HOW THE LEOPARD WAS LOOSED
The burning thought of Jehane cut off, sixty feet below him, yet far as
she could ever be, swept across Richard's mind like a roaring wind, and
ridded the room for wilder guests. In came stalking Might-have-been and
No-more, holding each by a shrinking shoulder the delicate maid of his
first delight, Jehane, lissom in a thin gown; Jehane like a bud, with
her long hair alight. Her hair was loose, her face aflame; she was very
young, very much to be kissed, fresh and tall--Oh, God, the mere
loveliness of her! In came the scent of wet stubbles, the fresh salt air
of Normandy, the pale gold of the shaws, the pale sky, the mild October
sun. He felt again the stoop, again the lift of her to his horse, again
the stern ride together; saw again the Dark Tower, and all the love and
sweet pleasure that they made. The bride in the church turning her proud
shy head, the bride in his arm, clinging as they flew, the bride in the
tower, the crowned Countess, the nestling mate--oh, impossibly lost!
Inconceivably put away! Eternally his lover and bride!
Pity, if you can, this lonely heart, this king in chains, this hot
Angevin, son of Henry, son of Geoffrey, son of Fulke, this Yea-and-Nay.
He who dared not look upon the city, lest, seeing, he should risk all
to take it, had now looked upon the bride unaware, and could not touch
her. The fragrance of her, the sacred air in which a loved woman moves,
had floated up to him: his by all the laws of hell, in spite of heaven;
but his no more. Such nearness and such deprivation--to see, to desire,
and not to seize--flung his wits abroad; from that hour his was a lost
soul. Hungry, empty-eyed, ranging, feverish, he lashed up and down his
prison-room, with bare teeth gleaming, and desperate soft strides. No
thought he had but mere despair, no hope but the mere ravin of a beast.
He was across the room in four; he turned, he lunged back; at the wall
he threw up his head, turned and lunged, turned and lunged again. He was
always at it, or rocking on his bed. No hope, nor thought, nor reckoning
had he, but to say Yea against God, Who said him Nay.
So, many times, had he stood, fatal enemy of himself. His Yea would hold
fast while none accepted it, his Nay while no one obeyed. But the supple
knees of men sickened him of his own decree. 'These fools accept my
bidding: the bidding then is foolishness.' So when Fate, so when God,
underwrote his bill, _Le Roy le veult_, he scorned himself and the bill,
and risked wide heaven to make either nought.
If Austria had murdered him then, it had perhaps been well; but his
enemies being silenced, his friends did enemies' work unknowing, by
giving him scope to mar himself. The ransom was raised at the price of
blood and prayers, the ransom was paid. The Earl of Leicester and
Bishop of Salisbury brought it; so the Leopard was loosed. With a quick
shake of the head, as if doing violence to himself, he turned his face
westward and pushed through the Low Countries to the sea. There he was
met by his English peers, by Longchamp, by his brother of Rouen, by men
who loved and men who feared; but he had no word for any. Grim and
hungry he stalked through the lane they made him, on to the galley;
folded in his cloak there, lonely he paced the bridge. He was rowed to
the west with his eyes fixed always on the east, away from his kingdom
to where he supposed his longing to be. His mother met him at Dunwich:
it seemed he knew her not. 'My son, my son Richard,' she said as she
knelt to him. 'Get up, Madame,' he bid her; 'I have work to do.' He rode
savagely to London through the grey Essex flats; had himself crowned
anew; went north with a force to lay Lincolnshire waste; levelled
castles, exacted relentless punishment, exorbitant tribute, the last
acquittance. He set a red smudge over the middle of England, being
altogether in that country three months, a total to his name and reign
of a poor six. Then he left it for good and all, carrying away with him
grudging men and grudged money, and leaving behind the memory of a stone
face which always looked east, a sword, a heart aloof, the myth of a
giant knight who spoke no English and did no charity, but was without
fear, cruelly just, and as cold as an outland grave. If you ask an
Englishman what he thinks of Richard Yea-and-Nay, he will tell
you:--That was a king without pity or fear or love, considering neither
God, nor the enemy of God, nor unhappy men. If the fear of God is the
beginning of wisdom, the love of Him is the end of it. How could King
Richard love God, who did not fear enough; or we, who feared too much?
He crossed into Normandy, and at Honfleur was met by them who loved him
well; but he repaid them ill. Here also they seemed remote from his
acquaintance. Gaston of Béarn, with eyes alight, came dancing down the
quay, to be the first to kiss him. Richard, shaking with fever (or what
was like fever), gave him a burning dry hand, but looked away from him,
always hungrily to the east. Des Barres, who had thrown off allegiance
for his love, got no thanks for it. He may have known Abbot Milo again,
or Mercadet, his lean good captain: he said nothing to either of them.
