“Yes, Father, you would have won. Oh, he must not see you!” Katharine cried, a great tide of love mounting in her breast, the love that draws a mother fiercely to shield her backward boy. “Father, will you not go into your chamber? I have a new book for you, Father—all pictures, dear. Come—” She was coaxing him when Sire Henry appeared in the doorway.
“But I do not wish to look at pictures,” Charles said, peevishly; “I wish to play cards. You are an ungrateful daughter, Katharine. You are never willing to amuse me.” He sat down with a whimper and began to pluck at his dribbling lips.
Katharine had moved a little toward the door. Her face was white. “Now welcome, sire!” she said. “Welcome, O great conqueror, who in your hour of triumph can find no nobler recreation than to shame a maid with her past folly! It was valorously done, sire. See, Father; here is the King of England come to observe how low we sit that yesterday were lords of France.”
“The King of England!” echoed Charles, and he rose now to his feet. “I thought we were at war with him. But my memory is treacherous. You perceive, brother of England, I am planning a new mousetrap, and my mind is somewhat preempted. I recall now that you are in treaty for my daughter’s hand. Katharine is a good girl, a fine upstanding girl, but I suppose—” He paused, as if to regard and hear some invisible counsellor, and then briskly resumed: “Yes, I suppose policy demands that she should marry you. We trammelled kings can never go free of policy—ey, my compère of England? No; it was through policy I wedded her mother; and we have been very unhappy, Isabeau and I. A word in your ear, son-in-law: Madame Isabeau’s soul formerly inhabited a sow, as Pythagoras teaches, and when our Saviour cast it out at Gadara, the influence of the moon drew it hither.”
Henry did not say anything. Steadily his calm blue eyes appraised Dame Katharine. And King Charles went on, very knowingly:
“Oho, these Latinists cannot hoodwink me, you observe, though by ordinary it chimes with my humor to appear content. Policy again, son-in-law: for once roused, I am terrible. Today in the great hall-window, under the bleeding feet of Lazarus, I slew ten flies—very black they were, the black shrivelled souls of parricides—and afterward I wept for it. I often weep; the Mediterranean hath its sources in my eyes, for my daughter cheats at cards. Cheats, sir!—and I her father!” The incessant peering, the stealthy cunning with which Charles whispered this, the confidence with which he clung to his destroyer’s hand, was that of a conspiring child.
“Come, Father,” Katharine said. “Come away to bed, dear.”
“Hideous basilisk!” he spat at her; “dare you rebel against me? Am I not King of France, and is it not blasphemy for a King of France to be mocked? Frail moths that flutter about my splendor,” he shrieked, in an unheralded frenzy, “beware of me, beware! for I am omnipotent! I am King of France, Heaven’s regent. At my command the winds go about the earth, and nightly the stars are kindled for my recreation. Perhaps I am mightier than God, but I do not remember now. The reason is written down and lies somewhere under a bench. Now I sail for England. Eia! eia! I go to ravage England, terrible and merciless. But I must have my mousetraps, Goodman Devil, for in England the cats of the middle-sea wait unfed.” He went out of the room, giggling, and in the corridor began to sing:
“A hundred thousand times goodbye!
I go to seek the Evangelist,
For here all persons cheat and lie …”
All this while Henry remained immovable, his eyes fixed upon Katharine. Thus (she meditated) he stood among Frenchmen; he was the boulder, and they the waters that babbled and fretted about him. But she turned and met his gaze squarely. She noted now for the first time how oddly his left eyebrow drooped. Katharine said: “And that is the king whom you have conquered! Is it not a notable conquest to overcome so wise a king? to pilfer renown from an idiot? There are cutthroats in Troyes, rogues doubly damned, who would scorn the action. Now shall I fetch my mother, sire? the commander of that great army which you overcame? As the hour is late, she is by this time tipsy, but she will come. Or perhaps she is with some paid lover, but if this conqueror, this second Alexander, wills it she will come. O God!” the girl wailed, on a sudden; “O just and all-seeing God! are not we of Valois so contemptible that in conquering us it is the victor who is shamed?”
“Flower of the marsh!” he said, and his voice pulsed with tender cadences—“flower of the marsh! it is not the King of England who now comes to you, but Alain the harper. Henry Plantagenet God has led hither by the hand to punish the sins of this realm, and to reign in it like a true king. Henry Plantagenet will cast out the Valois from the throne they have defiled, as Darius cast out Belshazzar, for such is the desire and the intent of God. But to you comes Alain the harper, not as a conqueror but as a suppliant—Alain who has loved you wholeheartedly these two years past, and who now kneels before you entreating grace.”
Katharine looked down into his countenance, for to his speech he had fitted action. Suddenly and for the first time she understood that he believed France to be his by Divine favor and Heaven’s peculiar intervention. He thought himself God’s factor, not His rebel. He was rather stupid, this huge, handsome, squinting boy; and as she comprehended this, her hand went to his shoulder, half maternally.
“It
