I am not of a nature to be long overwhelmed. All that night and far into the next day I lay upon Voewood, alternately sleeping and bewailing the chance which tossed me to and fro upon the restless ocean of time, and then I arose. I threw my arms round each in turn of those dear, callous ones in the chapel, and pushed back the brambles from them, and wept a little, and told myself the pleasure-store of life was now surely spent to the very last coin—then, with a mighty effort, tore myself away. Again and again, while the smooth swell of the grassy mound under which the foundations of the long-destroyed Saxon homestead with the little chapel by the rivulet were in sight, I turned and turned, loth and sad. But no sooner had the leafy screen hid them than I set off and ran whither I knew not, nor cared—indeed, I was so terribly drawn by that spot—so close in the meshes of its association, so thralled by the presence of the dust of all I had had to lose or live for, that I feared, if the best haste were not made, I should neither haste nor fly from that terribly sweet hillock of lamentations forever.
What could it matter where my wandering feet were turned? All the world was void and vapid, east and west alike indifferent, to one so homeless, and thus I stalked on through glades and coppices for hours and days, with my chin upon my chest, and feeling marvelously cheap and lonely. But enough of this. Never yet did I crave sympathy of any man: why should I seem to seek it of you—skeptical and remote?
There were those who appeared at that time to take compassion on me unasked, and I remember the countrywomen at whose cottage doors I hesitated a moment—yearning with pent-up affection over their curly-headed little ones—added to the draught of water I begged such food as their slender stores provided. One of these gave me a solid green forester’s cape and jerkin; another put shoes of leather upon my feet; and a third robbed her husband’s pegs to find me headwear, and so through the gifts of their unspoken good-will I came by degrees into the raiment of the time.
But nothing seemed to hide the inexpressible strangeness I began to carry about with me. No sorry apparel, no woodman’s cap drawn down over my brows, no rustic clogs upon my wandering feet, masked me for a moment from the awe and wonder of these good English people. None of them dared ask me a question, how I came or where I went, but everywhere it was the same. They had but to look upon me, and up they rose, and in silence, and, drawn involuntarily by that stern history of mine they knew naught of, they ministered to me according to their means. The women dropped their courtesies, and—unasked, unasking—fed the grim and ragged stranger from their cleanest platter, the men stood by and uncapped them to my threadbare russet, and whole groups would watch spellbound upon the village mounds as I paced moodily away.
In course of time my grief began to mend, so that it was presently possible to take a calmer view of the situation, and to bend my thoughts upon what it were best to do next. Though I love the greenwood, and am never so happy as when solitary, yet my nature was not made, alas! for sylvan idleness. I felt I had the greatest admiration and brotherhood with those who are recluse and shun the noisy struggles of the world; yet had I always been a leader of men, I now remembered, as all the pages of my past history came one by one before me and I meditated upon them day and night. No, I was not made to walk these woods alone, and, if another argument were wanting, it were found in the fact that I was here exposed to every weather, hungry and shelterless! I could not be forever begging from door to door, eternally throwing my awe-inspiring shadow across the lintels of these gentle-mannered woodland folk, and my tastes, though never gluttonous, rebelled most strongly against the perpetual dietary of herbs and roots and limpid brooks.
Reflecting on these things one day, as I lay friendless and ragged in the knotty elbow of a great oak’s earth-bare roots, after some weeks of homeless wandering, I fell asleep, and dreamed all the fair shining landscape were a tented field, and all the rustling rushes down by the neighboring streamlet’s banks were the serried spears of a great concourse of soldiers defiling by, the sparkle of the sunlight on the ripples seeming like the play of rays upon their many warlike trappings, the yellow flags and water-flowers making no poor likeness of dancing banners and bannerets.
’Twas a simple dream, such as came of an empty stomach and a full head, yet somehow I woke from that sleep with more of my old pulse of pleasure and life beating in my veins than had been there for a long time. And with the wish for another spell of bright existence, spent in the merry soldier mood that suited me so well, came the means to attain it.
