In the year of grace 1386, upon the feast of Saint Bartholomew (thus
Nicolas begins), came to the Spanish coast Messire Peyre de Lesnerac,
in a war-ship sumptuously furnished and manned by many persons of
dignity and wealth, in order they might suitably escort the Princess
Jehane into Brittany, where she was to marry the Duke of that province.
There were now rejoicings throughout Navarre, in which the Princess
took but a nominal part and young Antoine Riczi none at all.
This Antoine Riczi came to Jehane that August twilight in the hedged
garden. "King's daughter!" he sadly greeted her. "Duchess of
Brittany! Countess of Rougemont! Lady of Nantes and of Guerrand! of
Rais and of Toufon and Guerche!"
"Nay," she answered, "Jehane, whose only title is the Constant Lover."
And in the green twilight, lit as yet by one low-hanging star alone,
their lips met, as aforetime.
Presently the girl spoke. Her soft mouth was lax and tremulous, and
her gray eyes were more brilliant than the star yonder. The boy's arms
were about her, so that neither could be quite unhappy; and besides, a
sorrow too noble for any bitterness had mastered them, and a vast
desire whose aim they could not word, or even apprehend save cloudily.
"Friend," said Jehane, "I have no choice. I must wed with this de
Montfort. I think I shall die presently. I have prayed God that I may
die before they bring me to the dotard's bed."
Young Riczi held her now in an embrace more brutal. "Mine! mine!" he
snarled toward the obscuring heavens.
"Yet it may be I must live. Friend, the man is very old. Is it wicked
to think of that? For I cannot but think of his great age."
Then Riczi answered: "My desires--may God forgive me!--have clutched
like starving persons at that sorry sustenance. Friend! ah, fair,
sweet friend! the man is human and must die, but love, we read, is
immortal. I am fain to die, Jehane. But, oh, Jehane! dare you to bid
me live?"
"Friend, as you love me, I entreat you live. Friend, I crave of the
Eternal Father that if I falter in my love for you I may be denied even
the bleak night of ease which Judas knows." The girl did not weep;
dry-eyed she winged a perfectly sincere prayer toward incorruptible
saints. He was to remember the fact, and through long years.
For even as Riczi left her, yonder behind the yew-hedge a shrill
joculatrix sang, in rehearsal for Jehane's bridal feast.
Sang the joculatrix:
"_When the morning broke before us
Came the wayward Three astraying,
Chattering a trivial chorus--
Hoidens that at handball playing
(When they wearied of their playing),
Cast the Ball where now it whirls
Through the coil of clouds unstaying,
For the Fates are merry girls!_"
And upon the next day de Lesnerac bore young Jehane from Pampeluna and
presently to Saille, where old Jehan the Brave took her to wife. She
lived as a queen, but she was a woman of infrequent laughter.
She had Duke Jehan's adoration, and his barons' obeisancy, and his
villagers applauded her passage with stentorian shouts. She passed
interminable days amid bright curious arrasses and trod listlessly over
pavements strewn with flowers. Fiery-hearted jewels she had, and
shimmering purple cloths, and much furniture adroitly carven, and many
tapestries of Samarcand and Baldach upon which were embroidered, by
brown fingers time turned long ago to Asian dust, innumerable asps and
deer and phoenixes and dragons and all the motley inhabitants of air
and of the thicket: but her memories, too, she had, and for a dreary
while she got no comfort because of them. Then ambition quickened.
Young Antoine Riczi likewise nursed his wound as best he might; but
about the end of the second year his uncle, the Vicomte de
Montbrison--a gaunt man, with preoccupied and troubled eyes--had
summoned Antoine into Lyonnois and, after appropriate salutation, had
informed the lad that, as the Vicomte's heir, he was to marry the
Demoiselle Gerberge de Nerac upon the ensuing Michaelmas.
"That I may not do," said Riczi; and since a chronicler that would
tempt fortune should never stretch the fabric of his wares too thin,
unlike Sir Hengist, I merely tell you these two dwelt together at
Montbrison for a decade, and always the Vicomte swore at his nephew and
predicted this or that disastrous destination so often as Antoine
declined to marry the latest of his uncle's candidates--in whom the
Vicomte was of an astonishing fertility.
