Chivalry (11 page)

Ysabeau would have slept that night within the chamber of Rosamund
Eastney had either slept. As concerns the older I say nothing. The girl,
though soon aware of frequent rustlings near at hand, lay quiet,
half-forgetful of the poisonous woman yonder. The girl was now fulfilled
with a great blaze of exultation: to-morrow Gregory must die, and then
perhaps she might find time for tears; meanwhile, before her eyes, the
man had flung away a kingdom and life itself for love of her, and the
least nook of her heart ached to be a shade more worthy of the
sacrifice.

After it might have been an hour of this excruciate ecstasy the Countess
came to Rosamund's bed. "Ay," the woman began, "it is indisputable that
his hair is like spun gold and that his eyes resemble sun-drenched
waters in June. It is certain that when this Gregory laughs God is more
happy. Girl, I was familiar with the routine of your meditations before
you were born."

Rosamund said, quite simply: "You have known him always. I envy the
circumstance, Madame Gertrude—you alone of all women in the world I
envy, since you, his sister, being so much older, must have known him
always."

"I know him to the core, my girl," the Countess answered. For a while
she sat silent, one bare foot jogging restlessly. "Yet I am two years
his junior—Did you hear nothing, Rosamund?" "No, Madame Gertrude, I
heard nothing."

"Strange!" the Countess said; "let us have lights, since I can no longer
endure this overpopulous twilight." She kindled, with twitching fingers,
three lamps. "It is as yet dark yonder, where the shadows quiver very
oddly, as though they would rise from the floor—do they not, my
girl?—and protest vain things. But, Rosamund, it has been done; in the
moment of death men's souls have travelled farther and have been
visible; it has been done, I tell you. And he would stand before me,
with pleading eyes, and would reproach me in a voice too faint to reach
my ears—but I would see him—and his groping hands would clutch at my
hands as though a dropped veil had touched me, and with the contact I
would go mad!"

"Madame Gertrude!" the girl stammered, in communicated terror.

"Poor innocent fool!" the woman said, "I am Ysabeau of France." And when
Rosamund made as though to rise, in alarm, Queen Ysabeau caught her by
the shoulder. "Bear witness when he comes that I never hated him. Yet
for my quiet it was necessary that it suffer so cruelly, the scented,
pampered body, and no mark be left upon it! Eia! even now he suffers!
No, I have lied. I hate the man, and in such fashion as you will
comprehend when you are Sarum's wife."

"Madame and Queen!" the girl said, "you will not murder me!" "I am
tempted!" the Queen answered. "O little slip of girlhood, I am tempted,
for it is not reasonable you should possess everything that I have lost.
Innocence you have, and youth, and untroubled eyes, and quiet dreams,
and the fond graveness of a child, and Gregory Darrell's love—" Now
Ysabeau sat down upon the bed and caught up the girl's face between two
fevered hands. "Rosamund, this Darrell perceives within the moment, as I
do, that the love he bears for you is but what he remembers of the love
he bore a certain maid long dead. Eh, you might have been her sister,
Rosamund, for you are very like her. And she, poor wench—why, I could
see her now, I think, were my eyes not blurred, somehow, almost as
though Queen Ysabeau might weep! But she was handsomer than you, since
your complexion is not overclear, praise God!"

Woman against woman they were. "He has told me of his intercourse with
you," the girl said, and this was a lie flatfooted. "Nay, kill me if you
will, madame, since you are the stronger, yet, with my dying breath, I
protest that Gregory has loved no woman truly in all his life except
me."

The Queen laughed bitterly. "Do I not know men? He told you nothing. And
to-night he hesitated, and to-morrow, at the lifting of my finger, he
will supplicate. Since boyhood Gregory Darrell has loved me, O white,
palsied innocence! and he is mine at a whistle. And in that time to
come he will desert you, Rosamund—bidding farewell with a pleasing
Canzon,—and they will give you to the gross Earl of Sarum, as they gave
me to the painted man who was of late our King! and in that time to come
you will know your body to be your husband's makeshift when he lacks
leisure to seek out other recreation! and in that time to come you will
long for death, and presently your heart will be a flame within you, my
Rosamund, an insatiable flame! and you will hate your God because He
made you, and hate Satan because in some desperate hour he tricked you,
and hate all men because, poor fools, they scurry to obey your whims!
and chiefly you will hate yourself because you are so pitiable! and
devastation only will you love in that strange time which is to come. It
is adjacent, my Rosamund."

