No hideous massacre or sack followed the taking of Palermo, for though Roger had conquered the island for himself he was a true mirror of chivalry, and was never cruel. He was chivalrous not only to the defeated, but to those other helpless creatures, women, who 242in his day were mere pawns in the great military and political games played by the men; married whether they would or no, and unmarried without heed of any protest from them; thrust into convents against their wishes, and haled out of convents if they were needed. And swept ruthlessly from the board when they had served their purpose, or when they got in the way of those fierce pieces passaging back and forth across the chequered squares of the field of life. Roger loved the Norman maid Eremberga from his early boyhood, it appears, and as soon as his hazardous fortunes would permit she was had out from Normandy, and the history of the great soldier is full of his devotion, and of her fidelity and courage. As at the siege of Troina, when the two were reduced by hunger and cold to the greatest extremities, sharing one cloak between them, so that finally Roger, rendered desperate by his wife’s sufferings, burst through the ring of Saracens, leaving her to defend the fortress with unshaken valour until he returned with a force adequate to save her, and raise the siege. There is an amusing story of Roger and his eldest brother, that ruthless old fox, Robert Guiscard. They were fighting one another at the time, and Roger’s soldiers captured Robert, who was disguised and spying. He with difficulty rescued Robert from the angry captors, took him to a private room, kissed him, helped him to escape, and promptly next day fell upon his forces with such fury that Robert was glad to make peace and fulfil the broken promises which had caused the dispute.... It was not Roger, the great Count—he had little time in his busy life for building—but his son Roger the 243King, who raised the great pile at Monreale which Jane and Peripatetica were on their way to see. Not by way of the winding rocky road which for centuries the pious pilgrims had climbed, but whisked up the heights by an electric tram which pretended it was a moving-picture machine, displaying from its windows an ever widening panorama of burning blue sea, of pink and purple mountains, of valleys down which flowed rivers of orange groves, of a domed and spired city in the plain, and a foreground freaked with an astonishing carpet of flowers. “If you were to see that in a picture you wouldn’t believe it,” quoted Jane from the famous Book of Bromides, writhing her neck like an uneasy serpent in an endeavour to see it all at once.