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.