The Project Gutenberg eBook, Chivalry, by James Branch Cabell, et al

CHIVALRY:

Dizain des Reines

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

1921

“AINSI A VOUS, MADAME, A MA TRÈS HAULTE ET
TRÈS NOBLE DAME, A QUI J’AYME A DEVOIR
ATTACHEMENT ET OBÉISSANCE,
J’ENVOYE CE LIVRET.”

Few of the more astute critics who have appraised the work of
James Branch Cabell have failed to call attention to that
extraordinary cohesion which makes his very latest novel a further
flowering of the seed of his very earliest literary work. Especially
among his later books does the scheme of each seem to dovetail into
the scheme of the other and the whole of his writing take on the
character of an uninterrupted discourse. To this phenomenon, which
is at once a fact and an illusion of continuity, Mr. Cabell himself
has consciously contributed, not only by a subtly elaborate use of
conjunctions, by repetition, and by reintroducing characters from
his other books, but by actually setting his expertness in genealogy
to the genial task of devising a family tree for his figures of
fiction.

If this were an actual continuity, more tangible than that fluid
abstraction we call the life force; if it were merely a tireless
reiteration and recasting of characters, Mr. Cabell’s work
would have an unbearable monotony. But at bottom this apparent
continuity has no more material existence than has the thread of
lineal descent. To insist upon its importance is to obscure, as has
been obscured, the epic range of Mr. Cabell’s creative genius.
It is to fail to observe that he has treated in his many books every
mainspring of human action and that his themes have been the
cardinal dreams and impulses which have in them heroic qualities.
Each separate volume has a unity and harmony of a complete and
separate life, for the excellent reason that with the consummate
skill of an artist he is concerned exclusively in each book with one
definite heroic impulse and its frustrations.

It is true, of course, that like the fruit of the tree of life,
Mr. Cabell’s artistic progeny sprang from a first conceptual
germ—“In the beginning was the Word.” That
animating idea is the assumption that if life may be said to have an
aim it must be an aim to terminate in success and splendor. It
postulates the high, fine importance of excess, the choice or
discovery of an overwhelming impulse in life and a conscientious
dedication to its fullest realization. It is the quality and
intensity of the dream only which raises men above the biological
norm; and it is fidelity to the dream which differentiates the
exceptional figure, the man of heroic stature, from the muddling,
aimless mediocrities about him. What the dream is, matters not at
all—it may be a dream of sainthood, kingship, love, art,
asceticism or sensual pleasure—so long as it is fully
expressed with all the resources of self. It is this sort of
completion which Mr. Cabell has elected to depict in all his work:
the complete sensualist in Demetrios, the complete phrase-maker in
Felix Kennaston, the complete poet in Marlowe, the complete lover in
Perion. In each he has shown that this complete self-expression is
achieved at the expense of all other possible selves, and that
herein lies the tragedy of the ideal. Perfection is a costly flower
and is cultured only by an uncompromising, strict husbandry.

All this is, we see, the ideational gonfalon under which surge
the romanticists; but from the evidence at hand it is the banner to
which life also bears allegiance. It is in humanity’s records
that it has reserved its honors for its romantic figures. It
remembers its Caesars, its saints, its sinners. It applauds, with a
complete suspension of moral judgment, its heroines and its heroes
who achieve the greatest self-realization. And from the splendid
triumphs and tragic defeats of humanity’s individual strivings
have come our heritage of wisdom and of poetry.

Once we understand the fundamentals of Mr. Cabell’s
artistic aims, it is not easy to escape the fact that in Figures
of Earth he undertook the staggering and almost unsuspected task
of rewriting humanity’s sacred books, just as in Jurgen
he gave us a stupendous analogue of the ceaseless quest for beauty.
For we must accept the truth that Mr. Cabell is not a novelist at
all in the common acceptance of the term, but a historian of the
human soul. His books are neither documentary nor representational;
his characters are symbols of human desires and motives. By the not
at all simple process of recording faithfully the projections of his
rich and varied imagination, he has written thirteen books, which he
accurately terms biography, wherein is the bitter-sweet truth about
human life.

II

Among the scant certainties vouchsafed us is that every age
lives by its special catchwords. Whether from rebellion against the
irking monotony of its inherited creeds or from compulsions
generated by its own complexities, each age develops its code of
convenient illusions which minimize cerebration in dilemmas of
conduct by postulating an unequivocal cleavage between the current
right and the current wrong. It works until men tire of it or
challenge the cleavage, or until conditions render the code
obsolete. It has in it, happily, a certain poetic merit always; it
presents an ideal to be lived up to; it gives direction to the
uncertain, stray impulses of life.

The Chivalric code is no worse than most and certainly it is
prettier than some. It is a code peculiar to an age, or at least it
flourishes best in an age wherein sentiment and the stuff of dreams
are easily translatable into action. Its requirements are less of
the intellect than of the heart. It puts God, honor, and mistress
above all else, and stipulates that a knight shall serve these three
without any reservation. It requires of its secular practitioners
the holy virtues of an active piety, a modified chastity, and an
unqualified obedience, at all events, to the categorical imperative.
The obligation of poverty it omits, for the code arose at a time
when the spiritual snobbery of the meek and lowly was not pressing
the simile about the camel and the eye of the needle. It leads to
charming manners and to delicate amenities. It is the opposite of
the code of Gallantry, for while the code of Chivalry takes
everything with a becoming seriousness, the code of Gallantry takes
everything with a wink. If one should stoop to pick flaws with the
Chivalric ideal, it would be to point out a certain priggishness and
intolerance. For, while it is all very well for one to cherish the
delusion that he is God’s vicar on earth and to go about his
Father’s business armed with a shining rectitude, yet the
unhallowed may be moved to deprecate the enterprise when they
recall, with discomfort, the zealous vicarship of, say, the late
Anthony J. Comstock.

But here I blunder into Mr. Cabell’s province. For he has
joined many graceful words in delectable and poignant proof of just
that lamentable tendency of man to make a mess of even his most
immaculate conceivings. When he wrote Chivalry, Mr. Cabell
was yet young enough to view the code less with the appraising eye
of a pawnbroker than with the ardent eye of an amateur. He knew its
value, but he did not know its price. So he made of it the thesis
for a dizain of beautiful happenings that are almost flawless in
their verbal beauty.

III

It is perhaps of historical interest
here to record the esteem in which Mark Twain held the genius of Mr.
Cabell as it was manifested as early as a dozen years ago. Mr.
Cabell wrote The Soul of Melicent, or, as it was rechristened
on revision, Domnei, at the great humorist’s request,
and during the long days and nights of his last illness it was Mr.
Cabell’s books which gave Mark Twain his greatest joy. This
knowledge mitigates the pleasure, no doubt, of those who still,
after his fifteen years of writing, encounter him intermittently
with a feeling of having made a great literary discovery. The truth
is that Mr. Cabell has been discovered over and over with each
succeeding book from that first fine enthusiasm with which Percival
Pollard reviewed The Eagle’s Shadow to that generous
acknowledgment by Hugh Walpole that no one in England, save perhaps
Conrad and Hardy, was so sure of literary permanence as James Branch
Cabell.

With The Cream of the Jest, Beyond Life, and
Figures of Earth before him, it is not easy for the
perceptive critic to doubt this permanence. One might as sensibly
deny a future to Ecclesiastes, The Golden Ass,
Gulliver’s Travels, and the works of Rabelais as to
predict oblivion for such a thesaurus of ironic wit and fine
fantasy, mellow wisdom and strange beauty as Jurgen. But to
appreciate the tales of Chivalry is, it seems, a gift more
frequently reserved for the general reader than for the professional
literary evaluator. Certainly years before discussion of Cabell was
artificially augmented by the suppression of Jurgen there
were many genuine lovers of romance who had read these tales with
pure enjoyment. That they did not analyse and articulate their
enjoyment for the edification of others does not lessen the quality
of their appreciation. Even in those years they found in
Cabell’s early tales what we find who have since been directed
to them by the curiosity engendered by his later work, namely, a
superb craftsmanship in recreating a vanished age, an atmosphere in
keeping with the themes, a fluid, graceful, personal style, a poetic
ecstasy, a fine sense of drama, and a unity and symmetry which are
the hall-marks of literary genius.

BURTON RASCOE. New York City, September, 1921.

Imprimis, as concerns the authenticity of these tales perhaps
the less debate may be the higher wisdom, if only because this
Nicolas de Caen, by common report, was never a Gradgrindian. And in
this volume in particular, writing it (as Nicolas is supposed to
have done) in 1470, as a dependant on the Duke of Burgundy, it were
but human nature should he, in dealing with the putative descendants
of Dom Manuel and Alianora of Provence, be niggardly in his
ascription of praiseworthy traits to any member of the house of
Lancaster or of Valois. Rather must one in common reason accept old
Nicolas as confessedly a partisan writer, who upon occasion will
recolor an event with such nuances as will be least inconvenient to
a Yorkist and Burgundian bias.

The reteller of these stories needs in addition to plead guilty
of having abridged the tales with a free hand. Item, these tales
have been a trifle pulled about, most notably in “The Story of
the Satraps,” where it seemed advantageous, on reflection, to
put into Gloucester’s mouth a history which in the original
version was related ab ovo, and as a sort of bungling
prologue to the story proper.

Item, the re-teller of these stories desires hereby to tender
appropriate acknowledgment to Mr. R. E. Townsend for his assistance
in making an English version of the lyrics included hereinafter; and
to avoid discussion as to how freely, in these lyrics, Nicolas has
plagiarized from Raimbaut de Vaqueiras and other elder poets.¹

And—“sixth and lastly”—should confession
be made that in the present rendering a purely arbitrary title has
been assigned this little book; chiefly for commercial reasons,
since the word “dizain” has been adjudged both
untranslatable and, in its pristine form, repellantly
outré.

2

You are to give my titular makeshift, then, a wide
interpretation; and are always to remember that in the bleak, florid
age these tales commemorate this Chivalry was much the rarelier
significant of any personal trait than of a world-wide code in
consonance with which all estimable people lived and died. Its root
was the assumption (uncontested then) that a gentleman will always
serve his God, his honor and his lady without any reservation; nor
did the many emanating by-laws ever deal with special cases as
concerns this triple, fixed, and fundamental homage.

Such is the trinity served hereinafter. Now about lady-service,
or domnei, I have written elsewhere. Elsewhere also I find it
recorded that “the cornerstone of Chivalry is the idea of
vicarship: for the chivalrous person is, in his own eyes at least,
the child of God, and goes about this world as his Father’s
representative in an alien country.”

I believe the definition holds: it certainly tends to explain
the otherwise puzzling pertinacity with which the characters in
these tales talk about God and act upon an assured knowledge as to
Heaven’s private intentions and preferences. These people are
the members of one family engrossed, as all of us are apt to be when
in the society of our kin, by family matters and traditions and
by-words. It is not merely that they are all large children
consciously dependent in all things upon a not foolishly indulgent
Father, Who keeps an interested eye upon the least of their doings,
and punishes at need,—not merely that they know themselves to
act under surveillance and to speak within ear-shot of a divine
eavesdropper. The point is, rather, that they know this observation
to be as tender, the punishment to be as unwilling, as that which
they themselves extend to their own children’s pranks and
misdemeanors. The point is that to them Heaven is a place as actual
and tangible as we consider Alaska or Algiers to be, and that their
living is a conscious journeying toward this actual place. The point
is that the Father is a real father, and not a word spelt with
capital letters in the Church Service; not an abstraction, not a
sort of a something vaguely describable as “the Life
Force,” but a very famous kinsman, of whom one is naïvely
proud, and whom one is on the way to visit.... The point, in brief,
is that His honor and yours are inextricably blended, and are both
implicated in your behavior on the journey.

We nowadays can just cloudily imagine this viewing of life as a
sort of boarding-school from which one eventually goes home, with an
official report as to progress and deportment: and in retaliation
for being debarred from the comforts of this view, the
psychoanalysts have no doubt invented for it some opprobrious
explanation. At all events, this Chivalry was a pragmatic
hypothesis: it “worked,” and served society for a long
while, not faultlessly of course, but by creating, like all the
other codes of human conduct which men have yet tried, a tragi-comic
mêlée wherein contended “courtesy and humanity,
friendliness, hardihood, love and friendship, and murder, hate, and
virtue, and sin.”

3

For the rest, since good wine needs no bush, and an inferior
beverage is not likely to be bettered by arboreal adornment, I elect
to piece out my exordium (however lamely) with “The
Printer’s Preface.” And it runs in this fashion:

“Here begins the volume called and entitled the Dizain of
Queens, composed and extracted from divers chronicles and other
sources of information, by that extremely venerable person and
worshipful man, Messire Nicolas de Caen, priest and chaplain to the
right noble, glorious and mighty prince in his time, Philippe, Duke
of Burgundy, of Brabant, etc., in the year of the Incarnation of our
Lord God a thousand four hundred and seventy: and imprinted by me,
Colard Mansion, at Bruges, in the year of our said Lord God a
thousand four hundred and seventy-one; at the commandment of the
right high, mighty and virtuous Princess, my redoubted Lady,
Isabella of Portugal, by the grace of God Duchess of Burgundy and
Lotharingia, of Brabant and Limbourg, of Luxembourg and of Gueldres,
Countess of Flanders, of Artois, and of Burgundy, Palatine of
Hainault, of Holland, of Zealand and of Namur, Marquesse of the Holy
Empire, and Lady of Frisia, of Salins and of Mechlin; whom I beseech
Almighty God less to increase than to continue in her virtuous
disposition in this world, and after our poor fleet existence to
receive eternally. Amen.”

The Prologue

A Sa Dame

Inasmuch as it was by your command, illustrious and exalted lady,
that I have gathered together these stories to form the present little
book, you should the less readily suppose I have presumed to dedicate to
your Serenity this trivial offering because of my esteeming it to be not
undeserving of your acceptance. The truth is otherwise: your postulant
approaches not spurred toward you by vainglory, but rather by equity,
and equity’s plain need to acknowledge that he who seeks to write of
noble ladies must necessarily implore at outset the patronage of her who
is the light and mainstay of our age. I humbly bring my book to you as
Phidyle approached another and less sacred shrine, farre pio et
saliente mica, and lay before you this my valueless mean tribute not
as appropriate to you but as the best I have to offer.

It is a little book wherein I treat of divers queens and of
their love-business; and with necessitated candor I concede my
chosen field to have been harvested, and scrupulously gleaned, by
many writers of innumerable conditions. Since Dares Phrygius wrote
of Queen Heleine, and Virgil (that shrewd necromancer) of Queen
Dido, a preponderating mass of clerks, in casting about for high and
serious matter, have chosen, as though it were by common instinct,
to dilate upon the amours of royal women. Even in romance we
scribblers must contrive it so that the fair Nicolete shall be
discovered in the end to be no less than the King’s daughter
of Carthage, and that Sir Doön of Mayence shall never sink in
his love affairs beneath the degree of a Saracen princess; and we
are backed in this old procedure not only by the authority of
Aristotle but, oddly enough, by that of reason.

Kings have their policies and wars wherewith to drug each human
appetite. But their consorts are denied these makeshifts; and love may
rationally be defined as the pivot of each normal woman’s life, and in
consequence as the arbiter of that ensuing life which is eternal.
Because—as anciently Propertius demanded, though not, to speak the
truth, of any woman—

And a dairymaid, let us say, may love whom she will, and nobody else
be a penny the worse for her mistaking of the preferable nail whereon to
hang her affections; whereas with a queen this choice is more
portentous. She plays the game of life upon a loftier table, ruthlessly
illuminated, she stakes by her least movement a tall pile of counters,
some of which are, of necessity, the lives and happiness of persons whom
she knows not, unless it be by vague report. Grandeur sells itself at
this hard price, and at no other. A queen must always play, in fine, as
the vicar of destiny, free to choose but very certainly compelled in the
ensuing action to justify that choice: as is strikingly manifested by
the authentic histories of Brunhalt, and of Guenevere, and of swart
Cleopatra, and of many others that were born to the barbaric queenhoods
of extinct and dusty times.

All royal persons are (I take it) the immediate and the responsible
stewards of Heaven; and since the nature of each man is like a troubled
stream, now muddied and now clear, their prayer must ever be, Defenda
me, Dios, de me! Yes, of exalted people, and even of their near
associates, life, because it aims more high than the aforementioned
Aristotle, demands upon occasion a more great catharsis, which would
purge any audience of unmanliness, through pity and through terror,
because, by a quaint paradox, the players have been purged of humanity.
For a moment Destiny has thrust her scepter into the hands of a human
being and Chance has exalted a human being to decide the issue of many
human lives. These two—with what immortal chucklings one may
facilely imagine—have left the weakling thus enthroned, free to
direct the heavy outcome, free to choose, and free to evoke much
happiness or age-long weeping, but with no intermediate course unbarred.
Now prove thyself! saith Destiny; and Chance appends: Now
prove thyself to be at bottom a god or else a beast, and now eternally
abide that choice. And now (O crowning irony!) we may not tell
thee clearly by which choice thou mayst prove either.

In this little book about the women who intermarried, not very
enviably, with an unhuman race (a race predestinate to the red ending
which I have chronicled elsewhere, in The Red Cuckold), it is of
ten such moments that I treat.

You alone, I think, of all persons living, have learned, as you have
settled by so many instances, to rise above mortality in such a testing,
and unfailingly to merit by your conduct the plaudits and the adoration
of our otherwise dissentient world. You have often spoken in the stead
of Destiny, with nations to abide your verdict; and in so doing have
both graced and hallowed your high vicarship. If I forbear to speak of
this at greater length, it is because I dare not couple your well-known
perfection with any imperfect encomium. Upon no plea, however, can any
one forbear to acknowledge that he who seeks to write of noble ladies
must necessarily implore at outset the patronage of her who is the light
and mainstay of our age.

Therefore to you, madame—most excellent and noble lady, to
whom I love to owe both loyalty and love—I dedicate this little
book.

In this place we have to do with the opening tale of the Dizain of
Queens. I abridge, as afterward, at discretion; and an initial account
of the Barons’ War, among other superfluities, I amputate as more
remarkable for veracity than interest. The result, we will agree at
outset, is that to the Norman cleric appertains whatever these tales may
have of merit, whereas what you find distasteful in them you must impute
to my delinquencies in skill rather than in volition.

Within the half hour after de Giars’ death (here one overtakes
Nicolas mid-course in narrative) Dame Alianora thus stood alone in the
corridor of a strange house. Beyond the arras the steward and his lord
were at irritable converse.

First, “If the woman be hungry,” spoke a high and
peevish voice, “feed her. If she need money, give it to her.
But do not annoy me.”

“This woman demands to see the master of the house,”
the steward then retorted.

“O incredible Boeotian, inform her that the master of the
house has no time to waste upon vagabonds who select the middle of
the night as an eligible time to pop out of nowhere. Why did you not
do so in the beginning, you dolt?” The speaker got for answer
only a deferential cough, and very shortly continued: “This is
remarkably vexatious. Vox et praeterea nihil—which
signifies, Yeck, that to converse with women is always delightful.
Admit her.” This was done, and Dame Alianora came into an
apartment littered with papers, where a neat and shriveled gentleman
of fifty-odd sat at a desk and scowled.

He presently said, “You may go, Yeck.” He had risen,
the magisterial attitude with which he had awaited her entrance cast
aside. “Oh, God!” he said; “you, madame!”
His thin hands, scholarly hands, were plucking at the air.

Dame Alianora had paused, greatly astonished, and there was an
interval before she said, “I do not recognize you,
messire.”

“And yet, madame, I recall very clearly that some thirty
years ago the King-Count Raymond Bérenger, then reigning in
Provence, had about his court four daughters, each one of whom was
afterward wedded to a king. First, Meregrett, the eldest, now
regnant in France; then Alianora, the second and most beautiful of
these daughters, whom troubadours hymned as the Unattainable
Princess. She was married a long while ago, madame, to the King of
England, Lord Henry, third of that name to reign in these
islands.”

Dame Alianora’s eyes were narrowing. “There is
something in your voice,” she said, “which I
recall.”

He answered: “Madame and Queen, that is very likely, for
it is a voice which sang a deal in Provence when both of us were
younger. I concede with the Roman that I have somewhat deteriorated
since the reign of Cynara. Yet have you quite forgotten the
Englishman who made so many songs of you? They called him Osmund
Heleigh.”

“He made the Sestina of Spring which won the violet crown
at my betrothal,” the Queen said; and then, with eagerness:
“Messire, can it be that you are Osmund Heleigh?” He
shrugged assent. She looked at him for a long time, rather sadly,
and demanded if he were the King’s man or of the barons’
party.

The nervous hands were raised in deprecation. “I have no
politics,” Messire Heleigh began, and altered it, gallantly
enough, to, “I am the Queen’s man, madame.”

“Then aid me, Osmund,” she said.

He answered with a gravity which singularly became him,
“You have reason to understand that to my fullest power I will
aid you.”

“You know that at Lewes these swine overcame us.” He
nodded assent. “Now they hold the King, my husband, captive at
Kenilworth. I am content that he remain there, for he is of all the
King’s enemies the most dangerous. But, at Wallingford,
Leicester has imprisoned my son, Prince Edward. The Prince must be
freed, my Osmund. Warren de Basingbourne commands what is left of
the royal army, now entrenched at Bristol, and it is he who must
liberate my son. Get me to Bristol, then. Afterward we will take
Wallingford.” The Queen issued these orders in cheery,
practical fashion, and did not admit opposition into the account,
for she was a capable woman.

“But you, madame?” he stammered. “You came
alone?”

“I come from France, where I have been
entreating—and vainly entreating—succor from yet another
monkish king, the holy Lewis of that realm. Eh, what is God about
when He enthrones these whining pieties! Were I a king, were I even
a man, I would drive these smug English out of their foggy isle in
three days’ space! I would leave alive not one of these curs
that dare yelp at me! I would—” She paused, anger
veering into amusement. “See how I enrage myself when I think
of what your people have made me suffer,” the Queen said, and
shrugged her shoulders. “In effect, I skulked back in disguise
to this detestable island, accompanied by Avenel de Giars and Hubert
Fitz-Herveis. To-night some half-dozen fellows—robbers,
thorough knaves, like all you English,—attacked us on the
common yonder and slew the men of our party. While they were cutting
de Giars’ throat I slipped away in the dark and tumbled
through many ditches till I spied your light. There you have my
story. Now get me an escort to Bristol.”

It was a long while before Messire Heleigh spoke. Then,
“These men,” he said—“this de Giars and this
Fitz-Herveis—they gave their lives for yours, as I understand
it,—pro caris amicis. And yet you do not grieve for
them.”

“I shall regret de Giars,” the Queen acknowledged,
“for he made excellent songs. But Fitz-Herveis?—foh! the
man had a face like a horse.” Again her mood changed.
“Many persons have died for me, my friend. At first I wept for
them, but now I am dry of tears.”

He shook his head. “Cato very wisely says, ‘If thou
hast need of help, ask it of thy friends.’ But the sweet friend that
I remember was a clean eyed girl, joyous and exceedingly beautiful.
Now you appear to me one of those ladies of remoter
times—Faustina, or Jael, or Artemis, the King’s wife of
Tauris,—they that slew men, laughing. I am somewhat afraid of
you, madame.”

She was angry at first; then her face softened. “You
English!” she said, only half mirthful. “Eh, my God! you
remember me when I was a high hearted young sorceress. Now the
powers of the Apsarasas have departed from me, and time has thrust
that Alianora, who was once the Unattainable Princess, chin deep in
misery. Yet even now I am your Queen, messire, and it is not yours
to pass judgment upon me.” “I do not judge you,”
he returned. “Rather I cry with him of old, Omnia incerta
ratione! and I cry with Salomon that he who meddles with the
strife of another man is like to him that takes a hound by the ears.
Yet listen, madame and Queen. I cannot afford you an escort to
Bristol. This house, of which I am in temporary charge, is
Longaville, my brother’s manor. Lord Brudenel, as you doubtless
know, is of the barons’ party and—scant cause for
grief!—is with Leicester at this moment. I can trust none of
my brother’s people, for I believe them to be of much the same
opinion as those Londoners who not long ago stoned you and would
have sunk your barge in Thames River. Oh, let us not blink the fact
that you are not overbeloved in England. So an escort is out of the
question. Yet I, madame, if you so elect, will see you safe to
Bristol.”

“You? Singly?” the Queen demanded.

“My plan is this: Singing folk alone travel whither they
will. We will go as jongleurs, then. I can yet manage a song to the
viol, I dare affirm. And you must pass as my wife.”

He said this with simplicity. The plan seemed unreasonable, and
at first Dame Alianora waved it aside. Out of the question! But
reflection suggested nothing better; it was impossible to remain at
Longaville, and the man spoke sober truth when he declared any
escort other than himself to be unprocurable. Besides, the lunar
madness of the scheme was its strength; that the Queen would venture
to cross half England unprotected—and Messire Heleigh on the
face of him was a paste-board buckler—was an event which
Leicester would neither anticipate nor on report credit. There you
were! these English had no imagination. The Queen snapped her
fingers and said: “Very willingly will I be your wife, my
Osmund. But how do I know that I can trust you? Leicester would give
a deal for me; he would pay any price for the pious joy of burning
the Sorceress of Provence. And you are not wealthy, I
suspect.”

“You may trust me, mon bel esper,”—his eyes
here were those of a beaten child—“because my memory is
better than yours.” Messire Osmund Heleigh gathered his papers
into a neat pile. “This room is mine. To-night I keep guard in
the corridor, madame. We will start at dawn.”

When he had gone, Dame Alianora laughed contentedly. “Mon
bel esper! my fairest hope! The man called me that in his
verses—thirty years ago! Yes, I may trust you, my poor
Osmund.”

So they set out at cockcrow. He had procured for himself a viol and
a long falchion, and had somewhere got suitable clothes for the Queen;
and in their aging but decent garb the two approached near enough to the
appearance of what they desired to be thought. In the courtyard a knot
of servants gaped, nudged one another, but openly said nothing. Messire
Heleigh, as they interpreted it, was brazening out an affair of
gallantry before the countryside; and they esteemed his casual
observation that they would find a couple of dead men on the common
exceedingly diverting.

When the Queen asked him the same morning, “And what will
you sing, my Osmund? Shall we begin the practise of our new
profession with the Sestina of Spring?”—old Osmund
Heleigh grunted out: “I have forgotten that rubbish long ago.
Omnis amans, amens, saith the satirist of Rome town, and with
reason.”

Followed silence.

One sees them thus trudging the brown, naked plains under a sky
of steel. In a pageant the woman, full-veined and comely, her russet
gown girded up like a harvester’s might not inaptly have
prefigured October; and for less comfortable November you could
nowhere have found a symbol more precise than her lank companion,
humorously peevish under his white thatch of hair, and constantly
fretted by the sword tapping at his ankles.

They made Hurlburt prosperously and found it vacant, for the
news of Falmouth’s advance had driven the villagers hillward.
There was in this place a child, a naked boy of some two years,
lying on a doorstep, overlooked in his elders’ gross terror.
As the Queen with a sob lifted this boy the child died.

“Starved!” said Osmund Heleigh; “and within a
stone’s throw of my snug home!”

The Queen laid down the tiny corpse, and, stooping, lightly
caressed its sparse flaxen hair. She answered nothing, though her
lips moved.

Past Vachel, scene of a recent skirmish, with many dead in the
gutters, they were overtaken by Falmouth himself, and stood at the
roadside to afford his troop passage. The Marquess, as he went by, flung
the Queen a coin, with a jest sufficiently high flavored. She knew the
man her inveterate enemy, knew that on recognition he would have killed
her as he would a wolf; she smiled at him and dropped a curtsey.

“This is remarkable,” Messire Heleigh observed. “I was hideously
afraid, and am yet shaking. But you, madame, laughed.”

The Queen replied: “I laughed because I know that some day I shall
have Lord Falmouth’s head. It will be very sweet to see it roll in the
dust, my Osmund.”

Messire Heleigh somewhat dryly observed that tastes differed.

At Jessop Minor befell a more threatening adventure. Seeking food at
the Cat and Hautbois in that village, they blundered upon the
same troop at dinner in the square about the inn. Falmouth and his
lieutenants were somewhere inside the house. The men greeted the
supposed purveyors of amusement with a shout; and one of these
soldiers—a swarthy rascal with his head tied in a
napkin—demanded that the jongleurs grace their meal with a song.

Osmund tried to put him off with a tale of a broken viol.

But, “Haro!” the fellow blustered; “by blood
and by nails! you will sing more sweetly with a broken viol than
with a broken head. I would have you understand, you hedge thief,
that we gentlemen of the sword are not partial to wordy
argument.” Messire Heleigh fluttered inefficient hands as the
men-at-arms gathered about them, scenting some genial piece of
cruelty. “Oh, you rabbit!” the trooper jeered, and
caught at Osmund’s throat, shaking him. In the act this rascal
tore open Messire Heleigh’s tunic, disclosing a thin chain
about his neck and a handsome locket, which the fellow wrested from
its fastening. “Ahoi!” he continued. “Ahoi, my
comrades, what sort of minstrel is this, who goes about England all
hung with gold like a Cathedral Virgin! He and his
sweetheart”—the actual word was
grosser—“will be none the worse for an interview with
the Marquess.”

The situation smacked of awkwardness, because Lord Falmouth was
familiar with the Queen, and to be brought specifically to his
attention meant death for two detected masqueraders. Hastily Osmund
Heleigh said:

“Messire, the locket contains the portrait of a lady whom
in my youth I loved very greatly. Save to me, it is valueless. I
pray you, do not rob me of it.”

But the trooper shook his head with drunken solemnity. “I
do not like the looks of this. Yet I will sell it to you, as the
saying is, for a song.”

“It shall be the king of songs,” said
Osmund,—“the song that Arnaut Daniel first made. I will
sing for you a Sestina, messieurs,—a Sestina in salutation of
Spring.”

The men disposed themselves about the dying grass, and presently
he sang.

Sang Messire Heleigh:

Osmund paused here for an appreciable interval, staring at the Queen.
You saw his flabby throat a-quiver, his eyes melting, saw his cheeks
kindle, and youth seeping into the lean man like water over a crumbling
dam. His voice was now big and desirous.

Sang Messire Heleigh:

Then Osmund put the viol aside and sat quite silent. The
soldiery judged, and with cordial frankness stated, that the
difficulty of his rhyming scheme did not atone for his lack of
indecency, but when the Queen of England went among them with
Messire Heleigh’s faded green hat she found them liberal. Even
the fellow with the broken head admitted that a bargain was
proverbially a bargain, and returned the locket with the addition of
a coin. So for the present these two went safe, and quitted the
Cat and Hautbois fed and unmolested.

“My Osmund,” Dame Alianora said, presently,
“your memory is better than I had thought.”

“I remembered a boy and a girl,” he returned.
“And I grieved that they were dead.”

Afterward they plodded on toward Bowater, and the ensuing night
rested in Chantrell Wood. They had the good fortune there to
encounter dry and windless weather and a sufficiency of brushwood,
with which Osmund constructed an agreeable fire. In its glow these
two sat, eating bread and cheese.

But talk languished at the outset. The Queen had complained of
an ague, and Messire Heleigh was sedately suggesting three spiders
hung about the neck as an infallible corrective for this ailment,
when Dame Alianora rose to her feet. “Eh, my God!” she
said; “I am wearied of such ungracious aid! Not an inch of the
way but you have been thinking of your filthy books and longing to
be back at them! No; I except the moments when you were frightened
into forgetfulness—first by Falmouth, then by the trooper. O
Eternal Father! afraid of a single dirty soldier!”

“Indeed, I was very much afraid,” said Messire
Heleigh, with perfect simplicity; “timidus perire,
madame.”

“You have not even the grace to be ashamed! Yet I am
shamed, messire, that Osmund Heleigh should have become the
book-muddled pedant you are. For I loved young Osmund
Heleigh.”

He also had risen in the firelight, and now its convulsive
shadows marred two dogged faces. “I think it best not to
recall that boy and girl who are so long dead. And, frankly, madame
and Queen, the merit of the business I have in hand is questionable.
It is you who have set all England by the ears, and I am guiding you
toward opportunities for further mischief. I must serve you.
Understand, madame, that ancient folly in Provence yonder has
nothing to do with the affair. Count Manuel left you: and between
his evasion and your marriage you were pleased to amuse yourself
with me—”

“You were more civil then, my Osmund—”

“I am not uncivil, I merely point out that this old folly
constitutes no overwhelming obligation, either way. I cry nihil
ad Andromachen! For the rest, I must serve you because you are a
woman and helpless; yet I cannot forget that he who spares the wolf
is the sheep’s murderer. It would be better for all England if
you were dead. Hey, your gorgeous follies, madame! Silver peacocks
set with sapphires! Cloth of fine gold—”

“Would you have me go unclothed?” Dame Alianora
demanded, pettishly.

