If you do not wish to marry a man, you have only to say him nay. You are not a princess. I would to G.o.d I were not!"

"What is the plot against your brother?" said Claire, willing to turn her companion from black ideas; "perhaps I can help. At least, I have with me one who, though they name him 'fool,' is yet wiser than all the men I have met, excepting only my father."

"And they name this marvel--what?" demanded the Princess.

"Jean-aux-Choux--the Fool of the Three Henries."

Mistress Catherine clapped her hands almost girlishly, forgetting her accustomed dignity.

"I have seen him," she cried; "once he came to Nerac, where he pleased the Reine Margot greatly. She is a judge of fools!"

"Our Jean is no fool, really," said Claire, "but born of my nation, and a learned man, very zealous for the Faith."

"I know--I know," said the Princess; "I have heard D'Aubigne say of him, that folly made the best cloak for unsafe wisdom. As to the design against the King, it is this. Before the Duke of Guise comes to the Parliament, the Valois will first invite my brother to a conference--not here in Blois, but nearer his own lines--at Poitiers, perhaps, or at Loches. The Queen-Mother, the Medici woman, though sick and old, has gathered many of her maids-of-honour. She will strive to work upon my easy brother with fair words and fair faces, in the hope that, like Judas, he will betray his Master with a kiss!"

"I had not thought there could be in all the world such--women!" said Claire. "After all, our Scottish way is fairer--and that is foot to foot and blade to blade!"

"Even the Valois dagger in the back is better," said the Princess; "but this Italian woman is cunning, like all her fox-brood of Florentine money-lenders! How shall we foil her? It is useless speaking to my brother. He would only laugh, and bid me get to my sampler till he had found a goodman of my own for me to knit hose for!"

"Let me ask counsel of the Doctor of the Sorbonne who is with me,"

Claire urged; "he is very wise, and----"

"A Doctor of the Sorbonne!" cried Mistress Catherine--"impossible! Why, have they not cursed my brother, excommunicated him? They have even turned against their own King!"

"Ay, but," said Claire, now eager to do her friend justice, "_my_ Doctor they have excommunicated also, because he withstood them in full Senatus. If he went back to Paris just now, they would hang him in his gown from the windows of his own cla.s.s-room!"

So in this way Doctor Anatole of the Sorbonne entered into the heretic councils of the Bearnais. Indeed, his was the idea which came like a lightning-flash of illumination upon the councils of Claire and the Princess Catherine.

"What of La Reine Margot?" murmured the Professor, as if he had been speaking to himself; "is she of her husband's enemies?"

"Nay--but," began the Princess, "that would be pouring oil upon fire!"

"Where one fire has burned, there is little fuel for a second,"

suggested the Professor sententiously.

"It is not the highest wisdom," said the careful Princess, "I fear it would not bring a blessing."

"It is wisdom--if not the highest, my Lady Catherine," said the learned Doctor, "and if the matter succeeds--that, for your Cause, will be blessing enough!"

"Then our Cause is not yours?" Catherine demanded sharply of him. The Professor smiled.

"I am old, or you children think so. I have at least seen the vanity of persecuting any man for the thought that is in his heart. I was bred a Catholic, yet have been persecuted by my brethren for differing from them. But I agree that most honest folk of the realm are of your brother's party--the brave, the wise, the single of eye and heart. There never will be a king in France till the Bearnais reigns."

The Professor spoke with a certain antique freedom, and the Princess, moved with a sudden impulse, laid her hand on his arm.

"You are with us, then, if not of us?" she said.

"I am of this young lady's party," smiled the Professor, turning to Claire, who had been listening quietly. There was a look of great love in his eyes.

"Then I must needs make sure of her!" said the princess, putting her arm about Claire's waist. "Mistress Claire, vow that you will recruit for our army!"

"Long ago one made me vow that vow!" said Claire. "I am not likely to betray the Cause for which my father died!"

The face of the Princess Catherine grew grave. She was thinking of her own father. Anthony of Bourbon had not made so good an end.

"I vowed my vow night and morning at my mother's knee," she said. "Thus it was she bade me promise, in these very words--'As I hope for Christ's dear mercy, I will live and I will die in the Faith given to the fishermen of Galilee. I will cleave to it, despising all other. Every believer, rich or poor, shall be my brother or my sister--they all princes and princesses in Jesus Christ, I only a poor sinner hoping in His mercy!'"

