Chivalry: Dizain des Reines, James Branch Cabell [the best books of all time .TXT] 📗
- Author: James Branch Cabell
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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—hé, 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
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