“Not so,” Osmund retorted; “again I say to you
with Tertullian, ‘Let women paint their eyes with the tints of
chastity, insert into their ears the Word of God, tie the yoke of
Christ about their necks, and adorn their whole person with the silk
of sanctity and the damask of devotion.’ I say to you that the
boy you wish to rescue from Wallingford, and make King of England,
is freely rumored to be not verily the son of Sire Henry but the
child of tall Manuel of Poictesme. I say to you that from the first
you have made mischief in England. And I say to you—”

But Dame Alianora was yawning quite frankly. “You will say
to me that I brought foreigners into England, that I misguided the
King, that I stirred up strife between the King and his barons. Eh,
my God! I am sufficiently familiar with the harangue. Yet listen, my
Osmund: They sold me like a bullock to a man I had never seen. I
found him a man of wax, and I remoulded him. They asked of me an
heir for England: I provided that heir. They gave me England as a
toy; I played with it. I was the Queen, the source of honor, the
source of wealth—the trough, in effect, about which swine
gathered. Never since I came into England, Osmund, has any man or
woman loved me; never in all my English life have I loved man or
woman. Do you understand, my Osmund?—the Queen has many
flatterers, but no friends. Not a friend in the world, my Osmund!
And so the Queen made the best of it and amused herself.”

Somewhat he seemed to understand, for he answered without
asperity:

“Mon bel esper, I do not find it anywhere in Holy Writ
that God requires it of us to amuse ourselves; but upon many
occasions we have been commanded to live righteously. We are tempted
in divers and insidious ways. And we cry with the Psalmist,
‘My strength is dried up like a potsherd.’ But God
intends this, since, until we have here demonstrated our valor upon
Satan, we are manifestly unworthy to be enregistered in God’s
army. The great Captain must be served by proven soldiers. We may be
tempted, but we may not yield. O daughter of the South! we must not
yield!”

“Again you preach,” Dame Alianora said. “That
is a venerable truism.”

“Ho, madame,” he returned, “is it on that
account the less true?”

Pensively the Queen considered this. “You are a good man,
my Osmund,” she said, at last, “though you are very
droll. Ohimé! it is a pity that I was born a princess! Had it
been possible for me to be your wife, I would have been a better
woman. I shall sleep now and dream of that good and stupid and
contented woman I might have been.” So presently these two
slept in Chantrell Wood.

Followed four days of journeying. As Messer Dante had not yet
surveyed Malebolge, Osmund Heleigh and Dame Alianora lacked a
parallel for that which they encountered; their traverse discovered
England razed, charred, and depopulate—picked bones of an
island, a vast and absolute ruin about which passion-wasted men
skulked like rats. Messire Heleigh and the Queen traveled without
molestation; malice and death had journeyed before them on this
road, and had swept it clear.

At every trace of these hideous precessors Osmund Heleigh would
say, “By a day’s ride I might have prevented
this.” Or, “By a day’s ride I might have saved
this woman.” Or, “By two days’ riding I might have
fed this child.”

The Queen kept Spartan silence, but daily you saw the fine woman
age. In their slow advance every inch of misery was thrust before
her for inspection; meticulously she observed and evaluated her
handiwork. Enthroned, she had appraised from a distance the
righteous wars she set afoot; trudging thus among the débris
of these wars, she found they had unsuspected aspects. Bastling the
royal army had recently sacked. There remained of this village the
skeletons of two houses, and for the rest a jumble of bricks,
rafters half-burned, many calcined fragments of humanity, and ashes.
At Bastling, Messire Heleigh turned to the Queen toiling behind.

“Oh, madame!” he said, in a dry whisper, “this
was the home of so many men!”

“I burned it,” Dame Alianora replied. “That
man we passed just now I killed. Those other men and women—my
folly slew them all. And little children, my Osmund! The hair like
flax, blood-dabbled!”

“Oh, madame!” he wailed, in the extremity of his
pity.

For she stood with eyes shut, all gray. The Queen demanded:
“Why have they not slain me? Was there no man in England to
strangle the proud wanton? Are you all cowards here?”

He said: “I detect only one coward in the affair. Your men
and Leicester’s men also ride about the world, and draw sword
and slay and die for the right as they see it. And you and Leicester
contend for the right as ye see it. But I, madame! I! I, who sat
snug at home spilling ink and trimming rose-bushes! God’s
world, madame, and I in it afraid to speak a word for Him!
God’s world, and a curmudgeon in it grudging God the life He
gave!” The man flung out his soft hands and snarled:
“We are tempted in divers and insidious ways. But I,
who rebuked you! behold, now, with how gross a snare was I
entrapped!” “I do not understand, my Osmund.”

“I was afraid, madame,” he returned, dully.
“Everywhere men fight, and I am afraid to die.”

So they stood silent in the ruins of Bastling.

“Of a piece with our lives,” Dame Alianora said at
last. “All ruin, my Osmund.”

But Messire Heleigh threw back his head and laughed, new color
in his face. “Presently men will build here, my Queen.
Presently, as in legend was re-born the Arabian bird, arises from
these ashes a lordlier and more spacious town.”

They went forward. The next day chance loosed upon them Gui
Camoys, lord of Bozon, Foliot, and Thwenge, who, riding alone
through Poges Copse, found there a man and a woman over their
limited supper. The woman had thrown back her hood, and Camoys drew
rein to stare at her. Lispingly he spoke the true court dialect.

“Ma belle,” said this Camoys, in friendly
condescension, “n’estez vous pas jongleurs?”

Dame Alianora smiled up at him. “Ouais, messire; mon mary
faict les chançons—” She paused, with dilatory
caution, for Camoys had leaped from his horse, giving a great laugh.

“A prize! ho, an imperial prize!” Camoys shouted.
“A peasant woman with the Queen’s face, who speaks
French! And who, madame, is this? Have you by any chance brought
pious Lewis from oversea? Have I bagged a brace of monarchs?”

Here was imminent danger, for Camoys had known the Queen some
fifteen years. Messire Heleigh rose, his five days’ beard
glinting like hoar-frost as his mouth twitched.

“I am Osmund Heleigh, messire, younger brother to the Earl
of Brudenel.”

“I have heard of you, I believe—the fellow who
spoils parchment. This is odd company, however, Messire Osmund, for
Brudenel’s brother.”

“A gentleman must serve his Queen, messire. As Cicero very
justly observes—”

“I am inclined to think that his political opinions are
scarcely to our immediate purpose. This is a high matter, Messire
Heleigh. To let the sorceress pass is, of course, out of the
question; upon the other hand, I observe that you lack weapons of
defence. Yet if you will have the kindness to assist me in unarming,
your courtesy will place our commerce on more equal footing.”

Osmund had turned very white. “I am no swordsman,
messire—”

“Now, this is not handsome of you,” Camoys began.
“I warn you that people will speak harshly of us if we lose
this opportunity of gaining honor. And besides, the woman will be
burned at the stake. Plainly, you owe it to all three of us to
fight.”

“—But I refer my cause to God. I am quite at your
service.” “No, my Osmund!” Dame Alianora then
cried. “It means your death.”

He spread out his hands. “That is God’s affair,
madame.”

“Are you not afraid?” she breathed.

“Of course I am afraid,” said Messire Heleigh,
irritably.

After that he unarmed Camoys, and presently they faced each
other in their tunics. So for the first time in the journey
Osmund’s long falchion saw daylight. He had thrown away his
dagger, as Camoys had none.

The combat was sufficiently curious. Camoys raised his left
hand. “So help me God and His saints, I have upon me neither
bone, stone, nor witchcraft wherethrough the power and the word of
God might be diminished or the devil’s power increased.”

Osmund made similar oath. “Judge Thou this woman’s
cause!” he cried, likewise.

Then Gui Camoys shouted, as a herald might have done,
“Laissez les aller, laissez les aller, laissez les aller, les
bons combatants!” and warily each moved toward the other.

On a sudden Osmund attacked, desperately apprehensive of his own
cowardice. Camoys lightly eluded him and slashed at Osmund’s
undefended thigh, drawing much blood. Osmund gasped. He flung away
his sword, and in the instant catching Camoys under the arms, threw
him to the ground. Messire Heleigh fell with his opponent, who in
stumbling had lost his sword, and thus the two struggled unarmed,
Osmund atop. But Camoys was the younger man, and Osmund’s
strength was ebbing rapidly by reason of his wound. Now
Camoys’ tethered horse, rearing with nervousness, tumbled his
master’s flat-topped helmet into the road. Osmund caught up
this helmet and with it battered Camoys in the face, dealing severe
blows.

“God!” Camoys cried, his face all blood.

“Do you acknowledge my quarrel just?” said Osmund,
between horrid sobs.

“What choice have I?” said Gui Camoys, very
sensibly.

So Osmund rose, blind with tears and shivering. The Queen bound
up their wounds as best she might, but Camoys was much dissatisfied.

“For private purposes of His own, madame,” he
observed, “and doubtless for sufficient reasons, God has
singularly favored your cause. I am neither a fool nor a pagan to
question His decision, and you two may go your way unhampered. But I
have had my head broken with my own helmet, and this I consider to
be a proceeding very little conducive toward enhancing my
reputation. Of your courtesy, messire, I must entreat another
meeting.”

Osmund shrank as if from a blow. Then, with a short laugh, he
conceded that this was Camoys’ right, and they fixed upon the
following Saturday, with Poges Copse as the rendezvous.

“I would suggest that the combat be to the death,”
Gui Camoys said, “in consideration of the fact it was my own
helmet. You must undoubtedly be aware, Messire Osmund, that such an
affront is practically without any parallel.”

This, too, was agreed upon.

Then, after asking if they needed money, which was courteously
declined, Gui Camoys rode away, and sang as he went. Osmund Heleigh
remained motionless. He raised quivering hands to the sky.

“Thou hast judged!” he cried. “Thou hast
judged, O puissant Emperor of Heaven! Now pardon! Pardon us twain!
Pardon for unjust stewards of Thy gifts! Thou hast loaned this woman
dominion over England, with all instruments to aid Thy cause, and
this trust she has abused. Thou hast loaned me life and manhood,
agility and wit and strength, all instruments to aid Thy cause.
Talents in a napkin, O God! Repentant we cry to Thee. Pardon for
unjust stewards! Pardon for the ungirt loin, for the service
shirked, for all good deeds undone! Pardon and grace, O King of
kings!”

Thus he prayed, while Gui Camoys sang, riding deeper into the
tattered, yellowing forest. By an odd chance Camoys had lighted on
that song made by Thibaut of Champagne, beginning Signor, saciez,
ki or ne s’en ira, which denounces all half-hearted
servitors of Heaven; and this he sang with a lilt gayer than his
matter countenanced. Faintly there now came to Osmund and the Queen
the sound of Camoys’ singing, and they found it, in the
circumstances, ominously apt.

Sang Camoys:

Dame Alianora shivered. But she was a capable woman, and so she
said: “I may have made mistakes. But I am sure I never meant
any harm, and I am sure, too, that God will be more sensible about
it than are you poets.”

They slept that night in Ousley Meadow, and the next afternoon
came safely to Bristol. You may learn elsewhere with what rejoicing
the royal army welcomed the Queen’s arrival, how courage
quickened at sight of the generous virago. In the ebullition Messire
Heleigh was submerged, and Dame Alianora saw nothing more of him
that day. Friday there were counsels, requisitions, orders signed, a
memorial despatched to Pope Urban, chief of all a letter (this in
the Queen’s hand throughout) privily conveyed to the Lady
Maude de Mortemer, who shortly afterward contrived Prince
Edward’s escape from her husband’s gaolership. There was
much sowing of a seed, in fine, that eventually flowered victory.
There was, however, no sign of Osmund Heleigh, though by Dame
Alianora’s order he was sought.

On Saturday at seven in the morning he came to her lodging, in
complete armor. From the open helmet his wrinkled face, showing like
a wizened nut in a shell, smiled upon her questionings.

“I go to fight Gui Camoys, madame and Queen.”

Dame Alianora wrung her hands. “You go to your
death.”

He answered: “That is true. Therefore I am come to bid you
farewell.”

The Queen stared at him for a while; on a sudden she broke into
a curious fit of deep but tearless sobbing, which bordered upon
laughter, too.

“Mon bel esper,” said Osmund Heleigh, gently,
“what is there in all this worthy of your sorrow? The man will
kill me; granted, for he is my junior by some fifteen years, and is
in addition a skilled swordsman. I fail to see that this is
lamentable. Back to Longaville I cannot go after recent happenings;
there a rope’s end awaits me. Here I must in any event shortly
take to the sword, since a beleaguered army has very little need of
ink-pots; and shortly I must be slain in some skirmish, dug under
the ribs perhaps by a greasy fellow I have never seen. I prefer a
clean death at a gentleman’s hands.”

“It is I who bring about your death!” she said.
“You gave me gallant service, and I have requited you with
death, and it is a great pity.”

“Indeed the debt is on the other side. The trivial
services I rendered you were such as any gentleman must render a
woman in distress. Naught else have I afforded you, madame, save
very anciently a Sestina. Ho, a Sestina! And in return you have
given me a Sestina of fairer make,—a Sestina of days, six days
of manly common living.” His eyes were fervent.

She kissed him on either cheek. “Farewell, my
champion!”

“Ay, your champion. In the twilight of life old Osmund
Heleigh rides forth to defend the quarrel of Alianora of Provence.
Reign wisely, my Queen, so that hereafter men may not say I was
slain in an evil cause. Do not, I pray you, shame my maiden venture
at a man’s work.”

“I will not shame you,” the Queen proudly said; and
then, with a change of voice: “O my Osmund! My Osmund, you
have a folly that is divine, and I lack it.”

He caught her by each wrist, and stood crushing both her hands
to his lips, with fierce staring. “Wife of my King! wife of my
King!” he babbled; and then put her from him, crying, “I
have not failed you! Praise God, I have not failed you!”

From her window she saw him ride away, a rich flush of glitter
and color. In new armor with a smart emblazoned surcoat the lean
pedant sat conspicuously erect; and as he went he sang defiantly,
taunting the weakness of his flesh.

Sang Osmund Heleigh:

So he rode away and thus out of our history. But in the evening Gui
Camoys came into Bristol under a flag of truce, and behind him heaved a
litter wherein lay Osmund Heleigh’s body.

“For this man was frank and courteous,” Camoys said
to the Queen, “and in the matter of the reparation he owed me
acted very handsomely. It is fitting that he should have honorable
interment.”

“That he shall not lack,” the Queen said, and gently
unclasped from Osmund’s wrinkled neck the thin gold chain, now
locketless. “There was a portrait here,” she said;
“the portrait of a woman whom he loved in his youth, Messire
Camoys. And all his life it lay above his heart.”

Camoys answered stiffly: “I imagine this same locket to
have been the object which Messire Heleigh flung into the river,
shortly before we began our combat. I do not rob the dead,
madame.”

“Well,” the Queen said, “he always did queer
things, and so, I shall always wonder what sort of lady he picked
out to love, but it is none of my affair.”

Afterward she set to work on requisitions in the King’s
name. But Osmund Heleigh she had interred at Ambresbury, commanding
it to be written on his tomb that he died in the Queen’s
cause.

How the same cause prospered (Nicolas concludes), how presently
Dame Alianora reigned again in England and with what wisdom, and how
in the end this great Queen died a nun at Ambresbury and all England
wept therefor—this you may learn elsewhere. I have chosen to
record six days of a long and eventful life; and (as Messire Heleigh
might have done) I say modestly with him of old, Majores majora
sonent. Nevertheless, I assert that many a forest was once a
pocketful of acorns.

THE END OF THE FIRST NOVEL

The Story of the Tenson

In the year of grace 1265 (Nicolas begins), about the festival
of Saint Peter ad Vincula, the Prince de Gâtinais came
to Burgos. Before this he had lodged for three months in the
district of Ponthieu; and the object of his southern journey was to
assure the tenth Alphonso, then ruling in Castile, that the
latter’s sister Ellinor, now resident at Entréchat, was
beyond any reasonable doubt the transcendent lady whose existence
old romancers had anticipated, however cloudily, when they fabled in
remote time concerning Queen Heleine of Sparta.

There was a postscript to this news. The world knew that the
King of Leon and Castile desired to be King of Germany as well, and
that at present a single vote in the Diet would decide between his
claims and those of his competitor, Earl Richard of Cornwall. De
Gâtinais chaffered fairly; he had a vote, Alphonso had a
sister. So that, in effect—ohé, in effect, he made no
question that his Majesty understood!

The Astronomer twitched his beard and demanded if the fact that
Ellinor had been a married woman these ten years past was not an
obstacle to the plan which his fair cousin had proposed?

Here the Prince was accoutred cap-à-pie, and hauled out a
paper. Dating from Viterbo, Clement, Bishop of Rome, servant to the
servants of God, desirous of all health and apostolical blessing for
his well-beloved son in Christ, stated that a compact between a boy
of fifteen and a girl of ten was an affair of no particular moment;
and that in consideration of the covenantors never having clapped
eyes upon each other since the wedding-day,—even had not the
precontract of marriage between the groom’s father and the
bride’s mother rendered a consummation of the childish oath an
obvious and a most heinous enormity,—why, that, in a sentence,
and for all his coy verbosity, the new pontiff was perfectly
amenable to reason.

So in a month it was settled. Alphonso would give his sister to
de Gâtinais, and in exchange get the latter’s vote to
make Alphonso King of Germany; and Gui Foulques of
Sabionetta—now Clement, fourth Pope to assume that
name—would annul the previous marriage, and in exchange get an
armament to serve him against Manfred, the late and troublesome
tyrant of Sicily and Apulia. The scheme promised to each one of them
that which he in particular desired, and messengers were presently
sent into Ponthieu.

It is now time we put aside these Castilian matters and speak of
other things. In England, Prince Edward had fought, and won, a
shrewd battle at Evesham. People said, of course, that such behavior
was less in the manner of his nominal father, King Henry, than
reminiscent of Count Manuel of Poictesme, whose portraits certainly
the Prince resembled to an embarrassing extent. Either way, the
barons’ power was demolished, there would be no more
internecine war; and spurred by the unaccustomed idleness, Prince
Edward began to think of the foreign girl he had not seen since the
day he wedded her. She would be a woman by this, and it was
befitting that he claim his wife. He rode with Hawise Bulmer and her
baby to Ambresbury, and at the gate of the nunnery they parted, with
what agonies are immaterial to this history’s progression; the
tale merely tells that, having thus decorously rid himself of his
mistress, the Prince went into Lower Picardy alone, riding at
adventure as he loved to do, and thus came to Entréchat,
where his wife resided with her mother, the Countess Johane.

In a wood near the castle he approached a company of Spaniards,
four in number, their horses tethered while these men (Oviedans, as
they told him) drank about a great stone which served them for a
table. Being thirsty, he asked and was readily accorded hospitality,
and these five fell into amicable discourse. One fellow asked his
name and business in those parts, and the Prince gave each without
hesitancy as he reached for the bottle, and afterward dropped it
just in time to catch, cannily, with his naked left hand, the
knife-blade with which the rascal had dug at the unguarded ribs. The
Prince was astounded, but he was never a subtle man: here were four
knaves who, for reasons unexplained—but to them of undoubted
cogency—desired his death: manifestly there was here an
actionable difference of opinion; so he had his sword out and killed
the four of them.

Presently came to him an apple-cheeked boy, habited as a page,
who, riding jauntily through the forest, lighted upon the Prince,
now in bottomless vexation. The lad drew rein, and his lips outlined
a whistle. At his feet were several dead men in various conditions
of dismemberment. And seated among them, as if throned upon this
boulder, was a gigantic and florid person, so tall that the heads of
few men reached to his shoulder; a person of handsome exterior,
high-featured and blond, having a narrow, small head, and vivid
light blue eyes, and the chest of a stallion; a person whose left
eyebrow had an odd oblique droop, so that the stupendous man
appeared to be winking the information that he was in jest.

“Fair friend,” said the page. “God give you
joy! and why have you converted this forest into a shambles?”

The Prince told him as much of the half-hour’s action as
has been narrated. “I have perhaps been rather hasty,”
he considered, by way of peroration, “and it vexes me that I
did not spare, say, one of these lank Spaniards, if only long enough
to ascertain why, in the name of Termagaunt, they should have
desired my destruction.”

But midway in his tale the boy had dismounted with a gasp, and
he was now inspecting the features of one carcass. “Felons, my
Prince! You have slain some eight yards of felony which might have
cheated the gallows had they got the Princess Ellinor safe to
Burgos. Only two days ago this chalk-eyed fellow conveyed to her a
letter.”

Prince Edward said, “You appear, lad, to be somewhat
overheels in the confidence of my wife.”

Now the boy arose and defiantly flung back his head in shrill
laughter. “Your wife! Oh, God have mercy! Your wife, and for
ten years left to her own devices! Why, look you, to-day you and
your wife would not know each other were you two brought face to
face.”

Prince Edward said, “That is very near the truth.”
But, indeed, it was the absolute truth, and as it concerned him was
already attested.

“Sire Edward,” the boy then said, “your wife
has wearied of this long waiting till you chose to whistle for her.
Last summer the young Prince de Gâtinais came
a-wooing—and he is a handsome man.” The page made known
all which de Gâtinais and King Alphonso planned, the words
jostling as they came in torrents, but so that one might understand.
“I am her page, my lord. I was to follow her. These fellows
were to be my escort, were to ward off possible pursuit. Cry haro,
beau sire! Cry haro, and shout it lustily, for your wife in company
with six other knaves is at large between here and
Burgos,—that unreasonable wife who grew dissatisfied after a
mere ten years of neglect.”

“I have been remiss,” the Prince said, and one huge
hand strained at his chin; “yes, perhaps I have been remiss.
Yet it had appeared to me—But as it is, I bid you mount, my
lad!”

The boy demanded, “And to what end?”

“Oy Dieus, messire! have I not slain your escort? Why, in
common reason, equity demands that I afford you my protection so far
as Burgos, messire, just as plainly as equity demands I slay de
Gâtinais and fetch back my wife to England.”

The page wrung exquisite hands with a gesture which was but
partially tinged with anguish, and presently began to laugh.
Afterward these two rode southerly, in the direction of Castile.

For it appeared to the intriguing little woman a diverting jest
that in this fashion her husband should be the promoter of her
evasion. It appeared to her more diverting when in two days’
space she had become fond of him. She found him rather slow of
comprehension, and she was humiliated by the discovery that not an
eyelash of the man was irritated by his wife’s decampment; he
considered, to all appearances, that some property of his had been
stolen, and he intended, quite without passion, to repossess himself
of it, after, of course, punishing the thief.

This troubled the Princess somewhat; and often, riding by her
stolid husband’s side, the girl’s heart raged at memory
of the decade so newly overpast which had kept her always dependent
on the charity of this or that ungracious patron—on any one
who would take charge of her while the truant husband fought out his
endless squabbles in England. Slights enough she had borne during
the period, and squalor, and physical hunger also she had known, who
was the child of a king and a saint.² But
now she rode toward the dear southland; and presently she would be
rid of this big man, when he had served her purpose; and afterward
she meant to wheedle Alphonso, just as she had always wheedled him,
and later still, she and Etienne would be very happy: in fine,
to-morrow was to be a new day.

So these two rode southward, and always Prince Edward found this
new page of his—this Miguel de Rueda,—a jolly lad, who
whistled and sang inapposite snatches of balladry, without any
formal ending or beginning, descanting always with the delicate
irrelevancy of a bird-trill.

Sang Miguel de Rueda:

“And still I would prefer to think,” the big man
interrupted, heavily, “that Sicily is not the only allure. I
would prefer to think my wife so beautiful.—And yet, as I
remember her, she was nothing extraordinary.”

The page a little tartly said that people might forget a deal
within a decade.

The Prince continued his unriddling of the scheme hatched in
Castile. “When Manfred is driven out of Sicily they will give
the throne to de Gâtinais. He intends to get both a kingdom
and a handsome wife by this neat affair. And in reason, England must
support my Uncle Richard’s claim to the German crown, against
El Sabio—Why, my lad, I ride southward to prevent a war that
would devastate half Europe.”

“You ride southward in the attempt to rob a miserable
woman of her sole chance of happiness,” Miguel de Rueda
estimated.

“That is undeniable, if she loves this thrifty Prince, as
indeed I do not question my wife does. Yet our happiness here is a
trivial matter, whereas war is a great disaster. You have not
seen—as I, my little Miguel, have often seen—a man
viewing his death-wound with a face of stupid wonder, a bewildered
wretch in point to die in his lord’s quarrel and understanding
never a word of it. Or a woman, say—a woman’s twisted
and naked body, the breasts yet horribly heaving, in the red ashes
of some village, or the already dripping hoofs which will presently
crush this body. Well, it is to prevent many such ugly spectacles
hereabout that I ride southward.”

Miguel de Rueda shuddered. But, “She has her right to
happiness,” the page stubbornly said.

“She has only one right,” the Prince retorted;
“because it has pleased the Emperor of Heaven to appoint us
twain to lofty stations, to entrust to us the five talents of the
parable; whence is our debt to Him, being fivefold, so much the
greater than that of common persons. Therefore the more is it our
sole right, being fivefold, to serve God without faltering, and
therefore is our happiness, or our unhappiness, the more an
inconsiderable matter. For, as I have read in the Annals of the
Romans—” He launched upon the story of King Pompey and
his daughter, whom a certain duke regarded with impure and improper
emotions. “My little Miguel, that ancient king is our Heavenly
Father, that only daughter is the rational soul of us, which is here
delivered for protection to five soldiers—that is, to the five
senses,—to preserve it from the devil, the world, and the
flesh. But, alas! the too-credulous soul, desirous of gazing upon
the gaudy vapors of this world—”

“You whine like a canting friar,” the page
complained; “and I can assure you that the Lady Ellinor was
prompted rather than hindered by her God-given faculties of sight
and hearing and so on when she fell in love with de Gâtinais.
Of you two, he is, beyond any question, the handsomer and the more
intelligent man, and it was God who bestowed on her sufficient wit
to perceive the superiority of de Gâtinais. And what am I to
deduce from this?”

The Prince reflected. At last he said: “I have also read
in these same Gestes how Seneca mentions that in poisoned bodies, on
account of the malignancy and the coldness of the poison, no worm
will engender; but if the body be smitten by lightning, in a few
days the carcass will abound with vermin. My little Miguel, both men
and women are at birth empoisoned by sin, and then they produce no
worm—that is, no virtue. But once they are struck with
lightning—that is, by the grace of God,—they are
astonishingly fruitful in good works.”

The page began to laugh. “You are hopelessly absurd, my
Prince, though you will never know it,—and I hate you a
little,—and I envy you a great deal.”

“Ah, but,” Prince Edward said, in misapprehension,
for the man was never quick-witted,—“but it is not for
my own happiness that I ride southward.”

The page then said, “What is her name?”

Prince Edward answered, very fondly, “Hawise.”

“I hate her, too,” said Miguel de Rueda; “and
I think that the holy angels alone know how profoundly I envy
her.”

In the afternoon of the same day they neared Ruffec, and at the
ford found three brigands ready, two of whom the Prince slew, and
the other fled.

Next night they supped at Manneville, and sat afterward in the
little square, tree-chequered, that lay before their inn. Miguel had
procured a lute from the innkeeper, and he strummed idly as these
two debated together of great matters; about them was an
immeasurable twilight, moonless, but tempered by many stars, and
everywhere they could hear an agreeable whispering of leaves.

“Listen, my Prince,” the boy said: “here is
one view of the affair.” And he began to chant, without
rhyming, without raising his voice above the pitch of talk, while
the lute monotonously accompanied his chanting.

Sang Miguel:

Followed a silence. “Ignorance spoke there,” the
Prince said. “It is the song of a woman, or else of a boy who
is very young. Give me the lute, my little Miguel.” And
presently the Prince, too, sang.

Sang the Prince:

Again there was a silence. “You paint a dreary world, my
Prince.”

“My little Miguel, I paint the world as the Eternal Father
made it. The laws of the place are written large, so that all may
read them; and we know that every road, whether it be my trodden
path or some byway through your gayer meadows, yet leads in the end
to God. We have our choice,—or to come to Him as a laborer
comes at evening for the day’s wages fairly earned, or to come
as a roisterer haled before the magistrate.”

“I consider you to be in the right,” the boy said,
after a lengthy interval, “although I decline—and
decline emphatically—to believe you.”

The Prince laughed. “There spoke Youth,” he said,
and he sighed as though he were a patriarch. “But we have
sung, we two, the Eternal Tenson of God’s will and of
man’s desires. And I claim the prize, my Little Miguel.”

Suddenly the page kissed one huge hand. “You have
conquered, my very dull and very glorious Prince. Concerning that
Hawise—” But Miguel de Rueda choked. “Oh, I do not
understand! and yet in part I understand!” the boy wailed in
the darkness.

And the Prince laid one hand upon his page’s hair, and
smiled in the darkness to note how soft was this hair, since the man
was less a fool than at first view you might have taken him to be;
and he said:

“One must play the game out fairly, my lad. We are no
little people, she and I, the children of many kings, of God’s
regents here on earth; and it was never reasonable, my Miguel, that
gentlefolk should cheat at their dicing.”

The same night Miguel de Rueda repeated the prayer which Saint
Theophilus made long ago to the Mother of God:

and so on. Or, in other wording: “Hearken, O gracious
Lady! thou that art more fair than any flower of the eglantine, more
comely than the blossoming of the rose or of the lily! thou to whom
was confided the very Son of God! Harken, for I am afraid! afford
counsel to me that am ensnared by Satan and know not what to do!
Never will I make an end of praying. O Virgin débonnaire! O
honored Lady! Thou that wast once a woman—!”

So he prayed, and upon the next day as these two rode southward,
he sang half as if in defiance.

Sang Miguel:

It was on the following day, near Bazas, that these two
encountered Adam de Gourdon, a Provençal knight, with whom
the Prince fought for a long while, without either contestant giving
way; in consequence a rendezvous was fixed for the November of that
year, and afterward the Prince and de Gourdon parted, highly pleased
with each other.

Thus the Prince and his attendant came, in late September, to
Mauléon, on the Castilian frontier, and dined there at the
Fir Cone. Three or four lackeys were about—some exalted
person’s retinue? Prince Edward hazarded to the swart little
landlord, as the Prince and Miguel lingered over the remnants of
their meal.

Yes, the fellow informed them: the Prince de Gâtinais had
lodged there for a whole week, watching the north road, as
circumspect of all passage as a cat over a mouse-hole. Eh,
monseigneur expected some one, doubtless—a lady, it might
be,—the gentlefolk had their escapades like every one else.
The innkeeper babbled vaguely, for on a sudden he was very much
afraid of his gigantic patron.

“You will show me to his room,” Prince Edward said,
with a politeness that was ingratiating.

The host shuddered and obeyed.

Miguel de Rueda, left alone, sat quite silent, his finger-tips
drumming upon the table. He rose suddenly and flung back his
shoulders, all resolution. On the stairway he passed the black
little landlord, who was now in a sad twitter, foreseeing bloodshed.
But Miguel de Rueda went on to the room above. The door was ajar. He
paused there.

De Gâtinais had risen from his dinner and stood facing the
door. He, too, was a blond man and the comeliest of his day. And at
sight of him awoke in the woman’s heart all the old
tenderness; handsome and brave and witty she knew him to be, as
indeed the whole world knew him to be distinguished by every namable
grace; and the innate weakness of de Gâtinais, which she alone
suspected, made him now seem doubly dear. Fiercely she wanted to
shield him, less from bodily hurt than from that self-degradation
which she cloudily apprehended to be at hand; the test was come, and
Etienne would fail. Thus much she knew with a sick, illimitable
surety, and she loved de Gâtinais with a passion which dwarfed
comprehension.

“O Madame the Virgin!” prayed Miguel de Rueda,
“thou that wast once a woman, even as I am now a woman! grant
that the man may slay him quickly! grant that he may slay Etienne
very quickly, honored Lady, so that my Etienne may die
unshamed!”

