Bernard passed his hand over his eyes as if to brush away some material veil.
"I am at your Grace's service," he said gently, and he rose from his seat as he spoke.
"I ask no service for myself," she answered, setting her foot upon the platform and coming to his side. "Yet I ask something which you may do for others."
Bernard hesitated, and then looked down.
"Silver and gold have I none," he said, quoting, "but such as I have I give unto thee."
"I have both gold and silver, and lands, and a crown," answered the Queen, smiling carelessly, and yet in earnest. "I lack faith. And so, though my people have swords and armour, and have taken upon them the Cross to succour their brethren in the Holy Land, yet they have no leader."
"They have the King, your husband," answered Bernard, gravely.
Eleanor laughed, not very cruelly, nor altogether scornfully, but as a man might laugh who was misunderstood, and to whom, asking for his sword, a servant should bring his pen.
"The King!" she cried, still smiling. "The King! Are you so great in mind and so poor in sense as to think that he could lead men and win? The King is no leader. He is your acolyte-I like to see him swinging a censer in time to your prayers and flattening his flat face upon the altar-steps beatified by your footsteps!"
The Queen laughed, for she had moods in which she feared neither God, nor saint, nor man. But Bernard looked grave at first, then hurt, and then there was pity in his eyes. He pointed to the window-seat beside the table, and he himself sat down upon his carved bench. Eleanor, being seated, rested her elbows on the table, clasped her beautiful hands together, and slowly rubbed her cheek against them, meditating what she should say next. She had had no fixed purpose in coming to the abbot's lodging, but she had always liked to talk with him when he was at leisure and to see the look of puzzled and pained surprise that came into his face when she said anything more than usually shocking to his delicate sensibilities. With impulses of tremendous force, there was at the root of her character a youthful and almost childlike indifference to consequences.
"You misjudge your husband," said the abbot, at last, drumming on the table nervously and absently with the tips of his white fingers. "They who do their own will only are quick to condemn those who hope to accomplish the will of Heaven."
"If you regard the King as the instrument of Divine Providence," answered Eleanor, with curling lip, "there is nothing to be said. Providence, for instance, was angered with the people of Vitry. Providence selected the King of France to be the representative of its wrath. The King, obedient as ever, set fire to the church, and burned several priests and two thousand more or less innocent persons at their prayers. Nothing could be better. Providence was appeased-"
"Hush, Madam!" exclaimed Bernard, lifting a thin hand in deprecation. "That was the devil's work."
"You told me that I was condemning one who is accomplishing the will of Heaven."
"In leading the Crusade, yes-"
"Then my husband works for both parties. Today he serves God; to-morrow he serves Mammon." Eleanor raised her finely pencilled eyebrows. "I believe there is a parable that teaches us what is to become of those that serve two masters."
"It applies to those who try to serve them at the same time," answered the abbot, meeting her contemptuous look with the quiet boldness of a man sure of power. "You know as well as I that the King took oath to lead a Crusade out of repentance for what he did at Vitry."
"A bargain, then, of the very kind against which you preached to-day." The Queen still smiled, but less scornfully, for she fancied herself as good as Bernard in an argument.
"It is a very easy thing to fence with words," Bernard said. "It is one thing to argue, it is quite another to convince your hearers."
"I do not desire to convince you of anything," answered Eleanor, with a little laugh. "I would rather be convinced."
She looked at him a moment and then turned away with a weary little sigh of discontent.
"Was it without conviction that you took the Cross from my hands to— day?" asked Bernard, sadly.
"It was in the hope of conviction."
Bernard understood. Before him, within reach of his hand, that great problem was present which, of all others, Paganism most easily and clearly solved, but with which Christianity grapples at a disadvantage, finding its foothold narrow, and its danger constant and great. It is the problem of the conversion of great and vital natures, brave, gifted and sure of self, to the condition of the humble and poor in spirit. It is easy to convince the cripple that peace is among the virtues; the sick man and the weak are soon persuaded that the world is a sensuous illusion of Satan, in which the pure and perfect have no part nor share; it is another, a greater and a harder matter, to prove the strong man a sinner by his strength, and to make woman's passion ridiculous in comparison of heaven. The clear flame of the spirit burns ill under the breath of this dying body, and for the fleeting touch of a loving hand the majesty of God is darkened in a man's heart.
Bernard saw before him the incarnate strength and youth and beauty of her from whom a line of kings was to descend, and in whom were all the greatest and least qualities, virtues and failings of her unborn children-the Lion Heart of Richard, the heartless selfishness of John, the second Edward's grasping hold, Henry the Third's broad justice and wisdom; the doubt of one, the decision of another, the passions of them all in one, coursing in the blood of a young and kingly race.
"You wish not to convince others, but to be convinced," Bernard said, "and yet it is not in your nature to yield yourself to any conviction. What would you of me? I can preach to them that will hear me, not to those that come to watch me and to smile at my sayings as if I were a player in a booth at a fair. Why do you come here to-night? Can I give you faith as a salve, wherewith to anoint your blind eyes? Can I furnish you the girdle of honesty for the virtue you have not? Shall I promise repentance for you to God, while you smile on your next lover? Why have you sought me out?"
"If I had known that you had no leisure, and the Church no room for any but the altogether perfect, I would not have come."
She leaned back in the window-seat and folded her arms, drawing the thin dark stuff of her cloak into severe straight lines and shadows, in vivid contrast with the radiant beauty of her face. Her straight and clear-cut brows lowered over her deep eyes, and her lips were as hard as polished coral.
Bernard looked at her again long and earnestly, understanding in part, and in part guessing, that she had suffered a secret disappointment on that day and had come to him rather in the hope of some kind of mental excitement than with any idea of obtaining consolation. To him, filled as he was with the lofty thoughts inspired by the mission thrust upon him, there was something horrible in the woman's frivolity-or cynicism. To him the Cross meant the Passion of Christ, the shedding of God's blood, the Redemption of mankind. To her it was a badge, an ornament, the excuse for a luxurious pilgrimage of fair women living delicately in silken tents, and clothed in fine garments of a fanciful fashion. The contrast was too strong, too painful. Eleanor and her girl knights would be too wholly out of place, with their fancies and their whims, in an army of devoted men fighting for a faith, for a faith's high principle as between race and race, and for all which that faith had made sacred in its most holy places. It was too much. In profoundest disappointment and sadness Bernard's head sank upon his breast, and he raised his hands a little, to let them fall again upon his knees, as if he were almost ready to give up the struggle.
Eleanor felt the wicked little thrill of triumph in his apparent despair which compensates schoolboys for unimaginable labour in mischief, when they at last succeed in hurting the feelings of a long— suffering teacher. There had been nothing but an almost childish desire to tease at the root of all that she had said; for before all things she was young and gay, and her surroundings tended in every way to repress both gayety and youth.