“It would be very easy now to strangle this herring,” Sire Edward reflected.
“But it is not easy to strangle a whole school of herring,” the fellow retorted. “Hoh, Messire d’Aquitaine, the bushes of Ermenoueïl are alive with my associates. The hut yonder, in effect, is girdled by them—and we have our orders to let no man pass.”
“Have you any orders concerning women?” the King said.
The man deliberated. Sire Edward handed him three gold pieces. “There was assuredly no specific mention of petticoats,” the soldier now recollected, “and in consequence I dare to pass the Princess, against whom certainly nothing can be planned.”
“Why, in that event,” Sire Edward said, “we two had as well bid each other adieu.”
But Meregrett only said, “You bid me go?”
He waved his hand. “Since there is no choice. For that which you have done—however tardily—I thank you. Meantime I return to Rigon’s hut to rearrange my toga as King Caesar did when the assassins fell upon him, and to encounter with due decorum whatever Dame Luck may prefer.”
She said, “You go to your death.”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “In the end we necessarily die.”
Dame Meregrett turned, and without faltering passed back into the hut.
When he had lighted the inefficient lamp which he found there, Sire Edward wheeled upon her in half-humorous vexation. “Presently come your brother and his tattling lords. To be discovered here with me at night, alone, means trouble for you. If Philippe chances to fall into one of his Capetian rages it means death.”
She answered, as though she were thinking about other matters, “Yes.”
Now, for the first time, Sire Edward regarded her with profound consideration. To the fingertips this so-little lady showed a descendant of the holy Lewis whom he had known and loved in old years. Small and thinnish she was, with soft and profuse hair that, for all its blackness, gleamed in the lamplight with stray ripples of brilliancy, as you may see sparks shudder to extinction over burning charcoal. She had the Valois nose, long and delicate in form, and overhanging a short upper-lip; yet the lips were glorious in tint, and the whiteness of her skin would have matched the Hyperborean snows tidily enough. As for her eyes, the customary similes of the court poets were gigantic onyxes or ebony highly polished and wet with May dew. These eyes were too big for her little face: they made of her a tiny and desirous wraith which nervously endured each incident of life, like a foreigner uneasily acquiescent to the custom of the country.
Sire Edward moved one step toward this tiny lady and paused. “Madame, I do not understand.”
Dame Meregrett looked up into his face unflinchingly. “It means that I love you, sire. I may speak without shame now, for presently you die. Die bravely, sire! Die in such fashion as may hearten me to live.”
The little Princess spoke the truth, for always since his coming to Mezelais she had viewed the great conqueror as through an awful haze of forerunning rumor, twin to that golden vapor which enswathes a god and transmutes whatever in corporeal man would have been a defect into some divine and hitherto unguessed-at excellence. I must tell you in this place, since no other occasion offers, that even until the end of her life it was so. For to her what in other persons would have seemed flagrant dullness showed somehow, in Sire Edward, as the majestic deliberation of one that knows his verdict to be decisive, and therefore appraises cautiously; and if sometimes his big, irregular calm eyes betrayed no apprehension of the jest at which her lips were laughing, and of which her brain approved, always within the instant her heart convinced her that a god is not lightly moved to mirth.
And now it was a god—O deus certè!—who had taken a woman’s paltry face between his hands, half roughly. “And the maid is a Capet!” Sire Edward mused.
“Blanch has never desired you any ill, beau sire. But she loves the Archduke of Austria. And once you were dead, she might marry him. One cannot blame her,” Meregrett considered, “since he wishes to marry her, and she, of course, wishes to make him happy.”
“And not herself, save in some secondary way!” the big King said. “In part I comprehend, madame. Now I too hanker after this same happiness, and my admiration for the cantankerous despoiler whom I praised this morning is somewhat abated. There was a Tenson once—Lord, Lord, how long ago! I learn too late that truth may possibly have been upon the losing side—” Thus talking incoherencies, he took up Rigon’s lute.
Sang Sire Edward:
“Incuriously he smites the armored king
And tricks his counsellors—
yes, the jingle ran thus. Now listen, madame—listen, the while that I have my singing out, whatever any little cutthroats may be planning in corners.”
Sang Sire Edward:
“As, later on,
Death will, half-idly, still our pleasuring,
And change for fevered laughter in the sun
Sleep such as Merlin’s—and excess thereof—
Whence we, divorceless Death our Viviaine
Implacable, may never more regain
The unforgotten rapture, and the pain
And grief and ecstasy of life and love.“For, presently, as quiet as the king
Sleeps now that planned the keeps of Ilion,
We, too, will sleep, whilst overhead the spring
Rules, and young lovers laugh—as we have done—
And kiss—as we, that take no heed thereof,
But slumber very soundly, and disdain
The worldwide heralding of winter’s wane
And swift sweet ripple of the April rain
Running about the world to waken love.“We shall have done with Love, and Death be king
And turn our nimble bodies carrion,
Our red lips dusty;—yet our live lips cling
Despite that age-long severance and are one
Despite the grave and the vain grief thereof—
Which we will baffle, if in Death’s domain
Fond memories may enter, and we twain
May dream a little, and rehearse again
In that unending sleep our present love.“Speed forth to her in
