ay, 'Beau sire, Madame Berengere will never like your songs unless you
sing of her.' All this served the girl's private ends. Gradually and
gradually she led him to see that thing as fixed. She did it, as it
were, on tiptoe, for she knew what a shyer he was; but luckily for her
schemes, the Queen-Mother trusted her to the bottom, said nothing and
allowed nothing to be said.

Meantime the affairs of the Crusade conspired with Jehane to drive
Richard once more to church. If he got little money in England, where
abbeys were rich in corn but poor in pelf, and the barons had been so
prompt to rob each other that they could not be robbed by the King,--he
got less in Gaul, eaten up by war for a hundred years. You cannot bleed
a stuck pig, as King Richard found. England was empty of money. He got
men enough; from one motive or another every English knight was willing
to rifle the East. He had ships enough. But of what use ships and men
if there was no food for them nor money to buy it? He tried to borrow,
he tried to beg, he tried what in a less glorious cause a plain man
would call stealing. King Richard came not of a squeamish race, and
would have sold anything to any buyer, pawned his crown or taken another
man's to get the worth of a company's pay out of it. Fines, escheats,
reliefs, forfeitures, wardships, marriages--he heaped exaction on
exaction, with mighty little result. When his mind was set he was
inexorable, insatiable, without scruple. What he got only sharpened his
appetite for more. King Tancred of Sicily owed the dowry of Richard's
sister Joan. He swore he would wring that out of him to the last doit.
He offered the city of London to the highest bidder, and lamented the
slaughter of the Jews when the tenders were few. Here was a position to
be in! His Englishmen lay rotting in Southampton town, his ships in
Southampton water. His Normans and Poictevins were over-ripe; he as dry
as an unpinched pear. He saw, to his infinite vexation, his honour again
in pawn, and no means of redeeming it. Jehane, with tears in her voice,
plied the Navarrese marriage with more passion than she would ever have
allowed herself to urge her own. Richard said he would think of it. 'Now
I have him half-way,' Jehane told the Queen-Mother. He was driven the
other half by his banished brother John.

Prince John, bundled out of the country within a week of the coronation,
went to Paris and a pocketful of mischief in which to put his hand.