Unsparing, unconciliatory as ever, even when most merciful and generous, Edward turned, but reeled as he re-entered the tent, and his dizziness recurring, needed the support of both his brother and Richard to lay him down on the couch.
The Grand Master of the Temple renewed his assurance that this was a token of the poison, and Eleanor was unheeded when she declared that her dear lord had been affected in the same manner before his wound, ever since indeed the Whit Sunday when he had ridden home from the great Church of St. John of Acre in the full heat of the sun.
Dame Idonea was muttering the mediæval equivalent for fiddlesticks, as plain as her respect for the Temple would allow her.
At that moment the leech whom Hamlyn had been sent into the town to summon, made his appearance, and fully confirmed the Templar’s opinion. Neither the wizened Greek physician, nor the dignified Templar, considered the soft but piteous assurance of the wife that the venom had at once been removed by her own lips as more than mere feminine folly, and Dame Idonea’s real experience of knights thus saved, and on the other hand of the fatal consequences of rude surgery in such a climate, were disregarded as an old woman’s babble. Her voice waxed shrill and angry, and her antagonists’ replies in Lingua Franca, mixed with Arabic, Latin, and Greek, rang through the tent, till the Prince could bear it no longer.
“Peace,” he said, with an asperity unlike his usual stern patience, “I had liefer brook your knives than your tongues! Without further jangling, tell me clearly, learned physician, the peril of either submitting or not submitting to your steel.”
The Greek told, with as little tergiversation as was in his nature, that he viewed a refusal as certain death, but several times Dame Idonea was bursting out upon him, and Edward had to hold up his finger to silence her.
“Now, kind lady,” quoth he, “let me hear the worst you foretell for me from your experience.”
Dame Idonea did not spare him either the fate of Cœur de Lion, the dangers of fever and pain, and above all “of that strange enchantment that binds the teeth together and forbids a man to swallow his food.” Poor Eleanor looked at him imploringly all the time, but as none of them had ever heard of the circulation of the blood, they could not tell that her simple remedy had been truly efficacious, and that if it had been otherwise the incisions would now come too late. Thus the balance of prudence made itself appear to be on the side of the physician, and for him the Prince decided. “Mi Doña,” he said, ever his most caressing term for her, “it must be so! I think not lightly of what thou hast done for me, but, as matters stand, too much hangs upon this life of mine for me not to be bound to run no needless risk for fear of a little pain. If I live and speak now, next to highest Heaven it is owing to thee; and when we came on this holy war, sweet Eleanor, didst thou not promise to hinder me from naught that a true warrior of the Cross ought to undergo? And is this the land to shrink from the Cross?”
Alas! to Eleanor the pang was the belief in the uselessness of his suffering and danger. She never withstood his will, but physically she was weak, and her weeping was piteous in its silence. Edward bade his brother lead her away; and Edmund, after the usual fashion, vented his own perplexity and distress upon the most submissive person in his way. He assumed more resistance on the part of his gentle sister-in-law than she made, and carrying her from the tent, roughly told her, silent as she was, that it was better that she should scream and cry than all England wail and lament.
And so Eleanor’s devoted deed, the true saving of her husband, has lived on as a mere delusive tradition, weakly credited by the romantic, while the credit of his recovery has been retained by the Knight-Templars’ leech. Not a sound was uttered by the Prince while under those hands; but when his wife was permitted to return to him, she found him in a dead faint, and the silver reliquary she had left with him crushed flat and limp between his fingers.