“I must question, messire,” de Gâtinais was
saying, “whether you have been well inspired. Yes, quite
frankly, I do await the arrival of her who is your nominal wife; and
your intervention at this late stage, I take it, can have no outcome
save to render you absurd. So, come now! be advised by me,
messire—”

Prince Edward said, “I am not here to talk.”

“—For, messire, I grant you that in ordinary
disputation the cutting of one gentleman’s throat by another
gentleman is well enough, since the argument is unanswerable. Yet in
this case we have each of us too much to live for; you to govern
your reconquered England, and I—you perceive that I am
candid—to achieve in turn the kingship of another realm. Now
to secure this realm, possession of the Lady Ellinor is to me
essential; to you she is nothing.”

“She is a woman whom I have deeply wronged,” Prince
Edward said, “and to whom, God willing, I mean to make
atonement. Ten years ago they wedded us, willy-nilly, to avert the
impending war between Spain and England; to-day El Sabio intends to
purchase Germany with her body as the price; you to get Sicily as
her husband. Mort de Dieu! is a woman thus to be bought and sold
like hog’s flesh! We have other and cleaner customs, we of
England.”

“Eh, and who purchased the woman first?” de
Gâtinais spat at him, viciously, for the Frenchman now saw his
air-castle shaken to the corner-stone.

“They wedded me to the child in order that a great war
might be averted. I acquiesced, since it appeared preferable that
two people suffer inconvenience rather than many thousands be slain.
And still this is my view of the matter. Yet afterward I failed her.
Love had no clause in our agreement; but I owed her more protection
than I have afforded. England has long been no place for women. I
thought she would comprehend that much. But I know very little of
women. Battle and death are more wholesome companions, I now
perceive, than such folk as you and Alphonso. Woman is the weaker
vessel—the negligence was mine—I may not blame
her.” The big and simple man was in an agony of repentance.

On a sudden he strode forward, his sword now shifted to his left
hand and his right hand outstretched. “One and all, we are
weaklings in the net of circumstance. Shall one herring, then, blame
his fellow if his fellow jostle him? We walk as in a mist of error,
and Belial is fertile in allurements; yet always it is granted us to
behold that sin is sin. I have perhaps sinned through anger, Messire
de Gâtinais, more deeply than you have planned to sin through
luxury and through ambition. Let us then cry quits, Messire de
Gâtinais, and afterward part in peace, and in common
repentance.”

“And yield you Ellinor?” de Gâtinais said.
“Oh no, messire, I reply to you with Arnaud de Marveil, that
marvellous singer of eld, ‘They may bear her from my presence,
but they can never untie the knot which unites my heart to her; for
that heart, so tender and so constant, God alone divides with my
lady, and the portion which God possesses He holds but as a part of
her domain, and as her vassal.’” “This is
blasphemy,” Prince Edward now retorted, “and for such
observations alone you merit death. Will you always talk and talk
and talk? I perceive that the devil is far more subtle than you,
messire, and leads you, like a pig with a ring in his nose, toward
gross iniquity. Messire, I tell you that for your soul’s
health I doubly mean to kill you now. So let us make an end of
this.”

De Gâtinais turned and took up his sword. “Since you
will have it,” he rather regretfully said; “yet I
reiterate that you play an absurd part. Your wife has deserted you,
has fled in abhorrence of you. For three weeks she has been tramping
God knows whither or in what company—”

He was here interrupted. “What the Lady Ellinor has
done,” Prince Edward crisply said, “was at my request.
We were wedded at Burgos; it was natural that we should desire our
reunion to take place at Burgos; and she came to Burgos with an
escort which I provided.”

De Gâtinais sneered. “So that is the tale you will
deliver to the world?”

“After I have slain you,” the Prince said,
“yes.”

“The reservation is wise. For if I were dead, Messire
Edward, there would be none to know that you risk all for a drained
goblet, for an orange already squeezed—quite dry,
messire.”

“Face of God!” the Prince said.

But de Gâtinais flung back both arms in a great gesture,
so that he knocked a flask of claret from the table at his rear.
“I am candid, my Prince. I would not see any brave gentleman
slain in a cause so foolish. In consequence I kiss and tell. In
effect, I was eloquent, I was magnificent, so that in the end her
reserve was shattered like the wooden flask yonder at our feet. Is
it worth while, think you, that our blood flow like this
flagon’s contents?”

“Liar!” Prince Edward said, very softly. “O
hideous liar! Already your eyes shift!” He drew near and
struck the Frenchman. “Talk and talk and talk! and lying talk!
I am ashamed while I share the world with a thing as base as
you.”

De Gâtinais hurled upon him, cursing, sobbing in an
abandoned fury. In an instant the place resounded like a smithy, for
there were no better swordsmen living than these two. The
eavesdropper could see nothing clearly. Round and round they veered
in a whirl of turmoil. Presently Prince Edward trod upon the broken
flask, smashing it. His foot slipped in the spilth of wine, and the
huge body went down like an oak, his head striking one leg of the
table.

“A candle!” de Gâtinais cried, and he panted
now—“a hundred candles to the Virgin of
Beaujolais!” He shortened his sword to stab the Prince of
England.

The eavesdropper came through the doorway, and flung herself
between Prince Edward and the descending sword. The sword dug deep
into her shoulder, so that she shrieked once with the cold pain of
this wound. Then she rose, ashen. “Liar!” she said.
“Oh, I am shamed while I share the world with a thing as base
as you!”

In silence de Gâtinais regarded her. There was a long
interval before he said, “Ellinor!” and then again,
“Ellinor!” like a man bewildered.

“I was eloquent, I was magnificent” she said,
“so that in the end her reserve was shattered!
Certainly, messire, it is not your death which I desire, since a man
dies so very, very quickly. I desire for you—I know not what I
desire for you!” the girl wailed.

“You desire that I should endure this present
moment,” de Gâtinais replied; “for as God reigns,
I love you, of whom I have spoken infamy, and my shame is very
bitter.”

She said: “And I, too, loved you. It is strange to think
of that.”

“I was afraid. Never in my life have I been afraid before
to-day. But I was afraid of this terrible and fair and righteous
man. I saw all hope of you vanish, all hope of Sicily—in
effect, I lied as a cornered beast spits out his venom.”

“I know,” she answered. “Give me water,
Etienne.” She washed and bound the Prince’s head with a
vinegar-soaked napkin. Ellinor sat upon the floor, the big
man’s head upon her knee. “He will not die of this, for
he is of strong person. Look you, Messire de Gâtinais, you and
I are not strong. We are so fashioned that we can enjoy only the
pleasant things of life. But this man can enjoy—enjoy, mark
you—the commission of any act, however distasteful, if he
think it to be his duty. There is the difference. I cannot fathom
him. But it is now necessary that I become all which he
loves—since he loves it,—and that I be in thought and
deed all which he desires. For I have heard the Tenson
through.”

“You love him!” said de Gâtinais.

She glanced upward with a pitiable smile. “No, it is you
whom I love, my Etienne. You cannot understand how at this very
moment every fibre of me—heart, soul, and body—may be
longing just to comfort you, and to give you all which you desire,
my Etienne, and to make you happy, my handsome Etienne, at however
dear a cost. No; you will never understand that. And since you may
not understand, I merely bid you go and leave me with my
husband.”

And then there fell between these two an infinite silence.

“Listen,” de Gâtinais said; “grant me
some little credit for what I do. You are alone; the man is
powerless. My fellows are within call. A word secures the
Prince’s death; a word gets me you and Sicily. And I do not
speak that word, for you are my lady as well as his, and your will
is my one law.”

But there was no mercy in the girl, no more for him than for
herself. The big head lay upon her breast; she caressed the gross
hair of it ever so lightly. “These are tinsel oaths,”
she crooned, as if rapt with incurious content; “these are the
old empty protestations of all you strutting poets. A word gets you
what you desire! Then why do you not speak that word? Why do you not
speak many words, and become again as eloquent and as magnificent as
you were when you contrived that adultery about which you were just
now telling my husband?”

De Gâtinais raised clenched hands. “I am
shamed,” he said; and then he said, “It is just.”

He left the room and presently rode away with his men. I say
that, here at last, he had done a knightly deed, but she thought
little of it, never raised her head as the troop clattered from
Mauléon, with a lessening beat which lapsed now into the
blunders of an aging fly who doddered about the window yonder.

She stayed thus, motionless, her meditations adrift in the
future; and that which she foreread left her not all sorry nor
profoundly glad, for living seemed by this, though scarcely the
merry and colorful business which she had esteemed it, yet
immeasurably the more worth while.

THE END OF THE SECOND NOVEL

THE THIRD NOVEL.—MEREGRETT OF FRANCE, THINKING TO PRESERVE A
HOODWINKED GENTLEMAN, ANNOYS A SPIDER; AND BY THE GRACE OF DESTINY THE
WEB OF THAT CUNNING INSECT ENTRAPS A BUTTERFLY, A WASP, AND THEN A GOD;
WHO SHATTERS IT.

The Story of the Rat-Trap

In the year of grace 1298, a little before Candlemas (thus
Nicolas begins), came letters to the first King Edward of England
from his kinsman and ambassador to France, Earl Edmund of Lancaster.
It was perfectly apparent, the Earl wrote, that the French King
meant to surrender to the Earl’s lord and brother neither the
duchy of Guienne nor the Lady Blanch. This lady, I must tell you,
was now affianced to King Edward, whose first wife, Dame Ellinor,
had died eight years before this time.

The courier found Sire Edward at Ipswich, midway in celebration
of his daughter’s marriage to the Count of Holland. The King
read the letters through and began to laugh; and presently broke
into a rage such as was possible (men whispered) only to the
demon-tainted blood of Oriander’s descendants. Next day the
keeper of the privy purse entered upon the house-hold-books a
considerable sum “to make good a large ruby and an emerald
lost out of his coronet when the King’s Grace was pleased to
throw it into the fire”; and upon the same day the King
recalled Lancaster. The King then despatched yet another embassy
into France to treat about Sire Edward’s marriage. This last
embassy was headed by the Earl of Aquitaine: his lieutenant was Lord
Pevensey, the King’s natural son by Hawise Bulmer.

The Earl got audience of the French King at Mezelais. Walking
alone came this Earl of Aquitaine, with a large retinue, into the
hall where the barons of France stood according to their rank; in
unadorned russet were the big Earl and his attendants, but upon the
scarlets and purples of the French lords many jewels shone: it was
as though through a corridor of gayly painted sunlit glass that the
grave Earl came to the dais where sat King Philippe.

The King had risen at close sight of the new envoy, and had
gulped once or twice, and without speaking, had hurriedly waved his
lords out of ear-shot. The King’s perturbation was very
extraordinary.

“Fair cousin,” the Earl now said, without any
prelude, “four years ago I was affianced to your sister, Dame
Blanch. You stipulated that Gascony be given up to you in guaranty,
as a settlement on any children I might have by that incomparable
lady. I assented, and yielded you the province, upon the
understanding, sworn to according to the faith of loyal kings, that
within forty days you assign to me its seignory as your vassal. And
I have had of you since then neither my province nor my betrothed
wife, but only excuses, Sire Philippe.”

With eloquence the Frenchman touched upon the emergencies to
which the public weal so often drives men of high station, and upon
his private grief over the necessity—unavoidable,
alas!—of returning a hard answer before the council; and
became so voluble that Sire Edward merely laughed in that big-lunged
and disconcerting way of his, and afterward lodged for a week at
Mezelais, nominally passing by his minor title of Earl of Aquitaine,
and as his own ambassador.

Negotiations became more swift of foot, since a man serves
himself with zeal. In addition, the French lords could make nothing
of a politician so thick-witted that he replied to every
consideration of expediency with a parrot-like reiteration of the
circumstance that already the bargain was signed and sworn to: in
consequence, while daily they fumed over his stupidity, daily he
gained his point. During this period he was, upon one pretext or
another, very often in the company of his affianced wife, Dame
Blanch.

This lady, I must tell you, was the handsomest of her day; there
could nowhere be found a creature more agreeable to every sense; and
she compelled the adoring regard of men, it is recorded, not gently
but in an imperious fashion. Sire Edward, who, till this, had loved
her merely by report, and, in accordance with the high custom of
old, through many perusals of her portrait, now appeared besotted.
He was an aging man, near sixty, huge and fair, with a crisp beard,
and the bright unequal eyes of Manuel of Poictesme. The better-read
at Mezelais began to liken this so candidly enamored monarch and his
Princess to Sieur Hercules at the feet of Queen Omphale.

The court hunted and slew a stag of ten in the woods of
Ermenoueïl, which stand thick about the château; and at
the hunt’s end, these two had dined at Rigon the
forester’s hut, in company with Dame Meregrett, the French
King’s younger sister. She sat a little apart from the
betrothed, and stared through the hut’s one window. We know,
nowadays, it was not merely the trees she was considering.

Dame Blanch seemed undisposed to mirth. “We have slain the
stag, beau sire,” she said, “and have made of his death
a brave diversion. To-day we have had our sport of death,—and
presently the gay years wind past us, as our cavalcade came toward
the stag, and God’s incurious angel slays us, much as we slew
the stag. And we shall not understand, and we shall wonder, as the
stag did, in helpless wonder. And Death will have his sport of us,
as if in atonement.” Her big eyes shone, as when the sun
glints upon a sand-bottomed pool. “Ohé, I have known
such happiness of late, beau sire, that I am hideously afraid to
die.”

The King answered, “I too have been very happy of
late.”

“But it is profitless to talk about death thus drearily.
Let us flout him, instead, with some gay song.” And thereupon
she handed Sire Edward a lute.

The King accepted it. “Death is not reasonably mocked by
any person,” Sire Edward said, “since in the end he
conquers, and of the lips that gibed at him remains but a little
dust. Rather should I, who already stand beneath a lifted sword,
make for my destined and inescapable conqueror a Sirvente, which is
the Song of Service.”

Sang Sire Edward:³

“True, O God!” murmured the tiny woman, who sat
beside the window yonder. With that, Dame Meregrett rose, and passed
from the room.

The two lovers started, and laughed, and afterward paid little
heed to her outgoing. Sire Edward had put aside the lute and sat now
regarding the Princess. His big left hand propped the bearded chin;
his grave countenance was flushed, and his intent eyes shone under
their shaggy brows, very steadily, although the left eye was now so
nearly shut as to reveal the merest spark.

Irresolutely, Dame Blanch plucked at her gown; then rearranged a
fold of it, and with composure awaited the ensuing action, afraid at
bottom, but not at all ill-pleased; and she looked downward.

The King said: “Never before were we two alone, madame.
Fate is very gracious to me this morning.”

“Fate,” the lady considered, “has never denied
much to the Hammer of the Scots.”

“She has denied me nothing,” he sadly said,
“save the one thing that makes this business of living seem a
rational proceeding. Fame and power and wealth fate has accorded me,
no doubt, but never the common joys of life. And, look you, my
Princess, I am of aging person now. During some thirty years I have
ruled England according to my interpretation of God’s will as
it was anciently made manifest by the holy Evangelists; and during
that period I have ruled England not without odd by-ends of
commendation: yet behold, to-day I forget the world-applauded,
excellent King Edward, and remember only Edward
Plantagenet—hot-blooded and desirous man!—of whom that
much-commended king has made a prisoner all these years.”

“It is the duty of exalted persons,” Blanch
unsteadily said, “to put aside such private inclinations as
their breasts may harbor—”

He said, “I have done what I might for the happiness of
every Englishman within my realm saving only Edward Plantagenet; and
now I think his turn to be at hand.” Then the man kept
silence; and his hot appraisal daunted her.

“Lord,” she presently faltered, “lord, you
know that we are already betrothed, and, in sober verity, Love
cannot extend his laws between husband and wife, since the gifts of
love are voluntary, and husband and wife are but the slaves of
duty—”

“Troubadourish nonsense!” Sire Edward said;
“yet it is true that the gifts of love are voluntary. And
therefore—Ha, most beautiful, what have you and I to do with
all this chaffering over Guienne?” The two stood very close to
each other now. Blanch said, “It is a high
matter—” Then on a sudden the full-veined girl was
aglow. “It is a trivial matter.” He took her in his
arms, since already her cheeks flared in scarlet anticipation of the
event.

Thus holding her, he wooed the girl tempestuously. Here, indeed,
was Sieur Hercules enslaved, burned by a fiercer fire than that of
Nessus, and the huge bulk of the unconquerable visibly shaken by his
adoration. In a disordered tapestry of verbiage, aflap in winds of
passion, she presently beheld herself prefigured by Balkis, the
Judean’s lure, and by that Princess of Cyprus who reigned in
Aristotle’s time, and by Nicolete, the King’s daughter
of Carthage,—since the first flush of morning was as a
rush-light before her resplendency, the man swore; and in
conclusion, he likened her to a modern Countess of Tripolis, for
love of whom he, like Rudel, had cleft the seas, and losing whom he
must inevitably die as did Rudel. Sire Edward snapped his fingers
now over any consideration of Guienne. He would conquer for her all
Muscovy and all Cataia, too, if she desired mere acreage. Meanwhile
he wanted her, and his hard and savage passion beat down opposition
as if with a bludgeon.

“Heart’s emperor,” the trembling girl replied,
“I think that you were cast in some larger mould than we of
France. Oh, none of us may dare resist you! and I know that nothing
matters, nothing in all the world, save that you love me. Then take
me, since you will it,—and take me not as King, since you will
otherwise, but as Edward Plantagenet. For listen! by good luck you
have this afternoon despatched Rigon for Chevrieul, where to-morrow
we were to hunt the great boar. So to-night this hut will be
unoccupied.”

The man was silent. He had a gift that way when occasion served.

“Here, then, beau sire! here, then, at nine, you are to
meet me with my chaplain. Behold, he marries us, as glibly as though
we two were peasants. Poor king and princess!” cried Dame
Blanch, and in a voice which thrilled him, “shall ye not,
then, dare to be but man and woman?”

“Ha!” the King said. “So the chaplain makes a
third! Well, the King is pleased to loose his prisoner, that
long-imprisoned Edward Plantagenet: and I will do it.”

So he came that night, without any retinue, and habited as a
forester, with a horn swung about his neck, into the unlighted hut
of Rigon the forester, and he found a woman there, though not the
woman whom he had expected.

“Treachery, beau sire! Horrible treachery!” she
wailed.

“I have encountered it before this,” the big man
said.

“Presently will come to you not Blanch but Philippe, with
many men to back him. And presently they will slay you. You have
been trapped, beau sire. Ah, for the love of God, go! Go, while
there is yet time!” Sire Edward reflected. Undoubtedly, to
light on Edward Longshanks alone in a forest would appear to King
Philippe, if properly attended, a tempting chance to settle divers
difficulties, once for all; and Sire Edward knew the conscience of
his old opponent to be invulnerable. The act would violate the core
of hospitality and knighthood, no doubt, but its outcome would be a
very definite gain to France, and for the rest, merely a dead body
in a ditch. Not a monarch in Christendom, Sire Edward reflected, but
feared and in consequence hated the Hammer of the Scots, and in
further consequence would not lift a finger to avenge him; and not a
being in the universe would rejoice more heartily at the success of
Philippe’s treachery than would Sire Edward’s son and
immediate successor, the young Prince Edward of Caernarvon. Taking
matters by and large, Philippe had all the powers of common-sense to
back him in contriving an assassination.

What Sire Edward said was, “Dame Blanch, then, knew of
this?” But Meregrett’s pitiful eyes had already answered
him, and he laughed a little.

“In that event, I have to-night enregistered my name among
the goodly company of Love’s Lunatics,—as yokefellow
with Dan Merlin in his thornbush, and with wise Salomon when he
capered upon the high places of Chemosh, and with Duke Ares
sheepishly agrin in the net of Mulciber. Rogues all, madame! fools
all! yet always the flesh trammels us, and allures the soul to such
sensual delights as bar its passage toward the eternal life wherein
alone lies the empire and the heritage of the soul. And why does
this carnal prison so impede the soul? Because Satan once ranked
among the sons of God, and the Eternal Father, as I take it, has not
yet forgotten the antique relationship,—and hence it is
permitted even in our late time that always the flesh rebel against
the spirit, and that always these so tiny and so thin-voiced
tricksters, these highly tinted miracles of iniquity, so gracious in
demeanor and so starry-eyed—”

Then he turned and pointed, no longer the orotund zealot but the
expectant captain now. “Look, my Princess!” In the
pathway from which he had recently emerged stood a man in full armor
like a sentinel. “Mort de Dieu, we can but try to get out of
this,” Sire Edward said.

“You should have tried without talking so much,”
replied Meregrett. She followed him. And presently, in a big splash
of moonlight, the armed man’s falchion glittered across their
way. “Back,” he bade them, “for by the
King’s orders, I can let no man pass.”

“It would be very easy now to strangle this
herring,” Sire Edward reflected.

“But it is not easy to strangle a whole school of
herring,” the fellow retorted. “Hoh, Messire
d’Aquitaine, the bushes of Ermenoueîl are alive with my
associates. The hut yonder, in effect, is girdled by them,—and
we have our orders to let no man pass.”

“Have you any orders concerning women?” the King
said.

The man deliberated. Sire Edward handed him three gold pieces.
“There was assuredly no specific mention of petticoats,”
the soldier now recollected, “and in consequence I dare to
pass the Princess, against whom certainly nothing can be
planned.”

“Why, in that event,” Sire Edward said, “we
two had as well bid each other adieu.”

But Meregrett only said, “You bid me go?”

He waved his hand. “Since there is no choice. For that
which you have done—however tardily—I thank you.
Meantime I return to Rigon’s hut to rearrange my toga as King
Caesar did when the assassins fell upon him, and to encounter with
due decorum whatever Dame Luck may prefer.”

She said, “You go to your death.”

He shrugged his broad shoulders. “In the end we
necessarily die.”

Dame Meregrett turned, and without faltering passed back into
the hut.

When he had lighted the inefficient lamp which he found there,
Sire Edward wheeled upon her in half-humorous vexation.
“Presently come your brother and his tattling lords. To be
discovered here with me at night, alone, means trouble for you. If
Philippe chances to fall into one of his Capetian rages it means
death.”

She answered, as though she were thinking about other matters,
“Yes.”

Now, for the first time, Sire Edward regarded her with profound
consideration. To the finger-tips this so-little lady showed a
descendant of the holy Lewis whom he had known and loved in old
years. Small and thinnish she was, with soft and profuse hair that,
for all its blackness, gleamed in the lamplight with stray ripples
of brilliancy, as you may see sparks shudder to extinction over
burning charcoal. She had the Valois nose, long and delicate in
form, and overhanging a short upper-lip; yet the lips were glorious
in tint, and the whiteness of her skin would have matched the
Hyperborean snows tidily enough. As for her eyes, the customary
similes of the court poets were gigantic onyxes or ebony highly
polished and wet with May dew. These eyes were too big for her
little face: they made of her a tiny and desirous wraith which
nervously endured each incident of life, like a foreigner uneasily
acquiescent to the custom of the country.

Sire Edward moved one step toward this tiny lady and paused.
“Madame, I do not understand.”

Dame Meregrett looked up into his face unflinchingly. “It
means that I love you, sire. I may speak without shame now, for
presently you die. Die bravely, sire! Die in such fashion as may
hearten me to live.”

The little Princess spoke the truth, for always since his coming
to Mezelais she had viewed the great conqueror as through an aweful
haze of forerunning rumor, twin to that golden vapor which enswathes
a god and transmutes whatever in corporeal man would have been a
defect into some divine and hitherto unguessed-at excellence. I must
tell you in this place, since no other occasion offers, that even
until the end of her life it was so. For to her what in other
persons would have seemed flagrant dulness showed somehow, in Sire
Edward, as the majestic deliberation of one that knows his verdict
to be decisive, and therefore appraises cautiously; and if sometimes
his big, irregular calm eyes betrayed no apprehension of the jest at
which her lips were laughing, and of which her brain approved,
always within the instant her heart convinced her that a god is not
lightly moved to mirth.

And now it was a god—O deus certè!—who
had taken a woman’s paltry face between his hands, half
roughly. “And the maid is a Capet!” Sire Edward mused.

“Blanch has never desired you any ill, beau sire. But she
loves the Archduke of Austria. And once you were dead, she might
marry him. One cannot blame her,” Meregrett considered,
“since he wishes to marry her, and she, of course, wishes to
make him happy.”

“And not herself, save in some secondary way!” the
big King said. “In part I comprehend, madame. Now I too hanker
after this same happiness, and my admiration for the cantankerous
despoiler whom I praised this morning is somewhat abated. There was
a Tenson once—Lord, Lord, how long ago! I learn too late that
truth may possibly have been upon the losing side—” Thus
talking incoherencies, he took up Rigon’s lute.

Sang Sire Edward:

“yes, the jingle ran thus. Now listen, madame—listen, the while
that I have my singing out, whatever any little cut-throats may be
planning in corners.”

Sang Sire Edward:

Sire Edward put aside the lute. “Thus ends the Song of
Service,” he said, “which was made not by the King of
England but by Edward Plantagenet—hot-blooded and desirous
man!—in honor of the one woman who within more years than I
care to think of has at all considered Edward Plantagenet.”

“I do not comprehend,” she said. And, indeed, she
dared not.

But now he held both tiny hands in his. “At best, your
poet is an egotist. I must die presently. Meantime I crave largesse,
madame, and a great almsgiving, so that in his unending sleep your
poet may rehearse our present love.” And even in Rigon’s
dim light he found her kindling eyes not niggardly.

Sire Edward strode to the window and raised big hands toward the
spear-points of the aloof stars. “Master of us all!” he
cried; “O Father of us all! the Hammer of the Scots am I! the
Scourge of France, the conqueror of Llewellyn and of Leicester, and
the flail of the accursed race that slew Thine only Son! the King of
England am I, who have made of England an imperial nation, and have
given to Thy Englishmen new laws! And to-night I crave my hire.
Never, O my Father, have I had of any person aught save reverence or
hatred! never in my life has any person loved me! And I am old, my
Father—I am old, and presently I die. As I have served
Thee—as Jacob wrestled with Thee at the ford of
Jabbok—at the place of Peniel—” Against the
tremulous blue and silver of the forest the Princess saw how
horribly the big man was shaken. “My hire! my hire!” he
hoarsely said. “Forty long years, my Father! And now I will
not let Thee go except Thou hear me, and grant me life and this
woman’s love.”

He turned, stark and black in the rearward splendor of the moon.
“As a prince hast thou power with God,” he calmly
said, “and thou hast prevailed. For the King of kings
was never obdurate, my dear, to them that have deserved well of Him.
So He will attend to my request, and will get us out of this pickle
somehow.”

Even as he said this, Philippe the Handsome came into the room,
and at the heels of the French King were seven lords, armed
cap-à-pie.

The French King was an odd man. Subtly smiling, he came forward
through the twilight, with soft, long strides, and he made no outcry
at recognition of his sister. “Take the woman away,
Victor,” he said, disinterestedly, to de Montespan. Afterward
he sat down beside the table and remained silent for a while,
intently regarding Sire Edward and the tiny woman who clung to Sire
Edward’s arm; and in the flickering gloom of the hut Philippe
smiled as an artist may smile who gazes on the perfected work and
knows it to be adroit.

“You prefer to remain, my sister?” he said
presently. “Hé bien! it happens that to-night I am in a
mood for granting almost any favor. A little later and I will attend
to your merits.” The fleet disorder of his visage had lapsed
again into the meditative smile which was that of Lucifer watching a
toasted soul. “And so it ends,” he said, “and
England loses to-night the heir that Manuel the Redeemer provided.
Conqueror of Scotland, Scourge of France! O unconquerable king! and
will the worms of Ermenoueïl, then, pause to-morrow to consider
through what a glorious turmoil their dinner came to them?”

“Do you design to murder me?” Sire Edward said.

The French King shrugged. “I design that within this
moment my lords shall slay you while I sit here and do not move a
finger. Is it not good to be a king, my cousin, and to sit quite
still, and to see your bitterest enemy hacked and slain,—and
all the while to sit quite still, quite unruffled, as a king should
always be? Eh, eh! I never lived until to-night!”

“Now, by Heaven,” said Sire Edward, “I am your
kinsman and your guest, I am unarmed—”

Philippe bowed his head. “Undoubtedly,” he assented,
“the deed is foul. But I desire Gascony very earnestly, and so
long as you live you will never permit me to retain Gascony. Hence
it is quite necessary, you conceive, that I murder you. What!”
he presently said, “will you not beg for mercy? I had
hoped,” the French King added, somewhat wistfully, “that
you might be afraid to die, O huge and righteous man! and would
entreat me to spare you. To spurn the weeping conqueror of
Llewellyn, say ... But these sins which damn one’s soul are in
actual performance very tedious affairs; and I begin to grow aweary
of the game. Hé bien! now kill this man for me,
messieurs.”

The English King strode forward. “Shallow
trickster!” Sire Edward thundered. “Am I not
afraid? You grimacing baby, do you think to ensnare a lion with
such a flimsy rat-trap? Wise persons do not hunt lions with these
contraptions: for it is the nature of a rat-trap, fair cousin, to
ensnare not the beast which imperiously desires and takes in
daylight, but the tinier and the filthier beast that covets meanly
and attacks under the cover of darkness—as do you and your
seven skulkers!” The man was rather terrible; not a Frenchman
within the hut but had drawn back a little.

“Listen!” Sire Edward said, and he came yet farther
toward the King of France and shook at him one forefinger;
“when you were in your cradle I was leading armies. When you
were yet unbreeched I was lord of half Europe. For thirty years I
have driven kings before me as did Fierabras. Am I, then, a person
to be hoodwinked by the first big-bosomed huzzy that elects to
waggle her fat shoulders and to grant an assignation in a forest
expressly designed for stabbings? You baby, is the Hammer of the
Scots the man to trust for one half moment a Capet? Ill-mannered
infant,” the King said, with bitter laughter, “it is now
necessary that I summon my attendants and remove you to a nursery
which I have prepared in England.” He set the horn to his lips
and blew three blasts. There came many armed warriors into the hut,
bearing ropes. Here was the entire retinue of the Earl of Aquitaine.
Cursing, Sire Philippe sprang upon the English King, and with a
dagger smote at the impassive big man’s heart. The blade broke
against the mail armor under the tunic. “Have I not told
you,” Sire Edward wearily said, “that one may never
trust a Capet? Now, messieurs, bind these carrion and convey them
whither I have directed you. Nay, but, Roger—” He
conversed apart with his son, the Earl of Pevensey, and what Sire
Edward commanded was done. The French King and seven lords of France
went from that hut trussed like chickens ready for the oven.

And now Sire Edward turned toward Meregrett and chafed his big
hands gleefully. “At every tree-bole a tethered horse awaits
us; and a ship awaits our party at Fécamp. To-morrow we sleep
in England—and, Mort de Dieu! do you not think, madame, that
once within my very persuasive Tower of London, your brother and I
may come to some agreement over Guienne?”

She had shrunk from him. “Then the trap was yours? It was
you that lured my brother to this infamy!”

“In effect, I planned it many months ago at Ipswich
yonder,” Sire Edward gayly said. “Faith of a gentleman!
your brother has cheated me of Guienne, and was I to waste eternity
in begging him to give me back my province? Oh, no, for I have many
spies in France, and have for some two years known your brother and
your sister to the bottom. Granted that I came hither incognito, to
forecast your kinfolk’s immediate endeavors was none too
difficult; and I wanted Guienne—and, in consequence, the
person of your brother. Hah, death of my life! does not the seasoned
hunter adapt his snare to the qualities of his prey, and take the
elephant through his curiosity, as the snake through his notorious
treachery?” Now the King of England blustered.

But the little Princess wrung her hands. “I am this night
most hideously shamed. Beau sire, I came hither to aid a brave man
infamously trapped, and instead I find an alert spider, snug in his
cunning web, and patiently waiting until the gnats of France fly
near enough. Eh, the greater fool was I to waste my labor on the
shrewd and evil thing which has no more need of me than I of it! And
now let me go hence, sire, unmolested, for the sake of chivalry.
Could I have come to the brave man I had dreamed of, I would have
come cheerily through the murkiest lane of hell; as the more artful
knave, as the more judicious trickster”—and here she
thrust him from her—“I spit upon you. Now let me go
hence.”

He took her in his brawny arms. “Fit mate for me,”
he said. “Little vixen, had you done otherwise I would have
devoted you to the devil.”

