“The King and my lord are gone back into the parlour.”

There was no cause to keep Master Richard any longer, so the fellow let him past, and he went down the gallery and the stairs towards the court that opened upon the hall.

But before he reached the door, there was a great tumult overhead, and a noise of men moving and crying, and Master Richard stayed to listen. (I had almost said that it had been better if he had not stayed, but made his way out quickly and escaped perhaps; but it is not so, as I now believe, for our Lord had determined what should be the end.)

Two fellows came running presently down the stairs up which Master Richard was looking.  One of them was a page of my lord’s, a lad dressed all in purple with the pointed shoes of which I have written before, and the other the man-at-arms that had kept the door.  The lad cried out shrilly when he saw him standing there, and came down the steps four at a leap, with his hands outstretched to either wall.  Master Richard thought that he would fall, and stepped forward to catch him, but the lad recovered himself on the rushes, and then, screaming with anger, sprang at the young man’s throat, seizing it with one hand, and striking him in the face again and again with the other.

For an instant Master Richard stood amazed, then he caught the lad’s hands without a word and held them so, looking at the man-at-arms who was now half-way down the stairs in his plate and mail, and at others who were following as swiftly as they could.  In the court outside, too, there were footsteps and the sound of talking, and presently the door was darkened by half a dozen others, who ran up at the tumult, and all in a moment Master Richard found himself caught from behind and his hands pulled away, so that the lad was able to strike him again, which he did, three or four times.

So he was taken by the men and held.

Master Richard could not understand what the matter was, as he looked at the press that gathered every moment on the stairs and in the court.  So he asked one that held him, and the page screamed out his answer above the tumult of voices and weapons.

So Master Richard understood, and went upstairs under guard, with the blood staining his brown and white dress, and his face bruised and torn, to await when the King should come out of the fit into which he had fallen, and judge him for the message which he had brought.

Of Master Richard’s second speaking with his Grace:  and of his detention

Abscondes eos in abscondito faciei tuae:  a conturbatione hominum.

Thou shalt hide them in the secret of Thy face:  from the disturbance of men.—­Ps. xxx. 21.

VII

I scarcely have the heart to write down all that befell Master Richard; and yet what it pleased God’s Majesty that he should suffer, cannot displease Him to write down nor to think upon.... [There follows a curiously modern discussion on what I may call the gospel of Pleasure, which is a very different thing from the gospel of Joy.  The former, as Sir John points out, disregards and avoids pain, the latter deals with it.  He points out acutely that this difference is the characteristic difference between Greek and Christian philosophy.]