Long Will

by Florence Converse

HERE are four chief hills of the Malverns: a round hill, a high hill, a long hill, and a green deep-furrowed stronghold whither the desperate Britons withdrew them once on a time, shrinking within the greedy clutch of Rome. And here they beaconed the warning to their fellows in the plain; and here they fought the losing battle, and here, in the grassy upward-circling trenches, they laid them down to sleep their last sleep.

But of these and their well-nigh forgotten defeat the dreamer recked little as he lay on the sun-warmed slope of the Round Hill. He looked inward, as dreamers will; and onward, as dreamers should; but backward, not yet. The past was a bit of yellow parchment at the bottom of an oak chest in the scriptorium of Malvern Priory. The dreamer had touched it reverently, as one touches a dead thing, and laid it away again. And Brother Owyn, looking on, had sighed. He too had his dreams, but they came out of the joy and the sorrow that lay at his back. Brother Owyn had chosen to live as one dead, but he could not slay his past.

“I will sing of life that is, and is to come. I will prophesy!” said the dreamer to Brother Owyn; and he went forth on the hills to wait for the Still Small Voice. But a little child came upon him and convicted him of his youth; and he was left on the hillside troubled, discomfited, uncertain.

So, presently, he arose and skirted the slope to the flat saddle, and set his face toward the summit of the Great Hill, and climbed up thither with the long steady stride of one who knows the ground beneath his feet. Straight up he went, a smooth green way for the most part, with bare bones of rock breaking through here and there. He had his world before him at the top, his little world of hill and river and plain, all misty dim about the edges, or where the edges must have been, all blue with the haze, and something like the sea. Close under the hill the brown church of the Priory stood up proudly, out of the midst of its lesser halls, its kitchen and guesten house. And all round and about the King's Forest billowed away into the mist, east and south. Neglected tillage, here and there a farm cut out of woodland, bubbled up on little low near hills to westward; and in the north,—its roof a sun-glance and its tower a shadow,—the cathedral of Worcester rose, very far, very faint behind the veil of Malvern mist,—and yet, a wonder in the plain.

The dreamer looked to east and west and north, and down the ridge of the little range to the south; and then, because it was given him to know that he should go away and leave all this, and mayhap never look on it again, he lay down with his face in the short grass, shutting out all; and so was silent a long while.

The wind blew strong from the northeast, lifting his heavy hair; the Priory bell rang eleven; and the dreamer arose and went onward along the ridge, Hereford way. He did not cease to speak in a low brooding voice as he strode, for that was his solitary hill-fashion; and if ever he was at pause in the way he cast out his arms to right and to left, or clasped them on his breast; or he would lift up his young troubled face to the sky.

“O my lady, Saint Truth,” he murmured, “I am not afraid,—but of myself only.” And he went more slow, sinking his head on his breast.

“There be two kind of poets: and one dwelleth in monastery and maketh long tales of saints, or it may be he furbisheth old matter of history. But this is not my place. And another sort abideth in a king's palace; he is a jongleur, and deviseth merry tales of love, and adventure of war, to please the ladies in hall. But I am not of these neither.”

Then after a little space the dreamer flung out his right hand and spoke aloud with a great passion, saying:—

“The people are dead of the pestilence, and they that live will die, for they starve and the lord of the manor refuseth them bread. But how shall one man drive three ploughs? His wife hungers and his sons are born dead. Who shall help him?”