'Friend, I have swayed kingdoms since.'
'Jehane, do you remember that August twilight in Pampeluna when last I kissed you? Then as now you wore a gown of green, Jehane.'
'But no such chain as this about my neck,' the woman answered, and lifted a huge golden collar garnished with emeralds and sapphires and with many pearls. 'Friend, the chain is heavy, yet I lack the will to cast it off. I lack the will, Antoine.' And with a sudden roar of mirth her courtiers applauded the evolutions of the saltatrice.
'King's daughter!' said Riczi then; 'O perilous merchandise! a god came to me and a sword had pierced his breast. He touched the gold hilt of it and said, 'Take back your weapon.' I answered, 'I do not know you.' 'I am Youth,' he said; 'take back your weapon.''
'It is true,' she responded, 'it is lamentably true that after to-night we are as different persons, you and I.'
He said: 'Jehane, do you not love me any longer? Remember old years and do not break your oath with me, Jehane, since God abhors nothing so much as perfidy. For your own sake, Jehane—ah, no, not for your sake nor for mine, but for the sake of that blithe Jehane, whom, so you tell me, time has slain!'
Once or twice she blinked, as dazzled by a light of intolerable splendor, but otherwise sat rigid. 'You have dared, messire, to confront me with the golden-hearted, clean-eyed Navarrese that once was I! and I requite.' The austere woman rose. 'Messire, you swore to me, long since, an eternal service. I claim my bond. Yonder prim man—gray-bearded, the man in black and silver—is the Earl of Worcester, the King of England's ambassador, in common with whom the wealthy dowager of Brittany has signed a certain contract. Go you, then, with Worcester into England, as my proxy, and in that island, as my proxy, wed the King of England. Messire, your audience is done.'
Latterly Riczi said this: 'Can you hurt me any more, Jehane?—nay, even in hell they cannot hurt me now. Yet I, at least, keep faith, and in your face I fling faith like a glove—old-fashioned, it may be, but clean—and I will go, Jehane.'
Her heart raged. 'Poor, glorious fool!' she thought; 'had you but the wit even now to use me brutally, even now to drag me from this dais—!' Instead he went from her smilingly, treading through the hall with many affable salutations, while always the jongleur sang.
Sang the jongleur:
And the following morning, being duly empowered, Antoine Riczi sailed for England in company with the Earl of Worcester, and upon Saint Richard's day the next ensuing was, at Eltham, as proxy of Jehane, married in his own person to the bloat King of England. First had Sire Henry placed the ring on Riczi's finger, and then spoke Antoine Riczi, very loud and clear:
'I, Antoine Riczi—in the name of my worshipful lady, Dame Jehane, the daughter of Messire Charles until lately King of Navarre, the Duchess of Brittany and the Countess of Rougemont—do take you, Sire Henry of Lancaster, King of England and in title of France, and Lord of Ireland, to be my husband; and thereto I, Antoine Riczi, in the spirit of my said lady'—he paused here to regard the gross hulk of masculinity before him, and then smiled very sadly—'in precisely the spirit of my said lady, I plight you my troth.'
Afterward the King made him presents of some rich garments of scarlet trimmed with costly furs, and of four silk belts studded with silver and gold, and with valuable clasps, whereof the recipient might well be proud, and Riczi returned to Lyonnois. 'Depardieux!' his uncle said; 'so you return alone!'
'As Prince Troilus did,' said Riczi—'to boast to you of liberal entertainment in the tent of Diomede.'
'You are certainly an inveterate fool,' the Vicomte considered after a prolonged appraisal of his face, 'since there is always a deal of other pink-and-white flesh as yet unmortgaged— Boy with my brother's eyes!' the Vicomte said, and in another voice; 'I would that I were God to punish as is fitting! Nay, come home, my lad!—come home!'
So these two abode together at Montbrison for a long time, and in the purlieus of that place hunted and hawked, and made sonnets once in a while, and read aloud from old romances some five days out of the seven. The verses of Riczi were in the year of grace 1410 made public, and not without acclamation; and thereafter the stripling Comte de Charolais, future heir to all Burgundy and a zealous patron of rhyme, was much at Montbrison, and there conceived for Antoine Riczi such admiration as was possible to a very young man only.
In the year of grace 1412 the Vicomte, being then bedridden, died without any disease and of no malady save the inherencies of his age. 'I entreat of you, my nephew,' he said at last, 'that always you use as touchstone the brave deed you did at Eltham. It is necessary a man serve his lady according to her commandments, but you have performed the most absurd and the cruelest task which any woman ever imposed upon her servitor. I laugh at you, and I envy you.' Thus he died, about Martinmas.
Now was Antoine Riczi a powerful baron, and got no comfort of his lordship, since in his meditations the King of Darkness, that old incendiary, had added a daily fuel until the ancient sorrow quickened into vaulting flames of wrath and of disgust.
'What now avail my riches?' said the Vicomte. 'Nay, how much wealthier was I when I was loved, and was myself an eager lover! I relish no other pleasures than those of love. Love's sot am I, drunk with a deadly wine, poor fool, and ever I thirst. As vapor are all my chattels and my acres, and the more my dominion and my power increase, the more rancorously does my heart sustain its misery, being robbed of that fair merchandise which is the King of England's. To hate her is scant comfort and to despise her none at all, since it follows that I who am unable to forget the wanton am even more to be despised than she. I will go into England and execute what mischief I may against her.'
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 very crown of that latter kingdom; and as the earth is altered by the advent of winter was the appearance of France transformed by his coming, and everywhere the nobles were stirred up to arms, the castles were closed, the huddled cities were fortified, and on either hand arose intrenchments.
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 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.
