PAGE 6
The Sestina
by
But Dame Alianora was yawning quite frankly. “You will say to me that I brought foreigners into England, that I misguided the King, that I stirred up strife between the King and his barons. Eh, my God! I am sufficiently familiar with the harangue. Yet listen, my Osmund: They sold me like a bullock to a man I had never seen. I found him a man of wax, and I remoulded him. They gave me England as a toy; I played with it. I was the Queen, the source of honor, the source of wealth–the trough, in effect, about which swine gathered. Never in all my English life, Osmund, has man or woman loved me; never in all my English life have I loved man or woman. Do you understand, my Osmund?–the Queen has many flatterers, but no friends. Not a friend in the world, my Osmund! And so the Queen makes the best of it and amuses herself.”
Somewhat he seemed to understand, for he answered without asperity:
“Mon bel esper, I do not find it anywhere in Holy Writ that God requires it of us to amuse ourselves; but upon many occasions we have been commanded to live righteously. We are tempted in divers and insidious ways. And we cry with the Psalmist, ‘My strength is dried up like a potsherd.’ But God intends this, since, until we have here demonstrated our valor upon Satan, we are manifestly unworthy to be enregistered in His army. The great Captain must be served by proven soldiers. We may be tempted, but we may not yield, O daughter of the South! we may not yield!” he cried, with an unheralded, odd wildness.
“Again you preach,” Dame Alianora said. “That is a venerable truism.”
“Ho, madame,” he returned, “is it on that account the less true?”
Pensively the Queen considered this. “You are a good man, my Osmund,” she said at last, with a fine irrelevance, “though you are very droll. Ohime! it is a pity that I was born a princess! Had it been possible for me to be your wife, I would have been a better woman. I shall sleep now and dream of that good and stupid and contented woman I might have been.” So presently these two slept in Chantrell Wood.
Followed four days of journeying. As Messer Dante had not yet surveyed Malebolge, they lacked a parallel for that which they encountered; their traverse discovered England razed, charred, and depopulate–picked bones of an island, a vast and absolute ruin about which passion-wasted men skulked like rats. They went without molestation; malice and death had journeyed on their road aforetime, as heralds, and had swept it clear.
At every trace of these hideous precessors Osmund Heleigh would say, “By a day’s ride I might have prevented this.” Or, “By a day’s ride I might have saved this woman.” Or, “By two days’ riding I might have fed this child.”
The Queen kept Spartan silence, but daily you saw the fine woman age. In their slow advance every inch of misery was thrust before her as for inspection; meticulously she observed and appraised her handiwork.
Bastling the royal army had recently sacked. There remained of this village the skeletons of two houses, and for the rest a jumble of bricks, rafters half-burned, many calcined fragments of humanity, and ashes. At Bastling, Messire Heleigh turned to the Queen toiling behind.
“Oh, madame!” he said, in a dry whisper, “this was the home of so many men!”
“I burned it,” Dame Alianora replied. “That man we passed just now I killed. Those other men and women–my folly killed them all. And little children, my Osmund! The hair like corn-floss, blood-dabbled!”
“Oh, madame!” he wailed, in the extremity of his pity.
For she stood with eyes shut, all gray. The Queen demanded: “Why have they not slain me? Was there no man in England to strangle the proud wanton? Are you all cowards here?”