Still grasping her, and victoriously lifting Dame Meregrett, so
that her feet swung clear of the floor, Sire Edward said, again with
that queer touch of fanatic gravity: “My dear, you are
perfectly right. I was tempted, I grant you. But it was never
reasonable that gentlefolk should cheat at their dicing. Therefore I
whispered Roger Bulmer my final decision; and he is now loosing all
my captives in the courtyard of Mezelais, after birching the tails
of every one of them as soundly as these infants’ pranks
to-night have merited. So you perceive that I do not profit by my
trick; and that I lose Guienne, after all, in order to come to you
with hands—well! not intolerably soiled.”

“Oh, now I love you!” she cried, a-thrill with
disappointment to find him so unthriftily high-minded. “Yet
you have done wrong, for Guienne is a king’s ransom.”

He smiled whimsically, and presently one arm swept beneath her
knees, so that presently he held her as one dandles a baby; and
presently his stiff and graying beard caressed her burning cheek.
Masterfully he said: “Then let Guienne serve as such and
ransom for a king his glad and common manhood. Now it appears
expedient that I leave France without any unwholesome delay, because
these children may resent being spanked. More
lately—hé, already I have in my pocket the Pope’s
dispensation permitting me to marry, in spite of our cousinship, the
sister of the King of France.”

Very shyly Dame Meregrett lifted her little mouth. She said
nothing because talk was not necessary.

In consequence, after a deal of political tergiversation
(Nicolas concludes), in the year of grace 1299, on the day of our
Lady’s nativity, and in the twenty-seventh year of King
Edward’s reign, came to the British realm, and landed at
Dover, not Dame Blanch, as would have been in consonance with
seasoned expectation, but Dame Meregrett, the other daughter of King
Philippe the Bold; and upon the following day proceeded to
Canterbury, whither on the next Thursday after came Edward, King of
England, into the Church of the Trinity at Canterbury, and therein
espoused the aforesaid Dame Meregrett.

THE END OF THE THIRD NOVEL

THE FOURTH NOVEL.—YSABEAU OF FRANCE, DESIROUS OF DISTRACTION,
LOOKS FOR RECREATION IN THE TORMENT OF A CERTAIN KNIGHT, WHOM SHE PROVES
TO BE NO MORE THAN HUMAN; BUT IN THE OUTCOME OF HER HOLIDAY HE CONFOUNDS
THIS QUEEN BY THE WIT OF HIS REPLY.

The Story of the Choices

In the year of grace 1327 (thus Nicolas begins) you could have
found in all England no couple more ardent in affection or in
despair more affluent than Rosamund Eastney and Sir Gregory Darrell.
She was Lord Berners’ only daughter, a brown beauty, of
extensive repute, thanks to a retinue of lovers who were
practitioners of the Gay Science, and who had scattered broadcast
innumerable Canzons in her honor; and Lord Berners was a man to
accept the world as he found it.

“Dompnedex!” the Earl was wont to say; “in
sincerity I am fond of Gregory Darrell, and if he chooses to make
love to my daughter that is none of my affair. The eyes and the
brain preserve a proverbial warfare, which is the source of all
amenity, for without lady-service there would be no songs and
tourneys, no measure and no good breeding; and a man delinquent in
domnei is no more to be valued than an ear of corn without the
grain. No, I am so profoundly an admirer of Love that I can never
willingly behold him slain, of a surfeit, by Matrimony; besides,
this rapscallion Gregory could not to advantage exchange purses with
Lazarus in the parable; and, moreover, Rosamund is to marry the Earl
of Sarum a little after All Saints’ day.”

“Sarum!” people echoed. “Why, the old goat has
had four wives already!”

And the Earl would spread his hands. “These redundancies
are permissible to one of the wealthiest persons in England,”
he was used to submit.

Thus it fell out that Sir Gregory came and went at his own
discretion as concerned Lord Berners’ fief of Ordish, all
through those choppy times of warfare between Sire Edward and Queen
Ysabeau. Lord Berners, for one, vexed himself not inordinately over
the outcome, since he protested the King’s armament to consist
of fools and the Queen’s of rascals; and had with entire
serenity declined to back either Dick or the devil.

But at last the Queen got resistless aid from Count William of
Hainault (in a way to be told about hereafter), and the King was
captured by her forces, and was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle. There
they held the second Edward to reign in England, who was the
unworthy son of Dame Ellinor and of that first squinting King Edward
about whom I have told you in the two tales preceding this tale. It
was in the September of this year, a little before Michaelmas, that
they brought Sir Gregory Darrell to be judged by the Queen;
notoriously the knight had been her husband’s adherent.
“Death!” croaked Adam Orleton, who sat to the right
hand, and, “Young de Spencer’s death!” amended the
Earl of March, with wild laughter; but Ysabeau leaned back in her
great chair—a handsome woman, stoutening now from gluttony and
from too much wine,—and regarded her prisoner with lazy
amiability.

“And what was your errand in Figgis Wood?” she
demanded—“or are you mad, then, Gregory Darrell, that
you dare ride past my gates alone?”

He curtly said, “I rode for Ordish.”

Followed silence. “Roger,” the Queen ordered,
“give me the paper which I would not sign.”

The Earl of March had drawn an audible breath. The Bishop of
London somewhat wrinkled his shaggy brows, like a person in shrewd
and epicurean amusement, while the Queen subscribed the parchment,
with a great scrawling flourish.

“Take, in the devil’s name, the hire of your
dexterities,” said Ysabeau. She pushed this document with her
wet pen-point toward March. “So! get it over with, that
necessary business with my husband at Berkeley. And do the rest of
you withdraw, saving only my prisoner.”

Followed another silence. Queen Ysabeau lolled in her carven
chair, considering the comely gentleman who stood before her,
fettered, at the point of shameful death. There was in the room a
little dog which had come to the Queen, and now licked the palm of
her left hand, and the soft lapping of its tongue was the only sound
you heard. “So at peril of your life you rode for Ordish,
then, messire?”

The tense man had flushed. “You have harried us of the
King’s party out of England,—and in reason I might not
leave England without seeing the desire of my heart.”

“My friend,” said Ysabeau, as if half in sorrow,
“I would have pardoned anything save that.” She rose.
Her face was dark and hot. “By God and all His saints! you
shall indeed leave England to-morrow and the world also! but not
without a final glimpse of this same Rosamund. Yet listen: I, too,
must ride with you to Ordish—as your sister,
say—Gregory, did I not hang, last April, the husband of your
sister? Yes, Ralph de Belomys, a thin man with eager eyes, the Earl
of Farrington he was. As his widow I will ride with you to Ordish,
upon condition you disclose to none at Ordish, saving only, if you
will, this quite immaculate Rosamund, any hint of our merry
carnival. And to-morrow (you will swear according to the nicest
obligations of honor) you must ride back with me to
encounter—that which I may devise. For I dare to trust your
naked word in this, and, moreover, I shall take with me a
sufficiency of retainers to leave you no choice.”

Darrell knelt before her. “I can do no homage to Queen
Ysabeau; yet the prodigal hands of her who knows that I must die
to-morrow and cunningly contrives, for old time’s sake, to
hearten me with a sight of Rosamund, I cannot but kiss.” This
much he did. “And I swear in all things to obey your
will.”

“O comely fool!” the Queen said, not ungently,
“I contrive, it may be, but to demonstrate that many tyrants
of antiquity were only bunglers. And, besides, I must have other
thoughts than those which I have known too long: I must this night
take holiday from thinking them, lest I go mad.”

Thus did the Queen arrange her holiday.

“Either I mean to torture you to-morrow,” Dame
Ysabeau said, presently, to Darrell, as these two rode side by side,
“or else I mean to free you. In sober verity I do not know. I
am in a holiday humor, and it is as the whim may take me. But do you
indeed love this Rosamund Eastney? And of course she worships
you?”

“It is my belief, madame, that when I see her I tremble
visibly, and my weakness is such that a child has more intelligence
than I,—and toward such misery any lady must in common reason
be a little compassionate.”

Her hands had twitched so that the astonished palfrey reared.
“I design torture,” the Queen said; “ah, I perfect
exquisite torture, for you have proven recreant, you have forgotten
the maid Ysabeau,—Le Desir du Cuer, was it not, my Gregory,
that you were wont to call her, as nowadays this Rosamund is the
desire of your heart. You lack inventiveness.”

His palms clutched at heaven. “That Ysabeau is dead! and
all true joy is destroyed, and the world lies under a blight from
which God has averted an unfriendly face in displeasure! yet of all
wretched persons existent I am he who endures the most grievous
anguish, for daily I partake of life without any relish, and I would
in truth deem him austerely kind who slew me now that the maiden
Ysabeau is dead.”

She shrugged wearily. “I scent the raw stuff of a
Planh,” the Queen observed; “benedicite! it was
ever your way, my friend, to love a woman chiefly for the verses she
inspired.” And she began to sing, as they rode through
Baverstock Thicket.

Sang Ysabeau:

So to Ordish in that twilight came the Countess of Farrington,
with a retinue of twenty men-at-arms, and her brother Sir Gregory
Darrell. Lord Berners received the party with boisterous
hospitality.

“Age has not blinded Father to the fact that your sister
is a very handsome woman,” was Rosamund Eastney’s
comment. The period appears to have been after supper, and the girl
sat with Gregory Darrell in not the most brilliant corner of the
main hall.

The wretched man leaned forward, bit his nether-lip, and then
with a tumbling rush of speech told of the sorry masquerade.
“The she-devil designs some horrible and obscure mischief, she
plans I know not what.”

“Yet I—” said Rosamund. The girl had risen,
and she continued with an odd inconsequence: “You have told me
you were Pembroke’s squire when long ago he sailed for France
to fetch this woman into England—”

“—Which you never heard!” Lord Berners shouted
at this point. “Jasper, a lute!” And then he halloaed,
“Gregory, Madame de Farrington demands that racy song you made
against Queen Ysabeau during your last visit.” Thus did the
Queen begin her holiday.

It was a handsome couple which came forward, with hand quitting
hand tardily, and with blinking eyes yet rapt: these two were not
overpleased at being disturbed, and the man was troubled, as in
reason he well might be, by the task assigned him.

“Is it, indeed, your will, my sister,” he said,
“that I should sing—this song?”

“It is my will,” the Countess said.

And the knight flung back his comely head and laughed. “A
truth, once spoken, may not be disowned in any company. It is not,
look you, of my own choice that I sing, my sister. Yet if Queen
Ysabeau herself were to bid me sing this song, I could not refuse,
for, Christ aid me! the song is true.”

Sang Sir Gregory:

and so on. It was a lengthy ditty, and in its wording not
oversqueamish; the Queen’s career in England was detailed
without any stuttering, and you would have found the catalogue
unhandsome. Yet Sir Gregory delivered it with an incisive gusto,
desperately countersigning his own death warrant. Her treacheries,
her adulteries and her assassinations were rendered in glowing terms
whose vigor seemed, even now, to please their contriver. Yet the
minstrel added a new peroration.

Sang Sir Gregory:

And when Darrell had ended, the Countess of Farrington, without
speaking, swept her left hand toward her cheek and by pure chance
caught between thumb and forefinger the autumn-numbed fly that had
annoyed her. She drew the little dagger from her girdle and
meditatively cut the buzzing thing in two. She cast the fragments
from her, and resting the dagger’s point upon the arm of her
chair, one forefinger upon the summit of the hilt, considerately
twirled the brilliant weapon.

“This song does not err upon the side of clemency,”
she said at last, “nor by ordinary does Queen Ysabeau.”

“That she-wolf!” said Lord Berners, comfortably.
“Hoo, Madame Gertrude! since the Prophet Moses wrung healing
waters from a rock there has been no such miracle recorded.”

“We read, Messire de Berners, that when the she-wolf once
acknowledges a master she will follow him as faithfully as any dog.
My brother, I do not question your sincerity, yet everybody knows
you sing with the voice of an unhonored courtier. Suppose Queen
Ysabeau had heard your song all through as I have heard it, and then
had said—for she is not as the run of
women—‘Messire, I had thought until this that there was
no thorough man in England save tall Roger Mortimer. I find him
tawdry now, and—I remember. Come you, then, and rule the
England that you love as you may love no woman, and rule me,
messire, since I find even in your cruelty—For we are no
pygmies, you and I! Yonder is squabbling Europe and all the ancient
gold of Africa, ready for our taking! and past that lies Asia, too,
and its painted houses hung with bells, and cloud-wrapt Tartary,
where we two may yet erect our equal thrones, upon which to receive
the tributary emperors! For we are no pygmies, you and I.’ She
paused. She shrugged. “Suppose Queen Ysabeau, who is not as
the run of women, had said this much, my brother?”

Darrell was more pallid (as the phrase is) than a sheet, and the
lute had dropped unheeded, and his hands were clenched.

“I would answer, my sister, that as she has found in
England but one man, I have found in England but one woman—the
rose of all the world.” His eyes were turned at this toward
Rosamund Eastney. “And yet,” the man stammered,
“because I, too, remember—”

“Hah, in God’s name! I am answered,” the
Countess said. She rose, in dignity almost a queen. “We have
ridden far to-day, and to-morrow we must travel a deal
farther—eh, my brother? I am going to bed, Messire de
Berners.”

So the men and women parted. Madame de Farrington kissed her
brother at leaving him, as was natural; and under her caress his
stalwart person shuddered, but not in repugnance; and the Queen went
away singing hushedly.

Sang Ysabeau:

Ysabeau would have slept that night within the chamber of
Rosamund Eastney had either slept. As concerns the older I say
nothing. The girl, though soon aware of frequent rustlings near at
hand, lay quiet, half-forgetful of the poisonous woman yonder. The
girl was now fulfilled with a great blaze of exultation: to-morrow
Gregory must die, and then perhaps she might find time for tears;
meanwhile, before her eyes, the man had flung away a kingdom and
life itself for love of her, and the least nook of her heart ached
to be a shade more worthy of the sacrifice.

After it might have been an hour of this excruciate ecstasy the
Countess came to Rosamund’s bed. “Ay,” the woman
began, “it is indisputable that his hair is like spun gold and
that his eyes resemble sun-drenched waters in June. It is certain
that when this Gregory laughs God is more happy. Girl, I was
familiar with the routine of your meditations before you were
born.”

Rosamund said, quite simply: “You have known him always. I
envy the circumstance, Madame Gertrude—you alone of all women
in the world I envy, since you, his sister, being so much older,
must have known him always.”

“I know him to the core, my girl,” the Countess
answered. For a while she sat silent, one bare foot jogging
restlessly. “Yet I am two years his junior—Did you hear
nothing, Rosamund?” “No, Madame Gertrude, I heard
nothing.”

“Strange!” the Countess said; “let us have
lights, since I can no longer endure this overpopulous
twilight.” She kindled, with twitching fingers, three lamps.
“It is as yet dark yonder, where the shadows quiver very
oddly, as though they would rise from the floor—do they not,
my girl?—and protest vain things. But, Rosamund, it has been
done; in the moment of death men’s souls have travelled
farther and have been visible; it has been done, I tell you. And he
would stand before me, with pleading eyes, and would reproach me in
a voice too faint to reach my ears—but I would see
him—and his groping hands would clutch at my hands as though a
dropped veil had touched me, and with the contact I would go
mad!”

“Madame Gertrude!” the girl stammered, in
communicated terror.

“Poor innocent fool!” the woman said, “I am
Ysabeau of France.” And when Rosamund made as though to rise,
in alarm, Queen Ysabeau caught her by the shoulder. “Bear
witness when he comes that I never hated him. Yet for my quiet it
was necessary that it suffer so cruelly, the scented, pampered body,
and no mark be left upon it! Eia! even now he suffers! No, I have
lied. I hate the man, and in such fashion as you will comprehend
when you are Sarum’s wife.”

“Madame and Queen!” the girl said, “you will
not murder me!” “I am tempted!” the Queen
answered. “O little slip of girlhood, I am tempted, for it is
not reasonable you should possess everything that I have lost.
Innocence you have, and youth, and untroubled eyes, and quiet
dreams, and the fond graveness of a child, and Gregory
Darrell’s love—” Now Ysabeau sat down upon the bed
and caught up the girl’s face between two fevered hands.
“Rosamund, this Darrell perceives within the moment, as I do,
that the love he bears for you is but what he remembers of the love
he bore a certain maid long dead. Eh, you might have been her
sister, Rosamund, for you are very like her. And she, poor
wench—why, I could see her now, I think, were my eyes not
blurred, somehow, almost as though Queen Ysabeau might weep! But she
was handsomer than you, since your complexion is not overclear,
praise God!”

Woman against woman they were. “He has told me of his
intercourse with you,” the girl said, and this was a lie
flatfooted. “Nay, kill me if you will, madame, since you are
the stronger, yet, with my dying breath, I protest that Gregory has
loved no woman truly in all his life except me.”

The Queen laughed bitterly. “Do I not know men? He told
you nothing. And to-night he hesitated, and to-morrow, at the
lifting of my finger, he will supplicate. Since boyhood Gregory
Darrell has loved me, O white, palsied innocence! and he is mine at
a whistle. And in that time to come he will desert you,
Rosamund—bidding farewell with a pleasing Canzon,—and
they will give you to the gross Earl of Sarum, as they gave me to
the painted man who was of late our King! and in that time to come
you will know your body to be your husband’s makeshift when he
lacks leisure to seek out other recreation! and in that time to come
you will long for death, and presently your heart will be a flame
within you, my Rosamund, an insatiable flame! and you will hate your
God because He made you, and hate Satan because in some desperate
hour he tricked you, and hate all men because, poor fools, they
scurry to obey your whims! and chiefly you will hate yourself
because you are so pitiable! and devastation only will you love in
that strange time which is to come. It is adjacent, my
Rosamund.”

The girl kept silence. She sat erect in the tumbled bed, her
hands clasping her knees, and she appeared to deliberate what Dame
Ysabeau had said. Plentiful brown hair fell about this
Rosamund’s face, which was white and shrewd. “A part of
what you say, madame, I understand. I know that Gregory Darrell
loves me, yet I have long ago acknowledged he loves me as one pets a
child, or, let us say, a spaniel which reveres and amuses one. I
lack his wit, you comprehend, and so he never speaks to me all that
he thinks. Yet a part of it he tells me, and he loves me, and with
this I am content. Assuredly, if they give me to Sarum I shall hate
Sarum even more than I detest him now. And then, I think, Heaven
help me! that I would not greatly grieve—Oh, you are all
evil!” Rosamund said; “and you thrust into my mind
thoughts which I may not understand!”

“You will comprehend them,” the Queen said,
“when you know yourself a chattel, bought and paid for.”

The Queen laughed. She rose, and her hands strained toward
heaven. “You are omnipotent, yet have You let me become that
into which I am transmuted,” she said, very low.

She began to speak as though a statue spoke through lips that
seemed motionless. “Men have long urged me, Rosamund, to a
deed which by one stroke would make me mistress of these islands.
To-day I looked on Gregory Darrell, and knew that I was wise in
love—and I had but to crush a lewd soft worm to come to him.
Eh, and I was tempted—!”

The girl said: “Let us grant that Gregory loves you very
greatly, and me just when his leisure serves. You may offer him a
cushioned infamy, a colorful and brief delirium, and afterward
demolishment of soul and body; I offer him contentment and a level
life, made up of small events, it may be, and lacking both in
abysses and in skyey heights. Yet is love a flame wherein the
lover’s soul must be purified; it is a flame which assays high
queens just as it does their servants: and thus, madame, to judge
between us I dare summon you.” “Child, child!” the
Queen said, tenderly, and with a smile, “you are brave; and in
your fashion you are wise; yet you will never comprehend. But once I
was in heart and soul and body all that you are to-day; and now I am
Queen Ysabeau—Did you in truth hear nothing, Rosamund?”

“Why, nothing save the wind.”

“Strange!” said the Queen; “since all the
while that I have talked with you I have been seriously annoyed by
shrieks and imprecations! But I, too, grow cowardly, it may
be—Nay, I know,” she said, and in a resonant voice,
“that by this I am mistress of broad England, until my
son—my own son, born of my body, and in glad anguish,
Rosamund—knows me for what I am. For I have
heard—Coward! O beautiful sleek coward!” the Queen said;
“I would have died without lamentation and I was but your
plaything!”

“Madame Ysabeau—!” the girl answered vaguely,
for she was puzzled and was almost frightened by the other’s
strange talk.

“To bed!” said Ysabeau; “and put out the
lights lest he come presently. Or perhaps he fears me now too much
to come to-night. Yet the night approaches, none the less, when I
must lift some arras and find him there, chalk-white, with painted
cheeks, and rigid, and smiling very terribly, or look into some
mirror and behold there not myself but him,—and in that
instant I shall die. Meantime I rule, until my son attains his
manhood. Eh, Rosamund, my only son was once so tiny, and so
helpless, and his little crimson mouth groped toward me, helplessly,
and save in Bethlehem, I thought, there was never any child more
fair—But I must forget all that, for even now he plots. Hey,
God orders matters very shrewdly, my Rosamund.”

Timidly the girl touched Ysabeau’s shoulder. “In
part, I understand, madame and Queen.”

“You understand nothing,” said Ysabeau; “how
should you understand whose breasts are yet so tiny? So let us put
out the light! though I dread darkness, Rosamund—For they say
that hell is poorly lighted—and they say—” Then
Queen Ysabeau shrugged. Pensively she blew out each lamp.

“We know this Gregory Darrell,” the Queen said in
the darkness, “ah, to the marrow we know him, however
steadfastly we blink, and we know the present turmoil of his soul;
and in common-sense what chance have you of victory?”

“None in common-sense, madame, and yet you go too fast.
For man is a being of mingled nature, we are told by those in holy
orders, and his life here is one unending warfare between that which
is divine in him and that which is bestial, while impartial Heaven
attends as arbiter of the tourney. Always a man’s judgment
misleads him and his faculties allure him to a truce, however brief,
with iniquity. His senses raise a mist about his goings, and there
is not an endowment of the man but in the end plays traitor to his
interest, as of God’s wisdom God intends; so that when the man
is overthrown, the Eternal Father may, in reason, be neither vexed
nor grieved if only the man takes heart to rise again. And when,
betrayed and impotent, the man elects to fight out the allotted
battle, defiant of common-sense and of the counsellors which God
Himself accorded, I think that the Saints hold festival in
heaven.”

“A very pretty sermon,” said the Queen. “Yet I
do not think that our Gregory could very long endure a wife given
over to such high-minded talking. He prefers to hear himself do the
fine talking.”

Followed a silence, vexed only on the purposeless September
winds; but I believe that neither of these two slept with
profundity.

About dawn one of the Queen’s attendants roused Sir
Gregory Darrell and conducted him into the hedged garden of Ordish,
where Ysabeau walked in tranquil converse with Lord Berners. The old
man was in high good-humor.

“My lad,” said he, and clapped Sir Gregory upon the
shoulder, “you have, I do protest, the very phoenix of
sisters. I was never happier.” And he went away chuckling.

The Queen said in a toneless voice, “We ride for
Blackfriars now.”

Darrell responded, “I am content, and ask but leave to
speak, briefly, with Dame Rosamund before I die.”

Then the woman came more near to him. “I am not used to
beg, but within this hour you encounter death, and I have loved no
man in all my life saving only you, Sir Gregory Darrell. Nor have
you loved any person as you loved me once in France. Oh, to-day, I
may speak freely, for with you the doings of that boy and girl are
matters overpast. Yet were it otherwise—eh, weigh the matter
carefully! for I am mistress of England now, and England would I
give you, and such love as that slim, white innocence has never
dreamed of would I give you, Gregory Darrell—No, no! ah,
Mother of God, not you!” The Queen clapped one hand upon his
lips.

“Listen,” she quickly said; “I spoke to tempt
you. But you saw, and you saw clearly, that it was the sickly whim
of a wanton, and you never dreamed of yielding, for you love this
Rosamund Eastney, and you know me to be vile. Then have a care of
me! The strange woman am I, of whom we read that her house is the
way to hell, going down to the chambers of death. Hoh, many strong
men have been slain by me, and in the gray time to come will many
others be slain by me, it may be; but never you among them, my
Gregory, who are more wary, and more merciful, and who know that I
have need to lay aside at least one comfortable thought against
eternity.”

“I concede you to have been unwise—” he
hoarsely began.

About them fell the dying leaves, of many glorious colors, but
the air of this new day seemed raw and chill.

Then Rosamund came through the opening in the hedge. “Now,
choose,” she said; “the woman offers life and high place
and wealth, and it may be, a greater love than I am capable of
giving you. I offer a dishonorable death within the moment.”

And again, with that peculiar and imperious gesture, the man
flung back his head, and he laughed. Said Gregory Darrell:

“I am I! and I will so to live that I may face without
shame not only God, but also my own scrutiny.” He wheeled upon
the Queen and spoke henceforward very leisurely. “I love you;
all my life long I have loved you, Ysabeau, and even now I love you:
and you, too, dear Rosamund, I love, though with a difference. And
every fibre of my being lusts for the power that you would give me,
Ysabeau, and for the good which I would do with it in the England
which I or blustering Roger Mortimer must rule; as every fibre of my
being lusts for the man that I would be could I choose death without
debate. And I think also of the man that you would make of me, my
Rosamund.

“The man! And what is this man, this Gregory Darrell, that
his welfare should be considered?—an ape who chatters to
himself of kinship with the archangels while filthily he digs for
groundnuts! This much I know, at bottom.

“Yet more clearly do I perceive that this same man, like
all his fellows, is a maimed god who walks the world dependent upon
many wise and evil counsellors. He must measure, to a
hair’s-breadth, every content of the world by means of a
bloodied sponge, tucked somewhere in his skull, a sponge which is
ungeared by the first cup of wine and ruined by the touch of his own
finger. He must appraise all that he judges with no better
instruments than two bits of colored jelly, with a bungling
makeshift so maladroit that the nearest horologer’s apprentice
could have devised a more accurate device. In fine, each man is
under penalty condemned to compute eternity with false weights, to
estimate infinity with a yard-stick: and he very often does it, and
chooses his own death without debate. For though, ‘If then I
do that which I would not I consent unto the law,’ saith even
an Apostle; yet a braver Pagan answers him, ‘Perceive at last
that thou hast in thee something better and more divine than the
things which cause the various effects and, as it were, pull thee by
the strings.’

“There lies the choice which every man must
face,—whether rationally, as his reason goes, to accept his
own limitations and make the best of his allotted prison-yard? or
stupendously to play the fool and swear even to himself (while his
own judgment shrieks and proves a flat denial), that he is at will
omnipotent? You have chosen long ago, my poor proud Ysabeau; and I
choose now, and differently: for poltroon that I am! being now in a
cold drench of terror, I steadfastly protest I am not very much
afraid, and I choose death without any more debate.”

It was toward Rosamund that the Queen looked, and smiled a
little pitifully. “Should Queen Ysabeau be angry or vexed or
very cruel now, my Rosamund? for at bottom she is glad.”

And the Queen said also: “I give you back your plighted
word. I ride homeward to my husks, but you remain. Or rather, the
Countess of Farrington departs for the convent of Ambresbury,
disconsolate in her widowhood and desirous to have done with worldly
affairs. It is most natural she should relinquish to her beloved and
only brother all her dower-lands—or so at least Messire de
Berners acknowledges. Here, then, is the grant, my Gregory, that
conveys to you those lands of Ralph de Belomys which last year I
confiscated. And this tedious Messire de Berners is willing
now—he is eager to have you for a son-in-law.”

About them fell the dying leaves, of many glorious colors, but
the air of this new day seemed raw and chill, while, very calmly,
Dame Ysabeau took Sir Gregory’s hand and laid it upon the hand
of Rosamund Eastney. “Our paladin is, in the outcome, a mortal
man, and therefore I do not altogether envy you. Yet he has his
moments, and you are capable. Serve, then, not only his desires but
mine also, dear Rosamund.”

There was a silence. The girl spoke as though it was a
sacrament. “I will, madame and Queen.”

Thus did the Queen end her holiday.

A little later the Countess of Farrington rode from Ordish with
all her train save one; and riding from that place, where love was,
she sang very softly.

Sang Ysabeau:

And within the hour came Hubert Frayne to Ordish, on a
foam-specked horse, as he rode to announce to the King’s men
the King’s barbaric murder overnight, at Berkeley Castle, by
Queen Ysabeau’s order.

“Ride southward,” said Lord Berners, and panted as
they buckled on his disused armor; “but harkee, Frayne! if you
pass the Countess of Farrington’s company, speak no syllable
of your news, since it is not convenient that a lady so thoroughly
and so praise-worthily—Lord, Lord, how I have
fattened!—so intent on holy things, in fine, should have her
meditations disturbed by any such unsettling tidings. Hey,
son-in-law?”

Sir Gregory Darrell laughed, very bitterly. “He that is
without blemish among you—” he said. Then they armed
completely, and went forth to battle against the murderous harlot.

THE END OF THE FOURTH NOVEL

The Story of the Housewife

In the year of grace 1326, upon Walburga’s Eve, some three hours after
sunset (thus Nicolas begins), had you visited a certain garden on the
outskirts of Valenciennes, you might there have stumbled upon a big,
handsome boy, prone on the turf, where by turns he groaned and vented
himself in sullen curses. His profanity had its palliation. Heir to
England though he was, you must know that this boy’s father in the
flesh had hounded him from England, as more recently had the lad’s
uncle Charles the Handsome driven him from France. Now had this boy
and his mother (the same Queen Ysabeau about whom I have told you in
the preceding tale) come as suppliants to the court of that stalwart
nobleman Sire William (Count of Hainault, Holland, and Zealand, and
Lord of Friesland), where their arrival had evoked the suggestion that
they depart at their earliest convenience. To-morrow, then, these
footsore royalties, the Queen of England and the Prince of Wales,
would be thrust out-of-doors to resume the weary beggarship, to knock
again upon the obdurate gates of this unsympathizing king or that deaf
emperor.

Accordingly the boy aspersed his destiny. At hand a nightingale
carolled as though an exiled prince were the blithest spectacle the
moon knew.

There came through the garden a tall girl, running, stumbling in her
haste. “Hail, King of England!” she said.

“Do not mock me, Philippa!” the boy half-sobbed.
Sulkily he rose to his feet.

“No mockery here, my fair sweet friend. No, I have told my
father all which happened yesterday. I pleaded for you. He
questioned me very closely. And when I had ended, he stroked his
beard, and presently struck one hand upon the table. ‘Out of
the mouth of babes!’ he said. Then he said: ‘My dear, I
believe for certain that this lady and her son have been driven from
their kingdom wrongfully. If it be for the good of God to comfort
the afflicted, how much more is it commendable to help and succor
one who is the daughter of a king, descended from royal lineage, and
to whose blood we ourselves are related!’ And accordingly he and
your mother have their heads together yonder, planning an invasion
of England, no less, and the dethronement of your wicked father, my
Edward. And accordingly—hail, King of England!” The girl
clapped her hands gleefully. The nightingale sang.

But the boy kept momentary silence. Not even in youth were the
men of his race handicapped by excessively tender hearts; yesterday
in the shrubbery the boy had kissed this daughter of Count William,
in part because she was a healthy and handsome person, and partly
because great benefit might come of an alliance with her father.
Well! the Prince had found chance-taking not unfortunate. With the
episode as foundation, Count William had already builded up the
future queenship of England. The strong Count could do—and, as
it seemed, was now in train to do—indomitable deeds to serve
his son-in-law; and now the beggar of five minutes since foresaw
himself, with this girl’s love as ladder, mounting to the high
habitations of the King of England, the Lord of Ireland, and the
Duke of Aquitaine. Thus they would herald him.

So he embraced the girl. “Hail, Queen of England!”
said the Prince; and then, “If I forget—” His
voice broke awkwardly. “My dear, if ever I
forget—!” Their lips met now. The nightingale discoursed
as if on a wager.

Presently was mingled with the bird’s descant another kind
of singing. Beyond the yew-hedge as these two stood silent, breast
to breast, passed young Jehan Kuypelant, one of the pages, fitting
to the accompaniment of a lute his paraphrase of the song which
Archilochus of Sicyon very anciently made in honor of Venus
Melaenis, the tender Venus of the Dark.

At a gap in the hedge the young Brabanter paused. His singing ended,
gulped. These two, who stood heart hammering against heart, saw for an
instant Jehan Kuypelant’s lean face silvered by the moonlight, his
mouth a tiny abyss. Followed the beat of lessening footfalls, while
the nightingale improvised an envoi.

