So for a long time they stood looking at each other. She found
adoration in his eyes and quailed before it; and in the man's mind not
a grimy and mean incident of the past but marshalled to leer at his
unworthiness: yet in that primitive garden the first man and woman,
meeting, knew no sweeter terror.
It was by the minstrel a familiar earth and the grating speech of earth
were earlier regained. "The affair is of the suddenest," Alain
observed, and he now swung the lute behind him. He indicated no
intention of touching her, though he might easily have done so as he
sat there exalted by the height of his horse. "A meteor arrives with
more prelude. But Love is an arbitrary lord; desiring my heart, he has
seized it, and accordingly I would now brave hell to come to you, and
finding you there, esteem hell a pleasure-garden. I have already made
my prayer to Destiny that she concede me love, and now of God, our
Father and Master, I entreat quick death if I am not to win you. For,
God willing, I shall come to you again, though in doing so it were
necessary that I split the world like a rotten orange."
"Madness! Oh, brave, sweet madness!" Katharine said. "I am a king's
daughter, and you a minstrel."
"Is it madness? Why, then, I think all sensible men are to be
commiserated. And indeed I spy in all this some design. Across half
the earth I came to you, led by a fox. Heh, God's face!" Alain swore;
"the foxes Samson, that old sinewy captain, loosed among the corn of
heathenry kindled no disputation such as this fox has set afoot. That
was an affair of standing corn and olives spoilt, a bushel or so of
disaster; now poised kingdoms topple on the brink of ruin. There will
be martial argument shortly if you bid me come again."
"I bid you come," said Katharine; and after they had stared at each
other for a long while, he rode away in silence. It was through a
dank, tear-flawed world that she stumbled conventward, while out of the
east the sun came bathed in mists, a watery sun no brighter than a
silver coin.
And for a month the world seemed no less dreary, but about Michaelmas
the Queen-Regent sent for her. At the Hôtel de Saint-Pol matters were
much the same. Her mother Katharine found in foul-mouthed rage over
the failure of a third attempt to poison the Dauphin of Vienne, as
Isabeau had previously poisoned her two elder sons; I might here trace
out a curious similitude between the Valois and that dragon-spawned
race which Jason very anciently slew at Colchis, since the world was
never at peace so long as any two of them existed: but King Charles
greeted his daughter with ampler deference, esteeming her Presbyter
John's wife, the tyrant of Ethiopia. However, ingenuity had just
suggested card-playing for his amusement, and he paid little attention
nowadays to any one save his opponent.
So the French King chirped his senile jests over the card-table, while
the King of England was besieging the French city of Rouen sedulously
and without mercy. In late autumn an armament from Ireland joined
Henry's forces. The Irish fought naked, it was said, with long knives.
Katharine heard discreditable tales of these Irish, and reflected how
gross are the exaggerations of rumor.
In the year of grace 1419, in January, the burgesses of Rouen, having
consumed their horses, and finding frogs and rats unpalatable, yielded
the town. It was the Queen-Regent who brought the news to Katharine.
"God is asleep," the Queen said; "and while He nods, the Butcher of
Agincourt has stolen our good city of Rouen." She sat down and
breathed heavily. "Never was poor woman so pestered as I! The
puddings to-day were quite uneatable, and on Sunday the Englishman
entered Rouen in great splendor, attended by his chief nobles; but the
Butcher rode alone, and before him went a page carrying a fox-brush on
the point of his lance. I put it to you, is that the contrivance of a
sane man? Euh! euh!" Dame Isabeau squealed on a sudden; "you are
bruising me."
Katharine had gripped her by the shoulder. "The King of England--a
tall, fair man? with big teeth? a tiny wen upon his neck--here--and
with his left cheek scarred? with blue eyes, very bright, bright as
tapers?" She poured out her questions in a torrent, and awaited the
answer, seeming not to breathe at all.
"I believe so," the Queen said.
"O God!" said Katharine.
"Ay, our only hope now. And may God show him no more mercy than he has
shown us!" the good lady desired, with fervor. "The hog, having won
our Normandy, is now advancing on Paris itself. He repudiated the
Aragonish alliance last August; and until last August he was content
with Normandy, they tell us, but now he swears to win all France. The
man is a madman, and Scythian Tamburlaine was more lenient. And I do
not believe that in all France there is a cook who understands his
business." She went away whimpering and proceeded to get tipsy.
The Princess remained quite still, as Dame Isabeau had left her; you
may see a hare crouch so at sight of the hounds. Finally the girl
spoke aloud. "Until last August!" Katharine said. "Until last August!
_Poised kingdoms topple on the brink of ruin, now that you bid me come
to you again_. And I bade him come!" Presently she went into her
oratory and began to pray.
In the midst of her invocation she wailed: "Fool, fool! How could I
have thought him less than a king!"
You are to imagine her breast thus adrum with remorse and hatred of
herself, what time town by town fell before the invader like
card-houses. Every rumor of defeat--and they were many--was her
arraignment; impotently she cowered at God's knees, knowing herself a
murderess, whose infamy was still afoot, outpacing her prayers, whose
victims were battalions. Tarpeia and Pisidice and Rahab were her
sisters; she hungered in her abasement for Judith's nobler guilt.
In May he came to her. A truce was patched up and French and English
met amicably in a great plain near Meulan. A square space was staked
out and on three sides boarded in, the fourth side being the river
Seine. This enclosure the Queen-Regent, Jehan of Burgundy, and
Katharine entered from the French side. Simultaneously the English
King appeared, accompanied by his brothers the Dukes of Clarence and
Gloucester, and followed by the Earl of Warwick. Katharine raised her
eyes with I know not what lingering hope; it was he, a young Zeus now,
triumphant and uneager. In his helmet in place of a plume he wore a
fox-brush spangled with jewels.
These six entered the tent pitched for the conference--the hanging of
blue velvet embroidered with fleurs-de-lys of gold blurred before the
girl's eyes, and till death the device sickened her--and there the Earl
of Warwick embarked upon a sea of rhetoric. His French was
indifferent, his periods interminable, and his demands exorbitant; in
brief, the King of England wanted Katharine and most of France, with a
reversion at the French King's death of the entire kingdom. Meanwhile
Sire Henry sat in silence, his eyes glowing.
"I have come," he said, under cover of Warwick's oratory--"I have come
again, my lady."
Katharine's gaze flickered over him. "Liar!" she said, very softly.
"Has God no thunder in His armory that this vile thief should go
unblasted? Would you filch love as well as kingdoms?"