The Professor bowed his head, crossed himself instinctively, and said, "Amen to so good a prayer! At the end, it is ever our mother's religion which is ours!"

CHAPTER XVI.

LA REINE MARGOT

The Bearnais was too wise to venture so near the wolf's den as Loches or Tours. The conference, therefore, took place in the little town of Argenton, perched along either side of the Creuse, a huddle of wooden-fronted houses cascading down to a clear blue river, every balcony filled with flowers and fluttering that day with banners.

Catherine, the Queen-Mother, was to travel from Chartres to represent her son King Henry III. of Valois, of Poland, and of France. Henry the Bearnais rode over from his entrenched camp at Beauregard with a retinue of Huguenot gentlemen, whose plain dark armour and weather-beaten features showed more acquaintance with camp than with court.

The Bearnais, as usual, proved himself gay, kindly, debonnaire. The Queen-Mother (also as usual) was amba.s.sador for her slothful son, conscious that her last summer was waning, mostly doing her travelling in a litter. Catherine de Medici never forgot for a moment that she was the centre round which forty years of intrigue had revolved. The wife of one king of France, the mother of three others, she played her part as in her youngest days. With death grappling at her heart, she surrounded herself with the flower of the youth and beauty of Italy and France, laughing with the gayest and ready with smile and gracious word for king or knave.

The deportment of the Bearnais was in strong contrast with that of his Huguenot suite. The King of Navarre made merry with all the world. He was ever the centre of a bright and changeful group of maids-of-honour to the Queen-Mother, with whom he jested and laughed freely, till Rosny whispered behind his hand to D'Aubigne, "If this goes on, we shall make but a poor treaty of it!"

And to him D'Aubigne replied grimly, "I will wager that my Lord Duke d'Epernon looks well to that."

"No," said Rosny shortly, "the old vixen is the sly renard."

Soon the festival ran its blithest. The Queen-Mother had withdrawn herself, possibly to repose, certainly to plot. With D'Epernon and the maids-of-honour the Bearnais remained, our Abbe John by his side, laughing with the merriest. Turenne and the other Huguenot veterans brooded sullenly in the background, seeing matters go badly, but not able to help it. Afterwards--well, they had a way all their own of speaking their minds. And the brave, good-humoured king would heed them too, in nowise growing angry with their freedoms. But, alas! by that time the steed would be stolen, the treaty signed, and the Medici and her maids-of-dishonour well on the way to Chartres.

The question was, whether or not Henry III. would throw himself wholly into the hands of the League at the forthcoming Parliament of Blois, or if, by a secret compact with the Bearnais, the gentlemen of the Huguenot Gascon provinces would attend to support the royal authority.

"I shall go, if our Bearnais commands me," said Turenne; "but I wager they will dye the Loire as red as ever they did the Seine on Bartholomew's Day--aye, and fringe the Chateau with us, as they did at Amboise. These Guises do not forget their ancient tricks."

"And right pretty you would look, my good Lord Turenne, your frosty beard wagging in the wind and a raven perched on your bald pate!"

"If I were in your shoes, I would not talk so freely either of beards or of baldness, D'Aubigne," growled Turenne. "I mind well when a certain clever lad had no more than the beard of a rabbit, which only comes out at night for fear of the dogs!"

"It is strange," said D'Aubigne, not in the least offended with his comrade, "that he who has no fear of the swords, should grow weak at the fluttering of a kerchief or before the artful carelessness of a neck-ribbon."

"Not strange at all," said Turenne; "is he not a man and a Bearnais?

Besides, being a Bourbon, he will pay those the best to whom he owes least. And we, who have loved him as we never loved father or mother, wife or child, will be sent back to the chimney-corner with our thumbs to suck!"

"Aye, because he is sure of us!" retorted D'Aubigne gloomily, unconsciously prefiguring a day when he should sit, an exile in a foreign town, eating his heart out, and writing a great book to the praise of an ungrateful, or perhaps forgetful master.

"The most curious thing of all," said Rosny, "is that we shall always love him--put down his fickleness to the account of others, cherish him as a deceived woman does the man from whom she cannot wholly tear her heart!"

"Yes," cried a new voice, as a red ha.s.sock of hair showed itself over the brown Capuchin's robe, "these things will we do--some of us in exile, all in sorrow, some in rags, and some in motley----"