But earlier Jehan Kuypelant also had sung, as though in rivalry with
the bird.

Sang Jehan Kuypelant:

It is time, however, that we quit this subject and speak of
other matters. Just twenty years later, on one August day in the
year of grace 1346, Master John Copeland—as men now called
Jehan Kuypelant, now secretary to the Queen of
England,—brought his mistress the unhandsome tidings that
David Bruce had invaded her realm with forty thousand Scots to back
him. The Brabanter found plump Queen Philippa with the
kingdom’s arbitress—Dame Catherine de Salisbury, whom
King Edward, third of that name to reign in Britain, and now warring
in France, very notoriously adored and obeyed.

This king, indeed, had been despatched into France chiefly, they
narrate, to release the Countess’ husband, William de
Montacute, from the French prison of the Châtelet. You may
appraise her dominion by this fact: chaste and shrewd, she had
denied all to King Edward, and in consequence he could deny her
nothing; so she sent him to fetch back her husband, whom she almost
loved. That armament had sailed from Southampton on Saint
George’s day.

These two women, then, shared the Brabanter’s execrable
news. Already Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Durham were the
broken meats of King David.

The Countess presently exclaimed: “Let them weep for this
that must! My place is not here.”

Philippa said, half hopefully, “Do you forsake Sire
Edward, Catherine?”

“Madame and Queen,” the Countess answered, “in
this world every man must scratch his own back. My lord has
entrusted to me his castle of Wark, his fiefs in Northumberland.
These, I hear, are being laid waste. Were there a thousand
men-at-arms left in England I would say fight. As it is, our men are
yonder in France and the island is defenceless. Accordingly I ride
for the north to make what terms I may with the King of
Scots.”

Now you might have seen the Queen’s eye brighten.
“Undoubtedly,” said she, “in her lord’s
absence it is the wife’s part to defend his belongings. And my
lord’s fief is England. I bid you God-speed, Catherine.”
And when the Countess was gone, Philippa turned, her round face
somewhat dazed and flushed. “She betrays him! she compounds
with the Scot! Mother of Christ, let me not fail!”

“A ship must be despatched to bid Sire Edward
return,” said the secretary. “Otherwise all England is
lost.”

“Not so, John Copeland! We must let Sire Edward complete
his overrunning of France, if such be the Trinity’s will. You
know perfectly well that he has always had a fancy to conquer
France; and if I bade him return now he would be vexed.”

“The disappointment of the King,” John Copeland
considered, “is a smaller evil than allowing all of us to be
butchered.”

“Not to me, John Copeland,” the Queen said.

Now came many lords into the chamber, seeking Madame Philippa.
“We must make peace with the Scottish rascal!—England is
lost!—A ship must be sent entreating succor of Sire
Edward!” So they shouted.

“Messieurs,” said Queen Philippa, “who
commands here? Am I, then, some woman of the town?”

Ensued a sudden silence. John Copeland, standing by the seaward
window, had picked up a lute and was fingering the instrument
half-idly. Now the Marquess of Hastings stepped from the throng.
“Pardon, Highness. But the occasion is urgent.”

“The occasion is very urgent, my lord,” the Queen
assented, deep in meditation.

John Copeland flung back his head and without prelude began to
carol lustily.

Sang John Copeland:

I must tell you that the Queen shivered, as if with extreme
cold. She gazed toward John Copeland wonderingly. The secretary was
fretting at his lutestrings, with his head downcast. Then in a while
the Queen turned to Hastings.

“The occasion is very urgent, my lord,” the Queen
assented. “Therefore it is my will that to-morrow one and all
your men be mustered at Blackheath. We will take the field without
delay against the King of Scots.”

The riot began anew. “Madness!” they shouted;
“lunar madness! We can do nothing until our King returns with
our army!”

“In his absence,” the Queen said, “I command
here.”

“You are not Regent,” the Marquess answered. Then he
cried, “This is the Regent’s affair!”

“Let the Regent be fetched,” Dame Philippa said,
very quietly. They brought in her son, Messire Lionel, now a boy of
eight years, and, in the King’s absence, Regent of England.

Both the Queen and the Marquess held papers.
“Highness,” Lord Hastings began, “for reasons of
state which I lack time to explain, this document requires your
signature. It is an order that a ship be despatched to ask the
King’s return. Your Highness may remember the pony you admired
yesterday?” The Marquess smiled ingratiatingly. “Just
here, your Highness—a crossmark.”

“The dappled one?” said the Regent; “and all
for making a little mark?” The boy jumped for the pen.

“Lionel,” said the Queen, “you are Regent of
England, but you are also my son. If you sign that paper you will
beyond doubt get the pony, but you will not, I think, care to ride
him. You will not care to sit down at all, Lionel.”

The Regent considered. “Thank you very much, my
lord,” he said in the ultimate, “but I do not like
ponies any more. Do I sign here, Mother?”

Philippa handed the Marquess a subscribed order to muster the
English forces at Blackheath; then another, closing the English
ports. “My lords,” the Queen said, “this boy is
the King’s vicar. In defying him, you defy the King. Yes,
Lionel, you have fairly earned a pot of jam for supper.”

Then Hastings went away without speaking. That night assembled
at his lodgings, by appointment, Viscount Heringaud, Adam Frere, the
Marquess of Orme, Lord Stourton, the Earls of Neville and Gage, and
Sir Thomas Rokeby. These seven found a long table there littered
with pens and parchment; to the rear of it, with a lackey behind
him, sat the Marquess of Hastings, meditative over a cup of
Bordeaux.

Presently Hastings said: “My friends, in creating our
womankind the Maker of us all was beyond doubt actuated by laudable
and cogent reasons; so that I can merely lament my inability to
fathom these reasons. I shall obey the Queen faithfully, since if I
did otherwise Sire Edward would have my head off within a day of his
return. In consequence, I do not consider it convenient to oppose
his vicar. To-morrow I shall assemble the tatters of troops which
remain to us, and to-morrow we march northward to inevitable defeat.
To-night I am sending a courier into Northumberland. He is an
obliging person, and would convey—to cite an
instance—eight letters quite as blithely as one.”

Each man glanced furtively about. England was in a panic by this, and
knew itself to lie before the Bruce defenceless. The all-powerful
Countess of Salisbury had compounded with King David; now Hastings,
too, their generalissimo, compounded. What the devil! loyalty was a
sonorous word, and so was patriotism, but, after all, one had estates
in the north.

The seven wrote in silence. I must tell you that when they had ended,
Hastings gathered the letters into a heap, and without glancing at the
superscriptures, handed all these letters to the attendant lackey.
“For the courier,” he said.

The fellow left the apartment. Presently you heard a departing clatter
of hoofs, and Hastings rose. He was a gaunt, terrible old man,
gray-bearded, and having high eyebrows that twitched and jerked.

“We have saved our precious skins,” said he.
“Hey, you fidgeters, you ferments of sour offal! I commend
your common-sense, messieurs, and I request you to withdraw. Even a
damned rogue such as I has need of a cleaner atmosphere in order to
breathe comfortably.” The seven went away without further
speech.

They narrate that next day the troops marched for Durham, where
the Queen took up her quarters. The Bruce had pillaged and burned
his way to a place called Beaurepair, within three miles of the
city. He sent word to the Queen that if her men were willing to come
forth from the town he would abide and give them battle.

She replied that she accepted his offer, and that the barons would
gladly risk their lives for the realm of their lord the King. The
Bruce grinned and kept silence, since he had in his pocket letters
from most of them protesting they would do nothing of the sort.

Here is comedy. On one side you have a horde of half-naked
savages, a shrewd master holding them in leash till the moment be
auspicious; on the other, a housewife at the head of a tiny force
lieutenanted by perjurers, by men already purchased. God knows what
dreams she had of miraculous victories, while her barons trafficked
in secret with the Bruce. It is recorded that, on the Saturday
before Michaelmas, when the opposing armies marshalled in the
Bishop’s Park, at Auckland, not a captain on either side
believed the day to be pregnant with battle. There would be a decent
counterfeit of resistance; afterward the little English army would
vanish pell-mell, and the Bruce would be master of the island. The
farce was prearranged, the actors therein were letter-perfect.

That morning at daybreak John Copeland came to the Queen’s
tent, and informed her quite explicitly how matters stood. He had
been drinking overnight with Adam Frere and the Earl of Gage, and
after the third bottle had found them candid. “Madame and
Queen, we are betrayed. The Marquess of Hastings, our commander, is
inexplicably smitten with a fever. He will not fight to-day. Not one
of your lords will fight to-day.” Master Copeland laid bare
such part of the scheme as yesterday’s conviviality had made
familiar. “Therefore I counsel retreat. Let the King be
summoned out of France.”

Queen Philippa shook her head, as she cut up squares of toast
and dipped them in milk for the Regent’s breakfast.
“Sire Edward would be vexed. He has always wanted to conquer
France. I shall visit the Marquess as soon as Lionel is
fed,—do you know, John Copeland, I am anxious about Lionel; he
is irritable and coughed five times during the night,—and then
I will attend to this affair.”

She found the Marquess in bed, groaning, the coverlet pulled up
to his chin. “Pardon, Highness,” said Lord Hastings,
“but I am an ill man. I cannot rise from this couch.”

“I do not question the gravity of your disorder,”
the Queen retorted, “since it is well known that the same
illness brought about the death of Iscariot. Nevertheless, I bid you
get up and lead our troops against the Scot.”

Now the hand of the Marquess veiled his countenance. “I am
an ill man,” he muttered, doggedly. “I cannot rise from
this couch.”

There was a silence.

“My lord,” the Queen presently began, “without
is an army prepared—yes, and quite able—to defend our
England. The one requirement of this army is a leader. Afford them
that, my lord—ah, I know that our peers are sold to the Bruce,
yet our yeomen at least are honest. Give them, then, a leader, and
they cannot but conquer, since God also is honest and incorruptible.
Pardieu! a woman might lead these men, and lead them to
victory!”

Hastings answered: “I am ill. I cannot rise from this
couch.”

“There is no man left in England,” said the Queen,
“since Sire Edward went into France. Praise God, I am his
wife!” She went away without flurry.

Through the tent-flap Hastings beheld all that which followed.
The English force was marshalled in four divisions, each commanded
by a bishop and a baron. You could see the men fidgeting, puzzled by
the delay; as a wind goes about a corn-field, vague rumors were
going about those wavering spears. Toward them rode Philippa, upon a
white palfrey, alone and perfectly tranquil. Her eight lieutenants
were now gathered about her in voluble protestation, and she heard
them out. Afterward she spoke, without any particular violence, as
one might order a strange cur from his room. Then the Queen rode on,
as though these eight declaiming persons had ceased to be of
interest. She reined up before her standard-bearer, and took the
standard in her hand. She began again to speak, and immediately the
army was in an uproar; the barons were clustering behind her, in
stealthy groups of two or three whisperers each; all were in the
greatest amazement and knew not what to do; but the army was
shouting the Queen’s name.

“Now is England shamed,” said Hastings, “since
a woman alone dares to encounter the Scot. She will lead them into
battle—and by God! there is no braver person under heaven than
yonder Dutch Frau! Friend David, I perceive that your venture is
lost, for those men would follow her to storm hell if she desired
it.”

He meditated, and shrugged. “And so would I,” said
Hastings.

A little afterward a gaunt and haggard old man, bareheaded and
very hastily dressed, reined his horse by the Queen’s side.
“Madame and Queen,” said Hastings, “I rejoice that
my recent illness is departed. I shall, by God’s grace, on
this day drive the Bruce from England.”

Philippa was not given to verbiage. Doubtless she had her
emotions, but none was visible upon the honest face. She rested one
plump hand upon the big-veined hand of Hastings. That was all.
“I welcome back the gallant gentleman of yesterday. I was
about to lead your army, my friend, since there was no one else to
do it, but I was hideously afraid. At bottom every woman is a
coward.”

“You were afraid to do it,” said the Marquess,
“but you were going to do it, because there was no one else to
do it! Ho, madame! had I an army of such cowards I would drive the
Scot not past the Border but beyond the Orkneys.”

The Queen then said, “But you are unarmed.”

“Highness,” he replied, “it is surely apparent
that I, who have played the traitor to two monarchs within the same
day, cannot with either decency or comfort survive that day.”
He turned upon the lords and bishops twittering about his
horse’s tail. “You merchandise, get back to your
stations, and if there was ever an honest woman in any of your
families, the which I doubt, contrive to get yourselves killed this
day, as I mean to do, in the cause of the honestest and bravest
woman our time has known.” Immediately the English forces
marched toward Merrington.

Philippa returned to her pavilion and inquired for John
Copeland. She was informed that he had ridden off, armed, in company
with five of her immediate retainers. She considered this strange,
but made no comment.

You picture her, perhaps, as spending the morning in prayer, in
beatings upon her breast, and in lamentations. Philippa did nothing
of the sort. She considered her cause to be so clamantly just that
to expatiate to the Holy Father upon its merits would be an
impertinence; it was not conceivable that He would fail her; and in
any event, she had in hand a deal of sewing which required immediate
attention. Accordingly she settled down to her needlework, while the
Regent of England leaned his head against her knee, and his mother
told him that ageless tale of Lord Huon, who in a wood near Babylon
encountered the King of Faëry, and subsequently bereaved an
atrocious Emir of his beard and daughter. All this the industrious
woman narrated in a low and pleasant voice, while the wide-eyed
Regent attended and at the proper intervals gulped his
cough-mixture.

You must know that about noon Master John Copeland came into the
tent. “We have conquered,” he said. “Now, by the
Face!”—thus, scoffingly, he used her husband’s
favorite oath,—“now, by the Face! there was never a
victory more complete! The Scottish army is fled, it is as utterly
dispersed from man’s seeing as are the sands which dried the
letters King Ahasuerus gave the admirable Esther!”

“I rejoice,” the Queen said, looking up from her
sewing, “that we have conquered, though in nature I expected
nothing else—Oh, horrible!” She sprang to her feet with
a cry of anguish. Here in little you have the entire woman; the
victory of her armament was to her a thing of course, since her
cause was just, whereas the loss of two front teeth by John Copeland
was a calamity.

He drew her toward the tent-flap, which he opened. Without was a
mounted knight, in full panoply, his arms bound behind him,
surrounded by the Queen’s five retainers. “In the rout I
took him,” said John Copeland; “though, as my mouth
witnesses, I did not find this David Bruce a tractable
prisoner.”

“Is that, then, the King of Scots?” Philippa
demanded, as she mixed salt and water for a mouthwash. “Sire
Edward should be pleased, I think. Will he not love me a little now,
John Copeland?”

John Copeland lifted both plump hands toward his lips. “He
could not choose,” John Copeland said; “madame, he could
no more choose but love you than I could choose.”

Philippa sighed. Afterward she bade John Copeland rinse his gums
and then take his prisoner to Hastings. He told her the Marquess was
dead, slain by the Knight of Liddesdale. “That is a
pity,” the Queen said. She reflected a while, reached her
decision. “There is left alive in England but one man to whom
I dare entrust the keeping of the King of Scots. My barons are sold
to him; if I retain Messire David by me, one or another lord will
engineer his escape within the week, and Sire Edward will be vexed.
Yet listen, John—” She unfolded her plan.

“I have long known,” he said, when she had done,
“that in all the world there was no lady more lovable. Twenty
years I have loved you, my Queen, and yet it is only to-day I
perceive that in all the world there is no lady more wise than
you.”

Philippa touched his cheek, maternally. “Foolish boy! You
tell me the King of Scots has an arrow-wound in his nose? I think a
bread poultice would be best.” She told him how to make this
poultice, and gave other instructions. Then John Copeland left the
tent and presently rode away with his company.

Philippa saw that the Regent had his dinner, and afterward
mounted her white palfrey and set out for the battle-field. There
the Earl of Neville, as second in command, received her with great
courtesy. God had shown to her Majesty’s servants most
singular favor: despite the calculations of reasonable men,—to
which, she might remember, he had that morning taken the liberty to
assent,—some fifteen thousand Scots were slain. True, her
gallant general was no longer extant, though this was scarcely
astounding when one considered the fact that he had voluntarily
entered the mêlée quite unarmed. A touch of age,
perhaps; Hastings was always an eccentric man: in any event, as
epilogue, this Neville congratulated the Queen that—by blind
luck, he was forced to concede,—her worthy secretary had made
a prisoner of the Scottish King. Doubtless, Master Copeland was an
estimable scribe, and yet—Ah, yes, Lord Neville quite followed
her Majesty—beyond doubt, the wardage of a king was an honor
not lightly to be conferred. Oh, yes, he understood; her Majesty
desired that the office should be given some person of rank. And
pardie! her Majesty was in the right. Eh? said the Earl of Neville.

Intently gazing into the man’s shallow eyes, Philippa
assented. Master Copeland had acted unwarrantably in riding off with
his captive. Let him be sought at once. She dictated to
Neville’s secretary a letter, which informed John Copeland
that he had done what was not agreeable in purloining her prisoner.
Let him without delay deliver the King to her good friend the Earl
of Neville.

To Neville this was satisfactory, since he intended that once in
his possession David Bruce should escape forthwith. The letter, I
repeat, suited this smirking gentleman in its tiniest syllable, and
the single difficulty was to convey it to John Copeland, for as to
his whereabouts neither Neville nor any one else had the least
notion.

This was immaterial, however, for they narrate that next day a
letter signed with John Copeland’s name was found pinned to
the front of Neville’s tent. I cite a passage therefrom:
“I will not give up my royal prisoner to a woman or a child,
but only to my own lord, Sire Edward, for to him I have sworn
allegiance, and not to any woman. Yet you may tell the Queen she may
depend on my taking excellent care of King David. I have poulticed
his nose, as she directed.”

Here was a nonplus, not without its comical side. Two great
realms had met in battle, and the king of one of them had vanished
like a soap-bubble. Philippa was in a rage,—you could see that
both by her demeanor and by the indignant letters she dictated;
true, none of these letters could be delivered, since they were all
addressed to John Copeland. Meanwhile, Scotland was in despair,
whereas the traitor English barons were in a frenzy, because they
did not know what had become of their fatal letters to the Bruce, or
of him either. The circumstances were unique, and they remained
unchanged for three feverish weeks.

We will now return to affairs in France, where on the day of the
Nativity, as night gathered about Calais, John Copeland came
unheralded to the quarters of King Edward, then besieging that city.
Master Copeland entreated audience, and got it readily enough, since
there was no man alive whom Sire Edward more cordially desired to
lay his fingers upon.

A page brought Master Copeland to the King, that stupendous,
blond and incredibly big person. With Sire Edward were that careful
Italian, Almerigo di Pavia, who afterward betrayed Sire Edward, and
a lean soldier whom Master Copeland recognized as John Chandos.
These three were drawing up an account of the recent victory at
Créçi, to be forwarded to all mayors and sheriffs in
England, with a cogent postscript as to the King’s incidental
and immediate need of money.

Now King Edward sat leaning far back in his chair, a hand on
either hip, and with his eyes narrowing as he regarded Master
Copeland. Had the Brabanter flinched, the King would probably have
hanged him within the next ten minutes; finding his gaze unwavering,
the King was pleased. Here was a novelty; most people blinked quite
honestly under the scrutiny of those fierce big eyes, which were
blue and cold and of an astounding lustre. The lid of the left eye
drooped a little: this was Count Manuel’s legacy, they
whispered.

The King rose with a jerk and took John Copeland’s hand.
“Ha!” he grunted, “I welcome the squire who by his
valor has captured the King of Scots. And now, my man, what have you
done with Davie?”

John Copeland answered: “Highness, you may find him at
your convenience safely locked in Bamborough Castle. Meanwhile, I
entreat you, sire, do not take it amiss if I did not surrender King
David to the orders of my lady Queen, for I hold my lands of you,
and not of her, and my oath is to you, and not to her, unless indeed
by choice.”

“John,” the King sternly replied, “the loyal
service you have done us is considerable, whereas your excuse for
kidnapping Davie is a farce. Hey, Almerigo, do you and Chandos avoid
the chamber! I have something in private with this fellow.”
When they had gone, the King sat down and composedly said,
“Now tell me the truth, John Copeland.”

“Sire,” Copeland began, “it is necessary you
first understand I bear a letter from Madame Philippa—”

“Then read it,” said the King. “Heart of God!
have I an eternity to waste on you slow-dealing Brabanters!”

John Copeland read aloud, while the King trifled with a pen,
half negligent, and in part attendant.

Read John Copeland:

  “My DEAR LORD,—recommend me to your
lordship with soul and body and all my poor might, and with all this
I thank you, as my dear lord, dearest and best beloved of all
earthly lords I protest to me, and thank you, my dear lord, with all
this as I say before. Your comfortable letter came to me on Saint
Gregory’s day, and I was never so glad as when I heard by your
letter that ye were strong enough in Ponthieu by the grace of God
for to keep you from your enemies. Among them I estimate Madame
Catherine de Salisbury, who would have betrayed you to the Scot.
And, dear lord, if it be pleasing to your high lordship that as soon
as ye may that I might hear of your gracious speed, which may God
Almighty continue and increase, I shall be glad, and also if ye do
continue each night to chafe your feet with a rag of woollen stuff,
as your physician directed. And, my dear lord, if it like you for to
know of my fare, John Copeland will acquaint you concerning the
Bruce his capture, and the syrup he brings for our son Lord
Edward’s cough, and the great malice-workers in these shires
which would have so despitefully wrought to you, and of the manner
of taking it after each meal. I am lately informed that Madame
Catherine is now at Stirling with Robert Stewart and has lost all
her good looks through a fever. God is invariably gracious to His
servants. Farewell, my dear lord, and may the Holy Trinity keep you
from your adversaries and ever send me comfortable tidings of you.
Written at York, in the Castle, on Saint Gregory’s day last
past, by your own poor

“PHILIPPA.

“To my true lord.”

“H’m!” said the King; “and now give me
the entire story.”

John Copeland obeyed. I must tell you that early in the
narrative King Edward arose and strode toward a window.
“Catherine!” he said. He remained motionless while
Master Copeland went on without any manifest emotion. When he had
ended, King Edward said, “And where is Madame de Salisbury
now?”

At this the Brabanter went mad. As a leopard springs he leaped
upon the King, and grasping him by each shoulder, shook that monarch
as one punishing a child.

“Now by the splendor of God—!” King Edward
began, very terrible in his wrath. He saw that John Copeland held a
dagger to his breast, and he shrugged. “Well, my man, you
perceive I am defenceless.”

“First you will hear me out,” John Copeland said.

“It would appear,” the King retorted, “that I
have little choice.”

At this time John Copeland began: “Sire, you are the
mightiest monarch your race has known. England is yours, France is
yours, conquered Scotland lies prostrate at your feet. To-day there
is no other man in all the world who possesses a tithe of your
glory; yet twenty years ago Madame Philippa first beheld you and
loved you, an outcast, an exiled, empty-pocketed prince. Twenty
years ago the love of Madame Philippa, great Count William’s
daughter, got for you the armament with which England was regained.
Twenty years ago but for Madame Philippa you had died naked in some
ditch.”

“Go on,” the King said presently.

“Afterward you took a fancy to reign in France. You
learned then that we Brabanters are a frugal people: Madame Philippa
was wealthy when she married you, and twenty years had quadrupled
her private fortune. She gave you every penny of it that you might
fit out this expedition; now her very crown is in pawn at Ghent. In
fine, the love of Madame Philippa gave you France as lightly as one
might bestow a toy upon a child who whined for it.”

The King fiercely said, “Go on.”

“Eh, sire, I intend to. You left England undefended that
you might posture a little in the eyes of Europe. And meanwhile a
woman preserves England, a woman gives you Scotland as a gift, and
in return asks nothing—God have mercy on us!—save that
you nightly chafe your feet with a bit of woollen. You hear of
it—and inquire, ‘Where is Madame de
Salisbury?’ Here beyond doubt is the cock of Aesop’s
fable,” snarled John Copeland, “who unearthed a gem and
grumbled that his diamond was not a grain of corn.”

“You shall be hanged at dawn,” the King replied.
“Meanwhile spit out your venom.”

“I say to you, then,” John Copeland continued,
“that to-day you are master of Europe. I say to you that, but
for this woman whom for twenty years you have neglected, you would
to-day be mouldering in some pauper’s grave. Eh, without
question, you most magnanimously loved that shrew of Salisbury!
because you fancied the color of her eyes, Sire Edward, and admired
the angle between her nose and her forehead. Minstrels unborn will
sing of this great love of yours. Meantime I say to
you”—now the man’s rage was
monstrous—“I say to you, go home to your too-tedious
wife, the source of all your glory! sit at her feet! and let her
teach you what love is!” He flung away the dagger.
“There you have the truth. Now summon your attendants, my
très beau sire, and have me hanged.”

The King made no movement. “You have been
bold—” he said at last.

“But you have been far bolder, sire. For twenty years you
have dared to flout that love which is God’s noblest heritage
to His children.”

King Edward sat in meditation for a long while. The squinting of
his left eye was now very noticeable. “I consider my
wife’s clerk,” he drily said, “to discourse of
love in somewhat too much the tone of a lover.” And a flush
was his reward.

But when this Copeland spoke he was like one transfigured. His
voice was grave and very tender, and he said:

“As the fish have their life in the waters, so I have and
always shall have mine in love. Love made me choose and dare to
emulate a lady, long ago, through whom I live contented, without
expecting any other good. Her purity is so inestimable that I cannot
say whether I derive more pride or sorrow from its preeminence. She
does not love me, and she will never love me. She would condemn me
to be hewed in fragments sooner than permit her husband’s
finger to be injured. Yet she surpasses all others so utterly that I
would rather hunger in her presence than enjoy from another all
which a lover can devise.”

Sire Edward stroked the table through this while, with an
inverted pen. He cleared his throat. He said, half-fretfully:

“Now, by the Face! it is not given every man to love
precisely in this troubadourish fashion. Even the most generous
person cannot render to love any more than that person happens to
possess. I have read in an old tale how the devil sat upon a
cathedral spire and white doves flew about him. Monks came and told
him to begone. ‘Do not the spires show you, O son of
darkness’ they clamored, ‘that the place is holy?’
And Satan (in this old tale) replied that these spires were capable
of various interpretations. I speak of symbols, John. Yet I also
have loved, in my own fashion,—and, it would seem, I win the
same reward as you.”

The King said more lately: “And so she is at Stirling now?
hobnob with my armed enemies, and cajoling that red lecher Robert
Stewart?” He laughed, not overpleasantly. “Eh, yes, it
needed a bold person to bring all your tidings! But you Brabanters
are a very thorough-going people.”

The King rose and flung back his high head. “John, the
loyal service you have done us and our esteem for your valor are so
great that they may well serve you as an excuse. May shame fall on
those who bear you any ill-will! You will now return home, and take
your prisoner, the King of Scotland, and deliver him to my wife, to
do with as she may elect. You will convey to her my
entreaty—not my orders, John,—that she come to me here
at Calais. As remuneration for this evening’s insolence, I
assign lands as near your house as you can choose them to the value
of £500 a year for you and for your heirs.”

You must know that John Copeland fell upon his knees before King
Edward. “Sire—” he stammered.

But the King raised him. “No, no,” he said,
“you are the better man. Were there any equity in fate, John
Copeland, your lady had loved you, not me. As it is, I must strive
to prove not altogether unworthy of my fortune. But I make no large
promises,” he added, squinting horribly, “because the
most generous person cannot render to love any more than that person
happens to possess. So be off with you, John Copeland,—go, my
squire, and bring me back my Queen!”

Presently he heard John Copeland singing without. And through
that instant, they say, his youth returned to Edward Plantagenet,
and all the scents and shadows and faint sounds of Valenciennes on
that ancient night when a tall girl came to him, running, stumbling
in her haste to bring him kingship. “She waddles now,”
he thought forlornly. “Still, I am blessed.” But
Copeland sang, and the Brabanter’s heart was big with joy.

Sang John Copeland:

THE END OF THE FIFTH NOVEL

The Story of the Satraps

In the year of grace 1381 (Nicolas begins) was Dame Anne magnificently
fetched from remote Bohemia, and at Westminster married to Sire
Richard, the second monarch of that name to reign in England. This
king, I must tell you, had succeeded while he was yet an infant, to
the throne of his grandfather, the third King Edward, about whom I
have told you in the story preceding this.

Queen Anne had presently noted a certain priest who went forbiddingly
about her court, where he was accorded a provisional courtesy, and who
went also into many hovels, where pitiable wrecks of humankind
received his alms and ministrations.

Queen Anne made inquiries. This young cleric was amanuensis to
the Duke of Gloucester, she learned, and was notoriously a by-blow
of the Duke’s brother, dead Lionel of Clarence. She sent for
this Edward Maudelain. When he came her first perception was,
“How wonderful is his likeness to the King!” while the
thought’s commentary ran, unacknowledged, “Yes, as an
eagle resembles a falcon!” For here, to the observant eye, was
a more zealous person, already passion-wasted, and a far more
dictatorial and stiff-necked person than the lazy and amiable King;
also, this Maudelain’s face and nose were somewhat too long
and high: the priest was, in a word, the less comely of the pair by
a very little, and to an immeasurable extent the more kinglike.

“You are my cousin now, messire,” the Queen told
him, and innocently offered to his lips her own.

He never moved; but their glances crossed, and for that instant
she saw the face of a man who has just stepped into a quicksand. She
grew red, without knowing why. Then he spoke, composedly, of trivial
matters.

Thus began the Queen’s acquaintance with Edward Maudelain.
She was by this time the loneliest woman in the island. Her husband
granted her a bright and fresh perfection of form and color, but
desiderated any appetizing tang, and lamented, in his phrase, a
certain kinship to the impeccable loveliness of some female saint in
a jaunty tapestry; bright as ice in sunshine, just so her beauty
chilled you, he complained: moreover, this daughter of the Caesars
had been fetched into England, chiefly, to breed him children, and
this she had never done. Undoubtedly he had made a bad
bargain,—he was too easy-going, people presumed upon it. His
barons snatched their cue and esteemed Dame Anne to be negligible;
whereas the clergy, finding that she obstinately read the Scriptures
in the vulgar tongue, under the irrelevant plea of not comprehending
Latin, began to denounce her from their pulpits as a heretic and as
the evil woman prophesied by Ezekiel.

It was the nature of this desolate child to crave affection, as
a necessary, and pitifully she tried to purchase it through
almsgiving. In the attempt she could have found no coadjutor more
ready than Edward Maudelain. Giving was with these two a sort of
obsession, though always he gave in a half scorn of his fellow
creatures which was not more than half concealed. This bastard was
charitable and pious because he knew his soul, conceived in double
sin, to be doubly evil, and therefore doubly in need of redemption
through good works.

Now in and about the Queen’s lonely rooms the woman and
the priest met daily to discuss now this or that point of theology,
or now (to cite a single instance) Gammer Tudway’s obstinate
sciatica. Considerate persons found something of the pathetic in
their preoccupation by these matters while, so clamantly, the
dissension between the young King and his uncles gathered to a head.
The King’s uncles meant to continue governing England, with
the King as their ward, as long as they could; he meant to relieve
himself of this guardianship, and them of their heads, as soon as he
was able. War seemed inevitable, the air was thick with portents;
and was this, then, an appropriate time, the judicious demanded of
high Heaven, for the Queen of imperilled England to concern herself
about a peasant’s toothache?

Long afterward was Edward Maudelain to remember this quiet and amiable
period of his life, and to wonder over the man that he had been
through this queer while. Embittered and suspicious she had found him,
noted for the carping tongue he lacked both power and inclination to
bridle; and she had, against his nature, made Maudelain see that every
person is at bottom lovable, and that human vices are but the stains
of a traveller midway in a dusty journey; and had incited the priest
no longer to do good for his soul’s health, but simply for his
fellow’s benefit.

In place of that monstrous passion which had at first view of her
possessed the priest, now, like a sheltered taper, glowed an adoration
which made him yearn, in defiance of common-sense, to suffer somehow
for this beautiful and gracious comrade; though very often pity for
her loneliness and knowledge that she dared trust no one save him
would throttle Maudelain like two assassins, and would move the
hot-blooded young man to a rapture of self-contempt and exultation.

Now Maudelain made excellent songs, it was a matter of common report.
Yet but once in their close friendship did the Queen command him to
make a song for her. This had been at Dover, about vespers, in the
starved and tiny garden overlooking the English Channel, upon which
her apartments faced; and the priest had fingered his lute for an
appreciable while before he sang, more harshly than was his custom.

