Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/219

 he had been asked, and demands payment. "Finish," he goes on, with a boldness which challenges some sympathy, "what you have begun, and then we will settle about my promise; such was our agreement." It is characteristic of Rufus not to be angry at a really bold word. Evidently entering into the grotesque side of the dispute, he rejects the doctrine of payment by results; he answers that he has done his best, and that, though he had not succeeded, he cannot go away with nothing for his trouble. At last, after some further haggling, the parties in this strange dispute come to a compromise. The Jew pays, and the King receives, half the sum which had been promised in the beginning.

A king of whom such stories as these could be told, whether every detail is literally true or not, must have utterly cast aside all the decencies of his own or of any other age. But Rufus, according to the tales told of him, went even further than this. He is charged with a kind of personal defiance of the Almighty, quite distinct alike from mere carelessness and from speculative unbelief. When he recovered from the sickness which forms such an epoch in his life, "God," he said, "shall never see me a good man; I have suffered too much at his hands." He mocked at God's judgement and doubted his justice—his disbelief in the ordeal is quoted as an