The White Plumes of Navarre Part 16

"I will report you to the Provost-Marshal, to the Major-domo of the palace, and your backs shall pay for this insolence to my niece!"

"I think they meant no harm, sir," said Claire breathlessly, taking the arm of the Professor of the Sorbonne. She was astonished at his heat.

"The whipping-bench and a good dozen spare rods are what they want!"

growled the Professor. "These are ill times. 'Train up a child in the way he should go,' saith the Book. But in these days the young see only evil all their days, and when they are old they depart not from that!"

CHAPTER XV.

MISTRESS CATHERINE

Upon the return of the Professor and Claire from the river-side to the little walled garden and white house of Dame Granier, they found Anthony Arpajon waiting for them. With him was a lady--no, a girl of thirty; the expression is right. For through the girlish brightness of her complexion, and in spite of the quick smile that went and came upon her lips, there pierced the sure determination and settled convictions of the adult of a strong race.

"I am Catherine d'Albret and a cousin of your friend," said the girl; "I have a number of followers--brave gentlemen all of them, who have ridden with me from the south. They are lodging with our friend Anthony here.

But I am come to abide with you--if I may. We shall share the same room and, if you like me, we shall talk the moon across the sky!"

She held out both her hands, but Claire's shy Scottish blood still held off. The Professor came to their a.s.sistance.

"As my lady is a D'Albret," he said, "she must be a cousin-germain to our good Abbe John!"

The girl smiled, and gave her head a little uplift, half of amus.e.m.e.nt, half of contempt.

"Ay, truly," she said, "but we are of different religions. I love not to see a man waste his life on the benches of the Sorbonne; and all for what--only to wear a red hat when all is done, like my Uncle of Bourbon!"

The Professor sighed, and thoughtfully rubbed his brow. Then he smiled, as he answered the girl.

"Ah," he said, "it is always so with you young people. Here am I who have spent the best part of my life on these very Sorbonne benches, teaching Eloquence to a party of young jackanapes who had far better hold their tongues till they have something to say. And for me, no cardinal's hat at the end of all!"

He sighed a second time, as he added, "Indeed, I know not very well what, after all, is at the end--certainly not their monkish dreams of h.e.l.l, purgatory, paradise!"

The newcomer stepped eagerly forward and laid her hand on his lips.

"Hush," she said, "you have lost your way. You have wandered in your own mazes of subtlety, and arrived nowhere. Now we of the Faith will lead you in the green pastures, beside still but living waters, which your soul shall love!"

The Professor watched the maiden before him a little sadly. Her face was all aglow with enthusiasm. There was a brilliant light in her eyes.

"Yes, I shall teach you--I, Catherine of Navarre----"

There was a noise outside on the quay.

She turned towards the window to look out. At the first step, a little halt in her gait betrayed her. The Professor of Eloquence sank on one knee.

"You are Jeanne d'Albret's own daughter," he said, "her very self, as I saw her a month before the Bartholomew. Even so she spoke--even so she walked. The Bearnais hath no philosophy other than his sword and the ready quip on his tongue. He cares no more for one religion or the other than the white plume he carries in the front of battle. But not so you."

"Henry of Bourbon-Vendome is my brother," said Catherine, "all king, all brave man. His faults are not mine--nor mine his. I am, as I said, a manifest D'Albret. But Henry holds of Bourbon!"

The two young maids mounted to their chamber. Madame Granier was already there, ordering the bed-linen for the new guest. The girls stood looking a long while into each other's faces.

"You are prettier than I," said Mistress Catherine; "but they tell me that, for all that (and it is saying much), your father made you a good daughter of the Religion!"

"He was indeed all of good and brave and in instruction wise--I fear me I have profited but little!"

"Ah," said the Princess, "that is as I would expect your father's daughter to speak. For the present, I cannot offer you much. I have a great and serious work to do. But one day you shall be my maid-of-honour!"

It is the way of princesses, even of the wisest. But the daughter of Francis the Scot was free-born. She only smiled a little, and answered, with her father's quiet dignity of manner, "Then or now, I will do anything for the daughter of Queen Jeanne!"

"By-and-by, perhaps, you will be willing to do a little for myself,"

said the Princess gently, putting out her arms and taking Claire's head upon her shoulder. "We shall love one another well, little one."

The "little one" was at least four inches taller than the speaker, but something must be forgiven to a princess.

Meantime, Madame Granier had arranged all Mistress Catherine's simple linen and travelling necessities--the linen strong, white, and country-spun, smelling of far-off Navarre, bleached on the meadows by the brooks that prattle down from the snows. The brushes and combs were of plain material--no gold or silver about them anywhere. Only in a little s.h.a.green case rested a silver spoon, a knife, and a two-p.r.o.nged fork, with a gilt crown upon each. Otherwise the camp-equipment of a simple soldier of the Bearnais could not have been commoner.

When the hostess had betaken her downstairs, Mistress Catherine drew her new friend down on a low settle, and holding her hand, began to open out her heart gladly, as if she had long wished for a confidante.

"I have come to seek my brother," she said; "I expected him here in this house. There is a plot to take his life. Guise and D'Epernon both hate him. And, indeed, both have cause. He is too brave for one--too subtle for the other. You heard how, at the beginning of this war, he sent messengers to the Duke of Guise saying, 'I am first prince of the blood--you also claim the throne. Now, to prevent the spilling of much brave blood, let us two fight it out to the death!' But Guise merely answered that he had no quarrel with his cousin of Navarre, having only taken up arms to defend from heresy the Catholic faith--what a coward!"

"It seems to me," said Claire, "that no man can be a coward who ventures himself with an angry treacherous king as freely as in his own house."

"Ah"--the Princess smiled scornfully--"our cousin Guise does not lack courage of the insolent sort. Witness how on the day of the Barricades he extended his kind protection to King Henry III. of Valois in his own city of Paris, where he had dwelt fourteen years. Nay, he even rode in from Soissons that he might do it!"

"You do not love my Lord of Guise?" said Claire. "Yet my father used to call him the best Huguenot in France, and swear that neither Rosny, nor D'Aubigne, nor yet he himself did one half so much service to the Bearnais as the Duke of Guise!"

The King's sister pondered a while upon this.

"That is perhaps true," she said at last; "Guise is vain, and venturesome because he is vain. He cannot do without shouting crowds, and hands held out to him by every scavenger and pewterer's apprentice--'Guise--the good Guise!' Pah! The man is no better than a posturer before a booth at a fair!"

"I have heard almost as much from my father," Claire answered; "he used to say that Mayenne led the armies, the priests collected the pennies, and as for Guise, he was only the big man who beat the Leaguers' drum!"

"Your father is dead, they say," murmured the Princess softly; "but in his time he must have been a man of wit."

"He taught me all I know," Claire a.s.sented, "and he died in the service of the Faith and of the King of Navarre."

"It is strange that I should never have met him," said Catherine. "I have heard say he was on mission to my brother."

"On secret mission," said Claire; "we came often to the camp by night, and were gone in the morning."

The Princess looked at her junior in great astonishment.

"Then you have seen camps, and men, and cities?" she asked eagerly.

"And you, courts!" answered Claire, on her part not a little wistfully.

A shudder traversed the slender body of the Princess. Her lip curled with disgust.

"You speak like a child," she answered hotly. "Why, I tell you, on the head of my mother, you are safer and better in a camp of German _reiters_ than in any court in Europe. But I forgot--you, at least, can pick and choose. You were not born to be only a p.a.w.n in the chess-play.