"Then worse than beggar, thou," broke out Annys, indignantly. "Thou, Will Langland, a chantry priest, chanting and mumbling some Latin words for thy belly's hunger! For do you aught else for the good of the land? Do you feed the poor, or clothe them? Are you serving Christ if you but mouth some words over the empty pates of the gentry so that they have leave to go and lie as they will ever after? Can this be he who wrote:—
"'Faith without deeds is as dead as a door-tree'?"
Langland quivered as if he had received a blow. "Ah, wot I well what kind of a man that Will Langland, singer of Piers, should be. Stay! If it tortures you to see in the gluttonous, servile chantry priest of yestere'en the poet whom you honored, doth it not hurt more, ay! a thousand-fold more, that very Will Langland? Think you there is one word that these hands have writ that does not rise up and mock at me? Think you it is a light thing to be thus crucified, as it were, by one's own flesh and blood?"
"Surely," he went on, after an instant's pause, during which he looked sadly away, far into the distant horizon, as if his own words had stirred many recollections within him, "surely I can be no more hateful in thy sight than in mine own. Do I not daily curse this weak, lust-loving clod of flesh that holdeth prisoner a mind that at least once dreamed noble dreams? Ah, Robert Annys, thou wouldst weep water fast enough with both eyes didst know one tenth part of the unruth of him who walks the earth as Will Langland."
And he was about to go, when Annys cried: "Hold! who am I, indeed, that I should judge thee? Well wot I how oft the deed fits ill with the creed. But stay, canst get a word to one Rose Westel in the Castle? But a hint of my presence, and she will come, as she awaits me." Langland readily promised to return to the Castle and give her the message, and Annys again sought his hiding-place.
He did not have long to wait before Rose approached. Before he came forward to meet her, he observed the Legate walking swiftly after her, so he remained hidden. When Rose saw that she was being followed, she gave a little gasp of surprise. "I thought you had gone with my Lord," she said to the Cardinal Legate.
His eyes gloated over her beauty as he replied. "Thou knowest, little one, I could not find it in my heart to leave thee."
"Oh, can you never let me be?" she moaned.