In the first stage of these wanderings, while still fresh from the cloister shrine, I had paid but the very smallest heed to my attire and its details. I was clad in clean, sufficient wraps, so much was certain, with a linen belt about me, and sandals upon my feet; yet even this was really more than I noticed with any closeness. But as I ran and walked, and my flesh grew hot and nervous with the fever of my sorrow, a constant chafing of my feet and hands annoyed me. I had stopped by a woodside river bank, and there discovered with wrathful irritation that upon my bare apostolic toes and upon my sanctified thumbs—those soldier thumbs still flat and strong with years of pressing sword-hilts and bridle-reins—there were glistening in holy splendor such a set of gorgeous gems as had rarely been taken for a scramble through the woods before! There were beryls and sapphires and pearls, and ruddy great rubies from the caftans of Paynim chiefs slain by long-dead Crusaders, and onyx and emerald from Cyprus and the remotest East set in rude red gold by the rough artificers of rearward ages, and all these put upon me, no doubt, after the manner in which at that time credulous piety was wont to bedeck the shrine and images of saints and martyrs. I was indeed at that moment the wealthiest beggar who ever sat forlorn and friendless on a grassy lode. But what was all this glistening store to me, desolate and remorseful, with but one remembrance in my heart, with but one pitiful sight before my eyes? I pulled the shining gems angrily from my swollen fingers and toes and hurled them one by one, those princely toys, into the muddy margin of the stream, and there, in that rude setting, ablazing, red, and green, and white, and hot and cool, with their wonderful scintillations they mocked me. They mocked me as I sat there with my chin in my palms, and twinkled and shone among the sludge and scum so merrily to the flickering sunshine, that presently I laughed a little at those cheerful trinkets that could shine so bravely in the contumacy of chance, and after a time I picked up one and rinsed it and held it out in the sunshine, and found it very fair—so fair, indeed, that a glimmer of listless avarice was kindled within me, and later on I broke a hawthorn spray and groped among the sedge and mire and hooked out thus, in better mood, the greater part of my strange inheritance.
Then, here I was, upon this other bank, waking up after my dream, and, turning over the better to watch the fair landscape stretching below, my waistcloth came unbound, and out upon the sand amid the oak roots rolled those ambient, glistening rings again. At first I was surprised to see such jewels in such a place, staring in dull wonderment while I strove to imagine whence they came, but soon I remembered piece by piece their adventure as has been told to you, and now, with the warm blood in my veins again, I did not throw them by, but lay back against the oak and chuckled to myself as my ambitious heart fluttered with pleasure under my draughty rags, and crossed my legs, and weighed upon my finger-tips, and inventoried, and valued, all in the old merchant spirit, those friendly treasures.
How unchanging are the passions of humanity! I tossed those radiant playthings up in the sunlight and caught them, I counted and recounted them, I tore shreds from my clothing and cleaned and polished each in turn, I started up angry and suspicious as a kite’s wheeling shadow fell athwart my hoard. Forgotten was hunger and houselessness—I no longer mourned so keenly the emptiness of the world or the brevity of friendships: I, to whom these treasures should have been so light, overlooked nearly all my griefs in them, and was as happy for the moment in this unexpected richness as a child.
And then, after an hour or so of cheerful avarice, I sat up sage and reflective, and, having swathed and wrapped my store safely next my heart, I must needs climb the first grassy knoll showing above the woodlands and search the horizon for some place wherein a beginning might be made of spending it. Nothing was to be seen thence but a goodly valley spread out at a distance, and there my steps were turned—for men, like streams, ever converge upon the lowlands.
Now that I had the heart to fall into beaten tracks, coming out of the sheltering thicket byways for the first time since quitting the mounds over the ashes of Voewood, I observed more of the new people and times among whom fate had thus thrown me. And truly it was a very strange meeting with these folk, who were they whom I had known when last I walked these woods, and yet were not. I would stare at them in perplexity, marveling at the wondrous blend of nations I saw in face and hair and eyes. Their very clothes were novel to me, and unaccountable, while their speech seemed now the oddest union of many tongues—all foreign, yet upon these English lips most truly native—and wondrous to listen to. I would pass a sturdy yokel leading out his teams to plowing, and when I spoke to him it made my ears tingle to hear how antique Roman went hand in hand with ancient British, and good Norman was linked upon his lips with better Saxon! That polyglot youth, knowing no tongue but one, was most scholarly in his ignorance. To him ’twas English that he spoke; but to me, who had lived through the making of that noble speech, who knew each separate individual quantity that made that admirable whole, his jargon was most wonderful!
