Chivalry Part 10

"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 a.s.sa.s.sinations 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstance, 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 G.o.d!"

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 G.o.d 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. a.s.suredly, 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 trans.m.u.ted," 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 a.s.says 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, G.o.d 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s are yet so tiny? So let us put out the light! though I dread darkness, Rosamund--For they say that h.e.l.l 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l, 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 G.o.d's wisdom G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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.