The White Plumes of Navarre Part 18

He opened the robe wider, and under the stained brown the jester's motley met their eyes.

"Who is this fool who mixes so freely in the councils of his betters?"

cried Turenne. "Is there never a wooden horse and a provost-marshal in this--this ball-room?"

But Rosny, whose business it was to know all things, had had dealings with Jean-aux-Choux.

"It is the Fool of the Three Henries!" he whispered, "a wise man, they say--bachelor of Geneva, a deacon at the trade of theology, and all that!"

"I see nothing for it," D'Aubigne interrupted drily, "but that we should agree to put all three Henries into motley, and set Jean-aux-Choux on the throne!"

"Speak your mind plainly, Jean-aux-Choux," cried Turenne peremptorily; "we are none of us of the Three Henries. And we will bear no fooling.

What is your message to us--Sir Fool with the Death's Head? Out with it, and briefly."

Jean-aux-Choux waved his hand in the direction of the bridge of Gargilesse.

"Yonder--yonder," he said, "is your answer coming to you!"

Beyond the crowded roofs of the old town, thatched and tiled, the white track to Gargilesse and Croizant meandered amid the spa.r.s.e and sunburnt vegetation of autumn. Sparks of light, stars seen at noonday, began to dance behind the little broomy knolls, where the pods were cracking open merrily in the heat of the sun.

"They are spears," cried the well-advised veterans of the south, men of the old Huguenot guard. "Who comes? None from that direction to do us any good!"

Then Rosny, who, in moments of action, could make every one afraid of him, with his fair skin and the false air of innocence on his face, in which two blue eyes strange and stern were set, rode up to the King and, bidding him leave ribbons and sashes to give his mind for a moment to sword-points, he indicated, without an unnecessary word, the cavalcade which approached from the south.

Henry of Navarre, who was never angered by a just rebuke, instantly left the ladies with whom he had been jesting, and jumping on horseback, rode right up to the top of a steep bank, which commanded the bridge by which the hors.e.m.e.n must cross.

There he remained for a long while, none daring to speak further to him.

For again, in a moment, he had become the war-captain. Though not very tall when on foot, the Bearnais sat his horse like a centaur, and it was said of him, that the fiercer the fray, the closer Henry gripped his knees, and the looser the rein with which he rode into the smother.

"Why," he cried, setting his gloved hands on either hip, "it is Margot--my wife Margot, with another retinue of silks and furbelows!"

And the Bearnais laughed aloud.

"Check and checkmate for the old apothecary's daughter," he chuckled.

"After all, our little Margot is _spirituelle_, though she and I do not get on together."

And setting spurs to his charger, he rode on far ahead of all his gentlemen to welcome the Queen of Navarre at the bridge-head of Argenton. There he dismounted, and throwing the reins to the nearest groom, he walked to the bridle of a lady, who, fair, fresh, and smiling, came ambling easily up on a white Arab.

It was Marguerite of Valois, his wife, who five years ago had possessed herself of the strong castle of Usson in Auvergne. Sole daughter of one king of France, sole sister of three others, and wife of the King of Navarre, Marguerite of Valois had been a spoiled beauty from her earliest years. The division of blame is no easy matter, but certainly the Bearnais was not the right man to tame and keep a b.u.t.terfly-spirit like that of "La Reine Margot."

The marriage had been made and finished in the terrible days which preceded the Saint Bartholomew. The two Queens of France and Navarre had the business in hand. It had been baptised in torrents of Protestant blood on that fatal night when the Guise ladies watched at their windows, while beneath the Leaguers silently bound the white crosses on their brows. Indeed, from the side of Catherine de Medici, the marriage of Henry of Navarre and Marguerite of Valois had been arranged with the single proper intent of bringing Coligny, Conde, and the other great Huguenots to the shambles prepared for them.

It served its purpose well; but when her mother, Catherine de Medici, and her royal brothers would gladly have broken off the marriage, Margot's will was the firmest of any. But though there was little of good in the life of the Queen Margot, there was ever something good in her heart.

She refused to be separated from her husband, merely to serve the intrigues of the Queen-Mother and the Guises.

"Once already I have been sacrificed to your plots," she said. "Because of that, I have a husband who will never love me. A night of blood stands between us. Yet will I do nothing against him, because he is my husband. Nor yet for you, my kinsfolk, because ye paid me away like the thirty pieces of silver which Judas scattered in the potter's field. I was the price of blood," so she taunted her mother, "and for that my husband will never love me!"

No, it was not for that, as history and legend tell all too plainly; but she was a woman, and had the woman's right to explain the matter so.

