"No," answered Mary, tugging free her hands and shaking a dainty sleeve of Cyprian gauze, "we will never turn infidel and peril our souls--not even to please _you_, Sir Musa."
She saw a dark shadow flit over Musa's face: was it as the ship's lantern swayed in the slow swell of the sea? But he replied quickly:--
"Alas! I am not such a friend to the lord of Andalusia to-day that I can proffer there princely hospitality."
Then their talk ran fast on a thousand nothings; but the shadow on Musa's face haunted Mary. She resolved in her heart, she would never again remind him that their faith lay as a gulf between them.
The stout ship reached Marseilles, where she was to barter her Eastern wares for Frankish iron, oil, and wax. Her passengers sped joyously to La Haye, a rich and stately castle in the pleasant South Country, where Baron Hardouin, Mary's uncle, received his niece and future nephew with courtly hospitality, as became a great seigneur of Provence. And when Richard rode again northward with a lock of brown hair in his bosom, he had a promise that, when he returned in autumn, there should be a wedding such as became the heiress of a Greek Cæsar and a great Baroness of the Languedoc.
Never again was Longsword to ride with fairer visions and a merrier heart. He was in France, the home of knightly chivalry, of Christian faith. As they passed through Aix and Avignon and Orange, and all along the stately Rhone, the wealthy lords and ladies entertained him in their castles, Theroulde paying by his stories for all the feastings and wassail. And Richard carried his head high, for the fame of his deeds in Sicily had run overseas; and men honored him, and the great countesses gave soft looks and words,--with more perchance, had he only suffered. "Verily," thought Richard in his heart, "the _jongleurs_ did well to sing that when King Alexander the Great lay a-dying, he had only one sorrow,--that he had not conquered France, head of the whole world." But for the ladies, their troops of troubadours and their "courts of love," Richard had only pleasant words, no more. For Longsword had a vision before his eyes that two years before he had never dreamed. Fairer than all knightly glory, the sweet delirium of battle, the cry of a thousand heralds proclaiming him victor, rose the dream of a strong and beautiful woman ever beside him; her voice ever in his ears, her touch upon his arm, her breath upon his cheek; and from year unto year his soul drawing to itself joy and power merely by looking upon her--this was the dream. And Richard marvelled that once his life had found rest in hawking and sword-play. So as he rode northward, all the little birds upon the arching trees sang that one name "Mary"; and the great Rhone, hastening seaward, murmured it from each eddy and foaming boulder; and the kind west wind whispered it, as it blew over the pleasant corn-lands of Toulouse and Aquitaine.