CHAPTER I.
The Count d'Auvergne left Agnes de Meranie, with his mind stretched to the highest point of excitement. For months and months he had been dwelling on the thoughts of that one moment. In the midst of other scenes and circumstances, his soul had been abstracted and busy with the anticipations of that hour. His whole powers and energies had been wrought up to bear it firmly and calmly. And now he had accomplished his task. It was done! he had seen, he had met the object of his young, deep, all-absorbing affection--the object of all his regrets, the undesigning cause of all his misery--he had seen her the wife of another--he had seen her in sorrow and distress--he had helped even to tear her heart, by pressing on her a separation from the man she loved. He had marked every touch of her strong affection for Philip. He had felt every cold and chilling word she had addressed to himself, and yet he had borne it calmly--firmly, at least. Like the Indian savage, he had endured the fire and the torture without a sign of suffering; but still the fire and the torture had done their work upon his corporeal frame.
The words in the letter, presented to him by De Coucy's page, swam dizzily before his eyes, without conveying their defined meaning to his senses. He saw that it was some new pang--he saw that it was some fresh misfortune; but reason reeled upon her throne, and he could not sufficiently fix his mind to gather what was the precise nature of the tidings he received. He bade the page follow, however, in a hurried and confused tone, and passed rapidly on through the castle hall into the town, and to the lodging where he had left his retainers. His horse stood saddled in the court, and all seemed prepared for departure; and without well knowing why, but with the mere indistinct desire of flying from the sorrows that pursued him, he mounted his horse and turned him to the road.
"Shall we follow, my lord?" demanded his squire, running at his bridle as he rode forward.
"Ha?--Yes!--Follow!" replied the count, and galloped on with the letter the page had given him still in his hand. He rode on with the swiftness of the wind; whenever his horse made the least pause, urging him forward with the spur, as if a moment's cessation of his rapid pace gave him up again to the dark and gloomy thoughts that pursued him like fierce and winged fiends.
Still, his long habit of commanding his feelings struggled for its ancient power. He felt that his mind was overcome, and he strove to raise it up again. He endeavoured to recall his stoical firmness; he tried to reason upon his own weakness; but the object to which he had bent all his thoughts was accomplished--the motive for his endurance was over, his firmness was gone, and reason hovered vaguely round each subject that was presented to her, without grasping it decidedly. During the last two years, he had raised up, as it were, a strong embankment in his own mind against the flood of his sorrows, he had fortified it with every power of a firm and vigorous intellect; but the torrent had swelled by degrees, till its force became resistless; and now it bore away every barrier, with destruction the more fearful from the opposition it had encountered.
He rode on. The day was burning and oppressive. The hot mid-day sun struck scorching on its brow, and his eyes became wild and bloodshot; but still he rode on, as if he felt in no degree anything that passed without the dark chamber of his own bosom. De Coucy's page had hastened for his horse when he found the count about to depart, and had galloped after. Seeing at length that his thoughts were occupied in other matters, and that he held the letter he had received, crushed together in his hand, Ermold De Marcy made bold to spur forward his weary beast, and approaching D'Auvergne to say, "Is there any hope, my lord, of your being able, in this matter, to relieve sir Guy?"
"Sir Guy!" cried D'Auvergne, suddenly checking his horse in full career, and gazing in the page's face with an anxious, thoughtful look, as if he strove with effort to recollect his ideas, and fix them on the subject brought before him--"Sir Guy! What of sir Guy! Who is sir Guy?"
"Do you not remember me, beau sire?" asked the page, astonished at the wild, unsettled look of a man whose fixed, stern, immoveable coldness of expression had often been a matter of wonder to the light, volatile youth, whose own thoughts and feelings changed full fifty times a day--"do you know me, beau sire?" he asked. "I am Ermold de Marcy, the page of sir Guy de Coucy, who now lies in English bonds, as that letter informs you."
"De Coucy in bonds!" cried the count, starting. Then, after gazing for a moment or two in the page's face, he added slowly, "Ay!--Yes!--True! Some one told me of it before, methinks. In bonds! I will march and deliver him!"
"Alas! my lord!" answered the page, "all the powers in France would not deliver him by force. He is in the hands of the English army, full fifty thousand strong; and it is only by paying his ransom, I may hope to see my noble lord freed."
"You shall pay his ransom," replied D'Auvergne--"yes, you shall pay his ransom. How much does the soldan ask?"
"'Tis the English king who holds him, my lord," answered the page; "not the soldan. We are in France, beau sire, not in Palestine."
"Not in Palestine, fool!" cried the count, frowning as if the page sought to mock him. "Feel I not the hot sun burning on my brow? And yet," he continued, looking round, "I believe thou art right.--But the ransom, what does the soldan require.--De Coucy!--the noble De Coucy!--to think of his ever being a prisoner to those infidel Saracens! What does the miscreant soldan demand?"
Surprised and shocked at what he beheld, the page paused for a moment till D'Auvergne repeated his question. Then, however, seeing that it would be a vain attempt to change the current of the count's thoughts, he replied, "I do not know, my lord, precisely; but I should suppose they would never free a knight of his renown under a ransom of ten thousand crowns."
