Katharine had gripped her by the shoulder. "The King of England—a tall, fair man? with big teeth? a tiny wen upon his neck—here—and with his left cheek scarred? with blue eyes, very bright, bright as tapers?" She poured out her questions in a torrent, and awaited the answer, seeming not to breathe at all.
"I believe so," the Queen said.
"O God!" said Katharine.
"Ay, our only hope now. And may God show him no more mercy than he has shown us!" the good lady desired, with fervor. "The hog, having won our Normandy, is now advancing on Paris itself. He repudiated the Aragonish alliance last August; and until last August he was content with Normandy, they tell us, but now he swears to win all France. The man is a madman, and Scythian Tamburlaine was more lenient. And I do not believe that in all France there is a cook who understands his business." She went away whimpering and proceeded to get tipsy.
The Princess remained quite still, as Dame Isabeau had left her; you may see a hare crouch so at sight of the hounds. Finally the girl spoke aloud. "Until last August!" Katharine said. "Until last August! Poised kingdoms topple on the brink of ruin, now that you bid me come to you again. And I bade him come!" Presently she went into her oratory and began to pray.
In the midst of her invocation she wailed: "Fool, fool! How could I have thought him less than a king!"
You are to imagine her breast thus adrum with remorse and hatred of herself, what time town by town fell before the invader like card-houses. Every rumor of defeat—and they were many—was her arraignment; impotently she cowered at God's knees, knowing herself a murderess, whose infamy was still afoot, outpacing her prayers, whose victims were battalions. Tarpeia and Pisidice and Rahab were her sisters; she hungered in her abasement for Judith's nobler guilt.
In May he came to her. A truce was patched up and French and English met amicably in a great plain near Meulan. A square space was staked out and on three sides boarded in, the fourth side being the river Seine. This enclosure the Queen-Regent, Jehan of Burgundy, and Katharine entered from the French side. Simultaneously the English King appeared, accompanied by his brothers the Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester, and followed by the Earl of Warwick. Katharine raised her eyes with I know not what lingering hope; it was he, a young Zeus now, triumphant and uneager. In his helmet in place of a plume he wore a fox-brush spangled with jewels.
These six entered the tent pitched for the conference—the hanging of blue velvet embroidered with fleurs-de-lys of gold blurred before the girl's eyes, and till death the device sickened her—and there the Earl of Warwick embarked upon a sea of rhetoric. His French was indifferent, his periods interminable, and his demands exorbitant; in brief, the King of England wanted Katharine and most of France, with a reversion at the French King's death of the entire kingdom. Meanwhile Sire Henry sat in silence, his eyes glowing.
"I have come," he said, under cover of Warwick's oratory—"I have come again, my lady."