Part 16

For a while he swept on oblivious of fatigue and faintness from lack of food. The one definite thought in his mind was that he was needed, there was work for him to do. The success of the great Uprising was endangered, and he was on his way to turn failure into victory. He would bring the men back to reason, he would show them how much depended upon it that they come before the King with clean hands.

For the first time in many months the old elixir of leadership ran through his veins. He was a man, a worker, once more. The dreamer, the monk, the scholar were gone--swallowed up in a wave of disgust for the life of the past few months. Of what use had he been to the world? With infinite toil he had copied a few words from the Past. What had he done for the unborn Future? Always with eyes and ears turned backward, he had been like those unfortunates on whom Dante had looked with such horror, who had their faces turned toward their reins. It seemed a strange whim that he could have delighted in the calm shelter of the Abbey; he now regarded it with detestation--it was the false peace against which his master, John Wyclif, had warned him. He was again breasting the stormy currents of life. The call of his people had come to him, and he was on his way to them. His long sleep was over. He was awake now. They needed him. He would save them.

"I am coming," he tried to shout, but he was voiceless, and suddenly his knees sank under him and he fell heavily to the ground.

For a long time he lay on the ground unconscious. As consciousness slowly and painfully came back to him, he looked about him wildly, and tried to recall what had happened. He was lying among the fens before the Cathedral. He was chilled through with the ooze of the swamp soaking up through the long grasses which were crushed beneath him where he had fallen. He found it impossible to rise. The land lay wrapped in the silence of evening. He could hear only the voices of frogs unceasingly ringing like sleigh bells, an occasional sobbing sigh of the wind as it touched the line of rushes, and the sucking of the water into the grasses as he stirred.

A terrible sense of some task to be done oppressed him. What was it? For a long time he gazed dumbly up at the sullen steely clouds that were driving across the heavens with a powerful rush and swirl. A damp sea fog was coming in from the ocean, and only now and then could he see the outlines of the Cathedral, looming up grimly against the horizon, cold and dark and forbidding, as some great monster looking down in triumph on his helplessness.

Of a sudden there were lights moving in the distance where lay the highroad to Sudbury. They moved about restlessly as if borne on the shoulders of moving men. Sometimes they halted, and sometimes they grouped themselves in twos and threes, and again they moved on rhythmically in regular unison. Hoarse cries and orders came to him in muffled tones, and at last he could make out that some people were singing, and by listening intently, he could just make out the words:--

"With right and with might With skill and with will; Let might help right, And skill go before will And right before might So goeth our mill aright."

God! he understood.

The refrain carried him back, oh, so long ago, when he had kneeled before the altar of yonder Minster, and the stirring words had come to him as a message from God. How full of strength and vigor was he then!

Those flashing lights in the distance meant that the men were already forming, and on their way to the Manor. They would set fire to it, doubtless, and they would deal roughly with the Baron; it was all too likely that they would kill him. And what would the King have to say to the murderers of the great Baron de Leaufort? Oh, they must be saved from committing this terrible folly. Of course they would be saved. Was he not on his way now to save them? He would hold them in control; he would make them con well their own song, that right must go before might. He would march with them and not leave them again until they stood before the King, and he as spokesman would approach and say:--

"O King Richard, we are leal men and not traitors, as we have been falsely called. These men but seek to be free men, and to have the love of life and the life of love which should be all men's, be he king or caitiff."

He would do this.

He made another attempt to rise, but sank back again among the grasses.

"Oh, my God, my God, wherefore hast Thou forsaken me?"

The full bitterness of his helplessness rushed over him. A clod of clay!--forsooth, he was less than a clod of clay. He was of less use to the world than the smallest blade of grass, or the tiniest drop of dew. He could do nothing. He had to lie there and watch those lights disappear, and though his heart and his mind and his soul went with them, his body must remain there, prone among the bogs. What a failure he had made of his life. The one crucial call had come for him, and he could not answer "Adsum."

"By their fruits ye shall know them."

What fruit had he to show? He was as a tree that had fallen by the wayside, uprooted, worthless. It was because of late he had been swallowed up in the thought of personal salvation--the monastic idea, which, after all, was but a sublimated selfishness. And how came it that he, of all others, should have fallen into the fatal error of killing his body instead of preserving it for noble ends? His life at the Abbey had not conquered his body, it had permitted his body to conquer him. The weaker the body, the stronger its sway. He looked back on his days of youthful strength, when he had contemplated with disgust the unkempt, wild-eyed hermits with their locks matted thick about their temples, when they appeared in their dirty rags along the highway, begging alms to keep body and soul together. How he had scorned the false ideals of those hermits who dared to call themselves the truest Christians. And how much better had he done with his own life? Wrecked it, wrecked it high and dry on the barren rocks of monasticism.

