Here Was a Man by Norah Lofts

Author:Norah Lofts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 1963-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

For a long time Raleigh did not sleep. He lay on his back on a soft skin that one of the Indians had spread for him and stared at the sky, studded with stars. The moon rose, wide and red, from the darkness of the trees at one side of the clearing, grew pale, sailed over and disappeared behind the trees on the other side. He thought of Lisbeth lying alone white and very faint and distant like a flower drowned in a deep pool. She was not as real at that moment as the city that was calling him from the reaches of the uncharted river, or the Queen into whose ears he saw himself pouring the tale of its taking. He thought of Topiawari and his sad acceptance of defeat. So he might have sat at Sherborne waiting for death. “What was it that drove some men? Was it hunger for the acclamation of their fellows, human and passing, as Lisbeth had so bitterly said? Or was it that they were given some part to play in the vast drama of the world? Suppose Columbus had preferred to mend nets and drink wine in the back streets of Genoa, or Christ had been content in the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. That life, pattern for all human lives, had been planned from the beginning, every journey, every meal, every word spoken had been preordained and known somewhere, by someone, before ever Mary had felt the stir in her womb. If one, then why not all? And what kind of a planner could it be who arranged for some men such hard parts to play? These Indians for example; the galley slaves of Morocco; the Huguenots in France. Was it all perhaps for the entertainment of some immortal playgoer, who looking now upon the clearing in the savage forest and seeing him awake would think, “Raleigh soliloquizes”?

The effort to understand the un-understandable made his brain reel. He gave up, as so many had done before him, turned over and slept.

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