ne; but men live, their secret springs what they have
always been. How the two Kings, then, smeared over their strifes at
Vezelay; how John of Mortain was left biting his nails, and Alois
weeping at the foot of a cross; how Christian armies like dusty snakes
dragged their lengths down the white shores of Rhone, and how some took
ship at Marseilles, and some saved their stomachs at the cost of their
shoes; of King Richard's royal galley _Trenchemer_, a red ship with a
red bridge, and the dragon at the mast; of the shields that made her
bulwarks terrible; of who went adventurous and who remained; of a fleet
that lay upon the waters like a flock of sea-gulls--countless, now at
rest, now beating the sea into spumy wrath; of what way they made,
qualms they suffered, prayers they said in their extremity, vows they
made and afterwards broke, thoughts they had and afterwards were ashamed
of--of these and all such things I must be silent if I am to make a
good end to my history. It shall be enough for you that the red ship
held King Richard, and King Richard his own thoughts, and that never far
from him, in a ship called _Li Chastel Orgoilous_, sat Jehane with
certain women of hers, nursing her hope and a new and fearful wonder she
had. Prayer sits well in women, and age-long watching: one imagines that
Jehane never left the poop through those long white days, those burning
nights; but could always be seen or felt, a still figure sitting apart,
elbow on knee, chin in hand-like a Norn reading fate in the starred web
of the night. In the dark watches, when the ships lay drifting under the
stars, or lurched forward as the surges drove them on, and the tinkling
of the water against the side was all the sound, some woman's voice (not
Jehane's) would be heard singing faint and far off, some little shrill
and winding prayer.

Saincte Catherine,
Vela la nuict qui gagne!

they would hear, and hang upon the cadence. At such times Richard,
stretched upon his lion-skin, would raise himself, and lift up his face
to the immense, and with his noble voice make the darkness tremble as he
sang--

Domna, dels angels regina,
Domna, roza ses espina,
Domna, joves enfantina,
Domna, estela marina,
De las autras plus luzens!

But so soon as his voice filled the night, the woman's faltered and
died; and he, holding on for a stave or more, would stop on a note that
had a wailing fall, and the lapping of the waves