Читать книгу The Romantic Prince - Рафаэль Сабатини - Страница 4

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Anthony of Egmont contemplated the world with disapproval. He had reached the conclusion that it was no place for a gentleman.

This happened in the year of grace 1467, amid the opulent surroundings of the Burgundian Court, when and where there were abundant grounds for his harsh assumption.

In common with his cousin, friend, and brother-in-arms, Charles of Burgundy, it was Anthony’s bad or good fortune—who shall say which?—to have been born in the expiring days of the age of chivalry. Almost from birth he had been imbued with the lofty ideals of that age, and in early years he had taken for a pattern upon which to mould himself that very perfect and peerless knight, the Sieur Jacques de Lalaing, who was almost the last to uphold, in all its romantic effulgence, the chivalrous tradition. And Lalaing, who might have lived for deeds of high endeavour, had been stricken down and slain at the early age of thirty-three at Gaveren, in a battle whose sordid purpose was the imposition of a salt-tax upon the oppressed burghers of Ghent.

As a boy of ten, when newly appointed page to Philip the Good, Anthony had witnessed in the Feast of the Pheasant the last princely endeavour to fan the cooling embers of chivalry into flame and to set on foot a crusade that should rid Christendom of the menace of the encroaching Turk, to whom Constantinople had lately fallen. He had seen that effort, sustained for a full year, languish and finally perish without a single knightly blow being struck, and there, it seemed to him, the spirit of chivalry had finally and utterly expired.

To be sure there were still joustings to be witnessed; but these were no longer of more significance than tennis or hawking or any other of the exercises in which nobility sought amusement. The language of chivalry still continued to be employed; but the meaning of its terms had changed. Great orders of chivalry still existed, of which perhaps the greatest was the Golden Fleece, which the late Duke Philip had founded, and of which Anthony himself wore the coveted collar. But when that same collar was hung about the neck of the twenty days’ old Charles, a blow was struck at the very foundations of an institution which demanded that knighthood should be the acquisition of personal merit alone, to be attained only after a long and arduous physical and spiritual novitiate.

Anthony, with a considerable armed following out of Guelders, had been one of the allies who had lately fought on the Burgundian side in the War of the Public Weal, a war undertaken on the knightly grounds of abolishing extortionate taxation and setting free from its intolerable burden the ‘poor oppressed people of France.’ Because deceived by this pretext, Anthony’s disillusion was the greater when the true aims of that war of rapacity became apparent. Burgundy’s sole interest in that rebellion of the French vassals against their King was the retention of Picardy and the cities of the Somme, which the crafty Louis was scheming to restore to the Crown of France, to which they rightly belonged.

Anthony had fought at Montlhéry beside his cousin Charles, and he accounted it an engagement reflecting little military and no knightly credit upon either side. At Charles’s elbow he had been a witness of the protracted intrigues that followed; of the covetousness, discontent, and treachery among the allies. He had attended the parleys which at last wrung extortionate terms from the rascally little king of France, whom in a world of knaves he had been almost tempted to admire as the most perfect of his kind. He had revolted at the greed of the allies in the division of the spoils, and their complete oblivion in the hour of triumph of the ‘poor oppressed people’ on whose behalf the war had been undertaken.

Anon he had witnessed the Burgundian ruthlessness at Liège and the drawing up of the Piteous Peace, which had brought that hitherto independent little state virtually within the vast embrace of the Burgundian Duchy. And he had observed the horrors and abominations of the vengeance wreaked upon Dinant for its resistance, so that men said of it, as of old men had said of Carthage, Cy fust Dinant. He had returned from that campaign retaining few indeed of those bright illusions which throughout youth he had been amassing. Instead of the imagined high-souled pageantry of war, he had beheld war’s stark and piteous realities. The gallant joust he had conceived it had resolved itself into sordid, bestial carnage. And since then, his vision of other things, rendered keener and truer by that one terrible glimpse of truth, he had viewed the court and the great figures that composed it with a new perception of their real quality. Under a noble, glittering exterior which had hitherto deceived him, he now discovered mean faithlessness, vulgar mendacity, and sordid avarice. Yet despite all this, because of something within his own poetic spirit, he still clung to one illusion which lent a glamour to the world about him until the Lady Catharine of Bourbon robbed him of that, and brought him abruptly to the conclusion we have discovered.

