The World of Romance | Page 7

in the dark night, but I
knew well that it was all there; for much had I studied this pool in the
day-time, trying to learn the secret of it; many hours I had spent there,
happy with a kind of happiness, because forgetful of the past. And even
now, could I not hear the wind going through those trees, as it never
went through any trees before or since? could I not see gleams of the
dismal moor? could I not hear those reeds just taken by the wind,
knocking against each other, the flat ones scraping all along the round
ones? Could I not hear, moreover, the slow trickling of the land-springs
through the clay banks?
The cold, chill horror of the place was too much for me; I had never
been there by night before, nobody had for quite a long time, and now
to come on such a night! If there had been any moon, the place would
have looked more as it did by day; besides, the moon shining on water
is always so beautiful, on any water even: if it had been starlight, one
could have looked at the stars and thought of the time when those fields
were fertile and beautiful (for such a time was, I am sure), when the
cowslips grew among the grass, and when there was promise of
yellow-waving corn stained with poppies; that time which the stars had
seen, but which we had never seen, which even they would never see
again--past time!
Ah! what was that which touched my shoulder?--Yes, I see, only a dead

leaf.--Yes, to be here on this eighth of May too of all nights in the year,
the night of that awful day when ten years ago I slew him, not
undeservedly, God knows, yet how dreadful it was!--Another leaf! and
another!--Strange, those trees have been dead this hundred years, I
should think. How sharp the wind is too, just as if I were moving along
and meeting it;--why, I am moving! what then, I am not there after all;
where am I then? there are the trees; no, they are freshly-planted oak
saplings, the very ones that those withered last-year's leaves were
blown on me from.
I have been dreaming then, and am on my road to the lake: but what a
young wood! I must have lost my way; I never saw all this before.
Well--I will walk on stoutly.
May the Lord help my senses! I am riding!--on a mule; a bell tinkles
somewhere on him; the wind blows something about with a flapping
sound: something? in heaven's name, what? My long black
robes.--Why--when I left my house I was clad in serviceable broadcloth
of the nineteenth century.
I shall go mad--I am mad--I am gone to the devil--I have lost my
identity; who knows in what place, in what age of the world I am living
now? Yet I will be calm; I have seen all these things before, in pictures
surely, or something like them. I am resigned, since it is no worse than
that. I am a priest then, in the dim, far-off thirteenth century, riding,
about midnight I should say, to carry the blessed Sacrament to some
dying man.
Soon I found that I was not alone; a man was riding close to me on a
horse; he was fantastically dressed, more so than usual for that time,
being striped all over in vertical stripes of yellow and green, with
quaint birds like exaggerated storks in different attitudes
counter-changed on the stripes; all this I saw by the lantern he carried,
in the light of which his debauched black eyes quite flashed. On he
went, unsteadily rolling, very drunk, though it was the thirteenth
century, but being plainly used to that, he sat his horse fairly well.
I watched him in my proper nineteenth-century character, with

insatiable curiosity and intense amusement; but as a quiet priest of a
long-past age, with contempt and disgust enough, not unmixed with
fear and anxiety.
He roared out snatches of doggrel verse as he went along, drinking
songs, hunting songs, robbing songs, lust songs, in a voice that sounded
far and far above the roaring of the wind, though that was high, and
rolled along the dark road that his lantern cast spikes of light along ever
so far, making the devils grin: and meanwhile I, the priest, glanced
from him wrathfully every now and then to That which I carried very
reverently in my hand, and my blood curdled with shame and
indignation; but being a shrewd priest, I knew well enough that a
sermon would be utterly thrown away on a man who was drunk every
day in the year, and, more especially, very drunk then. So I held my