A lark ran up the sky a-caroling, and the child and the dreamer waited with their two heads thrown backward, watching. Then, when the bird was nested, the child leaped up and waved his little arms, his eyes shone, and "I 'll sing like to that one," he cried; "I 'll soar very high, and sing, and sing, the world beneath me one ear to hearken. Let us be larks, brother!"
But the dreamer shook his head. "I am the cuckoo. I sing but two notes, and them over and over," he answered mournfully.
The little lad caught up the fantasy and played with it betwixt his ripples of sweet laughter. "A brown bird, and it singeth hid,--two soft and lovely notes. Nay, come thou to London and turn nightingale."
"Alas!" said the dreamer, and again, "Alas!"
And the Priory bell rang soft in the valley, ten clear strokes.
"Dinner!" exclaimed the child, "and my lady's rondel lacking of three rhymes!"
"Yon 's the pass," said the dreamer, "between the two hills. 'T is a straight road."
"Ay, and a long one, is 't? And the monks feed fast, and clean the platter."
"Nay, 't is nearer than thou deem'st. Thy legs will carry thee to the gate ere the first dish is empty. The mist that is ever on Ma'vern Hills, even though the sun shine, maketh a near thing stand afar off. Haste thee! And hearken; to-night, an thou 'lt have a merry tale of a Green Knight and Sir Gawaine of Arthur's Court, see thou beseech Brother Owyn. Himself hath been a knight one while."
The lad was twinkling down the pass, when he turned about, and "God keep thee, cuckoo!" quoth he.
"God keep thee, little lark!" said the dreamer.
There are four chief hills of the Malverns: a round hill, a high hill, a long hill, and a green deep-furrowed stronghold whither the desperate Britons withdrew them once on a time, shrinking within the greedy clutch of Rome. And here they beaconed the warning to their fellows in the plain; and here they fought the losing battle, and here, in the grassy upward-circling trenches, they laid them down to sleep their last sleep.
But of these and their well-nigh forgotten defeat the dreamer recked little as he lay on the sun-warmed slope of the Round Hill. He looked inward, as dreamers will; and onward, as dreamers should; but backward, not yet. The past was a bit of yellow parchment at the bottom of an oak chest in the scriptorium of Malvern Priory. The dreamer had touched it reverently, as one touches a dead thing, and laid it away again. And Brother Owyn, looking on, had sighed. He too had his dreams, but they came out of the joy and the sorrow that lay at his back. Brother Owyn had chosen to live as one dead, but he could not slay his past.