The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay

by Maurice Hewlett

THE BOOK OF NAY

---

CHAPTER I

THE CHAFFER CALLED MATE-GRIFON

Differing from the Mantuan as much in sort as degree, I sing less the arms than the man, less the panoply of some Christian king offended than the heart of one in its urgent private transports; less treaties than the agony of treating, less personages than persons, the actors rather than the scene. Arms pass like the fashion of them, to-day or to-morrow they will be gone; but men live, their secret springs what they have always been. How the two Kings, then, smeared over their strifes at Vézelay; how John of Mortain was left biting his nails, and Alois weeping at the foot of a cross; how Christian armies like dusty snakes dragged their lengths down the white shores of Rhone, and how some took ship at Marseilles, and some saved their stomachs at the cost of their shoes; of King Richard's royal galley Trenchemer, a red ship with a red bridge, and the dragon at the mast; of the shields that made her bulwarks terrible; of who went adventurous and who remained; of a fleet that lay upon the waters like a flock of sea-gulls—countless, now at rest, now beating the sea into spumy wrath; of what way they made, qualms they suffered, prayers they said in their extremity, vows they made and afterwards broke, thoughts they had and afterwards were ashamed of—of these and all such things I must be silent if I am to make a good end to my history. It shall be enough for you that the red ship held King Richard, and King Richard his own thoughts, and that never far from him, in a ship called Li Chastel Orgoilous, sat Jehane with certain women of hers, nursing her hope and a new and fearful wonder she had. Prayer sits well in women, and age-long watching: one imagines that Jehane never left the poop through those long white days, those burning nights; but could always be seen or felt, a still figure sitting apart, elbow on knee, chin in hand-like a Norn reading fate in the starred web of the night. In the dark watches, when the ships lay drifting under the stars, or lurched forward as the surges drove them on, and the tinkling of the water against the side was all the sound, some woman's voice (not Jehane's) would be heard singing faint and far off, some little shrill and winding prayer.

Saincte Catherine,
Vélà la nuict qui gagne!

they would hear, and hang upon the cadence. At such times Richard, stretched upon his lion-skin, would raise himself, and lift up his face to the immense, and with his noble voice make the darkness tremble as he sang—

Domna, dels angels regina,
Domna, roza ses espina,
Domna, joves enfantina,
Domna, estela marina,
De las autras plus luzens!

But so soon as his voice filled the night, the woman's faltered and died; and he, holding on for a stave or more, would stop on a note that had a wailing fall, and the lapping of the waves or cry of hidden birds take up the rule again. This did not often obtain. Mostly he watched out the night, sleeping little, talking none, but revolving in his mind the great deeds to do. By day he was master of the fleet, an admirable seaman who, knowing nothing of ships' business before he embarked, dared not confess so much to himself. Richard must be leader if he was to be undertaker at all. So he led his fleet from his first hour with it, and brought it safely into the roadstead.

---

They made Messina prosperously, a white city cooped within walls, with turrets and belfries and shining domes, stooping sharply to the violet sea. King Philip with his legions was to have come by land as far as Genoa, and was not expected yet awhile. Nor was there any sign of the Queen-Mother, of Berengère, or of the convoy from Navarre.

A landing was made in the early morning. Before the Sicilians were well awake Richard's army was in camp, the camp entrenched, and a most salutary gallows set up just outside it, with a thief upon it as a warning to his brothers of Sicily. So far good. The next thing was an embassy to King Tancred, the Sicilian King, which demanded (1) the person of Queen Joan (Richard's sister), (2) her dowry, (3) a golden table twelve foot long, (4) a silk tent, and (5) a hundred galleys fitted out for two years. This despatched, Richard entertained himself with his hawks and dogs, and with short excursions into Calabria. On one of these he went to visit the saintly Abbot Joachim, at once prophet and philosopher and man of cool sense; and on another to kill wild boars. When he came back in October from the second of these, he found matters going rather ill.

King Tancred avoided seeing him, sent no tables, nor ships, nor dowry. He did send Queen Joan, and Queen Joan's bed; moreover, because she had been Queen of Sicily, he sent a sack of gold coins for her entertainment; but he did not propose to go any further. Richard, seeing what sort of courses his plans were likely to take, crossed once more into Calabria, attacked a fortified town which the Sicilians had settled, turned the settlers out, and established his sister there with Jehane, her shipload of ladies, and a strong garrison. Then he returned to Messina.

Certainly, he saw, his camp there could be of no long tenure. The Grifons, as they called the inhabitants, were about it like hornets; not a day passed without the murder of some man of his, or an ambush which cost him a score. Thieving was a courtesy, raiding an amenity in a Grifon, it appeared. Richard, hoping yet for the dowry and a peaceful departing, had laid a strict command that no harm should be done to any one of them unless he should be caught bloody-handed. 'Well and good!' writes Milo; 'but this meant to say that no man might scratch himself for fear he should kill a louse.' Nature could not endure such a direction, so Richard then (whose own temper was none of the longest) let himself go, fell upon a party of these brigands, put half to the sword and hanged the other half in rows before the landward gate of Messina. You will say that this did not advance his treaty with King Tancred; but in a sense it did. When the Messenians came out of their gates to attack him in open field, it was found and reported by Gaston of Béarn, who drove them in with loss, that William des Barres and the Count of Saint-Pol had been with them, each heading a company of knights. Richard flew into a royal, and an Angevin, rage. He swore by God's back that he would bring the walls flat; and so he did. 'This is the work of that little pale devil of France, then,' he said. 'A likely beginning, by my soul! Now let me see if I can bring two kings to reason at once.'

He used the argument of the long arm. Bringing up his engines from the ships, he pounded the walls of Messina to such purpose that he could have walked in barefoot in two or three places. King Tancred came in person to sue for peace; but Richard wanted more than dowry by this time. 'The peace you shall have,' he said, 'is the peace of God which passeth understanding, and for which, I take it, you are not yet ready, unless you bring hither with you Philip of France.' This the unfortunate Tancred really could not do; but he did bring proxies of Philip's. Saint-Pol came, Des Barres, and the Bishop of Beauvais with his russet, soldier's face. King Richard sat considering these worthy men.

'Ah, now, Saint-Pol, you are playing a good part in this Christian adventure, I think!' he broke out after a time. Saint-Pol squared his jaw. 'If I had caught you in your late sally, my friend,' Richard went on, 'I should have hanged you on a tree, knight or no knight. Why, fool, do you think your shameful brother worth so much treachery? With him before your eyes can you do no better? I hope so. Get you back, and tell King Philip this: He and I are vowed to honesty; but if he breaks faith again, I have that in me which shall break him. As for you, Bishop of Beauvais'—one saw the old war-priest blink—'I know nothing of your part in this business, and am willing to think charitably. If you, an old man, have any of the grace of God left in you, bestow some of it on your master. Teach him to serve God as you serve Him, Beauvais. I will try to be content with that.' He turned to Des Barres, the finest soldier of the three. 'William,' he said more gently, for he really liked the man, 'I hope to meet you in a better field, and side by side. But if face to face again, William,' and he lifted his hand, 'beware of me.'

None of them had a word to say, but with troubled faces left the presence; which shows (to some men's thinking) that Richard's strength lay in his cause. That was not the opinion of Des Barres, nor is it mine. Meeting them afterwards, when he made a pact of friendship and alliance with Tancred, and renewed that which he had had with Philip, he showed them a perfectly open countenance. Nevertheless, he took possession of Messina, as he had said he would, and built a great tower upon the wall, which he called Mate-Grifon. Then he sent for his sister and Jehane, and kept a royal Christmas in the conquered city.

Trouble was not over. There were constant strifes between nation and nation, man and man. Winter storms delayed the Queen-Mother; Richard fretted and fumed at the wasting of his force, but saw not the worst of the matter. If vice was eating his army, jealousy was eating Philip's sour little heart, and rage that of Saint-Pol. Saint-Pol, with Gurdun to back him, had determined to kill the English King; with them went, or was ready to go, Des Barres. He was not such a steady hater by any means. Some men seek temptation, others fall under it; Des Barres was of this kind.

Of temptation there was a plenty, since Richard was the most fearless of men. When he had forgiven an injury it did not exist for him any more. He was glad to see Des Barres, glad to play, talk, grumble, or swear with him—a most excellent enemy. One day, idling home from a hawking match, he got tilting with the Frenchman, with reeds for lances. Neither seemed in earnest until Richard's horse slipped on a loose stone and threw him. This was near the gate. You should have seen the change in Des Barres. 'Hue! Hue! Passavant!' he yelled, possessed with the devil of destruction; and came pounding at Richard as if he would ride over him. At the battle-cry a swarm of fellows—Frenchmen and Brabanters—came out and about with pikes. Richard was on his feet by that time, perfectly advised what was astir. He was alone, but he had a sword. This he drew, and took a stride or two towards Des Barres, who had pulled up short of him, and was panting. The pikemen, who might have hacked him to pieces, paused for another word. A second of time passed without it, and Richard knew he was safe. He went up to Des Barres.

'Learn, Des Barres,' he said, 'that I allow no cries about my head save those for Saint George.'

'Sire,' said Des Barres, 'I am no man of yours.'

'It is truly said,' replied Richard, 'but I will dub you one'; and he smote him with the flat of his sword across the cheek. The blood leapt after the sword.

'Soul of a virgin!' cried Des Barres, white as cloth, except for the broad weal on his face.

'Your soul against mine, graceless dog,' said the King. 'Another word and I pull you down.' Just then who should come riding out of the gate but Gilles de Gurdun, armed cap-a-pie?

'Here, my lord,' said Des Barres, clearing his throat, 'comes a gentleman who has sought your Grace with better cause than mine.'

'Who is your gentleman?' Richard asked him.

'It is De Gurdun, sire, a Norman knight whose name should be familiar.'

'I know him perfectly,' said Richard. He turned to one of the bystanders, saying, 'Fetch that gentleman to me.' The man ran nimbly to meet De Gurdun.

Des Barres, watching narrowly, saw Gilles start, saw him look, almost saw the bracing of his nerves. What exactly followed was curious. Gilles moved his horse forward slowly. King Richard, standing in leather doublet and plumed cap, waited for him, his arms folded. Des Barres on horseback, an enemy; the bystanders, tattered, savage, high-fed men, enemies also; in front the most implacable enemy of all.

When De Gurdun was within spear-reach he stopped his horse and sat looking at the King. Richard returned the look; it was an eyeing match, soon over. Gurdun swung off the horse, threw the rein to a soldier, and tried footing it. The steady duel of the eyes continued until Gilles was actually within sword's distance. Here he stopped once more; finally gave a queer little grunt, and went down on one knee. Des Barres sighed as he eased his heart. The tension had been terrible.

Richard said, 'De Gurdun, stand up and answer me. You seek my life, as I understand. Is it so?'

Sir Gilles began to stammer. 'No man has loved the law—no knight ever loved lady—' and so on; but Richard cut him short.

'Answer me, man,' he said, in a voice which was nearly as dry as his father's, 'do you wish for my life?'

'King,' said Gilles, his great emotion lending him dignity, 'if I do, is it a strange matter? You have had my father's and brother's. You have mine in your hand. You corrupted and then stole my beloved. Are these no griefs?'

Richard grew impatient; he could never bear waiting.

'Do you wish my life?' he asked again. Gilles was overwrought. 'By God on high, but I do wish it!' he cried out, almost whimpering.

King Richard threw down his sword. 'Take it then, you fool,' he said. 'You talk too much.'

A silence fell upon the party, so profound that the cicala in the dry hedge shrilled to pierce the ear. Richard stood like a stock, with Des Barres gaping at him. Gurdun was all of a tremble, but swung his sword about in his sword-hand. After a while he took a deep breath, a fumbling step forward; and Des Barres, leaning out over the saddle, caught him by the surcoat.

'Drop that man, Des Barres,' said Richard, without moving his eyes from the Norman. Des Barres obeyed; and as the silence resumed Gilles began twitching his sword again. When a lizard rustled in the grass a man started as if shot.

Gilles gave over first, threw his sword away with a sob. 'God ha' mercy, I cannot! I cannot!' he fretted, and stood blinking the tears from his eyes. Richard picked up his weapon and returned it to him. 'You are brave enough, my friend,' he said, 'for better work. Go and do better in Syria.'

'There is no better work for me, sir,' said Gurdun, 'unless you can justify yourself.'

'I never justify myself,' said Richard. 'Give me my sword.' De Gurdun gave it him. Richard sheathed it, went to his horse, mounted, rode away at walking pace. Nobody moved till he was out of sight. Then said Des Barres with a high oath, 'I could serve that King if he would let me.'

'God damn him,' said Gilles de Gurdun for his part.

It was near the end of January when they sighted over sea the painted sails of the Queen. Mother's galley. Her fleet anchored in the roads, and the lady came ashore. She had two interviews, one with her son, one with Jehane. But she did not choose to see her daughter, Queen Joan, a very handsome, free lady.

'Marriage!' cried King Richard, when this was broached. 'This is no time to talk of marriage. I have waited six months, and now the lady must wait a while, other six if needs be. We leave this accursed island in two days. Between my friends and my enemies I have fought the length and breadth of it twice over. Am I to spend my whole host killing Christians? A little more inactivity, good mother, and I shall be in league with the Soldan against Philip. Bring the lady to Acre, and I will marry her there.'

'No, no, Richard,' said the Queen-Mother; 'I am needed in England. I cannot come.'

'Then let Joan take her,' said the King.

The Queen-Mother, knowing him very well, tried him no further. She sent for Jehane, and held her close in talk for nearly an hour.

'Never leave my son, Jehane,' was the string she harped on. 'Never leave him for good or ill weather. Mated or unmated, never leave him.'

'Never in life, Madame,' said Jehane, then bit her lip lest she should utter what her mind was full of. But the Queen-Mother had no eyes.

'Pray for him,' she said; and Jehane, 'I pray hourly, Madame.' Then the Queen kissed her on both cheeks, and in such kindness they parted.

---

CHAPTER II

OF WHAT JEHANE LOOKED FOR, AND WHAT BERENGÈRE HAD

Milo the abbot writes, 'When the spring airs, moving warmly over the earth, ruffled the surface of the deep, and that to a tune so winning that there was no thought of the treachery below, we took to the ships and steered a course south-east by south. This was in the quindenes of Easter. The two queens (if I may call them so, of whom one had been and one hoped to be of that estate), Joan and Berengère, went in a great ship which they call a dromond, a heavy-timbered ship carrying a crowd of sail. With them, by request of Madame Berengère, went Countess Jehane, not by any request of her own. The King himself led her aboard, and by the hand into the state pavilion on the poop.

'"Madame," he said to his affianced, "I bring you your desired mate. Use her as you would use me, for if I have a friend upon earth it is she."

'"Oh, sire," says Berengère, "I am acquainted with this lady. She has nothing to fear from me."

'Queen Joan said nothing, being afraid of her brother. So Madame Jehane kissed the hands of the pair of queens, meekly kneeling to each in turn; and so far as I know she did them faithful service through all the mischances of a voyage whereon every woman and every other man was horribly sick.

'Having made the Pharos in favourable weather, and kept Mount Gibello and the wild Calabrian coast upon our lee (as is fitting), we stood out for the straight course over the immense waste of water. Now was no more land to be seen at either hand; but the sky fitted close upon the edges of the sea like a dome of glass on a man's forehead. There was neither cover from the sun nor hiding-place from the prying concourse of the stars; the wind came searchingly, the waters stirred beneath it, or, being driven, heaped themselves up into towers of ruin. The cordage flacked, the strong ribs creaked; like a beast over-burdened the whole ship groaned, wallowing in a sea-trough without breath to climb. So we endured for many days, a straggling host of men, ordinarily capable, powerless now beneath that dumb tyrant the sky. Where else could be our refuge? We all looked to King Richard—by day to his royal ensign, by night to the great wax candle which he always had lighted and stuck in a lantern. His commands were shouted from ship to ship over two miles or more of sea; if any strayed or dropped behind we lay-to that he might come up. But very often, after a day's idle rolling, we knew that the sea had claimed some boatload of our poor souls, and went on. The galleys kept touch with the dromonds, enclosing them (as it were) within the cusps of a new moon, and so driving them forward. To see this light of our King's moving, now fast, now slow, now up, now down, restlessly over the field of the night, was to remember the God of the Israelites, who (for their sakes and ours) became a pillar of fire at that season, and transformed himself into a tall cloud in the daytime. Busy as it was, this point of light, it only figured the unresting spirit of the King, careful of all these children of his, ordering the hosts of the Lord.

'Storms drove us at length on to the island of Crete, where Minos once had his kingly habitation, and his wife died of pleasure. Again they drove us, more unfortunately, out of our course upon the inhospitable coasts of Rhodes, where the salt wind suffers no trees to live, nor safe anchorage to be, nor shelter from the ravage of the sea. In this vexed place there was no sign of land but a long line of surf beating upon a rocky shore, the mist of spray and blown sand, spars of drowned ships, innumerable anxious flocks of birds. Here was no roadstead for us; yet here, but for the signal providence of heaven, we had likely all have perished (as many did perish), miserably failing at once of purpose, the sacraments of Christ, and reasonable beds. The fleet was scattered wide, no ship could see his neighbour; we called on the King, on the Saviour, on the Father of all. But deep answered to deep, and the prayer of so many Christians, as it appeared, skilled little to change the eternal purposes of God.

'Then one inspired among us climbed up to the masthead, having in his teeth a piece of the True Cross set in a silver heart; and called aloud to the wild weather, "Save, Lord, we perish!" as was said of old by very sacred persons. To which palpable truth so urgently declared an answer was vouchsafed, not indeed according to our full desires, yet (doubtless) level with our deserts. The wind veered to the north; and though it abated nothing of its force, preserved us from the teeth of the rocks. Before it now, under bare poles, without need of oars, we drove to the southward; and while a little light still endured descried a great mountainous and naked coast rising out of the heaped waters, which we knew to be the land of Cyprus. Off the western face of this dark shore, in a little shelter at last, we lay-to and tossed all night. Next day in fairer weather, hoisting sail, we made a good haven defended by stout sea-walls, a mole and two lighthouses: these were of a city called Limasol. Upon my galley, at least, there was one who sang Lauda Sion, whose tune before had been Adhæsit pavimento, when he rested tired eyes upon the clustered spires of a white city, smokeless and asleep in the early morning light.'

So far without weariness I hope Milo may have conducted the reader. In relation to the sea you may take him for an expert in the terrors he describes. Not so in Cyprus. War tempts him to prolixity, to classical allusion, even to hexameters of astonishingly loose joints. Every stroke of his hero's sword-arm seems to him of weight. No doubt it was, once; but not in a chronicle of this sort, where the Cypriote gests must take a lowly place among others fair and foul of this King-errant. Let me put Milo on the shelf for a little, and abridge.

I tell you then that the Emperor of Cyprus, by name Isaac, was a thin-faced man with high cheek-bones. A Greek of the Greeks, he undervalued what he had never seen, precisely for that reason. When heralds went up to Nikosia to announce the coming-in of King Richard, Isaac mumbled his lips. 'Prutt!' he said, 'I am the Emperor. What have I to do with your kings?' Richard showed him that with one king he had plenty to do, by assaulting Limasol and putting armies to flight in the plains about Nikosia. Shall I sing the battle of the fifty against five thousand; tell how King Richard with precisely half a hundred knights came cantering against the sun and a host, as gay and debonair as to a driving of stags? They say that he himself led the charge, covered in a wonderful silken surcoat, colour of a bullfinch's breast, and wrought upon in black and white heraldry. They say that at the sight of the pensils a-flutter, at the sound of the hunting-horns, the Grifons let fly a shaft a-piece; then threw down their bows and scattered. But the knights caught them. Isaac was on a hill to watch the battle. 'Who is that marvellous tall knight who seems to be swimming among my horse?' 'Splendour, it is Rikardos, King of the West,' they told him, 'reputed a fierce swimmer.' 'He drowns, he drowns!' cried the Emperor, as the red plumes were whelmed in black. 'Nay, but he dives rather, Majesty.' He heard the death-shouts, he saw white faces turned his way; then the mass was cleft asunder, blown off and dispersed like the sparks from a smithy. The thing was of little moment in a time of much; there was no fighting left in the Cypriotes after that sunny morning's work. Nikosia fell, and the Emperor Isaac, in silver chains, heard from his prison-house the shouts which welcomed the Emperor Richard. These things were accomplished by the first week in May. Then came Guy of Lusignan with bad news of Acre and worse of himself. Philip was before the town, Montferrat with him. Montferrat had the Archduke's of Austria as well as French support; with these worthies, and the ravished wife of old King Baldwin for title-deed, he claimed the throne of Jerusalem; and King Guy of Lusignan (but for the name of the thing) was of no account at all. Guy said that the siege of Acre was a foppery. King Philip was ill, or thought he was; Montferrat was treating with Saladin; the French knights openly visited the Saracen women; and the Duke of Burgundy got drunk. 'What else could he get, poor fool?' asked Richard; then said, 'But I promise you this: Montferrat shall never be King of Jerusalem while I live—not because I love you, my friend, but because I love the law. I shall come as soon as I can to Acre, when I have done here the things which must be done.' He meant his marriage.

Little Madame Berengère was lodged, as became her, in the Emperor's palace at Limasol, having with her Queen Joan of Sicily, and among her women the young fair lady Jehane, none too fair, poor girl, by this time. Berengère herself, who was not very intelligent, remarked her, and gave her the cold shoulder. As day swallowed up day, and Richard, at his affairs, gave her no thought, or at least no sign, Jehane's condition became an abominable eyesore to the Queendesignate; so Queen Joan plucked up her courage age to the point, and seeking out her brother, let him know that she had tidings for his private ear.

'I do not admit that I have such an ear,' said Richard. It is no part of a king's baggage. Yet by all means name your tidings, my sister.'

'Dear sire,' said Joan, 'it appears that you have sown a seed, and must look before long for the harvest.' The King laughed.

'God knows, I have sown enough seeds. But mostly they come up tares, I am apt to find. My harvesting is of little worth. What now, sister?'

'Beau sire,' says the Queen, I know not how you will take it. Your bonamy, the Picardy lady, is with child, and not so far from her time neither. My sister Berengère is greatly offended.'

King Richard began to tremble; but whether from the ague which was never long out of him, or from joy, or from trouble, who knows?

'Oh, sister,' he said, 'Oh, sister, are you very sure of this?

'I was sure of it,' replied the lady, 'the moment I saw her in the autumn at Messina. But now your question is not worth the asking.'

The King abruptly left his sister and went over to the Queen's side of the palace. Berengère was sitting upon a balcony, all her ladies with her; but Jehane a little apart. When the King was announced all rose to their feet. He looked neither right nor left of him, but fixedly at Jehane, with a high bright flush upon his sharp face and fever sparks in his eyes. To these signals Jehane, because of her great exaltation, flew the answering flags. Richard touched Berengère's hand with the hair on his lip: to Jehane he said, 'Come, ma mye,' and led her out of the balcony.

This was not as it should have been; but Richard, used to his way, took it, and Richard moved could move bigger mountains than those of ceremony. He lunged forward along the corridors, Jehane following as she might, led by the hand, but not against her will. No doubt she was with child, no doubt she was glorious on that account. She was a very proud girl.

Alone, those two who had loved so fondly gazed each at the work wrought upon the other without a word said, the King all luminous with love, and she all dewy. If soul spoke to soul ever in this world, said Richard's soul, 'O Vase, that bearest the pledge of my love!' and hers, 'O Strong Wine, that brimmest in my cup!'

He came forward and embraced her with his arm. He felt her heart beat, he guessed her pride; he felt her thrill, he knew his own defeat. He felt her so strong and salient under his hand—so strong, so full-budded, so hopeful of fruit—that despair of her loss seized him again, terrible rage. He sickened, while in her the warm blood leaped. He wanted everything; she, nothing in the world. He, the king of men, was the bond; she, the cast-off minion, she, this Jehane Saint-Pol, was the free. So God, making war upon the great, rights the balances of this world.

But he was extraordinarily gentle with her; he gripped himself and throttled the animal close. Gaining grace as he went, his heart throve upon its own blood. Balm was shed on his burning face, he sucked peace as it fell. Then he, too, discerned the God near by; to him, too, came with beating wings the pure young Love, that best of all, which hath no needs save them of spending.

His voice was hushed to a boy's murmur.

'Jehane, ma mye, is it true?'

'I am the mother of a son,' she said.

'Give God the glory!'

But she said, 'He hath given it to me.' Her face was turned to where God might be: Richard, looking down, kissed her on the mouth. Tremblingly they kissed and long, not as young lovers, but as spouse and spouse, drinking their common joy.

After a while his present troubles came thronging back, and he said bitterly: 'Ah, child, thou art widowed of me while yet we both live. Yet it was in thy power to be mother of a king.'

Said she, leaning her head on his breast, 'Every woman that beareth a child is mother of a king; but not every woman's child hath a king to his father. Thus it is with me, Richard, who am doubly blessed.'

'Ah, God!' he cried, poignantly concerned, 'Ah God, Jehane, see what trammels I have enmeshed us in, thee in one net and me in another! So that neither can I help thee, being roped down to this work, nor thou thyself, trapped by my fault. How shall I do? Lo, my sin, my sin! I cried Yea; and now cometh God, and, Nay, King Richard, He saith. The sin is mine, and the burden of the sin is thine. Is this a horrible thing?

Jehane smiled up in his face. 'And dost thou think it, Richard, a burden so grievous,' she said, 'to be mother of thy son? Dost thou think that the world can be harsh to me after that; or that in the life to come there will be no remembrance to make the long days sweet?' She looked very proudly upon him, smiling all the time; she put her hands up and crowned his head with them. 'Oh, my dear life, my pride and my master,' said Jehane, 'let all come to me that must come now; I am rich above all my desires, and my lowliness has been of no account with God. Now let me go, blessing His name.'

He would not let her go, but still looked earnestly down at her, struggling with himself against himself.

'I must be married, Jehane,' says he presently. And she, 'In a good hour, my lord.'

'It is an accursed hour,' he said; 'nothing but ill can come of it.'

'Lord,' said she, 'thou art vowed to this work.'

'I know it very well,' he replied; 'but a man does as he can.'

'You, my King Richard, do as you will,' said Jehane. So he kissed her and let her go.

Among the multitudinous affairs now heaped upon him—business of his new empire and his old, business of Guy's, business of the war, business of marriage—he set first and foremost this business of Jehane's. He removed her from the Queen's house, gave her house and household of her own. It was in Limasol, a pleasant place overlooking the sea and the ships, a square white house set deep in myrtle woods and oleanders. Once more the 'Countess of Poictou' had her seneschal, chaplain, ladies of honour. That done, he fixed Saint Pancras' day for his marriage, had the ships got out, furnished, and appointed for sea. The night before Saint Pancras he sent for Abbot Milo in a hurry. Milo found him walking about his room, taking long, carefully accurate strides from flagstone to flagstone.

He continued this feverish devotion for some minutes after his confessor's coming-in; and seeing him deep in thought, the good man stood patient by the doorway. So presently Richard seemed aware of him, stopped in mid walk, and looking at him, said—

'Milo, continence is, I suppose, of all virtues the most excellent?' Milo prepared to expatiate.

'Undoubtedly, sire, it is so, because of all virtues the least comfortable. Saint Chrysostom, indeed, goes so far as to declare—'; but Richard broke in.

'And therefore, Milo, it is urged upon the clergy by the ordinances of many honourable popes and patriarchs?'

'Distinguo, sire,' said Milo, 'distinguo. There are other reasons. It is written, So run that ye may obtain. Now, no man can run after the prize we seek if he carrieth a woman on his back. And that for two reasons: first, because she is so much dead weight; and second, because a woman is so made that, if her bearer did achieve the reward, she would immediately claim a share in it. But that is no part of the divine plan, as I understand it.'

'Let us talk of the laity, Milo,' said the King, abstractedly. 'If one of them set up for a runner, should he not be a virgin?'

'Lord,' replied the abbot, 'if he can. But that is not so convenient.'

'How not so?' asked King Richard.

'My lord,' Milo said, if all the laity were virgins there would soon be no laity at all, and then there would be no priests—a state of affairs not provided for by the Holy Church. Moreover, the laity have a kingdom in this world; but the religious not of this world. Now, this world is too excellent a good place not to be peopled; and God hath appointed a pleasant way.'

Said the King, 'A way of sorrow and shame.'

'Not so, sire,' said Milo, 'but a way of honour. And if I rejoice that the same way is before your Grace, I am not alone in happiness.'

'A king's business,' said Richard, 'is to govern himself wisely (having paid his debts), and his people wisely. It may be that he should get heirs if none are. But if heirs there be, then what is his business with more? Why should his son be better king than his brother, for example?'

'Lord,' Milo admonished, 'a king who is sure of himself will make sure of his issue. That too is a king's business.'

Said Richard moodily, 'Who is sure of himself?' He turned away his head, bidding Milo a good night. As the abbot made his reverence he added, 'I am to be married to-morrow.'

'I devoutly hope so,' said the good man. 'And then your Grace will have a surer hope than in your Grace's brother.'

'Get you to bed, Milo,' Richard said, 'and let me be alone.'

Married he was, so far as the Church could provide, in the Basilica of Limasol, with the Bishop of Salisbury to celebrate. Vassals of his, and allies, great lords of three realms, bishops and noble knights filled the church and saw the rites done. High above them afterwards, before the altar, he sat crowned and vested in purple, holding in his right hand the sceptre of his power, and the orb of his dominion in his left hand. Then Berengère, daughter of Navarre, kneeling before him, was by him thrice crowned: Queen of England, Empress of Cyprus, Duchess of Normandy. But she never got upon her little dark head the red cap of Anjou which had covered up Jehane's gold hair. Jehane was neither at the church nor at the great feast that followed. She, on Richard's bidding, was in her ship, Li Chastel Orgoilous, whose head swayed to the running tide.

But a great feast was held, at which Queen Berengère sat by the King in a gold chair, and was served on knees by the chief officers of the household, the kingdom, and the duchy. Also, after dinner, full and free homage was done her—a desperate long ceremony. The little lady had great dignity; and if they found her stiff, it is to be hoped they remembered her very young. But although everybody saw that Richard was in the clutches of his ague throughout these performances, so much so that when he was not talking his teeth chattered in his head, and his hand spilt the wine on its way to the mouth—none were prepared for what was to come, unless such intimates as Gaston of Béarn or Mercadet, his Gascon con captain, may have known it. At the close of the homage-giving he rose up in his throne, threw back his purple robe, and showed to all beholders the wrinkled mail beneath it. He was, in fact, in chain-armour from shoulders to feet. For a moment all looked open-mouthed. He drew his sword with a great gesture, and held it on high.

