The Essential James Branch Cabell Collection - James Branch Cabell

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as though it were by common instinct, to dilate upon the amours of royal women. Even in romance we scribblers must contrive it so that the fair Nicolete shall be discovered in the end to be no less than the King's daughter of Carthage, and that Sir Don of Mayence shall never sink in his love affairs beneath the degree of a Saracen princess; and we are backed in this old procedure not only by the authority of Aristotle but, oddly enough, by that of reason.

      Kings have their policies and wars wherewith to drug each human appetite. But their consorts are denied these makeshifts; and love may rationally be defined as the pivot of each normal woman's life, and in consequence as the arbiter of that ensuing life which is eternal. Because--as anciently Propertius demanded, though not, to speak the truth, of any woman--

      Quo fugis? ah demens! nulla est fuga, tu licet usque Ad Tanaim fugias, usque sequetur amor.

      And a dairymaid, let us say, may love whom she will, and nobody else be a penny the worse for her mistaking of the preferable nail whereon to hang her affections; whereas with a queen this choice is more portentous. She plays the game of life upon a loftier table, ruthlessly illuminated, she stakes by her least movement a tall pile of counters, some of which are, of necessity, the lives and happiness of persons whom she knows not, unless it be by vague report. Grandeur sells itself at this hard price, and at no other. A queen must always play, in fine, as the vicar of destiny, free to choose but very certainly compelled in the ensuing action to justify that choice: as is strikingly manifested by the authentic histories of Brunhalt, and of Guenevere, and of swart Cleopatra, and of many others that were born to the barbaric queenhoods of extinct and dusty times.

      All royal persons are (I take it) the immediate and the responsible stewards of Heaven; and since the nature of each man is like a troubled stream, now muddied and now clear, their prayer must ever be, _Defenda me, Dios, de me_! Yes, of exalted people, and even of their near associates, life, because it aims more high than the aforementioned Aristotle, demands upon occasion a more great catharsis, which would purge any audience of unmanliness, through pity and through terror, because, by a quaint paradox, the players have been purged of humanity. For a moment Destiny has thrust her scepter into the hands of a human being and Chance has exalted a human being to decide the issue of many human lives. These two--with what immortal chucklings one may facilely imagine--have left the weakling thus enthroned, free to direct the heavy outcome, free to choose, and free to evoke much happiness or age-long weeping, but with no intermediate course unbarred. _Now prove thyself_! saith Destiny; and Chance appends: _Now prove thyself to be at bottom a god or else a beast, and now eternally abide that choice. And now_ (O crowning irony!) _we may not tell thee clearly by which choice thou mayst prove either_.

      In this little book about the women who intermarried, not very enviably, with an unhuman race (a race predestinate to the red ending which I have chronicled elsewhere, in _The Red Cuckold_), it is of ten such moments that I treat.

      You alone, I think, of all persons living, have learned, as you have settled by so many instances, to rise above mortality in such a testing, and unfailingly to merit by your conduct the plaudits and the adoration of our otherwise dissentient world. You have often spoken in the stead of Destiny, with nations to abide your verdict; and in so doing have both graced and hallowed your high vicarship. If I forbear to speak of this at greater length, it is because I dare not couple your well-known perfection with any imperfect encomium. Upon no plea, however, can any one forbear to acknowledge that he who seeks to write of noble ladies must necessarily implore at outset the patronage of her who is the light and mainstay of our age.

      _Therefore to you, madame--most excellent and noble lady, to whom I love to owe both loyalty and love--I dedicate this little book._

      I

      _THE STORY OF THE SESTINA_

      "Armatz de fust e de fer e d'acier, Mos ostal seran bosc, fregz, e semdier, E mas cansos sestinas e descortz, E mantenrai los frevols contra 'ls fortz."

      THE FIRST NOVEL.--ALIANORA OF PROVENCE, COMING IN DISGUISE AND IN ADVERSITY TO A CERTAIN CLERK, IS BY HIM CONDUCTED ACROSS A HOSTILE COUNTRY; AND IN THAT TROUBLED JOURNEY ARE MADE MANIFEST TO EACH THE SNARES WHICH HAD BEGUILED THEM AFORETIME.

      The Story of the Sestina

      In this place we have to do with the opening tale of the Dizain of Queens. I abridge, as afterward, at discretion; and an initial account of the Barons' War, among other superfluities, I amputate as more remarkable for veracity than interest. The result, we will agree at outset, is that to the Norman cleric appertains whatever these tales may have of merit, whereas what you find distasteful in them you must impute to my delinquencies in skill rather than in volition.

      Within the half hour after de Giars' death (here one overtakes Nicolas mid-course in narrative) Dame Alianora thus stood alone in the corridor of a strange house. Beyond the arras the steward and his lord were at irritable converse.

      First, "If the woman be hungry," spoke a high and peevish voice, "feed her. If she need money, give it to her. But do not annoy me."

      "This woman demands to see the master of the house," the steward then retorted.

      "O incredible Boeotian, inform her that the master of the house has no time to waste upon vagabonds who select the middle of the night as an eligible time to pop out of nowhere. Why did you not do so in the beginning, you dolt?" The speaker got for answer only a deferential cough, and very shortly continued: "This is remarkably vexatious. _Vox et praeterea nihil_--which signifies, Yeck, that to converse with women is always delightful. Admit her." This was done, and Dame Alianora came into an apartment littered with papers, where a neat and shriveled gentleman of fifty-odd sat at a desk and scowled.

      He presently said, "You may go, Yeck." He had risen, the magisterial attitude with which he had awaited her entrance cast aside. "Oh, God!" he said; "you, madame!" His thin hands, scholarly hands, were plucking at the air.

      Dame Alianora had paused, greatly astonished, and there was an interval before she said, "I do not recognize you, messire."

      "And yet, madame, I recall very clearly that some thirty years ago the King-Count Raymond Brenger, then reigning in Provence, had about his court four daughters, each one of whom was afterward wedded to a king. First, Meregrett, the eldest, now regnant in France; then Alianora, the second and most beautiful of these daughters, whom troubadours hymned as the Unattainable Princess. She was married a long while ago, madame, to the King of England, Lord Henry, third of that name to reign in these islands."

      Dame Alianora's eyes were narrowing. "There is something in your voice," she said, "which I recall."

      He answered: "Madame and Queen, that is very likely, for it is a voice which sang a deal in Provence when both of us were younger. I concede with the Roman that I have somewhat deteriorated since the reign of Cynara. Yet have you quite forgotten the Englishman who made so many songs of you? They called him Osmund Heleigh."

      "He made the Sestina of Spring which won the violet crown at my betrothal," the Queen said; and then, with eagerness: "Messire, can it be that you are Osmund Heleigh?" He shrugged assent. She looked at him for a long time, rather sadly, and demanded if he were the King's man or of the barons' party.

      The nervous hands were raised in deprecation. "I have no politics," Messire Heleigh began, and altered it, gallantly enough, to, "I am the Queen's man, madame."

      "Then aid me, Osmund," she said.

      He answered with a gravity which singularly became him, "You have reason to understand that to my fullest power I will aid you."

      "You know that at Lewes these swine overcame us." He nodded assent. "Now they hold the King, my husband, captive at Kenilworth. I am content that he remain there, for he is of all the King's enemies the most dangerous. But, at Wallingford, Leicester has imprisoned

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