Chivalry Part 20

Silent he stood before her, still as an effigy, while meltingly the jongleur sang.

"Jehane!" said Antoine Riczi, in a while, "have you, then, forgotten, O Jehane?"

The resplendent woman had not moved at all. It was as though she were some tinted and lavishly adorned statue of barbaric heathenry, and he her postulant; and her large eyes appeared to judge an immeasurable path, beyond him. Now her lips fluttered somewhat. "I am the d.u.c.h.ess of Brittany," she said, in the phantom of a voice. "I am the Countess of Rougemont. The Lady of Nantes and of Guerrand! of Rais and of Toufon and Guerche!... Jehane is dead."

The man had drawn one audible breath. "You are that Jehane, whose only t.i.tle is the Constant Lover!"

"Friend, the world smirches us," she said half-pleadingly, "I have tasted too deep of wealth and power. I am drunk with a deadly wine, and ever I thirst--I thirst--"

"Jehane, do you remember that May morning in Pampeluna when first I kissed you, and about us sang many birds? Then as now you wore a gown of green, Jehane."

"Friend, I have swayed kingdoms since."

"Jehane, do you remember that August twilight in Pampeluna when last I kissed you? Then as now you wore a gown of green, Jehane."

"But I wore no such chain as this about my neck," the woman answered, and lifted a huge golden collar garnished with emeralds and sapphires and with many pearls. "Friend, the chain is heavy, yet I lack the will to cast it off. I lack the will, Antoine." And now with a sudden shout of mirth her courtiers applauded the evolutions of the saltatrice.

"King's daughter!" said Riczi then; "O perilous merchandise! a G.o.d came to me and a sword had pierced his breast. He touched the gold hilt of it and said, 'Take back your weapon.' I answered, 'I do not know you.' 'I am Youth' he said; 'take back your weapon.'"

"It is true," she responded, "it is lamentably true that after to-night we are as different persons, you and I."

He said: "Jehane, do you not love me any longer? Remember old years and do not break your oath with me, Jehane, since G.o.d abhors nothing so much as unfaith. For your own sake, Jehane,--ah, no, not for your sake nor for mine, but for the sake of that blithe Jehane, whom, so you tell me, time has slain!"

Once or twice she blinked, as if dazzled by a light of intolerable splendor, but otherwise she stayed rigid. "You have dared, messire, to confront me with the golden-hearted, clean-eyed Navarrese that once was I! and I requite." The austere woman rose. "Messire, you swore to me, long since, eternal service. I claim my right in domnei.

Yonder--gray-bearded, the man in black and silver--is the Earl of Worcester, the King of England's amba.s.sador, in common with whom the wealthy dowager of Brittany has signed a certain contract. Go you, then, with Worcester into England, as my proxy, and in that island, as my proxy, become the wife of the King of England. Messire, your audience is done."

Riczi said this: "Can you hurt me any more, Jehane?--no, even in h.e.l.l they cannot hurt me now. Yet I, at least, keep faith, and in your face I fling faith like a glove--old-fashioned, it may be, but clean,--and I will go, Jehane."

Her heart raged. "Poor, glorious fool!" she thought; "had you but the wit even now to use me brutally, even now to drag me from this das--!" Instead he went away from her smilingly, treading through the hall with many affable salutations, while the jongleur sang.

Sang the jongleur:

"There is a land those hereabout Ignore ... Its gates are barred By t.i.tan twins, named Fear and Doubt.

These mercifully guard That land we seek--the land so fair!-- And all the fields thereof, Where daffodils flaunt everywhere And ouzels chant of love,-- Lest we attain the Middle-Land, Whence clouded well-springs rise, And vipers from a slimy strand Lift glittering cold eyes.

"Now, the parable all may understand, And surely you know the name of the land!

Ah, never a guide or ever a chart May safely lead you about this land,-- The Land of the Human Heart!"

And the following morning, being duly empowered, Antoine Riczi sailed for England in company with the Earl of Worcester; and upon Saint Richard's day the next ensuing was, at Eltham, as proxy of Jehane, married in his own person to the bloat King Henry, the fourth of that name to reign. This king was that same squinting Harry of Derby (called also Henry of Lancaster and Bolingbroke) who stole his cousin's crown, and about whom I have told you in the preceding story.

First Sire Henry placed the ring on Riczi's finger, and then spoke Antoine Riczi, very loud and clear:

"I, Antoine Riczi,--in the name of my worshipful lady, Dame Jehane, the daughter of Messire Charles until lately King of Navarre, the d.u.c.h.ess of Brittany and the Countess of Rougemont,--do take you, Sire Henry of Lancaster, King of England and in t.i.tle of France, and Lord of Ireland, to be my husband; and thereto I, Antoine Riczi, in the spirit of my said lady"--the speaker paused here to regard the gross hulk of masculinity before him, and then smiled very sadly--"in precisely the spirit of my said lady, I plight you my troth."

