Chivalry: Dizain des Reines by James Branch Cabell (top 100 novels TXT) 📕
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- Author: James Branch Cabell
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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:
“King Jesus hung upon the Cross,
‘And have ye sinned?’ quo’ He,—.
‘Nay, Dysmas, ’tis no honest loss
When Satan cogs the dice ye toss,
And thou shall sup with Me,—
Sedebis apud angelos,
Quia amavisti!’
“At Heaven’s Gate was Heaven’s Queen,
‘And have ye sinned?’ quo’ She,—
‘And would I hold him worth a bean
That durst not seek, because unclean,
My cleansing charity?—
Speak thou that wast the Magdalene,
Quia amavisti!’”
“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
X
THE STORY OF THE FOX-BRUSH
“Dame serez de mon cueur, sans debat,
Entierement, jusques mort me consume.
Laurier souëf qui pour mon droit combat,
Olivier franc, m’ostant toute amertume.”
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
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