Chivalry (10 page)

"Sest fable es en aquest mon
Semblans al homes que i son;
Que el mager sen qu'om pot aver
So es amar Dieu et sa mer,
E gardar sos comendamens."

THE FOURTH NOVEL.—YSABEAU OF FRANCE, DESIROUS OF DISTRACTION, LOOKS FOR
RECREATION IN THE TORMENT OF A CERTAIN KNIGHT, WHOM SHE PROVES TO BE NO
MORE THAN HUMAN; BUT IN THE OUTCOME OF HER HOLIDAY HE CONFOUNDS THIS
QUEEN BY THE WIT OF HIS REPLY.

In the year of grace 1327 (thus Nicolas begins) you could have found in
all England no couple more ardent in affection or in despair more
affluent than Rosamund Eastney and Sir Gregory Darrell. She was Lord
Berners' only daughter, a brown beauty, of extensive repute, thanks to a
retinue of lovers who were practitioners of the Gay Science, and who had
scattered broadcast innumerable Canzons in her honor; and Lord Berners
was a man to accept the world as he found it.

"Dompnedex!" the Earl was wont to say; "in sincerity I am fond of
Gregory Darrell, and if he chooses to make love to my daughter that is
none of my affair. The eyes and the brain preserve a proverbial warfare,
which is the source of all amenity, for without lady-service there would
be no songs and tourneys, no measure and no good breeding; and a man
delinquent in domnei is no more to be valued than an ear of corn
without the grain. No, I am so profoundly an admirer of Love that I can
never willingly behold him slain, of a surfeit, by Matrimony; besides,
this rapscallion Gregory could not to advantage exchange purses with
Lazarus in the parable; and, moreover, Rosamund is to marry the Earl of
Sarum a little after All Saints' day."

"Sarum!" people echoed. "Why, the old goat has had four wives already!"

And the Earl would spread his hands. "These redundancies are permissible
to one of the wealthiest persons in England," he was used to submit.

Thus it fell out that Sir Gregory came and went at his own discretion as
concerned Lord Berners' fief of Ordish, all through those choppy times
of warfare between Sire Edward and Queen Ysabeau. Lord Berners, for one,
vexed himself not inordinately over the outcome, since he protested the
King's armament to consist of fools and the Queen's of rascals; and had
with entire serenity declined to back either Dick or the devil.

But at last the Queen got resistless aid from Count William of Hainault
(in a way to be told about hereafter), and the King was captured by her
forces, and was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle. There they held the
second Edward to reign in England, who was the unworthy son of Dame
Ellinor and of that first squinting King Edward about whom I have told
you in the two tales preceding this tale. It was in the September of
this year, a little before Michaelmas, that they brought Sir Gregory
Darrell to be judged by the Queen; notoriously the knight had been her
husband's adherent. "Death!" croaked Adam Orleton, who sat to the right
hand, and, "Young de Spencer's death!" amended the Earl of March, with
wild laughter; but Ysabeau leaned back in her great chair—a handsome
woman, stoutening now from gluttony and from too much wine,—and
regarded her prisoner with lazy amiability.

"And what was your errand in Figgis Wood?" she demanded—"or are you
mad, then, Gregory Darrell, that you dare ride past my gates alone?"

He curtly said, "I rode for Ordish."

Followed silence. "Roger," the Queen ordered, "give me the paper which I
would not sign."

The Earl of March had drawn an audible breath. The Bishop of London
somewhat wrinkled his shaggy brows, like a person in shrewd and
epicurean amusement, while the Queen subscribed the parchment, with a
great scrawling flourish.

"Take, in the devil's name, the hire of your dexterities," said Ysabeau.
She pushed this document with her wet pen-point toward March. "So! get
it over with, that necessary business with my husband at Berkeley. And
do the rest of you withdraw, saving only my prisoner."

Followed another silence. Queen Ysabeau lolled in her carven chair,
considering the comely gentleman who stood before her, fettered, at the
point of shameful death. There was in the room a little dog which had
come to the Queen, and now licked the palm of her left hand, and the
soft lapping of its tongue was the only sound you heard. "So at peril of
your life you rode for Ordish, then, messire?"

The tense man had flushed. "You have harried us of the King's party out
of England,—and in reason I might not leave England without seeing the
desire of my heart."

