YMOUS.

The Baron of Gilsland walked with slow step and an anxious countenance
towards the royal pavilion. He had much diffidence of his own capacity,
except in a field of battle, and conscious of no very acute intellect,
was usually contented to wonder at circumstances which a man of livelier
imagination would have endeavoured to investigate and understand, or
at least would have made the subject of speculation. But it seemed very
extraordinary, even to him, that the attention of the bishop should have
been at once abstracted from all reflection on the marvellous cure which
they had witnessed, and upon the probability it afforded of Richard
being restored to health, by what seemed a very trivial piece of
information announcing the motions of a beggardly Scottish knight, than
whom Thomas of Gilsland knew nothing within the circle of gentle
blood more unimportant or contemptible; and despite his usual habit
of passively beholding passing events, the baron's spirit toiled with
unwonted attempts to form conjectures on the cause.

At length the idea occurred at once to him that the whole might be a
conspiracy against King Richard, formed within the camp of the allies,
and to which the bishop, who was by some represented as a politic and
unscrupulous person, was not unlikely to have been accessory. It was
true that, in his own opinion, there existed no character so perfect as
that of his master; for Richard being the flower of chivalry, and the
chief of Christian leaders, and obeying in all points the commands of
Holy Church, De Vaux's ideas of perfection went no further. Still, he
knew that, however unworthily, it had been always his master's fate
to draw as much reproach and dislike as honour and attachment from the
display of his great qualities; and that in the very camp, and amongst
those princes bound by oath to the Crusade, were many who would have
sacrificed all hope of victory over the Saracens to the pleasure of
ruining, or at least of humbling, Richard of England.

"Wherefore," said the baron to himself, "it is in no sense impossible
that this El Hakim, with this his cure, or seeming cure, wrought on the
body of the Scottish squire, may mean nothing but a trick, to which he
of the Leopard may be accessory, and wherein the Bishop of Tyre, prelate
as he is, may have some share."

This hypothesis, indeed, could not be so easily reconciled with the
alarm manifested by the bishop on learning that, contrary to his
e