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

of these daughters, whom troubadours hymned as the Unattainable Princess. She was married a long while ago, madame, to the King of England, Lord Henry, third of that name to reign in these islands.”

Dame Alianora’s eyes were narrowing. “There is something in your voice,” she said, “which I recall.”

He answered: “Madame and Queen, that is very likely, for it is a voice which sang a deal in Provence when both of us were younger. I concede with the Roman that I have somewhat deteriorated since the reign of Cynara. Yet have you quite forgotten the Englishman who made so many songs of you? They called him Osmund Heleigh.”

“He made the Sestina of Spring which won the violet crown at my betrothal,” the Queen said; and then, with eagerness: “Messire, can it be that you are Osmund Heleigh?” He shrugged assent. She looked at him for a long time, rather sadly, and demanded if he were the King’s man or of the barons’ party.

The nervous hands were raised in deprecation. “I have no politics,” Messire Heleigh began, and altered it, gallantly enough, to, “I am the Queen’s man, madame.”

“Then aid me, Osmund,” she said.

He answered with a gravity which singularly became him, “You have reason to understand that to my fullest power I will aid you.”

“You know that at Lewes these swine overcame us.” He nodded assent. “Now they hold the King, my husband, captive at Kenilworth. I am content that he remain there, for he is of all the King’s enemies the most dangerous. But, at Wallingford, Leicester has imprisoned my son, Prince Edward. The Prince must be freed, my Osmund. Warren de Basingbourne commands what is left of the royal army, now entrenched at Bristol, and it is he who must liberate my son. Get me to Bristol, then. Afterward we will take Wallingford.” The Queen issued these orders in cheery, practical fashion, and did not admit opposition into the account, for she was a capable woman.

“But you, madame?” he stammered. “You came alone?”

“I come from France, where I have been entreating—and vainly entreating—succor from yet another monkish king, the holy Lewis of that realm. Eh, what is God about when He enthrones these whining pieties! Were I a king, were I even a man, I would drive these smug English out of their foggy isle in three days’ space! I would leave alive not one of these curs that dare yelp at me! I would—” She paused, anger veering into amusement. “See how I enrage myself when I think of what your people have made me suffer,” the Queen said, and shrugged her shoulders. “In effect, I skulked back in disguise to this detestable island, accompanied by Avenel de Giars and Hubert Fitz-Herveis. To-night some half-dozen fellows—robbers, thorough knaves, like all you English,—attacked us on the common yonder and slew the men of our party. While they were cutting de Giars’ throat I slipped away in the dark and tumbled through many ditches till I spied your light. There you have my story. Now get me an escort to Bristol.”

It was a long while before Messire Heleigh spoke. Then, “These men,” he said—“this de Giars and this Fitz-Herveis—they gave their lives for yours, as I understand it,—pro caris amicis. And yet you do not grieve for them.”

“I shall regret de Giars,” the Queen acknowledged, “for he made excellent songs. But Fitz-Herveis?—foh! the man had a face like a horse.” Again her mood changed. “Many persons have died for me, my friend. At first I wept for them, but now I am dry of tears.”

He shook his head. “Cato very wisely says, ‘If thou hast need of help, ask it of thy friends.’ But the sweet friend that I remember was a clean eyed girl, joyous and exceedingly beautiful. Now you appear to me one of those ladies of remoter times—Faustina, or Jael, or Artemis, the King’s wife of Tauris,—they that slew men, laughing. I am somewhat afraid of you, madame.”

She was angry at first; then her face softened. “You English!” she said, only half mirthful. “Eh, my God! you remember me when I was a high hearted young sorceress. Now the powers of the Apsarasas have departed from me, and time has thrust that Alianora, who was once the Unattainable Princess, chin deep in misery. Yet even now I am your Queen, messire, and it is not yours to pass judgment upon me.” “I do not judge you,” he returned. “Rather I cry with him of old, Omnia incerta ratione! and I cry with Salomon that he who meddles with the strife of another man is like to him that takes a hound by the ears. Yet listen, madame and Queen. I cannot afford you an escort to Bristol. This house, of which I am in temporary charge, is Longaville, my brother’s manor. Lord Brudenel, as you doubtless know, is of the barons’ party and—scant cause for grief!—is with Leicester at this moment. I can trust none of my brother’s people, for I believe them to be of much the same opinion as those Londoners who not long ago stoned you and would have sunk your barge in Thames River. Oh, let us not blink the fact that you are not overbeloved in England. So an escort is out of the question. Yet I, madame, if you so elect, will see you safe to Bristol.”

“You? Singly?” the Queen demanded.

“My plan is this: Singing folk alone travel whither they will. We will go as jongleurs, then. I can yet manage a song to the viol, I dare affirm. And you must pass as my wife.”

