The Prince and the Page: A Story of the Last Crusade by Charlotte M. Yonge (ebook reader .TXT) 📖

that God will take away thy master from thy head to-day?”  For the moment, however, the Princess’s sole thought was how her husband would bear it, and she watched anxiously till the struggle was over, in the space of a few seconds, and he met the Genoese with his usual reserved courtesy; and returning his salutation, signed to him to communicate his tidings.

They were however brief, for the captain had held by his ship, and all he knew was that deadly sickness, fever, and plague had raged in the camp.  The Papal Legate was dead, and the good King of France.  His son was dead too, and many another beside.

“Which son?”

“Not the eldest—he lay sick, but there were hopes of him; but the little one—he had been carried on board his ship, but it had not saved him.”

“Poor little Tristan!” sighed Eleanor; “true Cross-bearer, born in one hapless Crusade to die in another.”

“The King of Sicily?” demanded Edward between his teeth.

“He had arrived the very day of his brother’s death,” said the Genoese; “and when he had seen how matters stood, he had concluded a truce with the King of Tunis, and intended to sail as soon as the new King of France could bear to be moved.”

In the meantime the vessel had been anchored, and preparations were made for landing; but the Princes impatience to hear details would not brook even the delay of waiting till his horse could be set ashore.  He committed to the Earl of Gloucester the charge of encamping his men on the island, left a message with him for his brother Edmund, who was in another ship, and perceiving that Richard had suffered the least of all his suite, summoned him to attend him in the boat which was at once lowered.

This would have been a welcome call had not Richard found that poor little John de Mohun had not revived like the other passengers, but still lay inert and sometimes moaning.  All Richard could do was to beg the groom specially attached to the pages’ service, to have a care of the little fellow, and get him sheltered in a tent as soon as possible; but the Prince never suffered any hesitation in obeying him, and it was needful to hurry at once into the boat.

Without a word, the Prince with long swift strides, in the light of the sinking sun, walked up the low hill, the same where erst the pious Æneas climbed with his faithful Achates following.  From the brow the Trojan prince had beheld the rising city in the valley—the English prince came on its desolation.  Yet nature had made the vale lovely—green with well-watered verdure, fields of beauteous green maize, graceful date palms, and majestic cork trees; and among them were white flat-roofed Moorish houses; but many a black stain on the fair landscape told of the fresh havoc of an invading army.

Utterly blotted out was Carthage.  Half demolished, half choked with sand, the city of Dido, the city of Hannibal, the city of Cyprian—all had vanished alike, and nothing remained erect but a Moorish fortress, built up with fragments of the huge stones of the old Phoenicians, intermixed with the friezes and sculptures of Græcising Rome, and the whole fabric in the graceful Saracenic taste; while completing the strange mixture of periods, another of those mournful French banners drooped from the battlements, and around it spread the white tents of the armies of France and the Two Sicilies, like it with trailing banners; an orphaned plague-stricken host in a ruined city.

While the Prince paused for a moment’s glance, a party of knights came spurring up the hill, who had been ordered off to meet him on the first intelligence that his fleet was in sight, but had been taken by surprise by his alertness.

They met with bowed heads and dejected mien; and there was one who hid his face and wept aloud as he exclaimed, “Ah!  Messire, our holy King loved you well!”

“Alas, beau sire Guillaume de Porçeles!” was all that Edward could say, as with tears in his eyes he held out his hand to the good Provençal knight, adding, “Let me hear!”

The knight, leading his horse and walking by Edward’s side, told how the King had been induced to make his descent on Tunis, from some wild hope of the king’s conversion, which had been magnified by Charles of Anjou, from his dislike to let so gallant an army pass by without endeavouring to obtain some personal advantage to his own realm of Sicily.  Though a vassal of Beatrix of Provence, the Sire de Porçeles was no devoted admirer of her husband, Charles of Anjou, and spoke with no concealment of the unhappy perversion of the Crusade.  Charles of Anjou was all-powerful with the court of Rome, and in crusading matters Louis deemed it right absolutely to surrender to the ecclesiastical power all that judgment which had made him so prudent and wise a king at home, while his crusades were lamentable failures.  Thus in him it had been a piece of obedient self-denial not to press forward to the Holy Sepulchre; but to land in this malarious bay to fulfil aims that, had he but used his common sense, he would have seen to be merely those of private ambition.  There it had been one scene of wasting sickness.  A few deeds of arms had been done to refresh the spirits of the French, such as the taking of the fort of Carthage, and now and then a skirmish of some foraging party; but in general the Moors launched their spears and fled without staying for combat.  Many who had hid themselves in the vaults and cellars of Carthage had been dragged out and put to death, and their bodies had aided in breeding pestilence.  Name after name fell from the lips of the knight, like the roll of warriors fallen in a great battle, when

“They melted from the field like snow,
Their king, their lords, their mightiest low.”

And the last foreign embassy that ever reached Louis IX. had been that of the Greek Emperor Michael Palæologos, come to set before him the savage barbarities perpetrated upon Christians by this brother—

“Who had spoilt the purpose of his life.”

It was as Charles entered the port, that Louis, lying on a bed of ashes, with his hands crossed upon his breast, and the words, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!” entered not the Jerusalem of his earthly schemes, but the Jerusalem of his true aspirations.

“Shall we conduct you to my Lord the King of Sicily?” asked De Porçeles.