In the year of grace 1401 came the belated news that Duke Jehan had
closed his final day. "You will be leaving me!" the Vicomte growled;
"now, in my decrepitude, you will be leaving me! It is abominable, and
I shall in all likelihood disinherit you this very night."
"Yet it is necessary," Riczi answered; and, filled with no unhallowed
joy, rode not long afterward for Vannes, in Brittany, where the
Duchess-Regent held her court. Dame Jehane had within that fortnight
put aside her mourning, and sat beneath a green canopy, gold-fringed
and powdered with many golden stars, upon the night when he first came
to her, and the rising saps of spring were exercising their august and
formidable influence. She sat alone, by prearrangement, to one end of
the high-ceiled and radiant apartment; midway in the hall her lords and
divers ladies were gathered about a saltatrice and a jongleur, who
diverted them to the mincing accompaniment of a lute; but Jehane sat
apart from these, frail, and splendid with many jewels, and a little
sad, and, as ever (he thought), was hers a beauty clarified of its mere
substance--the beauty, say, of a moonbeam which penetrates full-grown
leaves.
And Antoine Riczi found no power of speech within him at the first.
Silent he stood before her for an obvious interval, still as an effigy,
while meltingly the jongleur sang.
"Jehane!" said Antoine Riczi, "have you, then, forgotten, O Jehane?"
Nor had the resplendent woman moved at all. It was as though she were
some tinted and lavishly adorned statue of barbaric heathenry, and he
her postulant; and her large eyes appeared to judge an immeasurable
path, beyond him. Now her lips had fluttered somewhat. "The Duchess
of Brittany am I," she said, and in the phantom of a voice. "The
Countess of Rougemont am I. The Lady of Nantes and of Guerrand! of
Rais and of Toufon and Guerche! ... Jehane is dead."
The man had drawn one audible breath. "You are Jehane, whose only
title is the Constant Lover!"
"Friend, the world smirches us," she said half-pleadingly. "I have
tasted too deep of wealth and power. Drunk with a deadly wine am I,
and ever I thirst--I thirst--"
"Jehane, do you remember that May morning in Pampeluna when first I
kissed you, and about us sang many birds? Then as now you wore a gown
of green, Jehane."
"Friend, I have swayed kingdoms since."
"Jehane, do you remember that August twilight in Pampeluna when last I
kissed you? Then as now you wore a gown of green, Jehane."
"But no such chain as this about my neck," the woman answered, and
lifted a huge golden collar garnished with emeralds and sapphires and
with many pearls. "Friend, the chain is heavy, yet I lack the will to
cast it off. I lack the will, Antoine." And with a sudden roar of
mirth her courtiers applauded the evolutions of the saltatrice.
"King's daughter!" said Riczi then; "O perilous merchandise! a god came
to me and a sword had pierced his breast. He touched the gold hilt of
it and said, 'Take back your weapon.' I answered, 'I do not know you.'
'I am Youth,' he said; 'take back your weapon.'"
"It is true," she responded, "it is lamentably true that after to-night
we are as different persons, you and I."
He said: "Jehane, do you not love me any longer? Remember old years
and do not break your oath with me, Jehane, since God abhors nothing so
much as perfidy. For your own sake, Jehane--ah, no, not for your sake
nor for mine, but for the sake of that blithe Jehane, whom, so you tell
me, time has slain!"
Once or twice she blinked, as dazzled by a light of intolerable
splendor, but otherwise sat rigid. "You have dared, messire, to
confront me with the golden-hearted, clean-eyed Navarrese that once was
I! and I requite." The austere woman rose. "Messire, you swore to me,
long since, an eternal service. I claim my bond. Yonder prim
man--gray-bearded, the man in black and silver--is the Earl of
Worcester, the King of England's ambassador, in common with whom the
wealthy dowager of Brittany has signed a certain contract. Go you,
then, with Worcester into England, as my proxy, and in that island, as
my proxy, wed the King of England. Messire, your audience is done."
Latterly Riczi said this: "Can you hurt me any more, Jehane?--nay, even
in hell they cannot hurt me now. Yet I, at least, keep faith, and in
your face I fling faith like a glove--old-fashioned, it may be, but
clean--and I will go, Jehane."
Her heart raged. "Poor, glorious fool!" she thought; "had you but the
wit even now to use me brutally, even now to drag me from this dais--!"
