"I think so," said Cerdic, "and there are many like him also. We have never known them, or they us, but chance has changed that for once. Nevertheless I am not sorry he has gone. We are of one kind and he of another, and best apart. Let us set out round the lake; we have a long task before us, and I fear dangerous."
They gathered up their fishing lines and the remaining fish, which they had cooked for their journey, and set out upon it.
They were full of hope and courage, resolute to surmount the perils and difficulties which were before them, and yet, all innocent of fate, one was going to a sudden death and the other was moving towards an adventure which would end in death and torture also.
It is surely a very good and wise ordering of affairs, that we do not often have a warning of what shall shortly befall us. Only rarely do we feel the cold air from the wings of Death beat upon our doomed faces. Now and then, indeed, we get a glimpse of those unseen principalities and powers by whom we are for ever surrounded. Women in child-birth have, so it is said, seen an angel bearing them the new soul they are going to give to the world, as God's messenger came to Our Lady of old time.
More often the black angel, who is to take us from one life to another, presses upon a man's brain that he may know his near translation. Visions are given to men who have lived as men should live, and have beaten down Satan under their feet.
A wise and awful hand moves the curtain aside for them. And it is sometimes so with a great sinner. When that arch scoundrel Geoffroi was close upon his end, he also had a solemn warning. Fear came to him in the night and whispered, as you have heard, that he was doomed.
But these two children were given no sign. It was not for them; they could not have understood it. God is a psychologist, and He watched these two simple ones very tenderly.
A mile of heavy going lay behind them. Over the quaking fen bright with evil-looking flowers, as beautiful and treacherous as some pale sensual woman of the East, they plodded their weary and complacent way.
Lean, brown, old Cerdic was to die. Radiance was waiting for this poor man, as the sun—how dull beside that greater radiance which was so soon to illuminate him!—clomb up the sky.
They crossed various ditches and water-ways, leaping some and wading breast-high through others, covered with floating scum and weeds. Once or twice a wide pool of black water alive with fish brought them to a check, and they had to swim over it or make a long detour. After about three hours their journey became more easy. There was not so much water about, and the ground, which was covered with fresh, vividly green grass in wide patches, was much firmer.