Thorne Guy
The Serf

CHAPTER XII

 
"Through the gray willows danced the fretful gnat,
The grasshopper chirped idly from the tree,
 In sleek and oily coat the water-rat,
Breasting the little ripples manfully
Made for the wild-duck's nest."
 

They won to land, with the aid of a floating oar. Hyla and Cerdic were for getting back to Icomb and explaining what had befallen them to the fathers, but Huber flatly refused to accompany them. He said it was his duty to go back to Hilgay and say what had become of his comrades, and how they had met their end.

"But if you tell Lord Fulke how you have eaten and slept in friendship – for we must rest and eat before we go – with those that did kill his father, what then?" said Cerdic.

"Lord Fulke would not dare harm me for that, even were I to tell him. I am too well liked among the men. Natheless, I shall say nothing. I shall say that I clomb on the boat, and won the shore, and so made my way home. Look you to this. Can I give up the only life I know, and my master, and eke my wife to serve the priests, or live hunted and outlaw in the fens with you?" He argued it out with perfect fairness and good sense, and, with a sinking of the heart, they saw that their ways must indeed lie very far apart.

Material considerations made the whole thing difficult. They were in an unenviable position, and one of great danger, and their only means of transport was the one boat. "There is only one way," said Cerdic, "and that is this: we must row over the lake to the Priory first, and then leave the boat with Huber to make his own way back over the lake and through the fenways."

The man-at-arms crossed himself with fervour.

"Not I," he said. "I would not venture again upon that accursed lake for my life. It is cursed. You have heard of the Great Black Hand? It is an evil place, and has taken many of my good comrades. Leave you me here and go your ways. I will try to get back through the fen."

"Art no fenman, Huber, and canst scarcely swim. Also, that is the most dangerous part of the fen, the miles between the river and this lake. It's nought but pools, water-ways, and bog. You could not go a mile."

"Then I will stay here and rot. There is no mortal power that shall make me upon that water more."

There was such genuine superstitious terror in his face and voice that they felt it useless to attempt persuasion, and they cast about in their minds for some other solution of the difficulty. It was long in coming, for in truth the problem was very difficult. At last it was solved, poorly enough, but with a certain possibility of safety.

The three men had landed but a few hundred yards from the opening of the water-way which led to Hilgay, winding in devious routes among the fen. To regain the monastery there were two ways – One, the obvious route, by simply crossing the great lake, for the Abbey was almost exactly opposite, and the other, most difficult and dangerous, to skirt the lake side, where there was but little firm ground, and go right round it to the Priory.

Seeing no help for it, they decided on attempting that. Huber was to have the big, heavy boat, and as best he could, make his way back to Hilgay. It was a curious decision to have arrived at. By all possible rights, Hyla and Cerdic should have kept the boat for their own use, and let Huber shift as best he could. He was, or rather had been, an enemy; they had not only treated him with singular kindness, but he owed his very life to them. It is difficult to exactly gauge their motive. Probably their long slavery had something of its influence with them. Despite their new ideals and the stupendous upheaval of their lives, it is certain that they could hardly avoid regarding Huber from the standpoint of their serfdom. He had been one of their rulers, and there still clung to him some savour of authority. Yet it was not all this feeling that influenced them. Some nobler and deeper instinct of self-denial and kindness had made them do this thing.

In a closed locker, in the stern of the boat, they found some fishing lines, and a flint for making fire. It was easy to get food, and they spent the day resting and fishing. At length night fell softly over the wanderers, and they fell asleep round the fire, while the other went scraping among the reeds searching for fresh-water mussels, and the night wind sent black ripples over all the pools and the great lake beyond.

They were early up, catching more fish for breakfast, and, rather curiously for those times, they bathed in the fresh cold water, whereby they were most heartily refreshed and put into good courage. Then came the time of parting. It was fraught with a certain melancholy, for they had seemed very close together in their common danger.

"I doubt we shall ever clap eyes on you again, Huber," Hyla said. "Cerdic and I are not likely to trouble Hilgay again, unless indeed my lord catch us again, and I think there is but little fear of that."

"No, friend Hyla," said the man-at-arms; "we must say a long good-bye this morn."

"You will get back in a day," said Cerdic, "though boat be heavy and the way not easy. What tale will you tell Lord Fulke?"

"Just truth, Cerdic, though indeed I shall not tell all the truth. I shall tell how my good comrades died, and how I did win to land with you two, and left you by the mere. I shall tell Lord Fulke that I could not overcome you, for that you were two to my one, and eke armed. That you saved me from the water I must not say, though well I should like to do so. They would think that I was in league with you, and had failed in my duty, if I said anything to your credit."

