Oh! it was horrible and sickening to feel the old world reel and spin like this beneath my laggard feet; to see crowns and states and people flit by like idle shadows on a sunny wall; to espouse great quarrels that set men into wide-asunder camps, and to wake and find the quarrel long since over and forgotten; to swear allegiance to a king and love and serve him, and then to find, in the beat of a pulse, that he had gone and was forgotten; to be the bearer of proud news that should kindle joy in a thousand thousand hearts, and then to wake when even the meaning of that news, the very cause and purport of it, was long since past and gone—it was surely bitter!
And for myself—I, who, as you know, link a ready sympathy with any cause, who love and live and hope with a fervor which no experience quenches and no adversity can dim—to be thus cut adrift from all I lived and hoped for, to be cast like this on to the bleak, friendless shore of some age, remote, unknown, unvalued—surely it was a mischance as heavy as any mischance could be!
I had not any friend in all that universe, I said to myself as I lay and thought sad thoughts upon the grassy mound—a friend!—not one kind human heart in this hive of human atoms set store by me—not one had heard I lived—not one cared if I died! There was not in all the world one question of how I fared, one wish that ran in union with any wish of mine—one single link to join me to my kind. And what links could I forge again? How could I set out to hope afresh or love, or fear or wish for? Hope! gods! had I not hopes yesterday? And what were they now?—a tawdry, silly sheaf of tinseled fancies. And love!—how could I love, remembering the new-dead Isobel?—and fear and desire! neither touched the accursed monotony of my desolation; either would have been a boon from Heaven to break the miserable calm of my despair!
It was thus I reasoned with myself for hours as the gathering darkness settled down; and, poor as I had often been, and comradeless, I do not think, in all a long and varied life, I had ever felt more reft of friends or melancholy lonesome. In vain my mind was racked to piece the evidence of that huge lapse of time which, there was no doubt, had passed since the great battle on the Crecy hills. I could recall as they have been set down every incident of the voyage, my escape, and what had followed the awakening: but the sleep itself was to me even now just one long, soft, dreamless, well-earned slumber from point to point. So absolutely natural had been that wondrous trance that to think on it would make me start up with a cry, and shake my fist to where, in the valley, the lights of Elizabeth’s camp were faintly shining among the trees, and half persuade myself that this were the dream—that the yellow-haired Princess had somehow mocked me, that Edward indeed still lived, with my jolly comrades, and I might still hope to win renown and smiles amid them, and see those that I knew, and drink red wine from friendly flagons. Then I would remember all the many signs that told the Princess had not fooled me—had but spoke the cruel, naked truth—and down I would sink again on the turf under the deepening shadows, and bewail my lot.
Tossed fiercely about like this, time passed unnoticed; the day went out in the west behind the pale amber and green satin curtains of the sunset, and, while I sat and grieved, the yellow stars climbed into the sky, all the sweet silent planets of the night set out upon their unseen pathways and airy paraboles, and behind the thicket that sheltered me the moon got up and threw across the lonely road a tracery of black and silver shadows. The evening air blew strong and cool upon my flushed, hot brow, and lulled the teeming thoughts that crowded there. Soft velvet bats came down, and the faint lisp of their hollow wings brushing by me was kindly and sympathetic. Overhead, the sallows hung out a thousand golden points to the small people of the twilight, and a faint perfume—an incense of hope—fell on me with the yellow dust of those gentle flowers. If I say these cool influences somewhat respirited me, you will deride my changing mood. Yet why should I hesitate for that? I did grow calmer under the gentle caressing of the evening; it was all so fair and still about me presently, and there was this star that I knew and that; and the night-owl churning overhead was surely the very same bird that had sung above my hunter-couch in the Saxon woodlands; and the lonely trumpet of the heron, flying homeward up the valley, brought back a score of peaceful memories. After all, men might change and go—shallow, small puppets that they were!—but this, at least, was the same old earth about me, and that was something. I would find a sheltered corner and sleep. Mayhap, with to-morrow’s dawn the world might look a little brighter!
Just as this wise resolution was on the point of being put in force, the faint sound of horse-hoofs, demurely walking up toward my lurking-place, came down on the night wind, and, retiring a moment into the deep shadows, I had not long to wait before the same shaggy palfrey and the same dreamy old fellow met earlier in the day came pacing along the road. The scholar—for so I guessed him—looked neither to right nor left; his strange thin face was turned full up to the moonlight, and the bright rays shone upon his vacant eyes and long white beard with a strange sepulchural luster. He was letting the reins hang loose upon his pony’s neck, and, as he came near, thinking himself alone, he stretched out his long, sinewy hands in front; and it was plain to see his lips worked in the moonlight with unspoken thoughts quicker than an abbot’s at unpaid-for mass. Utterly oblivious to everything around, in the white shine of the great night planet, old, lunatic, and gaunt, he looked, methought, the strangest wayfarer that ever rode down a woodland lane by nightfall. He was indeed so weird and unapproachable in his reverie that, though I had felt a small gleam of pleasure in first recognizing something which, if not friend, was at least acquaintance, yet now as he drew nigh, remote and visionary, with glassy eyes fixed on the twinkling stars, and thin white locks lifting about his broad and wrinkled forehead, I hesitated to greet him, and stood back.
But that palfrey he bestrode was more watchful than his rider. He saw me loom dark among the hazels, and came to so sudden a stop as threw the old man forward upon his ears, and, whatever his fancies may have been, jerked them clean from sky to earth in less time than it takes to write.
The scholar pulled himself together, and, with some show of valor, threw back his wide cloak from his right shoulder, and uncovered on his other side the hilt of a tarnished, rusty sword. Then, peeping and peering all about, he cried: “Ho! you there in the shadows! Be ye thieves or beggars, know that I have nothing to give and less to lose!”
“And he who stops your way, Sir,” I answered, stepping forward into the clear, “is exactly in like circumstance.”
“Oh! it is you, friend, is it?” cried the old man, seeming much relieved. “I thought I had fallen into a nest of footpads, or at the least a camp of beggars.”