Rather, it was the root-difference of all lack of common interest and mutual love. Two young people, with different upbringings, with mothers wide apart as the heaven of Jeanne d'Albret and the inferno of the Medici, were suddenly thrown together with no bond save that of years to unite them. Each went a several way--neither the right way--and there is small wonder that the result of such a marriage was only unhappiness.

Said Henry of Navarre to Rosny, his best confidant, when there was question of his own wedding:

"Seven things are needed in the woman I ought to marry."

"Seven is a great number, Your Majesty," answered the Right Hand of the Bearnais; "but tell them to me, and I will at least cause search to be made. I will make proclamation for the lady who can put her foot into seven gla.s.s slippers, each one smaller than the other!"

"First, then," said the King of Navarre, posing a forefinger on the palm of his other hand, and speaking sagely, as a master setting out the steps of a proposition, "she must have beauty of person!"

"Good," said Rosny; "Your Majesty has doubtless satisfied himself that there are such to be found in the land--once or twice!"

"Wait, Rosny--let me finis.h.!.+" said the King. And so continued his enumeration of wifely necessities, as they appeared to a great prince of the sixteenth century.

"_Item_, she must be modest in her life, of a happy humour, vivid in spirit, ready in affection, eminent in extraction, and possessed of great estates in her own right!"

For all answer Rosny held up his hands.

"I know--I know," smiled the Bearnais, "you would say to me that this marvel of womankind has been dead some time. I would rather say to you that she has never been born!"

So it came about that Marguerite, the pretty, foolish b.u.t.terfly of the Valois courts, and her Bearnais husband, rough, soldierly, far-seeing, politic, had not seen each other for five years. Marguerite had shut herself up in the castle of Usson, one of the dread prison fortresses built by "that fox," Louis the Eleventh.

Though sent almost as a prisoner there, or at least under observation, she had speedily possessed herself of castle and castellan, guard and officers, kitchen scullions and gardener varlets. For she had the open hand, especially when the money was not her own, the ready wit, and above all, the charming smile, though even that meant nothing. At least, Margot the Queen was not malicious; and so it was without any fear, but rather with the sort of silent amus.e.m.e.nt with which we applaud a child's new trick, that the King dismounted, kissed his wife's hand, answered her gay greetings, and even cast a critic's eye on the array of beauties who followed in her train.

Many gallant gentlemen of the south also accompanied her. Raimonds and Castellanes were there, Princes of Baux and Seigneurs de la Tour--all willing at once to visit the camp of the Bearnais, and to testify their loyalty to the Court of France. For in the south, the League and the Guises had made but little progress.

"Why, Margot, what brings you hither?" said the Bearnais, as he paced along by his wife's side, while the suite had dropped far enough behind for them to speak freely.

"Well, husband mine," said the Queen Margot, "you have been a bad boy to me, and if I had not been mine own sweet self, you and my brother (peace to his ashes, as soon as he is dead!) would have shut me up in a big, dull castle to do needlework alone with a cat and a duenna. But I was too clever for you. And, after that, they poisoned your mind against little Margot--oh, I know. So I do not blame you greatly, Henry. Also, I have a temper that is trying at short range--I admit it. So I am come to make up--at least, if you will. And further, if by chance my good, simple mother and that gallant, crafty Epernon lad have any tricks to try upon you--why, then I have brought a bag of them too, and can play them, trick for trick, till we win--you and I, Harry!"

Margot the Queen waved her hand to the covey of beauties who rode behind her.

"I would say that they are all queens of beauty," she said, smiling down at him; "but do you know (I am speaking humbly because I know well that you do not agree) I am the only really pretty queen in the world?"

"As to that I do most heartily take oath," said the Bearnais.

"Ah, but," said Margot, touching him gently on the cheek with the lash of her riding-whip, "I mind well how you swore you would wed the Queen of England, provided she brought you that rich land--aye, though she had as many wrinkles on her brow as the sea that surrounds her isle, or even the Infanta of Spain, old and wizened as a last year's pippin, if only she brought you in dower the Low Countries!"

"Ah, Margot," said Henry, smiling up at his wife, "and I thought it was your sole boast that you never cast up old stories! You always found new ones--or made them!"

"I did but tease," she said; "but indeed, for all my mother is so ill, this is no time for jesting. I have come to see that you get fair play among them all, my little friend Henry. Though you love me not greatly, and I did sometimes throw the table-equipage at your head, yet Margot of France and Navarre is not the woman to see her husband wronged--least of all by her own mother and that good, excellent, mignon-loving brother of mine, the King-t.i.tular of some small remnant of France."

CHAPTER XVII.

MATE AND CHECKMATE