Chivalry (5 page)

Sang Camoys:

"Et vos, par qui je n'ci onques aie,
Descendez luit en infer le parfont."

Dame Alianora shivered. But she was a capable woman, and so she said: "I
may have made mistakes. But I am sure I never meant any harm, and I am
sure, too, that God will be more sensible about it than are you poets."

They slept that night in Ousley Meadow, and the next afternoon came
safely to Bristol. You may learn elsewhere with what rejoicing the royal
army welcomed the Queen's arrival, how courage quickened at sight of the
generous virago. In the ebullition Messire Heleigh was submerged, and
Dame Alianora saw nothing more of him that day. Friday there were
counsels, requisitions, orders signed, a memorial despatched to Pope
Urban, chief of all a letter (this in the Queen's hand throughout)
privily conveyed to the Lady Maude de Mortemer, who shortly afterward
contrived Prince Edward's escape from her husband's gaolership. There
was much sowing of a seed, in fine, that eventually flowered victory.
There was, however, no sign of Osmund Heleigh, though by Dame Alianora's
order he was sought.

On Saturday at seven in the morning he came to her lodging, in complete
armor. From the open helmet his wrinkled face, showing like a wizened
nut in a shell, smiled upon her questionings.

"I go to fight Gui Camoys, madame and Queen."

Dame Alianora wrung her hands. "You go to your death."

He answered: "That is true. Therefore I am come to bid you farewell."

The Queen stared at him for a while; on a sudden she broke into a
curious fit of deep but tearless sobbing, which bordered upon laughter,
too.

"Mon bel esper," said Osmund Heleigh, gently, "what is there in all this
worthy of your sorrow? The man will kill me; granted, for he is my
junior by some fifteen years, and is in addition a skilled swordsman. I
fail to see that this is lamentable. Back to Longaville I cannot go
after recent happenings; there a rope's end awaits me. Here I must in
any event shortly take to the sword, since a beleaguered army has very
little need of ink-pots; and shortly I must be slain in some skirmish,
dug under the ribs perhaps by a greasy fellow I have never seen. I
prefer a clean death at a gentleman's hands."

"It is I who bring about your death!" she said. "You gave me gallant
service, and I have requited you with death, and it is a great pity."

"Indeed the debt is on the other side. The trivial services I rendered
you were such as any gentleman must render a woman in distress. Naught
else have I afforded you, madame, save very anciently a Sestina. Ho, a
Sestina! And in return you have given me a Sestina of fairer make,—a
Sestina of days, six days of manly common living." His eyes were
fervent.

She kissed him on either cheek. "Farewell, my champion!"

"Ay, your champion. In the twilight of life old Osmund Heleigh rides
forth to defend the quarrel of Alianora of Provence. Reign wisely, my
Queen, so that hereafter men may not say I was slain in an evil cause.
Do not, I pray you, shame my maiden venture at a man's work."

"I will not shame you," the Queen proudly said; and then, with a change
of voice: "O my Osmund! My Osmund, you have a folly that is divine, and
I lack it."

He caught her by each wrist, and stood crushing both her hands to his
lips, with fierce staring. "Wife of my King! wife of my King!" he
babbled; and then put her from him, crying, "I have not failed you!
Praise God, I have not failed you!"

From her window she saw him ride away, a rich flush of glitter and
color. In new armor with a smart emblazoned surcoat the lean pedant sat
conspicuously erect; and as he went he sang defiantly, taunting the
weakness of his flesh.

Sang Osmund Heleigh:

"Love sows, but lovers reap; and ye will see
The loved eyes lighten, feel the loved lips cling
Never again when in the grave ye be
Incurious of your happiness in spring,
And get no grace of Love, there, whither he
That bartered life for love no love may bring."

So he rode away and thus out of our history. But in the evening Gui
Camoys came into Bristol under a flag of truce, and behind him heaved a
litter wherein lay Osmund Heleigh's body.

"For this man was frank and courteous," Camoys said to the Queen, "and
in the matter of the reparation he owed me acted very handsomely. It is
fitting that he should have honorable interment."

"That he shall not lack," the Queen said, and gently unclasped from
Osmund's wrinkled neck the thin gold chain, now locketless. "There was a
portrait here," she said; "the portrait of a woman whom he loved in his
youth, Messire Camoys. And all his life it lay above his heart."

