Next morning I rode away for London upon the grey horse, loading the
armour of the knight I had killed and such other possessions as remained
to me upon the mare which I led with a rope. Save William there was none
to say me good-bye, for the misery in Hastings was so great that all
were concerned with their own affairs or in mourning their dead. I
was not sorry that it fell out thus, since I was so full of sadness at
leaving the place where I was born and had lived all my life, that I
think I should have shed tears if any who had been my friends had spoken
kind words to me, which would have been unmanly. Never had I felt
so lonely as when from the high ground I gazed back to the ruins of
Hastings over which still hung a thin pall of smoke. My courage seemed
to fail me altogether; I looked forward to the future with fear,
believing that I had been born unlucky, that it held no good for me
who probably should end my days as a common soldier or a fisherman, or
mayhap in prison or on the gallows. From childhood I had suffered these
fits of gloom, but as yet this was the blackest of them that I had
known.
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