Sang Maudelain:

Dame Anne had risen. She said nothing. She stayed in this
posture for a lengthy while, one hand yet clasping each breast. Then
she laughed, and began to speak of Long Simon’s recent fever.
Was there no method of establishing him in another cottage? No, the
priest said, the peasants, like the cattle, were always deeded with
the land, and Simon could not lawfully be taken away from his owner.

One day, about the hour of prime, in that season of the year
when fields smell of young grass, the Duke of Gloucester sent for
Edward Maudelain. The court was then at Windsor. The priest came
quickly to his patron. He found the Duke in company with the
King’s other uncle Edmund of York and bland Harry of Derby,
who was John of Gaunt’s oldest son, and in consequence the
King’s cousin. Each was a proud and handsome man: Derby alone
(who was afterward King of England) had inherited the squint that
distinguished this family. To-day Gloucester was gnawing at his
finger nails, big York seemed half-asleep, and the Earl of Derby
appeared patiently to await something as yet ineffably remote.

“Sit down!” snarled Gloucester. His lean and evil
countenance was that of a tired devil. The priest obeyed, wondering
that so high an honor should be accorded him in the view of three
great noblemen. Then Gloucester said, in his sharp way:
“Edward, you know, as England knows, the King’s
intention toward us three and our adherents. It has come to our
demolishment or his. I confess a preference in the matter. I have
consulted with the Pope concerning the advisability of taking the
crown into my own hands. Edmund here does not want it, and my
brother John is already achieving one in Spain. Eh, in imagination I
was already King of England, and I had dreamed—Well! to-day
the prosaic courier arrived. Urban—the Neapolitan
swine!—dares give me no assistance. It is decreed I shall
never reign in these islands. And I had dreamed—Meanwhile, de
Vere and de la Pole are at the King day and night, urging revolt. As
matters go, within a week or two, the three heads before you will be
embellishing Temple Bar. You, of course, they will only hang.”

“We must avoid England, then, my noble patron,” the
priest considered.

Angrily the Duke struck a clenched fist upon the table.
“By the Cross! we remain in England, you and I and all of us.
Others avoid. The Pope and the Emperor will have none of me. They
plead for the Black Prince’s heir, for the legitimate heir.
Dompnedex! they shall have him!”

Maudelain recoiled, for he thought this twitching man insane.

“Besides, the King intends to take from me my fief at
Sudbury,” said the Duke of York, “in order to give it to
de Vere. That is both absurd and monstrous and abominable.”

Openly Gloucester sneered. “Listen!” he rapped out
toward Maudelain; “when they were drawing up the Great Peace
at Brétigny, it happened, as is notorious, that the Black
Prince, my brother, wooed in this town the Demoiselle Alixe Riczi,
whom in the outcome he abducted. It is not so generally known,
however, that, finding this sister of the Vicomte de Montbrison a
girl of obdurate virtue, my brother had prefaced the action by
marriage.”

“And what have I to do with all this?” said Edward
Maudelain.

Gloucester retorted: “More than you think. For this Alixe
was conveyed to Chertsey, here in England, where at the year’s
end she died in childbirth. A little before this time had Sir Thomas
Holland seen his last day,—the husband of that Joane of Kent
whom throughout life my brother loved most marvellously. The
disposition of the late Queen-Mother is tolerably well known. I make
no comment save that to her moulding my brother was as so much wax.
In fine, the two lovers were presently married, and their son reigns
to-day in England. The abandoned son of Alixe Riczi was reared by
the Cistercians at Chertsey, where some years ago I found
you.”

He spoke with a stifled voice, wrenching forth each sentence;
and now with a stiff forefinger flipped a paper across the table.
“In extremis my brother did more than confess. He
signed,—your Majesty,” said Gloucester. The Duke on a
sudden flung out his hands, like a wizard whose necromancy fails,
and the palms were bloodied where his nails had cut the flesh.

“Moreover, my daughter was born at Sudbury,” said
the Duke of York.

And of Maudelain’s face I cannot tell you. He made
pretence to read the paper carefully, but his eyes roved, and he
knew that he stood among wolves. The room was oddly shaped, with
eight equal sides: the ceiling was of a light and brilliant blue,
powdered with many golden stars, and the walls were hung with smart
tapestries which commemorated the exploits of Theseus. “Then I
am King,” this Maudelain said aloud, “of France and
England, and Lord of Ireland, and Duke of Aquitaine! I perceive that
Heaven loves a jest.” He wheeled upon Gloucester and spoke
with singular irrelevance, “And what is to be done with the
present Queen?”

Again the Duke shrugged. “I had not thought of the dumb
wench. We have many convents.”

Now Maudelain twisted the paper between his long, wet fingers
and appeared to meditate.

“It would be advisable, your Grace,” observed the
Earl of Derby, suavely, and breaking his silence for the first time,
“that you yourself should wed Dame Anne, once the Apostolic
See has granted the necessary dispensation. Treading too close upon
the fighting requisite to bring about the dethronement and death of
our nominal lord the so-called King, a war with Bohemia, which would
be only too apt to follow this noble lady’s assassination,
would be highly inconvenient, and, lacking that, we would have to
pay back her dowry.”

Then these three princes rose and knelt before the priest; they
were clad in long bright garments, and they glittered with gold and
many jewels. He standing among them shuddered in his sombre robe.
“Hail, King of England!” cried these three.

“Hail, ye that are my kinsmen!” he answered;
“hail, ye that spring of an accursed race, as I! And woe to
England for that hour wherein Manuel of Poictesme held traffic with
the Sorceress of Provence, and the devil’s son begot an heir
for England! Of ice and of lust and of hell-fire are all we sprung;
old records attest it; and fickle and cold and ravenous and without
shame are all our race until the end. Of your brother’s
dishonor ye make merchandise to-day, and to-day fratricide whispers
me, and leers, and, Heaven help me! I attend. O God of Gods! wilt
Thou dare bid a man live stainless, having aforetime filled his
veins with such a venom? Then haro, will I cry from Thy deepest
hell.... Oh, now let the adulterous Redeemer of Poictesme rejoice in
his tall fires, to note that his descendants know of what wood to
make a crutch! You are very wise, my kinsmen. Take your measures,
messieurs who are my kinsmen! Though were I of any other race, with
what expedition would I now kill you, I that recognize within me the
strength to do it! Then would I slay you! without any animosity,
would I slay you then, just as I would kill as many splendid
snakes!”

He went away, laughing horribly. Gloucester drummed upon the
table, his brows contracted. But the lean Duke said nothing; big
York seemed to drowse; and Henry of Derby smiled as he sounded a
gong for that scribe who would draw up the necessary letters. The
Earl’s time was not yet come, but it was nearing.

In the antechamber the priest encountered two men-at-arms
dragging a dead body from the castle. The Duke of Kent, Maudelain
was informed, had taken a fancy to a peasant girl, and in
remonstrance her misguided father had actually tugged at his
Grace’s sleeve.

Maudelain went into the park of Windsor, where he walked for a
long while alone. It was a fine day in the middle spring; and now he
seemed to understand for the first time how fair was his England.
For all England was his fief, held in vassalage to God and to no man
alive, his heart now sang; allwhither his empire spread, opulent in
grain and metal and every revenue of the earth, and in stalwart men
(his chattels), and in strong orderly cities, where the windows
would be adorned with scarlet hangings, and women (with golden hair
and red lax lips) would presently admire as King Edward rode slowly
by at the head of a resplendent retinue. And always the King would
bow, graciously and without haste, to his shouting people.... He
laughed to find himself already at rehearsal of the gesture.

It was strange, though, that in this glorious fief of his so
many persons should, as yet, live day by day as cattle live,
suspicious of all other moving things (with reason), and roused from
their incurious and filthy apathy only when some glittering baron,
like a resistless eagle, swept uncomfortably near as he passed on
some by-errand of the more bright and windy upper-world. East and
north they had gone yearly, for so many centuries, these dumb
peasants, to fight out their master’s uncomprehended quarrel,
and to manure with their carcasses the soil of France and of
Scotland. Give these serfs a king, now, who (being absolute), might
dare to deal in perfect equity with rich and poor, who with his
advent would bring Peace into England as his bride, as Trygaeus did
very anciently in Athens—“And then,” the priest
paraphrased, “may England recover all the blessings she has
lost, and everywhere the glitter of active steel will cease.”
For everywhere men would crack a rustic jest or two, unhurriedly.
Virid fields would heave brownly under their ploughs; they would
find that with practice it was almost as easy to chuckle as it was
to cringe.

Meanwhile on every side the nobles tyrannized in their degree,
well clothed and nourished, but at bottom equally comfortless in
condition. As illuminate by lightning Maudelain saw the many
factions of his barons squabbling for gross pleasures, like wolves
over a corpse, and blindly dealing death to one another to secure at
least one more delicious gulp before that inevitable mangling by the
teeth of some burlier colleague. The complete misery of England
showed before Maudelain like a winter landscape. The thing was
questionless. He must tread henceforward without fear among frenzied
beasts, and to their ultimate welfare. On a sudden Maudelain knew
himself to be invincible and fine, and hesitancy ebbed.

True, Richard, poor fool, must die. Squarely the priest faced
that stark and hideous circumstance; to spare Richard was beyond his
power, and the boy was his brother; yes, this oncoming King Edward
would be a fratricide, and after death would be irrevocably damned.
To burn, and eternally to burn, and, worst of all, to know that the
torment was eternal! ay, it would be hard; but, at the cost of
Richard’s ignoble life and of Edward’s inconsiderable
soul, to win so many men to manhood was not a bargain to be refused.

The tale tells that Maudelain went toward the little garden
which adjoined Dame Anne’s apartments. He found the Queen
there, alone, as nowadays she was for the most part, and he paused
to wonder at her bright and singular beauty. How vaguely odd was
this beauty, he reflected, too; how alien in its effect to that of
any other woman in sturdy England, and how associable it was,
somehow, with every wild and gracious denizen of the woods which
blossomed yonder.

In this place the world was all sunlight, temperate but
undiluted. They had met in a wide, unshaded plot of grass, too short
to ripple, which everywhere glowed steadily, like a gem. Right and
left, birds sang as if in a contest. The sky was cloudless, a faint
and radiant blue throughout, save where the sun stayed as yet in the
zenith, so that the Queen’s brows cast honey-colored shadows
upon either cheek. The priest was greatly troubled by the proud and
heatless brilliancies, the shrill joys, of every object within the
radius of his senses.

She was splendidly clothed, in a kirtle of very bright green,
tinted like the verdancy of young ferns in sunlight, and wore over
all a gown of white, cut open on each side as far as the hips. This
garment was embroidered with golden leopards and was trimmed with
ermine. About her yellow hair was a chaplet of gold, wherein
emeralds glowed. Her blue eyes were as large and shining and
changeable (he thought) as two oceans in midsummer; and Maudelain
stood motionless and seemed to himself but to revere, as the Earl
Ixion did, some bright unstable wisp of cloud, while somehow all
elation departed from him as water does from a wetted sponge
compressed. He laughed discordantly.

“Wait—! O my only friend—!” said
Maudelain. Then in a level voice he told her all, unhurriedly and
without any apparent emotion.

She had breathed once, with a deep inhalation. She had screened
her countenance from his gaze the while you might have counted
fifty. Presently she said: “This means more war, for de Vere
and Tressilian and de la Pole and Bramber and others of the barons
know that the King’s fall signifies their ruin. Many thousands
die to-morrow.”

He answered, “It means a war which will make me King of
England, and will make you my wife.”

“In that war the nobles will ride abroad with banners and
gay surcoats, and will kill and ravish in the pauses of their songs;
while daily in that war the naked peasants will kill the one the
other, without knowing why.”

His thought had forerun hers. “Yes, some must die, so that
in the end I may be King, and the general happiness may rest at my
disposal. The adventure of this world is wonderful, and it goes
otherwise than under the strict tutelage of reason.”

“It would not be yours, but Gloucester’s and his
barons’. Friend, they would set you on the throne to be their
puppet and to move only as they pulled the strings. Thwart them in
their maraudings and they will fling you aside, as the barons have
pulled down every king that dared oppose them. No, they desire to
live pleasantly, to have fish on Fridays, and white bread and the
finest wine the whole year through, and there is not enough for all,
say they. Can you alone contend against them? and conquer them? for
not unless you can do this may I dare bid you reign.”

The sun had grown too bright, too merciless, but as always she
drew the truth from him. “I could not venture to oppose in
anything the barons who supported my cause: for if I did, I would
not endure a fortnight. Heaven help us, nor you nor I nor any one
may transform through any personal force this bitter world, this
piercing, cruel place of frost and sun. Charity and Truth are
excommunicate, and a king is only an adorned and fearful person who
leads wolves toward their quarry, lest, lacking it, they turn and
devour him. Everywhere the powerful labor to put one another out of
worship, and each to stand the higher with the other’s corpse
as his pedestal; and Lechery and Greed and Hatred sway these proud
and inconsiderate fools as winds blow at will the gay leaves of
autumn. We walk among shining vapors, we aspire to overpass a
mountain of unstable sparkling sand! We two alone in all the
scuffling world! Oh, it is horrible, and I think that Satan plans
the jest! We dream for a while of refashioning this bright
desolation, and know that we alone can do it! we are as demigods,
you and I, in those gallant dreams! and at the end we can but
poultice some dirty rascal!”

The Queen answered sadly: “Once and only once did God
tread this tangible world, for a very little while, and, look you,
to what trivial matters He devoted that brief space! Only to chat
with fishermen, and to talk with light women, and to consort with
rascals, and at last to die between two cutpurses, ignominiously! If
Christ Himself achieved so little that seemed great and admirable,
how should we two hope to do any more?”

He answered: “It is true. Of anise and of cumin the Master
gets His tithe—” Maudelain broke off with a yapping
laugh. “Puf! Heaven is wiser than we. I am King of England. It
is my heritage.”

“It means war. Many will die, thousands will die, and to
no betterment of affairs.”

“I am King of England. I am Heaven’s satrap here,
and answerable to Heaven alone. It is my heritage.” And now
his large and cruel eyes were aflame as he regarded her.

And visibly beneath their glare the woman changed. “My
friend, must I not love you any longer? You would be content with
happiness? Then I am jealous of that happiness! for you are the one
friend that I have had, and so dear to me—Look you!” she
said, with a light, wistful laugh, “there have been times when
I was afraid of everything you touched, and I hated everything you
looked at. I would not have you stained; I desired to pass my whole
life between the four walls of some dingy and eternal gaol, forever
alone with you, lest you become like other men. I would in that
period have been the very bread you eat, the least perfume which
delights you, the clod you touch in crushing it, and I have often
loathed some pleasure I derived from life because I might not
transfer it to you undiminished. For I wanted somehow to make you
happy to my own anguish.... It was wicked, I suppose, for the
imagining of it made me happy, too.”

Now while he listened to this dear and tranquil speaking, Edward
Maudelain’s raised hands had fallen like so much lead, and
remembering his own nature, he longed for annihilation, before she
had appraised his vileness. He said:

“With reason Augustine crieth out against the lust of the
eyes. ‘For pleasure seeketh objects beautiful, melodious,
fragrant, savory, and soft; but this disease those contrary as well,
not for the sake of suffering annoyance, but out of the lust of
making trial of them!’ Ah! ah! too curiously I planned my own
damnation, too presumptuously I had esteemed my soul a worthy
scapegoat, and I had gilded my enormity with many lies. Yet indeed,
indeed, I had believed brave things, I had planned a not ignoble
bargain—! Ey, say, is it not laughable, madame?—as my
birth-right Heaven accords me a penny, and with that only penny I
must presently be seeking to bribe Heaven.”

Then he said: “Yet are we indeed God’s satraps, as
but now I cried in my vainglory, and we hold within our palms the
destiny of many peoples. Depardieux! God is wiser than we are.
Still, Satan offers no unhandsome bribes—bribes that are
tangible and sure. For Satan, too, is wiser than we are.”

They stood like effigies, lit by the broad, unsparing splendor
of the morning, but again their kindling eyes had met, and again the
man shuddered. “Decide! oh, decide very quickly, my only
friend!” he said, “for throughout I am all filth!”

Closer she drew to him, and laid one hand upon each shoulder.
“O my only friend!” she breathed, with red lax lips
which were very near to his, “through these six years I have
ranked your friendship as the chief of all my honors! and I pray God
with an entire heart that I may die so soon as I have done what I
must do to-day!”

Now Maudelain was trying to smile, but he could not quite manage
it. “God save King Richard!” said the priest. “For
by the cowardice and greed and ignorance of little men is Salomon
himself confounded, and by them is Hercules lightly unhorsed. Were I
Leviathan, whose bones were long ago picked clean by pismires, I
could perform nothing against the will of many human pismires.
Therefore do you pronounce my doom.”

“O King,” then said Dame Anne, “I bid you go
forever from the court and live forever a landless man, friendless,
and without even any name. Otherwise, you can in no way escape being
made an instrument to bring about the misery and death of many
thousands. This doom I dare adjudge and to pronounce, because we are
royal and God’s satraps, you and I.”

Twice or thrice his dry lips moved before he spoke. He was aware
of innumerable birds that carolled with a piercing and intolerable
sweetness. “O Queen!” he hoarsely said, “O fellow
satrap! Heaven has many fiefs. A fair province is wasted and accords
to Heaven no revenue. So wastes beauty, and a shrewd wit, and an
illimitable charity, which of their pride go in fetters and achieve
no increase. To-day the young King junkets with his flatterers, and
but rarely thinks of England. You have that beauty by which men are
lightly conquered, and the mere sight of which may well cause a
man’s voice to tremble as my voice trembles now, and through
desire of which—But I tread afield! Of that beauty you have
made no profit. O daughter of the Caesars, I bid you now gird either
loin for an unlovely traffic. Old Legion must be fought with fire.
True that the age is sick, true that we may not cure, we can but
salve the hurt—” His hand had torn open his sombre gown,
and the man’s bared breast shone in the sunlight, and on his
breast heaved sleek and glittering beads of sweat. Twice he cried
the Queen’s name. In a while he said: “I bid you weave
incessantly such snares of brain and body as may lure King Richard
to be swayed by you, until against his will you daily guide this
shallow-hearted fool to some commendable action. I bid you live as
other folk do hereabouts. Coax! beg! cheat! wheedle! lie!” he
barked like a teased dog, “and play the prostitute for him
that wears my crown, till you achieve in part the task which is
denied me. This doom I dare adjudge and to pronounce, because we are
royal and God’s satraps, you and I.”

She answered with a tiny, wordless sound. But presently,
“I take my doom,” the Queen proudly said. “I shall
be lonely now, my only friend, and yet—it does not
matter,” the Queen said, with a little shiver. “No,
nothing will ever greatly matter now, I think, now that I may not
ever see you any more, my dearest.”

Her eyes had filled with tears; she was unhappy, and, as always,
this knowledge roused in Maudelain a sort of frenzied pity and a
hatred, quite illogical, of all other things existent. She was
unhappy, that only he comprehended: and for her to be made unhappy
was unjust.

So he stood thus for an appreciable silence, staying motionless
save that behind his back his fingers were bruising one another.
Everywhere was this or that bright color and an incessant melody. It
was unbearable. Then it was over; the ordered progress of all
happenings was apparent, simple, and natural; and contentment came
into his heart like a flight of linnets over level fields at dawn.
He left her, and as he went he sang.

Sang Maudelain:

The Queen shivered in the glad sunlight. “I am, it must
be, pitiably weak,” she said at last, “because I cannot
sing as he does. And, since I am not very wise, were he to return
even now—But he will not return. He will never return,”
the Queen repeated, carefully. “It is strange I cannot
comprehend that he will never return! Ah, Mother of God!” she
cried, with a steadier voice, “grant that I may weep! nay, of
thy infinite mercy let me presently find the heart to weep!”
And about the Queen of England many birds sang joyously.

She sent for the King that evening, after supper, and they may
well have talked of many matters, for he did not return to his own
apartments that night. Next day the English barons held a council,
and in the midst of it King Richard demanded to be told his age.

“Your Grace is in your twenty-second year,” said the
uneasy Gloucester, who was now with reason troubled, since he had
been vainly seeking everywhere for the evanished Maudelain.

“Then I have been under tutors and governors longer than
any other ward in my dominion. My lords, I thank you for your past
services, but I need them no more.” They had no check handy,
and Gloucester in particular foreread his death-warrant, but of
necessity he shouted with the others, “Hail, King of
England!”

That afternoon the King’s assumption of all royal
responsibility was commemorated by a tournament, over which Dame
Anne presided. Sixty of her ladies led as many knights by silver
chains into the tilting-grounds at Smithfield, and it was remarked
that the Queen appeared unusually mirthful. The King was in high
good humor, a pattern of conjugal devotion; and the royal pair
retired at dusk to the Bishop of London’s palace at Saint
Paul’s, where was held a merry banquet, with dancing both
before and after supper.

THE END OF THE SIXTH NOVEL

The Story of the Heritage

In the year of grace 1399 (Nicolas begins) dwelt in a hut near
Caer Dathyl in Arvon, as he had dwelt for some five years, a gaunt
hermit, notoriously consecrate, whom neighboring Welshmen revered as
the Blessed Evrawc. There had been a time when people called him
Edward Maudelain, but this period he dared not often remember.

For though in macerations of the flesh, in fasting, and in
hour-long prayers he spent his days, this holy man was much troubled
by devils. He got little rest because of them. Sometimes would come
into his hut Belphegor in the likeness of a butler, and whisper,
“Sire, had you been King, as was your right, you had drunk
to-day not water but the wines of Spain and Hungary.” Or
Asmodeus saying, “Sire, had you been King, as was your right,
you had lain now not upon the bare earth but on cushions of
silk.”

One day in early spring, they say, the spirit called Orvendile
sent the likeness of a fair woman with yellow hair and large blue
eyes. She wore a massive crown which seemed too heavy for her
frailness to sustain. Soft tranquil eyes had lifted from her book.
“You are my cousin now, messire,” this phantom had
appeared to say.

That was the worst, and Maudelain began to fear he was a little
mad because even this he had resisted with many aves.

There came also to his hut, through a sullen snowstorm, upon the
afternoon of All Soul’s day, a horseman in a long cloak of
black. He tethered his black horse and he came noiselessly through
the doorway of the hut, and upon his breast and shoulders the snow
was white as the bleached bones of those women that died in
Merlin’s youth.

“Greetings in God’s name, Messire Edward
Maudelain,” the stranger said.

Since the new-comer spoke intrepidly of holy things a cheerier
Maudelain knew that this at least was no demon.
“Greetings!” he answered. “But I am Evrawc. You
name a man long dead.”

“But it is from a certain Bohemian woman I come. What
matter, then, if the dead receive me?” And thus speaking, the
stranger dropped his cloak.

He was clad, as you now saw, in flame-colored satin, which
shimmered with each movement like a high flame. He had the
appearance of a tall, lean youngster, with crisp, curling, very dark
red hair. He now regarded Maudelain. He displayed peculiarly
wide-set brown eyes; and their gaze was tender, and the tears
somehow had come to Maudelain’s eyes because of his great love
for this tall stranger. “Eh, from the dead to the dead I
travel, as ever,” said the new-comer, “with a message
and a token. My message runs, Time is, O fellow satrap! and
my token is this.”

In this packet, wrapped with white parchment and tied with a
golden cord, was only a lock of hair. It lay like a little yellow
serpent in Maudelain’s palm. “And yet five years
ago,” he mused, “this hair was turned to dust. God keep
us all!” Then he saw the tall lean emissary puffed out like a
candle-flame; and upon the floor he saw the huddled cloak waver and
spread like ink, and he saw the white parchment slowly dwindle, as
snow melts under the open sun. But in his hand remained the lock of
yellow hair.

“O my only friend,” said Maudelain, “I may not
comprehend, but I know that by no unhallowed art have you won back
to me.” Hair by hair he scattered upon the floor that which he
held. “Time is! and I have not need of any token to
spur my memory.” He prized up a corner of the hearthstone,
took out a small leather bag, and that day purchased a horse and a
sword.

At dawn the Blessed Evrawc rode eastward in secular apparel. Two
weeks later he came to Sunninghill; and it happened that the same
morning the Earl of Salisbury, who had excellent reason to consider
...

Follows a lacuna of fourteen pages. Maudelain’s
successful imposture of his half-brother, Richard the Second, so
strangely favored by their physical resemblance, and the subsequent
fiasco at Circencester, are now, however, tolerably well known to
students of history.

In one way or another, Maudelain contrived to take the place
of his now dethroned brother, and therewith also the punishment
designed for Richard. It would seem evident, from the Argument of
the story in hand, that Nicolas de Caen attributes a large part of
this mysterious business to the co-operancy of Isabel of Valois,
King Richard’s eleven year old wife. And (should one have a
taste for the deductive) the foregoing name of Orvendile, when
compared with “THE STORY OF THE SCABBARD,” would
certainly hint that Owain Glyndwyr had a finger in the affair.

It is impossible to divine by what method, according to
Nicolas, this Edward Maudelain was substituted for his younger
brother. Nicolas, if you are to believe his “EPILOGUE,”
had the best of reasons for knowing that the prisoner locked up in
Pontefract Castle in the February of 1400, after Harry of Derby had
seized the crown of England, was not Richard Plantagenet: as is
attested, also, by the remaining fragment of this same
“STORY OF THE HERITAGE.”

... and eight men-at-arms followed him.

Quickly Maudelain rose from the table, pushing his tall chair
aside, and as he did this, one of the soldiers closed the door
securely. “Nay, eat your fill, Sire Richard,” said Piers
Exton, “since you will not ever eat again.”

“Is it so?” the trapped man answered quietly.
“Then indeed you come in a good hour.” Once only he
smote upon his breast. “Mea culpa! O Eternal Father, do
Thou shrive me very quickly of all those sins I have committed, both
in thought and deed, for now the time is very short.”

And Exton spat upon the dusty floor. “Foh, they had told
me I would find a king here. I discover only a cat that
whines.”

“Then ’ware his claws!” As a viper leaps
Maudelain sprang upon the nearest fellow and wrested away his
halberd. “Then ’ware his claws, my men! For I come of an
accursed race. And now let some of you lament that hour wherein the
devil’s son begot an heir for England! For of ice and of lust
and of hell-fire are all we sprung; old records attest it; and
fickle and cold and ravenous and without fear are all our race until
the end. Hah, until the end! O God of Gods!” this Maudelain
cried, with a great voice, “wilt Thou dare bid a man die
patiently, having aforetime filled his veins with such a venom? For
I lack the grace to die as all Thy saints have died, without one
carnal blow struck in my own defence. I lack the grace, my Father,
for even at the last the devil’s blood You gave me is not
quelled. I dare atone for that old sin done by my father in the
flesh, but yet I must atone as befits the race of Oriander!”

Then it was he and not they who pressed to the attack. Their
meeting was a bloody business, for in that dark and crowded room
Maudelain raged among his nine antagonists like an angered lion
among wolves.

They struck at random and cursed shrilly, for they were now
half-afraid of this prey they had entrapped; so that presently he
was all hacked and bleeding, though as yet he had no mortal wound.
Four of these men he had killed by this time, and Piers Exton also
lay at his feet.

Then the other four drew back a little. “Are ye tired so
soon?” said Maudelain, and he laughed terribly. “What,
even you! Why, look ye, my bold veterans, I never killed before
to-day, and I am not breathed as yet.”

Thus he boasted, exultant in his strength. But the other men saw
that behind him Piers Exton had crawled into the chair from which
(they thought) King Richard had just risen, and they saw Exton
standing erect in this chair, with both arms raised. They saw this
Exton strike the King with his pole-axe, from behind, once only, and
they knew no more was needed.

“By God!” said one of them in the ensuing stillness,
and it was he who bled the most, “that was a felon’s
blow.”

But the dying man who lay before them made as though to smile.
“I charge you all to witness,” he faintly said,
“how willingly I render to Caesar’s daughter that which
was ever hers.”

Then Exton fretted, as if with a little trace of shame:
“Who would have thought the rascal had remembered that first
wife of his so long? Caesar’s daughter, saith he! and dares in
extremis to pervert Holy Scripture like any Wycliffite! Well, he is
as dead as that first Caesar now, and our gracious King, I think,
will sleep the better for it. And yet—God only knows! for they
are an odd race, even as he said—these men that have old
Manuel’s blood in them.”

THE END OF THE SEVENTH NOVEL

The Story of the Scabbard

In the year of grace 1400 (Nicolas begins) King Richard, the
second monarch of that name to rule in England, wrenched his own
existence, and nothing more, from the close wiles of his cousin,
Harry of Derby, who was now sometimes called Henry of Lancaster, and
sometimes Bolingbroke. The circumstances of this evasion having been
recorded in the preceding tale, it suffices here to record that this
Henry was presently crowned King of England in Richard’s
place. All persons, saving only Owain Glyndwyr and Henry of
Lancaster, believed King Richard dead at that period when Richard
attended his own funeral, as a proceeding taking to the fancy, and,
among many others, saw the body of Edward Maudelain interred with
every regal ceremony in the chapel at Langley Bower. Then alone Sire
Richard crossed the seas, and at thirty-three set out to inspect a
transformed and gratefully untrammelling world wherein not a foot of
land belonged to him.

Holland was the surname he assumed, the name of his
half-brothers; and to detail his Asian wanderings would be tedious
and unprofitable. But at the end of each four months would come to
him a certain messenger from Glyndwyr, supposed by Richard to be the
imp Orvendile, who notoriously ran every day around the world upon
the Welshman’s business. It was in the Isle of Taprobane,
where the pismires are as great as hounds, and mine and store the
gold of which the inhabitants afterward rob them through a very
cunning device, that this emissary brought the letter which read
simply, “Now is England fit pasture for the White Hart.”
Presently Richard Holland was in Wales, and then he rode to
Sycharth.

There, after salutation, Glyndwyr gave an account of his long
stewardship. It was a puzzling record of obscure and tireless
machinations with which we have no immediate concern: in brief, the
barons who had ousted King Log had been the very first to find their
squinting King Stork intolerable; and Northumberland, Worcester,
Douglas, Mortimer, and so on, were already pledged and in open
revolt. “By the God I do not altogether serve,” Owain
ended, “you have but to declare yourself, sire, and within the
moment England is yours.”

Richard spoke with narrowed eyes. “You forget that while
Henry of Lancaster lives no other man can ever hope to reign
tranquilly in these islands. Come then! the hour strikes; and we
will coax the devil for once in a way to serve God.”

“Oh, but there is a boundary appointed,” Glyndwyr
moodily returned. “You, too, forget that in cold blood this
Henry stabbed my best-loved son. But I do not forget this, and I
have tried divers methods which we need not speak of,—I who
can at will corrupt the air, and cause sickness and storms, raise
heavy mists, and create plagues and fires and shipwrecks; yet the
life itself I cannot take. For there is a boundary appointed, sire,
and beyond that frontier the Master of our Sabbaths cannot serve us
even though he would.”

Richard crossed himself. “You horribly mistake my meaning.
Your practices are your own affair, and in them I decline to dabble.
I merely design to trap a tiger with his appropriate bait. For you
have a fief at Caer Idion, I think?—Very well! I intend to
herd your sheep there, for a week or two, after the honorable
example of Apollo. It is your part to see that Henry knows I am
living disguised and defenceless at Caer Idion.”

The gaunt Welshman chuckled. “Yes, squinting Henry of
Lancaster would cross the world, much less the Severn, to make quite
sure of Richard’s death. He would come in his own person with
at most some twenty trustworthy followers. I will have a hundred
there; and certain aging scores will then be settled in that
place.” Glyndwyr meditated afterward, very evilly.
“Sire,” he said without prelude, “I do not
recognize Richard of Bordeaux. You have garnered much in
travelling!”

“Why, look you,” Richard returned, “I have
garnered so much that I do not greatly care whether this scheme
succeed or no. With age I begin to contend even more indomitably
that a wise man will consider nothing very seriously. You barons
here believe it an affair of importance who may chance to be the
King of England, say, this time next year; you take sides between
Henry and me. I tell you frankly that neither of us, that no man in
the world, by reason of innate limitations, can ever rule otherwise
than abominably, or, ruling, can create anything save discord. Nor
can I see how this matters either, since the discomfort of an
ant-village is not, after all, a planet-wrecking disaster. No,
Owain, if the planets do indeed sing together, it is, depend upon
it, to the burden of Fools All. For I am as liberally endowed
as most people; and when I consider my abilities, my performances,
my instincts, and so on, quite aloofly, as I would appraise those of
another person, I can only shrug: and to conceive that common-sense,
much less Omnipotence, would ever concern itself about the actions
of a creature so entirely futile is, to me at least,
impossible.”