Camoys answered stiffly: "I imagine this same locket to have been the
object which Messire Heleigh flung into the river, shortly before we
began our combat. I do not rob the dead, madame."

"Well," the Queen said, "he always did queer things, and so, I shall
always wonder what sort of lady he picked out to love, but it is none of
my affair."

Afterward she set to work on requisitions in the King's name. But Osmund
Heleigh she had interred at Ambresbury, commanding it to be written on
his tomb that he died in the Queen's cause.

How the same cause prospered (Nicolas concludes), how presently Dame
Alianora reigned again in England and with what wisdom, and how in the
end this great Queen died a nun at Ambresbury and all England wept
therefor—this you may learn elsewhere. I have chosen to record six days
of a long and eventful life; and (as Messire Heleigh might have done) I
say modestly with him of old,
Majores majora sonent.
Nevertheless, I
assert that many a forest was once a pocketful of acorns.

"Plagues a Dieu ja la nueitz non falhis,
Ni'l mieus amicx lone de mi nos partis,
Ni la gayta jorn ni alba ne vis.
Oy Dieus! oy Dieus! de l'alba tan tost we!"

THE SECOND NOVEL.—ELLINOR OF CASTILE, BEING ENAMORED OF A HANDSOME
PERSON, IS IN HER FLIGHT FROM MARITAL OBLIGATIONS ASSISTED BY HER
HUSBAND, AND IS IN THE END BY HIM CONVINCED OF THE RATIONALITY OF ALL
ATTENDANT CIRCUMSTANCES.

In the year of grace 1265 (Nicolas begins), about the festival of Saint
Peter
ad Vincula
, the Prince de Gatinais came to Burgos. Before this
he had lodged for three months in the district of Ponthieu; and the
object of his southern journey was to assure the tenth Alphonso, then
ruling in Castile, that the latter's sister Ellinor, now resident at
Entrechat, was beyond any reasonable doubt the transcendent lady whose
existence old romancers had anticipated, however cloudily, when they
fabled in remote time concerning Queen Heleine of Sparta.

There was a postscript to this news. The world knew that the King of
Leon and Castile desired to be King of Germany as well, and that at
present a single vote in the Diet would decide between his claims and
those of his competitor, Earl Richard of Cornwall. De Gatinais chaffered
fairly; he had a vote, Alphonso had a sister. So that, in effect—ohe,
in effect, he made no question that his Majesty understood!

The Astronomer twitched his beard and demanded if the fact that Ellinor
had been a married woman these ten years past was not an obstacle to the
plan which his fair cousin had proposed?

Here the Prince was accoutred cap-a-pie, and hauled out a paper. Dating
from Viterbo, Clement, Bishop of Rome, servant to the servants of God,
desirous of all health and apostolical blessing for his well-beloved son
in Christ, stated that a compact between a boy of fifteen and a girl of
ten was an affair of no particular moment; and that in consideration of
the covenantors never having clapped eyes upon each other since the
wedding-day,—even had not the precontract of marriage between the
groom's father and the bride's mother rendered a consummation of the
childish oath an obvious and a most heinous enormity,—why, that, in a
sentence, and for all his coy verbosity, the new pontiff was perfectly
amenable to reason.

So in a month it was settled. Alphonso would give his sister to de
Gatinais, and in exchange get the latter's vote to make Alphonso King of
Germany; and Gui Foulques of Sabionetta—now Clement, fourth Pope to
assume that name—would annul the previous marriage, and in exchange get
an armament to serve him against Manfred, the late and troublesome
tyrant of Sicily and Apulia. The scheme promised to each one of them
that which he in particular desired, and messengers were presently sent
into Ponthieu.

It is now time we put aside these Castilian matters and speak of other
things. In England, Prince Edward had fought, and won, a shrewd battle
at Evesham. People said, of course, that such behavior was less in the
manner of his nominal father, King Henry, than reminiscent of Count
Manuel of Poictesme, whose portraits certainly the Prince resembled to
an embarrassing extent. Either way, the barons' power was demolished,
there would be no more internecine war; and spurred by the unaccustomed
idleness, Prince Edward began to think of the foreign girl he had not
seen since the day he wedded her. She would be a woman by this, and it
was befitting that he claim his wife. He rode with Hawise Bulmer and her
baby to Ambresbury, and at the gate of the nunnery they parted, with
what agonies are immaterial to this history's progression; the tale
merely tells that, having thus decorously rid himself of his mistress,
the Prince went into Lower Picardy alone, riding at adventure as he
loved to do, and thus came to Entrechat, where his wife resided with her
mother, the Countess Johane.