"My beloved Master hath called, and I have failed Him," he cried out again and again in his despair.

Ely Minster had withdrawn itself entirely into the night, but to one so familiar with its contour as Annys, it was easy to carve it out from the surrounding darkness; to him it still dominated the landscape as at high noon. He recalled the defiance which he had launched at it as he had stood before it in the November gloaming.

"Be not over triumphant, even now," he murmured; "thou art doomed to bow thy haughty head in this land of stalwart men."

Perhaps it was not yet too late to redeem himself. Surely that great God who had put the breath of life into his nostrils could at will fill his loins with strength. Perhaps he had succumbed too readily. He would have faith.

"I would seek unto God," Job's prayer rose to his lips, "and unto God would I commit my cause, which doeth great things and unsearchable; marvellous things without number."

The wind that had stirred lazily through the reeds now suddenly freshened. Gathering strength, at last it whipped the fog before it, scurrying across the land. As it parted the white veil before the cathedral, the moon was just peeping above the roof. As it sailed over the octagon it left Ely Minster below, carven out of the impenetrable night--etched against the brightening sky, it stood out grimmer, gloomier, than ever.

As the moon climbed the heavens, the beams rested on the rugged pile. Little by little its frown was smoothed out, a tremor swept over it, and it smiled. No longer fearsome, no longer wrapped in gloom, it appeared in the soft radiance, a celestial vision. The arcades of pointed arches, the exquisite stone parapet, the pinnacled turrets of the divine octagon, the noble towers, all stood forth in their fairylike delicacy of detail, and yet in all the simple majesty of the complete creation.

His heart beat tumultuously. The spectacle seemed to him too beautiful for the eyes of man to behold. To him there was a desecration--a sacrilegiousness--in his presence there as this glorious being bared her full loveliness to her lover night.

Then there came a voice into the wind--the voice that had appeared unto Isaiah of old:--

"Thou art my servant, I have chosen thee and not cast thee away; fear not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God; I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness."

XXXII

The men pressed on through the night wearilessly. In the hearts of all was the joy of living a moment which had lit up the horizon for two-score years and more. Of a large body of men some there were whose throats craved the rare wines that were stored in my lord's cellars, whose stomachs hungered for the grain of the well-filled garner-houses, whose fingers longed for the contents of the great oaken chests, bursting with precious stuffs. Yet the large majority of them scorned such base motives. These were idealists, throwing away the small advantage of the moment for the greater advantage of the morrow. Many, strong in the faith of their leaders, had flung hand from the plough which at least had kept starvation from their bodies. Surely the moon looking down that night witnessed a strange sight--a deeply significant, portentous sight--the laborers, ill clad, with the marks of their toil yet upon them, armed only with cracked bows, broken swords, rusty staves, axes, scythes, whips, and even stout sticks, going forth fearlessly to meet trained armies. And the moon, looking down that night, found not only the highroad between Ely and Sudbury alive with marching men, but also the highroad that lay between Canterbury and Mile End, and that between Peterborough and St. Alban's, and that which led from Lincoln to Huntington, and the one from Southampton to Maidstone. From the north, from the east, and from the south, wherever the moon turned its face, the roads were black with the men, for the signal had been given, and the great Uprising had begun.

On the way, small wonder that some bodies of men, grown sullen by the long wait, broke the bounds their leaders would have put upon them, and satisfied their private enmities. Some set fire to all the homes of lawyers that they came upon, for too long had the lawyers lived off the slavery of the people; others cut off the heads of all the clerks they encountered, because the land was lumbered with them; others attacked monasteries and burned the records, that their bondage could not be proven to the future, doing their work so thoroughly as to toss on the flaming pile every book and bit of writing they could lay their hands on; still more waylaid teachers of grammar, and made them take great oaths that they would henceforth cease teaching youngsters to read and write,--for what was the good of clerkliness save to gain a mysterious and unjust power over the workers of the fields?

The great god Demos, after centuries of dreamless sleep, throwing off his sluggishness with effort, only partially articulate as yet, staggering on awkwardly, aimlessly, blindly,--drunk with the sudden revelation of his own huge strength, a tragic picture enough with his great heart reaching out toward some Ideal, but not quite knowing what it was, nor how to get it. When at last this great monster, in the shape of ten thousand laborers on the banks of the Thames, was to appear before the King--what was the welcome that would be tendered? Demos was politely informed by a noble earl that he was not costumed fitly to meet the King. The giant, tamed by the very insolence and unexpectedness of the weapon used, the one weapon perchance before which he would have quailed--acknowledged a temporary defeat. Not dressed to appear before the King! And who, forsooth, had made the laws that poor men may not go abroad save in russet cloth? Why had they not made that answer?

