But in the year of grace 1417 there was a breathing space for discredited France, and presently the Vicomte de Montbrison was sent into England, as ambassador. He got in London a fruitless audience of King Henry, whose demands were such as rendered a renewal of the war inevitable; and afterward, in the month of April, about the day of Palm Sunday, and within her dower-palace of Havering-Bower, an interview with Queen Jehane.
A solitary page ushered the Vicomte whither she sat alone, by prearrangement, in a chamber with painted walls, profusely lighted by the sun, and making pretence to weave a tapestry. When the page had gone she rose and cast aside the shuttle, and then with a glad and wordless cry stumbled toward the Vicomte. 'Madame and Queen—!' he coldly said.
A frightened woman, half-distraught, aging now but rather handsome, his judgment saw in her, and no more; all black and shimmering gold his senses found her, and supple like some dangerous and lovely serpent; and with a contained hatred he had discovered, as by the terse illumination of a thunderbolt, that he could never love any woman save the woman whom he most despised.
She said: 'I had forgotten. I had remembered only you, Antoine, and Navarre, and the clean-eyed Navarrese —' Now for a little, Jehane paced the gleaming and sun-drenched apartment as a bright leopardess might tread her cage. Then she wheeled. 'Friend, I think that God Himself has deigned to avenge you. All misery my reign has been. First Hotspur, then prim Worcester harried us. Came Glyndwyr afterward to prick us with his devil's horns. Followed the dreary years that linked me to the rotting corpse God's leprosy devoured while the poor furtive thing yet moved. All misery, Antoine! And now I live beneath a sword.'
'You have earned no more,' he said. 'You have earned no more, O Jehane! whose only title is the Constant Lover!' He spat it out.
She came uncertainly toward him, as though he had been some not implacable knave with a bludgeon. 'For the King hates me,' she plaintively said, 'and I live beneath a sword. Ever the big fierce-eyed man has hated me, for all his lip-courtesy. And now he lacks the money to pay his troops, and I am the wealthiest person within his realm. I am a woman and alone in a foreign land. So I must wait, and wait, and wait, Antoine, till he devise some trumped-up accusation. Friend, I live as did Saint Damoclus, beneath a sword. Antoine!' she wailed—for now was the pride of Queen Jehane shattered utterly—'within the island am I a prisoner for all that my chains are of gold.'
'Yet it was not until o' late,' he observed, 'that you disliked the metal which is the substance of all crowns.'
And now the woman lifted to him a huge golden collar garnished with emeralds and sapphires and with many pearls, and in the sunlight the gems were tawdry things. 'Friend, the chain is heavy, and I lack the power to cast it off. The Navarrese we know of wore no such perilous fetters about her neck. Ah, you should have mastered me at Vannes. You could have done so, and very easily. But you only talked—oh, Mary pity us! you only talked!—and I could find only a servant where I had sore need to find a master. Then pity me.'
But now came many armed soldiers into the apartment. With spirit Queen Jehane turned to meet them, and you saw that she was of royal blood, for the pride of ill-starred emperors blazed and informed her body as light occupies a lantern. 'At last you come for me, messieurs?'
'Whereas,' their leader read in answer from a parchment—'whereas the King's stepmother, Queen Jehane, is accused by certain persons of an act of witchcraft that with diabolical and subtile methods wrought privily to destroy the King, the said Dame Jehane is by the King committed (all her attendants being removed), to the custody of Sir John Pelham, who will, at the King's pleasure, confine her within Pevensey Castle, there to be kept under Sir John's control: the lands and other properties of the said Dame Jehane being hereby forfeit to the King, whom God preserve!'
'Harry of Monmouth!' said Jehane—'oh, Harry of Monmouth, could I but come to you, very quietly, and with a knife—!' She shrugged her shoulders, and the gold about her person glittered in the sunlight. 'Witchcraft! ohime, one never disproves that. Friend, now are you avenged the more abundantly.'
'Young Riczi is avenged,' the Vicomte said; 'and I came hither desiring vengeance.'