Nor was I yet fully reconciled to the unity of these new people and their mutual kinsmanship. I could not remember all feuds were ended. When down the path would come a more than usually dusky wayfarer—a trooper, perhaps, with leather jerkin, shield on back, and sword by side—I would note his swart complexion and dark black hair, and then ’twas “Ho! ho! a Norman villain straying from his band!” And back I would step among the shadows, and, gripping the staff that was my only weapon, scowl on him while he whistled by, half mindful, in my forgetfulness, to help the Saxon cause by rapping the fellow over his head. On the other hand if one chanced upon me who had the flaxen hair and pleasant eyes of those who once were called my comrades—if he wore the rustic waistless smock, as many did still, of hind or churl—why, then, I was mighty glad to see that Saxon, and crossed over, friendly, to his pathway, bespeaking him in the pure tongue of his forefathers, asked him of garth and homestead, and how fared his thane and heretoga—all of which, it grieved me afterward to notice, perplexed him greatly.
Not only in these ways was there much for me to learn, but, with speech and fashions, modes and means of life had changed. At one time I met a strange piebald creature, all tags and tassels, white and red, with a hundred little bells upon him, a cap with peaks hanging down like asses’ ears, and a staff, with more bells, tucked away under his arm. He was plodding along dejected, so I called to him civilly:
“Why, friend! Who are you?”
“I am a fool, Sir!”
“Never mind,” I replied cheerfully, “there is the less likelihood of your ever treading this earth companionless.”
“Why, that is true enough,” he said, “for it was too much wisdom that sent me thus solitary afield,” and he went on to tell me how he had been ejected that morning from a neighboring castle. “I had belauded and admired my master for years—therein I had many friends, yet was a fool. Yesterday we quarreled about some trifle—I called him beast and tyrant, and therein, being just and truthful, I lost my place and comrades over the first wise thing I said for years!—it is a most sorry, disorderly world.”[2]
This strange individual, it seemed, lived by folly, and, though I had often noticed that wit was not a fat profession, I could not help regarding him with wonder. He was, under his veneer of shallowness, a most gentle and observant jester. Long study in the arts of pleasing had given him a very delicate discrimination of moods and men. He could fit a merriment to the capacity of any man’s mind with extraordinary acumen. He had stores of ill-assorted learning in the empty galleries of his head, and wherewithal a kindly, gentle heart, a whimsical companionship for sad-eyed humanity which made him haste to laugh at everything through fear of crying over it. We were companions before we had gone a mile, and many were the things I learned of him. When our way parted I pressed one of my rings into his hand. “Good-by, fool!” I said.
“Good-by, friend!” he called. “You are the first wise man with whom I ever felt akin”; and indeed, as his poor buffoon’s coat went shining up the path, I felt bereft and lonely again for a spell.
Then I found another craftsman of this curious time. A little way farther on, near by to a lordly house standing in wide stretches of meadow and park lands, a most plaintive sound came from a thicket lying open to the sun. Such a dismal moaning enlisted my compassion, for here, I thought, is some luckless wight just dying or, at least, in bitterest extremity of sorrow: so I approached, stepping lightly round the blossoming thicket—peering this way and that, and now down on my hands and knees to look under the bushes, and now on tiptoe, craning my neck that I might see over, and so, presently, I found the source of the sighs and moans. It was a young man of most dainty proportions, with soft, fine-combed hair upon his pretty sloping shoulders, his sleeves so long they trailed upon the moss, his shoes laced with golden threads and toed and tasseled in monstrous fashion. A most delicate perfume came from him: his clothes were greener than grass in springtime, turned back, and puffed with damask. In his hand he had a scroll whereon now and again he looked, and groaned in most plaintive sort.
“Why, man,” I asked, “what ails you? Why that dreadful moaning? What are you, and what is yon scroll?” So absorbed was he, however, it was only when I had walked all round him to spy the wound, if it might be, that he suffered from, and finally stood directly in his sunshine, repeating the question, that he looked up.
“Interrupter of inspiration! Hast thou asked what I am, and what this is?”
“Yes; and more than once.”
“Fie! not to see! I am a minstrel—a bard; my Lord’s favorite poet up at yonder castle, and this is an ode to his mistress’s eyebrows. I was in travail of a rhyme when thy black shadow fell upon the page.”
