“Lord,” she presently faltered, “lord, you know that we are already betrothed, and, in sober verity, Love cannot extend his laws between husband and wife, since the gifts of love are voluntary, and husband and wife are but the slaves of duty—”
“Troubadourish nonsense!” Sire Edward said; “yet it is true that the gifts of love are voluntary. And therefore—Ha, most beautiful, what have you and I to do with all this chaffering over Guienne?” The two stood very close to each other now. Blanch said, “It is a high matter—” Then on a sudden the full-veined girl was aglow. “It is a trivial matter.” He took her in his arms, since already her cheeks flared in scarlet anticipation of the event.
Thus holding her, he wooed the girl tempestuously. Here, indeed, was Sieur Hercules enslaved, burned by a fiercer fire than that of Nessus, and the huge bulk of the unconquerable visibly shaken by his adoration. In a disordered tapestry of verbiage, aflap in winds of passion, she presently beheld herself prefigured by Balkis, the Judean’s lure, and by that Princess of Cyprus who reigned in Aristotle’s time, and by Nicolete, the King’s daughter of Carthage—since the first flush of morning was as a rush-light before her resplendency, the man swore; and in conclusion, he likened her to a modern Countess of Tripolis, for love of whom he, like Rudel, had cleft the seas, and losing whom he must inevitably die as did Rudel. Sire Edward snapped his fingers now over any consideration of Guienne. He would conquer for her all Muscovy and all Cataia, too, if she desired mere acreage. Meanwhile he wanted her, and his hard and savage passion beat down opposition as if with a bludgeon.
“Heart’s emperor,” the trembling girl replied, “I think that you were cast in some larger mould than we of France. Oh, none of us may dare resist you! and I know that nothing matters, nothing in all the world, save that you love me. Then take me, since you will it—and take me not as King, since you will otherwise, but as Edward Plantagenet. For listen! by good luck you have this afternoon despatched Rigon for Chevrieul, where tomorrow we were to hunt the great boar. So tonight this hut will be unoccupied.”
The man was silent. He had a gift that way when occasion served.
“Here, then, beau sire! here, then, at nine, you are to meet me with my chaplain. Behold, he marries us, as glibly as though we two were peasants. Poor king and princess!” cried Dame Blanch, and in a voice which thrilled him, “shall ye not, then, dare to be but man and woman?”
“Ha!” the King said. “So the chaplain makes a third! Well, the King is pleased to loose his prisoner, that long-imprisoned Edward Plantagenet: and I will do it.”
So he came that night, without any retinue, and habited as a forester, with a horn swung about his neck, into the unlighted hut of Rigon the forester, and he found a woman there, though not the woman whom he had expected.
“Treachery, beau sire! Horrible treachery!” she wailed.
“I have encountered it before this,” the big man said.
“Presently will come to you not Blanch but Philippe, with many men to back him. And presently they will slay you. You have been trapped, beau sire. Ah, for the love of God, go! Go, while there is yet time!” Sire Edward reflected. Undoubtedly, to light on Edward Longshanks alone in a forest would appear to King Philippe, if properly attended, a tempting chance to settle divers difficulties, once for all; and Sire Edward knew the conscience of his old opponent to be invulnerable. The act would violate the core of hospitality and knighthood, no doubt, but its outcome would be a very definite gain to France, and for the rest, merely a dead body in a ditch. Not a monarch in Christendom, Sire Edward reflected, but feared and in consequence hated the Hammer of the Scots, and in further consequence would not lift a finger to avenge him; and not a being in the universe would rejoice more heartily at the success of Philippe’s treachery than would Sire Edward’s son and immediate successor, the young Prince Edward of Caernarvon. Taking matters by and large, Philippe had all the powers of common sense to back him in contriving an assassination.
What Sire Edward said was, “Dame Blanch, then, knew of this?” But Meregrett’s pitiful eyes had already answered him, and he laughed a little.
“In that event, I have tonight enregistered my name among the goodly company of Love’s Lunatics—as yokefellow with Dan Merlin in his thornbush, and with wise Salomon when he capered upon the high places of Chemosh, and with Duke Ares sheepishly agrin in the net of Mulciber. Rogues all, madame! fools all! yet always the flesh trammels us, and allures the soul to such sensual delights as bar its passage toward the eternal life wherein alone lies the empire and the heritage of the soul. And why does this carnal prison so impede the soul? Because Satan once ranked among the sons of God, and the Eternal Father, as I take it, has not yet forgotten the antique relationship—and hence it is permitted even in our late time that always the flesh rebel against the spirit, and that always these so tiny and so thin-voiced tricksters, these highly tinted miracles of iniquity, so gracious in demeanor and so starry-eyed—”
Then he turned and pointed, no longer the orotund zealot but the expectant captain now. “Look, my Princess!” In the pathway from which he had recently emerged stood a man in full armor like a sentinel. “Mort de Dieu, we can but try to get out of this,” Sire Edward said.
“You should have tried without talking so much,” replied Meregrett. She followed him. And presently, in a big splash of