When the men of Cambridgeshire reached the Manor of the Baron de Leaufort, he awoke and sent his bailiff down to them. The bailiff was a man who trusted in the stability of the feudal structure of society as few trust in the permanence of heaven.

"What would ye," he cried; "wot ye no better than to disturb his Lordship at this time o' night? Disperse instanter, and if it be that ye have aught to say on the morrow when ye are sober, my Lord bids me say he will hold a love-day, and listen to your complaints."

"We want no love-day," sang out one, surlily.

"Who are we?" cried another, "we are those who want no bailiff to tell us what to do. We want to see the Baron. Order him to come straightway."

The bailiff gasped. "_Order_ the Baron!" The heavens could tremble, after all! "Varlets! Idle churls! How dare ye talk so insolently? By my two ears some of ye will hang for this night's work."

"Now thou hast but one ear to swear by," cried a great fellow, approaching the bailiff and slicing off one ear with a stroke of his knife.

The bailiff screamed and clapped his hand to his bleeding head. "The land is full enough of bailiffs," shouted some.

"Seize him, seize him," cried others.

The heavens had fallen. His fat cheeks were chalky and hung flabbily under his eyes. He saw his mistake. He should have been more conciliatory. "Hold, fellows, what would ye, drink?"

But his trembling voice was lost in the babble that arose as two or three took hold of him and bore him along, shrieking pitifully. As those that carried him seemed not to know what to do with their burden, a man solved the problem by reaching forth a rusty sword and severing the head from the body. In a trice half a dozen fellows were after the rolling head, and had raised it, dripping, upon a lance. The lance they stuck into the ground with the head lifted on high, that all might see. Several others busied themselves with picking up twigs and branches, and in a few minutes they had a roaring bonfire in a wide circle about the lance, so that the curling flames lit up its hideous, ghastly burden.

The men danced about the fire in glee.

"Ha, ha, Sir Bailiff," they mocked, "who are we, indeed? Do you know us now, Master Bailiff?"

While others said:--

"We are thy master, now, Sir Bailiff, and the masters of all England from this night on."

"Serfs and villeins ye be, and serfs and villeins ye remain," called a strong, contemptuous voice from the doorway.

They paused, and saw de Leaufort standing coolly before them. His arms were folded on his breast. He had not taken the trouble to arm himself. Surely a noble of the realm need not quail before his own villeins. He also held feudalism a law of the universe.

"Begone, madmen," he commanded. "Disperse to your homes! Ye must be all out of your senses; the scourge and the whip shall bring them back to you, I promise you. Not many shall see his feet for many days to come."

Then, as he caught sight of the bailiff's head stuck on the lance, he started back in amazement at their daring. Before he could speak again, a dozen fellows pushed him roughly from the door and made their way into the house. "Stay," he cried hoarsely; but no one paid the slightest attention to him, save that one or two, in passing, plucked at his beard, and one clapped his hand familiarly on his shoulders, and called him "Brother." "For," he said, "from to-night we all shall be brothers throughout the land, and not masters and slaves."

The Baron passed one hand across his brow as if he, too, were taking leave of his senses. Was it some terrible nightmare? He had been warned that the people were rising, he had expected some setting forth of grievances, and perhaps some slight show of force; but insolence like this was past all belief.

As he stood hesitating, there approached John Kyrkeby to him, who stuck a huge clenched fist into his face and said surlily: "Look you, Baron de Leaufort, the time for such as you has come. The land has groaned long enough under the sway of barons and earls. Mark me, there are some here who will not rest till your blood soak this ground. I think myself they have gone far enough, yet keep a civil tongue within your head, or it will roll on the earth as that other did. Have a care, or I cannot protect you."

"Thou protect me, indeed!" cried de Leaufort, drawing himself up proudly. "I am well used to hold my back up to thee to be measured for the cloth, but I shall never demean myself by holding it to thee for protection. Indeed! wilt protect me with thy shears?"

The man gave a hoarse laugh. "Ay! it tastes strangely on the tongue, does it not? Yet, mark me, the signs of my trade will be remembered and thought somewhat of long after yours will be forgotten; for, of a truth, the time is come when men must earn their bread, as Holy Writ saith, by the sweat of their brow, or go breadless."

The Baron made an impatient gesture and turned to enter the house.

"Here," cried the tailor, "bind him! it will do no harm to keep him from mischief."

Twenty men rushed upon de Leaufort to do their leader's bidding. His eyes darted fire. "Touch me not," he cried, "caitiffs! I suffer no such indignity at your hands. Kill me, and ye will find that I can die as a brave soldier, but I cannot owe my life to dogs."

An arrow let fly grazed his cheek and drew blood.