Instead he went from her smilingly, treading through the hall with many
affable salutations, while always the jongleur sang.
Sang the jongleur:
"_There is a land the rabble rout
Knows not, whose gates are barred
By Titan twins, named Fear and Doubt,
That mercifully guard
The land we seek--the land so fair!--
And all the fields thereof,_
"_Where daffodils grow everywhere
About the Fields of Love--
Knowing that in the Middle-Land
A tiny pool there lies
And serpents from the slimy strand
Lift glittering cold eyes._
"_Now, the parable all may understand,
And surely you know the name o' 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 of England. First had 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"--he 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, whereof the recipient might well be
proud, and Riczi returned to Lyonnois. "Depardieux!" his uncle said;
"so you return alone!"
"As Prince Troilus did," 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, and in another voice; "I would that I were God to
punish as is fitting! Nay, come home, my lad!--come home!"
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,
and 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 a man
serve his lady according to her commandments, but you have performed
the most absurd and the cruelest task which any woman ever imposed upon
her servitor. I laugh at you, and I envy you." Thus he died, about
Martinmas.
Now was Antoine Riczi a powerful baron, and got no comfort of his
lordship, since in his meditations the King of Darkness, that old
incendiary, had added a daily fuel until the ancient sorrow quickened
into vaulting flames of wrath and of disgust.
"What now avail my riches?" said the Vicomte. "Nay, how much wealthier
was I when I was loved, and was myself an eager lover! I relish no
other pleasures than those of love. Love's sot am I, drunk with a
deadly wine, poor fool, and ever I thirst. As vapor are all my
chattels and my acres, and the more my dominion and my power increase,
the more rancorously does my heart sustain its misery, being 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 very crown of that latter kingdom; and as
the earth is altered by the advent of winter was the appearance of
France transformed by his coming, and everywhere the nobles were
stirred up to arms, the castles were closed, the huddled cities were
fortified, and on either hand arose intrenchments.
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 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, in the month of April, about the day of Palm
Sunday, and within her dower-palace of Havering-Bower, an interview
with Queen Jehane.
_Nicolas omits, and unaccountably, to mention that during the French
wars she had ruled England as Regent, and with marvellous
capacity--although this fact, as you will see more lately, is the pivot
of his chronicle._
A solitary page ushered the Vicomte whither she sat alone, by
prearrangement, in a chamber with painted walls, profusely lighted by
the sun, and making 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.
A frightened woman, half-distraught, aging now but rather handsome, his
judgment saw in her, and no more; all black and shimmering gold his
senses found her, and supple like some dangerous and lovely serpent;
and with a contained hatred he had discovered, as 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 devil's horns. Followed the dreary years that
linked me to the rotting corpse God's leprosy devoured while the poor
furtive thing yet moved. 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. Ever the big
fierce-eyed man has hated me, 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 devise some trumped-up
accusation. Friend, I live as did Saint Damoclus, beneath a sword.
Antoine!" she wailed--for now was the pride of Queen Jehane shattered
utterly--"within the island am I a prisoner for all that my chains are
of gold."
"Yet it was not until o' late," he observed, "that you disliked the
metal which is the substance of all crowns."
And now the woman lifted to him a huge golden collar 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 about her neck. Ah, you should have mastered me at Vannes.
You could have done so, and 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. Then 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 the pride of ill-starred emperors blazed and informed her body as
light occupies a lantern. "At last you come for me, messieurs?"
"Whereas," their leader read in answer from a parchment--"whereas the
King's stepmother, Queen Jehane, is accused by certain persons of an
act of witchcraft 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--"oh, Harry of Monmouth, could I but
come to you, very quietly, and 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 avenged, no less. 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, and in the sight of common men! and know that Riczi is
avenged,--you milliner!"
[Illustration: "'TAKE NOW YOUR PETTY VENGEANCE!'" _Painting by
Elisabeth Shippen Green_]
"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 fresh and private audience of King
Henry, and readily obtained it. "Unhardy is unseely," the Vicomte said
at its conclusion. Then 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 dissatified.
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.
Then presently these lords had sided with King Henry, as had the
Vicomte de Montbrison, in open field. Latterly Jehan Sans-Peur was
slain at Montereau; and a little later the new Duke of Burgundy, who
loved the Vicomte as he loved no other man, had shifted his coat.
