“Ye are robbers all,” cried Bartholomew: “you cheated him in his weakness into signing his property away from the friend who smoothed his pillow in his dying hours.”
“Thou naughty knave,” retorted the Master, “talk not to me of bricks and straw. It was gold that was contained in thy box, and the devil knows by what scurvy arts thou didst cozen us of our promised reward. His own paper convicts thee of the fraudulent attempt to get him to will his goods to thee. See what he left in the bottom of our box.” And the Master threw the scrap above-transcribed upon the table. “Take it and never let me see thy rogue’s face again.”
Brother Bartholomew leaped in his skin as he grabbed the document. He made no ceremony of leave-taking, but bolted down the stairs. When he got into the cloister outside he took from his pouch a dingy scrap of paper, which was the fellow of that which the Master had thrown to him. What he read on it was this:
Sciant omnes presentes et futuri quod
er Hospitalis Divi Johannis apud Canteb
doctori Ecclyston et sociis Collegii Jes
one equaliter inter se dividendum aut
ri meo in antedicto Hospitali ea racio
it totum thesaurum meum ita ut extat cl
dam lapidem iacentem in septentrionali
eiusdem cuius istud signum extat a dea
Then brother Bartholomew put the two pieces together, and it was thus that he translated the continuous lines:
Know all men present and to come that | I, John Baldwin, late a broth
er of the Hospital of Saint John at Camb | ridge, give, grant and bequeath to master
doctor Eccleston and the fellows of the College of Jes | u for my relief during sick
ness, equally to be divided among them, or | to master Bartholomew Aspelon, a brother
of mine in the aforesaid Hospital, provid | ed that he shall have it who is first fin
der, all my treasure as it now lies pri | vily buried in a tomb under a cert
ain stone lying on the northern | side of the choir in the chapel of the Hospital
aforesaid, of which this is the sign, a dea | th’s head.
Of what further pertains to brother John Baldwin and his bequest I have no more to say than that his name is not included in the Form for the Commemoration of Benefactors of Jesus College. Also that for twenty years after the events here recorded a cheerful individual, in a lay habit, might be seen, seated of custom on the ale-bench at the Sarazin’s Head. He drank of the best, paid in cash and never lacked for money. He could tell a good tale and he sang a good song. His Wassail song was always in request at the Sarazin’s Head.
The Burden of Dead Books
By its air of reverend quiet, its redolence of dusty death, in the marshalled lines of its sleeping occupants, and in the labels that briefly name the dead author and his work, an ancient repository of books, such as a college library, suggests the, perhaps, hackneyed similitude of a great cemetery. Here and there, among the vast majority of the undistinguished dead, we detect names that are still familiar. Here and there are the monuments of men who have at least been the ancestors of a surviving family of scholars and scientists. Some names will awake memories, not for the individual achievement of their bearers, but for the cause in which they worked. Royalist and Republican, Anglican, Romanist and Puritan here have laid down the arms which they bore against each other, and together sleep the sleep from which there is no rising. Though the issues for which these men fought are dead things now, their spirit is with us and their works follow them. But with the majority it is not so. Outnumbering all others are the hand-labourers of whose names the catalogue has no record. Their daywork, paid or unpaid, was commanded by more ambitious masters, who absorbed whatever temporary measure of credit attended the collaboration. Over the ashes of these unnamed toilers we waste no regrets: they sleep well. It is the fallen ambitions, the wasted energies, the mistaken aims of the master-craftsmen in letters that are food for ironical contemplation.