Chivalry

conclusion, by the Countess of Tripolis, for love of whom he had cleft the seas, and losing whom he must inevitably die as Rudel did. He 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 with a bludgeon.

'Heart's emperor,' the trembling girl more lately said, '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 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 hunt the great boar. And in consequence to-night 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. He laughed. 'The King is pleased to loose his prisoner; and I will do it.' He fiercely said this, for the girl was very beautiful.

So he came that night, without any retinue, and habited as a forester, a horn swung about his neck, into the unlighted hut of Rigon the forester, and found a woman there, though not the woman whom he had perhaps expected.

'Treachery, beau sire! Horrible treachery!' she wailed.

'I have encountered it ere this,' the big man said.

'Presently comes 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 disputations, once for all; and Sire Edward knew the conscience of his old opponent to be invulnerable. The act would violate all laws of hospitality and knighthood —oh, granted! 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 at Philippe's achievement one-half so heartily as would Sire Edward's son and immediate successor, the young Prince Edward of Caernarvon. So that, all in all, ohime! Philippe had planned the affair with forethought.

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 to-night enregistered my name among the goodly company of Love's Lunatics—

'Sots amoureux, sots privez, sots sauvages, 
Sots vieux, nouveaux, et sots de tous ages,'

thus he scornfully declaimed, 'and as yokefellow with Dan Merlin in his thorn-bush, and with wise Salomon when he capered upon the high places of Chemosh, and with Duke Ares sheepishly agrin within 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 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 zealot but the expectant captain now. 'Look, my Princess!' For 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,' Sire Edward said.

'Too late,' said Meregrett; and yet she followed him. And presently, in a big splash of moonlight, the armed man's falchion glittered across their way. 'Back,' he bade them, 'for by the King's orders no man passes.'

'It were very easy now to strangle this herring,' Sire Edward reflected.

'But scarcely a whole school of herring,' the fellow retorted. 'Nay, Messire d'Aquitaine, the bushes of Ermenoueil are alive with my associates. The hut yonder, in effect, is girdled by them—and we have our orders.'

'Concerning women?' the King said.

The man deliberated. Then Sire Edward handed him three gold pieces. 'There was assuredly no specific mention of petticoats,' the soldier now reflected, 'and in consequence I dare to pass the Princess.'

'And in that event,' Sire Edward said, 'we twain 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 can but return to Rigon's hut to rearrange my toga as King Caesar did when the assassins fell upon him, and to encounter whatever Dame Luck may send with due decorum.'

'To die!' she said.

He shrugged his broad shoulders. 'In the end we necessarily die.'

Dame Meregrett turned and passed back into the hut without faltering.

And 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 infamy. If Philippe chance to fall into one of his Capetian rages it means death.'

'Nay, lord, it means far worse than death.' And she laughed, though not merrily.

And now, for the first time, Sire Edward regarded her with profound consideration, as may we. To the fingertips this so-little lady showed a descendant of the holy Lewis 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 a spark shudder to extinction over burning charcoal. The Valois nose she had, long and delicate in form, and overhanging a short upper-lip; yet the lips were glorious in tint, and her skin the very Hyperborean snow in tint. As for her eyes, say, gigantic onyxes—or ebony highly polished and wet with May dew. They were too big for her little face; and they made of her a tiny and desirous wraith which nervously endured each incident of life—invariably acquiescent, as a foreigner must necessarily be, to the custom of the country. In fine, this Meregrett was strange and brightly colored; and she seemed always thrilled with some subtle mirth, like that of a Siren who notes how the sailor pauses at the bulwark and laughs a little (knowing the outcome), and does not greatly care. Yet now Dame Meregrett's countenance was rapt.

And 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 aweful haze of forerunning rumor, twin to that golden vapor which enswathes a god and transmutes whatever in corporeal man had 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 but flagrant dulness showed, somehow, in Sire Edward, as the majestic deliberation of one that knows his verdict to be decisive, and hence appraises cautiously; and if sometimes his big, calm eyes betrayed no apprehension of the jest at which her lips were laughing, and of which her brain very cordially 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 certe!—who had taken a woman's paltry face between his hands, half roughly. 'And the maid is a Capet!' Sire Edward mused.

'Never has Blanch desired you any ill, beau sire. But it is the Archduke of Austria that she loves, beau sire. And once you were dead, she might marry him. One cannot blame her,' Meregrett considered, 'since he wishes to