"Without doubt," said Hyla.

"You are right, Huber. But I do not look to see Hilgay again."

"And I pray that you never may, friend, for your end would be a very terrible and bloody one. And now hear me. You have taken me to your hearts that did come to use you shamefully. My life is your gift, and I will save pennies that prayer may be made for you by some priest that you be kept from harm, and win quiet and safety. Moreover, never will I do ill to any serf again, for your sakes. For you are good and true men, and have my love. Often I shall remember you and the lake and all that has come about, when I am far away. And give me your hand and say farewell, and Lord Christ have you safe."

They said the saddest of all human words, "farewell," and turning he left them. The big boat moved slowly away among the reeds until it was hidden from their sight. Once they thought they heard his voice in a distant shout of farewell, and they called loudly in answer, but there was no response but the lapping of the water on the reeds.

"A true man," said Hyla sadly.

"I think so," said Cerdic, "and there are many like him also. We have never known them, or they us, but chance has changed that for once. Nevertheless I am not sorry he has gone. We are of one kind and he of another, and best apart. Let us set out round the lake; we have a long task before us, and I fear dangerous."

They gathered up their fishing lines and the remaining fish, which they had cooked for their journey, and set out upon it.

They were full of hope and courage, resolute to surmount the perils and difficulties which were before them, and yet, all innocent of fate, one was going to a sudden death and the other was moving towards an adventure which would end in death and torture also.

It is surely a very good and wise ordering of affairs, that we do not often have a warning of what shall shortly befall us. Only rarely do we feel the cold air from the wings of Death beat upon our doomed faces. Now and then, indeed, we get a glimpse of those unseen principalities and powers by whom we are for ever surrounded. Women in child-birth have, so it is said, seen an angel bearing them the new soul they are going to give to the world, as God's messenger came to Our Lady of old time.

More often the black angel, who is to take us from one life to another, presses upon a man's brain that he may know his near translation. Visions are given to men who have lived as men should live, and have beaten down Satan under their feet.

A wise and awful hand moves the curtain aside for them. And it is sometimes so with a great sinner. When that arch scoundrel Geoffroi was close upon his end, he also had a solemn warning. Fear came to him in the night and whispered, as you have heard, that he was doomed.

But these two children were given no sign. It was not for them; they could not have understood it. God is a psychologist, and He watched these two simple ones very tenderly.

A mile of heavy going lay behind them. Over the quaking fen bright with evil-looking flowers, as beautiful and treacherous as some pale sensual woman of the East, they plodded their weary and complacent way.

Lean, brown, old Cerdic was to die. Radiance was waiting for this poor man, as the sun – how dull beside that greater radiance which was so soon to illuminate him! – clomb up the sky.

They crossed various ditches and water-ways, leaping some and wading breast-high through others, covered with floating scum and weeds. Once or twice a wide pool of black water alive with fish brought them to a check, and they had to swim over it or make a long detour. After about three hours their journey became more easy. There was not so much water about, and the ground, which was covered with fresh, vividly green grass in wide patches, was much firmer.

Cerdic went on in front with a willow-pole, probing the ground to see if it was safe for them to venture on, a most necessary precaution in that land of bog and morass.

They were passing a clump of reeds when, with a quick scurry, a large hare ran out almost under their feet. Something had happened to one of its fore-legs, for it limped badly, and scrambled along at no great rate.

A hare's leg is a wonderfully fragile piece of mechanism, despite its enormous power. Often when the animal is leaping it over-balances itself in mid air, and coming down heavily breaks the thin bone. This is what had happened to the creature that startled them from the reeds.

The quick eye of the old lawer-of-dogs saw at once that the animal was injured and could not go very fast. Here was a chance of food which would be very welcome. With a shout to Hyla he went leaping after it. His lean, brown legs spread over the ground, hardly seeming to touch it as he ran. He soon came up with the hare, but just as he was stooping to grasp it the creature doubled, and was off in a new direction. Hyla saw Cerdic pick himself up, stumble, recover, and flash away on the new track. In a minute a tall hedge of reeds, which seemed as if they might fringe a pool, hid him from view.

Hyla plodded slowly on, wondering if Cerdic would catch the hare, and thinking with a pleasant stomachic anticipation what a very excellent meal they might have if that were so. In about five minutes he came up to the reeds, and just as he approached them his heart gave a great leap of fear. Cerdic was calling him, but in a voice such as he had never heard him use before, it was so changed and terrible. Half shout, half whine, and wholly unnerving. He plunged through the cover, the wet splashing up round his feet in little jets as he did so, and then he came across his friend.