"Ten thousand crowns!" cried D'Auvergne, his mind getting more and more astray every moment, under the effort and excitement of conversation, "thou shalt have double! Then with the remainder thou shalt buy thee a flock of sheep, and find out some valley in the mountains, where nor man nor woman ever trod; there shalt thou hide thee with thy sheep, till age whitens thee, and death strikes thee. Thou shalt! thou shalt, I tell thee, that the records of the world may say there was once a man who lived and died in peace. But come to Jerusalem! Come! and thou shalt have the gold. For me, I am bound by a holy vow to do penance in solitude amongst the green woods of Mount Libanus. Follow quick! follow! and thou shalt have the gold."
So saying, the count rode on, and Ermold de Marcy followed with his train; speaking earnestly, though not very sagely perhaps, with D'Auvergne's chief squire, concerning the sudden fit of insanity that had seized his lord.
Notwithstanding the strange turn which the mind of count Thibalt had taken, he mistook not his road to Paris, nor did he once err in the various turnings of the city. On the contrary, with a faculty sometimes possessed by madness, he seemed to proceed with more readiness than usual, following all the shortest and most direct streets towards the house of the canons of St. Berthe's; where, on his arrival, he went straight to the apartments which had been assigned to him by the good fathers; and calling for his treasurer, whom he had left behind on his visit to Compiègne, he demanded the key of his treasure.
The case which contained the sums he had destined to defray the expenses of his return to the Holy Land was soon laid open before him. For a moment or two, he gazed from it to the page, with one of the painful, wandering looks of a mind partially gone, striving vainly to collect all its remaining energies, and concentrate them on some matter of deep and vital import.
"Take it!" cried he at length--"take what is necessary.--Tell thy lord," he added with great effort, as if the linking each idea to the other was a work of bitter labour--"tell thy lord, I would come--I would strive to free him myself--I would do much.--But, but--Auvergne is not what he was. My heart is the same--but my brain, youth! my brain!"--and he carried his hand to his brow, wandering over it with his fingers, while his eyes fixed gradually on vacancy; and he continued muttering broken sentences to himself, such as, "This morning!--ay! this morning.--The hot sun of the desert.--And Agnes--yes, Agnes--her cold words." Then suddenly catching the eye of the page fixed upon his countenance, he pointed to the gold, exclaiming angrily, "Take it! Why dost thou not take it?--Get thee gone with it to thy lord. Dost thou stay to mock. Take the gold and get thee gone, I say!"
The page, without further bidding, kneeled beside the case, and took thence as many bags of gold as he thought necessary for the purpose of ransoming De Coucy; placing them one by one in his pouch. When he had done, he paused a moment for licence to depart, which was soon given in an angry "Get thee gone!" and, descending the stairs as quickly as possible, he only stayed with the servants of the count d'Auvergne, to bid them have a care of their lord; for that, to a certainty, he was as mad as a marabout; after which, he mounted his horse and rode away.
Ermold de Marcy first turned the head of his weary beast towards the east; but no sooner was he out of Paris, than he changed that direction for one nearly west; and, without exactly retreading his steps, he took quite an opposite path to that which he first intended. This retrograde movement proceeded from no concerted purpose, but was, in reality and truth, a complete change of intention; for, to say sooth, the poor page was not a little embarrassed with the business he had in hand.
"Here," thought he, "I have about me twelve thousand crowns in gold. The roads are full of cotereaux, routiers, and robbers of all descriptions; my horse is so weary, that if I am attacked, I must e'en stand still and be plundered. Night is coming on fast; and I have nowhere to lie--and what to do I know not. If I carry all this gold about with me too, till I find my master, I shall lose it, by Saint Jude! By the holy rood! I will go to the old hermit of Vincennes. He cheated me, and proved himself a true man, after all, about that ring. So I will leave the gold under his charge till I have learned more of my lord, and to whom he has surrendered himself."
This resolution was formed just as he got out of the gate of the city; and skirting round on the outside, he took his way towards the tower of Vincennes; after passing which, he soon reached the dwelling of the hermit in the forest of Saint Mandé, with but little difficulty in finding his road. The old man received him with somewhat more urbanity than usual, and heard his tale in calm silence. Ermold related circumstantially all that had occurred to him since he followed his lord from Paris, looking upon the hermit in the light of a confessor, and relieving his bosom of the load that had weighed upon it ever since his truant escapade to the good town of La Flêche. He told, too, all the efforts he had made to avert the unhappy effects of Jodelle's treachery; and pourtrayed, with an air of bitter mortification, that interested the old man in his favour, the degree of despair he had felt when, on mounting the hill above Mirebeau, he saw the English army in possession of the city and country round about.
"And saw you no one who had escaped?" demanded the anchorite, with some earnestness.