'Peers and noble vassals,' he called out in measured tones (in which, nevertheless, deep down the shaking fit could be discerned, vibrating the music), 'the work calls us; Acre is in peril. Kings, who are servants of the King of Kings, put by their private concerns; queens, who bow to one throne only, to that bow with haste. Now, you of the Cross, who follows me to win the Cross? The ships are ready, my lords. Shall we go?'

The great hall was struck dumb. Queen Berengère, only half understanding, looked scared about her. One could not but pity the extinguishment of her poor little great affairs. Queen Joan grew very red. She had the spirit of her family, was angry, fiercely whispered in her brother's ear. He barely heard her; he shook her words from his ears, stamped on the pavement.

'Never, never! I am for the Cross! Lord Jesus, behold thy knight! The work is ready, shall I not do it? I call Yea! for this turn. Ha, Anjou! To the ships, to the ships!'

His sword flickered in the air; there followed it, leaping after the beam, a great swish of steel, soon a forest of swords.

'Ha, Richard! Ha, Anjou! Ha, Saint George!' So they made the rafters volley; and so headlong after King Richard tumbled out into the dusk and sought the ships. The new Queen was crying miserably on the daïs, Queen Joan tapping her foot beside her. Late at night they also put out to sea. On his knees, facing the shrouded East, King Richard spent his wedding night, with his bare sword for his partner.

---

CHAPTER III

WHO FOUGHT AT ACRE

After they had lost the harbour of Limasol, from that hasty dark hour of setting out, the fleet sailed (it seemed) under new stars and encountered a new strange air. All night they toiled at the oars; and in the morning, very early, every eye was turned to the fired East, where, in the sea-haze, lay the sacred places clothed (like the Sacrament) in that gauzy veil. First of them Trenchemer steered, the King's red galley, in whose prow, stiff and hieratic as a figurehead, was the King himself, watching for a sign. The great ships rolled and plunged, the tide came racing by them, blue-green water lipped with foam, carrying upon it unknown weeds, golden fruit floating, wreckage unfamiliar, a dead fish scarlet-rayed, a basket strangely wrought—drifting heralds of a country of dreams. About noon, when mass had been said upon his galley, King Richard was seen to throw up his arms and stretch them wide; the shout followed the sign—'Terra Sancta! Terra Sancta!' they heard him cry. Voice after voice, tongue after tongue, took up the word and lifted it from ship to ship. All fell upon their knees, save the rowers. A dim coast, veiled in violet, lifted before their eyes—mountain ranges, great hollows, clouded places, so far and silent, so mysteriously wrapt, full of awe, no one could speak, no one had thought to speak, but must look and search and wonder. A quick flight of shore birds, flashing creatures that twittered as they swept by, broke the spell. This then was a land where living things abode; it was not only of the sacred dead. They drew nearer, their hearts comforted.

They saw Margat, a lonely tower high on a split rock; they saw Tortosa, with a haven in the sea; Tripolis, a very white city; Neplyn. Botron they saw, with a great terraced castle; afterwards Beyrout, cedars about its skirt. Mountains rose up nearer to the sound of the surf; they saw Lebanon capped with cloud-wreaths, then snowy Hermon gleaming in the sun. They saw Mount Tabor with a grey head, and two mountains like spires which stood separate and apart. Tyre they passed, and Sidon, rich cities set in the sand, then Scandalion; at length after a long night of watching a soft hill showed, covered with verdure and glossy dark woods, Carmel, shaped like a woman's breast. Making this hallowed mount, in the plain beyond they saw Acre, many-towered; and all about it the tents of the Christian hosts, and before it in the blue waters of the bay ships riding at anchor, more numerous than the sea-birds that haunt Monte Gibello or swim sentinel about its base. Trumpets from the shore answered to their trumpets; they heard a wild tattoo of drums within the walls. On even keels in the motionless tide the ships took up their moorings; and King Richard, throwing the end of his cloak over his shoulder, jumped off the gunwale of Trenchemer, and waded breast-deep to shore. He was the first of his realm to touch this storied Syrian earth.

Now for affairs. The meeting of the Kings was cordial, or seemed so. King Philip came out of his pavilion to meet his royal brother, and Richard, kissing him, asked him how he did. 'Very vilely, Richard,' said the young man. 'I think there is a sword in my head. The glaring sun flattens me by day, and all night I shiver.'

'Fever, my poor coz,' said Richard, with a kind hand upon his shoulder. Philip burst out with his symptoms, wailing like a child: 'The devil bites me. I vomit black. My skin is as dry as a snake's. Yesterday they bled me three ounces.' Richard walked back with him among the tents, conversing cheerfully, and for a few days held his old ascendancy over Philip; but only for a few. Other of the leaders he saw: some gave him no welcome. The Marquess of Montferrat kept his quarters, the Duke of Burgundy was in bed. The Archduke of Austria, Luitpold, a hairy man with light red eyelashes, professed great civility; but Richard had a bad way with strangers. Not being receptive, he took no pains to pretend that he was. The Archduke made long speeches, Richard short replies; the Archduke made longer speeches, Richard no replies. Then the Archduke grew very red, and Richard nearly yawned. This was at the English King's formal reception by the leaders of the Crusade. With the Grand Master of the Temple he got on better, liking the looks of the man. He did not observe Saint-Pol on King Philip's left hand; but there he was, flushed, excited, and tensely observant of his enemy. That same night, when they held a council of war, there was seen a smoulder of that fire which you might have decently supposed put out. King Philip came down in a mighty hurry, and sat himself in the throne; Montferrat, Burgundy, and others of that faction serried round about him. The English and Angevin chiefs were furious, and the Archduke halted between two opinions. By the time (lateish) when King Richard was announced Gaston of Béarn and young Saint-Pol had their swords half out. But Richard came and stood in the doorway, a magnificent leisurely figure. All his party rose up. Richard waited, watching. The Archduke (who really had not seen him before) rose with apologies; then the French followed suit, singly, one here and one there. There only remained seated King Philip and the Marquess of Montferrat. Still Richard waited by the door; presently, in a quiet voice, he said to the usher, 'Take your wand, usher, to that paralytic over there. Tell him that he shall use it, or I will.' The message was delivered: at an angry nod from King Philip the Marquess got darkly up, and Richard came into the hall with King Guy of Jerusalem. These two sat down one on each side of France; and so the council began.

It was hopeless from the outset—a posse of hornets droned into fury by the Archduke. While he talked the rest maddened, longing for each other's blood, failing that of Luitpold. Richard, who as yet had no plans of his own, took no interest whatever in plans. He acted throughout as if the Marquess was not there, and as if he wished with all his heart that the Archduke was not there. On his part, the Marquess would have given nearly all he owned to have behaved so to Guy of Lusignan set over him; but the Marquess had not that art of lazy scorn which belongs to the royal among beasts: he glowered, he was sulky. Meantime the Archduke buzzed his age-long periods, and Richard (clasping his knee) looked at the ceiling. At last he sighed profoundly, and 'God of heaven and earth!' escaped him. King Philip burst into a guffaw—his first for many a day—and broke up the assembly. Richard had himself rowed out to Jehane in her ship.

He had no business there, though his business was innocent enough; but she could not tell him so now. The girl was dejected, ill, and very nervous about herself. Moreover, she had suffered from sea-sickness. She could not hide her comfort to have him; so he took her up and kissed her as of old, and ended by settling her on his knee. There she cried, quietly but freely. He stayed with her till she slept; then went back to the shore and walked about the trenches, thinking out the business before him. The dawn light found him at it. In a day or two, having got his tackle ashore, he began the assault upon a plan of his own, without reference to any other principality or power at all. By this time King Philip lay heaped in his bed, and had had his distempered brain wrought upon by Montferrat and his kind, Saint-Pol, Des Barres, and their kind.

---

Richard had with him Poictevins and Angevins, men of Provence and Languedoc, Normans and English, Scots and Welshry, black Genoese, Sicilians, Pisans, and Grifons from Cyprus. The Count of Champagne had his Flemings to hand; the Templars and the Hospitallers served him gladly. It was an agglomerate, a horde, not an army, and nobody but he could have wielded it. He, by the virtue in him, had them all at his nod. The English, who love to be commanded, hauled stones for him all day, though he had not a word of their language. The swart, praying Italians raved themselves hoarse whenever he came into their lines; even the Cypriotes, sullen and timorous creatures, whom no power among themselves could have driven to the walls, fixed the great petraries and mangonels, and ran grinning into the trap of death for this tawny-haired hero who stood singing, bareheaded, within bow-shot of the Turks, and laughed like a boy when some fellow slipped on to his back upon the dry grass. He was everywhere, day after day—in the trenches, on the towers, teaching the bowmen their business, crying 'Mort de Dieu!' when a mangonel did its work, and some flung rock made the wall to fly; he crouched under the tortoise-screens with the miners, took a mattock himself as indifferently as an arbalest or a cross-bow. He could do everything, and have (if not a word) a cheerful grin for every man who did his duty. As it was evident that he knew what such duty should be, and could have done it better himself, men sweated to win his praise. He was nearly killed on a scaling-ladder, too early put up, or too long left so. Three arrows struck him, and the defenders, calling on Allah, rolled an enormous boulder to the edge of the wall, which must have crushed him out of recognition on the Last Day. 'Garde, sire!' 'Dornna del Ciel!' came the cries from below; but 'Lady Virgin!' growled a shockhead from Bocton-under-Bleane, and pulled his King bodily off the ladder. The poor fellow was shot in the throat at the next moment; the stone fell harmless. King Richard took up his dead Englishman in his arms and carried him to the trenches. He did no more fighting until he had seen him buried, and ordained a mass for him. Things of those sort tempted men to love him.

The siege lasted ten days or more with varying successes. Day and night in the city they heard the drums beat to arms, the cries of the Sheiks, and more piercing, drawn-out cries than theirs. To the nightly shrilled pronouncement of the greatness of God came as answer the Christian's wailing prayer, 'Save us, Holy Sepulchre!' The King of France had an engine which he called The Bad Neighbour, and did well with it until the Turks provided a Bad Kinsman, much bigger, which put the Neighbour to shame, and finally burned him. King Richard had a belfry, and the Count of Flanders could throw stones with his sling from the trenches into the market-place; at any rate he said he could, and they all believed him. The Christians caused the Accursed Tower to totter; they made a breach below the Tower of Flies, in a most horrible part of the haven. Mine and countermine, Richard on the north side worked night and day, denying himself rest, food, reasonable care, for a week forgetful of Jehane and her hope. The weather grew stiflingly hot, night and day there was no breath of wind; the whole country reeked of death and abomination. Once, indeed, a gate was set fire to and rushed. The Christians saw before them for the first time the ghostly winding way of a street, where blind pale houses heeled to each other, six feet apart. There was a breathless fight in that pent way, a strangling, throttled business; Richard with his peers of Normandy, swaying banners, the crashing sound of steel on steel, the splash of split polls: but it could not be carried. The Turks, surging down on them, a wall of men, bodily forced them out. There was no room to swing an axe, no space for a horse to fall, least of all for draught of the bow. Richard cried the retreat; they could not turn, so walked backwards fighting, and the Turks repaired the gate. Acre did not fall by the sword, but by starvation rather, and the diligent negotiations of Saladin with our King. Richard's terms were, Restore the True Cross, empty us Acre of men-at-arms, leave two thousand hostages. This was accepted at last. The Kings rode into Acre on the twelfth of July with their hosts, and the hollow-eyed courtesans watched them furtively from upper windows. They knew their harvest was to reap.

Harvest with them was seed-time with others. It was seed-time with the Archduke. King Richard set up his household in the Castle (with a good lodging for Jehane in the Street of the Camel); King Philip, miserably ill, went to the house of the Templars; with him, sedulously his friend, the Marquess of Montferrat. But Luitpold of Austria proposed himself for the Castle, and Richard endured him as well as he could. But then Luitpold went further. He set up his banner on the tower, side by side with Richard's Dragon, meaning no offence at all. Now King Richard's way was a short way. He had found the Archduke a burdensome ass, but no more. The world was full of such; one must take them as part of the general economy of Providence. But he knew his own worth perfectly well, and his own standing in the host; so when they told him where the Austrian's flag flew, he said, 'Take it down.' They took it down. Luitpold grew red, made a long speech in German at which Richard frowned, and another (shorter) in Latin, at which he laughed. Luitpold put up his flag again; again Richard said, 'Take it down.' Luitpold was so angry that he made no speeches at all; he ran up his flag a third time. When King Richard was told, he laughed, and on this occasion said, 'Throw it away.' Gaston of Béarn, more vivacious than discreet, did so with ignominious detail. That day there was a council of the great estates, at which King Philip presided in a furred gown; for though the weather was suffocating his fever kept him chill to the bones. To the Marquess, pale with his old grudge, was now added the Archduke, flaming with his new one. The mottled Duke of Burgundy blinked approval of all grudges, and young Saint-Pol poured fire into the fire. Richard was not present, nor any of his faction; they, because they had not been advertised, he, because he was in the Street of the Camel at the knees of Jehane the Fair.

The Archduke began on the instant. 'By God, my lords,' he said, 'is there in the world a beast more flagrant than the King of England not killed already?' The Marquess showed the white rims of his eyes—' Injurious, desperate, bloody villain,' was his commentary; and Saint-Pol lifted up his hand to his master for leave to speak mischief. But King Philip said fretfully, 'Well, well, we can all speak of something, I suppose. He scorns me, he has always scorned me. He refuses me homage, he shamed my sister; and now he takes the lead of me.'

The Marquess kept muttering to the table, 'Hopeless villain, hopeless villain!' and the Archduke, after staring about him for sympathy, claimed attention, if not that; for he brought his fist down with a thump.

'By thunder, but I kill him!' he said deep in his throat. Saint-Pol came running and kissed his knee, to Luitpold's great surprise.

Philip shivered in his furs. 'I must go home,' he fretted; 'I am smitten to death. I must die in France.'

'Where is the King of England?' asked the, Marquess, knowing perfectly well.

'Evil light upon him,' cried Saint-Pol, 'he is in my sister's house. Between them they give me a nephew.'

'Oho!' Montferrat said. 'Is that it? Why, then, we know where to strike him quickest. We should make Navarre of our party.'

'He has done that himself, by all accounts: said the Duke of Burgundy, wide-awake.

The Archduke, returning to his new lodgings in the Bishop's house, sent for his astrologers and asked them, Could he kill the King of England?

'My lord,' said they, 'you cannot.'

'How is that?' he asked.

'Lord,' they told him, 'by our arts we discover that he will live for a hundred years.'

'It is very remarkable,' said the Archduke. 'What sort of years will they be?'

'Lord,' said the astrologers, 'they are divers in complexion; but many of them are red.'

'I will provide that they be,' said the Archduke. 'Go away.'

The Marquess sought no astrologers, but instead the Street of the Camel and Jehane's house. He observed this with great care, watching from an entry to see how King Richard would come out, whether attended or not. He observed more than the house, for much more was forced upon him. Human garbage filled the close ways of Acre, men and women marred by themselves or a hideous begetting, hairless persons and snug little chamberers, botch-faces, scald-heads, minions of many sorts, silent-footed Arabians as shameless as dogs, Greeks, pimps and panders, abominable women. Murder was swiftly and secretly done. Montferrat from his entry saw the manner of it. A Norman knight called Hamon le Rotrou came out of an infamous house in the dusk, and stepped into the Street of the Camel with his cloak delicately round him. Fine as he was, he was insanely a lover of the vile thing he had left; for he knelt down in the street to kiss her well-worn doorstep. He knelt under the light of a small lamp, and out of the shadow behind him stepped catfoot a tall thin man, white from head to foot, who, saying 'All hail, master,' stabbed Hamon deep in the side. Hamon jerked up his head, tottered, fell without more than a tired man's sigh sideways into the arms of his killer. This one eased his fall as tenderly as if he was upholding a girl, let him down into the kennel, drew him thence by the shoulders into the dark, and himself vanished. Montferrat swore softly to himself, 'That was neatly done. I must find out who this expert may be.' He went away full of it, having forgotten his housed enemy.

There was a Sheik Moffadin in the jail, one of the Soldan's hostages for the return of the True Cross. The Marquess went to see him.

'Who of your people,' he asked, 'is very tall and light-footed, robes him from head to foot in white linen, and kills quietly, as if he loved the dead, with an "All hail, master"?'

'We call him an Assassin in our language,' the Sheik replied; 'but he is not of our people by any means. He is a servant of the Old Man who dwells on Lebanon.'

'What old man is this, Moffadin?'

'I can tell you no more of him,' said the Sheik, 'save that he is master of many such men, who serve him faithfully and in silence. But he hates the Soldan, and the Soldan him.'

'How do they serve him, by killing?'

'Yes. They kill whomsoever he points out, and so receive (or think to receive) a crown in Paradise.'

'Is this old man's name Death, by our Saviour?' cried the Marquess.

The Sheik answered, 'His name is Sinan. But the name of Death would suit him very well.'

'Where should I get speech with some of his servants?' the Marquess inquired; adding, 'For my life is in danger. I have enemies who are irksome to me.'

'By the Tower of Flies you will find them,' said the Sheik, 'and late at night. There are always some of his people walking there. Seek out such a man as you have seen, and without fear accost him after his fashion, kissing him and saying, "Ah, Ali. Ah, Abdallah, servant of Ali."

'I am very much obliged to you, Moffadin,' said the Marquess.

---

That same night Jehane was in pain, and King Richard dared not leave her, nor the physicians either. And in the morning early she was delivered of a child, a strong boy, and then lay back and slept profoundly. Richard set two black women to fan the flies off her without stopping once under pain of death; and having seen to the proper care of the child and other things, returned alone through the blanching streets, glorifying and praising God.

---

CHAPTER IV

CONCERNING THE TOWER OF FLIES, SAINT-POL, AND THE MARQUESS OF MONTFERRAT

In the church of Saint Lazarus of the Knights, on Lammas Day, the son of Richard and Jehane was made a Christian by the Abbot of Poictiers. Gossips were the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leicester, and (by proxy) the Queen-Mother. He was named Fulke.

At the moment of anointing the church-bell was rung; and at that moment Gilles de Gurdun spat upon the pavement outside. Saint-Pol said to him, 'We must do better than that, Gilles.'

And Gilles, 'I pray God may spit him out.'

'Oh, He!' said Saint-Pol with a bitter laugh; 'He helps those who are helpful of themselves.'

'I cannot help myself, Eustace,' said Gurdun. 'I have tried. I had him unarmed before me at Messina, and he looked me down, and I could not do it.'

'Have at his back, then.'

'I hope it may not come to that, said Gilles; 'and yet it may, if it must.'

'Come with me to-night to the Tower of Flies,' said Saint-Pol. 'Here is my shameful sister brought out of church. I cannot stay.'

'I stay,' said Gilles de Gurdun. King Richard came out of church, and Jehane, and the child carried on a shield.

Jehane, who had much ado to walk without falling, saw not Gilles; but Gilles saw her, and the red in his face took a tinge of black. While she was before him he gaped at her, with a dry tongue clacking in his mouth, consumed by a dreadful despair; but when she had passed by, swaying in her weakness, barely able to hold up her lovely head, he lifted his face to the white sky, and looked unwinking at the sun, wondering where else an equal cruelty could abide. In this golden king, as cruel as the sun, and as swift, and as splendid! Ah, dastard, dastard! At the minute Gilles could have leapt at him and mauled the great shoulders with a dog's weapons. There was no solace for him but to bite. So he dashed his forearm into his face, and sluiced his teeth in that.

But King Richard of the high head mounted his horse in the churchyard, and rode among the people before Jehane's bearers to the Street of the Camel. Squires of his threw silver coins among the crowds who filled the ways.

Within the house, he laid her on her bed, and held up the child before her, high in the air. He was in that great mood where nothing could resist him. She, faint and fragrant on the bed, so frail as to seem transparent, a disembodied sprite, smiled because she felt at ease, as the feeble do when they first lie down.

'Lo, Fulke of Anjou!' sang Richard—'Fulke, son of Richard, the son of Henry, the son of Geoffrey, the son of Fulke! Fulke, my son Fulke, I will make thee a knight even now!' He held the babe in one hand, with the free hand drew his long sword. The flat blade touched the nodding little head.

'Rise up, Sir Fulke of Anjou, true knight of thine house, Sieur de Cuigny when I have thee home again. By the Face!' he cried shortly, as if remembering something, 'we must get him the badge: a switch of wild broom!'

'Dear lord, sweet lord,' murmured Jehane, faint in bed, nearly gone: but he raved on.

'When I lay, even as thou, Fulke, naked by my mother, my father sent for a branch of the broom, and stuck it in the pillow against I could carry it. And shalt thou go without it, boy? Art not thou of the broom-bearers?' He put the child into the nurse's arm and went to the door. He called for Gaston of Béarn, for the Dauphin of Auvergne, for Mercadet, for the devil. The Bishop of Salisbury came running in. 'Bishop,' said King Richard, 'you must serve me to-day. You must take ship, my friend, with speed; you must go to Bordeaux, thence a-horseback to the moor above Angers. Pluck me a branch of the wild broom and return. I must have it, I tell you; so go. Haste, Bishop. God be with you.'

The Bishop began to splutter. 'Hey, sire—!'

'Never call me that again, Bishop, if your ship is within sight by sunset,' he said. 'Call me rather the Prince of the Devils. See my chancellor, take my ring to him, omit nothing. Off with you, and back with all speed.'

'Ha, sire, look you now,' cried the desperate bishop, 'there will be no broom before next Easter. Here we are at Lammas.'

'There will be a miracle,' said Richard; 'I am sure of it. Go.' Fairly pushing him from the door, he returned to find Jehane in a dead faint. This set him raving a new tune. He fell upon his knees incontinent, raised her in his arms, carried her about, kissed her all over, cried upon the saints and God, did every extravagance under the sun, omitted the one wise thing of letting in the physicians. Abbot Milo at last, coming in, saved Jehane from him for the deeper purposes of God.

The Count of Saint-Pol, going to the Castle, to the Queen's side, found the Marquess with her. She also lay white and twisting on a couch, crisping and uncrisping her little hands. Montferrat stood at her head; three of her ladies knelt about her, whispering in her own tongue, proffering orange water, sweetmeats, a feather whisk. Saint-Pol knelt in her view.

'Madame, how is it with your Grace?' he said. The little lady quivered, but took no notice.

'Madame,' said Saint-Pol again, 'I am a peer of France, but a knight before all. I am come to serve your Grace with my manhood. I pray you speak to me.' The Marquess folded his arms; his large white face was a sight to see.

Queen Berengère's palms were bleeding a little where her nails had broken the skin. She was quite white; but her eyes, burning black, had no pupils. When Saint-Pol spoke for the second time she shook beyond all control and threw her head about. Also she spoke.

'I suffer, I suffer horribly. It is cruel beyond understanding or knowledge that a girl should suffer as I suffer. Where is God? Where is Mary? Where are the angels?'

'Dearest Madame, dearest Madame,' said the cooing women, and one stroked her face. But the Queen shook the hand off, and went wailing on, saying more than she could have meant.

'Is it good usage of the daughter of a king, Lord Jesus? Is this the way of marriage, that the bride be left on her wedding day?' She jumped up on her couch and took hold of her bosom in the sight of men. 'She hath given him a child! He is with her now. Am I not fit for children? Shall there never be milk? Oh, oh, here is more shame than I can bear!' She hid her face in her hands, and rocked herself about.

Montferrat (really moved) said low to Saint-Pol: 'Are we knights to suffer these wrongs to be?' Said Saint-Pol with a sob in his voice, 'Ah, God, mend it!'

'He will,' said Montferrat, 'if we help to mend.'

This reminded Saint-Pol of his own words to De Gurdun; so he made haste to throw himself before the Queen, that he might still be pure in his devotion. 'My lady Berengère,' he said ardently, 'take me for your soldier. I am a bad man, but surely not so bad as this. Let me fight him for you.'

The Queen shook her head, impatient. 'Hey! What can you do against so glorious a man? He is the greatest in the world.'

'Ha, domeneddio!' said the Marquess with a snort. 'I have that which will abate such glory. Dearest Madame, we go to pray for your health.' He kissed her hand, and drew away with him Saint-Pol, who was trembling under the thoughts that fired him.

'Oh, my soul, Marquess!' said the youth, when they were in the glare of day again. 'What shall we do to mend this wretchedness?' The Marquess looked shrewdly.

'End the wretch who wrought it.'

'Do we go clean to that, Marquess? Have we no back-thoughts of our own?'

'The work is clean enough. You come to-night to the Tower of Flies?'

'Yes, yes, I will come,' said Saint-Pol.

'I shall have one with me,' the Marquess went on, 'who will be of service, mind you.'

'Ah,' said Saint-Pol, 'and so shall I.'

The Marquess stroked his nose. 'Hum,' he said, advising, 'who might your man be, Saint-Pol?'

'One,' said Eustace, 'who has reason to hate Richard as much as that poor lady in there.'

'Who is that?'

'My sister Jehane's lover.'

'By the visible Host,' said Montferrat,' we shall be a loving company, all told.' So they parted for the time.

The Tower of Flies stands apart from the city on a spit of sand which splays out into two flanges, and so embraces in two hooks a lagoon of scummy ooze, of weeds and garbage, of all the waste and silt of a slack water. In front of it only is the tidal sea, which there flows languidly with a half-foot rise; on the other is the causeway running up to the city wall. Above and all about this dead marsh you hear day and night the buzzing of innumerable great flies, and in the daytime see them hanging like gauze in the thick air. They say the reason is that anciently the pagans sacrificed hecatombs hereabout to the idols they worshipped; but another (more likely) is that the lagoon is a dead slack, and stinks abominably. All dead things thrown from the city walls come floating thither, and there stay rotting. The flies get what they can, sharing with the creatures of land and sea; for great fish feed there; and at night the jackals and hyænas come down, and bicker over what they can drag out. But more than once or twice the sharks drag them in, and have fresh meat, if their brother sharks allow it. However all this may be, the place has a dreadful name, a dreadful smell, and a dreadful sound, what with the humming of flies and dull rippling of the sharks. These can seldom be seen, since the water is too thick; but you can tell their movements by the long oily waves (like the heads of large arrows) which their fins throw behind them as they quest from carcase to carcase down there in the ooze.

Thither in the murk of night came Montferrat in a black cloak, holding his nose, but made feverish through his ears by the veiled chorus of the flies. By the starshine and glow of the putrid water he saw a tall man in a white robe, who stood at the extreme edge of the spit and looked at the sharks. Montferrat hid his guards behind the Tower, crossed himself, drew his sword to hack a way through the monstrous flies, and so came swishing forward, like a man who mows a swathe.

The tall man saw him, but did not move. The Marquess came quite close.

'What are you looking at, my friend?' he asked, in the Arabian tongue.

'I am looking at the sharks, which have a new corpse in there,' said the man. 'See what a turmoil there is in the water. There must be six monsters together in that swirl. See, see, there speeds another!'

The Marquess turned sick. 'God help, I cannot look,' he said.

'Why,' said the Arabian, 'It is a dead man they fight over.'

'May be, may be,' said the Marquess. 'You, my friend, are very familiar with death. So am I; nor do I fear living man. But these great fish terrify me.'

'You are a fool,' returned the other. 'They seek only their meat. But you and I, and our like, seek nicer things than that. We have our souls to feed; and the soul of a man is a free eater, of stranger appetite than a shark.'

The Marquess looked at the flies. 'O God, Arabian, let us go away from this place! Is there no rest from the flies?

'None at all,' said the Arabian; 'for thousands have been slain here; and the flies also must be fed.'

'Pah, horrible!' said the Marquess, all in a sweat. The Arabian turned; but his face was hidden, with a horrible appearance, as if a hooded cloak stood up by itself and a voice proceeded from a fleshless garb. 'You, Marquess of Montferrat,' it said, 'what do you want with me by the Tower of Flies?'

The Marquess remembered his needs. 'I want the death of a man,' he said; 'but not here, O Christ.'

'Who sent you?' asked the Arabian.

'The Sheik Moffadin, a captive, in the name of Ali, and of Abdallah, servant of Ali.' So the Marquess, and would have kissed the man, but that he saw no face under the hood, and dared not kiss emptiness.

'Come with me,' said the Arabian.

---

An hour later the Marquess came into the Tower of Flies, shaking. He found Saint-Pol there, the Archduke of Austria, and Gilles de Gurdun. There were no greetings.

'Where is your man, Marquess?' asked Saint-Pol of the pale Italian.

'He is out yonder looking at the sharks,' said the Marquess, in a whisper; 'but he will serve us if we dare use him.' He struck at the flies weaving about his head. 'This is a horrible place, Saint-Pol,' he said, staring. Saint-Pol shrugged.

'The deed we compass, dear Marquess, is none of the choicest, remember,' said he. The Marquess then saw that Austria's broad leather back was covered with flies. This quickened his loathing.

'By our Saviour,' he said, 'one must hate a man very much to talk against him here.'

'Do you hate enough?' asked Saint-Pol.

The Marquess stared about him. He saw the Archduke peacefully twiddle his thumbs. He saw De Gurdun, who stood moodily, looking at the floor.

'Oh, content you,' Saint-Pol answered him. 'That man hates more than you or I. And with more reason.'

'What are your reasons, Eustace?' asked Montferrat, still in a whisper.

'I hate him,' said Saint-Pol, 'for my brother's sake, whose back he broke; for my sister's sake, whose heart he must break before he has done with her; for my house's sake, to which (in Eudo's person) he gave the lie; because he is of Anjou, cruel as a cat and savage as a dog; because he is a ruthless, swift, treacherous, secret, unconscionable beast. Are these enough reasons for you?'

'By God, Eustace,' said the breathless Montferrat, 'I cannot think it. Not here!'

'Then,' said Saint-Pol, 'I hate him for Berengère's sweet sake. That is a good and clean hatred, I believe. That wasted lady, writhing white on a bed, moved me to pure pity. If I loved her before I will love her now with whole service, not daring belie my knighthood. I love that queen and intend to serve her. I have never seen such pitiful beauty before. What! Is the man insatiate? Shall he have everything? He shall have nothing. That will serve for me, I hope. Now, Marquess, it is your turn.'

