In silence de Gatinais 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 Gatinais 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 Gatinais, 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 Gatinais.

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 Gatinais 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 Gatinais 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 Mauleon, 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



III

THE STORY OF THE RAT-TRAP

"Leixant a part le stil dels trobados, Dos grans dezigs ban combatut ma pensa, Mas lo voler vers un seguir dispensa: Yo l'vos publich, amar dretament vos."

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 Ermenoueil, which stand thick about the chateau; 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. "Ohe, 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]

"I sing of Death, that comes unto the king, And lightly plucks him from the cushioned throne; And drowns his glory and his warfaring In unrecorded dim oblivion; And girds another with the sword thereof; And sets another in his stead to reign; And ousts the remnant, nakedly to gain Styx' formless shore and nakedly complain Midst twittering ghosts lamenting life and love.

"For Death is merciless: a crack-brained king He raises in the place of Prester John, Smites Priam, and mid-course in conquering Bids Caesar pause; the wit of Salomon, The wealth of Nero and the pride thereof, And battle-prowess—or of Tamburlaine Darius, Jeshua, or Charlemaigne,— Wheedle and bribe and surfeit Death in vain, And get no grace of him nor any love.

"Incuriously he smites the armored king And tricks his counsellors—"

"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 Ermenoueil 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 certe!—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:

"Incuriously he smites the armored king And tricks his counsellors—

"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:

"As, later on, Death will, half-idly, still our pleasuring, And change for fevered laughter in the sun Sleep such as Merlin's,—and excess thereof,— Whence we, divorceless Death our Viviaine Implacable, may never more regain The unforgotten rapture, and the pain And grief and ecstasy of life and love.

"For, presently, as quiet as the king Sleeps now that planned the keeps of Ilion, We, too, will sleep, whilst overhead the spring Rules, and young lovers laugh—as we have done,— And kiss—as we, that take no heed thereof, But slumber very soundly, and disdain The world-wide heralding of winter's wane And swift sweet ripple of the April rain Running about the world to waken love.

"We shall have done with Love, and Death be king And turn our nimble bodies carrion, Our red lips dusty;—yet our live lips cling Despite that age-long severance and are one Despite the grave and the vain grief thereof,— Which we will baffle, if in Death's domain Fond memories may enter, and we twain May dream a little, and rehearse again In that unending sleep our present love.

"Speed forth to her in halting unison, My rhymes: and say no hindrance may restrain Love from his aim when Love is bent thereon; And that were love at my disposal lain— All mine to take!—and Death had said, 'Refrain, Lest I, even I, exact the cost thereof,' I know that even as the weather-vane Follows the wind so would I follow Love."

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-a-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. "He 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 Ermenoueil, 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. He 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 Fecamp. 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—he, 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



IV

THE STORY OF THE CHOICES

"Sest fable es en aquest mon Semblans al homes que i son; Que el mager sen qu'om pot aver So es amar Dieu et sa mer, E gardar sos comendamens."

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:

"Man's love hath many prompters, But a woman's love hath none; And he may woo a nimble wit Or hair that shames the sun, Whilst she must pick of all one man And ever brood thereon— And for no reason, And not rightly,—

"Save that the plan was foreordained (More old than Chalcedon, Or any tower of Tarshish Or of gleaming Babylon), That she must love unwillingly And love till life be done,—. He for a season, And more lightly."

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:

"Dame Ysabeau, la prophecie Que li sage dit ne ment mie, Que la royne sut ceus grever Qui tantost laquais sot aymer—"[4]

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:

"Ma voix mocque, mon cuer gemit— Peu pense a ce que la voix dit, Car me membre du temps jadis Et d'ung garson, d'amour surpris, Et d'une fille—et la vois si— Et grandement suis esbahi."

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:

"Were the All-Mother wise, life (shaped anotherwise) Would be all high and true; Could I be otherwise I had been otherwise Simply because of you, ... With whom I have naught to do, And who are no longer you!

"Life with its pay to be bade us essay to be What we became,—I believe Were there a way to be what it was play to be I would not greatly grieve ... Hearts are not worn on the sleeve. Let us neither laugh nor grieve!"

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:

"As with her dupes dealt Circe Life deals with hers, for she Reshapes them without mercy, And shapes them swinishly, To wallow swinishly, And for eternity;

"Though, harder than the witch was, Life, changing not the whole, Transmutes the body, which was Proud garment of the soul, And briefly drugs the soul, Whose ruin is her goal;

"And means by this thereafter A subtler mirth to get, And mock with bitterer laughter Her helpless dupes' regret, Their swinish dull regret For what they half forget."

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

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: For this perplexing matter the curious may consult Paul Verville's Notice sur la vie de Nicolas de Caen, p. 93 et seq. The indebtedness to Antoine Riczi is, of course, conceded by Nicolas in his "EPILOGUE."]

[Footnote 2: She was the daughter of King Ferdinand of Leon and Castile, whose conversion to sainthood the inquisitive may find recorded elsewhere.]

[Footnote 3: Not without indulgence in anachronism. But Nicolas, be it repeated, was no Gradgrindian.]

[Footnote 4: Nicolas gives this ballad in full, but, for obvious reasons, his translator would prefer to do otherwise.]



V

THE STORY OF THE HOUSEWIFE

"Selh que m blasma vostr' amor ni m defen Non podon far en re mon cor mellor, Ni'l dous dezir qu'ieu ai de vos major, Ni l'enveya' ni'l dezir, ni'l talen."

THE FIFTH NOVEL.—PHILIPPA OF HAINAULT DARES TO LOVE UNTHRIFTILY, AND WITH THE PRODIGALITY OF HER AFFECTION SHAMES TREACHERY, AND COMMON-SENSE, AND HIGH ROMANCE, QUITE STOLIDLY; BUT, AS LOVING GOES, IS OVERTOPPED BY HER MORE STOLID SQUIRE.



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:

"Hearken and heed, Melaenis! For all that the litany ceased When Time had pilfered the victim, And flouted thy pale-lipped priest, And set astir in the temple Where burned the fires of thy shrine The owls and wolves of the desert— Yet hearken, (the issue is thine!) And let the heart of Atys, At last, at last, be mine!

"For I have followed, nor faltered— Adrift in a land of dreams Where laughter and pity and terror Commingle as confluent streams, I have seen and adored the Sidonian, Implacable, fair and divine— And bending low, have implored thee To hearken, (the issue is thine!) And let the heart of Atys, At last, at last, be mine!"

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 Chatelet. 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:

"There are taller lads than Atys, And many are wiser than he,— How should I heed them?—whose fate is Ever to serve and to be Ever the lover of Atys, And die that Atys may dine, Live if he need me—Then heed me, And speed me, (the moment is thine!) And let the heart of Atys, At last, at last, be mine!

"Fair is the form unbeholden, And golden the glory of thee Whose voice is the voice of a vision Whose face is the foam of the sea, And the fall of whose feet is the flutter Of breezes in birches and pine, When thou drawest near me, to hear me, And cheer me, (the moment is thine!) And let the heart of Atys, At last, at last, be mine!"

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 Faery, 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 melee 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 Creci, 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?"