Afterward fell the poised scale of circumstance, and with an aweful
clangor; and now in France clean-hearted persons spoke of the Vicomte
de Montbrison as they would of Ganelon or of Iscariot, and in every
market-place was King Henry proclaimed as governor of the realm.
Meantime was Queen Jehane conveyed to prison and lodged therein for
five years' space. She had the liberty of a tiny garden, high-walled,
and of two scantily furnished chambers. The brace of hard-featured
females Pelham had provided for the Queen's attendance might speak to
her of nothing that occurred without the gates of Pevensey, and she saw
no other persons save her confessor, a triple-chinned Dominican; and in
fine, had they already lain Jehane within the massive and gilded coffin
of a queen the outer world would have made as great a turbulence in her
ears.
But in the year of grace 1422, upon the feast of Saint Bartholomew, and
about vespers--for thus it wonderfully fell out--one of those grim
attendants brought to her the first man, save the fat confessor, whom
the Queen had seen within five years. The proud, frail woman looked
and what she saw was the common inhabitant of all her dreams.
Said Jehane: "This is ill done. The years have avenged you. Be
contented with that knowledge, and, for Heaven's sake, do not endeavor
to moralize over the ruin Heaven has made, and justly made, of Queen
Jehane, as I perceive you mean to do." She leaned backward in the
chair, very coarsely clad in brown, but knowing her countenance to be
that of the anemone which naughtily dances above wet earth.
"Friend," the lean-faced man now said, "I do not come with such intent,
as my mission will readily attest, nor to any ruin, as your mirror will
attest. Nay, madame, I come as the emissary of King Henry, now dying
at Vincennes, and with letters to the lords and bishops of his council.
Dying, the man restores to you your liberty and your dower-lands, your
bed and all your movables, and six gowns of such fashion and such color
as you may elect."
Then with hurried speech he told her of five years' events: how within
that period King Henry had conquered entire France, and had married the
French King's daughter, and had begotten a boy who would presently
inherit the united realms of France and England, since in the supreme
hour of triumph King Henry had been stricken with a mortal sickness,
and now lay dying or perhaps already dead, at Vincennes; and how with
his penultimate breath the prostrate conqueror had restored to Queen
Jehane all properties and all honors which she formerly enjoyed.
"I shall once more be Regent," the woman said when he had made an end;
"Antoine, I shall presently be Regent both of France and of England,
since Dame Katharine is but a child." Jehane stood motionless save for
the fine hands that plucked the air. "Mistress of Europe! absolute
mistress, and with an infant ward! now, may God have mercy on my
unfriends, for they will soon perceive great need of it!"
"Yet was mercy ever the prerogative of royal persons," the Vicomte
suavely said, "and the Navarrese we know of was both royal and very
merciful, O Constant Lover."
The speech was as a whip-lash. Abruptly suspicion kindled in her eyes,
as a flame leaps from stick to stick. "Harry of Monmouth feared
neither man nor God. It needed more than any death-bed repentance to
frighten him into restoral of my liberty." There was a silence. "You,
a Frenchman, come as the emissary of King Henry who has devastated
France! are there no English lords, then, left alive of all his army?"
The Vicomte de Montbrison said: "There is perhaps no person better
fitted to patch up this dishonorable business of your captivity,
wherein a clean man might scarcely dare to meddle."
She appraised this, and more lately said with entire irrelevance: "The
world has smirched you, somehow. At last you have done something save
consider your ill-treatment. I praise God, Antoine, for it brings you
nearer."
He told her all. King Henry, it appeared, had dealt with him at
Havering in perfect frankness. The King needed money for his wars in
France, and failing the seizure of Jehane's enormous wealth, had
exhausted every resource. "And France I mean to have," the King said.
"Yet the world knows you enjoy the favor of the Comte de Charolais; so
get me an alliance with Burgundy against my imbecile brother of France,
and Dame Jehane shall repossess her liberty. There you have my price."
"And this price I paid," the Vicomte sternly said, "for 'Unhardy is
unseely,' Satan whispered, and I knew that Duke Philippe trusted me.