“I have known the thought,” said
Owain,—“though rarely since I found the Englishwoman
that was afterward my wife, and never since my son, my Gruffyd, was
murdered by a jesting man. He was more like me than the others,
people said.... You are as yet the empty scabbard, powerless alike
for help or hurt. Ey, hate or love must be the sword, sire, that
informs us here, and then, if only for a little while, we are as
gods.”

“Pardie! I have loved as often as Salomon, and in fourteen
kingdoms.”

“We of Cymry have a saying, sire, that when a man loves
par amours the second time he may safely assume that he has never
been in love at all.”

“—And I hate Henry of Lancaster as I do the
devil.”

“I greatly fear,” said Owain with a sigh,
“lest it may be your irreparable malady to hate nothing, not
even that which you dislike. No, you consider things with both eyes
open, with an unmanly rationality: whereas Sire Henry views all
matters with that heroic squint which came into your family from
Poictesme.”

“Be off with your dusty scandals!” said Richard,
laughing.

So then Glyndwyr rode south to besiege and burn the town of
Caerdyf, while at Caer Idion Richard Holland abode tranquilly for
some three weeks. There was in this place only Caradawc (the former
shepherd), his wife Alundyne, and their sole daughter Branwen. They
gladly perceived Sire Richard was no more a peasant than he was a
curmudgeon; as Caradawc observed: “It is perfectly apparent
that the robe of Padarn Beisrudd, which refuses to adjust itself to
any save highborn persons, would fit him as a glove does the hand;
but we will ask no questions, since it is not wholesome to dispute
the orderings of Owain Glyndwyr.”

Now day by day would Richard Holland drive the flocks to pasture
near the Severn, and loll there in the shade, and make songs to his
lute. He grew to love this leisured life of bright and open spaces;
and its long solitudes, grateful with the warm odors of growing
things and with poignant bird-noises; and the tranquillity of these
meadows, that were always void of hurry, bedrugged the man through
many fruitless and contented hours.

Each day at noon Branwen would bring his dinner, and she would
sometimes chat with him while he ate. After supper he would
discourse to Branwen of remote kingdoms, through which, as aimlessly
as a wind veers, he had ridden at adventure, among sedate and alien
peoples who adjudged him a madman; and she, in turn, would tell him
curious tales from the Red Book of Hergest,—telling of
Gwalchmai, and Peredur, and Geraint, in each one of which fine
heroes she had presently discerned an inadequate forerunnership of
Richard’s existence.

This Branwen was a fair wench, slender and hardy. She had the
bold demeanor of a child who is ignorant of evil and in consequence
of suspicion. Happily, though, had she been named for that unhappy
lady of old, the wife of King Matholwch, for this Branwen, too, had
a white, thin, wistful face, like that of an empress on a silver
coin which is a little worn. Her eyes were large and brilliant,
colored like clear emeralds, and her abundant hair was so much
cornfloss, only it was more brightly yellow and was of immeasurably
finer texture. In full sunlight her cheeks were frosted like the
surface of a peach, but the underlying cool pink of them was rather
that of a cloud just after sunset, Richard decided. In all, a taking
morsel! though her shapely hands were hard with labor, and she
rarely laughed; for, as if in recompense, her heart was tender, and
she rarely ceased to smile as though she were thinking of some
peculiar and wonderful secret which she intended, in due time, to
share with you and with nobody else. Branwen had many lovers, and
preferred among them young Gwyllem ap Llyr, a portly lad, who was
handsome enough, though he had tiny and piggish eyes, and who sang
divinely.

One day this Gwyllem came to Richard with two quarter-staves.
“Saxon,” he said, “you appear a stout man. Take
your pick of these, then, and have at you.”

“Such are not the weapons I would have named,”
Richard answered: “yet in reason, Messire Gwyllem, I can deny
you nothing that means nothing to me.”

With that they laid aside their coats and fell to exercise. In
these unaccustomed bouts Richard was soundly drubbed, as he had
anticipated, but he found himself the stronger man of the two, and
he managed somehow to avoid an absolute overthrow. By what method he
contrived this he never ascertained.

“I have forgotten what we are fighting about,” he
observed, after ten minutes of heroic thumps and hangings;
“or, to be perfectly exact, I never knew. But we will fight no
more in this place. Come and go with me to Welshpool, Messire
Gwyllem, and there we will fight to a conclusion over good sack and
claret.”

“Content!” cried Gwyllem; “but only if you
yield me Branwen.”

“Have we indeed wasted a whole half-hour in squabbling
over a woman?” Richard demanded; “like two children in a
worldwide toyshop over any one particular toy? Then devil take me if
I am not heartily ashamed of my folly! Though, look you, Gwyllem, I
would speak naught save commendation of these delicate and
livelily-tinted creatures so long as one is able to approach them in
a becoming spirit of levity: it is only their not infrequent misuse
which I would condemn; and in my opinion the person who elects to
build a shrine for any one of them has only himself to blame if his
chosen goddess will accept no burnt-offering except his honor and
happiness. Yet since time’s youth have many fine men been
addicted to this insane practice, as, for example, were Hercules and
Merlin to their illimitable sorrow; and, indeed, the more I
reconsider the old gallantries of Salomon, and of other venerable
and sagacious potentates, the more profoundly am I ashamed of my
sex.”

Gwyllem said: “This lazy gabbling of yours is all very
fine. Perhaps it is also reasonable. Only when you love you do not
reason.”

“I was endeavoring to prove that,” said Richard
gently. Then they went to Welshpool, ride and tie on Gwyllem’s
horse. Tongue loosened by the claret, Gwyllem raved aloud of
Branwen, like a babbling faun, while to each rapture Richard affably
assented. In his heart he likened the boy to Dionysos at Naxos, and
could find no blame for Ariadne. Moreover, the room was comfortably
dark and cool, for thick vines hung about the windows, rustling and
tapping pleasantly, and Richard was content.

“She does not love me?” Gwyllem cried. “It is
well enough. I do not come to her as one merchant to another, since
love was never bartered. Listen, Saxon!” He caught up
Richard’s lute. The strings shrieked beneath Gwyllem’s
fingers as he fashioned his rude song.

Sang Gwyllem:

“Now, were I to get as tipsy as that,” Richard
enviously thought, midway in a return to his stolid sheep, “I
would simply go to sleep and wake up with a headache. And were I to
fall as many fathoms deep in love as this Gwyllem ventures, or,
rather, as he hurls himself with a splurge, I would perform—I
wonder, now, what miracle?”

For he was, though vaguely, discontent. This Gwyllem was so
young, so earnest over every trifle, and above all, was so
untroubled by forethought: each least desire controlled him, as
varying winds sport with a fallen leaf, whose frank submission to
superior vagaries the boy appeared to emulate. Richard saw that in a
fashion Gwyllem was superb. “And heigho!” said Richard,
“I am attestedly a greater fool than he, but I begin to weary
of a folly so thin-blooded.”

The next morning came a ragged man, riding upon a mule. He
declared himself a tinker. He chatted out an hour with Richard, who
perfectly recognized him as Sir Walter Blount; and then this tinker
crossed over into England.

Richard whistled. “Now my cousin will be quite sure, and
now my anxious cousin will come to speak with Richard of Bordeaux.
And now, by every saint in the calendar! I am as good as King of
England.”

He sat down beneath a young oak and twisted four or five blades
of grass between his fingers while he meditated. Undoubtedly he
would kill this squinting Henry of Lancaster with a clear conscience
and even with a certain relish, much as one crushes the uglier sort
of vermin, but, hand upon heart, Richard was unable to avow any
particularly ardent desire for the scoundrel’s death. Thus
crudely to demolish the knave’s adroit and year-long schemings
savored actually of grossness. The spider was venomous, and his
destruction laudable; granted, but in crushing him you ruined his
web, a miracle of patient machination, which, despite yourself,
compelled hearty admiring and envy. True, the process would recrown
a certain Richard, but then, as Richard recalled it, being King was
rather tedious. Richard was not now quite sure that he wanted to be
King, and, in consequence, be daily plagued by a host of vexatious
and ever-squabbling barons. “I shall miss the little huzzy,
too,” he thought.

“Heigho!” said Richard, “I shall console
myself with purchasing all beautiful things that can be touched and
handled. Life is a flimsy vapor which passes and is not any more:
presently Branwen will be married to this Gwyllem and will be grown
fat and old, and I shall be remarried to little Dame Isabel, and
shall be King of England: and a trifle later all four of us shall be
dead. Pending this deplorable consummation a wise man will endeavor
to amuse himself.”

Next day he despatched Caradawc to Owain Glyndwyr to bid the
latter send the promised implements to Caer Idion. Richard,
returning to the hut the same evening, found Alundyne there, alone,
and grovelling at the threshold. Her forehead was bloodied when she
raised it and through tearless sobs told of what had happened. A
half-hour earlier, while she and Branwen were intent upon their
milking, Gwyllem had ridden up, somewhat the worse for liquor.
Branwen had called him sot, had bidden him go home. “That I
will do,” said Gwyllem and suddenly caught up the girl.
Alundyne sprang for him, and with clenched fist Gwyllem struck her
twice full in the face, and laughing, rode away with Branwen.

Richard made no observation. In silence he fetched his horse,
and did not pause to saddle it. Quickly he rode to Gwyllem’s
house, and broke in the door. Against the farther wall stood lithe
Branwen fighting silently: her breasts and shoulders were naked,
where Gwyllem had torn away her garments. He wheedled, laughed,
swore, and hiccoughed, turn by turn, but she was silent.

“On guard!” Richard barked. Gwyllem wheeled. His
head twisted toward his left shoulder, and one corner of his mouth
convulsively snapped upward, so that his teeth were bared. There was
a knife at Richard’s girdle, which he now unsheathed and flung
away. He stepped eagerly toward the snarling Welshman, and with both
hands seized the thick and hairy throat. What followed was brutal.

For many minutes Branwen stood with averted face, shuddering.
She very dimly heard the sound of Gwyllem’s impotent fists as
they beat against the countenance and body of Richard, and heard the
thin splitting vicious noise of torn cloth as Gwyllem clutched at
Richard’s tunic and tore it many times. Richard did not utter
any articulate word, and Gwyllem could not. There was entire silence
for a heart-beat, and the thudding fall of something ponderous and
limp.

“Come!” Richard said then. Through the hut’s
twilight he came, as glorious in her eyes as Michael fresh from that
primal battle with old Satan. Tall Richard came to her, his face all
blood, and lifted her in his arms lest Branwen’s skirt be
soiled by the demolished thing which sprawled across their path. She
never spoke. She could not speak. In his arms she rode homeward,
passive, and content. The horse trod with deliberation. In the east
the young moon was taking heart as the darkness thickened, and
innumerable stars awoke. Branwen noted these things incuriously.

Richard was horribly afraid. He it had been, in sober verity it
had been Richard of Bordeaux, that some monstrous force had seized,
and had lifted, and had curtly utilized as its handiest implement.
He had been, and in the moment had known himself to be, the thrown
spear as yet in air, about to kill and quite powerless to refrain
from killing. It was a full three minutes before he had got the
better of his bewilderment and laughed, very softly, lest he disturb
this Branwen, who was so near his heart....

Next day she came to him at noon, bearing as always the little
basket. It contained to-day a napkin, some garlic, a ham, and a
small soft cheese; some shalots, salt, nuts, wild apples, lettuce,
onions, and mushrooms. “Behold a feast!” said Richard.
He noted then that she carried also a blue pitcher filled with thin
wine, and two cups of oak-bark. She thanked him for last
night’s performance, and drank a mouthful of wine to his
health.

“Decidedly, I shall be sorry to have done with
shepherding,” said Richard as he ate.

Branwen answered, “I too shall be sorry, lord, when the
masquerade is ended.” And it seemed to Richard that she
sighed, and he was the happier.

But he only shrugged. “I am the wisest person unhanged,
since I comprehend my own folly. Yet I grant you that he was wise,
too, the minstrel of old time that sang: ‘Over wild lands and
tumbling seas flits Love, at will, and maddens the heart and
beguiles the senses of all whom he attacks, whether his quarry be
some monster of the ocean or some fierce denizen of the forest, or
man; for thine, O Love, thine alone is the power to make playthings
of us all.’”

“Your bard was wise, no doubt, yet it was not in such
terms that Gwyllem sang of this passion. Lord,” she demanded
shyly, “how would you sing of love?”

Richard was replete and contented with the world. He took up the
lute, in full consciousness that his compliance was in large part
cenatory. “In courtesy, thus—”

Sang Richard:

“Three sounds are rarely heard,” said Branwen;
“and these are the song of the birds of Rhiannon, an
invitation to feast with a miser, and a speech of wisdom from the
mouth of a Saxon. The song you have made of courtesy is tinsel. Sing
now in verity.”

Richard laughed, though he was sensibly nettled and perhaps a
shade abashed. Presently he sang again.

Sang Richard:

Richard had resolved that Branwen should believe him. Tinsel,
indeed! then here was yet more tinsel which she must receive as
gold. He was very angry, because his vanity was hurt, and the
pin-prick spurred him to a counterfeit so specious that consciously
he gloried in it. He was superb, and she believed him now; there was
no questioning the fact, he saw it plainly, and with exultant
cruelty; then curt as lightning came the knowledge that what Branwen
believed was the truth.

Richard had taken just two strides toward this fair girl.
Branwen stayed motionless, her lips a little parted. The affairs of
earth and heaven were motionless throughout the moment, attendant,
it seemed to him; and to him his whole life was like a wave that
trembled now at full height, and he was aware of a new world all
made of beauty and of pity. Then the lute fell from his spread out
hands, and Richard sighed, and shrugged.

“There is a task set me,” he said—“it is
God’s work, I think. But I do not know—I only know that
you are very beautiful, Branwen,” he said, and in the name he
found a new and piercing loveliness.

And he said also: “Go! For I have loved many women, and,
God help me! I know that I have but to wheedle you and you, too,
will yield! Yonder is God’s work to be done, and within me
rages a commonwealth of devils. Child! child!” he cried,
“I am, and ever was, a coward, too timid to face life without
reserve, and always I laughed because I was afraid to concede that
anything is serious!”

For a long while Richard lay at his ease in the lengthening
shadows of the afternoon.

“I love her. She thinks me an elderly imbecile with a flat
and reedy singing-voice, and she is perfectly right. She has never
even entertained the notion of loving me. That is well, for
to-morrow, or, it may be, the day after, we must part forever. I
would not have the parting make her sorrowful—or not, at
least, too unalterably sorrowful. It is very well that Branwen does
not love me.

“Why should she? I am almost twice her age, an aging
fellow now, battered and selfish and too indolent to love
her—say, as Gwyllem loved her. I did well to kill that
Gwyllem. I am profoundly glad I killed him, and I thoroughly enjoyed
doing it; but, after all, the man loved her in his fashion, and to
the uttermost reach of his gross nature. I love her in a rather more
decorous and acceptable fashion, it is true, but only a half of me
loves her. The other half of me remembers that I am aging, that
Caradawc’s hut is leaky, that, in fine, bodily comfort is the
single luxury of which one never tires. I am a very contemptible
creature, the empty scabbard of a man, precisely as Owain
said.” This settled, Richard whistled to his dog.

The sun had set. There were no shadows anywhere as Richard and
his sheep went homeward, but on every side the colors of the world
were more sombre. Twice his flock roused a covey of partridges which
had settled for the night. The screech-owl had come out of his hole,
and bats were already blundering about, and the air was cooling.
There was as yet but one star in the green and cloudless heaven, and
this was very large, like a beacon: it appeared to him symbolical
that he trudged away from this star.

Next morning the Welshmen came, and now the trap was ready for
Henry of Lancaster.

It befell just two days later, about noon, that while Richard
idly talked with Branwen a party of soldiers, some fifteen in
number, rode down the river’s bank from the ford above. Their
leader paused, then gave an order. The men drew rein. He cantered
forward.

“God give you joy, fair sir,” said Richard, when the
cavalier was near him.

The new-comer raised his visor. “God give you eternal joy,
my fair cousin,” he said, “and very soon. Now send away
this woman before that happens which must happen.”

“Do you plan,” said Richard, “to disfigure the
stage of our quiet pastorals with murder?”

“I design my own preservation,” King Henry answered,
“for while you live my rule is insecure.”

“I am sorry,” Richard said, “that in part my
blood is yours.”

Twice he sounded his horn, and everywhere from rustling
underwoods arose the half-naked Welshmen. Said Richard: “You
should read history more carefully, Cousin Henry. You might have
profited, as I have done, by considering the trick which our
grandfather, old Edward Longshanks, played on the French King at
Mezelais. As matters stand, your men are one to ten. You are
impotent. Now, now we balance our accounts! These persons here will
first deal with your followers. Then they will conduct you to
Glyndwyr, who has long desired to deal with you himself, in privacy,
since that Whit-Monday when you murdered his son.”

The King began, “In mercy, sire—!” and Richard
laughed a little, saying:

“That virtue is not overabundant among us of
Oriander’s blood, as we both know. No, cousin, Fate and Time
are merry jesters. See, now, their latest mockery! You the King of
England ride to Sycharth to your death, and I the tender of sheep
depart into London, without any hindrance, to reign henceforward
over these islands. To-morrow you are worm’s-meat, Cousin
Henry: to-morrow, as yesterday, I am King of England.”

Then Branwen gave one sharp, brief cry, and Richard forgot all
things saving this girl, and strode to her. He had caught up her
hard, lithe hands; against his lips he strained them close and very
close.

“Branwen—!” he said. His eyes devoured her.

“Yes, King,” she answered. “O King of England!
O fool that I have been to think you less!”

In a while Richard said: “Well, I at least am not fool
enough to think of making you a king’s whore. So I must choose
between a peasant wench and England. Now I choose, and how gladly!
Branwen, help me to be more than King of England!”

Low and very low he spoke, and long and very long he gazed at
her, and neither seemed to breathe. Of what she thought I cannot
tell you; but in Richard there was no power of thought, only a great
wonderment. Why, between this woman’s love and aught else
there was no choice for him, he knew upon a sudden. Perhaps he would
thus worship her always, he reflected: and then again, perhaps he
would be tired of her before long, just as all other persons seemed
to abate in these infatuations: meanwhile it was certain that he was
very happy. No, he could not go back to the throne and to the little
French girl who was in law his wife.

And, as if from an immense distance, came to Richard the dogged
voice of Henry of Lancaster. “It is of common report in these
islands that I have a better right to the throne than you. As much
was told our grandfather, King Edward of happy memory, when he
educated you and had you acknowledged heir to the crown, but his
love was so strong for his son the Prince of Wales that nothing
could alter his purpose. And indeed if you had followed even the
example of the Black Prince you might still have been our King; but
you have always acted so contrarily to his admirable precedents as
to occasion the rumor to be generally believed throughout England
that you were not, after all, his son—”

Richard had turned impatiently. “For the love of Heaven,
truncate your abominable periods. Be off with you. Yonder across
that river is the throne of England, which you appear, through some
lunacy, to consider a desirable possession. Take it, then; for,
praise God! the sword has found its sheath.”

The King answered: “I do not ask you to reconsider your
dismissal, assuredly—Richard,” he cried, a little
shaken, “I perceive that until your death you will win
contempt and love from every person.”

“Yes, yes, for many years I have been the playmate of the
world,” said Richard; “but to-day I wash my hands, and
set about another and more laudable business. I had dreamed certain
dreams, indeed—but what had I to do with all this strife
between the devil and the tiger? No, Glyndwyr will set up Mortimer
against you now, and you two must fight it out. I am no more his
tool, and no more your enemy, my cousin—Henry,” he said
with quickening voice, “there was a time when we were boys and
played together, and there was no hatred between us, and I regret
that time!”

“As God lives, I too regret that time!” the bluff,
squinting King replied. He stared at Richard for a while wherein
each understood. “Dear fool,” Sire Henry said,
“there is no man in all the world but hates me saving only
you.” Then the proud King clapped spurs to his proud horse and
rode away.

More lately Richard dismissed his wondering marauders. Now he
and Branwen were alone and a little troubled, since each was afraid
of that oncoming moment when their eyes must meet.

So Richard laughed. “Praise God!” he wildly cried,
“I am the greatest fool unhanged!”

She answered: “I am the happier for your folly. I am the
happiest of God’s creatures.”

And Richard meditated. “Faith of a gentleman!” he
declared; “but you are nothing of the sort, and of this fact I
happen to be quite certain.” Their lips met then and afterward
their eyes; and each of these ragged peasants was too glad for
laughter.

THE END OF THE EIGHTH NOVEL

The Story of the Navarrese

In the year of grace 1386, upon the feast of Saint Bartholomew
(thus Nicolas begins), came to the Spanish coast Messire Peyre de
Lesnerac, in a war-ship sumptuously furnished and manned by many
persons of dignity and wealth, in order suitably to escort the
Princess Jehane into Brittany, where she was to marry the Duke of
that province. There were now rejoicings throughout Navarre, in
which the Princess took but a nominal part and young Antoine Riczi
none at all.

This Antoine Riczi came to Jehane that August twilight in the
hedged garden. “King’s daughter!” he sadly greeted
her. “Duchess of Brittany! Countess of Rougemont! Lady of
Nantes and of Guerrand! of Rais and of Toufon and Guerche!”

She answered, “No, my dearest,—I am that Jehane,
whose only title is the Constant Lover.” And in the green
twilight, lit as yet by one low-hanging star alone, their lips and
desperate young bodies clung, now, it might be, for the last time.

Presently the girl spoke. Her soft mouth was lax and tremulous,
and her gray eyes were more brilliant than the star yonder. The
boy’s arms were about her, so that neither could be quite
unhappy, yet.

“Friend,” said Jehane, “I have no choice. I
must wed with this de Montfort. I think I shall die presently. I
have prayed God that I may die before they bring me to the
dotard’s bed.”

Young Riczi held her now in an embrace more brutal. “Mine!
mine!” he snarled toward the obscuring heavens.

“Yet it may be I must live. Friend, the man is very old.
Is it wicked to think of that? For I cannot but think of his great
age.”

Then Riczi answered: “My desires—may God forgive
me!—have clutched like starving persons at that sorry
sustenance. Friend! ah, fair, sweet friend! the man is human and
must die, but love, we read, is immortal. I am wishful to kill
myself, Jehane. But, oh, Jehane! dare you to bid me live?”

“Friend, as you love me, I entreat you to live. Friend, I
crave of the Eternal Father that if I falter in my love for you I
may be denied even the one bleak night of ease which Judas
knows.” The girl did not weep; dry-eyed she winged a perfectly
sincere prayer toward incorruptible saints. Riczi was to remember
the fact, and through long years of severance.

For even now, as Riczi went away from Jehane, a shrill
singing-girl was rehearsing, yonder behind the yew-hedge, the song
which she was to sing at Jehane’s bridal feast.

Sang this joculatrix:

And upon the next day de Lesnerac bore young Jehane from
Pampeluna and presently to Saillé, where old Jehan the Brave
took her to wife. She lived as a queen, but she was a woman of
infrequent laughter.

She had Duke Jehan’s adoration, and his barons’
obeisancy, and his villagers applauded her passage with stentorian
shouts. She passed interminable days amid bright curious arrasses
and trod listlessly over pavements strewn with flowers. She had
fiery-hearted jewels, and shimmering purple cloths, and much
furniture adroitly carven, and many tapestries of Samarcand and
Baldach upon which were embroidered, by brown fingers that time had
turned long ago to Asian dust, innumerable asps and deer and
phoenixes and dragons and all the motley inhabitants of air and of
the thicket; but her memories, too, she had, and for a dreary while
she got no comfort because of them. Then ambition quickened.

Young Antoine Riczi likewise nursed his wound as best he might;
but at the end of the second year after Jehane’s wedding his
uncle, the Vicomte de Montbrison—a gaunt man, with preoccupied
and troubled eyes—had summoned Antoine into Lyonnois and,
after appropriate salutation, had informed the lad that, as the
Vicomte’s heir, he was to marry the Demoiselle Gerberge de
Nérac upon the ensuing Michaelmas.

“That I may not do,” said Riczi; and since a
chronicler that would tempt fortune should never stretch the fabric
of his wares too thin (unlike Sir Hengist), I merely tell you these
two dwelt together at Montbrison for a decade: and the Vicomte swore
at his nephew and predicted this or that disastrous destination as
often as Antoine declined to marry the latest of his uncle’s
candidates,—in whom the Vicomte was of an astonishing
fertility.

In the year of grace 1401 came the belated news that Duke Jehan
had closed his final day. “You will be leaving me!” the
Vicomte growled; “now, in my decrepitude, you will be leaving
me! It is abominable, and I shall in all likelihood disinherit you
this very night.”

“Yet it is necessary,” Riczi answered; and, filled
with no unhallowed joy, he rode for Vannes, in Brittany, where the
Duchess-Regent held her court. Dame Jehane had within that fortnight
put aside her mourning. She sat beneath a green canopy, gold-fringed
and powdered with many golden stars, when Riczi came again to her,
and the rising saps of spring were exercising their august and
formidable influence. She sat alone, by prearrangement, to one end
of the high-ceiled and radiant apartment; midway in the hall her
lords and divers ladies were gathered about a saltatrice and a
jongleur, who were diverting the courtiers, to the mincing
accompaniment of a lute; but Jehane sat apart from these, frail, and
splendid with many jewels, and a little sad.

And Antoine Riczi found no power of speech within him at the
first. Silent he stood before her, still as an effigy, while
meltingly the jongleur sang.

“Jehane!” said Antoine Riczi, in a while,
“have you, then, forgotten, O Jehane?”

The resplendent woman had not moved at all. It was as though she
were some tinted and lavishly adorned statue of barbaric heathenry,
and he her postulant; and her large eyes appeared to judge an
immeasurable path, beyond him. Now her lips fluttered somewhat.
“I am the Duchess of Brittany,” she said, in the phantom
of a voice. “I am the Countess of Rougemont. The Lady of
Nantes and of Guerrand! of Rais and of Toufon and Guerche!... Jehane
is dead.”

The man had drawn one audible breath. “You are that
Jehane, whose only title is the Constant Lover!”

“Friend, the world smirches us,” she said
half-pleadingly, “I have tasted too deep of wealth and power.
I am drunk with a deadly wine, and ever I thirst—I
thirst—”

“Jehane, do you remember that May morning in Pampeluna
when first I kissed you, and about us sang many birds? Then as now
you wore a gown of green, Jehane.”

“Friend, I have swayed kingdoms since.”

“Jehane, do you remember that August twilight in Pampeluna
when last I kissed you? Then as now you wore a gown of green,
Jehane.”

“But I wore no such chain as this about my neck,”
the woman answered, and lifted a huge golden collar garnished with
emeralds and sapphires and with many pearls. “Friend, the
chain is heavy, yet I lack the will to cast it off. I lack the will,
Antoine.” And now with a sudden shout of mirth her courtiers
applauded the evolutions of the saltatrice.

“King’s daughter!” said Riczi then; “O
perilous merchandise! a god came to me and a sword had pierced his
breast. He touched the gold hilt of it and said, ‘Take back
your weapon.’ I answered, ‘I do not know you.’
‘I am Youth’ he said; ‘take back your
weapon.’”

“It is true,” she responded, “it is lamentably
true that after to-night we are as different persons, you and
I.”

He said: “Jehane, do you not love me any longer? Remember
old years and do not break your oath with me, Jehane, since God
abhors nothing so much as unfaith. For your own sake,
Jehane,—ah, no, not for your sake nor for mine, but for the
sake of that blithe Jehane, whom, so you tell me, time has
slain!”

Once or twice she blinked, as if dazzled by a light of
intolerable splendor, but otherwise she stayed rigid. “You
have dared, messire, to confront me with the golden-hearted,
clean-eyed Navarrese that once was I! and I requite.” The
austere woman rose. “Messire, you swore to me, long since,
eternal service. I claim my right in domnei.
Yonder—gray-bearded, the man in black and silver—is the
Earl of Worcester, the King of England’s ambassador, in common
with whom the wealthy dowager of Brittany has signed a certain
contract. Go you, then, with Worcester into England, as my proxy,
and in that island, as my proxy, become the wife of the King of
England. Messire, your audience is done.”

Riczi said this: “Can you hurt me any more,
Jehane?—no, even in hell they cannot hurt me now. Yet I, at
least, keep faith, and in your face I fling faith like a
glove—old-fashioned, it may be, but clean,—and I will
go, Jehane.”

Her heart raged. “Poor, glorious fool!” she thought;
“had you but the wit even now to use me brutally, even now to
drag me from this daïs—!” Instead he went away from
her smilingly, treading through the hall with many affable
salutations, while the jongleur sang.

Sang the jongleur:

And the following morning, being duly empowered, Antoine Riczi
sailed for England in company with the Earl of Worcester; and upon
Saint Richard’s day the next ensuing was, at Eltham, as proxy
of Jehane, married in his own person to the bloat King Henry, the
fourth of that name to reign. This king was that same squinting
Harry of Derby (called also Henry of Lancaster and Bolingbroke) who
stole his cousin’s crown, and about whom I have told you in
the preceding story. First Sire Henry placed the ring on
Riczi’s finger, and then spoke Antoine Riczi, very loud and
clear:

“I, Antoine Riczi,—in the name of my worshipful
lady, Dame Jehane, the daughter of Messire Charles until lately King
of Navarre, the Duchess of Brittany and the Countess of
Rougemont,—do take you, Sire Henry of Lancaster, King of
England and in title of France, and Lord of Ireland, to be my
husband; and thereto I, Antoine Riczi, in the spirit of my said
lady”—the speaker paused here to regard the gross hulk
of masculinity before him, and then smiled very
sadly—“in precisely the spirit of my said lady, I plight
you my troth.”

Afterward the King made him presents of some rich garments of
scarlet trimmed with costly furs, and of four silk belts studded
with silver and gold, and with valuable clasps, of which the owner
might well be proud, and Riczi returned to Lyonnois.
“Depardieux!” his uncle said; “so you return
alone!”

“I return as did Prince Troilus,” said
Riczi—“to boast to you of liberal entertainment in the
tent of Diomede.”

“You are certainly an inveterate fool,” the Vicomte
considered after a prolonged appraisal of his face, “since
there is always a deal of other pink-and-white flesh as yet
unmortgaged—Boy with my brother’s eyes!” the
Vicomte said, in another voice; “I have heard of the task put
upon you: and I would that I were God to punish as is fitting! But
you are welcome home, my lad.”

So these two abode together at Montbrison for a long time, and
in the purlieus of that place hunted and hawked, and made sonnets
once in a while, and read aloud from old romances some five days out
of the seven. The verses of Riczi were in the year of grace 1410
made public, not without acclamation; and thereafter the stripling
Comte de Charolais, future heir to all Burgundy and a zealous patron
of rhyme, was much at Montbrison, and there conceived for Antoine
Riczi such admiration as was possible to a very young man only.

In the year of grace 1412 the Vicomte, being then bedridden,
died without any disease and of no malady save the inherencies of
his age. “I entreat of you, my nephew,” he said at last,
“that always you use as touchstone the brave deed you did at
Eltham. It is necessary for a gentleman to serve his lady according
to her commandments, but you performed the most absurd and the most
cruel task which any woman ever imposed upon her lover and servitor
in domnei. I laugh at you, and I envy you.” Thus he died,
about Martinmas.

Now was Antoine Riczi a powerful baron, but he got no comfort of
his lordship, because that old incendiary, the King of Darkness,
daily added fuel to a smouldering sorrow until grief quickened into
vaulting flames of wrath and of disgust.

“What now avail my riches?” said the Vicomte.
“How much wealthier was I when I was loved, and was myself an
eager lover! I relish no other pleasures than those of love. I am
Love’s sot, drunk with a deadly wine, poor fool, and ever I
thirst. All my chattels and my acres appear to me to be bright
vapors, and the more my dominion and my power increase, the more
rancorously does my heart sustain its bitterness over having been
robbed of that fair merchandise which is the King of
England’s. To hate her is scant comfort and to despise her
none at all, since it follows that I who am unable to forget the
wanton am even more to be despised than she. I will go into England
and execute what mischief I may against her.”