The Marquess struck out at the flies. 'I hate him,' he said, 'because, before the King of France, he called me a liar and threatened me with ignominious death.' He gasped here, and looked round him to see what effect he had made. Saint-Pol's eyes (green-grey like his sister's) were upon him, rather coldly; Gurdun's on the floor still. The Archduke was scratching in his beard; and the chorus of flies swelled and shrilled. The Marquess needed alliances.

'Eh, my friends,' he said, almost praying, 'will this not serve me?'

Said Saint-Pol, 'Marquess, listen to this man. Speak, Gilles.'

Gilles looked up. 'I have tried to kill him. I had my chance fair. I could not do it. I shall try again, for the law is on my side. To you, lords, I shall say nothing, for I am a man ashamed to speak of what I desire to do, not yet certain whether I can accomplish it. This I say, the man is my liege lord, but a thief for all that. I loved my Lady Jehane when she was twelve years old and I a page in her father's house. I have never loved any other woman, and never shall. There are no other women. She gave herself to me for good reason, and he himself gave her into my hand for good reason. And then he robbed me of her on my wedding day, and has slain my father and young brother to keep her. He has given her a child: enough of this. Dastard! I will follow and follow until I dare to strike. Then I will kill him. Let me alone.' Gilles, red and gloomy, had to jerk the words out: he was no speaker. The Marquess had a fierce eye.

'Ha, De Gurdun,' he said, 'we need thee, good knight. But come out of this accursed fly-roost, and we shall show thee a better way than thine. It is the flies that make thee afraid.'

'Eh, damn the flies,' said Gilles. 'They will never disturb me. They do but seek their meat.'

'They disturb me horribly,' said the Marquess, with Italian candour.

Saint-Pol laughed. 'I told you that I could bring you in a man,' he said. 'Now, Marquess, you have our two clean reasons. What is yours?'

'I have given you mine,' said Montferrat, shifting his feet. 'He called me a liar.'

'It lacks cogency,' said Saint-Pol. 'One must have clean reasons in an unclean place.' The Marquess broke out into blasphemy.

'May hell scorch us all if I have no reasons! What! Has he not kept me from my kingdom? Guy of Lusignan will be king by his means. What is Philip against Richard? What am I? What is the Archduke?' He had forgotten that the Archduke was there.

'By Beelzebub, the god of this place,' said that deep-voiced hairy man, 'you shall see what the Archduke is when you want him. But I am no murderer. I am going home. I know what is due to a prince, and from a prince.'

'Do as you please, my lord,' said Saint-Pol; 'but our schemes are like to be endangered by such goings.'

'I have so little liking for your schemes, to be plain with you,' replied the Archduke, 'that they may fail and fail again for me. How I deal with the King of England, who has insulted me beyond hope, is a matter for him and me to determine.'

'Cousin,' said Montferrat, 'you desert me.'

'Cousin again,' said the Archduke, 'do you wonder?' And so he walked out.

'Punctilious boar!' cried Saint-Pol in a fume, 'who can only get his tushes in one way! Now, Marquess, what are we to do?'

The Marquess smiled darkly, and tapped his nose. 'I have my business in good train. I have an ancient friend on Lebanon. Stand in with me, the pair of you, and I have all done smoothly.'

'You hire?' asked Saint-Pol, drily. Then he shrugged—'Oh, but we may trust you!'

'Per la Madonna!' said the Marquess.

'What will you do, Gilles?' Saint-Pol asked the Norman. 'Will you leave it to the Marquess of Montferrat?'

'I will not,' said Gilles. 'I follow King Richard from point to point. I hire nobody.'

The Marquess's hands went up, desperate of such folly. 'You only with me, my Eustace!' he said.

Saint-Pol looked up. 'I differ from either. I have a finer plan than either. You are satisfied with a sword-stroke in the back—'

'By my soul, it shall not be in the back!' cried De Gurdun. Saint-Pol shrugged again.

'That is the Marquess's way. But what matter? You want to see him down. So do I, by heaven, but in hell, not on the earth. I will see him tormented. I will see him ashamed. I will wreck his hopes. I will make him a mockery of all kings, drag his high spirit through the mud of disastrousness. Pouf! Do you think him all flesh? He is finer stuff than that. What he makes others I seek to make him-soiled, defiled, a blown rag. There is work to be done in that kind here and at home. King Philip will see to one; I stay with the host.'

'It is a good plan,' said the Marquess; 'I admire it exceedingly. But steel is safer for a common man. I go to Lebanon, for my part, to my friends there. But I think we are in agreement.'

Before they went away, they cut their arms with a dagger, and mingled their blood. The Marquess wrapped his wound deep in his cloak to keep the flies from it. Across the silence of the night, as they made their way into the city, came the cry of the watchman from a belfry: 'Save us, Holy Sepulchre!' It floated from tower to tower, from land far out to sea. Jehane, dry in her hot bed, heard it; Richard, on his knees in an oratory, heard it, crossed himself, and repeated the words. Queen Berengère moaned in her sleep; the Duke of Burgundy snored; and the Arabian spat into the lagoon.

---

CHAPTER V

THE CHAPTER OF FORBIDDING: HOW DE GURDUN LOOKED, AND KING RICHARD HID HIS FACE

Since the Soldan broke his pledges, King Richard swore that he would keep his. So he had all the two thousand hostages killed, except the Sheik Moffadin, whom the Marquess had enlarged. He has been blamed for this, and I (if it were my business) should blame him too. He asked no counsel, and allowed no comment: by this time he was absolute over the armies in Acre. If I am to say anything upon the red business it shall be this, that he knew very well where his danger lay. It was his friends, not his enemies, he had reason to fear; and upon these the effect of what he did was instantaneous, and perhaps well-timed. The Count of Flanders had died of the camp-sickness; King Philip was stricken to the bones with the same crawling disease. Nothing now could keep Philip away from France. Acre was full of rumours, meetings of kings and princes, spies, racing messengers. Who should stay and who go was the matter of debate. Philip meant to go: his friend, Prince John of England, had been writing to him. Flanders must be occupied, and Flanders, near England, was nearer yet to Normandy. The Marquess also meant to go—to Sidon for Lebanon. He had things to do up there on Richard's and his own account, as you shall hear. But the Archduke chose to stay in Acre—and so on.

King Richard heard of each of these hasty discussions with a shrug, and only put his hand down when they were all concluded. He said that unless French hostages were left in his keeping for the fulfilment of covenants, he should know what to do.

'And what is that, King of England?' asked Philip.

'What becomes me,' was the short answer, given in full hail before the magnates. They looked at each other and askance at the sanguine-hued King, who drove them all huddling before him by mere magnanimity. What could they do but leave hostages? They left Burgundy, Beauvais, and Henry of Champagne—one friend, one enemy, and one blockhead. Now you see a reason for drawing the sword upon the wretched Turks. If Richard had planted, they, poor devils, had to water.

So King Philip went home, and the Marquess to Sidon for Lebanon; and Richard, knowing full well that they meant him ill here and at home, turned his face towards Jerusalem.

---

When the time came for ordering the goings of his host, he grew very nervous about what he must leave behind him in Acre. Whether he was a good man or not, a good husband, a good lover or not, he was passionately a father. In every surge and cry of his wild heart he showed this. The heart is a generous inn, keeps open house, grows wide to meet all corners. The company is divers. In King Richard's heart sat three guests: Christ and His lost Cross, Jehane and her lost honour, and little Fulke upon her breast. Christ was a dumb guest, but the most eloquent still. There had been no nods from Him since the great day of Fontevrault; but Richard watched Him daily and held himself bound to be His footboy. See these desperate shifts of the great-hearted man! Here were his two other guests: little Fulke, who claimed everything, and still Jehane, who claimed nothing; and outside the door stood Berengère, crisping and uncrisping her small hands. To serve Christ he had married the Queen; to serve the Queen he had put away Jehane; to honour Jehane (who had given him her honour) he had abjured the Queen. Now lastly, he prayed Christ to save him Fulke, his first and only son. 'My Saviour Christ,' he prayed on his last night at Acre, 'let Thine honour be the first end of this adventure. But if honour come to Thee, my Lord, through me, let honour stay with me and my son through Thee. I cannot think I do amiss to ask so much. One other thing I ask before I go out. Watch over these treasures of mine that I leave in pawn, for I know very well that I shall get no more of them.' Then he kissed the mother and the child, comforting them, and went out, not trusting himself to look back at the house.

He had made the defences of Acre as good as he knew, which was very good indeed. He had bettered the harbour; he left ships in it, established a post between it and Beyrout, between Beyrout and Cyprus. He sent Guy of Lusignan to be his regent in that island, Emperor if he chose. He left Abbot Milo to comfort Jehane, the Viscount of Béziers to rule the town and garrison. Shriven, fortified with the Sacrament, he spent his last night in Acre on the 21st of August. Next morning, as soon as it was day, he led his army out on its march to Jerusalem.

Joppa was his immediate object, to which place a road ran between the mountains and the sea, never far from either. He had little or no transport, nor could expect food by the way, for Saladin had seen to that. The ships had to work down level with him, with reserves of men and stores; and even so the thing had an ugly look. The mountains of Ephraim, not very lofty, were covered with a thick growth of holm-oak: excellent cover, wherein, as he knew quite well, the Saracens could move as he moved, choose their time, and attack him on front, rear, or left flank, wherever chance offered. It was a journey of peril, harassing, slow, and without glory.

For six weeks he led and held a running battle, wherein the powers of earth and air, the powers of Mahomet, and dark forces within his own lines all strove against him. He met them alone, with a blank face, eyes bare, teeth hard-set. Whatever provocation was offered from without or within, he would not attack, nor let his friends attack, until the enemy was in his hand. You, who know what longanimity may be and how hard a thing to come at, may admire him for this.

Directly the Christians were over the brook Belus, their difficulties were upon them. The way was through a pebbly waste of beach and salt-grass, and a sea-scrub of grey bushes. A mile to their left the rocks began, spurs of the mountains; the shrubs became stunted trees; the rocks climbed, the trees with them; then the forest rose, first sparsely, then thick and dark; lastly, into the deep blue of the sky soared the toothed ridges, grey, scarred, and splintry. Scurrying horsemen, on beasts incredibly sure of foot, hung on the edge of these fastnesses, yelling, whirling their lances, white-clad, swarthy and hoarse. They came by fifties, or in clouds they came, swept by like a windstorm, and were gone. And in each shrill and terrible rush some stragglers, be sure, would call upon Christ in vain. Or sometimes great companies of Mamelukes in mail, massed companies in blocks of men, stood covered by their bowmen as if offering battle. If the Christians opened out to attack (as at first they did), or some party of knights, more adventurous than another, pricked forward at a canter, and hastening as their hearts grew high cried at last the charge, 'Passavant!' or 'Sauve Anjou!' out of the wood with cries would come the black cavalry, sweep up behind our men, and cut off one company or another. And if so by day, by night there was no long peace under the large stars. Desperate stampedes, the scattering of camp-fires, trampling, grunting in the dark; ghostly horsemen looming and vanishing suddenly in the half-light; and in the lull the querulous howling of wild beasts disappointed.

To their full days succeeded their empty days, when they were alone with the desert and the sun. Then hunger and thirst assailed them, serpents bit them, stinging flies drove men mad, the sand burnt their feet through steel and leather. They lost more this way than by Saracen ambush, and lost more hearts than men. This was a time for private grudges to awaken. Hatred feeds on such dry meat. In the empty watches of the night, in the blistering daytime, under the white sky or the deep violet, Des Barres remembered his struck face, De Gurdun his stolen wife, Saint-Pol his dead brother, and the Duke of Burgundy his forty pounds.

It must be said that Richard stretched his authority as far as it would go. His direct aim was to reach Joppa with speed, and thence to strike inward over the hills to the Holy City. It was against sense to attack this enemy hugging the woody heights; but as time went on, as he lost men and heard the muttering of those who saw them go, he understood that if he could tempt Saladin into close battle upon chosen ground it would be well. This was a difficult matter, for though (as he knew) the Saracen army followed him in the woods, it kept well out of sight. None but the light horsemen showed near at hand, and their tactics were to sting like wasps, and fly—never to join battle. At last, in the swamp of Arsûf, where the Dead River splays over broad marshes, and goes in a swamp to the sea-edge, he saw his chance, and took it.

Here a feint, carried out by Gaston of Béarn with great spirit, brought Saladin into the open. The Christians continued their toilsome march, Saladin attacked their rear; and for six hours or more that rearguard fought a retreating battle, meeting shock after shock, striking no blow, while the centre and the van watched them. This was one of the tensest days of Richard's iron rule. De Charron, commanding the rear, sent imploring messengers—'For Christ's love let us charge, sire, we can bear no more of this.' He was answered, 'Let them come on again.' Then Saint-Pol, seeing one of the chances of his life, was in open mutiny of the tongue. 'Are we sheep, then?' Thus he to the French with Burgundy. 'Is the King a drover of cattle? Where is the chivalry of France?' Even Richard's friends grew fretful: Champagne tossing his head, muttering curses to himself, Gaston of Béarn pale and serious, chewing his beard. Two more wild assaults the rearguard took stiffly, at the third they broke in two places, but repelled the Turks. Richard, watching like a hawk, saw his opportunity. He sent down a message to the Duke of Burgundy, to Saint-Pol and De Charron—'Hold them yet once more; at six blasts of my trumpet, charge.' The Duke of Burgundy, block though he was, was prepared to obey. About him came buzzing Saint-Pol and his friends: 'Impossible, my lord Duke, we cannot keep in our men. Attack, attack.' Saladin was then coming on, one of his thunderous charges. 'God strike blind those French mules!' cried Richard. 'They are out!' This was true: from left to centre the Christian bowmen were out, the knights pricking after them to the charge. Richard cursed them from his heart. 'Sound trumpets!' he shouted, 'we must let go.' They sounded; they ran forward: the English first, then the Normans, Poictevins, men of Anjou and Pisa, black Genoese—but the left had moved before them, and made doubtful Richard's échelon. They knelt, pulled bowstrings to the ear. The sky grew dun as the long shafts flew; the oncoming tide of men flickered and tossed like a broken sea, and the Soldan's green banner dipped like a reed in it. A second time the blast of arrows, like a gust of death, smote them flat: Richard's voice rang sharply out—'Passavant, chivalers! Sauve Anjou!'—and a young Poictevin knight, stooping low in his saddle, went rocking down the line with words for Henry of Champagne, who ruled the centre. The archers ran back and crouched; Richard and his chivalry on the extreme right moved out, the next company after him, and the next, and the next, company following company, until, in echelon, all the long fluttering array galloped over the marsh, overlapped and enfolded the Saracen hordes in their bright embrace. A frenzied cry from some emir by the standard gave notice of the danger; the bodyguard about the Soldan were seen urging him. Saladin gave some hasty order as he rode off; Richard saw it, and tasted the bitterness of folly. 'By God, we shall lose him—oh, bemused hog of Burgundy!' He sent a man flying to the Duke; but it was too late. Saladin gained the woods, and with him his bodyguard, the flower of his state.

The Mamelukes also turned to fly. To right, to left, the mad horsemen drove—the black, the plumed, the Nubians in yellow, the Turcomans with spotted skins over their mail, the men of Syria, knighthood of Egypt—trampling underfoot their own kind. But the steel chain held most of these; the knights had bound horse to horse: wide on the left the Templars and Hospitallers fanned out and swept all stragglers into the net. So within hoops of iron, as it were, the slaughter began, silent, breathless, wet work. Here James d'Avesnes was killed, a good knight; and here Des Barres went down in a huddle of black men, and had infallibly perished but that King Richard himself with his axe dug him out. 'Your pardon, King of the World,' sobbed Des Barres, kissing his enemy's knee. 'Pooh,' says Richard, 'we are all kings here. Take my sword and get crowns'; and so he turned again into battle, and Des Barres pressed after him. That was the beginning of a firm friendship between the two. Des Barres eschewed the counsels of Saint-Pol from that day.

But there was treachery still awake and about. When the rout was begun Richard reined up for a minute, to breathe his horse and watch the way of the field. He sat apart from his friends, seeing the lines ride by. All in a moment inexplicably, as when in a race of the tide comes a sudden thwart gust of wind and changes the face of the day, there was a scurry, a babble of voices, the stampede of men fighting to kill: the Turks with Christians on their backs came trampling, struggling together. A sword glinted close to Richard—'Death to the Angevin devil!' he heard, and turning received in mid shield De Gurdun's sword. At the same moment a knight ran full tilt into the assailant, knocked him off his horse, and himself reeled, powerless to strike. This was Des Barres, paying his debts. The King smiled grimly to see the wholesome treachery, and Gurdun's dismay at it. 'Gilles, Gilles,' says he, 'be sure you get me alone in the world when next you strike at my back. Now get you up, Norman, and fight a flying enemy, if you please. I will await your return.' De Gurdun saluted, but avoided his lord's face, and rode after the Turks. Des Barres stood, deep-breathing, by the King.

'Will he come back, sire?' asked the French knight.

'Not he,' said Richard; 'he is ashamed of himself.' He added, 'That is a very honest man, to whom I have done a wrong. But listen to this, Des Barres; if I had not wronged him, I was so placed that I should have injured a most holy innocent soul. Let be. I shall meet De Gurdun again. He may have me yet if he do not tire.'

He had been speaking as if to himself so far, but now turned his hawk-eyes upon Des Barres. 'Tell me now,' he said, 'who gave the order to the rear to charge, against my order?'

'Sire,' replied Des Barres, 'it was the Duke of Burgundy.'

'You do not understand me,' said Richard. 'It came through the Duke of Burgundy's windpipe. But who put it into his thick head?'

Des Barres looked troubled. 'Ah, sire, must I answer you?'

Considering him, King Richard said, 'No, Des Barres, you need not. For now I know who it was. Well, he has lost me my game, and won a part of his, I doubt.' Then he rode off, bidding Des Barres sound the recall.

'Of the pagans that day,' writes Milo by hearsay, 'we made hecatombs two score five: yet the King my master took no pleasure of that, as I gather, deeming that he should have had Saladin's head in a bag. Also we gained a clear road to Joppa.' So they did; but Joppa was a heap of stones.

---

They held a great council there. Richard put out his views. There were two things to be done: repair Joppa and march at once on Jerusalem, there to find and have again at Saladin; or pursue the coast road to Ascalon and raise the siege of that city. 'I, my lords, am for Ascalon,' Richard said. 'It is the key of Egypt. While the Soldan holds us cooped up in Ascalon he can get his pack-mules through. If we relieve it, after the battery we have done him we can hold Jerusalem at our whim. What do you say to this, Duke of Burgundy?'

In the natural order of things the Duke would have said nothing. But he had been filled to the neck by Saint-Pol. Richard being for Ascalon, the key of Egypt, the Duke declared himself for Jerusalem, 'the key,' as he rather flatly said, 'of the world.' To this Richard contented himself with replying, that a key was little worth unless you could open the door with it. All the French stood by their leader, except Des Barres. He, with Richard's party, leaned to the King's side. But the Duke of Burgundy would not budge, sat like a lump. He would not go to Ascalon, and none of his battle should go. Richard cursed all Frenchmen, but gave in. The truth was, he dared not leave Saint-Pol behind him.

They repaired the walls and towers of Joppa, garrisoned the place. Then late in the autumn (truthfully, too late) they struck inland over a rolling grass country towards Blanchegarde, a white castle on a green hill. Moving slowly and cautiously, they pushed on to Ramleh, thence to Bêtenoble, which is actually within two days' march of Jerusalem. The month was October, mellow autumn weather. King Richard, moved by the sacred influences, the level peace of the fair land, filled day and night with the thought that he was on the threshold of that soil which bore the very footmarks of our blessed Saviour—King Richard, I say, was in great heart. He had been against the enterprise thus to do; he would have approached from Ascalon; the enterprise was folly. But it was glorious folly, for which a man might well die. He was ready to die, though he hoped and believed that he should not. Saladin, once bitten, would be shy: he had been badly bitten at Arsûf. Then came the Bishop of Beauvais with Burgundy to his tent—Saint-Pol stayed behind—with speeches, saying that the winter season was at hand; that it would be more prudent to withdraw to Joppa, or even to go down to Ascalon. Ascalon needed succours, it seemed. Richard's heart stood still at this treachery; then he blazed out in fury. 'Are we hare or hounds, by heaven? Do you presume—?' He mastered himself. 'What part, pray, does Almighty God take in these pastimes of yours?'

The Duke of Burgundy looked heavily at the Bishop. The Bishop said, 'Sire, Ascalon is besieged.'

Said Richard, 'You old fool, do you not know the Soldan better than that? Or do you put him on a parity with this Duke? It was under siege three weeks ago, as you remember perfectly well.'

The Duke still looked at the Bishop. Driven again to say something, the latter began—'Sire, your words are injurious; but I have spoken advisedly. The Count of Saint-Pol—'

'Ah,' said Richard, 'the Count of Saint-Pol? Now I begin to understand you. Please to fetch in your Count of Saint-Pol.'

Saint-Pol was sent for, and he came, darkly smiling, respectful, but aware. King Richard held his voice, but not his hand, on the curb. The hand shook a little.

'Saint-Pol,' he said, 'the Duke of Burgundy refers me to the Bishop, the Bishop to you. This seems the order of command in King Philip's host. Between the three of you I conceive to lie the honour of France. Now observe me. Three weeks ago I was for Ascalon, and you for Jerusalem. Now that I have brought you within two days of your desire—two days, observe—you are for Ascalon, and I for Jerusalem. What is the meaning of this?'

'Sire,' said Saint-Pol, reasonably, 'it means that we believe the Holy City impregnable at this season, or untenable; and Ascalon still pregnable.'

The King put a hand to the table. 'It means nothing of the sort, man. You do not believe Ascalon can be taken. It is eight days' journey, and was in straits a month ago. You make me ashamed of the men I am forced to lead. What faith have you? What religion? The faith of your sick master the Runagate! The religion of your white Marquess of Montferrat! And I had taken you for men. Foh! you are rats.'

This was dreadful hearing: Saint-Pol bit his lip, but made no other answer.

'Sire,' said the Bishop with heat, 'my manhood has never been reproached before. When you carried war into my country in the King your father's time, I met you in a hauberk of mail. If I met your Grace, judge if I should fear the Soldan. It is my devout hope to kiss the Holy Sepulchre and touch the Holy Cross, but before I die, not afterwards.'

'Pish!' said King Richard.

'Sire,' Beauvais ventured again, 'our master King Philip set us over his host as foster-fathers of his children. We dare not imperil so many lives unadvisedly.'

'Unadvisedly!' the King thundered at him, red to the roots of his hair.

'I withdraw the word, sire,' said the Bishop in a hurry; 'yet it is the mature opinion of us all that we should seek the coast for winter-quarters, not the high lands. We claim, at least, the duty of choosing for those whose guardians we are.'

If Richard had been himself of two years earlier he would have killed then and there a second Count of Saint-Pol; and for a pulse or two the young man saw his death bright in the King's eyes. That the angry man commanded himself is, I think, to his credit. As it was, he did what he had certainly never done before: he tried to reason with the Duke of Burgundy.

'Duke of Burgundy,' he said, leaning over his chair and talking low, 'you are no Frenchman, and the more of a man on that account. You and I have had our differences. I have blamed you, and you me. But I have never found you a laggard when there was work for the sword or adventure for the heart. Now, of all adventures in the world the highest in which a man may engage is here. Across those hills lies the city of God, of which (I suppose) no soul among us might, unhelped, dare hope the sight, much less the touch, least of all the redemption. I tell you, Duke of Burgundy, there is that within me (not my own) which will lead you thither with profit, glory and honour. Will you trust me? So far as I have gone along with you I have done reasonably well. Did I scatter the heathen at Arsûf? No thanks to you, Burgundy, but I did. Did I hold a safe course to Joppa? Have I then brought you so near, and myself so near, for nothing at all? If I have been a fool in my day, I am not a fool now. I speak what I know. With this host I can save the city. Without the best of it, I can do nothing. What do you say, my lord? Will you let Beauvais take his Frenchmen to dishonour, and you and your Burgundians play for honour with me? The prize is great, the reward sure, here or in heaven. What do you say, Duke of Burgundy?'

His voice shook by now, and all the bystanders watched without breath the heavy, brooding, mottled man over against him. He, faithful to his nature, looked at the Bishop of Beauvais. But Beauvais was looking at his ring.

'What do you say, my lord?' again asked King Richard.

The Duke of Burgundy was troubled: he blinked, looking at Saint-Pol. But Saint-Pol was looking at the tent-roof.

'Be pleased to look at me,' said Richard; and the man did look, working under his wrongs.

'By God, Richard,' said the Duke of Burgundy, 'you owe me forty pound!'

King Richard laughed till he was helpless.

'It may be, it may well be,' he gasped between the throes of his mirth. 'O lump of clay! O wonderful half-man! O most expressive river-horse! You shall be paid and sent about your business. Archbishop, be pleased to pay this man his bill. I will content you, Burgundy, with money; but I will be damned before I take you to Jerusalem. My lords,' he said, altering voice and look in a moment, 'I will conduct you to the ships. Since I am not strong enough for Jerusalem I will go to Ascalon. But you! By the living God, you shall go back to France.' He dismissed them all, and next day broke up his camp.

But before that, very early in the morning, after a night spent with his head in his hands, he rode out with Gaston and Des Barres to a hill which they call Montjoy, because from there the pilgrims, tending south, see first among the folded hills Jerusalem itself lie like a dove in a nest. The moon was low and cold, the sun not up; but the heavens and earth were full of shadowless light; every hill-top, every black rock upon it stood sharply cut out, as with a knife. King Richard rode silently, his face covered in a great hood; neither man with him dared speak, but kept the distance due. So they skirted hill after hill, wound in and out of the deep valleys, until at last Gaston pricked forward and touched his master on the arm. Richard started, not turned.

'Montjoy, dear master,' said Gaston.

There before them, as out of a cup, rose a dark conical hill with streamers of white light behind and, as might be, leaping from it. 'The light shines on Jerusalem,' said Gaston: Richard, looking up at the glory, uncovered his head. Sharp against the light stood a single man on Montjoy, who faced the full sun. They who saw him there were still deep in shade.

'Gaston and Des Barres,' said King Richard, when they had reached the foot of the wet hill, 'stay you here. Let me go on alone.'

Gaston demurred. 'The hill is manned, sire. Beware an ambush. You have enemies close by.' He hinted at Saint-Pol.

'I have only one enemy that I fear, Gaston,' said the King; 'and he rides my horse. Do as I tell you.'

They obeyed; so he went under their anxious eyes. Slowly he toiled up the bridle-path which the feet of many pilgrims had worn into the turf; slowly they saw him dip from the head downwards into the splendour of the dawn. But when horse and man were bathed full in light, those two below touched each other and held hands; for they saw him hoist his great shield from his shoulder and hold it before his face. So as he stayed, screening himself from what he sought but dared not touch, the solitary watcher turned, and came near him, and spoke.

'Why does the great King cover his face?' said Gilles de Gurdun; 'and why does he, of his own will, keep the light of God from him? Is he at the edge of his dominion? Hath he touched the limit of his power? Then I am stronger than my Duke; for I see the towers shine in the sun; I see the Mount of Olives, Calvary also, and the holy temple of God. I see the Church of the Sepulchre, the battlements and great gates of the city. Look, my lord King. See that which you desire, that you may take it. Fulke of Anjou was King of Jerusalem; and shall not Richard be a king? What is lacking? What is amiss? For kings may desire that which they see, and take that which they desire, though other men go cursing and naked.'

Said King Richard from behind his shield, 'Is that you, Gurdun, my enemy?'

'I am that man,' said Gilles, 'and bolder than you are, since I can look unoffended upon the place where our Lord God suffered as a man. Suffering, it seems, maketh me sib with God.'

'I will never look upon the city, though I have risked all for the sake of it,' said Richard; 'for now I know that it was no design of God's to allow me to take it, although it was certainly His desire that I should come into this country. Perhaps He thought me other than now I am. I will not look. For if I look upon it I shall lead my men up against it; and then they will be cut off and destroyed, since we are too few. I will never see what I cannot save.'

Said Gilles between his teeth, 'You robber, you have seen my wife, and cannot save her now' Richard laughed softly.

'God bless her,' he said, 'she is my true wife, and will be saved sure enough. Yet I will tell you this, Gurdun. If she was not mine she should be yours; and what is more, she may be so yet.'

'You speak idly,' said Gurdun, 'of things which no man knows.'

'Ah,' said the King, 'but I do know them. Leave me: I wish to pray.'

Gilles moved off, and sat himself on the edge of the hill looking towards Jerusalem. If Richard prayed, it was with the heart, for his lips never opened. But I believe that his heart, in this hour of clear defeat, was turned to stone. He took his joys with riot, his triumphs calmly; his griefs he shut in a trap. Such a nature as his, I suppose, respects no persons. Whether God beat him, or his enemy, he would take it the same way. All that Gilles heard him say aloud was this: 'What I have done I have done: deliver us from evil.' He bade no farewell to his hope, he asked no greeting for his altered way. When he had turned his back upon the sacred places he lowered his shield; and then rode down the hill into the cold shadow of the valley.

If he was changed, or if his soul, naked of hope, was stricken bleak, so was the road he had to go. That day he broke up his camp and fared for Ascalon and the sea. Stormy weather set in, the rains overtook him; he was quagged, blighted with fever, lost his way, his men, his men's love. Camp-sickness came and spread like a fungus. Men, rotten through to the brain, died shrieking, and as they shrieked they cursed his name. One, a Poictevin named Rolf, whom he knew well, turned away his blackened face when Richard came to visit him.

'Ah, Rolf,' said the King, 'dost thou turn away from me, man?'

'I do that, by our Lord,' said Rolf, 'since by these deeds of thine my wife and children will starve, or she become a whore.'

'As God lives,' said Richard, 'I will see to it.'

'I do not think He can be living any more,' said Rolf, 'if He lets thee live, King Richard.' Richard went away. The time dragged, the rain fell pitilessly, without end. He found rivers in floods, fords roaring torrents, all ways choked. At every turn the Duke of Burgundy and Saint-Pol worked against him.

Also he found Ascalon in ruins, but grimly set about rebuilding it. This took him all the winter, because the French (judging, perhaps, that they had done their affair) took to the ships and sailed back to Acre. There they heard, what came more slowly to King Richard, strange news of the Marquess of Montferrat, and terrible news of Jehane Saint-Pol.

