Kitabı oku: «The Prince and the Page: A Story of the Last Crusade», sayfa 6

CHAPTER VII—AMONG THE RUINS OF CARTHAGE

 
"But man is more than law, and I may have
Some impress of myself upon the world;
One poor brief life, helping to feed the flame
Of chivalry, and keep alive the truth
That courage, honour, mercy, make a knight."
 

Queen Isabel, by S. M.

"Land in sight! Cheer up, John, my man!" said Richard, leaning over a bundle of cloaks that lay on the deck of a Genoese galley.

The cross floated high aloft, accompanied by the lions of English royalty; the bulwark was hung round with blazoned shields, and the graceful white sails were filled by a gay breeze that sent the good ship dancing over the crested waves of the Mediterranean, in company with many another of her gallant sisters, crowded with the chivalry of England.

Woeful was however the plight of great part of that chivalry.

Merrily merrily bounded the bark, but her sport felt very like death

to many of her freight, and among others to poor little John de

Mohun.

His father, Baron Mohun of Dunster, had been deeply implicated in the Barons' Wars, and had been a personal friend of the Earl of Leicester, from whom he had only separated himself in consequence of the outrageous exactions and acts of insolence perpetrated by the young Montforts. He had indeed received a disabling wound while fighting on the Prince's side at Evesham; but his submission had been thought so insecure that his son and heir had been required of him, ostensibly as page, but really as hostage.

In spite of his Norman surname, little John of Dunster was, at twelve years old, a sturdy thoroughgoing English lad, with the strongest possible hatred to all foreigners, whom with grand indifference to natural history he termed "locusts sucking the blood of Englishmen." Not a word or command would he understand except in his mother tongue; and no blows nor reproofs had sufficed to tame his sturdy obstinacy. The other pages had teased, fagged, and bullied him to their hearts' content, without disturbing his determination to go his own way; and his only friend and protector had been Richard, whom, under the name of Fowen, he took for a genuine Englishman, and loved with all his heart. If anything would ever cure him of his wilful awkwardness and dogged bashfulness, it was likely to be the kindness of Richard—above all, in the absence of the tormentors, for Hamlyn de Valence alone of the other pages had been selected to attend upon the Prince in this expedition; and he, though scornful and peremptory, did not think the boy worthy of his attention, and did not actively tease him.

At present Hamlyn de Valence, as well as most others of the passengers, lay prostrate; scarcely alive even to the assurance of Richard, who had still kept his feet, that the outline of the hills was quickly becoming distinct, and that they were fast entering the gulf where lay the fleet that had brought the crusaders of France and Sicily, whom they hoped to join in the conquest and conversion of Tunis. On arriving at Aigues Mortes, they had found that the French King had already sailed for Sicily; and following him thither, learnt that his brother, Charles of Anjou, had persuaded him to begin his crusade by a descent on Tunis, to which the Sicilian crown was said to have some claim; that he had sailed thither at once, and Charles had followed him so soon as the Genoese transports could return for the Sicilian troops.

"I see the masts!" exclaimed Richard; "the bay is crowded with them! There must be a goodly force. Yonder are two headlands; within them we shall have smoother water—see—"

"What strikes thee so suddenly silent?" growled one of the muffled figures stretched on deck.

"The ensigns are but half-mast high, my Lord," returned Richard in an awe-struck voice; "the lilies of France are hung drooping downward."

"These plaguy southern winds at their tricks," muttered at first Earl Gilbert of Gloucester, for he it was who had spoken, though Richard had not known him to be so near; then sitting up, he came to a fuller view: "Hm—it looks ill! Thou canst keep thy feet, Fowen, or what do they call thee? Down with thee to the cabin, and let the Prince know."

Stepping across the prostrate forms, and meeting with vituperations as he trode, Richard made his way to the ladder that led below, and notified his presence behind the curtain that veiled the royal cabin. He was summoned to enter at once. The Prince was endeavouring to write at a swinging-table, the Princess lay white and resigned on a couch, attended on by Dame Idonea (or more properly Iduna) Osbright, a lady who had lost her husband in a former Crusade, and had ever since been a sort of high-born head nurse in the palace. A Danish skald, who had once been at the English court, had said that she seemed to have eaten her namesake's apple of immortality, without her apple of beauty, for no one could ever remember to have seen her other than a tiny dried-up old witch, with keen gray eyes, a sharp tongue, an ever ready foot and hand, and a frame utterly unaffected by any of the influences so sinister to far younger and stronger ones. Devoted to all the royal family, her special passion was for Prince Edmund, who, in his mother's repugnance to his deformity, had been left almost entirely to her, and she had accompanied the Princess Eleanor all the more willingly from her desire to look after her favourite nursling.

"There, Lady," said Edward to his wife, "the tossing is all but over; here is Richard come to tell us that we are nigh on land."

"Even so, my Lord," returned Richard; "we are entering the gulf, but my Lord of Gloucester has sent me to report to you that in all the ships the colours are trailing."

"Sayst thou?" exclaimed the Prince, hastily laying aside his writing materials. "Fear not, mi Dona, I will return anon and tell thee how it is. We are in smoother water already."

"So much smoother that I will come with thee out of this stifling cabin," said Eleanor. "O would that we had been in time for thee to have counselled thine uncles—"

"We will see what we have to grieve for ere we bemoan ourselves," said the Prince. "My good uncle of France would put his whole fleet in mourning for one barefooted friar!"

