies that her son's reputation was blasted with the soldiers?"

"My sister would not have been aware of your intrigues had I not unmasked them. Besides, more than once did I hear her say, and justly say, that in case peace was established, it would be better for the country if its chief, instead of being ever prone to battle, gave serious thought to the healing of the wounds inflicted by the past wars. She often mentioned you as one of the men who wisely prefer peace to war."

"It is true, I hold that the sword, good to destroy, is impotent to reconstruct," remarked Victoria; "and the freedom of Gaul once firmly established, I would prefer to see my son give more thought to peace than to war. It was, therefore, Schanvoch, that I commissioned you with one last attempt with the Franks, looking to the restoration of peace."

"Allow that I interrupt you, Victoria," put in Tetrik, "and that I ask our friend Schanvoch whether he has any other charges against me."

"I charge you with being either the secret agent of the Roman Emperor Galien, or the agent of the chief of the new creed, Roman Catholicism."

"I!" cried the governor. "I the agent of the Christians!"

"I said the agent of the chief of the new creed. I refer to the Bishop of Rome, who entitles himself 'Sovereign Pontiff.'"

"I the agent of Etienne, the Bishop of Rome, and fourteenth Pope of the new church? – of that Pope, of whom Firmilien, the Bishop of Caesarea, wrote to Cyprian, the presiding officer of the Spanish council, composed of twenty-eight bishops: 'Would one believe that that man (Pope Etienne) had a soul in his body? Evidently his body is but ill conducted, and his soul is in a disordered condition. Etienne does not stick at calling his brother Cyprian a false Christ, a false apostle, a fraudulent artisan; in order to forestall having these things said of himself, he has the audacity to make the accusation against others.' And can I be the agent of that ambitious pontiff! Of that simoniacal bishop, who is given over to all manner of vices!"

"Yes – unless that, deceiving at once both the Roman Emperor and the Pope of Rome, you are serving both, ready to sacrifice the one or the other, according as your ambition may require."

"That I serve the Romans is a thing that I am ready to admit," Tetrik answered with his unalterable placidity. "However unjust your suspicion towards me, it may be understood, as an instance of extreme patriotism. We are well aware that, although we have succeeded, by force of arms, to reconquer during nearly three centuries, inch by inch the full freedom once enjoyed by old Gaul, the Roman Emperors have seen with sorrow our country slip from their dominion. Accordingly, I can understand, Schanvoch, how you might accuse me of desiring to arrive at power in Gaul, with the end in view of sooner or later restoring the country to the Romans, although in doing so I would be betraying it most infamously. But is it imaginable that I act in the interest of the Pope of the Christians, of those unhappy people who are everywhere persecuted and martyrized? It is not a sane thought! What could I do for them? What could they do for me?"

Schanvoch was about to answer. Victoria interrupted him with a gesture and said to Tetrik while she pointed to the cross of black wood, the emblem of the death of Jesus, that was placed near the brass vase with the seven twigs of mistletoe, a druid symbol much in use among the Gauls:

"Look at that cross, Tetrik, it tells you that, without infidelity to our own gods, I nevertheless venerate him who said that no man has the right to oppress his fellows; that the guilty merit pity and consolation, not contempt and severity; and that the irons of the slave should be stricken off. Blessed be these maxims, Tetrik; the wisest of our druids have accepted them as holy; accordingly, you may judge how dearly I love the gentle and pure morality of that young man of Nazareth. But listen, Tetrik," Victoria added pensively, "there is something unexplainable, strange and mysterious that makes me shudder. Yes, many a time and oft, during my long watches beside the cradle of my grandson, and when I pondered the present and the past, tormenting thoughts crowded upon my mind concerning the future of our well-beloved Gaul."