"My friend," said Ysabeau, as if half in sorrow, "I would have pardoned
anything save that." She rose. Her face was dark and hot. "By God and
all His saints! you shall indeed leave England to-morrow and the world
also! but not without a final glimpse of this same Rosamund. Yet listen:
I, too, must ride with you to Ordish—as your sister, say—Gregory, did
I not hang, last April, the husband of your sister? Yes, Ralph de
Belomys, a thin man with eager eyes, the Earl of Farrington he was. As
his widow I will ride with you to Ordish, upon condition you disclose to
none at Ordish, saving only, if you will, this quite immaculate
Rosamund, any hint of our merry carnival. And to-morrow (you will swear
according to the nicest obligations of honor) you must ride back with me
to encounter—that which I may devise. For I dare to trust your naked
word in this, and, moreover, I shall take with me a sufficiency of
retainers to leave you no choice."

Darrell knelt before her. "I can do no homage to Queen Ysabeau; yet the
prodigal hands of her who knows that I must die to-morrow and cunningly
contrives, for old time's sake, to hearten me with a sight of Rosamund,
I cannot but kiss." This much he did. "And I swear in all things to obey
your will."

"O comely fool!" the Queen said, not ungently, "I contrive, it may be,
but to demonstrate that many tyrants of antiquity were only bunglers.
And, besides, I must have other thoughts than those which I have known
too long: I must this night take holiday from thinking them, lest I go
mad."

Thus did the Queen arrange her holiday.

"Either I mean to torture you to-morrow," Dame Ysabeau said, presently,
to Darrell, as these two rode side by side, "or else I mean to free you.
In sober verity I do not know. I am in a holiday humor, and it is as the
whim may take me. But do you indeed love this Rosamund Eastney? And of
course she worships you?"

"It is my belief, madame, that when I see her I tremble visibly, and my
weakness is such that a child has more intelligence than I,—and toward
such misery any lady must in common reason be a little compassionate."

Her hands had twitched so that the astonished palfrey reared. "I design
torture," the Queen said; "ah, I perfect exquisite torture, for you have
proven recreant, you have forgotten the maid Ysabeau,—Le Desir du
Cuer, was it not, my Gregory, that you were wont to call her, as
nowadays this Rosamund is the desire of your heart. You lack
inventiveness."

His palms clutched at heaven. "That Ysabeau is dead! and all true joy is
destroyed, and the world lies under a blight from which God has averted
an unfriendly face in displeasure! yet of all wretched persons existent
I am he who endures the most grievous anguish, for daily I partake of
life without any relish, and I would in truth deem him austerely kind
who slew me now that the maiden Ysabeau is dead."

She shrugged wearily. "I scent the raw stuff of a Planh," the Queen
observed; "
benedicite!
it was ever your way, my friend, to love a
woman chiefly for the verses she inspired." And she began to sing, as
they rode through Baverstock Thicket.

Sang Ysabeau:

"Man's love hath many prompters,
But a woman's love hath none;
And he may woo a nimble wit
Or hair that shames the sun,
Whilst she must pick of all one man
And ever brood thereon—
And for no reason,
And not rightly,—

"Save that the plan was foreordained
(More old than Chalcedon,
Or any tower of Tarshish
Or of gleaming Babylon),
That she must love unwillingly
And love till life be done,—.
He for a season,
And more lightly."

So to Ordish in that twilight came the Countess of Farrington, with a
retinue of twenty men-at-arms, and her brother Sir Gregory Darrell. Lord
Berners received the party with boisterous hospitality.

"Age has not blinded Father to the fact that your sister is a very
handsome woman," was Rosamund Eastney's comment. The period appears to
have been after supper, and the girl sat with Gregory Darrell in not the
most brilliant corner of the main hall.

The wretched man leaned forward, bit his nether-lip, and then with a
tumbling rush of speech told of the sorry masquerade. "The she-devil
designs some horrible and obscure mischief, she plans I know not what."

"Yet I—" said Rosamund. The girl had risen, and she continued with an
odd inconsequence: "You have told me you were Pembroke's squire when
long ago he sailed for France to fetch this woman into England—"

"—Which you never heard!" Lord Berners shouted at this point. "Jasper,
a lute!" And then he halloaed, "Gregory, Madame de Farrington demands
that racy song you made against Queen Ysabeau during your last visit."
Thus did the Queen begin her holiday.

