"When the morning broke before us
Came the wayward Three astraying,
Chattering a trivial chorus—
Hoidens that at handball playing
(When they wearied of their playing),
Cast the Ball where now it whirls
Through the coil of clouds unstaying,
For the Fates are merry girls!"
And upon the next day de Lesnerac bore young Jehane from Pampeluna and presently to Saille, where old Jehan the Brave took her to wife. She lived as a queen, but she was a woman of infrequent laughter.
She had Duke Jehan's adoration, and his barons' obeisancy, and his villagers applauded her passage with stentorian shouts. She passed interminable days amid bright curious arrasses and trod listlessly over pavements strewn with flowers. Fiery-hearted jewels she had, and shimmering purple cloths, and much furniture adroitly carven, and many tapestries of Samarcand and Baldach upon which were embroidered, by brown fingers time turned long ago to Asian dust, innumerable asps and deer and phoenixes and dragons and all the motley inhabitants of air and of the thicket: but her memories, too, she had, and for a dreary while she got no comfort because of them. Then ambition quickened.
Young Antoine Riczi likewise nursed his wound as best he might; but about the end of the second year his uncle, the Vicomte de Montbrison—a gaunt man, with preoccupied and troubled eyes—had summoned Antoine into Lyonnois and, after appropriate salutation, had informed the lad that, as the Vicomte's heir, he was to marry the Demoiselle Gerberge de Nerac upon the ensuing Michaelmas.
"That I may not do," said Riczi; and since a chronicler that would tempt fortune should never stretch the fabric of his wares too thin, unlike Sir Hengist, I merely tell you these two dwelt together at Montbrison for a decade, and always the Vicomte swore at his nephew and predicted this or that disastrous destination so often as Antoine declined to marry the latest of his uncle's candidates—in whom the Vicomte was of an astonishing fertility.
In the year of grace 1401 came the belated news that Duke Jehan had closed his final day. "You will be leaving me!" the Vicomte growled; "now, in my decrepitude, you will be leaving me! It is abominable, and I shall in all likelihood disinherit you this very night."
"Yet it is necessary," Riczi answered; and, filled with no unhallowed joy, rode not long afterward for Vannes, in Brittany, where the Duchess-Regent held her court. Dame Jehane had within that fortnight put aside her mourning, and sat beneath a green canopy, gold-fringed and powdered with many golden stars, upon the night when he first came to her, and the rising saps of spring were exercising their august and formidable influence. She sat alone, by prearrangement, to one end of the high-ceiled and radiant apartment; midway in the hall her lords and divers ladies were gathered about a saltatrice and a jongleur, who diverted them to the mincing accompaniment of a lute; but Jehane sat apart from these, frail, and splendid with many jewels, and a little sad, and, as ever (he thought), was hers a beauty clarified of its mere substance—the beauty, say, of a moonbeam which penetrates full-grown leaves.
And Antoine Riczi found no power of speech within him at the first. Silent he stood before her for an obvious interval, still as an effigy, while meltingly the jongleur sang.
"Jehane!" said Antoine Riczi, "have you, then, forgotten, O Jehane?"
Nor had the resplendent woman moved at all. It was as though she were some tinted and lavishly adorned statue of barbaric heathenry, and he her postulant; and her large eyes appeared to judge an immeasurable path, beyond him. Now her lips had fluttered somewhat. "The Duchess of Brittany am I," she said, and in the phantom of a voice. "The Countess of Rougemont am I. The Lady of Nantes and of Guerrand! of Rais and of Toufon and Guerche! ... Jehane is dead."