“Ah, death! None can escape, none overtake him; see we are his prisoners now, yet he tantalizes us by a show of immunity. As a sarcophagus is let down by suspending ropes in tedious stages, with jogglings and pauses, into the grave, so passes each through perils and sickenings from life to death. No, no, an undue fear of death intoxicates us until phantasmagoria possess the brain. We call these hopes; they are delusive! But will any of you follow for a charge down to the Virgin’s fountain? We can not more than die; that we must soon, in any event. I think I could die more complacently, having cooled my thirst where she was wont to cool hers.”
“Ugh,” exclaimed the Templar, with a shudder of disgust, “the fountain flows out through an old stone coffin! By my plume! while drinking there I’d be fancying that the ghost of the one robbed of his last house were leering at me and reveling in the thought that I’d soon be poor and thirstless as he. Verily the flavor of a drink depends much on the goblet!”
“We may have plenty of miserable fancies, if we only court such; for me, Templar, I prefer to comfort myself by cheerier thoughts; while I drank there, I’d think of the coolings of death’s streams; of her, that at this fountain slaked her body’s thirst and from the chalice of death drank serenely at last. My sword, the gift of my king, after having shed torrents of blood, hangs uselessly at my side. It seems cruel as powerless; ay, ’tis hateful! My mother gave me, on my departure, better gifts by far; tears, kisses, undying love, and the charge to call on Mary if ever evil befell me. The latter I know not how to do; but still my weak faith, methinks, would be helped to cry ‘Mother’ to God, if I could only stand where that mother stood who won the first love of the infant Jesus, the last anxious thoughts of the God man.”
“Sir Charleroy is unusually pious to-night; but alas, though I’ve been taught to say our church’s Litany, calling on ‘the Virgin most faithful,’ ‘Virgin most merciful,’ ‘Help of the Christian,’ ‘Lady of Victories,’ I can not use those phrases here. Where’s the help, the mercy, the victory now? The Litany, belongs to England!”
“We are in our present plight because we have won heaven’s neglect through having more vices than graces, probably.”
“Whatever the cause, the mocking disappointment is apparent. It is nigh thirteen hundred years since the Holy son and His mother began proclaiming and exemplifying the White Kingdom here. Now in all this land of theirs, we thirteen, fateful number, alone are left of those who openly own His cause. Yea, and the city where He grew in favor, these nature-blessed plains whose flowers gave Him picture sermons, are all filled with burrowing monsters eternally at war with Him and His.”
“Faith will rest until assured that the Promiser is dead, and that can never be, Sir Knight.”
“My faith staggers at the sights of Nazareth. Chief, look yonder.”
The knights all now called Sir Charleroy chief, when addressing him.