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 assistance.
"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 amusement,
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
hell, 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 shagreen case rested a silver spoon, a knife, and a two-pronged
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 assented, "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 pawn in the chess-play.
If you do not wish to marry a man, you have only to say him nay. You are
not a princess. I would to God I were not!"
"What is the plot against your brother?" said Claire, willing to turn
her companion from black ideas; "perhaps I can help. At least, I have
with me one who, though they name him 'fool,' is yet wiser than all the
men I have met, excepting only my father."
"And they name this marvel--what?" demanded the Princess.
"Jean-aux-Choux--the Fool of the Three Henries."
Mistress Catherine clapped her hands almost girlishly, forgetting her
accustomed dignity.
"I have seen him," she cried; "once he came to Nerac, where he pleased
the Reine Margot greatly. She is a judge of fools!"
"Our Jean is no fool, really," said Claire, "but born of my nation, and
a learned man, very zealous for the Faith."
"I know--I know," said the Princess; "I have heard D'Aubigne say of him,
that folly made the best cloak for unsafe wisdom. As to the design
against the King, it is this. Before the Duke of Guise comes to the
Parliament, the Valois will first invite my brother to a conference--not
here in Blois, but nearer his own lines--at Poitiers, perhaps, or at
Loches. The Queen-Mother, the Medici woman, though sick and old, has
gathered many of her maids-of-honour. She will strive to work upon my
easy brother with fair words and fair faces, in the hope that, like
Judas, he will betray his Master with a kiss!"
"I had not thought there could be in all the world such--women!" said
Claire. "After all, our Scottish way is fairer--and that is foot to foot
and blade to blade!"
"Even the Valois dagger in the back is better," said the Princess; "but
this Italian woman is cunning, like all her fox-brood of Florentine
money-lenders! How shall we foil her? It is useless speaking to my
brother. He would only laugh, and bid me get to my sampler till he had
found a goodman of my own for me to knit hose for!"
"Let me ask counsel of the Doctor of the Sorbonne who is with me,"
Claire urged; "he is very wise, and----"
"A Doctor of the Sorbonne!" cried Mistress Catherine--"impossible! Why,
have they not cursed my brother, excommunicated him? They have even
turned against their own King!"
"Ay, but," said Claire, now eager to do her friend justice, "_my_ Doctor
they have excommunicated also, because he withstood them in full
Senatus. If he went back to Paris just now, they would hang him in his
gown from the windows of his own class-room!"
So in this way Doctor Anatole of the Sorbonne entered into the heretic
councils of the Bearnais. Indeed, his was the idea which came like a
lightning-flash of illumination upon the councils of Claire and the
Princess Catherine.
"What of La Reine Margot?" murmured the Professor, as if he had been
speaking to himself; "is she of her husband's enemies?"
"Nay--but," began the Princess, "that would be pouring oil upon fire!"
"Where one fire has burned, there is little fuel for a second,"
suggested the Professor sententiously.
"It is not the highest wisdom," said the careful Princess, "I fear it
would not bring a blessing."
"It is wisdom--if not the highest, my Lady Catherine," said the learned
Doctor, "and if the matter succeeds--that, for your Cause, will be
blessing enough!"
"Then our Cause is not yours?" Catherine demanded sharply of him. The
Professor smiled.
"I am old, or you children think so. I have at least seen the vanity of
persecuting any man for the thought that is in his heart. I was bred a
Catholic, yet have been persecuted by my brethren for differing from
them. But I agree that most honest folk of the realm are of your
brother's party--the brave, the wise, the single of eye and heart. There
never will be a king in France till the Bearnais reigns."
The Professor spoke with a certain antique freedom, and the Princess,
moved with a sudden impulse, laid her hand on his arm.
"You are with us, then, if not of us?" she said.
"I am of this young lady's party," smiled the Professor, turning to
Claire, who had been listening quietly. There was a look of great love
in his eyes.
"Then I must needs make sure of her!" said the princess, putting her arm
about Claire's waist. "Mistress Claire, vow that you will recruit for
our army!"
"Long ago one made me vow that vow!" said Claire. "I am not likely to
betray the Cause for which my father died!"
The face of the Princess Catherine grew grave. She was thinking of her
own father. Anthony of Bourbon had not made so good an end.
"I vowed my vow night and morning at my mother's knee," she said. "Thus
it was she bade me promise, in these very words--'As I hope for Christ's
dear mercy, I will live and I will die in the Faith given to the
fishermen of Galilee. I will cleave to it, despising all other. Every
believer, rich or poor, shall be my brother or my sister--they all
princes and princesses in Jesus Christ, I only a poor sinner hoping in
His mercy!'"
The Professor bowed his head, crossed himself instinctively, and said,
"Amen to so good a prayer! At the end, it is ever our mother's religion
which is ours!"