Chivalry: Dizain des Reines by James Branch Cabell (top 100 novels TXT) 📕

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