It was a handsome couple which came forward, with hand quitting hand
tardily, and with blinking eyes yet rapt: these two were not overpleased
at being disturbed, and the man was troubled, as in reason he well might
be, by the task assigned him.

"Is it, indeed, your will, my sister," he said, "that I should
sing—this song?"

"It is my will," the Countess said.

And the knight flung back his comely head and laughed. "A truth, once
spoken, may not be disowned in any company. It is not, look you, of my
own choice that I sing, my sister. Yet if Queen Ysabeau herself were to
bid me sing this song, I could not refuse, for, Christ aid me! the song
is true."

Sang Sir Gregory:

"Dame Ysabeau, la prophecie
Que li sage dit ne ment mie,
Que la royne sut ceus grever
Qui tantost laquais sot aymer—"
[4]

and so on. It was a lengthy ditty, and in its wording not oversqueamish;
the Queen's career in England was detailed without any stuttering, and
you would have found the catalogue unhandsome. Yet Sir Gregory delivered
it with an incisive gusto, desperately countersigning his own death
warrant. Her treacheries, her adulteries and her assassinations were
rendered in glowing terms whose vigor seemed, even now, to please their
contriver. Yet the minstrel added a new peroration.

Sang Sir Gregory:

"Ma voix mocque, mon cuer gemit—
Peu pense a ce que la voix dit,
Car me membre du temps jadis
Et d'ung garson, d'amour surpris,
Et d'une fille—et la vois si—
Et grandement suis esbahi."

And when Darrell had ended, the Countess of Farrington, without
speaking, swept her left hand toward her cheek and by pure chance caught
between thumb and forefinger the autumn-numbed fly that had annoyed her.
She drew the little dagger from her girdle and meditatively cut the
buzzing thing in two. She cast the fragments from her, and resting the
dagger's point upon the arm of her chair, one forefinger upon the summit
of the hilt, considerately twirled the brilliant weapon.

"This song does not err upon the side of clemency," she said at last,
"nor by ordinary does Queen Ysabeau."

"That she-wolf!" said Lord Berners, comfortably. "Hoo, Madame Gertrude!
since the Prophet Moses wrung healing waters from a rock there has been
no such miracle recorded."

"We read, Messire de Berners, that when the she-wolf once acknowledges a
master she will follow him as faithfully as any dog. My brother, I do
not question your sincerity, yet everybody knows you sing with the voice
of an unhonored courtier. Suppose Queen Ysabeau had heard your song all
through as I have heard it, and then had said—for she is not as the run
of women—'Messire, I had thought until this that there was no thorough
man in England save tall Roger Mortimer. I find him tawdry now, and—I
remember. Come you, then, and rule the England that you love as you may
love no woman, and rule me, messire, since I find even in your
cruelty—For we are no pygmies, you and I! Yonder is squabbling Europe
and all the ancient gold of Africa, ready for our taking! and past that
lies Asia, too, and its painted houses hung with bells, and cloud-wrapt
Tartary, where we two may yet erect our equal thrones, upon which to
receive the tributary emperors! For we are no pygmies, you and I." She
paused. She shrugged. "Suppose Queen Ysabeau, who is not as the run of
women, had said this much, my brother?"

Darrell was more pallid (as the phrase is) than a sheet, and the lute
had dropped unheeded, and his hands were clenched.

"I would answer, my sister, that as she has found in England but one
man, I have found in England but one woman—the rose of all the world."
His eyes were turned at this toward Rosamund Eastney. "And yet," the man
stammered, "because I, too, remember—"

"Hah, in God's name! I am answered," the Countess said. She rose, in
dignity almost a queen. "We have ridden far to-day, and to-morrow we
must travel a deal farther—eh, my brother? I am going to bed, Messire
de Berners."

So the men and women parted. Madame de Farrington kissed her brother at
leaving him, as was natural; and under her caress his stalwart person
shuddered, but not in repugnance; and the Queen went away singing
hushedly.

Sang Ysabeau:

"Were the All-Mother wise, life (shaped anotherwise)
Would be all high and true;
Could I be otherwise I had been otherwise
Simply because of you, ...
With whom I have naught to do,
And who are no longer you!

"Life with its pay to be bade us essay to be
What we became,—I believe
Were there a way to be what it was play to be
I would not greatly grieve ...
Hearts are not worn on the sleeve.
Let us neither laugh nor grieve!"