Afterward the King made him presents of some rich garments of scarlet trimmed with costly furs, and of four silk belts studded with silver and gold, and with valuable clasps, of which the owner might well be proud, and Riczi returned to Lyonnois. "Depardieux!" his uncle said; "so you return alone!"

"I return as did Prince Troilus," said Riczi--"to boast to you of liberal entertainment in the tent of Diomede."

"You are certainly an inveterate fool," the Vicomte considered after a prolonged appraisal of his face, "since there is always a deal of other pink-and-white flesh as yet unmortgaged--Boy with my brother's eyes!" the Vicomte said, in another voice; "I have heard of the task put upon you: and I would that I were G.o.d to punish as is fitting! But you are welcome home, my lad."

So these two abode together at Montbrison for a long time, and in the purlieus of that place hunted and hawked, and made sonnets once in a while, and read aloud from old romances some five days out of the seven. The verses of Riczi were in the year of grace 1410 made public, not without acclamation; and thereafter the stripling Comte de Charolais, future heir to all Burgundy and a zealous patron of rhyme, was much at Montbrison, and there conceived for Antoine Riczi such admiration as was possible to a very young man only.

In the year of grace 1412 the Vicomte, being then bedridden, died without any disease and of no malady save the inherencies of his age.

"I entreat of you, my nephew," he said at last, "that always you use as touchstone the brave deed you did at Eltham. It is necessary for a gentleman to serve his lady according to her commandments, but you performed the most absurd and the most cruel task which any woman ever imposed upon her lover and servitor in domnei. I laugh at you, and I envy you." Thus he died, about Martinmas.

Now was Antoine Riczi a powerful baron, but he got no comfort of his lordship, because that old incendiary, the King of Darkness, daily added fuel to a smouldering sorrow until grief quickened into vaulting flames of wrath and of disgust.

"What now avail my riches?" said the Vicomte. "How much wealthier was I when I was loved, and was myself an eager lover! I relish no other pleasures than those of love. I am Love's sot, drunk with a deadly wine, poor fool, and ever I thirst. All my chattels and my acres appear to me to be bright vapors, and the more my dominion and my power increase, the more rancorously does my heart sustain its bitterness over having been robbed of that fair merchandise which is the King of England's. To hate her is scant comfort and to despise her none at all, since it follows that I who am unable to forget the wanton am even more to be despised than she. I will go into England and execute what mischief I may against her."

The new Vicomte de Montbrison set forth for Paris, first to do homage for his fief, and secondly to be accredited for some plausible mission into England. But in Paris he got disquieting news. Jehane's husband was dead, and her stepson Henry, the fifth monarch of that name to reign in Britain, had invaded France to support preposterous claims which the man advanced to the crown of that latter kingdom; and as the earth is altered by the advent of winter, so was the appearance of France transformed by King Henry's coming, and everywhere the n.o.bles were stirred up to arms, the castles were closed, the huddled cities were fortified, and on every side arose entrenchments.

Thus through this sudden turn was the new Vicomte, the dreamer and the recluse, caught up by the career of events, as a straw is borne away by a torrent, when the French lords marched with their va.s.sals to Harfleur, where they were soundly drubbed by the King of England; as afterward at Agincourt.

But in the year of grace 1417 there was a breathing s.p.a.ce for discredited France, and presently the Vicomte de Montbrison was sent into England, as amba.s.sador. He got in London a fruitless audience of King Henry, whose demands were such as rendered a renewal of the war inevitable; and afterward got, in the month of April, about the day of Palm Sunday, at the Queen's dower-palace of Havering-Bower, an interview with Queen Jehane.[*]

[*Nicolas unaccountably omits to mention that during the French wars she had ruled England as Regent with signal capacity,--although this fact, as you will see more lately, is the pivot of his chronicle.]

A curled pert page took the Vicomte to where she sat alone, by prearrangement, in a chamber with painted walls, profusely lighted by the sun, and made pretence to weave a tapestry. When the page had gone she rose and cast aside the shuttle, and then with a glad and wordless cry stumbled toward the Vicomte. "Madame and Queen--!" he coldly said.

His judgment found in her a quite ordinary, frightened woman, aging now, but still very handsome in these black and shimmering gold robes; but all his other faculties found her desirable: and with a contained hatred he had perceived, as if by the terse illumination of a thunderbolt, that he could never love any woman save the woman whom he most despised.

