So the following morning Sir Walter and Cuthbert, both clad in fishers’ garb, joined the fisherman and his stalwart sons on the beach. The largest boat, or rather sloop, was got under weigh, the wind blew directly off shore, and soon they saw the white cliffs of Dorset, and the red ones of Devon, which meet near Lyme Regis, receding on the right and left.
As they drew out to sea, and the whole coast line became visible, Hey Tor and the moorland hills loomed in the far distance on the left, and until they sank beneath the sea Cuthbert never took his eyes from them.
Now all was sea and sky for many hours, until the coasts of Normandy, about the mouth of the Seine, came into sight. And they ran the boat up the river to the nearest point to the great Abbey of Bec, founded by the famous Herlwin in 1034, and which had furnished two successive Archbishops to Canterbury in the persons of Lanfranc and Anselm.
The present Abbot had been a personal friend of Father Ambrose, and so soon as they had bidden a kind and grateful farewell to their English friends, the honest fishermen, who absolutely refused the offer of gold for their services, they directed their steps to the famous Abbey.
After a journey of some hours, they arrived safely at Bec.
“Behold an Abbey, which God has yet preserved from the spoilers,” said Father Ambrose, as he looked upon the glorious pile—grand as that they had lost—and then added with a sigh, “Alas, poor Glastonbury.”
There they met unbounded hospitality, and Father Ambrose only waited to bestow his adopted son in the care of the Baron de Courcy, whose castle was hard by, ere he resumed that life he had never willingly abandoned.
The Baron de Courcy was a descendant of an old and famous Norman house, distinguished in the days of the Conquest, when Aymer de Courcy, refusing to share in the sports of England, retired to his Norman estate, although he had fought at Hastings, and enjoyed the favour of the Conqueror.
His good qualities, well known to those who have read of them in the “Andredsweald,” a chronicle of the house of Michelham in Sussex,[57] had not suffered in transmission through so many generations: and our Cuthbert found a warm reception in the Norman household.