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.