---

CHAPTER VI

THE CHAPTER CALLED CLYTEMNESTRA

At Acre, by the time September was set, the sun had put all the air to the sword, so that the city lay stifled, stinking in its own vice; and the nights were worse than the days. Then was the great harvest of the flies, when men died so quickly that there was no time to bury them. So also mothers saw their children flag or felt their force grow thin: one or another swooned suddenly and woke no more; or a woman found a dead child at the breast, or a child whimpered to find his mother so cold. At this time, while Jehane lay panting in bed, awake hour by hour and fretting over what she should do when the fountains of her milk should be dry, and this little Fulke, royal glutton, crave without getting of her—she heard the women set there to fan her talking to each other in drowsy murmurs, believing that she slept. By now she knew their speech.

Said one between the slow passes of the fans, 'Giafar ibn Mulk hath come into the city secretly.' And the other, 'Then we have a thief the more.'

'Peace,' said the first, 'thou grudger. He is one of my lovers, and telleth me whatsoever I seek to know. He is come in from Lebanon; so much, and more, I know already.'

'What ill report doth he bring of his master?' asked the second, a lazy girl, whose name was Misra, as the first was called Fanoum.

Fanoum answered, 'Very ill report of the Melek'—that was King Richard's name here—'but it is according to the desires of the Marquess.'

'Ohè!' said Misra, 'we must tell this sleeper. She is moon of the Melek.'

'Thou art a fool to think me a fool,' said Fanoum. 'Why, then, shall I be one to turn the horn of a mad cow, to pierce my own thigh? Let the Franks kill each other, what have we but gain? They are dogs alike.'

Misra said, 'Hearken thou, O Fanoum, the Melek is no dog. Nay, he is more than a man. He is the yellow-haired King of the West, riding a white horse, who was foretold by various prophets, that he should come up against the Sultan. That I know.'

'Then he will have more than a man's death,' said Fanoum. 'The Marquess goeth with Giafar to Lebanon, to see the Old Man of Musse, whom he serveth. The Melek must die, for of all men living or dead the Marquess hateth him.'

'Oh, King of Kings!' said Misra, with a little sob, 'and thou wilt stand by, thou sorrowful, while the Marquess kills the Melek!'

Fanoum answered, 'Certainly I will; for any of our lord's people can kill the Marquess; but it needeth the guile of the Old Man to kill the Melek. Let the wolf slay the lion while he sleepeth: anon cometh the shepherd and slayeth the gorged wolf. That is good sense.'

'Well,' said Misra, 'it may be so. But I am sorry for his favourite here. There are no daughters of Au so goodly as this one. The Melek is a wise lover of women.'

'Let be for that,' replied Fanoum comfortably; 'the Old Man of Musse is a wiser. He will come and have her, and we do well enough in Lebanon.'

They would have said more, had Jehane needed any more. But it seemed to her that she knew enough. There was danger brewing for King Richard, whom she, faithless wretch, had let go without her. As she thought of the leper, of her promise to the Queen-Mother, of Richard towering but to fall, her heart grew cold in her bosom, then filled with fire and throbbed as if to burst. It is extraordinary, however, how soon she saw her way clear, and on how small a knowledge. Who this Old Man might be, who lived on Lebanon and was most wise in the matter of women, she could have no guess; but she was quite sure of him, was certain that he was wise. She knew something of the Marquess, her cousin. Any ally of his must be a murdermonger. A wise lover of women, the Old Man of Musse, who dwelt on Lebanon! Wiser than Richard! And she more goodly than the daughters of Au! Who were the daughters of Ali? Beautiful women? What did it matter if she excelled them? God knew these things; but Jehane knew that she must go to market with the Old Man of Musse. So much she calmly revolved in her mind as she lay her length, with shut eyes, in her bed.

With the first cranny of light she had herself dressed by her sulky, sleepy women, and went abroad. There were very few to see her, none to dare her any harm, so well as she was known. Two eunuchs at a wicked door spat as she passed; she saw the feet of a murdered man sticking out of a drain, the scurry of a little troop of rats. Mostly, the dogs of the city had it to themselves. No women were about, but here and there a guarded light betrayed sin still awake, and here and there a bell, calling the faithful to church, sounded a homely note of peace. The morning was desperately close, without a waft of air. She found the Abbot Milo at his lodging, in the act of setting off to mass at the church of Saint Martha. The sight of her wild face stopped him.

'No time to lose, my child,' he said, when he had heard her. 'We must go to the Queen: it is due to her. Saviour of mankind!' he cried with flacking arms, 'for what wast Thou content to lay down Thy life!' They hurried out together just as the sun broke upon the tiles of the domed churches, and Acre began to creep out of bed.

The Queen was not yet risen, but sent them word that she would receive the abbot, 'but on no account Madame de Saint-Pol.' Jehane pushed off the insult just as she pushed her hot hair from her face. She had no thoughts to spare for herself. The abbot went into the Queen's house.

Berengère looked very drowned, he thought, in her great bed. One saw a sharp white oval floating in the black clouds which were her hair. She looked younger than any bride could be, childish, a child ill of a fever, wilful, querulous, miserable. All the time she listened to what Milo had to say her lips twitched, and her fingers plucked gold threads out of the cherubim on the coverlet.

'Kill the King of England? Kill my lord' Montferrat? Eh, they cannot kill him! Oh, oh, oh!'—she moaned shudderingly—'I would that they could! Then perhaps I should sleep o' nights.' Her strained eyes pierced him for an answer. What answer could he give?

'My news is authentic, Madame. I came at once, as my duty was, to your Grace, as to the proper person—' Here she sat right up in her bed, wide-eyed, all alight.

'Yes, yes, I am the proper person. I will do it, if no other can. Virgin Mary!'—she stretched her arms out, like one crucified—'Look at me. Am I worthy of this?' If she addressed the Virgin Mary her invitation was pointedly to the abbot, a less proper spectator. He did look, however, and pitied her deeply; at her lips dry with hatred, which should have been freshly kissed, at her drawn cheeks, into her amazed young heart: eh, God, he knew her loveworthy once, and now most pitiful. He had nothing to say; she went on breathless, gathering speed.

'He has spurned me whom he chose. He has left me on my wedding day. I have never seen him alone—do you heed me? never, never once. Ah, now, he has chosen for his minion: let her save him if she can. What have I to do with him? I am the daughter of a king; and what is he to me, who treats me so? If I am not to be mother of England, I am still daughter of Navarre. Let him die, let them kill him: what else can serve me now?' She fell back, and lay staring up at him. In every word she said there was sickening justice: what could Milo do? In his private mind he confirmed a suspicion—being still loyal to his King—that one and the same thing may be at one and the same time all black and all white. He did his best to put this strange case.

'Madame,' he said, 'I cannot excuse our lord the King, nor will I; but I can defend that noble lady whose only faults are her beauty and strong heart.' Mentioning Jehane's beauty, he saw the Queen look quickly at him, her first intelligent look. 'Yes, Madame, her beauty, and the love she has been taught to give our lord. The King married her, uncanonically, it is true; but who was she to hold up church law before his face? Well, then she, by her own pure act, caused herself to be put away by the King, abjuring thus his kingly seat. Hey, but it is so, that by her own prayers, her proper pleading, her proper tears, she worked against her proper honour, and against the child in her womb. What more could she do? What more could any wife, any mother, than that? Ah, say that you hate her without stint, would you have her die? Why, no! for what pain can be worse than to live as she lives? My lady, she prevailed against the King; but she could not prevail against her own holy nature working upon the King's great heart. No! When the King found out that she was to be mother of his child, he loved her so well that, though he must respect her prayers, he must needs respect her person also. The King thought within himself, "I have promised Madame de Saint-Pol that I will never strive with her in love; and I will not. Now must I promise Almighty God that, in her life, I will not strive so at all." Alas, Madame, and alas! Here the King was too strong for the girl; here her own nobility rose up against her. Pity her, not blame her; and for the King—I dare to say it—find pity as well as blame. All those who love his high heart, his crowned head, find pity for him in theirs. For many there are who do better, having no occasion to do as ill; but there can be none who mean better, for none have such great motions.'

Milo might have spared his breath. The Queen had heard one phrase of all his speech, and during the rest had pondered that. When he had done, she said, 'Fetch me in this lady. I would speak with her.'

'Breast shall touch breast here,' said Milo to himself, full of hope, 'and mouth meet mouth. Courage, old heart.'

When the tall girl was brought in Queen Berengère did not look at her, nor make any response to her deep reverence; but bade her fetch a mirror from the table. In this she looked at herself steadily for some time, smoothing and coiling back her hair, arranging her neck-covering so as to show something of her bosom, and so on. She sent Jehane for boxes of unguent, her colour-boxes, brush for the eyebrows, powder for the face. Finally she had brought to her a little crown of diamonds, and set it in her hair. After patting her head and turning it about and about, she put the glass down and made a long survey of Jehane.

'They do well,' she said, 'who call you sulky: you have a sulky mouth. I allow your shape; but there are reasons for that. You are very tall; you have a long throat. Green eyes are my detestation—fie, turn them from me. Your hair is wonderful, and your skin. I suppose women of the North are so commonly. Come nearer.' Jehane obeying, the Queen touched her neck, then her cheek. 'Show me your teeth,' she said. 'They are strong and good, but much larger than mine. Your hands are big, and so are your ears; you do well to cover them. Let me see your foot.' She peeped over the edge of the bed; Jehane put her foot out. 'It is not so large as I expected,' said the Queen, 'but much larger than mine.' Then she sighed and threw herself back. 'You are certainly a very tall girl. And twenty-three years old? I am not twenty yet, and have had fifty lovers. The Abbot of Poictiers said you were beautiful. Do you think yourself so?'

'It is not my part to think of it, Madame,' said Jehane, holding herself rather stiffly.

'You mean that you know it too well,' said Berengère. 'I suppose it is true. You have a fine colour and a fine person—but that is a woman's. Now look at me carefully, and say how you find me. Put your hand here, and here, and here. Touch my hair; look well at my eyes. My hair reaches to my knees when I stand up, to the floor when I sit down. I am a king's daughter. Do you not think me beautiful?'

'Yes, Madame. Oh, Madame—!' Jehane, trembling before her visions, could hardly stand still; but the Queen (who had no visions now the mirror was put by) went plaining on.

'When I was in my father's court his poets called me Frozen Heart, because I was cold in loving. Messire Bertran de Born loved me, and so did my cousin the Count of Provence, and the Count of Orange, and Raimbaut, and Gaucelm, and Ebles of Ventadorn. Now I have found one colder than ever I was, and I am burning. Are you a great lover of the King?'

At this question, put so quietly, Jehane grew grave. It took her above her sense of dangers, being in itself a dignity. 'I love the King so well, Queen Berengère,' she said, 'that I think I shall make him hate me in time.'

'Folly,' snapped the Queen, 'or guile. You would spur him. Is it true what the Abbot Milo told me?'

'I know not what he has told you,' said Jehane; 'but it is true that I have not dared let the King love me, and now dare least of all.'

The Queen clenched her hands and teeth. 'You devil,' she said, 'how I hate you. You reject what I long for, and he loathes me for your sake. You a creature of nought, and I a king's daughter.'

From the nostrils of Jehane the breath came fluttering and quick; in her splendid bosom stirred a storm that, if she had chosen to let it loose, could have shrivelled this little prickly leaf: but she replied nothing to the Queen's hatred. Instead, with eyes fixed in vacancy, and one hand upon her neck, she spoke her own purpose and lifted the talk to high matters.

'I touch not again your King and mine, O Queen. But I go to save him.'

'Woman,' said Berengère, 'do you dare tell me this? Are my miseries nothing to you? Have you not worked woe enough?'

Jehane suddenly threw her hair back, fell upon her knees, lifted her chin. 'Madame, Madame, Madame! I must save him if I die. I implore your pardon—I must go!'

'Why, what can you do against Montferrat?' The Queen shivered a little: Jehane looked fixedly at her, solemn as a dying nun.

'You say that I am handsome,' she said, then stopped. Then in a very low voice—'Well, I will do what I can.' She hung her golden head.

The Queen, after a moment of shock, laughed cruelly. 'I suppose I could not wish you anything worse than that. I hate you above all people in the world, mother of a bastard. Oh, it will be enough punishment. Go, you hot snake; leave me.'

Jehane rose to her feet, bowed her head and went out. Next moment the Queen must have whipped out of bed, for she caught her before she could shut the door, and clung to her neck, sobbing desperately. 'O God, Jehane, save Richard! Have mercy on me, I am most wretched.' Now the other seemed to be queen.

'My girl,' said Jehane, 'I will do what I promised.' She kissed the scorching forehead, and went away with Milo to find Giafar ibn Mulk.

To get at him it was necessary to put the girl Fanoum to the question. This was done. Giafar ibn Mulk, enticed into the house, proved to be a young man of prudence and resource. He could not, he said, conduct them to his master, because he had been told to conduct the Marquess; but an equally sure guide could be found, and there were no objections to his delaying his own illustrious convoy for a week or more. Further than that he could not go, nor did the near prospect of death, which the abbot exhibited to him, prove any inducement to the alteration of his mind. 'Death?' he said, when the implements of that were before him. 'If I am to die, I am to die: not twice it happens to a man. But I recommend to these priests the expediency of first finding El Safy.' As this was to be their guide up Lebanon, those priests agreed. El Safy also agreed, when they had him. A galley was got ready for sea; the provisional Grand Master of the Temple wrote a commendatory letter to his 'beloved friend in the one God, Sinan, Lord of the Assassins, Vetus de Monte'; and then, in two days' time, Milo the abbot, Jehane with her little Fulke, a few women, and El Safy (their master in the affair), left Acre for Tortosa, whence they must climb on mule-back to Lebanon.

---

CHAPTER VII

THE CHAPTER OF THE SACRIFICE ON LEBANON; ALSO CALLED CASSANDRA

From the haven at Acre to the bill of Tortosa is two days' sailing with a fair wind. Thence, climbing the mountains, you reach Musse in four days more, if the passes are open. If they are shut you do not reach it at all. High on Lebanon, above the frozen gorge where Orontes and Leontes, rivers of Syria, separate in their courses; above the terrace of cedars, above Shurky the clouded mountain, lies a deep green valley sentinelled on all sides by snow peaks and by the fortresses upon their tops. In the midst of that, among cedars and lines of cypress trees, is the white palace of the Lord of the Assassins, as big as a town. A man may climb from pass to pass of Lebanon without striking upon the place; sighting it from some dangerous crag, he may yet never approach it. None visit the Old Man of Musse but those who court Death in one of his shapes; and to such he never denies it. Dazzling snow-curtains, black hanging-woods, sheer walls of granite, frame it in: looking up on all sides you see the soaring pikes; and deep under a coffer-lid of blue it lies, greener than an emerald, a valley of easy sleep. There in the great chambers young men lie dreaming of women, and sleek boys stand about the doorways with cups of madness held close to their breasts. They are eaters and drinkers of hemp, these people, which causes them to sleep much and wake up mad. Then, when the Old Man calls one or another and says, Go down the mountains into the cities of the seaboard, and when thou seest such-a-one, kiss him and strike deep—he goes out then and there with fixed eyeballs, and never turns them about until he finds whom he seeks, nor ever shuts them until his work is done. This is the custom of Musse in the enclosed valley of Lebanon.

Thither on mules from Tortosa came El Safy, leading the Abbot Milo and Jehane, and brought them easily through all the defiles to that castle on a spur which is called Mont-Ferrand, but in the language of the Saracens, Bārin. From that height they looked down upon the domes and gardens of Musse, and knew that half their work was done.

What immediately followed was due to the insistence of El Safy, who said that if Jehane was not suitably attired and veiled she would fail of her mission. Jehane did not like this.

'It is not the custom of our women to be veiled, El Safy,' she said, 'except at the hour when they are to be married.'

'And it is not the custom of our men,' replied the Assassin, 'to choose unveiled women. And this for obvious reasons.'

'What are your reasons, my son?' asked the abbot.

'I will tell you,' said El Safy. 'If a man should come to our master with a veiled woman, saying, My lord, I have here a woman faced like the moon, and more melting than the peach that drops from the wall, the Old Man would straightway conceive what manner of beauty this was, and picture it more glorious than the truth could ever be; and then the reality would climb up to meet his imagining. But otherwise if he saw her barefaced before him; for eyesight is destructive to mind-sight if it precede it. The eye must be servant. So then he, dreaming of the veiled treasure, weds her and finds that she is just what was predicted of her by the merchant. For women and other delights, as we understand the affair, are according to our zest; and our zest is a thing of the mind's devising, added unto desire as the edge of a sword is superadded to the sword. So the fair woman must certainly be veiled.'

'The saying hath meat in it,' said the abbot; 'but here is no question of merchants, nor of marriage, pardieu.'

'If there is no question of marriage, of what is there question in this company?' asked El Safy. 'Let me tell you that two questions only concern the Old Man of Musse.'

Jehane, who had stood pouting, with a very high head, throughout this little colloquy, said nothing; but now she allowed El Safy his way. So she was dressed.

They put on her a purple vest, thickly embroidered with gold and pearls, underdrawers of scarlet silk, and gauze trousers (such as Eastern women wear) of many folds. Her hair was plaited and braided with pearls, a broad silk girdle tied about her waist. Over all was put a thick white veil, heavily fringed with gold. Round her ankles they put anklets of gold, with little bells on them which tinkled as she walked; last, scarlet slippers. They would have painted her face and eyebrows, but that El Safy decided that this was not at all necessary. When all was done she turned to one of her women and demanded her baby. El Safy, to Milo's surprise, made no demur. Then they put her in a gold cage on a mule's back, and so let her down by a steep path into the region of birds and flowering trees. There was very little conversation, except when the abbot hit his foot against a rock. In the valley they passed through a thick cedar grove, and so came to the first of four gates of approach.

Half a score handsome boys, bare-legged and in very short white tunics, led them from hall to hall, even to the innermost, where the Old Man kept his state. The first hall was of cedar painted red; the second was of green wood, with a fountain in the middle; the third was deep blue, and the fourth colour of fire. But the next hall, which was long and very lofty, was white like snow, except for the floor, which had a blood-red carpet; and there, on a white throne, sat the Old Man of Musse, himself as blanched as a swan, robed all in white, white-bearded; and about him his Assassins as colourless as he.

The ten boys knelt down and crossed their arms upon their bosoms; El Safy fell flat upon his face, and crawling so, like a worm, came at length to the steps of the throne. The Old Man let him lie while he blinked solemnly before him. Not the Pope himself, as Milo had once seen him, hoar with sanctity, looked more remotely, more awfully pure than this king of murder, snowy upon his blood-red field. What gave closer mystery was that the light came strange and milky through agate windows, and that when the Old Man spoke it was in a dry, whispering voice which, with the sound of a murmur in the forest, was in tune with the silence of all the rest. El Safy stood up, and was rigid. There ensued a passionless flow of question and answer. The Old Man murmured to the roof, scarcely moving his lips; El Safy answered by rote, not moving any other muscles but his jaw's. As for the Assassins, they stayed squat against the walls, as if they had been dead men, buried sitting.

At a sign from El Safy the abbot with veiled Jehane came down the hail, and stood before the white spectre on his throne. Jehane saw that this was really a man. There was a faint tinge of red at his nostrils, his eyes were yellowish and very bright, his nails coloured red. The shape of his head was that of an old bird. She judged him bald under his high cap; but his beard came below his breast-bone. When he opened his mouth to speak she observed that his teeth were the whitest part of him, and his lips rather grey. He did not seem to look at her, but said to the abbot, 'Tell me why you have come into my country, being a Frank and a Christian dog; and why you have brought with you this fair woman.'

'My lord,' said the abbot, after clearing his throat, 'we are lovers and servants of the great king whom you call the Melek Richard, a lion indeed in the paths of the Moslems, who makes bitter war upon your enemy the Soldan; and in defence of him we are come. For it appears that a servant of your lordship's, called Giafaribn Mulk, is now in Acre, which is King Richard's good town, conspiring with the Marquess the death of our lord.'

'It is the first I have heard of it,' said the Old Man. 'He was sent for a different purpose, but his hand is otherwise free. What else have you to say?'

'Why, this, my lord,' said the abbot, 'that our lord the King has too many enemies not declared, who compass his destruction while he compasses their soul's health. This is so shameful that we think it no time for the King's lovers to be asleep. Therefore I, with this woman, who, of all persons living in the world, is most dear to him (as he to her), have come to warn your lordship of the Marquess his abominable design, in the sure hope that your lordship will lend it no favour. King Richard, we believe, is besieging the Holy City, and therefore (no doubt) hath the countenance of Almighty God. But if the devil (who loves the Marquess, and is sure to have him) may reckon your lordship also upon his side, we doubt that he may prevail.'

'And do you also think,' asked the Old Man, scarcely audible, 'That the Melek Richard will thank you for these precautions of yours?'

'My lord,' said Milo, 'we seek not his thanks, nor his good opinion, but his safety.

'It is one thing to seek safety,' said the Old Man, 'but another thing to find or keep it. Get you back to the doorway.'

So they did, and the lord of the place sat for a long time in a stare, not moving hand or foot. Now it happened that the child in Jehane's arm woke up, and began to stretch itself, and whimper, and nozzle about for food. Jehane tried to hush it by rocking herself to and fro gently on one foot. The abbot, horrified, frowned and shook his head; but Jehane, who knew but one lord now Richard was away, took no notice. Presently young Fulke set up a howl which sounded piercing in that still place. Milo began to say his prayers; but no one moved except Jehane, whose course, to her own mind, was clear. She put the great veil back over her head, and bared her beauty; she unfastened the purple vest, and bared her bosom. This she gave to the child's searching mouth. The free gesture, the bent head, the unconscious doing, made the act as lovely as the person. Fulke murmured his joy, and Jehane looking presently up saw the Old Man's solemn eyes blinking at her. This did not disconcert her very much, for she thought, 'If he is correctly reported he has seen a mother before now.'

It might seem that he had or had not: his action reads either way. After three minutes' blinking he sent an old Assassin (not El Safy) down the hall to the door.

'Thus,' he reported, 'saith the Old Man of Musse, Lord of the Assassins. Tell the Sheik of the Nazarenes that the Marquess of Montferrat shall come up and go down, and after that come up no more. Also, let the Sheik depart in peace and with all speed, lest I repent and put him suddenly to death. As for the fair woman, she must remain among my ladies, and become my dutiful wife, as a ransom price.'

The abbot, as one thunderstruck, raised his hands on high. 'O sack of sin!' he groaned, 'O dross for the melting-pot! O unspeakable sacrifice!' But Jehane, gravely smiling, checked him. 'Why, Lord Abbot, is any sacrifice too great for King Richard?' she asked, gently reproving him. 'Nay, go, my father; I shall do very well. I am not at all afraid. Now do what I shall tell you. Kiss the hand of my lord Richard from me when you see him, bidding him remember the vows we made to each other on the day at Fontevrault when he took up the Cross, and again before the lifted Host at Cahors. And to my lady Queen Berengère say this, that from this day forth I am wife of a man, and stand not between her bed and the King, as God knows I have never meant to stand. Kiss me now, my father, and pray diligently for me.' He tells us that he did, and records the day long ago when he had first kissed the poor girl in the chapel of the Dark Tower, the day when, as she hoped, she had taught her great lover to tread upon her heart.

At this time a great black, the chief of the eunuchs, came and touched her on the shoulder. 'Whither now, friend?' said Jehane. He pointed the way, being a deaf-mute. 'Lead,' said she; 'I will follow.' And so she did.

She turned no more her head, nor did she go with it lowered, but carried it cheerfully, as if her business was good. The black led her by many winding ways to a garden filled with orange-trees, and across this to a bronze door. There stood two more blacks on guard, with naked swords in their hands. The eunuch struck twice on the lintel. The door was opened from within, and they entered. An old lady dressed in black came to meet them; to her the eunuch handed Jehane, made a reverence, and retired. They shut the bronze doors. What more? After the bath, and putting on of habits more sumptuous than she had ever heard tell of, she was taken by slaves into the Hall of Felicity. There, among the heavy-eyed languid women, Jehane sat herself staidly down, and suckled her child.

---

CHAPTER VIII

OF THE GOING-UP AND GOING-DOWN OF THE MARQUESS

The Marquess of Montferrat travelled splendidly from Acre to Sidon with six galleys in his convoy. So many, indeed, did not suffice him; for at Sidon he took off his favourite wife with her women, eunuchs and janissaries, and thus with twelve ships came to Tripolis. Thence by the Aleppo road he went to Karak of the Knights, thence again, after a rest of two days, he started—he, the knights and esquires of his body in cloth of gold, with scarlet housings for the mules, litters for his womenkind; with his poets, his jongleurs, his priest, his Turcopoles and favourites; all this gaudy company, for the great ascent of Mont-Ferrand.

His mind was to impress the Old Man of Musse, but it fell out otherwise. The Old Man was not easily impressed, because he was so accustomed to impressing. You do not prophesy to prophets, or shake priests with miracles. When he reached the top of Mont-Ferrand he was met by a grave old Sheik, who informed him quietly that he must remain there. The Marquess was very angry, the Sheik very grave. The Marquess stormed, and talked of armed hosts. 'Look up, my lord,' said the Sheik. The mountain-ridges were lined with bowmen; in the hanging-woods he saw the gleam of spears; between them and the sky, on all sides as far as one could see, gloomed the frozen peaks. The Marquess felt a sinking. He arose chastened on the morrow, and negotiations were resumed on the altered footing. Finally, he begged for but three persons, without whose company he said he could not do. He must have his chaplain, his fool, and his barber. Impossible, the Sheik said; adding that if they were so necessary to the Marquess he might 'for the present' remain with them at Mont-Ferrand. In that case, however, he would not see the Lord of the Assassins.

'But that, very honourable sir,' said the Marquess, with ill-concealed impatience, 'is the simple object of my journey.'

'So it was reported,' the Sheik observed. 'It is for you to consider. For my own part I should say that these persons cannot be indispensable for a short visit.'

'I can give his lordship a week,' said the Marquess.

'My master,' replied the Sheik, 'may give you an hour, but considers that half that time should be ample. To be sure, there is the waiting for audience, which is always wearisome.'

'My friend,' the Marquess said, opening his eyes, 'I am the King-elect of Jerusalem.'

'I know nothing of such things,' replied the Sheik. 'I think we had better go down.' Three only went down: the Sheik, the Marquess, and Giafar ibn Mulk.

When at last they were in the garden-valley, and better still had reached the third of the halls of degree, they were met by the chief of the eunuchs, who told them his master was in the harem, and could not be disturbed. The Marquess, who so far had been all smiles and interest, was now greatly annoyed; but there was no help for that. In the blue court he must needs wait for nearly three hours. By the time he was ushered into the milky light of the audience chamber he was faint with rage and apprehension; he was dazzled, he stumbled over the blood-red carpet, arrived fainting at the throne. There he stayed, tongue-cloven, while the colourless Lord of Assassins blinked inscrutably upon him, with eyes so narrow that he could not tell whether he so much as saw him; and the adepts, rigid by the tribune-wall, stared at their own knees.

'What do you need of me, Marquess of Montferrat? 'asked the old hierarch in his most remote voice. The Marquess gulped some dignity into himself.

'Excellent sir,' he said, 'I seek the amity of one king to another, alliance in a common good cause, the giving and receiving of benefits, and similar courtesies.'

These propositions were written down on tablets, and carefully scrutinized by the Old Man of Musse, who said at last—

'Let us take these considerations in order. Of what kings do you propound the amity?'

'Of yourself, sir,' replied the Marquess, 'and of myself.'

'I am not a king,' said Sinan, 'and had not heard that you were one either.'

'I am King-elect of Jerusalem,' the Marquess replied with stiffness. The Old Man raised his wrinkled forehead.

'Well,' he said, 'let us get on. What is your common good cause?'

'Eh, eh,' said the Marquess, brightening, 'it is the cause of righteous punishment. I strike at your enemy the Soldan through his friend King Richard.' The Old Man pondered him.

'Do you strike, Marquess?' he asked at length.

'Sir,' the Marquess made haste to answer, 'your question is just. It so happens that I cannot strike King Richard because I cannot reach him. I admit it: I am quite frank. But you can strike him, I believe. In so doing, let me observe, you will deal a mortal blow at Saladin, who loves him, and makes treaties with him to your detriment and the scandal of Christendom.'

'Do you speak of the scandal of Christendom?' asked Sinan, twinkling.

'Alas, I must,' said the Marquess, very mournful.

'The cause is near to your heart, I see, Marquess.'

'It is in it,' replied the Marquess. The Old Man considered him afresh; then inquired where the Melek might be found.

The Marquess told him. 'We believe he is at Ascalon, separate from the Duke of Burgundy.'

'Giafar ibn Mulk and Cogia Hassan,' said the Old Man, as if talking in his sleep, 'come hither.' The two young men rose from the wall and fell upon their faces before the throne. Their master spoke to them in the tone of one ordering a meal.

Return with the Marquess to the coast by the way of Emesa and Baalbek; and when you are within sight of Sidon, strike. One of you will be burned alive. I think it will be Giafar. Let the other return speedily with a token. The audience is finished.'

The Old Man closed his eyes. At a touch from another the two prostrate Assassins crept up and kissed his foot, then rose, waiting for the Marquess. He, pale as death, saw, felt, heard nothing. At another sign a man put his hand on either shoulder.

'Ha, Jesus-God!' grunted the Marquess, as the sweat dripped off him.

'Stop bleating, silly sheep, you will awaken the Master,' said Giafar in a quick whisper. They led him away, and the Old Man slept in peace.

---

The Marquess saw nothing of his people at Mont-Ferrand, for (to begin with) they were not there, and (secondly) he was led another way. By the desolate crag of Masyaf, where a fortress, hung (as it seems) in mid-air, watches the valleys like a little cloud; through fields of snow, by terraces cut in the ice where the sheer rises and drops a thousand feet either way; so to Emesa, a mountain village huddled in perpetual shadows; thence down to Baalbek, and by foaming river-gorges into the sun and sight of the dimpling sea: thus they led the doomed Italian. He by this time knew the end was coming, and had braced himself to meet it stolidly.

The towers of Sidon rose chastely white above the violet; they saw the golden sands rimmed with foam; they saw the ships. Going down a lane, luxuriant with flowers and scented shrubs, where steep cactus hedges shut out the furrowed fields and olive gardens, and the cicalas made hissing music, Giafar ibn Mulk broke the silence of the three men.

'Is it time?' he asked of his brother, without turning his head.

'Not yet,' Cogia replied. The Marquess prayed vehemently, but with shut lips.

