The tidings of this melancholy event came to Berengaria, when her heart was agitated by the perplexity of her own situation not only, but by the intelligence that Richard’s fleet had been wrecked off the port of Lisbon, and that he was himself engaged in hostilities with Tancred. Cœur de Lion was indeed justly incensed with the usurper of his sister’s dominions. Upon the first news of the fall of Jerusalem, William the Good had prepared to join the crusade with one hundred galleys equipped and provisioned for two years, sixty thousand measures of wine, sixty thousand of wheat, the same number of barley, together with a table of solid gold and a tent of silk, sufficiently capacious to accommodate two hundred persons. Being seized with a fatal disease, he left these articles by will to Henry II, and settling upon his beloved Joanna a princely dower, intrusted to her the government of the island. No sooner was he deceased, than Tancred, an illegitimate son of Roger of Apulia, seized upon the inheritance and threw the fair widow into prison. The roar of the advancing lion startled Tancred from his guilty security, and he lost no time in unbarring the prison doors of his royal captive. But Richard required complete restitution, and enforced his demands by the sword. He seized upon Messina, but finally through the intervention of the French king, accommodated the matter by accepting forty thousand ounces of gold, as his father’s legacy and his sister’s dower. He also affianced his nephew Arthur of Brittany, to the daughter of Tancred, the Sicilian prince agreeing on his part to equip ten galleys and six horse transports for the crusade. Completely reconciled to the English king, Tancred, in a moment of confidence, showed him letters in which Philip had volunteered to assist in hostilities against Richard. This treachery on the part of Philip brought matters to a crisis. Seizing the evidences of perfidy, Richard strode his way to the French camp, and with eyes sparkling with rage, and a voice of terrible power, upbraided him with his baseness. Philip strongly asserted his innocence, and declared the letters a forgery, a mere trick of Richard to gain a pretext for breaking off the affair with his sister. The other leaders interposed and shamed Philip into acquiescence with Richard’s desire to be released from his engagement with Alice. Some days after the French king sailed for Acre.
But though the hand of the royal Plantagenet was thus free, the long anticipated nuptials were still postponed. It was the period of the lenten fast, when no devout Catholic is permitted to marry. Eleanor finding it impossible longer to leave her regency in England, conducted Berengaria to Messina, and consigned her to the care of Queen Joanna, who was also preparing for the voyage. The English fleet, supposed lost, arrived in the harbor of Messina about the same time, and arrangements were speedily made for departure. As etiquette forbade the lovers sailing together, Richard embarked his sister with her precious charge on board one of his finest ships, in the care of the noble Stephen de Turnham, while himself led the convoy in his favorite galley Trenc-the-mere, accompanied by twenty-four knights, whom he had organized in honor of his betrothment, under a pledge that they would with him scale the walls of Acre. From their badge, a fillet of blue leather, they were called knights of the Blue Thong.
Thus with one hundred and fifty ships and fifty galleys, did the lion-hearted Richard and his bride hoist sail for the Land of Promise, that El Dorado of the middle ages, the Utopia of every enthusiast whether of conquest, romance or religion.
CHAPTER V.
| “The strife of fiends is on the battling clouds, The glare of hell is in these sulphurous lightnings; This is no earthly storm.” |
Trustfully and gaily as Infancy embarks upon the untried ocean of existence, the lovers left the harbor of Messina, and moved forth with their splendid convoy, upon the open sea. By day the galley of Berengaria chased the flying shadows of the gallant Trenc-the-mere along the coast of Greece, or followed in its rippling wake among the green isles of the clustering Cyclades; by night, like sea-fowl folding their shining wings, the vessels furled their snowy canvass, and with silver feet keeping time to the waves, danced forward over the glassy floor of the blue Mediterranean, like a charmed bride listening to the sound of pipe and chalumeaux that accompanied the spontaneous verse with which the royal troubadour wooed her willing ear.
The treacherous calm that had smiled upon the commencement of their voyage, at length began to yield to the changeful moods of the stormy equinox, which like a cruel sportsman, toyed with the hopes and fears of its helpless prey. Clouds and sunshine hurried alternately across the face of the sky. Fitful gusts of wind tossed the waves in air or plucked the shrouds of the ships and darted away, wailing and moaning among the waters. Then fell a calm—and then—with maddening roar the congregated floods summoned their embattled strength to meet the mustering winds, that, loosened from their caves, burst upon the sea with terrific power.
The females crept trembling to their couches, dizzy with pain and faint with fear. The sickness of Berengaria increased to that state of insensibility in which the body, palsied with agony, has only power to assist the mind in shaping all outward circumstances into visions of horror. She was again in the cell of the alchemist; saw lurid flames, heard deafening explosions, with unearthly shrieks and groans proceeding from myriads of fiends that thronged round her with ominous words and gibing leer. She felt herself irresistibly borne on, on, with a speed ever accelerated, and that defied all rescue, and with all there was an appalling sense of falling, down, down, down, into interminable depths.
The fantasy sometimes changed from herself, but always to her dearer self. Richard contending with mighty but ineffectual struggles against inexorable Genii, was hurried through the unfathomable waters before her, the fatal ring gleaming through all their hideous forms upon her aching sight; and the confused din of strange sounds that whirled through her giddy brain could never drown the endless vibrations of the whispered words,