Chivalry Part 8

"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 a.s.sociates. The hut yonder, in effect, is girdled by them,--and we have our orders to let no man pa.s.s."

"Have you any orders concerning women?" the King said.

The man deliberated. Sire Edward handed him three gold pieces. "There was a.s.suredly no specific mention of petticoats," the soldier now recollected, "and in consequence I dare to pa.s.s 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 a.s.sa.s.sins 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 pa.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 G.o.d and trans.m.u.tes 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 G.o.d is not lightly moved to mirth.

And now it was a G.o.d--_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 rehea.r.s.e 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 rehea.r.s.e our present love." And even in Rigon's dim light he found her kindling eyes not n.i.g.g.ardly.

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 hoa.r.s.ely 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 G.o.d,"_ 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 Ermenouel, 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 a.s.sented, "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 d.a.m.n 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 a.s.signation 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 impa.s.sive 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 s.h.i.+p 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 bl.u.s.tered.

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 h.e.l.l; 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."