Six or more yards away there was a stretch of what at first glance appeared to be pleasant meadow land, so bright was the grass and so studded with flowers. In the centre of the space, which might measure twenty square yards, Cerdic stood engulfed to the waist, and rapidly sinking deeper. He made superhuman efforts to extricate himself. His arms beat upon the sward, and his hands clutched terribly at the tufts of grass and marsh flowers. His face, under all its tan, became a dark purple, as the terrible pressure on his body increased, and he began to bleed violently from the nose, and to vomit. Hyla went cautiously towards him, but every step he took became more dangerous, and he was forced to stand still in an agony of helplessness. Even in his own comparative security he could feel the soft caressing ground sucking eagerly at his feet.

He watched in horror. Slowly now, though with horrible distinctness, the body of his friend was going from him. The green grass lay round his arm-pits, and his arms were extended upon it at right angles like the arms of a man crucified. His fingers kept jumping up and down as if he were playing upon some instrument.

Then there came a gleam of hope. The motion ceased, and the head and upper part of the shoulders remained motionless.

"Have you touched bottom, Cerdic?" Hyla called in a queer high-pitched voice that startled himself.

"No, Hyla," came in thick, difficult reply, "and I die. I am going away from you, and must say farewell. I have loved you very well, and now good-bye. I am not afraid. Good-bye. I will pray to God as I die. Do you also pray, and farewell, farewell!"

He closed his staring eyes, and very gradually the sucking motion recommenced.

Hyla stared stupidly at this slow torture, unable to move or think.

It was soon over now, and the body sank very quickly away, and left the survivor gazing without thought at the spot where nothing marked a grave.

As he watched, a hare with a broken leg began to hobble across the vivid greenness.

CHAPTER XIII

"A most composed invincible man, in difficulty and distress knowing no discouragement, in danger and menace laughing at the whisper of fear."

There is a wonderful steadfast courage about men of Hyla's breed. Even though the object they pursue has lost its value, they go on in a dogged relentless "following up" from which nothing can turn them.

For two hours or more he mourned and thought of old times, gazing in a kind of strange wonder at the silent carpet of grass. The shrewd weatherworn face, the twinkling eager eyes, the nasal drawl which so glibly offered up petitions to heaven, all came back to him with a singular vividness. He was surprised to find how actual and clear his friend's personality was to him. It almost frightened him. He glanced round him once or twice uneasily. Cerdic seemed so real and near, an unseen partner in the silence.

When one has heard bells tolling for a long time, and suddenly they stop, the brain is still conscious of the regular lin-lan-lone.

While this psychic influence eddied round him, and the kindly old face, ploughed deep with toil and sorrow, was still a veritable possession of his brain, there was a certain comfort.

As it began to fade, as day from the sky, his loneliness came upon him like death. The real agony of his loss began, and it tortured him until he could feel no more. Pain is its own anodyne in the end.

The cordage of his brave heart was so racked and strained by all he had endured that its capacity for sensation was over. So he mourned Cerdic dead no longer, his heart was dead.

But we know nothing of this poor brother, if not that in him was a sound piece of manhood, hardened, tempered, and strong. His soul was sweet and healthy, his rough-built body proud of blood and powerful. He must go on and fear nothing. Once more he must rise from his fall and try fortune with a stout sad heart, proving his own Godhead and the glory of his will, over which Fate could have no lordship.

In this only, as the poet sang, are men akin to gods, and in all life there is no glory like the "glory of going on."

Then did Hyla, the invincible, rise from the ground to breast circumstance —per varios casus– to seek his Latium once more.

He fell to eating cold roast fish.

When he set out again, he had to make a long detour. The sounding pole still remained to him, and he probed every step as he slowly skirted the treacherous green. It was characteristic of him that as he left the fatal spot where the dead Cerdic lay deep down in the mud he never looked round or gazed sadly at the place. He had no thought of sentimental leave-taking, no little poetic luxury of grief moved him. It were an action for a slighter brain than this.

It began to be late afternoon, as Hyla made a slow and difficult progress. He had got round the swamp, and pushed on over the fen. Sometimes he waded through stagnant pools fringed with rushes and covered with brilliant copper-coloured water plants. Once, pushing his pole before him, he swam over a wide black pond in which the sun was mirrored all blood red. Often he broke his way through forests of reeds which spiked up far above his head. Everywhere before him the creatures of the fen ran trembling.

