All that
Beatrix had said to him in the garden at Constantinople came back to
him now; until now, he had disbelieved it all, as a wild and foolish
impossibility, for he was over-modest and diffident of himself in such
matters.
Beatrix would certainly have been killed but for the chance which had
thrown the mare across the narrow way, and he had risked his life to
save another woman. It mattered not that the other was the Queen; that
was not the reason why he had leapt upon the bridle. He had done it for
a glance of her eyes, for the tone of her voice, as it were in an
instant of temptation, when he had stepped out of the rank to face
destruction for a dearer sake. It seemed like a crime, and it proved
against his own belief that he loved what he loved not. Had he let the
Queen pass, and had he stopped Beatrix's horse instead, she might have
been unhurt, and one other brave man might have saved Eleanor at the
brink. Indeed, he thought of the sad face with its pathetic little
smile, drawn with pain and hot upon the pillow, by his fault; and he
thought with greater fear of the danger that some deep hurt might leave
the slender frame bent and crippled for life.
But meanwhile the news had spread quickly that it was the silent
Englishman, neither knight nor squire, who had saved the Queen, and
outside the tent men stopped and talked of the deed, and asked
questions of Alric, who had picked up enough Norman-French to give
tolerably intelligible answers. At first came soldiers, passing as they
went to fetch water from the lake, and again as they came back with
copper vessels filled to the brim and dripping upon their shoulders,
they set down their burdens and talked together.
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