The girl kept silence. She sat erect in the tumbled bed, her hands
clasping her knees, and she appeared to deliberate what Dame Ysabeau had
said. Plentiful brown hair fell about this Rosamund's face, which was
white and shrewd. "A part of what you say, madame, I understand. I know
that Gregory Darrell loves me, yet I have long ago acknowledged he loves
me as one pets a child, or, let us say, a spaniel which reveres and
amuses one. I lack his wit, you comprehend, and so he never speaks to me
all that he thinks. Yet a part of it he tells me, and he loves me, and
with this I am content. Assuredly, if they give me to Sarum I shall hate
Sarum even more than I detest him now. And then, I think, Heaven help
me! that I would not greatly grieve—Oh, you are all evil!" Rosamund
said; "and you thrust into my mind thoughts which I may not understand!"

"You will comprehend them," the Queen said, "when you know yourself a
chattel, bought and paid for."

The Queen laughed. She rose, and her hands strained toward heaven. "You
are omnipotent, yet have You let me become that into which I am
transmuted," she said, very low.

She began to speak as though a statue spoke through lips that seemed
motionless. "Men have long urged me, Rosamund, to a deed which by one
stroke would make me mistress of these islands. To-day I looked on
Gregory Darrell, and knew that I was wise in love—and I had but to
crush a lewd soft worm to come to him. Eh, and I was tempted—!"

The girl said: "Let us grant that Gregory loves you very greatly, and me
just when his leisure serves. You may offer him a cushioned infamy, a
colorful and brief delirium, and afterward demolishment of soul and
body; I offer him contentment and a level life, made up of small events,
it may be, and lacking both in abysses and in skyey heights. Yet is love
a flame wherein the lover's soul must be purified; it is a flame which
assays high queens just as it does their servants: and thus, madame, to
judge between us I dare summon you." "Child, child!" the Queen said,
tenderly, and with a smile, "you are brave; and in your fashion you are
wise; yet you will never comprehend. But once I was in heart and soul
and body all that you are to-day; and now I am Queen Ysabeau—Did you in
truth hear nothing, Rosamund?"

"Why, nothing save the wind."

"Strange!" said the Queen; "since all the while that I have talked with
you I have been seriously annoyed by shrieks and imprecations! But I,
too, grow cowardly, it may be—Nay, I know," she said, and in a resonant
voice, "that by this I am mistress of broad England, until my son—my
own son, born of my body, and in glad anguish, Rosamund—knows me for
what I am. For I have heard—Coward! O beautiful sleek coward!" the
Queen said; "I would have died without lamentation and I was but your
plaything!"

"Madame Ysabeau—!" the girl answered vaguely, for she was puzzled and
was almost frightened by the other's strange talk.

"To bed!" said Ysabeau; "and put out the lights lest he come presently.
Or perhaps he fears me now too much to come to-night. Yet the night
approaches, none the less, when I must lift some arras and find him
there, chalk-white, with painted cheeks, and rigid, and smiling very
terribly, or look into some mirror and behold there not myself but
him,—and in that instant I shall die. Meantime I rule, until my son
attains his manhood. Eh, Rosamund, my only son was once so tiny, and so
helpless, and his little crimson mouth groped toward me, helplessly, and
save in Bethlehem, I thought, there was never any child more fair—But I
must forget all that, for even now he plots. Hey, God orders matters
very shrewdly, my Rosamund."

Timidly the girl touched Ysabeau's shoulder. "In part, I understand,
madame and Queen."

"You understand nothing," said Ysabeau; "how should you understand whose
breasts are yet so tiny? So let us put out the light! though I dread
darkness, Rosamund—For they say that hell is poorly lighted—and they
say—" Then Queen Ysabeau shrugged. Pensively she blew out each lamp.

"We know this Gregory Darrell," the Queen said in the darkness, "ah, to
the marrow we know him, however steadfastly we blink, and we know the
present turmoil of his soul; and in common-sense what chance have you of
victory?"

"None in common-sense, madame, and yet you go too fast. For man is a
being of mingled nature, we are told by those in holy orders, and his
life here is one unending warfare between that which is divine in him
and that which is bestial, while impartial Heaven attends as arbiter of
the tourney. Always a man's judgment misleads him and his faculties
allure him to a truce, however brief, with iniquity. His senses raise a
mist about his goings, and there is not an endowment of the man but in
the end plays traitor to his interest, as of God's wisdom God intends;
so that when the man is overthrown, the Eternal Father may, in reason,
be neither vexed nor grieved if only the man takes heart to rise again.
And when, betrayed and impotent, the man elects to fight out the
allotted battle, defiant of common-sense and of the counsellors which
God Himself accorded, I think that the Saints hold festival in heaven."

