CHAPTER XIII
"A most composed invincible man, in difficulty and distress knowing no discouragement, in danger and menace laughing at the whisper of fear."
There is a wonderful steadfast courage about men of Hyla's breed. Eventhough the object they pursue has lost its value, they go on in a doggedrelentless "following up" from which nothing can turn them.
For two hours or more he mourned and thought of old times, gazing in akind of strange wonder at the silent carpet of grass. The shrewdweatherworn face, the twinkling eager eyes, the nasal drawl which soglibly offered up petitions to heaven, all came back to him with asingular vividness. He was surprised to find how actual and clear hisfriend's personality was to him. It almost frightened him. He glancedround him once or twice uneasily. Cerdic seemed so real and near, anunseen partner in the silence.
When one has heard bells tolling for a long time, and suddenly theystop, the brain is still conscious of the regular lin-lan-lone.
While this psychic influence eddied round him, and the kindly old face,ploughed deep with toil and sorrow, was still a veritable possession ofhis brain, there was a certain comfort.
As it began to fade, as day from the sky, his loneliness came upon himlike death. The real agony of his loss began, and it tortured him untilhe could feel no more. Pain is its own anodyne in the end.
The cordage of his brave heart was so racked and strained by all he hadendured that its capacity for sensation was over. So he mourned Cerdicdead no longer, his heart was dead.
But we know nothing of this poor brother, if not that in him was a soundpiece of manhood, hardened, tempered, and strong. His soul was sweet andhealthy, his rough-built body proud of blood and powerful. He must go onand fear nothing. Once more he must rise from his fall and try fortunewith a stout sad heart, proving his own Godhead and the glory of hiswill, over which Fate could have no lordship.
In this only, as the poet sang, are men akin to gods, and in all lifethere is no glory like the "glory of going on."
Then did Hyla, the invincible, rise from the ground to breastcircumstance--_per varios casus_--to seek his Latium once more.
He fell to eating cold roast fish.
When he set out again, he had to make a long detour. The sounding polestill remained to him, and he probed every step as he slowly skirted thetreacherous green. It was characteristic of him that as he left thefatal spot where the dead Cerdic lay deep down in the mud he neverlooked round or gazed sadly at the place. He had no thought ofsentimental leave-taking, no little poetic luxury of grief moved him. Itwere an action for a slighter brain than this.
It began to be late afternoon, as Hyla made a slow and difficultprogress. He had got round the swamp, and pushed on over the fen.Sometimes he waded through stagnant pools fringed with rushes andcovered with brilliant copper-coloured water plants. Once, pushing hispole before him, he swam over a wide black pond in which the sun wasmirrored all blood red. Often he broke his way through forests of reedswhich spiked up far above his head. Everywhere before him the creaturesof the fen ran trembling.
Sometimes the firmer ground he came to was as brilliant as old carpetsfrom the house of an Eastern king. The yellow broom moss was maturing,and bright chestnut-coloured capsules curved among it. The wild thymecrisped under his feet. The fairy down of the cotton grass floated roundthem.
Little tufts of pale sea-lavender nestled among the long leaves of themarsh zostera, plump, rank, and full of moisture. The fox-tail grass andthe cat's-tail grass flourished everywhere.
We of to-day can have but a faint idea of that wonderful and luxuriantcarpet over which he trod. The fair yellow corn now stands straight andtall over those solitudes. The broad dyke cut deep in the brown peat nowstraightly cleaves the fen, still beautiful and rich in life, butchanged for ever from its ancient magic.
By night the lone sprites of the marsh with their ghostly lamps flitdisconsolate, for the hand of man has come and tamed that teemingwilderness which was once so strange and alien from Man. Man was notwanted there in those old days, and the cruel swamps claimed alife-sacrifice as the price of their invasion.
Hyla's hard brown feet were all stained by the living carpet on whichthey walked. His advancing tread broke down the great vivid crimsonballs of the _agaricus fungus_, and split its fat milk-white stem intocreamy flakes. The crimson poison painted his instep, and the brightorange chanterelle mingled its harmless juice with that of its deadlycousin. His ankles were powdered with the dull pink-white of the hydnum,that strong mushroom on which they say the hedgehog feeds greedily atmidnight, the tiny fruit of the "witches' butter" crumbled at his touch.
Over all, the fierce dragon-fly swung its mailed body, the Geoffroi ofthe fen insects.
The light and shadow sweeping over the wheat in its ordered planting arebeautiful, but Hyla saw what we can never see in England more, saw withhis steadfast, regardless eyes more natural beauties than we can eversee again.
In every clump of reeds that fringed the pool, he came suddenly uponsome old pike basking in the sun, like a mitred bishop in his green andgold. The green water flags trembled as he sunk away.
The herons paddled in the shallow pools, and tossed the little silverfish from them to each other, the cold-eyed hawk dropped like a shootingstar, and fought the stoat for his new-killed prey.
The shadows lengthened and lay in patches over the wild world of water.The blue mists began to rise from a hundred pools, and the bats toflicker through them. The sunlight faded rapidly away, the world becamegreyish ochre colour, then grey, a soft cobweb grey, through which fellthe hooting of an owl, and the last call of a plover.
Resolute, though wearied and faint, firm in resolve, though with abitter loneliness at his heart, Hyla plunged on through the twilight.For some little time the ground had been much firmer and a little raisedabove the level of the fen, but as day was dying, he found he hadentered upon a long and gradual slope, and that once more it behoved himto walk with infinite care.
Old rotting tree-trunks cropped up here and there, relics of some vast,ancient forest, which, mingling with rotting vegetation of all kinds,sent up a smell of decay in his nostrils. At every step he sank up tothe knees, and brown water, the colour of brandy, splashed up to hiswaist.
He seemed to have arrived at a more desolate evil part of the fens thanbefore. The approaching night made his progress more and more difficult.It was here that the night herons had their nests and breeding-places,inaccessible to men. The ground was bespattered with their excrements,and with feathers, broken egg-shells, old nests, and half-eaten fishcovered with yellow flies.
Then as he ploughed on he saw a sight at which even his stout heartfailed him. His long struggle seemed suddenly all in vain. Right beforehim was a wide creek or arm of the lake, two hundred yards from reeds toreedy shore, entirely barring the way. Too far for him to swim, alldead-weary as he was, mysterious and ugly in the faint light, it gavehim over utterly to despair.
It began to be cold, and the chilly marish-vapour crept into his bonesand turned the marrow of them to ice.
He sat on a mound formed by a great log and the _debris_ of a mass ofdecayed roots, the whole damp and cold as a fish's belly, and coveredwith living fungi and slimy moss. His feet were buried in the brownwater.
It was now too dark to move in any direction with safety, and until dayshould break again he must remain where he was. He had no more food ofany kind, and was absolutely exhausted. So he moaned a little prayer,more from habit than from any comfort in the act, and stretching himselfover the damp moss fell into a fitful sleep. He dreamed he was back atthe Priory, and heard in his dreaming the distant sound of the monkssinging prayers.
It was a picture of his own life, this sorry end to all his day'sendeavour. It fore-shadowed his career, so rapidly darkening down intodeath. His life-path, trod with such bitterness, growing ever moredevious and painful, while the _ignes fatui_ of Hope danced round itsclosing miles!