The new Vicomte de Montbrison set forth for Paris, first to do
homage for his fief, and secondly to be accredited for some
plausible mission into England. But in Paris he got disquieting
news. Jehane’s husband was dead, and her stepson Henry, the
fifth monarch of that name to reign in Britain, had invaded France
to support preposterous claims which the man advanced to the crown
of that latter kingdom; and as the earth is altered by the advent of
winter, so was the appearance of France transformed by King
Henry’s coming, and everywhere the nobles were stirred up to
arms, the castles were closed, the huddled cities were fortified,
and on every side arose entrenchments.

Thus through this sudden turn was the new Vicomte, the dreamer
and the recluse, caught up by the career of events, as a straw is
borne away by a torrent, when the French lords marched with their
vassals to Harfleur, where they were soundly drubbed by the King of
England; as afterward at Agincourt.

But in the year of grace 1417 there was a breathing space for
discredited France, and presently the Vicomte de Montbrison was sent
into England, as ambassador. He got in London a fruitless audience
of King Henry, whose demands were such as rendered a renewal of the
war inevitable; and afterward got, in the month of April, about the
day of Palm Sunday, at the Queen’s dower-palace of
Havering-Bower, an interview with Queen Jehane.⁵

A curled pert page took the Vicomte to where she sat alone, by
prearrangement, in a chamber with painted walls, profusely lighted
by the sun, and made pretence to weave a tapestry. When the page had
gone she rose and cast aside the shuttle, and then with a glad and
wordless cry stumbled toward the Vicomte. “Madame and
Queen—!” he coldly said.

His judgment found in her a quite ordinary, frightened woman,
aging now, but still very handsome in these black and shimmering
gold robes; but all his other faculties found her desirable: and
with a contained hatred he had perceived, as if by the terse
illumination of a thunderbolt, that he could never love any woman
save the woman whom he most despised.

She said: “I had forgotten. I had remembered only you,
Antoine, and Navarre, and the clean-eyed Navarrese—” Now
for a little, Jehane paced the gleaming and sun-drenched apartment
as a bright leopardess might tread her cage. Then she wheeled.
“Friend, I think that God Himself has deigned to avenge you.
All misery my reign has been. First Hotspur, then prim Worcester
harried us. Came Glyndwyr afterward to prick us with his
devils’ horns. Followed the dreary years that linked me to the
rotting corpse which God’s leprosy devoured while the poor
furtive thing yet moved, and endured its share in the punishment of
Manuel’s poisonous blood. All misery, Antoine! And now I live
beneath a sword.”

“You have earned no more,” he said. “You have
earned no more, O Jehane! whose only title is the Constant
Lover!” He spat it out.

She came uncertainly toward him, as though he had been some not
implacable knave with a bludgeon. “For the King hates
me,” she plaintively said, “and I live beneath a sword.
The big, fierce-eyed boy has hated me from the first, for all his
lip-courtesy. And now he lacks the money to pay his troops, and I am
the wealthiest person within his realm. I am a woman and alone in a
foreign land. So I must wait, and wait, and wait, Antoine, till he
devises some trumped-up accusation. Friend, I live as did Saint
Damoclus, beneath a sword. Antoine!” she wailed—for now
the pride of Queen Jehane was shattered utterly—“I am
held as a prisoner for all that my chains are of gold.”

“Yet it was not until of late,” he observed,
“that you disliked the metal which is the substance of all
crowns.”

And now the woman lifted toward him her massive golden necklace,
garnished with emeralds and sapphires and with many pearls, and in
the sunlight the gems were tawdry things. “Friend, the chain
is heavy, and I lack the power to cast it off. The Navarrese we know
of wore no such perilous fetters. Ah, you should have mastered me at
Vannes. You could have done so, very easily. But you only
talked—oh, Mary pity us! you only talked!—and I could
find only a servant where I had sore need to find a master. Let all
women pity me!”

But now came many armed soldiers into the apartment. With spirit
Queen Jehane turned to meet them, and you saw that she was of royal
blood, for now the pride of many emperors blazed and informed her
body as light occupies a lantern. “At last you come for me,
messieurs?”

“Whereas,” the leader of these soldiers read from a
parchment—“whereas the King’s stepmother, Queen
Jehane, is accused by certain persons of an act of witch-craft that
with diabolical and subtile methods wrought privily to destroy the
King, the said Dame Jehane is by the King committed (all her
attendants being removed) to the custody of Sir John Pelham, who
will, at the King’s pleasure, confine her within Pevensey
Castle, there to be kept under Sir John’s control: the lands
and other properties of the said Dame Jehane being hereby forfeit to
the King, whom God preserve!”

“Harry of Monmouth!” said Jehane,—“ah,
my tall stepson, could I but come to you, very quietly, with a
knife—!” She shrugged her shoulders, and the gold about
her person glittered in the sunlight. “Witchcraft!
ohimé, one never disproves that. Friend, now are you avenged
the more abundantly.”

“Young Riczi is avenged,” the Vicomte said;
“and I came hither desiring vengeance.”

She wheeled, a lithe flame (he thought) of splendid fury.
“And in the gutter Jehane dares say what Queen Jehane upon the
throne might never say. Had I reigned all these years as mistress
not of England but of Europe,—had nations wheedled me in the
place of barons,—young Riczi had been none the less avenged.
Bah! what do these so-little persons matter? Take now your petty
vengeance! drink deep of it! and know that always within my heart
the Navarrese has lived to shame me! Know that to-day you despise
Jehane, the purchased woman! and that Jehane loves you! and that the
love of proud Jehane creeps like a beaten cur toward your feet, in
the sight of common men! and know that Riczi is avenged,—you
milliner!”

“Into England I came desiring vengeance—Apples of
Sodom! O bitter fruit!” the Vicomte thought; “O fitting
harvest of a fool’s assiduous husbandry!”

They took her from him: and that afternoon, after long
meditation, the Vicomte de Montbrison entreated a second private
audience of King Henry, and readily obtained it. “Unhardy is
unseely,” the Vicomte said at this interview’s
conclusion. The tale tells that the Vicomte returned to France and
within this realm assembled all such lords as the abuses of the
Queen-Regent Isabeau had more notoriously dissatisfied.

The Vicomte had upon occasion an invaluable power of speech; and
now, so great was the devotion of love’s dupe, so heartily, so
hastily, did he design to remove the discomforts of Queen Jehane,
that now his eloquence was twin to Belial’s insidious talking
when that fiend tempts us to some proud iniquity.

Then presently these lords had sided with King Henry, as did the
Vicomte de Montbrison, in open field. Next, as luck would have it,
Jehan Sans-Peur was slain at Montereau; and a little later the new
Duke of Burgundy, who loved the Vicomte as he loved no other man,
had shifted his coat, forsaking France. These treacheries brought
down the wavering scales of warfare, suddenly, with an aweful
clangor; and now in France clean-hearted persons spoke of the
Vicomte de Montbrison as they would speak of Ganelon or of Iscariot,
and in every market-place was King Henry proclaimed as governor of
the realm.

Meantime Queen Jehane had been conveyed to prison and lodged
therein. She had the liberty of a tiny garden, high-walled, and of
two scantily furnished chambers. The brace of hard-featured females
whom Pelham had provided for the Queen’s attendance might
speak to her of nothing that occurred without the gates of Pevensey,
and she saw no other persons save her confessor, a triple-chinned
Dominican; had men already lain Jehane within the massive and gilded
coffin of a queen the outer world would have made as great a
turbulence in her ears.

But in the year of grace 1422, upon the feast of Saint
Bartholomew, and about vespers—for thus it wonderfully fell
out,—one of those grim attendants brought to her the first
man, save the fat confessor, whom the Queen had seen within five
years. The proud, frail woman looked and what she saw was the
inhabitant of all her dreams.

Said Jehane: “This is ill done. Time has avenged you. Be
contented with that knowledge, and, for Heaven’s sake, do not
endeavor to moralize over the ruin which Heaven has made, and justly
made, of Queen Jehane, as I perceive you mean to do.” She
leaned backward in the chair, very coarsely clad in brown, but
knowing that her coloring was excellent, that she had miraculously
preserved her figure, and that she did not look her real age by a
good ten years. Such reflections beget spiritual comfort even in a
prison.

“Friend,” the lean-faced man now said, “I do
not come with such intent, as my mission will readily attest, nor to
any ruin, as your mirror will attest. Instead, madame, I come as the
emissary of King Henry, now dying at Vincennes, and with letters to
the lords and bishops of his council. Dying, the man restores to you
your liberty and your dower-lands, your bed and all your movables,
and six gowns of such fashion and such color as you may
elect.”

Then with hurried speech he told her of five years’
events: of how within that period King Henry had conquered France,
and had married the French King’s daughter, and had begotten a
boy who would presently inherit the united realms of France and
England, since in the supreme hour of triumph King Henry had been
stricken with a mortal sickness, and now lay dying, or perhaps
already dead, at Vincennes; and of how with his penultimate breath
the prostrate conqueror had restored to Queen Jehane all properties
and all honors which she formerly enjoyed.

“I shall once more be Regent,” the woman said when
the Vicomte had made an end; “Antoine, I shall presently be
Regent both of France and of England, since Dame Katharine is but a
child.” Jehane stood motionless save for the fine hands that
plucked the air. “Mistress of Europe! absolute mistress, and
with an infant ward! now, may God have mercy on my unfriends, for
they will soon perceive great need of it!”

“Yet was mercy ever the prerogative of royal
persons,” the Vicomte suavely said, “and the Navarrese
we know of was both royal and very merciful, O Constant
Lover.”

The speech was as a whip-lash. Abruptly suspicion kindled in her
shrewd gray eyes. “Harry of Monmouth feared neither man nor
God. It needed more than any death-bed repentance to frighten him
into restoring my liberty.” There was a silence. “You, a
Frenchman, come as the emissary of King Henry who has devastated
France! are there no English lords, then, left alive of his,
army?”

The Vicomte de Montbrison said; “There is at all events no
person better fitted to patch up this dishonorable business of your
captivity, in which no clean man would care to meddle.”

She appraised this, and said with entire irrelevance: “The
world has smirched you, somehow. At last you have done something
save consider how badly I treated you. I praise God, Antoine, for it
brings you nearer.”

He told her all. King Henry, it appeared, had dealt with him at
Havering in perfect frankness. The King needed money for his wars in
France, and failing the seizure of Jehane’s enormous wealth,
had exhausted every resource. “And France I mean to
have,” the King said. “Now the world knows you enjoy the
favor of the Comte de Charolais; so get me an alliance with Burgundy
against my imbecile brother of France, and Dame Jehane shall
repossess her liberty. There you have my price.”

“And this price I paid,” the Vicomte sternly said,
“for ‘Unhardy is unseely,’ Satan whispered, and I
knew that Duke Philippe trusted me. Yea, all Burgundy I marshalled
under your stepson’s banner, and for three years I fought
beneath his loathed banner, until at Troyes we had trapped and slain
the last loyal Frenchman. And to-day in France my lands are
confiscate, and there is not an honest Frenchman but spits upon my
name. All infamy I come to you for this last time, Jehane! as a man
already dead I come to you, Jehane, for in France they thirst to
murder me, and England has no further need of Montbrison, her
blunted and her filthy instrument!”

The woman nodded here. “You have set my thankless service
above your life, above your honor. I find the rhymester glorious and
very vile.”

“All vile,” he answered; “and outworn!
King’s daughter, I swore to you, long since, eternal service.
Of love I freely gave you yonder in Navarre, as yonder at Eltham I
crucified my innermost heart for your delectation. Yet I, at least,
keep faith, and in your face I fling faith like a
glove—outworn, it may be, and God knows, unclean! Yet I, at
least, keep faith! Lands and wealth have I given, up for you, O
king’s daughter, and life itself have I given you, and
lifelong service have I given you, and all that I had save honor;
and at the last I give you honor, too. Now let the naked fool
depart, Jehane, for he has nothing more to give.”

While the Vicomte de Montbrison spoke thus, she had leaned upon
the sill of an open casement. “Indeed, it had been
better,” she said, still with her face averted, and gazing
downward at the tree-tops beneath, “it had been far better had
we never met. For this love of ours has proven a tyrannous and evil
lord. I have had everything, and upon each feast of will and sense
the world afforded me this love has swept down, like a
harpy—was it not a harpy you called the bird in that old poem
of yours?—to rob me of delight. And you have had nothing, for
he has pilfered you of life, giving only dreams in exchange, my poor
Antoine, and he has led you at the last to infamy. We are as God
made us, and—I may not understand why He permits this
despotism.”

Thereafter, somewhere below, a peasant sang as he passed
supperward through the green twilight, lit as yet by one low-hanging
star alone.

Sang the peasant:

“It may be that in some sort the jingle answers me!”
then said Jehane; and she began with an odd breathlessness,
“Friend, when King Henry dies—and even now he
dies—shall I not as Regent possess such power as no woman has
ever wielded in Europe? can aught prevent this?”

“It is true,” he answered. “You leave this
prison to rule over England again, and over conquered France as
well, and naught can prevent it.”

“Unless, friend, I were wedded to a Frenchman. Then would
the stern English lords never permit that I have any finger in the
government.” She came to him with conspicuous deliberation and
rested her hands upon his breast. “Friend, I am weary of these
tinsel splendors. What are this England and this France to me, who
crave the real kingdom?”

Her mouth was tremulous and lax, and her gray eyes were more
brilliant than the star yonder. The man’s arms were about her,
and of the man’s face I cannot tell you. “King’s
daughter! mistress of half Europe! I am a beggar, an outcast, as a
leper among honorable persons.”

But it was as though he had not spoken. “Friend, it was
for this I have outlived these garish, fevered years, it was this
which made me glad when I was a child and laughed without knowing
why. That I might to-day give up this so-great power for love of
you, my all-incapable and soiled Antoine, was, as I now know, the
end to which the Eternal Father created me. For, look you,”
she pleaded, “to surrender absolute dominion over half Europe
is a sacrifice. Assure me that it is a sacrifice, Antoine! O
glorious fool, delude me into the belief that I surrender much in
choosing you! Nay, I know it is as nothing beside what you have
given up for me, but it is all I have—it is all I have,
Antoine!”

He drew a deep and big-lunged breath that seemed to inform his
being with an indomitable vigor; and grief and doubtfulness went
quite away from him. “Love leads us,” he said,
“and through the sunlight of the world Love leads us, and
through the filth of it Love leads us, but always in the end, if we
but follow without swerving, Love leads upward. Yet, O God upon the
Cross! Thou that in the article of death didst pardon Dysmas! as
what maimed warriors of life, as what bemired travellers in muddied
byways, must we presently come to Thee!”

“Ah, but we will come hand in hand,” she answered;
“and He will comprehend.”

THE END OF THE NINTH NOVEL

The Story of the Fox-Brush

In the year of grace 1417, about Martinmas (thus Nicolas
begins), Queen Isabeau fled with her daughter the Lady Katharine to
Chartres. There the Queen was met by the Duke of Burgundy, and these
two laid their heads together to such good effect that presently
they got back into Paris, and in its public places massacred some
three thousand Armagnacs. That, however, is a matter which touches
history; the root of our concernment is that, when the Queen and the
Duke rode off to attend to this butcher’s business, the Lady
Katharine was left behind in the Convent of Saint Scholastica, which
then stood upon the outskirts of Chartres, in the bend of the Eure
just south of that city. She dwelt for a year in this well-ordered
place.

There one finds her upon the day of the decollation of Saint
John the Baptist, the fine August morning that starts the tale.
Katharine the Fair, men called her, with considerable show of
reason. She was very tall, and slim as a rush. Her eyes were large
and black, having an extreme lustre, like the gleam of undried
ink,—a lustre at some times uncanny. Her abundant hair, too,
was black, and to-day seemed doubly sombre by contrast with the gold
netting which confined it. Her mouth was scarlet, all curves, and
her complexion was famous for its brilliancy; only a precisian would
have objected that she possessed the Valois nose, long and thin and
somewhat unduly overhanging the mouth.

To-day as she came through the orchard, crimson garbed, she
paused with lifted eyebrows. Beyond the orchard wall there was a
hodgepodge of noises, among which a nice ear might distinguish the
clatter of hoofs, a yelping and scurrying, and a contention of soft
bodies, and above all a man’s voice commanding the turmoil.
She was seventeen, so she climbed into the crotch of an apple-tree
and peered over the wall.

He was in rusty brown and not unshabby; but her regard swept
over this to his face, and there noted how his eyes shone like blue
winter stars under the tumbled yellow hair, and noted the flash of
his big teeth as he swore between them. He held a dead fox by the
brush, which he was cutting off; two hounds, lank and wolfish, were
scaling his huge body in frantic attempts to get at the carrion. A
horse grazed close at hand.

So for a heart-beat she saw him. Then he flung the tailless body
to the hounds, and in the act spied two black eyes peeping through
the apple-leaves. He laughed, all mirth to the heels of him.
“Mademoiselle, I fear we have disturbed your devotions. But I
had not heard that it was a Benedictine custom to rehearse aves in
tree-tops.” Then, as she leaned forward, both elbows resting
more comfortably upon the wall, and thereby disclosing her slim body
among the foliage like a crimson flower green-calyxed, he said,
“You are not a nun—Blood of God! you are the Princess
Katharine!”

The nuns, her present guardians, would have declared the ensuing
action horrific, for Katharine smiled frankly at him and asked how
could he thus recognise her at one glance.

He answered slowly: “I have seen your portrait. Hah, your
portrait!” he jeered, head flung back and big teeth glinting
in the sunlight. “There is a painter who merits
crucifixion.”

She considered this indicative of a cruel disposition, but also
of a fine taste in the liberal arts. Aloud she stated:

“You are not a Frenchman, messire. I do not understand how
you can have seen my portrait.”

The man stood for a moment twiddling the fox-brush. “I am
a harper, my Princess. I have visited the courts of many kings,
though never that of France. I perceive I have been woefully
unwise.”

This trenched upon insolence—the look of his eyes, indeed,
carried it well past the frontier,—but she found the statement
interesting. Straightway she touched the kernel of those
fear-blurred legends whispered about Dom Manuel’s reputed
descendants.

“You have, then, seen the King of England?”

“Yes, Highness.”

“Is it true that in him, the devil blood of Oriander has
gone mad, and that he eats children—like Agrapard and
Angoulaffre of the Broken Teeth?”

His gaze widened. “I have heard a deal of scandal
concerning the man. But certainly I never heard that.”

Katharine settled back, luxuriously, in the crotch of the
apple-tree. “Tell me about him.”

Composedly he sat down upon the grass and began to acquaint her
with his knowledge and opinions concerning Henry, the fifth of that
name to reign in England, and the son of that squinting Harry of
Derby about whom I have told you so much before.

Katharine punctuated the harper’s discourse with eager
questionings, which are not absolutely to our purpose. In the main,
this harper thought the man now buffeting France a just king, and he
had heard, when the crown was laid aside, Sire Henry was
sufficiently jovial, and even prankish. The harper educed anecdotes.
He considered that the King would manifestly take Rouen, which the
insatiable man was now besieging. Was the King in treaty for the
hand of the Infanta of Aragon? Yes, he undoubtedly was.

Katharine sighed her pity for this ill-starred woman. “And
now tell me about yourself.”

He was, it appeared, Alain Maquedonnieux, a harper by vocation,
and by birth a native of Ireland. Beyond the fact that it was a
savage kingdom adjoining Cataia, Katharine knew nothing of Ireland.
The harper assured her that in this she was misinformed, since the
kings of England claimed Ireland as an appanage, though the Irish
themselves were of two minds as to the justice of these pretensions;
all in all, he considered that Ireland belonged to Saint Patrick,
and that the holy man had never accredited a vicar.

“Doubtless, by the advice of God,” Alain said:
“for I have read in Master Roger de Wendover’s
Chronicles of how at the dread day of judgment all the Irish are to
muster before the high and pious Patrick, as their liege lord and
father in the spirit, and by him be conducted into the presence of
God; and of how, by virtue of Saint Patrick’s request, all the
Irish will die seven years to an hour before the second coming of
Christ, in order to give the blessed saint sufficient time to
marshal his company, which is considerable.” Katharine
admitted the convenience of this arrangement, as well as the neglect
of her education. Alain gazed up at her for a long while, as if in
reflection, and presently said: “Doubtless the Lady Heleine of
Argos also was thus starry-eyed and found in books less diverting
reading than in the faces of men.” It flooded
Katharine’s cheeks with a livelier hue, but did not vex her
irretrievably; if she chose to read this man’s face, the
meaning was plain enough.

I give you the gist of their talk, and that in all conscience is
trivial. But it was a day when one entered love’s wardship
with a plunge, not in more modern fashion venturing forward bit by
bit, as though love were so much cold water. So they talked for a
long while, with laughter mutually provoked and shared, with divers
eloquent and dangerous pauses. The harper squatted upon the ground,
the Princess leaned over the wall; but to all intent they sat
together upon the loftiest turret of Paradise, and it was a full two
hours before Katharine hinted at departure.

Alain rose, approaching the wall. “To-morrow I ride for
Milan to take service with Duke Filippo. I had broken my journey
these three days past at Châteauneuf yonder, where this fox
has been harrying my host’s chickens. To-day I went out to
slay him, and he led me, his murderer, to the fairest lady earth may
boast. Do you not think that, in returning good for evil, this fox
was a true Christian, my Princess?”

Katharine said: “I lament his destruction. Farewell,
Messire Alain! And since chance brought you hither—”

“Destiny brought me hither,” Alain affirmed, a
mastering hunger in his eyes. “Destiny has been kind; I shall
make a prayer to her that she continue so.” But when Katharine
demanded what this prayer would be, Alain shook his tawny head.
“Presently you shall know, Highness, but not now. I return to
Châteauneuf on certain necessary businesses; to-morrow I set
out at cockcrow for Milan and the Visconti’s livery.
Farewell!” He mounted and rode away in the golden August
sunlight, the hounds frisking about him. The fox-brush was fastened
in his hat. Thus Tristran de Léonois may have ridden
a-hawking in drowned Cornwall, thus statelily and composedly,
Katharine thought, gazing after him. She went to her apartments,
singing an inane song about the amorous and joyful time of spring
when everything and everybody is happy,—

and burst into a sudden passion of tears. There were born every
day, she reflected, such hosts of women-children, who were not
princesses, and therefore compelled to marry detestable kings.

Dawn found her in the orchard. She was to remember that it was a
cloudy morning, and that mist-tatters trailed from the more distant
trees. In the slaty twilight the garden’s verdure was
lustreless, the grass and foliage were uniformly sombre save where
dewdrops showed like beryls. Nowhere in the orchard was there
absolute shadow, nowhere a vista unblurred; in the east, half-way
between horizon and zenith, two belts of coppery light flared
against the gray sky like embers swaddled by ashes. The birds were
waking; there were occasional scurryings in tree-tops and outbursts
of peevish twittering to attest as much; and presently came a
singing, less musical than that of many a bird perhaps, but far more
grateful to the girl who heard it, heart in mouth. A lute
accompanied the song demurely.

Sang Alain:

Candor in these matters is best. Katharine scrambled into the
crotch of the apple-tree. The dew pattered sharply about her, but
the Princess was not in a mood to appraise discomfort.

“You came!” this harper said, transfigured; and then
again, “You came!”

She breathed, “Yes.”

So for a long time they stood looking at each other. She found
adoration in his eyes and quailed before it; and in the man’s
mind not a grimy and mean incident of the past but marshalled to
leer at his unworthiness: yet in that primitive garden the first man
and woman, meeting, knew no sweeter terror.

It was by the minstrel that a familiar earth and the grating
speech of earth were earlier regained. “The affair is of the
suddenest,” Alain observed, and he now swung the lute behind
him. He indicated no intention of touching her, though he might
easily have done so as he sat there exalted by the height of his
horse. “A meteor arrives with more prelude. But Love is an
arbitrary lord; desiring my heart, he has seized it, and accordingly
I would now brave hell to come to you, and finding you there, would
esteem hell a pleasure-garden. I have already made my prayer to
Destiny that she concede me love. Now of God, our Father and Master,
I entreat quick death if I am not to win you. For, God willing, I
shall come to you again, even if in order to do this I have to split
the world like a rotten orange.”

“Madness! Oh, brave, sweet madness!” Katharine said.
“You are a minstrel and I am a king’s daughter.”

“Is it madness? Why, then, I think sane persons are to be
commiserated. And indeed I spy in all this some design. Across half
the earth I came to you, led by a fox. Hey, God’s face!”
Alain swore; “the foxes which Samson, that old sinewy captain,
loosed among the corn of heathenry kindled no disputation such as
this fox has set afoot. That was an affair of standing corn and
olives spoilt, a bushel or so of disaster; now poised kingdoms
topple on the brink of ruin. There will be martial argument shortly
if you bid me come again.”

“I bid you come,” said Katharine; and after they had
stared at each other for a long while, he rode away in silence. It
was through a dank and tear-flawed world that she stumbled
conventward, while out of the east the sun came bathed in mists, a
watery sun no brighter than a silver coin.

And for a month the world seemed no less dreary, but about
Michaelmas the Queen-Regent sent for her. At the Hôtel de
Saint-Pol matters were much the same. Katharine found her mother in
foul-mouthed rage over the failure of a third attempt to poison the
Dauphin of Vienne, as Queen Isabeau had previously poisoned her two
elder sons; I might here trace out a curious similitude between the
Valois and that dragon-spawned race which Jason very anciently slew
at Colchis, since the world was never at peace so long as any two of
them existed. But King Charles greeted his daughter with ampler
deference, esteeming her to be the wife of Presbyter John, the
tyrant of Aethiopia. However, ingenuity had just suggested
card-playing for King Charles’ amusement, and he paid little
attention nowadays to any one save his opponent at this new game.

So the French King chirped his senile jests over the card-table,
while the King of England was besieging the French city of Rouen
sedulously and without mercy. In late autumn an armament from
Ireland joined Henry’s forces. The Irish fought naked, it was
said, with long knives. Katharine heard discreditable tales of these
Irish, and reflected how gross are the exaggerations of rumor.

In the year of grace 1419, in January, the burgesses of Rouen,
having consumed their horses, and finding frogs and rats
unpalatable, yielded the town. It was the Queen-Regent who brought
the news to Katharine.

“God is asleep,” the Queen said; “and while He
nods, the Butcher of Agincourt has stolen our good city of
Rouen.” She sat down and breathed heavily. “Never was
any poor woman so pestered as I! The puddings to-day were quite
uneatable, as you saw for yourself, and on Sunday the Englishman
entered Rouen in great splendor, attended by his chief nobles; but
the Butcher rode alone, and before him went a page carrying a
fox-brush on the point of his lance. I put it to you, is that the
contrivance of a sane man? Euh! euh!” Dame Isabeau squealed on
a sudden; “you are bruising me.”

Katharine had gripped her by the shoulder. “The King of
England—a tall, fair man? with big teeth? a tiny wen upon his
neck—here—and with his left cheek scarred? with blue
eyes, very bright, bright as tapers?” She poured out her
questions in a torrent, and awaited the answer, seeming not to
breathe at all.

“I believe so,” the Queen said, “and they say,
too, that he has the damned squint of old Manuel the Redeemer.”

“O God!” said Katharine.

“Ay, our only hope now. And may God show him no more mercy
than has this misbegotten English butcher shown us!” the good
lady desired, with fervor. “The hog, having won our Normandy,
is now advancing on Paris itself. He repudiated the Aragonish
alliance last August; and until last August he was content with
Normandy, they tell us, but now he swears to win all France. The man
is a madman, and Scythian Tamburlaine was more lenient. And I do not
believe that in all France there is a cook who understands his
business.” She went away whimpering, and proceeded to get
tipsy.

The Princess remained quite still, as Dame Isabeau had left her;
you may see a hare crouch so at sight of the hounds. Finally the
girl spoke aloud. “Until last August!” Katharine said.
“Until last August! Poised kingdoms topple on the brink of
ruin, now that you bid me come to you again. And I bade this
devil’s grandson come to me, as my lover!” Presently she
went into her oratory and began to pray.

In the midst of her invocation she wailed: “Fool, fool!
How could I have thought him less than a king!”

You are to imagine her breast thus adrum with remorse and hatred
of herself, the while that town by town fell before the invader like
card-houses. Every rumor of defeat—and the news of some fresh
defeat came daily—was her arraignment; impotently she cowered
at God’s knees, knowing herself a murderess, whose infamy was
still afoot, outpacing her prayers, whose victims were battalions.
Tarpeia and Pisidicé and Rahab were her sisters; she hungered
in her abasement for Judith’s nobler guilt.

In May he came to her. A truce was patched up, and French and
English met amicably in a great plain near Meulan. A square space
was staked out and on three sides boarded in, the fourth side being
the river Seine. This enclosure the Queen-Regent, Jehan of Burgundy,
and Katharine entered from the French side. Simultaneously the
English King appeared, accompanied by his brothers the Dukes of
Clarence and Gloucester, and followed by the Earl of Warwick.
Katharine raised her eyes with I know not what lingering hope; but
it was he, a young Zeus now, triumphant and uneager. In his helmet
in place of a plume he wore a fox-brush spangled with jewels.

These six entered the tent pitched for the conference—the
hanging of blue velvet embroidered with fleurs-de-lys of gold
blurred before the girl’s eyes,—and there the Earl of
Warwick embarked upon a sea of rhetoric. His French was indifferent,
his periods were interminable, and his demands exorbitant; in brief,
the King of England wanted Katharine and most of France, with a
reversion at the French King’s death of the entire kingdom.
Meanwhile Sire Henry sat in silence, his eyes glowing.

“I have come,” he said, under cover of
Warwick’s oratory—“I have come again, my
lady.”

Katharine’s gaze flickered over him. “Liar!”
she said, very softly. “Has God no thunders remaining in His
armory that this vile thief still goes unblasted? Would you steal
love as well as kingdoms?”

His ruddy face was now white. “I love you,
Katharine.”

“Yes,” she answered, “for I am your pretext. I
can well believe, messire, that you love your pretext for theft and
murder.”

Neither spoke after this, and presently the Earl of Warwick
having come to his peroration, the matter was adjourned till the
next day. The party separated. It was not long before Katharine had
informed her mother that, God willing, she would never again look
upon the King of England’s face uncoffined. Isabeau found her
a madwoman. The girl swept opposition before her with gusts of
demoniacal fury, wept, shrieked, tore at her hair, and eventually
fell into a sort of epileptic seizure; between rage and terror she
became a horrid, frenzied beast. I do not dwell upon this, for it is
not a condition in which the comeliest maid shows to advantage. But,
for the Valois, insanity always lurked at the next corner, and they
knew it; to save the girl’s reason the Queen was forced to
break off all discussion of the match. Accordingly, the Duke of
Burgundy went next day to the conference alone. Jehan began with
“ifs,” and over these flimsy barriers Henry, already
fretted by Katharine’s scorn, presently vaulted to a towering
fury.

“Fair cousin,” the King said, after a deal of
vehement bickering, “we wish you to know that we will have the
daughter of your King, and that we will drive both him and you out
of this kingdom.”

The Duke answered, not without spirit, “Sire, you are
pleased to say so; but before you have succeeded in ousting my lord
and me from this realm, I am of the opinion that you will be very
heartily tired.”

At this the King turned on his heel; over his shoulder he flung:
“I am tireless; also, I am agile as a fox in the pursuit of my
desires. Say that to your Princess.” Then he went away in a
rage.

It had seemed an approvable business to win love incognito,
according to the example of many ancient emperors, but in practice
he had tripped over an ugly outgrowth from the legendary custom. The
girl hated him, there was no doubt about it; and it was equally
certain he loved her. Particularly caustic was the reflection that a
twitch of his finger would get him Katharine as his wife, for before
long the Queen-Regent was again attempting secret negotiations to
bring this about. Yes, he could get the girl’s body by a
couple of pen-strokes, and had he been older that might have
contented him: as it was, what he wanted was to rouse the look her
eyes had borne in Chartres orchard that tranquil morning, and this
one could not readily secure by fiddling with seals and parchments.
You see his position: this high-spirited young man now loved the
Princess too utterly to take her on lip-consent, and this marriage
was now his one possible excuse for ceasing from victorious warfare.
So he blustered, and the fighting recommenced; and he slew in a
despairing rage, knowing that by every movement of his arm he became
to her so much the more detestable.