Exhausted by his vehemence, the old man's head fell wearily on his breast, and the Italian stole noiselessly away.
VII
When Robert Annys was announced, a message was sent to him, bidding him be a guest at dinner, which was just on the point of being served, and promising him private audience immediately after. So he waited in one of the stately apartments of the superb palace, and looked on the walls and ceilings, all wainscoted with oak so carefully chosen that the better part of a forest must have been sacrificed to it, and on the rich tapestries and hangings, and wondered that those calling themselves servants of God should be housed in palaces of brick and stone with ten windows to a front and three stories, one on the other, while those to whom they ministered in the name of Christ were huddled together in miserable huts of clay with roofs of moss or turf.
His host did not keep him waiting long. Almost immediately after he had cordially greeted his guest, the maître d'hôtel announced dinner, and the strangely mated couple made their way to the Great Hall. The Bishop staked a good deal upon the surroundings in which Annys now found himself. He counted upon a certain refined delicacy that he noted in the poor priest, a sensitiveness to environment that would make him respond to the luxury and elegance about him. He hoped that Annys might reflect that all this power and wealth might be his if he would but stretch forth his hand, and that thereby the influence of the scene at the cross-roads might yet be overcome. But the Bishop was too late; a few hours before, and it might have seemed a goodly thing to Robert Annys to entertain in this lordly fashion, it might have seemed a Christly thing to toss discarded crusts and broken pieces of meat into a jewelled bowl that its contents might be thrown to the beggars clamoring before the gate; but now a higher conception of Christliness mastered him. He had been too profoundly moved at the cross-roads, the whole scene had come to him too directly as the answer of God to his prayer, for him to respond readily to what went on about him. Instead, a profound disgust seized upon him, a bitter contempt for this kind of Christianity, so that he could scarce restrain himself from rising and openly rebuking the Bishop for all this unseemly pomp and splendor.
They sat at the raised, or great table as it was called, facing the other tables, which were set longitudinally, and which were only boards laid upon trestles so that they could easily be removed to permit the floor to be spread with fresh rushes after the evening meal. These rushes served as a bed for all who assembled there, for the hospitality of my Lord Bishop was never questioned. Let merchants, priests, jesters, clerks, scholars from Oxford, or mummers, all lie there and welcome; to-morrow the tables would be set up again with plenty for all.
Before anything was brought in to eat, a liveried fellow knelt before each guest at the high table, holding a beautiful silver ewer filled with scented water into which to dip the hands, followed by another fellow similarly liveried who passed a soft linen napkin upon which to dry them. Then came trenchers of fresh white bread on which to place their meat, the folk below at the long tables receiving only the ordinary trenchers of wood which could be scraped to serve for many meals. Looking at these trenchers, Annys thought sadly of the miserable, coarse, black bread made of beans or coarsely pounded oats that must answer for the poor. And he thought of the sweat with which even such poor stuff must be earned. Pondering over all this, the delicate sole, found only on the tables of the great, the fine almonds, the roasted figs, and colored sugar-plums seemed to choke him. His Piers must content himself with a dish of herrings and onions, and perhaps an infrequent bit of cheese, or still less frequent scrap of meat. He bethought him of how that great-hearted poet of the Malvern Hills had cried out that all mischief proceeds from the clergy, who ought to set an example of holy poverty, and who rather emulated the splendor of knighthood:—
"Now is religion a rider, a buyer of land as though he were a lord."