She wheeled, a lithe flame (he thought) of splendid fury. 'And in the gutter Jehane dares say what Queen Jehane upon the throne might never say. Had I reigned all these years as mistress not of England but of Europe— had nations wheedled me in the place of barons—young Riczi had been avenged, no less. Bah! what do these so- little persons matter? Take now your petty vengeance! drink deep of it! and know that always within my heart the Navarrese has lived to shame me! Know that to-day you despise Jehane, the purchased woman! and that Jehane loves you! and that the love of proud Jehane creeps like a beaten cur toward your feet, and in the sight of common men! and know that Riczi is avenged,—you milliner!'
'Into England I came desiring vengeance—Apples of Sodom! O bitter fruit!' the Vicomte thought; 'O fitting harvest of a fool's assiduous husbandry!'
They took her from him: and that afternoon, after long meditation, the Vicomte de Montbrison entreated a fresh and private audience of King Henry, and readily obtained it. 'Unhardy is unseely,' the Vicomte said at its conclusion. Then the tale tells that the Vicomte returned to France and within this realm assembled all such lords as the abuses of the Queen-Regent Isabeau had more notoriously dissatified.
The Vicomte had upon occasion an invaluable power of speech; and now, so great was the devotion of love's dupe, so heartily, so hastily, did he design to remove the discomforts of Queen Jehane, that now his eloquence was twin to Belial's.
Then presently these lords had sided with King Henry, as had the Vicomte de Montbrison, in open field. Latterly Jehan Sans-Peur was slain at Montereau; and a little later the new Duke of Burgundy, who loved the Vicomte as he loved no other man, had shifted his coat. Afterward fell the poised scale of circumstance, and with an aweful clangor; and now in France clean-hearted persons spoke of the Vicomte de Montbrison as they would of Ganelon or of Iscariot, and in every market-place was King Henry proclaimed as governor of the realm.
Meantime was Queen Jehane conveyed to prison and lodged therein for five years' space. She had the liberty of a tiny garden, high-walled, and of two scantily furnished chambers. The brace of hard-featured females Pelham had provided for the Queen's attendance might speak to her of nothing that occurred without the gates of Pevensey, and she saw no other persons save her confessor, a triple-chinned Dominican; and in fine, had they already lain Jehane within the massive and gilded coffin of a queen the outer world would have made as great a turbulence in her ears.
But in the year of grace 1422, upon the feast of Saint Bartholomew, and about vespers—for thus it wonderfully fell out—one of those grim attendants brought to her the first man, save the fat confessor, whom the Queen had seen within five years. The proud, frail woman looked and what she saw was the common inhabitant of all her dreams.
Said Jehane: 'This is ill done. The years have avenged you. Be contented with that knowledge, and, for Heaven's sake, do not endeavor to moralize over the ruin Heaven has made, and justly made, of Queen Jehane, as I perceive you mean to do.' She leaned backward in the chair, very coarsely clad in brown, but knowing her countenance to be that of the anemone which naughtily dances above wet earth.
'Friend,' the lean-faced man now said, 'I do not come with such intent, as my mission will readily attest, nor to any ruin, as your mirror will attest. Nay, madame, I come as the emissary of King Henry, now dying at Vincennes, and with letters to the lords and bishops of his council. Dying, the man restores to you your liberty and your dower- lands, your bed and all your movables, and six gowns of such fashion and such color as you may elect.'
Then with hurried speech he told her of five years' events: how within that period King Henry had conquered entire France, and had married the French King's daughter, and had begotten a boy who would presently inherit the united realms of France and England, since in the supreme hour of triumph King Henry had been stricken with a mortal sickness, and now lay dying or perhaps already dead, at Vincennes; and how with his penultimate breath the prostrate conqueror had restored to Queen Jehane all properties and all honors which she formerly enjoyed.
'I shall once more be Regent,' the woman said when he had made an end; 'Antoine, I shall presently be Regent both of France and of England, since Dame Katharine is but a child.' Jehane stood motionless save for the fine hands that plucked the air. 'Mistress of Europe! absolute mistress, and with an infant ward! now, may God have mercy on my unfriends, for they will soon perceive great need of it!'