“No!” said Edward, with bitter sternness; “to my uncle of France.”

“Down, down, my Lord, and all of you instantly,” shouted Porçeles suddenly, throwing himself face downwards on the ground.  Edward was too good a soldier not to follow the injunction instantaneously, and Richard did the same, as well as all the knights who had come up with Porçeles.  Even the horses buried their noses in the hot sandy soil.  A strange rushing roaring sound passed over them; there was a sense of intense suffocation, then of heat, pricking, and irritation.  The Provençals were rising; and the Prince and his page doing the same, shook off a plentiful load of sand, and beheld, careering furiously away, between them and the western sun, what looked like a purple column, reaching from earth to heaven, and bespangled with living gold-dust, whirling round in giddy spirals, and all the time fleeting so fast that it was diminishing every moment, and was gone in a wink of the eye.

“Is it enchantment?” gasped Richard to the squire nearest him, as he strove to clear his eyes from the sand and gaze after the wonder.

“Worse than enchantment,” quoth the squire; “it is a sand whirlwind.”

They were soon crossing the ditch that had been dug around the camp among the ruins, and passed through lanes of tents erected among the thick foliage that mantled the broken walls; here and there tracks of mosaic pavement; of temples to Dido or Anna peeping forth beneath either the luxuriant vegetation or the heavy sand-drifts; or columns of the new Carthage lying veiled by acanthus; or remnants of churches destroyed by Genseric—all alike disregarded by the sickly drooping figures that moved feebly about among them, regarding them as little save stumbling-blocks.

A Moorish house in the midst of a once well-laid-out garden, now trampled and destroyed, was the place to which the Provençal knight led the English Prince.  Entering the doorway of a court, where a fountain sparkled in the midst of a marble pavement, they saw the richly-latticed stone doorway of the house guarded by two figures in armour like iron statues; and passing between them, they came into the principal chamber, marble-floored, and with a divan of cushions round it; but full in the midst of the room lay a coffin, covered with the lilied banner, and the standard of the Cross; the crowned helmet, good sword, knightly spurs, and cross-marked shield lying upon it; solemn forms in armour guarded it, and priests knelt and chanted prayers and psalms around it.  Within were only the bones of Louis, which were to be taken to St. Denis.  The flesh, which had been removed by being boiled in wine and spices, was already on its way to Palermo in a vessel whose melancholy ensigns would have announced the loss to the English had they not passed it in the night.

Long did Edward kneel beside the remains of his uncle, with his face hidden and thoughts beyond our power to trace.  Richard’s heart was full of that strange question “Wherefore?”  Wherefore should the best and purest schemes planned by the highest souls fall over like a crested wave and become lost?  So it had been, he would have said, with the Round Table under Arthur, so with England’s rights beneath his own noble father, so with the Crusade under such leaders as Edward of England and Louis of France.  Did he mark the answer in those Psalms that the priests were singing around—

“Qui seminant in lacrymis, in exultatione metent,
Euntes ibant et flebant mittentes semina sua,
Venientes autem venient cum exultatione portantes manipulos suos.” [100]

Surely we may believe that Simon of Leicester and Louis of France were alike beyond grief at their marred visions, their errors of deed or of judgment were washed away, and their true purpose was accepted, both waiting the harvest when their works should follow them, and it should have been made manifest that the effect of what they had been and had suffered had told far more on future generations than what they had wrought out in their own lifetime.

It was at that moment that the sensation that an eye was upon him caused Richard to raise his eyes from the floor.  One of the armed figures, who had hitherto stood as still as suits of armour in a castle hall, had partially lowered the visor of the helmet, and eyes, nose, and a part of the cheeks were visible.  Richard looked up, and they were those of his father! was it a delusion of his fancy?  He closed his eyes and looked again.  Again it was the deep brown Montfort eye, the clearly-cut nose, the embrowned skin!  He glanced at the bearings on the shield.  Behold, it was his own—the red field and white lion rampant with a forked tail, which he had not seen for so long.

Almost at the same moment another person entered the chamber—a man with a sallow complexion, narrow French features, sharp gray eyes, and a certain royal bearing that even a cunning shrewdness of expression could not destroy.  His face was composed to a look of melancholy, and he crossed himself and knelt down near Edward to await the conclusion of his devotions.  Edward, who knelt absorbed in grief, with his cloak partly over his face, apparently did not perceive him, and after two or three unheeded endeavours at attracting notice, he at length rose and said in a low voice, “My fair nephew.”  For a moment the Prince lifted up his face, and Richard had rather have died than have encountered that glance of mournful reproof; then hiding his face in his hands again, he continued his devotions.

When these were ended he rose from his knees; and when out of the death-chamber bowed his bead and with grave courtesy exchanged greetings with Charles of Anjou, asking at the same time to see his young cousin Philippe, the new King of France.

An inquiry from an attendant elicited that Philippe had just dropped asleep under the influence of a potion from his leech.

“Then, fair nephew,” said Charles of Sicily, “be content with your old uncle, and come to my apartments, where I will set before you the necessities that have led me to conclude the truce that is baffling your eager desire of deeds of arms.”

“Pardon me, royal uncle,” returned Edward, “I must see my camp set up.  It is already late, and I must take order that my troops mingle not where contagion might seize them.  Another time,” he added, “I may brook the argument better.”

Charles of Anjou did not press him further.