“Oh, peace, peace, for pity's sake,” whispered the Queen, “you do but offend him more!”
“I care not,” said Edith; “the spotless virgin fears not the raging lion. Let him work his will on this worthy knight. Edith, for whom he dies, will know how to weep his memory. To me no one shall speak more of politic alliances to be sanctioned with this poor hand. I could not—I would not—have been his bride living—our degrees were too distant. But death unites the high and the low—I am henceforward the spouse of the grave.”
The King was about to answer with much anger, when a Carmelite monk entered the apartment hastily, his head and person muffled in the long mantle and hood of striped cloth of the coarsest texture which distinguished his order, and, flinging himself on his knees before the King, conjured him, by every holy word and sign, to stop the execution.
“Now, by both sword and sceptre,” said Richard, “the world is leagued to drive me mad!—fools, women, and monks cross me at every step. How comes he to live still?”
“My gracious liege,” said the monk, “I entreated of the Lord of Gilsland to stay the execution until I had thrown myself at your royal—”
“And he was wilful enough to grant thy request,” said the King; “but it is of a piece with his wonted obstinacy. And what is it thou hast to say? Speak, in the fiend's name!”
“My lord, there is a weighty secret, but it rests under the seal of confession. I dare not tell or even whisper it; but I swear to thee by my holy order, by the habit which I wear, by the blessed Elias, our founder, even him who was translated without suffering the ordinary pangs of mortality, that this youth hath divulged to me a secret, which, if I might confide it to thee, would utterly turn thee from thy bloody purpose in regard to him.”
“Good father,” said Richard, “that I reverence the church, let the arms which I now wear for her sake bear witness. Give me to know this secret, and I will do what shall seem fitting in the matter. But I am no blind Bayard, to take a leap in the dark under the stroke of a pair of priestly spurs.”
“My lord,” said the holy man, throwing back his cowl and upper vesture, and discovering under the latter a garment of goatskin, and from beneath the former a visage so wildly wasted by climate, fast, and penance, as to resemble rather the apparition of an animated skeleton than a human face, “for twenty years have I macerated this miserable body in the caverns of Engaddi, doing penance for a great crime. Think you I, who am dead to the world, would contrive a falsehood to endanger my own soul; or that one, bound by the most sacred oaths to the contrary—one such as I, who have but one longing wish connected with earth, to wit, the rebuilding of our Christian Zion—would betray the secrets of the confessional? Both are alike abhorrent to my very soul.”
“So,” answered the King, “thou art that hermit of whom men speak so much? Thou art, I confess, like enough to those spirits which walk in dry places; but Richard fears no hobgoblins. And thou art he, too, as I bethink me, to whom the Christian princes sent this very criminal to open a communication with the Soldan, even while I, who ought to have been first consulted, lay on my sick-bed? Thou and they may content themselves—I will not put my neck into the loop of a Carmelite's girdle. And, for your envoy, he shall die the rather and the sooner that thou dost entreat for him.”