They reached an open moor, where there were rocks covered with cistus and wild vine. Here the air was very sweet and pure, the sun pleasant. The Marquess's ass grew frisky, pricked up his ears and brayed. Giafar ibn Mulk edged up close, and put his arm round the Marquess's neck.

'The signal is a good one,' he said. 'Strike, Cogia.'

Cogia drove his knife in up to the heft. The Marquess coughed. Giafar lifted him from his ass, quite dead.

'Now,' says he, 'go thou back, Cogia. I will stay here. For so the Old Man plainly desired.'

'I think with you,' said Cogia. 'Give me the token.' So they cut off the Marquess's right hand, and Cogia, after shaking it, put it in his vest. When he was well upon his way to the mountain road, Giafar sat down on a bank of violets, ate some bread and dates, then went to sleep in the sun. So afterwards he was found by a picket of soldiers from Sidon, who also found all of their lord but his right hand. They took Giafar ibn Mulk and burned him alive.

The Old Man of Musse was extremely kind to Jehane, who pleased him so well that he was seldom out of her company. He thought Fulke a fine little boy, as he could hardly fail to be, owning such parents. All the liberty that was possible to the favourite of such a great prince she had. One day, about six weeks after she had first come into the valley, he sent for her. When she had come in and made her reverence he drew her near to his throne, put his arm round her, and kissed her. He observed with satisfaction that she was looking very well.

'My child,' he said kindly, 'I have news which I am sure will please you. Very much of the Marquess of Montferrat is by this time lying disintegrate in a vault.'

Jehane's green eyes faltered for a moment as she gazed into his wise old face.

'Sir,' she asked, by habit, 'is this true?' 'It is quite true,' said the Old Man. 'In proof of it regard his hand, which one of my Assassins, the survivor, has brought me.' He drew from his bosom a pale hand, and would have laid it in Jehane's lap if she had let him. As she would not, he placed it beside him on the floor. Pursuing his discourse, he said—

'I might fairly claim my reward for that. And so I should if I had not got it already.'

Again Jehane pondered him gravely. 'What reward more have you, sire?'

The Old Man, smiling very wisely, pressed her waist. Jehane thought.

'Why, what will you do with me now, sire?' she inquired. 'Will you kill me?'

'Can you ask?' said the Old Man. Then he went on more seriously to say that he supposed the life of King Richard to be safe for the immediate future, but that he foresaw great difficulties in his way before he could be snug at home. 'The Marquess of Montferrat was by no means his only enemy,' he told her. 'The Melek suffers, what all great men suffer, from the envy of others who are too obviously fools for him to suppose them human creatures. But there is nothing a fool dislikes so much as to behold his own folly; and as your Melek is a looking-glass for these kind, you may depend upon it they will smudge him if they can. He is the bravest man in the world, and one of the best rulers; but he has no discretion. He is too absolute and loves too little.'

Jehane opened her eyes very wide. 'Why, do you know my lord, sire?' she asked. The Old Man took her hand.

'There are very few personages in the world of whom I do not know something,' he said; 'and I tell you that there are terms to the Melek's government. A man cannot say Yea and Nay as he chooses without paying the price. The debt on either hand mounts up. He may choose with whom he will settle—those he has favoured or those he has denied. As a rule one finds the former more insatiable. Let him then beware of his brother.'

Jehane leaned towards him, pleading with eyes and mouth. 'Oh, sire,' she said, trembling at the lips, 'if you have any regard for me, tell me when any danger threatens King Richard. For then I must leave you.'

'Why, that is as it may be,' said her master; 'but I will let you know what I think good for you to know, and that must content you.'

Jehane's beauty, enhanced as it was now by the sumptuous attire which she loved and by her bodily well-being, was great, and her modesty greater; but her heart was the greatest thing she had. She raised her eyes again to the twinkling eyes of her possessor, and kept them there for a few steady seconds, while she turned over his words in her mind. Then she looked down, saying, 'I will certainly stay with you till my lord's danger is at hand. It is a good air for my baby.'

'It is good for all manner of things,' said the Old Man; 'and remarkably good for you, my Garden of Exhaustless Pleasure. And I will see to it that it continues to water the roses in your cheeks, beautiful child.' Jehane folded her hands.

'You will do as you choose, my lord,' said she, 'I doubt not.'

'Be quite sure of it, dear child,' said the Old Man.

Then he sent her back into the harem.

---

CHAPTER IX

HOW KING RICHARD REAPED WHAT JEHANE HAD SOWED, AND THE SOLDAN WAS GLEANER

'Consider with anxious care the marrow of your master when he is fortunate,' writes Milo of Poictiers: 'if it lasts him, he is a slow spender of his force; but on that account all the more dangerous in adversity, having the deeper funds. By this I would be understood to imply that the devil of Anjou, turned to fighting uses in King Richard's latter years, found him a habitable fortalice.' With the best reasons in life for the reflection, he might have said it more simply; for it is simply true. Deserted by his allies, balked of his great aspiration, within a day's march of the temple of God, yet as far from that as from his castle of Chinon; eaten with fever; having death, lost purpose, murmurings, fed envy reproach, upon his conscience—he yet fought his way through sullen leagues of mud to Ascalon; besieged it, drove his enemy out, regained it. Thence, pushing quickly south, he surprised Darum, and put the garrison to the sword. By this act he cut Saladin in two, and drove such a wedge into the body of his empire as might leave either lung of it at his mercy. The time seemed, indeed, ripe for negotiation. Saladin sent his brother down from Jerusalem with presents of hawks; Richard, sitting in armed state at Darum, received him affably. There was still a chance that treaty might win for Jesus Christ what the sword had not won.

Then, as if in mockery of the greatness of men, came ill news apace. The Frenchmen, back in Acre, heard tell of Montferrat's doings and undoing. Pretty work of this sort perturbed the allies. The Duke of Burgundy charged Saladin with the murder; Saint-Pol loudly charged King Richard, and the Duke's death, coming timely, left him in the field. He made the most of his chance, wrote to the Emperor, to King Philip, to his cousin the Archduke of Austria (at home by now), of this last shameful deed of the red Angevin. He even sent messengers to Richard himself with open letters of accusal. Richard laughed, but for all that broke off negotiations with Saladin until he could prove Saint-Pol as great a liar as he himself knew him to be. Then rose up again the question of the Crown of Jerusalem. The Count of Champagne took ship and came to Darum to beg it of Richard. He too brought news with him. The Duke of Burgundy was dead of an apoplexy. 'It seems that God is still faintly on my side,' said Richard, 'There went out a sooty candle.'

The next words gave his boast the lie. 'Beau sire,' said Count Henry, 'I grieve to tell you something more. Before I left Acre I saw the Abbot Milo.'

Richard had grey streaks in his face. 'Ah,' he says hoarsely, 'go on, cousin.' The young man stammered.

'Beau sire, God strikes in divers places, but always finds out the joints of our harness.'

'Go on,' says King Richard, sitting very still.

'Dear sire, my cousin, the Abbot Milo went out of Acre three weeks before the death of the Marquess. With him also went Madame Jehane; but he returned without her. This is all I know, though it is not all that the abbot knows.'

At the mention of her name the King took a sharp breath, as you or I do when quick pain strikes us. To the rest he listened without a sign; and asked at the end, 'Where is Milo?'

'He is at Acre, sire,' says the Count; 'and in prison.'

'Who put him there?'

'Myself, sire.'

'You did wrong, Count. Get you back to Acre and bring him to me.' Champagne went away.

---

Great trouble, as you know, always made Richard dumb; the grief struck inwards and congealed. He became more than ever his own councillor, the worst in the world. Lucky for the Abbot Milo that he was in bonds; but now you see why he penned the aphorism with which I began this chapter.

After that short, stabbing flash across his face, he shut down misery in a vice. The rest of his talk with the Count might have been held with a groom. Henry of Champagne, knowing the man, left him the moment he got the word; and King Richard sat down by the table, and for three hours never stirred. He was literally motionless. Straightly rigid, a little grey about the face, white at the cheek-bones; his clenched hand stiff on the board, white also at the knuckles; his eyes fixed on the door—men came in, knelt and said their say, then encountering his blank eyes bent their heads and backed out quietly. If he thought, none may learn his thought; if he felt, none may touch the place; if he prayed, let those who are able imagine his prayers. What Jehane had been to him this book may have shadowed out: this only I say, that he knew, from the very first hint of the fact, why she had gone out with Milo and sent Milo home alone. The Queen knew, because Jehane had told her; but he knew with no telling at all. She had gone away to save him from herself. Needing him not, because she so loved him, it was her beauty which was hungry for his desire. Not daring to mar her beauty, she had sought to hide it. Greater love hath none than this. If he thought of that it should have softened him. He did not think of it: he knew it.

At the end of his grim vigil he got up and went out of his house. He was served with his horse, his esquires came at call to the routine of garrison days and nights. He rode round the walls, out at one of the gates, on a sharp canter of reconnaissance in the hills. Perhaps he spoke more shortly than usual, and more drily; there may have been a dead quality in his voice, usually so salient. There was no other sign. At supper he sat before them all, ate and drank at his wont. Once only he startled the hallful of them. He dropped his great gold cup, and it split.

But as day followed night, all men saw the change in him, Christians and Saracens alike. A spirit of quiet savagery seemed to possess him; the cunning, with the mad interludes, of a devil. He set patient traps for the Saracens in the hills, and slaughtered all he took. One day he fell upon a great caravan of camels coming from Babylon to Jerusalem, and having cut the escort to pieces, slew also the merchants and travellers. He seemed to give the sword the more heartily in that he sought it for himself, but could never get it. No doubt he deserved to get it. He performed deeds of impossible foolhardy gallantry, the deeds of a knight-errant; rode solitary, made single-handed rescues, suffered himself to be cut off from his posts, and then with a handful of knights, or alone, indeed, carved his way back to Darum. Des Barres, the Earl of Leicester and the Grand Master, never left his side; Gaston of Béarn used to sleep at the foot of his bed and creep about after him like a cat; but this terrible mood of his wore them out. Then, at last, the Count of Champagne came back with Milo and more bad news. Joppa was in sore straits, again besieged; the Bishop of Sarum was returned from the West, having a branch of dead broom in his hand and stories of a throttled kingdom on his lips.

Before any other Richard had Milo alone. The good abbot is very reticent about the interview in his book. What he omits is more significant than what he says. 'I found my master,' he writes, 'sitting up in his bed in his hauberk of mail. They told me he had eaten nothing for two days, yet vomited continually. He had killed five hundred Saracens meantime. I suppose he knew who I was. "Tell me, my good man," he said (strange address!), "the name of the person to whom Madame d'Anjou took you."

'I said, "Sire, we went to the Lord of the Assassins, whom they call Old Man of Musse."

'"Why did you go, monk?" he asked, and felt about for his sword, but could not find it. Yet it was close by. I said, "Sire, because of a report which had reached the ears of Madame that the Marquess and the Old Man were in league to have you murdered." To this he made no reply, except to call me a fool. Later he asked, "How died the Marquess?"

'"Sire," I answered, "most miserably. He went up Lebanon to see the Old Man, and came presently down again with two of the Assassins in his company, but none of his train. These persons, being near his city of Sidon, at a signal agreed upon stabbed him with their long knives, then cut off his right hand and despatched it to the Old Man by one of them. The other stayed by the corpse, and was so found peacefully sleeping, and burned."

'The King said nothing, but gave me money and a little jewel he used to wear, as if I had done him a service. Then he nodded a dismissal, and I, wondering, left him. He did not speak to me again for many weeks.'

---

You may collect that Richard was very ill. He was. The disease of his mind fed fat upon the disease of his body, and from the spoils of the feast savagery reared its clotted head. Syrian mothers still quell their children with the name of Melek Richard, a reminiscence of the dreadful time when he was without ruth or rest. He spoke of his purposes to none, listened to none. The Bishop of Sarum had come in with a budget of disastrous news: Count John had England under his heel, Philip of France had entered Normandy in force, the lords of Aquitaine were in revolt. If God had no use for him in the East, here was work to do in the West. But had He none? What of Joppa, shuddering under the sword? What of Acre, where the French army wallowed in sloth, with two queens at its mercy and Saint-Pol in the mercy-seat? What, indeed, of Jehane?

Nobody breathed her name; yet night and day the image of her floated, half-hid in scarlet clouds, before King Richard. These clouds, a torn regiment, raced across his vision, like cavalry broken, in mad retreat. Out of the tumbled mass two hands would throw up, white, long, thin hands, Jehane's hands drowned in frothy blood. Then, in his waking dream, when he drove in the spurs and started to save, the colours changed, black swam over the blood; and one hand only would stay, held up warningly, saying, 'Forbear, I am separate, fenced, set apart.' Thus it was always: menace, wicked endeavour, shipwreck, ruin; always so, her agony and denial, his wrath and defeat.

But this was wholesome torment. There was other not so purgatorial—damned torment. That was when the sudden thought of her possession by another man, of his own robbery, his own impotence to regain, came upon him in a surging flood and made his neck swell with the rage of a beast. And no crouching to spring, no flash through the air, no snatching here. Here was no Gilles de Gurdun to deal with. Only the beast's resource was his, who had the beast's desire without his power. At such times of obsession he lashed up and down his chamber or the flat roof of his house, all the tragic quest of a leopard in a cage making blank his desperate hunting eyes. 'Lord, Lord, Lord, how long can this endure?' Alas, the cage was wider than any room, and stronger by virtue of his own fashioning of the locks. But to do him justice, Jehane's grave face would sail like a moon among the storm-clouds sooner or later, and humble him to the dust.

Sometimes, mostly at dawn, when a cool wind stole through the trees, he saw the trail of events more clearly, and knew whom to blame and whom to praise. Generous as he was through and through, at these times he did not spare the whip. But the image he set up before whom to scourge himself was Jehane Saint-Pol, that pure cold saint, offering up her proud body for his needs; and so sure as he did that he desired her, and so sure as he desired he raged that he had been robbed. Robber as he owned himself, now he had been robbed. So the old black strife began again. Many and many a dawn, as he thought of these things, he went out alone into the shadowless places of the land, to the quiet lapping sea, to the gardens, or to the housetop fronting the new-born day, with prayer throbbing for utterance, but a tongue too dry to pray. Despair seized on him, and he led his men out to death-dealing, that so haply he might find death for himself. The time wore to early summer, while he was nightly visited by the thought of his sin, and daily winning more stuff for repentance. Then, one morning, instead of going out singly to battle with his own soul, he went in to the Abbot Milo. What follows shall be told in his own words.

'The King came to me very early in the morning of Saints Primus and Felician, while I yet lay in my bed. "Milo, Milo," said he, "what must I do to be saved?" He was very white and wild, shaking all over. I said, "Dear Master, save thy people. On all sides they cry to thee—from England, from Normandy, from Anjou, from Joppa also, and Acre. There is no lack of entreaty." He shook his head. "Here," he said, "I can do no more. God is against me, the work too holy for such a wretch." "Lord," I said, "we are all wretches, Heaven save us! If your Grace is held off God's inheritance, you can at least hold others from your own. Here, may be, you took a charge too heavy; but there, at home, the charge was laid upon you. Renouncing here, you shall gain there. It cannot be otherwise." I believed in what I said; but he gripped the caps of his knees and rocked himself about. "They have beaten me, Milo. Saint-Pol, Burgundy, Beauvais—I am bayed by curs. What am I, Milo?" "Sire," I said, "your father's son. As they bayed the old lion, so they bay the young." He gaped at me, open-mouthed. "By God. Milo," he said, "I bayed him myself, and believed that he deserved it." "Lord," I answered, "who am I to judge a great king? For my part I never believed that monstrous sin was upon him." Here he jumped up. "I am going home, Milo," he said; "I am going home. I am going to my father's tomb. I will do penance there, and serve my people, and live clean. Look now, Milo, shrive me if thou hast the power, for my need is great." The thought was blessed to him. He confessed his sins then and there, all a huddle of them, weeping so bitterly that I should have wept myself had I not been ready rather to laugh and crack my fingers to see the breaking up of his long and deadly frost. Before I shrived him, moreover, I dared to speak of Madame Jehane, how he had now lost her for ever, and why; how she was now at last a man's wife, and that by her own deliberate will; and how also he must do his duty by the Queen. To all of which he gave heed and promises of quiet endurance. Then I shrived him, and that very morning gave him the Lord's sacred body in the Church of the Sepulchre. I believed him sane; and so for a long time he was, as he testified by deeds of incredible valour.'

It was not long after this that the fleet put out to sea, shaping course for Acre. Message after message came in from beleaguered Joppa; but King Richard paid little heed to them, pending the issue of new treating with Saladin. He certainly sailed with a single eye on Acre. But Joppa lay on his course, and it is probable, he being what he was, that the sight of no means to do great deeds made great deeds done. When his red galley sighted Joppa, standing in for the purpose, all seemed over with the doomed city. This, no doubt (since his mood was hot), urged him to one of those impossible acts, 'incredible deeds of valour,' as Milo calls them, for which his name lives, while those of many better kings are forgotten.

The country about Joppa slopes sharply to the sea, and gives little or no shelter for ships; but so quick is the slope that a galley may ride under the very walls of the town and take in provision from the seaward windows. On the landward side it is dangerously placed, seeing that the stoop of the country runs from the mountains to it. The few outlying forts, the stone bridge over the river, cannot be held against a resolute foe. When King Richard's fleet drew near enough to see, it was plain what had been done. The Saracens had carried the outworks; they held the bridge. At leisure they had broached the walls and swarmed in. The flag on the citadel still flew; battle or carnage was raging in the streets all about it. Its fall was a matter of hours.

Now King Richard stood on the poop of his galley, watching all this. He saw a man come running down the mole chased by half a dozen horsemen in yellow, a priest by the look of him; you could see the gleam of his tonsure as he plunged. For so he did, plunged into the sea and swam for his life. The pursuers drew up on the verge and shot at him with their long bows. They were of Saladin's bodyguard, fine marksmen who should never have missed him. But the priest swam like a fish, and they did miss him. King Richard himself hooked him out by the gown, and then clipped him in his arms like a lover. 'Oh, brave priest! Oh, hardy heart!' he cried, full of the man's bravery. 'Give him room there. Let him cough up the salt. By my soul, barons, I wish that any draught of wine may be so glorious sweet.'

The priest sat up and told his tale. The city was a shambles; every man, woman, or child had been put to the sword. Only the citadel held out; there was no time to lose. No time was lost; for King Richard, in his tunic and breeches as he was, in his deck shoes, without a helm, unmailed in any part, snatched up shield and axe. 'Who follows Anjou?' he called out, then plunged into the sea. Des Barres immediately followed him, then Gaston of Béarn (with a yell) and the Earl of Leicester neck and neck; then the Bishop of Salisbury, a stout-hearted prince, Auvergne, Limoges, and Mercadet. These eight were all the men in authority that Trenchemer held, except some clerks, fat men who loved not water. But as soon as the other ships saw what was afoot, a man here and there followed his King. The rest rowed closer to the shore and engaged the Saracen horsemen with their archers. Long before any men could be got off the eight were on dry land, and had found a way into the sacked city.

How they did what they did the God of Battles knows best; but that they did it is certain. All accounts of the fray agree, Bohadin with Vinsauf, Moslem and Christian alike. What pent rage, what storm curbed up short, what gall, what mortification, what smoulder of resentment, bit into King Richard, we may guess who know him. Such it was as to nerve his arm, nerve his following to be his lovers, make him unassailable, make a devil of him. Not a devil of blind fury, but a cold devil who could devise a scope for his malice, choose how to do his stabbing work wiseliest. Inside the town gate they took up close order, wedgewise, linked and riveted; a shield before, shields beside, Richard with his double-axe for the wedge's beak. They took the steep street at a brisk pace, turning neither right nor left, but heading always for the citadel, boring through and trampling down what met them. This at first was not very much, only at one corner a company of Nubian spears came pelting down a lane, hoping to cut them off by a flank movement. Richard stopped his wedge; the blacks buffeted into their shields with a shock that scattered and tossed them up like spray. The wedge held firm; red work for axe and swords while it lasted. They killed most of the Nubians, drove bodily through the rabble at their heels; then into the square of the citadel they came. It was packed with a shrieking horde, whose drums made the day a hell, whose great banners wagged and rocked like osiers in a flood-water. They were trying to fire the citadel, and some were swarming the walls from others' backs. The square was like a whirlpool in the sea, a sea of tense faces whose waves were surging men and the flying wrack their gonfanons.

King Richard saw how matters lay in this horrible hive; these men could not fight so close. Cavalry can do nothing in a dense mass of foot, bowmen cannot shoot confined; spearmen against swords are little worth, javelins sped once. So much he saw, and also the straining crowd, the lifted, threatening arms, the stretched necks about the citadel. 'O Lord, the heathen are come into Thine inheritance. At the word, sirs, cleave a way.' And then he cried above the infernal riot, 'Save, Holy Sepulchre! Save, Saint George!' and the wedge drove into the thick of them.

This work was butcher's work, like sawing through live flesh. Too much blood in the business: after a while the haft of the King's axe got rotten with it, and at a certain last blow gave way and bent like a pulpy stock. He helped himself to a beheaded Mameluke's scimitar, and did his affair with that. Once, twice, thrice, and four times they furrowed that swarm of men; nothing broke their line. Richard himself was only cut in the feet, where he trod on mailed bodies or broken swords; the others (being themselves in mail) were without scathe. They held the square until the Count of Champagne came up with knights and Pisan arbalestiers, and then the day was won. They drove out the invaders; on the Templars' house they ran up the English dragon-flag. King Richard rested himself.

Two days later a pitched battle was fought on the slopes above Joppa. Saladin met Richard for the last time, and the Melek worsted him. Our King with fifteen knights played the wedge again when his enemy was packed to his taste; and this time (being known) with less carnage. But the left wing of the invading army re-entered the town, the garrison had a panic. Richard wheeled and scoured them out at the other end; so they perished in the sea. Men say, who saw him, that he did it alone. So terrible a name he had with the Saracens, this may very well be. There had never been seen, said they, such a fighter before. Like sheep they huddled at his sight, and like sheep his onset scattered them. 'Let God arise,' says Milo with a shaking pen: 'and lo! He arose. O lion in the path, who shall stand up against thee?'

He drove Saladin into the hills, and set him manning once more the watch-towers of Jerusalem. But he had reached his limit; sickness fastened on him, and on the ebb of his fury came lagging old despair. For a week he lay in his bed delirious, babbling breathless foolish things of Jehane and the Dark Tower, of the broomy downs by Poictiers, the hills of Languedoc, of Henry his handsome brother, of Bertran de Born and the falcon at Le Puy. Then followed a pleasant thing. Saladin, the noble foe, heard of it, and sent Saphadin his brother to visit him. They brought the great Emir into the tent of his great enemy.

'O God of the Christians!' cried he with tears, 'what is this work of thine, to make such a mirror of thy might, and then to shatter the glass?' He kissed King Richard's burning forehead, then stood facing the standers-by.

'I tell you, my lords, there has been no such king as this in our country. My brother the Sultan would rather lose Jerusalem than have such a man to die.'

At this Richard opened his eyes. 'Eh, Saphadin, my friend,' he says, 'death is not mine yet, nor Jerusalem either. Make me a truce with my brother Saladin for three years. Then with the grace of God I will come and fight him again. But for this time I am spent.'

'Are you wounded, dear sire?' asked Saphadin.

'Wounded?' said the King in a whisper. 'Yes, wounded in the soul, and in the heart—sick, sick, sick.'

Saphadin, kneeling down, kissed his ring. 'May the God whom in secret we both worship, the God of Gods, do well by you, my brother.' So he said, and Richard nodded and smiled at him kindly.

When peace was made they carried him to his ship. The fleet went to Acre.

---

CHAPTER X

THE CHAPTER CALLED BONDS

King Richard sent for his sister Joan of Sicily on the morrow of his coming to Acre, and thus addressed her: 'Let me hear now, sister, the truth of what passed when the Queen saw Madame d'Anjou.'

'Madame d'Anjou!' cried Joan, who (as you know) had plenty of spirit; 'I think you rob the Queen of a title there.'

'I cannot rob her of what she never had,' said King Richard; 'but I will repeat my question if you do not remember it.'

'No need, sire,' replied the lady, and told him all she knew. She added, 'Sire and my brother, if I may dare to say so, I think the Queen has a grief. Madame Jehane made no pretensions—I hope I do her full justice—but remember that the Queen made none either. You took her of your royal will; she was conscious of the honour. But of what you gave you took away more than half. The Queen loves you, Richard; she is a most miserable lady, yet there is time still. Make a wife of your queen, brother Richard, and all will be well. For what other reason in the world did Madame Jehane what she did? For love of an old man whom she had never seen, do you think?'

The King's brow grew dark red. He spoke deliberately. 'I will never make her my wife. I will never willingly see her again. I should sin against religion or honour if I did either. I will never do that. Let her go to her own country.'

'Sire, sire,' said Joan, 'how is she to do that?'

'As she will,' says the King; 'but, for my part of it, with every proper accompaniment.'

'Sire, the dowry—'

'I return it, every groat.'

'The affront—'

'The affront is offered. I prevent a greater affront.'

'Is this fixed, Richard?'

'Irrevocably.'

'She loves you, sire!'

'She loves ill. Get up on your feet.'

'Sire, I beseech you pity her.'

'I pity her deeply. I think I pity everybody with whom I have had to deal. I do not choose to have any more pitiful persons about me. Fare you well, sister. Go, lest I pity you.' She pleaded.

'Ah, sire!'

'The audience is at an end,' said the King; and the Queen of Sicily rose to take leave.

---

He kept his word, never saw Berengère again but once, and that was not yet. What remained for him to do in Syria he did, patched up a truce with Saladin, saw to Henry of Champagne's election, to Guy of Lusignan's establishment; dealt out such rewards and punishments as lay in his power, sent the two queens with a convoy to Marseilles. Then, two years from his hopeful entry into Acre as a conqueror, he left it a defeated man. He had won every battle he had fought and taken every city he had invested. His allies had beaten him, not the heathen.

They were to beat him again, with help. The very skies took their part. He was beset by storms from the day he launched on the deep, separated from his convoy, driven from one shore to another, fatally delayed. His enemies had time to gather at home: Eustace of Saint-Pol, Beauvais, Philip of France; and behind all these was John of Mortain, moving heaven and earth and them to get him a realm. By a providence, as he thought it, Richard put into Corsica under stress of weather, and there heard how the land lay in Gaul. Philip had won over Raymond of Toulouse, Saint-Pol heading a joint-army of theirs was near Marseilles, ready to destroy him. King Richard was to walk into a trap. By this time, you must know, he had no more to his power than the galley he rode in, and three others. He had no Des Barres, no Gaston, no Béziers; he had not even Mercadet his captain, and no thought where they might be. The trap would have caught him fast.

'Pretty work,' he said, 'pretty work. But I will better it.' He put about, and steered round Sicily for the coast of Dalmatia; here was caught again by furious gales, lost three ships out of the four he had, and finally sought haven at Gazara, a little fishing village on that empty shore. His intention was to travel home by way of Germany and the Low Countries, and so land in England while his brother John was still in France. Either he had forgotten, or did not care to remember, that all this country was a fief of the Archduke Luitpold's. He knew, of course, that Luitpold hated him, but not that he held him guilty of Montferrat's murder. Suspecting no great difficulty, he sent up messengers to the lord of Gazara for a safe-conduct for certain merchants, pilgrims. This man was an Austrian knight called Gunther.

'Who are your pilgrims?' Gunther asked; and was told, Master Hugh, a merchant of Alost, he and his servants.

'What manner of a merchant?' was Gunther's next question.

'My lord,' they said, who had seen him, 'a fine man, tall as a tree, and strong and straight, having keen blue eyes, and a reddish beard on his chin, as the men of Flanders do not use.'

Gunther said, 'Let me see this merchant,' and went down to the inn where King Richard was.

Now Richard was sitting by the fire, warming himself. When Gunther came in, furred and portly, he did not rise up; which was unfortunate in a pretended merchant.

'Are you Master Hugh of Alost?' Gunther asked, looking him over.

'That is the name I bear,' said Richard. 'And who are you, my friend?'

The Austrian stammered. 'Hey, thou dear God, I am Lord Gunther of this castle and town!' he said, raising his voice. Then the King got up to make a reverence, and in so doing betrayed his stature.

'I should have guessed it, sir, by your gentleness in coming to visit me here. I ask your pardon.' Thus the King, while Gunther wondered.

'You are a very tall merchant, Hugh,' says he. 'Do they make your sort in Alost?' King Richard laughed.

'It is the only advantage I have of your lordship. For the rest, my countrywomen make straight men, I think.'

'Were you bred in Alost, Master Hugh?' asked Gunther suspiciously; and again Richard laughed as he said, 'Ah, you must ask my mother, Lord Gunther.'

'Lightning!' was the Austrian's thought; 'here is a pretty easy merchant.'

He raised some little difficulties, vexations of routine, which King Richard persistently laughed at, while doing his best to fulfil them. Gunther did not relish this. He named the Archduke as his overlord, hard upon strangers. Richard let it slip that he did not greatly esteem the Archduke. However, in the end he got his safe-conduct, and all would have been well if, on leaving Gazara, he had not overpaid the bill.

Overpay is not the word: he drowned the bill. In a hurry for the road, the innkeeper fretted him. 'Reckoning, landlord!' he cried, with one foot in the stirrup: 'how the devil am I to reckon half-way up a horse? Here, reckon yourself, my man, and content you with these.' He threw a fistful of gold besants on the flags, turned his horse sharply and cantered out of the yard. 'Colossal man!' gasped the innkeeper. 'King or devil, but no merchant under the sun.' So the news spread abroad, and Gunther puffed his cheeks over it. A six-foot-two man, a monstrous leisurely merchant, who rose not to the lord of a castle and town, who did not wait for his lordship's humour, but found laughable matter in his own; who was taller than the Archduke and thought his Grace a dull dog; who made a Danaë of his landlord! Was this man Jove? Who could think the Archduke a dull dog except an Emperor, or, perhaps, a great king? A king: stay now. There were wandering kings abroad. How if Richard of England had lost his way? Here he slapped his thigh: but this must be Richard of England—what other king was so tall? And in that case, O thunder in the sky, he had let slip his Archduke's deadly enemy! He howled for his lanzknechts, his boots, helmet, great sword; he set off at once, and riding by forest ways, cut off the merchant in a day and a night. He ran him to earth in the small wooden inn of a small wooden village high up in the Carinthian Alps, Blomau by name, which lies in a forest clearing on the road to Gratz.