Contemporary chroniclers have done rather less than justice to this cultured, sensitive gentleman, anachronistically chivalrous in his Burgundian setting. Mention of him by those writers is so scanty as to be almost contemptuous, and little would be known of him at all but for the comparatively obscure Chronique Scandaleuse left by André de La Marche, brother of the more famous chronicler Olivier de La Marche, who was steward of the late Duke’s household. Neither the latter nor the equally famous Comines makes any mention whatever of this Count Anthony, leaving us to suppose that his younger brother, the infamous Adolph, was the old Duke Arnold of Guelders’s only son.

Better perhaps this silence than the recklessly slanderous statement, penned, no doubt, out of sycophancy to Charles of Burgundy, with which Adrian de Budt dismisses the legitimate heir to the throne of Guelders.

‘The extinction of the House of Guelders,’ he writes, ‘is no matter for honest men’s regret. God will not long suffer that the welfare of a people should lie in the hands of princes such as the weak and vacillating Duke Arnold or his wicked and almost parricidal son Adolph. As for that other son, known in the old Duke’s lifetime as Count Anthony of Guelders, and since then happily vanished, no man knows how or whither, this prince combined, with the weakness of his father and the rascality of his brother, a hypocrisy so consummate that in early life he deceived the world, and won the countenance and affection of even such shrewd judges of men as our good Duke Philip and his noble son, that thunderbolt of war, that mightiest Prince of the Occident, Duke Charles. This Lord Anthony simulated a lofty idealism amounting to little less than saintliness, and for this was accounted an ornament to that greatest and most coveted of all orders of chivalry, the Golden Fleece, and was foremost in the councils of its chapter. Because of his rich endowment of mind and person, but more particularly because he pretended to observe a chastity such as is prescribed for, but seldom discovered in our clergy, he endeared himself to Charles of Burgundy, who in these matters practised an austerity oddly in contrast with the more joyous habits of his sire. Yet it is an odd irony of Fate’s that by the lack of the very virtue to which he made the greatest pretence was this false Galahad undone. Inconstancy in an honourable attachment and an adulterous adventure in Zealand were between them the causes of his extinction.’

Never was truth more untruly told.

As to his having vanished, ‘no man knows how or whither,’ one man at least there was who knew the full tale of it, and who has left that chronicle from which we may now reconstruct the event.

Already at the time of the War of Public Weal, Charles of Burgundy, who, owing to his father’s failing health, had assumed the regency of the vast Burgundian dominions, was concerned with all those measures of statecraft by which a prince consolidates his power. His possessions extending over the two Burgundies, Artois and Flanders, Namur, Brabant, including Mechlin and Antwerp, Limbourg, Holland, Zealand, Hainault, and Luxembourg, rendered him the mightiest and wealthiest prince in Christendom—as the King of France had lately experienced to his bitter cost—one whose ducal coronet was ripe for conversion into a royal crown. Towards this coveted and merited kingship he already steered a course. With the title of King of the Romans, the Emperor should presently crown him to a kingdom mightier than any other in Europe, and to render his position unassailably secure, he was already buttressing it with desirable alliances. By marrying his sister-in-law, Catharine of Bourbon, to his dear friend and brother-in-arms, Count Anthony, he ensured himself the endurance of the alliance already existing between himself and the Duchy of Guelders, to which Anthony was heir.

The beauty of the Lady Catharine had conspired with Burgundian aspirations to melt the Lord Anthony’s austerity. It was a beauty that had melted the austerity of many men, and was to melt that of yet more. In the case of Count John of Armagnac, that beauty was hardly required to accomplish so much. For John of Armagnac, as all the world knows, was entirely without austerity of any kind. Greed-begotten disloyalty to his suzerain, Louis XI of France, had driven him into alliance with Burgundy in the War of Public Weal. The alliance had subsequently justified his seeking the relaxations offered by the Burgundian Court at Brussels, and the soft eyes of the Lady Catharine—blue, mysteriously tranquil pools, in which a man might drown his soul—had been responsible for keeping him there when his welcome, never too cordial, was wearing thin.

Because in all that concerned a lady to whom he was affianced, the romantic, dreamy idealist Anthony was at this stage incapable of thinking evil, it became necessary for the Duke, himself, to draw his attention to what was passing.

Now Charles of Burgundy was never remarkable for any gifts of mincing diplomacy. The downright, uncompromising bluntness which he used in the transaction of private and public affairs was equalled only by that headlong audacity in the field which has made him known to posterity as Charles the Temerarious.