“Give me the leaf! Why, it is the sickliest stuff that ever did dishonor to virgin paper! There, take it back,” I said, angry to find so many fools abroad, “and listen to me! You may be a poet, for I have no experience of them, but as I am a man thou art not a bard! You a bard! You the likeness and descendant of Howell ap Griffith and a hundred other Saxon gleemen! You one of the guild of Gryffith ap Conan—you a scop or a skald!—why, boy, they could write better stuff than thou canst though they had been drunk for half a day! You a stirrer of passions—you a minstrel—you a tightener of the strong sinews of warrior hearts!—fie! for shame upon your silly trivial sonnets, your particolored suits and sweet insipid vaporings! Out, I say! Get home to thy lady’s footstool, or, by Thor and Odin, I will give thee a beating out of pure respect for noble rhyming!”
The poet did not wait to argue. I was angry and rough, and the rudest-clad champion that ever swung a flail in the cause of the muses. So he took to his heels, and as I watched that pretty butterfly aiming across the sunny meadows for his master’s portals, and stopping not for hedge or ditch, “By Hoth,” I said, laughing scornfully, “we might have been friends if he could but have writ as well as he can run!”
Then I went on again, and had not gone far, when down the road there came ambling on a mule a crafty-looking Churchman, with big wallets hanging at his saddle-bows, a portentous rosary round his neck, and bare, unwashed feet hanging stirrupless by his palfrey’s side.
“Now here’s another tradesman,” I muttered to myself, “of this most perplexing age. Heaven grant his wares are superior to the last ones! Good-morning, Father!”
“Good-morning, Son! Art going into the town to take up arms for Christ and His servant Edward?”
“Yes,” I answered, “I am bound to the town, but I have not yet chosen a master.”
“Then you are all the more sure to go to the fighting, for every one, just now, who has no other calling, is apprentice to arms.”
“It will not be the first time I have taken that honorable indenture.”
“No, I guess not,” said the shrewd Friar, eyeing me under his penthouse eyebrows, “for thou art a stout and wiry-looking fellow, and may I never read anything better than my breviary again if I cannot construe in your face a good and varied knowledge of camps and cities. But there was something else I had to say to you.” [“Here comes the point of the narrative,” I thought to myself.] “Now, so trim a soldier as you, and one wherewithal so reflective, would surely not willingly go where hostile swords are waving and cruel French spears are thicker than yonder tall-bladed glass, unshriven—with all thy sins upon thy back?”
“Why then, monk, I must stay at home. Is that what you would say?”
“Nay, not at all. There is a middle way. But soft! Hast any money with thee?”
“Enough to get a loaf of bread and a cup of ale.”
“Oh!” said the secret pardoner (for his calling was then under ban and fine), a little disappointedly, “that is somewhat small, but yet, nevertheless,” he muttered partly to himself, “these are poor times, and when all plump partridges are abroad Mother Church’s falcons must necessarily fly at smaller game. Look here! good youth. Forego thy mortal appetites, defer thy bread and ale, and for that money saved thereby I will sell thee one of these priceless parchments here in my wallet—scrolls, young man, hot from the holy footstool of our blessed father in Rome, and carrying complete unction and absolution to the soul of their possessor! Think, youth! is not eternal redemption worth a cup of muddy ale? Fie to hesitate! Line thy bosom with this blessed scroll, and go to war cleaner-hearted than a new-born babe. There! I will not be exacting. For one of those silver groats I fancy I see tied in thy girdle I will give thee absolute admittance into the blessed company of saints and martyrs. I tell thee, man, for half a zecchin I will make thee comrade of Christ and endow thee with eternity! Is it a bargain?”
Silent and disdainful, I, who had seen a dozen hierarchies rise and set in the various peopled skies of the world, took the parchment from him and turned away and read it. It was, as he said—more shame on human intellect!—a full pardon of the possessor’s sins wrote out in bad Norman Latin, and bearing the sign and benediction of St. Peter’s chair. I read it from top to bottom, then twisted its red tapes round it again and threw it back to that purveyor of absolutions. Yes; and I turned upon that reverend traveler and scorned and scouted him and his contemptible baggage. I told him I had met two sad fools since noon, but he was worse than either. I scoffed him, just as my bitter mood suggested, until I had spent both breath and invention, then turned contemptuous, and left him at bay, mumbling inarticulate maledictions upon my biting tongue.
No more of these shallow panderers fell in my path to vex and irritate me, and before the white evening star was shining through the brilliant tapestry of the sunset over the meadow-lands in the west, I had drawn near to and entered the strong, shadowy, moated walls of my first English city.