King Richard was drinking sour beer in the kitchen, and not liking it. The lanzknechts surrounded the house; Gunther with two of them behind him came clattering in. Glad of the diversion, Richard looked up.

'Ha, here is Lord Gunther again,' said he. 'Better than beer.'

'King Richard of England,' said the Austrian, white by nature, heat, and his feelings, 'I make you my prisoner.'

'So it seems,' replied the King; 'sit down, Gunther. I offer you beer and a most indifferent cheese.'

But Gunther would by no means sit down in the presence of an anointed king for one bidding.

'Ah, sire, it is proper that I should stand before you,' he said huskily, greatly excited.

'It is not at all proper when I tell you to be seated,' returned King Richard. So Gunther sat down and wiped his head, Richard finished his beer; and then they went to sleep on the floor. Early in the morning the prisoner woke up his gaoler.

'Come, Gunther,' he says, 'we had better take the road.'

'I am ready, sire,' says Gunther, manifestly unready. He rose and shook himself.

'Lead, then,' Richard said.

'I follow you, sire.'

'Lead, you white dog,' said the King, and showed his teeth for a moment. The Austrian obeyed. One of Richard's few attendants, a Norman called Martin Vaux, adopted for his own salvation the simple expedient of staying behind; and Gunther was in far too exalted a mood to notice such a trifle. When he and his troop had rounded the forest road, Martin Vaux rounded it also, but in the opposite direction. He was rather a fool, though not fool enough to go to prison if he could help it. Being a seaman by grace, he smelt for his element, and by grace found it after not many days. More of him presently.

Archduke Luitpold was in his good town of Gratz when news was brought him, and the man. 'Du lieber Gott!' he crowed. 'Ach, mein Gunther!' and embraced his vassal.

His fiery little eyes burned red, as Mars when he flickers; but he was a gentleman. He took Richard's proffered hand, and after some fumbling about, kissed it.

'Ha, sire!' came the words, deeply exultant, from his big throat. 'Now we are on more equal terms, it appears.'

'I agree with you, Luitpold,' said the King; and then, even as the Archduke was wetting his lips for the purpose, he added, 'But I hope you will not stretch your privilege so far as to make me a speech.'

Austria swallowed hard. 'Sire, it would take many speeches to wipe out the provocations I have received at your hands. All the speeches in the councils of the world could not excuse the deaths of my second cousin the Count of Saint-Pol and of my first cousin the Marquess of Montferrat.'

'That is true,' replied Richard, 'but neither could they restore them to life.'

'Sire, sire!' cried the Archduke, 'upon my soul I believe you guilty of the Marquess's death.'

'I assumed that you did,' was the King's answer; 'and your protestation adds no weight to my theory, but otherwise.'

'Do you admit it, King Richard?' The Archduke, an amazed man, looked foolish. His mouth fell open and his hair stuck out; this gave him the appearance of a perturbed eagle in a bush.

'I am far from denying it,' says Richard. 'I never deny any charges, and never make any unless I am prepared to pursue them; which is not the case at present.'

'I must keep you in safe hold, sire,' the Archduke said. 'I must communicate with my lord the Roman Emperor.'

'You are in your right, Luitpold,' said King Richard.

The end of the day's work was that the King of England was lodged in a high tower, some sixty feet above the town wall.

---

Now consider the acts of Martin Vaux, smelling for the sea. In a little time he did better than that, for he saw it from the top of a high mountain, shining far off in the haze, and then had nothing to do but follow down a river-bed, which brought him duly to Trieste. Thence he got a passage to Venice, where the wineshops were too good or too many for him. He talked of his misfortunes, of his broken shoes, of Austrian beer, of his exalted master, of his extreme ingenuity and capacity for all kinds of faithful service. Now Venice was, as it is now, a place colluvies gentium. Gaunt, lonely Arabs stalked the narrow streets, or dreamed motionless by the walls of the quay. The city was full of strayed Crusaders, disastrous broken blades, of renegade Christians, renegade Moslems, adaptable Jews, of pilgrims, and chafferers of relics from the holy places. Martin's story spread like the plague, but not (unhappily) to any advantage of King Richard imperturbable in his tower. Martin Vaux then, having drunk up the charity of Venice, shipped for Ancona. There too he met with attentions, for there he met a countryman of his, the Sieur Gilles de Gurdun, a Norman knight.

When Sir Gilles heard that King Richard was in prison, but that Jehane was not with him, he grew very red. That he had never learned of her deeds at Acre need not surprise you. He had not heard because he had not been to Acre with the French host, but instead had gone pilgrim to Jerusalem, and thence with Lusignan to Cyprus. So now he took Martin Vaux by the windpipe and shook him till his eyes stared like agate balls. 'Tell me where Madame Jehane is, you clot, or I finish what I have begun,' he said terribly. But Martin could tell him no more, for he was quite dead. It was proper, even in Ancona, to be moving after that; and Gilles was very ready to move. The hunger and thirst for Jehane, which had never left him for long, came aching back to such a pitch that he felt he must now find her, see her, touch her, or die. The King was her only clue; he must hunt him out wherever he might be. One of two things had occurred: either Richard had tired of her, or he had lost her by mischance of travel. There was a third possible thing, that the Queen had had her murdered. He put that from him, being sure she was not dead. 'Death,' said Gilles, 'is great, but not great enough to have Jehane in her beauty.' He really believed this. So he came back to his two positions. If the King had tired of her, he would not scruple (being as he was) to admit as much to Gilles. If he had lost her, he was safe in prison; and Gilles knew that with time he could find her. But he must be sure. He thought of another thing. 'If he is in prison, in chains, he might be stabbed with certain ease.' His heart exulted at the hot thought.

It was not hard to follow back on Martin's dallying footsteps. He traced him to Venice, to Trieste, up the mountains as far as Blomau. There he lost him, and shot very wide of the mark. In fact, the slow-witted young man went to Vienna on a false rumour—but it boots not recount his wanderings. Six months after he left Ancona, ragged, hatless, unkempt, hungry, he came within sight of the strong towers of Gratz; and as he went limping by the town ditch he heard a clear, high voice singing—

Li dous consire
Quem don' Ainors soven—

and knew that he had run down his man.

One other, crouching under the wall, most intent watcher, saw him stop as if hit, clap his hand to his shock-head, then listen, brooding, working his jaws from side to side. The voice stayed; Gilles turned and slowly went his way back. He limped under the gateway into the town, and the croucher by the wall peered at him between the meshes of her dishevelled hair.

---

CHAPTER XI

THE CHAPTER CALLED A LATERE

The Old Man of Musse, Lord of all the Assassins, descendant of Ali, Fulness of Light, Master of them that eat hemp, and many things beside, wedded Jehane and made her his principal wife. He valued in her, apart from her bodily perfections, her discretion, obedience, good sense, and that extraordinary sort of pride which makes its possessor humble, so inset it is; too proud, you may say, to give pride a thought. Esteeming her at this price, it is not remarkable if she came to be his only wife.

This was the manner of her life. When her husband left her, which was very early in the morning, she generally slept for an hour, then rose and went to the bath. Her boy was brought to her in the pavilion of the Garden of Fountains; she spent two hours or more with him, teaching him his prayers, the honour of his father, love and duty to his mother, respect for the long purposes of God. At ten o'clock she broke her fast, and afterwards her women sat with her at needlework; and one would sing, or one tell a good tale; or, leave being given, they would gossip among themselves, with a look ever at her for approval or (what rarely happened) disapproval. There was not a soul among her slaves who did not love her, nor one who did not fear her. She talked no more than she had ever done, but she judged no less. Many times a day the Old Man sent for her, or sometimes came to her room, to discuss his affairs. He never found her out of humour, dull, perverse, or otherwise than well-disposed to all his desires. Far from that, every Friday he gave thanks in the mosque for the gift of such an admirable wife—grave, discreet, pious, amorous, chaste, obedient, nimble, complaisant, and most beautiful, as he hereby declared that he found her. Being a man of the greatest possible experience, this was high praise; nor had he been slow in making up his mind that she was to be trusted. He was about to prove his deed as good as his opinion.

Word was brought her on a day, as she sat in the harem with her boy on her knee, singing to herself and him some winding song of France, that this redoubtable lord of hers was waiting to see her in her chamber. She put the child down and followed the eunuch. Entering the room where the Old Man sat, she knelt down, as was customary, and kissed his knee. He touched her bent head. 'Rise up, my child,' says he, 'sit with me for a little. I have matters of concernment for you.' She sat at once by his side; he took her hand and began to talk to her in this manner.

'It appears, Jehane, that I am something of a prophet. Your late master, the Melek Richard, has fallen into the power of his enemies; he is now a prisoner of the Archduke's on many charges: first, the killing of your brother Eudo, Count of Saint-Pol; but that is a very trifling affair, which occurred, moreover, in fair battle. Next, they accuse him—falsely, as you know—of the death of Montferrat. We may have our own opinion about that. But the prime matter, as I guess, is ransom, and whether those who wish him ill (not for what he has done to them, but for what he has not allowed them to do to him) will suffer him to be ransomed. Now, what have you to say, my child? I see that it affects you.'

Jehane was affected, but not as you might expect. With great self-possession she had a very practical mind. There were neither tears nor heart-beatings, neither panic nor flying of colours. Her eyes sought the Old Man's and remained steadily on them; her lips were firm and red.

'What are you willing to do, sire?' she asked him. Sinan stroked his fine beard.

'I can dispose of the business of Montferrat in a few lines,' he said, considering. 'More, I can reach the Melek and assure him of comfort. What I cannot do so easily, though I admit no failure, mind, is to induce his enemies at home to allow of a ransom.'

'I can do that,' said Jehane, 'if you will do the rest.' The Old Man patted her cheek.

'It is not the custom of my nation to allow wives abroad. You, moreover, are not of that nation. How can I trust the Melek, who (I know) loves you? How can I trust you, who (I know) love the Melek?'

'Oh, sire,' says Jehane, looking him full in the face, 'I came here because I loved my lord Richard; and when I have assured his safety I shall return here.' She looked down, as she added—'For the same reason, and for no other.'

'I quite understand you, child,' said the Old Man, and put his hand under her chin. This made her blush, and brought up her face again quickly.

'Dear sire,' she said shyly, 'you are very kind to me. If I had another reason for returning it would be that.' Sinan kissed her.

'And so it shall be, my dear,' he assured her. 'There is time enough. You shall certainly go, due regard being had to my dignity, and your health, which is delicate just now.'

'Have no fear for me, my lord,' she said. 'I am very strong.' He kissed her again, saying, 'I have never known a woman at once so beautiful and so strong.'

He wrote two letters, sealing them with his own signet and that of King Solomon. To the Archduke he said curtly—

'To the Archduke Luitpold, Vetus de Monte sends greeting. If the Melek Richard be any way let in the matter of his life and renown, I bid you take heed that as I served the Marquess of Montferrat, so also I shall serve your Serenity.'

But the Emperor demanded more civil advertisement: he got a remarkably fine letter.

'To the most exalted man, Henry, by the grace of God Emperor of the Romans, happy, pious, ever august, the invincible Conqueror, Vetus de Monte, by the same great Chief of the Assassins, sends greeting with the kiss of peace. Let your Celsitude make certain acquaintance with error in regard to the most illustrious person whom you have in hold. Not that Melek Richard caused the death of the Marquess Conrad; but I, the Ancient, the Lord of Assassins, Fulness of Light, for good cause, namely to save my friend the same Melek from injurious death at the hands of the Marquess. And him, the said Melek, I am resolved at all hazards to defend by means of the silent smiters who serve me. So farewell; and may He protect your Celsitude whom we diversely worship.'

As with every business of the Old Man's, preparations were soon and silently made. In three or four days' time Jehane strained the young Fulke to her bosom, took affectionate humble leave of her master, and left the green valley of Lebanon on her embassy.

She was sent down to the coast in the manner becoming the estate of a Sultan's favourite wife. She never set foot on the ground, never even saw it. She was in a close-curtained litter, herself veiled to the eyes. Sitting with her was a vast old Turkish woman, whom in the harem they called the Mother of Flowers. Mules bore the litter, eunuchs on mules surrounded it. On all sides, a third line of defence, rode the janissaries, hooded in white, on white Arabian horses. So they came swiftly to Tortosa, whose lord, in strict alliance with him of Musse, little knew that in paying homage to the shrouded cage he was cap-in-hand to Jehane of Picardy. Long galleys took up the burden of the mountain roads, dipped and furrowed across the Ægean, and touched land at Salonika. Hence by relays of bearers Jehane was carried darkly to Marburg in Styria, where at last she saw the face of the sky.

They took her to the inn and unveiled her. Then the chief of the eunuchs handed her a paper which he had written himself, being deprived of a tongue:—'Madame, Fragrance of the Harem, Gulzareen (which is to say, Golden Rose), thus I am commanded by my dreadful master. From this hour and place you are free to do what seems best to your wisdom. The letters of our lord will be sent forward by the proper bearers of them, one to Gratz, where the Archduke watches the Melek, and one to the Emperor of the Romans, wherever he may be found. In Gratz is he whom you seek. This day six months I shall be here to attend your Sufficiency.' He bowed three times, and went away.

'Now, mother,' said Jehane to the old duenna, 'do for me what I bid you, and quickly. Get me brown juice for my skin, and a ragged kirtle and bodice, such as the Egyptians wear. Give me money to line it, and then let me go.' All this was done. Jehane put on vile raiment which barely covered her, stained her fair face, neck, and arms brown, and let her hair droop all about her. Then she went barefoot out, hugging herself against the cold, being three months gone with child, and took the road over barren moorland to Gratz.

She had not seen King Richard for nearly two years, at the thought of which thing and of him the hot blood leapt up, to thrust and tingle in her face. She did not mean to see him now if she could help it, for she knew just how far she could withstand him; she would save him and then go back. Thus she reasoned with herself as she trudged: 'Jehane, ma mye, thou art wife now to a wise old man, who is good to thee, and has exalted thee above all his women. Thou must have no lovers now. Only save him, save him, save him, Lord Jesus, Lady Mary!' She treated this as a prayer, and kept it very near her lips all the way to Gratz, except when she felt herself flush all over with the thought, 'School of God! Is so great a king to be prayed for, as if he were a sick monk?' Nevertheless, she prayed more than she flushed. Nothing disturbed her; she slept in woods, in byres, in stackyards; bought what she needed for food, attracted no attention, and got no annoyance worthy the name. At the closing in of the fifth day she saw the walls of the city rise above the black moors into the sky, and the towers above them. The dome of a church, gilded, caught the dying sun's eye; its towers were monstrous tall, round, and peaked with caps of green copper. On the walls she counted seven other towers, heavy, squat, flat-roofed fortresses with huge battlements. A great flag hung in folds, motionless about a staff. All was a uniform dun, muffled in stormy sky, lowering, remote from knowledge, and alien.

But Jehane herself was of the North, and not impressionable. Grey skies were familiar tents to her, moorlands roomy places, one heap of stones much like another. But her heart beat high to know Richard half a league away; all her trouble was how she should find him in such a great town. It was dusk when she reached it; they were about to shut the gates. She let them, having seen that there were booths and hovels at the barriers, even a little church. It was there she spent the night, huddled in a corner by the altar.

Dawn is a laggard in Styria. She awoke before it was really light, and crept out, munching a crust. The suburb was dead asleep, a little breeze ruffled the poplars, and blew wrinkles on the town ditch. About and about the walls she went, peering up at their ragged edge, at the huge crumbling towers, at the storks on steep roofs. 'Eh, Lord God, here lies in torment my lovely king!' she cried to herself. The keen breeze freshened, the cloud-wrack went racing westward; it left the sky clean and bare. Out of the east came the red sun, and struck fire upon the dome of Saint Stanislas. Out of a high window then came the sound of a man singing, a sharp strong voice, tremulous in the open notes. She held her bosom as she heard—

Al entrada del tems clar, eya!
Per joja recomençar, eya!
Vol la regina mostrar
Qu'el' es si amoroza.

The sun kindled her lifted face, filled her wet eyes with light, and glistened on her praying lips.

After that her duty was clear, as she conceived it. She dared not attempt the tower: that would reveal her to him. But she could not leave it. She must wait to learn the effect of her lord's letter, wait to see the bearer of it: here she would wait, where she could press the stones which bore up the stones pressed by Richard. So she did, crouching on the earth by the wall, sheltered against the wind or the wet by either side of a buttress, getting her food sparingly from the booths at the gate, or of charity. The townsmen of Gratz, hoarse-voiced touzleheads mostly, divined her to be an anchoress, a saint, or an unfortunate. She was not of their country, for her hair was burnt yellow like a Lombard's, and her eyes green; her face, tanned and searching, was like a Hungarian's; they thought that she wove spells with her long hands. On this account at first she was driven away on to the moors; but she always returned to her place in the angle, and counted that a day gained when she knew by Richard's strong singing that he yet lived. His songs told her more than that: they were all of love, and if her name came not in her image did. She knew by the mere pitch of his voice—who so well?—when he was occupied with her and when not. Mostly he sang all the morning from the moment the sun struck his window. Thus she judged him a light sleeper. From noon to four there was no sound; surely then he slept. He sang fitfully in the evening, not so saliently; more at night, if there was a moon; and generally he closed his eyes with a stave of Li dous consire, that song which he had made of and for her.

When she had been sitting there for upwards of a month, and still no sign from the bearer of the letter, she saw Gilles de Gurdun come halting up the poplar avenue and pry about the walls, much as she herself had done. She knew him at once for all his tatters, this square-faced, low-browed Norman. How he came there, if not as a slot-hound comes, she could not guess; but she knew perfectly well what he was about. The blood-instinct had led him, inflexible man, from far Acre across the seas, over the sharp mountains and enormous plains; the blood-instinct had brought him as truly as ever love led her—more truly, indeed. Here he was, with murder still in his heart.

Watching him through the meshes of her hair, elbowing her arms on her knees, she thought, What should she do? Plead? Nay, dare she plead for so royal a head, for so great a heart, so great a king, for one so nearly god that, for a sacrifice, she could have yielded up no more to very God? This strife tore her to pieces, while Gurdun snuffled round the walls, actually round the buttress where she crouched, spying out the entries. On one side she feared Gilles, on the other scorned what he could do. There was the leper! He made Gilles terrible; even her sacrifice on Lebanon might not avail against such as he. But King Richard! But this strong singer! But this god of war! Gilles came round the walls for a second time, nosing here and there, stopping, shaking his head, limping on. Then she heard the King's voice singing, high and sharp and spiring; his glorious voice, keener than any man's, as pure as any boy's, singing with astounding gaiety, 'Al entrada del tems clar, eya!'

Gilles stopped as one struck, and gaped up at the tower. To see his stupid mouth open, Jehane's bosom heaved with pride well-nigh insufferable. Had any woman, since Mary conceived, such a lover as hers! 'Oh, Gilles, Gilles, go you on with your knife in your vest. What can you do, little oaf, against King Richard?' Gilles went in by the gate, and she let him go. He was away two days, by which time she had cause to alter her mind. The prisoner sang nothing; and presently a man dressed like a Bohemian came out of the town and spoke to her. This was Cogia, the Assassin, bearer of the letter.

'Well, Cogia?' said Jehane, holding herself.

'Mistress, the letter of our lord has been delivered. I think it may go hard with the Melek.'

'What, Cogia? Does the Archduke dare?'

'The Archduke, mistress, desires not the Melek's death. He is a worthy man. But many do desire it—kings of the West, kinsmen of the Marquess, above all the Melek's blood-brother. One of that prince's men, as I judge him, is with him now—one of your country, mistress.'

In a vision she saw the leper again, a dull smear in the sunny waste, scratching himself on a white stone. She saw him come hopping from rock to rock, his wagging finger, shapeless face, tongueless voice.

'Mistress—' said Cogia. She turned blank eyes upon him. 'I pray,' she said; 'I pray. Has God no pity?'

Cogia shrugged. 'What has God to do with pity? The end of the world is in His hand already. The Melek is a king, and the Norman dung in his sight. Who knows the end but God, and how shall He pity what He hath decreed for wisdom? This I say, if the King dies the man dies.'

Jehane threw up her head. 'The King will not die, Cogia. Yet to-morrow, if the man comes not out, I will go to seek him.'

---

Early in the morning Gilles did come out, turned the angle of the ditch, and shuffled towards her, his head hung. Jehane moved swiftly out from the shadow of the buttress and confronted him. She folded her arms over her breast; and at that moment the shadow of Richard's tower was capped with the shadow of Richard himself. But she saw nothing of this. 'Halt there, Sir Gilles,' she said. The Norman gave a squeal, like a hog startled at his trough, and went dead-fire colour.

'Ha, Heart of Jesus!' said Gilles de Gurdun.

---

CHAPTER XII

THE CHAPTER OF STRIFE IN THE DARK

One very great power of King Richard's had never served him better than now, the power of immense quiescence, whereunder he could sit by day or by night as inert as a stone, a block hewn into shape of a man, neither to be moved by outside fret nor by the workings of his own mind. Into this rapt state he fell when the prison doors shut on him, and so remained for three or four weeks, alone while the Fates were spinning. The Archduke came daily to him with speeches, injuries to relate, injuries to impart. King Richard hardly winked an eyelid. The Archduke hinted at ransom, and Richard watched the wall behind his head; he spoke of letters received from this great man or that, which made ransom not to be thought of; and Richard went to sleep. What are you to do with a man who meets your offers and threats with the same vast unconcern? If it is matter for resentment, Richard gave it; if it is a matter which money may leaven, it is to be observed that while Richard offered no money his enemies offered much.

These letters to the Archduke were not of the sort which fill the austere folios of the Codex Diplomaticus as bins with bran, or make Rymer's book as dry as Ezekiel's valley. They were pungent, pertinent, allusive, succinct, supplementing, as with meat, those others. The Count of Saint-Pol wrote, for instance, 'Kinsman, kill the killer of your kin,' and could hardly have expressed himself better under the circumstances. King Philip of France sent two letters: one by a herald, very long, and chiefly in the language of the Epistle of Saint James, designed for the Codex. The other lay in the vest of a Savigniac monk, and was to this effect: 'In a ridded acre the husbandman can sow with hopes of good harvesting. When the corn is garnered he calleth about him his friends and fellow-labourers, and cheer abounds. Labour and pray. I pray.' Last came a limping pilgrim from Aquitaine, whose hat was covered with metal saints, and in his left shoe a wad of parchment, which had made him limp. This proved to be a letter from John Count of Mortain, which said, 'Now I see in secret. But when I am come into my kingdom I will reward openly.' The Archduke was by no means a wise man; but it was not easy to know something of European politics and mistake the meaning of letters like these. If it was a question of money, here was money. And imagine now the Archduke, bursting with the urgent secrets of so many princes, making speeches about them—through all of which King Richard slumbered! 'Damn it, he flouts me, does he?' said Austria at last; and left him alone. From that moment Richard began to sing.

Let us do no wrong to Luitpold: it was not merely a question of money, but money turned the scale. Not only had Richard mortally affronted his gaoler; he had innumerably offended him. The Archduke was punctilious; Richard with his petulant foot stamped on every little point he laboured, or else, like a buttress, let him labour them in vain. He did not for a moment disguise his fatigue in Luitpold's presence, his relief at his absence, or his unconcern with his properties. This galled the man. He could not, for the life of him, affect indifference to Richard's indifference. When the messenger, therefore, arrived from the Old Man of Musse, the insolence of the message was most unfortunate. The Archduke, angry as he was, could afford to be cool. He played on the Old Man the very part which Richard had played on him—that is, treated him and his letter as though they were not.

Then he broke with Richard altogether; and then came Gilles de Gurdun with secret words and offers.

The Archduke drained his beer-horn, and with his big hand wrung his beard dry. He winked hard at Gilles, whom he thought to be a hired assassin of deplorable address sent, probably, by Count John.

'Are you angry enough to do what you propose?' he asked him. 'I am not, let me tell you.'

'I have been trying to kill him for four years,' said Gilles.

'And are you man enough, my fellow?' Gilles cast down his eyes.

'I have not been man enough yet, since he still lives. I think I am now.' Then there was a pause.

'What is your price?' asked Luitpold after this.

Gilles said, 'I have no price'; and the Archduke, 'You suit my humour exactly.'

---

Richard, I say, had begun to sing from the day he was sure that the Archduke had given him up. Physical relief may have had something to do with that, but moral certainty had more. What made him fume or freeze was doubt. There was very little room for doubt just now but that his enemies would prove too many for Austria's scruples. His friends? He was not aware that he had any friends. Des Barres, Gaston, Auvergne, Milo? What did they amount to? His sister Joan, his mother, his brothers? Here he shrugged, knowing his own race too well. He had never heard of the Angevin who helped any Angevin but himself. Lastly, Jehane. He had lost her by his own fault and her extreme nobility. Let her go, glorious among women! He was alone. Odd creature, he began to sing.

Singing like a genius to the broad splash of sunlight on brickwork, Gilles de Gurdun found him. Richard was sitting on a bench against the wall, one knee clasped in his hands, his head thrown back, his throat rippling with the tide of his music. He looked as fresh and gallant a figure as ever in his life; his beard trimmed sharply, his strong hair brushed back, his doublet green, his trunks of fine leather, his shoes of yet finer. The song he was upon was Li Chastel d' Amors, which runs—

Las portas son de parlar
Al eissir e al entrar:
Qui gen non sab razonar,
Defors li ven a estar.
E las claus son de prejar:
Ab cel obron li cortes—

and so on through many verses, made continuous by the fact that the end of each sixth line forms the rhyme of the next five. Now, Gilles knew nothing of Southern minstrelsy, and if he had, the pitch he was screwed to would have shrilled such knowledge out of him. At 'Defors li ven a estar,' he came in, and sturdily forward. Richard saw him and put up his hand: on went the hammered rhymes—

E las claus son de prejar:
Ab cel obron li cortes.

Here was a little break. Gilles, very dark, took a step; up shot Richard's warning hand—

Dedinz la clauson qu'i es
Son las mazos dels borges . . .

On went the exulting voice after the new rhymes, gayer and yet more gay. Li Chastel d'Amors has twelve linked verses, and King Richard, wound up in their music, sang them all. When at last he had stopped, he said, 'Now, Gurdun, what do you want here?'

Gilles came a step or two of his way, and so again a step or two, and so again, by jerks. When he was so near that it was to be seen what he had in his right hand, the King got up. Gilles saw that he had light fetters on his ankles which could not stop his walking. Richard folded his arms.

'Oh, Gurdun,' he said, 'what a fool you are.'

Gurdun vented a sob of rage, and flung himself forward at his enemy. He was a shorter man, but very thickset, with arms like steel. He had a knife, rage like a thirst, he was free. Richard, as he came on, hit him full on the chin, and sent him flying. Gurdun picked himself up again, his mouth twitching, his eyes so small as to be like slits. Knife in hand he leaned against the wall to fetch up his breath.

'Well,' said Richard, 'Have you had enough?'

'Yes, you wolf,' said Gurdun, 'I shall wait till it is dark.'

'I think it may suit you better,' was the King's comment as he sat down on the bed. Gurdun squatted by the wall, watching him. After about an hour of humming airs to himself Richard lay full length, and in a short time Gilles ascertained that he was asleep. This brought tears into the man's eyes; he began to cry freely. Virgin Mary! Virgin Mary! why could he not kill this frozen devil of a king? Was there a race in the world which bred such men, to sleep with the knife at the throat? He rose to his feet, went to look at the sleeper; but he knew he could not do his work. He ranged the room incessantly, and at every second or third turn brought up short by the bed. Sometimes he flashed up his long knife; it always stayed the length of his arm, then flapped down to his flank in dejection. 'If he wakes not I must go away. I cannot do it so,' he told himself, as finally he sat down by the wall. It grew dusk. He was tired, sick, giddy; his head dropped, he slept. When he woke up, as with a snort he did, it was inky dark. Now was the time, not even God could see him now. He turned himself about; inch by inch he crept forward, edging along by the bed's edge. Painfully he got on his knees, threw up his head. 'Jehane, my robbed lost soul!' he howled, and stabbed with all his might. King Richard, cat-like behind him, caught him by the hair, and cuffed his ears till they sang.

'Ah, dastard cur! Ah, mongrel! Ah, white-galled Norman eft! God's feet, if I pommel you for this!' Pommel him he did; and, having drawn blood at his ears, he turned him over his knee as if he had been a schoolboy, and lathered his rump with a chair-leg. This humiliating punishment had humiliating effects. Gilles believed himself a boy in the cloister-school again, with his smock up. 'Mea culpa, mea culpa! Hey, reverend father, have pity!' he began to roar. Dropping him at last, Richard tumbled him on to the bed. 'Blubber yourself to sleep, clown,' he told him. 'Blessed ass, I have heard you snoring these two hours, snoring and rootling over your jack-knife. Sleep, man. But if you rootle again I flog again: mind you that.' Gilles slept long, and was awoken in full light by the sound of King Richard calling for his breakfast.

The gaoler came pale-faced in. 'A thousand pardons, sire, a thousand pardons—'

'Bring my food, Dietrich,' says Richard, 'and send the barber. Also, the next time the Archduke desires murder done let him find a fellow who knows his trade. This one is a bungler. Here's the third time to my knowledge he has missed. Off with you.'

Gilles lay face downwards, abject on the bed. In came the King's breakfast, a jug of wine, some white bread. The King's beard was trimmed, his hair brushed, fresh clothes put on. He dismissed his attendants, crossed over the room like a stalking cat, and gave Gilles a clap behind which made him leap in the air.

'Get up, Gurdun,' said Richard. 'Tell me that you are ashamed of yourself, and then listen to me.'

Gilles went down on one knee. 'God knows, my lord King,' he mumbled, 'that I have done shamefully by you.' He got up, his face clouded, his jaw went square. 'But not more shamefully, by the same God, than you have done by me.'

The King looked at him. 'I have never justified myself to any man,' he said quietly, 'nor shall I now to you. I take the consequences of all my deeds when and as they come. But from the like of you none will ever come. I speak of men. Now I will tell you this very plainly. The next time you cross my path adversely, I shall kill you. You are a nuisance, not because you desire my life, but because you never get it. Try no more, Gurdun.'

'Where is Jehane, my lord?' said Gurdun, very black.

'I cannot tell you where the Countess of Anjou may be,' he was answered. 'She is not here, and is not in France. I believe she is in Palestine.'

'Palestine! Palestine! Lord Christ, have you turned her away?' Gilles cried, beside himself. Again King Richard looked at him, but afterwards shrugged.

