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