No More Learning

THE LAST TOURNAMENT.


One day while King Arthur and Sir Lancelot were riding far, far beneath
a winding wall of rock they heard the wail of a child.

A half-dead oak tree climbed up the sides of the rock and up in mid-air
it held an eagle's nest. Through its branches rushed a rainy wind and
through the wind came the voice of a little child. Lancelot sprang up
the crag and from the nest at the tree-top he brought down a baby girl.
Round her neck was twined a necklace of rubies, wound round and round
three times.

Arthur took the baby and gave it to Queen Guinevere, who soon loved it
very tenderly and named her "Nestling. " But Nestling had caught a
terrible cold in her strange little home in the wild eagle's nest and
died. And after that whenever the Queen looked at the ruby necklace it
made her very sad so she gave it to Arthur and said:

"Take these jewels of our Dead Innocence and make them a prize at a
tournament. "

"Just as you wish," cried the King, "but why don't you wear the diamonds
that I found for you in the tarn, which Lancelot won for you at the
jousts? "

"Don't you know that they slipped out of my hands the very day that he
gave them to me, while I was leaning out of the window to see Elaine in
the barge on the river? But these rubies will bring better luck than
that to the lady who gets them, for they didn't come from a dead king's
skeleton, but from the body of a sweet baby girl. Perhaps, who knows,
the purest of your knights will win them at the jousts for the purest of
my ladies. "

So the great jousts were proclaimed with trumpets that blew all along
the streets of Camelot and out across the faded fields to the farthest
towers, and everywhere the knights armed themselves for a day of glory
before the king.

But just the day before they were to be held, as King Arthur sat in his
great hall, a churl staggered in through the door; his face was all
striped with the lashes of a dog whip, his nose was broken, one eye was
out, a hand was off and the other hand dangled at his side with
shattered fingers.
"My poor Churl," cried the king, full of indignant pity, "what beast or
fiend has been after you? Or was it a man who hurt you so? "

"He took them all away," sputtered the churl, "a hundred good ones. It
was the Red Knight. He--Lord, I was tending sheep, my pigs, a hundred
good ones, and he drove them all off to his tower. And when I said that
you were always kind to poor churls like me as well as gentle lords and
ladies, he made for me and would have killed me outright if he didn't
want me to bring you message and made me swear that I would tell you.

"He said, 'Tell the king that I have made a Round Table of my own in the
North, and that whatever his knights swear not to do mine swear that
they will do; and tell him his hour has come, and that the heathen are
after him, and that his long lance is broken, and that his sword
Excalibur is a straw. '"

Then Arthur turned to Sir Kay the Seneschal and said: "Take this churl
of mine and tend him very carefully as if he were the son of a king
until all his hurts are healed," and as Sir Kay left the hall with the
churl the king went on to Lancelot: "The heathen have been quiet for a
long, long time, but now they are rising again in the North, and I will
go with my younger knights to put them down, so as to make the whole
island safe from one shore to the other. And while I go away, you, Sir
Lancelot, will sit in my chair to-morrow at the tournament and be the
judge there of the field. For why should you anyway care to go in again
yourself, when you've already won the nine diamonds for the queen? "

"Very well," replied Lancelot, "if you wish, although it would be better
if you would let me go off with the younger knights and you stay here
with the others and watch the tournament. But, if not, all is well? "

"Is all really well? " cried the king, "or have I just dreamed that our
knights are not quite so true and manly as they used to be and that my
noble realm which has been built up by noble deeds and noble vows is
going to fall back into beastly roughness and violence again? "

He gathered all the younger Knights of the Round Table together and
started away with them down the hilly streets of Camelot, and at the
gateway turned sharply North.

The next morning, the day of the Tournament, the Tournament of the Dead
Innocence they called it, a wet wind blew.