'You speak after your kind. Now, Gurdun, get you home. Go to my friends in Normandy, to my brother Mortain, to my brother of Rouen; bid them raise a ransom. I must go back. You have disturbed me, sickened me of assassination, reminded me of what I intended to forget. If I get any more assassins I shall break prison and the Archduke's head, and I should be sorry to do that, as I have no grudge against him. Find Des Barres, Gurdun, raise all Normandy. Find above all Mercadet, and set him to work in Poictou. As for England, my brother Geoffrey will see to it. Aquitaine I leave to the Lord of Béarn. Off now, Gurdun, do as I bid you. But if you speak another word to me of Madame d'Anjou, by God's death I will wring your neck. You are not fit to speak of me: how should you dare speak of her? You! A stab-i'-the-dark, a black-entry cutter of throats, a hedgerow knifer! Foh, you had better speak nothing, but be off. Stay, I will call the castellan.' And so he did, roaring through the key-hole. The gaoler came up flying.

'Conduct this animal into the fresh air, Dietrich,' said King Richard; 'send him about his business. Tell your master he will now do better. And when that is done, let me go on to the leads that I may walk a little.'

Gurdun followed his guide speechless; but the Archduke was very vexed, and declined to see him. 'I decide to be a villain, and he makes me a vain villain,' said the great man. 'Bid him go to the devil.' So then Gilles with head hanging came out of the gate, and Jehane leaped from her angle to confront him.

To say that he dropped like a shot bird is to say wrong; for a bird drops compact, but Gilles went down disjunct. His jaw dropped, his hands dropped, his knees, last his head. 'Ha, Heart of Jesus!' he said, and covered his eyes. She began to talk like a hissing snake.

'What have you done with the King? What have you done?' King Richard on the roof peered down and saw her. He turned quite grey.

'I could do nothing, Jehane,' Gilles whimpered; 'I went to kill him.'

'You fool, I know it. I saw you go. I could have stayed you as I do now. But I would not.'

'Why not, Jehane?'

She spurned him with a look. 'Because I love King Richard, and know you, Gilles, what you can do and what not. Pshutt! You are a rat.'

'Rat,' says Gilles, 'I may be, but a rat may be offended. This king robbed me of you, and slew my father and brothers. Therefore I hated him. Is it not enough reason?'

Her eyes grew cold with scorn. 'Your father? Your brothers?' she echoed him. 'Pooh, I have given him more than that. I have burned my heart quite dry. I have accepted shame, I have sold my body and counted as nothing my soul. Robbed you? Nay, but I robbed myself, and robbed him also, when I cut him out of my own flesh. From the day when, through my prayers against blood, he was affianced to the Spanish woman, I held him off me, though I drained more blood to do it. Then, that not sufficing to save him, I gave myself to the Old Man of Musse; to be his wife, one of his women, do you understand? His wife, I say. And you talk now of father and brothers and your robbery, to me who am become an old man's toy, one of many? What are they to my soul, and my heart's blood, to my life and light, and the glory that I had from Richard? Oh, you fool, you fool, what do you know of love? You think it is embracing, clipping, playing with a chin: you fool, it is scorching your heart black, it is welling blood by drops, it is fasting in sight of food, death where sweet life offers, shame held more honourable than honour. Oh, Saint Mary, star of women, what do men know of love?' Dry-eyed and pinched, she looked about her as if to find an answer in the sullen moors. If she had looked up to the heavy skies she might have had one; for on the tower's top stood King Richard like a ghost.

'Listen now to me, Jehane,' said Gilles, red as fire. 'I have hated your King for four years, and three times sought his life. But now he has beaten me altogether. Too strong, too much king, for a man to dare anything singly against him. What! he slept, and I could not do it; and then I slept, and he awoke and let me lie. Then once again I woke and thought him still sleeping, and stabbed the bed; and he came behind me, stealthy as a cat, and trounced me over his knee like a child. Oh, oh, Jehane, he is more than man, and I by so much less. And now, and now, he sends me out to win his ransom as if I were an old lover of his, and I am going to do it! Why, God in glory look down upon us, what is the force that he hath?'

Gilles now shivered and looked about him; but Jehane, having mastered her breath, smiled.

'He is King,' she said. 'Come, Gilles, I will go with you. You shall find the Abbot Milo, and I the Queen-Mother. I have the ear of her.'

'I will do as I am bid, Jehane,' said the cowed man, 'because I needs must.'

As they went away together, King Richard on the roof threw up his arms to the sky, howling like a night wolf. 'Now, God, Thou hast stricken me enough. Now listen Thou, I shall strike if I can.'

---

After a while came Cogia the Assassin; to whom Jehane said, 'Cogia, I must take a journey with this man. You shall put us on the way, and wait for me until I come again.'

'Mistress,' replied Cogia, 'I am your slave. Do as you will.'

She put on the dress of a religious, Gilles the weeds of a pilgrim from Jerusalem. Then Cogia bought them asses in Gratz and led them down to Trieste. They found a ship going to Bordeaux, went on board, had a fair passage, passed the Pillars of Hercules on their tenth day out, and were in the Gironde in five more. At Bordeaux they separated. Gilles went to Poictiers in a company of pilgrims; Jehane, having learned that Queen Berengère was at Cahors, turned her face to the Gascon hills. But she had left behind her a prisoner to whom death could bring the only ransom worth a thought.

---

CHAPTER XIII

OF THE LOVE OF WOMEN

'Ask me no more how I did in those days,' writes Abbot Milo. 'Mercy smile upon me in the article of death, but I worked for the ransom of King Richard as (I hope) I should for that of King Christ. Many an abbey of Touraine goes lean now because of me; many a mass is wrought in a pewter chalice that Richard might come home. Yet I soberly believe that Madame Alois, King Philip's sister, was precious above rubies in the work.'

I think he is right. That stricken lady, in the habit of a grey nun of Fontevrault, came by night to Paris, and found her brother with John of Mortain. They had been upon the very business. Philip, not all knave, had been moved by the news of Richard's immobility. He had had some of De Gurdun's report.

'Christ-dieu,' he said, 'a great king calm in chains! And my brother Richard. Yet God knows I hate him.' So he went muttering on. The Count edged in his words as he could.

'He hates you, indeed, sire. He hates me. He hates all of us.'

'I think we could find him reasons for that, my friend, if he lacked them,' said Philip shrewdly. 'Do you know that De Gurdun is in Poictou come from Styria?'

Count John said nothing; but he did know it very well. When they announced Madame Alois the King started, and the Count went sick white.

'We will receive her Grace,' said Philip, and advanced towards the door for the purpose. In she came in her old eager, stumbling, secret way, knelt in a hurry to kiss her brother's hand, then rose and looked intently at John of Mortain.

The King said, 'You visit us late, sister; but your occasions may drive you.'

'They do drive me, sire. I have seen the Sieur Gilles de Gurdun. King Richard is in hold at Gratz, and must be delivered.'

'By you, sister?'

'By me, sire.'

'You grow Christian, Madame.'

'It is my need, sire. I have done King Richard a great wrong. This is not tolerable to me.'

'Eh,' says Philip, 'not so fast. Was no wrong done to you?'

'Wrong was done me,' said the white girl, 'but not by him.'

'The wrong lies in his blood. What though the wrong-doer is dead? His blood must answer it.'

Alois shivered, and so, for that matter, did one other there. She answered, 'I pray for his death. Dying or dead, his blood shall answer it.'

'You speak darkly, sister.'

'I live in the dark,' said Alois.

'King Richard has affronted my house in you sister.'

But she said, 'I have affronted King Richard through his house.'

'Is this all you have to say, Alois?'

'No, sire,' she told him, with a fierce and biting look at Mortain; 'but it is all I need say now.'

It was. A cry broke strangling from the Count. 'Ha, Jesus! Sire! Save my brother!' The wretch could bear no more. The woman's eyes were like swords.

King Philip marvelled. 'You!' he said, 'you!' John put out his hands. Oh, sire, Madame is in the right. I am a wicked man. I must make my brother amends. He must be saved.'

King Philip scratched his head. 'Who is in the dark if not I? I will deal with you presently, Mortain. But you, Madame,' he turned hotly on the lady, 'you must be plainer. What is your zeal for the King of England? He is your cousin, and might have been your husband.' Alois flinched, but Philip went roughly on. 'Do you owe him thanks that he is not? Is this what spurs you?'

She looked doubtfully. 'I owe him honour, Philip,' she said slowly. 'He is a great king.'

'Great king, great king!' Philip broke out; 'pest! and great rascal. There is no truth in him, no bottom, no thanks, no esteem. He counts me as nothing.'

'To him,' said Alois, 'you are nothing.'

'Madame,' said Philip, 'I am King of France, your brother and lord. He is my vassal; owes fealty and breaks it, signs treaties and levies war; hectors me and laughs, kills my servants and laughs. He is my cousin, but I am his suzerain. I do not choose to be mocked. There will be no rest for this kingdom while he is in it.' He stopped, then turned to the shaking man. 'As for you, Count of Mortain, I must have an explanation. My sister loves her enemies: it is a Christian virtue. I have not found it one of yours. You, perhaps, fear your enemies, even caged. Is this your thought? You have made yourself snug in Aquitaine, Count; you are not unknown in Anjou, I think. Do you begin to wish that you might be? Are you, by chance, a little oversnug? I candidly say that I prefer you for my neighbour in those parts. I can deal with you. Do me the obedience to speak.'

'Sire,' said the Count, spreading out his hands, 'Madame Alois has turned me. I am a sinner, but I can restore. My brother is my lord, a clement prince—'

'Pish!' said King Philip, and gave him his back.

'Madame, go to bed,' he said to his sister. 'I shall pay dear for it, but I will not oppose my cousin's ransom. Be content with that.' Alois slipped out. Then he turned upon John like a flash of flame.

'Now, Mortain,' he said, 'what proof is there of that old business of my sister's?'

John showed him a scared eye—the milky eye of a drowned man. 'Ah, God, sire, there is none at all—none—none!' He had no breath. Philip raised his voice.

'Look to yourself; I shall not help you. Leave my lands, go where you will, hide, bury your head, drown yourself. If I spoke what lies bottomed in my heart I should kill you with mere words. But there is worse for you in store. There will be war in France, if I know Richard; but mark what I say, after that there shall be war in England.' The thought of Richard overwhelmed him: he gave a queer little sigh. 'See, now, how much love and what lives of women are spent for one tall man, who gives nothing, and asks nothing, but waits, looking lordly, while they give and give and give. Let Richard come, since women cry for wounds. But you!' He flamed again. 'Get you to hell: you are all a liar. Avoid me, lest I learn more of you.'

'Dear sire,' John began. Philip loathed him. 'Ah, get you gone, snake, or I tread upon you,' he said; and the prince avoided. So much was wrought by Alois of France.

---

No visitation of a dead woman could have shocked Queen Berengère more suddenly than the apparition of a tall nun, when she saw it was Jehane. She put her hand upon her heart.

'Ah,' she said, 'you trouble me again, Jehane? Am I never to rest from you?'

jehane did not falter. 'Do I have any rest? The King is chained in Styria; he must be redeemed. It is your turn. I saved his life for you once by selling my own. Now I am the wife of an old man, with nothing more to sell. Do you sell something.'

'Sell? Sell? What can I sell that he will buy?' whined Berengère. 'He loves me not.'

'Well,' said Jehane, 'what has that to do with it? Do you not love him?'

'I am his miserable wife. I have nothing to sell.

'Sell your pride, Berengère,' says Jehane. Berengère bit her lip.

'You speak strangely to me, woman.'

Says Jehane, 'I am grown strange. Once I was a girl dishonoured because I loved. Now I am a wife greatly honoured because I do not love.'

'You do not love your husband?'

'How should I,' said Jehane, 'when I love yours? But I honour my husband, and watch over his honour: he is good to me.'

'You dare to tell me that you love the King? Ah, you have been with him again!' Jehane looked critically at her.

'I have not seen him, nor ever shall till he is dead. But we must save him, you and I, Berengère.'

Berengère, the little toy woman, when she saw how noble the other stood, and how inflexible, came wheedling to her, with hands to touch her chin.

'Jehane, sister, let it be my part to save Richard. Indeed I love him. You have done so much, to you now he should be nothing. Let me do it, let me do it, please, Jehane!' So she stroked and coaxed. The tall nun smiled.

'Must I always be giving, and my well never be dry? Yes, yes, I will trust you. No; you shall not kiss me yet; I have not done. Go to the Queen-Mother, go to the King your brother. Go not to the French King, nor to Count John. He is more cruel than hyænas, and more a coward. Find the Abbot Milo, find the Lord of Béarn, find the Sieur des Barres, find Mercadet. Raise England, sell your jewels, your crown; eh, God of Gods, sell your pretty self. The Queen-Mother is a fierce woman, but she will help you. Do these things faithfully, and I leave King Richard's life in your hands. May I trust you?' The other girl looked up at her, wistfully, still touching her chin.

'Kiss me, Jehane!'

'Yes, yes, I will kiss you now, Frozen Heart. You are thawed.'

Jehane, going back to Bordeaux, found Cogia with a ship, wherein she sailed for Tortosa. But Berengère, Queen of England, played a queen's part.

---

CHAPTER XIV

HOW THE LEOPARD WAS LOOSED

The burning thought of Jehane cut off, sixty feet below him, yet far as she could ever be, swept across Richard's mind like a roaring wind, and ridded the room for wilder guests. In came stalking Might-have-been and No-more, holding each by a shrinking shoulder the delicate maid of his first delight, Jehane, lissom in a thin gown; Jehane like a bud, with her long hair alight. Her hair was loose, her face aflame; she was very young, very much to be kissed, fresh and tall—Oh, God, the mere loveliness of her! In came the scent of wet stubbles, the fresh salt air of Normandy, the pale gold of the shaws, the pale sky, the mild October sun. He felt again the stoop, again the lift of her to his horse, again the stern ride together; saw again the Dark Tower, and all the love and sweet pleasure that they made. The bride in the church turning her proud shy head, the bride in his arm, clinging as they flew, the bride in the tower, the crowned Countess, the nestling mate—oh, impossibly lost! Inconceivably put away! Eternally his lover and bride!

Pity, if you can, this lonely heart, this king in chains, this hot Angevin, son of Henry, son of Geoffrey, son of Fulke, this Yea-and-Nay. He who dared not look upon the city, lest, seeing, he should risk all to take it, had now looked upon the bride unaware, and could not touch her. The fragrance of her, the sacred air in which a loved woman moves, had floated up to him: his by all the laws of hell, in spite of heaven; but his no more. Such nearness and such deprivation—to see, to desire, and not to seize—flung his wits abroad; from that hour his was a lost soul. Hungry, empty-eyed, ranging, feverish, he lashed up and down his prison-room, with bare teeth gleaming, and desperate soft strides. No thought he had but mere despair, no hope but the mere ravin of a beast. He was across the room in four; he turned, he lunged back; at the wall he threw up his head, turned and lunged, turned and lunged again. He was always at it, or rocking on his bed. No hope, nor thought, nor reckoning had he, but to say Yea against God, Who said him Nay.

So, many times, had he stood, fatal enemy of himself. His Yea would hold fast while none accepted it, his Nay while no one obeyed. But the supple knees of men sickened him of his own decree. 'These fools accept my bidding: the bidding then is foolishness.' So when Fate, so when God, underwrote his bill, Le Roy le veult, he scorned himself and the bill, and risked wide heaven to make either nought.

If Austria had murdered him then, it had perhaps been well; but his enemies being silenced, his friends did enemies' work unknowing, by giving him scope to mar himself. The ransom was raised at the price of blood and prayers, the ransom was paid. The Earl of Leicester and Bishop of Salisbury brought it; so the Leopard was loosed. With a quick shake of the head, as if doing violence to himself, he turned his face westward and pushed through the Low Countries to the sea. There he was met by his English peers, by Longchamp, by his brother of Rouen, by men who loved and men who feared; but he had no word for any. Grim and hungry he stalked through the lane they made him, on to the galley; folded in his cloak there, lonely he paced the bridge. He was rowed to the west with his eyes fixed always on the east, away from his kingdom to where he supposed his longing to be. His mother met him at Dunwich: it seemed he knew her not. 'My son, my son Richard,' she said as she knelt to him. 'Get up, Madame,' he bid her; 'I have work to do.' He rode savagely to London through the grey Essex flats; had himself crowned anew; went north with a force to lay Lincolnshire waste; levelled castles, exacted relentless punishment, exorbitant tribute, the last acquittance. He set a red smudge over the middle of England, being altogether in that country three months, a total to his name and reign of a poor six. Then he left it for good and all, carrying away with him grudging men and grudged money, and leaving behind the memory of a stone face which always looked east, a sword, a heart aloof, the myth of a giant knight who spoke no English and did no charity, but was without fear, cruelly just, and as cold as an outland grave. If you ask an Englishman what he thinks of Richard Yea-and-Nay, he will tell you:—That was a king without pity or fear or love, considering neither God, nor the enemy of God, nor unhappy men. If the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, the love of Him is the end of it. How could King Richard love God, who did not fear enough; or we, who feared too much?

He crossed into Normandy, and at Honfleur was met by them who loved him well; but he repaid them ill. Here also they seemed remote from his acquaintance. Gaston of Béarn, with eyes alight, came dancing down the quay, to be the first to kiss him. Richard, shaking with fever (or what was like fever), gave him a burning dry hand, but looked away from him, always hungrily to the east. Des Barres, who had thrown off allegiance for his love, got no thanks for it. He may have known Abbot Milo again, or Mercadet, his lean good captain: he said nothing to either of them. His friends were confounded: here was the gallant shell of King Richard with a new insatiable tenant. So indeed they found it. There was great business to be done: war, the holding of Assise, the redressing of wrongs from the sea to the Pyrenees. He did it, but in a terrible, hasty way. It appeared that every formal act required fretted him to waste, that every violent act allowed gave him little solace. It appeared that he was living desperately fast, straining to fill up time, rather than use it, towards some unknown, but (to him) certain end. His first act in Normandy, after new coronation, was to besiege the border castles which the French had filched in his absence. One of these was Gisors. He would not go near Gisors; but conducted the leaguer from Rouen, as a blindfold man plays chess; and from Rouen he reduced the great castle in six weeks. One thing more he did there, which gave Gaston a clue to his mood. He sent a present of money, a great sum, to an old priest, curate of Saint-Sulpice; and when they told him that the man was dead, and a great part of the church he had served burnt out by King Philip, his face grew bleak and withered, and he said, 'Then I will burn Philip out.' He had Gisors, castle, churches, burgher-holds, the whole town, burned level with the ground. There was not to be a stone on a stone: and it was so. Gaston of Béarn slapped his thigh when he heard of this: 'Now,' he said, 'now at last I know what ails my King. He has seen his lost mistress.'

He did so ruthlessly in Normandy that he went far to make his power a standing dread to the fair duchy. On the rock at Les Andelys he built a huge castle, to hang there like a thunder-cloud scowling over the flats of the Seine. He called it, what his temper gave no hint of (so dry with fever he was), the galliard hold. 'Let me see Chastel-Gaillard stand ready in a year,' he said. 'Put on every living man in Normandy if need be.' He planned it all himself; rock of the rock it was to be, making the sheer yet more sheer. He called it again his daughter, daughter of his conception of Death. 'Build,' said he, 'my daughter Gaillarda. As I have conceived her let the great birth be.' And it was so. For a bitter christening, when all was done, he had his French prisoners thrown down into the fosse; and they say that it rained blood upon him and his artificers as they stood by that accursed font. The man was mad. Nothing stayed him: for the first time since they who still loved him had had him back, they heard him laugh, when his daughter Gaillarda was brought forth. And, 'Spine of God,' he cried, 'this is a saucy child of mine, and saucily shall she do by the French power.' Then his face was wrenched by pain, as with a sob he said, 'I had a son Fulke.' Gaillarda did saucily enough, to tyrannise over ten years of Philip's life; in the end, as all know, she played the strumpet, and served the enemies of her father's house, but not while Richard lived to rule her.

He drove Philip into a truce of years, pushed down into Touraine, and thence went to Anjou, but not to sit still. He was never still, never seemed to sleep, or get any of the solace of a man. He ate voraciously, but was not nourished, drank long, but was never drunken, revelled without mirth, hunted, fought, but got no joy. He utterly refused to see the Queen, who was at Cahors in the south. 'She is no wife of mine,' he said; 'let her go home.' Tentative messages were brought by very tentative messengers from his brother John. Good service, such and such, had been done in Languedoc; so and so had been hanged, or gibbeted, so and so rewarded: what had our dear and royal brother to say? To each he said the same thing: 'Let my good brother come.' But John never came.

No one knew what to make of him; he spoke to none of his affairs, none dared speak to him. Milo writes in his book, 'The King came back from Styria as one who should arise from the grave with all the secrets of the chattering ghosts to brood upon. Some worm gnawed his vitals, some maggot had drilled a hole in his brain. I know not what possessed him or what could possess him beside a devil. This I know, he never sent to me for direction in spiritual affairs, nor (so far as I could learn) to any other religious man. He never took the Sacrament, nor seemed to want it. But be sure he wanted it most grievously.' So, insanely ridden, he lived for three years, one of which would have worn a common man to the bones. But the fire still crackled, freely fed; his eyes were burning bright, his mind (when he gave it) was keen, his head (when he lent it) seemed cool. What was he living for? Did Death himself look askance at such a man? Or find him a good customer who sent him so many souls? Two things only were clear: he sent messenger after messenger to Rome, and he returned his wife's dowry. Those must mean divorce or repudiation of marriage. Certainly the Queen's party took it so, though the Queen herself clung pitifully to her throne; and the Queen's party grew the larger for the belief.

Such as it was, the Queen's party nested in Aquitaine and the Limousin, with all the turbulent lords of that duchy under its flag. Prince John himself was with Berengère at Cahors, biting his nails as was usual with him, one eye watching for Richard's vengeance, one eye wide for any peace-offering from the French King. He dared not act overtly against Richard, nor dared to take up arms for him. So he waited. The end was not very far off.

Count Eustace of Saint-Pol was the moving spirit in these parts, grown to be an astute, unscrupulous man of near thirty years. His spies kept him well informed of Richard's intolerable state; he knew of the embassies to Rome, of the fierce murdering moods, of the black moods, of the cheerless revelry and fruitless energy of this great stricken Angevin. 'In some such hag-ridden day my enemy may be led to overtax himself,' he considered. To that end he laid a trap. He seized and fortified two hill-castles in the Limousin, between which lay straggling a village called Chaluz. 'Let us get Richard down here,' was his plan. 'He will think the job a light one, and we shall nip him in the hills.' The Bishop of Beauvais lent a hand, so did Adhémar Viscount of Limoges, and Achard the lord of Chaluz, not because he desired, but because he was forced by Limoges his suzerain. Another forced labourer was Sir Gilles de Gurdun, who had been found by Saint-Pol doing work in Poictou and won over after a few trials.

Now, when King Richard had been some four, nearly five, years at home, neither nearer to his rest nor fitter for it than he had been when he landed, he got word from the south that a great treasure had been found in the Limousin. A man driving the plough on a hillside by Chaluz had upturned a gold table, at which sat an emperor, Charles or another, with his wife and children and the lords of his council, all wrought in fine gold. 'I will have that golden emperor,' said Richard, 'having just made one out of clay. Let him be sent to me.' He spoke carelessly, as they all thought, simply to get in his gibe at the new Emperor of the Romans, his nephew, whom he had caused to be chosen; and seeing that that was not the treasure he craved, it is like enough. But somebody took his word into Languedoc, and somebody brought back word (Saint-Pol's word) that the Viscount of Limoges, as suzerain of Chaluz, claimed treasure-trove in it. 'Then I will have the Viscount of Limoges as well,' said Richard. 'Let him be sent to me, and the table with him.'

The Viscount did not go. 'We have him, eh, we have him!' cheered Saint-Pol, rubbing his hands together.

But the Viscount, 'Be not so very sure. He may send Gaston or Mercadet. Or if the fit is on him he may come in force. We cannot support that. I believe that you have played a fool's part, Saint-Pol.'

'I am playing a gentleman's part,' replied the other, 'to entrap a villain.'

'Your villain is six foot two inches, and hath arms to agree,' said the Viscount, a dry man.

'We will lay him by the heels, Viscount; we will lop those long arms, cold-blooded, desperate tyrant. He has brought two lovely ladies to misery. Now let him know misery.' Thus Saint-Pol, feeling very sure of himself.

---

The Queen was at Cahors all this time, living in a convent of white nuns, probably happier than she had ever been in her life before. Count John kept her informed of all Richard's offences; Saint-Pol, you may take my word for it, was so exuberantly on her side that it must be almost an offence in her to refuse him. But she, in a pure mood of abnegation, would hear nothing against King Richard. Even when she was told, with proof positive, that he was in treaty with Rome, she said not a word to her friends. Secretly she hugged herself, beginning (like most women) to find pleasure in pain. 'Let him deny me, let him deny me thrice, even as Thou wert denied, sweet Lord Jesus!' she prayed to Christ on the wall. 'So denied, Thou didst not cease from loving. I think the woman in Thee outcried the man.' She got a piercing bliss out of each new knife stuck in her little jumping heart. Once or twice she wrote to Alois of France, who was at Fontevrault, in her King's country. 'Dear lady,' she wrote, 'they seek to enrage my lord against me. If you see him, tell him that I believe nothing that I hear until I receive the word from his own glorious mouth.' Alois, chilly in her cell, took no steps to get speech with King Richard. 'Let her suffer: I suffer,' she would say. And then, curiously jealous lest more pain should be Berengère's than was hers, a daughter's of France, she made haste to send assuring messages to Cahors. Still Berengère sweetly agonised. Saint-Pol sent her letters full of love and duty, enthusiastic, breathing full arms against her wrongs. But she always replied, 'Count of Saint-Pol, you do me injury in seeking to redress your own. I admit nothing against my lord the King. Many hate him, but I love him. My will is to be meek. Meekness would become you very well also.' Saint-Pol could not think so.

Lastly came the intelligence that King Richard in person was moving south with a great force to win the treasure of Chaluz. The news was true. Not only did he dwell with the nervous persistency of the afflicted upon the wretched gold Cæsar, but with clearer political vision saw a chance of subduing all Aquitaine. 'Any stick will do, even Adhémar of Limoges,' he said, not suspecting Saint-Pol's finger in the dish; and told Mercadet to summon the knights, and the knights their array. Before he set out he sent two messengers more—one to Rome, and one much further east. Then he began his warlike preparations with great heart.

---

CHAPTER XV

OECONOMIC REFLECTIONS OF THE OLD MAN OF MUSSE

Jehane, called Gulzareen, the Golden Rose, had borne three children to the Old Man of Musse. She was suckling the third, and teaching her eldest, the young Fulke of Anjou, his Creed, or as much of it as she could remember, when there came up a herald from Tortosa who bore upon his tabard the three leopards of England. He delivered a sealed letter thus superscribed—

'La très-haulte et ma très chère dame, Madame Jehane, Comtesse d'Anjou, de la part le Roy Richard. Hastez tousjours.'

The letter was brought to the Old Man as he sat in his white hail among his mutes.

'Fulness of Light,' said the Vizier, after prostrations, 'here is come a letter from the Melek Richard, sealed, for her Highness the Golden Rose.'

'Give it to me, Vizier,' said the Old Man, and broke the seal, and read—

'Madame, most dear lady, in a very little while I shall be free from my desperate nets; and then you shall be freed from yours. Keep a great heart. After five years of endeavour at last I come quickly.—Richard of Anjou.'

The Old Man sat stroking his fine beard for some time after he had dismissed his Vizier. Looking straight before him down the length of his hail, no sound broke the immense quiet under which he accomplished his meditations of life and death. The Assassins dreaming by the walls breathed freely through their noses.

As a small voice heard from far off in these dreams of theirs, the voice of one calling from a distant height, came his words, 'Cogia ibn Hassan ibn Alnouk, come and hearken.' A slim young man rose, ran forward and fell upon his face before the throne. Once more the faint far cry came floating, 'Bohadin son of Falmy of Balsora, come and hearken'; and another white-robed youth followed Cogia.

'My sons,' said the Old Man, 'the word is upon you. Go to the West for forty days. In the country of the Franks, in the south parts thereof, but north of the great mountains, you shall find the Melek Richard, admirable man, whom Allah longs for. Strike, my sons, but from afar (for not otherwise shall ye dare him), and gain the gates of Paradise and the soft-bosomed women of your dreams. Go quickly, prepare yourselves.' The two young men crawled to kiss his foot; then they went out, and silence folded the hail of audience once more like a wrapping.

Later in the day a slave-girl told Jehane that her master was waiting for her. The baby was asleep in the cradle under a muslin veil; she kissed Fulke, a fine tall boy, six and a half years old, and followed the messenger.

The Old Man embraced her very affectionately, kissed her forehead and raised her from her knees. 'Come and sit with me, beautiful and pious wife, mother of my sons,' said he. 'I have many things to say to you.'

When they were close together on the cushions of the window, Sinan put his arm round her waist, and said, 'For a good and happy marriage, my Gulzareen, it is well that the woman should not love her husband too much, but rather be meek, show obedience to his desires, and alacrity, and give courtesy. The man must love her, and honour that in her which makes her worth, her beauty, to wit, the bounty of her fruitfulness, and her discretion. But for her it is enough that she suffer herself to be loved, and give him her duty in return. The love that seeds in her she shall bestow upon her children. That is how peace of mind grows in the world, and happiness, for without the first there can never be the second. You, my child, have a peaceful mind: is it not so?'

'My lord,' Jehane replied, with no sign of the old discontent upon her red mouth, 'I am at peace. For I have your affection; you tell me that I deserve it. And I give my children love.'

'And you are happy, Jehane?'

She sighed, ever so lightly. 'I should be happy, my lord. But sometimes, even now, I think of King Richard, and pray for him.'

'I believe that you do,' said the Old Man. 'And because I desire your happiness in all things, I desire you to see him again.'

A bright blush flooded Jehane, whose breath also became a trouble. By a quick movement she drew her veil about her, lest he should see her unquiet breast. So the mother of Proserpine might have been startled into new maidenhood when, in her wanderings, some herd had claimed her in love. Her husband watched her keenly, not unkindly. Jehane's trouble increased; he left her alone to fight it. So at last she did; then touched his hand, looking deeply into his face. He, loving her greatly, held her close.

'Well, Joy of my Joy?'

