"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 _débris_ 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!