y their
breath, as boys blow feathers to and fro. Peace of the church! Who, I
prithee, minds it? The peace of the church, among Crusaders, implies war
with the Saracens, with whom the princes have made truce; and the one
ends with the other. And besides, see you not how every prince of them
is seeking his own several ends? I will seek mine also--and that is
honour. For honour I came hither; and if I may not win it upon the
Saracens, at least I will not lose a jot from any respect to this paltry
Duke, though he were bulwarked and buttressed by every prince in the
Crusade."

De Vaux turned to obey the King's mandate, shrugging his shoulders at
the same time, the bluntness of his nature being unable to conceal that
its tenor went against his judgment. But the hermit of Engaddi stepped
forward, and assumed the air of one charged with higher commands than
those of a mere earthly potentate. Indeed, his dress of shaggy skins,
his uncombed and untrimmed hair and beard, his lean, wild, and contorted
features, and the almost insane fire which gleamed from under his
bushy eyebrows, made him approach nearly to our idea of some seer of
Scripture, who, charged with high mission to the sinful Kings of Judah
or Israel, descended from the rocks and caverns in which he dwelt in
abstracted solitude, to abash earthly tyrants in the midst of their
pride, by discharging on them the blighting denunciations of Divine
Majesty, even as the cloud discharges the lightnings with which it is
fraught on the pinnacles and towers of castles and palaces. In the
midst of his most wayward mood, Richard respected the church and its
ministers; and though offended at the intrusion of the hermit into his
tent, he greeted him with respect--at the same time, however, making a
sign to Sir Thomas de Vaux to hasten on his message.

But the hermit prohibited the baron, by gesture, look, and word, to stir
a yard on such an errand; and holding up his bare arm, from which the
goatskin mantle fell back in the violence of his action, he waved it
aloft, meagre with famine, and wealed with the blows of the discipline.

"In the name of God, and of the most holy Father, the vicegerent of the
Christian Church upon earth, I prohibit this most profane, bloodthirsty,
and brutal defiance betwixt two Christian princes, whose shoulders are
signed with the blessed mark under which they swore brotherhood. Woe
to him by whom it is broken!--Richard of England, recall the most
unhal