'Lord,' she said, speaking hurriedly and low, 'let me not see him, ask it not of me. It is more than I dare. It is more than would be right; I ask it for his sake, not for mine. For he has a great heart, the greatest heart that ever man had in the world; also he is sudden to change, as I know very well; and the sight of me denied him might move him to a desperate act, as once before it did.' She lowered her head lest he should see all she had to show. He smiled gravely, stroking her hand and playing with it, up and down.

'No, child, no,' he said, 'it will do you no harm now. The harm, I take it, has been done: soon it will be ended. You shall hear from his own lips that he will not hurt you.'

Jehane looked at him in wonder, startled out of confusion of face.

'Do you know more of him than I do, sire?' she asked, with a quick heart.

'I believe that I do,' replied the Old Man; 'and take my word for it, dear child, that I wish him no ill. I wish him,' he continued very deliberately, 'less ill than he has sought to do himself. I wish him most heartily well. And you, my girl, whom I have grown wisely and tenderly to love; you, my Golden Rose, Moon of the Caliph, my stem, my vine, my holy vase, my garden of endless delight—for you I wish, above all things, rest after labour, refreshment and peace. Well, I believe that I shall gain them for you. Go, therefore, since I bid you, and take with you your son Fulke, that his father may see and bless him, and (if he think fit) provide for him after the custom of his own country. And when you have learned, as learn you will, from his mouth what I am sure he will tell you, come back to me, my Pleasant Joy, and rest upon my heart.'

Jehane sighed, and wrought with her fingers in her lap. 'If it must be, sire—'

'Why, of course it must be,' said the Old Man briskly.

He sent her away to the harem with a kiss on her mouth, and had in Cogia, and Bohadin son of Falmy of Balsora. To these two rapt Assassins he gave careful instructions, which there was no mistaking. The Golden Rose, properly attended, would accompany them as far as Marseilles. She would journey on to Pampluna and abide in the court of the King of Navarre (who loved Arabians, as his father before him) until such time as word was brought her by one of them, the survivor, that they had found King Richard, and that he would see her. Then she would set out, attended by the Vizier, the chief of the eunuchs, and the Mother of Flowers, and act as she saw proper.

Very soon after this the galley left the marble quay of Tortosa upon a prosperous voyage through blue water. Jehane, her son Fulke of Anjou, and the other persons named, were in a great green pavilion on the poop. But she saw nothing, and knew nothing, of Cogia ibn Hassan ibn Alnouk or of Bohadin son of Falmy of Balsora.

---

CHAPTER XVI

THE CHAPTER CALLED CHALUZ

When King Richard said, without any confirmatory oath, that he should hang Adhémar of Limoges and the Count of Saint-Pol, all who heard him believed it. The Abbot Milo believed it for one. Figuratively, you can see his hands up as you read him. 'To hang two knights of such eminent degree and parts,' he writes, 'were surely a great scandal in any Christian king. Not that the punishment were undeserved or the executioner insufficient, God knoweth! But very often true policy points out the wisdom of the mean; and this is its deliberative, that to hang a bad man when another vengeance is open—such as burning in his castle, killing on his walls, or stabbing by apparent mistake for a common person—to hang him, I say, suggests to the yet unhanged a way of treating his betters. There are more ways of killing a dog than choking him with butter; and so it is with lords and other rebels against kings. In this particular case King Richard only thought to follow his great father (whom at this time he much resembled): what in the end he did was very different from any act of that monarch's that I ever heard tell of, to remember which makes me weep tears of blood. But so he fully purposed at that time, being in his hottest temper of Yea.'

He said Yea to the hanging of Saint-Pol and Limoges, and made ready a host which must infallibly crush Chaluz were it twenty times prepared. But he said Nay to the sacrifice of Jehane on Lebanon, and to that end increased his arms to overawe all the kingdoms of the South which had sanctioned it. Vanguard, battle and rear, he mustered fifteen thousand men. Des Barres led the van, English bowmen, Norman knights. Battle was his, all arms from Anjou, Poictou, and Touraine. Rearguard the Earl of Leicester took, his viceroy in Aquitaine. When the garrison of Chaluz saw the forested spears on the northern heights, the great engines piled against the sky-line, the train of followers, pennons of the knights, Dragon of England, Leopards of Anjou, the single Lion of Normandy, the wise among them were for instant surrender.

'Here is an empery come out against us!' cried Adhémar. 'If I was not right when I told you that I knew King Richard.'

'The filched empery of a thief,' said Saint-Pol. 'Honesty is ours. I fight for my lady Berengère, the glory of two realms, my sovereign mistress till I die.'

'Vastly well,' returned the other; 'but I do not fight for this lady, but for a gold table with gold dolls sitting at it.' Such also was the reflection of Achard, castellan of Chaluz, looking ruefully at his crazy walls.

---

Two grassy hills rise, like breasts, out of a rolling plain of grass. Each is crowned with a tower; between them are the church and village of Chaluz, which form a straggling street. Wall and ditch pen in these buildings and tie tower to tower: as Richard saw, it was the easiest thing in the world to cut the line in the middle, isolate, then reduce the towers at leisure. Adhémar saw that too, and got no comfort from it, until it occurred to him that if he occupied one tower and left the other to Saint-Pol, he would be free to act at his own discretion, that is, not act at all against the massed power of England and Anjou. Saint-Pol, you see, fought for the life of Richard, and Adhémar for a gold table, which makes a great difference. He effected this separation of garrisons; however, some show of resistance was made by manning the walls and daring the day with banners.

King Richard went softly to work, as he always ways did when actually hand in hand with war. Warfare was an art to him, neither a sport nor a counter-irritant; he was never impetuous over it. For a week he satisfied himself with a close investiture of the town on all sides. No supplies could get in nor fugitives out. Then, when everything was according to his liking, he advanced his engines, brought forward his towers, set sappers to work, and delivered assault in due form and at the weakest point. He succeeded exquisitely. There was no real defence. The two hill-towers were stranded, Chaluz was his.

He put the garrison to the sword, and set the village on fire. At once Viscount Adhémar and his men surrendered. Richard took the treasure—it was found that the golden Cæesar had no head—and kept his word with the finders, hanging the Viscount and castellan on one gibbet within sight of the other tower. 'Oh, frozen villain,' swore Saint-Pol between his teeth, 'so shalt thou never hang me.' But when he looked about him at his dozen of thin-faced men he believed that if Richard was not to hang him it might be necessary for him to hang himself. More, it came into his mind that there was a hand or two under him which might be anxious to save him the trouble. Being, however, a man of abundant spirit, he laughed at the summons to surrender so long as there was a horse to eat, man to shoot, or arrow for the shooting. As for fire, he believed himself impregnable by that arm; and any day succour might come from the South. Surely his Queen would not throw him to the dogs! Where was Count John if not hastening to win a realm; where King Philip if not hopeful to chastise a vassal? Daily King Richard, in no hurry, but desperately reckless, rode close to the tower and met the hardy eyes of Saint-Pol watching him from the top. Richard was a galliard fighter, as he had always been.

'Come down, Saint-Pol,' he would say, 'and dance with Limoges.'

'When I come down, sire,' the answer would be, 'there will be no dancing in your host.'

Richard took his time, and also intolerable liberties with his life. Milo lost his hair with anxiety, not daring to speak; Gaston of Béarn did dare, but was shaken off by his mad master. Des Barres, who loved him, perhaps, as well as any, never left him for long together, and wore his brain out devising shifts which might keep him away from the walls. But Richard, for this present whim of his, chose out a companion devil as heedless as himself, Mercadet namely, his brown Gascon captain, of like proportions, like mettle, like foolhardiness; and with him made the daily round, never omitting an exchange of grim banter with Saint-Pol. It was terrible to see him, without helm on his head, or reason in it, canter within range of the bow.

'Oh, Saint-Pol,' he said one day, 'if thou wert worth my pains, I would have thee down and serve thee as I did thy brother Eudo. But no; thou must be hanged, it seems.' And Saint-Pol, grinning cheerfully, answered, 'Have no fear, King, thou wilt never hang me.'

'By my soul,' said Richard back again, 'a little more of this bold gut of thine, my man, and I let thee go free.'

'Sire,' said Saint-Pol soberly, 'that were the worst of all.'

'How so, boy?'

'Because, if you forgave me, I should be required by my knighthood to forgive you; and that I will never do if I can help it. So I should live and be damned.'

'Have it then as it must be,' said Richard laughing, and turned his back. Saint-Pol could have shot him dead, but would not. 'Look, De Gurdun,' he says, 'there goes the King unmailed. Wilt thou shoot him in the back, and so end all?'

'By God, Eustace,' says Gilles, 'that I will not.'

'Why not, then?'

Gurdun said, 'Because I dare not. I am more afraid of him when he scorns me thus than when his face is upon me. Let him lead an assault upon the walls, and I will split his headpiece if I may; but I will never again try him unarmed.'

'Pouf!' said Saint-Pol; but he was of the same mind.

---

Then came a day when Des Barres was out upon the neighbouring hills with a company of knights, scouting. There had been rumours of hostile movement from the South, from Provence and Roussillon; of a juncture of Prince John, known to be in Gascony, with the Queen's brother of Navarre. Nothing was known certainly, but Richard judged that John might be tempted out. It was a bright cold day, cloudless, with a most bitter north-east wind singing in the bents. Des Barres, sitting his horse on the hill, blew upon his ungauntleted hand, then flacked it against his side to drive the blood back. Surveying the field with a hunter's eye, he saw King Richard ride out of the lines on his chestnut horse, Mercadet with him, and (in a green cloak) Gaston of Béarn. Richard had a red surcoat and a blown red plume in his cap. He carried no shield, and by the ease with which he turned his body to look behind him, one hand on the crupper, Des Barres was sure that he was not in mail.

'Folly of a fool!' he snorted to his neighbour, Savaric de Dreux: 'there pricks our lord the King, as if to a party of hawks.'

'Wait,' said Savaric. 'Where away now?

'To bandy gibes with Saint-Pol, pardieu. Where else should he go at this hour?'

'Saint-Pol will never do him a villainy,' said Savaric.

'No, no. But De Gurdun is there.'

'Wait now,' says Savaric again. 'Look, look! Who comes out of the smoke?'

They could see the beleaguered tower perfectly, brown and warm-looking in the sun; below it, still smoking, the village of Chaluz, a heap of charred brickwork. They saw a man in clean white come creeping out of the smoke, stooping at a run. He hid wherever he could behind the broken wall, but always ran nearer, stooped and ran with bent body over his bent knees. He worked his way thus, gradually nearer and nearer to the tower; and Des Barres watched him anxiously.

'Some camp-thief making off—'

'Look, look!' cried Savaric. The white man had come out by the tower, was now kneeling in the open; at the same moment a man slipped down a rope from the tower-top. Before he had touched earth they saw the kneeling man pull a bowstring to his ear and let fly. Next the fellow on the rope, touching ground, ran fleetly forward and, springing on the white-robed man, drove him to the earth. They saw the flash of a blade.

'That is strange warfare,' said Des Barres, greatly interested.

'There is warfare in heaven also,' said Savaric. 'See those two eagles.' Two great birds were battling in the cold blue. Feathers fell idly, like black snow-flakes; then one of the eagles heeled over, and down he came.

But when they looked towards the tower again they saw a great commotion. Men running, horses huddled together, one in red held up by one in green. Then a riderless chestnut horse looked about him and neighed. Des Barres gave a short cry. 'O God! They have shot King Richard between them. Come, Savaric, we must go down.'

'Stop again,' said that other. 'Let us sweep up those assassins as we go. There I see another thief in white.' Des Barres saw him too. 'Spur, spur!' he called to his knights; 'follow me.' He got his line in motion, they all galloped across the sunny slopes like a light cloud. But as they drove forward the play was in progress; they saw it done, as it were, in a scene. One white figure lay heaped upon the ground, another was running by the wall towards him, furtively and bent, as the first had come. The third actor, he of the tower, had not heard the runner, but was still stooped over the man he had evidently killed, groping probably for marks or papers upon him.

'Spur, spur!' cried Des Barres, and the line went rattling down. They were not in time. The white runner was too quick for the killer of his mate: he did, indeed, look round; but the other was upon him before he could rise. There was a short tussle; the two rolled over and over. Then the white-clad man got up, raised his fallen comrade, shouldered him, and sped away into the smoke of Chaluz. When Des Barres and his friends were within bowshot of the tower one man only was below it; and he lay where he had been stabbed. The white-robed murderers, the living and the dead, were lost in smoke. The King and his party were gone. Out of the tower came Saint-Pol with his men, unarmed, bareheaded, and waited silently in rank for Des Barres.

This one came up at a gallop. 'My prisoner, Count of Saint-Pol,' he called out as he came; then halted his line by throwing up his hand.

'The King has been shot, Sir Guilhem,' Saint-Pol said gravely; 'not by me. I am the King's prisoner. Take me to him, lest he die before I see his eyes.'

'Who is that dead man of yours over there?' asked Des Barres.

'His name is Sieur Gilles de Gurdun, a knight of Normandy and enemy of the King's, but dead (if dead he be) on the King's account. He killed the assassin.'

'I know that very well,' says Des Barres, 'for I saw the deed, which was a good one. I must hunt for those white-gowns. Who might they be?'

'I know nothing of them. They are no men of mine. Their robes were all white, their faces all dark, and they ran like Turks. But what can Turks do here?'

'They must be found,' said Des Barres, and sent out Savaric with half of his men.

They picked up Gilles, quite dead of two wounds, one in the back of the neck, another below the heart. Des Barres put him over his saddlebow; then took his prisoners into camp.

King Richard had been carried to his pavilion and put to bed. His physicians were with him, and the Abbot Milo, quite unmanned. Gaston of Béarn was crying like a girl at the door. The Earl of Leicester had ridden off for the Queen, Yvo Tibetot for the Count of Mortain. Des Barres learned that they had pulled out the arrow, a common one of Genoese make, but feared poison. King Richard had been shot in the right lung.

---

CHAPTER XVII

THE KEENING

In the wan hours left to him came three women, one after another, and spoke the truth so far as they knew it each.

The first was Alois of France in the habit of a grey lady of Fontevrault, with a face more dead than her cowl, and hair like wet weed, but in her hollow eyes the fire of her mystery; who said to the watchers by the door: 'Let me in. I am the voice of old sorrow.' So they held back the curtains of the tent, and she came shuffling forward to the long body on the bed. At the sound of her skirts the King turned his altered face her way, then rolled his head back to the dark.

'Take her away,' he said in a whisper; so Des Barres stood up between him and the woman.

But Alois put her hands out, as a blind man does.

'Soul's health, Des Barres; I purge old sins. Avoid, all of you,' she said, 'and leave me with him. Save only his confessor. What I have to say must be said in secret, as it was done secretly.'

Richard sighed. 'Let her stay; and let Milo stay,' he said. The rest went out on tip-toe. Alois came and knelt at the head of the bed.

'Listen now, Richard,' said she; 'for thy last hour is near, and mine also. Twice over I have sought to tell thee, but was denied. Each time I might have done thee a service; now I will do thee good service. Thou art not guilty of thy father's death, nor he of my despair.'

The King did not turn his head, but looked up sideways, so that she saw his eye shining. His lips moved, then stuck together; so Milo put a sponge with wine upon them. Then he whispered, 'Tell me, Alois, who was guilty with thee?'

She said, 'Thy brother John of Mortain was that man. A villain is he.'

A moaning sigh escaped the King, long-drawn, shuddering, very piteous. 'Eh, Alois, Alois! Which of us four was not a villain?'

Said Alois, 'What is past is past, and I have told thee. What is to come I cannot tell thee, for the past swallows me up. Yet I say again, thy brother John is a sick villain, a secret villain, and a thief.'

'God help him, God judge him,' said Richard with another sigh. 'I can do neither, nor will not.' He moaned again, but so hopelessly, as being so weary and fordone, that Abbot Milo began to blubber out loud. Alois lifted up her drawn face, and struck her breast.

'Ah, would to God, Richard,' she cried, 'would to God I had come to thee clean! I had saved thee then from this most bitter death. For if I love thee now, judge how I had loved thee then.'

He said, with shut eyes, 'None could love me long, since none could trust me, and not I myself.' Then he said fretfully to the abbot, 'Take her away, Milo; I am tired.'

Alois, kneeling, kissed his dry forehead. 'Farewell,' she said, 'King Richard, most a king when most in bonds, and most merciful when most in need of mercy. My work is done. Remains to pray and prepare.' She went out noiselessly, as she had come in, and no man of them saw her again.

---

Next came Queen Berengère, about the time of sunset. She came stiffly, as if holding herself in a trap, with much formal bowing to Death; quite white, like ivory, in a black robe; in her hands a great crucifix. At the door she paused for a minute, the Earl of Leicester being with her.

'Grief is quick in me, Leicester,' she said; then to the ushers of the door, 'Does he live? Will he know me? Does he wake? Does he not cry for me now?'

'Madame, the King sleeps,' they told her.

'I go to pray for him,' said the Queen, and went in.

Stiffly she knelt at his bedhead, and with both hands held up the crucifix to her face. She began to talk to it in a low worn voice, as though she were asking the Christ to reckon her misery.

'Thou Christ,' she complained, 'Thou Christ, look upon me, the daughter of a king, crucified terribly with Thee. This dying man is the King my husband, who denied me as Thou, Christ, wert denied; who sought to put me by, and yet is loved. Yet I love him, Christ; yet I have worked for him against my honour, holding it as cheap as he did. When he was in prison I humbled myself to set him loose; when he was loosed I held his enemies back, while he, cruelly, held me back. I have prayed for him, and pray now, while he lies there, struck secretly, and dies not knowing me; and leaves me alone, careless whether I live or die. Ah, Saviour of the world, do I suffer or not?'

She awoke the sick man, who opened his eyes and stared about him. He signed to Milo to draw nigh, which the snuffling old man did.

'Who is here?' he whispered. 'Not—?'

'No, no, dearest lord,' said Milo quickly. 'But the Queen is here.'

'Ah,' said he, 'poor wretch!' And he sighed. Then he said, 'Turn me over, Milo.' It was done, with a flux of blood to the mouth. They stayed that and brought him round with aqua vitæ.

The Queen was terribly moved to see his ravaged face. No doubt she loved him. But she had nothing to say. For some time their eyes were fixed, each on the other; the Queen's misty, the King's fever-bright, terribly searching, terribly intelligent. He read her soul.

'Madame,' he said, but she could scarcely hear him, 'I have done you great wrong, yet greater wrong elsewhere. I cannot die in comfort without your pardon; but I cannot ask it of you, for if I still had years to live, I should do as I have done.' A sob of injury shook the Queen.

'Richard! Richard! Richard!' she wailed, 'I suffer! You have my heart; you have always had it. And what have I? Nothing, O God! Nothing at all.'

'Madame,' said he, 'the wrong I did you was that I gave you the right to anything. That was the first and greatest wrong. To give it you I thieved, and in taking it again I thieved again. God knoweth—' He shut his eyes, and kept them shut. She called to him more urgently, 'Richard, Richard!' but he made no answer, and appeared to sleep. The Queen shivered and sniffed, turned to her Christ, and so spent the night.

---

The last to come was Jehane in a white gown; and she came with the dawn. Eager and flushed she was, with dawn-colour in her face; and stepped lightly over the dewy grass, her lips parted and hair blown back. She came in exalted with grief, so that no wardens of the door, nor queens, nor college of queens, could have stayed her. She was as tall as any there, and went past the guard at the door without question or word said, and so lightly and fiercely to the bed. There she stood, dilating and glowing, looking not back on her spent life, but on to the glory of the dying.

The Queen knew that she was there, but went on with her prayers, or seemed to go on. Jehane knelt suddenly, put her arms out over Richard, stooped and kissed his cheek. Then she looked up, desperately triumphing, for any one to question her right. None did. Berengère prayed incessantly, and Jehane panted. The words broke from her at last. 'Dost thou question my right, Berengère,' she said fiercely, 'to kiss a dead man, to love the dead and speak greatly of the dead? Which of us three women, thinkest thou, knoweth best what report to make concerning this beloved, thou, or Alois, or I? Alois came, speaking of old sins; and you are here, plaining of new sins: what shall I do, now I am here? Am I to speak of sin to come? Thou dear knight,' and she touched his head, 'there is no more room for thy great sins, alas! But I think thou shalt leave behind thee some spark of a fire.' She looked again at Berengère, who saw the glint of her green eyes and the old proud discontent twisting her lip, but did nothing. 'Look, Berengère,' said Jehane, 'I speak as mother of his child Fulke of Anjou. I had rather my son Fulke sinned as his fathers have sinned, so that he sinned greatly like them, than that he should grow pale, scheming safety in a cloister, and make the Man in our Saviour ashamed of His choice. I had rather the bad blood stay, so it stay great blood, than that it should be thin like thine. What is there to fear, girl? A sword? I have had a sword in my heart eight years, and made no sound. Let the son pierce what the father pierced before. I am a lover, saying not to my beloved, "Stroke my heart, dearest lord"; but instead, "Stab if thou wilt, my King, and let me bleed for thee." So I have bled, sweet Lord Jesus, and so shall bleed again!' She stooped and kissed his head, saying, 'Amen. Let the poor bleed if the King ask.' The Queen went on praying; but Richard opened his eyes without start or quiver, looked at Jehane leaning over him, and smiled.

'Well, my girl, well,' he said, 'thou art in good time. What of the lad?'

'He is here, Richard.'

'Bring him to me,' says the King. So Des Barres stole out to the Moslems at the door, and came back leading Fulke by the hand, a slim, tall boy, fair-haired, and frank in the face, with his father's delicate mouth and bold grey eyes. Jehane turned to take him.

'This is thy father, boy.'

'I know it, ma'am,' says young Fulke, and knelt down by the bed. King Richard put his hand on his head.

'What a rough pelt, Fulke,' he says, 'like thy father's. God send thee a better inside to it, my boy. God make a man of thee.'

'He will never make me a great king, sire,' says Fulke.

'He can make thee better than that,' said his father.

'I think not,' answered Fulke. 'You are the greatest king in the whole world, sire. The Old Man of Musse said it.'

'Kiss me, Fulke,' said Richard. The boy put his face up quickly and kissed his father's lips. 'What a lover!' the King laughed; and Jehane said, 'He always kisses on the lips.' Richard sighed, suddenly tired; Fulke looked about, frightened at all the solemnity, and took his mother's hand. She gave him over to Des Barres, who led him away.

The King signed to Jehane to bend down her head. So she did, and even thus could barely hear him.

'I must die in peace if I can, sweet soul,' he muttered. They all saw that the end was not far off. 'Tell me what will become of thee when I am gone.' She stroked his cheek.

'I shall go back to my husband and children, dear one. I have left three behind me, all sons.'

'Are they good to thee? Art thou happy?'

'I am at peace with myself, wife of a wise old man; I love my children, and have the memory of thee, Richard. These will suffice me.'

'There is one more thing for thee to give me, my Jehane.' She smiled pityingly.

'Why, what is left to give, Richard?' He said in her ear, 'Our boy Fulke.'

'Ah,' said Jehane. The Queen was now watching her intently between her hands.

'Jehane, Jehane,' said King Richard, sweating with the effort to be heard, 'all our life together thou hast been giving and I spending, thou miser that I might play the prodigal. For the last time I ask of thee: deny me not. Wilt thou stay here with Fulke our son?'

Jehane could not speak; she shook her head, and showed him her eyes all blind with tears. The tears came freely, from more eyes than hers. Richard's head dropped back, and for a full minute they thought him gone. But no. He opened his eyes again and moved his lips. They strained to hear him. 'The sponge, the sponge,' he said: then, 'Bring me in Saint-Pol.' The cold light began to steal in through the crannies of the tent.

The young man was brought in by Des Barres, in chains. Jehane, now behind Richard's head, lifted him up in her arms.

'Knock off those fetters,' says the King. Saint-Pol was free.

'Eustace,' says Richard, 'you and I have bandied hard words enough, and blows enough. My chains will be off before sunrise, and yours are off already. Answer me, is Gurdun dead?'

Saint-Pol dropped to his knees. 'Oh, my lord, he died where he fell. But as God knows, he had no hand in this, nor had I.'

'If I know it, I suppose God knows it too,' said Richard, smiling rather thinly. 'Now, Eustace, I have a word to say. I have done much against your name; to your brother because he spoke against a great lady and ill of my house; to your sister here, because I loved her not well enough and myself too well. Eustace, you shall kiss her before I go.'

Saint-Pol got up and went to her. Brother and sister kissed each other above the King's head. Then said Richard, 'Now I will tell you that I had nothing to do with the death of your cousin Montferrat.'

'Oh, sire! oh, sire!' cried Saint-Pol; but Jehane looked at her brother.

'I had to do with that, Eustace,' she said. 'He laid the death of the King, and I laid his death at the price of my marriage. He deserved it.'

'Sister,' said Saint-Pol, 'he did deserve it; and I deserve what he had. Oh, sire,' he urged with tears, 'take my life, as your right is, but forgive me first.'

'What have I to forgive you, brother?' said Richard. 'Come, kiss me. We were good friends in the old days.' Saint-Pol, with tears, kissed him. Richard sat up.

'I require you now, Saint-Pol and Des Barres, that between you you defend my son Fulke. Milo has the deeds of his lands of Cuigny. Bring him up a good knight, and let him think gentlier of his father than that father ever did of his. Will you do this? Make haste, make haste!'

The Queen broke in with a cry. 'Oh, sire! oh, sire! Is there nothing for me? Madame!' she turned to Jehane and held her fast by the knees, 'have pity, spare me a little, a very little work! O Christ! O Christ!'—she rocked herself about—'Can I do nothing in the world for my King?'

Jehane stooped to take her up. 'Madame, watch over my little Fulke, when his father is gone, and I am gone.' The Queen was crying bitterly.

'I will never leave him if you will trust me,' she began to say. Richard put his band out. 'Let it be so. My lords, serve the Queen and me in this matter.' The two lords bowed their heads, and the Queen tumbled to her sobbed prayers again.

The King's eyes were almost gone; certainly he could not see out of them. They understood his moving lips, 'A sponge, quick.'

Jehane brought it and wiped his mouth; she could not see either for tears. He gave a strong movement, wrenched his head up from her arm, then gave a great gasp, 'Christ! I am done!' There followed on this a rush of blood which made all hearts stand still. They wiped it away. But Jehane saw that with that hot blood had gone his spirit. She lifted high her head and let them read the truth from her eyes. Then she put her lips upon his, and so stayed, and felt him grow cold below her warmth. The fire was out.

They buried him at Fontevrault as he had directed, at the feet of his father. King John was there with the peers of England, Normandy, and Anjou. The Queen was there; but not Alois (unless behind the grille), and not King Philip, because he hated King John much worse than he ever hated Richard. And Jehane was not there, nor Fulke of Anjou with his governors, because they had another business to perform.

Not all of King Richard was buried there, where the great effigy still marks the place of great dust. Jehane had his heart in a casket, and with Fulke her son, Des Barres, her brother Saint-Pol, Gaston of Béarn, and the Abbot Milo, took it to the church of Rouen and saw it laid among the dead Dukes of Normandy; fitting sepulture for a heart as bold as any of theirs, and capable of more gentle music when the fine hand plucked the chords. After this Jehane kissed Fulke and left him with the Queen, his uncle, and Guilhem des Barres. Then she went back to her ship.

---

In the white palace in the green valley of Lebanon the Old Man of Musse embraced his wife. 'Moon of my soul, my Garden, my Treasure-house!' he called her, and kissed her all over.

'The King died in peace, my lord,' she said, 'and I have peace because of that.'

'Thy children shall call thee blessed, my beloved, as I call thee.'

'The prophecy of the leper was not fulfilled, sir,' says Jehane.

Ah,' replied the Old Man of Musse, all these things are in the hands of the Supreme Disposer, Who with His forefinger points us the determined road.'

Then Jehane went in to her children, and other duties which her station required of her.

---

EPILOGUE OF THE ABBOT MILO

'When I consider,' writes the Abbot Milo on his last page, 'that I have lived to see the deaths of three Kings of England, wearers of the broom-switch, and of the manner of those deaths, I am led to admire the wonderful ordering of Almighty God, Who accorded to each of them an end illustrative of his doings in the world, and so wrote, as it were, in blood for our learning. King Henry produced strife, King Richard induced strife, and King John deduced it. King Henry died cursing and accursed; King Richard forgiving and forgiven; King John blaspheming, and not held worthy of reproof. The first did evil, meaning evilly; the second evil, meaning well; the third was evil. So the first was wretched in death, the second pitiful, the third shameful. The first loved a few, the second loved one, the third none. So the death of the first was gain to a few, that of the second to one, that of the third to none; for he that loves not, neither can he hate: he is negligible in the end. But observe now, the chief woe of these kings of the House of Anjou was that they hurt whom they loved more than whom they hated.

'King Henry was a great prince, who did evil to many both in his life and death. My dear master, lord, and friend might have been a greater, had not his head gone counter to his heart, his generosity not been tripped up by his pride. So generous as he was, all the world might have loved him, as one loved him; and yet so arrogant of mind that the very largess he bestowed had a sting beneath it, as though he scorned to give less to creatures that lacked so much. All his faults and most of his griefs sprang from this rending apart of his nature. His heart cried Yea! to a noble motion. Then came his haughty head to suggest trickery, and bid him say Nay! to the heart's urgency.

'He was a religious man, a pious man, the hottest fighter with the coolest judgment of any I have ever known; a great lover of one woman. He might have been a happy man if she had been let have her way. But he thwarted her, he played with her whole-heart love, blew hot and cold; neither let her alone nor clove to her through all. So she had to pay. And of him, my friend and king howsoever, I say from the bottom of my soul, if his death did not benefit poor Jehane, then it is a happy thing for a woman to go bleeding in the side. But I know that she was fortunate in his death, and believe that he was also. For he had space for reparation, died with his lovers about him, having been saved in time from a great disgrace. And it is a very wise man who reports: Illi Mors gravis incubat, qui notus nimis omnibus, ignotus moritur sibi. But King Richard knew himself in those last keen hours, and (as we believe) won forgiveness of God.

'God be good to him where he is! They say that when he died, that same day his soul was solved from purgatorial fires (by reason, one may suppose, of his glorious captaincy of the armies of the Cross), and he drawn up to heaven in a flamy cloud. I know nothing certainly of this, which was not revealed to me; but my prayer is that he may be now with Hannibal and Judas Maccabæus and Charles the great Emperor; and by this time of writing (if there be no offence in it) with Jehane to sit upon his knee.

'UPON WHOSE TWO SOULS, JESU, HAVE MERCY!'

EXPLICIT