‘A great lord, a hot lord, a very strenuous lord!’ he said in jerks.  It was all there was to say.

‘He is a prince who might claim a lady’s love, I suppose,’ said Berengere, with considering looks.

‘Ho ho!  And so he has!’ cried Bertran.  ’I assure your Grace he is no novice.  Many he has claimed, and many have claimed him.  Shall I number them?’

‘I beg that you will not,’ she said, stiffening herself.  So Bertran grinned his rage.  But he had one thing to say.

’This much I will tell you, Princess.  The name I give him is Yea-and-Nay:  beware of it.  He is ever of two minds:  hot head and cold heart, flaming heart and chilled head.  He will be for God and the enemy of God; will expect heaven and tamper with hell.  With rage he will go up, laughing come down.  Ho!  He will be for you and against you; eager, slow; a wooer, a scorner; a singer of madrigals, ah, and a croaker afterwards.  There is no stability in him, neither length of love nor of hate, no bottom, little faith.’  Berengere rose.

‘You vex yourself, Bertran, and me also,’ she said.  ’It is ill talking between a prince and his friend.’

‘Am I not your friend then, my lady?’ he asked her with bitterness.

‘You cannot be the friend of a prince, Bertran,’ said Berengere calmly.  His muttered ‘O God, the true word!’ sufficed him for thought all his road from Navarre.  He went, as you know already, to Poictiers, where Richard was making festival with Jehane.

But when, unhappy liar, he found out the truth, it came too late to be of service to his designs.  Don Sancho, he learned, was beforehand with him even there, fully informed of the outrage at Gisors and the marriage at Poictiers, with very clear views of the worth of each performance.  Bertran, gnashing his teeth, took up the service of the man he loathed; gnashing his teeth, he let Richard kiss him in the lists and shower favours upon him.  When presents of stallions came from Navarre he began to see what Don Sancho was about.  Any meeting of Richard and that profound schemer would have been Bertran’s ruin.  So when Richard was King, he judged it time to be off.

‘Now here,’ says Abbot Milo, dealing with the same topics, ’I make an end of Bertran de Born, who did enough mischief in his life to give three kings wretchedness—­the young King Henry, and the old King Henry, and the new King Richard.  If he was not the thorn of Anjou, whose thorn was he?  Some time afterwards he died alone and miserable, having seen (as he thought) all his plots miscarry, the object of his hatred do the better for his evil designs, and the object of his love the better without them.  He was cast off.  His peers were at the Holy War, his enemy on a throne.  There had arisen a generation which shrugged at his eld, and remained one which still thought him a misgoverned youth.  Great poet he was, great thief, and a silly fool.  So there’s an end of him:  let him be.’