The Serf Part 18

Huber gave a long, low whistle, but there was no answer. He repeated it at intervals of about a minute.

They were getting restive, wondering what might have happened, when Huber changed his tactics. He began to whistle very softly and sweetly--the scamp had a pipe like any bird--the lilt of a love-song. It was a plaintive air which rose and fell delicately in the night. Most of them knew it, for it was a popular song among the soldiers of that day, and had been made by a strolling minstrel one evening in the Picard camp at Gournay, and thence spread all over Northern Europe by the mercenaries.

The men-at-arms began to nod to its rhythm and beat quiet time to it.

Then one fellow began to whistle a ba.s.s under his breath, and another and another took up the air very quietly, till the boat was like a cage of fairy singing birds. They were so amused by their occupation, and, indeed, they were producing a very pretty concert, that they quite forgot their purpose for the moment, and abandoned themselves one and all to the music. It recalled many merry memories of Tilliers and Falaise, of Mortain and Arques, and of the orchards of their Norman home.

They were beginning the whole thing all over again--so much did it please them--when they became aware of another and more distant augmentation to their concert. They stopped, and the silvery whistle from the bank still s.h.i.+vered out a note or two before it stopped. In a moment more they heard splas.h.i.+ng, and a dark figure pushed aside the reeds and waded out to them.

"It is all safe," said the new-comer. "The murderer is here sure enough.

He does not know who I am, and I am in a hut close to his."

"Bon," said Huber, "I am glad to see you. Lord Fulke will be very pleased. We feared something was wrong when we heard the bell."

"Depardieux! and well you might. I did not think of that. But natheless, that bell means good fortune for our little plan, my friends. All the monks and all the villeins from the village have gone inside to service in the chapel. Only the theows are alone, and it will be an easy matter to take the man without interference if we are quick."

"How far is it from here?"

"As a bird flies, about two furlongs. But it will be longer for us, for we must make a detour to keep away from the walls. We shall come on the village from behind. There is a big midden ditch, but I have a plank to cross it."

"We'll give Sir Hyla a dip in it as we pa.s.s."

"'Twould be a fitting mitra."

Then with no more words, led by Heraud, they left the boat and stole silently up the hill in the dark.

An archer remained in the boat to guard it and to help them to find it again.

Hyla retired into his hut about half-past eight. He had been working all day, cleaning out pig-styes and carting the manure to the ditch which ran north of the village, and which served as a slight defence, and also as a storing place for fertilizing material to spread upon the fields. A strange occupation, perhaps, for a man who had but lately done a deed of such moment, and who was more than half a hero! But he had been set to this work purposely by the monks, who knew human nature, and thought it best for the man. The monks were the only psychologists in the twelfth century.

With some men this would have been wise, no doubt, but to Hyla's credit it should be said that he thought very little about himself. His rather heavy, sullen manner may easily have conveyed a false impression as to his own estimate of himself, but he was humble enough in reality.

In fact, Hyla was too humble, and more so than befitted his strong nature. He cleaned the filth from the styes with never a thought that he might be better or more profitably employed. And in this fact we have another vivid expression of the psychology of serfdom.

The only certain way in which it is possible to get at the inner meaning of a period in history, is by the comparison of the att.i.tude of an individual brain towards his time, and the att.i.tude of a general type of brain. The individual with the point of view must, of course, be a known quant.i.ty.

Historians, I am certain, have not yet entirely realised this simple and beautiful method. Properly understood, it is as mathematically exact as any comparative method can possibly be. It is the way in which history will be written in the future when the modern Headmaster-Historian will no longer be allowed to write an "epoch" and dispose of the two first editions entirely among the boys of his own school.

Of its extreme fascination as a pursuit the cultured cannot speak too highly. It combines the pleasures of the laboratory with the pleasures of psychology, and never was Science so happily wedded to Art.

Here is a trifling case in point. Friend Hyla--whose temperament we know something of--felt no degradation in cleaning out the pig-stye, although he had just done a great and n.o.ble thing. We know Hyla as a man very far from perfect. We know him subject to the ordinary failings of mankind.

Why, then, was Hyla content? The answer supplies us with a luminous exposition of serfdom as a social state, how stern a thing it was, how bitter. Pages of rhetoric could give no better explanation of that hard fact.

So Hyla had been quite content, and as the sun was setting he sat down outside his hut with his wife on one side and his daughter on the other, as happy as a man could be. Bread and meat lay upon the ground by his side. A cow's horn full of Welsh ale was stuck into the turf by him.

He was now working for kind masters who would not beat him or ill-treat his womankind. His hut was weather-proof, his food was excellent, and the peace of the holy life near by was stealing over him, and he was at last at rest. The peace of it all was like a cup of cold water to a poor man dying of thirst.

He stroked his wife's hard gnarled hand, very glad to be so close to her. He looked with unconscious admiration at the frank beauty of Frija as she lay gracefully by his side. Only one grief a.s.sailed him now, and that was the thought of Elgifu. He put it from him with a shudder. Yet, he thought, they would hardly hurt her. He was a man of bitter experience, and felt that she would be fairly safe in that wicked time.

Before the little family retired to rest, Cerdic came to them to pray.

The ex-lawer of dogs had, it must be confessed, most of the instincts of the street-corner preacher. He was never so happy as when he was making an extempore prayer, and in his heart of hearts he felt sure that he should have been a priest. Hyla regarded this accomplishment of his friend's with unfeigned admiration. Cerdic's praying was his one great pleasure. Both men were perfectly sincere about it. Cerdic and Hyla were both quite certain that the Saints heard and remarked upon every word.

At the same time, in an age when music was a monopoly, literature a thing for the fortunate few, and the theatre was not, these poor fellows found their aesthetic excitement in family prayers. Indeed, if we come to think of it, the Puritan cla.s.ses in England to-day are much the same.

Indeed, as long as the saving grace of Sincerity is present, the plan seems excellent. It will not fill the pockets of the theatrical manager, but it will keep a good many fools out of mischief.

So, with full bellies and in great peace of mind, Hyla and Cerdic prayed to G.o.d, and fell upon sleep.

Another hour of peaceful sleep remains for you, poor Hyla. Another little hour, and then good-bye to sleep. Good-bye to wife and child and comfort for ever and a day. A few short hours and you go to the beginning of your great martyrdom. Your works shall live after you.

But hus.h.!.+ the time is nearly gone, the sands are running very rapid in the gla.s.s. Sleep has still a gift for you, lie undisturbed!

CHAPTER X

"At the sight therefore, of this river, the Pilgrims were much stunned; but the men that went with them said, 'You must go through, or you cannot come at the gate.'"

Hyla slept ill after an hour or two. Tired nature gave him a physical oblivion for a time, but when his exhaustion was worked off, he began to toss uneasily and to dream. The events of the past days danced in a confused jumble in his brain, and the dominant sensation was one of gliding over water.

Water and the vast lonely fen lands were vividly before him in a hundred uneasy and fantastic ways. He awoke to find the hut hot and stifling beyond all bearing. The deep breathing of his women folk was all the immediate sound he heard, though an owl was sobbing intermittently in the wood by the lake.

How hot it was! The rich earthy smell, a fertile, luxuriant odour of life, was terribly oppressive. There was an earthen jar of lake water at the door of the hut, but when he groped a silent way to it, he found it warm and full of the taste of weeds and tree roots. There was no comfort in it.

He stood looking out into the night. There was no moon, but it was hardly dark. Now and then a ghostly sheet of summer lightning flickered over the sky. Late as it was the air was full of flying insects. The c.o.c.kchafers boomed as they circled over the enclosure in their long, swift flight. Great moths, with huge fat bodies, hung on the roofs of the huts or flapped to the neighbouring trees. The heavy, lazy Goat Moths, three years old, and nearly four inches from wing to wing. The male Wood Leopard, more active than his great brother, the sombre-coloured Noctuas, the evil-looking, long-bodied Hawk Moths, all danced in the dusky air.

Out in the fields the crickets sang like a thousand little bells, and the atropus, a tiny insect from which bucolic superst.i.tion has evolved the "death watch," ticked as it ran over the door posts.

Glow-worms winked in pale gleams among the gra.s.s, and louder than any other noise was the deep hum of the great Stag-beetle as he flew by. A myriad night life pulsed round the waking man. The Goatsucker flew round the borders of the wood catching the insects in his flight, and his strange, jarring pipe thrilled all the heavy air; among the leaves and undergrowth the Hedgepig, rested with his long day's sleep, rustled in search of food, making his curious, low, gurgling sound, and rattling his spines.

In those far-off days wild life luxuriated and throve. Day and night were full of strange sounds heard but rarely now. As Hyla stood wearily by his hut, the Polecat was fis.h.i.+ng for eels in the mud of the lake sh.o.r.e. Old dog-foxes slunk through the woods in search of prey, while their cubs frisked like kittens in the open s.p.a.ces of the woods, playing hide-and-seek, and engaging in a mimic warfare. The air was full of Noctules and Natterers, great silent bats.

In some dim way, Hyla was influenced by all this vitality around him.

Richard Espec in his place would have said, "In wisdom Thou hast made them all, the earth is full of Thy riches. Thou openest Thy hand and fillest all things living with plenteousness; they continue this day according to Thine ordinance, for all things serve Thee. He spake the word and they were made, He commanded, and they were created!"

That would have been the logical expression of a good man who spent his life in reconciling the concrete with the unseen. Hyla's att.i.tude was just the same, though he was not educated to elevate a thought into an expression of thought.

But, nevertheless, he felt the mystery of the night, and the live creatures at work in it.

The Spirit of G.o.d worked in him as it worked in wiser and more considerable men.

But it was rather lonely also. His great deed still had its influence of terror upon him. A man who violently disturbs the society in which he lives and moves, as Hyla had done, wants human companions.h.i.+p. It is ill to know one is absolutely alone.

He thought that he would seek Cerdic, if, perchance, he was in a mood for talk, and not too drowsy. He went towards his friend's hut. In the dim light, as he threaded his way across the stoke, he saw that many other serfs had found their shelters too noisesome and hot for comfort.

They lay about in front of the huts in curious twisted att.i.tudes, breathing heavily with weariness and sleep.

Cerdic had also chosen the air to lie in. He was stretched on a skin, lying on his back, and in his hand was a half-eaten piece of black bread, showing that sleep had caught him before he had finished his supper.

Hyla lent over him and whispered in his ear. It was interesting to see how quickly and yet how silently the man awoke. With no sound of astonishment or surprise, he sat up, with alert enquiring eyes, full awake and ready for anything that might be toward.