In the tedious negotiations of the next few days it was arranged that the Princess should await the Queen-Mother at Bayonne, and sail with her and the fleet to Sicily.  There King Richard would meet and marry her.  What had passed between her and Jehane in the orchard, who knows?  They kissed at parting; but Jehane neither told Richard, nor did he ask her, why Berengere had lain her cheek upon her bosom, or why herself had stooped so low her head.  Women’s ways!

So Red Heart made her sacrifice, and Frozen Heart suffered the Sun; and he they called later Lion-Heart went out to fight Saladin, and less open foes than he.

BOOK II

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 Vezelay; 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.