She said: "I had forgotten. I had remembered only you, Antoine, and Navarre, and the clean-eyed Navarrese--" Now for a little, Jehane paced the gleaming and sun-drenched apartment as a bright leopardess might tread her cage. Then she wheeled. "Friend, I think that G.o.d Himself has deigned to avenge you. All misery my reign has been. First Hotspur, then prim Worcester harried us. Came Glyndwyr afterward to p.r.i.c.k us with his devils' horns. Followed the dreary years that linked me to the rotting corpse which G.o.d's leprosy devoured while the poor furtive thing yet moved, and endured its share in the punishment of Manuel's poisonous blood. All misery, Antoine! And now I live beneath a sword."

"You have earned no more," he said. "You have earned no more, O Jehane! whose only t.i.tle is the Constant Lover!" He spat it out.

She came uncertainly toward him, as though he had been some not implacable knave with a bludgeon. "For the King hates me," she plaintively said, "and I live beneath a sword. The big, fierce-eyed boy has hated me from the first, for all his lip-courtesy. And now he lacks the money to pay his troops, and I am the wealthiest person within his realm. I am a woman and alone in a foreign land. So I must wait, and wait, and wait, Antoine, till he devises some trumped-up accusation. Friend, I live as did Saint Damoclus, beneath a sword.

Antoine!" she wailed--for now the pride of Queen Jehane was shattered utterly--"I am held as a prisoner for all that my chains are of gold."

"Yet it was not until of late," he observed, "that you disliked the metal which is the substance of all crowns."

And now the woman lifted toward him her ma.s.sive golden necklace, garnished with emeralds and sapphires and with many pearls, and in the sunlight the gems were tawdry things. "Friend, the chain is heavy, and I lack the power to cast it off. The Navarrese we know of wore no such perilous fetters. Ah, you should have mastered me at Vannes. You could have done so, very easily. But you only talked--oh, Mary pity us! you only talked!--and I could find only a servant where I had sore need to find a master. Let all women pity me!"

But now came many armed soldiers into the apartment. With spirit Queen Jehane turned to meet them, and you saw that she was of royal blood, for now the pride of many emperors blazed and informed her body as light occupies a lantern. "At last you come for me, messieurs?"

"Whereas," the leader of these soldiers read from a parchment--"whereas the King's stepmother, Queen Jehane, is accused by certain persons of an act of witch-craft that with diabolical and subtile methods wrought privily to destroy the King, the said Dame Jehane is by the King committed (all her attendants being removed) to the custody of Sir John Pelham, who will, at the King's pleasure, confine her within Pevensey Castle, there to be kept under Sir John's control: the lands and other properties of the said Dame Jehane being hereby forfeit to the King, whom G.o.d preserve!"

"Harry of Monmouth!" said Jehane,--"ah, my tall stepson, could I but come to you, very quietly, with a knife--!" She shrugged her shoulders, and the gold about her person glittered in the sunlight.

"Witchcraft! ohime, one never disproves that. Friend, now are you avenged the more abundantly."

"Young Riczi is avenged," the Vicomte said; "and I came hither desiring vengeance."

She wheeled, a lithe flame (he thought) of splendid fury. "And in the gutter Jehane dares say what Queen Jehane upon the throne might never say. Had I reigned all these years as mistress not of England but of Europe,--had nations wheedled me in the place of barons,--young Riczi had been none the less avenged. Bah! what do these so-little persons matter? Take now your petty vengeance! drink deep of it! and know that always within my heart the Navarrese has lived to shame me! Know that to-day you despise Jehane, the purchased woman! and that Jehane loves you! and that the love of proud Jehane creeps like a beaten cur toward your feet, in the sight of common men! and know that Riczi is avenged,--you milliner!"

"Into England I came desiring vengeance--Apples of Sodom! O bitter fruit!" the Vicomte thought; "O fitting harvest of a fool's a.s.siduous husbandry!"

They took her from him: and that afternoon, after long meditation, the Vicomte de Montbrison entreated a second private audience of King Henry, and readily obtained it. "Unhardy is unseely," the Vicomte said at this interview's conclusion. The tale tells that the Vicomte returned to France and within this realm a.s.sembled all such lords as the abuses of the Queen-Regent Isabeau had more notoriously dissatisfied.

The Vicomte had upon occasion an invaluable power of speech; and now, so great was the devotion of love's dupe, so heartily, so hastily, did he design to remove the discomforts of Queen Jehane, that now his eloquence was twin to Belial's insidious talking when that fiend tempts us to some proud iniquity.

Then presently these lords had sided with King Henry, as did the Vicomte de Montbrison, in open field. Next, as luck would have it, Jehan Sans-Peur was slain at Montereau; and a little later the new Duke of Burgundy, who loved the Vicomte as he loved no other man, had shifted his coat, forsaking France. These treacheries brought down the wavering scales of warfare, suddenly, with an aweful clangor; and now in France clean-hearted persons spoke of the Vicomte de Montbrison as they would speak of Ganelon or of Iscariot, and in every market-place was King Henry proclaimed as governor of the realm.