Yea, all Burgundy I marshalled under your stepson's banner, and for
three years I fought beneath his loathed banner, until in Troyes we had
trapped and slain the last loyal Frenchman. And to-day in France my
lands are confiscate, and there is not an honest Frenchman but spits
upon my name. All infamy I come to you for this last time, Jehane! as
a man already dead I come to you, Jehane, for in France they thirst to
murder me, and England has no further need of Montbrison, her blunted
and her filthy instrument!"
The woman shuddered. "You have set my thankless service above your
life, above your honor even. I find the rhymester glorious and very
vile."
"All vile," he answered; "and outworn! King's daughter, I swore to
you, long since, eternal service. Of love I freely gave you yonder in
Navarre, as yonder at Eltham I crucified my innermost heart for your
delectation. Yet I, at least, keep faith, and in your face I fling
faith like a glove--outworn, it may be, and, God knows, unclean! Yet
I, at least, keep faith! Lands and wealth have I given up for you, O
king's daughter, and life itself have I given you, and lifelong service
have I given you, and all that I had save honor; and at the last I give
you honor, too. Now let the naked fool depart, Jehane, for he has
nothing more to give."
She had leaned, while thus he spoke, upon the sill of an open casement.
"Indeed, it had been far better," she said, and with averted face, "had
we never met. For this love of ours has proven a tyrannous and evil
lord. I have had everything, and upon each feast of will and sense the
world afforded me this love has swept down, like a harpy--was it not a
harpy you called the bird in that old poem of yours?--to rob me of
delight. And you have had nothing, for of life he has pilfered you,
and he has given you in exchange but dreams, my poor Antoine, and he
has led you at the last to infamy. We are as God made us, and--I may
not understand why He permits this despotism."
Thereafter, somewhere below, a peasant sang as he passed supperward
through the green twilight, lit as yet by one low-hanging star alone.
Sang the peasant:
"_King Jesus hung upon the Cross,
'And have ye sinned?' quo' He,--
'Nay, Dysmas, 'tis no honest loss
When Satan cogs the dice ye toss,
And thou shall sup with Me,--
Sedebis apud angelos,
Quia amavisti!'_
"_At Heaven's Gate was Heaven's Queen,
'And have ye sinned?' quo' She,--
'And would I hold him worth a bean
That durst not seek, because unclean,
My cleansing charity?--
Speak thou that wast the Magdalene,
Quia amavisti!'_"
"It may be that in some sort the jingle answers me!" then said Jehane;
and she began with an odd breathlessness: "Friend, when King Henry
dies--and even now he dies--shall I not as Regent possess such power as
no woman has ever wielded in Europe? can aught prevent this?"
"Naught," he answered.
"Unless, friend, I were wedded to a Frenchman. Then would the stern
English lords never permit that I have any finger in the government."
She came to him with conspicuous deliberation and laid one delicate
hand upon either shoulder. "Friend, I am aweary of these tinsel
splendors. I crave the real kingdom."
Her mouth was tremulous and lax, and her gray eyes were more brilliant
than the star yonder. The man's arms were about her, and an ecstasy
too noble for any common mirth had mastered them, and a vast desire
whose aim they could not word, or even apprehend save cloudily.
And of the man's face I cannot tell you. "King's daughter! mistress of
half Europe! I am a beggar, an outcast, as a leper among honorable
persons."
But it was as though he had not spoken. "Friend, it was for this I
have outlived these garish, fevered years, it was this which made me
glad when I was a child and laughed without knowing why. That I might
to-day give up this so-great power for love of you, my all-incapable
and soiled Antoine, was, as I now know, the end to which the Eternal
Father created me. For, look you," she pleaded, "to surrender absolute
dominion over half Europe is a sacrifice. Assure me that it is a
sacrifice, Antoine! O glorious fool, delude me into the belief that I
deny myself in choosing you! Nay, I know it is as nothing beside what
you have given up for me, but it is all I have--it is all I have,
Antoine!" she wailed in pitiful distress.
He drew a deep and big-lunged breath that seemed to inform his being
with an indomitable vigor, and doubt and sorrow went quite away from
him. "Love leads us," he said, "and through the sunlight of the world
he leads us, and through the filth of it Love leads us, but always in
the end, if we but follow without swerving, he leads upward. Yet, O
God upon the Cross! Thou that in the article of death didst pardon
Dysmas! as what maimed warriors of life, as what bemired travellers in
muddied byways, must we presently come to Thee!"
"But hand in hand," she answered; "and He will comprehend."