For a while he swept on oblivious of fatigue and faintness from lack
of food. The one definite thought in his mind was that he was needed,
there was work for him to do. The success of the great Uprising was
endangered, and he was on his way to turn failure into victory. He
would bring the men back to reason, he would show them how much
depended upon it that they come before the King with clean hands.
For the first time in many months the old elixir of leadership ran
through his veins. He was a man, a worker, once more. The dreamer, the
monk, the scholar were gone--swallowed up in a wave of disgust for the
life of the past few months. Of what use had he been to the world? With
infinite toil he had copied a few words from the Past. What had he done
for the unborn Future? Always with eyes and ears turned backward, he
had been like those unfortunates on whom Dante had looked with such
horror, who had their faces turned toward their reins. It seemed a
strange whim that he could have delighted in the calm shelter of the
Abbey; he now regarded it with detestation--it was the false peace
against which his master, John Wyclif, had warned him. He was again
breasting the stormy currents of life. The call of his people had come
to him, and he was on his way to them. His long sleep was over. He was
awake now. They needed him. He would save them.
"I am coming," he tried to shout, but he was voiceless, and suddenly
his knees sank under him and he fell heavily to the ground.
For a long time he lay on the ground unconscious. As consciousness
slowly and painfully came back to him, he looked about him wildly,
and tried to recall what had happened. He was lying among the fens
before the Cathedral. He was chilled through with the ooze of the
swamp soaking up through the long grasses which were crushed beneath
him where he had fallen. He found it impossible to rise. The land lay
wrapped in the silence of evening. He could hear only the voices of
frogs unceasingly ringing like sleigh bells, an occasional sobbing sigh
of the wind as it touched the line of rushes, and the sucking of the
water into the grasses as he stirred.
A terrible sense of some task to be done oppressed him. What was it?
For a long time he gazed dumbly up at the sullen steely clouds that
were driving across the heavens with a powerful rush and swirl. A damp
sea fog was coming in from the ocean, and only now and then could
he see the outlines of the Cathedral, looming up grimly against the
horizon, cold and dark and forbidding, as some great monster looking
down in triumph on his helplessness.
Of a sudden there were lights moving in the distance where lay the
highroad to Sudbury. They moved about restlessly as if borne on
the shoulders of moving men. Sometimes they halted, and sometimes
they grouped themselves in twos and threes, and again they moved on
rhythmically in regular unison. Hoarse cries and orders came to him
in muffled tones, and at last he could make out that some people were
singing, and by listening intently, he could just make out the words:--
"With right and with might
With skill and with will;
Let might help right,
And skill go before will
And right before might
So goeth our mill aright."
God! he understood.
The refrain carried him back, oh, so long ago, when he had kneeled
before the altar of yonder Minster, and the stirring words had come to
him as a message from God. How full of strength and vigor was he then!
Those flashing lights in the distance meant that the men were already
forming, and on their way to the Manor. They would set fire to it,
doubtless, and they would deal roughly with the Baron; it was all too
likely that they would kill him. And what would the King have to say to
the murderers of the great Baron de Leaufort? Oh, they must be saved
from committing this terrible folly. Of course they would be saved.
Was he not on his way now to save them? He would hold them in control;
he would make them con well their own song, that right must go before
might. He would march with them and not leave them again until they
stood before the King, and he as spokesman would approach and say:--
"O King Richard, we are leal men and not traitors, as we have been
falsely called. These men but seek to be free men, and to have the love
of life and the life of love which should be all men's, be he king or
caitiff."
He would do this.
He made another attempt to rise, but sank back again among the grasses.
"Oh, my God, my God, wherefore hast Thou forsaken me?"
The full bitterness of his helplessness rushed over him. A clod of
clay!--forsooth, he was less than a clod of clay. He was of less use
to the world than the smallest blade of grass, or the tiniest drop of
dew. He could do nothing. He had to lie there and watch those lights
disappear, and though his heart and his mind and his soul went with
them, his body must remain there, prone among the bogs. What a failure
he had made of his life. The one crucial call had come for him, and he
could not answer "Adsum."
"By their fruits ye shall know them."
What fruit had he to show? He was as a tree that had fallen by the
wayside, uprooted, worthless. It was because of late he had been
swallowed up in the thought of personal salvation--the monastic idea,
which, after all, was but a sublimated selfishness. And how came it
that he, of all others, should have fallen into the fatal error of
killing his body instead of preserving it for noble ends? His life at
the Abbey had not conquered his body, it had permitted his body to
conquer him. The weaker the body, the stronger its sway. He looked
back on his days of youthful strength, when he had contemplated with
disgust the unkempt, wild-eyed hermits with their locks matted thick
about their temples, when they appeared in their dirty rags along
the highway, begging alms to keep body and soul together. How he had
scorned the false ideals of those hermits who dared to call themselves
the truest Christians. And how much better had he done with his own
life? Wrecked it, wrecked it high and dry on the barren rocks of
monasticism.
"My beloved Master hath called, and I have failed Him," he cried out
again and again in his despair.
Ely Minster had withdrawn itself entirely into the night, but to one so
familiar with its contour as Annys, it was easy to carve it out from
the surrounding darkness; to him it still dominated the landscape as at
high noon. He recalled the defiance which he had launched at it as he
had stood before it in the November gloaming.
"Be not over triumphant, even now," he murmured; "thou art doomed to
bow thy haughty head in this land of stalwart men."
Perhaps it was not yet too late to redeem himself. Surely that great
God who had put the breath of life into his nostrils could at will
fill his loins with strength. Perhaps he had succumbed too readily. He
would have faith.
"I would seek unto God," Job's prayer rose to his lips, "and unto God
would I commit my cause, which doeth great things and unsearchable;
marvellous things without number."
The wind that had stirred lazily through the reeds now suddenly
freshened. Gathering strength, at last it whipped the fog before it,
scurrying across the land. As it parted the white veil before the
cathedral, the moon was just peeping above the roof. As it sailed over
the octagon it left Ely Minster below, carven out of the impenetrable
night--etched against the brightening sky, it stood out grimmer,
gloomier, than ever.
As the moon climbed the heavens, the beams rested on the rugged pile.
Little by little its frown was smoothed out, a tremor swept over it,
and it smiled. No longer fearsome, no longer wrapped in gloom, it
appeared in the soft radiance, a celestial vision. The arcades of
pointed arches, the exquisite stone parapet, the pinnacled turrets
of the divine octagon, the noble towers, all stood forth in their
fairylike delicacy of detail, and yet in all the simple majesty of the
complete creation.
His heart beat tumultuously. The spectacle seemed to him too beautiful
for the eyes of man to behold. To him there was a desecration--a
sacrilegiousness--in his presence there as this glorious being bared
her full loveliness to her lover night.
Then there came a voice into the wind--the voice that had appeared unto
Isaiah of old:--
"Thou art my servant, I have chosen thee and not cast thee away; fear
not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God; I will
strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with
the right hand of my righteousness."