Chivalry (21 page)

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 crown of that latter kingdom; and as the
earth is altered by the advent of winter, so was the appearance of
France transformed by King Henry's coming, and everywhere the nobles
were stirred up to arms, the castles were closed, the huddled cities
were fortified, and on every side arose entrenchments.

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 borne away
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 got, in the month of April, about the day of
Palm Sunday, at the Queen's dower-palace of Havering-Bower, an
interview with Queen Jehane.
[5]

A curled pert page took the Vicomte to where she sat alone, by
prearrangement, in a chamber with painted walls, profusely lighted by
the sun, and made 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.

His judgment found in her a quite ordinary, frightened woman, aging
now, but still very handsome in these black and shimmering gold robes;
but all his other faculties found her desirable: and with a contained
hatred he had perceived, as if 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 devils' horns. Followed the dreary years that linked
me to the rotting corpse which God's leprosy devoured while the poor
furtive thing yet moved, and endured its share in the punishment of
Manuel's poisonous blood. 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. The big, fierce-eyed
boy has hated me from the first, 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 devises some trumped-up
accusation. Friend, I live as did Saint Damoclus, beneath a sword.
Antoine!" she wailed—for now the pride of Queen Jehane was shattered
utterly—"I am held as a prisoner for all that my chains are of gold."

"Yet it was not until of late," he observed, "that you disliked the
metal which is the substance of all crowns."

And now the woman lifted toward him her massive golden necklace,
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. Ah, you should have mastered me at Vannes. You could
have done so, 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. Let all women 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 now the pride of many emperors blazed and informed her body as
light occupies a lantern. "At last you come for me, messieurs?"

"Whereas," the leader of these soldiers read from a
parchment—"whereas the King's stepmother, Queen Jehane, is accused by
certain persons of an act of witch-craft 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,—"ah, my tall stepson, could I but
come to you, very quietly, with a knife—!" She shrugged her
shoulders, and the gold about her person glittered in the sunlight.
"Witchcraft! ohime, 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 none the less avenged. 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, in the sight of common men! and know that Riczi is
avenged,—you milliner!"

"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 second private audience of King
Henry, and readily obtained it. "Unhardy is unseely," the Vicomte said
at this interview's conclusion. 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
dissatisfied.

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 insidious talking when that fiend
tempts us to some proud iniquity.

Then presently these lords had sided with King Henry, as did the
Vicomte de Montbrison, in open field. Next, as luck would have it,
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, forsaking France. These treacheries brought down the
wavering scales of warfare, suddenly, with an aweful clangor; and now
in France clean-hearted persons spoke of the Vicomte de Montbrison as
they would speak of Ganelon or of Iscariot, and in every market-place
was King Henry proclaimed as governor of the realm.

Meantime Queen Jehane had been conveyed to prison and lodged therein.
She had the liberty of a tiny garden, high-walled, and of two scantily
furnished chambers. The brace of hard-featured females whom 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; had men 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 inhabitant of all her dreams.

Said Jehane: "This is ill done. Time has avenged you. Be contented
with that knowledge, and, for Heaven's sake, do not endeavor to
moralize over the ruin which 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 that her coloring
was excellent, that she had miraculously preserved her figure, and
that she did not look her real age by a good ten years. Such
reflections beget spiritual comfort even in a prison.

"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. Instead, 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: of how
within that period King Henry had conquered 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 of 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 the Vicomte 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
shrewd gray eyes. "Harry of Monmouth feared neither man nor God. It
needed more than any death-bed repentance to frighten him into
restoring 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 his, army?"

The Vicomte de Montbrison said; "There is at all events no person
better fitted to patch up this dishonorable business of your
captivity, in which no clean man would care to meddle."

She appraised this, and said with entire irrelevance: "The world has
smirched you, somehow. At last you have done something save consider
how badly I treated you. 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.
"Now 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 at 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 nodded here. "You have set my thankless service above your
life, above your honor. 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."

While the Vicomte de Montbrison spoke thus, she had leaned upon the
sill of an open casement. "Indeed, it had been better," she said,
still with her face averted, and gazing downward at the tree-tops
beneath, "it had been far better 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 he has pilfered you of life, giving only dreams in
exchange, 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."