“Madame and Queen!” the girl said, “you will not murder me!” “I am tempted!” the Queen answered. “O little slip of girlhood, I am tempted, for it is not reasonable you should possess everything that I have lost. Innocence you have, and youth, and untroubled eyes, and quiet dreams, and the fond graveness of a child, and Gregory Darrell’s love—” Now Ysabeau sat down upon the bed and caught up the girl’s face between two fevered hands. “Rosamund, this Darrell perceives within the moment, as I do, that the love he bears for you is but what he remembers of the love he bore a certain maid long dead. Eh, you might have been her sister, Rosamund, for you are very like her. And she, poor wench—why, I could see her now, I think, were my eyes not blurred, somehow, almost as though Queen Ysabeau might weep! But she was handsomer than you, since your complexion is not overclear, praise God!”
Woman against woman they were. “He has told me of his intercourse with you,” the girl said, and this was a lie flatfooted. “Nay, kill me if you will, madame, since you are the stronger, yet, with my dying breath, I protest that Gregory has loved no woman truly in all his life except me.”
The Queen laughed bitterly. “Do I not know men? He told you nothing. And to-night he hesitated, and to-morrow, at the lifting of my finger, he will supplicate. Since boyhood Gregory Darrell has loved me, O white, palsied innocence! and he is mine at a whistle. And in that time to come he will desert you, Rosamund—bidding farewell with a pleasing Canzon,—and they will give you to the gross Earl of Sarum, as they gave me to the painted man who was of late our King! and in that time to come you will know your body to be your husband’s makeshift when he lacks leisure to seek out other recreation! and in that time to come you will long for death, and presently your heart will be a flame within you, my Rosamund, an insatiable flame! and you will hate your God because He made you, and hate Satan because in some desperate hour he tricked you, and hate all men because, poor fools, they scurry to obey your whims! and chiefly you will hate yourself because you are so pitiable! and devastation only will you love in that strange time which is to come. It is adjacent, my Rosamund.”
The girl kept silence. She sat erect in the tumbled bed, her hands clasping her knees, and she appeared to deliberate what Dame Ysabeau had said. Plentiful brown hair fell about this Rosamund’s face, which was white and shrewd. “A part of what you say, madame, I understand. I know that Gregory Darrell loves me, yet I have long ago acknowledged he loves me as one pets a child, or, let us say, a spaniel which reveres and amuses one. I lack his wit, you comprehend, and so he never speaks to me all that he thinks. Yet a part of it he tells me, and he loves me, and with this I am content. Assuredly, if they give me to Sarum I shall hate Sarum even more than I detest him now. And then, I think, Heaven help me! that I would not greatly grieve—Oh, you are all evil!” Rosamund said; “and you thrust into my mind thoughts which I may not understand!”
“You will comprehend them,” the Queen said, “when you know yourself a chattel, bought and paid for.”
The Queen laughed. She rose, and her hands strained toward heaven. “You are omnipotent, yet have You let me become that into which I am transmuted,” she said, very low.
She began to speak as though a statue spoke through lips that seemed motionless. “Men have long urged me, Rosamund, to a deed which by one stroke would make me mistress of these islands. To-day I looked on Gregory Darrell, and knew that I was wise in love—and I had but to crush a lewd soft worm to come to him. Eh, and I was tempted—!”
The girl said: “Let us grant that Gregory loves you very greatly, and me just when his leisure serves. You may offer him a cushioned infamy, a colorful and brief delirium, and afterward demolishment of soul and body; I offer him contentment and a level life, made up of small events, it may be, and lacking both in abysses and in skyey heights. Yet is love a flame wherein the lover’s soul must be purified; it is a flame which assays high queens just as it does their servants: and thus, madame, to judge between us I dare summon you.” “Child, child!” the Queen said, tenderly, and with a smile, “you are brave; and in your fashion you are wise; yet you will never comprehend. But once I was in heart and soul and body all that you are to-day; and now I am Queen Ysabeau—Did you in truth hear nothing, Rosamund?”
“Why, nothing save the wind.”
“Strange!” said the Queen; “since all the while that I have talked with you I have been seriously annoyed by shrieks and imprecations! But I, too, grow cowardly, it may be—Nay, I know,” she said, and in a resonant voice, “that by this I am mistress of broad England, until my son—my own son, born of my body, and in glad anguish, Rosamund—knows me for what I am. For I have heard—Coward! O beautiful sleek coward!” the Queen said; “I would have died without lamentation and I was but your plaything!”