The Essential James Branch Cabell Collection - James Branch Cabell

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      "O Madam Destiny, omnipotent, Why need our elders trouble us at play? We know that very soon we shall repent The idle follies of our holiday, And being old, shall be as wise as they: But now we are not wise, and lute and fife Plead sweetlier than axioms,--so to-day Grudge us not life!

      "O Madam Destiny, omnipotent, You have given us youth--and must we cast away The cup undrained and our one coin unspent Because our elders' beards and hearts are gray? They have forgotten that if we delay Death claps us on the shoulder, and with knife Or cord or fever flouts the prayer we pray-- 'Grudge us not life!'

      "Madam, recall that in the sun we play But for an hour, then have the worm for wife, The tomb for habitation--and to-day Grudge us not life!"

      Candor in these matters is best. Katharine scrambled into the crotch of the apple-tree. The dew pattered sharply about her, but the Princess was not in a mood to appraise discomfort.

      "You came!" this harper said, transfigured; and then again, "You came!"

      She breathed, "Yes."

      So for a long time they stood looking at each other. She found adoration in his eyes and quailed before it; and in the man's mind not a grimy and mean incident of the past but marshalled to leer at his unworthiness: yet in that primitive garden the first man and woman, meeting, knew no sweeter terror.

      It was by the minstrel that a familiar earth and the grating speech of earth were earlier regained. "The affair is of the suddenest," Alain observed, and he now swung the lute behind him. He indicated no intention of touching her, though he might easily have done so as he sat there exalted by the height of his horse. "A meteor arrives with more prelude. But Love is an arbitrary lord; desiring my heart, he has seized it, and accordingly I would now brave hell to come to you, and finding you there, would esteem hell a pleasure-garden. I have already made my prayer to Destiny that she concede me love. Now of God, our Father and Master, I entreat quick death if I am not to win you. For, God willing, I shall come to you again, even if in order to do this I have to split the world like a rotten orange."

      "Madness! Oh, brave, sweet madness!" Katharine said. "You are a minstrel and I am a king's daughter."

      "Is it madness? Why, then, I think sane persons are to be commiserated. And indeed I spy in all this some design. Across half the earth I came to you, led by a fox. Hey, God's face!" Alain swore; "the foxes which Samson, that old sinewy captain, loosed among the corn of heathenry kindled no disputation such as this fox has set afoot. That was an affair of standing corn and olives spoilt, a bushel or so of disaster; now poised kingdoms topple on the brink of ruin. There will be martial argument shortly if you bid me come again."

      "I bid you come," said Katharine; and after they had stared at each other for a long while, he rode away in silence. It was through a dank and tear-flawed world that she stumbled conventward, while out of the east the sun came bathed in mists, a watery sun no brighter than a silver coin.

      And for a month the world seemed no less dreary, but about Michaelmas the Queen-Regent sent for her. At the Htel de Saint-Pol matters were much the same. Katharine found her mother in foul-mouthed rage over the failure of a third attempt to poison the Dauphin of Vienne, as Queen Isabeau had previously poisoned her two elder sons; I might here trace out a curious similitude between the Valois and that dragon-spawned race which Jason very anciently slew at Colchis, since the world was never at peace so long as any two of them existed. But King Charles greeted his daughter with ampler deference, esteeming her to be the wife of Presbyter John, the tyrant of Aethiopia. However, ingenuity had just suggested card-playing for King Charles' amusement, and he paid little attention nowadays to any one save his opponent at this new game.

      So the French King chirped his senile jests over the card-table, while the King of England was besieging the French city of Rouen sedulously and without mercy. In late autumn an armament from Ireland joined Henry's forces. The Irish fought naked, it was said, with long knives. Katharine heard discreditable tales of these Irish, and reflected how gross are the exaggerations of rumor.

      In the year of grace 1419, in January, the burgesses of Rouen, having consumed their horses, and finding frogs and rats unpalatable, yielded the town. It was the Queen-Regent who brought the news to Katharine.

      "God is asleep," the Queen said; "and while He nods, the Butcher of Agincourt has stolen our good city of Rouen." She sat down and breathed heavily. "Never was any poor woman so pestered as I! The puddings to-day were quite uneatable, as you saw for yourself, and on Sunday the Englishman entered Rouen in great splendor, attended by his chief nobles; but the Butcher rode alone, and before him went a page carrying a fox-brush on the point of his lance. I put it to you, is that the contrivance of a sane man? Euh! euh!" Dame Isabeau squealed on a sudden; "you are bruising me."

      Katharine had gripped her by the shoulder. "The King of England--a tall, fair man? with big teeth? a tiny wen upon his neck--here--and with his left cheek scarred? with blue eyes, very bright, bright as tapers?" She poured out her questions in a torrent, and awaited the answer, seeming not to breathe at all.

      "I believe so," the Queen said, "and they say, too, that he has the damned squint of old Manuel the Redeemer."

      "O God!" said Katharine.

      "Ay, our only hope now. And may God show him no more mercy than has this misbegotten English butcher shown us!" the good lady desired, with fervor. "The hog, having won our Normandy, is now advancing on Paris itself. He repudiated the Aragonish alliance last August; and until last August he was content with Normandy, they tell us, but now he swears to win all France. The man is a madman, and Scythian Tamburlaine was more lenient. And I do not believe that in all France there is a cook who understands his business." She went away whimpering, and proceeded to get tipsy.

      The Princess remained quite still, as Dame Isabeau had left her; you may see a hare crouch so at sight of the hounds. Finally the girl spoke aloud. "Until last August!" Katharine said. "Until last August! _Poised kingdoms topple on the brink of ruin, now that you bid me come to you again_. And I bade this devil's grandson come to me, as my lover!" Presently she went into her oratory and began to pray.

      In the midst of her invocation she wailed: "Fool, fool! How could I have thought him less than a king!"

      You are to imagine her breast thus adrum with remorse and hatred of herself, the while that town by town fell before the invader like card-houses. Every rumor of defeat--and the news of some fresh defeat came daily--was her arraignment; impotently she cowered at God's knees, knowing herself a murderess, whose infamy was still afoot, outpacing her prayers, whose victims were battalions. Tarpeia and Pisidic and Rahab were her sisters; she hungered in her abasement for Judith's nobler guilt.

      In May he came to her. A truce was patched up, and French and English met amicably in a great plain near Meulan. A square space was staked out and on three sides boarded in, the fourth side being the river Seine. This enclosure the Queen-Regent, Jehan of Burgundy, and Katharine entered from the French side. Simultaneously the English King appeared, accompanied by his brothers the Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester, and followed by the Earl of Warwick. Katharine raised her eyes with I know not what lingering hope; but it was he, a young Zeus now, triumphant and uneager. In his helmet in place of a plume he wore a fox-brush spangled with jewels.

      These six entered the tent pitched for the conference--the hanging of blue velvet embroidered with fleurs-de-lys of gold blurred before the girl's eyes,--and there the Earl of Warwick embarked upon a sea of rhetoric. His French was indifferent, his periods were interminable, and his demands exorbitant; in brief, the King of England wanted Katharine and most of France, with a reversion at the French King's death of the entire kingdom. Meanwhile Sire Henry sat in silence, his eyes glowing.

      "I have come," he said, under cover of Warwick's oratory--"I have come again, my lady."

      Katharine's

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