the cousins as children.
Raimbaut found them no food for laughter now. Guillaume told all of
Raimbaut's oath of fealty, and of how these two were friends and their
unnatural feud was forgotten. "For we grow old,--eh, maker of songs?"
he said; "and it is time we made our peace with Heaven, since we are
not long for this world."

"Yes," said the knight; "oh yes, we both grow old." He thought of
another April evening, so long ago, when this Guillaume de Baux had
stabbed him in a hedged field near Calais, and had left him under a
hawthorn bush for dead; and Raimbaut wondered that there was no anger
in his heart. "We are friends now," he said. Biatritz, whom these two
had loved, and whose vanished beauty had been the spur of their long
enmity, sat close to them, and hardly seemed to listen.

Thus the evening passed and every one was merry, because the Prince had
overcome Lovain of the Great-Tooth, and was to punish the upstart on
the morrow. But Raimbaut de Vaquieras, a spent fellow, a derelict,
barren of aim now that the Holy Wars were over, sat in this unfamiliar
place--where when he was young he had laughed as a cock crows!--and
thought how at the last he had crept home to die as a dependent on his
cousin's bounty.

Thus the evening passed, and at its end Makrisi followed the troubadour
to his regranted fief of Vaquieras. This was a chill and brilliant
night, swayed by a frozen moon so powerful that no stars showed in the
unclouded heavens, and everywhere the bogs were curdled with thin ice.
An obdurate wind swept like a knife-blade across a world which even in
its spring seemed very old.

"This night is bleak and evil," Makrisi said. He rode a coffin's
length behind his master. "It is like Prince Guillaume, I think. What
man will sorrow when dawn comes?"

Raimbaut de Vaquieras replied: "Always dawn comes at last, Makrisi."

"It comes the more quickly, messire, when it is prompted."

The troubadour only smiled at words which seemed so meaningless. He
did not smile when later in the night Makrisi brought Mahi de Vernoil,
disguised as a mendicant friar. This outlaw pleaded with Sire Raimbaut
to head the tatters of Lovain's army, and showed Raimbaut how easy it
would be to wrest Venaissin from Prince Guillaume. "We cannot save
Lovain," de Vemoil said, "for Guillaume has him fast. But Venaissin is
very proud of you, my tres beau sire. Ho, maker of world-famous songs!
stout champion of the faith! my me