His friends were confounded: here was the gallant shell of King Richard
with a new insatiable tenant. So indeed they found it. There was great
business to be done: war, the holding of Assise, the redressing of
wrongs from the sea to the Pyrenees. He did it, but in a terrible, hasty
way. It appeared that every formal act required fretted him to waste,
that every violent act allowed gave him little solace. It appeared that
he was living desperately fast, straining to fill up time, rather than
use it, towards some unknown, but (to him) certain end. His first act in
Normandy, after new coronation, was to besiege the border castles which
the French had filched in his absence. One of these was Gisors. He
would not go near Gisors; but conducted the leaguer from Rouen, as a
blindfold man plays chess; and from Rouen he reduced the great castle in
six weeks. One thing more he did there, which gave Gaston a clue to his
mood. He sent a present of money, a great sum, to an old priest, curate
of Saint-Sulpice; and when they told him that the man was dead, and a
great part of the church he had served burnt out by King Philip, his
face grew bleak and withered, and he said, 'Then I will burn Philip
out.' He had Gisors, castle, churches, burgher-holds, the whole town,
burned level with the ground. There was not to be a stone on a stone:
and it was so. Gaston of Béarn slapped his thigh when he heard of this:
'Now,' he said, 'now at last I know what ails my King. He has seen his
lost mistress.'
He did so ruthlessly in Normandy that he went far to make his power a
standing dread to the fair duchy. On the rock at Les Andelys he built a
huge castle, to hang there like a thunder-cloud scowling over the flats
of the Seine. He called it, what his temper gave no hint of (so dry with
fever he was), the galliard hold. 'Let me see Chastel-Gaillard stand
ready in a year,' he said. 'Put on every living man in Normandy if need
be.' He planned it all himself; rock of the rock it was to be, making
the sheer yet more sheer. He called it again his daughter, daughter of
his conception of Death. 'Build,' said he, 'my daughter Gaillarda. As I
have conceived her let the great birth be.' And it was so. For a bitter
christening, when all was done, he had his French prisoners thrown down
into the fosse; and they say that it rained blood upon him and his
artificers as they stood by that accursed font. The man was mad. Nothing
stayed him: for the first time since they who still loved him had had
him back, they heard him laugh, when his daughter Gaillarda was brought
forth. And, 'Spine of God,' he cried, 'this is a saucy child of mine,
and saucily shall she do by the French power.' Then his face was
wrenched by pain, as with a sob he said, 'I had a son Fulke.' Gaillarda
did saucily enough, to tyrannise over ten years of Philip's life; in the
end, as all know, she played the strumpet, and served the enemies of her
father's house, but not while Richard lived to rule her.
He drove Philip into a truce of years, pushed down into Touraine, and
thence went to Anjou, but not to sit still. He was never still, never
seemed to sleep, or get any of the solace of a man. He ate voraciously,
but was not nourished, drank long, but was never drunken, revelled
without mirth, hunted, fought, but got no joy. He utterly refused to see
the Queen, who was at Cahors in the south. 'She is no wife of mine,' he
said; 'let her go home.' Tentative messages were brought by very
tentative messengers from his brother John. Good service, such and such,
had been done in Languedoc; so and so had been hanged, or gibbeted, so
and so rewarded: what had our dear and royal brother to say? To each he
said the same thing: 'Let my good brother come.' But John never came.
No one knew what to make of him; he spoke to none of his affairs, none
dared speak to him. Milo writes in his book, 'The King came back from
Styria as one who should arise from the grave with all the secrets of
the chattering ghosts to brood upon. Some worm gnawed his vitals, some
maggot had drilled a hole in his brain. I know not what possessed him or
what could possess him beside a devil. This I know, he never sent to me
for direction in spiritual affairs, nor (so far as I could learn) to any
other religious man. He never took the Sacrament, nor seemed to want it.
But be sure he wanted it most grievously.' So, insanely ridden, he lived
for three years, one of which would have worn a common man to the bones.
But the fire still crackled, freely fed; his eyes were burning bright,
his mind (when he gave it) was keen, his head (when he lent it) seemed
cool. What was he living for? Did Death himself look askance at such a
man? Or find him a good customer who sent him so many souls? Two things
only were clear: he sent messenger after messenger to Rome, and he
returned his wife's dowry. Those must mean divorce or repudiation of
marriage. Certainly the Queen's party took it so, though the Queen
herself clung pitifully to her throne; and the Queen's party grew the
larger for the belief.
Such as it was, the Queen's party nested in Aquitaine and the Limousin,
with all the turbulent lords of that duchy under its flag. Prince John
himself was with Berengère at Cahors, biting his nails as was usual with
him, one eye watching for Richard's vengeance, one eye wide for any
peace-offering from the French King. He dared not act overtly against
Richard, nor dared to take up arms for him. So he waited. The end was
not very far off.
