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

“There is a land those hereabout

Ignore ... Its gates are barred

By Titan 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 Duchess of Brittany and the Countess of Rougemont,—do take you, Sire Henry of Lancaster, King of England and in title 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 God 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 nobles 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 vassals 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 space for discredited France, and presently the Vicomte de Montbrison was sent into England, as ambassador. 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.5

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 God Himself has deigned to avenge you. All misery my reign has been. First Hotspur, then prim Worcester harried us. Came Glyndwyr afterward to prick us with his devils’ horns. Followed the dreary years that linked me to the rotting corpse which God’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 title 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 massive 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 God 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! ohimé, 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 assiduous 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 assembled 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