Philip Augustus; or, The Brothers in Arms

by G. P. R. James

"Oh, that alters the case," cried count Julian, not sorry in his heart to be relieved from the painful necessity of maintaining his resolution at the risk of his life. "If you, sire, in your bounty, choose to make him my equal in wealth--William de la Roche Guyon being dead, and I being his prisoner,--all the conditions will be fulfilled, and he shall have my daughter. What I have said is as firm as fate."

"Well then," replied the king, glancing his eye towards the barons, who stood round, smiling at the old knight's mania, "we will not only make De Coucy your equal in wealth, sir Julian, but far your superior. A court of peers, lords!--a court of peers! Let my peers stand around."

Such of the spectators as were by right peers of France, advanced a step from the other persons of the circle, and the king proceeded.

"Count Julian of the Mount!" said he in a stern voice, "We, Philip the Second, king of France, with the aid and counsel of our peers, do pronounce you guilty of leze majesté; and do declare all your feofs, lands, and lordships, wealth, furniture, and jewels, forfeited and confiscate to the Crown of France, to use and dispose thereof, as shall be deemed expedient!"

"A judgment! a judgment!" cried the peers while the countenance of poor Count Julian fell a thousand degrees. "Now, sir," continued the king, "without a foot of land in Europe, and without a besant to bless yourself,--William de la Roche Guyon being dead, and you that good knight's prisoner,--we call upon you to fulfil your word to him, and consent to his marriage with your daughter, Isadore, on pain of being held false and mansworn, as well as stubborn and mulish."

"What I have said is said!" replied count Julian, putting forth his wonted proposition in a very crest-fallen tone. "My resolutions are always as firm as the centre.--De Coucy, I promised her to you, under such circumstances. They are fulfilled, and she is your's--though it is hard that I must marry my daughter to a beggar.

"Beggar, sir!" cried the king, his brow darkening again; "let me tell you, that though rich enough in worth and valour alone to match the daughter of a prince, sir Guy de Coucy, as he stands there, possesses double in lands and lordships what you have ever possessed. De Coucy, it is true: the lands and lordships of Tankerville, and all those fair domains upon the banks of the broad Rhone, possessed by the Count of Tankerville, who wedded your father's sister, are now yours, by a charter in our royal treasury, made under his hand, some ten years ago, and warranted by our consent. We have ourself, pressed by the necessities of the state, taken for the last year the revenue of those lands, purposing to make restitution--to you, if it should appear that the count was really dead--to him, if he returned from Palestine, whither he was said to have gone. But we find ourself justified by an unexpected event. We acted in this by the counsel of the wise and excellent hermit of Vincennes, now a saint in God's paradise: and we have just learned, that the count de Tankerville himself it was who died ten days ago in the person of that same Bernard, the anchorite of Vincennes. He had lived there in that holy disguise for many years; and it was so long since we had seen him, the change in his person, by fasts and macerations, was so great, and his appearance as a hermit altogether so different from what it was as the splendid Count of Tankerville, that, though not liable to forget the faces we have seen, in his case we were totally deceived. On his death-bed he wrote to us this letter, full of pious instruction and good counsel. At the same time, he makes us the unnecessary prayer of loving and protecting you. You, therefore, wed the proud old man's daughter, far his superior in every gift of fortune; and, as some punishment to his vanity and stubbornness, we endow you and your heirs with all those feofs that he has justly forfeited, leaving you to make what provision for his age you yourself may think fit."

Count Julian hung his head; but here let it be said, that he had never any cause to regret that the king had cast his fortunes into such a hand; for De Coucy was one of those whose hearts, nobly formed, expand rather than contract under the sunshine of fortune.

CHAPTER XV.

Six days had elapsed after the scenes we have described in our two last chapters, and Philip Augustus had taken all measures to secure the fruits of his victory, when, at the head of a gay party of knights and attendants, no longer burdened with warlike armour, but garmented in the light and easy robes of peace, the conquering monarch spurred along the banks of the Oise, anxious to make Agnes a sharer of his joy, and to tell her that, though the crafty policy of Rome still prolonged the question of his divorce, he was now armed with power to dictate what terms he pleased, and to bring her enemies to her feet.