And with his face into the sunset he was gone.
XXXI
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.