"Bring me the man that shot that," shouted Kyrkeby; "another arrow, and it will stick from his own hulk."

While they were securing the Baron, who was obliged to submit, dozens of fellows came rushing from the house as if shot out of a catapult, tumbling over one another, carrying jewelled goblets and precious vases, casks of wine, suits of mail, and oaken chests.

Some set upon the chests and ripped them open with axes, and allowed the contents to scatter on the ground; others burst open casks of wine, and what was not soaked into the earth speedily went to make the mob the wilder.

"To the fire, to the fire, in with them," they shouted.

Some obeyed. Others first decked themselves out in the fineries and strutted up and down and cut queer capers, curious as children to know how it would feel to have a long tail dragging behind them as they walked. One fellow was seen to slip a jewelled goblet into his tunic. He was instantly jerked from his feet, and at a nod from their leader was thrown bodily on to the flames, the jewelled goblet aimed after him. The fellow screamed in agony, and some seemed taken aback, but the multitude approved, and cried out:--

"Thus do we serve all thieves."

"We are honest men, not thieves; we shall cast the jewels and the gewgaws on the flames, but it must not be said that we burn down manors only to rob their contents," cried Simon the smith.

The Baron stood on one side, his arms bound to his side, one moment cursing under his breath, and the next assuming a stolid indifference as he watched one after another of his possessions thrown on the bonfire, and disappear in a pillar of flame. Suddenly some fellows created a new diversion by making a cross-piece of two lances, and rigging it up with a huge pile of fineries which had been dragged from one of the chests. This they dressed in a surcoat of tyretain furred with the skins of many martens, throwing over it a long mantle of velvet, lined with ermine, and surmounting the whole with a magnificent scarlet hat with a large white plume nodding from it, and a great clasp of gold in the very front. Then, standing at a distance from this effigy, the men gleefully riddled it with arrows. Tiring of this sport, some one snatched a burning brand from the fire and flung it, showering sparks in every direction, upon the roof of the Manor House. Instantly more brands were thrown on by other willing hands, and the house was soon roaring so fiercely that the men had to give way before it.

"Fellows, this is the man who has undone by force our lovely Rose Westel, the handsomest maid in Cambridgeshire."

A strange light came into de Leaufort's eyes. Could this be, after all, but a woman's revenge?

A hoarse shout arose from a hundred throats.

"Throw him back into his own house."

"It will give him a warm enough welcome."

"Off with his head."

"We will bear it with us to Blackheath and set it up there that all may know who are the masters of England."

The Baron closed his eyes and calmly awaited the fatal stroke which he knew could not be long delayed.

It came; but notwithstanding its perfect aim, it did not strike de Leaufort, but sent a jet of hot blood from the white kerchief of a woman who had rushed from the darkness to fling her arms about him.

He bent over her with a hoarse cry, tugging at his bonds until one from pity severed them with a stroke of his knife.

"Rose, Rose, you here?"

She opened her eyes and smiled. Death bore a radiant visage, seeing that her lover's arms were about her, his breath was on her cheeks, her life was for his. A tall, slender figure sprang to her side, pressed a crucifix against her stiffening lips, and all was over.

Murmuring the prayer for the dead, the figure kneeled in solemn contemplation of the lovely face, and then suddenly drew itself up and turned its burning eyes upon the throng. A shiver ran through them all. It was their old leader, Robert Annys.

For an instant he looked on them in silence. In his face, grief and pity, and anger and indignation, all struggled for mastery. As his gaze wandered to the rich stuffs, trampled and soiled on the ground, the shattered, gaping chests, the twisted pieces of silver and gilt, and finally the lance with the grewsome head surveying the smoking and blackened ruins of the Manor House, at last the indignation--passionate, intense--conquered.

"How came ye so to shame our Cause?" The words burst from him at white heat.

"What is this before me?" he asked; "a gathering of thieves and robbers and murderers, or of true men--workers who are throwing down their tools that their brethren may also have bread between their teeth? Are we men in whose bosoms burns the desire to sweep off the face of the earth all unruth and injustice and wrong? or are we, as some men say of us, but varlets whose envy and greed make us lust for the ease of the gentles? Are we seeking to build up or to destroy? Answer me that! I tell you, fellow-men, we dare not come before the King with our hands dripping with blood and the land laid waste by our torches. And how dare we come before God with a prayer for justice on our lips, but only envy and murder in our hearts?"

The men stood in awed silence, looking up at Annys, who seemed to tower above them in his righteous indignation--Robert Annys, beloved of all, who had put himself again at their head as by a miracle.

The beautifully modulated voice swept on, the voice with the old familiar ring in it, the voice that once had wielded such power over them. Impassioned it continued, and yet with the overtone of a great pity and tenderness now vibrating through it.