Katharine looked down into his countenance, for to his speech he had fitted action. Suddenly and for the first time she understood that he believed France his by a divine favor and Heaven's peculiar intervention. He thought himself God's factor, not His rebel. He was rather stupid, this huge handsome boy; and realizing it, her hand went to his shoulder, half maternally.
"It is nobly done, sire. I know that you must wed me to uphold your claim to France, for otherwise in the world's eyes you are shamed. You sell, and I with my body purchase, peace for France. There is no need of a lover's posture when hucksters meet."
"So changed!" he said, and he was silent for an interval, still kneeling. Then he began: "You force me to point out that I no longer need a pretext to hold France. France lies before me prostrate. By God's singular grace I reign in this fair kingdom, mine by right of conquest, and an alliance with the house of Valois will neither make nor mar me." She was unable to deny this, unpalatable as was the fact. "But I love you, and therefore as man wooes woman I sue to you. Do you not understand that there can be between us no question of expediency? Katharine, in Chartres orchard there met a man and a maid we know of; now in Troyes they meet again—not as princess and king, but as man and maid, the wooer and the wooed. Once I touched your heart, I think. And now in all the world there is one thing I covet—to gain for the poor king some portion of that love you would have squandered on the harper." His hand closed upon hers.
At his touch the girl's composure vanished. "My lord, you woo too timidly for one who comes with many loud-voiced advocates. I am daughter to the King of France, and next to my soul's salvation I esteem France's welfare. Can I, then, fail to love the King of England, who chooses the blood of my countrymen as a judicious garb to come a-wooing in? How else, since you have ravaged my native land, since you have besmirched the name I bear, since yonder afield every wound in my dead and yet unburied Frenchmen is to me a mouth which shrieks your infamy?"
He rose. "And yet, for all that, you love me."
She could not find words with which to answer him at the first effort, but presently she said, quite simply, "To see you lying in your coffin I would willingly give up my hope of heaven, for heaven can afford no sight more desirable."
"You loved Alain."
"I loved the husk of a man. You can never comprehend how utterly I loved him."
Now I have to record of this great king a piece of magnanimity which bears the impress of more ancient times. "That you love me is indisputable," he said, "and this I propose to demonstrate. You will observe that I am quite unarmed save for this dagger, which I now throw out of the window—" with the word it jangled in the courtyard below. "I am in Troyes alone among some thousand Frenchmen, any one of whom would willingly give his life for the privilege of taking mine. You have but to sound the gong beside you, and in a few moments I shall be a dead man. Strike, then! for with me dies the English power in France. Strike, Katharine! if you see in me but the King of England."
She was rigid; and his heart leapt when he saw it was because of terror.