"No one," replied the page, "but our own mad juggler. Gallon the fool, who had got away, though sore wounded with an arrow. From him, however, I learned nothing, for he was so cursed with the pain of his wound, that he would speak no sense; and when I questioned him sharply, he shouted like a devil, as is his wont, and ran off as hard as he could. I then rode forward to Tours," continued the page, "and for a crown, got a holy clerk to write me a letter to the count d'Auvergne, in case I could not have speech of him, telling him of my lord's case, and praying his help; and never did I doubt that the noble count would instantly go down to Tours himself, to ransom his brother in arms; but, God help us all! I found his wit a cup-full weaker than when I left him."
"How so?" demanded the hermit: "what wouldst thou say, boy? Why did not the good count go? Speak more plainly."
"Alas! good father, he is as mad as the moon!" replied the page; "something that happened this morning at Compiègne, his followers say, must have been the cause, for yesterday he was as wise and calm as ever. To-day, too, when he rose, he was gloomy and stern, they tell me, as he always is; but when he came back from the château, he was as mad as a Saracen santon."
The hermit clasped his hands, and knit his brows; and after thinking deeply for several minutes, he said, apparently more as a corollary to his own thoughts, than to the pages words, "Thus we should learn, never for any object, though it may seem good, to quit the broad and open path of truth. That word policy has caused, and will cause, more misery in the world, than all the plagues of Egypt. I abjure it, and henceforth will never yield a word's approval to aught that has even a touch of falsehood, be it but in seeming. Never deceive any one, youth! even to their own good, as thou mayest think; for thou knowest not what little circumstance may intervene, unknown to thee, and, scattering all the good designs of the matter to the wind, may leave the deceit alone, to act deep and mischievously. A grain of sand in the tubes of a clepsydra will derange all its functions, and throw its manifold and complicated movements wrong. How much more likely, then, that some little unforeseen accident in the intricate workings of this great earthly machine should prove our best calculations false, and whip us with our own policy! Oh! never, never deceive! Deceit in itself is evil, and intention can never make it good."
Though, like most people, who, when they discover an error in their own conduct, take care to sermonise some other person thereupon, the hermit addressed his discourse to Ermold de Marcy, his homily was in fact a reproach to himself; for, in the page's account of the count d'Auvergne's madness, he read, though mistakenly, the effects of the scheme he had sanctioned, as we have seen, for freeing the country from the interdict. For a moment or two, he still continued to think over what he had heard, inflicting on himself that sort of bitter castigation, which his stern mind was as much accustomed to address to himself as to others. He then turned again to the subject of De Coucy. "'Tis an unhappy accident, thou hast told me there, youth," he said, coming suddenly back, upon the subject, without any immediate connexion;--"'tis an unhappy accident,--both your lord being taken, and his brother in arms being unable to aid him; but we must see for means to gain his ransom, and, God willing! it shall be done."
"'Tis done already, father hermit," replied the page: "the noble count had not lost his love for sir Guy, though he had lost his own senses; and albeit he was in no state to manage the matter of the ransom himself, he gave me sufficient money. It lies there in that pouch, twelve thousand crowns, all in gold. Now, I dare not be riding about with such a sum; and so I have brought it to you to keep safe, while I go back and find out the earl of Salisbury, who, I have heard say, was an old companion of my master's in the Holy Land, and will tell me, for his love, into whose hands he has fallen. I will now lead my beast back to the village, by Vincennes, for carry me he can no farther; and, though I could stretch me here in your hut for the night, no stable is near, and my poor bay would be eaten by the wolves before daybreak. To-morrow, with the first ray of the morning, I set out to seek my lord, and find means of freeing him. 'Tis a long journey, and may be a long treaty. Give me, therefore, two months to accomplish it all; and if I come not then, think that the routiers have devoured me; and send, I pray thee, good father, to king Philip, and bid him see my lord ransomed."
"Stay, boy," said the hermit: "you must not go alone. To-morrow morning, speed to Paris; seek sir François de Roussy, Mountjoy king-at-arms; tell him I sent thee. Show him thy lord's case, and bid him give thee a herald to accompany thee on thine errand. Thus shall thou do it far quicker, and far more surely; and the herald's guerdon shall not be wanting when he returns."
The page eagerly caught at the idea, and the farther arrangements between himself and the hermit were easily made. After having yielded a few of its gold pieces, to defray the expenses of the page's journey, the pouch, with the money it contained, was safely deposited under the moss and straw of the hermit's bed; which place, as we have seen, had already, on one occasion, served a similar purpose. Ermold de Marcy then received the old man's blessing, and bidding him adieu, left him to contemplate more at leisure the news he had so suddenly brought him.
It was then, when freed from the immediate subject of De Coucy's imprisonment, which the presence of the page had of course rendered the first subject of consideration, that the mind of the hermit turned to the unhappy fate of Arthur Plantagenet. He paused for several moments, with his arms folded on his chest, drawing manifold sad deductions from that unhappy prince's claim to the crown of England, joined with his present situation, and his uncle's established cruelty. There were hopes that the English barons might interfere, or that shame and fear might lead John to hold his unscrupulous hand. But yet the chance was a frail one; and as the old man contemplated the reverse, he gave an involuntary shudder, and sinking on his knees before the crucifix, he addressed a silent prayer to Heaven, for protection to the unfortunate beings exposed to the cruel ambition of the weak and remorseless tyrant.