He said this with simplicity. The plan seemed unreasonable, and at first Dame Alianora waved it aside. Out of the question! But reflection suggested nothing better; it was impossible to remain at Longaville, and the man spoke sober truth when he declared any escort other than himself to be unprocurable. Besides, the lunar madness of the scheme was its strength; that the Queen would venture to cross half England unprotected—and Messire Heleigh on the face of him was a paste-board buckler—was an event which Leicester would neither anticipate nor on report credit. There you were! these English had no imagination. The Queen snapped her fingers and said: “Very willingly will I be your wife, my Osmund. But how do I know that I can trust you? Leicester would give a deal for me; he would pay any price for the pious joy of burning the Sorceress of Provence. And you are not wealthy, I suspect.”

“You may trust me, mon bel esper,”—his eyes here were those of a beaten child—“because my memory is better than yours.” Messire Osmund Heleigh gathered his papers into a neat pile. “This room is mine. To-night I keep guard in the corridor, madame. We will start at dawn.”

When he had gone, Dame Alianora laughed contentedly. “Mon bel esper! my fairest hope! The man called me that in his verses—thirty years ago! Yes, I may trust you, my poor Osmund.”

So they set out at cockcrow. He had procured for himself a viol and a long falchion, and had somewhere got suitable clothes for the Queen; and in their aging but decent garb the two approached near enough to the appearance of what they desired to be thought. In the courtyard a knot of servants gaped, nudged one another, but openly said nothing. Messire Heleigh, as they interpreted it, was brazening out an affair of gallantry before the countryside; and they esteemed his casual observation that they would find a couple of dead men on the common exceedingly diverting.

When the Queen asked him the same morning, “And what will you sing, my Osmund? Shall we begin the practise of our new profession with the Sestina of Spring?”—old Osmund Heleigh grunted out: “I have forgotten that rubbish long ago. Omnis amans, amens, saith the satirist of Rome town, and with reason.”

Followed silence.

One sees them thus trudging the brown, naked plains under a sky of steel. In a pageant the woman, full-veined and comely, her russet gown girded up like a harvester’s might not inaptly have prefigured October; and for less comfortable November you could nowhere have found a symbol more precise than her lank companion, humorously peevish under his white thatch of hair, and constantly fretted by the sword tapping at his ankles.

They made Hurlburt prosperously and found it vacant, for the news of Falmouth’s advance had driven the villagers hillward. There was in this place a child, a naked boy of some two years, lying on a doorstep, overlooked in his elders’ gross terror. As the Queen with a sob lifted this boy the child died.

“Starved!” said Osmund Heleigh; “and within a stone’s throw of my snug home!”

The Queen laid down the tiny corpse, and, stooping, lightly caressed its sparse flaxen hair. She answered nothing, though her lips moved.

Past Vachel, scene of a recent skirmish, with many dead in the gutters, they were overtaken by Falmouth himself, and stood at the roadside to afford his troop passage. The Marquess, as he went by, flung the Queen a coin, with a jest sufficiently high flavored. She knew the man her inveterate enemy, knew that on recognition he would have killed her as he would a wolf; she smiled at him and dropped a curtsey.

“This is remarkable,” Messire Heleigh observed. “I was hideously afraid, and am yet shaking. But you, madame, laughed.”

The Queen replied: “I laughed because I know that some day I shall have Lord Falmouth’s head. It will be very sweet to see it roll in the dust, my Osmund.”

Messire Heleigh somewhat dryly observed that tastes differed.

At Jessop Minor befell a more threatening adventure. Seeking food at the Cat and Hautbois in that village, they blundered upon the same troop at dinner in the square about the inn. Falmouth and his lieutenants were somewhere inside the house. The men greeted the supposed purveyors of amusement with a shout; and one of these soldiers—a swarthy rascal with his head tied in a napkin—demanded that the jongleurs grace their meal with a song.

Osmund tried to put him off with a tale of a broken viol.

But, “Haro!” the fellow blustered; “by blood and by nails! you will sing more sweetly with a broken viol than with a broken head. I would have you understand, you hedge thief, that we gentlemen of the sword are not partial to wordy argument.” Messire Heleigh fluttered inefficient hands as the men-at-arms gathered about them, scenting some genial piece of cruelty. “Oh, you rabbit!” the trooper jeered, and caught at Osmund’s throat, shaking him. In the act this rascal tore open Messire Heleigh’s tunic, disclosing a thin chain about his neck and a handsome locket, which the fellow wrested from its fastening. “Ahoi!” he continued. “Ahoi, my comrades, what sort of minstrel is this, who goes about England all hung with gold like a Cathedral Virgin! He and his sweetheart”—the actual word was grosser—“will be none the worse for an interview with the Marquess.”

The situation smacked of awkwardness, because Lord Falmouth was familiar with the Queen, and to be brought specifically to his attention meant death for two detected masqueraders. Hastily Osmund Heleigh said:

“Messire, the locket contains the portrait of a lady whom in my youth I loved very greatly. Save to me, it is valueless. I pray you, do not rob me of it.”

But the trooper shook his head with drunken solemnity. “I do not like the looks of this. Yet I will sell it to you, as the saying is, for a song.”

“It shall be the king of songs,” said Osmund,—“the song that Arnaut Daniel first made. I will sing for you a Sestina, messieurs,—a Sestina in salutation of Spring.”

The men disposed themselves about the dying grass, and presently he sang.

Sang Messire Heleigh: