The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay by Maurice Hewlett (digital ebook reader .txt) 📗

After that short, stabbing flash across his face, he shut down misery in a vice. The rest of his talk with the Count might have been held with a groom. Henry of Champagne, knowing the man, left him the moment he got the word; and King Richard sat down by the table, and for three hours never stirred. He was literally motionless. Straightly rigid, a little grey about the face, white at the cheek-bones; his clenched hand stiff on the board, white also at the knuckles; his eyes fixed on the door—men came in, knelt and said their say, then encountering his blank eyes bent their heads and backed out quietly. If he thought, none may learn his thought; if he felt, none may touch the place; if he prayed, let those who are able imagine his prayers. What Jehane had been to him this book may have shadowed out: this only I say, that he knew, from the very first hint of the fact, why she had gone out with Milo and sent Milo home alone. The Queen knew, because Jehane had told her; but he knew with no telling at all. She had gone away to save him from herself. Needing him not, because she so loved him, it was her beauty which was hungry for his desire. Not daring to mar her beauty, she had sought to hide it. Greater love hath none than this. If he thought of that it should have softened him. He did not think of it: he knew it.

At the end of his grim vigil he got up and went out of his house. He was served with his horse, his esquires came at call to the routine of garrison days and nights. He rode round the walls, out at one of the gates, on a sharp canter of reconnaissance in the hills. Perhaps he spoke more shortly than usual, and more drily; there may have been a dead quality in his voice, usually so salient. There was no other sign. At supper he sat before them all, ate and drank at his wont. Once only he startled the hallful of them. He dropped his great gold cup, and it split.

But as day followed night, all men saw the change in him, Christians and Saracens alike. A spirit of quiet savagery seemed to possess him; the cunning, with the mad interludes, of a devil. He set patient traps for the Saracens in the hills, and slaughtered all he took. One day he fell upon a great caravan of camels coming from Babylon to Jerusalem, and having cut the escort to pieces, slew also the merchants and travellers. He seemed to give the sword the more heartily in that he sought it for himself, but could never get it. No doubt he deserved to get it. He performed deeds of impossible foolhardy gallantry, the deeds of a knight-errant; rode solitary, made single-handed rescues, suffered himself to be cut off from his posts, and then with a handful of knights, or alone, indeed, carved his way back to Darum. Des Barres, the Earl of Leicester and the Grand Master, never left his side; Gaston of Béarn used to sleep at the foot of his bed and creep about after him like a cat; but this terrible mood of his wore them out. Then, at last, the Count of Champagne came back with Milo and more bad news. Joppa was in sore straits, again besieged; the Bishop of Sarum was returned from the West, having a branch of dead broom in his hand and stories of a throttled kingdom on his lips.

Before any other Richard had Milo alone. The good abbot is very reticent about the interview in his book. What he omits is more significant than what he says. 'I found my master,' he writes, 'sitting up in his bed in his hauberk of mail. They told me he had eaten nothing for two days, yet vomited continually. He had killed five hundred Saracens meantime. I suppose he knew who I was. "Tell me, my good man," he said (strange address!), "the name of the person to whom Madame d'Anjou took you."

'I said, "Sire, we went to the Lord of the Assassins, whom they call Old Man of Musse."

'"Why did you go, monk?" he asked, and felt about for his sword, but could not find it. Yet it was close by. I said, "Sire, because of a report which had reached the ears of Madame that the Marquess and the Old Man were in league to have you murdered." To this he made no reply, except to call me a fool. Later he asked, "How died the Marquess?"

'"Sire," I answered, "most miserably. He went up Lebanon to see the Old Man, and came presently down again with two of the Assassins in his company, but none of his train. These persons, being near his city of Sidon, at a signal agreed upon stabbed him with their long knives, then cut off his right hand and despatched it to the Old Man by one of them. The other stayed by the corpse, and was so found peacefully sleeping, and burned."

'The King said nothing, but gave me money and a little jewel he used to wear, as if I had done him a service. Then he nodded a dismissal, and I, wondering, left him. He did not speak to me again for many weeks.'

You may collect that Richard was very ill. He was. The disease of his mind fed fat upon the disease of his body, and from the spoils of the feast savagery reared its clotted head. Syrian mothers still quell their children with the name of Melek Richard, a reminiscence of the dreadful time when he was without ruth or rest. He spoke of his purposes to none, listened to none. The Bishop of Sarum had come in with a budget of disastrous news: Count John had England under his heel, Philip of France had entered Normandy in force, the lords of Aquitaine were in revolt. If God had no use for him in the East, here was work to do in the West. But had He none? What of Joppa, shuddering under the sword? What of Acre, where the French army wallowed in sloth, with two queens at its mercy and Saint-Pol in the mercy-seat? What, indeed, of Jehane?

Nobody breathed her name; yet night and day the image of her floated, half-hid in scarlet clouds, before King Richard. These clouds, a torn regiment, raced across his vision, like cavalry broken, in mad retreat. Out of the tumbled mass two hands would throw up, white, long, thin hands, Jehane's hands drowned in frothy blood. Then, in his waking dream, when he drove in the spurs and started to save, the colours changed, black swam over the blood; and one hand only would stay, held up warningly, saying, 'Forbear, I am separate, fenced, set apart.' Thus it was always: menace, wicked endeavour, shipwreck, ruin; always so, her agony and denial, his wrath and defeat.

But this was wholesome torment. There was other not so purgatorial—damned torment. That was when the sudden thought of her possession by another man, of his own robbery, his own impotence to regain, came upon him in a surging flood and made his neck swell with the rage of a beast. And no crouching to spring, no flash through the air, no snatching here. Here was no Gilles de Gurdun to deal with. Only the beast's resource was his, who had the beast's desire without his power. At such times of obsession he lashed up and down his chamber or the flat roof of his house, all the tragic quest of a leopard in a cage making blank his desperate hunting eyes. 'Lord, Lord, Lord, how long can this endure?' Alas, the cage was wider than any room, and stronger by virtue of his own fashioning of the locks. But to do him justice, Jehane's grave face would sail like a moon among the storm-clouds sooner or later, and humble him to the dust.

Sometimes, mostly at dawn, when a cool wind stole through the trees, he saw the trail of events more clearly, and knew whom to blame and whom to praise. Generous as he was through and through, at these times he did not spare the whip. But the image he set up before whom to scourge himself was Jehane Saint-Pol, that pure cold saint, offering up her proud body for his needs; and so sure as he did that he desired her, and so sure as he desired he raged that he had been robbed. Robber as he owned himself, now he had been robbed. So the old black strife began again. Many and many a dawn, as he thought of these things, he went out alone into the shadowless places of the land, to the quiet lapping sea, to the gardens, or to the housetop fronting the new-born day, with prayer throbbing for utterance, but a tongue too dry to pray. Despair seized on him, and he led his men out to death-dealing, that so haply he might find death for himself. The time wore to early summer, while he was nightly visited by the thought of his sin, and daily winning more stuff for repentance. Then, one morning, instead of going out singly to battle with his own soul, he went in to the Abbot Milo. What follows shall be told in his own words.

'The King came to me very early in the morning of Saints Primus and Felician, while I yet lay in my bed. "Milo, Milo," said he, "what must I do to be saved?" He was very white and wild, shaking all over. I said, "Dear Master, save thy people. On all sides they cry to thee—from England, from Normandy, from Anjou, from Joppa also, and Acre. There is no lack of entreaty." He shook his head. "Here," he said, "I can do no more. God is against me, the work too holy for such a wretch." "Lord," I said, "we are all wretches, Heaven save us! If your Grace is held off God's inheritance, you can at least hold others from your own. Here, may be, you took a charge too heavy; but there, at home, the charge was laid upon you. Renouncing here, you shall gain there. It cannot be otherwise." I believed in what I said; but he gripped the caps of his knees and rocked himself about. "They have beaten me, Milo. Saint-Pol, Burgundy, Beauvais—I am bayed by curs. What am I, Milo?" "Sire," I said, "your father's son. As they bayed the old lion, so they bay the young." He gaped at me, open-mouthed. "By God. Milo," he said, "I bayed him myself, and believed that he deserved it." "Lord," I answered, "who am I to judge a great king? For my part I never believed that monstrous sin was upon him." Here he jumped up. "I am going home, Milo," he said; "I am going home. I am going to my father's tomb. I will do penance there, and serve my people, and live clean. Look now, Milo, shrive me if thou hast the power, for my need is great." The thought was blessed to him. He confessed his sins then and there, all a huddle of them, weeping so bitterly that I should have wept myself had I not been ready rather to laugh and crack my fingers to see the breaking up of his long and deadly frost. Before I shrived him, moreover, I dared to speak of Madame Jehane, how he had now lost her for ever, and why; how she was now at last a man's wife, and that by her own deliberate will; and how also he must do his duty by the Queen. To all of which he gave heed and promises of quiet endurance. Then I shrived him, and that very morning gave him the Lord's sacred body in the Church of the Sepulchre. I believed him sane; and so for a long time he was, as he testified by deeds of incredible valour.'

It was not long after this that the fleet put out to sea, shaping course for Acre. Message after message came in from beleaguered Joppa; but King Richard paid little heed to them, pending the issue of new treating with Saladin. He certainly sailed with a single eye on Acre. But Joppa lay on his course, and it is probable, he being what he was, that the sight of no means to do great deeds made great deeds done. When his red galley sighted Joppa, standing in for the purpose, all seemed over with the doomed city. This, no doubt (since his mood was hot), urged him to one of those impossible acts, 'incredible deeds of valour,' as Milo calls them, for which his name lives, while those of many better