James Cabell: Chivalry

"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 in 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 shuddered. "You have set my thankless service above your life, above your honor even. 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."

She had leaned, while thus he spoke, upon the sill of an open casement. "Indeed, it had been far better," she said, and with averted face, "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 of life he has pilfered you, and he has given you in exchange but dreams, 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?"

"Naught," he answered.

"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 laid one delicate hand upon either shoulder. "Friend, I am aweary of these tinsel splendors. I 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 an ecstasy too noble for any common mirth had mastered them, and a vast desire whose aim they could not word, or even apprehend save cloudily.

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 deny myself 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!" she wailed in pitiful distress.

He drew a deep and big-lunged breath that seemed to inform his being with an indomitable vigor, and doubt and sorrow went quite away from him. "Love leads us," he said, "and through the sunlight of the world he leads us, and through the filth of it Love leads us, but always in the end, if we but follow without swerving, he 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!"

"But hand in hand," she answered; "and He will comprehend."

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. This, 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 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 some 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 odd times uncanny. Her abundant hair, too, was black, and to-day doubly sombre by contrast with the gold netting which confined it. Her mouth was scarlet, all curves, and her complexion 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 were blue winter stars under the tumbled yellow hair, and 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.