"A very pretty sermon," said the Queen. "Yet I do not think that our
Gregory could very long endure a wife given over to such high-minded
talking. He prefers to hear himself do the fine talking."

Followed a silence, vexed only on the purposeless September winds; but I
believe that neither of these two slept with profundity.

About dawn one of the Queen's attendants roused Sir Gregory Darrell and
conducted him into the hedged garden of Ordish, where Ysabeau walked in
tranquil converse with Lord Berners. The old man was in high good-humor.

"My lad," said he, and clapped Sir Gregory upon the shoulder, "you have,
I do protest, the very phoenix of sisters. I was never happier." And he
went away chuckling.

The Queen said in a toneless voice, "We ride for Blackfriars now."

Darrell responded, "I am content, and ask but leave to speak, briefly,
with Dame Rosamund before I die."

Then the woman came more near to him. "I am not used to beg, but within
this hour you encounter death, and I have loved no man in all my life
saving only you, Sir Gregory Darrell. Nor have you loved any person as
you loved me once in France. Oh, to-day, I may speak freely, for with
you the doings of that boy and girl are matters overpast. Yet were it
otherwise—eh, weigh the matter carefully! for I am mistress of England
now, and England would I give you, and such love as that slim, white
innocence has never dreamed of would I give you, Gregory Darrell—No,
no! ah, Mother of God, not you!" The Queen clapped one hand upon his
lips.

"Listen," she quickly said; "I spoke to tempt you. But you saw, and you
saw clearly, that it was the sickly whim of a wanton, and you never
dreamed of yielding, for you love this Rosamund Eastney, and you know me
to be vile. Then have a care of me! The strange woman am I, of whom we
read that her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of
death. Hoh, many strong men have been slain by me, and in the gray time
to come will many others be slain by me, it may be; but never you among
them, my Gregory, who are more wary, and more merciful, and who know
that I have need to lay aside at least one comfortable thought against
eternity."

"I concede you to have been unwise—" he hoarsely began.

About them fell the dying leaves, of many glorious colors, but the air
of this new day seemed raw and chill.

Then Rosamund came through the opening in the hedge. "Now, choose," she
said; "the woman offers life and high place and wealth, and it may be, a
greater love than I am capable of giving you. I offer a dishonorable
death within the moment."

And again, with that peculiar and imperious gesture, the man flung back
his head, and he laughed. Said Gregory Darrell:

"I am I! and I will so to live that I may face without shame not only
God, but also my own scrutiny." He wheeled upon the Queen and spoke
henceforward very leisurely. "I love you; all my life long I have loved
you, Ysabeau, and even now I love you: and you, too, dear Rosamund, I
love, though with a difference. And every fibre of my being lusts for
the power that you would give me, Ysabeau, and for the good which I
would do with it in the England which I or blustering Roger Mortimer
must rule; as every fibre of my being lusts for the man that I would be
could I choose death without debate. And I think also of the man that
you would make of me, my Rosamund.

"The man! And what is this man, this Gregory Darrell, that his welfare
should be considered?—an ape who chatters to himself of kinship with
the archangels while filthily he digs for groundnuts! This much I know,
at bottom.

"Yet more clearly do I perceive that this same man, like all his
fellows, is a maimed god who walks the world dependent upon many wise
and evil counsellors. He must measure, to a hair's-breadth, every
content of the world by means of a bloodied sponge, tucked somewhere in
his skull, a sponge which is ungeared by the first cup of wine and
ruined by the touch of his own finger. He must appraise all that he
judges with no better instruments than two bits of colored jelly, with a
bungling makeshift so maladroit that the nearest horologer's apprentice
could have devised a more accurate device. In fine, each man is under
penalty condemned to compute eternity with false weights, to estimate
infinity with a yard-stick: and he very often does it, and chooses his
own death without debate. For though, 'If then I do that which I would
not I consent unto the law,' saith even an Apostle; yet a braver Pagan
answers him, 'Perceive at last that thou hast in thee something better
and more divine than the things which cause the various effects and, as
it were, pull thee by the strings.'