Chivalry: Dizain des Reines by James Branch Cabell (comprehension books .txt) 📗

I nor any one may transform through any personal force this bitter world, this piercing, cruel place of frost and sun. Charity and Truth are excommunicate, and a king is only an adorned and fearful person who leads wolves toward their quarry, lest, lacking it, they turn and devour him. Everywhere the powerful labor to put one another out of worship, and each to stand the higher with the other’s corpse as his pedestal; and Lechery and Greed and Hatred sway these proud and inconsiderate fools as winds blow at will the gay leaves of autumn. We walk among shining vapors, we aspire to overpass a mountain of unstable sparkling sand! We two alone in all the scuffling world! Oh, it is horrible, and I think that Satan plans the jest! We dream for a while of refashioning this bright desolation, and know that we alone can do it! we are as demigods, you and I, in those gallant dreams! and at the end we can but poultice some dirty rascal!”

The Queen answered sadly: “Once and only once did God tread this tangible world, for a very little while, and, look you, to what trivial matters He devoted that brief space! Only to chat with fishermen, and to talk with light women, and to consort with rascals, and at last to die between two cutpurses, ignominiously! If Christ Himself achieved so little that seemed great and admirable, how should we two hope to do any more?”

He answered: “It is true. Of anise and of cumin the Master gets His tithe—” Maudelain broke off with a yapping laugh. “Puf! Heaven is wiser than we. I am King of England. It is my heritage.”

“It means war. Many will die, thousands will die, and to no betterment of affairs.”

“I am King of England. I am Heaven’s satrap here, and answerable to Heaven alone. It is my heritage.” And now his large and cruel eyes were aflame as he regarded her.

And visibly beneath their glare the woman changed. “My friend, must I not love you any longer? You would be content with happiness? Then I am jealous of that happiness! for you are the one friend that I have had, and so dear to me—Look you!” she said, with a light, wistful laugh, “there have been times when I was afraid of everything you touched, and I hated everything you looked at. I would not have you stained; I desired to pass my whole life between the four walls of some dingy and eternal gaol, forever alone with you, lest you become like other men. I would in that period have been the very bread you eat, the least perfume which delights you, the clod you touch in crushing it, and I have often loathed some pleasure I derived from life because I might not transfer it to you undiminished. For I wanted somehow to make you happy to my own anguish.... It was wicked, I suppose, for the imagining of it made me happy, too.”

Now while he listened to this dear and tranquil speaking, Edward Maudelain’s raised hands had fallen like so much lead, and remembering his own nature, he longed for annihilation, before she had appraised his vileness. He said:

“With reason Augustine crieth out against the lust of the eyes. ‘For pleasure seeketh objects beautiful, melodious, fragrant, savory, and soft; but this disease those contrary as well, not for the sake of suffering annoyance, but out of the lust of making trial of them!’ Ah! ah! too curiously I planned my own damnation, too presumptuously I had esteemed my soul a worthy scapegoat, and I had gilded my enormity with many lies. Yet indeed, indeed, I had believed brave things, I had planned a not ignoble bargain—! Ey, say, is it not laughable, madame?—as my birth-right Heaven accords me a penny, and with that only penny I must presently be seeking to bribe Heaven.”

Then he said: “Yet are we indeed God’s satraps, as but now I cried in my vainglory, and we hold within our palms the destiny of many peoples. Depardieux! God is wiser than we are. Still, Satan offers no unhandsome bribes—bribes that are tangible and sure. For Satan, too, is wiser than we are.”

They stood like effigies, lit by the broad, unsparing splendor of the morning, but again their kindling eyes had met, and again the man shuddered. “Decide! oh, decide very quickly, my only friend!” he said, “for throughout I am all filth!”

Closer she drew to him, and laid one hand upon each shoulder. “O my only friend!” she breathed, with red lax lips which were very near to his, “through these six years I have ranked your friendship as the chief of all my honors! and I pray God with an entire heart that I may die so soon as I have done what I must do to-day!”

Now Maudelain was trying to smile, but he could not quite manage it. “God save King Richard!” said the priest. “For by the cowardice and greed and ignorance of little men is Salomon himself confounded, and by them is Hercules lightly unhorsed. Were I Leviathan, whose bones were long ago picked clean by pismires, I could perform nothing against the will of many human pismires. Therefore do you pronounce my doom.”

“O King,” then said Dame Anne, “I bid you go forever from the court and live forever a landless man, friendless, and without even any name. Otherwise, you can in no way escape being made an instrument to bring about the misery and death of many thousands. This doom I dare adjudge and to pronounce, because we are royal and God’s satraps, you and I.”

Twice or thrice his dry lips moved before he spoke. He was aware of innumerable birds that carolled with a piercing and intolerable sweetness. “O Queen!” he hoarsely said, “O fellow satrap! Heaven has many fiefs. A fair province is wasted and accords to Heaven no revenue. So wastes beauty, and a shrewd wit, and an illimitable charity, which of their pride go in fetters and achieve no increase. To-day the young King junkets with his flatterers, and but rarely thinks of England. You have that beauty by which men are lightly conquered, and the mere sight of which may well cause a man’s voice to tremble as my voice trembles now, and through desire of which—But I tread afield! Of that beauty you have made no profit. O daughter of the Caesars, I bid you now gird either loin for an unlovely traffic. Old Legion must be fought with fire. True that the age is sick, true that we may not cure, we can but salve the hurt—” His hand had torn open his sombre gown, and the man’s bared breast shone in the sunlight, and on his breast heaved sleek and glittering beads of sweat. Twice he cried the Queen’s name. In a while he said: “I bid you weave incessantly such snares of brain and body as may lure King Richard to be swayed by you, until against his will you daily guide this shallow-hearted fool to some commendable action. I bid you live as other folk do hereabouts. Coax! beg! cheat! wheedle! lie!” he barked like a teased dog, “and play the prostitute for him that wears my crown, till you achieve in part the task which is denied me. This doom I dare adjudge and to pronounce, because we are royal and God’s satraps, you and I.”

She answered with a tiny, wordless sound. But presently, “I take my doom,” the Queen proudly said. “I shall be lonely now, my only friend, and yet—it does not matter,” the Queen said, with a little shiver. “No, nothing will ever greatly matter now, I think, now that I may not ever see you any more, my dearest.”

Her eyes had filled with tears; she was unhappy, and, as always, this knowledge roused in Maudelain a sort of frenzied pity and a hatred, quite illogical, of all other things existent. She was unhappy, that only he comprehended: and for her to be made unhappy was unjust.

So he stood thus for an appreciable silence, staying motionless save that behind his back his fingers were bruising one another. Everywhere was this or that bright color and an incessant melody. It was unbearable. Then it was over; the ordered progress of all happenings was apparent, simple, and natural; and contentment came into his heart like a flight of linnets over level fields at dawn. He left her, and as he went he sang.

Sang Maudelain: