"It is true, indeed, I did, sire!" replied the archbishop. "But----"
"But me no buts! sir," replied the king. "I will none of them! You did pronounce the divorce. I have it under your hand, and that is enough.--And you, bishop of Paris? You of Soissons?--and you?--and you?--and you?" he continued, turning to the prelates, one after the other.
No one could deny the sentence of divorce which they had pronounced some years before, and Philip proceeded.
"Well then, by the Lord Almighty, I swear, that you must, and shall, support your sentence! If you were wrong, you shall bear the blame and the punishment; not I--no, nor one I love better than myself. Let that bishop in France, who did not pronounce sentence of divorce between Ingerburge and myself, enforce the interdict within his diocese if he will; but whosoever shall do so, bishop or abbot, whose hand is to that sentence, I will cast him forth from his diocese, and his feofs, and his lands. I will strip him of his wealth and his rank, and banish him from my realms for ever. Let it be marked and remembered! for, as I am a crowned king, I will keep my word to the letter!"
Philip spoke in that firm, deep, determined tone, which gave no reason to hope or expect that any thing on earth would make him change his purpose. And after he had done, he laid his hand still clasped upon the table, the rigid sinews seeming with difficulty to relax in the least from the tension into which the vehement excitement of his mind had drawn them. He glanced his eyes, too, from countenance to countenance of the bishops, with a look that seemed to dare them to show one sign of resistance.
But all their eyes were cast down in bitter silence, each well knowing that the fault, however it arose, lay amongst themselves; and Philip, after a moment's pause, rose from the table, exclaiming--"Lords and knights, the council is over;" and, followed by Arthur and the principal part of the barons, he left the hall.
CHAPTER III.
I love not to see any one depart, for the sad magic of fancy is sure to conjure up a host of phantasm danger, and sorrows, to fill the space between the instant present, and that far distant one, when the same form shall again stand before us. We are sure, too, that Time must work his bitter commission,--that he must impair, or cast down, or destroy; and I know hardly any pitch of human misery so great, that when we see a beloved form leave us, we may justly hope, on our next meeting, to find all circumstances of a brighter aspect. Make up our accounts how we will with Fate, Time is always in the balance against us.
The last sight of Isadore of the Mount called up in the breast of Guy de Coucy as sombre a train of thoughts as ever invaded the heart of man since the fall. When might he see her again? he asked himself, and what might intervene? Would she not forget him? would she indeed be his till death? Would not the slow flowing of hour after hour, with all the obliterating circumstance of time's current, efface his image from her memory? and even if her heart still retained the traces that young affection had there imprinted, what but misery would it bring to both? He had spoken hopes to her ear, that he did not feel himself; and, when he looked up at the large, dark mass of towers and battlements before him, as he turned back from the barbican, it struck his eye with the cold, dead, unhopeful aspect of a tomb. He entered it, however, and, proceeding direct to the inner court, approached the foot of the watch-tower, the small, narrow door of which opened there, without communicating with any other building.
De Coucy paced up its manifold steps, and, stationing himself at the opening, fixed his eyes upon the skirt of the forest, where the road emerged, waiting for one more glance of her he loved, though the distance made the sight but a mere slave of Fancy. In about a quarter of an hour, the train of Sir Julian appeared, issuing from the forest; and De Coucy gazed, and gazed, upon the woman's form that rode beside the chief of the horsemen, till the whole became an indistinct mass of dark spots, as they wound onward towards Vernon.