He sought the apartments assigned to his cousin in the palace of Brussels one July evening, and found him, to his exasperation, at his studies in his closet, a small chamber whose walls were hung with tapestries from the looms of Arras. He drove out the single page who was in attendance, and came straight to business.

‘By Saint George, if I were betrothed as you are to a lady none too heedful of the honour, I’d at least make my betrothal respected. I would so, by Saint George!’

On the rare occasions when he felt moved to swear, Duke Charles commonly elected to do so by Saint George. This—like the device on his banner—by way of reminding his audience of his English blood. Philip the Good, his father, took pride in being a Valois and French in every nerve of him. But it was one of the idiosyncrasies, almost one of the perversities of this son of Isabella of Portugal, who was of Lancastrian descent, that he must ever be affronting his subjects both French and Flemish by proclaiming himself a foreigner. Sometimes he insisted upon his English extraction. More commonly he boasted himself a Portuguese, which, indeed, his appearance confirmed. Short of stature, broad and powerful of frame, black of hair, and dark of eye, with a big-boned, swarthy countenance prominent of nose and jaw, there was about him nothing of the fair and delicately built Valois. He contrasted oddly, too, with the heir of Guelders, who leaned back now in his tall chair of crimson velvet, faintly startled by his visitor’s abruptness. Their mutual affection dispensed with any ceremony between them when in private.

A Flemish wit of singular knowledge for his day, hearing them described on the score of their intimacy as Damon and Pythias, had retorted that they reminded him, rather, of Ormuzd and Ahriman, the powers of light and darkness. If the image is too grossly exaggerated in so far as concerns Duke Charles, it is not without justification in the case of Count Anthony. A creature of light he seemed, indeed; a radiant, joyous personality, with his tawny, golden hair which fell in a wavy mane about the nape of his shapely neck. Serenity sat upon his lofty brow and finely featured, square-chinned face; ardour glowed in his great dark eyes in which at times there was a hint of gold. They were the eyes of a visionary, of a poet, of a man of dreams rather than of action, of one imbued with an energy that was spiritual rather than physical.

In his thirtieth year, and some three years younger than the Duke, there was still an almost stripling grace about his long limbs and slender frame, and this notwithstanding the mantle of dignity and reserve imposed by his lofty station and worn with incomparable ease.

He smiled now in tolerant amusement of the vehemence so habitual to his choleric cousin. He spoke in the even, deliberate tones of a voice that was singularly attractive.

‘Who is it that is lacking in respect?’

‘Who? The lady herself. Who else?’

Smiling still, Count Anthony sighed. ‘Well, well! Shall I blame her for that? It is for me to make myself well-considered. Then, perhaps, she will come to respect that for which I stand to her.’

‘It is what I urge!’ thundered the other’s impatience.

‘I am about it now.’ Count Anthony took up the quill which, upon his cousin’s advent, he had laid down and pointed with it to the sheet of parchment spread before him on the table, a square, solid table tautly covered with crimson velvet which was secured along the edges by ponderous gilt studs.

The Duke saw a deal of writing, most of it erased. This prodigality of ink meant nothing to him, and he said so with his glance. The younger man explained himself. The long, delicate fingers of his left hand touched an open volume beside the sheet.

‘I am assisted in my delectable labours by Messer Petrarch.’

‘Who’s he?’ quoth the Lord of Burgundy.

‘An Italian poet, lately dead.’

‘A poet!’ Contempt exploded in the word.

‘A greater than either of us, Charles.’

It was by no means the first time that Charles suspected in his cousin a streak of madness.

‘A maker of songs!’

‘His songs will be remembered when your laws are forgotten—great prince though you be. His name will be cherished when mine and even yours will have perished from the memory of man. His voice will still be heard in the world when your tongue and mine are so much scattered dust.’ Count Anthony sighed and smiled. ‘Who would be an emperor that might be a poet?’

‘I would, for one,’ said the Duke of Burgundy.

‘Only because you are without perception of what it means to be a poet. A maker of songs, you say. Do you conceive what vision is vouchsafed the man who can make songs, and what else he makes in making them, what spiritual discoveries he reveals to a benighted world, with what effulgence his songs dispel the darkness in which men grope? Could you make this contemptible thing, a song, Charles?’

