What could it matter where my wandering feet were turned? All the world was void and vapid, east and west alike indifferent, to one so homeless, and thus I stalked on through glades and coppices for hours and days, with my chin upon my chest, and feeling marvelously cheap and lonely. But enough of this. Never yet did I crave sympathy of any man: why should I seem to seek it of you—skeptical and remote?
There were those who appeared at that time to take compassion on me unasked, and I remember the countrywomen at whose cottage doors I hesitated a moment—yearning with pent-up affection over their curly-headed little ones—added to the draught of water I begged such food as their slender stores provided. One of these gave me a solid green forester’s cape and jerkin; another put shoes of leather upon my feet; and a third robbed her husband’s pegs to find me headwear, and so through the gifts of their unspoken good-will I came by degrees into the raiment of the time.
But nothing seemed to hide the inexpressible strangeness I began to carry about with me. No sorry apparel, no woodman’s cap drawn down over my brows, no rustic clogs upon my wandering feet, masked me for a moment from the awe and wonder of these good English people. None of them dared ask me a question, how I came or where I went, but everywhere it was the same. They had but to look upon me, and up they rose, and in silence, and, drawn involuntarily by that stern history of mine they knew naught of, they ministered to me according to their means. The women dropped their courtesies, and—unasked, unasking—fed the grim and ragged stranger from their cleanest platter, the men stood by and uncapped them to my threadbare russet, and whole groups would watch spellbound upon the village mounds as I paced moodily away.
In course of time my grief began to mend, so that it was presently possible to take a calmer view of the situation, and to bend my thoughts upon what it were best to do next. Though I love the greenwood, and am never so happy as when solitary, yet my nature was not made, alas! for sylvan idleness. I felt I had the greatest admiration and brotherhood with those who are recluse and shun the noisy struggles of the world; yet had I always been a leader of men, I now remembered, as all the pages of my past history came one by one before me and I meditated upon them day and night. No, I was not made to walk these woods alone, and, if another argument were wanting, it were found in the fact that I was here exposed to every weather, hungry and shelterless! I could not be forever begging from door to door, eternally throwing my awe-inspiring shadow across the lintels of these gentle-mannered woodland folk, and my tastes, though never gluttonous, rebelled most strongly against the perpetual dietary of herbs and roots and limpid brooks.
Reflecting on these things one day, as I lay friendless and ragged in the knotty elbow of a great oak’s earth-bare roots, after some weeks of homeless wandering, I fell asleep, and dreamed all the fair shining landscape were a tented field, and all the rustling rushes down by the neighboring streamlet’s banks were the serried spears of a great concourse of soldiers defiling by, the sparkle of the sunlight on the ripples seeming like the play of rays upon their many warlike trappings, the yellow flags and water-flowers making no poor likeness of dancing banners and bannerets.
’Twas a simple dream, such as came of an empty stomach and a full head, yet somehow I woke from that sleep with more of my old pulse of pleasure and life beating in my veins than had been there for a long time. And with the wish for another spell of bright existence, spent in the merry soldier mood that suited me so well, came the means to attain it.
In the first stage of these wanderings, while still fresh from the cloister shrine, I had paid but the very smallest heed to my attire and its details. I was clad in clean, sufficient wraps, so much was certain, with a linen belt about me, and sandals upon my feet; yet even this was really more than I noticed with any closeness. But as I ran and walked, and my flesh grew hot and nervous with the fever of my sorrow, a constant chafing of my feet and hands annoyed me. I had stopped by a woodside river bank, and there discovered with wrathful irritation that upon my bare apostolic toes and upon my sanctified thumbs—those soldier thumbs still flat and strong with years of pressing sword-hilts and bridle-reins—there were glistening in holy splendor such a set of gorgeous gems as had rarely been taken for a scramble through the woods before! There were beryls and sapphires and pearls, and ruddy great rubies from the caftans of Paynim chiefs slain by long-dead Crusaders, and onyx and emerald from Cyprus and the remotest East set in rude red gold by the rough artificers of rearward ages, and all these put upon me, no doubt, after the manner in which at that time credulous piety was wont to bedeck the shrine and images of saints and martyrs. I was indeed at that moment the wealthiest beggar who ever sat forlorn and friendless on a grassy lode. But what was all this glistening store to me, desolate and remorseful, with but one remembrance in my heart, with but one pitiful sight before my eyes? I pulled the shining gems angrily from my swollen fingers and toes and hurled them one by one, those princely toys, into the muddy margin of the stream, and there, in that rude setting, ablazing, red, and green, and white, and hot and cool, with their wonderful scintillations they mocked me. They mocked me as I sat there with my chin in my palms, and twinkled and shone among the sludge and scum so merrily to the flickering sunshine, that presently I laughed a little at those cheerful trinkets that could shine so bravely in the contumacy of chance, and after a time I picked up one and rinsed it and held it out in the sunshine, and found it very fair—so fair, indeed, that a glimmer of listless avarice was kindled within me, and later on I broke a hawthorn spray and groped among the sedge and mire and hooked out thus, in better mood, the greater part of my strange inheritance.
Then, here I was, upon this other bank, waking up after my dream, and, turning over the better to watch the fair landscape stretching below, my waistcloth came unbound, and out upon the sand amid the oak roots rolled those ambient, glistening rings again. At first I was surprised to see such jewels in such a place, staring in dull wonderment while I strove to imagine whence they came, but soon I remembered piece by piece their adventure as has been told to you, and now, with the warm blood in my veins again, I did not throw them by, but lay back against the oak and chuckled to myself as my ambitious heart fluttered with pleasure under my draughty rags, and crossed my legs, and weighed upon my finger-tips, and inventoried, and valued, all in the old merchant spirit, those friendly treasures.
How unchanging are the passions of humanity! I tossed those radiant playthings up in the sunlight and caught them, I counted and recounted them, I tore shreds from my clothing and cleaned and polished each in turn, I started up angry and suspicious as a kite’s wheeling shadow fell athwart my hoard. Forgotten was hunger and houselessness—I no longer mourned so keenly the emptiness of the world or the brevity of friendships: I, to whom these treasures should have been so light, overlooked nearly all my griefs in them, and was as happy for the moment in this unexpected richness as a child.
And then, after an hour or so of cheerful avarice, I sat up sage and reflective, and, having swathed and wrapped my store safely next my heart, I must needs climb the first grassy knoll showing above the woodlands and search the horizon for some place wherein a beginning might be made of spending it. Nothing was to be seen thence but a goodly valley spread out at a distance, and there my steps were turned—for men, like streams, ever converge upon the lowlands.