In a wood near the castle he approached a company of Spaniards, four in
number, their horses tethered while these men (Oviedans, as they told
him) drank about a great stone which served them for a table. Being
thirsty, he asked and was readily accorded hospitality, and these five
fell into amicable discourse. One fellow asked his name and business in
those parts, and the Prince gave each without hesitancy as he reached
for the bottle, and afterward dropped it just in time to catch, cannily,
with his naked left hand, the knife-blade with which the rascal had dug
at the unguarded ribs. The Prince was astounded, but he was never a
subtle man: here were four knaves who, for reasons unexplained—but to
them of undoubted cogency—desired his death: manifestly there was here
an actionable difference of opinion; so he had his sword out and killed
the four of them.

Presently came to him an apple-cheeked boy, habited as a page, who,
riding jauntily through the forest, lighted upon the Prince, now in
bottomless vexation. The lad drew rein, and his lips outlined a whistle.
At his feet were several dead men in various conditions of
dismemberment. And seated among them, as if throned upon this boulder,
was a gigantic and florid person, so tall that the heads of few men
reached to his shoulder; a person of handsome exterior, high-featured
and blond, having a narrow, small head, and vivid light blue eyes, and
the chest of a stallion; a person whose left eyebrow had an odd oblique
droop, so that the stupendous man appeared to be winking the information
that he was in jest.

"Fair friend," said the page. "God give you joy! and why have you
converted this forest into a shambles?"

The Prince told him as much of the half-hour's action as has been
narrated. "I have perhaps been rather hasty," he considered, by way of
peroration, "and it vexes me that I did not spare, say, one of these
lank Spaniards, if only long enough to ascertain why, in the name of
Termagaunt, they should have desired my destruction."

But midway in his tale the boy had dismounted with a gasp, and he was
now inspecting the features of one carcass. "Felons, my Prince! You have
slain some eight yards of felony which might have cheated the gallows
had they got the Princess Ellinor safe to Burgos. Only two days ago this
chalk-eyed fellow conveyed to her a letter."

Prince Edward said, "You appear, lad, to be somewhat overheels in the
confidence of my wife."

Now the boy arose and defiantly flung back his head in shrill laughter.
"Your wife! Oh, God have mercy! Your wife, and for ten years left to her
own devices! Why, look you, to-day you and your wife would not know each
other were you two brought face to face."

Prince Edward said, "That is very near the truth." But, indeed, it was
the absolute truth, and as it concerned him was already attested.

"Sire Edward," the boy then said, "your wife has wearied of this long
waiting till you chose to whistle for her. Last summer the young Prince
de Gatinais came a-wooing—and he is a handsome man." The page made
known all which de Gatinais and King Alphonso planned, the words
jostling as they came in torrents, but so that one might understand. "I
am her page, my lord. I was to follow her. These fellows were to be my
escort, were to ward off possible pursuit. Cry haro, beau sire! Cry
haro, and shout it lustily, for your wife in company with six other
knaves is at large between here and Burgos,—that unreasonable wife who
grew dissatisfied after a mere ten years of neglect."

"I have been remiss," the Prince said, and one huge hand strained at his
chin; "yes, perhaps I have been remiss. Yet it had appeared to me—But
as it is, I bid you mount, my lad!"

The boy demanded, "And to what end?"

"Oy Dieus, messire! have I not slain your escort? Why, in common reason,
equity demands that I afford you my protection so far as Burgos,
messire, just as plainly as equity demands I slay de Gatinais and fetch
back my wife to England."

The page wrung exquisite hands with a gesture which was but partially
tinged with anguish, and presently began to laugh. Afterward these two
rode southerly, in the direction of Castile.

For it appeared to the intriguing little woman a diverting jest that in
this fashion her husband should be the promoter of her evasion. It
appeared to her more diverting when in two days' space she had become
fond of him. She found him rather slow of comprehension, and she was
humiliated by the discovery that not an eyelash of the man was irritated
by his wife's decampment; he considered, to all appearances, that some
property of his had been stolen, and he intended, quite without passion,
to repossess himself of it, after, of course, punishing the thief.