‘The King died in peace, my lord,’ she said, ’and I have peace because of that.’

‘Thy children shall call thee blessed, my beloved, as I call thee.’

‘The prophecy of the leper was not fulfilled, sir,’ says Jehane.

Ah,’ replied the Old Man of Musse, all these things are in the hands of the Supreme Disposer, Who with His forefinger points us the determined road.’

Then Jehane went in to her children, and other duties which her station required of her.

EPILOGUE OF THE ABBOT MILO

‘When I consider,’ writes the Abbot Milo on his last page, ’that I have lived to see the deaths of three Kings of England, wearers of the broom-switch, and of the manner of those deaths, I am led to admire the wonderful ordering of Almighty God, Who accorded to each of them an end illustrative of his doings in the world, and so wrote, as it were, in blood for our learning.  King Henry produced strife, King Richard induced strife, and King John deduced it.  King Henry died cursing and accursed; King Richard forgiving and forgiven; King John blaspheming, and not held worthy of reproof.  The first did evil, meaning evilly; the second evil, meaning well; the third was evil.  So the first was wretched in death, the second pitiful, the third shameful.  The first loved a few, the second loved one, the third none.  So the death of the first was gain to a few, that of the second to one, that of the third to none; for he that loves not, neither can he hate:  he is negligible in the end.  But observe now, the chief woe of these kings of the House of Anjou was that they hurt whom they loved more than whom they hated.

’King Henry was a great prince, who did evil to many both in his life and death.  My dear master, lord, and friend might have been a greater, had not his head gone counter to his heart, his generosity not been tripped up by his pride.  So generous as he was, all the world might have loved him, as one loved him; and yet so arrogant of mind that the very largess he bestowed had a sting beneath it, as though he scorned to give less to creatures that lacked so much.  All his faults and most of his griefs sprang from this rending apart of his nature.  His heart cried Yea! to a noble motion.  Then came his haughty head to suggest trickery, and bid him say Nay! to the heart’s urgency.

’He was a religious man, a pious man, the hottest fighter with the coolest judgment of any I have ever known; a great lover of one woman.  He might have been a happy man if she had been let have her way.  But he thwarted her, he played with her whole-heart love, blew hot and cold; neither let her alone nor clove to her through all.  So she had to pay.  And of him, my friend and king howsoever, I say from the bottom of my soul, if his death did not benefit poor Jehane, then it is a happy thing for a woman to go bleeding in the side.  But I know that she was fortunate in his death, and believe that he was also.  For he had space for reparation, died with his lovers about him, having been saved in time from a great disgrace.  And it is a very wise man who reports:  Illi Mors gravis incubat, qui notus nimis omnibus, ignotus moritur sibi.  But King Richard knew himself in those last keen hours, and (as we believe) won forgiveness of God.