Now that I had the heart to fall into beaten tracks, coming out of the sheltering thicket byways for the first time since quitting the mounds over the ashes of Voewood, I observed more of the new people and times among whom fate had thus thrown me. And truly it was a very strange meeting with these folk, who were they whom I had known when last I walked these woods, and yet were not. I would stare at them in perplexity, marveling at the wondrous blend of nations I saw in face and hair and eyes. Their very clothes were novel to me, and unaccountable, while their speech seemed now the oddest union of many tongues—all foreign, yet upon these English lips most truly native—and wondrous to listen to. I would pass a sturdy yokel leading out his teams to plowing, and when I spoke to him it made my ears tingle to hear how antique Roman went hand in hand with ancient British, and good Norman was linked upon his lips with better Saxon! That polyglot youth, knowing no tongue but one, was most scholarly in his ignorance. To him ’twas English that he spoke; but to me, who had lived through the making of that noble speech, who knew each separate individual quantity that made that admirable whole, his jargon was most wonderful!
Nor was I yet fully reconciled to the unity of these new people and their mutual kinsmanship. I could not remember all feuds were ended. When down the path would come a more than usually dusky wayfarer—a trooper, perhaps, with leather jerkin, shield on back, and sword by side—I would note his swart complexion and dark black hair, and then ’twas “Ho! ho! a Norman villain straying from his band!” And back I would step among the shadows, and, gripping the staff that was my only weapon, scowl on him while he whistled by, half mindful, in my forgetfulness, to help the Saxon cause by rapping the fellow over his head. On the other hand if one chanced upon me who had the flaxen hair and pleasant eyes of those who once were called my comrades—if he wore the rustic waistless smock, as many did still, of hind or churl—why, then, I was mighty glad to see that Saxon, and crossed over, friendly, to his pathway, bespeaking him in the pure tongue of his forefathers, asked him of garth and homestead, and how fared his thane and heretoga—all of which, it grieved me afterward to notice, perplexed him greatly.
Not only in these ways was there much for me to learn, but, with speech and fashions, modes and means of life had changed. At one time I met a strange piebald creature, all tags and tassels, white and red, with a hundred little bells upon him, a cap with peaks hanging down like asses’ ears, and a staff, with more bells, tucked away under his arm. He was plodding along dejected, so I called to him civilly:
“Why, friend! Who are you?”
“I am a fool, Sir!”
“Never mind,” I replied cheerfully, “there is the less likelihood of your ever treading this earth companionless.”
“Why, that is true enough,” he said, “for it was too much wisdom that sent me thus solitary afield,” and he went on to tell me how he had been ejected that morning from a neighboring castle. “I had belauded and admired my master for years—therein I had many friends, yet was a fool. Yesterday we quarreled about some trifle—I called him beast and tyrant, and therein, being just and truthful, I lost my place and comrades over the first wise thing I said for years!—it is a most sorry, disorderly world.”[2]
[2] The Phœnician must have failed to recognize in the new finery of the time the latest representative of a brotherhood that had long existed.
This strange individual, it seemed, lived by folly, and, though I had often noticed that wit was not a fat profession, I could not help regarding him with wonder. He was, under his veneer of shallowness, a most gentle and observant jester. Long study in the arts of pleasing had given him a very delicate discrimination of moods and men. He could fit a merriment to the capacity of any man’s mind with extraordinary acumen. He had stores of ill-assorted learning in the empty galleries of his head, and wherewithal a kindly, gentle heart, a whimsical companionship for sad-eyed humanity which made him haste to laugh at everything through fear of crying over it. We were companions before we had gone a mile, and many were the things I learned of him. When our way parted I pressed one of my rings into his hand. “Good-by, fool!” I said.
“Good-by, friend!” he called. “You are the first wise man with whom I ever felt akin”; and indeed, as his poor buffoon’s coat went shining up the path, I felt bereft and lonely again for a spell.