‘Could I?’ The Duke shrugged and laughed, between derision and impatience. ‘I can make the songs that become my station. I made some at Montlhéry to the music of the cannon.’ His smile broadened, displaying the big white teeth of his prominent upper jaw. ‘That was music enough for the King of France. It brought Picardy and the cities of the Somme to the Crown of Burgundy. Could your poets have done that?’

‘No more than they could have voiced the croak of the carrion crows that followed in your wake.’

But the Duke took no offence at this, perhaps not understanding. His contempt remained unabated and secure.

‘I deal in realities, Anthony. Not in dreams.’

‘Dreams! You despise dreams and vaunt reality! Will you tell me what reality in all the world was not first a dream? Are not all things of human fashioning the fruit of dreams? Were they not first conceived in the mind before they were given visible, tangible shape? Is not this very world in which we move and live the product of a dream? Where else was it all conceived but in the mind of a Creator?’

The Duke was scowling now. ‘You go too fast and too deep. If you are to argue the Creator into a poet, you’d best carry your polemics to the bishops. It need not perturb you if they send you to the fire for heresy, since at the stake you can dream of water to put out the faggots.’

‘Charles, I despair of you.’

‘As I of you. Though I may despair a little less when you tell me what your Italian poet has to do with Catharine.’

‘He lends my poverty a little of his wealth. I borrow from him. Thus:’ and taking up the parchment he began to read.

‘Cupid’s right hand did open my left side ...’

But he got no farther; for here the Duke, now thoroughly out of patience, interrupted brutally.

‘If Cupid’s right hand would but open your eyes to what is happening he’ld find a better employment for your wits than this lovesick caterwauling. The Lady Catharine is a thought too generous of herself. You do not make her sufficiently aware of you. And you give her leisure in which to become excessively aware of other men.’

Count Anthony stared at him, blankly indignant.

‘Why, here’s lewdness!’

‘That is the word, though I hesitated to employ it.’

‘I apply it to your mind, Charles.’

‘Apply it to Catharine’s conduct. It will be more apt.’

Count Anthony came abruptly to his feet, his head thrown back, the colour deepening in his face.

‘In God’s name, Charles, what are you saying?’

‘Am I not plain enough?’

‘Too plain, I think. You imply that the Lady Catharine, who is one day to be Duchess of Guelders and the mother of future dukes ...’ He could not complete the expression of his ugly thought. But the Duke completed it for him.

‘... Is very much a woman, and the subject of too much gossip. Wait!’ He was suddenly of a harsh peremptoriness, and, weary of skirmishing about the subject, drove straight at the heart of it. ‘It is being said quite openly that Catharine was the subject of Auxonne’s quarrel with d’Épinal; and now there are rumours of bad blood between d’Épinal and Armagnac.’

‘Armagnac!’ Count Anthony’s voice usually so musical was as harsh as the Duke’s. ‘Armagnac?’ he repeated. ‘For what is that vile dog in this?’

The Duke shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘Catharine has smiled upon him, I suppose. She is prodigal of her smiles. And Armagnac has never been known to resist the allurement of a woman’s eyes. The fault, Anthony, is yours.’

‘Mine?’ Anthony laughed on a note of bitterness. ‘My fault that the devil of wantonness is in your sister-in-law?’

‘Your fault that, being affianced to her, you sit here with your dreams and leave the reality to others. Will you still prefer the dream? Will you still hug the shadow, while others consume the substance for you?’

Count Anthony stood tense a moment, his thumbs hooked into the belt of red velvet, studded with golden hearts as big as walnuts, that girt his crimson gown about him.

‘If you will give me leave, Charles,’ he said after a moment, ‘I will seek the Lady Catharine at once.’

‘I’ll do more, Anthony. I will conduct you to her.’

Together they came to the gallery above the great hall, where a troupe of Flemish players were entertaining the assembled court. The Count, in his eagerness of suppressed anger, went a step ahead of his burly cousin. The latter, keeping close, already began to dread the mischief he might have set afoot. It was characteristic of him to act on the impulse of his mood and to reflect afterwards upon the consequences. Thus was his life made up of such occasions as the present. He mistrusted the purposeful set of Anthony’s tall figure and the unusual grimness that had come to invest that fair and gentle countenance. He wanted no open scandals at his court; still less did he want anything in the nature of a breach between two such powerful princes as Anthony of Guelders and John of Armagnac. In any such quarrel, particularly if concerned with his own sister-in-law, he must of necessity intervene, and on whichever side he intervened that intervention must result in setting the other against him and thus in the loss of a valued ally.