Count Eustace of Saint-Pol was the moving spirit in these parts, grown
to be an astute, unscrupulous man of near thirty years. His spies kept
him well informed of Richard's intolerable state; he knew of the
embassies to Rome, of the fierce murdering moods, of the black moods, of
the cheerless revelry and fruitless energy of this great stricken
Angevin. 'In some such hag-ridden day my enemy may be led to overtax
himself,' he considered. To that end he laid a trap. He seized and
fortified two hill-castles in the Limousin, between which lay straggling
a village called Chaluz. 'Let us get Richard down here,' was his plan.
'He will think the job a light one, and we shall nip him in the hills.'
The Bishop of Beauvais lent a hand, so did Adhémar Viscount of Limoges,
and Achard the lord of Chaluz, not because he desired, but because he
was forced by Limoges his suzerain. Another forced labourer was Sir
Gilles de Gurdun, who had been found by Saint-Pol doing work in Poictou
and won over after a few trials.
Now, when King Richard had been some four, nearly five, years at home,
neither nearer to his rest nor fitter for it than he had been when he
landed, he got word from the south that a great treasure had been found
in the Limousin. A man driving the plough on a hillside by Chaluz had
upturned a gold table, at which sat an emperor, Charles or another, with
his wife and children and the lords of his council, all wrought in fine
gold. 'I will have that golden emperor,' said Richard, 'having just made
one out of clay. Let him be sent to me.' He spoke carelessly, as they
all thought, simply to get in his gibe at the new Emperor of the Romans,
his nephew, whom he had caused to be chosen; and seeing that that was
not the treasure he craved, it is like enough. But somebody took his
word into Languedoc, and somebody brought back word (Saint-Pol's word)
that the Viscount of Limoges, as suzerain of Chaluz, claimed
treasure-trove in it. 'Then I will have the Viscount of Limoges as
well,' said Richard. 'Let him be sent to me, and the table with him.'
The Viscount did not go. 'We have him, eh, we have him!' cheered
Saint-Pol, rubbing his hands together.
But the Viscount, 'Be not so very sure. He may send Gaston or Mercadet.
Or if the fit is on him he may come in force. We cannot support that. I
believe that you have played a fool's part, Saint-Pol.'
'I am playing a gentleman's part,' replied the other, 'to entrap a
villain.'
'Your villain is six foot two inches, and hath arms to agree,' said the
Viscount, a dry man.
'We will lay him by the heels, Viscount; we will lop those long arms,
cold-blooded, desperate tyrant. He has brought two lovely ladies to
misery. Now let him know misery.' Thus Saint-Pol, feeling very sure of
himself.
* * * * *
The Queen was at Cahors all this time, living in a convent of white
nuns, probably happier than she had ever been in her life before. Count
John kept her informed of all Richard's offences; Saint-Pol, you may
take my word for it, was so exuberantly on her side that it must be
almost an offence in her to refuse him. But she, in a pure mood of
abnegation, would hear nothing against King Richard. Even when she was
told, with proof positive, that he was in treaty with Rome, she said not
a word to her friends. Secretly she hugged herself, beginning (like most
women) to find pleasure in pain. 'Let him deny me, let him deny me
thrice, even as Thou wert denied, sweet Lord Jesus!' she prayed to
Christ on the wall. 'So denied, Thou didst not cease from loving. I
think the woman in Thee outcried the man.' She got a piercing bliss out
of each new knife stuck in her little jumping heart. Once or twice she
wrote to Alois of France, who was at Fontevrault, in her King's country.
'Dear lady,' she wrote, 'they seek to enrage my lord against me. If you
see him, tell him that I believe nothing that I hear until I receive the
word from his own glorious mouth.' Alois, chilly in her cell, took no
steps to get speech with King Richard. 'Let her suffer: I suffer,' she
would say. And then, curiously jealous lest more pain should be
Berengère's than was hers, a daughter's of France, she made haste to
send assuring messages to Cahors. Still Berengère sweetly agonised.
Saint-Pol sent her letters full of love and duty, enthusiastic,
breathing full arms against her wrongs. But she always replied, 'Count
of Saint-Pol, you do me injury in seeking to redress your own. I admit
nothing against my lord the King. Many hate him, but I love him. My will
is to be meek. Meekness would become you very well also.' Saint-Pol
could not think so.
Lastly came the intelligence that King Richard in person was moving
south with a great force to win the treasure of Chaluz. The news was
true. Not only did he dwell with the nervous persistency of the
afflicted upon the wretched gold Cæsar, but with clearer political
vision saw a chance of subduing all Aquitaine. 'Any stick will do, even
Adhémar of Limoges,' he said, not suspecting Saint-Pol's finger in the
dish; and told Mercadet to summon the knights, and the knights their
array. Before he set out he sent two messengers more--one to Rome, and
one much further east. Then he began his warlike preparations with great
heart.