Sometimes the firmer ground he came to was as brilliant as old carpets from the house of an Eastern king. The yellow broom moss was maturing, and bright chestnut-coloured capsules curved among it. The wild thyme crisped under his feet. The fairy down of the cotton grass floated round them.

Little tufts of pale sea-lavender nestled among the long leaves of the marsh zostera, plump, rank, and full of moisture. The fox-tail grass and the cat's-tail grass flourished everywhere.

We of to-day can have but a faint idea of that wonderful and luxuriant carpet over which he trod. The fair yellow corn now stands straight and tall over those solitudes. The broad dyke cut deep in the brown peat now straightly cleaves the fen, still beautiful and rich in life, but changed for ever from its ancient magic.

By night the lone sprites of the marsh with their ghostly lamps flit disconsolate, for the hand of man has come and tamed that teeming wilderness which was once so strange and alien from Man. Man was not wanted there in those old days, and the cruel swamps claimed a life-sacrifice as the price of their invasion.

Hyla's hard brown feet were all stained by the living carpet on which they walked. His advancing tread broke down the great vivid crimson balls of the agaricus fungus, and split its fat milk-white stem into creamy flakes. The crimson poison painted his instep, and the bright orange chanterelle mingled its harmless juice with that of its deadly cousin. His ankles were powdered with the dull pink-white of the hydnum, that strong mushroom on which they say the hedgehog feeds greedily at midnight, the tiny fruit of the "witches' butter" crumbled at his touch.

Over all, the fierce dragon-fly swung its mailed body, the Geoffroi of the fen insects.

The light and shadow sweeping over the wheat in its ordered planting are beautiful, but Hyla saw what we can never see in England more, saw with his steadfast, regardless eyes more natural beauties than we can ever see again.

In every clump of reeds that fringed the pool, he came suddenly upon some old pike basking in the sun, like a mitred bishop in his green and gold. The green water flags trembled as he sunk away.

The herons paddled in the shallow pools, and tossed the little silver fish from them to each other, the cold-eyed hawk dropped like a shooting star, and fought the stoat for his new-killed prey.

The shadows lengthened and lay in patches over the wild world of water. The blue mists began to rise from a hundred pools, and the bats to flicker through them. The sunlight faded rapidly away, the world became greyish ochre colour, then grey, a soft cobweb grey, through which fell the hooting of an owl, and the last call of a plover.

Resolute, though wearied and faint, firm in resolve, though with a bitter loneliness at his heart, Hyla plunged on through the twilight. For some little time the ground had been much firmer and a little raised above the level of the fen, but as day was dying, he found he had entered upon a long and gradual slope, and that once more it behoved him to walk with infinite care.

Old rotting tree-trunks cropped up here and there, relics of some vast, ancient forest, which, mingling with rotting vegetation of all kinds, sent up a smell of decay in his nostrils. At every step he sank up to the knees, and brown water, the colour of brandy, splashed up to his waist.

He seemed to have arrived at a more desolate evil part of the fens than before. The approaching night made his progress more and more difficult. It was here that the night herons had their nests and breeding-places, inaccessible to men. The ground was bespattered with their excrements, and with feathers, broken egg-shells, old nests, and half-eaten fish covered with yellow flies.

Then as he ploughed on he saw a sight at which even his stout heart failed him. His long struggle seemed suddenly all in vain. Right before him was a wide creek or arm of the lake, two hundred yards from reeds to reedy shore, entirely barring the way. Too far for him to swim, all dead-weary as he was, mysterious and ugly in the faint light, it gave him over utterly to despair.

It began to be cold, and the chilly marish-vapour crept into his bones and turned the marrow of them to ice.

He sat on a mound formed by a great log and the dèbris of a mass of decayed roots, the whole damp and cold as a fish's belly, and covered with living fungi and slimy moss. His feet were buried in the brown water.

It was now too dark to move in any direction with safety, and until day should break again he must remain where he was. He had no more food of any kind, and was absolutely exhausted. So he moaned a little prayer, more from habit than from any comfort in the act, and stretching himself over the damp moss fell into a fitful sleep. He dreamed he was back at the Priory, and heard in his dreaming the distant sound of the monks singing prayers.

It was a picture of his own life, this sorry end to all his day's endeavour. It fore-shadowed his career, so rapidly darkening down into death. His life-path, trod with such bitterness, growing ever more devious and painful, while the ignes fatui of Hope danced round its closing miles!