"Depend on it, my Lord, 'tis mourning for something in earnest," interposed Dame Iduna; "I said it was not for nothing that a single pyot came and rocked up his ill-omened tail while we were taking horse for this expedition, and my Lady there was kissing the little ones at home, nor that a hare ran over our road at Bagshot—"

"Well, Dame," interposed the Prince good-humouredly, seeing his wife somewhat affected by the list of omens, "I know you have a horse-shoe in your luggage, so you will come safe off, whoever does not!"

"And what matters what my luck is," returned the Dame, "an old beldame such as me, so long as you and your brother come off safe, and find the blessed princes at home well and sound? Would that we were out of this sandy hole, or that any one would resolve me why we cannot go straight to Jerusalem when we are about it!"

The Dame had delayed them while she spoke, in order to adjust the Princess's muffler over her somewhat dishevelled locks; but Eleanor seeing that her husband was impatient, put a speedy end to her operations, and took his arm.

Meantime the vessel had come within the Gulf of Goletta, and others of the passengers had revived, and were standing on deck to watch their entrance into the very harbour that two thousand years before had sheltered the storm-tossed fleet of AEneas; but if the Trojan had there found a wooded haven, the groves and sylvan shades must long since have been destroyed, for to the new-comers the bay appeared inclosed by spits of sand, though there was a rising ground in front that cut off the view. In the centre of the bay was a low sandy islet, covered with remains of masonry, and with a fort in the midst. On this was mounted the French banner, but likewise drooping; and all around it lay the ships with furled sails and trailing ensigns, giving them an inexpressibly mysterious look of woe, like living creatures with folded wings and vailed crests, lying on the face of the waters in a silent sleep of sorrow. There was an awe of suspense that kept each one on the deck silent, unable to utter the conjecture that weighed upon his breast.

A boat was already putting off, and its quick movements seemed to mar the solemn stillness, as, impelled by the regular strokes of a dozen dark handsome Genoese mariners with gaily-tinted caps, it shot towards the vessel. A Genoese captain in graver garb sat at the helm, and as they came alongside, a whisper, almost a shudder, seemed to thrill upwards from the boat to the crew, and through them to the passengers, "Il Re!" "il Re santo," "il Re di Francia." It seemed to have pervaded the whole ship even before the Genoese had had time to take the rope flung to him and to climb up the ship's side, where as his fellow-captain greeted him, he asked hastily for the Principe Inglese.

For Edward had not come forward, but was standing with his back against the mainmast, with colourless cheek and eyes set and fixed. Eleanor looked up to him in silence, aware that he was mastering vehement agitation, and would endure no token of sympathy or sorrow that would unnerve him when dignity required firmness. To him, Louis IX., the husband of his mother's sister, had been the guiding friend and noble pattern denied to him in his father; and Eleanor, intrusted to his uncle's care during the troubles of England, a maiden wife in her first years of womanhood, had been formed and moulded by that holy and upright influence. To both the loss was as that of a father; and the murmur among the sailors was to them as a voice saying, "Knowest thou 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 AEneas 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 Graecising 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 Porceles!" was all that Edward could say, as with tears in his eyes he held out his hand to the good Provencal 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 Porceles 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 Palaeologos, 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

Porceles.

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

"Down, down, my Lord, and all of you instantly," shouted Porceles 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 Porceles. 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 Provencals 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 Provencal 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."¹
 

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. There was that in his face and voice which betokened that his fierce indignation and overpowering grief were scarcely restrained, and that a word of excuse in his present mood would but have roused the lion.

Horses had been provided for him and his attendant. He flung himself on his steed at once, and Richard was obliged to follow without a moment's opportunity of making inquiry about the wonderful apparition he had seen in the chamber of death.

For some distance Edward galloped rapidly over the sandy soil, then drawing up his horse when he had come to the brow from which he could see on the one side the valley of Carthage, on the other the bay, he made an exclamation which Richard took for a summons, and he came up asking if he were called. "No, boy, no! I only spoke my thoughts aloud! Failure and success! We've seen them both to-day—in the two kings! What thinkst thou of them?"

"Better be wrecked than work the wreck, my Lord," said Richard.

"Ay! but why surrender the wit to the worker of the wreck?" said Edward. Then knitting his brow, "Two holy men have I known who did not blind their wit for their conscience' sake—two alone—did it fare better with them? One was the good Bishop of Lincoln—the other thou knowst, Richard! Well, one goes after another—first good Bishop Grostete, then the Lord of Leicester, and now mine uncle of France; and if earth is to have no better than such as it pleases the Saints to leave in it, it will not be worth staying in much longer."

"My Lord," said Richard, coming near, "methought I saw my father's face under a visor—one of the knightly guards beside the holy King."

"Well might thy fancy call him up in such a presence," said Edward. "They twain had hearts in the same place above, though they saw the world below on different sides, and knew each other little, and loved each other less, in life. That's all at an end now! Well, back to our camp to make the best of the world they have left behind them!" And then in a tone that Richard was not meant to hear, "While mi dona Leonor remains to me there is something saintly and softening still in this world! Heaven help me—ay, and all my foes—were she gone from it too!"